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cheri-translates · 4 years ago

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[CN] Idle Chat with Gavin

🍒 Warning: This post contains detailed spoilers for a feature which has not been released in English servers! 🍒

The CN server was recently graced with a new feature called 随便聊聊 (“Idle Chat”), where you can select a mood and talk to the love interests about work, life, and studies :>

Idle Chat with: Kiro / Lucien / Shaw / Victor

[ WORK - Topic 1: Overtime ]

1. Mood: Happy

MC: Yay! I don’t have to work overtime today! Want to have a sumptuous meal together?

Gavin: Good timing. I’m off shift today

Gavin: Apart from eating

Gavin: We can find other things to do.

2. Mood: Upset

MC: I’m sorry I’m sorry. I might reach an hour late today. I have to work overtime suddenly to handle something...

Gavin: It’s okay

Gavin: I’ll come over to accompany you during that one hour. That way, you won’t be considered late.

3. Mood: Angry

MC: I really don’t want to work overtime any longer. I’ve been sleeping right after getting home for so many consecutive days, and have absolutely no personal time...

Gavin: Have you been sleeping well?

Gavin: Once you’re done with this busy period, let’s go for a long vacation together.

[ WORK - Topic 2: Income ]

1. Mood: Happy

MC: I had a shock when I checked the accounts. Without realising it, I’ve saved so much money! It shows that persevering in financial management is very useful!

Gavin: I find it very useful too.

Gavin: When I was young, I’d put my future into a savings box

Gavin: Now, I’ll put my future into our hands.

2. Mood: Upset

MC: Why is it always so easy to spend money, but so difficult to earn it

Gavin: Mm, I also wonder about this question...

Gavin: Want to do up a plan to save money together?

3. Mood: Angry

MC: Barely ten minutes after being happy about payday, several notification messages for arrears arrived! I shouldn’t have purchased so many things last month!

Gavin: This month, I’ll be your shopping supervisor.

Gavin: If there’s anything you want to buy, let me know.

[ WORK - Topic 3: Program Progress ]

1. Mood: Happy

MC: Do you still remember the program I talked to you about before? After persistent hard work, we managed to secure a partnership!

Gavin: I remember

Gavin: Back then, you said you wouldn’t give up

Gavin: I’m also very happy to see that you didn’t give up.

2. Mood: Upset

MC: There hasn’t been any progress in the recent program... All inspiration has been expended, and our operations have also been exhausted...

Gavin: Want to go for a short trip with me over the weekend?

Gavin: To refresh your inspiration and motivation.

3. Mood: Angry

MC: The data provided by the partner is absurd! If I were to go along with them, nothing would be done!

Gavin: In that case, give them an absurd proposal

Gavin: They’ll know where they’ve gone wrong.

[ WORK - Topic 4: Program Results ]

1. Mood: Happy

MC: This program was successfully approved! I think my incredibly~ superb proposal was one of the contributory factors! We can officially start working on it tomorrow!

Gavin: Will you be busy from tomorrow onwards then?

Gavin: If you need to work overtime during this period

Gavin: Remember to call me.

2. Mood: Upset

MC: Is the work produced for the other party really okay... Even if it gets approved, there still seems to be something missing

Gavin: The MC I know is a persistent and confident girl

Gavin: No one can deny your accomplishments.

3. Mood: Angry

MC: When will the program finally get approved! There are seventeen versions stuffed in my file!!!

Gavin: A senior from the Task Force once told me a technique to examining clues

Gavin: List down the mistakes made in the previous seventeen versions

Gavin: And you’ll have new inspiration.

💙

[ LIFE - Topic 1: Losing Weight ]

1. Mood: Happy

MC: Did you notice anything different about me today? I’ll give you three seconds to think about it! Forget it, I think you might not have been able to see it...

Gavin: Cough, I could tell. You’ve lost weight.

Gavin: But it wasn’t because of what I saw. I used another method to determine it.

2. Mood: Upset

MC: Should I reach a compromise with my weight? I’ve been losing weight then gaining weight - it feels like a waste of time.

Gavin: There’s no need to lose weight

Gavin: No matter what, you’ll always be the best-looking in my eyes

Gavin: ...mm, but exercise is still needed.

3. Mood: Angry

MC: I shouldn’t have gone for the dinner party yesterday! When I weighed myself today, I really became heavier by 1kg!

Gavin: It shows that you’ve gained 1kg of happiness yesterday

Gavin: Let it get absorbed into your body.

[ LIFE - Topic 2: Meals ]

1. Mood: Happy

MC: I accidentally bought too much... I don’t think I need so many vegetables since I’m cooking for myself...

Gavin: In that case, could you leave me a share?

Gavin: I’ll pay for the food expenses

Gavin: Mm, and I’ll also be responsible for washing the dishes and being an assistant.

2. Mood: Upset

MC: I bought the snack which is especially popular on the internet. But when I ate it, I didn’t think it was great. Has my taste become disconnected with the masses?

Gavin: Taste is something personal

Gavin: Want to head out together today?

Gavin: We’ll find snacks that you and I both find delicious

3. Mood: Angry

MC: I made an absolutely perfect bento for lunch at work, but my hand slipped when taking it out of the microwave and it all fell out!

Gavin: Did you scald your hand?

Gavin: Let’s have dinner together.

Gavin: To make up for the regret of not being able to eat your absolutely perfect bento.

[ LIFE - Topic 3: Reading ]

1. Mood: Happy

MC: The science fiction book I read today is really interesting! It’s also especially rich in imagination. I think you’ll like the style as well!

Gavin: All right.

Gavin: But I’ve been busy with missions these days, so I might not have time to read

Gavin: I’ve noted down the name of the book. I’ll tell you my thoughts after reading it.

2. Mood: Upset

MC: I was looking for spiritual comfort when I came across a book on philosophy. In the end, I think I’ve become even more perplexed by the world... Have you felt this way too?

Gavin: Mm, there are times I’m perplexed by the world too

Gavin: But once I think about you, I’ll feel calmer.

3. Mood: Angry

MC: Today, I borrowed a murder mystery novel from the library. Some unreasonable reader wrote the name of the murderer directly on the first page!!

Gavin: ...

Gavin: That’s really going overboard.

Gavin: Try treating it as backwards reasoning, and observe the process.

[ LIFE - Topic 4: Games]

1. Mood: Happy

MC: I’ve finally defeated that difficult boss! I was even thinking that if I failed again, I’d refer to the guide. I didn’t expect to beat it!

Gavin: That level is really difficult

Gavin: I only managed to defeat it after reading the guide

Gavin: You’re very strong - a first-rate gamer.

2. Mood: Upset

MC: I think I’ve outgrown the age of game addiction. I just feel like leaving once I go online. I can’t find anything interesting...

Gavin: Maybe you just temporarily lack motivation towards this game

Gavin: Want to try a new game?

Gavin: Minor recommended a multi-player game involving solving riddles

Gavin: I think you should like it.

3. Mood: Angry

MC: I met a cheater in the game again! People who ruin the experience of the game are so annoying! It makes me feel like giving up on the game...

Gavin: Report him.

Gavin: People who contravene the rules are being played by the game

Gavin: And not playing the game.

💙

[ SCHOOL - Topic 1: Progress ]

1. Mood: Happy

MC: The method you taught me is really effective! Today, I finally overcame the temptation to slack off, and successfully completed my task!

Gavin: There are many methods

Gavin: You don’t necessarily have to use the one I taught you

Gavin: But if you can get used to it, it shows that you have a lot of potential.

2. Mood: Upset

MC: I’d rather doodle on paper or stare into space than look at the textbook... I’m a girl who’s tired of studying T-T

Gavin: It’s already late - don’t force yourself to read the textbook

Gavin: The girl who’s tired of studying should become a girl who sleeps early

Gavin: That way, she can become a diligent girl tomorrow.

3. Mood: Angry

MC: There are only ten more days till the end of the course, and my learning progress has just begun...

Gavin: There are still ten days

Gavin: Which means there are 240 hours, 14400 minutes

Gavin: If you look at it this way, there’s still time.

[ SCHOOL - Topic 2: Homework ]

1. Mood: Happy

MC: The teacher actually complimented me today. Even though all she said was that my work is neat... I’m still very happy!

Gavin: Even back then, your handwriting was always delicate and neat

Gavin: Just like you as a person.

2. Mood: Upset

MC: I can’t help but find excuses to slack off whenever I scan through the questions. I just scanned through five minutes worth of video clips...

Gavin: And now you’ve slacked off by sending me 25 words.

Gavin: Be a little more focused.

3. Mood: Angry

MC: Even though there isn’t much homework in each course, when you put them together, it’s basically WAY. TOO. MUCH.

Gavin: When I was in school, I also felt that there was a lot of homework

Gavin: So I would prioritise the easier questions first...

Gavin: It isn’t a special method, but you can try it.

[ SCHOOL - Topic 3: Pre-exam Revision ]

1. Mood: Happy

MC: Today, I memorised all the examinable points. Tomorrow, I’ll be entering the battlefield. Everything has been prepared - all I’m missing is a little bit of courage from you!

Gavin: All right, give me your hand.

Gavin: I have a lot of courage,

Gavin: And I can give it all to you, the one stepping into the battlefield tomorrow.

2. Mood: Upset

MC: Although I’ve looked through all the examinable points, I still feel unsure and uneasy...

Gavin: Don’t be anxious. Since you’re done with revision, rest early

Gavin: Tomorrow, I’ll send you to the examination venue.

3. Mood: Angry

MC: It’s too difficult, it’s way too difficult. I really shouldn’t have registered for this class. I still can’t memorise anything when it’s almost the exam...

Gavin: I’ll bring you out for a ride in a while

Gavin: You can share all your grievances and stress with the wind.

[ SCHOOL - Topic 4: Post-exam celebration]

1. Mood: Happy

MC: My exam is over! I’ve been freed! And my results were much better than expected!

Gavin: You know your results immediately?

Gavin: Congratulations

Gavin: I’m outside the exam venue. Sparky and I are waiting for you.

2. Mood: Upset

MC: A weight has been lifted off my shoulders since the exam is over. Even though I planned so many celebratory activities, I don’t feel like doing them now...

Gavin: If you don’t have any ideas

Gavin: Leave the planning to me.

Gavin: Wait for me at the entrance of the examination venue. I’ll be there soon.

3. Mood: Angry

MC: I’m so angry! I shouldn’t have compared answers with other people! I feel unwell after doing that...

Gavin: Did you get many answers wrong?

Gavin: Since the examination is already over

Gavin: You could alleviate your anger and hunger with me.

#mlqc #mlqc cn #mlqc spoilers #mlqc gavin #just gavin being prime husband material

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mkyujji · 4 years ago

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2020 in Review

My personal 2020.

Not gonna lie, it was a tough year.

I started out feeling vaguely hopeful that we’d managed to limp through most of the clusterfuck that was an orange shitstain for a president. Probably should have realized that meant that his last year was going to be catastrophic.

My father died.

I reconnected with one of my brothers over it and completely disconnected with the other one. My son and I both lost our jobs, though he lost his sooner and more thoroughly. I gained my job back when our casino re-opened (thank all the dieties that ever even thought about existing for me finally putting my foot down in F&B and switching to security when I did or this would not likely have happened), my son remained unemployed until late October/early November when he managed to get a job at Wal-Mart. He absolutely hates it and finally understands how I felt about the Deli all those years. My ex-husband kicked his current wife’s daughter out of their house, they all got COVID-19, the wife ended up in ICU for a few weeks, my daughter got promoted to manager of her newest job at Dunken Donuts and had two car accidents, further cementing my son’s decision to never drive a car ever.

My son also started displaying concerning InCel MRA like beliefs after 9 months of having nothing to do but sink into the darker corners of the internet that I still haven’t figured out to handle.

I learned to garden, knit, and sew. I learned to make bread and kimchi, beef stroganoff and bibimbap. I’m still working on figuring out the card weaving and the crystal resin.

I made it to level 4 on Duolingo’s Chinese course and then proceeded to forget all of it once I was back at work and had no time to practice.

My two podcast ventures have finally started moving forward even if we haven’t reached a point of actually posting anything yet. (One is hockey, one is mythology and linguistics)

I’ve made 3 cooking videos and 3 knitting videos for my kids, since one of the things we discovered after dad died - well, two things - was that all of his recipes are lost with him and I have exactly one video of my father and it’s his lasik eye surgery video from a few years ago.

In fandom news, I picked up two new fandoms - The Witcher and The Old Guard.

I posted 4 new fics. The Witcher - One Less Bridge to Burn and Destiny (Oh a Daunting Melody) Star Trek - Field Medicine 101 and a Steve/Tony MCU fic for a holiday exchange that I’ll add once creators have been revealed. Technically I’ve written a second part/sequel to it, but the nature of anonymous fic exchanges means that I can’t really post that until after creators have been revealed.

I wrote 1616 words of Old Guard fic, 14,532 words of The Witcher fic, 203 words of Merlin fic, 1464 words of Star Trek fic, 4551 words of MCU fic, 2500 words of Torchwood fic, 1344 words of X-Men fic for a total of 26,210 words of fic. Which doesn’t sound like a lot if you’re used to churning out Big Bangs and the like, but after nearly a decade of being strangled with writer’s block, it felt really nice to manage to actually get words out. It’s slow going, but for once I have actual hope that these words are going to lead to more posted and completed fic in 2021, so huzzah!

I also started a novel which has a framework and a lot of random bits and pieces littered through that framework.

There were a lot of highs and lows (mostly lows) in 2020 and I am beyond glad to see the backside of it.

For 2021, my goals are to finally publish episodes for at least one of my podcasts, finish at least 4 more fics, and make more progress on my novel. I’d also like to get back into Tai Chi, but I can’t see that happening until things either open back up or I get more space in my living room. I want to try to lessen the amount of procrastination that I am prone to. 2020 proved that putting things off til tomorrow means the odds of the person you meant to do them for won't be there gets higher. I refuse to let my relationship with my non-toxic brother wither again.

I hope that 2021 is kinder than 2020 was in every respect.

#RL #2020

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for-your-therapeutic-smile · 4 years ago

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They Never Teach You How to Stop

Rarely do I lack the words to express myself. Perhaps this reflects my failure to maintain my journal consistently throughout 2020. Here goes an honest attempt to capture and document my mental state and the fatigue of Covid, the inertia of this shelter-in-place, the anxiety of this political crisis we face as a nation, the pressure of being a 1L in law school against the backdrop of civil unrest and Justice Ginsburg’s death, coming out - my dad told me he was disappointed -, the possible erosion of my relationship with someone I love, and this feeling of absolute dread and resentment for a system that continuously fails my and future generations (robbing us of a social contract that promised life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness), among many other things I’m too tired to consider. When did we accept a $0 baseline as the American Dream? Oh, to be debt free - free from this punishment for having pursued an education. Stifling the educated to prevent them (myself included) from organizing and mobilizing the masses so we can supplant this system with a better one is the overall objective of the oppressive class (read: Pedagogy of the Oppressed); it’s the conflict between the bourgeois and the proletariat. The proletariat has swallowed the middle class, leaving only the ruling class. I am essentially on autopilot, forcing myself to go through the motions so I can survive another day. I know others join me in this mental gymnastics of unparalleled proportions, one social scientists and medical researchers will soon study and subsequently publish their findings in an attempt to explain the unexplainable. Despite a lack of air circulation, we are breathing history; the constitution, like our societal norms, must adapt accordingly. Judge Barrett: there is no place for originalism. While I seldom admit weakness or an inability to manage life’s curveballs, this series of unfortunate events seems almost too much to bear.

And yet somehow I continue to find the energy to submit assignments due at 11:59 p.m., write this post at 1:38 a.m., “sleep”, wake at 7 a.m. so I can read and prepare (last minute!) the assigned material leading into my torts or contracts class. I find the energy to text my boyfriend (or ex-boyfriend) so I can attempt to salvage the real and genuine connection we have, cook elaborate meals to find some solace, wrestle with whether or not to hit my yoga mat (I don’t), apply to a fellowship for the school year and summer internships, prepare my dual citizenship paperwork, manage a campaign for two progressive politicians, and listen to music in an attempt to stay sane . . . ~*Queues John Mayer’s “War of My Life” and “Stop This Train”*~ . . . I realize I have to be kinder to myself, give credit where credit is due. I hate feeling self-congratulatory though.

Mostly, I am too afraid of the repercussions if I stop moving at a mile/minute, that I can just work away the pain and be the superhuman who numbs himself from the low-grade depression and nervous breakdown. My body tells me to slow down, as evidenced by the grinding of my teeth, but I take on more responsibility because people rely on me. I must show up. I am a masochist in that way. This is what I signed up for and I’ll be damned if I don’t carry through on my promise to do the work. Pieces of my soul scattered about like Horcruxes, though they’re pure, not evil, so I hope nobody resolves to destroy them.

My mind rarely rests. It’s 3:08 a.m., one of the lonelier hours where night meets morning; it’s the hour for and of intense introspection. It makes you consider pulling an all-nighter, one you reserve for an “important” school or work deadline. We always put our personal lives on the back-burner. 3 a.m. sets the tone for a potentially awful day. But that doesn’t matter right now. I’m letting some of my favorite albums play in the background: Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Mac Miller’s Circles, Rhye’s Blood, Alicia Keys’ ALICIA, Coldplay’s Ghost Stories, Frank Ocean’s Blonde, Miley Cyrus’ Dead Petz in addition to other playlists, Tiny Desk performances, and tracks (I unearthed last week, like When It’s Over by Sugar Ray). I need to feel something. I need to feel anything. I need to feel everything. We experience such a broad spectrum of emotions throughout the day that we lose track of if we don’t pause to absorb them. Music reinforces empathy; it releases dopamine.

I spent the past two hours reading through old journals and posts, as scattered as they were, on a wide range of topics: poems I had written about falling in and out love, anecdotes about my world travels, and entries on personal, political, and professional epiphanies. The other night I found one of my favorites, a previous post from my time living in Indonesia, centering on the dualities of technology. It resonated with me more than the others. To summarize, I wrote about my tendency to equate the Internet with a sense of interconnectedness (shoutout to Tumblr for being my digital journal; to Twitter for being a place of comedy and revolution; to Instagram for curating my *aesthetic*; to Facebook where I track my family’s accomplishments and connect with travel buddies displaced around the globe all searching for a home). And yet I feel incredibly lonely and disconnected whenever I spend too much time using technology, so much so that I set screen time limitations on my phone recently to curtail this obsession with constant communication and information gathering. Trump and Biden admitted that it’s unlikely we’ll know the results of the election on November 3rd during their first presidential debate. Push notifications don’t allow us to learn of trauma within the comforts of our own homes. I’m already fearing where I will be when that news breaks.

This global pandemic and indefinite shutdown of the world (economy) undeniably exacerbates these feelings. This is some personal and collective turmoil. But I was complicit in the endless scrolling and swiping of faces and places long before Covid-19. Instead of choosing to interact with my direct environment (today’s research links this behavior to the same levels of depression one feels when they play slot machines), I am still an active on all these platforms, participating the least in the most tangible one: my physical life. I am tired of pretending. I am tired of being tired. I am tired of embodying fake energy to exist in systems that fail me. I am tired of the quagmire. Like Anaïs Nin, I must be a mermaid [because] I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living. This particular excerpt from that 2016 entry was difficult for me to read: “The fantasy of what could have been if a certain plan had unfolded will haunt you forever if you do not come to peace with the reality of the situation. I hope you come to terms with reality.” I am not at peace with my current reality. But is anyone?

It’s a bit surreal for my peers to have suddenly started caring about international relations theory. It’s transported me back to my 2012 IR lecture at Northeastern: are you a constructivist or a feminist? Realist or liberalist? Neo? Marxist? The one no one wants you to talk about. Absent upward mobility, this is class warfare. But I cannot be “a singular expression of myself . . . there are too many parts, too many spaces, too many manifestations, too many lines, too many curves, too many troubles, too many journeys, too many mountains, too many rivers” . . . It feels like America’s wake-up call. But I know people will retreat into the comforts of capitalism if Biden wins and, well, we all enter uncharted waters together if the Electoral College re-elects #45. For those who weren’t paying attention: the world is multipolar and we are not the hegemon. Norms matter. People tend to be self-interested and shortsighted. Look to the past in order to understand the future. History, as the old adage goes, repeats itself. Once a cheater, always a cheater. Taxation without representation. Indoctrination. Welcome to the language of political discourse. Students of IR and polisci have long awaited your participation. Too little too late? Plot twist: it’s a lifelong commitment. You must continue to engage irrespective of the election outcome or else we will regress just as quickly as we progress. Now dive into international human rights treaties (International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights; International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights), political refugees, FGM. No one said it wasn’t dismal. But it’s important. We need buy-in.

While I am grateful for the continuation of my education, for this extended time with family, for this opportunity to be a campaign manager for two local progressive candidates (driving to Boston to pick up revised yard signs as proof that the work never stops), it would be remiss of me, however, not to admit that I am lonely: I am buried in my books, in the depressing news both nationally and globally, and in precedent-setting Supreme Court cases (sometimes for the worst, e.g. against the preservation of our environment). In my nonexistent free time I work on political asylum cases, essentially creating an enforceability framework of international law, for people fleeing country conditions so unthinkable (the irony of that work when my country falls greater into authoritarianism and oligarchy is not lost on me). I am fulfilling my dream of becoming a human rights lawyer which stems back to middle school. I saw Things I Imagined (thank you Solange). I have held an original copy of the Declaration of Independence that we sent to the House of Lords in 1778 and the Human Rights Act of 1998 while visiting the U.K. Parliamentary Archives as an intern for a Member of Parliament. This success terrifies and exhausts me; it also oxygenizes and saves me. Every decision, every sacrifice, has led me to this point.

“It’s the choosing that’s important, isn’t it?,” Lois Lowry of The Giver rhetorically asks. This post is not intended to be woe is me! I am fortunate to be in this position, to have this vantage point at such an early age, and I understand the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. My life has purpose. I am committed to the work that transcends boundaries; it is larger than life itself. It provides a unique perspective. But it makes it difficult to coexist with people so preoccupied in the drama they create in their lives and the general shallowness of the world we live. It feels like there is no option to pump the brakes on any of this work, especially in light of our current climate, and that pressure oftentimes feels insurmountable. Time is of the essence. It feels, whether true or not, that hardly anyone relates to my experience, so if I don’t carve out this time to write about it, then I am neither recording nor processing it.

Tonight, in between preparing tomorrow’s coursework, I realize that I have an unprecedented number of questions about life, which startles me because typically I have the answers or at least have a goal in mind that launches me into the next phase of life or contextualizes the current one. These goals, often rooted in this capitalistic framework, in this falsity of “needing” to advance my career as a means of helping people, distract me from asking myself the existential questions, the reasons for why we live and what we fundamentally want our systems to look like; they have distracted me from real grassroots community organizing until now. They distract me from the fact that, like John Mayer, I don’t know which walls to smash; similarly, I don’t know which train to board. Right now feels like we are living through impossible and hopeless times and I don’t want to placate myself into thinking otherwise despite my relatively optimistic outlook on life. As we face catastrophic circumstances – the consequences of this election and climate change (famine, refugees, lack of resources) – I do not want to live in perpetual sadness. I am searching for clarity and direction so I can step into a better, fuller version of myself.

It’s now 3:33 a.m. Here is the list of questions that I have often asked myself in different stages of life, but recently, until now, I have not been willing to confront for fear that I might not be able to answers them. But I owe it to myself to pose them here so I can have the overdue conversation, the one I know leads me to better understanding myself:

Are you happy? Why or why not?

What do you want the future to hold? What groundwork are you going to do to ensure it happens?

What does your ideal day/week/month/year/decade look like? Why?

With whom do you want to spend your days? Why?

Who do you love and care about? Have you told people you care about that you love them? Does love and vulnerability scare you?

What do you expect of people – of yourself, of your partner, of your family, and of your friends? Should you have those expectations? Why or why not?

What do you feel and why?

What relaxes you? What scares you? What brings you joy?

What do you want to improve? Why?

What do you want to forgive yourself for and why?

Does the desire to reinvent yourself diminish your ability to be present?

Do you have a greater fear of failure or success? Why?

How do you escape the confines of this broken system? How do you break from the guilt of participation in it and having benefited from it?

How do we reconcile our daily lives with the fact that we’re living through an extinction event? This one comes from my friend (hi Jeanne) and a podcast she listened to recently.

How do you help people? How do you help yourself? Are you pouring from an empty cup?

How will you find joy in your everyday responsibilities, in the mission you have chosen for yourself? What, if any, will be the warning signs to walk away from this work, in part or in its entirety? Without being a martyr, do you believe in dying for the cause?

So here are some of the lessons I have learned during this quarantine/past year:

“I’ve Got Dreams to Remember,” so do not take your eyes off them. Chasing paper does not bring you happiness.

Be autonomous, particularly in your professional life.

Focus on values instead of accolades.

Do everything with intention and honest energy.

Listen to Tracy Chapman’s “Crossroads” & Talkin’ Bout a Revolution for an energy boost and reminder that other revolutionaries have shared and continue to share your fervent passion . . . “I’m trying to protect what I keep inside, all the reasons why I live my life” . . . When self-doubt nearly cripples you and you yearn a few minutes to run away when in reality you can’t escape your responsibilities, go for a drive and queue up “Fast Car” . . . “I got no plans, I ain’t going nowhere, so take your fast car and keep on driving.”

With that said, take every opportunity to travel (you can take the work with you if absolutely necessary). Go to Italy. Buy the concert ticket and lose yourself in the moment. Remember that solo excursions are equally as important as collective ones. But, from personal experience, you prefer the company. Find the balance.

Detach from the numbers people keep trying to assign to measure your personhood.

Closely examine the people in your inner circle and ask them for help when you need it.

“And life is just too short to keep playing the game . . . because if you really want somebody [or something], you’ll figure it out later, or else you will just spend the rest of the night with a BlackBerry on your chest hoping it goes *vibration, vibration*” (John Mayer’s Edge of Desire) . . . so love fiercely and unapologetically.

Be specific.

Go to therapy even when life is good.

#reflection #covid #quarantine #late nights #music #revolution #diary #politics #john mayer #alicia keys #tracy chapman #love #dear diary #travel #writing #personal #mental health

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too-spicy-and-too-queer · 6 years ago

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Discovering the aromantic identity at a later age

I’ve noticed that a lot of queer people say tumblr is not a great place for queer people with less visible identities. But the aromantic community here is the only thriving queer community I’ve ever found that accepted me unconditionally. I’ve been thinking about this, and I want to talk about it some, as an aro that is a good bit older than most the tumblr community.

Connecting with people with similar queer identities to me as a teen in the 90s was a nearly impossible task. Nobody at the queer youth group at my high school had ever heard of someone like me. The internet was still in its infancy when I was a teen. Social media didn’t exist and online queer communities were very tiny. There was no place for me to go to find people like me. The labels “nonbinary” and “aromantic” didn’t even exist yet, much less all the terminology and models that are used in these communities today. The lack of peers, role models, or even language to describe my experience had a profoundly damaging effect on me, which you can read more about in an earlier post. I never met anyone going through the same things I am, or someone older who already had been through it, until I was already in my 30s. And even now, the LGBT centers where I live are pretty bad about recognizing the needs of the more marginalized queer demographics. So internet communities, especially tumblr and chat rooms, are where I get almost all of my support.

I internalized the fact that I was the only person like me, which you can read more about in my last post. It made sense at the time to extrapolate that if I had never met anyone like me well into adulthood, then I must be the only one. This kind of brutal, crushing isolation is hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it. I spent most of my 20s in deep denial about all this, to the point that I convinced myself that some of my own feelings and experiences were not real. I was basically gaslighting myself when it came to being queer, when my partners weren’t already invalidating me. I’ve been out for a few years now as nonbinary and aromantic, and I’m still struggling to uncover all the toxic thought and behavior patterns I built earlier in my life.

Probably the most confusing part of living a closeted life was dating. I’m relatively romance-positive. I enjoy things like kissing and cuddling and being very sweet and affectionate. I experience sexual attraction. The hardest part of all this for me was that I saw little to no difference between my feelings for my closest friends and my feelings for my partners. I love my friends the same way I love my partners, so why not speak sweetly to them and act affectionately? Why not kiss or have sex if we both consent? I was always stumbling over boundaries and social expectations in this regard that I could not see, and accidentally offending or alienating people I cared about. While I understood that friendships and romantic relationships were very different, and I could even describe many of those differences in detail, I could not see any distinction in my own feelings and inner experiences. This disconnect between my inner and outer experiences was jarring and bewildering. I also did not understand repulsion at all. When I felt repulsed, I blamed my partner. Surely, I thought, they must have done something wrong if I feel so hurt or disgusted. This assumption is one of the greatest mistakes I have ever made.

I did not have the emotional or linguistic tools to process and communicate the experience of repulsion, so I did not learn a healthy way to deal with it until very recently. I still panic or lash out when I feel repulsed because I’m still trying to unlearn my previous behaviors. This problem can be extended to nearly everything about being queer for me. While I did develop good general interpersonal communication skills at an early age, I still could not communicate about my own queer experiences for a long time, partly because I didn’t have words to describe them, and partly because I didn’t believe they were real in the first place. The struggle is tremendous. Because I had so many experiences of being invalidated by multiple partners, I have a hard time trusting that someone new won’t do the same thing.

The progress I’ve made in the past year, thanks to the support and validation I get from the tumblr aromantic community, is difficult to overstate. Finding the aromantic community here has literally been a life-changing experience for me. I’m processing through decades of accumulated pain and repression at a rate I didn’t think was possible. I know I still have unforeseen hard times ahead, but honestly I had lost hope that I could even get to the point where I am now.

So to you youngins, I want to be the supportive and validating adult for you that I never had. Hopefully you won’t need to go through the traumatic decade of isolation and repression as an adult that I did. Seeing you have the hope that I didn’t at your age gives me hope now.

To those of you closer to my age, there’s a place for us in this community. I know that feeling alone for so long makes it hard to think beyond the solitary lives we’ve been forced into, that we’re used to feeling disconnected and unwelcome. But this community is growing, and we have a chance to escape into wide open acceptance, to connect, to belong, to heal. We can be a part of that for each other.

#aro #aromantic #aromantic community #queer identity #my post

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lissliss2244-blog · 6 years ago

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My journey to healing Trigeminal Neuralgia

I am going to go back to 2016. I'm sitting at my kitchen table when ZAP I feel an intense electric jolt go through the left side of my face. I had no idea what it was so I just continued on with my day forgetting it even happened, until the next day when it happened again and continued to happen. The pain getting consistently worse as time went by. I was scared! I had no idea what was happening to me.

The next thing I knew the Days had turned into months that I dealt with the excruciating, stabbing, electrocuting pain. It really feels like a big blur to me now when I look back. Maybe because I was drugged up and practically living in the bath tub or Maybe I'm subconsciously blocking it out. I don't know but I do remember the pain and the multiple times that I went to the ER begging for some pain relief and to know what was going on with me. They did blood tests and eventually an MRI which came back negative for MS which they thought could possibly be causing it and told me that everything looked good.

During this time I'm sitting on the hospital bed in agony barely able to talk. Finally a doctor came in and told me that they're pretty sure I have Trigeminal Neuralgia. Ummm what??? And that's exactly how I left feeling too. He hardly told me anything about it except for it's caused by nerves, to go see a neurologist and not to look it up online. Oh and they gave me something for the pain which I'm pretty sure was gabapentin. I got switched from medication to medication so it's hard to remember. Gabapentin,tegretol, and carbamazepine which all had horrible side effects!

When I got home the first thing I did was look it up because hello and wow did I have a mental breakdown. I called my love and bawled my eyes out due to the fact that all over the internet it says it's incurable. That I would have this pain for the rest of my life!! That it's called "the suicide disease" that it's the worst pain known to man and the only way to treat it is drugs and surgery that could possibly go wrong or not even work!!!! Talk about panic attack! He tried to calm me down and tell me that he's sure it's not as bad as I thought but oh it was.

What could I do though? Nothing so I took the medication hoping and praying it would help and On top of having horrendous pain in my face and head I was also completely out of it from the drugs. I was anxious, moody, disconnected, depressed, foggy, exhausted and not myself at all! Oh and not to mention putting on weight another lovely side effect.

At that point I started doing my own research and found topiramate (topomax) which I read made you lose weight and that people took it to help depression and some took it for trigeminal neuralgia. I figured I hit the jackpot. It did start working and eventually the attacks went away. My neurologist did fail to mention what happens when you get off of one drug and replace it with another. It made me really sick and out of it. I wish I had been forewarned so I at least knew what was happening to me.

Anyways even after the TN went away I kept taking the topomax because I thought that if I stopped I would get it back. In fact I took it for a whole year and was still taking it when the trigeminal neuralgia came back again!

At the time it came back I was going through the most traumatic experience of my entire life and was extremely heart broken and depressed so I started wondering if all the emotional pain and stress caused it to come back. I remembered not being in the best place emotionally when I first got TN even though having the love of my life pass away far transcended any pain I've ever experienced. I wondered if it was linked to stress and heartache.

As I moved back into the tub to keep warm, avoiding the cold and everything else that would trigger attacks I researched and researched. It got to the point that I couldn't talk, eat, sleep, or barely even move around. My mom had to take care of my 4 year old. I couldn't hold her or answer her when she called for her mommy. It broke my heart and was hard on her too.

I came up pretty much empty handed with the research. I found one woman that said she thought it was weight related. She would get it back only when she wasn't being as healthy and gained weight but besides that all I could find was people dealing with TN laying around in agony and taking multiple drugs. It looked hopeless. That's actually the reason I'm writing this because I hope that it reaches as many people with TN as possible so that I can give you all some hope and another route besides scary drugs and surgery

Anyways as I lay in the bath tub I was doing some internet surfing being the only thing I really could do. When I lost connection... for the entire day. I was frustrated and bored so I figured I would read a book. When my nerves calmed down for a minute I went to pick a book. I grabbed one that I had been wanting to read for a while but then I felt like I heard my loves voice in my head saying "no baby put that down and grab the healing code You can read that later but you need this one now" so of course I listened to him.

My aunt gave me the healing code for my birthday the year before and said that when she was getting another gift for someone else she had a strong feeling to get it for me and save it for my birthday but I had never even opened it up until then.

The healing code is about a doctor with a strong faith that tried for years to heal his wife until one day when he was given a vision of these certain hand movements held over different parts of your head and neck and a certain prayer that is supposed to heal your emotional wounds which in turn heal your physical illnesses. It's the idea that anything painful emotionally that has ever happened to you even as a child will come out in some sort of physical pain if not dealt with. Which I do believe in.

I was desperate at that point so I started doing the healing codes multiple times a day every day. I had some really enlightening moments and felt like it was helping to sort out my emotions about everything going on. When I first started doing the codes my attacks got worst for the first couple days which he says in his book will happen at first as part of the healing process and then the attacks started getting less and less frequent and didn't last as long until they went away all together. I was so thankful for the healing codes. I was so appreciate of all the little things I could do again that we all take for granted like brushing my teeth and drinking water etc.

I kept taking the topomax again due to the fear that if I stopped it would come back and before the healing codes I actually upped my dose to help with the pain. It didn't help but now I was on an even higher dosage which was not good at all. Topomax was not the miracle drug that I thought it was. It caused lots of unwanted side effects. For one I felt completely stupid. Over time I realized that I couldn't even communicate. My brain was completely fogged and I would lose my train of thought mid sentence. My family noticed that I was really different too. I was depressed and not myself at all. Apparently people call topomax dopomax because of those negative effects.

I was really disappointed to read about people all over the place taking it for weight loss and depression when it has such negative side effects. It's like everyone is on some sort of ridiculous medication that's been prescribed to them when there are so many healthy alternatives without all the nasty side effects. Just because a doctor or a therapist prescribed it doesn't mean it's safe!

Eventually after about two and a half years of dopomax I was doing an angel card reading and heard his voice again telling me it's time to get off of my medication. So again I listened. I was scared that I would get the TN back but I took my chances and weaned myself off of it. The only thing that happened was that I became me again. My family mentioned that I sounded, looked, and laughed like myself again. Isn't that strange that it can even change your laugh? Imagine what it does inside your body? Medications are not our friends.

After that I was drinking a lot and eating whatever I wanted I will be honest. It wasn't good but I was trying to drown out the pain of losing my other half. That continued for a while until my family and I heard about the medical medium and we're told to get his books. I bought the medical medium by Anthony William and gave it to my mom as a gift as she herself was going through a lot due to her breast implants. She read it and long story short got me and my dad on board.

Anthony talks about how our bodies can heal themselves if we give them lots of fruits, vegetables, and greens. He also says everyone should drink celery juice upon waking up and take his detox smoothie with wild blueberries, spirulina, bananas, cilantro, dulce and orange juice to remove the metals from our bodies. He has been guided by spirit ever since he was little and has saved so many lives. He has a 28 day fruits and vegetable cleanse to heal your body and give it a break from everything else we consume so I started the cleanse.

He says to eat raw fruits and vegetables but I did some cooked some raw. About a week into it I got my first small attack from the TN and then of course they progressed into something worse. I panicked. I thought I'd have to get on some horrible medication again or get the surgery even though I'd read that a lot of people's surgeries didn't work.

Then as I was surfing the net once again back in the bath tub I decided to type the medical medium trigeminal neuralgia into google and lo and behold I found a podcast completely dedicated to the cause and cure of trigeminal neuralgia... I cried listening to it. It filled me with light and hope just to hear what is actually causing This pain. That it's a version of the shingles virus. A virus that CAN be healed!! If we don't feed the virus what it wants like eggs, dairy, gluten, MSG and fats it will go away!

Also if we take supplements to cure it like B12, zinc, loposomal vitamin C, lysine, and many more we can fight it. So I kept on doing the cleanse and taking the vitamins and without any medication at all my attacks were better than they were the last two times I had TN. It's only continued to get better and better.

As of right now I'm 28 days into the cleanse and I get anywhere from 2-6 attacks throughout the whole day and I'm able to sleep through the night again. Also the attacks are short jolts. They're still painful and I can't wait until they're gone but my attacks before would last anywhere from 5-30 minutes straight all day long and they were agonizingly painful!

I'm so extremely thankful for Anthony William and spirit for what they have done for me and so many others!! I urge everyone who has this horrendous illness to get Anthony's book the medical medium or just look it up to find the cleanse and listen to his podcast about TN. In fact I urge anyone that's dealing with any illness or that just wants to become more healthy to get his books. He has another one about cleansing the liver and healing the thyroid which I have not yet read. All I know is that it truly works.

As of Now I'm going to do a week of raw fruits and vegetables with no fats meaning no avocado, nuts, or oils. I'm hoping it will get rid of this once and for all. If it works then I'm going to continue to eat a lot of fruits, veggies, and greens but also slowly start incorporating things into my diet like beans and gluten free grains and eventually I'll allow myself to splurge and have a piece of pizza every now and then because who wants to miss out on that for the rest of their lives!?

I do now know that everything we put in our bodies is extremely important so I won't allow myself to abuse my body and get to the unhealthy point that I got to in the past. Our bodies fight for us everyday and we need to fight for them!

If you guys would like to hear what happens with my healing journey let me know and I will update you! Thank you for reading my story I hope it can help all of you out there struggling with this life altering virus!

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itsfinancethings · 4 years ago

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New world news from Time: Tens of Thousands Are Protesting in Belarus. Here What’s Behind the Uprising Against President Lukashenko

For over a week, tens of thousands of people have protested across Belarus over disputed elections on Aug. 9 after which Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s longest serving leader, claimed a sixth term as president. Thousands of people, including factory workers, police officers and TV presenters, have gone on strike to join the protests and call for the President—who has ruled the ex-Soviet country of 9.5 million—since 1994 to step down.

“Belarus has not seen protests like this since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” says Matthew Frear, a Belarus expert at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Clashes with riot police have left at least two dead, hundreds injured and at least 6,700 arrested. Authorities have launched a severe crackdown in the capital city, Minsk, where police have deployed stun grenades and rounds of rubber bullets and drove a van into crowds. According to Amnesty International, detained protesters have been subjected to “widespread torture.”

Fighting for his political future like never before, Lukashenko has tried to show he hasn’t lost the support of the nation—but hasn’t had much success. When Lukashenko toured the Minsk Wheel Tractor Plant on Monday and told the crowd, “you workers have always supported the president,” the workers chanted “Go away!”

Later the same day, during a visit to another factory, Lukashenko offered to change the constitution. “We’ll put the changes to a referendum, and I’ll hand over my constitutional powers. But not under pressure or because of the street,” he said. The opposition says he’s made empty promises like this before.

What happened with Belarus’ election?

On Aug. 10, official results handed Lukashenko 80.1% of the vote. His main rival, Svetlana Tikhonovskaya, a political newcomer and former teacher, only won 10.1%. She rejected the outcome, insisting that she would have won support ranging from 60% to 70% had votes been properly counted. “It’s difficult to say what the result would have been because the entire process was rigged — some of the votes cast for Lukashenko were faked,” says Frear. “But in some polling stations, where it was done more fairly, she did receive up to 80% of the votes. The only way to know is to hold new free and fair elections” he adds.

Dubbed ‘Europe’s Last Dictatorship’ by George W Bush in 2005, Lukashenko’s regime has banned opinion polls, jailed opposition figures and conducted elections that were called “severely flawed” by the European Commission. “The last free and fair elections were in 1994,” says Frear.

Three months ahead of the Aug. 9 elections, authorities jailed three opposition candidates and barred them from running, including Tikhanovskaya’s husband, a popular YouTuber and opposition figure, Sergei Tikhanovsky at the end of May.

Hours after denouncing the elections, Tikhanosvkaya fled to neighboring Lithuania, where she had previously evacuated her children ahead of the elections. In a YouTube video, she said she made the “very difficult decision independently,” adding that “children are the main thing in life” and that the political unrest is not worth anyone losing their life. She has since told protesters not to “stay on the sidelines” and to rally peacefully. “We have always said that we need to defend our choice only by lawful, non violent means,” she said in another video on Aug. 14.

Vikor Drachev—TASS/Getty ImagesA striking worker of Belaruskaly, Belarus’ major producer of potash fertilizers.

Why are workers protesting?

Protests have emerged across Belarus since June amid anger over the jailing of opposition figures, economic stagnation and Lukashenko’s mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis, which he dubbed a “psychosis” that could be cured by a vodka and a sauna visit despite recently contracting the illness himself. Since the election results, more than a dozen protests have emerged in towns and cities over the disputed election results. Unofficial estimates for a protest in the capital on Sunday ranged between 100,00 and 220,000 people. Thousands of people rallied last night in Minsk for a ninth consecutive night since Lukashenko declared victory.

Workers have taken to the streets with a variety of demands, including stopping the police violence and holding new elections.

Videos and photos shared on social media in recent days showed workers at several state-run enterprises walking off the job and telling their bosses they would not go back to work until police stop beating up demonstrators and authorities release the thousands of protestors detained since the election. Police officers and members of the special forces (Omon) have announced they were quitting on social media. In one video, a security officer burns his uniform in a show of defiance.

Several journalists and TV presenters have also gone on strike, demanding that state media cover the protests objectively, says Katia Glod, a London-based independent expert on Belarus and former consultant at European Endowment for Democracy, a think tank in Brussels. The state media is “complete propaganda,” Glod says. “It has portrayed the protests as ‘riots.'”

At least six presenters have left the state-run broadcasting company, Belarus-1 (BT) channel, in the past week, including Andrei Makayonak, a host on the Good Morning Belarus program, who resigned on Aug. 12. In an interview with daily newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda in Belarus, he said: “Before I always remained neutral, because I was sure that when the situation is not very good, there must be a positive person who supports everyone with his smile.” He said that in the country’s current climate, his smile feels “rather blasphemous” and no longer “inspires the audience.”

Evgeny Maloletka—Bloomberg/Getty ImagesAlexander Lukashenko, Belaruss president, gestures while giving a speech during a rally of his supporters in Independence Square in Minsk, Belarus, on, Aug. 16, 2020.

How has Lukashenko responded to the protests?

On Aug. 14—the sixth consecutive day of protests—Lukashenko called the demonstrators foreign-backed revolutionaries who are trying to destabilize the country. “Don’t throw yourselves onto the streets. You must understand that you are being used, and our children are being used, like cannon fodder,” he said in a televised address.

Since the elections, people in Belarus report intermittently losing access to the Internet, social networks and messaging apps, triggering suspicions among protesters that the government is using technology as a means of stifling dissent. Lukashenko, however, has denied that the government is involved and claimed the Internet was being disconnected from abroad. “In the past, the authorities have blocked the sites of opposition candidates. But a full Internet shutdown has never happened before,” Frear says.

In the context of a deep recession and the coronavirus crisis, Lukashenko will need to borrow a lot of money from foreign governments, says Glod. “His loss of legitimacy threatens his ability to get money from Western institutions and that’s what bothers him,” she adds.

Belarus has long relied on Russian energy subsidies worth billions of dollars each year shore up its largely state-controlled economy. But over the past year, the Kremlin has ramped up pressure on Belarus to accept closer political and economic ties by ramping up energy prices and cutting subsidies. But Lukashenko has rejected several of Moscow’s proposals over the years for deeper integration, including a single currency.

Under siege from the West, Lukashenko appears to be turning to his Russian neighbor for support. After a phone conversation with Valadmir Putin, Lukashenko declared on Aug. 15 that Putin had agreed to provide “comprehensive security assistance” against the protests. Lukashenko didn’t specify details but he said that “when it comes to the military component, we have an agreement with [Russia],” referring to a treaty the countries signed back in 1999 that was supposed to create a “unified state.” The treaty was never fully implemented and in recent years, the countries’ relations have worsened as Lukashenko has pushed against Moscow’s calls for deeper economic and political ties.

Lukashenko wants Putin to bolster his number of riot police, Glod says. “He is particularly worried about a lack of police,” she says. But there’s no guarantee will Russia provide such support, Frear says. “Lukashenko might be trying to scare the opposition or to corner Russia into providing support,” he says.

A Kremlin statement on 15 Aug. made no mention of providing security assistance but expressed confidence that all the problems will be resolved soon.

How have other world leaders responded?

The elections and police brutality have drawn widespread condemnation abroad. President Trump said on Aug. 18: “it doesn’t seem like it’s too much democracy there in Belarus” and that he would like to talk to Russia “at an appropriate time” in the wake of the unrest. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Aug. 10 the vote was “not free and fair” and denounced “ongoing violence against protesters and the detention of opposition supporters,” while the U.K. announced on Aug. 17, that it did not accept” the “fraudulent” Belarus presidential vote.

After Aug.14 emergency talks, the European Union announced it would impose sanctions targeting Belarusian officials responsible for the brutal crackdown and election fraud. “What happened in Belarus in the last few days is completely unacceptable and calls for a clear reaction of the E.U.,” Germany’s Haiko Maas said during a press conference the same day.

The E.U. first placed sanctions on Belarus in 2004, and tightened them in 2011 over human rights abuses and election fraud. Many sanctions, including those targeting arms companies and travel bans were lifted in 2016 after the E.U. cited progress in improving the rule of law.

The latest sanctions are unlikely to bother Lukashenko, analysts say. “They’re limited and targeted. They won’t bring the country down,” says Frear.

“The E.U. is in a difficult position. It has to stand by its values so it cannot just ignore the fraud and post election violence” Glod says. “But they don’t want to push Lukashenko towards Russia.”

Evgeny Maloletka—Bloomberg/Getty ImagesProtesters unfurl a banner in the colors of the former Belarus national flag as they call for the resignation of President Alexander Lukashenko in Minsk, Belarus, on, Aug. 16, 2020.

What could happen next?

It looks like neither Lukashenko nor the protesters intend on backing down, analysts say. “He is a person who never compromises. He sees it as a weakness,” Glod sayd.

At the same time, experts doubt he can rely on Russian intervention to repress the protests. The Kremlin’s priority is to keep Belarusians on its side says Frear, but “if it openly intervenes on behalf of Lukashenko and embroils itself in a violent crackdown, it could lose the support of Belarusians.”

It would also be very costly for Putin. “He would need enormous financial resources to sustain Belarus’s collapsing economy. It’s also unclear how that could play out domestically,” says Glod. Putin’s popularity has suffered a historic blow in recent months following the economic fallout from the COVID-19 crisis, with ratings dropping to 60% in July.

The future will either see “an even more bloody crackdown or long war of attrition where neither side—the authorities or protesters—stands down,” says Frear, drawing parallels with the ongoing protests in Hong Kong.

Protesters are hoping for another election. And a crackdown continues to fail and mass protests continue to rage, “there’s more chance Lukashenko will cede” to those calls, Frear says.

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swampgallows · 7 years ago

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i have been in a stasis for over four months since quitting my job, and before that i was stuck even longer. I sent in for my health insurance so it’s just a matter of being contacted by those assholes to see if i can stay with my HMO despite being unemployed. if i had just been less of a coward and came forth saying “i am going to kill myself on site if i dont leave” and cited that as a reason for my departure i might have been let go or able to be on unemployment or redirected to some kind of support program but from everything i’ve read and heard i’d essentially just end up in the same spot i’m in now with a dose of added shame.

i have to just move forward. my next chapter isn’t as long as i want it to be and i feel like it isn’t moving the story forward as much as i’d like but i have to just cut my losses and move forward. i am struggling with the last of the commissions that i accepted back in april; if it isnt my body giving me trouble then it’s the computer itself or it’s my family obligations or my surroundings etc. i should be better at tuning stuff out by now but i’m not.

playing video games is becoming increasingly difficult. my computer feels too dark and too bright at the same time, and i’m having a lot of other sensory issues as well. my music will be too loud and i can’t hear it at the same time. im generally hard of hearing, like my parents, like i tend to hear background noises louder than i hear things in front of me. i’ll open a video game and it’s hard to even look at it. sometimes i am reading and i forget how. writing is okay but sometimes words stop being words and become shapes. it doesnt make sense to say i am overstimulated because i have had nothing going on and generally no obligations except to walk the dog. but i am paralyzed with shame because i know i am not being productive and any time i try to relax i just dissociate. i need a kind of “active meditation”, if it’s possible, something where i can be in the moment and alive but also not occupied by all of the thoughts in my head. time is either screaming at me or is deleted. i would like to keep a schedule but i cant. even at my job, reinforced by other people, i couldnt. sometimes i would go into the bathroom and completely detach from everything. i found myself ‘detaching’ even on the job. i would forget where i was and what i was doing and what year it was. i would forget who i was. i wouldnt get to see my friends etc for so long that i would forget they existed, or that i existed among them.

typical fucking pisces i guess, floating between fiction and reality, between worlds, between life and death. i’m struggling to keep grounded.

i personally feel i am using tumblr too much but i do not have an ‘exit strategy’. i do not know what to do if i stop using it or if i become disconnected from the internet for too long. i guess i’m technically addicted, but a lot of other factors are involved, as it is with addiction. my environment is shit, my self is shit, i dont have a job to go to. but even when i did and wasnt on tumblr etc its not like i was thinking about ‘when can i get back to tumblr’. maybe im addicted to wow again, i dont know. i think about warcraft a lot. when i had quit and it wasnt in my life anymore i was also experiencing major depressive episodes but it wasnt because of wow. i had broken up w my boyfriend of 3 yrs, i had entered college, i had lost some major friends and was involved in a series of abusive relationships. my curriculum was gutted with the recession and budget cuts so i didnt get that “college experience” everyone had been crowing about since the dawn of time, and i dont think anyone has gotten it since. did not get the degree i was working for, did not get to study abroad, did not progress even close to the amount that i wanted to.

but maybe i am an agoraphobic. i remember “hanging out” with a bunch of the animation students, eating food with them, and fucking freaking out, just itching and prickling to leave. I knew that i wanted to be “normal”, i wanted to be able to just chill, but i felt like i had to get home, like i was wasting time. but then i would get home and do nothing. i just wanted to get away. people would ask me to hang out all the time and i just wouldnt want to go. i dont know why. i dont know why i felt like i was “wasting time” or felt fearful. im comfortable with very few people and even then i dont necessarily dissociate but im allowed to just be quiet or to listen. i guess with those groups i felt like i had to come in and always be resident funnyman. i got so sick of “haha youre SOOOO FUNNYYY I LOVE YOU” like it’s no wonder so many comedians are actually just mentally ill depressives. it’s sickening to be a fucking clown for people. and i felt like that at my job too, just some novelty, a doll. my WACKY!!! coworker with her green hair and a pet snake!! bizarre!!! all of her outfits look like costumes!!!! like i know im not normal, i know how i look to people, i want to be able to just dress comfortably and align my identity with my comfort zone. if my hair could grow out of my hair green i would sign up for that. i dont dye my hair for attention. i dont think anybody does, really. it’s too much fucking work to do it for other people.

god im fuckign shivering and freaking out just typing this. i have to come back to this later.

#blathering

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szopenhauer · 4 years ago

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why aren’t you with your first love? my first female crush was hetero

were you sad when you heard about michael jackson’s death? no have you ever kissed an ex after you broke up? because we’re together again lol how long could you go without cursing? not long if I’m around people :x did anything annoy you today? mostly my computer and thunderstorm have you consumed alcohol in the past 24 hours? I don’t drink so obviously not have you ever kissed someone who’s last name started with an b? no what were you doing at 8am this morning? sleeping if you were kicked out of your house, where would you go first? I would try grandma and my gf probably maybe my sister? if none of those options would work then I’d be homeless what will you be doing in 3 hours? hopefully sleeping is tomorrow gonna be a good day? what are you going to do? doubt it, nothing much are you satisfied with your life as of now? am not are any of your friends taller than you? of course, I’m very short have you ever gone out of your way to make someone happy? shitload of times who was the last person you took a picture with? my dad or my gf do you wear a belt with every pair of jeans? I don’t wear jeans or belts where did you get the shirt you are wearing? got it from my sister as a gift the last two people you kissed, are they virgins? I only kissed one person in my entire life and that’s personal describe how you feel right now in one word? bad anybody tell you they miss you lately? my gf made a post about it if that counts are you closer to your father or mother? my dad what’s your relationship with the person you talked to last? she’s my mom do you say sorry first? often did you speak to your father today? yeah, like every day what locker number is yours? I never had a locker do you sleep on a certain side of the bed? my bed is too small to have sides do you prefer an ocean or a pool? pool, ocean is more scary do you shut off the water when you brush your teeth? yup do you sleep with your closet door opened or closed? my wardrobe is always closed are you capable of holding down a long-term relationship? we’ll see is there someone that you believe you will always be attached to? at least my father if your best friend made out with your boyfriend/ girlfriend, what would you do? my father? with my gf?... what is bothering you right now? ugh... do you think someone is thinking about you right now? sure do you like when people play with your hair? I don’t care much do you miss how things use to be with someone? absolutely

how are you doing today? sigh... sex ruins relationships, right? could say so

do you think it’s a bunch of bull shit when people say “i have no regrets”? I hate this kind of ppl, stay away! who got you the jewelry you’re wearing? I’m not wearing any jewelry atm do you get scared during scary movies? I usually get grossed out how do you feel right now? *shrug* is there anybody you wish you could be spending time with right now? I’m fine being alone do you like hugs? depends two days from today, where will you be? either home or or hospital... or dead are relationships ever really worth it? time will show do you miss your past? badly is the last person you kissed older than you? nope, almost 2 months younger what color shirt are you wearing? black and white stripes with a cat shaped UFO and a pug what do you currently hear right now? nothing, I can’t listen to music anymore because my mom is asleep and I don’t want to use my headphones what are you planning on doing after this? maybe another survey

are you gonna be home tonight? yup, unless smth bad will happen then I will go to ER - you never know name the first person you can think of that you know that has a tattoo? I’ve been talking about it today lmfao W. and S. had tattoos do you slam doors when you’re mad? might is your room messy or clean? organized mess do you tell your best friend everything? it’s not possible but I try my best do you think anyone has feelings for you? it seems did your last kiss take place on a bed? I don’t think so are you someone’s best friend? one of best friends, not the only one have you kissed anyone whose name starts with a z? my name starts with z

when you take surveys, are your answers inspired by the person’s before you? I basically never read their answers, can happen accidentally but it doesn’t change anything

are you a “fan” of a lot of things on facebook? been on my old account, that was one of the reasons I created new profile, the only thing I regret about that fact is losing my Criminal case progress :(

have you ever “spoken” to any celebrities via. twitter? Grimes

do you like croissants? noooo

do you get a lot of traffic outside your house or not? nah what does the last jacket you wore look like? blue plaid with grey hood, buttons and pockets

do you eat cereal bars? tried some in the past

are you on any prescribed medication? can’t take any meds currently

how often do you change your bedsheets? rarely because I’m allergic to most of detergents and then I have ever bigger problems with sleeping

if you haven’t already, are you scared of leaving home? if you have, do you like it? just a little

do you know how to look after yourself away from home? (budget, pay pills, feed yourself, cook, clean, do laundry etc.) not everything, I need to learn some stuff yet

do you drink a lot of juice? nope

what would you do if you found an abandoned baby on your doorstep, with a note asking you to keep it and take care of it? it’s illegal...

how many times have you moved in your life so far? 0

do you have a certain routine in the bath or shower? what is it? I bath my shoulders first (unless I wash my hair then my head goes first)

is there anything that you loved a year ago but just can’t stand now? food mostly

what do you do when people give you mixed messages? I try to find out the truth

would you ever eat kangaroo steak? ewww, hell no

is there a chalkboard or whiteboard anywhere in your house? I hate chalkboards, I have magnetic board tho

do you like dried fruit at all? what’s your favorite type? meh

how many times have you been to the ER? at least 3 times how has this past week been for you? complicated

when a friend walks out of your life, do you go after them or let them go? walks out HOW and WHY? what do people think about you that isn’t true? long story, dunno where should I even start, plenty of gossips to mention what do you think about internet best friends? why not? how many months until your birthday? half a year does it bother you when your friends bring up your past mistakes? I do that myself but at times it doesn’t make me laugh but hurts me if the year consisted of only one season, which would you choose? summer? if somebody liked you right now, what do you think is a cool way to tell you? I’m taken so if we’re not talking about my partner then I don’t think someone should tell me that when was the last time you cried really hard? yesterday, today only slightly and just once could you go out in public looking like you do now? yes last person you gave something to? parents do you believe that if you want something bad enough you’ll get it? pfft honestly, has anyone ever seen you in your underwear? well I was in hospitals, been visiting many doctors, went to school where we had PE, have a family and am in a relationship etc etc etc would you ever shave your head to save someone you love? that doesn’t really help when’s the next time you will kiss somebody? not soon, second half of the next month? how’s your heart lately? physically or emotionally? are you a jealous person? a bit do you wear the hood on your hoodie? sometimes can you successfully blow up and tie a balloon? doubt it where’s the weirdest place you’ve changed clothes? not sure which place was the weirdest what are you doing next week? no plans what was the first thing you thought this morning? I was thinking about my dream (me and some strangers were in an abandoned factory of some sort and there were dragons chasing us but I was escaping and even saved a little girl) would you rather have your nose or tongue pierced? nose ever stayed up all night on the phone? not whole night has the last person you kissed ever been mad at you? she was indeed does someone call and talk to you every night before you go to sleep? luckily not has the last person you kissed seen you cry? few times did anyone see your last kiss? we were one on one have you ever kissed someone who was high? I haven’t do you want to please everyone? no way, it’s not possible anyway anything interesting happen this week? mostly interesting bad

do you still talk to the person you last kissed? in general because at this very moment they’re busy would you kiss the last person you kissed again? we're going to what does that person look like? tall, curly hair, glasses, black clothes have you dated someone who wasn’t good to you? not that I deserve anything good but... would you ever cut your hair 6 inches shorter than it is now? I would be bald :o when was the last time it rained? today last person you cuddled with dies, are you sad? omg

have you ever helped a blind/visually impaired person to cross the road? there was no occassion

have you ever had a letter get lost in the mail, only to receive it months/years later? I sent a letter to my (now ex) friend and she never received it because someone stolen it

do you ever feel disconnected from everyone around you? kinda

have you ever had a stalker? more than once

have you ever had to look after someone’s pet when they were away on holiday? sorta

do you know anyone who works as an air hostess? someone I know wants to work as an air hostess but she’s studying

have you ever found something in your home which belonged to a previous owner? there was no previous owner

^ even if you haven’t, what would you do if you did? would you try and find the original owner? no idea

do you (or does anyone you know) tend to exaggerate any sign of sickness? looks like it

have you ever owned a pet goldfish? no fish, ever

were you ever bullied in primary school? not only primary

have you ever been into any kind of sex shop? online ones count?

when you go to church, do you light a candle for anyone? there were those coin turned on lamp candles in Ełk that I loved but they’re gone

are you/or is anyone you know a really good painter? no one is that good

would you be more inclined to give money to homeless people who play music as opposed to just sitting and begging? that’s true

have you ever traveled by train? if so, do you do it often? at least once a year

have you ever been diagnosed with any kind of heart condition? when I was born

are you homeschooled? if you went to regular highschool, do you think you’d have liked being taught at home? wish I was homeschooled

is one of your parents very much into diy? my mom likes diy but not obsessively

do you know of anyone who is/has been in a coma? -

do you like skimming stones? I suck at it

would you ever want to work in cafe, even if only temporarily? not even temporarily

how much would you to do to get back something which contained your most treasured memories? damn

do you know anyone who is afraid of butterflies? I heard K. is

have you ever been inside a lighthouse? I don’t recall do you have any money from different countries other than your own? several coins if you already have your license, how did you feel on the day of your test? I don’t have my license do you care if you buy things that are ‘made in china’ or not? I avoid buying some specific items that were made in china would you rather swim in the pool or play in a sprinkler? none, am against sprinklers actually if you get your pictures developed, or if you have in the past, do you keep the negatives or just throw them away? my mom kept them

where were you 2 hours ago? home

are you wearing socks right now? almost always

have you been to the movies in the last 5 days? not since high school who was the last person to hear you cry? more like saw that I cried/want to cry, not hear have you bought any clothing items in the last week? mother bought a crop top for me this day one thing you hate about yourself? can’t choose one, there’s more what are your plans for the day? day is over did you have fun today? moment what do you know about the future? that I’ll die someday as every other human being do you have a tan? honey skin is my tan during summer how old do you want to be when you have kids? I don’t want to have any kids! how do you like your soda? I don’t drink soda who was the last person to make you cry? myself? what day is tomorrow? Friday have you ever worn red lipstick? it was the only one I ever used

do you know who bonnie and clyde are? remind me of Sara

are you christian? I am

if so, have you ever read the entire bible? I guess

are you generally attracted to more outgoing and loud people or quiet and mysterious people? smth in between

have you ever cried because you couldn’t be with someone? that was dumb of me

could you ever see yourself going to those college parties, getting drunk, fucking some random person and getting an std? u can apparently get std without parties, drinking and sex

don’t you hate it when things are amazing in other people’s lives and you’re stuck in a hole? very

do you have problems with one - or both - of your parents? with one of them way more

do you sleep a lot? barely

do you like drinking water? whatever

have you ever been to a funeral? 1

do you like writing? when I have smth to write about

are you doing/did you do good in school? got worse with time

do you think moths are bad luck? whaaat? but they’re so pretty! :o

or do you not believe in supersitious stuff? I believe in some superstitions but like five of them or smth

will you date someone that’s not your race? I believe

i hope you aren’t racist… are you? am I? :(

have you ever made yourself throw up? disgusting, not able to do that

do you think you exercise enough? I don’t exercise

have you ever pierced something on your body, yourself? I’m not stupid

Have you ever listened to the same song on repeat for hours on end? that happened Do you like staying in hotels? hmm... Are musicals interesting or boring? annoying, besides Cats What is your favorite scent of incense? I don’t burn it

Can you tune a guitar by ear or do you need a tuner? need a tuner Do you like love songs? oh well...

Don’t you hate it when your eyes burn? it’s awful, got that problem last weeks Have you ever sex texted? I’ve sexted

Would you know who to talk to if you wanted weed? but I don’t want it Have you ever worn leather? fake What is your greatest fear? personal If you could kiss anyone right now, who would it be? my gf What perfume do you wear? none, I hate perfumes Do you smell good right now? I don’t think so What is your favorite energy drink? never tried any and don’t want to

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deniscollins · 6 years ago

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Do Not Disturb: How I Ditched My Phone and Unbroke My Brain

Do you or your coworkers look at your smartphone more than 52 times a day (which is the national average)? Do you or your co-workers need to unhook your brain from the harmful routines it has adopted around cell phone use? If yes, how can this problem be addressed to improve the relationship they have with their cell phones?

My name is Kevin, and I have a phone problem.

And if you’re anything like me — and the statistics suggest you probably are, at least where smartphones are concerned — you have one, too.

I don’t love referring to what we have as an “addiction.” That seems too sterile and clinical to describe what’s happening to our brains in the smartphone era. Unlike alcohol or opioids, phones aren’t an addictive substance so much as a species-level environmental shock. We might someday evolve the correct biological hardware to live in harmony with portable supercomputers that satisfy our every need and connect us to infinite amounts of stimulation. But for most of us, it hasn’t happened yet.

I’ve been a heavy phone user for my entire adult life. But sometime last year, I crossed the invisible line into problem territory. My symptoms were all the typical ones: I found myself incapable of reading books, watching full-length movies or having long uninterrupted conversations. Social media made me angry and anxious, and even the digital spaces I once found soothing (group texts, podcasts, YouTube k-holes) weren’t helping. I tried various tricks to curb my usage, like deleting Twitter every weekend, turning my screen grayscale and installing app-blockers. But I always relapsed.

Eventually, in late December, I decided that enough was enough. I called Catherine Price, a science journalist and the author of “How to Break Up With Your Phone,” a 30-day guide to eliminating bad phone habits. And I begged her for help.

Mercifully, she agreed to be my phone coach for the month of January, and walk me through her plan, step by step. Together, we would build a healthy relationship with my phone, and try to unbreak my brain.

‘A Bit Horrifying’

I confess that entering phone rehab feels clichéd, like getting really into healing crystals or Peloton. Digital wellness is a budding industry these days, with loads of self-help gurus offering miracle cures for screen addiction. Some of those solutions involve new devices — such as the “Light Phone,” a device with an extremely limited feature set that is meant to wean users off time-sucking apps. Others focus on cutting out screens entirely for weeks on end. You can now buy $299 “digital detox” packages at luxury hotels or join the “digital sabbath”movement, whose adherents vow to spend one day a week using no technology at all.

Thankfully, Catherine’s plan is more practical. I’m a tech columnist, and while I don’t begrudge anyone for trying more extreme forms of disconnection, my job prevents me from going cold turkey.

Instead, her program focuses on addressing the root causes of phone addiction, including the emotional triggers that cause you to reach for your phone in the first place. The point isn’t to get you off the internet, or even off social media — you’re still allowed to use Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms on a desktop or laptop, and there’s no hard-and-fast time limit. It’s simply about unhooking your brain from the harmful routines it has adopted around this particular device, and hooking it to better things.

When we started, I sent her my screen time statistics, which showed that I had spent 5 hours and 37 minutes on my phone that day, and picked it up 101 times — roughly twice as many as the average American.

“That is frankly insane and makes me want to die,” I wrote to her.

“I will admit that those numbers are a bit horrifying,” she replied.

Catherine encouraged me to set up mental speed bumps so that I would be forced to think for a second before engaging with my phone. I put a rubber band around the device, for example, and changed my lock screen to one that showed three questions to ask myself every time I unlocked my phone: “What for? Why now? What else?”

For the rest of the week, I became acutely aware of the bizarre phone habits I’d developed. I noticed that I reach for my phone every time I brush my teeth or step outside the front door of my apartment building, and that, for some pathological reason, I always check my email during the three-second window between when I insert my credit card into a chip reader at a store and when the card is accepted.

Mostly, I became aware of how profoundly uncomfortable I am with stillness. For years, I’ve used my phone every time I’ve had a spare moment in an elevator or a boring meeting. I listen to podcasts and write emails on the subway. I watch YouTube videos while folding laundry. I even use an app to pretend to meditate.

If I was going to repair my brain, I needed to practice doing nothing. So during my morning walk to the office, I looked up at the buildings around me, spotting architectural details I’d never noticed before. On the subway, I kept my phone in my pocket and people-watched — noticing the nattily dressed man in the yellow hat, the teens eating hot Takis and laughing, the kid with Velcro shoes. When a friend ran late for our lunch, I sat still and stared out the window instead of checking Twitter.

It’s an unnerving sensation, being alone with your thoughts in the year 2019. Catherine had warned me that I might feel existential malaise when I wasn’t distracting myself with my phone. She also said paying more attention to my surroundings would make me realize how many other people used their phones to cope with boredom and anxiety.

“I compare it to seeing a family member naked,” she said. “Once you look around the elevator and see the zombies checking their phones, you can’t unsee it.”

Withdrawal Sets In

Next, I gave my phone the Marie Kondo treatment — looking at all my apps and keeping the ones that sparked joy and contributed to healthy habits and tossing those that didn’t.

For me, that meant deleting Twitter, Facebook and all other social media apps, along with news apps and games. I kept messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal, and non-distracting utilities like cooking and navigation apps. I pruned my home screen to just the essentials: calendar, email and password manager. And I disabled push notifications for everything other than phone calls and messages from a preset list of people that included my editor, my wife and a handful of close friends.

Where you keep your phone is also important. Studies have shownthat people who don’t charge their phones in their bedrooms are significantly happier than those who do. Catherine charges her phone in a closet; for me, she recommended a locking mini-safe. I bought one and started storing my phone inside, which simultaneously reduced my nighttime usage and made me feel like I was guarding the queen’s jewels.

And I pursued activities that could replace my phone habit. On the recommendation of my colleague Farhad Manjoo, I signed up for pottery classes. As it turned out, pottery makes a perfect phone substitute. It’s manually challenging and demands concentration for hours on end. It gets your hands dirty, too, which is a good deterrent to fiddling with expensive electronics.

After a pottery class, I updated my wife on my progress. I told her that while it felt great to disconnect, I still worried that I was missing something important. I liked having a constant stream of news at my fingertips, and I wanted to do more of the things I actually like about social media, like keeping tabs on my friends’ babies and maintaining ambient Kardashian awareness.

“I’m sad that you’re having trouble with this,” she said, “because it’s been great for me.”

She explained that since my phone detox started, I’d been more present and attentive at home. I spent more time listening to her, and less time distractedly nodding and mumbling while checking my inbox or tapping out tweets.

Psychologists have a name for this: “phubbing,” or snubbing a person in favor of your phone. Studies have shown that excessive phubbing decreases relationship satisfaction and contributes to feelings of depression and alienation.

For years, I’ve justified my phubbing by treating it as a professional necessity. Isn’t it my job to know when news happens? Won’t I be neglecting my duties if it takes me an extra hour to learn that Jeff Bezos is getting divorced, or another YouTuber did something racist?

I put this question to Catherine, who reassured me that I wasn’t jeopardizing my career by being slightly later to the news. She reminded me that I’d been happier since I dialed down my screen time, and she gently encouraged me to focus on the other side of the cost-benefit analysis.

“Think of the bigger picture of what you’re getting by not being on Twitter all the time.”

A Thoreau Cleansing

The biggest test came with a “trial separation” — a 48-hour period during which I wasn’t allowed to use my phone or any other digital device. (Catherine’s program calls for a 24-hour separation, but I decided to try a more hard-core version.)

I had dreaded this idea at the outset, but when the weekend actually arrived, I got giddy with excitement. I rented an off-the-grid Airbnb in the Catskills, warned my editor that I’d be offline for the weekend and took off.

A phone-free weekend involved some complications. Without Google Maps, I got lost and had to pull over for directions. Without Yelp, I had trouble finding open restaurants.

But mostly, it was great. For two solid days, I basked in 19th-century leisure, feeling my nerves softening and my attention span stretching back out. I read books. I did the crossword puzzle. I lit a fire and looked at the stars. I felt like Thoreau, if Thoreau periodically wondered what was happening on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram story.

I also felt twinges of anger — at myself, for missing out on this feeling of restorative boredom for so many years; at the engineers in Silicon Valley who spend their days profitably exploiting our cognitive weaknesses; at the entire phone-industrial complex that has convinced us that a six-inch glass-and-steel rectangle is the ideal conduit for worldly experiences.

Sadly, there is no way to talk about the benefits of digital disconnection without sounding like a Goop subscriber or a neo-Luddite. Performative wellness is obnoxious, as is reflexive technophobia.

But I cannot stress enough that under the right conditions, spending an entire weekend without a phone in your immediate vicinity is incredible. You have to try it.

Rewired and Renewed

Allow me a bit of bragging: Over the course of 30 days, my average daily phone time, as measured by the iPhone’s built-in screen time tracker, has dwindled from around five hours to just over an hour. I now pick up my phone only about 20 times a day, down from more than 100. I still use my phone for email and texting — and I’m still using my laptop plenty — but I don’t itch for social media, and I often go hours without so much as a peek at any screen.

In one of our conversations, I asked Catherine if she worried that I would relapse. She said it was possible, given the addictive properties of phones and the likelihood that they’ll only keep getting more essential. But she said that as long as I remained aware of my relationship with my phone, and continued to notice when and how I used it, I’d have gotten something valuable.

“Your life is what you pay attention to,” she said. “If you want to spend it on video games or Twitter, that’s your business. But it should be a conscious choice.”

One of the most unexpected benefits of this program is that by getting some emotional distance from my phone, I’ve started to appreciate it again. I keep thinking: Right here, in my pocket, is a device that can summon food, cars and millions of other consumer goods to my door. I can talk with everyone I’ve ever met, create and store a photographic record of my entire life, and tap into the entire corpus of human knowledge with a few swipes.

Steve Jobs wasn’t exaggerating when he described the iPhone as a kind of magical object, and it’s truly wild that in the span of a few years, we’ve managed to turn these amazing talismanic tools into stress-inducing albatrosses. It’s as if scientists had invented a pill that gave us the ability to fly, only to find out that it also gave us dementia.

But there is a way out. I haven’t taken an M.R.I. or undergone a psychiatric evaluation, but I’d bet that something fundamental has shifted inside my brain in the past month. A few weeks ago, the world on my phone seemed more compelling than the offline world — more colorful, faster-moving and with a bigger scope of rewards.

I still love that world, and probably always will. But now, the physical world excites me, too — the one that has room for boredom, idle hands and space for thinking. I no longer feel phantom buzzes in my pocket or have dreams about checking my Twitter replies. I look people in the eye and listen when they talk. I ride the elevator empty-handed. And when I get sucked into my phone, I notice and self-correct.

It’s not a full recovery, and I’ll have to stay vigilant. But for the first time in a long time, I’m starting to feel like a human again.

#Cell phones

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terryblount · 6 years ago

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Fallout 76 Review: Semi-Wasted, Semi-Wonderful

By now you’ve likely seen Fallout 76’s overwhelmingly bad reception. Mainstream sites have roasted it, the internet has mocked it, and retailers have slashed the price of it. The oft-heard critical terms are glitchy, soulless, broken, cash-grab, early-access, and junk. All these and more hang over Fallout 76 like a condemning toxic cloud.

So is this game simply trash? Is it unworthy of any attention? Well, it’s certainly true that Fallout 76 is broken, buggy, and sometimes unplayable. If we gave review scores here I’d probably give Fallout 76 a 4 or 5 out of 10. It has potential, but it’s simply a malfunctioning game rife with incompetent programming and faulty systems.

This leaves me in a strange position. After 65+ hours of play, I’m still eager to leisurely explore, build my character, and craft ever-more-powerful gear. I clearly see the numerous and unacceptable issues, and yet I find myself quite captivated by this mostly-dead Appalachia open-world.

In a world full of glitches and server instability, is inner-peace possible? Do we even dare to ask?

How can I enjoy Fallout 76? Am I insane? Just plain stupid? Bought-off by Bethesda? For those who dare to dive in, I humbly ask you to read this lengthy review in which I explain why Fallout 76 is both a technical disaster and a potentially powerful gameplay experience.

First, Let’s Roast: So Much Broken Stuff!

In case you haven’t read and/or watched how embarrassingly broken this game is, let me give you the highlights of the low points.

I’ve had about 14 game crashes, 20-plus server disconnects, 7 or 8 sudden maintenance shutdowns, and probably 30-plus lagging out episodes taking up to two minutes to resolve. The servers are less stable than the results of my last psychiatric evaluation (dual-burn!).

I was playing the game for five minutes to get final screenshots for this review…and then BAM.

In the worst case when the game does disconnect you, you might log back in and find you’ve lost the last five minutes or more of progress. Or maybe you won’t have. It seems to depend on the servers’ moods.

Particularly disturbing is how the quest log will sometimes fail to load. I’ll get in game and all my quests have simply vanished from the game world. Oh joy! Sometimes they’ll load in a few minutes. Other times I have to reconnect over and over and hope the game manages to scrounge up all that pesky quest data stuff.

This trash heap represents Fallout 76’s programming. A big mess of junk, basically.

One particular quest was deleted from my quest log and reinstated about eight times over the course of a week or so, but finally the servers dug deep and registered my completion. As such, finishing a quest is often a momentous occasion not because of stellar writing (it’s not) or amazing rewards (they’re not). Rather, it’s kind of a miracle the game could momentarily function well enough to allow proper quest completion.

To make matters worse, the quest system itself uses a checkpoint system that fails to save your progress for many quests given but not begun. For instance, let’s say a robot at point A gives you a quest to go to point B. Despite the game adding this quest to your journal, if you quit your game without going to point B, the quest will be deleted as if you never began it. Idiocy is what this is.

Ah, the dreaded T-pose in the wild! Stop breaking my immersion! Go away; nobody likes you!

Then there’s the broken artificial intelligence. About half the time enemies will glitch out in numerous mystifying ways. You just never know if they’ll slide around in a “T-pose” or teleport back and forth or glitch out of world or die instantly or be naked or invisible. Who knows, maybe they’ll even behave properly!

And we mustn’t forget about the persistent and unacceptable lag. Remember the 1990s on dial-up internet with all its hitches and delays? Fallout 76 not only remembers but emulates this with very obnoxious momentary pauses between major actions like looting, shooting, and building. At best, it’s a split-second annoyance. At worst, it’s seconds on end of bandwidth befuddlement. Do you even network code, Bethesda bro!?

The servers couldn’t be bothered to load super-mutant clothing. Very embarrassing, really.

The framerate and performance is often quite fine…except when it’s totally dismal. In typical fashion, Fallout 76 can sometimes run very smoothly, but then the programming strangles itself with all those bits and pixels and things grind to a stuttering, halting mess. This is a seriously dysfunctional game engine.

On your end as a player, your attacks often won’t register and animations won’t play. When they do play, you’ll often shoot or swing right through enemies. If you thought previous Bethesda games had bad combat, wonky movement, and glitchy animations, Fallout 76 takes it to a new level. More like 76 times more glitches (ultra-burn!).

A more surface annoyance is how the game refuses to remember my username and password. And why can’t the keyboard/mouse and controller be swapped on the fly? This is 2018, isn’t it?

Oh, and the game can’t even exit properly. I usually get stuck at a frozen game screen when quitting, even when using Alt-F4. I then have to invisibly open the Task Manager, type “fa” to select the “Fallout 76” program and then use Ctrl-E to end the task. If you didn’t know how to do all that…then you’d probably have to restart your computer or something. Fun!

So are you excited to play Fallout 76 yet?! Did I mention not only is the game priced at $60 retail but there’s a micro-transaction shop full of outrageously over-priced stuff that should be in the game to begin with? Yoda voice: Greedy and incompetent, Bethesda is!

$4 for a map, $14 for a rocket decoration, $4 for a door texture. Such blatant greed.

There’s my Fallout 76 roast. Disdainful derision for a flamboyantly flawed Fallout. If you are dead-set on hating Fallout 76, stop reading now and go in peace. Or read on and hopefully see why there may still be something worth salvaging in this massive mess.

What Player Would Enjoy This?!

Ok. That was a lot of broken stuff, wasn’t it? This is why, as a reviewer, I cannot recommend or endorse Fallout 76 in its current state. It’s truly one of the most broken triple-A games ever released. And yet, there is much here to enjoy and for a certain type of player.

This is key: Fallout 76 will only appeal to a more-limited range of players because it’s absolutely not the typical Bethesda RPG experience. I believe there is unique captivating joy buried within Fallout 76, but it requires defiant digging and self-determination.

There’s a vast world out there, full of treasures…if you look closely and carefully.

Let me explain by starting with what types of players won’t enjoy Fallout 76. Firstly, story-driven players won’t be satisfied. There’s only a bare-bones narrative told with holotapes (audio logs). There are no cutscenes or reveals or payoffs. There’s no characters to truly care about.

Action-focused players won’t be pleased. There’s almost no well-designed combat encounters. Most combat is awkward and clunky. There’s no sense of progression like in mission-based shooters, and the combat “Events” are mostly terrible (often broken) wave-based affairs.

Role-players won’t find much of a role to play since there’s not a single character to have a back-and-forth dialogue with. Shakespeare said “all the world’s a stage”, but Fallout 76 is more like an abandoned stage days after the last debauched performance, everyone gone and everything in disarray.

MMO-fans won’t find much to celebrate because Fallout 76 is the anti-social multiplayer game. Instead of advertising how you can get a job and become a hero or villain like many MMO-style games, Fallout 76’s “selling point” is how all those interesting interactions are as dead and gone as all the human NPCs.

This is where all the NPCs went. Thrown in dumpsters, never to give out quests again.

Speaking of everyone being dead, we finally get to the target audience of Fallout 76. The archeologists. The anthropologists. The wanderers. The nomads. The explorers of the unknown. The ones who are energized by solitude and find rest in their own private world.

Fallout 76 calls out to those who dream of having Disneyland all to themselves without the masses getting in their way. Put me in my own world. Let me explore. Let me discover. Let me escape the shackles of someone else’s story. Set me free from the madness of human interaction. This is, ironically, the mantra of Fallout 76.

A whole world to explore at my own pace, in my own way. To me this sounds like heaven!

Now you probably think I’m nuttier than my last peanut butter and jelly sandwich…but stick with me here, I’m going somewhere delicious with all this.

Self-Amusement Park: My True Story

Let me tell you a true story. When I was about 12 I went to an amusement park near my home. The whole park was rented that day by my friend’s mom’s employer, so we had full access to the massive park with only a maybe 200 of us instead of the usual 2,000+.

Just out golfing, enjoying the crisp, newly irradiated greens. And looking snazzy!

It was glorious. There were no lines and no crowded streets. I’d run from ride to ride with my friend. We’d go together a few times, then we’d split up and do what we wanted. It felt like this was my park. This was my world, created just for me to explore and enjoy.

To this day I remember this event as my best theme park visit ever. This experience was much better than all the other fancy super-crowded parks I’d go to in the subsequent years. Those other mega-parks were always chock full of people, reminding me I am but one of thousands, at the mercy of the crowds.

Here is where Fallout 76 resonates with me so much. Contrary to what I’ve said above, I don’t hate all human interaction. However, I want that interaction to be limited and optional and realistic. I don’t want to feel like I’m 1 of the 10,000 “Heroes” going on some quest-checklist to save the day like many online games.

The world is full of little locations such as this, pieces of lore to fit together however you like.

As a result, Fallout 76’s system is actually very enjoyable for me: there’s up to 24 players scattered around the massive world, which means I’m usually on my own. However, I always know other players are out there, released from my same Vault, exploring just like me. This setup gives an added realism and human connection to my exploration in a mostly non-distracting and beneficial way.

To put it another way, I can be alone but not lonely. Fallout 76 isn’t forcing me to team up and be social, and it’s not relegating me to an offline-only world populated by shallow NPCs. Just like my day at the amusement park, I have a big world to explore, but there’s others out there to create a contrast to my isolation. For me, this is a wonderful feeling.

Fallout 76’s Star: The Appalachia World Itself

Let’s get back to some specifics and describe the game world. Fallout 76 features not only the largest but also the most meticulously crafted game-space Bethesda has ever created. The attention to detail, little touches, and overall sense of place makes exploring the huge West Virginia Appalachia landscape a delight to me.

What a breathtaking, compelling, and expansive world, and it’s all mine to discover!

Truly the natural environments are stunning and impressive. This is a huge step up from anything Fallout 4 offered. Sadly, the man-made locations and buildings are mostly recycled assets from Fallout 4, and it’s almost all inferior to the creatively crafted natural artwork.

I cannot overstate how impressed I am with Fallout 76’s natural world full of truly unique biomes and locales. The lush green and bright red forests. The haunting mucky mires. The rocky moon-like crags and mining outposts. The otherworldly irradiated flora. It’s mesmerizing and graphically impressive!

There are some fantastically dangerous locales to explore…better bring a gas mask!

Most importantly, the world’s full of typical Fallout story tidbits. Husband and wife farmers about to lose everything suddenly hit it big only to have the world get nuked the next week. A bank robbery gone wrong made irrelevant by Armageddon. These stories get pieced together as you carefully find corpses and notes and so forth.

Thanks to the superb quality of the world itself, I find myself logging in and relaxing as I settle in to another session of wanderlust, being transported to what feels like a real place I can live and breathe in.

Such a quaint and calming scene. There’s beauty in simplicity. And those rocks are looking nice!

Sometimes I’ll just meander to a few locations and admire the views, takes some photos, and maybe find a note from a dead inhabitant. This leads us to what I’m calling my three pillars of Fallout 76.

My Three Pillars of Fallout 76: Wander, Discover, Examine

So we’ve already made it clear that this isn’t a game about story or characters. So what is it about? I personally view Fallout 76 as my solitary world to get lost in, and I find something very peaceful about walking through this vibrant world full of dead people and abandoned civilizations.

This simple process of journeying has kept me energized for a good 65+ hours, and I believe this is the fundamental gameplay loop of Fallout 76: wander, discover, examine. Let me explain each one.

I really love this photo. The ambience and mood is so gloomy yet soothing in a way.

First, I wander. I argue this game is for the wanderers, the nomads, those who see an inherent value in simply going forward to find what’s there. This feeling of wanderlust has never been truer than in Fallout 76. The game’s very premise is thus: the world is destroyed…go out and study what has happened…there’s nobody to help you…so forge your own path or die trying.

This mostly open-ended story structure is a tough pill to swallow for many fans because we’re used to Bethesda giving us all the major quest paths. This idea that we must blaze our own trail is what sets Fallout 76 apart, in an often misunderstood way.

Going out and seeing the sights for yourself is such a huge part of Fallout 76’s draw.

Moreover, many players will be sorely disappointed at how many “empty” locations there are. Many will ask, “What’s the point of yet another destroyed building to walk away from with only a backpack full of junk?” And yet, for us wanderers and explorers, the process of finding new places is, in itself, a worthwhile endeavor.

Now the second pillar: to discover. To discover is to live. This is the compelling truth that drives many of the world’s researchers, archeologists, and anthropologists. These are the ones that must discover, no matter what it may or may not lead to.

Some will ask what nonsense I’m talking about. It’s a big mental-shift to go from the quest-based discovery of prior games to this more free-form discovery of Fallout 76. Many players will hate it, but that indicates they perhaps haven’t discovered the joy of discovery!

One of countless little scenes set up to make you wonder and laugh and get immersed!

There’s so much to find and learn about in Fallout 76! The world is full of visually interesting locales and buildings and towns and bunkers! Uncovering a cabin hidden in the woods, now silent and empty; this is a joy to us archeologists! Let’s excavate the truth as best we can. We may never know exactly what happened, but we’ll try!

Coming across a scene of decaying bandit corpses, all at each other’s throats. Listening to a holotape stashed nearby that explains the philosophical disagreement that led to these deaths. Fallout 76 is so wonderfully full of this environmental storytelling, with dead bodies in curious positions and hints at how life failed to survive. The anthropologist in my eats all this up!

This is Greg. He fell off a ladder and died. A note warned him to be careful. He paid it no mind.

This brings us to the third pillar: examine. Let me tell you another story. I was in a summer program when I was a youth, going into the hills and digging up dirt to attempt to find old Native American arrowheads and other relics. We’d go there and dig and dig. Often we’d find nothing. Sometimes we’d find a few items that might be part of past civilizations. There was an urge to connect with the past and to find something hidden, which pushed us forward.

As many of us grow up, we lose this sense of wonder. We don’t have the patience for it perhaps. Fallout 76 is a rare game that asks us to slow down and study its world, much like how many of us remember playing and loving the game Myst back in the 1990s (another game that was criticized for being sort of empty, without much plot).

Here’s a mundane computer workstation. I thought this was a really nice setup for a photo. I like the cardboard box, unsure if it should fall or hold strong. That’s how our life can be at times.

This is where many label Fallout 76 as wasted or worthless. The gamer who wants to blow through five quests in 30 minutes and unlock that special weapon and become the hero…they probably won’t understand why people would bother with Fallout 76. And that’s fair for them: this isn’t their type of game.

And yet for me, some of my best times in Fallout 76 has been my own personal journey that started with wanderlust, blossomed into discovery, and finished with contemplative examination of the past. This seemingly basic process has compelled me to continue playing Fallout 76, pushing through all the horrible bugs and issues, akin to pioneers trying to avoid freezing to death or being glitched out of existence by diseased programming.

Helvetia: A Case Study

Still unsure if Fallout 76 is for you? Consider this case study that encapsulates this wander, discover, and examine philosophy that I claim makes Fallout 76 so captivating to a select group of players.

Welcome to Helvetia! It’s a nice place…or was…at some point…probably!

As I attentively stroll through the beautiful Appalachia countryside, I stumble upon a quaint little German/Swiss town, once a tourist destination but now lifeless apart from the roving ghouls. I’m filled with excitement because I know I’m going to discover and learn more about this world I love.

Questions fill my mind. Who lived here? What happened to this place? We’re they happy? What will I find as I go from house to house searching for answers? On the video-game side, I wonder if I’ll find a decent weapon blueprint or some higher level power armor.

As I explore the boundaries of the town and make a first sweep, I find no quest or higher purpose. Instead I find an art exhibit, a voting location gone haywire, and an old plundered inn. I spend maybe 20 minutes carefully sifting through the broken furniture and junk.

A swing-set for children. What manner of fun did kids have here? Where did it all go wrong?

There’s some notes here and there, and I do find a holotape. I hunker down in a safe corner and listen. It gives me a rare glimpse into the actual lives of the now-very-dead townsfolk. I also find a big score of tasty honey from the derelict-but-quaint local honey shop. Great!

All this exploration is done mostly quietly and peacefully with just a little combat to clear out the ghouls. After about an hour I’ve “finished” this location. I leave with the satisfaction of knowing I’ve explored another piece of post-war West Virginia history. Thus ends my time with Helvetia.

Helvetia if this Was Fallout 5: A Thought Experiment

Does my story bore you to death? Does my experience sound dreadfully dull? To some it will. These are the players who will likely curse Fallout 76 for, quite simply, not being Fallout 5. Part of the issue is it’s so easy to reimagine this town the way a fifth Fallout would have done it. For the sake of curiosity, let’s be creative and come up with our own Fallout 5 Helvetia.

This man was a writer…perhaps one of Bethesda’s, which explains the lack of storytelling…

If this were Fallout 5, this location would have been a vibrant town full of NPCs. You’d probably meet the town leader who gives you a grand quest to reinstate the annual town celebration day, requiring you to decorate the town or sabotage the whole event.

There would have been a deranged-ghoul who gives you a quest to kill the local honey shop owner because he believes the honey is a mind-control agent. You’d be able to side with him or turn him in. You’d later run into his family on the other side of the map, telling you of the time he ate some irradiated honey and nearly went feral.

Perhaps there’d be an upbeat German/Swiss companion you could recruit, dressed in a colorful blend of that culture’s traditional clothing and scavenged parts. She’d talk in an accent of course and have a quest to find her lost loved ones.

This photo is meant to calm our hearts and open our minds to the creative space…or whatever.

Did I mention you’d be able to buy a player-home? You’d then decorate it with a bunch of fun German/Swiss trinkets as you complete quests for the townsfolk. By the end, they’d adopt you as their local town hero, possibly building a statue to you unless you choose to role-play a humble character.

The above structure is the well-established (some would say tired) Bethesda role-playing design, and this is what many wanted Fallout 76 to be. They didn’t want a Helvetia that’s empty and dead, and I can’t argue with their feelings. All this stuff would have been pretty fun no doubt, and there’s clearly a huge appetite for standard Bethesda/Fallout quests and role-playing.

The flames are the hopes of Fallout fans as Bethesda burns down our dreams of Fallout 5.

But here’s the bottom-line: Bethesda chose to not make a typical experience, so it’s not reasonable for me, as a reviewer, to expect it of Fallout 76. They made it clear from day one what this game would be. Maybe that was a poor choice, but as a reviewer, I cannot judge the game based on a different game I wish they would have made.

And let me go a step farther, at the risk of upsetting some people. In a way, exploring Helvetia was a fresher experience for me than if it was the usual Bethesda Fallout stuff. Going the dead and desolate route let me express my own inquisitiveness in a bolder way than if all the stories were right there in front of me in living NPC form.

Engaging with and helping NPCs has its joys of course, but in Fallout 76 the joy is in helping yourself to discover and learn about this world. I strongly believe piecing the fragments of this broken world together is enriching in its own way. That drive to know what used to be and how it all was lost is what makes Fallout 76 worthy to me.

A Tangent: We’ve Done this Before: Fallout Tactics

Speaking of people’s desire for Fallout 5, this isn’t the first time us Fallout fans have gotten something radically different than what we wanted. And ironically, this isn’t the first time us old-timers have played Fallout with friends.

Look! It’s Fallout with friends! Well, actually they’re total strangers…but I can pretend!

Way back in 2001, it had been 3 years since Fallout 2 took the CRPG world by storm, and we had all been waiting year after year for Fallout 3. And yet we didn’t get it. What we got was a weird multiplayer Fallout forgoing story and traditional RPG elements. Sound familiar? It would take a full 10 years to give us a proper Fallout 3 (although it was reimagined/mainstreamed by Bethesda).

For many, this Fallout Tactics was written off as a fake Fallout, and it certainly wasn’t what most fans wanted. Still, many of us accepted it for what it was and made the best out of it. I have fond memories of building my Tactics team and facing off against friends on our LAN.

Fast forward to today. We all want a proper Fallout 5, one that returns to form with the intelligence and wit and depth of Fallout 1, Fallout 2, and New Vegas. And yet here we are with a multiplayer Fallout forgoing story and traditional RPG elements. Sigh…

Fallout 76 questing: you sit by skeletons and act like there’s choices and consequences.

To add insult to injury, I fear it will take us another 10 years to once again get a proper Fallout. Bethesda is busy with their new game Starfield. And then there’s Elder Scrolls VI. That probably puts us out roughly 10 years…a distant dream at best.

Therefore, it’s no wonder why Fallout fans are upset. Fallout Tactics was the last PC release for a decade, and it’s possible Fallout 76 will also stand alone for countless years. At least Fallout Tactics was competently made…Fallout 76 is not.

Anyway, I think this comparison is fascinating, and it helps explain how crestfallen so many Fallout fans are. Even if Fallout 76 released perfectly stable and bug-free, nothing can replace a real Fallout 5 in the hearts of many. And that’s understandable.

Back to the Review: World Size and Nuke Farming

Let’s get back to some actual review stuff. First off, how much content is here? To give perspective, I reached level 40 after 45 hours of playtime, and at this point I’d explored most of the left side of the map with maybe 55% of locations remaining. The Challenge tracker put my quest and event completion around 33%. So this is a big game world.

In regard to nukes, the first one I saw was at 25 hours, but it was way far away from me. At 50 hours I was at a location that got nuked, and I engaged in cooperative high-level play with a bunch of level 100+ characters. I got annihilated by the end-game enemies, but it was fun to get a glimpse of what high-level players do in the end-game.

This is the landscape after a nuke. Bask in the beautiful orange haze! So lovely! Warning: real nukes aren’t lovely; they’re terrible and should never be set off, even if you’re very, very angry.

I’m now level 60 or so at 65 hours of playtime, and I’ve engaged in quite a few end-game nuke farming affairs. Too bad the framerate and game performance tanks when you’ve got a nuke going off and 10+ players all crammed in a small zone. Maybe after another 20 patches…

One of the big draws is late-game legendary item farming (and high-end crafting), and I do think it’s pretty fun to try to farm a great new weapon to rework your character build around.

Character Builds and Perk Cards

Speaking of character builds, one of the few design decisions that has been mostly praised is the perk card system. Gone is the static character builds of the past that lock you into one path. Now you slowly collect new perk cards you can freely equip and unequip at your leisure.

The perk card system really is a fun and interesting way to build your character! Strength FTW!

Every player level lets you pick a S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attribute (up to level 50), which allows for more (or upgraded) perk cards to be equipped to the attribute you select. It’s good fun deciding if you want a super-Strong or super-Lucky or very Agile or Perceptive character.

It’s also a real pleasure to slowly open new packs of cards and decide how to build your character. Do you focus on shotguns, survival, or something supremely wacky? There’s some really fun cards and returning favorite features like the Mysterious Stranger.

Even though at first there’s some essential cards (carry weight!), once you reach level 30 or so you have quite a large variety of build options open up to you. And once you reach level 50 and beyond, the depth of the character system fully reveals itself.

Crafting and Base Building

Fallout 76’s crafting is basically the same as Fallout 4. You can disassemble weapons and armor to learn how to craft various parts. It’s fun to slowly accumulate crafting knowledge, letting you make some incredibly powerful guns after dozens of hours of hard work.

The base building system is very limited, only allowing one mobile C.A.M.P. location. When you first start, you’re unable to build any of the cool stuff, and it can take 50+ hours or more to unlock even a fraction of the best building parts.

Here’s the first home I built! Very cozy. Very usable. I’ll upgrade someday, but for now it’s home!

There’s certainly a joy to occasionally taking time to build up your mobile base, saving chunks as Blueprints for easy reassembly as you move throughout the wasteland. Many players will likely miss the permanent Settlements and player houses of past Fallout games, but this mobile, more-limited base building fits well with Fallout 76 lore.

Workshops: A Great Idea Poorly Implemented

One of Fallout 76’s new ideas is the workshop system. All over the map you’ll find sites you can “claim” to make your own, such as junkyards and farms. Then you can build extractor units to harvest various resources over time. Other players can attempt to steal your workshop from you, making them “wanted” (Fallout 76’s penalty system), and you’ll fight it out.

Here I am “claiming” a workshop…I could be attacked by another player…but why bother?

The system is great in theory. The idea of claiming land as your own, harvesting certain resources like crystal or gold or aluminum, and defending it from attackers is fantastic.

The problem is in how unstable and fleeting Fallout 76’s world is. If you get disconnected or quit, all your workshop progress is erased since it’s only stored for that specific game session. So it’s not like you can slowly build up workshops over time. Overall, workshops are a wasted opportunity that end up being an occasional diversion instead of a robust, meaningful game system.

Terrible Non-Collectibles

Let me briefly note that Fallout 76 changes all the permanent-buff collectibles of past Fallout games into short-period buffs usually lasting an hour. This is a huge letdown since it renders Bobbleheads and Magazines mostly inconsequential. Nobody is going to alter their gameplay because they get 30% easier locking for an hour after using a certain Bobblehead.

Normally this would be an awesome find! But Bobbleheads are boring in Fallout 76…sad face!

This change also means none of these are true collectibles anymore. They respawn over and over and you can’t collect or display them like so many fans (myself included) have loved doing in prior Fallout games. Now I find myself vendoring Bobbleheads or using them instantly because who cares…

It’s an unfortunate change that takes something so fun and rewarding and makes it mundane and lame. It would have been great fun tracking these down with friends, sharing where we found them, and showing them off at our bases. Fail. Maybe they’ll patch it.

Holotapes, Notes, and Story Quests

I previously mentioned how Fallout 76 is full of various lore tidbits, fed mostly through holotapes and notes. For the record, I’ve found over 100 holotapes, roughly 150 notes, and about 20 treasure maps.

On the quest side, I’ve completed over 10 main quests, about 12 side quests, and a slew of unsorted quests. So there is questing to be had…it’s just limited…and without much cohesion.

Enemy Diversity and Challenge

It’s unfortunate that Fallout 76 reuses so much of Fallout 4’s enemies and assets. Still, it’s nice to see a wide variety of new and interesting creatures included. There’s some really creative and funny takes on irradiated wildlife in Fallout 76. However, the majority of the time is spent fighting the four or five main enemy types, which gets repetitive very quickly.

Look at that cutesy-wootsy fox! I bet he’s got a nice pelt for crafting! C’mere Mr. Fox!

The game challenge overall is as one would expect from a Bethesda title: easy. Tough enemies do spawn, but I mostly died because of the terrible or broken AI, glitches, or other technical issues. But nobody really plays Fallout for the combat challenge I would imagine.

Sound Design, Music, and Radio Stations

Fallout 76’s sounds are mostly rehashes from Fallout 4. There’s a few nice additions with fantastic environmental sound effects in places. Bubbling, steaming, grinding, and chirping world sounds create a nice ambient backdrop for exploration.

I’m sneaking into this Super Mutant camp! Must be very quiet! Nobody set off a nuke!

The biggest standout is the absolutely phenomenal instrumental soundtrack by Inon Zur. He’s been doing the Fallout music ever since Fallout Tactics interestingly enough, and I think Fallout 76 is his best work yet. It’s truly brilliant, creating such a warm yet despairing mood. So good!

There are only two actual radio stations in Fallout 76: classical and the standard early to mid 1900s tunes. It’s all fine, even if we’ve been hearing some of these songs for years now in prior games.

In case you were wondering, Atom Bomb Baby is just as glorious in the Appalachia as it was in Fallout 4. Truly an epic song!

Online Events: They’re Bad

Fallout 76 includes a couple types of “online” quests, and both are pretty bad. There’s “Events” and “Daily Quests” that repeat on timers. Sadly each of these quest types tend to be very generic, very tedious, and very fetch-questy.

The “Powering Up” Events are quite tedious…running around repairing stuff for a minor reward.

Most players will probably attempt these quests once and realize how unfulfilling they are. Overall Bethesda did a terrible job creating fun and engaging repeatable quests…not surprisingly really.

Photo Mode and Photos as Loading Screens!

Fallout 76 has a fantastic photo mode that’s super-fun to use as a sort of selfie-documentary, visually recounting your personal game journey. There’s so many wonderful and wild places for photo opportunities! And remember how I said this game is for anthropologists and explorers and archeologists and stuff? They love to take photos, trust me on this one!

Photo mode brings much happiness and joy! Here’s me chilling with my raider buddies!

I’ve personally taken over 80 photos during my 65+ hours exploring West Virginia, and it’s a trip down memory lane to go into the Photo Gallery and see the way my character has visually and geographically progressed throughout the game. Good times.

Not only is there a photo mode, but Fallout 76 uses your photos as loading screen artwork. This may sound minor, but it’s pretty much the best feature ever invented. Too much? Ok, but using your own photos as loading screens is the best feature you never knew you needed.

Even if Fallout 76 goes down is history as utterly hated, the one thing it’ll always have is your photos as loading screens! They’ll never be able to take that away from you, Fallout 76! Never!

Couldn’t We Have Had a Few NPCs?

I want to say I agree with all the criticism that says Fallout 76 did NOT need to have every single human/ghoul NPC be dead. Bethesda could definitely have included a handful of NPCs here and there and still delivered the core Fallout 76 experience.

This is as close to a NPC dialogue as you’re going to get: some text on a computer screen.

Some traditional Fallout quests and NPCs and dialogue wouldn’t have ruined the game. Therefore, it’s easy to look at the game and feel like Bethesda was just lazy and didn’t want to do all the hard work of writing dialogue and quests and choices and consequences. That’s logical criticism.

But Bethesda claims this is how they wanted to make the game. No dialogue. No proper NPCs. Fair enough I guess…but there’s still plenty of other ways they could have added more quality quests.

Fake Conclusion: The Fallout Future

The future for Fallout 76 is as bright or dark as Bethesda wants it to be. There’s great potential to fix all the bugs and lag and issues and to deliver quality (free) content for months to come. There’s also the unfortunate possibility Bethesda won’t ever stabilize the game, will add even more egregious cash-grabs (loot boxes), and charge big money for lame expansions in the future.

My faith in Bethesda is in as good of condition as this decimated cathedral.

I honestly have very little faith in Bethesda. I don’t trust them at all. Fallout 76 could get turned around like Final Fantasy XIV or The Division, but will that happen? Final Fantasy XIV took three years with a full relaunch, and The Division took a year and a half of extreme patching to make it into a truly solid, deep, and expansive game.

Does Bethesda have the will, the competency, and the moral compass to do what’s right and needed? Only time will tell.

Proper Conclusion: Semi-Wasted, Semi-Wonderful

As stated at the very start, Fallout 76 often is broken, usually buggy, and sometimes unplayable. And yet it’s also one of the most beautiful and detailed post-apocalyptic open-game-worlds ever created. Appalachia is the star: so exquisitely detailed and captivating. And when the game functions there’s dozens upon dozens of hours of brilliant exploration to be had.

Despite the enthralling exploration, the game definitely lacks quests, a sense of permanence, and a traditional video game plot. The cooperative play can be lots of fun, whether it’s low-level basic exploration or end-game nuke runs with a crew of 10+ other highly-geared Power Armor players. And yet stability issues are the greatest threat to your fun.

What else will emerge from Bethesda’s vaults? Can they unleash Fallout 76’s potential? Maybe.

Ultimately, there’s no way a serious review can overlook all the faults, but sometimes there’s joy to be had even in the most busted of video games. Just be aware that only a certain type of player will enjoy Fallout 76’s bleak, mostly-dead world of self-guided gameplay.

If my review piques your interest, then the safe bet is to buy Fallout 76 for cheap…in a year…if they’ve fixed everything…and over time you may come to appreciate the joy of wandering, discovering, and examining Fallout 76’s strange and creative Appalachia open-world.

At the very least, let’s agree using your photos on loading screens is genius. So Fallout 76 isn’t all bad, right?

Vibrant, huge open-world

Beautiful scenic views

Captivating exploration

Piecing together the lore

Character build diversity

Perk card flexibility

Coop when you want to

Base building and expansion

Crafting and upgrading gear

Atmospheric soundtrack

Fallout vibe when working

Server instability

Serious latency issues

So many bugs and glitches

Quest tracker issues

Lack of NPCs, dialogue

Clunky, awkward combat

Lame events and daily quests

Cumbersome menus

Recycled Fallout 4 assets

Ugly up-close details

Insulting micro-transactions

Playtime: 65 hours total. Nick’s explored about 75% of the map, having almost completed the final quests. He’s engaged in end-game content, built many homes, and crafted hundreds of weapons and armor. He’s eager to finish this review and get back to living the life Appalachia!

Computer Specs: Windows 10 64-bit computer using an Intel i7-3930k CPU, 32GB of memory, and a nVidia GTX 980 Ti graphics card.

Also read the Fallout 76 PC Performance Analysis.

Fallout 76 Review: Semi-Wasted, Semi-Wonderful published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

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fbitennis · 6 years ago

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Tennis Needs Some Fan-Developed Toy Stats (and the tours need Stats Czars)

Every sport needs analytics, but in its infancy with respect to a particular sport it can be overwhelming for some fans and for the governing bodies themselves. Hence, in baseball, while Bill James was creating his various complex runs created formulae, he also introduced some simple “toy stats,” like pitching game scores, the hall of fame monitor and the eponymous “Favorite Toy.”

What is a toy stat?

Toy stats are faux analytics -- they do not attempt to scientifically explain a particular aspect of the sport, eschewing mathematical and data-collecting complexities in favor of ease of calculation. For that reason, you don’t need toy stats to explain a sport.

Yet they serve as a necessary bridge between traditional stats and true analytics. They tend to be a little more fun, easier to calculate (or gather the data for), and placed on a scale that makes sense to a casual observer (e.g., 0 is bad, 50 is average, 100 is good). This makes them more accessible to fans who just aren’t there yet on more complex analytics.

When you get the fans interested in a metric that at least seems advanced, you get two things: (1) the governing bodies of the sport take more notice, which opens the coffers to the data they keep in the black box and (2) many fans will think harder about analytics, and will not stop at the toy stats, instead moving on to more advanced analytics. I’d be shocked if any baseball stathead (like me) who had spreadsheets to calculate linear weights, WAR or park factors didn’t at some point also have a spreadsheet to calculate a pitcher’s game score. Toy stats are a gateway drug, in a good way.

For those not familiar with pitching game scores in baseball, you basically add some counting stats from a pitching performance and fit it into a 0-100 scale (although it is possible in unusual circumstances to have negative game scores and games greater than 100). You can’t fully understand a pitcher’s performance in a game if you know he had a game score of 85, but you know something about his performance (it was very very good, even if he lost the game), and for that reason, game scores are still published on various baseball sites, sometimes in slightly altered form. And even though toy stats do not try to fully explain an aspect of the sport, they should tell you something about what they measure that adds to the discussion...they still need integrity.

Development of Analytics in Tennis

In tennis, there is a strong undercurrent of true analytics that has been building for a few years, largely through Jeff Sackman at Tennis Abstract and his Match Charting Project. That’s advanced stuff, and it will take time to enter the public consciousness the way some baseball metrics have.

The progress will continue to be slow while the ATP, WTA and other tennis organizations keep the more detailed data in a black box. The WTA, ATP and USTA do not understand fully understand how to use the statistics they have at their disposal, which is not surprising for a sport in which the analytics are just now being developed. For years, the WTA, ATP and USTA have outsourced this, hiring various data companies to help them with stats, and hoping this would keep them in step with the statistical revolution. Yet the tours, without any in-house expertise, must rely entirely on those companies to produce something useful. Those companies do not understand tennis, and the tours don’t understand the analytics world well enough to know whether they are getting the kind of stats that matter from their statistical “partners.” There’s a communication/knowledge gap.

Toy Stats in Tennis

SAP, Infosys and IBM (for example) tend to produce the kind of bite-sized statistical nugget that fits the transitory nature of TV, but they have not produced any serious analytics or even a really good toy stat. An example is the horrible “IBM Keys to the Match,” in which we would learn that if Player X can win 75% of his service points, he has a really good chance of winning the match. What they neglect to point out is that any player who wins 75% or more of his service points has about a 96% chance of winning the match (based on actual results on the ATP Tour 2015-2018).

The ATP seems to be trying, however. Even though the hawkeye-level data is still in the black box, the ATP’s web site is chock full of ways to slice and dice compiled match stats, in different years, different surfaces, etc. (And kudos for that). Compare the WTA site, where you will be lucky if you can find the match stats for the match that was played this morning.

The ATP recently has developed three toy stats, indicating that they are starting to see the need. Those are the Serve Rating, the Return Rating and the Under Pressure Rating, which add together some basic stats, like the pitching game score does. Here’s the Serve Rating, for example:

First serve in % + first serves won % + second serves won % + service games won % + average aces/match - average double faults/match

The Serve Rating does not come close to passing the smell test for true analytics. For example, the formula adds and subtracts percentages and counting stats to and from each other, some of the stats are duplicative, and some of the individual components are meaningless (e.g., aces and double faults are calculated per match, despite matches having different numbers of service games and serves). However, a toy stat doesn’t have to be a true analytical measure.

The Serve Rating, Return Rating and Under Pressure Rating are practically the definition of a toy stat in terms of calculation and availability of data. However, in my opinion, they do not meet the integrity component -- the calculation just makes no sense, instead just throwing every stat they can think of into the addition and subtraction, with no weights, scaling, etc. Plus, the Serve Rating and Return Rating in particular give us no return for our calculation efforts. Here are the top 10 players by the ATP’s Serve Rating, last 52 weeks, all surfaces:

Here’s the same chart, with the top 10 by Service Games Won % added, which is one of the six components of Serve Rating:

Same 10 guys, with just a one position shift here or there. Why add and subtract six components when you can just sort by one of them?

In-House Statistical Czars

These new ratings indicate the ATP is making an effort, but also highlight the disconnect between what the big data partners could be doing with the data, if only the tours could communicate what the sport really needs.

Ideally, the ATP and WTA would have statistical czars, to bridge the gap between tour headquarters and the giant data companies who have the info and the raw know-how, but cannot seem to translate it to tennis. The czars would be like APIs, which let two pieces of software communicate with each other. The czars also would be populists, encouraging the proliferation of the data and the analytics. The czars would not need to have data science degrees (that’s what the big data companies are for), but they would need to understand what data science is capable of and what is necessary to fully bring tennis into the modern stats-based world, which fans increasingly crave.

Some good toy stats would be a great place to start.

Fan-Developed Toy Stats

While we are waiting for the tours to employ these in-house stats czars, we need tennis fans to develop and publish their own toy stats to spark fan interest and make the tours themselves more aware of what they need to do to get tennis up to speed. We only need a handful of toy stats to take hold. Bill James (and others) did not wait for Major League Baseball to get started.

As a recap, these toy stats should:

Be relatively easy to calculate, which means only addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, assuming use of a basic calculator (real or computer-based) with a memory function

Use stats that are readily available to anyone with an Internet connection

Be scaled so that someone seeing the toy stat will have a sense of how good, bad or average the measured performance is

Tell us something that we would not otherwise know using an already-existing stat

Bonus: Have a clever name that is descriptive and easy to promote

If you need an example, Carl Bialik’s Dominance Ratio (now available on any Tennis Abstract player page) is a good one, although it might qualify as something more than a toy stat. Dominance Ratio for a player in a match is his percentage of return points won, divided by the percentage of his own serves lost. Or, restated, return points won % divided by opponent’s return points won %. A DR of 1.0 indicates an even match between the two players. A DR >1.0 indicates an increasing level of dominance by the player measured, and conversely, the opposing player would have a DR <1.0, indicating he or she was dominated to one degree or another.

Let’s use the bullet points above to test it with our toy stat criteria:

Involves only division, even if you start with the counting stats rather than starting with the return percentages

Return points won are readily available at the ATP web site in various places. It’s a little tougher to find it at the WTA site, although the old WTA site included this data, and you can find the women’s data at various other sites

DR is well-scaled, with 1.0 being even and numbers above and below 1.0 readily indicating the level of dominance.

Tells us something more than the score itself does. This doesn’t have to be true with respect to every match, as that’s an impossible standard. You don’t need to see a DR of 4.0 to know a player dominated a match she won 6-0 6-0. But it can be helpful to see a modest DR of 1.05 in a 6-4 6-3 match, indicating the match was closer than the score indicates.

Bonus: I think Dominance Ratio is a pretty good name. It’s short, indicates exactly what it is measuring, and can be abbreviated as DR for purposes of popularizing it (assuming you are not Victor Estrella Burgos)

#Tennis analytics #Toy Stats

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democratsunited-blog · 6 years ago

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Under Pressure From Progressives, Rep. Ro Khanna Endorses Both Democrats in Contentious New York Primary

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=3642

Under Pressure From Progressives, Rep. Ro Khanna Endorses Both Democrats in Contentious New York Primary

On Tuesday evening, New York Rep. Joe Crowley tweeted that he had won the support of progressive Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., in an increasingly heated primary in Queens and the Bronx. By Wednesday morning, following an outpouring of anger at Khanna, the endorsement had become a “dual endorsement” of both Crowley and his opponent, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Khanna’s painfully public shift from Crowley-backer to a neutral party undermines Crowley’s effort to demonstrate his strong support from the left. It will also leave a mark on Khanna as he navigates his future in Congress and within the progressive movement.

The online firestorm came a day after Crowley announced he had the support of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a fellow New York Democrat, who has spent much of the past year backing women in races across the country. The endorsement was not cost-free for Gillibrand, either. Combined with her endorsement of Gov. Andrew Cuomo over challenger Cynthia Nixon, her backing of Crowley over Ocasio-Cortez is being used as evidence that her support for women candidates extends only as far as their complicity with the Democratic machine.

Crowley’s rollout of the twin endorsements suggests that he senses his primary challenger is becoming a true threat — both to his seat in Congress and to his ambitions for leadership. Crowley, who represents New York’s 14th Congressional District, is routinely floated as a potential replacement for Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., but if he becomes toxic among progressives, his path to the top becomes much more narrow.

Khanna’s reversal was remarkable in that it played out in real time in a series of Twitter conversations among rattled supporters who filed accusations of “hypocrisy,” being a “sellout,” and capitulating to corporatists.

Although Crowley’s establishment bonafides might make him an uncontroversial choice for a mainstream Democrat, Khanna has built his political career on a progressive agenda. He is a member of Justice Democrats — a political group dedicated to electing aggressively progressive candidates around the country — and campaigned on issues like “Medicare for All,” free college, and a $15 minimum wage. Perhaps more controversial than Khanna’s Crowley endorsement itself was that it initially came in lieu of an endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez — a young, charismatic, progressive candidate whose scrappy campaign and authentic presentation style has garnered her national attention.

In many ways, the ascendancy of Crowley’s primary opponent mirrors Khanna’s.

The irony is that, in many ways, the ascendancy of Crowley’s primary opponent mirrors Khanna’s own trajectory. Both are millennial candidates of color who have challenged establishment figures from the left. In 2016, Khanna beat incumbent Mike Honda, who was popular among progressives — particularly with organized labor. Khanna went on to become one of the most outspoken members of Congress on the left, building a stable of progressive legislation rather than merely attacking President Donald Trump. He has also been among the few members of the House to make foreign policy a priority, speaking out on the war in Yemen and the May 14 slaughter in Gaza, for example. He was the first House member to become a Justice Democrat — an organization for which Ocasio-Cortez is a board member. For the most part, both candidates support the panoply of programs that have become a litmus test of sorts for progressivism.

It’s Khanna’s association with the left that made this endorsement of an establishment candidate so confusing to his backers. Despite the policy overlap between Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez, he threw his lot in with Crowley — a man whom Ocasio-Cortez has accused of being driven by Wall Street and luxury real estate money, and out of touch with a district he no longer lives in. (Crowley lives in Virginia). Arguably revealing his disconnect with Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez’s generation, Crowley recently chafed at what he said was Ocasio-Cortez’s effort to make the campaign “about race,” saying, “I can’t help that I was born white.”

When his followers objected that Khanna’s endorsement of Crowley over Ocasio-Cortez was inconsistent with his policy positions, Khanna was conciliatory, but he had trouble providing an explanation sufficient to satisfy his detractors.

In an email to The Intercept, Khanna acknowledged the complicated political bind he’s in, referencing his effort to balance his desire to back primary challengers with the need to stay on the good side of incumbents who can help pass important legislation.

The truth is it is always very difficult for an incumbent to endorse a challenger to one of his colleagues. I ran three times against an incumbent of my own party — the first time in 2003 opposing the war in Iraq. Twice I lost. Once I won. In all those races, I never received a single endorsement of a federal elected official, even though I had worked for President Obama. I vowed that I would always support the concept that primary challenges make our party better. I have tried to balance that with being effective in the House and building coalitions.

Crowley is a key member of House leadership, with significant control over committee assignments and the fate of legislation — presuming Democrats eventually take back the lower chamber. Leadership can make life miserable for rank-and-file Democrats and block them from accomplishing anything nationally or for their constituents back home. Staying in the good graces of the likes of Crowley is one way members ensure their efforts are not blocked by party leadership. By Wednesday morning, it was unclear how firmly Khanna remained in those good graces.

In response to the online criticism, Khanna first noted that Crowley had backed progressive legislation alongside Khanna, tweeting: “I have worked on progressive legislation with Mr. Crowley. But if you look at the totality of my endorsements and record, I think you might find it decent.” Khanna later explained what legislation he was referring to, tweeting that Crowley “was helpful on building support for Medicare for All and legalizing marijuana” and adding, “I didn’t know much about his opponent. She has run an inspiring race.”

In his email to The Intercept, he elaborated on the extent of Crowley’s cooperation.

I have worked with Crowley as has Marc Pocan (chair of progressive caucus) on a number of progressive issues. He supported Barbara Lee and my legalizing marijuana bill and helped build support for it. I visited his district on how to bring tech to low income and minority communities in Queens…Crowley also has moved left on many issues. He is a cosponsor of Medicare for All. He’s a cosponsor of the Workplace Democracy Act. He has helped the CPC on our legislative priorities and is someone I have interact[ion]s with. I have been candid about that being the reason for my endorsement.

Khanna was also hit with inaccurate charges that he had taken $2,000 from Crowley on March 23: “Just factually I did not. Please see open secrets,” he responded, referring to the website that tracks money in politics. “Never cashed this check per n[o] pac pledge.” He noted that Crowley sends money to all freshman Democrats in Congress, which is part of his campaign for leadership.

When followers accused Khanna of capitulating to the whims of the Democratic establishment, rather than using the power of his “megaphone” to do “what is best,” he responded: “I have called out [Chuck] Schumer, endorsed against [Dianne] Feinstein, and taken positions contrary to the establishment. On this race, we have a different opinion. Respect your desire to bring change.”

This didn’t satisfy all of his followers, some of whom pointed out that progressive outsider candidates, like Ocasio-Cortez and Khanna himself, have a tougher path to victory than corporate candidates, and that Khanna could have at least withheld an endorsement from Crowley so as not to hurt Ocasio-Cortez’s chances. Khanna, unflinchingly respectful and patient throughout, affirmed that he supports primary challenges because they “make the party stronger.”

Khanna claimed to be surprised that anyone cared about his endorsement, tweeting, “I didn’t think it would matter as much and when I did it months ago didn’t even know about the race. It was prior to the viral video,” he wrote, referring to an Ocasio-Cortez campaign ad that became an internet sensation late last month. “I have said Crowley has been helpful to me on legislation but Ms. Ocasio has run a remarkable race.”

“A year ago no one would have cared who I endorsed! I get there is a responsibility.”

This frustrated many Twitter users, who couldn’t understand how Khanna could make an endorsement without meeting all the candidates in the race. Khanna seemed to accept that critique without defensiveness, tweeting: “Fair enough. In the future I will be more diligent on researching all the candidates and soliciting input. A year ago no one would have cared who I endorsed! I get there is a responsibility.”

Several hours into the Twitter storm, Khanna seemed worn down by the number of progressives who expressed frustration with his endorsement. Acknowledging that he has “great respect” for many of his critics, he apologized. “I will learn from this for future endorsements,” he said. “Hope over the years to earn people’s trust based on my FP & economic positions.”

After the Twitter debate took some strange turns, including a misunderstanding over whether a photo of Khanna’s face photoshopped on an 18th century American portrait of a member of the Whig Party was a reference to British colonialism and a dig at Khanna’s South Asian ancestry (it was not), Khanna attempted to resolve the controversy by endorsing both candidates.

At 2:42 a.m., after nearly 10 hours of responding to critics, Khanna tweeted: “have listened today to hundreds of progressives from around the nation who have been inspired by @ocasio2018 campaign. I am equally inspired & dual endorsing her. I explained why I support Joe. But I want to affirm Ocasio-Cortez’s bold progressive positions. As a son of immigrants, I feel strongly we need more millennials, women of color, and disenfranchised communities entering the political process. She is a trailblazer. Competition is good, and the voters of NY-14 will only benefit from the spirited election.”

Outstanding interview! Watching this was one reason I decided to dual endorseZ @ggreenwald

— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) June 13, 2018

Reaction to this “dual” endorsement was mixed. Some appreciated that Khanna listened to his critics and responded substantively and without defensiveness, while at the same time questioning the point of a double endorsement, noting, “A dual endorsement in a race they are running against each other doesn’t help her much.”

Another user captured the tone of much of the disapproval: “Dude. Bad form. I sincerely think your best course of action is to rescind your endorsement of Crowley. I trust you to be a continuing progressive. To continue an endorsement of Crowley (and pelosi for that matter) is sincerely going to work against you in the future.”

Still others praised Khanna for his responsiveness: “Thank you, Ro! I was not happy with your endorsement of Crowley, but you listened to us and took action. Most politicians don’t do that. Alex will win and make you proud!”

In some ways, the controversy exposed a vulnerability for Khanna as he rises in prominence among progressive activists. Recently, The Intercept reported on his jobs guarantee plan, which critics said was too conservative to be described as such. One expert who reviewed Khanna’s plan, Darrick Hamilton, a professor of economics and urban policy at the New School, warned that enthusiasm over jobs guarantees meant that such plans were at risk of “being coopted, watered down, and deviated from its intended goal.” Economist Dean Baker, however, had a different reading.“[Khanna’s proposal is] obviously much more modest than a full-scale job guarantee,” Baker said in an interview with The Intercept, “because I don’t think we’re in place for a full-scale job guarantee.”

Khanna’s background as a Silicon Valley corporate lawyer and Ivy league economics lecturer, as well as his political origin as a centrist (before moving to the left of liberal incumbent Mike Honda), makes some progressives distrustful. Even Khanna describes himself as somewhere to the right of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.: “Obviously, everybody is a reflection of their district,” he told Mother Jones, “but I think the combination of Bernie Sanders’ moral clarity with Silicon Valley’s interest in and understanding of job creation can be a compelling platform for the Democratic Party.” Of course, to some voters, a more moderate approach is a plus.

Khanna finished the night by saying that he hoped his decision to pair his endorsement of Crowley with one of Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t “tip the scales” of the race.

Thanks. My hope is my endorsement of Ocasio, whose campaign I should have followed more closely, will at least now not tip the scales.

— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) June 13, 2018

His mistake, Khanna said, was endorsing Crowley without knowing more about Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign. “When I endorsed him, I did not look into Ocasio’s campaign. That was my mistake. I should have been more aware of how inspiring a candidate she is and how she is a true trailblazer,” he told The Intercept. “The feedback from hundreds of progressives around the country made me take a closer look at her candidacy. I watched the video that went viral and also her interview with Glenn Greenwald. Her life story has defied the odds. She is running as a civil rights pioneer and on bolds policies like not taking pac money and a jobs guarantee. I support strongly young progressives and particularly people of color getting into the political process. So I was proud to dual endorse her.”

Ocasio-Cortez, at least, seems to bear no resentment toward Khanna, tweeting: “To some it may not seem like much, but @RoKhanna endorsing our campaign challenging the House Dem leader is enormously consequential. He listened to the PEOPLE, adapted, and courageously endorsed Ocasio2018. He could have ignored our pushback. He didn’t. Let’s have his back.”

Top photo: Congressional candidate Ro Khanna smiles during a Bloomberg West Television interview in San Francisco, Calif., on July 2, 2014.

Read full story here

#Democrats

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traemallari · 8 years ago

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[ finally answering the call ]

My lavender candle burning, my Breathe oil diffusing, Sari’s rhythmic breathing and Mosaic radio on Spotify make for a relaxing environment to read Jesus Calling and do my Operation Solid Life readings. Been having some adventurous and active days here as of late, but sometimes you just need a whole morning to journal with Jesus.

Traveling, especially for work and my art, is an absolute blessing. But for this Catholic raised kid who enjoyed going to mass and visiting my home church, I miss that part of worship. Having left my hometown almost a decade ago now, I haven’t had a community to call my own. I always love visiting my little home church whenever I would find myself back home, but those visits have been as little as once a year. And the community has grown and changed and although some familiar faces are still there, my connection is not.

Before I left Fullerton last December to join this Wicked life, I asked my love if we could go to a service at The Rock church. It was a Christian church that was just down the street from where I had been living for a year and a half but had never noticed.

To be honest, I didn’t see it because that wasn’t what I was initially looking for. Even when I was in Las Vegas, I always looked for the nearest Catholic Church and would go to Sunday Mass. As the years went on, I stopped going to mass. I love the tradition and religious ways of a Catholic mass, but that is nostalgia, something familiar from my past. But my spirit wasn’t being ignited and I felt more disconnected than ever. God has never left me and He has been the driving force behind every decision I have ever made and clearly Jesus took the wheel on this crazy journey I’ve been on and let me tell you, He is a fearless driver! And although God speaks to me everyday, I knew I was still missing a lot from our relationship and I didn’t know how to make it grow and progress.

So, when I met Josh, he told me his family went to The Rock. He never invited me there or pushed me towards it. I actually wondered why he never did. Did I come off as someone who wouldn’t understand or accept or believe? But now I know it was God’s timing. It was I who would make the conscious decision to take a step towards Christ.

So Josh took me to a service before I left for Wicked. And I knew it was what I had been looking for. I was overwhelmed. And although I left fulfilled I was also left wanting more!

When I started Wicked, it in itself was pretty overwhelming. That first month, I tried to start my Operation Solid Life readings, but I was tired and stressed and homesick and feeling very alone having joined an already established family during the holiday season. Instead of finding solace in the Bible, I found more frustration. I didn’t understand how to use the Bible and I didn’t understand what to do with this new knowledge. I was just using a Bible application on my Surface Pro and I don’t like reading off a screen in the first place, and it had ads and it wasn’t the NIV (New International Version) which, without help, is hard to understand.

Therefore by the time the new year came around and we were in a new city, I had stepped away from my readings to focus more on integrating better into the show and the cast and crew and trying to make a community for myself with this new family.

A couple months later and we returned to upstate New York. I started to feel a stirring in my soul. It was hard to pinpoint. So, as the scorpio that I am, I took to deductive reasoning while testing out all roads. At first I thought that maybe the redundant lifestyle, even given the new cities, was starting to wear on me. I don’t like feeling like I’m on a hamster wheel. Finally comfortable in the show, I started to find different choices to make each show be different and enjoyable. And as I started to strengthen friendships and find different ways to experience each city uniquely, I ruled that out as the source of my unease.

I let Josh know that I didn’t feel right and maybe it was that I didn’t feel we were growing as a couple. My love language is quality time and seeing as we only saw each other once a month, sometimes for only 24 hours, I felt constricted by time to fill each second with being able to do things we couldn’t do apart. I like going with the flow and I like sometimes just sitting and taking our time and talking, but every second was always filled with some part of the new city that I wanted to share with him or if I was home, it was to basically just eat all the things I missed and catch up with others, which I never actually had time to properly do...I would just see my friends as I ate my food. Also, the time difference was hard for us to have much time at the end of the day to catch up. He is my absolute best friend in the entire world and we could go on and on delving deep into topics, talking about our day, things we’d been mulling over in our minds, random theories, what have you. But when you don’t have much time, I started to feel like I needed to edit what I wanted to share to only the main points, which isn’t why we talk in the first place. So we agreed we would make better time for each other regarding the time differences and he would put more effort into taking the reins when I would visit home so that I felt that my coming home was as important and needed to him as it was for me. After we adjusted that part of our communication, there was still something missing.

I was starting to feel undone.

And like most things that happen in my life, I ran into the wall that was blocking me, and I ran into it hard. It broke a few things I had built unnecessarily and it hurt. It hurt enough to cry. For days.

It is an extremely personal thing that happened to me and I feel uncomfortable sharing the details here. The main thing is that my path towards Christ suddenly overlapped with Josh’s and knowing that made me feel motivated. Still shaking from impact, I was on my feet and started walking.

I turned back to The Rock and found their website and started to watch the taped services. I was trying to find their podcasts, which, let me just say, someone needs to streamline their website a bit. It is not user friendly and missing a lot of vital information that newcomers, like myself, are looking for. However! I did stumble upon a video that explained the Operation Solid Life readings. The reason why I was so confused back in December is because it was just a reading plan that was given to me by Josh’s sweet mother. With the best intentions, she just included me in a family group text that just had the list of readings attached, but nothing else. There were directions that I did not know, and it was not at all her fault for assuming I knew what to do with the Bible.

Speaking of the Bible, I could not stand reading off the screen anymore and really did not like this Bible application on my computer. Thankfully, one of the ensemble girls, Nyla, gave a few of us new beautiful Bibles as her goodbye gift. It is a New International Version meaning it’s easier for me to read the stories and follow along. Plus, the cover of it is this super soft rubber that I love! I love tactile things. The cover matches my Jesus Calling book as well. Little things that make me happy!

I have always wanted to read the Bible to better understand it now as an adult. When I was younger, we weren’t focused too much on the Bible and I wasn’t taught how to use such a powerful communication tool. When I was living in LA during what I now refer to as my own spiritual winter season, I kept having that thought at the back of my mind, but it just wasn’t the right time. Wait. Let me correct that. I wasn’t at the right time. God’s time is always right all the time. And I needed to come to Him when I was ready.

Since then, I have realized my stirring wasn’t a hole asking to be filled. Not at all. God was already in there. That stirring was a calling. Like a phone ringing, waiting for me to pick up the receiver. The ringing was muffled, lost under a cluttered mess of experience and pain. It took the great shaking to dislodge a few things in order for me to hear where the ringing was coming from.

I answered. And unlike most of my internet in every different hotel, the connection was loud and clear.

I have also found that with my studies, I can feel as if I am able to express my gratitude for this life. Not this life in general, but the one right now, every moment, the specific present.

God has answered so many different prayers in just my recent months, and almost all of them with my joining the tour. When I first joined, my Glinda, the incomparable Amanda Jane Cooper, gave me a Giving Key with the word Faith on it. She would ask newcomers to pick a word from a list that reached out to them or something they wished to work on while they were here. When I picked the word, it was subconscious. It was the first one that jumped out to me and I was able to justify it at the time. But hindsight is 20/20. And I did not know how prophetic that small gesture would become.

I am still yearning for community, but I know that is something I just have to be patient with. I found that there is a satellite church in Michigan and I will be able to go to service with Josh when I’m there for two weeks with the show. And I’m hoping I’ll be able to visit the home church around my birthday. It’s hard that my days off are Monday and Tuesday when I visit home and there isn’t worship on those days.

But I know God is setting things into motion and building takes time.

And that’s it. That’s my spiritual journey as of late. I actually didn’t mean to write or document any of this save for in my physical journal. But I guess I’m supposed to share a little of mu journey because the Holy Spirit really let it rip!

Thank you to whomever has made it this far into this entry! I don’t share to boast or to find validation. I share because maybe others won’t feel so alone. Or maybe they wouldn’t know just by looking at me what it is I’m experiencing.

So if this has shed any light for you in any way, small or large, feel free to strike up a conversation with me. We are alone on our journeys, but we don’t have to be lonely.

lovelovelove

Tifa

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gabrielcollignon · 8 years ago

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Play Marketball: Turn Disconnected Teams Into High Performers

In his 2003 book Moneyball, Michael Lewis recounts how the management of the Oakland Athletics revolutionized baseball by relying on statistical analyses rather than intuition to choose new players. Before General Manager Billy Beane turned a single metric — on-base plus slugging (OPS) — into his North Star for every decision, team managers preferred strategies that were unlikely to fail rather than those that seemed most efficient. “The pain of looking bad,” Lewis writes, “is worse than the gain of making the best move.”

As a content marketing manager tasked with delivering my quota of MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) and hitting publication dates, I get it. Picking an approach that seems unlikely to fail is safe. Proposing a radical new management system seems not only bad, but foolhardy. “Why,” managers the world over ask every day, “should we try to fix something that isn’t broken?”

Unfortunately for status-quo fans everywhere, visionaries and innovators understand that what counts as “broken” is constantly in flux. In 2001, before Beane began his quiet revolution inside Major League Baseball, no other team’s decision-making style appeared broken. Yet Beane would soon overtake them because his success depended on breaking things.

Likewise, in the increasingly noisy and densely populated online world, the success of our content relies on its ability to break things. We have to break through to audiences underwhelmed by mediocre marketing. We have to break the habits of consumers who have always used a competing product or read a competitor’s newsletter. And, most importantly, we have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams.

We have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams, says @andreafryrear. Click To Tweet

Although, really, it’s just the last part, the management part, that we have to break — and by break, I mean teams must decide on their own structure without heavy-handed interference from management. Before the accusations of marketing communism begin to fly, let me be clear: I’m not advocating the dissolution of management altogether. I’m proposing that on a modern content marketing team (whose goals, obstacles, and workloads are typically so huge that it’s a wonder they don’t all sleep under their desks), a manager’s job is to hire amazing people, empower them using Agile principles and processes, and then work like hell to keep anyone else from interfering.

That’s a lot to do, so let’s start from the top.

Agile marketing team – what is it?

Some teams are naturally adaptive and data-driven, and could technically be considered agile (lowercase “a”). To qualify as Agile (capital “A”), a marketing team needs a structure that enables it to adapt and iterate.

This structure could take various forms, including Scrum (the classic Agile process based around sprints), Kanban (a pull-based system that uses work-in-progress limits), or a hybrid of the team’s invention. Most Agile teams work in sprints — set periods during which team members aim to complete a set amount of work that’s connected to a long-term plan. Each sprint lasts between one week and one month, with two weeks being the most common duration.

A mainstay of the Agile approach is the stand-up — a 15-minute meeting, usually held at the beginning of every work day, during which team members stay on their feet. They take turns updating everyone on what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and what obstacles they need help to overcome.

Whatever form the structure takes, some kind of systematic foundation is needed to keep an Agile team from descending into frenetic reactions disconnected from a long-term plan.

Changing your mind all the time does not make you Agile.

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Step 1 – Hire amazing people

Much has been written (some of it on this blog and in CCO magazine) about the growing talent crunch plaguing content marketing, so we don’t need to go into a lot of depth on this topic. The harsh truth is, it’s hard to find good content help these days. But the interviews, networking, and early-morning coffee meetings more than pay off when you consider the impact that truly passionate and skilled content creators have on your organization.

In an interconnected, digital world, great marketing can spread at the speed of a click. It doesn’t matter if it came from a team with a multimillion-dollar budget or a solopreneur doing it all on her own. The internet is nothing if not democratic.

That means finding — and retaining — creators who can consistently produce legitimately awesome work that gives you a regular shot at hitting the digital jackpot. There is no greater source of competitive advantage in content marketing than a talented team.

But those teams need the space and freedom to create or the legitimately awesome will rapidly devolve into lethargic and yawn-inducing.

#Content teams need space to create or the legitimately awesome will devolve into lethargy. @AndreaFryrear Click To Tweet

Step 2 – Empower teams with agility

Whether it’s through an Agile iteration or sprint (set length of time during which a team commits to producing a set amount of content) or work-in-progress limits (inflexible limit on how much content can be in any given state such as research, writing, editing, review at one time), Agile teams are governed by limitations on their workflow. This isn’t because they’re lazy or can’t handle the workload. It’s because when people have a split focus, they do terrible work (and it takes them longer to do it).

For example, let’s imagine that your current content plans include creating a new webinar, whose launch you will support with an e-book and a series of blog posts. You plan each piece, make assignments, and send the team off to work. A week passes and you check on progress. It turns out that one person got derailed when sales asked for lead-generation collateral, another lost a day to responding to angry customer tweets, and your CEO wanted a home-page rewrite that took precedence over the blog posts.

Now you’ve got three half-finished content items, which is like having none at all.

You can’t give a webinar that ends abruptly halfway through. Nobody wants to download an e-book that’s just an outline. And blog posts just don’t work if they’re composed entirely of headlines, header tags, and target keywords.

An Agile content team, on the other hand, would have focused on finishing one piece before starting something else. Its members could have told sales and the CEO that their requests would be added to content’s Agile backlog (a prioritized to-do list that serves as the source of all work done by the team), not to the top of the list of immediate to-do’s.

An #Agile content team focuses on finishing one piece before starting something else, says @AndreaFryrear. Click To Tweet

As a bonus, not only do Agile teams produce more content in less time, they also make team members happier and more engaged. And that means team members stick around longer, are easier to recruit, and help solve that thorny talent problem we talked about earlier.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Stop Working So Hard: Agile Marketers Work Smarter

Step 3 – Get in other people’s way

You might have expected me to close by telling you to get out of the way so your team can work their Agile magic, but that’s not the final step. On our hypothetical content team, we had external requests being thrown in from all sides and derailing our content creators. Even on an Agile team, not everybody will happily chirp, “Nope,” when an executive tries to interrupt their work. Agile teams are empowered, but that doesn’t mean they have super powers.

Managers need to act like an offensive line, getting in the way of people who are trying to disrupt their team while they’re executing a beautiful play. They attend daily stand-up meetings, listening attentively and volunteering to help remove roadblocks (and then doing it). They genuinely value the creative force that their team can wield, and they actively work to create a situation where it can do its thing.

Respect tradition … or profit from it

Marketing, like baseball, has ways it’s always been done. We can choose to adhere to traditional ways of managing and creating content, or we can look outside our own typical way of thinking to gain the upper hand. Someone in your niche will be using an Agile approach to start breaking things very soon. Imagine what would happen if it was you.

Hear Andrea Fryrear explain user-story mapping at the Intelligent Content Conference March 28-30 in Las Vegas. Register today and use BLOG100 to save $100.

This article originally appeared in the February issue of CCO magazine. Subscribe for your free print copy today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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