#the law states that if your ship has a visible height difference you have to draw your take on it

[ameamedraws]

Obligatory ship height difference post

[antagonistchanremade]

Some character descriptions of the Stellar Grievances cast.

Stella Greenfield, our main protagonist, is a 20-year-old black woman. In her “civilian” form she’s got long black hair in a ponytail and wears a sweater, leather jacket, miniskirt, thigh highs, and sneakers. In her “Logged In” form, Mechaniisms, her hair is drastically shortened and gets more boyish, and her clothes are replaced with dress pants, combat boots, a really nice dress shirt, a vest, and a cravat, not including her equipment. Her eyes are purple and she’s average height. She was a strategy game nerd in the real world, and upon being thrust into the game world she suddenly essentially had a shit ton of in-universe (since the game world and real world rely on different laws of physics; notably, Newton’s laws are specifically stated to not necessarily be true in the game world) engineering knowledge dumped into her head, so strategy and technology are her two big hobbies. When not giving orders or dealing with a situation herself, she can usually be found tinkering, either on the team’s ship, the GSF Headstrong, or on her own equipment and drones. Also, she comes from an interracial family and has a white stepmom and stepbrother (her stepbrother, Tyler, actually got her into Stellar Grievances in the first place, and he’s part of the main cast for a brief period of time in the beginning). And she’s bi and has ADHD. Her Wrench is called the Gauntlet Wrench.

She’s also regularly joined by her sidekick of sorts, an AI she programmed named Eve. Eve is fully conscious (which is rare but not unheard of in the setting), and usually refers to Stella as her mother. She sometimes appears as a holographic human (and can range in size depending on where she’s projected from; if she’s being projected from Stella’s own equipment, she’s usually the size of a fairy or something, but larger hologram projectors in larger machines can make her practically any size, usually life sized), but her primary function is to operate Stella’s various combat drones, so she can also appear as them instead (and some of them can get pretty humanoid; eventually, Stella even develops a drone that just... looks like the holographic form Eve takes, so Eve can basically have a real body if she so chooses). Eve acts like your typical AI assistant character- generally unemotional and analytical, but she has emotions and whatnot, she just doesn’t really have the emotional maturity to match her logical reasoning and academic intelligence and thus comes off like a computer to those who don’t really know her.

Then, Madison, our secondary protagonist. When she’s first introduced as Buttercup, she has back-length blonde hair and yellow eyes, and is wearing a fancy lolita dress; however, when Phyll dies and passes on his powers to her, her eyes turn green and she gets a green streak in her hair, and when she changes her name to Madison and joins the team, she cuts her hair a little shorter, starts wearing it in a side-ponytail, and switches to wearing jeans and a hoodie. In her “Logged In” state, Agent Yellow, she visibly matures, getting taller, curvier, and less babyfaced (since she was generally short, smol, and babyfaced in her civilian form), her voice gets deeper, her hair gets longer (and also pointier), and her clothes are replaced by beige power armor that... basically looks like Halo power armor but without the helmet. And she wears a beige cape. She also carries a green sniper rifle. Personality-wise, she’s very much the team Cinnamon Roll, though she also carries insecurities from her time with the other Awoken Agents (as she was the last one created, and shortly after her creation work fully began on the Specialist system, so she never really got to contribute much, especially since her only power was that she couldn’t stay dead); it doesn’t help that the Agent who was kindest to her, Phyll, is now dead, and the Agent who was least kind to her, Violet, had a crush on Phyll and blames his death on her (though Violet eventually gets over all this and becomes Madison’s love interest) and can often be found brooding. Her sniper rifle is called the Proto Rifle.

Lily Flowers is the team’s Medic, and the entire basis for her character back when I first envisioned her was that she toyed with general stereotypes for people who play “Healer” characters in media vs in real life. Specifically, back when she first started playing online games, she was what you’d expect from a “healer” character in anime- a moeblob who just wants to help the team, no matter what! But years and years of maining healer characters in online games has worn her down and she’s now more like someone who actually plays healer characters in real life- cynical, sarcastic, and untrusting. Her main coping method that stops her from becoming a total bitter pessimist? Being the team memelord and shitposter. She’s basically the Moca Aoba of the team, the Neptune of the team, the Yang Xiao Long of the team, you know, that character. The one who practically says “Eh? Ehhhh?” after everything they say to make sure everyone got the stupid pun they made. She’s got short messy pink hair and silver eyes, and they don’t change at all when she Logs In. What does change? Well, for one, her prosthetic, since she’s an amputee without a right arm. In her civilian state, her prosthetic is fairly normal; however, when she Logs In to become Yuyuriri, her existing prosthetic twists around to come out of her back, and a new prosthetic that’s bulkier and clumsier but has her MedTool built in is fixed in its place. That’s not the only thing that changes when she Logs In, but it’s the biggest difference; the other big difference is that she wears a big coat in her civilian form, but removes it when she Logs In. She appears to have a different outfit when she’s Logged In, but she’s actually wearing that outfit in her civilian form, too, just under her coat. Specifically, the outfit is made up of a blue turtleneck with no right arm (so it doesn’t get in the way of her second prosthetic), jean short shorts, tights, and boots. Lily’s also a lesbian, and in fact is Stella’s main love interest.

Kyousuke Tenjou, meanwhile, was originally created for two purposes. One, to be a sort of self-insert, and two, to parody/refine the character of Kirito from SAO; the former has mostly been abandoned (my idea was that he’d start out as a total Fedora Neckbeard type, but then slowly get better as he hung out with the rest of the team, and eventually even realize he was actually a transgirl, which is an exaggerated version of how I realized I was trans (I was never quite to the Broni Friendzoni level, but still), but I eventually dropped this aspect to focus more on the Kirito thing and also to keep the team more gender-balanced, though there are still hints of it). So, Kyousuke is this brooding longer swordsman dude who’s visually similar to and named similarly to Kirito, so the comparisons are obvious. But, see, Kirito is regularly rewarded by the series for being this jackass loner dude, even if it does make a token effort to have him grow out of it; the series claims that Kirito’s loner attitude makes him less happy, but more effective as a warrior. Stellar Grievances, meanwhile, makes it clear that Kyousuke’s loner attitude is a weakness and that he’s an arrogant dipshit for thinking he can play a teamwork-based game alone, and he’s mostly doing it in an attempt to look cool and badass when it really makes him look like an asshole and a dumbass. A big part of his character arc is about him unlearning all sorts of toxic masculinity, including some internalized aphobia (because he does start out as this jackass trying to get into every woman he sees’ pants, but it eventually becomes clear that he’s trying to compensate for the fact that he doesn’t actually find any of them attractive and he feels like not liking women makes him less of a man). Anyways, in his civilian form, his hair is short and messy, but longer and messier than Lily’s; his Logged In form, xX_Kyo_Xx (or Kyo for short), reins it back in to Lily levels. His eyes are blue and his hair is black, but when he Logs In his hair is dyed electric blue and he wears green colored contacts. The colored contacts are also functional, as he wears glasses in his civilian form but not his Logged In form. He’s generally wearing black jeans, black boots, and a black sweater in both forms. In his civilian form, he wears a brown jacket, but when he Logs In he trades that out for black gloves and a black cape.

Travis Bhatia was created pretty much alongside the concept of the Scout class itself, but once I’d finished deciding what the Scout class even did, I decided to flesh out his story, and his character arc ended up being about felon’s rights. Because a big part of his backstory is that when he was 19, he committed a horrible crime. And this wasn’t a case of him being framed, or it being an accident; he did a terrible thing on purpose. And he agrees that it was terrible, and even that he deserved to go to jail for what he did. And he did go to jail for three years. But when he got out, that was when the bullshit started. America treats its convicted felons very badly, even once they’ve served their time. And while Travis agrees that he deserved every second of his jailtime, he feels like he was completely screwed over when he got out. He’d served his time, but he was still being punished. And he ended up having to freeload with a cousin of his, and got addicted to online video games like Stellar Grievances. Which is why getting stuck in another world was the best thing that ever happened to him- it let him get a new start on life without the baggage of his felony. Travis is also a first-generation American, as his parents were immigrants from Britain, and he’s also ethnically Indian (for clarification, if it wasn’t obvious, actual Indian, like from India). In his civilian form, he wears jeans and a logo t-shirt; in his Logged In form, Explorer21 (or just Explorer for short), his jeans turn back, he gets his hoverboots, he gets goggles, he gets gloves, the logo on his shirt disappears, and he gets covered in belts, but most importantly, he gets a really long leather coat with a popped collar that looks totally cool when he’s flying around. He’s generally pretty chill and down-to-earth. He’s also gay and very flirty. Originally he was gonna be covered in robes, kinda inspired by the music video for Superheroes by Daft Punk. Travis is also the second tallest of the team after James.

James Reynolds was actually not originally gonna be part of the main cast. I created James to be an antivillain who became friends with Kyousuke and helped Kyosuke realize he was a transgirl, since James was himself a transman. The team’s Marine was gonna be Stella’s brother Tyler. However, I found myself mixing up Travis and Tyler’s names a lot, and realizing that I just liked James better than Tyler, and wanting explicit trans representation back in the team after I decided to leave Kyousuke a guy after all, so I decided to replace Tyler with James. But I didn’t want the antivillain angle with James to go away completely, and Tyler’s presence in the beginning of the story was very important (in fact, Tyler’s presence in the beginning was significantly more important than his presence once things get going, which is part of why I nixed him), so I decided that Tyler would be the team’s initial Marine, but he’d have to leave the team fairly early on, and the team would be without a Marine for a while until James, introduced as an antivillain, would betray his villainous allies to join the protagonists. Anyways, James is the tallest member, with blue eyes and messy orange hair in a ponytail. His general appearance can basically be described as “Bishounen”. He’s generally wearing jeans, a blue t-shirt, and an unbuttoned brown button-up shirt. His Logged In state, Don1998 (or just Don for short), wears a fedora (NOT FOR THOSE REASONS), a dress shirt, dress pants, dress shoes, a green tie, and a blazer. James is generally pretty quiet and stoic, though he does often either chuckle or glare depending on his mood. He’s also bi, and a frequent (willing) target of Travis’s flirting, though his primary love interest is a woman.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that Travis and James’ hair colors change when they Log In. Travis’s hair is black, Explorer’s is green; James’ hair is orange, Don’s is red. Don’s also got slightly shorter hair than James, but James’ hair is already pretty short. Travis has spiky hair in either form.

[vesseldocumentationservice]

What Is USCG Vessel Documentation? (And Other Common Questions)

USCG vessel documentation is a kind of national registration recognized around the world. As a function of government, it has been in existence since the 11th Act of the First Congress. Since 1920, the provision of preferred mortgages on recorded boats has helped to make vessel finance more accessible. The paperwork of a vessel provided by the United States Coast Guard is the ideal way of registering ownership of your boat with the government. It is typically regarded as a more prestigious kind of registration since it is a national form of registration that provides advantages that would not otherwise be accessible under state registration. Is There A Difference Between Different Types Of USCG Vessel Documentation? In a sense, sure. It’s true. When you fill out your first paperwork application, you’ll notice that there’s a section J that asks you to choose “endorsements.” This is where you’ll come in. Each of those approvals permits your vessel to be used for a different kind of operation. Suppose you want to utilize your boat for commercial fishing; in that case, the endorsement “Fishery” would be the appropriate choice. It follows that “Coastwise” is the most efficient mode of transportation whether you’re using it to convey people or goods. It would be best served with a “Registry” certification if it were to be used in foreign seas. “Recreational” is the best classification for people who desire the advantages of registration while just operating their vessel for recreational purposes. Is It Necessary For Me To Have My Boat’s Identification Number Painted On The Side? No, not if your vessel has been properly recorded. Undocumented boats (those registered with state bodies) are more likely to have their numbers displayed prominently aboard the ship. According to the National Archives, vessels with proper documentation are not obligated to do so. On the other hand, Documented boats are obliged to display their name and hailing port. The vessel name cannot be more than 33 characters in length, nor may it include anything close to, in spelling or sound, any phrase that “solicits aid at sea” or that is vulgar, indecent, or otherwise inappropriate. One rule of thumb is that if you have to ask yourself, “Is this too obscene,” it’s most likely that it is. Isn’t It True That If I’ve Properly Documented My Vessel, I Don’t Have to Worry about State Jurisdiction? You do have it. Even if a vessel is documented, it is still required to conform to the state’s laws in which it is operated. Depending on the situation, you may be required to register your vessel or display some state sticker (to demonstrate that you have met the state rules), among other things. Our team understands how perplexing this might be. We have a team of specialists here at the Maritime Documentation Center who can take your calls, answer your questions, and assist you in staying in compliance with the Maritime Documentation Center regulations. How Can I Prove That I Am The Legal Owner Of A Vessel? Ownership of a freshly constructed vessel that has not yet been documented may be readily confirmed by completing the CG-1261 form, known as a Builder’s Certificate, and declaring for whom the vessel was built or transferred to the appropriate authorities. The manufacturer may also provide proof of ownership or a state or international registration certificate on the Certificate of Origin. In the case of previously owned boats, the owner must provide a bill of sale or documentation of transfer, including information from the previous owner. What Is The Best Way To Recognize My Vessel? Before any number identification for the vessel, the acronym “NO” must be shown in block-type Arabic font with a minimum height requirement of 3 inches. It must be displayed in a structurally visible area inside the hull. All recreational boats shall have their hailing port and name conspicuously marked on the outside of the hull. Commercial vessels must be marked with identifying signs on the port and starboard bows, with the vessel’s name and hailing port visible at the vessel’s stern. Additionally, the location of the call inside the United States must be included in the hailing port data. Ultimately, USCG vessel documentation is a clear-cut form of national registration for a boat. It has been in existence for over 200 years, and it is also the only document recognized by all 50 states. If you need to have your boat secured with this kind of registration, then there are several choices to be made when choosing an appropriate firm to handle the paperwork for you. If you want more information about USCG vessel documentation, shipping documents, yacht insurance, or any other aspect of boat ownership, be sure to contact the professionals at Vessel Documentation Center!

[rolandfontana]

Beware the ‘Professional’ Reformer

James Doyle

It is a little startling to confront the sheer number of people who now earn their living as “criminal justice reformers.” This month saw the launch of the Council on Criminal Justice, the latest collection of “experts, innovators and influencers” intent on rethinking the justice system.

Reform has professionalized, and the profession is organized around discrete tasks that can be expressed in grant announcements, awarded, completed, evaluated, and (when promising) publicized.

Has this process fostered a vision of criminal justice change no individual participant would completely endorse, and which many participants would repudiate? Will it take on a life of its own?

Water is wet, but you can’t see “wetness” in any single molecule of H2O. Wetness is an “emergent” property that is visible only on the system level.

A similar principle can be applied to analyzing the emergent properties of the broad range of initiatives being advanced in criminal justice reform today.

The reform dynamic can amount to a one-way conversation, directed at practitioners. The practitioners will always need reforming; the reformers will always provide it.

This is not inevitable, but it bears watching.

A case in point: Risk assessment tools have emerged as a major element of efforts to to mobilize data as a means of reducing pretrial incarceration.

One such tool, developed by Arnold Ventures, has been the focus of recent debate. Attacked in a recent New York Times op ed column, it has also been vehemently defended.

Arnold promotes the Public Safety Assessment (PSA), an actuarial tool that it has developed and tested as a mechanism for safely minimizing pretrial detentions. Like other predictive tools, the PSA relies on a series of risk factors ( 11 factors and sub-factors),  all derived from the defendant’s past interactions with the criminal justice system, to estimate the danger of a failure to appear or a new crime.

Unlike many of the new predictive tools, the PSA’s assumptions, algorithms, and mechanics are available for public review.

The hope is that the PSA will filter out racial biases and lower pretrial incarceration rates—more specifically, that judges who substitute the PSA’s objective factors for their own preconceptions will discover that release is the right choice (or at least will have their backbones stiffened to do what they are afraid to do without numerical cover).

The PSA is an element of Arnold’s $48 million investment in the National Partnership for Pretrial Justice. 

The list of Arnold’s partners (“grantees” would be another word) in that effort reads like Homer’s epic catalog of the Greek ships drawn up before Troy.

An armada of grant-seeking, grant-executing, grant-evaluating, criminal justice institutions is represented in the National Partnership. Just to name a few of the individual vessels: RAND Corporation, Vera Institute of Justice, Urban Institute, Stanford University, RTI International, the National Center for State Courts, and the New York City Criminal Justice Agency.

Arnold’s website provides a comprehensive list of the individual research projects being undertaken by the think tanks. There is an astonishing amount of useful research underway.

Still, although many worthy efforts can be listed, the shape of the struggle—of the “greater than” zone in “greater than the sum of its parts”—hasn’t been given very much attention.

Will this really come down to an effort to prescribe, from the heights of the think tanks, in detail, and in advance, the steps to be taken by people on the distant frontlines?

Portraits in Risk

The signature tool of a contemporary reformer is data. But despite the heroic efforts of pioneers such as Amy Bach, the reformers frequently find themselves making do with the data they have rather than utilizing the data they need.

In PSA and similar efforts, the data is supplied by a system of portraiture that reduces the African-American men who are the intended beneficiaries of the actuarial approach to history-based scores.

There is a grim irony in the fact that the group whose experience in America is characterized by a unique and acute vulnerability will now be depicted exclusively in terms of the risk they present to others.

In this scoring, defendants are all past, no future; the only relevant aspect of their pasts implicates decisions (Arrest? Convict?) made about the defendants by the criminal system itself.

Meanwhile, the history-based scoring eliminates any need to take account of the iatrogenic injuries (loss of job, loss of children, disrupted treatment, loss of housing) that detention will inflict.

And since it considers only “static” historical factors, and not “dynamic” factors (such as treatment possibilities or employment counseling), the scoring also releases the system’s architects and operators from any need to consider their own problematic failures in risk reduction practice.

Besides—unlike a drug treatment program, or mental health counseling—PSA is free. The temptation for a local system under pressure to hope (or pretend) that it is a silver bullet that resolves all pretrial problems is substantial.

In the end, you are left with the mock-learned taxonomy of subject peoples that the British developed in London and then applied in colonial India through the Criminal Tribes Act.

 The Message in the Numbers

Debating the PSA’s statistical elegance won’t quite address all of the issues.

The risk here is that we will think the work is done when we eliminate the creation of false differences (assumptions based on racial stereotypes, for example).

But there is another mistake we can make about difference: we can ignore genuine differences (in law enforcement activity, or individual family, medical, or employment histories) when they exist.

The actuarial process says to the defendant, his family, and his community, “We see you (or your son, or your neighbor) as an integer, not a person.”

In fact (since everyone involved in the bail hearing knows everyone else’s race) it says to one vulnerable group, “We see you as one of the African-American integers.”

Would they choose to be depicted that way? Has anyone asked them?

It is hard to believe this approach doesn’t eventually erode trust in the law.

A research report by the Center for Court Innovation tactfully explains why no criminal history score can escape the influence of the racial weighting of the pre-existing determinations that constitute its data pool, and suggests workarounds to mute the effect.

No one actually believes that reformers generated a pure numerical tool that is then transmitted and faithfully mobilized on the front lines. PSA is explicitly not a substitute for judges.

As Prof. Mona Lynch has shown in a February, 2019 article in the American Bar Foundation’s Law & Social Inquiry journal, instead of transforming defendants into a set of criminal history points that help determine sentence assignment from a table, the quantified criminal histories simply provide a starting point: another opening for the frontline practitioners’ development of their own “narrative of the number.”

There is no reason to be confident that (with or without a score) the race of the defendant has no impact at an arraignment. For example, experience with Kentucky judges who were asked to employ a precursor risk assessment tool showed a heightened willingness to override risk scores where moderate-risk black defendants were evaluated.

Whatever biases the scores’ stylized representations of the defendants bleed out of the process, the practitioners can put right back in. In a context where a “false negative” (the release of a Willie Horton) terrifies the judge and a “false positive” (the detention of a Kalief Browder, who would not have committed a new crime) will never be discovered, at least one gravitational pull is baked in.

Judges care about community safety; they care about their own job security too.

It is a truism that “culture eats strategy for lunch.” You should expect courthouse culture to gnaw at your algorithm.

Frontline practitioners are not a transparent medium through which the message from the researchers and policy-makers passes; they refract the message to the community, and they refract the message back from the front.

People in Systems

Recently Jeremy Travis, Arnold Ventures’ Executive Vice-president for Criminal Justice, writing in The Crime Report, called for a new lens. He argued that the reform world needs, “a more expansive research agenda [that] would be focused on people, families and communities, not systems.”

That welcome observation might call for a friendly amendment.

The question isn’t people or systems; the question is people in systems. That means we have to spend some time understanding what sort of system people are entangled in.

Travis is quite right that a linear, sequential, model of a system and the research it attracts are inadequate. The criminal system is not a Newtonian mechanism of springs, gears, and switches where every action has an inevitable reaction that can be known in advance. It can’t be fixed by optimizing an individual component. It probably can’t be permanently “fixed” at all.

But criminal justice is a system: it is a complex socio-technical system. Its operators and the people whose lives they affect are subject to swirling clouds of influences which are not “causes” with inevitable effects. These influences impact the probabilities; they do not flip a switch. They are often over-lapping and sometimes conflicting. Everyone’s work is affecting everyone else’s work, all the time.

The work that is done often has to be very different from the work that can be defined in advance. Workarounds, triage, covert work rules, and “practical drift” adjustments multiply.  Very often “workmanship”—not simply following the rules laid down in the researchers’ grid—is what matters.

A great deal can be learned from measuring outputs, but it would be good to remember that outputs cast at best an oblique light on processes.

And there is a reading of the outputs that suggests that the frontline practitioners could be treated as a resource to be mobilized, rather than an audience to be instructed.

For example, a careful study of the “holistic” defense practices of the Bronx Defenders—which, in their highly individualized approach to defendants and their issues constitute a mirror opposite of the actuarial scoring solution—showed an 8.6 percent reduction in pretrial detention. As Silicon Valley De-Bug’s Participatory Defense initiative shows, there is every reason to think that the community, if it were treated as an element of the frontline, could make an important difference too.

My argument here is not that all researchers everywhere are always ignoring the realities of frontline life. I realize that there are numerous contacts between the research and the practice communities.

And my argument here is not for ignoring the researchers’ data-derived vision of the justice system in favor of the frontliners’ narratives.

The argument is for an explicit, determined focus on recognizing that we need both lenses, and that their two approaches are in tension. We can try to make sure that inevitable tension is a productive one.

There’s a lot to be learned, but it can’t be learned (or taught) top-down. Everyone got into this situation together; together is the only way we will get out.

We should do what we can to nourish the capacity for everyone to learn from each other— and all of the time.

James M. Doyle is a Boston defense lawyer and author, and a frequent contributor to The Crime Report. He welcomes readers’ comments.

Beware the ‘Professional’ Reformer syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/