#the term series for this is very loosey goosey

[jinxedcrab]

Update:

I finished The Element of Fire - first book in this two-parter - in one day. I have not read an entire book in one day in ages. Was I still able to tend to my child and accomplish a couple things during the day while I did it? Yes.

How...how did I do that?

Current Read: the updated and revised edition of the book of ile-rien

The death of the necromancer has been my favorite book for over 20 years. I coudnt tell you whether i found it at the library or it was originally my mothers. Martha Wells is having a well-deserved revival with her sci-fi stories but Ile-Rien will always be my favorite world. I seriously hope people pick it up to read. I also cant wait to see whats been updated/revised.

[suspected-spinozist]

Can I ask your opinion on the ttrpg ruleset "Beat to Quarters", by Omnihedron Games?

“Beat to Quarters” is fine for what it is – a collaborative storytelling engine about serving in the Royal Navy at some point between 1780 and 1815. For each storyline, or mission, the players decide what beats they want to hit (a tropical storm, run-in with privateers, French spy, etc.). The GM decides the details and resolves them into a series of discrete tests – these can be anything from chasing an enemy ship for three days to asking a lady to dance. For each test, the GM first draws a single card (the card of fate) from a standard 52-card deck. Players get a card pool based on their points in the relevant skill, as do opposing NPCs. Cards that match the card of fate in suit or number count as successes; the side with the most successes wins. 

The combat system is essentially an elaborated version of the test mechanic. One of the biggest challenges for ages of sail rpgs is dealing with the fact that naval engagements depend on a crew of 200+ and not 3-5 PCs. “Beat to Quarters” solves this problem by deciding that only PC actions matter by fiat. For every engagement, each PC completes a test, and the total number of successes are added to the ship’s “Broadside” score, with additional bonuses determined by the player’s gunnery skill and some features of the ship itself. Combat is resolved by another test against the opponent’s card pool. 

This is a solid system for crafting a tale about a group of plucky middies at sea for the first time or an outlaw who’s been press-ganged or what-have-you. These people wouldn’t have an enormous impact on the outcome of a real engagement and it’s hard to play those roles rewardingly in a more challenge-based game. It’s absolutely terrible as a simulation of late 18th century naval combat, but that’s obviously not the point. The test mechanic keeps the story progressing quickly and injects an element of randomness. It’s not skill-based; it’s not trying to be. 

I’m not particularly interested in this type of play, but I’m trying to critique the game on its own terms. My biggest objective issue is that there’s a lot of mechanical complexity that isn’t fully integrated into the gameplay. The worst offender here is a whole subsystem for keeping track of patronage and institutional connections which has no impact on how officers are promoted (inexplicably, that’s a pure test of skill). In general, the mechanism by which characters gain traits and skill ranks is very specific and granular, while the application of skills to challenges is pretty loosey-goosey. I’d want an experienced GM, or an editor. 

[biansella]

This December, Bergen County natives The Front Bottoms will be throwing their annual ‘Champagne Jam’ in Asbury Park’s historic Convention Hall for the fifth year in a row after a successful co-headlining tour with beloved indie band Manchester Orchestra. The Front Bottoms are a band that just won’t stop from their humble D.I.Y. beginning on Bar/None Records to their cult-icon status on Fueled By Ramen. Their last major release was the Ann EP, the second in their grandmother series, which sparked a tour where they would play both the EP and Going Greyfront-to-back.

 This tour, they’re taking things even looser with an entire bar setup on stage and more crowd interaction than thought possible for a band that signed to a major label. I got the chance to catch up with lead singer Brian Sella and talk about new beginnings, the artistic process and what home means to him.

How are you liking tour so far?

 So far, so good, you know? All the shows so far have been pretty fantastic, so it’s been a nice feeling…To be able to come out here and, you know, play the music, and it’s like, “Oh, wow, people are rockin’, rollin’ and having a good time.” So, it’s really incredible.

You guys are originally from New Jersey. I am too, so I know it must be nice to get away from it for a bit, right?

 [Laughs] Yeah you know it. Jersey is a nice place to come home to. A nice place to leave, a nice place to come home to.

Lots of great bands and musicians are from New Jersey, like Bruce Springsteen, Frank Sinatra, Whitney Houston, My Chemical Romance and The Misfits. What do you think it is about New Jersey that inspires great art?

 Well, really, I’m not sure. I think it’s probably the tone or the atmosphere of it all. It’s just kind of, like, you could live close to Manhattan, but you don’t live in the city. You live close to Philadelphia, but you’re not from Pennsylvania. You could go to the beach, it’s on the coastline. You could also shoot up to Boston. I think the fact that there’s access to so many different styles makes its own style. I think that’s kind of why so many people from Jersey end up being total freakin’ nutjobs. [Laughs] Just kidding.

Your music seems to be heading towards a more polished, pop sound with each release. Was this the goal of your art from the beginning, but you now have the skills and label power to complete it?

 I think the goal from the beginning was to just play shows. My life for the past eight to 10 years has been going on tour and playing shows every single day for months at a time, going to a different city and playing in front of different people. And the recording process for me? That lasts, like, two weeks. That’s such a quick blip in terms of the artistic experience. So I would never say that that was a goal to make the recording sounds the way that they sound. It was just part of the discovery of the art. I was just trying my best, and when all of a sudden you’re in a room with amazing equipment, and your friends are there and all the time it’s like, “Let’s try to make this sound a little bit better.”

 But really the process for me is just one of discovery. It’s not like a projected path, I’m not thinking, “Oh, when I was playing a basement in New Jersey,” or “Oh, I wish this sounded like a Katy Perry song.” Each day happens and it unfolds and you roll with the punches. I think the most important thing is hindsight and looking back and saying, “Okay, that happened. So what did I like? What don’t I like? What do I want to change?” And really every single step and every single part of the process is you just figuring it out.

 So, I don’t know the next album in terms of the discovery of myself through the art. It might be a country album or a D.I.Y.-sorta basement style recording. I can just kind of discover [myself] through the music and everybody can listen to it.

 To answer your question, it definitely wasn’t a plan to have things turn out this way. I feel like that’s why things happened so positively; because it was never a plan. Everything was awesome and any little experience or accomplishment was the biggest thing that had ever happened to us, even if it was just a tiny, little thing. We just kinda roll with the punches all the way through. I think it would be unfair to give myself the credit of saying this was all a plan.

You kind of built your way up from the bottom — you played D.I.Y. shows and you and the audience were on a peer level where you could have a beer with all eight members of your early shows. Now, you’re selling out large venues and people are tattooing your face on their body. How does it feel like to have gained a cult following?

 [Laughs] It’s strange, it’s a strange world. I think that’s part of the whole thing that we were saying — there was no plan, you kinda let the audience decide the plan. That’s why I always take requests on stage, because I’m not up here for myself, I’m not up here for my plan. This is whatever people want.

 Like, back in the day, when there would be 10 people at the show, I could drink a beer with every single one of these people and a lot of these people got my face tattooed on them. It’s crazy, it’s a weird experience. I’m still so fucking lucky and I just try and stay naive about the whole thing and just excited about every little step.

I think that’s the best way to do it.

 I think so. You can’t plan anything, really, and it’s a bummer, but sometimes it works out. In this particular situation it worked out. It was years of time that I think people would consider it not working out. The six or seven years of time where there was only 10 people coming to the shows. And my family was like, “Okay, what are you doing? You’re still living in the van with Mat…” But for me, I was so happy and so pumped, this was amazing.

 So, I think that naiveté of it all was very important. If I had listened to anybody else talk, I wouldn’t be where I am now. You gotta stay positive and do what you want to do. I know it’s hard to be like, “Oh, just stay positive and everything will work out,” but really that’s kinda what happened. Me and Mat just stayed positive and remembered that we were having fun, and how lucky we were to not have to go work at a landscaping job or at a grocery store or something like that. That was the best feeling in the fucking world. You know, like with your writing it’s the same thing, you write articles and people read them. That’s a form of art. That’s incredible.

Thanks. Yeah, it’s nice for people to see what you produce.

 Exactly! One time this girl was like, “I want to go around the country and read my poetry to people.” And in a very negative way I was like, “That doesn’t exist, that’s not a real thing.” And she said, “That’s what you do.” And it really hit me like, “Oh my gosh, that is what I do.” And it was like this crazy awakening of, yeah, I shouldn’t be telling people, “That doesn’t exist, that doesn’t happen,” because that’s what everybody was saying to me when I was trying to “read my poetry” around the country.

Now that you’ve been signed to Fueled By Ramen, you guys have been able to add more touring members and build a more elaborate stage setup. You, Mat and Tom are familiar faces on tour, but Jennifer, Roshan and Eric are now a part of the ensemble. What made you choose them?

 Basically, Mat. First of all, the people in the band: Roshan, Eric and Jen, are unbelievable musicians. They’re fantastic. They are actual musicians. They are the reason it sounds incredible on stage.

Oh, I agree, it sounds great.

 Thank you very much, that means a lot. It’s an experiment, like I was sayin’, we’re trying to figure it out. It’s all over the place, everyone has their style and we’re just trying to put on a good performance.

 But basically, Rosh[an] is in a bunch of bands, he played keyboard in a band Mat was good friends with. Mat’s girlfriend was somehow involved. I met Ro[shan] at a bar one night, he was playing bass, and he had come highly recommended from Mat. And then Jen was in a band called River City Extension that we have quite a history with. We’ve known those guys a really long time, and I really wanted a violin player, I thought that would add a lot. And then Eric, we met at the studio. He was a studio rat, just always there, and I was making demos and stuff with him and it turns out he’s really incredible at bass. So we had him play bass and moved Tom over to electric guitar. And he loves to play electric guitar, so he was all about that.

 And that’s always how it all comes together. Same with how I met Tom. I met Tom through [former guitarist] Ciaran, eight years ago. He just showed up at my house and Ciaran was like, “This guy plays bass, he’s amazing,” and we heard him play bass and we told him, “Dude, you should be in the band!”. That’s always the way that it’s been. We always try to keep it loosey goosey like that.

Sounds like a good deal. By the way, ‘Champagne Jam’ is taking place where you live: Asbury Park, one of many coastal New Jersey beach towns [like where I’m from]. In your latest single “End of Summer,” and also “Vacation Town” off of Going Grey, you capture the melancholy that comes with the passing of another season. Was that inspired by Asbury [Park]?

 Absolutely inspired by Asbury Park. My girlfriend and I, we’re living there right now, so it’s definitely full circle. I wrote a lot of those songs when I was living there. That vibe of the summer time going into the winter time, it is definitely an energy that inspired those songs, absolutely.

Do you feel like that sort of parallels your life? Like you’re entering a new season, or new chapter?

 Everything is very personal with my art, even if it’s about somebody else. I’m always drawing from my little perspective in there, especially as a songwriter, I gotta do that. I do feel like maybe it is a new chapter. Like I was saying, I’ve been on tour for fuckin’ nine years. Not consistently, but I’ve been hustling for nine years and it’s been a fucking grind for sure. And we have this tour, we do the ‘Champagne Jam’ and then in the new year we’re planning to just write a lot. I’m going to try to write as much as I can.

 So I do think that it’s kind of like a chapter sort of ending and also sort of starting again. You need that refresher for art. You need to go get new inspiration. That’s where I’m at. I’m taking it year-to-year in Asbury, and you know, I like it. You’re always looking for the next thing and this is the first time in my life that I’m like, “Okay, I guess I can just chill”.

[herringbookshelf]

Great backstory on the distributive politics of siting shelters and the battle between the progressive (Haney) and conservative (Breed) factions of San Francisco homeless politics:

District 6 Supervisor Matt Haney, who oversees the Embarcadero — as well as the Tenderloin and SoMa — says he was a rather late addition to this plan.

He told us he did not know about the meeting during which it was purportedly decided that a waterfront Navigation Center would provide both much-needed shelter for the city’s homeless population and a political boost provided by San Francisco’s most vituperative NIMBYs. Meeting participants confirm Haney was in the dark.  

When the mayor’s office contacted him, Haney says, “it wasn’t a, ‘what do you think?’ It was a, ‘This is gonna be in the Chronicle, do you want to give a quote?’”

He did. He also went to at least 12 HOA meetings to push for the waterfront Navigation Center. Many of these gatherings resembled dramatic readings of Internet comment sections. This was not a fun time. During this period, Haney appeared weary and shell-shocked; he grew a beard befitting a man who sleeps in a Denny’s.  

Fast-forwarding to last week: On the very day Mayor Breed and others were gathered to open the shiny new Embarcadero Navigation Center, a Chronicle story — Amazing timing! Simply amazing! — trumpeted that, within hours, Haney would introduce legislation requiring a Navigation Center in every supervisorial district .

Many of the questions posed to Breed and others weren’t about the Navigation Center they were opening, and the righteous fight that led to this glorious day — but Haney’s pending legislation.

Well, that was awkward. Brutally awkward. And then Haney introduced his legislation.

Jeff Kositsky, the director of the city’s Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing, doesn’t think much of this legislation. Neither does the mayor’s office. “If you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” Kositsky says. “And if you’re a legislator, everything looks like an opportunity to legislate.”

Granted, he hasn’t read the legislation yet. He says he’s busy. Kositsky and anyone else who cares to can read it here.

In a nutshell, Haney’s legislation does two things: Only Districts 6, 9, and 10 have Navigation Centers, and it would mandate the other eight to open one in the not-too-distant future (including two within six months in districts presently without them); and — critically — it would also define just what a Navigation Center is.

In the beginning, back in 2015, Navigation Centers were conceived of as low-capacity, high-intensity places where the city’s most chronically homeless could be ministered to in a relaxed, low-barrier atmosphere. There weren’t lots of difficult rules, they could bring in their pets and possessions, they could walk in and out like adults, and, barring abhorrent behavior, they wouldn’t be forced to relocate until they were placed in permanent housing. That’s what’s meant by “navigation.”

That has changed, drastically, but the poll-tested title “Navigation Center” — 90 percent approval! — has not. The Embarcadero site is nearly three times as large as the 75-bed inaugural Navigation Center on Mission near 16th. And many of the guests here, as they call them, are only provided a spot for 30 days. The heavy majority of those satisfactorily housed via Navigation Center stays are doing so by hopping on a bus and going back to live elsewhere, with others.

Haney’s legislation would eliminate that 30-day cap, tripling it off the bat. But it would also allow for indefinite stays for guests who are engaging in programs and services — programs and services that are also mandated in his legislation. So that pretty much means indefinite stays could be the norm.

Kositsky, again, is not a fan. He says the decision-making processes  in here are arbitrary and political, the turnaround times are too fast, it would mandate the city to haphazardly erect centers in legislative districts instead of places homeless people actually are, and — a Kositsky mantra — it focuses on Navigation Centers to the exclusion of everything else this city does: housing, shelter, prevention, etc.

It also employs “restrictive language on what a Navigation Center is,” which he feels ties his staff’s hands.

But not everyone in the homeless service world feels that would be a bad thing.

With nothing short of magical thinking, city leaders have put forth Navigation Centers as the solution for an ever-widening series of problems. In the process, the centers have been transmogrified into places where few people are truly “navigating” anywhere.

San Francisco officials “have been so loosey-goosey with this,” says a veteran homeless service worker regarding the ever-malleable definition of what constitutes a Navigation Center. “There has been a willingness to make up definitions on the fly as it suits certain situations. That’s bad. There are good practices, and they need to be institutionalized.”

Haney, for his part, wants clarity. “I want to see a lot more of these Navigation Centers and I want people to know what it means when these come into their neighborhoods,” he says. “I was adamant for the Embarcadero Navigation Center, but I learned a lot through that process. We have to be clear on what we’re doing and why, and how it’s successful.”

“I want to make sure we’re certain and confident about the model and their success. And I am questioning whether we have that right now.”

Haney’s fellow elected officials accuse him of being political here, and bemoan playing politics with the plight of the homeless. But they’re already doing that by even continuing to use the term “Navigation Centers.”

Whether or not Haney’s legislation gets eight votes at the Board and a veto-proof majority — and that’s far from certain — these are conversations that are long past due. They will be messy. But that’s the mess the city made for itself when, for years, leaders overpromised what could be accomplished by Navigation Centers, and presented them as the end-all and be-all of homeless services, igniting a Navigation Center arms race — while, simultaneously, watering down the centers’ tangible benefits.

By all means, build these much-needed spaces for the homeless — but it’s time to be forthright about where they fit in the city’s long-term solutions for the homeless crisis, and just what we hope to accomplish with one, or six or 11.

Matt Haney’s legislation may not be what San Francisco needs. But it’s certainly the legislation San Francisco deserves.

[takerfoxx]

Finished Castlevania Season 4! On the whole...I liked it a lot! But it was the season I had the most...nitpicks about, mainly in terms of pacing and story structure. Still, I felt it was overall a good time and ended strongly.

Quick recap: the first two seasons were definitely the strongest, since it had Dracula as a unifying figure, it was one single storyline that was very good. Season 3 was also good, but I felt it was a little more loosey-goosey, Alucard's arc didn't serve much purpose, and the two dark twists at the end seemed to be pretty mean-spirited and unnecessary and left a bad taste in my mouth.

So anyway, this seasons...

So like I said, it was very good, and ended stronger than the last season, but there were a few bits that felt...off.

Okay, so firstly, Isaac is sort of chilling. He's having his night creatures rebuild that city, he has that AWESOME discussion with Flyeyes, and he's contemplating his place in the world and resolves to start trying to use his dark power for good. Okay, neat!

And then all of a sudden he's attacking Styria.

...um, why? Granted, I only saw the last two seasons once, but I don't seem to recall him ever even mentioning Styria, certainly not enough to just decide to launch a full-on invasion. I mean I guess it makes sense that he would have beef with Carmilla, but one would expect such a thing to be, you know, brought up beforehand?

Also, while the invasion and subsequent fight between Isaac and Carmilla was awesome, building her up as such a threat only to end her in such a sudden manner partway through the season felt a little final season of Game of Thrones-ish.

Also, I'm not sure how I feel about what they did with Saint-Germaine. I mean, his heel turn does sort of make sense, but since it was all explained through flashbacks over one episode, it still felt...weird.

And finally, while really cool in how it was directed and animated, the final fight felt sort of strange. Like, Varney is Death in disguise. Um, okay?

Look, I was looking forward to Death appearing in this show, and when he got confirmed I was really excited. But all the buildup he got was Trevor's monologue at that one shrine, just enough to confirm that he's going to show up. And then, all of a sudden, Dracula's lost ex-flunky was him the whole time. Which...sound cool on paper, but how it was executed felt more confusing than anything. Like, wouldn't it have been so much cooler if we got the reveal that Varney was Death a few episodes earlier, like it gets shown to the audience but not the characters, letting tension build as everyone sort of writes off this loser vampire that we know is really is terrifyingly powerful being? Maybe even do something to build some antagonistic chemistry with him and the heroes. I don't know, it just sort of took me out of the fight.

Also, during the fight with the remnants of Dracula's court, I kept thinking, "Wow! These all look like really interesting characters that fans of the game series probably recognize! Sure would have been nice to meet them ahead of time!"

Still, those critiques aside, it was a good time. And that last episode? Oh, that's a chef kiss right there. I mean, it's nice when a relentlessly dark series ends on a nice and sweet note, one that feels earned. Isaac and Hector are finally at peace, Lenore's exit was beautifully bittersweet, Alucard's refugees are building a town over Dracula's castle and the Belmont estate, Sypha's pregnant, and even Trevor's little return, while predictable, still felt nice. Like, the trio was back together and happy and at peace. It was nice. Even the bit about Dracula and Lisa having been resurrected and deciding to retire from basically everything and just start over was really sweet, in a very strange, kind of fucked up way! Also probably contradicts the games, but fuck it, I never played them.

So yeah. Some issues with the pacing and structure, I would have done a few things differently, but overall I really enjoyed this show and felt that it ended strongly.

In other news, new Camp Cretaceous just dropped!

[sheetforce5-blog]

Wolf Richter: Markets Are in a Tizzy. So What Will the Fed Do?

By Wolf Richter, a San Francisco based executive, entrepreneur, start up specialist, and author, with extensive international work experience. Originally published at Wolf Street

Markets are in a tizzy. They’re finally reacting to the Fed’s rate-hike cycle, the slowest rate-hike cycle in history. It took three years to nudge up the effective federal funds rate from near zero to 2.40% now. Throughout, the Fed has communicated its goals of “removing accommodation” from the “financial conditions” in the markets — thus tightening “financial conditions” that had become loosey-goosey during years of zero-interest-rate policy and QE.

And suddenly, financial conditions in the markets started tightening in October. So let’s see where we are — and how this might impact the Fed’s decisions.

“Financial conditions” is a key term in the Fed’s official communications. For example, in the minutes from the November FOMC meeting, the most recent available, the term was used five times:

Once, when “participants” discussed the interest the Fed pays banks on “excess reserves” on deposit at the Fed. This rate, it said, provided “good control of short-term money market rates in a variety of market conditions and effective transmission of those rates to broader financial conditions.”

Two times, when it discussed financial conditions directly: “Participants observed that financial conditions tightened over the intermeeting period, as equity prices declined, longer-term yields and borrowing costs for most sectors increased, and the foreign exchange value of the dollar rose. Despite these developments, a number of participants judged that financial conditions remained accommodativerelative to historical norms.”

Once, when it discussed that its “policy was not on a preset course,” and that it could change its policy in one direction or the other, depending on the incoming data, including “the recent tightening in financial conditions….”

And one more time, to make sure everyone gets it: “Financial conditions, although somewhat tighter than at the time of the September FOMC meeting, had stayed accommodative overall….”

These “financial conditions” indicate how easy and cheap, or how hard and expensive it is for borrowers to borrow. Tightening financial conditions mean that investors are reluctant to fund high-risk companies. This shows up, for example, as the difference (the “spread” or risk premium) between the yields of risky corporate bonds and “risk-free” Treasury securities.

In the riskiest category of corporate bonds, CCC-and-below-rated bonds, just above D for default, yields started surging in October 2018, after being somnolent through the entire rate hike cycle.

The average yield surged in three months from 9.6% at the beginning of October to 13.58% yesterday at the close. In other words, for these companies, the cost of borrowing over those three months has surged by 41%.

Even more telling is the “spread” between the average CCC-and-below yield and the equivalent Treasury yield. It shows how much more investors demand to be paid to take on the extra risks of these junk bonds, compared to Treasury securities.

This spread has widened from 6.7 percentage points at the beginning of October to 11.1 percentage points as of yesterday’s close.

The fact that the spread (risk premium) has widened faster than the CCC-yield has risen over this period is impacted by two factors:

The surge of the CCC-rated yield from 9.6% to 13.58%;

The decline of the 10-year Treasury yield from about 3.2% in early October to 2.6% now.

In other words, investors are clamoring for low-risk assets. And they need to be induced with richer yields to invest in high-risk assets. This is a sign that “financial conditions” are finally tightening.

But this spread is still low compared to the Oil Bust when it shot up to 20 percentage points, and compared to the Financial Crisis when it spiked to over 40 percentage points – a sign financial conditions had become so tight that credit flows were freezing up.

So the current spread of 11.1 percentage points is nothing to get frazzled about. But it means that for these CCC-rated companies, the long-prevailing ultra-loose financial conditions have tightened significantly.

The same principle is at work in the category of BBB-rated bonds — the lowest investment-grade category (here’s my color-coded cheat sheet for the corporate bond rating scales). The average yield has surged from about 4.1% at the beginning of October to 6.17% yesterday at the close. And the spread to Treasuries has widened from 2.1 percentage points to 3.61 percentage points.

So, yields on riskier credits are rising, and spreads to Treasury yields are widening at a good clip. This is exactly what the Fed has set out to accomplish three years ago.

But the well-known lag between changes in monetary policy and its transmission to the markets — typically between 12-18 months – was nearly three years this time around, in part due to the very “gradual” pace of the rate hikes that markets brushed off for the longest time. But no more.

There are various indices that track “financial conditions.” One of them is the St. Louis Fed Financial Stress Index, released weekly, including this morning. It’s made up of 18 components: seven interest rate measures, six yield spreads, and five other indices. A level of zero means “normal” financial conditions (blue horizontal line in the chart below). When financial conditions are tighter than “normal,” the index shows a positive value. When these conditions are easier than “normal,” the index is negative. I circled the recent rise:

Note the enormous spike during the Financial Crisis, when financial conditions tightened so much that credit was beginning to freeze up.

In November 2017, nearly two years after the Fed had started its rate-hike cycle, the index dipped to record lows, a sign of the lag between changes in monetary policies and transmission to the markets.

By “normalizing” its monetary policy, the Fed attempts to “normalize” financial conditions in the markets to bring them back to historical norms. This means making credit more expensive and harder to come by for riskier enterprises. It means risk is getting “repriced.” It means that the Financial Stress Index ticks up to about the blue zero-line in the chart above.

Starting in May 2017, I wrote a series of articles about how the markets were blowing off the Fed. The theme was that the Fed would keep going with its rate hikes until the markets react sufficiently. Now they’re no longer blowing off the Fed. They’re reacting.

So now the question is this: When will the Fed consider financial conditions to have tightened sufficiently to where it can keep its monetary policy unchanged? This point is clearly approaching.

The Fed does not want to trigger another financial crisis where credit freezes up and mayhem breaks out. It just wants to “normalize” financial conditions.

Markets can react wildly, overshooting in both directions. And as we have seen, there is this lag between monetary policy and market reaction to those policies. No one knows yet how much further financial conditions will tighten on their own, even if the Fed just hangs tight.

The Fed’s “gradual” approach has been designed to avoid a sudden market reaction, such as a convulsion into another financial crisis, with all kinds of things collapsing left and right, which would then induce the Fed to once again go haywire with experimental monetary policies that no one can figure out how to undo afterwards without blowing down the entire house of cards again.

[Perhaps the latter part of that phrase is the perplexed state we’re in now.]

From the Fed’s point of view, it would be far better if financial conditions tighten in small increments until they’re “normalized” — at which point the Fed could wait until the dust settles and until there’s better visibility. We’re not far from this point, after the recent market gyrations.

The problem that the markets have – and why they’re in such a tizzy – is that investors have been pampered and coddled for so long by central-bank policies that “normal” financial conditions now seem like cruel and unbearable torture. But they’ll get used to it if there is enough time.

This entry was posted in Banking industry, Economic fundamentals, Federal Reserve, Investment outlook on January 4, 2019 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield.

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Source: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/01/wolf-richter-markets-tizzy-will-fed.html

[digital-strategy]

Been quite the week, hasn’t it?

In case you missed it: Last Wednesday, Panoply announced that it was getting out of the content business and, as a result, would be letting go of its entire editorial division — putting more than a few good producers out of a job — in favor of focusing solely on its “podcast hosting and ads services business,” i.e. its Megaphone platform. The company is also getting out of direct ad sales — leaving its client base to shop for new sales partners, seemingly abruptly — in favor of its podcast monetization offering that’s rooted in its partnership with Nielsen’s audience segmentation tool. Which is to say: Panoply is essentially shifting into a direct LibSyn and Art19 competitor with an additional monetization edge.

The Panoply news wasn’t an isolated development. That same day, Slate Group chairman Jacob Weisberg announced that he was leaving to form a new audio company with the author Malcolm Gladwell, he of Revisionist History podcast fame. On Thursday, the linear radio giant iHeartMedia acquired HowStuffWorks’ parent company Stuff Media for $55 million (that’s $5 million above what Scripps paid for Midroll, by the way). Capping things off, later that Thursday, the media conglomerate Endeavor began rolling out word of its own podcast division, Endeavor Audio, to the public.

That’s a ton of big news for a two-day span. Each story is complicated enough on its own, but the clustering of stories was dramatic enough to inspire questions about what they mean as a collective and what they tell us about the podcast industry. Joshua Benton strung together the news blitz

on Thursday

, closing with a useful framing question: “Is this a classic case of legacy media (iHeart) buying into its digital disruptor (podcasting), à la the investments of companies like Comcast, Hearst, Time Warner investing into digital natives like BuzzFeed, Vox Media, and Mic? Or something less positive, a sign of further shakeouts in an industry that, while far more structured than in its loosey-goosey early days, is still relatively decentralized?”

In my understanding, the Panoply decision was driven by a cold calculation. Put simply, the company has moved to no longer stretch its resources (and identity) across multiple lines of businesses — content, direct ad sales, technology — and to restructure itself purely around the one business that it has identified as having the most differentiation and long-term growth potential in the marketplace. Panoply may have had some high-profile shows over the years, but the business of hit production is exorbitantly risk-heavy, and when it comes to podcasts, you’re talking about an environment with an infinite competitive horizon already stacked with formidable players.

That challenge is further grounded with a more mundane truism: It’s hard to build any business, but it’s exponentially harder to build three interrelated businesses from scratch at the same time. Based on the messaging that came out from the restructure, it seems Panoply’s higher-ups determined that it would be more prudent to put all their chips on Megaphone. (It should be noted Steve Lickteig, EP of podcasts at sister company Slate, asserted over Twitter that Panoply’s move has no bearing on their operations. “We are still 100% in the game,” he wrote.)

Some readers wrote in to draw a line between Panoply’s withdrawal from the podcast content business and

Audible’s early August move

to eliminate a considerable number of roles within its original programming unit, particularly the podcast-style production team led by former NPR exec Eric Nuzum. Some suspected the two stories to be linked by a similar skepticism, perhaps from the companies’ respective higher-ups, about the prospects of podcasting.

I don’t see how that could be the case. If anything, Panoply’s move feels like a doubling down on the industry’s prospects, as the choice to focus on Megaphone is itself a bet that there will be more popular and profitable podcasts to come that would need next-gen technology support.

The Audible situation is a tad messier. As I’ve mentioned previously, I suspect the reshuffling of the company’s original programming division to primarily be linked to the executive turnover that took place last December. A shift in leadership philosophy and internal politics, in other words. In any case, the platform appears to going down its own path on original programming: audiobook-only products, theatrical adaptations, meditation app acquisitions. The Amazon-owned audiobooks giant may not be competing within the infrastructural context of podcasting, but they still very much compete for the relationship with audiences. Those two stories aren’t linked by skepticism about podcasting; rather, they’re linked by a similar move to double-down on their respective ecosystems in pursuit of the same goal: to derive value from capturing the earballs of people everywhere.

Nevertheless, the timing of the Panoply news was suspect, as it took place shortly after the company presented at the IAB Podcast Upfronts where, among other things, it announced a new fiction podcast co-written by The Bright Sessions’ Lauren Shippen and starring Kelly Marie Tran. (The project is still apparently going to roll out in November which…you know, awkward.) I don’t know, exactly, what’s behind the strange timing, but I reckon it has to do at least something with Jacob Weisberg’s decision to head out on his own.

In parallel to the Panoply news on Wednesday, Weisberg announced that, after 22 years, he was leaving the Slate Group, which houses both Panoply and sister company Slate, to form a new audio company with Malcolm Gladwell. His departure comes at a moment where Slate, a veteran internet magazine operation, appears to have found some success navigating the choppy digital media waters with the help of a growing podcast business. At the end of 2017, podcasting made up 25 percent of the company’s revenues, up from virtually nothing in 2014. And this year has looked to be a good one so far for Slate podcasting. Working off the strength of a formidable long-running portfolio that includes the Slate Political Gabfest and The Gist, the company has been rolling out a fleet of new shows, which includes the critically-acclaimed, widely consumed (its first season reportedly brought in 11 million downloads), and utterly fantastic Slow Burn. More big projects are in the oven: I’ve previously reported that Slate is working with author Michael Lewis to develop a podcast series.

Which raises the question: Why is Weisberg leaving to form a new audio venture with Gladwell now instead of keeping things in-house at Slate? I have no special insight into this, and there’s likely a ton of backstory we’re not privy to, but I can’t help seeing a possible parallel with the Panoply story here. Whatever the overarching circumstances, this could well be a situation where Weisberg and Gladwell want to run where they could previously only walk.

Anyway, specific details about Weisberg and Gladwell’s new venture are still scant, but we do know that it will focus on producing podcasts, audiobooks, and smart speaker content. I find the explicit evocation of audiobooks especially interesting; given Audible’s strategic shift to partnering directly with well-known authors to produce audiobook-only products and bypass publishing houses, it’s hard not to imagine the play here. And if Weisberg and Gladwell haven’t already thought about striking up a direct relationship with Audible, they should be.

I’ll admit to not being particularly surprised about iHeartMedia acquiring Stuff Media. I’ve heard rumors about HowStuffWorks slipping on a price tag as far back as June; when I followed up with the company, those rumors were categorically denied. (¯\_(ツ)_/¯). But here we are.

I vibe with Josh Benton’s suggestion that this story is, indeed, one of a legacy media acquiring its way into area knowledge and expertise of its digital disruptor. The move is good for iHeartMedia: Up to this point, the liner radio entity had experimented with various ways of interpreting the on-demand audio business, with ambiguous results (as communicated through ambiguous Podtrac ranking analytics) and some minor measurement controversies along the way. In HowStuffWorks, they’ve acquired a humming content factory that already performs well within the context of podcasting. (Endeavor Audio pulled a similar move in its rollout, striking a partnership with the Parcast network and its lines of genre product.)

On HowStuffWorks’ end, things strike me as a little more mixed. The Atlanta-based podcast giant has been at this for a long time, persisting through early podcast history beneath the umbrella of multiple parent companies before spinning out as an independent entity and raising $15 million in Series A money about a year ago. Since going solo, they’ve expanded, struck a few new partnerships, modernized their backend, and rolled out a few big-swing shows, including Atlanta Monster. That the company decided to be acquired (for $55 million, which feels a little flat, IMHO) rather than staying independent to either (a) further bump that number up or (b) become a bigger business of their own is the sticking point. A year is a really short time for a spin-out and exit, so either they didn’t read their long-term independent prospects positively…or perhaps this was always part of the plan.

Anyway, the Panoply and iHeartMedia-HowStuffWorks stories interact in a really interesting way: Prior to the acquisition, HowStuffWorks hosted its podcast portfolio on Megaphone, which I presume is an arrangement that’s pretty lucrative for Panoply. It’s unclear to me whether iHeartMedia will move HowStuffWorks onto another platform — perhaps its own in-house solution? — or whether they’ll keep things as is and build a sales infrastructure to meet it. We’ll see.

So, taken collectively, what do all these stories mean? Are they data points contributing to some impending cataclysm, or do they point elsewhere — towards something simultaneously better and worse, something just different?

One way to read this is a story of an industry “maturing.” In the final accounting, we have: a broad multi-purpose podcast company that’s restructured into a pure tech company, one big radio company gobbling up a smaller podcast content company, and one brand new content company. Put another way: You have a company that’s finally decided on what it should be, one big legacy media company buying their way into the medium, and a new audio company built on the foundation of a really popular blue-chip podcast (and Broken Record).

Another way to read it: The past few years marked a period of unchecked experimentation on a large scale, where a wide spread of gambits were laid out with ample runway. What we’re seeing might now might be the beginning of a turn: The tests have been run, the results have come in, and the time has come to shift resources based on what was found. In other words, as the podcast industry continues down its steady and relatively unsexy path of growth, players are reshuffling their decks in response.

The unfortunate reality, of course, is that the machinations of companies, corporations, and organizations tend to come at the expense (or indifference) of workers. With Panoply’s exit from the content business, a number of talented producers are back out on the job market at the end of the month. I tweeted out earlier that I thought the market for is better now for experienced audio producers that it ever was, given the preponderance of new audio companies and increased need for skilled labor. (Yes, everyone can make a podcast. No, not everyone can make a listenable one.)

I do believe that, by the way, but the belief is not without caveat: By a “better” job market, I mean that the current environment is one where producers can get paid gigs more easily than, say, five or six years ago. That doesn’t necessarily refer to the ability to get a desirable job at a company that will make good decisions, listen to you, and provide you with a place to grow — that’s a whole other bag of worms. But you can get paid. And that’s the frustrating heart of all this: Abundant jobs or no, producers function within a system where the fates of workers are mostly at the relatively unprotected mercy of capital, companies, and their leadership team struggling through their respective problems of identity, vision, and product-market fit.

One last thing. The framework for thinking through all of this remains the same: Demand for time-shifted on-demand audio content continues to increase, and demand for good on-demand audio creators and producers are going up accordingly. The central question we’re grappling with here is how money gets made. That story is only partly about how the podcast industry/community figures out its arrangements and business model. It’s also about how it deals with opportunities, challenges, and interactions with other systems — audiobooks, music streaming platforms, and whatever else lies around the corner.

This is an excerpt from this week’s Hot Pod newsletter, which you can read in full here.

via Nieman Lab

[sfjazz]

John Luther Adams Interview with SF Classical Voice

https://www.sfcv.org/events-calendar/artist-spotlight/john-luther-adams-gets-a-festival-at-sfjazz

John Luther Adams Gets a Festival at SFJAZZ

BY JEFF KALISS,

July 17, 2017

In a feature preceding the San Francisco Symphony’s performance of John Luther Adams’s The Light That Fills the World a couple of years back, SFCV contributor Brett Campbell stated that, “No composer has been more successful at using sound and music not just to portray place in a sonic way, like a realist painter or photographer, but also to make listeners feel the emotion of being there.” Adams, who has spent the largest part of his career in Alaska and now has homes also in Mexico and New York City, will be here for a full week at the end of this month, for the John Luther Adams Festival. It’s hosted by SFJAZZ and will be presented at that organization’s Miner Auditorium, as well as at Grace Cathedral and at Land’s End, above the ocean in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

“I’m convinced that this is the biggest such series of events devoted exclusively to my music that’s ever happened,” says the 64-year-old Adams, who started in music as a rock ’n’ roll drummer and percussionist at age 12 and went on to study at the California Institute of the Arts, graduating in 1973. He came to Alaska as an environmental activist, then moved there and began to express in musical form his affection for nature and for the culture of Inuit and Athabascan native peoples.

Adams performed as timpanist and percussionist with the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra and the Arctic Chamber Orchestra, as well as in a progressive jazz trio, before focusing completely on composition, counting Lou Harrison among his major musical mentors. In 2014 and 2015, he won a Pulitzer and a Grammy (Best Contemporary Classical Composition) for Become Ocean, recorded by the Seattle Symphony, but this month’s festival will showcase his non-orchestral writing, for soloists and ensembles of various sizes. Following is a distillation of SFCV’s long and far-ranging conversation with Adams, who was in Santiago, Chile.

What are you doing down there?

My wife Cynthia and I have been here for the last two months, holed up in the desert, working on a large — [chuckles] even for John Luther Adams, this is large — new piece, for Lincoln Center. It’s called In the Name of the Earth, and it will premiere outdoors, in Central Park, in August of 2018, with upwards of one thousand singers involved. I’ll be spending most of the next year working on it. I’ve recently been returning to the human voice. My latest CD is a concert-length work, Canticles for the Holy Winds, which I composed for a fabulous group, The Crossing, the new music choir based in Philadelphia, just released by Cantaloupe Music. Of course, “in the name,” or “in nomine,” is a conscious reference to Christian liturgy. But in the place of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I want to invoke the Earth, the Waters, and the Holy Winds.

I’d like to know about your own religious background. I also want you to tell us about the Native American and Inuit elements that inspire your music and the titles of some of your pieces, including two that we’ll hear in this festival. My older brother, Tony, taught in an Alaskan community college for many years, and over time his left-wing ideology seemed to have been informed by native spirituality.

That’s a great question, and not the usual. I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church and sang in the church choir, but I’ve never been a practicing Christian. My politics have always been way to the left, but I’ve never been red, I’ve always been green. My path is similar to your brother’s, in that I feel a deep resonance with what I understand of native lifeways and belief systems, from spending most of my life in Alaska. I’ve learned from the people there that everything is sacred and everything is quotidian, and we need to float back and forth between those two modes of being present in the world.

You’ve tried to help make that happen.

Absolutely, whether it’s taking music out of the concert hall and into the big world, or in my own experience. Like with a piece like Ilimaq [the Inuit term for a spiritual journey], for solo drummer and electronics, that’s being performing on the last night of the festival [at the Miner Auditorium, on July 30]. It’s inspired by Inuit traditions of the shaman’s drum. Yes, it’s a musical instrument, but it’s also a vehicle for traveling between this world and the spirit world, which is present with us all the time.

Will the solo drummer, Doug Perkins, be acquainted with these traditions?

Doug’s one of the foremost proponents of my music. He’s been the ringmaster of more performances of Inuksuit [from the Inuit term for a landmark, the free admission Land’s End performance takes place on July 29] than anyone else on the planet. But hopefully the music conveys all of that on its own terms. Because, frankly, if it doesn’t, then all the blather, all the verbiage, ultimately mean nothing.

Let me return to what you’ve been doing in Chile, and how that might give us insight into your process.

Each work involves different tools and processes. I use whatever tool is important, including computers: notation software, audio software. But in recent years, for a variety of reasons, I’ve made a concerted effort to return as much as possible to pencil and paper, and I’m very particular: I use a pencil that is no longer made, friends have been buying them up, whenever they can, at exorbitant prices, and I use custom-made 11-inch by 17-inch manuscript paper in landscape format. But even before I get to pencil and paper, I try to hold a piece in my mind’s ear as long as I possibly can. It enforces a kind of discipline on my imagination, and keeps me from just manipulating things.

In your recorded pieces, I’m finding colors and tones. I wonder if you’re inherently synesthetic.

You know, Jeff, I think we all are. I don’t have that kind of Messiaen or Scriabin synesthesia, but my friend David Abram, the philosopher, says that our senses want to be whole, in the presence of any strong stimulation or excitement. There’s a kind of vacuum, in our bodies, in our minds, in our spirits, perhaps, that needs to be filled. That’s the way in which I’m synesthetic.

Maybe you can get us there better than when we’re stuck in a concert hall chair riding yet another symphonic warhorse.

I hope it’s not a heavy-handed mission, but it’s something I want for myself. Our lives, our culture, our world, the human world, has become dangerously, potentially fatally fragmented, and we’ve got to put things back together. And we damn well better do it in a hurry, because Antarctica is coming apart now. I hope it can happen in a gorgeous space like the SFJAZZ Center, it’s a more promising environment in which to experience this. But it’s also part of the reason why I’ve moved outside, so that in experiencing Inuksuit at Land’s End, people from San Francisco, or from the other side of the Bay, may experience a place they know well in a new way. And I’m thrilled about installing [the electronic soundscape] Veils and Vesper, one of my favorite pieces, in Grace Cathedral [on July 29], where you might see colors you haven’t seen before, or not in a while.

How did this festival come to be?

Randall Kline, the godfather of SFJAZZ, is a force of nature, and he approached me; he was politely persistent. It would be fine in a classical music venue, but I particularly like that it’s happening outside the classical music ghetto, if you will. Because this is where the audience for this new music is, particularly with younger people who don’t care whether something is classified as classical or jazz or anything else. All these listeners care about is haring something that moves them, something that touches them, maybe something they haven’t heard before. [Kline and Adams will host a Listening Party at the Miner Auditorium, to open the festival on July 26.]

Will you be functioning anything like a conductor?

No. I used to perform my own music regularly, I had a series of ensembles, but it’s not my job. I’ll come to San Francisco a couple of days early, visit all the sites, and begin to fine-tune how we’ll present each of the pieces in each of the spaces. Then I’ll be in rehearsals with the JACK Quartet, and Doug Perkins, and with the ensemble for Inuksuit. Once I act as a sort of landscape architect for designing the overall shape of the performances, I’ll be working with the audio technicians as a sort of sound designer. My music is all about sound and also all about space, not just musical, poetic, or metaphorical space, but physical, acoustic, volumetric space.

It looks like Inuksuit will involve the largest ensemble, if not also the biggest audience.

It can be performed with anywhere from 9 to 99 musicians, in multiples of three, because there are three different families of instruments — metal, drums, and air, in a way corresponding to earth, water, and wind — and you have to have an equal number. I know Doug started recruiting some time ago, and I think we’re shooting for somewhere around 66. But it’s not a loosey-goosey hippy-dippy happening, it’s a serious musical composition and performance. Though it is open-ended in its form, and flexible in its scale.

What about the role of the listeners/audience? Will they be free to wander around the Sutro Baths?

I try to leave it completely undetermined. What I want for you is what I want for myself, which is an invitation to enter into a place, into a world that may be ravishingly beautiful, may be a little bit scary, some combination of the two, and to have the freedom to take your own journey. Find a spot and root yourself, or move the whole time and just follow your ears. I’m hoping to give you the opportunity to experience more fully your own presence, your own place in the world. And if it’s not putting too grandiose a point on it, I’d say that’s a kind of model of how I imagine human society might be. If we lived in a society in which we all felt more deeply embedded and responsible and empowered, I think problems like global warming and income inequality and injustice would be dealt with more immediately.

Which should also involve deep listening, to each other.

Which is a very, very hard thing to do.

Will your pieces make special demands on the Miner Auditorium?

I think so, including lighting demands. Take the world premiere of the new string quartet,Everything That Rises [July 28]. It’s really four simultaneous solos, and the musicians [the JACK Quartet] will be deployed around the house, around the audience, in four different directions on four different levels. The same will be true for Ilimaq, the big percussion work with electronics. We’ll do that as surround sound.

How has it been to have a chamber ensemble like JACK in your stable?

A number of my large ensemble works included a string quartet, but I’d never imagined I’d write a string quartet [per se]. Then, while I was teaching at Harvard for a semester, I heard the JACK Quartet, and I instantly understood how I might make the medium my own. The result was The Wind in High Places [composed in 2011, to be performed by the JACK on July 27], which is a 20-minute piece composed in natural harmonics on open strings. A couple of years later, a second quartet followed, Untouched [also on the July 27 program], a further exploration of that Aeolian sound world. That was written for Brooklyn Rider with JACK in mind, and JACK is recording it this weekend. The third quartet was Canticles of the Sky, and they finally got to touch the fingerboards. Now comesEverything That Rises, where they play stopped tones, but it’s also in [just intonation] tuning. It’s the harmonic series superimposed on itself, going up the spiral, and as you get higher and higher, the intervals get smaller and smaller, so they get more dissonant; but of course they’re acoustically perfect dissonances, so they don’t have that edgy growl. The JACK is recording it this weekend in Banff, but San Francisco is getting the premiere performance.

I assume that after the prep work, you’ll be free to be out there among the rest of us listeners?

I’m excited about meeting the listeners, particularly those who may be regulars at SFJAZZ but maybe haven’t heard that much of this kind of music, whatever we call it now.

After the spacious inspirations of Alaska and Mexico, have you found inspirational soundscapes in New York?

I’m not a city boy. Cynthia and I have a lovely little one-bedroom apartment in the liveliest corner of what the real estate developers are trying to call SOHA, which is South Harlem. There’s a certain kind of work I can do in New York, but I can’t do the deep, slow, foundation work, so we’ve been spending as much time as we can in undisclosed remote locations, so I can get some serious work done. But last year I did a little piece that is my one and only New York City piece. It was a commission from the Metropolitan Museum, which took over the old Whitney Museum building when the Whitney moved downtown. They asked me to make a little sound log, composed from recordings that were “crowd-sourced” in the streets between the two buildings. It’s called Soundwalk 9:09.

And the Beatles version which preceded it, “One After 909."

“Move over once, move over twice.”

I see you’ve held on to your rock cred. What’s in the offing, aside from that Central Park piece?

Next March, in Seattle, Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony will give the world premiere performance of Become Desert, which completes the trilogy that began withBecome River and Become Ocean. This will be a huge piece, the same length as Become Ocean but with five separate ensembles, including choir. And they’re bringing it to Cal Performances in April.

Will Cynthia be here with you for your festival? Does she have a part in your creations, aside from as wife and mother?

I wouldn’t go anywhere without her, and oh my goodness, she does indeed! She is very much my muse, my foil, my best friend, my compatriot from the environmental crusade; we have shared so much in our lives together. And fortunately, she’s not in music at all. [Cynthia Adams is the founder and CEO of GrantStation, which helps nonprofits secure funding. The Adams’s son, Sage, is GrantStation’s lead programmer.] Cynthia is completely adventurous and irreverent. She’s become a kind of collaborator, not in an obvious way but that we’re having these experiences in wild country, sharing our solitude. She’s a fantastic observer, because she is smart, and incredibly patient. She brings to being present in a place that quality of intense attention that I want to bring to my work as composer, and that I hope to inspire for you, as a listener to the music.

Jeff Kaliss has written about opera and other classical forms for the MarinIndependent-Journal and The Oakland Tribune. He is based in San Francisco, and also covers jazz, world music, country, rock, film, theater, and other entertainment. The second edition of his authorized biography of Sly & the Family Stone was published by Backbeat Books.