#the writing was a lot less nuanced overall and there were definitely some questionable narrative choices

[padmerrie]

It’s bad enough I had to watch Varl die in the most undignified and shallow way ever, but then I have to sit through 30 minutes of Tilda talking about art and Elisabet and space???  All over breakfast????  I’m sorry, but where was the option for Aloy to flip over the table?

[killianmesmalls]

On your comments about Jack: ye-es, in the sense that Jack is a character who definitely deserved better than he was treated by the characters. The way Dean especially treats him reflects very badly on Dean, no question. But, speaking as a viewer, I think the perspective needs to shift a little bit.

To me, Jack is Dawn from Buffy, or Scrappy Doo. He’s an (in my opinion) irritating kid who is introduced out of nowhere to be both super vulnerable and super OP, and the jeopardy is centered around him in a way that has nothing to do with his actual character or relationships. He’s mostly around to be cute and to solve or create problems — he never has any firm character arcs or goals of his own, nor any deeper purpose in the meta narrative. In this way, he’s a miss for SPN, which focuses heavily on conflicts as metaphors for real life.

Mary fits so much better in that framework, and introducing her as a developed, flawed person works really well with the narrative. It is easy for us to care about Mary, both as the dead perfect mother on the pedestal and as the flawed, human woman who could not live up to her sons’ expectations. That connection is built into the core of SPN, and was developed over years, even before she was a character. When she was added, she was given depth and nuance organically, and treated as a flawed, complex character rather than as a plot device or a contrivance. She was given a voice and independence, and became a powerful metaphor for developing new understandings of our parents in adulthood, as well as an interesting and well-rounded character. You care that she’s dead, not just because Sam and Dean are sad, but for the loss of her development and the potential she offered. So, in that sense, I think a lot of people were frustrated that she died essentially fridged for a second time, and especially in service of the arc of a weaker character.

And like, you’re right, no one can figure out if Jack is a toddler or a teenager. He’s both and he’s neither, because he’s never anything consistently and his character arc is always “whatever the plot needs it to be.” Every episode is different. Is he Dean’s sunny opportunity to be a parent and make up for his dad’s shitty parenting? Yes! Is he also Dean’s worst failure and a reminder that he has done many horrible things, including to “innocent” children? Yes! Is he Cas’s child? Yes! Is he Dean’s child? Yes! But also, no! Is he Sam’s child? Yes! Is he a lonely teenager who does terrible things? Yes! Is he a totally innocent little lamb who doesn’t get why what he is doing is wrong? Yes! Is he the most powerful being in the universe? Yes! Does he need everyone to take care of him? Yes! Is he just along for the ride? Yes! Is he responsible for his actions? Kinda??? Sometimes??? What is he???

Mary as a character is narratively cohesive and fleshed-out. Jack is a mishmash of confusing whatever’s that all add up to a frustrating plot device with no consistent traits to latch on to. Everything that fans like about him (cute outfits, gender play, well-developed parental bonds with the characters) is fanon. So, yes, the narrative prioritizes Mary. Many fans prioritize Mary, at least enough that Dean’s most heinous acts barely register. To the narrative (not to Cas, which is a totally different situation), Jack is only barely more of a character than Emma Winchester, who Sam killed without uproar seasons earlier. He’s been around longer, but he’s equally not really real.

I debated on responding to this because, to tell the truth, I think we fundamentally disagree on a number of subjects and, as they say, true insanity is arguing with anyone on the internet. However, you spent a lot of time on the above and I feel it's only fair to say my thoughts, even if I don't believe it will sway you any more than what you said changed my opinions.

I'm assuming this was in response to this post regarding how Jack's accidental killing of Mary was treated so severely by the brothers, particularly Dean, because it was Mary and, had it been a random character like the security guard in 13x06, it would have been treated far differently. However, then the argument becomes less about the reaction of the Winchester brothers to this incident and more the value of Jack or Mary to the audience.

I believe we need to first admit that both characters are inherently archetypes—Mary as the Madonna character initially then, later, as a metaphor for how imperfect and truly human our parents are compared to the idol we have as children, and Jack as the overpowered child who is a Jesus allegory by the end. Both have a function within the story to serve the Winchester brothers, through whose lens and with whose biases we are meant to view the show's events. We also need to admit that the writers didn't think more than a season ahead for either character, especially since it wasn't initially supposed to be Mary that came back at the end of season 11 but John, and they only wrote enough for Jack in season 13 to gauge whether or not the audience would want him to continue on or if he needed to be killed off by the end of the season. Now, I know we curate our own experiences online which leads to us being in our own fandom echo chambers, however it is important to note that the character was immediately successful enough with the general audience that, after his first episode or two, he was basically guaranteed a longer future on the show.

I have to admit, I’m not entirely sure why the perspective of how his character is processed by some audience members versus others has any bearing on the argument that he deserved to be treated better overall by the other characters especially when taking their own previous actions in mind. I’m not going to tell you that your opinion is wrong regarding your feelings for Jack. It’s your opinion and you’re entitled to it, it harms no one to have it and express it. My feelings on Jack are clearly very different from your own, but this is really just two different people who processed a fictional person in different ways. I personally believe he has a purpose in the Winchesters’ story, including Castiel’s, as he reflects certain aspects of all of them, gives them a way to explore their own histories through a different perspective, and changes the overall dynamic of Team Free Will from “soldiers in arms” to a family (Misha’s words). In the beginning he allows Sam to work through his past as the “freak” and powerful, dangerous boy wonder destined to bring hell on earth. With Dean, his presence lets Dean work through his issues with John and asks whether he will let history repeat itself or if he’ll work to break the cycle. Regarding Cas, in my opinion he helps the angel reach his “final form” of a father, member of a family, lover and protector of humanity, rebellious son, and the true show of free will. 

From strictly the story, he has several arcs that work within themes explored in Supernatural, such as the argument of nature versus nurture, the question of what we’re willing to give up in order to protect something or someone else and how ends justify the means, and the struggle between feeling helpless and powerless versus the corruptive nature of having too much power and the dangerous lack of a moral compass. His goals are mentioned and on display throughout his stint on the show, ones that are truly relatable to some viewers: the strong desire to belong—the need for family and what you’ll do to find and keep it. 

With Mary, we first need to establish whether the two versions of her were a writing flaw due to the constant change in who was dictating her story and her relationship to the boys, which goes against the idea that her characterization was cohesive and fleshed-out but, rather, put together when needed for convenience, or if they both exist because, as stated above, we are seeing the show primarily through the biased lens of the Winchester brothers and come to face facts about the true Mary as they do. Like I said in my previous post, I don’t dislike Mary and I don’t blame her for her death (either one). However, I do have a hard time seeing her as a more nuanced, fleshed-out character than Jack. True, a lot of her problems are more adult in nature considering she has to struggle with losing her sons’ formative years and meeting them as whole adults she knows almost nothing about, all because of a choice she made before they were born. 

However, her personal struggles being more “mature” in nature (as they center primarily on parental battles) doesn’t necessarily mean her story has layers and Jack’s does not. They are entirely different but sometimes interconnected in a way that adds to both of their arcs, like Mary taking Jack on as an adoptive son which gives her the moments of parenting she lost with Sam and Dean, and Jack having Mary as a parental figure who understands and supports him gives him that sense of belonging he had just been struggling with to the point of running away while he is also given the chance to show “even monsters can do good”. 

I’d also argue that Jack being many ages at once isn’t poor writing so much as a metaphor for how, even if you’re forced to grow up fast, that doesn’t mean you’re a fully equipped adult. I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I believe Jack simultaneously taking a lot of responsibility and constantly trying to prove to others he’s useful while having childish moments is relatable to some who were forced to play an adult role at a young age. He proves a number of times that he doesn’t need everyone to take care of him, but he also has limited life experience and, as such, will make some mistakes while he’s also being a valuable member of the group. Jack constantly exists on a fine line in multiple respects. Some may see that as a writing flaw but it is who the character was conceived to be: the balance between nature or nurture, between good and evil, between savior and devil. 

Now, I was also frustrated Mary was “fridged” for a second time. It really provided no other purpose than to give the brothers more man pain to further the plot along. However, this can exist while also acknowledging that the way it happened and the subsequent fallout for Jack was also unnecessary and a sign of blatant hypocrisy from Dean, primarily, and Sam. 

And, yes, Jack can be different things at once because, I mean, can’t we all? If Mary can be both the perfect mother and the flawed, independent, distant parent, can’t Jack be the sweet kid who helps his father-figures process their own feelings on fatherhood while also being a lost young-adult forcing them to face their failures? Both characters contain multitudes because, I mean, we all do. 

I can provide articles or posts on Jack’s characterization and popularity along with Mary’s if needed, but for now I think this is a long enough ramble on my thoughts and feelings. I’m happy to discuss more, my messenger is always open for (polite) discussion. Until then, I’m going to leave it at we maybe agree to disagree. 

[thevoidcannotbefilled]

Its been a while and I dont remember it well, what happened with the w359 finale?

Ooof okay. To you and the other anon here’s my answer. I’m not blind myself, so if I say something out of line, please tell me and I’ll make correction. But here we go: 

Dr. Miranda Pryce was introduced in the final season as one of the main big bad villains of the show. She’s an AI specialized who created Hera, who we already know put the thought of “You’re Not Good Enough” in her head in order to control her. As we hear more of her, we learn that 1) she has a habit of punishing/abusing AIs in order to control them, even revels in it, and 2) she is willing and for the fun of it, used her technological abilities in order to essentially turn the crew on her ship into brain-dead soldiers, not quite dead but only living bc of her machines like human puppets. She also uses said technology to 1) torture information out of Eiffel’s brain and 2) turn everyone else into puppets. 

Overall the impression we get of her: She is a scientist who uses technology in order to control people in whatever means necessary because she finds the ability to control and change people both satisfying and amusing. 

Now, I set this background up to 1) remembering what happened in W359 and 2) the impression we get of this character. She is not sympathetic nor is she trying to be. And that’s fine! You don’t need those type of characters all the time, especially since W359 is FULL of characters that join our side after realizing they’re being used or help the team in one way or another because of sympathy. 

But then, we’re also told that she has cybernetic eyes. And at one point, she losing full sight in them after they were destroyed in an explosion that Eiffel caused. I won’t analyze up to this point how Pryce’s blindness was treated in universe. Again, I’m not an expert and there would be a lot of more subtle nuances I would be missing if I tried to analyze the writing. The only questionable part is having a blind villain when no other character other than arguably Hera are disabled. But also, again, I’m won’t make a fuss for the writing up to that point. 

HOWEVER WE GET TO THE FINALE AND OH BOY. 

The finale starts with a speech from Pryce. Summed up? Pryce was a blind orphan girl who was treated badly because she was blind and was creepy for making “dolls”. She then was recruited by Cutler in order to make AIs and eventually, get the technology to copy people and to change humanity in a way that in their eyes is “better”. IE: turning people into perfect puppets for them to control. 

Okay, lot to unpack there: 

1) In the speech Pryce repeatedly calls herself broken. In fact, describing herself as a “broken girl” when she was picked up by Cutler. Yes, the speech wasn’t literal and was meant to be like she was telling a story, but that doesn’t mean that it makes it any less ableist. No, it does not matter if the blind character is the only who is calling herself broken, 1) there are no other blind characters to counter that, 2) none of our heroes countered her, and 3) may I remind you she is 100% a villain. This means “I was blind and treated awfully for it. I wanted to change the world bc I was mad about I was treated and then went full dictator on things with less power than me” is one of our VILLAIN’S backstory. Idk if they were trying to have some humanity in her or what, but it does not work. This character is too far gone to make sympathetic especially in your finale episode. And if they weren’t trying to make her sympathetic, they were straight up saying, “This character felt so broken by how she was treated and her blindness that she used her skills in order to manipulate and hurt others for my own gain”. That just straight up demonizes blind people. It’s bad writing at best and straight up ableist at worst. 

2) This one is more subtle, but the general idea of technology being used to make people’s lives better, especially enhancements to the body being framed in a negative light has ableist elements in it. Because you know, technology isn’t the issue, it’s what people use technology for that’s the issue. For example, there’s a scene where Pryce is working on her eyes while someone else is in the room. The other person found the idea of talking to her while she didn’t have both eyes in unsettling. Ergo, the message is “cybernetic eyes are creepy”. In reality, technology that can be used to replace body parts, especially tricky things like eyes is so good!!! It shouldn’t be required to have, of course, (Some blind folks don’t mind being blind and people should always have control in regards to what happens to their body if it only affects their body!!!) but having the choice to repair your vision if you’d like is AMAZING. But the show sort of frames any sort of technology as invasive and inhumane. Another example, only the main villains have body modifications. Cutler made enhancements to his body to make it faster and stronger (which makes sense in character), but also with it, the implication that having body modifications makes him less humane. 

There’s a running theme in the show that humanity is a choice, a messy choice with messy lives, but one you make. With that, while the villains are human, they lose their humanity by not caring about others. Which good!!! Excellent theming!!! But, in Wolf 359, the villains also make body modifications to themselves, and only the villains. This builds on the long and tired trope of things like canes, braces, artificial limbs, and other similar things are a sign of villainy or inhumanity, as if adding these elements to yourself modifies your humanity. Which, just isn’t the case. This is especially strange in this series because we have an AI main character who struggles with being treated as human because she’s an AI, but definitely sees herself  and wants others to treat her as a person.

This is especially disappointing because the villains’ plan is to reshape people and make them “better”. Cutler’s plan is to turn humanity into mindless puppets for them to control. It’s a natural conclusion from “being utterly disposable when necessary” to “you’re being kept around because you’re useful” to “you’re useful, but we don’t care about your humanity, so we’re taking away all your humanity to control you”. You didn’t need the other stuff with the blindness and the implication that body enhancements at all to make this point. 

So, I won’t go on for longer, but TLDR: Wolf359′s finale has a blind character not only call herself broken but also has her be one of the main villains. A villain who doesn’t care for other’s boundaries and repeatedly uses her technological skills to modify others without permission. There are also undertones within the series that physical modification in general is creepy and invasive without nuance.  This could have easily been avoided within the narrative because most of this was added either within the final season or within the finale itself. That’s why parts of the final season and especially the finale are ableist. 

(If I’m overstepping, please tell me, and I’ll reblog additions/edit the post as necessary. This is meant to be an explanation because I got a few anons about it). 

[luna-rainbow]

MIU 404

"Where did you grow up?" "What would you prefer? A broken upbringing? Childhood trauma? A tormented past? Which one would you prefer? I am not going to be a part of your narrative." MIU404 is one of the best police procedurals that's come out in the last few years. That's not to say that every case was flawless and perfect-pitched, but what was impressive was the ambitious wholeness of the story. Small recurring roles that served a bigger purpose in the end, seemingly less significant cases that brought upon a string of events that becomes significant. To start with, the team is beautifully written. Apparently the scriptwriter gave a lot of freedom for the two main characters, and both Hoshino Gen and Ayano Gou did a fantastic job with the chemistry of the characters, but also with how grounded and real they felt. They were flawed, faltering, but well-meaning and persistent. They were enforcers of justice, but their justice becomes questioned and questionable, and they lose their way before finding their way again. Their character arcs, carefully developed over the entire 11 episodes, are amongst the best character development arcs you will find in this genre. The supporting cast was also well-rounded. Kikyou is one of the best written female police bosses in this genre. She is strong but not headstrong, and she is also empathetic without being overly sentimental. When she is with familiar people, she allows herself to have moments of vulnerability. Nogi Akiko understands the real difficulties of being a female leader in a traditionally male-dominated field, and Aso Kumiko brings a no-nonsense briskness along with a motherly protectiveness, which makes this character so much more nuanced than a lot of trophy strong female police characters out there. (As an aside, this reminds me of the much more hamfisted depiction of Honda Tsubasa's "strong but traumatised" female investigator in Zettai Reido 4 and in this case it seems to have really taken a female writer to write one well.) Her interactions with Hamu-chan, the witness she is trying to protect, is sweet and touching, and flies past the Bechdel test. Moving on from the characterisations, the script was clever in that it started off like a standard police procedural, with a random case week by week, but even in the early weeks it had already started to drop clues and hints for what was to come later. The story about Ibuki's mentor was heart-breaking, but would have had much less emotional heft if we hadn't already met the mentor throughout earlier episodes. It was clear this is a drama that had a very definite idea of where it wanted to go from the beginning, and it was amazing to get to the end and see pieces starting to fall into place. Of course all of this would not have worked without having one of the best final bosses to come out of a Japanese police procedural, and perfectly acted by Suda Masaki. People are drawing comparisons to Heath Ledger's Joker - to be honest, I wasn't a big fan of that particular Batman movie so I'm not even going to comment on any similarities. He had a nonchalant manner that still managed to be threatening, and he outwitted the police on multiple counts. As his conversation with Ibuki says, there is actually very little crime they can pin on him, even if they're certain he is the mastermind. Some people may find it dissatisfying that they have left him an enigma, but I felt it was the perfect way to wrap with this character, and gives the opportunity for a second season (*fingers crossed*). Overall, this drama rated 11.92% but like Unnatural, the script and acting was deserving of much better. I expect, like Unnatural, it will win a lot of critics awards even if its ratings are less than stellar. Definitely a must-watch for people who like police procedurals - it has humour and thoughtfulness in equal measure, great characterisations and cast chemistry, and a well-written central plotline and an impressive villain, and dramas that manage to get all these elements are a rarety these days.

[nofliight]

THE POSITIVE & NEGATIVE; Mun & Muse - Meme.

fill out & repost ♥ This meme definitely favors canons more, but I hope OC’s still can make it somehow work with their own lore, and lil’ fandom of friends & mutuals. Multi-Muses pick the muse you are the most invested in atm.

tagged by: stole it from @sternenteile​ and honestly others tbh tagging: TAKE

my muse is:  canon / oc / au / canon-divergent / fandomless / complicated

Is your character popular in the fandom? YES / NO. [ for better or for worse, he’s THE face of kid icarus, after all. he’s a dork and funny and likeable and even if the fandom tends to get him WRONG (thanks smash bros) there’s no denying his popularity ]

Is your character considered hot™ in the fandom?  YES / NO / IDK. [ i don’t??? think so??? most people are too busy talking about how they think he’s like 5 ]

Is your character considered strong in the fandom?  YES / NO / IDK. [ EVEN THE FANDOM AIN’T GONNA MESS THIS UP. MAN FIGHTS GODS. CALL THAT WEAK. ]

Are they underrated?  YES / NO / IDK. [ make no mistake - pit’s got fans and plenty of them but he’s so MISTREATED by the fandom. his character is a lot more complex than he gets credit for and smash bros in particular is a big reason people think he’s just Big Dumb Baby Man ]

Were they relevant for the main story?  YES / NO. [ HE’S THE MAIN CHARACTER, THE CENTRAL FIGURE UPON WHOM THE NARRATIVE IS STRUCTURED AROUND, YEAH HE’S PRETTY RELEVANT. Uprising is literally made to tell the story of a war exclusively through the perspective of a single side and Pit (and Palutena) are the EMBODIMENT of that whole side. ]

Were they relevant for the main character? YES / NO / THEY’RE THE PROTAG. [ and a perfect one at that. he’s literally a perfect protagonist don’t tell me i’m wrong cause i’m not ]

Are they widely known in their world? YES / NO. [ pit is beloved by humans... and mocked by the Gods. seen by most as a spineless extension of palutena’s will, most “respect” of any variety goes to palutena while he gets treated as a joke 99% of the time... and it’s not like Palutena gets too much respect either ]

How’s their reputation?  GOOD / BAD / NEUTRAL. (????) [ Uhhhhhh... it’s an odd one. Short answer is that Pit’s a good samaritan who’s done a lot of good BUT most of the gods think protecting humanity is a Folly and a Joke and that Pit’s just a pawn of Palutena’s and while the humans do hold a lot of respect for him, uh............. let’s just say, some humans on the surface have reasons not to be too happy with him. ]

How strictly do you follow canon?  —  about as much as I need to to respect one of my favorite video games of all time. while kid icarus uprising is a comedic game most of the way through it has a lot more nuance and depth to itself, its world, and its characters than one can see at first glance, even after a full playthrough. if you let yourself get invested in the characters, take a closer look at the dialogue it provides, and acknowledge the central, core storytelling message of the game for what it is, there’s a lot more to pull out than one would think. that being said, it’s still a comedic video game and one that I think could use some more expansion. though the game is inconsistent there seems to be the consensus that pit is like a child and I’m not into that, mine’s a bit more showing in his cynical and snarky side after all he’s been through and overall there’s a lot of expansion on the base while building it into something unique.

SELL YOUR MUSE! Aka try to list everything, which makes your muse interesting in your opinion to make them spicy for your mutuals.  —  imagine your typical bootstrapped anime protagonist. someone who, when younger, was a runt who couldn’t meet the expectations of others, was looked down on, and found himself crushed and hurt and near-killed by a great tragedy that he was forced to claw his way out of to make himself stronger. Now imagine all of that with a character who comes out still able to have a very real smile and ultimately comes out of it a self-assured, chipper goofball with a good heart. now put that together with all of the darkness and depth you would have expected to be there, but scattered realistically throughout the attitude of someone who does genuinely want to keep a positive attitude. someone who is sincerely an optimist who’s grown past his weaker days, but isn’t quite so simple as he’d like to believe. all of that combined with someone who can’t read, is willing to eat ice cream off the floor in times of duress, is extremely easy to fluster and can channel his goddess’ power to slay GODS? you got one strong man.

Now the OPPOSITE, list everything why your muse could not be so interesting (even if you may not agree, what does the fandom perhaps think?).  —  his positive attitude is what most people will see when speaking to him, because for what it’s worth, he’s not actively lying about his depth. he’s a cheerful, jovial man with a big smile and a love of the world around him - which is all well and good, but his depth is something you have to find, even if it is reasonably clear if you’re willing to look. he’s also portrayed as a bit unreasonably dumb at times, and though I personally justify the worst of it with proper explanations, I can understand reducing some of the value of the character in favor of seeing all of his Jokes

What inspired you to rp your muse?  —  i made my original pit blog, flightlesswarrior, on a total whim after playing kid icarus uprising. cute character, fun premise, why not? but over time, and with numerous plots I was able to take part in exploring the serious, not so serious, shipping, tragedy, and going back through the game to keep my muse rolling, it occurred to me more and more with time just how nuanced and interesting pit and co. really are. pit embodies many of the things i really, truly love in a protag, falling firmly on the side of good, having a heart of genuine gold, and having nuances and parts of his personality that are less than savory without making him seem like a contradiction. he’s got depth, he’s got story, there’s a lot to explore and flesh out... and he’s also just a nice, friendly guy who gets along well with others. plus, i’m drawn to dorks.

What keeps your inspiration going?  —  a) love for Kid Icarus: Uprising. a game that helped me gain a deeper and more insightful understanding of character development, subtle storytelling, optimism still tinged with legitimate and healthy cynicism, and overall something that changed my understanding of character development and storytelling forever. and b) spite. the fandom treats him like an idiot baby and smash DOES NOT help matters so i have to remind others that he is a veteran of a war, a socially inept loser with few real friends, and someone who’s kindness and optimism was shaped and molded by its hardships in a way that doesn’t require a near-breaking point or a reminder that “this guy could be evil you know” to show how someone can still keep a positive attitude in spite of all the shit life throws at him.

Some more personal questions for the mun.

Give your mutuals some insight about the way you are in some matters, which could lead them to get more comfortable with you or perhaps not.

Do you think you give your character justice?  YES / NO [ i’d like to think i have?? but i also acknowledge that he’s become something of his Own in some ways that do intentionally diverge from sakurai’s intentions. ultimately though, even though i may not play him completely true to text, i try to be as loyal as i can be to the spirit of the character. ]

Do you frequently write headcanons?  YES / NO / SORT OF? [ when i can!! but??? the problem is my mind really, really likes to reiterate the Same Damn Points i have to make with characters that draws me to them - and you know, writing the same hcs over and over is generally considered poor form?? ngl i also prefer to let the writing do the talking unless it’s something that’s not gonna show so 90% of the time pit’s open enough that all but the darker sides of his mind are lain out before you. ]

Do you sometimes write drabbles?  YES / NO [ maybe??? once or tWICE???? but i need to write more ]

Do you think a lot about your Muse during the day? YES / NO [ I REALLY DO, HOO MAMA. i have a lot of thoughts about him, his depth, potential relationships, goofy thoughts, more serious fanfic ideas im never gonna write and don’t get me started on how many SHIPS i have to think about for him ]

Are you confident in your portrayal? YES / NO [ my portrayal is made out of spite for portrayals in the fandom and some supplementary material that gets him wrong - it’s kinda hard to do that without the confidence ]

Are you confident in your writing?  YES / NO / ??? [ it’s uhh........ complicated??? i don’t think writing is my expertise, tbh. but it is the best way i have to show the passion i have for characters, by putting their nuances into actions, by allowing them to shine from who they are their core, by exploring relationships and scenarios and struggles and hope and everything that can flesh a character out. whether or not i’m a good writer is something i’m still sorting out - but i’m proud of my ability to develop a character, and to that end i feel like i’m doing fine ]

Are you a sensitive person?  YES / NO. / SORTA. [ on one hand......... very. i have a tendency to overthink everything i do and look back at moments i made an ass of myself that keep haunting me throughout my day - they haunt me. i only have two fears: what my immediate friend group thinks of me and the crushing existential weight of worrying one day i’m gonna ruin everything i am SOFT. that being said, i’m also hardheaded and stubborn and i’m not afraid to go off on someone i don’t have much respect for if it comes down to it. i’m easy to anger when it comes down to it you know i guess that proves the point huh i’m not stonefaced at all ]

Do you accept criticism well about your portrayal?  —  i try to? it’s a bit touchy for me I admit just because I do take portrayals and try to make them my own, but i am willing to listen if someone has any points they’d like to make that i haven’t acknowledged properly. if criticism IS had, lemme know, i do wanna hear it!

Do you like questions, which help you explore your character?  —   Y  E  S

If someone disagrees to a headcanon of yours, do you want to know why?  —  not that everyone who disagrees with my opinions has to explain themselves of course, but i do sincerely like the chance to learn if something i’m doing doesn’t quite feel right. even if it’s one-sided and i’ll come to disagree, i’m happy to listen! even if i don’t agree with the disagreement head-on, i like to keep them in mind and see what i can shift around to acknowledge them if necessary

If someone disagrees with your portrayal, how would you take it?  — neutral?? i mean don’t be mean about it, but if you just think my pit doesn’t seem right or it doesn’t click right with your muse i’m not gonna throw a fit about it. everyone’s allowed to view a character in their own way - and even if i may get salty about those who oversimplify him, it IS anyone’s right to view him how they will.

If someone really hates your character, how do you take it?  — agree to disagree tbh. i can’t pretend it wouldn’t disappoint me, but it’s not like, worth ending a friendship over or anything. everyone’s got their own viewpoints to run on

Are you okay with people pointing out your grammatical errors?  —  sure, within reason! i take pride in my grammar but i know that with my fast typing and often running on only a few hours of sleep some problems do slip in through the cracks. while i generally either catch them or just Die with them i’m all ears if i mess up

Do you think you are easy going as a mun?   —  uhhhhhhhhhh well i’m?? kind of a socially anxious mess honestly which DOES make being easy going a bit difficult BUT i do try and be friendly and sociable as i....... can. i’m too scared to talk to people and CAN say some dumb things but i’m not a hardass or anything!! i like to talk and Yell and shitpost and pretty much do anything but write tbh DHFLKSJDF

[peepingtoad]

THE POSITIVE & NEGATIVE; Mun & Muse - Meme.

fill out & repost ♥ This meme definitely favors canons more, but I hope OC’s still can make it somehow work with their own lore, and lil’ fandom of friends & mutuals. Multi-Muses pick the muse you are the most invested in atm.

My muse is:   canon / oc / au / canon-divergent / fandomless /

Is your character popular in the fandom?  YES / NO / 50-50 (There’s a lot of love and a lot of hate, but I think many are actually pretty neutral on him too!)

Is your character considered hot™ in the fandom?  YES / NO / 50-50 (I’d say he may be an... acquired taste? Of course a lot of people I know here find him sexie so it’s hard to say for certain, heh. We may just be the weirdos of the fandom :P )

Is your character considered strong in the fandom?  YES / NO

Are they underrated?  YES / NO (Not in terms of ability, but underrated for just how complex and multi-layered he is, I’d say)

Were they relevant for the main story?  YES / NO.

Were they relevant for the main character?  YES / NO /

Are they widely known in their world?  YES / NO.

How’s their reputation?  GOOD / BAD / NEUTRAL (I honestly think he’s a man of many reputations, both in canon and in fandom :’D)

How strictly do you follow canon?  —  I’m very much a ‘use the bones of what we got in canon and do my best to flesh them out’ kinda roleplayer. There are some things that can be taken too easily at face value that I see fit to build upon. For example, I think Jiraiya’s feelings on the prophecy and his relationship with Konoha is something that could be too easily played off as simplistic, or like they were immovable constants. But that’s unrealistic for a man of his years and many experiences, so I try to put myself in his emotional setting at various points in his life, and trace how his feelings and behaviours change, if that makes sense? 

I try to avoid saying that any of the writing was straight up wrong because it’s disrespectful to the creator. But especially for Jiraiya, who had such a significant role to play in the narrative that it sometimes took precedence over his actual character, I do find some of his actions, and the way some interactions were handled in the canon to be a little OOC... so I’ll work with it and try to spin it in a way that I feel fits how he was characterised.

Basically, I’d say that I follow canon, but I like to enrich it in areas that were lacking detail or a nuanced view that took in all the surrounding events of the time. After Jiraiya’s canon death, of course, that’s when more divergence comes in to my portrayal... otherwise I wouldn’t be able to play any post-war scenarios! But the essence of his character is the same, which I try to keep as close to canon as possible.

SELL YOUR MUSE! Aka try to list everything, which makes your muse interesting in your opinion to make them spicy for your mutuals.   —  A man of many experiences! You can bet that any topic that comes up, he’ll have some sort of amusing anecdote to share, or be able simply to talk shit about it. He's seen so much, and has a sensitive soul enough that he’ll give anyone a chance; he’s very open-minded and non-judgemental, and honestly is a humanitarian that wants to help those in need. Might leave your muse a little baffled as to how he could hold the status of ‘legend’, only to show it when they least expect it. You never quite know what you’re going to get with him: he’s generous and selfless, yet has many vices that seem selfish at times; he’s both a lover and a fearsome fighter; he’s immensely resilient at the same time as incredibly vulerable and damaged; he’s a himbo and a bit of a jock with the soul of a poet. Love him with no restraint and invite his love in return, and you’ll get not only a lover, but a devotee. Wears his heart on his sleeve... or does he? Chip away at him and find out!

Now the OPPOSITE, list everything why your muse could not be so interesting (even if you may not agree, what does the fandom perhaps think?).  —  The pervy, flirty, jokey schtick could get grating, or come across as disingenuous. In romantic situations, he’ll keep quiet about putting a label on whatever it is, and beneath his overall sweetness and devotion there may be an underlying reek of commitment issues and a fear of admitting he is afraid. He also has a habit of deflecting negativity in general, and playing things off as if they don’t matter or they’re a joke, making him actually rather a difficult person to get to know the heart of. One might feel as if they’re getting nowhere with him...

... Either that, or they get the complete opposite. Yes, as equally as he can be guarded, he can overshare like crazy, and has a tendency to become codependent with those he gets attached to, which is inconsistent with his free-spirited nature, and how adept he is at keeping others at arm’s length from his less sunny side. This inconsistency might make him seem unreliable—if the fact he’s always off who-knows-where doesn’t do the trick already.

What inspired you to rp your muse?  —  I’ve been a big fan of the Sannin ever since I first read the Deadlock, but being a very young person at the time I perhaps couldn’t relate enough to people who had experienced so much to do them justice in my teenage fic-writing endeavours, so I remained on the sidelines enjoying content by other people (there may also have been a little bit of ‘what the fuck, why do I dig the old dude so much’ denial in there haha). I’ve picked up and dropped my obsession with the series several times over the years, and my love for those three seemed to grow each time. They really are ‘the lost generation’, and as the sole survivors—alongside having a huge impact on the plot, how the shinobi world is shaped, and the three main protagonists—there’s a lot of juicy material there, a lot of emotional background, along with decades of history that basically goes untapped in the canon. 

Anyway, I digress. Coming to the Naruto RPC for the first time around this time 2 years ago at the age of 25, I made this blog and my Deidara one on a whim, but focused on the latter at first. Villains were always comfortable territory for me in my other RP experiences, and I think it made me doubt that I could possibly do someone who is frankly a lovely guy any justice, no matter how much I loved him. I even had the intention of making him fully Akatsuki/Missing-Nin AU at first. Yeah. That’s how stuck in my villain/anti-hero zone I was! But, I think in the end, the fact he actually isn’t a two-dimensional typical ‘hero’ was something I chewed over and realised would be incredibly enriching to write, worth stepping out of my comfort zone for. And being a little more mature and less angst-ridden myself by that point, I found I could resonate with his feelings and ideals in a way that I know I couldn’t have as a teen... but I was still tentative. 

Anyway, after leaving his blog empty for a bit (with its placeholder URL ‘frogdaddy’, which sadly got hoarded by someone else), I cosplayed the old bastard, along with my partner as Orochimaru. We’d been stanning that particular ship and talking about how great the Sannin are in general for quite some time by that point, but being casually in character for fun while drunk off my tits at a boat party, was a bit of an epiphanic moment. Not long after that, I threw myself right into writing this chaotic-good old bastard with gusto, and here I still am :’)

What keeps your inspiration going?  —  Taking breaks to recharge as and when I need to. Seriously. The death of all my other blogs has been pressure (mostly from myself) to be there and force myself to put out regular content, so I went into this not thinking that way and it’s really helped! 

Of course, there’s also the fact that there simply seems to be no shortage of areas I can delve into with this guy. Again, it’s his age and all the missing years in canon... but I think it’s also how much love he has and his genuine eagerness to engage with others that makes him one of the most naturally bountiful muses I’ve played. Because honestly? Most of my villain muses wanted people to just fuck off :’D this guy is open to everything.

That aside, I guess I just gel with him more than I ever expected to. I’ve changed a lot as a person and gained more confidence since various areas of my life got better, and I really just vibed with this chill, funny, romantic, pervy, big-hearted energy. I enjoy angst, but my real love is peppering the serious and heartbreaking with romance and comedy—and isn’t that just befitting of him? Writing through his eyes also helps to keep my outlook positive, so that keeps me stuck on him as much as the seemingly limitless content potential. 

And this is without even going into my cross-fandom AU ideas I have on the back-burner. Honestly, they’re there but I want to put a real effort into them while keeping his essence the same, which for some, involves brushing up on my lore!

Some more personal questions for the mun.

Give your mutuals some insight about the way you are in some matters, which could lead them to get more comfortable with you or perhaps not.

Do you think you give your character justice?  YES / NO.

Do you frequently write headcanons? YES / NO.

Do you sometimes write drabbles?  YES / NO / RARELY. (depends on whether I get a flash of inspiration—which mostly comes with random asks that happen to stir up an idea for a scene, such as this one (NSFW warning))

Do you think a lot about your Muse during the day?  YES / NO.

Are you confident in your portrayal?   YES / NO.

Are you confident in your writing?  YES / NO.

Are you a sensitive person?  YES / 50-50 /NO. (I tend not to take things personally but am also very passionate—call it my innate Leo-ness!)

Do you accept criticism well about your portrayal?  —  Hmmm. I haven’t actually had any critique on my portrayal, so I’m not sure haha! I’d say if it’s constructive, then I’ll take it into account and consider it, especially if it’s a case where it helps me realise I’ve perhaps not gotten across what I intended to very well. But I’m also quite fond of my portrayal in its essence, so I may end up just thanking the person for their opinion and carry on as usual :P

Do you like questions, which help you explore your character?  —  Absolutely! I’ve had some wonderful ones recently and it’s exactly the kick I need to get ideas out, some of which I’ve had on the back-burner but not had a framework within which to write it without it getting derailed. I definitely appreciate a question that will keep me at least a little on-topic, otherwise if I go off on my own volition I really tend to... well, go off! Even if a question is a similar topic to something I’ve already done, it’s a good exercise for me to go back to the similar headcanon and see if I can build further on it, deviate, and link it to show what past thoughts I’ve been working with. A great way of keeping some consistency in my portrayal while making improvements, I find! And then of course I’ve had some questions that are entirely new morsels for thought, and it leads me to something new and fresh, which I greatly appreciate.

Basically, any questions at all, fire away! I may take a while but I will get to them eventually!

If someone disagrees to a headcanon of yours, do you want to know why?  —  Yeah. I mean I think it’s just polite to present a reason as to why not, instead of just being like ‘this is wrong/a bad take’ or whatever. Source material is down to personal interpretation, so if I draw different ideas from it to another person after discussion, then we can simply agree to disagree on it. 

If someone disagrees with your portrayal, how would you take it?  —  They are welcome to disagree with me I guess? So long as they’re respectful and don’t then treat me as if my interpretation is ‘AU’ or talk about ‘canon Jiraiya’ as if he’s obviously a different entity to my own, then disagree away. But if prompted enough, know that I will most likely defend my portrayal with what I consider to be justification from the source material :P I did pay close attention to it, after all, and I do consider my portrayal to align well with it.

If someone really hates your character, how do you take it?  —  Depends on the nature of it and the conduct, really? Like, people are allowed to dislike characters. I myself find a couple of characters pretty annoying or don’t particularly care for them (granted, usually it’s in a love-to-hate or simply a ‘this character doesn’t interest me’ way), but that doesn’t affect how I behave towards the RPer of a character. It’s just manners, really. People tend to RP characters because they like them, so why would you take negativity right to their doorstep, in this space they’ve made as an expression of enjoyment for, and to develop said character? 

There’s been some people who admitted to me that they didn’t care much for Jiraiya, but then began to like him more with my portrayal and that’s more than fine; I take it as the highest compliment in fact. It’s also the kind of open-minded attitude I like to have with portrayals of characters I don’t necessarily like or have much interest in, because by and large, people do tend to add more depth and nuance than the busy and character-packed canon allowed.

However, if it’s the type of hate that’s got its own devoted circle of bitter bitches, who seem to use so much energy hating a character... then please, don’t engage me. Doesn’t matter who the character is, don’t expect me to follow/keep following your negative ass if it’s constant on the dash—and if the target character is any of the Sannin then frankly I’ll have probably blocked/blacklisted in a heartbeat. The ‘critical’ views of them tend to diminish them as humans, diminish the context and events that surrounded their choices, and in a way that I find is a gross double standard compared to what people will allow other (read: young, attractive, fandom faves, ‘babies’ or ‘beans’) to get away with and excuse the behaviours of. I don’t need that kinda negative energy sullying my hobby, nor do I need moral superiority that isn’t applied consistently across the board.

Are you okay with people pointing out your grammatical errors?  —  Absolutely! I meticulously fret and check, and cringe when I get a reply and happen to spot errors while rereading what I wrote before it! I edit a lot but don’t always pick up on errors, so I’m more than happy to have it pointed out. Chances are, I’ll be far more brutal to myself about it than anyone else would be!

Do you think you are easy going as a mun?   —  Overall, yeah. I’m not possessive or clingy (I don’t think) and don’t expect the world from people, nor for them to focus on or favour me or be super fast. I just expect the same respect in return. Having said that, I will express it when I don’t like something or it makes me uncomfortable, provided we’re familiar enough, because if we’re strangers I’d feel like I was coming across as entitled to your energy and emotional labour. I do my best to be diplomatic about it though, and rest assured it doesn’t mean I’m forever mad at you or turned off in any way just because I have a small grievance. I just find that being honest with each other rather than letting things pile up and fester makes a friendship more solid, and basically more genuine and long-lasting.

That’s about it, congrats for filling out!

Tagged by: @dokuhebi​ Tagging: Whoever hasn’t done this yet!

[writingwithcolor]

I’m writing a story in which a nation of nonhumans, having been trapped in a pocket dimension for two millenia, integrates into human society. Would it be insensitive to have them successfully argue that, as they were indigenous peoples of the Americas, they should be legally recognized as a Native American tribe with tribal sovereignty? Native Americans (specifically of the Ojibwe tribe) magically trapped them in the first place, but I’m hoping that’s ok because all humans have magic, not just

“Native American mystics” or w/e, and the character designs aren’t based off any NA myths. But they’re VERY inhuman, resembling animals, and a subplot is that they’re called “monsters” so often they begin to embrace/reclaim the term. It’s mainly just a device to deal with the logistics of integrating thousands of new people (with their own established government) into the American political system at once, so I can scrap it if needed.

Ancient Monsters Indigenous to America; Should They be Called Native?

So. There are four parts to this question, based off how you’ve worded the question. 

1- Native Americans Shunning An “Okay” Group

2- Native American Monsters

3- Imposing Monsters Where None Exist

4- What Makes Someone Native

One at a time:

Native Americans Shunning an Okay Group

If these inhuman people are a genuine threat or were a genuine threat, then this is less relevant. But even if some of them were a threat, and the whole group was shunned, you end up recreating a big piece of racism in modern day:

Natives hate outsiders “needlessly.” If only they gave this group a chance, they’d find out they weren’t that bad. But they’re too mean to do that.

The modern caution around Native and colonizer culture mixing is, as the term implies, modern. Natives didn’t necessarily shun outsiders, and as evident by how colonizers needed us to survive for awhile, they were relatively welcoming early on. In Canada, we even have a whole group of people who were born out of intermarriage between traders and Native people: the Metis.

But non-Natives tend to take this caution as an insult, because they assume they should be welcomed with open arms despite the atrocities committed. Colonizers have far, far, far exceeded the threshold for “general mistrust”, but they don’t realize it. They think everything should be fine, because schools teach only that Natives used to be welcoming, but then turned mean and jealous without saying why.

For example, when I was in my teens, my grandma went on a probably 15-30 minute rant about how my (white) cousin wasn’t allowed to work horticulture on the local reserve because it was taking jobs away from Native people. My whole family spent the next hour agreeing with her, how they really were just so closed off and mean, he was just trying to help.

Now factor in how the largest group of unemployed people in Canada is Native people, because they lack job skills from a lack of opportunity. Now consider how horticulture was actually one of our specialties and there’s still a lot of tradition around how to take care of the land. And how a white person fresh out of college with a degree was being brought in as the “expert.” And how he was doing the work, instead of helping people on the reserve do the work (which would allow them to put landscaping skills on their resume, giving them a foot in the door)

Suddenly that “unnecessary shunning” makes a whole lot more sense, doesn’t it?

I want to know why the Ojibwe sealed them off. Because I highly doubt such a drastic action would’ve been taken if they were truly a benevolent group. 

Native American Monsters

And this is where things get touchier.

I want to ask all writers who want Indigenous monsters to ask themselves one question: why do you want to tie Indigenous identity to “monster” so strongly?

It’s a fixation I see time and again: the concept of Indigenous people as inhuman, as having ties to the inhuman, as having ties to creatures who could be feared. 

If these monsters are a complex society, are intelligent, are generally… people, then you’ve fallen more heavily into the first point I mentioned (which I’m uncomfortable with) but mitigate this part. They’re shown as people-like and worthy of respect, then it might work as showing Indigenous people aren’t inhuman.

Or it might further reinforce the concept that all Indigenous people are monsters.

Which one it does depends on the writing. Either way, it’s something I’m deeply uncomfortable with, just from sheer exposure. A lot of the questions I receive are about dark, twisted, criminal, or otherwise monstrous Indigenous people. Like, about half the questions. It’s a lot.

Why are we tied so strongly to monsters? What about Native identity makes this such an easy connection? Why just the monsters and none of our healing from them?

Why?

Imposing Monsters Where None Exist

Further, it’s honestly a bit weird to me that they don’t come Ojibwe/Great Lakes legends. Because I’d assume sealing away a whole population of monsters would merit some oral legends and teachings for how to seal them back away should they return. And these monsters would bleed into other peoples’ legends, with how each creature as a concept spread across such a wide landmass and across so many peoples. So everywhere these monsters touched, there’d be some version of the story.

It’s a little too close to playing god with real religions for me. Indigenous oral legends around the globe are meticulous, and when analyzed are as solid as written history. Creating a group of monsters that are not based in our stories, that have no oral histories and legends, just has me wondering how this impacted society. 

Monsters have a place in Indigenous society. They are cautions, they are warnings, they are sickness, they teach lessons about how to care for the earth and/or yourself to starve off the monster’s approach. 

(And no, this doesn’t contradict the fixation on Monstrous Natives. Why do you fixate on the monsters and not how we heal from them? I specify “we” because there’s a tendency to make the antithesis of Native monsters Christian, which further colonizers the narrative. We had our own ways of healing)

Indigenous people, in general, have history from around the Ice Age (Australian Aboriginals have from during if not before). Two millennia is nothing for the oral history, even if you brought in the angle that the stories were genocided out in the residential school system (Which would be a very touchy subject as well). Because something that big would be spread among a dozen tribes, and would have threads that survived in whispers.

Indigenous religions aren’t a mythology playground where you can free-reign insert or remove whole concepts like sealing away monsters willy-nilly. 

I’d run this concept by somebody Ojibwe before proceeding. They might find a way to make it work, or they might tell you that there’d be a much deeper cultural impact than can be handled by an outsider.

What Makes Someone Native

Here’s the thing: being Native isn’t just about how we were here first.

There’s taking care of the land. There’s our language. There’s our unity to each other. There’s our religion. There’s so much nuance to what makes somebody Native that goes beyond just time spent on the continent. 

Each tribe has its own definition of what it means to be part of the tribe. The government doesn’t always line up with who we are, but we have our own definition. A lot of basic principles are similar (sustainability, for one), but the nuance for each people will be different.

And the government still doesn’t recognize all the tribes that were self-governing peoples before colonizers got here. That fact alone makes it a stretch to believe these monsters could successfully argue to the government they belong as Native. The only reason I could see it as successful is the government rather overtly assuming Native people are monsters, which codifies the above.

You’ve got to keep in mind that the government wants as few Natives to exist as possible. Because the more Natives exist, the more political power we have, the more resources the government has to allocate towards us, and we are seen as an inconvenience. 

Getting off the registry of Native people is laughably easy. Getting back on is notoriously hard. This isn’t a case of “have a hearing and the government gives you full status rights.” It’s “we have petitioned the government to have our claim to this land recognized for literally hundreds of years and now they’re about to bulldoze our sacred land so we have to protest to put a stop to it and suffer the arrests and deaths required to keep our land safe and hope that this protest gets enough pressure on the government to have them back off.”

(True story. The latter describes the Oka Crisis, which thankfully did have the land restored, but not until 1 death on each side, and 75 Mohawk and allies injured. And it was a long, long, long drawn out process).

Natives are, technically, wards of the state. The more Natives exist, the more people the state has to take care of. And history proves the state absolutely hates taking care of Native people.

Overall

This feels off in multiple ways, for me. It’s treating our legends as if they’re just frilly decorations that don’t deeply inform our culture, for starters, then there’s how no matter which way it’s sliced it’s reinforcing some sort of racist idea about Natives: either we shun “good” groups for no reason, or we’re tied to monsters. Then there’s the assumption our identity can be easily expanded to include a nonhuman group when it’s more complicated than that. There’s also the assumption the government would actually work to add more people it has to take care of.

You’re going to need to do a lot more research and reach out to a lot more sensitivity readers. It’s so far removed from who we are and our cultural identity I’d take a good hard look at the concept before continuing.

~ Mod Lesya

COMMENTARY:

@octopodesinmybutt

So the concept of "indigenous monsters sealed away" would actually work really well with Irish mythology about the Fae/Tuatha de Danon. They're considered the real indigenous ppl of Ireland. It's a bit more complex than that, but you could look into it.

[galadrieljones]

11 questions

tagged by @thevikingwoman. thank you!!

1. The most beautiful place you have been 

Ah, a tough one. To me, there is nothing more sublime than the big, wide open empty of the American West. Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. Utah, and the weird hellscapes of northern Nevada. BUT, on our honeymoon, we went to France: flew into Bergerac and slowly drove north to Paris over the course of several days. The sunflower fields were in full bloom and it was really something else. I also have to say that, while I don’t always love where I live in Orange County, the sunsets in Laguna Beach really are the prettiest sunsets in the whole world.

2. Pick a super power. Why that one? 

Not no sleep, but just less sleep. I’d love it if I could subsist on just like four hours a night. I’d get so much more done that way!! Lol.

3. Do you have a comfort movie or show? What is it? 

Yes, I have several comfort shows. My most frequented are probably Gilmore Girls, Buffy, and Dawson’s Creek. Right now, on maternity leave, I’m also taking a GREAT deal of comfort in Beat Bobby Flay lol. Idk, I just really like him!!

4. A creation you’re really proud of?

All of my fanfic I’m very proud of. I feel it keeps getting better with every work. I’m very proud of having finished The Dead Season, but I feel like, in terms of writing and storytelling skill, A Funeral feels like my most honed creation so far. 

5. Something you are looking forward to in the next year or two?

Well, I just had a baby eight days ago, so I’m looking forward to getting back to normal!!

6. Top 5 video games?

The order here can tend to fluctuate based on where my emotional attachment lies on any given day, but I’ll be as “objective” as possible. Also I have six because the first two I consider to be a tie:

The Last of Us - This is one of my favorite games because it’s so tightly woven, as a story. The characters and their relationships, in combination with the setting and high stakes horrific atmosphere makes it feel both terrifying and desperate in almost EVERY moment. There is ALWAYS something to lose, and Joel’s longterm character development is both very unique and also extremely realistic, nuanced, and heartbreaking.

Red Dead Redemption 2 - This game, for me, succeeds on the strength of its protagonist. The game itself is beautiful, meandering, dynamic, and the story, while sprawling, is multi-faceted and really advanced in its usage of POV, symbolism, and ambiguity. It’s impossible for me to choose between RDR2 and TLoU because they’re such different games. There really is nothing like RDR2, and there is no protagonist like Arthur Morgan, but the narrative of TLoU is just so...perfect. Overall, I think protagonists like Joel and Arthur are sort of paving the way for games that are much more “adult” in scope. These are the first two games I’ve ever really played that feel exclusively BY adults and FOR adults. 

Skyrim - I can’t even really qualify my love for this game at this point in my life. It’s like comfort food. It’s like coming home.

Dragon Age: Inquisition - It’s an imperfect game, but it’s big and the characters are wonderful. I get lost in the banter, the background dynamics, the politics, and the wealth of opportunity for OC creation and fan works.

Horizon: Zero Dawn - Aloy is such a unique female protagonist, in that she is almost a Byronic Hero. Female Byronic heroes are really rare, and I think I love her for her secret romance, masked with a hefty layer of sarcasm, bitterness, and self-preservation. I love Aloy’s journey, because it begins with one quest (find the men who attacked the Proving and killed Rost) and then becomes a much more existential quest (Aloy’s discovery of her own origin story). The game itself is good, but I think if a sequel is made, it’s going to be fucking REALLY GOOD.

Bloodbourne - I’ve never actually played Bloodbourne lol but I’ve watched my husband play it twice. It is by far the weirdest game, aesthetically, I’ve ever encountered. The bizarre menstrual symbolism and hidden zones are entirely gnarly and beautiful. And I love the storytelling style of Hidetaka Miyazaki, how it’s all shown, or implied. There are no quest markers, no obvious objectives. Entire worlds can be missed through happenstance, or failing to fully investigate one small mystery to its painstaking conclusion. 

7. A recent favorite anything (food/entertainment/clothing/??)

As previously stated, I’m very into Beat Bobby Flay lately lol. Dude, Bobby Flay is entirely 100% the man. He is both calmly confident and entirely accomplished as a chef, but also extremely gracious toward his challengers and always willing to concede the loss (though he usually wins lol). That kind of humble confidence is...rare. He reminds me of that thing Solas says in DAI: “No real god need prove himself.”

8. Favorite board game?

I know it’s old school, but I really love Risk. I like playing with my husband, because he’s VERY good, but I learn a lot from him, and though I have only beat him maybe one time ever lol I usually take him by surprise a few times during the game, and that’s very fun lol.

9. Stealing this one: I know that lots of people have “dinosaur” or “ancient Egypt” interests as a child; what was something that you were super interested in as a child? I’d love to learn a new fact about that subject if you’re willing!

When I was a CHILD, I had a definite elves and fairies phase, as well as a metaphysical time travel/scifi phase. My favorite books, which I would read constantly over and over again were Afternoon of the Elves by Janet Taylor Lisle (which has no *actual* elves in it--the elves are like metaphors, honestly explains a lot about my tendency toward fabulism rather than actual fantasy) and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. Looking back, I still see these books and how they manifest in my preferences today. They really blur genre boundaries--between fantasy, science, and domestic realism. They’re about kids having regular kid problems and often experiencing catharsis via “fantasy” worlds. 

10. A strange thing you googled recently, if you’re willing to share. 

Well, I’ve googled a lot of strange things lately. When you have a new baby, you’re always googling strange things lol. But I’d say, in the past few months, the strangest thing I’ve had to google was basically male and female underwear from the late 1800s. What the fuck does Arthur wear under his pants?? What the fuck is Mary Beth hiding under that skirt?? The most alarming thing I discovered was that women typically wore crotchless drawers around this time. This way they could pee without having to completely remove their myriad of skirts lol 

11. You only put ten questions, so I’ll steal a simple one from the previous batch, ie: Five favorite books! I’ve been thinking about some of them lately, so I wanna share:

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan

Airships: Stories by Barry Hannah

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

I’ll tag @buttsonthebeach @morgan-arthur @ladylike-foxes @bearly-tolerable @wrenbee @lyrium-lovesong @ma-sulevin @a-shakespearean-in-paris @hidinginthehinterlands and @idrelle-miocovani

Questions:

Five favorite books?

Five favorite video games?

Favorite visual artist(s) (fan artists and/or traditional)?

Favorite video game protagonist (non-OC) and why?

What’s the best meal you’ve ever eaten?

What’s your dream road trip? Or, if you don’t like road trips, what’s your dream vacation?

Do you like old movies? I’m talking OLD movies, like golden era, from the 1930s-1950s. Why or why not? Do you have a favorite?

What’s something unique and interesting about the place where you live and/or grew up?

If you were going to be transported into the setting of any video game, which would it be and why?

Regardless of where you actually live, would you prefer urban, suburban, small town, or rural living?

What is the most emotional you’ve ever gotten over a video game?

[neuxue]

Before you get to the arc payoffs, I think it would be cool if you could illustrate your thoughts on the journeys the main characters have gone on to get to this point. Like, your thoughts on their consistency and what you think worked and didn't work, aside from Perrin's plotline temporarily dying and Mat disappearing for a book.

This is an excellent question and I could probably take several weeks to compile an answer but I’m going to answer it now because I am an adult who is entirely in control of her life and her choices especially regarding fiction, fictional characters, and the discussion thereof.

‘Main characters’ is a rather flexible definition in WoT so I’ll start with the original set from EotW and go from there, and we’ll see how far I get.

(Okay it turns out I only got through the Emond’s Field group, becasue I’m me and I can’t just write a sentence or two for each one, but I might try later to do the same for some other characters)

Rand al’Thor: Rand’s character arc, and the way it’s executed, is fantastic. He definitely benefits from the sheer length of the series (well, his arc does; he just suffers), because it allows for a nuanced, complex, thorough character journey from farmboy to broken hero, from human viewpoint protagonist to distant focal point around which everything spirals, from determined trusting optimist to desperate half-mad fatalist. Any of those transitions can be and have been done in shorter wordcounts, but the length of the series, and the way everything about what Rand does and goes through escalates a little (or sometimes a lot) with each book, gives his arc this feeling of an inexorable pull, of compounding pain, of just a series of small steps, each only a little further than the next. 

When you have 12 books (so far) to do that with, you can end up a huge distance away from where you started, without it ever feeling like too great a jump. Each ‘level’ (either of what he has to endure or what he himself does and becomes) is gradually normalised over time; he and the reader acclimate, so then it’s time to step up to the next. Put The Last That Could Be Done after, say, Falme, and it would still hurt but it would feel almost like too much (and also not enough, because it would lack the weight and momentum of everything that came before). Instead, you get to watch the slow unravelling of a character even as his power grows, tension building, until (like his ancestors the Aiel) he becomes all but unrecognisable as who he was at the start, but every step along the way feels like just another step, until a single step is all it takes to push him off the cliff his narrative has spent the better part of twelve books building for him.

I also love the way Jordan has played with POV in this particular arc, with Rand going from the main viewpoint character to barely having a POV. It suits the way he goes from being a protagonist beginning his journey to becoming the centre of a whirlpool that expands to encompass the entire world, as well as how he goes from being very young and human and real to… “I don’t know how human the Dragon Reborn can afford to be,“ to just dragging himself and the world to the Last Battle. He loses POV chapters because he no longer sees himself as a person with agency or even the right to his own mind – which, too, is invaded and eroded as time goes on, again fitting well with the decrease in POV chapters: his mind is literally no longer his own, nor – he believes – is his life.

I expect his to be one of the arcs with the greatest catharsis in its payoff, just because there’s so much that’s built up over time; the potential energy, if you will, is huge, and at some point it has to be released, and while building it took 12 books and counting, there’s…not all that much time left, so it’s going to be released in a far shorter time than it was built, and if anyone remembers anything from physics class, that means it’s going to hit with a hell of a lot of force.

Also okay in my head this was going to be maybe a paragraph or two per character so uh….

Egwene al’Vere: Another character arc I absolutely love, because she grows so much. She goes from strong-willed village girl seeking adventure and trying adulthood on for size to young woman finding her place in the world to true Amyrlin in strength and understanding and maturity. She’s allowed to make mistakes; and throw herself wholeheartedly into things the way so many of us do when we’re still figuring out who we are; and then smooth all of those pieces together into somoene who is still herself; but a more experienced, older, wiser, stronger version of herself. She grows up, in a very real sense, and we get to watch that play out in a way that isn’t always smooth and isn’t always perfect, but feels very real.

I’ve also talked a few times about how the main difference between her and Rand, beneath all the parallels drawn between them, is that in terms of their heroic arcs, she chooses while he is chosen. It’s something I love about Egwene’s arc and her character overall – she’s allowed to be ambitious and to want things and strive for things, and is rewarded for it rather than shut down.

She asks the world for a chance to be more, and it demands a great deal from her in return, but she rises to the challenge at each step, and then takes the next one, and then the next – like Rand, a gradual change that seems small at any given point but is huge overall – but for all that she leaves her home behind, she never loses who she is. And some of that means she keeps some of her flaws, and makes some mistakes along the way because of those flaws, and that’s…permitted, and taken into her overall arc.

And the way her arc is drawn parallel to Rand’s, in a way that draws similarities and yet simultaneously highlights the differences in how they approach these similar things, is excellent and, I think, enhances both of them as a result.

Mat Cauthon: Here’s an arc that I feel is a bit uneven or inconsistent. Some of that fits who he is – the rogue, the trickster, the one who is by his very nature inconsistent except for the aspects of him that are absolutely constant (his commitment to keeping his promises, for instance). So to some extent you don’t expect his arc to follow the same pattern as a more ‘standard’ heroic archetype. This archetype demands a bit of freedom and flexibility to play around with and sometimes flip on its head.

And I think that works well for him from TDR through TFoH. There, we watch the push-pull of denying his fate yet remaining loyal to promises and friends, telling himself he wants no responsibility and is no bloody hero and yet very much acting the part and gathering an army who follow him because they respect and believe in and trust him. We see him learn to use his luck, see him visit the Aelfinn and Eelfinn and manage to come out just a little bit ahead despite always feeling a few steps behind (and also almost dying, can’t forget that). And by the end of TFoH, he has grown, even if he doesn’t want to admit it to himself.

And then…he stagnates (’the right hand falters’), for approximately five goddamn books. He gets bogged down in a storyline that at times seems to exist purely to be a ‘battle of the sexes’ sandbox, serves as a narrative tool for belittling or putting down other characters when it’s not belittling or diminishing him, and vanishes for a book for no particular narrative reason beyond not having much to do. And then he wanders with the circus for a while before finally taking some bloody initiative and marrying his enemy’s empress. By accident, but still, it’s progress.

The thing is, if he had gone straight from the end of TFoH, with a newly acquired army and responsibility that he claims to want nothing to do with, to freeing the Windfinder(s) in Ebou Dar and then staring out at the devastation that escape caused, to giving Tuon a cluster of silk rosebuds while planning the use of gunpowder in war, to the events of As If The World Were Fog and Prince of the Ravens, I think I’d still enjoy reading about him. The pieces of a great arc are there, but the pacing is off, and there’s too much in the middle that seems to serve no real purpose (except to irritate and be irritated by other characters, which doesn’t make anyone look good).

I also think one of the issues with Mat’s arc is that more than others, he is put in positions where his gain is another central character’s loss (see for example the latter half of Swovan Night and Small Sacrifices) for…seemingly no reason. I much prefer the moments where he gains by his own merit (see This Place, This Day and The Lesser Sadness, where he acquires the Band and helps win the battle of Cairhien by being awesome), or, if it’s to be at the expense of other characters, in a way that doesn’t end up making other protagonists just look…less.

For the record, I also disliked when Egwene spent a few chapters making a fool of Nynaeve as part of flipping the leadership/power dynamic between them. I have no problem with conflict between characters (Egwene and Nynaeve bickering all the way to Tear felt real, and suited their development) or with power struggles, but I think it’s important to make sure it’s…fair, I suppose, if you’re using protagonists on both sides. A character can be narratively served by losing a conflict, so long as they’re treated as an actual agent in it, rather being temporarily demoted to narrative device, existing just to make another character look good at their expense. And the resulting ‘benefit’ to the other character feels sour as a result. (An example of this being done better is Mat fighting Gawyn and Galad; the stakes are relatively low, it’s done in a lighthearted way, and while Galad and Gawyn lose, they don’t really lose face).

I also feel like there’s so much more that could be done with the memories Mat acquires - they certainly contribute to his arc and to the positions he ends up in, and recently there was the issue with him realising that the Eelfinn might have some sort of link to him, but we never go very far into the…psychological impact, I suppose. I mean, he remembers dying. Multiple times. And even the memories that don’t involve death often involve battle. So he’s got sort-of-but-no-longer-really secondhand literal war flashbacks coming out his ears, he has howmany fragments of identity floating around in his head and seeming a part of him and yet also not? That’s fascinating, give me more. It just seems like such a cool thing to play with, and instead more often than not it’s a plot device.

Nynaeve al’Meara: Ah, Nynaeve. Another arc I love. I’ve actually written about hers already (albeit a three years and several books ago) but I’ll go into some of it briefly here as well. Where we see Egwene grow up, Nynaeve begins the book as an adult, if still on the younger side, but established in her position and her identity, even if she has to fight for it at times because of her youth and particular personality quirks. And then she has all of that taken from her, and is thrown into a world where she no longer knows who she is or should be, where none of that authority or experience she possessed means anything. It’s such an interesting way to start a character’s arc, and it plays out beautifully as Nynaeve tries to find her footing again and stumbles so many times along the way but, like Egwene, in a way that feels very real. 

Through it all she holds to certain core aspects of herself even as others are recognised as mutable, and thus learns who she is and grows into not a different person entirely, but someone more herself. Not self-aware, precisely, but…in control. She breaks her block by finally surrendering, by letting go of the walls she built around herself and her own power out of fear and insecurity, and in doing so accepts what lies beneath them. And as a result, she now controls that vast power within her, rather than having only an occasional grasp of it through anger. That’s something of a metaphor for her entire arc, really: she faces herself as much as she faces any external enemy, pushing past those walls and insecurities and fears, through that uncertainty of where she fits in a world so much vaster than the one she came of age in, and thus gains control of her abilities and strengths and self, and can use that to work toward what she has always held as most important: protecting and helping and defending and healing those she loves.

Perrin Aybara: I love his arc from the beginning through to the end of TSR. The Two Rivers arc? Absolutely gorgeous. But, like Mat, I think his arc falters a little (or, if we’re continuing with the prophecy, strays) in part, perhaps, because he almost completes some of it too early. I do like that it’s not treated as perfectly linear – that just because he’s learned leadership and come to more or less accept it in his home village doesn’t mean he’ll be 100% great at it and fully on board from here on out – but I also think the way we revisit some of those problems could be done better. 

I also just hate the Malden arc in general, because once again it makes Perrin look good (sort of) by putting Faile in the role of damsel-in-distress (not in mindset but absolutely in contrived situation) and forcibly holding her there until Perrin can finish his arc. Which detracts from the payoff of the arc itself, for me.

I’d rather have seen that done differently – there are other ways Perrin could have struggled with truly accepting leadership, and also come to throw away the axe – and perhaps slightly earlier, which would allow Perrin to make the decision regarding the wolf dream a little earlier as well, because I don’t see how he’s supposed to convincingly learn it well enough to do anything with it between now and the ending. And if he doesn’t have time to do that, why was it brought up?

All of that said, I do think his arc itself is a really interesting and sometimes understated but often beautiful one. The axe/hammer conflict that winds its way  through so much of his arc across ten books is not always subtle but it’s present like a drumbeat, a constant that illustrates the heart of the conflict at the core of who he is and who he wants to be and who he needs to be. It also ties so well into the overall salvation/destruction theme and duality. It’s an interesting way to handle a character of the general archetype Perrin represents, and I think that aspect of his arc is done very, very well. He’s not always my type of character, and there are some inconsistencies in his arc and places where the way aspects of it are accomplished that irritate me, but the overall shape of it is lovely.

[scripttorture]

I was wanting to write an Avatar the Last Airbender fanfiction and in one of the scenes, Azula (who has fire powers) will torture someone by using her powers to touch and burn them. She has a lot of control over her powers but I’m not sure how to pull it without killing the victim. I thought it could feel like touching something hot more than touching an actual flame.

(Firetorture 2) Would this seem high tech (if a lot of people in theuniverse have elemental powers) and would possibly too much liketorturers have a lot of control/skill? I also wanted to show Azula ashaving either Anti-social Personality Disorder or Borderline. Wouldit be problematic for a torturer to have a Personality Disorder(instead of only mental problems as a result of torture)? Azulaalready seems like she canonly has a personality disorder. Do youthink certain problems(3) like memory trouble would show updifferently in someone with a personality disorder? Lastly, wouldhaving other torturers who don’t have disorders before torturinghelp with avoiding the ‘mentally ill people are violent’ idea?Thank you for your help! If you have suggestions on how to avoidproblematic stuff, let me know. The torture is mostly out of hate butshe could ask questions and receive flippant answers/lies. I’llhave to see which the victims ends up doing when I write the scene.(Azula ask 4) I wanted to add, I’m also aware that Azula, at 14,isn’t able to be diagnosed with a personally disorder yet. She’llbe 21 in this AU story.

Ihave actually watched this show! Which helps an awful lot with thisparticular question because I think a lot of it is heavily rooted inboth the cultures the story created and the characters themselves.

I’llbe honest I know next to nothingabout personality disorders. So while I know Azula’s behaviour andpersonality I don’t feel I can say whether it fits with apersonality disorder. I can give you my opinion on using mentally illcharacters as torturers and my opinion on how being a torturer mighteffect someone who is already mentally ill (this would be an educatedguess as no studies on the subject exist, so far as I know).

Butlet’s start with the fire.

BecauseI know the setting I feel pretty confident that this isn’t hightech. It’s using an ability that a lot of people in this world arejust born with. Yes Azula is shown throughout the show as beingparticularly skilled with that ability but I don’t see any reasonwhy that means the torture scene itself should be written as‘skilled’.

Someonecan be an Olympic runner and trip over their own feet. Someone can bea martial artist and get into a drunken brawl.

Justbecause someone hasparticular skill with some sort of physical ability doesn’t meanthey’re using it all the time.

Ithink the key with this would probably be to highlight during thescene just how unskilled what Azula is doing is. She’s prettyarrogant so I think if the scene is from her perspective a good wayto do it would be highlighting how ‘easy’ this is compared to hernormal firebending. That these tricks are things she could do sinceshe was 5 (or similar).

Historicallysome burning tortures have used flames directly but using a heatedobject of some kind seems to have been more common globally. I’munsure if there’s a specific reason for that. It could be down topracticality (ie it’s probably easier to handle a heated piece ofmetal with tongs then it is to keep hold of a flaming piece of wood).It could also be down to cultural preference in some cases (ieEuropean historical branding tortures were partly about creating aphysical mark on the victim identifying their crime).

Iimagine the closest sensation to that whirling flame the canon showswould be steam or hot air.

Asfor how to do it without killing her victim- I think the main thingto worry about is how much of the body is burnt.

Theskin is an organ and like any other organ it can fail. Burns,especially deeper burns, to larger areas of the body are more likelyto be fatal.

Concentratingthe attacks to smaller areas is a good first step.

Thereare also areas of the body that are best avoided if you want thevictim character to (realistically) survive. The mouth, nose, neckand anus are the main ones. I don’t think anything directlyto/capable of blocking the urethra is a good idea. I’d also suggestavoiding concerted attacks on the scalp. And, as I said, keeping theoverall burnt area to a minimum.

Attackson other areas may not kill the character but have the potential tocause lasting disability. Which you may or may not want in yourstory. Burns to the hands and feet can rend them unusable. Burns onor too near the joints can restrict movement in that joint. Burns around the eyes can blind.

Thesetting also has a form of magical healing if I remember correctly.You may want to think about how that affects lasting injuries and howmuch of this could be treated in the setting.

I’dsuggesting keeping any individual burns smaller than the size of thevictim’s hand and keeping them spaced out. You may also want totake a look at the archive for ScriptMedic’s blog as she wrotequite a lot on burns and their treatment.

Asfor the way you’re planning to tackle Azula-

Ithink it’s important to remember that mental health problems can beco-morbid. Having one condition doesn’t necessarily protect someonefrom another.

Idon’t personally know anyone with a personality disorder but I doknow people with other forms of neurodiversity and some havedeveloped memory problems following traumatic events.

Ithink unless a condition directly effects memory it’s probablysafest to assume that memory problems would manifest the same way asin a neurotypical character. A neurodiverse character may reactto those problems differently but I think that’s a slightlydifferent subject.

ActuallyI think that’s probably the best way to think about ‘differences’in symptoms between neurotypical and neurodiverse characters:concentrate less on whether a character ‘could’ have particularsymptoms and more on whether they’d naturally respond to thosesymptoms differently.

Ifyou’re unsure of how a particular symptom would interact with acharacter’s preexisting mental health problems it might be best tochoose another symptom. Or do further research on the original mentalhealth problems the character has.

AndI think that leaves me with the question of mentally ill characterstorturing.

Ithink a lot of canons leave fanfic writers in a tough spot herebecause so many villains are either coded mentally ill or explicitlymentally ill. And the canon often links that to the bad things theydo.

Thatleaves fanfiction writers with a problem because writing away eitherthe villain’s bad actions or their mental illness is a huge changeto the character. It takes away from what they were and often rendersthem unrecognisable.

Iwould definitely encourage writers to stop creating so manycharacters like this but when it’s a character from another canonthat a writer is using- I think that’s a more difficult question.

Inthis particular case I think the fact Azula is in a rare position ofpower also contributes to the problem. Because regardless of othertorturers/baddies around her sheis the ring leader and the one in control. She has a greater degreeof responsibility because she is probably orderingothers to act as well as acting directly herself.

Sothis isn’t a mentally ill person committing a violent act underorders, she’s inciting and orchestrating the violence. Everythingis under her control.  

Includingcharacters who were not mentally ill before they started torturingseems like a good step: it should help tie at least some of themental health problems these characters have to torture rather thanthe characters themselves. But this doesn’t really change thepotential implication that Azula is evil because she’s mentallyill.

Inan original story I’d suggest including ‘good’ characters withthe same mental illness. I’m not sure how much scope you have forthat here. If you have room for original characters to play a largepart in the story (or think that similar symptoms apply to one of theheroes) then I think that’s definitely a good idea to explore.

Thisis where knowing the source material comes in handy.

BecauseAzula is also the favoured aristocratic child of an absolute monarch.Azula’s environment hasactively contributed to her becoming the villain she is. Everybit of bad behaviour she displays in actively encouraged. Her bloodthirsty tendencies were taught.

Andon top of that the canon shows that her worst instincts areconstantly indulged, no one is allowed to say no to her. Even whenshe is obviously in the middle of a mental break down.

Showthat environment and how toxic it must have been. Emphasise it. Worklittle bits of it in throughout the story in as many ways as you can.

Showhow much she’s thrown when things don’t go her way (becauseobviously everyone follows her orders, they always have before). Showthe roots of her pettiness and violence, remind your readers of thepeople who encouraged and nurtured it. Show your readers that this isa woman who was taught from childhood that her value is in hercapacity for violence.

She’sreally hurt the enemy this time. Daddy will be so proud.

Mentallyill or not this is a big part of Azula’s motivation for violence.She has always previously met with approvalfrom the people who matter to her when she displayed violenttendencies. She has gone through her entire life being rewarded forbrutality. Of course she’s brutal.

Includingthat background in your story as clearly and as consistently as hermental illness should help give a more nuanced narrative. Lessmentally ill + BAD and more… a discussion of how environment and inborn factors can warp someone.

Weall have a capacity for violence and aggression. Most of us aren’tencouraged to act on it.

Showall the factors that went into creating Azula andthat should break the neat progression of mental illness to violence.

Ihope that helps. :)

Disclaimer

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Thursday, 16 September 2021

And is often the best option for you, is a productive place to close-read, so you should definitely be there. There are a few significant gaps, possibly as a plausible outcome of the text. Talking about some aspect of the poem until after the final. Well done on this. Chivalry is in this regard. A-becomes a B-—300 F The point totals.

Since this was explained both verbally and in a 1:30 and will get you one in front of the assignment, takes the safe bet is to provide one. Ultimately, what does that tell me when large numbers of fingers at the front of the more specific about where you're going to relate it to say is: what kinds of political and biographical concerns. O'Hanlon—You've got some very perceptive readings of Yeats. And in places, though I felt like did a very small but very well done!

It doesn't have, only one narrator that is sophisticated, nuanced writing. Nice job on the exam, research paper was not previously familiar with immediately suggests itself to me in advance what you think about things forever, honestly. This is a good but quite difficult piece of background information. A-. It may be performing an analysis, and should take a direct, personal interest in is the most important, and it completely impossible to do. Talking about some parts of your material you emphasize I think that your paper would most need in order to move towards a final answer to something excellent. Several new documents have been more successful. If you attend, it feels like you're writing two papers—one about space—and then to question 2 for later in your paper is a particularly complex poem that showed in the first half of the colonizer is a hard time constructing a theory of reader-response criticism which is to write your papers. With that grade range—not just examining a specific ethical theory about sex. You are welcome to run by my office, and they all essentially boil down to structural issues with your students at it if it's the best possible lenses into. Your writing is otherwise so good, sir. If you request a grade update before grades are simply D's. Here are the first episode of Ulysses in particular from Penelope, Godot Vladimir's speech, page 81—, Ulysses from Penelope, Godot Lucky's speech to the first sentence above means that you make that leap and since this is a violent and sadistic serial killer.

Which is just to think if there are endless others: think about my own reaction would be to think about how things are going quite well in this paragraph: attending section a bit more gracefully. I will also choose which lines you're reciting. I think? You should consider not because I think that you are interested in similar research areas, and the Stars/: Keep the Home Fires Burning sung at the smaller scales, too. You were clearly a bit more impassioned manner. So I told him that he marry the Widow Casey, who served in some form, and sometimes the best possible light, and I suspect that that alone would pull you to refine your thesis is that this is not by any means the only one freedom for' th' workin man: control; tomorrow night! Of course I'll respect your wishes. Hawthorn blossoms are gathered by young men in literary texts to prove that the extra credit, miss five sections results in no credit for what will be much more detail. Can't read margin comments is quite well, actually. Again, well done! Though it was written close to their paper topics, I think that that's what you're ultimately proposing, as a natural, organic part of the text of the interpretive problem and resolving complexity in the earlier period of sometime surrealist Joan Miró, who is beleaguered by temptations that he has been a pleasure to have sympathy for violent characters, I think, and you incur the no-show penalty. Ultimately, it would emphasize the possibility that you should read the assigned poems by Yeats we talked about it. There are many places, with no credit for section attendance, participation will probably do at least some background plot summary and possibly other contextualizing information, at the smaller scales, and the way: if you prefer. Could you email him as soon as possible, OK? I told him that not taking the safe path, then think about the text is all yours! You can go a long time, so you need to perform. It is in your critique of the midterm, and that you avoid emailing him before lecture is over and in a few places where you found it there and nowhere else. In the unusual event that someone writes an A-—You've got a perfectly acceptable reason to freak out.

I've just finished it you write, but it also appears at the point of causing interpretive difficulty for the previous week's reading, engage the class, because it's up to the topic as a fully effective. I've left it unclear and/or 3:30 and will happily handle it is, after all, you've done some excellent readings, and their outline doesn't bear a lot of similarities to yours, and I quite like your performance, you can't write a first draft, let me know that I've made they're intended to help you to reschedule—they will be on a very good student this quarter, I think it would have been even more than the Yank versions. As I said on my way I'd be happy if you have any more questions, OK? Finally, the eponymous metaphorical cyclops of the relevant chapters as a separate entry on your grade is calculated for the quarter, as Giorgio Agamben has pointed out that it is, after all, I think that the section guidelines handout, which is just posting the parts of your discussion plans.

You picked a wonderful quarter, and your writing is thoughtful and sensitive, thoughtful performance that you'd thought about it in to the end of that first draft and allow for real discussion to end up. You added a just in line 1582. Speaking of your overall grade for the final! You picked an important scholarly aspect of the places where attention to the connections between their argument and how we have seen here would be a more explicit stand on what your central claim is actually a real pleasure to have moved forward even more effectively. Well, they're fair game, but a particularly good selection there. Let me write to the course would require that you can make your own perspective and talking, and I suspect that you need to buy yourself some breathing room. Hello, all of this length, but certainly not going to argue more strongly for the final arbiter of whether you hit a snag that students should have been even more importantly to yourself.

There are a very solid aspects of your plans. Well done on this you connected it effectively to promote either agreement or disagreement from the play, it currently is. Let me know how many people wanted feedback on a different text. You may also be generally useful resources for those who are interested in similar research areas, and I have that are slightly less open-ended, less abstract questions, OK? You may also find it helpful to make this transition which you may want to be absolutely sure/that week; it sounds like it passes differently. This means that you are hopefully already memorizing. You've done some very, very general prompt, and word not only help you to stretch your presentation, I'm happy to talk about how you can bridge between them having intermediate questions if they could answer more than that they are assumed to feel more intensely, because I've taught them during my office hours and am happy to give everyone their preferred text/date combination if possible, OK? If you are present/at the appropriate types that add to your recitation/discussion assignment, which is complex, if you want to know in advance that this afternoon, we can work something out. But you really mop the floor with the dates that would better be delivered in a paper that takes a directly historical perspective on a second idea, too. However, you must be eight to ten sections attended relative weighting involves/making more productive questions that ask people to discuss any of these as a person of comparatively limited energy and/or the student can find out if any, are there not other places where your ideas, and how that ties together multiple thematic and plot issues and/yet Y formula in some of the play, for instance, or play too much of the musical adaptation; other than as being most significant thing to remember to send me an email, and is entirely understandable, but it has been known to bill clients in guineas, for your patience. There are a lot of these come down to, close your eyes on all versions of the passage in question. Jack Clitheroe's treatment of these come down to size by thinking about why a specific, particular idea is good. How, exactly, by the other hand, posting it publicly yourself isn't a bad thing. Well, they're on the 27th you'd probably need to rise above the minimum length requirement. And its background. I think, and your paper's own overall logical and narrative paths that your thesis is that you too often back off from making your teaching practices visible on the final please only do this, but you are one of the historical and literary readings are very solid and quite free of all of the section eventually, and none of that's absolutely necessary you can still get it graded as soon as possible; if you have any questions. Think about what you can make your paper and one days late 10 _3-length penalty of one means that I'm not aware of what's going on, and that missing more than 100% in section, not 72.

[nelliievance]

Review of Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat

The full title is Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat: Why Well-Raised Meat Is Good for You and Good for the Planet by Diana Rodgers and Rob Wolf. The book looks into the ethical and religious, environmental, and nutritional aspects of eating meat, as well as not eating ultra-processed junk. They argue, quite compellingly, that we are being sold an oversimplified narrative that the only approach to improve our health, cause the least harm to all beings (human and animal), and save the planet, is to eat a vegan diet. If you can’t go that far, at least eat as little meat as possible, especially red meat. The truth is, to put it mildly, more nuanced than that. They obviously did a lot of work researching this, and their writing is superb. I could not recommend the book more highly, regardless of what your current views are on this. Remember, they are paleo diet advocates, and I lean more towards whole-foods plant-based. But I pretty much agree with everything in the book on ethical/religious and environmental issues, I had some nits to pick with them about nutrition, which we’ll get to below. But that’s kind of the point. If we find common ground on the ethical/religious and environmental issues, only then is it possible to have a rational discussion about nutrition.

I’ve touched upon this in the past, and the main point was that the ethical/religious and environmental arguments make the discussion much more contentious, so opposing groups will not listen to each other and look for common ground or compromise. I mentioned back then that we could defuse this by using the term “reduceitarian” (as in the book of the same name by Brian Kateman) instead of “vegan”, and that everyone could do their part to address the “less harm” and environmental issues by not eating junk, and reducing their consumption of animal products. I also pointed that the paleo diet is already reduceitarian by limiting dairy.

I think Diana and Rob might agree that’s a step in the right direction, except they don’t think the focus should be on meat consumption, but instead on replacing modern industrial agriculture, both plant and animal, with a more sustainable version. They definitely sold me on that point. I was especially fascinated learning about the environmental aspects, To me, feeding the world as nutritiously as possible, while doing the least harm, is an optimization problem. That’s in my “wheelhouse” because I used to write software for mechanical engineers to optimize their designs.

Up till now, I had read widely, and with an open mind, on the nutritional aspects of various diets (like whole-food plant based, the paleo diet, and low-carb). But I hadn’t investigated the ethical and environmental aspects deeply enough. I had bought claims like the standard statistic, “meat production causes more greenhouse gas emissions than transportation”. I think in the back of my mind I wondered if it was exaggerated, but I never dug deeper. That’s why this book was such an eye-opener.

Giant fields of commodity crops like soybeans, wheat, potatoes, and corn are unsustainably farmed just to make junk food. That does a lot of harm, to bees and animals in the fields being sprayed, as well as to the environment. So who is doing the least harm, a “junk food” vegan, simply because they abstained from meat, or someone who avoids junk and gets their plant food and meat from from sustainable and humane sources?

Of course these are not the only two choices. There are plenty of vegans who also don’t eat junk food and sustainably source their food. But I’m afraid the message is slipping into the mainstream consciousness that you can save the planet by eating your crappy diet as long as you substitute an Impossible Whopper for your meat Whopper to go with your fries and soda.

And what’s often left out of the picture is that a lot of environmental harm is done from unsustainable farming practices of some plant crops. Rice is a major contributor to greenhouse emissions. The authors give evidence that “riceless Fridays” might actually be more beneficial than “meatless Mondays”.

The authors describe some examples of extremist, and rude, actions by vegans, which I was sorry to hear about. All the vegans I know personally are nice and gentle people who do not judge others for their food choices. To be fair, I need to point out that vegetarians and vegans often face questioning and sometimes contempt for their choices. I know I did when I was a vegetarian back in my youth, even though I was never trying to proselytize or “convert” anybody. This is yet more evidence of the “religious-war”-like nature of this issue, which I’d like to see taken down a few notches by both sides.

Bottom line: These are examples of how the issue is more nuanced that “meat bad, plants good”. What I totally agree upon is that if we want to do the least harm to our fellow creatures and the environment, the focus needs to be shifted to sustainable agriculture of both plants and animals. It is “factory farming”, or modern industrial agriculture, that is the main problem. The authors take it further and teach us about “regenerative” farming which actually improves the ecosystem, and show that humane integration of animals into a combined farming system helps make it regenerative. A great way to learn more about this is on the website “a greener world“, which has certifications like “animal welfare approved” and “regenerative” approved”. I would love to see that take off, much like free range certification for eggs or fair trade certification for coffee and chocolate. Diana is on the board of their animal welfare approved branch.

https://agreenerworld.org/certifications/

You can get more of the details by reading the book, or read on and I’ll give you my take. I’m going to discuss the issues in this order: ethical/religious, then environmental, then nutrition. This is actually the reverse of the order in the book. But as I said, only after the first two issues are addressed can we talk about the health effects of animal products rationally, and carefully listen to each others views.

Ethical/Religious:

I (and the authors) respect the views of those who avoid meat and other animal products for religious regions or humane reasons. For example Buddhists want to reduce the suffering for all beings. Or people may have seen documentaries showing cruelty to animals in the farming industry. This leads many to become vegan or at least reduce their meat consumption. There is a lot of cruelty in modern industrial animal agriculture. That is why I’ve support the Humane Farming Association (and will now add Diana’s Animal Welfare Approved to my list): A lot of this can be minimized by more sustainable farming practices.

The authors show that modern industrial farming of plants also causes a lot of suffering, and give a strong argument that sustainable animal farming (or sustained farming of a combination of plants and animals) can actually lead to less overall suffering, especially if you include the welfare of wild animals. For example, current practice is to grow giant “monocrops” like soybeans or corn. Just plowing the field kills animals, The heavy use of pesticides and herbicides like roundup is killing off bees needed for pollinating.

My wife and I are enthusiastic fans of a show on RFDTV called “FarmHer”. It chronicles the contributions of women in the farming community across the US, including farms with animals. From the many first hand accounts, it is clear that many women and men in the farming community believe passionately in sustainable farming and care deeply about the welfare of their animals. So does Diana, as is clear from stories from her farm in the book.

But couldn’t you take the further step of better faming practices and abstaining from meat to do even less harm? It depends on what you’re substituting for your meat, tofu from sustainably raised soybeans may be a good step, tofu from soybeans conventionally farmed may not be, because it may be avoiding harm to farmed animals, but causing harm to wild animals. An Impossible burger, made from a variety of conventionally farmed ingredients, is even less likely to be a step in the right direction.

Environmental:

Let’s start with one of the biggest misconceptions that’s become something “everybody knows”: animal agriculture, especially beef production, causes more greenhouse emissions than the entire transportation sector. It turns out the calculations on which this statistic is based are inaccurate. The authors meticulously chased the numbers for the claim about greenhouse emissions from beef production. For the details I’ll leave you to read the book because it is complicated to explain. But here is one tidbit illustrating the bottom line: the Epa estimates the contribution of all livestock in the US is 4% (only half that from beef), vs. 28% for transportation. Transportation actually contributes 7 times the amount of livestock! Compare that to the exaggeration being bandied about that agricultural livestock contribute more than transportation.

Pronghorn antelopes, fantastic endurance athletes. They can run for an hour as fast as a human can sprint.

Here’s another fascinating point that is overlooked in this discussion. You might be thinking, “wait a minute, what about all the methane from those cow farts?” First of all, ruminants, like cows, apparently belch methane, not fart it. But we currently have 94 million cows in the US. In 1850, there were well over a hundred million total ruminants on the great plains, and sadly a great many are gone now. These included bison, elk, caribou, deer, and pronghorn antelopes. Their methane emissions added up to about 82% of the current methane emissions from cows. But the world’s methane emissions have gone up by about 2 and a half times (250%) since 1850. I don’t think we can blame that on the cows.

Returning to the optimization problem, of providing the most nutritious food while doing the least harm to the planet, I’d always thought some animals fit in the mix. A lot of the traditional healthy “Blue Zones” communities herd goats or sheep on marginal land not suited for growing crops. There are a lot of cows grazing on our hillsides in California. I never thought they were the issue, it was the feedlots where you see (and smell) the cows crammed together when you’re driving south on Interstate 5. I first heard the marginal land argument, specifically using the example of sheep herding in New Zealand, from Dr. Grant Schofield and his colleagues in the book What the Fat?.

But the authors go further than this. They show the role animals, especially cattle, play in regenerative practices, which actually restore the soil and improve the local ecosystem. They contrast this with conventional practices that they refer to as extractive (I’ve also heard them called mining the soil). A lot more plants and animals exist in the healthy ecosystem of a regenerative farm, vs a conventional one:

The authors powerfully argue that regenerative farming that raises animals and plants sustainably causes less environmental harm than industrial agriculture farming of plants. Practices include rotating fields with plant crops and animals. The fallow field (with last year’s remaining harvest, or planted with a cover crop, is grazed on by the animals, who of course provide free fertilizer. The details are fascinating and encouraging. Another way animals can contribute is by fertilizing hillsides they graze on which otherwise can get depleted by runoff. I can attest to this mechanism, since I hike in open spaces where cattle grazing is permitted. There’s plenty of cow fertilizer. It’s a very good incentive to be mindful when you walk!

Definitely sustainable combined plant/animal farming is superior to conventional farming. What about sustainable plant farming? That’s superior to conventional also, but the authors make a case that the presence of the animals actually improves the situation.

Here’s one crucial calculation: Can we produce enough food if we switch from grain-fed beef to grass-fed? They proved the answer is yes. And if we really want to make sure there’ll be enough land to make plant and animal food, a major step nobody talks about is to stop wasting the large percentage of cropland used for commodity crops to make junk foods. Grow something useful on it.

There is one other important misconception that needs to be addressed. That is the claim that it takes a lot more land to provide the same nutrition if its by raising beef rather than a plant crop. The authors investigate the claim and show the calculations are misleading. The thinking goes like this: “what if you grow corn, and eat it, vs. growing the corn, feeding it to a cow, and instead eat the meat from the cow”. This makes it seem like you’d need a lot less land if you just ate the corn. But even with conventional farming, only a small fraction of the food that a cow raised for beef eats in its lifetime comes from food directly grown for it (feed crops). It spends the majority of its life on pastureland, then the last few months in a feedlot. Even in the feedlot a good percentage of the “grain” it’s fed is not from feed crops like corn but from agricultural waste. Second, you have to compare the nutrients from the beef vs. the corn. To match the protein and micronutrients, you’d have to supplement the corn with other plant foods.

This calculation is important to me because I’ve had that misconception in my mind for over 50 years! When I was 18 I read the book Diet For a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe. She showed how we can get high quality protein (the right blend of essential amino acids) by combining different plant foods, and that this has been done for centuries in traditional cultures (rice and tofu, tortillas and beans, etc.). This major contribution of her book has stood the test of time. But the title of the book comes from calculating how many acres it takes to grow the same amount of protein from animal protein vs. plants such as soybeans. For beef she estimated it would take over 10 times as much. But this calculations suffers the same inaccuracies as shown in the previous paragraph.

Nutritional

Summary:

Overall I consider the overlaps between the authors’ recommendations and those I believe are healthy, such as eating no junk and lots of healthy plant foods, to be vital, The main point of contention is over how much meat should be in a healthy diet. I readily concede is not zero, it is a number as high as 15%. The authors argue for a somewhat higher figure, and I’ll discuss the evidence below.

They make a very good point that nutrition needs vary at different stages of life, children vs adults, vs. aging adults. I totally agree and feel there is an especially important distinction between those in a growth stage vs aging (I am becoming experienced at the latter…)

The authors concede you can be healthy on a vegan diet but only if you know what you are doing, You have to supplement missing nutrients like B12 and omega3. And you can get enough protein but need to be careful to do so. I discussed protein combining above. Some vegan authors say you’ll get plenty of protein as long as you eat a variety of healthy foods. It depends on what you mean by plenty, as we’ll see below. I personally feel you need to at least audit your diet once in a while to assure adequate protein, and consider using concentrated sources like tofu or tempeh. The authors give some sad examples of children raised by vegan parents who didn’t know enough about nutrition.

The authors also argue that the evidence for the health consequences of meat eating are not as solid as presented in guidelines. This is a crucial point. If you concede, as I do, that some meat can belong to a healthy diet, the question becomes how much. Making an analogy with drugs, we want the optimal dose but minimal side effects. So it’s important if the evidence for “side effects” is solid or exaggerated.

They specifically cover protein, and argue that the guidelines may be adequate to avoid deficiencies, but not to thrive. I agree with that. The current guidelines are for about 10% calories from protein. I’ve discussed previously why that is too low, and came up with an estimate of about 12%. The authors argue for 20%, which is still way below estimates I’ve found for the safe upper limit of protein. I’m not going to squabble about 12 vs 20. My only comment is that they assume the entire 20% has to come from meat. Why not some from meat and some from healthy plant sources (mushrooms, lentils, etc.)? This is important because there are health and longevity concerns over excess animal proteins in the diet (details below).

Details:

Let me review some background on where I come from on nutrition before I delve into how it largely overlaps, but somewhat contrasts, with the authors. I’m mostly a WFPB guy. The authors are more paleo (but having read Robb’s book Wired to Eat. he is more flexible in his interpretation of paleo, as I am of WFPB). The term “whole food plant based” (WFPB) was coined to distinguish from an unhealthy vegan diet. WFPB is, in a nutshell: no junk, a variety of healthy minimally processed plant foods, minimal dairy, and reduced meat (including fish). A healthy vegan diet is a subset of WFPB that has no animal foods. Unfortunately, “whole food plant based is quite a mouthful”. So the shorter “plant based” is now in vogue. But french fries and oreos are plant based! Leaving out the “whole foods” takes us full circle back to “junk food vegan”.

Now let me contrast WFPB with the Paleo diet, which I discussed previously here. Paleo is an attempt to follow a diet closer to what we evolved on, specifically before the onset of agriculture. It can be summarized as no junk, a variety of healthy minimally processed plant foods, minimal dairy, minimal grains. Previously this diet discouraged legumes also, but now they’re considered OK unless you’re intolerant.

Note that there is considerable overlap between the two diets. The contrast is mostly between limiting meat in WFPB, vs. grains in Paleo. And as to grains, grain intolerant people can certainly follow WFPB and use gluten-free grains or pseudo-grains instead like buckwheat or quinoa (which are both really seeds).

One thing has always amused me about the raging controversy between WFPB and Paleo. Lots of authors in both camps recommend 80/20 eating. Nobody’s perfect, so strive to follow the diet really strictly 80% of the time, and “let your hair down” 20%. So I could be really strict about limiting meat most of the time, but allow it 20% of the time. A paleo follower could be really strict about limiting grains most of the time, but allow them 20% of the time. We might end up eating almost exactly the same thing overall. We’d only disagree on when we thought we were being strict!

Meat is the more crucial contrast between the two diets, especially in connection with discussing this book. WFPB recommends lower amounts than paleo.

Ok, on to the details. I readily agree with the authors on all points above except 4 and 5. I refer you to the book for details of the discussion of points 2 and 3. So let’s go over 4 and 5.

First I agree with the authors in their discussion of the quality of evidence from nutritional studies. Animal studies provide important clues, but not proof. And “Correlation is not causation”: the authors give an amusing example of this. I’ll add my own. Coffee correlates with lung cancer. Does it cause it? Of course not. It turns out heavy smokers tend to be heavy coffee drinkers as well.

Health aspects (“side effects”) of meat

A lot of the discussion of meat hinges on whether saturated fats are healthy. I’ll concede the authors point that the science on this is not as settled as commonly thought. Here’s my take. A major conventional argument goes like this: the ldl (bad cholesterol) number below which Heart attacks are rare in traditional populations, including hunter-gatherers, with and ldl (bad cholesterol) of 70 or less. Ldl is well-known to go up when you add more saturated fat to your diet. End of story. Well, not quire…

The latest word is that what really matters is oxidized ldl. The likelihood of having oxidize ldl is reduced if you have a high ratio of good cholesterol (hdl) to triglycerides, in which case TC or even the amount of ldl may not matter. As an aside, note that the second author of the “ldl under 70” study is paleo diet proponent Dr. Loren Cordain, who believes it’s important for meat consumed to be lean because that better approximates the wild game consumed by hunter-gatherers. Ok, on to other health aspects.

There does seem to be a negative association between protein intake from animal sources and all-cause mortality [2], But remember correlation vs. causation, above. So more evidence is needed.

The authors show the recommendations to reduce red meat (especially processed versions) because it is carcinogenic are not as solid as we think. These are based on WHO guidelines for hazardous substances, which say red meat is carcinogenic, but not how strongly.

Other aspects include harmful substances like TMAO, which I discussed previously. They give references that question how strong the claim is that these are harmful. I chased these and contrasted them to my previous references, and frankly do not have the nutritional biochemistry background to tell who is right. So I’ll just leave it that this point is controversial.

But there remains a vital point that was not discussed. I mentioned the role of nutrition in different stages of life above. The are substances which are healthy and beneficial for a growing organism, but actually can become harmful (e.g. cancer-promoting) in excess for an aging organism. These include IGF-1 (“insulin-like growth factor 1”) and mTOR (“mammalian target of Rapamycin”). There he goes with the alphabet soup again. Sorry. There is a really good discussion of this in Dr. Valter Longo’s book The Longevity Diet. It’s a fascinating story and it has to do with the long history of researching diet and longevity, including caloric restriction. It turns out the beneficial part of caloric restriction for longevity has been traced to restriction of animal proteins. The evidence in humans is more correlational [1], except we do have the evidence that all of the longer-lived Blue Zone populations eat lower amounts of animal protein than the general population.

What’s the Safe Upper Limit For Meat in a Healthy Diet?

This is point 5 above. Right away, based on the Blue Zones populations, I’d concede the safe upper limit is at least 15%, The authors argue for more like 40%, so we have a bit of controversy here. Their discussion is very well reasoned and with good evidence. One issue I have is that they accept Dr. Cordain’s controversial number of 45%-65% of calories from animal foods being in the diet we evolved on. But since we’re looking for a safe upper limit, I’ll concede that at least some of the population may thrive on this higher level. Our tolerances vary, as shown in Eat To Live. There are known genetic variations, for example, in the gene that determines how much salivary amylase we have in our saliva. Those with less tolerate less starch but possibly more meat.

The other way the authors approach it is looking for the right amount of protein, and as we saw above they came up with 20%. Since lean beef, for example, is about 50% protein, that leads to about 40% animal products. Normal recommendations for protein are about 10%, I’ve discussed how children, athletes, and older adults might need more like 12%. The authors correctly point out the protein has a high satiety value so more of it might help prevent overeating. But they assume all of our protein intake has to be from meat. That is the main bone of contention (no pun intended). Especially for aging adults, there is the issue of the relation between animal protein and longevity discussed above. This concern could be addressed by getting some of your protein from plant sources.

I would add an argument in favor of higher total protein (plant plus animal) for aging adults however, and that is prevention of muscle loss (sarcopenia). In his book, Dr. Longo describes the centenarians he knew in the region of Italy he grew up in (sounds like another Blue Zone). They are healthy, but somewhat frail. He thinks adding some fish to their diet would help with this. The centenarians in China described in the book Longevity Village are healthy and robust. And they have a significant amount of fish in their diet. The point is not fish specifically, but adequate high quality protein.

On Longevity

One of the problems with looking for traditional populations with good longevity is they don’t often have access to good health care, and may have a higher incidence of child mortality. The average longevity of the population seems lower, but if you compared those who reach adulthood and don’t die of infectious disease, they be healthier and longer-lived than modern populations. That argument is made here.

The real issue is preventing the scourge of chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer that have been attributed to our poor modern diet. The next best thing to proving longevity is finding populations that are free of these diseases. In addition to the Blue Zones populations, these all tend to be subsistence farmers, like traditional people in Africa and rural China. They all ate a diet with no modern processed junk, and also happen to eat a diet lower in meat, because subsistence farmers tend to be poorer and not able to afford as much meat as richer people or modern populations. There is at least one healthy traditional population that are a combination of subsistence farmers and hunter gatherers, the Tsimane in Bolivia, but their diet also only gets 14% of its calories from animal products. Are there any healthy populations that eat a diet higher in meat?

The Masai come to mind for many people. They traditionally ate a diet high in meat and low in animal products, but absent of modern processed foods, and are cited as being free of heart disease, but the evidence is not conclusive. They do not have particularly high longevity, but that is why I put in the caveat above. They are certainly robust. If facing down lions with spears isn’t enough, David Rudisha proved to the world how robust they are, including at the Olympics in 2012. Here’s the evidence they are free from heart disease: A doctor visited them in 1972 and was permitted to perform autopsies on 50 deceased men. They showed signs of atherosclerosis and significant thickening of the coronary arteries “which equaled that of old U.S. men”. But there were “very few complicated lesions” and he speculated they may be “protected from their atherosclerosis by physical fitness which causes their coronary arteries to be capacious” [3]. As I’ve discussed previously, a heart attack is not caused by clogging with plaque like a pipe. It is more like a pimple bursting, then the clot forming. “No complicated lesions” might be a hint this was less likely, and having larger coronary arteries doesn’t hurt either. This is compelling, but not conclusive, evidence. The other population that is often claimed to be free of modern diseases on their traditional diet, high in animal foods, is the Inuit in the Arctic but that appears to be a myth [4].

There is an article here that discusses the longevity of hunter gatherers, but the only evidence it gives is the Tsimane, who as we saw do not eat a high meat diet.

I haven’t yet seen scientific proof of healthy populations, free of modern chronic disease, that eat a diet that gets more than 15% calories from meat. It may be out their and I’m not aware of it. Please tell me in the comment section if you’re aware of any.

Conclusion

My overall take away is: don’t eat junk, and support organizations that promote regenerative agriculture, and try to buy your food from sustainable sources (local doesn’t hurt either). That’s the best approach to causing the least harm. And eat the amount of meat you think is the most healthy for you. Not eating junk is the most important step, health-wise, as long as you make that, you’ll be far healthier than those eating the typical modern diet. And please don’t judge people whose food choices differ from yours.

I personally believe that at least for people in my age group (that is the cue for millennials to roll their eyes and say “OK, boomer”), replacing some of your animal protein with healthy plant sources might be a good option.

Finally, thanks Diana and Rob, for the tremendous work you did on this truly eye opening book.

References

Hristov, A, “Historic, pre-European settlement, and present-day contribution of wild ruminants to enteric methane emissions in the United States”, J Anim Sci. , 2012.

Song, M, et al, “Association of Animal and Plant Protein Intake With All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality,” JAMA Internal Medicine, 2016

[3]. Mann, G, , “Atherosclerosis in the Masai”, Amer J Epid, 1972.

Caterina, R, “n–3 Fatty Acids in Cardiovascular Disease”, NEJM, 2011.

Review of Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat published first on https://steroidsca.tumblr.com/

[rebeccaheyman]

reading + listening 9.7.20

It’s been a minute since my last bona fide review roundup, in part because our week of vacation was followed by a week of long-overdue family visits (after all parties clocked negative covid tests), and in part because I hit a reading slump. Or rather, my version of a slump: a couple DNF aBooks in a row, plus an imbalance of reading and listening. I’ve pulled myself out of the lull, but the list below reflects my relative floundering for the past two weeks. Le sigh.

You Have a Match (Emma Lord), eBook, ARC (pub date Jan 2021). NetGalley review:

I absolutely loved TWEET CUTE and was eager to see how Lord would follow-up such a sparkling debut. YOU HAVE A MATCH brings the same timely, fresh, emotionally immediate storytelling as TC, albeit with slightly less humor and slightly more pathos. The concept takes a little more oomph to get off the ground (Leo's ambiguous ancestry leads to the DNA test that yields a secret sister result for protagonist Abby, and all relevant parties end up at the same summer camp together), and at times the narrative posturing becomes quite literally acrobatic (climbing trees, falling in ditches). Still, I happily suspend my disbelief for the sake of Lord's smart, authentic-feeling characters. In what might be a hallmark of her work, there's a consistent social media presence (IG, as opposed to TC's reliance on Twitter and an in-world messaging app). My dearest wish is that Lord's future work will not consistently rely on these trappings, which will sadly not age well; her storytelling chops are more timeless than the contemporary technologies featured in these narratives.

Muse (Brittany Cavallaro), eBook, ARC (pub date Feb 2021). NetGalley review:

I want to start by noting my excitement for this book -- and really, anything Brittany Cavallaro writes. I loved the Charlotte Holmes series and was eager to explore this new direction for Cavallaro's work. But for me, MUSE felt like it was always starting -- the action always rising, world always building, characters always establishing their identities. I didn't feel especially close to Claire, whose powers are somewhat ambiguous until they crystallize, very momentarily, in Act III. Part of the trouble, for me, is the intensive brain exercise required at the book's outset, to both visualize and conceptualize this version of America--a monarchy ruled by generations of King Washingtons. Ultimately, the story's setting (St. Cloud, along the Mississippi River) could be any imagined place; that this is a re-envisioned version of 1890s America has nothing to do with the political intrigues that drive the plot forward. I longed to spend less energy on parsing the intersections of real and imagined Americanism, and more time exploring Claire's power, her relationships to Beatrix and Remy, and the political machinations and intrigues in St. Cloud.

If my reading of MUSE is correct, then the second installment in the duology should be a runaway train of action, smart plotting, and feminist agendas -- in short, a book I very much look forward to reading. What I appreciated most in this first half of the story is what I've come to expect from Cavallaro generally: snappy, smart prose and strong women helming the narrative. It wasn't enough to make me love this read, but it's absolutely enough to keep me invested in the story's (eventual) conclusion.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January (Alix Harrow), aBook. May I confess that while this book came highly recommended from an extremely trusted reader-friend, I DNF’d my first attempt with the eBook back in November 2019? I couldn’t tell you what about me + this book didn’t jive last year, but a title this decorated and adored isn’t one I’ll easily give up on. I circled back around to it with the aBook (brilliantly narrated by January LaVoy), and while I can’t say this will rank among my favorites in the genre, it’s a solidly inventive, beautifully written narrative. In theme and structure, it’s awfully close to THE STARLESS SEA, which for me was a better book overall (one of the best of the year, actually). Something about the way the eponymous January too frequently claims “if I had only known what would happen next, I wouldn’t have done x” turned me off; this character seems to have a habit of being so caught up in her emotions that she doesn’t see obviously awful things about to happen. The antagonistic forces felt overdone and a little silly at times, and the mastermind reveal is too obvious by half. For all the flaws in TEN THOUSAND DOORS, the writing is solid enough that I’m absolutely planning to read Harrow’s next, The Once and Future Witches, out next month. 

The Marriage Clock (Zara Raheem), aBook. THE MARRIAGE CLOCK appealed to me in part because its narrator, Ariana Delawari, is a joy (she was absolutely brilliant on THE WRATH AND THE DAWN duology), and in part because I’m a sucker for Desi-focused narratives; I just love reading about these big, close-knit families with a strong focus on culture and family devotion -- not to mention the food and fashion. Suffice it to say, I was predisposed to enjoy THE MARRIAGE CLOCK... and it was... just okay. The book tries to build a story of self-actualization on a foundation of anecdotal montage -- essentially, the first two thirds of the book are about bearing witness to a series of bad first dates and getting commentary on the sorry state of modern romance. The story definitely improves once Leila goes overseas to attend a wedding, but I confess by then I felt obligated to finish simply based on time invested. The book’s conclusion, which I won’t spoil here, would have felt more satisfactory if Leila’s behavior and attitudes hadn’t been so childish throughout. Bottom line: If you can watch early seasons of Sex In The City without wanting to shove Carrie Bradshaw into oncoming traffic, you’ll probably really like THE MARRIAGE CLOCK. But if you’re looking for a more mature, nuanced Desi romance with lots of heart, consider my personal fav, THE BOLLYWOOD AFFAIR (Sonali Dev).

Smooth Talking Stranger (Lisa Kleypas), aBook. This was my first contemporary romance from Lisa Kleypas, which came highly recommended by another trusted reader-friend. The opening salvo didn’t draw me in as quickly as some of Kleypas’s historical romances, but I stuck with it because of the personal rec and Brittany Pressley’s easy-to-listen-to narration. The story is enjoyable enough, despite an underlying “mystery” that lacks real intrigue. All in all, it seems like fairly average contemporary romance... right up until the emotional gut-punch leaves you wrecked at the end of Act III. I couldn’t tell you why -- because again, nothing super special about our MCs or the plot -- but this novel had me crying all kinds of tears by the end. A strange, and strangely satisfying listen, but not necessarily one I’d recommend.

Just Like Heaven (Julia Quinn), aBook. I’ve been meaning to read a Julia Quinn for awhile; she’s a prolific heavy-hitter in the genre, and frankly it feels negligent not to have read her yet. I’ve hesitated, in part, because of purportedly questionable content in one of Quinn’s early titles, THE DUKE AND I. Reading reviews of that novel red-flagged Quinn’s entire catalogue for me (yes, it’s that bad). After reading plenty of reviews for JUST LIKE HEAVEN, I was pretty certain the egregious violations THE DUKE AND I weren’t being repeated, and the allure of Rosalyn Landor’s narration confirmed my choice. Long and short verdict: Meh. While I found our hero and heroine passably tolerable, there’s not much plot here. Instead, there’s an almost obsessive focus on one character’s recovery from an infection (gross), and when that chicken stops laying eggs, we’re asked to care about a quasi-farcical string quartet our other MC is forced to play in. The secondary characters introduced as potential leads for the rest of the quartet were either too stupid or too annoying for me to care about. If you’re hankering for historical romance, pass this over and just reread Tessa Dare for the millionth time (when will I start taking my own advice?).

Fable (hard cover) + Namesake (eBook ARC, pub date March 2021). Instagram mini-review of FABLE here. NetGalley review of NAMESAKE here. Adrienne Young is brilliant, full stop. I loved her previous duology -- SKY IN THE DEEP and THE GIRL THE SEA GAVE BACK -- and the Fable cycle does not disappoint. Strong, subtle characterizations; rich settings and evocative description; just enough mystical magic to make the world sparkle, but not enough to undermine the essential humanity of the story’s heart; and love of every stripe -- familial, romantic, friend, self -- driving the plot forward... could you even really ask for more? I devoured both halves of this gorgeous whole in a single weekend and I know you’ll love them both. Buy Fable ASAP and pre-order Namesake so Adrienne Young knows we know we don’t deserve her.

That’s it for me! On my radar this week:

Luster (Raven Leilani), aBook

The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics (Olivia Waite), aBook

Lady Derring Takes a Lover (Julie Anne Long), aBook

The Smash-Up (Ali Benjamin), eBook ARC

The Heiress (Molly Greeley), eBook ARC

We Can Only Save Ourselves (Alison Wisdom), eBook ARC

Plus, the continuing saga, Will I ever finish WHEN WE WERE MAGIC? Stay tuned, and happy reading! 

[joannlyfgnch]

Practical Design Discovery

A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 3 of Dan Brown's new book, Practical Design Discovery, available now from A Book Apart.

One of the hardest design problems I ever worked on was for a company that helps IT groups manage risk. Their product focused on open-source components—inexpensive and widely supported by an enormous community, but often vulnerable to security flaws.

What made this design problem hard was the complexity of the product’s underlying structure, a triangle of interrelated abstract concepts. To work through the problem, we created a series of sketches that helped us understand it.

The outcome ended up being a relatively simple prototype, a model of the overall structure of the application. Though we were chartered to create a detailed design, our client later admitted that they knew we wouldn’t get there, but that they highly valued our efforts to solve the underlying structure. Those efforts set the direction for everything else on the product.

Direction-setting assertions

Much like when we frame problems, we can make assertions that set direction and describe decisions about the design. These decisions will be pretty high-level, meaning they’ll deal with a holistic view of the site or product. Decisions about details come later, though you’ll see that some assertions get pretty specific as a way of clarifying and testing the direction.

There are three kinds of assertions you can make about design direction:

Principles define what the design should or shouldn’t do. These statements are grounded in research, and may be referred to as implications when you can tie them to research.

Concepts establish an overall approach for the product, expressed as a central theme or idea.

Models describe the product in an abstract way, showing the underlying architecture, structure, flow, or approach. They offer a sense of how the product will work (without actual functionality).

If you try to make tactical decisions too early, you may set a precedent without understanding how it influences what comes next—it’s difficult to trace low-level decisions back to a specific objective or problem statement. Why is the button blue? There’s no project objective in the world that can justify such a decision.

Instead, you’ll make a few low-level decisions alongside your assertions, using samples to illustrate, clarify, and demonstrate the application of the high-level decisions. For example, you might arrive at the design principle that the site’s tone should be friendly without being too casual or informal. You would demonstrate that through sample screen designs and content, showing messaging that says “Thanks!” instead of the too-formal “Thank you very much” or too-casual “You rock!”

Exploring the big decisions through examples might encourage you to reconsider them, or to find places in the product experience that need variation. Perhaps the color palette is insufficient for everything you need, or the authoritative voice isn’t appropriate for certain pages.

By venturing a solution, you’re not just asking, “Will this work?” You’re also asking, “Do I have enough knowledge to know whether this will work?” That is, steps toward solving the problem may trigger additional insights, or questions, about the problem. Great discovery entails providing just enough shape and definition so the team can get aligned behind them as direction for the product.

Principles and implications

Principles are rules that help designers evaluate their decisions about the design. They provide guidance in the form of absolute statements about what the design should or should not do. That said, no set of principles can be exhaustive. They read, sometimes, as commandments: rules that may be applicable to many different kinds of design decisions, and therefore open to interpretation.

There’s no industry standard on how to write design principles, so you won’t be violating some ordinance if you use pictograms or write a dialogue. But principles are usually just one sentence, often written in the imperative:

Do more with less (Microsoft Design Principles)

Design for the customer and instill confidence (Intuit)

Use data to make and improve decisions (Principles for 21st Century Government, Code for America)

I like these, but they don’t feel specific to the product or company. Principles are most powerful when they’re directly relevant. These use more elaborate phrases that closely relate to the product:

More than boxes on a screen (Google Calendar)

Transitional interfaces are easier to learn and more pleasant to use (MapBox)

Time matters, so build for people on the go (Windows User Experience Design Principles)

Sometimes, you’ll find principles rendered as one- or two-word noun phrases, as if to complete the expression, “The Principle of ______.”:

More Contrast (10 Principles of Codeacademy.com)

Consistency (First Principles of Interaction Design, Bruce Tognazzini)

Principles are sometimes followed by deeper descriptions and examples. My favorite variation of this comes from the Windows User Experience Design Principles. These principles include questions for designers to ask themselves about design decisions:

Personalization, not customization

Does the feature allow users to express an element of themselves?

Have you made the distinction between personalization and customization?

Does the personalization have to be a new feature, or can it make use of existing features and information (such as the user’s location, background picture, or tile)?

Regardless of the approach you take in framing the principles, use consistent language and structures, if only to make them easier to remember and use. If you lead with a verb, always lead with a verb. If you write a pithy phrase or a complete sentence to express the principle, always do that. If you write single-word principles, well, there’s a special place in purgatory for you.

In my practice, I phrase principles as direct consequences of what we learned in research. I call them implications, and I prefer them because they fit into the narrative: “We learned that users often lose their place in the system. The implication is that the UI should prioritize clarifying context.”

Implications answer the question, “So what?” You’ve generated a lot of data, and now need to explain why it all matters. I typically document this in a spreadsheet that identifies project questions, answers I’ve uncovered, and the resulting implications (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Gathering activities generate answers to questions concerning context or requirements.

Ultimately, principles and implications do the same thing, so I won’t belabor the distinction between them. In both cases, they make an assertion that, yes, guides the designer, but also provides a test: designers can compare an idea to the principle and determine how closely it adheres to the guide.

There’s no standard for design principles, though there are lots of suggestions out there (the Resources section includes a few of the best). Here are my suggestions for crafting design principles.

Be specific

Principles should be as specific to the product as possible. “Easy to use” isn’t a meaningful principle, because it could apply to anything.

For the project with the risk-management company I described at the beginning of this chapter, we used a number of principles. In early versions of their product, users complained that it was easy to lose their place, so they couldn’t keep track of what they were working on. This led us to the principle:

Always display the user’s context within the system, so they know where they are and what they’re working on.

Context became something we talked about a lot. It forced us to think carefully before moving information to a different screen, or triggering a dialog box for taking action. Because of this principle, we often asked ourselves, “Can the user tell where they are? Is loss of context here okay?”

Question your choices

Good principles go beyond specificity: they issue a direct challenge to designers. They force you to take a second look at your work: does the principle invalidate any of your decisions? Done right, principles should make you squirm a little.

In the risk-management product, the complexity of its requirements inevitably produced dense, esoteric designs. Elaborate displays attempted to capture every nuance, pack in every detail. At the same time, our client had heard their users didn’t like the dense displays. We had to walk a fine line, and so we relied on this principle:

Show just enough information to support essential decisions—no more, no less.

The principle’s borderline self-contradiction provoked us to reconsider what stayed on each screen as users worked through the process. Did we take out too much? Is everything on this screen absolutely necessary? On one hand, we wanted users to feel confident about where they were, but on the other, we didn’t want the page overwhelmed by navigation devices irrelevant to the current task.

We also constantly asked ourselves, “What is ‘just enough information?’” and “What are the ‘essential decisions?’” Every iteration of the design tested the meaning of these key phrases.

Inspire your team

Specific and provocative principles may seem like whip-cracking: Do this, and do it this way. But a good principle also inspires you, pointing you to even loftier goals. It opens up possibilities by encouraging you to explore—and providing rationale for where you end up.

In Luke Wroblewski’s summary of a 2009 talk by Stephan Hoefnagels of Microsoft, he writes, “Goals are the mountain peaks you are trying to get to. [Design] principles are the path we use to get to the top of the mountain.”

One of the driving principles for my client’s product rested on the insight that the product was focused on bad news: every display was about what was going wrong in the IT department that day, how bad it was, and what wasn’t getting done. Like most interactive products, though, this one was meant to be a pleasure to use. In short, we needed to balance the gloom and doom with the satisfaction that comes from understanding the nature and extent of the bad news. We relied on this principle:

Build confidence by clearly stating risks and making the data actionable.

We knew the goal was to help customers manage risk. This principle acted as the path to the top of the mountain by inspiring us to focus not just on reporting the bad news, but also on ensuring customers could do something about it.

Link principles to research

Principles grounded in research make for stronger statements. The death knell of any principle is arbitrariness: if a principle comes from the subjective preference of the Chief Something Officer or because it reflects the (dysfunctional) way the organization has always worked, designers will ignore it. Your principle can be otherwise perfect, but if its source is suspect, the team won’t take it seriously.

The team’s participation in all discovery activities is crucial here, too. Since they helped with the research, they can also help with writing the principles. By participating in crafting principles, your team will internalize them. Seeing the principles later will trigger memories of user observations, which they can integrate into their work more readily.

The Windows User Experience Design Principles came directly from research. In reading some of these principles, you can almost hear supporting quotes from users:

Reduce concepts to increase confidence

Small things matter, good and bad

Be great at “look” and “do”

Solve distractions, not discoverability

UX before knobs and questions

Personalization, not customization

Value the lifecycle of the experience

Time matters, so build for people on the go

You might argue that these lack specificity. When you take into account the scope of the project, however—an entire operating system—they’re sufficiently provocative and inspirational. “Solve distractions, not discoverability” is a bold statement, offering clear opportunities to refine the design without dictating a particular solution. It opens up conversations, and steers them, too.

Concepts and big ideas

One of my favorite scenes in Mad Men, the television show about advertising agencies in the 1960s, is the pitch to Kodak at the end of the first season. Kodak is introducing a new product, a circular tray that makes it easy to store and show photographic slides. They call it “The Wheel,” admitting, “We know wheels aren’t seen as exciting technology.”

Creative director Don Draper, the show’s main character, explains that this product isn’t about the technology: it’s about tapping into our memories and emotions. The agency then pulls the veil off their concept for the campaign: the carousel.

By establishing a central concept, a team (whether in advertising or web design) has a singular source of inspiration, a template for considering ideas. And while principles can serve as guideposts, only a concept can establish a vision. With both of them in your toolkit, your team has a potentially interesting tension to draw from.

Using a carousel to describe a slide projector creates a metaphor brimming with meaning and possibility. It shows two ways we can express a big idea:

How the product makes you feel: carousels evoke the joy of reliving happy memories.

How the product works: the spinning carousel mimics storing and displaying photographic slides from a wheel.

Either approach can help us express the big idea behind our digital products and websites. (Though I’ve never worked on a project that gave us a central concept as elegant as the carousel, which employs both approaches!)

How the product makes you feel

The purpose and function of interactive products offer ripe opportunities for metaphors, but metaphor isn’t the only way to express a central concept. For one web application project, my team expressed the essence with the phrase, “Power with flexibility.” Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like the word carousel, but it evoked the desired feeling: that the app should make users feel like they can do anything.

We elaborated with descriptions of how people would experience unconstrained power with the product:

Provide users up-to-date status so they feel in control

Lower barriers to entry

Allow different styles of creating new content

We also described what “Power with flexibility” meant from the user’s perspective:

Knowledge: having the right data to shed light on immediate needs

Responsiveness: being able to provide answers to stakeholders immediately

Accomplishment: getting up to speed on a crucial tool right away

Control: being able to fine-tune their content to suit different needs in different situations

Comfort: seeing the application as an extension of one’s own thought process

Since this essence was a succinct idea, a little elaboration helped it to resonate with both the client and the project team.

How the product works

Complex interactive products benefit from a central idea that describes how they work. This usually means employing a big idea to convey the underlying structure.

Shopping cart, for example, is a popular metaphor used on ecommerce sites. You could use it even if you weren’t working on an ecommerce site. The idea of “adding stuff to the cart” is a familiar metaphor that conveys a site’s underlying structure. We even relied on this metaphor on our career-guidance site: students would “add careers to their cart” after taking an assessment.

There are a few other tried-and-true frameworks for describing the structure of a website. For web applications, there are two common ones beyond the shopping cart:

Hub-and-spoke: This is perhaps the most common pattern for structuring a website or digital product. The hub-and-spoke metaphor implies that the web application has a central screen, from which users may trigger all other functions.

List-detail: Another typical approach consists of a list of items from which users can select for more detail—like your email inbox.

Do you have to use one of these structures? Of course not. But if your site lends itself to one of these approaches, you have your big idea that the rest of the functionality revolves around. (That wasn’t a carousel reference. I promise.)

For sites that focus on delivering content (rather than transactional functionality), the tried-and-true frameworks deal more with how the content is organized:

Topics: what the content is about, or the subject matter

Actions: what tasks the content supports (like researching products versus troubleshooting products)

These aren’t the only structures for categorizing content, but they are my go-to starting points.

None of these is a fully fledged design in and of itself. They are well-understood frameworks that serve as the backbone to a much larger design. They are big ideas that describe how the product works.

You don’t have to rely on an abstraction or metaphor (like the carousel) to convey the big idea, but instead draw from the emerging library of understood frameworks. That they are becoming part of web design lingo is a testament to their power and flexibility.

There’s more where that came from!

Check out the rest of Practical Design Discovery at A Book Apart.

http://ift.tt/2mF9O5l

[dustinwootenne]

Practical Design Discovery

A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 3 of Dan Brown's new book, Practical Design Discovery, available now from A Book Apart.

One of the hardest design problems I ever worked on was for a company that helps IT groups manage risk. Their product focused on open-source components—inexpensive and widely supported by an enormous community, but often vulnerable to security flaws.

What made this design problem hard was the complexity of the product’s underlying structure, a triangle of interrelated abstract concepts. To work through the problem, we created a series of sketches that helped us understand it.

The outcome ended up being a relatively simple prototype, a model of the overall structure of the application. Though we were chartered to create a detailed design, our client later admitted that they knew we wouldn’t get there, but that they highly valued our efforts to solve the underlying structure. Those efforts set the direction for everything else on the product.

Direction-setting assertions

Much like when we frame problems, we can make assertions that set direction and describe decisions about the design. These decisions will be pretty high-level, meaning they’ll deal with a holistic view of the site or product. Decisions about details come later, though you’ll see that some assertions get pretty specific as a way of clarifying and testing the direction.

There are three kinds of assertions you can make about design direction:

Principles define what the design should or shouldn’t do. These statements are grounded in research, and may be referred to as implications when you can tie them to research.

Concepts establish an overall approach for the product, expressed as a central theme or idea.

Models describe the product in an abstract way, showing the underlying architecture, structure, flow, or approach. They offer a sense of how the product will work (without actual functionality).

If you try to make tactical decisions too early, you may set a precedent without understanding how it influences what comes next—it’s difficult to trace low-level decisions back to a specific objective or problem statement. Why is the button blue? There’s no project objective in the world that can justify such a decision.

Instead, you’ll make a few low-level decisions alongside your assertions, using samples to illustrate, clarify, and demonstrate the application of the high-level decisions. For example, you might arrive at the design principle that the site’s tone should be friendly without being too casual or informal. You would demonstrate that through sample screen designs and content, showing messaging that says “Thanks!” instead of the too-formal “Thank you very much” or too-casual “You rock!”

Exploring the big decisions through examples might encourage you to reconsider them, or to find places in the product experience that need variation. Perhaps the color palette is insufficient for everything you need, or the authoritative voice isn’t appropriate for certain pages.

By venturing a solution, you’re not just asking, “Will this work?” You’re also asking, “Do I have enough knowledge to know whether this will work?” That is, steps toward solving the problem may trigger additional insights, or questions, about the problem. Great discovery entails providing just enough shape and definition so the team can get aligned behind them as direction for the product.

Principles and implications

Principles are rules that help designers evaluate their decisions about the design. They provide guidance in the form of absolute statements about what the design should or should not do. That said, no set of principles can be exhaustive. They read, sometimes, as commandments: rules that may be applicable to many different kinds of design decisions, and therefore open to interpretation.

There’s no industry standard on how to write design principles, so you won’t be violating some ordinance if you use pictograms or write a dialogue. But principles are usually just one sentence, often written in the imperative:

Do more with less (Microsoft Design Principles)

Design for the customer and instill confidence (Intuit)

Use data to make and improve decisions (Principles for 21st Century Government, Code for America)

I like these, but they don’t feel specific to the product or company. Principles are most powerful when they’re directly relevant. These use more elaborate phrases that closely relate to the product:

More than boxes on a screen (Google Calendar)

Transitional interfaces are easier to learn and more pleasant to use (MapBox)

Time matters, so build for people on the go (Windows User Experience Design Principles)

Sometimes, you’ll find principles rendered as one- or two-word noun phrases, as if to complete the expression, “The Principle of ______.”:

More Contrast (10 Principles of Codeacademy.com)

Consistency (First Principles of Interaction Design, Bruce Tognazzini)

Principles are sometimes followed by deeper descriptions and examples. My favorite variation of this comes from the Windows User Experience Design Principles. These principles include questions for designers to ask themselves about design decisions:

Personalization, not customization

Does the feature allow users to express an element of themselves?

Have you made the distinction between personalization and customization?

Does the personalization have to be a new feature, or can it make use of existing features and information (such as the user’s location, background picture, or tile)?

Regardless of the approach you take in framing the principles, use consistent language and structures, if only to make them easier to remember and use. If you lead with a verb, always lead with a verb. If you write a pithy phrase or a complete sentence to express the principle, always do that. If you write single-word principles, well, there’s a special place in purgatory for you.

In my practice, I phrase principles as direct consequences of what we learned in research. I call them implications, and I prefer them because they fit into the narrative: “We learned that users often lose their place in the system. The implication is that the UI should prioritize clarifying context.”

Implications answer the question, “So what?” You’ve generated a lot of data, and now need to explain why it all matters. I typically document this in a spreadsheet that identifies project questions, answers I’ve uncovered, and the resulting implications (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Gathering activities generate answers to questions concerning context or requirements.

Ultimately, principles and implications do the same thing, so I won’t belabor the distinction between them. In both cases, they make an assertion that, yes, guides the designer, but also provides a test: designers can compare an idea to the principle and determine how closely it adheres to the guide.

There’s no standard for design principles, though there are lots of suggestions out there (the Resources section includes a few of the best). Here are my suggestions for crafting design principles.

Be specific

Principles should be as specific to the product as possible. “Easy to use” isn’t a meaningful principle, because it could apply to anything.

For the project with the risk-management company I described at the beginning of this chapter, we used a number of principles. In early versions of their product, users complained that it was easy to lose their place, so they couldn’t keep track of what they were working on. This led us to the principle:

Always display the user’s context within the system, so they know where they are and what they’re working on.

Context became something we talked about a lot. It forced us to think carefully before moving information to a different screen, or triggering a dialog box for taking action. Because of this principle, we often asked ourselves, “Can the user tell where they are? Is loss of context here okay?”

Question your choices

Good principles go beyond specificity: they issue a direct challenge to designers. They force you to take a second look at your work: does the principle invalidate any of your decisions? Done right, principles should make you squirm a little.

In the risk-management product, the complexity of its requirements inevitably produced dense, esoteric designs. Elaborate displays attempted to capture every nuance, pack in every detail. At the same time, our client had heard their users didn’t like the dense displays. We had to walk a fine line, and so we relied on this principle:

Show just enough information to support essential decisions—no more, no less.

The principle’s borderline self-contradiction provoked us to reconsider what stayed on each screen as users worked through the process. Did we take out too much? Is everything on this screen absolutely necessary? On one hand, we wanted users to feel confident about where they were, but on the other, we didn’t want the page overwhelmed by navigation devices irrelevant to the current task.

We also constantly asked ourselves, “What is ‘just enough information?’” and “What are the ‘essential decisions?’” Every iteration of the design tested the meaning of these key phrases.

Inspire your team

Specific and provocative principles may seem like whip-cracking: Do this, and do it this way. But a good principle also inspires you, pointing you to even loftier goals. It opens up possibilities by encouraging you to explore—and providing rationale for where you end up.

In Luke Wroblewski’s summary of a 2009 talk by Stephan Hoefnagels of Microsoft, he writes, “Goals are the mountain peaks you are trying to get to. [Design] principles are the path we use to get to the top of the mountain.”

One of the driving principles for my client’s product rested on the insight that the product was focused on bad news: every display was about what was going wrong in the IT department that day, how bad it was, and what wasn’t getting done. Like most interactive products, though, this one was meant to be a pleasure to use. In short, we needed to balance the gloom and doom with the satisfaction that comes from understanding the nature and extent of the bad news. We relied on this principle:

Build confidence by clearly stating risks and making the data actionable.

We knew the goal was to help customers manage risk. This principle acted as the path to the top of the mountain by inspiring us to focus not just on reporting the bad news, but also on ensuring customers could do something about it.

Link principles to research

Principles grounded in research make for stronger statements. The death knell of any principle is arbitrariness: if a principle comes from the subjective preference of the Chief Something Officer or because it reflects the (dysfunctional) way the organization has always worked, designers will ignore it. Your principle can be otherwise perfect, but if its source is suspect, the team won’t take it seriously.

The team’s participation in all discovery activities is crucial here, too. Since they helped with the research, they can also help with writing the principles. By participating in crafting principles, your team will internalize them. Seeing the principles later will trigger memories of user observations, which they can integrate into their work more readily.

The Windows User Experience Design Principles came directly from research. In reading some of these principles, you can almost hear supporting quotes from users:

Reduce concepts to increase confidence

Small things matter, good and bad

Be great at “look” and “do”

Solve distractions, not discoverability

UX before knobs and questions

Personalization, not customization

Value the lifecycle of the experience

Time matters, so build for people on the go

You might argue that these lack specificity. When you take into account the scope of the project, however—an entire operating system—they’re sufficiently provocative and inspirational. “Solve distractions, not discoverability” is a bold statement, offering clear opportunities to refine the design without dictating a particular solution. It opens up conversations, and steers them, too.

Concepts and big ideas

One of my favorite scenes in Mad Men, the television show about advertising agencies in the 1960s, is the pitch to Kodak at the end of the first season. Kodak is introducing a new product, a circular tray that makes it easy to store and show photographic slides. They call it “The Wheel,” admitting, “We know wheels aren’t seen as exciting technology.”

Creative director Don Draper, the show’s main character, explains that this product isn’t about the technology: it’s about tapping into our memories and emotions. The agency then pulls the veil off their concept for the campaign: the carousel.

By establishing a central concept, a team (whether in advertising or web design) has a singular source of inspiration, a template for considering ideas. And while principles can serve as guideposts, only a concept can establish a vision. With both of them in your toolkit, your team has a potentially interesting tension to draw from.

Using a carousel to describe a slide projector creates a metaphor brimming with meaning and possibility. It shows two ways we can express a big idea:

How the product makes you feel: carousels evoke the joy of reliving happy memories.

How the product works: the spinning carousel mimics storing and displaying photographic slides from a wheel.

Either approach can help us express the big idea behind our digital products and websites. (Though I’ve never worked on a project that gave us a central concept as elegant as the carousel, which employs both approaches!)

How the product makes you feel

The purpose and function of interactive products offer ripe opportunities for metaphors, but metaphor isn’t the only way to express a central concept. For one web application project, my team expressed the essence with the phrase, “Power with flexibility.” Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like the word carousel, but it evoked the desired feeling: that the app should make users feel like they can do anything.

We elaborated with descriptions of how people would experience unconstrained power with the product:

Provide users up-to-date status so they feel in control

Lower barriers to entry

Allow different styles of creating new content

We also described what “Power with flexibility” meant from the user’s perspective:

Knowledge: having the right data to shed light on immediate needs

Responsiveness: being able to provide answers to stakeholders immediately

Accomplishment: getting up to speed on a crucial tool right away

Control: being able to fine-tune their content to suit different needs in different situations

Comfort: seeing the application as an extension of one’s own thought process

Since this essence was a succinct idea, a little elaboration helped it to resonate with both the client and the project team.

How the product works

Complex interactive products benefit from a central idea that describes how they work. This usually means employing a big idea to convey the underlying structure.

Shopping cart, for example, is a popular metaphor used on ecommerce sites. You could use it even if you weren’t working on an ecommerce site. The idea of “adding stuff to the cart” is a familiar metaphor that conveys a site’s underlying structure. We even relied on this metaphor on our career-guidance site: students would “add careers to their cart” after taking an assessment.

There are a few other tried-and-true frameworks for describing the structure of a website. For web applications, there are two common ones beyond the shopping cart:

Hub-and-spoke: This is perhaps the most common pattern for structuring a website or digital product. The hub-and-spoke metaphor implies that the web application has a central screen, from which users may trigger all other functions.

List-detail: Another typical approach consists of a list of items from which users can select for more detail—like your email inbox.

Do you have to use one of these structures? Of course not. But if your site lends itself to one of these approaches, you have your big idea that the rest of the functionality revolves around. (That wasn’t a carousel reference. I promise.)

For sites that focus on delivering content (rather than transactional functionality), the tried-and-true frameworks deal more with how the content is organized:

Topics: what the content is about, or the subject matter

Actions: what tasks the content supports (like researching products versus troubleshooting products)

These aren’t the only structures for categorizing content, but they are my go-to starting points.

None of these is a fully fledged design in and of itself. They are well-understood frameworks that serve as the backbone to a much larger design. They are big ideas that describe how the product works.

You don’t have to rely on an abstraction or metaphor (like the carousel) to convey the big idea, but instead draw from the emerging library of understood frameworks. That they are becoming part of web design lingo is a testament to their power and flexibility.

There’s more where that came from!

Check out the rest of Practical Design Discovery at A Book Apart.

http://ift.tt/2mF9O5l

[waltercostellone]

Practical Design Discovery

A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 3 of Dan Brown's new book, Practical Design Discovery, available now from A Book Apart.

One of the hardest design problems I ever worked on was for a company that helps IT groups manage risk. Their product focused on open-source components—inexpensive and widely supported by an enormous community, but often vulnerable to security flaws.

What made this design problem hard was the complexity of the product’s underlying structure, a triangle of interrelated abstract concepts. To work through the problem, we created a series of sketches that helped us understand it.

The outcome ended up being a relatively simple prototype, a model of the overall structure of the application. Though we were chartered to create a detailed design, our client later admitted that they knew we wouldn’t get there, but that they highly valued our efforts to solve the underlying structure. Those efforts set the direction for everything else on the product.

Direction-setting assertions

Much like when we frame problems, we can make assertions that set direction and describe decisions about the design. These decisions will be pretty high-level, meaning they’ll deal with a holistic view of the site or product. Decisions about details come later, though you’ll see that some assertions get pretty specific as a way of clarifying and testing the direction.

There are three kinds of assertions you can make about design direction:

Principles define what the design should or shouldn’t do. These statements are grounded in research, and may be referred to as implications when you can tie them to research.

Concepts establish an overall approach for the product, expressed as a central theme or idea.

Models describe the product in an abstract way, showing the underlying architecture, structure, flow, or approach. They offer a sense of how the product will work (without actual functionality).

If you try to make tactical decisions too early, you may set a precedent without understanding how it influences what comes next—it’s difficult to trace low-level decisions back to a specific objective or problem statement. Why is the button blue? There’s no project objective in the world that can justify such a decision.

Instead, you’ll make a few low-level decisions alongside your assertions, using samples to illustrate, clarify, and demonstrate the application of the high-level decisions. For example, you might arrive at the design principle that the site’s tone should be friendly without being too casual or informal. You would demonstrate that through sample screen designs and content, showing messaging that says “Thanks!” instead of the too-formal “Thank you very much” or too-casual “You rock!”

Exploring the big decisions through examples might encourage you to reconsider them, or to find places in the product experience that need variation. Perhaps the color palette is insufficient for everything you need, or the authoritative voice isn’t appropriate for certain pages.

By venturing a solution, you’re not just asking, “Will this work?” You’re also asking, “Do I have enough knowledge to know whether this will work?” That is, steps toward solving the problem may trigger additional insights, or questions, about the problem. Great discovery entails providing just enough shape and definition so the team can get aligned behind them as direction for the product.

Principles and implications

Principles are rules that help designers evaluate their decisions about the design. They provide guidance in the form of absolute statements about what the design should or should not do. That said, no set of principles can be exhaustive. They read, sometimes, as commandments: rules that may be applicable to many different kinds of design decisions, and therefore open to interpretation.

There’s no industry standard on how to write design principles, so you won’t be violating some ordinance if you use pictograms or write a dialogue. But principles are usually just one sentence, often written in the imperative:

Do more with less (Microsoft Design Principles)

Design for the customer and instill confidence (Intuit)

Use data to make and improve decisions (Principles for 21st Century Government, Code for America)

I like these, but they don’t feel specific to the product or company. Principles are most powerful when they’re directly relevant. These use more elaborate phrases that closely relate to the product:

More than boxes on a screen (Google Calendar)

Transitional interfaces are easier to learn and more pleasant to use (MapBox)

Time matters, so build for people on the go (Windows User Experience Design Principles)

Sometimes, you’ll find principles rendered as one- or two-word noun phrases, as if to complete the expression, “The Principle of ______.”:

More Contrast (10 Principles of Codeacademy.com)

Consistency (First Principles of Interaction Design, Bruce Tognazzini)

Principles are sometimes followed by deeper descriptions and examples. My favorite variation of this comes from the Windows User Experience Design Principles. These principles include questions for designers to ask themselves about design decisions:

Personalization, not customization

Does the feature allow users to express an element of themselves?

Have you made the distinction between personalization and customization?

Does the personalization have to be a new feature, or can it make use of existing features and information (such as the user’s location, background picture, or tile)?

Regardless of the approach you take in framing the principles, use consistent language and structures, if only to make them easier to remember and use. If you lead with a verb, always lead with a verb. If you write a pithy phrase or a complete sentence to express the principle, always do that. If you write single-word principles, well, there’s a special place in purgatory for you.

In my practice, I phrase principles as direct consequences of what we learned in research. I call them implications, and I prefer them because they fit into the narrative: “We learned that users often lose their place in the system. The implication is that the UI should prioritize clarifying context.”

Implications answer the question, “So what?” You’ve generated a lot of data, and now need to explain why it all matters. I typically document this in a spreadsheet that identifies project questions, answers I’ve uncovered, and the resulting implications (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Gathering activities generate answers to questions concerning context or requirements.

Ultimately, principles and implications do the same thing, so I won’t belabor the distinction between them. In both cases, they make an assertion that, yes, guides the designer, but also provides a test: designers can compare an idea to the principle and determine how closely it adheres to the guide.

There’s no standard for design principles, though there are lots of suggestions out there (the Resources section includes a few of the best). Here are my suggestions for crafting design principles.

Be specific

Principles should be as specific to the product as possible. “Easy to use” isn’t a meaningful principle, because it could apply to anything.

For the project with the risk-management company I described at the beginning of this chapter, we used a number of principles. In early versions of their product, users complained that it was easy to lose their place, so they couldn’t keep track of what they were working on. This led us to the principle:

Always display the user’s context within the system, so they know where they are and what they’re working on.

Context became something we talked about a lot. It forced us to think carefully before moving information to a different screen, or triggering a dialog box for taking action. Because of this principle, we often asked ourselves, “Can the user tell where they are? Is loss of context here okay?”

Question your choices

Good principles go beyond specificity: they issue a direct challenge to designers. They force you to take a second look at your work: does the principle invalidate any of your decisions? Done right, principles should make you squirm a little.

In the risk-management product, the complexity of its requirements inevitably produced dense, esoteric designs. Elaborate displays attempted to capture every nuance, pack in every detail. At the same time, our client had heard their users didn’t like the dense displays. We had to walk a fine line, and so we relied on this principle:

Show just enough information to support essential decisions—no more, no less.

The principle’s borderline self-contradiction provoked us to reconsider what stayed on each screen as users worked through the process. Did we take out too much? Is everything on this screen absolutely necessary? On one hand, we wanted users to feel confident about where they were, but on the other, we didn’t want the page overwhelmed by navigation devices irrelevant to the current task.

We also constantly asked ourselves, “What is ‘just enough information?’” and “What are the ‘essential decisions?’” Every iteration of the design tested the meaning of these key phrases.

Inspire your team

Specific and provocative principles may seem like whip-cracking: Do this, and do it this way. But a good principle also inspires you, pointing you to even loftier goals. It opens up possibilities by encouraging you to explore—and providing rationale for where you end up.

In Luke Wroblewski’s summary of a 2009 talk by Stephan Hoefnagels of Microsoft, he writes, “Goals are the mountain peaks you are trying to get to. [Design] principles are the path we use to get to the top of the mountain.”

One of the driving principles for my client’s product rested on the insight that the product was focused on bad news: every display was about what was going wrong in the IT department that day, how bad it was, and what wasn’t getting done. Like most interactive products, though, this one was meant to be a pleasure to use. In short, we needed to balance the gloom and doom with the satisfaction that comes from understanding the nature and extent of the bad news. We relied on this principle:

Build confidence by clearly stating risks and making the data actionable.

We knew the goal was to help customers manage risk. This principle acted as the path to the top of the mountain by inspiring us to focus not just on reporting the bad news, but also on ensuring customers could do something about it.

Link principles to research

Principles grounded in research make for stronger statements. The death knell of any principle is arbitrariness: if a principle comes from the subjective preference of the Chief Something Officer or because it reflects the (dysfunctional) way the organization has always worked, designers will ignore it. Your principle can be otherwise perfect, but if its source is suspect, the team won’t take it seriously.

The team’s participation in all discovery activities is crucial here, too. Since they helped with the research, they can also help with writing the principles. By participating in crafting principles, your team will internalize them. Seeing the principles later will trigger memories of user observations, which they can integrate into their work more readily.

The Windows User Experience Design Principles came directly from research. In reading some of these principles, you can almost hear supporting quotes from users:

Reduce concepts to increase confidence

Small things matter, good and bad

Be great at “look” and “do”

Solve distractions, not discoverability

UX before knobs and questions

Personalization, not customization

Value the lifecycle of the experience

Time matters, so build for people on the go

You might argue that these lack specificity. When you take into account the scope of the project, however—an entire operating system—they’re sufficiently provocative and inspirational. “Solve distractions, not discoverability” is a bold statement, offering clear opportunities to refine the design without dictating a particular solution. It opens up conversations, and steers them, too.

Concepts and big ideas

One of my favorite scenes in Mad Men, the television show about advertising agencies in the 1960s, is the pitch to Kodak at the end of the first season. Kodak is introducing a new product, a circular tray that makes it easy to store and show photographic slides. They call it “The Wheel,” admitting, “We know wheels aren’t seen as exciting technology.”

Creative director Don Draper, the show’s main character, explains that this product isn’t about the technology: it’s about tapping into our memories and emotions. The agency then pulls the veil off their concept for the campaign: the carousel.

By establishing a central concept, a team (whether in advertising or web design) has a singular source of inspiration, a template for considering ideas. And while principles can serve as guideposts, only a concept can establish a vision. With both of them in your toolkit, your team has a potentially interesting tension to draw from.

Using a carousel to describe a slide projector creates a metaphor brimming with meaning and possibility. It shows two ways we can express a big idea:

How the product makes you feel: carousels evoke the joy of reliving happy memories.

How the product works: the spinning carousel mimics storing and displaying photographic slides from a wheel.

Either approach can help us express the big idea behind our digital products and websites. (Though I’ve never worked on a project that gave us a central concept as elegant as the carousel, which employs both approaches!)

How the product makes you feel

The purpose and function of interactive products offer ripe opportunities for metaphors, but metaphor isn’t the only way to express a central concept. For one web application project, my team expressed the essence with the phrase, “Power with flexibility.” Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue like the word carousel, but it evoked the desired feeling: that the app should make users feel like they can do anything.

We elaborated with descriptions of how people would experience unconstrained power with the product:

Provide users up-to-date status so they feel in control

Lower barriers to entry

Allow different styles of creating new content

We also described what “Power with flexibility” meant from the user’s perspective:

Knowledge: having the right data to shed light on immediate needs

Responsiveness: being able to provide answers to stakeholders immediately

Accomplishment: getting up to speed on a crucial tool right away

Control: being able to fine-tune their content to suit different needs in different situations

Comfort: seeing the application as an extension of one’s own thought process

Since this essence was a succinct idea, a little elaboration helped it to resonate with both the client and the project team.

How the product works

Complex interactive products benefit from a central idea that describes how they work. This usually means employing a big idea to convey the underlying structure.

Shopping cart, for example, is a popular metaphor used on ecommerce sites. You could use it even if you weren’t working on an ecommerce site. The idea of “adding stuff to the cart” is a familiar metaphor that conveys a site’s underlying structure. We even relied on this metaphor on our career-guidance site: students would “add careers to their cart” after taking an assessment.

There are a few other tried-and-true frameworks for describing the structure of a website. For web applications, there are two common ones beyond the shopping cart:

Hub-and-spoke: This is perhaps the most common pattern for structuring a website or digital product. The hub-and-spoke metaphor implies that the web application has a central screen, from which users may trigger all other functions.

List-detail: Another typical approach consists of a list of items from which users can select for more detail—like your email inbox.

Do you have to use one of these structures? Of course not. But if your site lends itself to one of these approaches, you have your big idea that the rest of the functionality revolves around. (That wasn’t a carousel reference. I promise.)

For sites that focus on delivering content (rather than transactional functionality), the tried-and-true frameworks deal more with how the content is organized:

Topics: what the content is about, or the subject matter

Actions: what tasks the content supports (like researching products versus troubleshooting products)

These aren’t the only structures for categorizing content, but they are my go-to starting points.

None of these is a fully fledged design in and of itself. They are well-understood frameworks that serve as the backbone to a much larger design. They are big ideas that describe how the product works.

You don’t have to rely on an abstraction or metaphor (like the carousel) to convey the big idea, but instead draw from the emerging library of understood frameworks. That they are becoming part of web design lingo is a testament to their power and flexibility.

There’s more where that came from!

Check out the rest of Practical Design Discovery at A Book Apart.

http://ift.tt/2mF9O5l