#which I do in certain contexts: I would like my posts to be legible; I would like my fic to be pleasing to look at and read

[onewomancitadel]

I intended this to be pithy for the sake of comic effect but what I will always care more about is a material point and actual like... enthusiastic participation in fandom for the sake of fannish interest. Short of actually being difficult to read (I don't like frequent irregular word shortenings like 'wld' in place of 'would' or ampersands in place of 'and', for instance) and/or incomprehensible, the bar to clear is amiable communication; in fact, I think the benefit of a conversational style married to trying to lay out a thesis is something very special to fandom, in terms of amassing thoughts together in an essayistic style and posting to a public forum. Not academic, but not exactly Twitter or TikTok, either. I guess it's closest to what you would get in verbal conversations IRL, academic or not.

And I suppose I find something comically at odds with itself - nearly even satirical - in the presentation of something totally absurd and stupid, only coming from the bowels of fandom's worst interpretation of a text, presented in a very formal style - it's very aspirational, yet it's not convincing me. I do hold care for conventional academic form - I don't like the blurring of casual boundaries with professional ones because I think those are protective more than they are limiting (having had impersonal and personal tutors, I always preferred the impersonal) - insofar as it dictates a professional standard of respect and gives a script for how to behave... but not when the form is itself is a means to establish legitimacy beyond the substance. I think that is why there are plenty of academics who cannot write clearly and try to instead write opaquely in the hopes that pretension might protect them from intellectual reproach. Many such cases.

I would not like to see such a thing in fandom. I would especially not like people to ever get the idea that their thoughts aren't worth hearing on the basis that they cannot formulate them in an essayistic style with appropriate subheadings and overuse of 'linking words'. Moreover is not a lifeboat. I think that will always, sadly, affect the brightest and not the dumbest.

Too often I have heard from wonderful people that they are afraid of speaking up in fear of sounding stupid, to then regale me with excellent ideas, and instead the very stupid are not afraid to voice their profound insights. Somebody's got to come up with a term for that...

Anyway, I would always prefer to hear somebody's materially good insights as opposed to worrying about presentation. Add this to the column as to why I do not like 'theorycrafting'.

I love really neatly formatted essays with subheaders and confident argumentative language in 'theorycrafting' that lay out the dumbest thesis you've ever read.

[nazuna-tunnel-vision]

hello this is the same anon!! this won't be nearly as long as my first ask LOL i just wanted to respond to some stuff in your reply!! i genuinely rly enjoy this kind of conversation and being able to have it in a respectful and nuanced way is very fun and enjoyable

your guess on my probable reaction to people he/him-ing characters i use she/her for is essentially correct! it's mostly for characters like ibara or mayoi where i refer to them with she/her pronouns basically all of the time. there's a bit of initial disorientation due to it taking me an extra moment to process who the pronouns are in referral to, but once that passes i'm usually able to just,, accept it and move on. it probably also helps that i write fic and tend to adhere a bit more to what's considered canon regarding pronouns when i do those; so while she/her ARE the pronoun set i prefer to use when referring to ibara or mayoi, i have and will probably continue to write fic where i use he/him. in that specific case it's because i want to make the fic more legible for people that might not share those headcanons with me (which isn't to say that i won't write fic where i do otherwise! just that i'm open to using different pronouns to better fit different contexts in which the character is being presented/discussed).

for a lot of other characters i also tend to have unfixed/multiple interpretations of what their gender might be or how i view it, which means i don't necessarily experience any gender/pronoun disorientation because they already exist in multiple ways in my head. (ie. i'm a big fan of they/them nagisa, but i usually refer to nagisa with he/him in fics/tumblr posts and also won't flinch at someone using she/her pronouns because they/them agender nagisa isn't the only version of nagisa's gender that exists in my head. i hope that makes sense i realize it might be a bit strange)

and, to be honest, i won't claim there aren't characters where i do have that same sort of discomfort to she/her pronouns - natsume and mao are big ones, since i so heavily relate to and headcanon those characters as transmasc that it weirdly feels more personal to see them be gendered differently. i think for myself, though, i can recognize that this person's interpretation of the character is just different from my own and there's nothing inherently wrong with either, just that it's not to my tastes for the reasons i have. and then i move on

i don't know if there's really a best answer to any of this discourse particularly since most (i'd argue maybe close to all?) trans headcanons do, as you say, stem from enthusiasm for the character and usually some level of personal engagement with gender/expression. that makes it a lot more personal and less clear-cut than if it were something else, yknow? it's good to have these discussions tho and this one's been really respectful and whatnot. hope ur having a good day and thank u again for reading my ask/responding so respectfully !

thank you again for the reply anon!!

it's pretty reassuring to know that you also feel that disorientation. like oh maybe it really is just a normal reaction phew, phew.

what you said about characters like nagisa is pretty interesting too. maybe the secret to get whacked in the face less is to already have different gender interpretations of the characters pre-loaded in your head?? 🤔 then when you see a certain pronoun you can just go "ohh we're doing he/him nagisa now? okay" then you pluck out your they/them nagisa lens and put the he/him nagisa lens on. or flick the switch to change to the he/him nagisa setting in your head.

that would certainly explain why i experience so much of the disorientation, because my she/her lens of most characters simply doesn't even exist at all, so i can't switch to them. it's hard to be immediately accepting of new interpretations when you never even thought of them to begin with. plus, pronouns don't really come pre-loaded with backstory to ease you into the character setting.

that said, pre-loading all these interpretations would take a lot of time and effort so it'll be impossible to apply this to the like. 50+ characters in the cast. but it does sound like something i can act on on my part to ease the discomfort i feel.

thank you again for the respectful discussion!! i really appreciate how you took the time to explain your perspective and replied my questions in good faith. i hope you have a good day too!

[marigoos]

Ok AHEM *taps mic*

Fragment 1: very legible, we love it himitsu wo kyouyuu / no okage de / ko kara .himitsu is "secret" (we all know which one, ya?), kyouyuu is "share" .no okage de means "thanks to", "because of" (always in a positive way). We're missing the agent, but pretty sure it's Bakugou himself... .ko kara is 99% koko kara, "from now on", "from here" So: share(d?) the secret / thanks to [you?] / from now on

Fragment 2: ha kore / kita issho(?) / deki(?) .That ha kore is pretty meaningless without the rest of the sentence, just know that kore is "this" and ha is just a particle .kita is the end of a past tense verb, but good luck finding out which one. I went with issho (together) for the rest, because well... 一緒 it could be something else but there are so many words that start with 一 that I don't think I would finish today if I checked them all. This one has the left part very similar, it does not sound out of place (like, say, "species" would), and it is fairly common anyway, so I'm betting on it. .ki is certain, de a lot less so, could be the first part of the verb dekiru, ~"to be able to". No clue about the conjugation, it's missing the last part

Fragment 3: ima ma [...] (?) / tasukete ku / cchan .The ima is a very well recognizable "now", and the only thing starting with ma that I would put after that would be made. Meaning "until now", "up to now". The kanji on the right is cut in half, it does look like nichi but again, so many words with nichi it's not fun. Could be hibi (days), could be nichijou (daily), could be mainichi (every day) if he writes very tight, could be Sunday for all we care .tasukete ku is probably tasukete kurete. With an arigatou at the end it's a very common way to say "thanks for helping / saving me". Given the implications of the term, I think he's thanking him for saving his ass against Shigaraki you know, when Bakugou fucked around and got 2 or 3 new holes for free .And yeah the -cchan is most definitely what you think :)

Fragment 4 is: -a bitch -ACTUALLY FRAGMENT 1! If you squint VERY HARD you can more or less recognize row 3 as frag 1's row 1. The top was just hidden behind the fingers in page 1, and now they're hiding the bottom. Not even gonna attempt what's left of row 1, it's a bunch of vertical lines... Row 2 looks like keta issho (???? again?) da keta, just like kita, just seems to be the last part of an undefined past tense verb. Unfortunately those two scribbles in the middle could be an 一 with some folding lines, because the paper is all crumpled. I looked and looked for something that resembled the other kanji and at some point it looked like "mirror", 鏡, but none of the compounds made any sense. So another issho it is... that oblique line on the right does seem to confirm it. da could be fine alone ("be/am/is/are") or could be datta ("was/were"). "We were together" (for a long time? I guess?)

We can thus deduct that the contents of the letter were along the lines of "hey Kacchan I know we've been around each other for years and thanks for saving my ass back there and I did a lot of things thanks to you and thanks for keeping my secret, but I got it from here (don't look for me k thx bye)" [heavily paraphrased][random order].

Now, why did I just spend half of my afternoon losing my sight on this? Because I don't trust Horikoshi :)

See, go back to frag 3. tasukete ku- is cut off at a very convenient point... another thing you can do with it is make it tasukete kudasai

"Help me"

Which, in the context of last chapter, AND with that -cchan just below it... idk, it doesn't look like a coincidence to me :)))

Moral of the story: I don't even ship these two, I'm just an agent of chaos. Enjoy! *drops post in the pit and watches the bakudekers rise*

[phoenixtakaramono]

Does Bing gē Have Descendants in ‘The Untold Tale?’

This topic has come up a few times since The Untold Tale takes place in the PIDW universe (post-Bingge vs Bingmei extra), I figured I might as well compile and archive my official answer here for me to refer my AO3 readers to in the future for convenience’s sake. I hope everyone doesn’t mind. :) I’m always happy to answer questions!

TL;DR

Q: Will we see Bing gē having fathered children with his harem of 600 or so wives in TUT?

A: For TUT, the answer is a definite “no.” There were a lot of factors which’d contributed to my decision. I’ll try to explain my reasoning down below.

Context

In PIDW, it is canon that Luo Binghe has a bountiful number of descendants with his harem of 600-or-so wives. It is a detail that has been mentioned even in ch1 of SVSSS and in ep1 of the donghua.

(SVSSS Excerpt - ch1)

(SVSSS donghua - ep1)

I like to plan things ahead of time. So from very early on, I knew this would be something I would have to decide on whether or not to address when I’d finally decided to expand TUT from just a prologue into a full-blown story. And after contemplating it, I decided against adding children into the story. It is because 1) it would make the situation more complicated, and 2) it would take TUT in a different direction that wouldn’t be fun for me to write.

I’m a very decisive writer, meaning when I make my mind up about something, chances are I won’t change my mind. This is because I would have already planned it into my plot outline, which means changing a decision would require me to change other details in the other chapters I have planned for that story. (I’m typically not a spontaneous writer; I try not to write spontaneously because when you’re a writer who rotates through multiple WIPs with different characters across different genres or writing styles, you inevitably have writer’s block because you probably won’t remember all the ideas or the direction you had whenever you return back to a different WIP. To reduce this shortcoming, it helps me personally to have a plot outline. This way I can return to any WIP, read my notes and then transcribe them into legible paragraphs, find a way to transition between the story beats I have to hit for that chapter, and then eventually post the final draft to AO3 when I feel it’s ready.)

Having made a decision, I knew I had to set it up in TUT and give a “reasonable explanation in-story.” Hence, in ch2, we see:

(Excerpt I - ch2)

Basically the set-up is TUT takes place post-Bingge vs Bingmei, but between “the third or fourth book” of the hypothetical PIDW webnovel series aka before Airplane wrote the fanservicey chapters where the luckier of LBH’s wives give birth to children during the harem drama plots and the children are probably rarely, if ever, mentioned again in the story as a lot of stallion novels tend to do.

(Excerpt II - ch2)

(Excerpt III - ch2)

Contrarian Tendencies

You know the saying: Monkey see, monkey do? In my case, it’s monkey see, monkey do not do.

A little fun fact about me as a writer: if I have already seen a fanfic where someone has already written a concept or idea into their story, chances are I will just avoid it entirely in my own stories. I don’t know why this aversion exists, but I’m assuming it’s because of my counterculture hipster inclinations and an intrinsic fear of plagiarism which has been beaten into all of our skulls since adolescence. There’s nothing wrong with being inspired by other people’s works. Technically everything’s been done before in writing so, as a writer, a good rule of thumb is to always try to give it your own unique spin on things. So for me, my brain somehow interpreted this a step further. This is a reason why I try to avoid reading stories from whichever fandom my WIP is from during the writing process of updating a fic, because this is how I get influenced. Once I see an idea or interpretation from another fanfiction, it influences me to not want to write it into my own. This is a very strong unconscious impulse for me. I guess this is just the neurons in my brain’s thinking that this way, it won’t be something my readers will have read before and the story idea will come across as different or fresh, and mine. In a way this is also how I show respect for fanfiction writers in the same fandom—by being inspired to not be inspired, ha. I like to think every story in the world serves a niche audience, so seeing a diverse range of originality and interpretations in a fandom is a good thing. This is also how I feel when I am able to identify certain popular tropes or depictions or patterns in a fandom; 99% of the time, it makes me feel a compulsion to “go against the grain” or write the opposite. For example, you have no idea how long it took me to come around the idea of incorporating the fanon “A-Yuan” into TUT. However cute it is, the moment it dominated the fandom (well, “dominated” is an exaggeration; it’s more like I’ve seen enough, especially in the Original LBH/ SY | SQQ tag), my gut reaction was to nope out of using it. But after seeing a lot of comments in my inbox with readers affectionately calling SY “A-Yuan,” I’d contemplated it for a long time and it wasn’t until ch4 that I decisively decided that yes, I can have Bing gē calling SY “A-Yuan” in TUT—but it has to be at the right moment for maximum dramatic and emotional impact. (See this thread that started it all. And this is the small sneak peek I wrote where LBH will call SY that for the first time.) <- This is the rare 1% where I actually conformed to what’s popular.

In this case, when I finally decided to expand the prologue into a full-blown story, coincidentally I had just recently read a good Binggeyuan (Bingyuan) fanfic which featured a kidnapped Shen Yuan interacting with Bing gē’s harem and LBH’s children/descendants. I’d liked their portrayal and even thought the children were cute. <- However, with me having reading this, the problem came up: I felt the familiar stubbornness in me rearing its head. So knowing myself, if I had included children, it is very likely the direction that I would have gone down for TUT would have been the opposite. To further complicate matters, you have to keep in mind the kind of writer I am. I tend to like grounding stories with a semblance of realism, no matter if the genre is pseudohistorical fantasy, romance, sci-fi, etc. And this writer has seen and read quite a few harem and palace intrigue Chinese dramas/ premises.

For further context, in those types of “historical” C-dramas^, in that sort of environment which fosters scheming, competition, jealousy, etc, it is almost expected to see heirs aka children aka descendants harmed along with the women. Innocent parties are often victims in these sorts of cutthroat premises, to underscore the underlying message the show or novel wishes to present. (See Ruyi’s Royal Love in the Palace. See Yanxi Palace. See The Legend of Haolan. See Nirvana in Fire. See The Rebirth of the Malicious Empress of Military Lineage. Etc.) And me being me, this would be the direction I would take. Remember, while TUT is meant to emulate a legitimate danmei C-novel reading experience in a fantasy world, I do drop pseudohistorical and cultural Easter eggs into the story. So trust me when I say you would not like the direction TUT would have gone down in, had I made LBH have children with his harem. I mean, theoretically yes, we could’ve seen endearing children characters from me, but you would have also seen me addressing a lot of the baggage that comes with (see Comment III Excerpt down below).

The situation with dissolving Bing gē’s harem is already complicated enough. As his romance with Shen Yuan develops, I didn’t want to have an additional headache thinking about how to address the issue of LBH having children already. Divorces in a pseudohistorical context is already a heavy topic—even more so when it’s divorces with children in the mix. Naturally I will still have SY and LBH eventually discuss the matter of legitimate heirs since LBH will essentially become the Sacred Ruler of all Three Realms and it’s a traditional precedent for an emperor to bed his empress, noble consort, and imperial concubines until he has his heirs (plural, because the rate of mortality was high in ancient China). In TUT’s case, at that point in the story SY will remind LBH that he’s essentially an immortal sovereign so there isn’t any need for an heir unless he wishes to retire. Furthermore, he will inform LBH that he could set a new precedent since he’s already different from the other emperors from history (with him being of half-Heavenly Demon and half-human cultivator lineage); as long as LBH is fully aware of all perspectives of the situation, he doesn’t necessarily need to conform to all traditions if this is something he really feels strongly about. But this future conversation(s) is likely the extent of it.

But wait, you say, what about a certain someone who’s going to be transmigrated as an imperial crown prince? Isn’t he going to be in that sort of vicious upbringing? <- Yes. But that’s an entirely seperate matter. In a way, since I’ve decided Bing gē will not have had any children or descendants in TUT, with Airplane, this now presents an opportunity for me to show the consequences of being one of the many children of an emperor with a harem of women vying for one man’s attention—and the power struggle that’d ensue in this kind of environment. It’s an interesting What-If parallel, if you think about it.

AO3 Comments

Although these are just small excerpts from replies I’ve written before, it’s nice and orderly to just compile them here for everyone since these will be buried underneath all the comments as TUT updates:

(Comment I- ch3)

(Comment II- ch4)

(Comment III- ch4)

Because of seeing comments that have asked me for my thoughts on whether or not I will include LBH’s children, I’ve had so much fun seeing theories thrown around: from LBH’s blood parasites being able to control conception, to someone’s headcanon about LBH being a hybrid and all that entails scientifically (think: mules). I will say in TUT, it’s more the former since in PIDW he’s supposed to have descendants; we’re pretending Bing gē doesn’t have any yet (and now definitely won’t, especially after having heard SY’s “prophecy”) because he subconsciously does not want children due to certain fears, trauma, etc. And his Heavenly Demon’s “blood parasites” (blood manipulation) is a convenient story device to explain why no wife has gotten pregnant yet.

I hope this explanation makes sense! Mainly I just wanted to have this archived on tumblr so that I have this post to refer to moving forward.

On a side note: especially since ch4 had been posted, quite a few people have actually mentioned they’ve read my replies to other comments and/or I have seen different people having hopped onto other readers’ comment threads (for example, imagine my pleasant surprise when I saw a reader you lovely person, you helpfully jumping in to respond to another reader’s questions about TUT, and their answers were actually aligned with what I would’ve answered!), so it’s always such a thrill whenever I see this level of engagement happening. I can’t explain why, but seeing this happening is just so cute to me. It really makes this writer feel so warm and fuzzy inside!

[southeastasianists]

In Malaysia, the ‘deep state’ is a shorthand for the perceived institutional inertia exerted by the 1.6 million strong civil service (see here, here and here) to undermine the newly elected Pakatan Harapan (PH) government, which was elected under the promises of weeding out state corruption, revamping the previous regime’s race-based policies, and improving civil service accountability and efficiency.

When juxtaposed against discussions of the deep state in the United States (US), it is interesting to see how the same concept can take on utterly divergent meanings. From a Democratic Party supporter’s point of view, the ‘deep state’ symbolises institutional integrity, in which bureaucrats and civil servants took measures to resist, moderate, and even compromise the actions of a capricious Presidency in the name of safeguarding constitutional provisions and national interest.

In other words, while in both cases ‘deep state’ theories depict a scenario where an elected executive is pitted against unelected bureaucrats and civil servants, the propriety of the enterprise-if such an enterprise exists at all-is very much in the eyes of the beholder. Given the highly polarised environment in Malaysia (and the United States), it is unsurprising that the rhetorical device finds its purchase. The moral ambiguity surrounding the term suggests it has a political, instead of scholarly, genesis.

The Deep State as Conspiratorial and Ideological

In places such as Pakistan, Thailand, or Turkey (where the battling of one ‘deep state’ is said to have instituted another), the term ‘deep state’ is often used to signify a parallel state consisted of a politically influential military elite. This is not the case for Malaysia or the US, given their tradition of having effective civilian control over the security forces.

This makes the search for a fixed definition for the ‘deep state’ elusive. Nevertheless, I argue there are two dimensions in its current rhetorical employment: the conspiratorial and the ideological.

Its conspiring side involves collective, tactical, and coordinated efforts by the civil service to undermine the government. Its ideological side means such efforts are geared towards specific goals, such as the protection of ethnoreligious hegemony, special interests, or cultural normative positions. The two sides work in tandem in that the conspiracy connects ‘deep state’ actors, while the ideology guides their strategy and actions.

Granted, this definition does not confirm the existence of a ‘deep state’, but rather how conspiracy and ideology are salient features in the conceptualisations of political actors. For example that is certainly the image of the deep state’ President Trump evoked.

Yet, transpired events in the form of media leaks, paperwork removal, information “slow-walking”, and resignations calls to mind, instead, the “foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance” described by James Scott in his seminal study of everyday forms of resistance in Malaysia instead of serving as proof of grand conspiracy.

In Malaysia, it is entirely legible that similar forms of resistance are present, and reasons for it can range from personal misgivings to institutional culture, the latter a barrier for any civil service reform. Nevertheless, the imagined conspiring cabal remains to be found.

Besides, to think about the ‘deep state’ meaningfully, the parameters of it must be defined first. Where does it begin and where it ends? When is it just the state and not the ‘deep state’?

In the case of Malaysia, the federated state structure (which is also found in the US) makes this a challenging venture, given the multi-tiered separation of powers between federal, state, and local governments. Malaysia’s hyper-centralised federalism does allow for centralisation of power and resources in Putrajaya at the expense of subnational governments. But considerable constitutional autonomy is still afforded to subnational polities, such as those associated with the administration of Islamic affairs. This signals that, for some issues, it can be federal-state tensions at play instead of the ‘deep state’ lunging forward to stymie the federal executive.

Measuring the Depth of the Deep State Theory in Malaysia

The claim that the ‘deep state’ has arisen at the critical juncture of PH’s election also bears scrutiny. Compared to the vast information leaks following Trump’s election (which has resulted in at least two high-profile books about the cacophonous Oval Office), the inner shenanigans of Putrajaya remain relatively obscured.

If a ‘deep state’ is present, it is difficult to imagine that conspiring actors will not capitalise on the newfound media freedom to further undermine a government struggling to deal with a ‘post-truth’ media landscape

Yet, there are more headlines generated by the inner schism of one political party as compared to bellows from the so-called ‘deep state’. The very few collectives representing the civil service, such as Congress of Unions of Employees in the Public and Civil Services (CUEPACS) and The National Union of Teaching Profession (NUTP), are relatively moderate in articulating group interests. Discussions about staff welfare and material benefits rarely venture into the ideological.

The leaks associated with the 1MDB saga, many of which would not be possible without government insiders, also suggests that if there is indeed a ‘deep state’ in Malaysia, its allegiance is not necessarily with the Barisan Nasional either. Stories of individual heroism that surfaced (not unlike those reported in the US) further illustrate how broad-sweeping views of the civil service are untrue, as much as they are unfair.

On the ideological front, Malaysia’s longstanding ethnocratic regime does provide some ammunition to the idea that the civil service serves ideology first before the elected government. And there are reasons to believe that some degree of socialisation has allowed ethno-religious supremacist to entrench itself, given the progressive ethnic homogenisation of the service as well as records of indoctrination programmes (such as the now-defunct National Civics Bureau, BTN).

Yet, even if a significant quarter of the civil service panders to the overarching Malay-Islam supremacist ideology (which is by no means confined to the civil service), it is far from certain that we are seeing a case of ideological homogeneity. At least not one that enables collective political mobilisation. The very fragmented nature of intra-Malay, intra-Islamist politics reflects this.

One must also bear in mind that the vote swing that propelled PH to power did contain its fair share of civil servant votes. Just because there is an overarching ideology, it does not mean convergence in political allegiances will automatically happen.

The fact that a group of prominent, high-ranking former civil servants, the G25, has been acting as a liberal-leaning pressure group also challenges the idea that the service is only occupied by those holding conservative beliefs that do not align with PH’s reform agenda.

Other Motivators of ‘Deep State’ Behaviours

My argument here is not that there are no internal state actors that seek to undermine the current government. That is a realistic possibility for any government, more so for one with dwindling popularity, especially among the majority Malay-Muslim electorate.

Nevertheless, it is equally valid that many of the ‘deep state’ characteristics decried in Malaysia are just the results of individual overzealous officials, institutional (in)capacity, or embedded, unthinking bureaucratic norms.

In Malaysia’s modern, hierarchical, and largely compliant civil service, careerist goals instead of ideological pursuit are more likely to be the motivator of bureaucratic behaviour. No doubt, such goals are informed by institutional culture; but institutional culture, even if underlined by ethnoreligious-centric norms and values, is still a long way from morphing into a conspiring, ideological ‘deep state’.

In some instances, professional ethics will prevail. For example, following the outbreak of the coronavirus, health professionals in the public sector are seen speaking out in social media against the fearmongering and xenophobic rhetoric of the opposition.

Ironically, the efforts that look very much like the ‘deep state’ came most prominently from academia, the field where discussions of institutional autonomy and intellectual objectivity are the most active. This suggests that the former regime may have left its ideological imprint deepest in Malaysia’s higher education (especially so in the humanities and social science) following decades of political domestication.

For example, an unpublished paper by a group of academics was reported to have been instrumental in derailing the government’s plans in ratifying the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Social media postings from an academic, including one that listed 365 failures of the PH government, have also generated heated debates about the ‘deep state’ on one hand, and academic freedom and rigour on the other.

What to Make of Malaysia’s ‘Deep State’ Obsession?

The more intellectually productive way to think about the ‘deep state’ discourse is by engaging with the socio-political context from which it arises. Malaysia’s (as well as the United States’) grapple with the term unfolded within a setting where a political outsider came into power under the promises and expectations of profound change. To put it simply, ‘deep state’ theories embody anxieties of coming changes as well as failures to realise them.

Complicating Malaysia’s situation is its untested governing formula. In stark contrast to the years of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO)’s hegemony, Malaysia is now governed by a coalition of five parties (inclusive of Sabah Heritage Party, WARISAN), each nominally having equal say. Not only that, the coalition also sits on an uneasy power transition plan with a definite successor but no definitive deadline.

Given the multipartite nature of the cabinet, the civil service is now stretched between parties and politicians that are engaged in considerable politicking. The collateral of politicians conspiring against each other can easily be mistaken as ‘deep state’ manifestations.

The recent resignation of a Minister, for example, contains traces of both intra– and inter-party contentions. The issue, which unfolded around a fracas surrounding the teaching of Jawi, is more convincing if read as politicians mobilising civil servants under their portfolios (and the larger society) instead of being a case of the proverbial tail wagging the dog.

It goes without saying that civil service reform is imperative for Malaysia, but ‘deep state’ theories remain superficial as guiding principles for such projects. Nonetheless, if there is a reason why imaginations of the state as ‘deep’ and ‘conspiratorial’ resonates with Malaysian society, it could be because this is how Malaysians generally feel about the mercurial yet highly consequential power play within the PH government: out of sight (and their control) but not necessarily out of mind.

[milleralexanderauthor]

Let’s talk about cartography and how it can be useful to you as a writer. 

Cartography is the process of map-making. You may have picked up a book in the past and noticed a map in the first few pages, ala Tolkien or Le Guin.

 These reference images help the reader get a better image of the layout and scope of the world of a novel. We’re not gonna talk about that today. What I want to talk about is how cartography can help you, the author, develop an in-depth world. 

First of all, under what circumstances should you spend your time on this? If you’re writing, say, a contemporary novel set in New Jersy, you probably don’t have to worry about this. The genres that benefit from this type of planning are:

-Science Fiction

-Fantasy

There are probably exceptions to this rule, but these two genres require a certain amount of worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is the process in which you develop the system, rules, and landscape your novel takes place in. In some instances, a novel may fall into these two genres but be set in a familiar setting. The landscape in these instances is still something I think you should give some degree of thought to. Consider how the landscape has changed or will change based on the parameters of your story. 

An example of this is Panem from The Hunger Games. 

Panem exists in a dystopian world in which the country of the United States has not only been divided, but rising sea levels have changed the coastline. This is an example of a familiar landscape that has changed because of the events of a novel or the rules of the world in which it exists. Even if you’re not starting a world from scratch, take into consideration what might alter your world.

Let’s say you are writing a novel set in a different world. Do you need to make a map?

Of course, you don’t NEED to do anything. I’m not your dad, I can’t tell you what to do. Do I think it’s incredibly helpful? YES.

Why? It will give you the same benefits it will give a reader. A more in-depth layout of the world you’re creating. 

If your characters are staying in the same place throughout the duration of the book, maybe creating a full map of the entire planet isn’t necessary. But maybe making a map of the city could help you. What does you’re city look like? What is the architecture like? What is the economy of your city like? What in the landscape influences that? 

If your characters are going on a Tolkien level journey across your world, you probably need to consider the landscape. Mapping is a good visual way of doing this. It’s also really fun, in my opinion.

“But Miller,” you may be saying. “Why would I go to all that effort if my characters don’t even go to most of these places?”

That’s worldbuilding for you. You will come up with a TON of details over this process that will never make it into your novel. However, the more detail YOU have in your brain, the more detailed your world will feel. 

“Okay, sure.” I hear you say. “But I’m a terrible artist!”

Me too. I’m not saying that the draft of the map you make has to be in your book. In fact, I encourage against that. If you think a visual aid will help your reader gain something or would just be a fun perk, you can refine it or hire a professional cartographer (yes, they exist) when your book is closer to publication. If you’re at that point, I’m not talking to you. I’m encouraging map making as a world building exercise to those of you who are trying to flesh out your worlds before you even commit anything to page. 

It can be an intimidating task, creating a whole world from scratch. I’m happy to tell you that it doesn’t have to be hard.

The first step is to consider the scope of your map. Like I said, only create what you feel you may use. Does your character never leave their home town? Do a map of the town? Does the country your story takes place in come into play during your book? Do a map of the country. Does your character make a grand journey across the world? Make the world. My RECOMMENDATION is to make at least the country your novel takes place in. You probably won’t use every location, but less is not always more. 

Then, consider the context. Are cities in your world trade centers? What are their major imports and exports? What type of climate does your world have? What is the political climate like? Are there physical boundaries that cut one part of your world off from another? These are things to keep in mind before you start making your map because the landscape of a world could have a profound impact on the daily lives of its residents. 

Next, we need to outline. I find countries or continents to be the easiest to do, and you’ll probably see why. Coastlines are honestly really easy to do. This is probably the part you’re freaking out about but worry not. There are some easy methods to get natural-looking coastlines and borders.

A prefer traditional paper and pencil art, so we’ll start with that. By all means, if you just wanna go crazy and come up with something all on your own, I won’t stop you. However, some of you may be intimidated by the idea of just DRAWING A WHOLE COUNTRY FROM NOTHING. There are a couple of things you can do if this is you.

Look at some reference pictures. 

Look at an atlas or a globe. Find borders and coastlines that look cool or fit into some of the ideas for your world and copy ‘em. To some people, this doesn’t feel “creative”. Someone will always look at your map and tell you that it looks like Russia or Italy, so don’t stress too much about it. 

BEANS. 

This will sound weird, but a tried and true method to get nice looking coastlines is to just dump a few handfuls of dry beans or rice onto a piece of paper and move them around until you like the look of it. Then you trace out the masses of beans until you got yourself a country, huzzah!

If you’re working in photoshop, a method I’ve seen used is to import a few images of different countries into it and move and transform them around until you you have a brand new landmass you like, then trace around that. 

Next, we need to fill the world with stuff. This sounds simple, but keep in mind that things don’t happen in a vacuum. 

If you’re building a forest or farmland, consider where a water source would be. 

If you’re adding a lake or rivers, consider how it would flow to the ocean with the force of gravity, starting in mountain ranges.

If you have mountains, consider how shifting tectonic plates would form them. You have to at least know the rules before you can break them. Your world has to make some type of sense and, if it doesn’t, you need to explain why. 

Take a look at the styles of maps to get an idea of how to indicate this on your map. Some maps take a very simplified approach to denoting landmarks, some are very complex. It’s up to you.

Once you know where your forests, mountains, and lakes will be, you can place your cities. 

Your cities should be placed in locations on your map that make sense. Is your city’s major export fish? Put it by the ocean. Is the climate cold? Put it at a higher elevation. Is your city isolated? What type of physical barriers could illustrate this? 

If you didn’t take any of these things into consideration before this exercise, you have now. Let’s say you have a protagonist who needs to get from one town to another, but you need to spice up the journey a little. You made this map, you look at it, there’s a river in between the towns. BOOM! Now your protagonist needs to cross a rushing icy river. Mini conflict, a setback. All because you considered the landscape of your environment.

Obviously, this works on a lot of different scales. How long will it take your protagonist to get from point a to point b? What stands in their way? How do the features of the landscape impact the world as a whole? Now you know. 

Finally, slap some labels on that bad boy. 

If your working on paper, it’s a good idea to do this ALL in pencil first and leave some space for labels. This will make referencing where things are and what they’re called easier. Get creative with it, use crazy fonts. It just needs to be LEGIBLE for your own sanity. Trust me. 

Honestly, doing this at some point in the worldbuilding process has done worlds of good for me. It really gets your creative juices flowing and it’s just another step to a well-rounded world. You can skip it if you’re not a visual person, but I definitely am and I’m sure some of you are, too. 

I just want to reiterate, this is for YOUR benefit only. No one else has to see it, its reference for you. However, if you want to add a map into your published works, consider talking to a professional artist/cartographer unless you, like, are one. Then I’m not sure why you read this much of my post. 

Thanks for reading! I post a wide variety of content on my blog every Friday including writing advice and book updates. Stop by and say hi!

-Miller

[fightmeyeats]

With over 125 million views in the month (roughly) since it was released, Lil Dicky’s music video Earth certainly is getting quite a bit of attention, especially (or so I’m told) in the tweenager/young-teenager crowd. The video draws on a wealth of big-name star power, profanity (although there is a “clean” version for children with 16 million views), and humor to convey its “globalized” pro-Earth/pro-Environmental message to a younger audience, before ending with a message about global warming and the twelve-year deadline, with a link to take action through WeLoveTheEarth.org. While there are certainly quite a few issues one might take with the song lyrics and visual representation, what I want to explore are not only the limitations implicit in this approach (namely a very Global North/Ameri-centric “globalized” imaginary, an obscuring of capitalist/corporate responsibility for climate change in favor of a neoliberal individual actions model, a maintaining of the Human/Nature binary, and a focus on a young audience when older demographics are perhaps more in need of convincing), but also the strengths of this approach and why, perhaps, it may be useful to step back and let these “meme-friendly” call-to-arms proliferate, rather than critiquing imperfect representations to death.

Ultimately, because I can see both how strong both the limitations and possibilities to these various approaches are, I am undecided on what the “correct” course of action may be. I recognize that the stakes are higher in this for some than for others--both in the sense that lack of action disproportionately is affecting certain communities, who therefore are more invested in results over perfect representation, as well as the way that because of the disproportionate effects of inaction, certain communities may find it less viable to overlook (and therefore further obscure) these inequalities; because of this, I am certainly not in any position to draw firm conclusions, and what follows is intended to be an exploration which I hope will invite a broader conversation.

Okay so let me start with a rundown of the limitations; while there are several points I’m making here, I am honestly going to try to keep each as succinct as possible because I think these may be more obvious than the benefits (that being said, I’m more than happy to delve into these points further if anyone has any questions or feels they do need to be made more visible). First, lets look at the “globalized” imaginary. The song’s chorus goes:

Earth, it is our planet (It's our planet) We love the Earth (We love the Earth), it is our home (Home) We love the Earth, it is our planet (It is our planet) We love the Earth, it is our home We love the Earth

Other lines include “We love you, India/Africa/the Chinese,” the humorous “We forgive you, Germany,” and “C'mon everybody, I know we're not all the same / But we're living on the same Earth.” These lines simultaneously call for a globalized action, while also imagining a) that something quasi-globalized already exists and b) that “differences” are the reason we have not fully come together. Frederick Cooper has an amazing article which I highly recommend called “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An African Historian's Perspective,” and one of his arguments which is especially relevant here is that "a 'globalizing' language stood alongside a structure of domination and exploitation that was lumpy in the extreme" (204). What does it mean, in this context, to say “we love the Earth,” let alone “we love you, India/Africa/China”? Listing Global South nations which often bare the brunt of capitalist/colonialist industrial exploitation might be intended to acknowledge the uneven effects global warming has on marginalized communities (what Rob Nixon has termed “slow violence”); but then why is Germany on the list (other than for the comedic effect), and more importantly who is the “we” who “loves” these nations, and what does that “love” amount to? I think constantly of Elizabeth Catte’s comment in What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, that she felt paranoid traveling for academic conferences that she would bring the smell of the coal industry with her, and give herself away as someone who wasn’t worth not being poisoned. Love is a beautiful idea to invoke, but do “we” “love” the Global South enough to stop poisoning “them”? And what about the poor in the Global North?

The lack of definition of “we” contributes to my second problem with the song/video: while I do not mean to undermine the absolute value individual actions have towards improving the environment, the opening of the song focuses on litter and the fumes exuded by personal vehicles. There is no direct reference to the kinds of waste and pollution created by corporations.

Thirdly, the lyrics contain a laundry list of humorous animal descriptions such as “Hi, I'm a baboon I'm like a man, just less advanced and my anus is huge.” While obviously intended to be funny, these descriptions reify the Human/Animal and Human/Nature divide and contribute to binary logics. One of the criticisms of the “Anthropocene” narrative is that it seperates “humanity” from “nature” in ways which obscure the entanglement actually involved in environmental networks. This is not in any way to imply that human actions and systems are not responsible for global warming (whether you put the blame on humanity in general as in the Anthropocene or specific individuals acting through capitalism as in the Capitalocene there is no denying that climate crisis is happening because of human action); rather, the problem here is that it this binary attempts to imagine a separateness between humans and nature which is not useful in addressing climate change, because it obscures the intricacy of interaction and allows us to vastly oversimplify what we see as viable solutions.

Finally, the video and lyrics are clearly intended to draw in a younger demographic, and yet polls have shown that there is an age gap in concern about climate change which trends towards younger populations.

That being said, let’s look at why this video may be a good and necessary thing, despite the potential drawbacks. First, even though younger people tend to already believe in and be more concerned about climate change than older folks, studies have shown that children change their parents’ minds about climate change, so convincing children/teens to care about climate change and to talk about it with their parents does have a measurable impact on the opinions of older adults. This leads to why the humorous lyrics and video may be particularly useful, despite the problematics outlined above. At this moment in time, social media and memes in particular are a particularly powerful political weapon. Mother Jones recently ran an article titled ““The Left Can’t Meme”: How Right-Wing Groups Are Training the Next Generation of Social Media Warriors” which outlines the role memes have played in perpetuating conservative and far-right thought and manifesting conservative/far-right desires. Memes are “cheap, subversive, and designed to provoke an emotional response, memes are a disruptive form of information guerrilla warfare.” Another article discussing “The Evolution of Political Internet Memes” argues that “memes are likely to gain more importance in a post-text future. Younger generations are shifting more and more to visual platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat. Images are therefore more likely shape their views on politics and politicians.” For these reasons, a song/music video such as Earth which is likely to draw in a large audience of kids/teens due to star power (everyone from Justin Bieber to Halsey to Kevin Hart makes an appearance), humor, and catchy tune is likely to make an impact on children and therefore their parents. Furthering this point, the website linked at the end of the music video presents itself in a far more professional manner--this is what parents are more likely to be looking at (and potentially donating to, and taking advice from) than the song itself. 

So again, I’m not sure whether this benefit outweighs the oversimplifications presented through the lyrics/video but I do think they’re worth considering, and I absolutely invite further conversation on this matter. Do we need to follow the conservative meme-model of making politics more easily legible/accessible? Or does this model further obscure the struggles of marginalized folks and render invisible issues that need to be brought to light and challenged? Is there a (better) way to balance this?

[dreadlock-detective]

How hard is it to choose colours for your (and my favourite) art style?

Eheh, well I canonly speak for myself, not for whoever you’re flattering by callingyour favorite, so I’ll stick to that! ;)

I suppose theliteral answer is “Usually not too hard?” but that’s boring solets see what I can ramble about color choice and such! Also I’ll put some links to James Gurney’s stuff because he is amazing and I cannot recommend his books enough!

(This’ll be in 3 sections - Color schemes, Contrast and leading the eye, and picking colors for shadows~ from longest to shortest too)

Part 1: COLOR SCHEMES

So I used to bereally bad at this until I got really into pixel art where I learneda few important lessons. First, the entire color palette workingtogether is what’s most important, not any single color, and second,colors work together in surprising ways COMPLETELY dependent on what’s around them!

For example, this isthe color palette for the Commedore 64 from back in the day. All whopping 16 colors the system could possibly display:

Individually thosecolors look pretty muddy, muted, and dull. But when you put them alltogether in an image they actually work pretty well together, because none of them completely break from the others. Usingmy own stuff as an example, I used the C64 palette to challengemyself with remaking a very colorful, very saturated screenshot from the Nintendo 64game Mischief Makers (because I love that game and both systems have“64” in the name so why not~)

So I turned this: (Nintendo 64 version, with waaay more colors available)

Into this:

Now, there’s clearly a BIG difference in the colors used, but I feel like everything still looks fine on its own. The muddy colors look a lot more harmonious when seen in an image than individually, with the brighter colors, such as the gems, even popping quite a bit.

For that second point I mentioned about colors working differently based on the colors around them, look at the character’s green hair, the green gem, and the green on the top of the blocks. They are all the exact same color. The green gem and hair, though, are shaded with a deeper, more saturated green and contrasted with a bright white, making it appear more saturated than the exact same green on the platforms, because the platforms’ green is surrounded by duller colors.

So it’s important to keep in mind that not only is each color important in the context of the whole, but also that what’s immediately around a color will massively impact how they appear, even when they are the exact same!

Important things to consider when picking colors is how close/far they are to each other in hue (the color itself, represented by the outer wheel in the image below), the saturation (how much gray is in the color, which effects how vibrant it is, which is the left->right in the box) and value (how much black is in the color, which is the top->bottom in the box).

Essentially the further away two colors are from the each other in any of these 3 directions the more they will stand out from each other. I’m not much of a teacher for color theory in general, so the best advice I can give is just to practice and to check out limited palettes other people have made and see how they handle it. In general, though, I try to keep most of the colors relatively close to each other in saturation and warm/cool colors, and then use one accent color that stands out in small amounts to make certain bits pop~

Links time!

Gurney’s post/video on Color Gamut, or manually limiting colors and how surrounding colors alters our perception of them (check out what appears as yellow in the cool colored image as opposed to the warm)

Gurney’s post on color in context and how many colors still register as bright yellow

Fun little tidbit about old cartoons made with limited palettes

Part 2: Contrast, and leading the eye!

Okay, so these other two might be a bit shorter. Basically, when you’re picking colors you want some to stand out and some to fall back. If everything is competing for attention it can be really hard to look at and the eye doesn’t know what’s important! One of the main things to look out for with this is contrast, as the eye is easily drawn to areas that are different than their surroundings.

Let me use two designs I’d had for my character Caelia - the left is her old color scheme and outfit and the right the new one:

Now, aside from minor differences in saturation, they’re actually pretty similar, but the one on the right I think works a lot better. In both of them the yellow acts as a strong accent color that can pull the eye, but on the old design on the left it pulls your eye in two directions - towards the headband and the coat trim, neither of which are actually important. Almost the entire rest of the design lacks that yellow so your eyes are actually drawn -away- from the character’s face and body. Imagine the coat being blown behind her as she’s doing an action pose and, yeah, the accent color doesn’t actually help anything.

The new design, I think, fixes that. Even though it remains an accent color the yellow now appears throughout the design. Her hair is now a lighter shade of yellow which is distinguished from the yellow on the clothing while also framing her face. Her torso now has a yellow accent on it so it draws the eye and, combined with the hair, has a strong distinction between her upper half (which is more yellow) and her lower half (which is mostly red). And finally what was the coat now wraps around her with an additional little strip on a waist sash. Now the yellow trim can easily allow the eye to figure out how her legs are positioned by how they wrap around them, instead of just hanging behind them.

It’s also important to point out that the hair is less saturated along with being lighter than the rest of the yellow - it both looks a bit more natural, blends with her skin color more, and also doesn’t compete with the high saturation in the clothing.

None of this is to say the left one is necessarily a bad design or conveys information poorly, just that the right one is a more unified design that is easier to understand at a glance. It’s something to keep in mind, but not a hard rule or anything. But remember that if EVERYTHING tries to stand out you’ll just end up with a mess.

LINKS!

Gurney on leading the eye with contrast and why what everything I just said might be bunk but might not be and also I think what I said applies better to simplified, cartoon forms as opposed to realism, since lines and blocks of color read differently than natural forms and lighting.

Spokewheeling - a composition technique that can be applied to character design as well.

Shapewhelding - another composition technique to think about, and can be important to AVOID at times (happens a lot in pixel art - dont want things melding together accidentally)

Gurney on why all of that might be bunk for general art composition anyway but might not be, but again I believe is still important for more stylized art

Part 3: SHADOWS!

Okay, so it’s nearing 1am as I write this and I’ll be honest I have the absolute least technical knowledge on this part, so I’ll tell you how I go about it but I STRONGLY suggest reading Gurney’s information on it (Again, seriously, I love his books, and “Color and Light” in particular is amazing and contains many of these posts and more)

When it comes to shading I have a pretty quick and dirty way to figure out what to do:

in case the text isn’t legible:

Choose a color for all shadows to move towards (usually a purple or blue)

Grab the base color for the thing I’m adding shadow to

Shift the color towards the direction of the shadow color I chose, and then make it darker and more saturated

And I do the exact opposite for highlights - I move away from the shadow color and then make it lighter and less saturated

Usually, anyway. And this method works best on the kind of color wheel I have there, but it can be adapted to most anything. And how far you move towards the shadow color and how dark/saturated you make the shadows will change the mood of the piece a lot. The colors in the screenshots are for a pretty light colored, low contrast piece.

I would go on more about it but I don’t actually have solid reasoning behind it other than it tends to look alright and I don’t want to spread incorrect thinking. Just… for the love of all that is colorful, DONT just shift the color towards black or white. It looks muddy and gross. Please. I beg you~

ON THE PLUS SIDE, Here’s a slew of awesome links!

Gurney and Chromatic Shadows Part 1!

Chromatic Shadows Part 2!

Relative color on skin tones!

Complementary shadows!

Induced colors! (or how our eyes can make highlights appear as different colors)

And I cant stress enough how great Gurney’s Color and Light book is for this stuff. I just can’t explain much ‘cuz I’m bad at actually studying this stuff well enough to talk about it!

Anyway, that about does it for my waaay longer than I thought and hella reply to a single sentence question! Hope that helped you, or SOMEONE at least! It was fun to ramble on about regardless~ (oh geeze yeah maybe rambling after midnight was a bad plan? Hopefuly this actually makes sense lol. If anyone needs any clarification just let me know!)

Cheers! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

[myfriendpokey]

receipt king

What's the difference between a paid game and a free one? In my opinion, one of them costs money, although various qualifications could be made. But maybe what's important is not the fact of purchase but the moment of purchase - that singular, legally recognised and binding moment where you hit the buy button or put the coin into the slot. Since after all the ways in which you really engage with, or even claim, a videogame can be spread out, blurry, diffuse.

Maybe it sits on your hard drive for a year before you play it, or in a notepad file full of steam keys, maybe you played it on and off in sessions too split up and individually indistinguished to solidify into a single instance. You can "own" both a paid gameand a free one but it's hard to feel your relationship to the former is not somehow more solid - maybe because it's founded on that moment of exchange, and not just the more transitory moments of lived experience. Experience comes and goes but purchases can be logged, tracked, indexed.

Maybe all the people who keep buying  reissues of Chrono Trigger for every platform it comes out on are just laying a more 'real', economic foundation to support the expanded dream-Chrono Trigger that exists in their heads…  Holding on to the receipts!

 ***

For a videogame to be sold is for it to exist in a network of exchange relations with, say, chairs, fruit, labour... And the implication is that these things can be compared but also that the comparisons can be quantified. A game is cheaper than a cup of coffee - or four times more expensive than a new movie, and both of these give us a picture of how it fits into the spaces of our life.

It also lets them take on a sort of objecthood-by-proxy, as another in the catalogue of commodities, which is increasingly important as the actual ontological status of a videogame gets ever more uncertain. Are you buying a program, an installer for a program, a temporary access pass for a program stored online, a program which runs using a server which remains in the company's control, a set of new assets, are you unlocking a set of existing assets which shipped with the game and were just stuck behind a paywall?

Emilie Reed has written about videogames in a museum context - with the expectation there that they get reframed as "singular objects", to fit the needs of an institution which has historically trafficked in singular objects. Maybe we can also think about this movement for objecthood in the context of the market - and that, since for at least forty years videogames have been a market artform, this movement was reflected on the aesthetic level as well. When people talk about a videogame as a "world", as a closed, alien space of object relations to be examined and explored at will, are they talking about the bare digital structures of the Game or about the mysterious opacity of the Object? Perhaps the unknowable heart of the  commodity is the true "bonus room", ha ha ha 8p

 ***

(I remember when Mountain was something of a critical talking point, and at the time I maybe crassly wondered if it was the production values - since there were plenty of glorious trainwrecks games making basically the same nonsequitor joke but it somehow only merited attention coming from a paid game with stylised graphics and lotsa assets… Now I wonder if it was specifically the saleability of Mountain which generated that fascinated reaction, as the dismissal of not-games wrestled with the deference thought due to the commodity. Which makes all those posts about the zen qualities of staring at it seem much funnier in retrospect.)

***

Anyway.

The free game / paid game thing is something that interests me because it's basically something I grind up against all the time, when I'm making things, and slowly need to come up with the vocabulary to deal with. The dream is always to "just make things" - you'd work on what takes your fancy and then figure out at the end whether it worked as a saleable product or not, which environment to release it to. But the problem is that even speculating something could be a paid game is enough to drastically change how you view it. What works in a free game absolutely does not in a commercial game, and vice versa.

I don't think anybody at all would have played Magic Wand if it came out for free, for example - that game could get away with being tonally muted and laid back because it took place within the bubble of objecthood that comes with being sold, and those qualities are experienced much differently in a free game.

A free game is one with no immediate comparison points - it could end after 5 minutes, after 50, it could demand your time and energy to no return... it lacks the "guarantee" of a pricetag, the guarantee of existing in some stable relationship with other objects. A commercial game could be the barest early-access WIP, or just some printed screenshots in an envelope. But the fact that it was sold at all grants it some of the enclosed legibility of the object, while free games conversely exist in the world of pure experience, which I think Hegel memorably described as a bloody head flying at you through the dark. Dreams, hallucinations, memory, etc.

 ***

So maybe we can think of commercial status as part of what Michael Brough calls the "grain" of a work, part of that network of processes and feedback which we either glide with or grind against while producing a thing. To make a free game paid is to change how it's read. The gaps which your attention span could easily skip over in a free title become unbearable contained within a fixed, sealed object. You begin to draw the contours and to fill in the gaps... The game becomes more ornate, detailed, denser within this narrowed scope, with a kind of symbolist langour and inertia seeping into the whole thing - the inertia of the product.

It may be hard to make a videogame into a narrative but to be sure it's harder to turn a product into one, a product which necessarily has something circular and static within the very foundation. The presumed audience for a product is like the little dude in the middle of the panopticon - everything is arranged panoramically for their benefit, necessitating a certain vagueness of temporal relationship, while a free game is arranged for the less predictable, less reliable, eye of the attention span as it moves through an unknown space. I like making both types of games and don't mean to imply one is either more mature or more subversive than the other, whatever those terms mean in this junk-ass consumer format. But it's not quite a matter of pure preference, either.

***

Archiving games can be notoriously difficult and I imagine this goes double for free ones - it's one thing to document, say, the NES library which at least has some kind of fixed scope for inclusion, trade magazines to consult, physical copies to track down... and even then there's always the frontier of, yknow, bootleg Dendy cartridges, nobody knowing when Mario came out, stuff like that. At least in principle it can be boiled down to a finite list of titles and release years. Who wants to deal with the messier and more nebulous task of recovering all the RPG Maker projects that briefly got hosted on Rapidshare in 2007? And even then, would it make sense to organize these games by a similar neat list of release dates?

Commercial games can afford the pretense that they "happened" at a singular point in time and that this singular point takes priority over the broader mulch timeline in which they were stumbled across, played, looked at, made fun of. It's not that you can't make a similar claim for the release point for freeware - it's just that it might mean a different thing, and I think it can be valuable trying to think of those games as something other than "commercial games that happen to cost $0". If to be released for free is to  engage with a fundamentally different context and set of assumptions - to deal with and work around a kind of vanishing experiential quality, rather than the fixed objecthood of the product - then it's hard to work out how to talk about and memorialise that without converting it into its opposite.

I've always wanted to write about more freeware games but how do you do it? Pick out a handful to talk about and avoid as much as possible the question of dealing with the endless churn? Elevate a few to ambassador standing? To pick a random RPG maker game and say "Crystal Masters 2 came out in 2008" can be to imply, like, a launch party, or some immediate impact, or that anybody at all paid attention or cared - which in turn can distort the actual expectations of how these things would be recieved that to some extent affected their aesthetics and structure. It’s still better than nothing, and I’m being pedantic – but it's hard not to think about it when at times it feels like the only way this stuff can be written about and preserved is as a set of attenuated best-ofs, by either becoming a product or by being treated as one.

I think if most of my games have been commercial lately it's less a question of expecting to get money from them and more because that sometimes feels like the only way they'll still have some kind of trail left in 10 years. I always liked the idea of making time capsules and just hiding them away in a rabbithole somewhere for people to find. Right now it feels like the types of videogame spaces I'm most comfortable in - the kind least hung up on ideas of importance - are archival ones, digging through the debris of the past, curious about what they'll find. In reaction I guess to what feels personally like increasingly calcified, unliveable contemporary or franchise-oriented spaces of culture it can feel freeing to think about the other ones, of things instantly forgotten or which barely existed at all. Blind albino cave salamanders - - 64!!

(images: castlevanias ii and bloodlines)

[lids-flutter-open]

writing bloggin ignore if u want

so after listening to a ton of rpg live play podcasts the thing i think i’ve taken away from it is that the dynamics between characters and character choice and motivation cannot be underestimated ever at all and that you can set up a plot but your characters have to take you thru it and you can’t force them to make certain choices, and i think this is gonna rlly help w my titus reno story--

in making jenny and reno come alive and be equally like, legible for me like titus, i rlly wanted like to figure out how and why they were all originally hanging out and what they want and what their longterm goals are. initially i conceptualized jenny as this sort of punk hermione who is chaotic good and breaks the rules for the sake of justice and benevolence etc but i couldn’t figure out how jenny would get like that or develop those principles in the context of the medical compound and i also didnt find that like, a compelling character arc. BUT i have a new idea where jenny is like, this drug dealer turned accidental but passionate prophet and it has just tied my whole thing together in a way that i hope is gonna help me actually get this stuff on paper+ it also provides a GREAT underlying dramatic arc and a good rationale for the dynamic of titus and reno to work as a couple the way i want it to

so: in this future world, everyone, human and mutant laborer alike, has this parasitic worm living in them that’s impossible to kill which makes people infertile, causes nerve damage, and finally eats your brain, some fifteen years after your initial infection. Because the worms lay thousands of eggs in all kinds of water supplies, most people are infected within a few years of birth, except some hastily quarantined human children. Super secret scientists know the worm is an alien and this fact has only recently been released, but it doesn’t make much noise because at this point there are multiple global crises threatening civilization--climate change that has flooded cities and made agriculture on industrial scales impossible in many areas, total breakdown of all democratic governments, and now almost universal infertility. Pig-human mutants, who had been raised as laborers in dangerous lines of work, continue to be produced even as human mothers fail to concieve; these piggos are taken to be tested on, and each year as more die others are brought in. The scientists are working on trying to find something to kill the parasite that everyone on earth has. 

Jenny’s roommate in the medical compound realizes, through an accident, that the worms release hallucinogenic chemicals when you eat potassium fertilizer. She starts tripping and then begins dealing potassium fertilizer (to which she has restricted access as a specially authorized gardener). When she becomes too sick to continue, Jenny takes over. The position of dealer affords piggos status and power, and Jenny even deals to nurses, without telling them what the substance is. But gradually as time goes on she begins to be curious about the visions everyone has on this drug--because they’re all the same. 

When people take the fertilizer and ingest it and the worms release hallucinogens, people see pretty much all the same thing. they see alien landscapes and waterfalls and a sky with two moons and a distant red sun. It drips and spasms and is intermingled with other kinds of LSD type visions, but in general people see the same thing over and over. Jenny becomes convinced that the visions are a link to the world the alien worm came from, and she starts making all her clients draw their visions in an attempt to catalogue them. At the same time, the visions start to shift, and people start to see weird humanoid aliens, and increasingly, start to see visions of strange vines growing into what look like large organic structures. When, shortly afterward, the doctors announce they have cloned an alien humanoid from DNA left in the asteroid /ship? that hit Earth and brought the worm, and are using this clone to create antibodies to the worm, Jenny realizes that the alien is one of the humanoids from her visions, and becomes determined to figure out a way to contact the aliens. 

Reno is one of Jenny’s clients. He is hooked on the hallucinogen because he likes her sense of purpose but also he likes to escape and draw his visions and feel that there is something in the world besides the limited medical compound and the adolescent power struggles that surround him. He also has a little crush on Titus, who as Jenny’s bff is a supplier for a lot of the dorms and who is, while not very well liked, and not part of any male friend group, semi- respected based on his activities.

Reno keeps borrowing things to pay Jenny with, and his roommate/dorm head Rustler gives him an ultimatum--pay it all back with the fertilizer hallucinogen, or fight Rustler in a public match to settle the debt. It isn’t mean spirited but it’s like an adolescent maintenance of the status quo thing. Reno determines to get the drug and pay people back. 

When Jenny notices some of her stash is gone, she stakes out the shed she keeps it in overnight and she and Titus ambush Reno and threaten him with: knives, blackmail, the suggestion they could alter his medical records to make him look sicker than he is and have him removed to the late-term infirmary, etc etc. Titus sees Reno is genuinely scared and that he also is really miserable to find himself on Jenny and Titus’s bad side, and feels a little proud and excited and drunk with power, and is like, “ok, we don’t have to do all that, but you do need to either work with us and act as a supplier or just tell Rustler you have to fight him and we’ll supply hallucinogens to whoever wins.” reno does this partly bc he wants to impress titus. after he wins the match he asks titus to be his boyfriend, which surprises jenny and titus. when titus realizes reno has a crush on him he is also stoked, proud, flattered etc... though he is initially motivated primarily by lust, self interest and self preservation, and his romantic feelings only really emerge later.

sorry for this long ass post but im so glad to like work all this out and establish the ways that my characters’ personalities work--

[nsfmc]

A checklist for computer science undergrads

influenced by john regehr's 'basic toolbox' post about this topic, i thought i would throw my hat into the ring given that my experiences have been different than john's and seem to be at odds with what i have observed from working with many competent developers.

As i was leaving grad school, a friend of mine suggested to me that a winning strategy in Industrial Design had been to pick some medium that you worked well in and focus on doing all your work with that. The rationale here was that starting anew each project with a new medium invariably impacted the execution of the final deliverable distracting your prof/critic/peers from the high-level feedback you actually wanted on your work, creative vision, etc.

The advice there is to focus less on the tool and more on using a tool efficiently to communicate your ideas. In most cases it does not matter what the tool is as long as you can deploy it to solve problems in your domain.

Much of the tooling that exists in CS is directed at very specific users: working programmers. using these tools correctly as an undergrad is aspirational, but often their execution is distorted in academic contexts.

Every lab or workplace should expect to bootstrap new hires on internal tooling/workflows and almost none of them should assume prior knowledge. Depending on the aims, the only hard requirement should be ability to program in a language or framework similar to the one being used.

Core skills

A single programming language

You do not need to be ultimately proficient in every language, you just need to be able to sketch out and implement a solution to most problems you encounter in one language you enjoy working in. Which language you pick does not matter. If you are in john's classes, however, you should probably ensure that you know two languages: a compiled/systems-ey one (rust, go, c, java, swift, clojure, etc) and a scripting language (python, ruby, javascript, clojurescript, elm, mathematica, anything goes here as long as it has a repl or runtime that you can use to hammer out solutions to problems).

If you're not one of john's students, typically the scripting language will suffice (although it is generally rare to finish a cs program being exposed to only one language).

s/Text Editor/Touch Typing/i

The advice to be familiar with a text editor is largely a request from others who expect you to competently pair-program with them at their pace. The point of knowing an editor is much the same as knowing at least one language passably: it should not be something that gets in your way.

More essential than being comfortable with a specific editor (it honestly does not matter which one as long as you like using it and you are productive with it) is being comfortable touch typing. In the event that slack or other IM platforms have not made you a better touch typist, it is well worth investing time if only so that the act of writing anything is no longer a major time hinderance.

At some point, you may find yourself bored or in need of procrastination and decide you want to customize your editor: that is a perfect time to try something like sublime or atom or vi or emacs.

rough shell experience

you should be able to navigate around a filesystem, make directories, read directory listings and read the cli help documentation for most commands.

you absolutely do not need to know the details of your shell's preferences around glob expansion or how to write legible shell scripts. you can learn that, but after a certain point, all the obscure functionality ends up beng more "dev-ops" style knowledge that rarely pays any dividends except when developing commercial developer-facing internal tooling.

incidentally, getting students past the hurdle of commandline BS is almost certainly a job of an advisor (or postdoc). Ignoring it helps nobody and if a research project's documentation (q.v. below) is poor or nonexistent, the PI only has themselves to blame for this ongoing time commitment.

reading documentation

this is probably the weakest skill i have seen from folks coming out of undergrad. nobody expects you to know all of a language, all of its quirks, etc etc. what you are expected to know is how to find the answer to any reasonable question around your language or toolchain of choice.

A useful skill: you should be able to, given a stylized block of shell commands, paste those into your terminal one-by-one in order to bootstrap some project i.e. ./configure && make && make test. nobody should expect that you understand autoconf unless your research project is specifically devoted to it in some obscure way (i'm sorry if this is the case).

Specifically, you do not need to know how to parse an excel-formatted csv, but you should know where to look (or be able to find a solution) in order to do that in a reasonable amount of time. You do not need to know what an ideal runtime serialization format is for your language, you only need to call back on the terms you learned in your cs classes: marshalling, serialization, persistence, writing data, etc. although it can be useful at the extremes, be skeptical of the amount and quality of programming language trivia you know offhand.

writing documentation

no, this is not technical writing. this simply means you should be able to write a plain text file for each project that outlines

how to build some program

what its implicit dependencies are

what its arguments are

what the exposed/public api is

aside from being useful to others, in roughly six weeks or half a semester, this will invariably be of use to future-you as well.

a good acid test here is pointing a friend to the project and asking if they can build it and understand how they might use it. at some point you will embed this knowledge into a Makefile, shell script, or some other dsl, but until then it is infinitely more useful to write down the steps.

html

unless this is your job (or you intend it to be) you only need to know how to make an academic-level webpage which requires only the most basic knowledge of semantic html: h1, h2, ul/ol li, p, a, img, pre, strong, em (optionally hr, dl dd & dt). avoid css. if anyone gives you shit, you can invoke "Default Systems" giving you a perfectly valid excuse to stop devoting any more attention to design after you have mastered those tags.

reproducing errors

it is unclear when you are an undergrad or novice if you have encountered a truly exceptional case or if you simply have no idea what you're doing. Make a habit of reproducing and then writing down steps to reproduce edge cases you encounter and share them with people you ask for help from.

above and beyond, if you can identify the specific step (or code or whatever) that you invoke that (seemingly) causes the error, you will have an easier time teasing apart the nature of bug as you are telling someone else about it.

the most basic of data visualization skills

all this means is that nobody is actually good at doing this and everyone thinks that two hours peeking at ggplot2 has made them wizards at communicating the complexity of some dataset or results. it hasn't.

in many cases it suffices to be able to graph something from mathematica, R, d3, mathplotlib, or google sheets / excel. again, nobody cares how you do it as long as you do it and it doesn't take you all day. if your lab or workplace has some in-house style for doing this, they will need to train you how to do that anyway.

nonlinear spider-sense

the single reason "big o" notation is taught in school is so that at some point you can look at a performance regression and say "ha, that almost looks like a parab—o.m.g." the ability to recognize code or performance that appears nonlinear (or pathologically exponential) is probably one of the core things that i think undergrads should try to hone because during almost no other time will you be asked repeatedly, and at length, to explain the space/time complexity of arbitrary blocks of code.

computers are fast enough that you can usually be blasé about performance but eventually you'll start looking. being able to recognize something that is accidentally quadratic is often the most practical day-to-day application of cs theory—hone this spider sense.

Nice to haves

Version Control

there is a large chasm between "git for one" and "using git as a team" and that harsh valley is almost certainly due to the large amount of human communication and coordination required to work on a project as a team. Most people stress learning git, but this is largely useless advice because most of git or hg's corner cases and weirdness only come up when you're trying to integrate your work successfully among your teammates. It is good advice to perhaps become vaguely competent using git or mercurial or rcs, that experience will almost certainly pale in comparison to the massive flail when you are trying to set up multiple worktrees to create integration branches that contain the contents of multiple prs (each likely with their own rebase/merge/squash quirks).

to that end, you should learn to, say, create a commit and push your work, but everything else beyond that is almost certainly guaranteed to be complicated by whatever your team's workflow is (github prs, phabricator, gerrit, etc). i have rarely met people outside of professional or open source contexts that are capable of producing sensible chained commits or sane pull requests, it is simply not a skill that is required outside of contributing to open source or working on a commercial application. When people ask for git experience they secretly crave this flavor of professionalism that it took months to acquire at each of their prior jobs or internships.

A Presentation Tool

the baseline here is very low, you only need to be able to make a presentation and in all likelihood if you are still an undergrad, you easily have ten-plus years of doing this already. worry about fonts/design/transitions/etc once your content is solid.

most people produce terrible presentations making the needed baseline here quite low—it is more important that you know how to practice giving a presentation than it is to actually create the slides for it.

debugger knowledge

i have met many successful professional working programmers that have little to no idea how their language's debugging tools work. if you are a gdb wizard this sounds shocking on its face but lots of developers make do just fine without them. This is not to say that you should be willfully ignorant of debuggers or eschew them (especially if this is part of your curriculum), but nobody should look down on you if you learn (or are taught this) On The Job.

many of these tools are technically robust but have a ui only moderately less hostile than an opaque box of loose razorblades and chocolates. much like git, most developers internalize some form of stockholm affection for these tools despite their poor design, nonexistent editor integration, and often incomplete terminal support.

you should understand roughly what a debugger is and what it can (and can't) do, but it's almost certain that you won't need to have mastered debugger internals straight out of college.

build systems

this is honestly a "top of maslow" need. This is great knowledge if you are planning to distribute code or need it to build dependably/reliably on others' computers, it is absolutely inessential for an undergrad to understand to do this level of orchestration except as documentation for others to evaluate that your project actually builds etc etc. if your advisor or boss asks you to learn something like make or whatever, then by all means.

You should know what a make tool is for and when it is necessary, but you should not expect that to apply to the lion's share of work you do in school.

working for a period of time before asking for help

although this should be a core skill many adults are incapable of doing this effectively. there is a tradeoff between "i'm learning" and "i'm being unproductive." In an academic lab, arguably much of your experience will appear to be some quantum state that simultaneously inhabits both extremes but your goal should be attempting to independently arrive at a solution and after some time cut-off (which you should negotiate with your advisor/postdoc/pi/whatever) you should say "i tried $A, $B, and $C to accomplish $GOAL and was unable to make any progress because $ERR_A, $ERR_B, and $ERR_C."

even the act of noting down "what i am trying to accomplish, how i tried, what went wrong" may in itself lead you to a correct solution, but without having done that due dilligence and outlined those aspects, it will be difficult to receive good feedback from somebody that is trying to help you.

unit/integrated/etc testing

if you find that something like TDD is useful for you as a productivity or refactoring tool, keep doing that! most working software people cannot even agree on what the point of testing is, so it feels unfair to burden undergrads with this. in a professional context, you will be in a codebase with some established testing norms, you need only mimic those until you have determined what works for you.

there are lots of sane and sensible resources for writing tests or thinking about tests. understand that everyone does testing slightly differently so your best bet will be to figure out how testing plays a part wherever you go. in most cases, that codebase will have a specific incantation to invoke tests, your best bet is to ask how they do things there are just go from there if the setup is not obvious.

understanding scope

most academic projects are poorly managed because they have inconsistent pressure to be profitable beyond whatever funding inspired them. simultaneously, many academic advisors are not trained well to manage or lead a team (remember, most were hired to write grants and produce research papers (or possibly to teach)). management is something an advisor is literally picking up "on the job".

If you are unsure what exactly you are supposed to do, you should clarify as soon as possible what deliverable is expected and when it is due. This seems obvious, but because communication is complicated you may end up assuming you need to, for instance, resolve outstanding cli argument parsing bugs rather than only needing to add support for a new one. Understanding the scope of a project you've been assigned prevents you from doing redundant work or opening prs that will never get merged.

language idioms

If you are cozy with a programming language, the natural evolution here is to begin learning what idiomatic programming is like for it: what are common libraries, do people tend to program it functionally or imperatively, for or map?, what patterns are awkward or hard to read, what are common tools in its toolchain, how do people use it to write web services, how do people use it to avoid shell scripting, what are its peformance pathologies, etc. this is the extension to knowing how to read the documentation: it is developing intuition about the language to avoid doing counterproductive work in the future.

Many developers learn one language and become fluent in its quirks then proceed to apply those to every language they see later on. if you encounter this as a novice, it may appear that they are simply Better Programmers and not, instead, people who are speaking a pidgin-python with a heavy haskell accent.

To recap

It is something of a mistake to hope that a cs student will have the gradually developed and refined skills of a professional tradesperson. Graduating cs students often do not have strong professional software development experience (this is what internships are meant to accomplish) but are good at thinking about design/architecture. if, at the very minimum, as an undergrad you can churn out some ruby and have the runtime execute it, you're usually in great shape.

most cs programs do not train students to develop tightly crafted applications with industry-tested documentation/syntax/structure/workflows etc. bootcamps, however, do stress this sort of thing, which causes a confusing periodic wave of "college is dead, long live bootcamps."

when looking at job descriptions or other checklists, it's useful to try to gaze back at the abyss and ask "why was this listed here?"

John's research is compiler-focused, deals with undefined behavior, and often invokes llvm, c, and other "low level" toolchains. a strong undergrad cs student will be able to intern with john productively because the core of his research focus is mostly general to computer science: correctness, compiler behavior, etc. someone with deep knowledge of C, llvm, compiler design/internals, etc is almost certainly in a position to become one of his graduate students or postdocs. I think john's list is interesting, but i think it emphasizes details that are often foreign to developers at all skill levels.

finally this list is biased itself, so take it with a grain of salt: all my work experience is in design and frontend/backend web development and the skills listed here represent the qualities i've observed from successful interns and developers i have interviewed and worked with in the past ~ eight years. my experience is clearly n=1, but among the things i've noticed is that it's easy to get people to learn git, but it's hard to get somebody to internalize recursion, nonlinear growth, or canonical architecture patterns within the same time period. i'm not saying it's impossible, but if you're a cs student, this is 100% what the point of most cs programs is.

[mybarricades]

Jean-Marie Gleize

‘Où vont les chiens ? ’, ‘Where do the dogs go?’,1 this question is posed by Baudelaire in the last ‘prose’ poem (in Spleen de Paris) in order to evoke a kind of literature that would correspond with urban, modern life – a kind of poetry which is adapted to those ‘sinuous ravines’ of the cities where the ‘poor’ roaming dogs are, the famished dogs. This question is also relevant to poetry: ‘where does poetry go?’, ‘where do the poets go?’. 

This question has troubled me for far too many years, and this is the reason why I cannot separate my poetic endeavours from a critical reflection on these. This critical reflection constitutes both the context and condition for my poetry (which for me constitutes the conditions of legibility). 

It is in this spirit (of active questioning) that I recently published a book titled Sorties (Exits) which forms the third part of a project (begun more than twenty years ago), with which I intend: 

  + To comment on a number of choices and tropisms concerning the part of literature called poetry – in sum why, for instance, I prefer this or that literary movement/praxis rather than another one: why this and not that Baudelaire, why les Petits Poèmes en Prose and not Les Fleurs du Mal; or Rimbaud and not Verlaine; Francis Ponge instead of René Char, or Saint John Perse, or André Breton; Denis Roche rather than Yves Bonnefoy or Philippe Jaccottet, and so forth. 

  + To emphasise the contours of a space more or less defined by practical notions (methodological tools) which progressively emerge during contemplation or reflection (literalism, realness (réelisme), prose in prose, a post-poetic praxis…). Rather than having fixed definitions, these terms are continuously being tested in concrete analyses of texts. 

Though elusive, these terms are consistent throughout my critical work, always susceptible to further modifications. 

To describe the contours of this space is to find ways which enables one to intervene in this field and to��situate this intervention. Not only to describe and demonstrate a fact, but, if it is possible, to modify the map of the landscape (through literature, but also through publications and joint collections, through magazines, and in teaching…). 

I have mentioned the fact that Sortie is the third part of a larger project. Thus, two previous attempts exist. 

The first book was titled Poésie et figuration, and was published in 1983 at the publishing company Seuil in the collection ‘Pierres Vives’ (which does not exist today, but which in my opinion had much power at that time because this was where the Essais critiques of Roland Barthes were published). Through a number of actual analyses from romanticism up to contemporary modernity, this critical essay endeavours to demonstrate the process of de-figuration, of progressive de-representation at work in the poetic text which makes it increasingly illegible, or legible in a different way. The purpose of this venture also was to draw attention to two different positions: 1.) the inventor of modern lyricism, the founder of a modern poetic language, profoundly de-conventionalised in his Méditations from 1820, Lamartine, and 2.) the ‘frantic’ poet or anti-poet, author of Mécrit (1972, the ‘Tel Quel’ collection at Seuil), Denis Roche, who with this ultimate work proclaimed the death of his own poetry and poetry as such (‘poetry is inadmissible; besides it does not exist’2 or that it no longer makes any sense or has any legitimacy). 

The second book, titled A noir and with the subtitle ‘Poésie et littéralité’ (from 1992 and published at the same company, but this time in the collection ‘Fiction & Cie’, founded and directed by exactly the aforementioned poet Denis Roche) was much more free in its formal aspects and corresponds with the development of my conception of literary criticism: the word ‘fiction’ in the collection’s title may be understood in a broad way, as it exceeds the genre of the novel. Concerning ‘& Cie’ this term opened the doors to much theoretical ado in various ways, which was if not downright perverse, then at least polymorphous. A Noir is hence a book which I regard as an indirect manifesto (a manifesto for the literal literature, for a prose conversion) which intermingles texts of criticism, panorama texts, poetic, metapoetic, autobiographic and polemical texts without masking the heterogeneity of the work… 

Sorties, the last part of the triptych picture, definitely emphasises and tightens the characteristics of A Noir. It is a book containing fifty texts, which may be regarded as different contributions to the understanding of contemporary poetry. They are both interior and exterior to the academic institution, and they often explicitly stress the context of the enunciation. They progress step by step dialectically through deliberate repetitions (foregrounding certain key texts through reformulations and re-descriptions, juxtaposing them with exemplary theoretical models, like for instance ‘La Mounine’ by Ponge in La Rage de l’expression or in the beginning of ‘Aprés le déluge’ in Illuminations by Rimbaud), which because they are not written at the same time produces a permanent montage – montage and re-montage. Therefore it is a matter of different versions, readjustments and possible contradictions of the same texts and themes; an approach that should be regarded as a continuing movement (cf. the fourth volume, where it says: ‘I don’t understand, still not: I continue’). 

Why ‘Sorties’?, this simple title in plural tense. ‘Sorties’ because it no doubt concerns a central trope by which one is to comprehend the critical gestures which are rough-hewed in these pages. Plural because the ‘sortie’ does not have just one dimension, but the modalities of the ‘sortie’ are even multiple, and each text in the book evoke different examples. I recall my friend who is a philosopher, Sarah Kofman, who has written a short book titled Comment s’en sortir? She alludes to the question of the aporetic in general, to the question of possible exits to situations seemingly without any exits. When I choose this word, I first of all presuppose that we are (or that I am) in an unfortunate position. And that it is a question of ways of escape. How? How does one escape from this? The anxiety has to do with a feeling of being subjugated to a certain space (a literary and poetic field, an institutional, social and political field), to a controlling and constraining regime, to the dominance of evidences (which are not very evident) which is generally accepted, but from which there are good reasons to emancipate oneself. 

In this case the principal exit, if I dare call it that, is the exit, or the attempt at leaving the ‘circus ring’, or the ‘routine’ of poetry (the terms in the inverted commas belong to Ponge’s parlance): the story of placing oneself after poetry with hands free. Rimbaud has escaped, has multiplied the exits, ever since his escapes as a child and until his ‘departure’; Mallarmé has said that he (Rimbaud) ‘operated himself to cure himself of poetry’.3 Francis Ponge has multiplied the possibilities of acts of secession, he quickly gave up writing ‘poems’, and instead he decided to exhibit his drafts and notebooks as texts (‘I make use of the magma of the simile, but only in order to dispose of it’,4 the true poetry is not in the poems but ‘in the energetic drafts made by the manics of this novel embrace’5). Let me pause for a minute at these two authors, these two exemplary decisions. It is clear that these exits, or attempts at exit, are at the same time ‘false exits’ so long as the institution (the school, the publishing company, the book store and the library) has lead the two back inside the traditional poetic field: Rimbaud and Ponge’s works have been published in La Pléiade and at the publishing company Seghers, and they are integrated in school books. It is this phenomenon I term the ‘internal exit’. One dares to note that the ineluctable nature of the ‘internal exit’ in no way seeks to discredit the act of ‘sortie’ itself. This exit (even when it does not present itself as a systematic refusal of or deviation from the generic frame and of the ideology that attend it) is ineluctably connected with any literary endeavour, which is seriously involved in formal invention; and if the poet himself has not sought the exit, it may be imposed on him from external forces. Thus, Lamartine is accused of violating the rules of rational poetry and the precision of unambiguous language, just as Hugo felt he had to respond to a ‘charge’, a charge which he knew was appropriate: ‘I threw the noble line to the black dogs of prose’.6 In fact, Hugo has contributed to a de-articulation of the alexandrine verse and to the contamination of the verse and of the poem by what we call prose: ‘prosaisms’ (in French, ‘prosaïsmes’), the facts of orality… 

Under these circumstances, I reserve an important place for the historical line of theoreticians and practitioners of sortie critique: Rimbaud, Ponge and Denis Roche. This lineage within ‘poésie critique’ (or critical post-poetry) is characterised by foregrounding the principle of ‘de-lyricising’ poetry and by the search of some kind of ‘objective poetry’ (the latter is announced – but not defined – by Rimbaud in one of his letters ‘du voyant’). In our modern (or modernist?) tradition, there might exist a literal objectivism or an objective literalism (which, by the way, always refrains from calling itself by that name, to present itself like that or dogmatise itself as such) which is made evident in the works of Claude Royet-Journoud, Jean Daive, Anne-Marie Albiach, Emmanuel Hocquard, Dominique Fourcade…, oeuvres that are drawn upon as Sorties progresses. This corpus (which is objective objectivistic and literal), which represents the lineage of critique, has affinities with the classics of experimental modernism, the relevant inheritors of the historical avant-gardes: poésie sonore, poésie concrete, poésie élémentaire, poésie-action or performance poetry, which are e.g. represented by poets like Bernard Heidsieck or Julien Blaine, and it is also has affinities with the most recent generation, that which emerges during the nineties; the origin of this generation is centred on the publication of two volumes of Revue de Littérature générale (‘RLG’) in 1995 published by Olivier Cadiot and Pierre Alferi at the publishing company POL; it is a book project which may partly be perceived as a manifesto (it being technical and practical rather than theoretical), the propositions in which many recognise themselves or against which they position themselves: C. Hanna, O. Quintyn, N. Quintane, M. Joseph…. 

It is necessary to direct our efforts towards a description of the way in which contemporary poetry is organised in France after the death of the avant-garde, after the death of the neo-avant-garde from the sixties and seventies, an époque where this movement was organised around the predominant groups of poets and magazines: the ‘textualists’ of Tel Quel, the ‘formalists’ of Change, and various groups inspired by them, along with groups in the periphery who were subjected to the necessity of not defining oneself in relation to or as a reaction against anything else but these hegemonic groups. In the eighties and nineties this field is dissolved, and one bears witness to a destruction of the field which, thus, becomes extremely blurred to the extent that everything from this time on can coexist; this allowed serious attempts at restoring traditional lyric poetry to reoccur; restoration, that is, a ‘return’ to a previous condition which is prior to the sterilising ‘catastrophe’ from the years where the systematic destruction of fundamental poetic values took place, i.e. the destruction of the lyric tradition: expression, the lyric I, emotion, metre and prosody, song… I am content to merely name in passing this moment, which is extremely interesting for the abundant resurgence of discourses which openly and aggressively are regressive (there are numerous texts that need to be looked out and analysed…).  It is in this context that I have proposed the idea (an idea that I pursue in Sorties) of comprehending the field after the sixties and seventies as a clear division intolapoésie (which I write as one word) and repoésie on the one hand, and néo-poésie and post-poésie on the other hand. The former willingly inherit the formal and thematic aspects of traditional poetry either to be legitimised by the ‘magistrates’ or incontestable ‘officials’ (Valéry in the beginning of the last century and Yves Bonnefoy today), or they inherit it as a reactionary mode: they are composed by the new lyric poets from the eighties, the re-lyric poets in continuation of whom a number of suggestions follow – from prosaic lyricisms to emphatic lyricisms (e.g. James Sacré and Pierre Oster). The latter part contains those who could be called the reformers or refounders of poetry, those who want to change poetry through a permanent reinvention of itself and its various forms; this is what I call neo-poetry, which is both the ex-formalists of Change ( they have close affinities with the Oulipo-group) and the neo-experimentalists (performance poetry, elementary poetry, etc.). They depend on the term ‘poetry’ in so far as they recognise themselves herein, but they also use it to flaunt a distance to what we understand by poetry. Last but not least post-poetry, i.e. poets who no longer define their poetic praxis in relation to questions which concern the intra-poetic debate: verse or non-verse, verse or prose, poem or non-poem, image or non-image etc.; poets who reflect on what they do, the non-identified objects that they produce, the ways in which their works circulate (in the book or outside the book), in another context. Just like the term ‘sortie interne’ applies to the ‘modernist critics’, it may also be used to designate the post-poets, and I believe it has an actual effect concerning the latter ones. All that is left to be done is to state that something different happens in different way. I.e. when one speaks of post-poetry you continue to place these movements in relation to poetry, in relation to the poetry from which they had sought ‘operation’ (to repeat Mallarmé’s comment on Rimbaud). Yes, but it is necessary to point out that there is a difference between post-poets and critical poets (non- or contra-poets), and this difference concerns 1.) the way in which they move outside any reference to formal, technical and theoretical questions, questions concerning poetry, so to speak, disregarding pretensions of novelty, 2.) the fact that the textual or other objects that they produce are very difficult to recuperate within any generic frame. I continue to assume that post-poetry is not an optical illusion. It tends to proliferate among us. 

There is no doubt another possible way of understanding the term ‘sortie’. It is inspired by Francis Ponge and it is connected with the effort in prose, the effort to invent a prose in prose, it is the effort to exit the circle enchanted by stylistic sublimation and by the idealising poeticity or re-poeticity (the key word here is: avoid to ‘arrange things’…). This other way of perceiving the exit has to do with the role which may be attributed to the literary activity after poetry. Let me quote the very short text by Ponge (which I reproduce here) from Cahier de l’Herne: 

Christ glorifies the humble. / The Church glorifies humility. Be careful! This is not the same / thing. On the contrary. / Christ degrades the powerful. The church lavishes on the powerful. / Arise ye wretched of the earth! I am the one who incites,7 

This text is written in 1942. At that time, Ponge was a member of the Communist Party. As early as in the thirties he says that it is important to ‘teach everyone the art of founding your own rhetoric’,8 the art of ‘resisting words’;9 or phrased differently: to resist the dominant ideological discourse, which surrounds us, which traverses us, which we interiorise to the extent that we no longer speak but are spoken to. When Ponge wrote in 1942 that ‘je suis un suscitateur’ (‘I suscitate’) it did not signify that he wanted to found a literary movement, he simply declared and suggested that when all is said and done, the act of writing is political. It is necessary to let those speak who do not speak or no longer speak. 

We, the readers, must bear in mind that our culture juxtaposes politics and discourse and sense (the ‘message’); this is one of the fundamental aspects in what we name ‘commitment’; and politics is also juxtaposed with the technical modalities of representation, of mimesis; this is what we call ‘realism(s)’ which is/are historically inseparable from the social conscience of the artists and the writers: critical and romantic realism(s) in different guises of ‘socialist’ realisms, which pass by the experimental naturalism begun by Zola, etc. What Ponge suggests can only be comprehended on the basis of these terms and demands that one envisages the written as an ‘act’ rather than as mere content, and as susceptible to or destined to suscitate and liberate other speech acts. He wants to demonstrate a certain way of facing language, facing the real and the world ‘actively’, to exemplify a resistance to ‘paroles’; to provide tools to avoid being hypnotised and paralysed by words, stereotypes, the frozen phrases, the language of the forest and of honey etc. It is in this sense that the written may be envisaged as a ‘communal’ activity, concerning man in community. And this is the reason why the word ‘communism’, in spite of the direction the term has taken with the history of socialism, continues to be a word in suspense – the meaning still remains to be defined. 

Towards the end of Sorties and in Film à venir which is my previous book, I describe the intact power of this word, the fact that this word necessarily must have another meaning, and that this other meaning is partly, let us say, stifled or impeded. I recall the circumstances of a drowned young revolutionary activist (who was a student at Lycée Mallarmé in Paris) in the Seine by Flins in June 1968, who was pushed in the river by a couple of mobilised Guards: ‘the surface of writing is like the mirror of the lake, it seems to reflect the sky above, but this sky above is really nothing more than the reflection of the sky that is caught in the water’.10 ‘A communist’ is for me a word which is caught in the water (in this body caught in the water). The post-poetic writings, as I perceive them, have as their goal ‘the pragmatic truth’. A condition for this, of course, is that post-poetry incessantly strives to liberate truth, to unveil it, to let it exit, ‘sortir’. 

_____________________________________________________________________

“Oúvont les chiens” is a talk given by Jean-Marie Gleize at the conference “Poetry Today” on October 20-21 2009 at Aarhus University, Denmark. The talk published here is translated by Louise Højgaard Marcussen & Lasse Gammelgaard.

Notes 

1. The English translator, Keith Waldrop, writes: ”Where are the dogs?”, but as the French verb vont entails movement, this translation is unsatisfactory for Gleize’s purposes. 

2. ’La poésie est inadmissible, d’ailleurs elle n’existe pas’. 

3. ‘opéré vivant de la poésie’. 

4. ‘j’utilise le magma analogique, mais c’est pour m’en débarrasser’. 

5. ’dans les brouillons acharnés des maniaques de la nouvelle étreinte’. 

6. ’J’ai jeté les vers noble aux chiens noirs de la prose’. 

7. ’Le Christ glorifiait les humbles. / L’Eglise glorifie l’humilité. Attention ! ce n’est pas la même shose. C’est tout le contraire. / Le Christ rabaissait les puissants. / L’Eglise encense les puissants. / « Debout les damnés de la terre ! «  / Je suis un suscitateur.’ Translation of these lines by Serge Gavronksy. 

8. ‘d’apprendre á chacun l’art de fonder sa propre rhétorique’. 

9. ’résister aux paroles’. 

10. ’La surface des écrits est comme le miroir des lacs, il parait refléter le ciel supérieur, mais ce ciel supérieur n’est en réalité que le reflet de ce ciel enfermé dans l’eau’.

[suzanneshannon]

Six tips for better web typography

How do we avoid the most common mistakes when it comes to setting type on the web? That’s the question that’s been stuck in my head lately as I’ve noticed a lot of typography that’s lackluster, frustrating, and difficult to read. So, how can we improve interfaces so that our content is easy to read at all times and contexts? How do learn from everyone else’s mistakes, too?

These questions encouraged me to jot down some rules that are easy to apply and have the greatest impact on legibility, based on my own personal experience. And, if you didn't know, I'm kinda a geek when it comes to typography. So, I thought I'd share the following six rules that I've come to adopt to get us started.

Rule #1: Set a good max-width for paragraphs

This is typically referred to as the measure in typographic circles and highly esteemed typographers will recommend that a paragraph have a width of around 75 characters for legibility reasons. Anything longer than that becomes difficult to read and causes unnecessary strain on the eyes because of the distance the eye has to travel left-to-right and back again (assuming ltr that is).

Here’s a quick example of a good max-width setting for a paragraph. Oh, and make sure to check out this demo on larger screen devices.

See the Pen Typography Example 1 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

Now, this all depends on a ton of factors that great designers contemplate when setting a paragraph. However, as web designers, the difficulty for us is that we have to make sure that paragraphs feel good in additional contexts, like on mobile devices, too. So, while this rule of ~75 characters is nice to have in our back pocket, it's most helpful when we’re trying to figure out the maximum width of our text block. More on this in a bit.

Also, I’d recommend setting that width on a container or grid class that wraps the paragraph instead of setting a max-width value on the paragraph element itself.

Kind of like this:

<div class="container"> <p>This is where our text goes.</p> </div>

p { font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px; } .container { max-width: 600px; }

Otherwise, there may be moments in the future when there's a need for certain paragraphs to be bigger and have a wider measure (like for introductory paragraphs perhaps). In those situations, making a different container class that just handles the larger width of the elements inside them is a nice and modular approach.

I’ve found that by having a system of classes that just deals with the width of things encourages writing much less code but also much more legible code as well. Although, yes, there is more HTML to write but I’d say that’s preferable to a lot of whacky CSS that has to be refactored in the future.

In short: make sure to set a good max-width for our paragraphs but also ensure that we set the widths on a parent class to keep our code readable.

Rule #2: Make the line height smaller than you think

One problem I often see in the wild is with paragraphs that have a line height that’s just way too big. This makes reading long blocks of text pretty exhausting and cumbersome as each hop from one line to the next feels like an enormous jump.

On mobile devices this is particularly egregious as I tend to see something like this often:

For some reason, a lot of folks tend to think that paragraphs on smaller devices require a larger line-height value — but this isn’t the case! Because the width of paragraphs are smaller, line-height can be even smaller than you might on desktop displays. That’s because on smaller screens, and with smaller paragraphs, the reader’s eye has a much shorter distance to hop from the end of one line to the beginning of the next.

This demo certainly isn’t typographically perfect (there’s no such thing), but it’s much easier to read than the majority of websites I stumble across today. In this example, notice how the line-height is probably much smaller than you’re familiar with and see how it feels as you read it:

See the Pen Typography Example 1 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

Rule #3: Make the margins small on mobile, too

Another common mistake I frequently see is the use of very large margins on either side of a paragraph of text, it's often on mobile devices that make for blocks of text that are difficult to read like this:

Just — yikes! How are we expected to read this?

Instead try using no more than 10-15px of margin on either side of the paragraph because we need to ensure that our paragraphs are as wide as possible on smaller devices.

I even see folks bump the font-size down on mobile to try and have a nice paragraph width but I’d highly recommend to avoid this as well. Think of the context, because mobile devices are often held in front of the user's face. There's no need to force the user to bring the device any closer to read a small block of text.

Most of the time, smaller margins are the better solve.

Rule #4: Make sure that the type isn’t too thin

This is perhaps my biggest complaint when it comes to typography on the web because so many websites use extraordinarily thin sans-serif typefaces for paragraph text. This makes reading difficult because it’s harder to see each stroke in a letter when they begin to fade away into the background due to the lack of contrast.

Here’s an example of using a typeface that’s too thin:

See the Pen Typography Example – Thin by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

Try and read the text there. Do you notice yourself struggling to read it? Because we’re using the light weight of Open Sans in this example, letterforms start to break apart and fall to bits. More focus is required to read it. Legibility decreases and reading becomes much more annoying than it really has to be.

I recommend picking a regular weight for body text, then trying to read a long string of text with those settings. Thin fonts look cute and pretty at a glance, but reading it in a longer form will reveal the difficulties.

Rule #5: Use bold weights for headings

Clear hierarchy is vital for controlling the focus of the reader, especially in complex applications that show a ton of data. And although it used to be more common a couple of years ago, I still tend to see a lot folks use very thin weights or regular weights for headings on websites. Again, this isn’t necessarily a die-hard rule — it’s a suggestion. That said, how difficult is it to scan this headline:

See the Pen Typography Example – Heading 1 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

It’s a little difficult to see in this example but it's easy to missing the headline altogether in a large application with lots of UI. I’ve often found that inexperienced typographers tend to create hierarchy with font-size whilst experienced typographers will lead with font-weight instead.

Here’s an example of something much easier to scan:

See the Pen Typography Example – Heading 2 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

In this example, I’ve set the paragraph text to a dark gray and the heading to a color closer to black while applying a bold weight. It’s not a substantial change in the code but it’s an enormous improvement in terms of hierarchy.

Little improvement like this will quickly add up to a better experience overall when the user is asked to slog through a ton of text.

Rule #6: Don’t use Lorem Ipsum to typeset a page

I think this advice might be the most underrated and I rarely hear it raised in front-end, typography, or design groups. I’ve even noticed seasoned designers struggle to typeset a page because Lorem Ipsum is used for the placeholder content, which makes it impossible for to gauge whether a paragraph of text is easy to read or not.

Setting text in Lorem Ipsum makes good typesetting kind of impossible.

Instead, pick text that you really enjoy reading. Ideally, typesetting would be done with finalized content but that's often a luxury in front-end development. That's why I’d recommend picking text that sounds close to the voice and tone of the project if there's a lack of actual content.

Seriously though, this one change will have an enormous impact on legibility and hierarchy because it encourages reading the text instead of looking at it all aesthetically. I noticed a massive improvement in my own designs when I stopped using undecipherable Lorem Ipsum text and picked content from my favorite novels instead.

And that’s it! There sure are a lot of rules when it comes to typography and these are merely the ones I tend to see broken the most. What kind of typographic issues do you see on the web though? Let us know in the comments!

The post Six tips for better web typography appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Six tips for better web typography published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[siliconwebx]

Six tips for better web typography

How do we avoid the most common mistakes when it comes to setting type on the web? That’s the question that’s been stuck in my head lately as I’ve noticed a lot of typography that’s lackluster, frustrating, and difficult to read. So, how can we improve interfaces so that our content is easy to read at all times and contexts? How do learn from everyone else’s mistakes, too?

These questions encouraged me to jot down some rules that are easy to apply and have the greatest impact on legibility, based on my own personal experience. And, if you didn't know, I'm kinda a geek when it comes to typography. So, I thought I'd share the following six rules that I've come to adopt to get us started.

Rule #1: Set a good max-width for paragraphs

This is typically referred to as the measure in typographic circles and highly esteemed typographers will recommend that a paragraph have a width of around 75 characters for legibility reasons. Anything longer than that becomes difficult to read and causes unnecessary strain on the eyes because of the distance the eye has to travel left-to-right and back again (assuming ltr that is).

Here’s a quick example of a good max-width setting for a paragraph. Oh, and make sure to check out this demo on larger screen devices.

See the Pen Typography Example 1 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

Now, this all depends on a ton of factors that great designers contemplate when setting a paragraph. However, as web designers, the difficulty for us is that we have to make sure that paragraphs feel good in additional contexts, like on mobile devices, too. So, while this rule of ~75 characters is nice to have in our back pocket, it's most helpful when we’re trying to figure out the maximum width of our text block. More on this in a bit.

Also, I’d recommend setting that width on a container or grid class that wraps the paragraph instead of setting a max-width value on the paragraph element itself.

Kind of like this:

<div class="container"> <p>This is where our text goes.</p> </div>

p { font-size: 18px; line-height: 24px; } .container { max-width: 600px; }

Otherwise, there may be moments in the future when there's a need for certain paragraphs to be bigger and have a wider measure (like for introductory paragraphs perhaps). In those situations, making a different container class that just handles the larger width of the elements inside them is a nice and modular approach.

I’ve found that by having a system of classes that just deals with the width of things encourages writing much less code but also much more legible code as well. Although, yes, there is more HTML to write but I’d say that’s preferable to a lot of whacky CSS that has to be refactored in the future.

In short: make sure to set a good max-width for our paragraphs but also ensure that we set the widths on a parent class to keep our code readable.

Rule #2: Make the line height smaller than you think

One problem I often see in the wild is with paragraphs that have a line height that’s just way too big. This makes reading long blocks of text pretty exhausting and cumbersome as each hop from one line to the next feels like an enormous jump.

On mobile devices this is particularly egregious as I tend to see something like this often:

For some reason, a lot of folks tend to think that paragraphs on smaller devices require a larger line-height value — but this isn’t the case! Because the width of paragraphs are smaller, line-height can be even smaller than you might on desktop displays. That’s because on smaller screens, and with smaller paragraphs, the reader’s eye has a much shorter distance to hop from the end of one line to the beginning of the next.

This demo certainly isn’t typographically perfect (there’s no such thing), but it’s much easier to read than the majority of websites I stumble across today. In this example, notice how the line-height is probably much smaller than you’re familiar with and see how it feels as you read it:

See the Pen Typography Example 1 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

Rule #3: Make the margins small on mobile, too

Another common mistake I frequently see is the use of very large margins on either side of a paragraph of text, it's often on mobile devices that make for blocks of text that are difficult to read like this:

Just — yikes! How are we expected to read this?

Instead try using no more than 10-15px of margin on either side of the paragraph because we need to ensure that our paragraphs are as wide as possible on smaller devices.

I even see folks bump the font-size down on mobile to try and have a nice paragraph width but I’d highly recommend to avoid this as well. Think of the context, because mobile devices are often held in front of the user's face. There's no need to force the user to bring the device any closer to read a small block of text.

Most of the time, smaller margins are the better solve.

Rule #4: Make sure that the type isn’t too thin

This is perhaps my biggest complaint when it comes to typography on the web because so many websites use extraordinarily thin sans-serif typefaces for paragraph text. This makes reading difficult because it’s harder to see each stroke in a letter when they begin to fade away into the background due to the lack of contrast.

Here’s an example of using a typeface that’s too thin:

See the Pen Typography Example – Thin by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

Try and read the text there. Do you notice yourself struggling to read it? Because we’re using the light weight of Open Sans in this example, letterforms start to break apart and fall to bits. More focus is required to read it. Legibility decreases and reading becomes much more annoying than it really has to be.

I recommend picking a regular weight for body text, then trying to read a long string of text with those settings. Thin fonts look cute and pretty at a glance, but reading it in a longer form will reveal the difficulties.

Rule #5: Use bold weights for headings

Clear hierarchy is vital for controlling the focus of the reader, especially in complex applications that show a ton of data. And although it used to be more common a couple of years ago, I still tend to see a lot folks use very thin weights or regular weights for headings on websites. Again, this isn’t necessarily a die-hard rule — it’s a suggestion. That said, how difficult is it to scan this headline:

See the Pen Typography Example – Heading 1 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

It’s a little difficult to see in this example but it's easy to missing the headline altogether in a large application with lots of UI. I’ve often found that inexperienced typographers tend to create hierarchy with font-size whilst experienced typographers will lead with font-weight instead.

Here’s an example of something much easier to scan:

See the Pen Typography Example – Heading 2 by Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) on CodePen.

In this example, I’ve set the paragraph text to a dark gray and the heading to a color closer to black while applying a bold weight. It’s not a substantial change in the code but it’s an enormous improvement in terms of hierarchy.

Little improvement like this will quickly add up to a better experience overall when the user is asked to slog through a ton of text.

Rule #6: Don’t use Lorem Ipsum to typeset a page

I think this advice might be the most underrated and I rarely hear it raised in front-end, typography, or design groups. I’ve even noticed seasoned designers struggle to typeset a page because Lorem Ipsum is used for the placeholder content, which makes it impossible for to gauge whether a paragraph of text is easy to read or not.

Setting text in Lorem Ipsum makes good typesetting kind of impossible.

Instead, pick text that you really enjoy reading. Ideally, typesetting would be done with finalized content but that's often a luxury in front-end development. That's why I’d recommend picking text that sounds close to the voice and tone of the project if there's a lack of actual content.

Seriously though, this one change will have an enormous impact on legibility and hierarchy because it encourages reading the text instead of looking at it all aesthetically. I noticed a massive improvement in my own designs when I stopped using undecipherable Lorem Ipsum text and picked content from my favorite novels instead.

And that’s it! There sure are a lot of rules when it comes to typography and these are merely the ones I tend to see broken the most. What kind of typographic issues do you see on the web though? Let us know in the comments!

The post Six tips for better web typography appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

😉SiliconWebX | 🌐CSS-Tricks

[vidmrkting75038]

Empowerment Vs. Manipulation: A Rant

Empowerment Vs. Manipulation: A Rant

There’s been a heated argument happening between UX and CRO. One side believes in equipping the user to make the best decisions for their specific needs. The other side, while generally well-intentioned, has a sub-group of professionals who believe in using tricks to get users to convert.

Let’s break down both of these…

Manipulation: Using psychological principles to influence (trick) a person to take an action. Result: Short-term success, poor long-term brand affinity.

Empowerment: Using an empathetic approach to understand the user’s needs, and giving them what is most useful and informative at the right time so they can make the best decision for themselves. Result: Gradual (and sustainable) long-term success, strong brand affinity.

Empowerment gives the user an opportunity to self-qualify. Manipulation tricks any user to skip the self-qualifying and take an action.

Let’s look at a few examples.

In-Person Manipulation: Liking.

A salesperson gives you an unsolicited (disingenuous) compliment with the intent to get you to like them, which will increase the likelihood that you’ll buy from them.

So you buy from them, thinking their intentions are good because well, you liked them. But this isn’t sustainable. Eventually, you figure it out…

*Listening to audio-tape*

This, my friends, is manipulation 101.

The takeaway from this is also: Consumers aren’t stupid. We eventually come around to these tactics. And when we do, we are very unlikely to engage with a brand that has used them on us.

A digital example of manipulation: Scarcity

Lots of brands will create an unnecessary element of urgency to get you to act quickly without giving yourself the chance to get all the information you need.

You might see this as a simple “limited time” promotion. But a closer look (or a savvy marketer) will show that this is a straight up manipulation tactic. They are limiting the amount of time you actually need to read about the product and make a decision. It takes away from the opportunity to learn about the actual factors that matter when making a decision to purchase. It uses a sense of urgency and scarcity to make us feel FOMO.

We’ve all purchased things simply because they were on sale or because it was a limited time offer. This usually ends up as a regret and gives us negative vibes about the place we bought it from.

A digital example of manipulation: Identity and Friction

This manipulation tactic is one of the most infuriating…

A closer look…

One might interpret this popup as just another common lead generation element. But can we be honest about what the brand who serves up this message is really saying?

Prompt: “Are you an idiot?” Opt-In Button: “Of course not. I’m smart! Sell me something!” Opt-Out Button: “Yes, I’m personally and professionally useless”

There is too much micro-aggression and shaming like this all over the web.

There are two principle methods of manipulation happening in most of these instances.

One method of manipulation is within the copy of the opt-in and opt-out selections (Identity).

Semper Plugins

“Of course I want to improve my SEO. Oh no, I’m not the type of person who is fine with crappy SEO!”

When presented with choices that require us to make to a claim about who we are, we are subconsciously saying these things about ourselves as we weigh the two options. When we claim a certain trait or characteristic about ourselves, we become committed to it and will make irrational decisions to validate it.

The other method of manipulation is found within the design (Friction).

Take a look at the design differences between the opt-in and opt-out buttons of these examples…

SocialTriggers

Bulk.ly

(REALLY??) Babylist

Notice how different the treatments are between the “opting in” button and the “opting out” button. The designer gave more contrast and legibility to the button they want you to choose, not necessarily the button that is most useful to you.

Sometimes, they will even make this opt-out button harder to find or click. Or straight up exclude an opt-out button!

The brain goes for the path of least resistance, and there can be a lot of resistance when playing hide-and-seek with an opt-out button.

This isn’t just manipulation, it’s being a jerk.

Want to know what people are thinking when they see these?

Imagine walking into a shop at the mall. An employee walks up to you, “Hello! Would you like to save money today, or are you not interested in being a better person?”

Anyone’s reaction:

On top of that, they pretend to not hear you when you tell them “no.”

The Importance of Context

Context also makes a difference when brands decide to use this shaming tactic.

On some sites, users might already be feeling vulnerable due to the general category they are browsing or problem they are trying to solve. This includes things like health and fitness, or dieting websites.

Ultimate Paleo Diet

This is unethical on a number of levels. It’s the opposite of empowerment: it’s shaming. Again, imagine if someone said that to you in person at the gym.

“Would you like a starter kit to help you lose weight? Or do you know everything already?”

Also, disrespecting your visitors is never acceptable. See some of the reactions that ultimatepaleoguide.com got on Twitter…

The best part here is when the owner of the brand gets involved in the conversation (not sure if they fully understood the point of the initial post).

Click here to see the full thread on Twitter.

It’s a really simple fix. Give a crap. It’s that easy. Care about your visitors, don’t disrespect them or insult their intelligence.

Although, there are brands out there who are getting it (sort of) right with these types of lead generation tactics.

Here are some examples of how to do it better:

It doesn’t take a lot of effort or resources to be respectful of your users. All it really takes is giving them a chance to make a choice of their own.

Kunocreative.com

Ah, much better. A nicely placed, easy-to-find “x” to close the popup. Thank you!

Sumo.com

Almost there! Two buttons to close/opt-out that are easy to find and no shaming copy for those who aren’t interested.

These psychological principles should be leveraged for the good of a user, not for a quick conversion.

From the UX goal of matching user needs with helpful content, these manipulation tactics are literally going backward. They are adding friction to satisfy their need for leads while completely ignoring the user’s actual goal.

Good UX presents you with equal or similar treatment for an “opt-in” or “opt-out” selection. Let users qualify themselves, and help nudge them in the right direction along the way.

Optimize for the user, not for conversions.

https://ift.tt/2N2nCp7

[constructionsworkr3053]

Empowerment Vs. Manipulation: A Rant

Empowerment Vs. Manipulation: A Rant

There’s been a heated argument happening between UX and CRO. One side believes in equipping the user to make the best decisions for their specific needs. The other side, while generally well-intentioned, has a sub-group of professionals who believe in using tricks to get users to convert.

Let’s break down both of these…

Manipulation: Using psychological principles to influence (trick) a person to take an action. Result: Short-term success, poor long-term brand affinity.

Empowerment: Using an empathetic approach to understand the user’s needs, and giving them what is most useful and informative at the right time so they can make the best decision for themselves. Result: Gradual (and sustainable) long-term success, strong brand affinity.

Empowerment gives the user an opportunity to self-qualify. Manipulation tricks any user to skip the self-qualifying and take an action.

Let’s look at a few examples.

In-Person Manipulation: Liking.

A salesperson gives you an unsolicited (disingenuous) compliment with the intent to get you to like them, which will increase the likelihood that you’ll buy from them.

So you buy from them, thinking their intentions are good because well, you liked them. But this isn’t sustainable. Eventually, you figure it out…

*Listening to audio-tape*

This, my friends, is manipulation 101.

The takeaway from this is also: Consumers aren’t stupid. We eventually come around to these tactics. And when we do, we are very unlikely to engage with a brand that has used them on us.

A digital example of manipulation: Scarcity

Lots of brands will create an unnecessary element of urgency to get you to act quickly without giving yourself the chance to get all the information you need.

You might see this as a simple “limited time” promotion. But a closer look (or a savvy marketer) will show that this is a straight up manipulation tactic. They are limiting the amount of time you actually need to read about the product and make a decision. It takes away from the opportunity to learn about the actual factors that matter when making a decision to purchase. It uses a sense of urgency and scarcity to make us feel FOMO.

We’ve all purchased things simply because they were on sale or because it was a limited time offer. This usually ends up as a regret and gives us negative vibes about the place we bought it from.

A digital example of manipulation: Identity and Friction

This manipulation tactic is one of the most infuriating…

A closer look…

One might interpret this popup as just another common lead generation element. But can we be honest about what the brand who serves up this message is really saying?

Prompt: “Are you an idiot?” Opt-In Button: “Of course not. I’m smart! Sell me something!” Opt-Out Button: “Yes, I’m personally and professionally useless”

There is too much micro-aggression and shaming like this all over the web.

There are two principle methods of manipulation happening in most of these instances.

One method of manipulation is within the copy of the opt-in and opt-out selections (Identity).

Semper Plugins

“Of course I want to improve my SEO. Oh no, I’m not the type of person who is fine with crappy SEO!”

When presented with choices that require us to make to a claim about who we are, we are subconsciously saying these things about ourselves as we weigh the two options. When we claim a certain trait or characteristic about ourselves, we become committed to it and will make irrational decisions to validate it.

The other method of manipulation is found within the design (Friction).

Take a look at the design differences between the opt-in and opt-out buttons of these examples…

SocialTriggers

Bulk.ly

(REALLY??) Babylist

Notice how different the treatments are between the “opting in” button and the “opting out” button. The designer gave more contrast and legibility to the button they want you to choose, not necessarily the button that is most useful to you.

Sometimes, they will even make this opt-out button harder to find or click. Or straight up exclude an opt-out button!

The brain goes for the path of least resistance, and there can be a lot of resistance when playing hide-and-seek with an opt-out button.

This isn’t just manipulation, it’s being a jerk.

Want to know what people are thinking when they see these?

Imagine walking into a shop at the mall. An employee walks up to you, “Hello! Would you like to save money today, or are you not interested in being a better person?”

Anyone’s reaction:

On top of that, they pretend to not hear you when you tell them “no.”

The Importance of Context

Context also makes a difference when brands decide to use this shaming tactic.

On some sites, users might already be feeling vulnerable due to the general category they are browsing or problem they are trying to solve. This includes things like health and fitness, or dieting websites.

Ultimate Paleo Diet

This is unethical on a number of levels. It’s the opposite of empowerment: it’s shaming. Again, imagine if someone said that to you in person at the gym.

“Would you like a starter kit to help you lose weight? Or do you know everything already?”

Also, disrespecting your visitors is never acceptable. See some of the reactions that ultimatepaleoguide.com got on Twitter…

The best part here is when the owner of the brand gets involved in the conversation (not sure if they fully understood the point of the initial post).

Click here to see the full thread on Twitter.

It’s a really simple fix. Give a crap. It’s that easy. Care about your visitors, don’t disrespect them or insult their intelligence.

Although, there are brands out there who are getting it (sort of) right with these types of lead generation tactics.

Here are some examples of how to do it better:

It doesn’t take a lot of effort or resources to be respectful of your users. All it really takes is giving them a chance to make a choice of their own.

Kunocreative.com

Ah, much better. A nicely placed, easy-to-find “x” to close the popup. Thank you!

Sumo.com

Almost there! Two buttons to close/opt-out that are easy to find and no shaming copy for those who aren’t interested.

These psychological principles should be leveraged for the good of a user, not for a quick conversion.

From the UX goal of matching user needs with helpful content, these manipulation tactics are literally going backward. They are adding friction to satisfy their need for leads while completely ignoring the user’s actual goal.

Good UX presents you with equal or similar treatment for an “opt-in” or “opt-out” selection. Let users qualify themselves, and help nudge them in the right direction along the way.

Optimize for the user, not for conversions.

https://ift.tt/2N2nCp7