Zephyr Dear

Once upon a time I wrote code to ferry packets of information from a radar antenna to a graphical display. I wrote this code because a company paid me money to do it, and because it made my manager smile and say “good job!” when I wrote it and it worked the way he wanted it to, and because I enjoyed writing code.

I was glad I got money, because I could use the money to rent an apartment and support my family, which made them glad. My manager was glad because his managers smiled and said “good job!”. That manager was happy because the good working code pleased the people from the Federal Aviation Administration who had contracted for it and ensured that they would contract for more software in the future. The people from the FAA were glad, because the President had tasked them with making air transit faster and safer, and getting the good working code meant that they made a good choice when they contracted with my employer.

The President tasked the people from the FAA with improving air traffic control, because the people who elected him wanted go and visit their children and their grandparents and their siblings and the people they had a crush on and very much wanted to see again. And also many people wanted to travel to other cities to work on their own projects that they would get money and recognition for. And all of these people wanted to not have to stand in long lines, and they wanted make these trips as quickly as they could without feeling scared of dying.

That good, working code made quite a lot of people happy.

Another time, I worked at a company to help them write programs that would help medical researchers manage clinical studies so that they could make new medicines so that people wouldn’t get so sick and so those people and their kids and husbands and wives and parents would be happy that they weren’t sick so much.

When I worked at this company I wrote some good, working code that I could use over and over again to solve problems more easily than I could have if I had to start from scratch every time. And this made me happy and less frustrated. So I wrapped that helpful code up into an imaginary box called a “library” and shared it with all the other programmers I knew.

The helpful code helped those other programmers so much that they were happier and less frustrated too, and they smiled and said “thank you” to me, and this made me even happier and made me want to write more helpful code.

Once, a long time ago, I started to learn two new programming languages that would make it easier for me to write good, helpful code. But some of the people I met who used one of the languages seemed angry and condescending a lot of the time. (“Condescending” means that they acted like they were better than people who did programming differently than they did). This made me not want to be part of that programming language community.

The people who used the other new programming language mostly seemed happy and kind and even a little bit silly. And this made me want to be happy and silly with them. So I used that language a lot, and learned a lot about it, and wrote a lot of code to help other people with it, and then I helped other people learn the language themselves.

A great many other programmers also wanted to be happy and silly and write code with this language. And sometimes the code they wrote was more silly than happy, and sometimes it was so silly that it turned out not to be so helpful after all, especially when the old programmers left and new programmers had to to work on it.

But many other programmers had ideas that were very clever and helpful indeed, and so quite a lot of projects made quite a lot of people happy using this happy, silly language. And so I think that if you want to have as much help as you can get, it’s good to be happy and kind and a little bit silly.

Once, a very long time ago indeed, there was a programmer who wanted to make good, helpful code. But all of the programs which were around back then had been made by people who did not want to share them. And so if this programmer wanted to make any of the programs better and more helpful, he first had to promise not to share them with anyone else.

This made the programmer sad and even a little mad. So he decided to write all-new programs from scratch, programs that he could share for free with anyone who wanted them.

You might think this programmer had no hope to recreate the work of hundreds of other programmers who had been working for years on these programs, at big companies that gave them lots of money.  But a funny thing happened. Being able to share their code made other programmers so happy, that they joined his cause and started helping him to write his new system of programs.

The new system grew, and grew, and more and more programmers helped because it made them happy. And soon many of the new, shared programs became even better than the old, not-shared programs. And new programmers started writing programs on top of the shared programs.

One programmer wrote a whole operating system using these shared programs, just for fun! An operating system is the program that starts all the other programs on your computer.

But these new, shared programs didn’t just make programmers happier. They grew, and grew, and got better, and better, and they filled the whole world! They helped people all over the world do things that made them happy, like buying clothes, playing games, investing money, and writing poetry. In fact, some of those new shared programs that made programmers happy are helping you read this story, can you believe that? I certainly hope this story is making you happy too.

One day a programmer wrote some code that didn’t make her totally happy. It was code that did a good job. But she thought it looked ugly, and she knew that when code looked ugly to her that was often a clue that it would be hard to work on later. And she didn’t want to make her future self sad and frustrated with code that was hard to work on.

And so she wrote me a message, and showed me the code she had written, because she knew I had been writing ugly code longer than she had, and so I might have learned more about how to make it not-ugly. And since it makes me happy to help people and it makes me happy to make code less ugly, I worked with her on it. And because we both had similar ideas about what makes code less ugly, together we were able to change the code to look prettier to both of us. (Programmers often agree on what kind of code is pretty and makes them happy to look at, but not always!)

We were both happy to have made code that was pretty. And when later on, other programmers worked on that code, it made them happy too.

Of course, I don’t always write code to make other people happy. One day I was curious about whether I could solve a tricky problem in a clever way using code. And so I sat down to try and find out, because answering questions is one of the things that makes me feel good.

After a while I found out that I could, indeed, solve the problem in that clever way. It wasn’t a problem that anyone needed help with right at that moment, but just looking at the solution made me feel happy and satisfied.

Later I went upstairs from my office, and gave my wife a big smile and a kiss, and then I played video games with my kids for a while. My wife knows that solving problems is one of the things that gives me pleasure, so she’s happy for me when I’m able to do it. My kids don’t understand this yet, but that’s OK. They just know that they are happy when their daddy is happy.

One day an alien from a star very far away arrived in orbit around Earth. No one knew the alien was there, because its ship was very small and painted black.

The alien used powerful telescopes and other sensors to observe the people of earth. It saw that there were some humans who sat in front of computers all day, tapping away with their funny little human fingers (It had computers of its own, so it knew what one was).

The alien didn’t understand human symbols or language. But it had very special instruments that could tell what creatures of any kind were feeling. It could see that the humans were writing things on their computers which made them feel happy, or pleased, or just satisfied. And it could see that they shared those things with other humans, which made the other humans happier. And then those humans went on to do work which made still other humans happier.

The alien didn’t know if the humans were writing poems or algorithms. All it could see was that they worked day in and day out on things which clearly existed just to make themselves and other humans feel good feelings. And that is what the alien reported back to the other aliens who had sent it.

And that is the story of how the great and powerful Blortian Star Empire decided not to vaporize the earth.

We need to talk about Pearl. Because a lot of you are taking an extremely meta angle on what’s going on in the story right now between Pearl, Rose Quartz, Greg, and Steven. And I want to get back into the crucial context of the story so far to make what’s happening clear.

First, a couple establishing facts: Pearl is not coded white, she is played by a Filipina woman. She is, however, clearly coded as a lesbian, and as mentally ill, both from a viewer’s perspective and within the context of her own society.

Gems are ancient. Unfathomably old and functionally ageless. The entire lifetime of a human being is a summer afternoon to a Gem, the rise and fall of entire cultures and societies merely passing events. Time is different to a Gem.

More than 6,000 years ago, Pearl arrived on Earth, presumably in the company of Rose Quartz, Ruby, and Sapphire, in relation to the task of using the earth to create new Gems. They started a rebellion and were left in exile on the planet.

Steven Universe is no more than 10 years old. Even if 6,000 years were the entire lifetime of a gem, or the equivalent of 80 years for a human, Steven’s life so far would amount to less than 1/8th of a year. Or a couple of months.

To put that in perspective for you, that means that Rose Quartz’s death has scarcely even passed to the perspective of the Crystal Gems. It has been the subjective equivalent of a few weeks. And in that tiny span of time for such long-lived beings, the remnants of their leader and the one Pearl loved most (yes, romantically, you putz) has developed into one of these just as brief little squishy earth monsters that she somehow became so enamored with that she sacrificed her own existence just to create/become one.

People are declaring Pearl an abuser, that she shouldn’t even be allowed around anyone else, least of all Steven, on account of her having uncontrolled outbursts of grief about the death of someone she was in love with almost no time ago at all from her perspective and from the perspective of the other gems. Given that Pearl is already established as someone who has poor emotional control and exhibits characteristics that in humans would be called autism or a personality disorder, do you really find it reasonable to expect her to be perfectly calm, cool, collected, normal, In the face of a being who has essentially co-opted her love’s life force in order to exist? Or do you simply think that people like her, within the narrative and without, shouldn’t be allowed around other people?

I’m asking as one of those people, by the way. Would you expect a human to mourn in a day? Would you expect a mentally ill human to? Would you expect that they isolate themselves from the only family they have left in the world because they couldn’t handle it with flawless grace? Now how about a member of an alien species that, as far as anyone can tell, doesn’t even have children or a social concept of child rearing?

I sure hope not. Personally, I’m impressed with how well Pearl is doing.

Twitter can be a gold mine for writers. Case in point, when pro writers decide to go on a rant about the craft, such as Eric Heisserer, who occasionally will sidle up to Twitter with a libation at hand, and lay down some flat-out wisdom, 140 characters at a time.

Last night, Eric took to the Twitter-verse to discuss a problem that vexes all writers from time to time: Falling out of love with a story. Reprinted in its entirety by permission.

OH HEY GUESS WHAT TIME IT IS? (D&D figure for scale) pic.twitter.com/P3tq1ur7tU

— Eric Heisserer (@HIGHzurrer) June 19, 2015

That’s right, gorgeous monsters, Uncle Eric is on Twitter tonight and ready to rumble! By that I mean slur my words and talk writing.

TONIGHT: I wanna talk about something a little different. Let’s get into a problem in just about any creative endeavor: Losing the love.

Burnout. Stress. Overthinking. All manner of culprits can get you to a point where you don’t know why you’re writing a thing anymore.

It’s a trap I have faced time and again. I get into the weeds on a script and forget why I wanted to write it in the first place.

Or somewhere along the way, I start writing to manage producer notes and I lose personal agency in the story. And that stops the love.

Or even worse, I’m all on my own, tinkering on something, and I begin writing in anticipation of notes I haven’t even gotten. Love = gone.

This line of work is taxing, and in insidious ways not as noticeable as an athlete’s injuries. It will drain you if you’re not careful.

You have to reclaim your passion for a story the way you would a relationship. You have to want to make it work; make it great.

Sometimes that means stepping away and coming back to it later. Sometimes that means rediscovering what made you fall for it at the start.

— Eric Heisserer (@HIGHzurrer) June 19, 2015

And once in a while you have to realize that you have nothing else to give to a project, and must part ways. But let’s talk inspiration.

I’ll start by focusing on writing for a producer/studio, but for those not in that place yet, it can apply to your trusted review circle.

I’ve noticed I can fall into a rut where I have stopped being inventive with a story because I’m too busy addressing notes; a worker bee.

I can fall out of love with a script when I’m trying to fix something on page 57 and nothing clicks. I’m just moving furniture for them.

More often than not, the only remedy is for me to get out of furniture-mover mode and look at stuff with NO notes, like page 32 here.

I get afraid to kill some darling that works, is a solid 7/10 somewhere, when I need to replace it with a 9/10 in order to fix other stuff.

Or I get too low to the ground on a script, fussing with minutiae, when what I need is a new Big Idea to shake the cobwebs loose.

Having worked for a non-Hwood corporation, there’s a period early on where you can clearly see what’s weird about company policy.

But the people there have been in it for too long to notice that it’s strange some manager goes through their mail first, or whatever.

And after a few months — usually about six — you will also become indoctrinated into the culture without knowing it.

Same applies to working on a script. At the start, what you want to do is so clear. But farther down the road, it gets murky.

And producers who’ve been on a project longer than you will be even more blind to it. They’ll clutch broken things because it’s familiar.

And often, for me, that loss of love on those projects happens when I’ve started ignoring what’s ‘off’ to fix smaller things.

So: Let yourself go, and shake things up. Try a few pages from another character's POV. Make a villain do a noble thing. Or a wicked hero.

— Eric Heisserer (@HIGHzurrer) June 19, 2015

Or hell, sometimes all you need is to reclaim your authorial voice and write a short story. A poem. Make a music video. Paint.

We writers are different from every other guild in this business. How? WE are the purveyors of intellectual property. It’s ours first.

Don’t forget that — we can stand on our chairs and say, “The story goes this way!” That’s what we’re paid to do, ostensibly.

So feel free to trick yourself into having fun again. To love again.

My buddy @wilzmak does a cool thing by imagining a wildly different actor/actress for a role. That can shake things loose like whoa.

The question that drives you isn't "what do I write for this story" but "what do I love about this story" — let passion take the wheel.

— Eric Heisserer (@HIGHzurrer) June 19, 2015

Sometimes I just add in a brand new ingredient into my story and mix it up that way. Lots of talking? Action sequence! Chaos! Reactions!

Is the problem that you don’t love a character in a story? Follow them outside the scripted pages, make them the coolest one in the movie.

I’ve also had troubles with a scene in my second act, always slogging things down — so I cut it entirely. Just referenced it later. Bam!

Try that out at times with your other readers/producers/execs. How many notice? How many miss something you improved by omitting?

Or maybe everything just feels like shit. Maybe you can’t write. The well is dry. Thinking hurts. Refill the well! Sharpen your saw.

Watch your favorite movies/TV. Read a book you’ve been meaning to read. Or spend a weekend doing nothing approximating work. Recharge.

If you love writing, set it free. If you come back refreshed, writing is your true love. If not, for fuck’s sake find another love.

We all get this. I know it’s not much of a concession to tell you, but you are absolutely not alone in that miasma of loveless doubt.

It’s even part of the process, really. You have to fall out of love in order to fall deeper the next time; to make it better. Smarter.

So, try to treat your material like you would want your spouse to treat you. Have your script drive you to the airport — wait, not that.

I mean to say — try not to take your frustrations out on the script, or the person who’s given you the note that something doesn’t work.

It’s reflexive to do that, and I still do it a lot. But really, that just breeds more negativity to the project. And you want passion.

Something I’ve started doing since I directed is: See the project from the eyes of an actor. Or a cinematographer. Make that person excited.

If you read a script of mine and you find some specific sound design, or scoring, or an odd camera move, that’s me falling in love again.

I know this is so easily transposed to love life advice but hell, make your story a sensory experience.

— Eric Heisserer (@HIGHzurrer) June 19, 2015

And on that note, I’m gonna finish this glass and read some Ted Chiang. Because damn does he get my imagination jump-started.

As usual, when Eric tipples the Scotch and dons his Mentor mask, he delivers wisdom from on high.

If I may add a coda: When you begin a writing project, take a few minutes to write down what draws you to it, what your emotional connection to the story is, why you’re passionate to write it. Then set that document in a safe place.

Later on, if you find yourself cursing the heavens and gnashing your teeth — not an easy double to pull off! — go back to that document. Read your words. Remind yourself what it was that excited you about it in the first place.

That may provide a conduit for you back to a happy place.

You may follow Eric on Twitter: @HIGHzurrer.

You may read my April 2013 interview with Eric here.

roachpatrol:

naamahdarling:

naamahdarling:

houseofalexzander:

All the feels.

It’s really exciting to see the masculine things I disliked about my body present in a photo like this, and not being afraid to post it.
My short hair, wide shoulders & even my scruff!
I used to hate all these parts of my body.
Not anymore.

If you have body issues now and then, it’s okay. So do I now and again.
Just remember you’re beautiful in your own kinds of ways. You don’t need anyone to define beauty for you!
❤

Xoxo
-Elliott Alexzander

T_T

How are you so ludicrously radiant?!

u know what?

i’m reblogging this pic AGAIN because it makes me so transcendently happy to look at it.

i think it’s obvious by now that i just find elliott alexzander fucking delightful.

but this specific picture contains so many things I love.

and, interestingly, the wide shoulders and scruff and short hair are a HUGE PART OF THAT.  those things are part of what makes them so distinctive, and so beautiful.

i’m just really smitten with this picture.  my favorite fashion pic i’ve seen in a long, long time.

how beautiful!

At The Christian Century, Mark Stoll writes about “The historical roots of evangelical anti-environmentalism.”

That’s not quite an accurate headline. Stoll really addresses the theological roots of [white] evangelical anti-environmentalism — with a good discussion of evangelical individualism:

Theologically, evangelicalism has accentuated the role of individuals. Evangelicals emphasized the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19–20) to preach salvation to all, who must each personally experience God’s grace and accept Christ. They rejected state-supported churches in favor of voluntary churches of the saved. Colonial persecution and oppression of Baptists confirmed their resentment against active government roles in religion. Evangelicalism swept the South in the early 19th century only when it acceded (tacitly at first, then openly) to existing social and economic institutions. Then, this meant defending slavery; today, it means championing social and economic individualism and weak government. Reluctant reformers, evangelicals insist that only conversion of every individual will solve the nation’s social, economic, and environmental problems. Government’s main role is to get out of religion’s way.

Stoll also runs through the influence of a “dominion” ideology in American Protestantism. I’d have added several more theological factors: an otherworldly focus on the afterlife; premillennial dispensationalism and Rapture mania; etc.

But those are all theological roots. What about the “historical” roots, which Stoll’s piece barely touches on?

Those historical roots, I think, boil down to two main points:

The historical basis for white evangelical anti-environmentalism.

1. The attempt during the 1980s-1990s to make “New Age” the Next Big Threat for direct-mail fundraising and for tribal identification. (During those years, you were far more likely to read about “Gaia” in white evangelical media than anywhere else.) As Christian Smith said, white evangelicals can only thrive when they feel embattled. And since direct-mail fundraising works best when people are scared, the direct-mail industry that shapes white evangelical culture is always on the lookout for a new bogeyman.

But for all the hype, the “New Age movement” was too small, fringe-y and wifty to make a convincing villain on its own. So to serve as a proper tribal enemy, “New Age-ism” had to be recast more expansively, to include the Sierra Club, people who recycle, and that one church member trying to get everyone to use mugs instead of styrofoam cups during coffee hour.

2. Al Gore ran for president in 2000. Against a Republican. Thereafter, talk of climate change or of the heat-trapping properties of carbon was the moral equivalent of Satanic baby-killing.

There are other, less significant factors, too. We’ve seen decades of earnest anti-environmental propaganda from corporate tools and sock-puppets like Calvin Beisner of the “Cornwall Alliance,” or the folks at IRD. But those groups are too feckless and transparently dishonest to credit them with having much influence on anyone who didn’t previously agree with them.

And there’s also, of course, the reflexive anti-environmentalism and anti-government, anti-regulation ideology of large evangelical donors. I suppose white evangelical anti-environmentalism wouldn’t exist without their permission and encouragement, because nothing the tribe does is permitted to exist without their permission and encouragement.

Mainly, though, the historical roots of white evangelical antipathy to environmentalism and of white evangelical climate denialism comes down to two things: Shirley MacLaine and Al Gore. That’s it.

My Facebook wall has lately been tremendously full of people debating Ask/Guess/Tell culture. I think the only posts that have been created by this is Malcolm Ocean’s Reveal Culture and Brienne’s Against Being For Or Against Tell Culture; if there are others, I will add them in. (If you don’t know what Ask/Guess Culture is, you should probably read this.)

On Facebook, Brienne makes a tremendously important point: that “cultures” is a bad framing; in reality, it makes more sense to frame them as something like “strategies”. It is a very rare individual who communicates solely through Ask, Guess, or Reveal. A person may use Ask to find out if someone else wants to hang out this weekend, but Guess to figure out what birthday present to get their mom. People don’t even use solely Guess or Ask in particular domains: someone might use Guess-based flirting with a partner they predict to be equally adroit, and Ask-based flirting for someone they think is too insecure to read the signals properly. In light of this, I will be calling them “Guess”, “Ask”, and “Reveal.”

Malcolm dislikes the idea of Reveal/Tell being seen as “an extreme form of Ask Culture”: as he points out, the demands of Reveal are quite different, and the ways interactions work are different as well. However, I think there’s a sense in which Ask and Guess are on different parts of a spectrum on which Reveal is one extreme end. Most obviously, Ask is textual communication, Guess is subtextual communication. But I think there’s a more subtle thing about skills.

Of course, all three strategies involve certain discrete skill sets. To Guess, one must be able to give legible hints; to Ask, to say “no” without fracturing goodwill in the relationship; to Reveal, to phrase needs and preferences that might hurt one’s partner in a tactful manner. But certain skills Guess and Ask/Reveal use are opposites. Guess requires cognitive empathy, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand what they’re up to. Ask, conversely, requires introspection: the ability to figure out what you really really want. Guess demands less introspection (it doesn’t matter if you can figure out what you want as long as the person who might give it to you can); Ask, less cognitive empathy (confused about what someone wants? They’ll tell you!).

Reveal is extraordinarily demanding with regards to introspection: to make it work, you don’t just have to know what you want, you have to know what you want instrumentally and what you want terminally, how you function on a very basic level. One can imagine “Conceal Culture” on the extreme other end: extraordinarily demanding of cognitive empathy, with almost no introspection required. Perhaps its assumptions of trust are “I trust that you have a good model of me and my preferences; I trust that I can understand you well enough to meet your needs and follow your boundaries.”

I think one problem in discussions of Ask/Guess/Reveal is that, all too often, both the skills we possess and the skills we lack are invisible. If we are introspective and self-aware, we think of that as a skill everyone has, or at least that is easy to acquire. If we have very little cognitive empathy, our misunderstandings might register as Just What Happens When You Don’t Communicate, instead of a skill that can be learned. For instance, consider Wesley Fenza’s Let’s Not Gel:

On first glance, it seems as though Ask Culture is clearly the superior of the two. When everyone asks for what they want, everyone has more information from which to make informed decisions. When people only send subtle hints, misunderstandings abound. The only obvious disadvantage of Ask Culture is that it makes it difficult to interact with people who subscribe to Guess Culture. However, that’s not really an argument in favor of Guess Culture, just an argument that we should understand that not everyone behaves as we do.

The most reasonable argument for Guess Culture is… um… well… there aren’t really any reasonable arguments for Guess Culture. The first glance was correct. Guess Culture is terrible for anyone who values communication.

Well… no.

If you are bad at modeling other people, then misunderstandings abound. If you have an excellent model of someone else, then the subtle hints are all the information you need.

Here’s one argument for Guess: Guess is good for people who lack self-awareness. For instance, a lot of people get in bad moods when they’re hungry, but are not capable of figuring out that they’re in a bad mood because they’re hungry rather than because of those assholes at work. In Ask, they are going to continue to be in a bad mood until it independently occurs to them to eat something. In Guess, their friend can notice that they’re probably hungry and say “let’s go eat.”

In addition, Guess allows people to signal care for each other. Meeting a need in Guess is saying “I care about you enough to devote mental effort to noticing your hints and preferences”; this sort of signaling of affection can strengthen relationships and make people feel more loved. Ask totally rules out this method of expressing affection. Pointing out that Guess is less efficient strikes me as similar to saying “why would I care about whether anyone buys me gifts for Christmas? It’s much more efficient when I buy everything myself.”

Finally, I’ve been friends with people with extraordinarily good cognitive empathy. It is great! When I come over, they have a cup of tea heating up and last time they were at the store they picked up my favorite flavor. I feel like using pure Ask hurts both those people (it reduces the value of something that would otherwise be a tremendous selling point) and the people around them (no favorite-flavor tea).

In Malcolm’s post, he argues that calling them “cultures” makes sense because of the shared assumptions: for instance, even if you have really good Ask skills, Ask does not work if you’re in a culture where you can predict your conversational partner is not going to say no. Even if you agree that no cultures are Ask about everything or Guess about everything, you can certainly use “this is an Ask Culture” as shorthand for “this culture tends to be more Ask.” And even if a culture isn’t 100% Ask in general, it might be completely Ask about certain topics, such as flirting.

However, I disagree. A lot of discussion of Ask and Guess tends to treat all relationships the same: there isn’t necessarily a clear distinction made between being Ask with strangers and Ask with one’s life partner. I think that is absurd (and regret the posts in which I have done it).

When a relationship is relatively low in intimacy, you have to go by defaults, and I think it’s here where Ask and Guess resemble cultures the most. If I just met someone and think they’re neat, I don’t know whether I can trust them to say ‘no’ when I ask them to get coffee with me. However, I can make a reasonable guess based on the fact that my social circle tends to be Ask about hanging out with people.

On the other hand, when a relationship is more intimate, I have a much better source of information than defaults: my knowledge of the person themself. I can know that Jane is very self-aware on most subjects so I should use Ask, but she enjoys me signaling my knowledge of her restaurant preferences, so when picking a place to eat I should Guess. For Joe, extensive negotiation about every little detail is part of the fun of sex, so we can use Reveal, while for Robin, even subtle hints tend to break the mood, so we use Conceal.

I don’t think Reveal and its hypothetical opposite Conceal will get as popular as Ask and Guess as defaults. Reveal is extraordinarily demanding: both in terms of introspection and in terms of its own skill set (for instance, the ability to deal with people saying negative things about you without becoming very unhappy). Outside of a very selected group, I doubt one would be able to trust that everyone had the requisite skills. However, I can certainly see individual relationships adopting Conceal or Reveal norms and doing quite well.

yeahhH!!! SUCK IT UBER!

By this point in the media/meta cycle, oceans of virtual ink have already been spilled on the comparative flaws and virtues of Jupiter Ascending, a film that is almost universally perceived as being both nonsensical and glorious. Now that I’ve finally seen it, however - because those of us with toddling offspring tend to be reliant on iTunes for our theatrical jollies, shut up - I’m moved to weigh in on the matter. Specifically: while I’ve seen a great deal said about the absolute comic insanity of JA’s wordlbuilding - bees that recognise royalty! flying space werewolves! floating sofas! - nowhere have I seen it pointed out that actually, Jupiter Ascending is basically an equally batshit redo of The Matrix.

I mean, look. Internets. I get that The Matrix was kind of seminal for all of us here who saw it in our tweens and teens and twenties, and it’s such a goddamn shame they never made a sequel and all that, but really. Really. How long has it been since you actually sat down and watched it? I know that it’s a hallowed classic that tends to exist in this weirdly exalted geek mental space, but if you’re going to pass judgement on the hilarity of Eddie Redmayne’s creepy sociopath voice, you’re going to need to cite me chapter and verse as to why Hugo Weaving’s inflected robot-drawl is any better. If you think it’s kinda twee that the film ends with Jupiter Jones donning space gravity boots and flying over Chicago, you have to justify why that’s inherently different to Neo rocketing into the sky in his black leather Coat of Awesome.

To be clear, I love The Matrix, and I love Jupiter Ascending. This isn’t me trying to pull down the former or devalue the latter; far from it. I’m just trying to point out that, except for the fact that The Matrix has a grim cyberpunk aesthetic and a passive male protagonist who’s endlessly rescued by a hot, badass woman in black leather before finally coming into his own, while Jupiter Ascending has a colourful space opera aesthetic and a passive female protagonist who’s endlessly rescued by a hot, badass man in black leather before finally coming into her own, they’re basically the exact same fucking film.

I mean, okay. Let’s break this shit down, shall we?

At the start of their respective films, both Neo and Jupiter are dissatisfied with their everyday lives, dreaming constantly of something beyond the mundane. In both cases, we witnesses their respective love-interests - Trinity and Caine - being leather-clad badasses before they ever encounter Neo and Jupiter, which meetings are ultimately assisted/enabled by friends who only appear at the start of each story. When Neo is first taken in by Agent Smith, who vanishes his mouth and injects him with a literal tracking bug while splaying him, bare-chested, over a table, he’s left thinking that the experience was a dream, after which, it’s Trinity who proves otherwise. Similarly, when Jupiter first encounters aliens, her mind is wiped, leaving her doubtful that anything really happened; the second time, however, she’s splayed in mid-air in a hospital gown and injected in the neck, at which point, she’s rescued by Caine. Neo is initially sceptical that he’s The One, while Jupiter likewise doubts the claim that she’s a Recurrence; each character is granted their special status by right of birth with an element of spiritual predetermination - even reincarnation - in an otherwise (pseudo)scientific context, and each has the ‘real’ truth of the world explained to them by an authoritative third party - Morpheus for Neo, and Stinger for Jupiter - who acts as a mentor to their love-interest.

Once taken aboard their respective spaceships, they each encounter a smooth-speaking man - Cypher for Neo, Titus for Jupiter - who, under the pretence of telling them the unvarnished truth of their new situation, effects a betrayal. This leads to the imprisonment of Morpheus and Stinger, both of whom are rescued by their protégés, Trinity and Caine. (It’s also worth remarking that these mentor-figures each have plot-significant names: Morpheus for the king of dreams who rescues Neo from sleep, and Stinger Apini, which is doubly evocative of the bees which ultimately reveal Jupiter’s heritage.) Cue some dramatic fight scenes with lots of guns and explosions, a pair of climaxes wherein Neo and Jupiter triumph over Agent Smith and Balem Abrasax before being immediately rescued from peril by Trinity and Caine, with secondary spaceship rescues also effected by Tank and Diomika Tsing, and a matched set of closing scenes where our protagonists soar off into the sky, and the symmetry is complete.

Note, too, that both stories hinge on combating regimes - the Machines and the Abrasax dynasty - that ritualistically harvest and liquefy human beings in order to extend their own lifespans, though whereas humans created Machines in The Matrix, in Jupiter Ascending, the Abrasax seeded humanity. In this sense, the two films are bookends, thematic mirror images of each other: The Matrix is dystopian, set after a cataclysm has already occurred, and so ends with Neo escaping into a reality both harsher and more honest than the one he’s known. Jupiter Ascending, however, which presents a more hopeful vision of the future, allows Jupiter to save the Earth before it can be destroyed: unlike Neo, Jupiter returns home with a renewed appreciation for her life, a couple of awesome gadgets and a flying werewolf boyfriend. Neo’s journey is full of self-doubt - though Morpheus believes in him, he fails his first jump in the simulator and is, at least ostensibly, denied his Chosen One status by the Oracle - and only comes full-circle when he learns to believe in himself. Jupiter’s journey, by contrast, is full of external validation: the bees confirm her as royalty, and she’s consistently treated as such, but the story ends with her realisation that she doesn’t need to rely on what other people think of her - that she is, first and foremost, in charge of her own life.

There’s an undeniable Star Wars vibe to the world of Jupiter Ascending: we’re shown lots of races living together, a complicated alien bureaucracy, fabulous costumes and futuristic technology. It’s a setting that consistently develops outwards, showing Jupiter the potential for both human and personal expansion. The Matrix, by contrast, takes place in a wasteland; 'the desert of the real’, as Morpheus says. The false matrix can be developed inwards, a literal fantasy realm, but the actual world is finite, limited, broken, and while the subsequent two films eventually show humanity making peace with the Machines, it’s a pax brokered by Neo’s death. In Jupiter Ascending, however, it’s Jupiter’s refusal to die that saves the Earth, ensuring that the planet remains in her keeping rather than passing to Balem.

As such, the primary differences between The Matrix and Jupiter Ascending can be summarised as follows:

• One has an everyman male protagonist with a badass female love interest; the other has an everywoman female protagonist with a badass male love interest.
• One has a gritty cyberpunk aesthetic, replete with lots of blacks, greys, greens and BDSM-style leather outfits; the other has a colourful space opera aesthetic, replete with lots of golds, purples, reds and couture-style silk outfits.
• One is thematically dark, focussed on the consequences of hubris and the aftermath of cataclysm; the other is thematically hopeful, focussed on the possibilities of expansion and the prevention of death.
• One has a secondary cast made memorable both by their diversity and visually distinct outfits, though most of these characters die; the other has a secondary cast made memorable both by their diversity and visually distinct outfits, though all of these characters live.
• One has a protagonist without any apparent familial ties to a world that is subsequently proven to be imaginary; the other has a protagonist with deep familial ties to a world that is subsequently prove to be more important than ever.

In other words, and despite their many similarities otherwise, The Matrix is gritty, dark and stereotypically masculine, while Jupiter Ascending is bright, hopeful and stereotypically feminine - though both, as I said at the outset, are equally batshit. Look, don’t make that face: yes, Jupiter Ascending has bees that recognise royalty and Jupiter trying to sell her eggs for a telescope and grey abducting aliens and the 'I’ve always loved dogs’ line and a scene where Caine gets an honest to god maxipad stuck to one of his man-wounds, but The Matrix has flying squid robots and Neo climbing along the outside of an office building because a stranger told him to and actual Men In Black and 'there is no spoon’ and a scene where Neo dives headfirst into a pavement that goes all Looney-Tunes liquid and springs him back up again. You’re meant to laugh at obvious absurdities at various points in both of them, is what I’m saying - hell, I remember seeing The Matrix at the cinema at the impressionable age of thirteen and laughing my fucking ass off every time Agent Smith spoke - but that doesn’t meant they’re any less awesome for being purposefully comic.

I find it telling, therefore, that while both films received a certain amount of praise and censure on release, there’s a marked difference in how their respective Wikipedia entries describe what is arguably a very similar critical reception, at least at the level of popular opinio. According to the entry for The Matrix:

“It was generally well-received by critics, and won four Academy Awards as well as other accolades including BAFTA Awards and Saturn Awards. Reviewers praised The Matrix for its innovative visual effects, cinematography and its entertainment. The film’s premise was both criticized for being derivative of earlier science fiction works, and praised for being intriguing. The action also polarized critics, some describing it as impressive, but others dismissing it as a trite distraction from an interesting premise.

"Despite this, the film has since appeared in lists of the greatest science fiction films, and in 2012, was added to the National Film Registry for preservation.”

But for Jupiter Ascending, we get this:

“Although critics praised the visuals, world-building, and originality, the general attitude toward the film was negative, with most criticism focused on incoherence in the screenplay and an over-reliance on special effects. Despite this, the film has found a cult following, particularly among female sci-fi fans who appreciate the film’s campiness, and that the film deviates from typical gender dynamics in a genre that is traditionally male-centric.”

And okay, look: I get, again, that The Matrix both won awards and grossed more money than Jupiter Ascending. It’s an awesome film, and a totally deserving classic! Nonetheless, it seems relevant that while both were praised for their visual effects, Jupiter Ascending is deemed to have an 'over-reliance’ on them that The Matrix, a film which showed a helicopter crashing into a glass skyscraper in slow motion and which basically pioneered the 'combatant frozen in midair while the camera spins around them’ trick, apparently lacks. Similarly, while the weirdness of The Matrix doesn’t stop it having an 'interesting premise’, Jupiter Ascending has 'incoherence in the screenplay’, despite the fact that they’re both telling largely identical stories.

So while it’s not a new opinion that Jupiter Ascending is deeply reminiscent of the tropes of teen girl fanfiction - hello, angel werewolf boyfriend! - and while it’s similarly been stated that most action movies are, in fact, written as million-dollar endorsements of the fantasies of teenage boys, I haven’t seen it pointed out that, in this case, you’ve already got a film written and directed by the exact same people telling the exact same story but in a thematically inverted way, such that you can arguably use it as yardstick for gauging the extent to which the comparative femininity and hopefulness of Jupiter Ascending have counted against it in the popular consciousness.

All of which is a way of saying: Jupiter Ascending is both awesome and flawed, but no more so than The Matrix, which leads me to think there’s more than a little sexism involved in its constant devaluation. Which doesn’t mean you’re sexist for thinking The Matrix is a better film - to each her own, as they say. But JA is space opera, which is meant to be lavish and rich and weird, and given that the Wachowskis are predominantly vaunted for The Matrix and V for Vendetta, which are gritty and dystopian and yes, stereotypically masculine, I can’t help feeling that Jupiter Ascending is frequently judged a failure simply for not being those things, instead of for its performance of an inherently campier genre.

Basically, I loved it, and you will prise my hovering space-throne sofas from my cold, dead hands.

You know what GTA’s been doing right for a while that the rest of the games industry needs to pay attention to? Making characters connect to their environment. You never have that floating foot in a grand theft auto game, and when you start moving you build momentum that takes time to stop. If you’re trying to move over rough terrain instead of floating over it like you’re on a moonwalk your character actually struggles to get uphill or maintain their footing. This is something that really takes me out of their games: I don’t feel like I’m really in the world, just piloting an eyeball camera through it that can swing a sword in front of it’s narrow field of vision.

How cool would that be in something like Fallout? Trekking over the ashblown wreck of the world, with an actual sense of weight about your character’s body, with movement characteristics which change incrementally as your encumbrance grows. Actually showing your character wearing a big survival pack even. Your gear slows you down, all that junk you’ve accumulated makes you sluggish to move and react. If you drop your pack you can move quickly, take cover, and react, but you gotta keep it in sight, lest someone try to drag it off.

People try to say “oh, but with mods,” but if the fundamental physical mechanics aren’t there in the engine to start with, there’s nothing for modders to work with, and this is one of those things that requires work to be done in engine.

But that would require an engine newer than 15 years old, so unfortunately, we’ll never see that outta Bethesda.

“How profoundly refreshing to leave behind rules of designation, imaginary cases, or the cat’s cradle of possible world semantics and to learn that the complexities are not in our language but in ourselves and in the world.” -Arthur C. Danto

Welcome back to Vi Hart Weekly! This week’s topics: new improv and webVR toys, gender video and comment curation, Rachel Dolezal and transrace, and this week’s book reviews.

Improv and webVR: pulling out bits and varying them

Open this in a new tab to accompany your news reading experience with this week’s piano improv, and maybe also get stuck staring at it for 10 minutes: vihart.github.io/spinny/daisy

I decided to throw together a bit of music pulled out of a longer improv, with a bit of webVR pulled out of a bigger project, with variations on both.

The webVR stuff started with this virtual version of our office we’ve been working on. I can’t say I recommend it at this point, but if you want you can see it here [arrow keys to move, or webVR with oculus and gamepad].

As it is, it might take 10 minutes to load and have broken textures, Which is why when I made this spinny thing I liked, I decided to pull it out and give it its own page where it can load and run quickly.

The spinny thing itself is based on this thing in our office made by Toby Schachman [above, left]. When I was looking for inspiration for what to put in our virtual office, I said to myself “why, that looks mighty for-loopable!” So I looped. And it was easy and effective enough that I couldn’t help isolating it and making some variations: 1, 2, 3

Cyclicy offset things are mesmerizing and easy to code, and I’ve made a few related things in webVR before [wasd to rotate view, and these have mouse interaction]. One of the brainfoods involved is Gary Foshee’s Harmonic Pendulum. Another is Jim Bumgardner’s Whitney Music Box, which might be what made me think music belonged involved somehow.

After my improv session that evening, I could remember that something in there was catchy and melodic, but not what it was at all. Usually it’d just be lost back into the aether of infinite potential pretty melodies, but I’d recorded this session and listened to it while I was messing with this code and making variations. Indeed, somewhere in the middle of an hour was this nice 5 minutes of melody, and I thought it went quite well with the webVR thing. So that’s how that happened.

But as we talked about last week, things get stuck in my head and vary and stuff. It happened to the webVR spinny thing, and it happened to this bit of music. It drove me nuts all through dinner, so then I went back for an improvisation just on that theme, to get it properly out of my head. I think I might like the original better, but here it is anyway:

And thus ends a story of simple musical and mathematical objects being taken out of their larger homes to be treated as their own special thing, one that gets stuck in your head and demands variations and repetition, an obsessive thought divorced from its context and focused on until it is finally destroyed.

YouTube’d a thing, and Comments

Enough people gave good responses to last week’s section on gender and Caitlyn Jenner, and seemed to consider it important [and it was the jumping off point for this ridiculous twitter exchange which gives me warm fuzzies], that I went ahead and edited the script and made it into a video:

On the topic of things I used to worry about or not understand when I was a horrible teenager:

I’ve heard some people say that the “PC police” have made it impossible to talk about gender and stuff, that they’re afraid to express their opinions because they’re afraid they’ll get backlash for what they perceive as no reason, drama, etc. My teenage self might have agreed, and would have never believed that if a bunch of people told me a thing I said was sexist/transphobic/etc, maybe that’s because it actually was sexist/transphobic/etc.

So I made a video about gender and stuff and I did not get any backlash from any of the groups that angry reddit/4chan trolls like to pretend jump on anyone who says anything about gender. Of course, that does not mean there was no backlash. I banned several hundred commenters for making transphobic, homophobic, and sexist comments. Some of these even were aimed specifically at me and on the topic of the video, though most were the same comments you’d see anywhere. Often these comments also contained complaints about the “PC police” who censor them, as if complaining about how some people don’t allow transphobic comments would keep me from banning them.

Years ago, I would have felt weird, guilty, or conflicted about this. While it’s considered justifiable to tell someone they’re not welcome to come into your house and insult you, it’s still considered rude to ask a guest to leave. Do they deserve a chance to learn? Etc.

But after gaining a better understanding of systems, and experience with the sheer numbers involved when dealing with internet social phenomena, I realize that there is no way but to moderate, aggressively, or else take responsibility for the inevitable consequence.

In a system where common stereotypes are treated as equal to minority opinions, it is inevitable that the stereotypes overwhelm any chance of discussion. And while I understand that many people have simply yet to learn, in a system where common ignorance is treated equally to expert knowledge, it is inevitable that common ignorance overwhelms. I know there’s plenty of other places on the internet that would welcome those ignorant comments; indeed, they seem word for word identical to the same troll comments that inevitably fill every space that does not actively curate them out. And there’s many places specifically set up for learning, and those need a lot of rules in order to function, specifically regarding the authority and greater knowledge of teachers over students.

When I post a video, I create a space. And I choose what to fill it with. I could pretend to myself that I’m just letting it fill itself, letting people decide and express their own thoughts that I am not responsible for, but I know too much to fool myself like that.

When you let a space fill itself, it fills itself with whatever’s the fastest material. Ignorance is fast. Hate is fast. It takes a lot of practice to be fast at love and tolerance, so while there are those who are fast at it, there’s not enough of them. It also takes time and practice to get fast at cultural norms, but everyone gets that practice and becomes an expert, whether they realize it or not. People can judge what’s outside those norms really really quickly.

I created that comment section, and I’m the only one who can curate it. There’s no such thing as impartiality, only avoidance of responsibility and capitulation to those who are quickest to judge and spend the most time judging. The internet is not a 1-person-1-vote democracy. The only responsible choice is to either mute selectively, or mute everyone. Given the time it takes to curate comments, removing comment sections altogether is often the only choice.

Sometime I’ll make a longer deeper post about the systems involved in this sort of stuff. But on the topic of being a responsible curator of the internet spaces we create, I’m going to say a bit more about one particular sort of comment that I’ve banned many people for: anything equivocating gender and race to justify intolerance. Which brings us to:

This Week’s Trending Media Topic: Rachel Dolezal and “Transracial”

A lot of people don’t know what to make of the concept that someone might identify as a different race, as you might have heard Rachel Dolezal claims (not that anyone has any official statements on the matter from Dolezal herself, as of writing this). I am not interested in speculating on her genuineness or in judging her actions, but for those who are in the position of having to curate comments/discussions, I hope some of my lines of thinking can at least point you in useful thought directions regarding the discourse surrounding this whole thing.

Many people are asking the question of whether one can be transracial or not. Whenever you find some “this or that?” question exploding in the media, the first question to ask yourself is not “this or that”, but:

1. Out of infinite possible questions, why this and why now?

2. In what context does the question make any sense?

There is much more information in the questions we choose to ask than in their answers. Questions don’t come out of nowhere, and treating the question itself as an independent purely-logical object misses the entire meaning of it. The reason for this question’s existence, the entire context on which it depends, is transgenderism. Without appropriating that context, the question would make very little sense as posed, and certainly “transracial” would not be trending social media. Maybe Dolezal herself would be trending, but the questions, the media story, would be a very different one.

Being both a semi-internet-famous person and a known feminist in the tech industry, I get people from every hateful corner of the internet forcing their way into my consciousness, so transrace is something I’ve heard many times before. People on the internet have been using the concept of transrace for years, not as an identity for themselves but as a hypothetical “argument” that they feel simultaneously justifies transphobia, mocks the “liberal agenda”, and allows them to throw in some racist stereotypes while they’re at it.

“Wow, a man can just decide he’s a woman? Next think you know liberals will decide a white person can just decide they’re black and [insert stereotypes here],” so their argument goes. I’ve deleted many comments of that form. I am much more aware than I’d like to be that some people understand race and gender so poorly that they find it reasonable to switch them up, context be damned.

I don’t know what’s up with Rachel Dolezal, but I do know that the hateful corners of the world are having an absolute field day. They invented this thing they thought was ridiculous purely as an excuse to mock others, and now they have one more excuse to pretend that they were justified.

While everyone else is confused and unsure what is going on with this person, the people who have been mocking this situation for years have their responses ready to go. The quickest easiest comments necessarily dominate all uncurated conversation. The tiny judgmental minority gets the most votes.

Dolezal is an interesting case and there’s a ton of complexities in there, but we can’t see what’s going on if we’re looking at race through the lens of gender. Another great way to destroy any chance of understanding this in context would be to focus intently on Dolezal herself. I’m sure there are people who see it all much more clearly than I, whose voices are hard to find because their answer to this question does not fit the “identity politics” “liberals pushing their ridiculous liberal agenda” storyline that provoked the asking of it.

Reason alone can’t untangle cultural problems; for that we need truth and history, two things we are very bad at facing.

This Week’s Book Reviews: On Color and Philosophy

Continuing my research on color and philosophy, this week I read “Form and Content” and “Color for Philosophers”. And this time I mean color as in Roy G. Biv, not color as in Dolezal, though as we’ve just seen, racial color vision is also rife with philosophical quandaries and examples of form without content.

Form and Content, by Bernard Harrison

An interesting book of the kind where the first sentence is “It is often held that language can express only the form but not the content of experience.”

Harrison’s way of getting at content of experience, as with many previous philosophers, is with color experience as a shining example. Color seems irrefutably to exist outside the human mind; seeing is believing I suppose. This book was published in 1973, at a time when a lot of good science on color vision was known to scientists but still ignored by philosophers. As an argument about color specifically, it’s out of date, but as an argument about the expressibility of content, It’s interesting to see the third way out of arguments that seemed, without the benefit of science, to be either-or propositions.

Harrison has this concept of “color presentation,” the theoretical actual color presented, which may or may not reflect the color as we see it. Without science, it seemed only a question of how skeptical one was of experience: are the colors we experience the correct real ones, or might we be seeing the wrong ones, and how would we know? But now we know there is no such thing as the “true real actual color of a thing” in the first place, that color experience can come from many different physical and psychological properties, and that in fact not everyone interprets the same wavelengths in the same way. It’s a warning against taking skepticism in the wrong direction: the real questions are in a different direction than all the cases that had been considered.

Another concept: “natural nameables.” Things in the world that are things, basically. Is “Yellow” a natural nameable? Would all cultures name yellow “yellow”, or is which wavelength corresponds to which words an arbitrary choice, and yellow is only a particular thing by convention?

The concept of “natural nameables” is interesting, though the question is wrongly put. Turns out yellow is neither a cultural convention nor a real existing special wavelength; it’s in the physiology of our eyes, the tiny receptors and cells that compute the signals before they even reach the brain. But Harrison’s account of what makes these colors consistently nameable is interesting and may yet have some truth in it: he takes Wilhelm Runge’s double-cone color space (color cubes are more popular these days, I think), and then starts adding points that he thinks allow the greatest amount of color discrimination (most roundy and evenly-sized voronoi cells).

Berlin and Kay’s “Basic Colour Terms”, which found that different languages have different numbers of words for colors but that they start with the same ones (first black/white, then red, etc) did make a big splash on the philosophy of color when it came out. So Harrison comes up with a scheme where perhaps adding these colors one by one to the geometric color space, in a way that gives the most even color sectors as you go, is what arises to the apparently strange fact that all languages with at least three colors will place the third one in about the same space as our “red”.

It’s good mathy thinking and I like it. Though language is not what makes red and green highly visible and pure colors to our eyes, it is also not fair to say “it’s how eyes work” and leave it at that. Eyes could (and do) work differently, with small variations across humans as to which blue is “true blue”, and large variations across species. It would be better to ask why our eyes evolved this set of capabilities, and an efficient splitting-up of a color space makes more sense here.

He also tackles the infamous “could we invert red and green?” question. If I learned red is actually green, could we, by talking, ever discover that I’m seeing it “wrong”? Would it be “wrong”? If there’s no way to tell by talking about it, then a red/green switch would be “discourse neutral”, which is a useful concept. Perhaps many things where we see them very differently but think we’re talking about the same thing are in fact “discourse-neutral” differences between us.

Harrison argues the red/green spectrum switch would not be discourse neutral, because while the spectrum of possible colors is symmetric, the naturally nameable ones aren’t; we’ve got subtleties on the reddish side, like orange and pink and brown, that create an asymmetry in the linguistic form of our color names. He calls this the “semantic topology”.

It’s a great idea, that language must necessarily have asymmetric semantic topologies so that we don’t accidentally invert our discourse. Whether this linguistic idea has much to do with color, or with anything at all, is another matter.

Color for Philosophers, by C. L. Hardin

Finally, in 1986, a philosopher/scientist got frustrated enough with unscientific philosophy to write this book on the science of color vision, targeted towards philosophers. I almost didn’t read it because I figure I know quite a bit about how color vision works, but I decided to because:

1. It’s helpful to see it all written out at once like that, with good explanations and diagrams and connections to philosophy, and with all these other recently-read books in mind.

2. Apparently it was successful in its mission, and raised the level of discourse in the philosophy of color. I wanted to know what kind of book does that, as well as understand the context more recent philosophers are writing in.

The forward by Arthur C. Danto (quoted in this post’s epigraph) sums up much of the motivation and frustration. “The disease so much of philosophy consists of is the belief that it is philosophy when in fact it is something else,” in the case of color, “just bad science”.

The truth of the world actually has some bearing on theoretical discourse, and one must be suspect of any argument outside of mathematics that claims to get by on reason alone.

My fascination with the philosophy of color began with just how much science can actually bring to it. It’s a great example of where questions of philosophy actually got answered, or at least complexified. When it comes to real tough things like qualia, to have a standard example actually get revolutionized and make progress is pretty cool.

Why is there no reddish green? Not any linguistic form, just the opposition color theory that makes it so that the cells in our eyes actually cannot send a red and green signal at the same time! Why are brown and pink standard color words, but not dark and light greenish-yellow? Because our receptors physically treat yellow as having more achromatic content (so it seems brighter) and less saturation (so it does not have the range of perceptibly different saturation that an equivalent to brown and pink require).

Why would our eyes do that? Probably not for the benefit of an asymmetric semantic topology, and more likely because seeing subtleties in browns and pinks is a useful adaptation. Evolution is not covered or speculated upon, though.

Color for Philosophers also hammers home just how much context matters even in things that seem basic. Wittgenstein wondered why there’s no such thing as a brown light, and how black and white translucent screens or filters should behave differently from colored ones. Well, because brown and black and white actually do not exist in isolation and cannot be seen without context. A single brown pixel, alone in a dark room, is orange. A single pink pixel is red.

It’s not some deep psychology perception process; it’s in the very simple computations that the cells of the eye do before sending out the signals. And it’s less a quirk of physiology and more that in a world full of light and shadows, accounting for context is the only way anything can ever have enduring properties (or else the white thing actually turns black when in shadow).

Hardin also tackles the inverted spectrum question, and makes note of “phenomenal asymmetries”. Someone who sees red as yellow might be able to pass through life without noticing, just as it’s common for colorblind people to go a long time without noticing. But if we get them in a lab, it’s easy to tell with some simple tests. And someone who sees red as yellow would not have the chromatic range to differentiate pinks from reds from browns, Hardin argues.

This makes some amount of sense, though I’m not convinced that it would be impossible for someone to percieve reds as a more chromatically depthful version of yellows that do include an easily-differentiable supersaturated yellow, along with easily differentiable yellowish-greens as a side benefit.

His argument against a red/green switch seems to rest upon that reds are obviously warm and greens are cool, so we could break discourse-neutrality by asking someone whether they think red looks warm or cool. I find this pretty weak. If fire looked green and water looked reddish-purple and everyone called green warm and red cool, I’m pretty sure I’d think green was plenty warm, but Hardin seems to think a warm green is an obvious contradiction. Either he’s wrong, or I am, in fact, a red/green invert and Hardin has just found me out.

Anyway, that’s all I have time for in this week’s brain thoughts news. Maybe see you next time!

Many people have observed that you can model the growth and decline of ideas as an evolutionary process. They begin as mutations of other ideas; they have traits that help them to survive or reproduce, and other traits that might make it more difficult; the ones that are more fit tend to flourish, and the ones that are less fit die out. This observation is sometimes called ‘memetics.’

I’ve noticed that talking about “memetic fitness” can refer to one of two completely different things.

First, it can mean how many people believe an idea. I think this is the one people originally meant by “memetic fitness”. I believe ideas like “God doesn’t exist”, “you shouldn’t judge people for their sex lives as long as they aren’t hurting anyone”, “ideas can be modeled as an evolutionary process”, “you can save a human life for three thousand dollars”, and “the sky is blue”. I can try to spread these ideas for other people: for instance, I can share a link to GiveWell’s top charities. Ideas which tend to be more fit in this sense include ideas which fit into people’s preconceptions, true ideas, ideas that justify evangelizing to other people, useful ideas, and evidently by revealed preference ideas told in ALL CAPS BOLD on Tumblr followed by a Japanese emoticon. ٩(ര̀ᴗര́)

Second, it can mean how many people talk about an idea. To pick an obvious example: Elevatorgate. Elevatorgate is not a conventional “is” or “ought”, the way that the ideas I talked about in the previous paragraph are. Neither side in Elevatorgate is particularly conventionally memetically fit: it seems like everyone basically continued to have the opinions they started out with. And yet when it flared up I used to entertain myself by sneaking tangential references to Elevatorgate in my blog posts and seeing how long it took the comments to descend into Elevatorgate madness. In case you’re wondering, mentioning the word “elevator” in an entirely unrelated comment in an entirely unrelated post was enough to cause it to break out.

There is a sense, I think, in which Elevatorgate is absurdly memetically fit– not as a set of ideas but as a topic of discussion.

This is sort of the general case of toxoplasmosis of rage. Scott points out that the topics of discussion which are the most memetically fit topics of discussion are often the divisive ones that make everyone get angry and want to scream at each other. But I don’t think that all absurdly fit discussion topics fall into this category. For instance, Kim Kardashian has made her entire career out of being a very fit topic of discussion, even though she is not a particularly controversial person (everyone seems to pretty much agree that she sucks). And people can certainly viciously argue with each other about Keynesianism and monetarism, but in most social groups they are nowhere near as memetically fit a topic as anything ending in -gate. That’s probably because monetary policy is confusing and difficult and involves words a lot of people don’t know the meaning of, whereas nearly everyone has hit on someone or wanted to hit on someone and therefore feels entitled to have an opinion on the subject.

The problem with memetically fit topics of discussion is that they are unlike memetically fit ideas. For ideas, memetic fitness is at least correlated with truth. The most memetically fit ideas are ones like “trees exist,” which we don’t even think of as ideas because they’re obviously true. Also, if you disagree that memetic fitness is correlated with truth, then you have no reason to believe any of the things that you believe and are forced to become a radical skeptic.

There is no guarantee, however, that memetically fit topics of discussion are actually important. In fact, most memetically fit topics seem to be really unimportant. As I write this, my Facebook trending news stories are about a New York Post critic who thinks that women don’t get Goodfellas and a virtual reality headset shipping with the Xbox One controller. I would contrast this with examples of important, memetically unfit topics of discussion, but then I realized that they’re memetically unfit so I don’t know what they are.

Memetically fit topics of discussion tend to be divisive. They tend to be things that everyone feels qualified to have an opinion on (thus, social issues more than economic or foreign policy). They tend to be interesting or at least to give everyone Someone Is Wrong On The Internet syndrome. But they don’t tend to be particularly important, probably because important things probably affect a lot of people, and people are bad at dealing with things that affect a lot of people.

What do we do about this? I’m not sure. I myself tend to get into vicious arguments about things far less important and more interesting than things I don’t get into vicious arguments about. But at least we should maybe take a step back and say to ourselves “is arguing about the plight of sad nerdy guys who can’t get a date really the most important topic I could be arguing about?”

One of my core political beliefs is that there would still be a Soviet Union if they’d been smart enough to have two communist parties that agreed on everything except abortion.

Obviously that’s a joke about the U.S., where we have two capitalist parties that largely agree on everything. The exceptions are issues that matter a lot to the regular people who make up the two parties’ bases, but are largely irrelevant to party elites who fund and run both of them.

I don’t believe Republican and Democratic elites ever sat down together and planned things this way. It’s just natural, because it’s tough for a political party to endure if it doesn’t rest on an economic base of big, overlapping sections of a country’s economy.

But here’s what’s really funny: according to the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, oligarch Boris Berezovsky did consciously want to set up post-Soviet politics in Russia to work like this.

Berezovsky made his billions mostly through shady privatization schemes, and was a key supporter of Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s. Then, according to Berezovsky, he chose Vladimir Putin to succeed Yeltsin. According to Gessen, “Berezovsky also had another brilliant idea, which to his regret Putin did not grasp: creating a fake two-party system, with Putin at the head of a socialist-democrat sort of party and Berezovsky leading a neoconservative one, or the other way around.”

Here are Berezovsky’s exact words, in an interview with Gessen from 2008:

When Putin became president, I was for a long time in a state of profound naiveté. Well, I went to him … I told him: “Listen, Volodya, what happened: we destroyed the entire political space. Devoured, not destroyed, but devoured it. We absolutely dominated … Look, I’ll suggest that we can not have effective political system, if there’s a tough competition. So I suggest we create an artificial two-party system. So, let’s say, the left and right. A Socially Oriented party and neo-conservatives liberal party. Choose any. And I’ll make another party. At the same time, my own heart is closer to neoconservatives, and I think so, you [Putin] are socially oriented. ” I earnestly believed then that he understood it. But I think that even then he looked at me like I was crazy.

Berezovsky had a falling-out with Putin that forced him leave Russia permanently, and he died in London in 2013 in what may or may not have been suicide. But it’s certainly worth pondering that at least one of the people at the top of the world has genuinely conceived of electoral politics as a meaningless puppet show, with himself and his friends as puppet masters.

(Thanks to Masha Gessen for pointing me to her Berezovsky interview transcript, and to Sharon Weinberger for translating it from Russian.)

(This post is from our blog: Unofficial Sources.)

Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

The post Russian Oligarch Wanted to Turn My Joke Into Reality appeared first on The Intercept.

In this splendid game, chess grandmaster Max Dlugy (Rating: 3130) is surprised—and intrigued—by the wily play of the ominously and accurately-named player "TrickyMate" (Rating: 1400).

(Hugh Hancock here again. Charlie's still beating the squamous and eldrich tentacles into malleable literary form, so I'm filling in for a few days. He'll be back soon.)

It's a weird time right now.

That's true in general. It's fascinating watching sci-fi authors like Charlie sprinting increasingly fast to keep ahead of the Bear Of Social And Technological Change. But it's specifically true right now for storytellers of all stripes, from comics artists (which category, somewhat to my surprise after two decades of movie-making, now includes me), to writers, to games designers, to filmmakers (also still including me).

Over the last year or so I've been taking a step back from my previous single-minded pursuit of performance capture and Machinima to get a broader understanding of the opportunities for anyone who wants to tell stories right now. Whilst Machinima has been pretty good to me, letting me travel all over the world, giving me the opportunity to pretend to be a Muppet on live CNN, and letting me tell stories ranging in scale from feature films to experimental arthouse shorts, it became clear to me that the landscape was changing pretty fast and I was probably missing out on all sorts of interesting things. So over the last year, I've experimented with comics, game development, prose fiction, a little bit of app development, virtual reality and filmmaking in many and various flavours.

And it's no exaggeration to say that the world of a lot of these artforms has been upended -- or in some cases entirely created -- in the last decade or so. And the next decade's going to make the last one look comparatively stable.

So what media are going to rise? Which are going to fall? Is VR going to look awesome then fail to deliver again?

I've got no certainties, but I do have some hunches and a lot more information than I had a year ago.

Feature Films

Right now, the world of indie feature films is fucked up.

For starters, the cost of production is in free-fall. We all know about GoPros, DSLR cameras being used on major productions and so on, but it goes way beyond that.

It's less about any single piece of tech becoming cheaper, and more about all the tech starting to interact in ways that do very strange and non-linear things to how films are made.

Cameras are becoming cheaper, sure, but they're also becoming lighter. At the same time, brushless motors and cheap IMUs mean that robot camera stabilisers are taking over from Steadicams for stable moving shots. And all of that means that a shot which used to require a guy who'd trained with a Steadicam can be done to 90% of the same quality by some untrained muppet (me) with a basic knowledge of how to walk smoothly and a magic box that does the rest of the work. And that magic box means that directors can rethink the rest of their shoot too, changing dolly shots (big pile of kit, couple of big hairy grips to work it) into a shot with a gimbal and a $200 self-balanced scooter. But all that might be irrelevant too because who the hell needs to wobble about on a scooter when you can probably just get a drone to do the shot?

Usable ISOs (the camera setting that affects how much light it needs) are shooting up like someone strapped them to a kangeroo with a rocket under it. And that means that our cameras need far less light, which means that the conversation with location owners about how we'll probably burn out all their electrics and is it OK if we park a generator next door becomes "fuck it, we'll just nip in, get the shot and use the ambient light. Two 40W household lights will be fine". But then obviously you don't want the rest of your crew to look like, well, a film crew, so it's a damn good thing that you can buy a perfectly good wide-shot camera that's small enough to count as a 1990s spy cam, right? (The fact that you can literally throw an axe at one without damaging it is a bonus.) You can just use your phone for the closeup shots.

But then you need to make sure that you don't have any big obvious sound gear -- but it's OK, because Rode just brought out a radio mic that frequency-hops on the 2.4Ghz band so you don't need a big-ass tunable reciever and can more or less rely on it to Just Work.

And the set's not quite perfect -- but that's not a problem because set extension tech is getting so good that you can more or less capture your actors and drop everything else you need in the shot in post.

And so on.

No-one really knows where this stuff is going to end up. Lots of grizzled veterans will tell you that it doesn't make a difference, and you still need experts from professions A through Q and kit worth $500,000 to make a decent film. Meanwhile, wide-eyed visionary types will tell you that we're heading toward a world where two-person film crews including the director are not only practical but routine.

(Two people? Luxury! How about a film made with ZERO crew including the director?)

All of this is bloody exciting. But the flipside is that once you've made your film for a budget that would have been impossible a decade ago, you'll find that the next stage has become more, not less, impossible.

The film distribution business is creaking and heaving under the strain of the world's change, and filmmakers are taking the hit hard.

Just the other day I heard the phrase "P&A is the new MG". Let me break that down for you.

'P&A', in movie terminology, is 'Prints and Advertising' -- in other words, the cost required to get a film into the cinema, and some marketing budget. 'MG', meanwhile, is 'Minimum Guarantee' -- what novelists would call an 'advance'. In the film world, thanks to the miracle of Hollywood Accounting, the MG is likely to be all the money you ever see from a film. (Both "Blair Witch" and "Lord Of The Rings" technically lost money, meaning the studios didn't owe any royalties.)

So in other words, in the brave new world of film, the advance you'll get from a distribution deal is... the money required to print the movie and advertise it. Which then gets spent on printing and advertising it.

Meaning your total expected income - not profit, income - from that distribution deal is $0.

So go to the brave new world of independent online distribution, right? Well, yeah. Except that the noise level and the difficulty of getting exposure at that point is so high that you'll still lose money. Without naming names, I know of reasonably commercial, well-made, well-reviewed indie movies that have made less than $3k -- against their $50k+ costs, not counting director's time -- on their independent release.

Netflix? They're swamped with filmmakers desperate to get onto their platform. iTunes? Just to get into the store -- with no publicity -- costs over $1,000.

The phrase I keep hearing about filmmaking is "there's never been a better time to get your movie made, and never been a worse time to get anyone to watch it".

Given all that, why the hell am I still working on live-action films? Because the technological change that's happening is just so damn exciting, that's why. The only other narrative medium that's changing as fast as film right now is VR. And where there's change, there's opportunity. If you're making films today the same way that indie filmmakers were making them a decade ago, sure, you're Gonna Have A Bad Time. But if you're trying to do something innovative? Then it's more a question of "test, observe results, repeat".

Television And Webseries

Televison's a refugee camp right now, where half of the hollow-eyed survivors wandering around in a daze are absent-mindedly clutching Oscars.

The growth of Netflix and all its rivals coupled with the sudden muscle of cable in the US means there's a huge amount of money and interest being poured into the TV market. At the same time, after things like Breaking Bad, House Of Cards, The Sopranos, et al, TV has shed its stigma and become the place to be.

Everyone's pouring money into TV: Amazon, Netflix, Playstation, even Yahoo, plus of course all the incumbents. Traditional film companies and even sales agents are jumping into TV-land too. And the same economies I mentioned above in film are also taking hold in TV.

So is it a good place to get into for a storyteller? Only if you're really good at deal-making or climbing institutional ladders.

Currently the money that's being spent is mostly being spent at the top. And thanks to the brain-drain from film, there's no shortage of really well-known people with serious portfolios eager to get their series made.

That means that it's at least as hard to break in as it ever was for a newbie, perhaps harder, unless you're already successful in another medium (books, comics, film), or you have strong contacts with an established Executive Producer or showrunner. And whilst you might even manage to sell your series idea to a production company, there's no guarantee that you'll end up associated with it subsequently.

There's no real 'indie television' in the same way as 'indie film' yet, and my understanding from experts in the distribution business is that even if you self-funded and made a TV-format series, you'd probably find you couldn't sell it.

So what about webseries?

Webseries are great - I've made a couple of them. They're an excellent format, superior to the feature film, I'd say, in all ways but one.

That one way is a bit of a killer, though. They just don't have a viable way to make money right now.

The economics of YouTube and similar platforms heavily favour content that's very fast to create and upload: Let's Play videos, direct-to-camera opinion or comedy pieces, or funny cat videos. At regular YouTube ad prices, even a piece that gets a million views will earn about $2,500, which is great if that took you three hours to make and cost you a fiver, but less good for drama, which is infamously slow and expensive by comparison.

That's true even given the technology shifts of today. Drama -- unless very cleverly scripted -- still requires multiple locations, props, costume, multiple actors, stunts and special effects, complex editing, colour grading, etc. That's exactly why the Netflix / HBO subscription model has been so game-changing -- because it generates a far higher per-viewer revenue stream, it means that TV drama doesn't have to be so mass-audience to survive. And even if you are mass-audience, TV ad prices are 10x what a YouTube creator will get -- making the difference between 'practical to create drama if you're massively successful' and 'not practical at all'.

The few drama webseries that do make a living for their creators survive off either corporate sponsorship, Kickstarters or similar ancilliary revenue streams. Patreon seems like it might be a practical approach for some webseries, but again the high costs of drama make it less viable than for comics (see below).

So, much like indie film, it's very possible to make webseries, provided you're willing to put significant amounts of your own money into them and get less than half of it back. Actually sustaining a living making them is... non-trivial. It's not impossible, but it's a pretty bleak landscape.

Games

Games development looks a bit like film right now, but nothing's quite as bad.

Games development tools are advancing, if anything, even faster than film tools, partially aided by the fact that the entire thing's digital.

If you have any interest in gaming as a creative medium, I urge you to download either the latest Unity or the latest Unreal Engine release. They're astonishingly easy to use; you'll be able to create a playable game inside about two hours if you have any familiarity with programming or 3D tools, and probably about three hours if you don't. They're absolute powerhouses of software, powering most of the latest big releases right up to AAA games in Unreal's case. Oh, and they're free. Barring some reasonable royalty agreements, completely free.

That's insane.

There's a huge and very active game development community producing thousands of tutorials on every aspect of game development. I've yet to find a single problem with Unity that I couldn't Google and solve immediately. There are hundreds of art assets and plugins available for very reasonable prices to make almost any genre and setting you want.

On the downside, no-one's yet solved the problem that games projects are subject to feature creep like you wouldn't believe. From regular reading on /r/gamedev, feature creep seems to be the pit trap that swallows about 75% of all indie devs. For storytellers, that's compounded by the bad news that most game genres that are narrative-heavy and still mainstream-acceptable are amongst the most cost- and time-heavy. (RPGs and Telltale Games-style narrative adventures being top of the list).

But again, the really big problem is distribution.

You can forget the mobile market, for starters. Discovery in the App Store is unbelievably bad, and the median number of copies sold for an indie game released on iOS without a marketing budget tends toward zero. The Google Play Store is very similar. And marketing mobile games is brutal -- there are a lot of companies going for a cash grab with huuuuuuuge budgets behind them, a lot more using exploit-based strategies like game cloning, and generally it's a pit fight where everyone else is either cheating or paying professional gladiators, and all you've got is a butter knife and hope.

PC gaming is better, but there too the competition is incredibly fierce, the process of getting into most of the storefronts is deeply arbitrary and generally getting anyone to pay attention is tough as hell.

Some of this is mitigated by the fact that the gaming community is surprisingly forgiving of low production values. Indeed, indie game developers are strongly encouraged to stay away from competing with the big franchises in that way. Provided a game has a coherent art style it can get away with being blocky as hell, 2D and palette-limited, or even deliberately ugly if that suits the gameplay.

If you're very focused, have innovative ideas for ways to tell stories through games without spending too much time on them, and are good at making friends with journalists, indie games are an interesting option for a storyteller right now. But the golden ticket they ain't, and there are plenty of pitfalls. Personally, I'm staying clear; not because of the discovery angle -- I am good at publicity -- but because my projects tend toward feature creep at the best of times, and game dev looks like a hole from which I would emerge 5 years later with a massive beard and a game reliant on half-decade-old technology.

Prose

I'm not going to get too in-depth with prose, partially because my prose experiments failed early and partially because, of all of these media, prose is the one where I know there are bigger experts than me hanging around here -- notably our gracious host.

Prose is interesting because it's the only one of the artforms I'm discussing here that has gone through a revolution in distribution but not in creation. Writing a novel doesn't take massively less time now than it did 15 years ago; sure, minor things have changed (I hear some considerable enthusiasm about Scrivener), but it's not like a novel used to take 10x as long to write as it does now.

However, the distribution landscape for self-publishers has changed beyond recognition. From the initial rise of the blog (which we really can't overestimate -- we're talking about ubiquitous, zero-gatekeeper journalism accessible to all) to the ebook and the Amazon Kindle store (which I'd argue are two seperate and equally important advances), prose distribution is the only one of these artforms that has really seen a frictionless, practical self-distribution framework emerge.

It really helps that readers clearly have much less hesitation buying self-published books than they do buying micro-budget films or even indie games. That's perhaps unsurprising: there are a lot less things that differentiate a newbie self-published author from a NYT Bestselling giant. Whilst there are still very important skills involved -- writing style and plot -- there aren't the additional hurdles of, for example, acting, music, sound design, sound recording, editing, colour grading, production design, prop design, costume, makeup, cinematography, camera and lens quality, lighting, CGI effects, practical effects, motion graphics and probably some other things I've missed.

Non-fiction text is sufficiently easy to turn into money that it reaches the hallowed ground of actually being a plausible, investable business plan. I funded my last big film project from the combination of a non-fiction info site that I founded and another on which I consulted.

Fiction is, still, harder than that. Most obviously, we've still not really figured out how to market fiction direct to consumers outside the comparative slam-dunk of 'you like this author, so here's another book by her/him'. I've been helping M. Harold Page market his "Shieldwall" novel recently, and even given the fact that I speak and consult professionally on online advertising for non-fiction, it's a tough sell.

In other "con" elements for prose, Amazon's discovery tools are the best of any store for fictional media, by a long way, but they're also not perfect, by an equally long way. And the field's increasingly crowded with new authors -- but the same's true of all these media except, perhaps, Virtual Reality.

But overall, prose fiction is probably in the best shape of all the artforms I've mentioned here.

Sadly, I just don't get on with writing it. My prose fiction attempt crapped out at 4,000 words. Twenty years of working in visual media appear to have wired me to need pictures. So I moved on...

Virtual Reality

The new frontier!

There are two huge problems with VR for a storyteller at present.

First, not that many people have a VR headset.

Secondly, no one has the faintest idea how to tell stories in VR. Well, OK, that may be a slight exaggeration. We have the faintest idea how to do it. We just don't have anything beyond that.

I've been experimenting with Virtual Reality since about 2 months after the first Oculus Rift developer kits became available. I participated in the first Oculus Rift Game Jam, creating a game whose visuals are the very definition of the phrase "programmer art". I've even worked in Virtual Reality creating sets for non-VR films, for my last animated film, Stone And Sorcery.

I still don't exactly know how you'd tell an effective story in the damn thing.

I think that 3D stereo cubemaps might have a significant part to play (and if you have a access to a VR headset, btw, I highly recommend checking them out), but beyond that I got nothin'.

However, there are heavyweights working on solving that problem. Oculus themselves has a dedicated team working on the problem. And Hollywood directors like Alfonso Cuarón are looking into the Rift for storytelling, too. Someone's going to crack it, and soon.

And aside from that minor detail, VR's an excellent environment for a storyteller right now. It's super-hip, so getting press coverage isn't hard. It has a massively enthusiastic community who will actually seek your work out. And if you make something really cool, John Carmack will review it and tell you what you could be doing better.

There's even money in it. Whilst, as previously noted, there aren't many people with a VR headset at present, the people who do have one are (a) rabidly enthusiastic and (b) have disposable income, by definition. Several VR apps, including the ubiquitous porn start-ups, are definitely posting revenue, although I don't know how profitable they are right now.

Oh, and VR experiences aren't even that hard to make. Unity and Unreal both work natively with the Rift -- it's essentially no harder to make a Rift game than to make, well, a game.

Overall, the future's bright. But it is still the future -- a stable medium it ain't.

Which makes it rather exciting.

Comics

And so we finally come to comics. Why the hell am I making a comic, exactly?

Well, quite a bit of it comes down to less-practical issues of vision and the nature of the medium (which I'll go into more detail about tomorrow on my own blog) as well as the fact that my unique background lets me cheat several aspects of the comics production process egregiously. I don't think most people are using a $50,000 motion capture system to make comics.

But comics are actually in a very interesting place right now.

They're about halfway between film and prose in terms of revolution of creation. 2D art has changed a lot in the last 15 years, thanks largely to a little program called Photoshop, but we're not in 'complete revolution, burn all the books' territory.

Nonetheless, comics creation has become fast enough that it's practical for a single creator to produce an ongoing narrative -- in some cases, a pretty epic one.

And in terms of distribution, it turns out that comics are very well suited to the Internet as a form of delivery.

I'm more enthusiastic about webcomics than I am about Comixology-style digital comics. Comixology itself has a self-distribution program, but its lead times are startlingly gigantic: three months or so to get a comic into the store, with infamously stringent requirements that often result in submissions getting knocked back a bunch of times. And once you're in there, it's another digital store, with similar discovery problems to the Apple App Store.

Webcomics have a discovery problem, again, but there is some help in the form of Project Wonderful, an advertising agency that's pretty much dedicated to comics creators, and a generally enthusiastic community. The comics subreddits, for example, are actively welcoming of comic author self-promotion, something that's not true at all of most of the other medias' subreddits.

Webcomics enable extremely rapid experimentation. I was able to test out a webcomic idea in about 5 hours last year -- all the way from 'have idea' (admittedly from an existing project) to 'publicise and get viable, interesting feedback'. That's incredibly powerful, and something that's missing from almost all the other media I've discussed here.

And the audience for webcomics is, quietly, absolutely gigantic. Even if we discount the popular comic strips as opposed to ongoing narratives (Penny Arcade, Dilbert, et al), the audience for top serialised-narrative webcomics like Homestuck is in the order of multiple millions a day. To put this in perspective, a webseries that gets 1,000,000 viewers for its premiere episode across all time is a huge success. A solid number of webcomics see 100,000+ page views a day -- more than you'd expect by the usual inverse square law rule.

( I suspect a lot of the size of the audience is down to one simple fact: unlike movies, TV shows, or even games, it's very easy to consume the latest page of a webcomic at work. )

The combination of rapid development time and the large audience makes webcomics unusually practical from a financial perspective, too. Just on an advertising basis, larger webcomics are doing numbers that will generate at least a modest income. The webcomics community is leading the charge on alternative support methods like Patreon, too, and there are quite a few comic creators on there clearing $3k+ per month.

So, strangely, it seems that comics, which most people involved in them regard as an almost inevitably loss-making proposition, ended up looking to me like one of the, if not the, best propositions of all the available media in the 2010s.

And that's why Carcosa, my ongoing webcomic happened.

The Future

Given this is Charlie's Blog, I can't possibly leave things at a statement of the present.

So, where are things going to be in five years?

Firstly, I don't think that the 'film is scr000d' situation is going to persist long-term. Right now it feels like we're in a classic Warren Buffet "be bold where others are fearful" situation. One large player moving in with a competently executed, low-friction independent movie marketplace would change a lot, and I've no doubt that will happen.

I do think that the movie world is going to change beyond recognition. In the medium term, (independent) film is probably going to look a lot more like the book world: films are not going to stop getting cheaper and faster to make, until $6,000 is an average or perhaps even unusually high budget for a indie feature-length production. Studio films are likely to go a different way - several people are predicting a massive crash in the studio world in the near future when a couple of tentpole blockbusters fail badly, and I'm inclined to think the odds of that happening are good.

The sheer quantity of indie features being made right now - 10,000+ a year or more - also all but guarantees that we'll see an E.L. James style breakout hit from the truly indie film world in the near future; probably more than one. We're already seeing an erosion in the power of the 'movie star', and I suspect that's going to continue, too. We may even see a dramatic turn against the prejudices against low production value: that has already happened a bit with the "Mumblecore" movement, and the rapid evolution of film on the Internet may end up taking the entire aesthetic of the medium in a very strange direction where some things look very slick and others very amateurish.

I'm less than convinced about the long-term viability of the feature format, because it's dependent on the cinema as a long-term cultural artifact. As films become cheaper and faster to make, I can see short films returning as a financially viable medium -- if we get to the point where you can make a short in a day, then the YouTube model starts to make sense.

I think that the culture at large is going to wake up one day and realise just how big webcomics have become. With Homestuck and Questionable Content already starting to push into TV-sized audiences, webcomics look to be the next artform to suddenly break out of the 'nerdy subculture' ghetto and into mainstream culture, in as much as that term means anything.

Finally, VR is either going to fail utterly or be huge, for values of 'huge' meaning 'bigger than the mobile phone'. I don't think it's possible to overestimate the impact of the first genuine reality simulation. We'll figure out some way to tell stories in it, but it might be that those stories are necessarily interactive in nature. Alternatively, we might end up discovering that actually, hovering like a ghost in the middle of a dramatic scene is a surprisingly natural way to view drama. Games are already discovering this: several of the most popular Oculus Rift titles are actually third-person, not first-person at all.

But regardless, VR isn't just a game-changer -- it's a reality-changer.

Alternatively, it may be that VR fails and the second horseman of the VRpocalypse, Augmented Reality, ends up being the real winner. That's certainly what Microsoft are betting on with their Hololens.

At which point, the best guide I could give to the future of entertainment would be to say "Have you heard of this guy called Charles Stross? He wrote a couple of books a few years ago that you might find interesting..."

Agree? Disagree? Think I've missed something key? Let me know below.

And if you'd like to read more of my rants and rambles, you can find me on Twitter at @hughhancock and on the Web at Strange Company.

amazonpoodle:

fun tip for the day, from a former customer service operator: if you call a customer service line that has little “this call may be recorded” disclaimer, and the person who helps you out does a good job, TELL THEM THIS. say, “you have been so helpful, i really appreciate it” or similar, not just because they were nice to you and you want to be nice back but because this counts on their quality assurance scores. at the place i worked doing credit card customer service, our bonuses/raises/continued employment depended heavily on somebody listening to our phone calls and grading them. a clear statement of appreciation (more than just “thank you”) was worth a lot. it takes like 15 extra seconds of your life. i try to do it whenever i can.

p.s. if you’re really feeling wild and/or somebody has rocked your world answering your questions about shipping or giving you a refund or fixing your computer, and you have some extra time, ASK TO TELL THEIR MANAGER HOW GREAT THEY’VE BEEN. trust me.

Node.

We lost fifteen million souls that day.

Fifteen million brains sheathed in wraparound full-sensory experience more real than reality: skydiving, bug-hunting, fucking long-lost or imaginary lovers whose fraudulence was belied only by their perfection. Gang-bangs and first-person space battles shared by thousands— each feeding from that trickle of bandwidth keeping them safely partitioned one from another, even while immersed in the same sensations. All lost in an instant.

We still don’t know what happened.

The basics are simple enough. Any caveman could tell you what happens when you replace a dirt path with a twenty-lane expressway: bandwidth rises, latency falls, and suddenly the road is big enough to carry selves as well as sensation. We coalesces into a vast and singular I. We knew those risks. That’s why we installed the valves to begin with: because we knew what might happen in their absence.

But we still don’t know how all those safeguards failed at the same time. We don’t know who did it (or what— rumors of rogue distributed AIs, thinking microwave thoughts across the stratosphere, have been neither confirmed or denied). We’ll never know what insights arced through that godlike mind-hive in the moments it took to throw the breakers, unplug the victims, wrest back some measure of control. We’ve spent countless hours debriefing the survivors (those who recovered from their catatonia, at least); they told us as much as a single neuron might, if you ripped it out of someone’s head and demanded to know what the brain was thinking.

Those lawsuits launched by merely human victims have more or less been settled. The others— conceived, plotted, and put into irrevocable motion by the 21-Second God in those fleeting moments between emergence and annihilation— continue to iterate across a thousand jurisdictions. The first motions were launched, the first AIgents retained, less than ten seconds into Coalescence. The rights of mayfly deities. The creation and the murder of a hive mind. Restitution strategies that would compel some random assortment of people to plug their brains into a resurrected Whole for an hour a week, so 21G might be born again. A legal campaign lasting years, waged simultaneously on myriad fronts, all planned out in advance and launched on autopilot. The hive lived for a mere 21 seconds, but it learned enough in that time to arrange for its own second coming. It wants its life back.

A surprising number of us want to join it.

Some say we should just throw in the towel and concede. No army of lawyers, no swarm of AIgents could possible win against a coherent self with the neurocomputational mass of fifteen million human brains, no matter how ephemeral its lifespan. Some suggest that even its rare legal defeats are deliberate, part of some farsighted strategy to delay ultimate victory until vital technological milestones have been reached.

The 21-Second God is beyond mortal ken, they say. Even our victories promote Its Holy Agenda.

Six million people risk losing their health care subsidies, yet @POTUS continues to deny that Obamacare is bad for the American people.

— Senator John Thune (@SenJohnThune) June 8, 2015

intrigue-posthaste-please:

One of the most important things that good fiction does consistently is to track the reader’s mental image closely. The near-hallucinatory images that appear in the mind of the reader of fiction as she reads are the author’s bread and butter. If we jolt the reader from her reverie, we’ve failed. 

If one sentence describes the interior of a shop from the point of view of someone who’s just entered, the next sentence doesn’t jump to describing the cars out on the street. When it’s necessary to move the action to a different setting, time is taken to describe the characters’ transition into that setting. A man leaves the shop; the bell on the door tinkles. The reader feels present in the scene. The setting takes on weight and permanence. 

There’s strict fidelity to the relation of static objects: everybody’s facing a certain way relative to one another, and sounds/smells/light originate from logical points in space. This way, alert and conscious readers are able to spin a seamless mental stage on which the characters flourish. 

Put another way: If we think of a piece of fiction as a grand and elaborate lie, the best liars are the ones who have their stories straight. 

This isn’t to say that tedious paragraphs are spent describing every detail of the setting so that every reader’s mental picture is 100% “accurate” and identical. Not at all. Rather, an author who creates a vivid setting writes simply and decisively. She may have a vast and precise mental picture of her setting, but judiciously divulge only certain illustrative details to the reader - those that are likely to pack the greatest punch. 

(Similarly, a master of character development has a near-complete understanding of his characters’ personality and backstory, beyond what’s feasible to include in the piece, and he uses dialogue and plot points to convey that backstory economically to maximal effect.) 

Every reader’s mental image is ultimately slightly different, but each one feels cohesive and solid, made real in the mind. The reader can always tell when the author is showing us a fully realized world through a keyhole, and it makes for infinitely more appealing fiction. 

Reblogging because this is relevant to the conversation I was responding to yesterday.  =)

I.

Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered to be living in sin; no other form of proposal is appropriate or accepted.

One day, a Dutch trader comes to the little kingdom. He explains that his homeland also has a quaint custom involving tulips: they speculate on them, bidding the price up to stratospheric levels. Why, in the Netherlands, a tulip can go for ten times more than the average worker earns in a year! The trader is pleased to find a new source of bulbs, and offers the people of the kingdom a few guilders per tulip, which they happily accept.

Soon other Dutch traders show up and start a bidding war. The price of tulips goes up, and up, and up; first dozens of guilders, then hundreds. Tulip-growers make a fortune, but everyone else is less pleased. Suitors wishing to give a token of their love find themselves having to invest their entire life savings – with no guarantee that the woman will even say yes! Soon, some of the poorest people are locked out of marriage and family-raising entirely.

Some of the members of Parliament are outraged. Marriage is, they say, a human right, and to see it forcibly denied the poor by foreign speculators is nothing less than an abomination. They demand that the King provide every man enough money to guarantee he can buy a tulip. Some objections are raised: won’t it deplete the Treasury? Are we obligated to buy everyone a beautiful flawless bulb, or just the sickliest, grungiest plant that will technically satisfy the requirements of the ritual? If some man continuously proposes to women who reject him, are we obligated to pay for a new bulb each time, thus subsidizing his stupidity?

The pro-subsidy faction declares that the people asking these question are well-off, and can probably afford tulips of their own, and so from their place of privilege they are trying to raise pointless objections to other people being able to obtain the connubial happiness they themselves enjoy. After the doubters are tarred and feathered and thrown in the river, Parliament votes that the public purse pay for as many tulips as the poor need, whatever the price.

A few years later, another Dutch trader comes to the little kingdom. Everyone asks if he is there to buy tulips, and he says no, the Netherlands’ tulip bubble has long since collapsed, and the price is down to a guilder or two. The people of the kingdom are very surprised to hear that, since the price of their own tulips has never stopped going up, and is now in the range of tens of thousands of guilders. Nevertheless, they are glad that, however high tulip prices may be for them, they know the government is always there to help. Sure, the roads are falling apart and the army is going hungry for lack of rations, but at least everyone who wants to marry is able to do so.

Meanwhile, across the river is another little kingdom that had the same tulip-related marriage custom. They also had a crisis when the Dutch merchants started making the prices go up. But they didn’t have enough money to afford universal tulip subsidies. It was pretty touch-and-go for a while, and a lot of poor people were very unhappy.

But nowadays they use daffodils to mark engagements, and their economy has never been better.

II.

In America, aspiring doctors do four years of undergrad in whatever area they want (I did Philosophy), then four more years of medical school, for a total of eight years post-high school education. In Ireland, aspiring doctors go straight from high school to medical school and finish after five years.

I’ve done medicine in both America and Ireland. The doctors in both countries are about equally good. When Irish doctors take the American standardized tests, they usually do pretty well. Ireland is one of the approximately 100% of First World countries that gets better health outcomes than the United States. There’s no evidence whatsoever that American doctors gain anything from those three extra years of undergrad. And why would they? Why is having a philosophy degree under my belt supposed to make me any better at medicine?

(I guess I might have acquired a talent for colorectal surgery through long practice pulling things out of my ass, but it hardly seems worth it.)

I’ll make another confession. Ireland’s medical school is five years as opposed to America’s four because the Irish spend their first year teaching the basic sciences – biology, organic chemistry, physics, calculus. When I applied to medical school in Ireland, they offered me an accelerated four year program on the grounds that I had surely gotten all of those in my American undergraduate work. I hadn’t. I read some books about them over the summer and did just fine.

Americans take eight years to become doctors. Irishmen can do it in four, and achieve the same result. Each year of higher education at a good school – let’s say an Ivy, doctors don’t study at Podunk Community College – costs about $50,000. So American medical students are paying an extra $200,000 for…what?

Remember, a modest amount of the current health care crisis is caused by doctors’ crippling level of debt. Socially responsible doctors often consider less lucrative careers helping the needy, right up until the bill comes due from their education and they realize they have to make a lot of money right now. We took one look at that problem and said “You know, let’s make doctors pay an extra $200,000 for no reason.”

And to paraphrase Dirkson, $200,000 here, $200,000 there, and pretty soon it adds up to real money. 20,000 doctors graduate in the United States each year; that means the total yearly cost of requiring doctors to have undergraduate degrees is $4 billion. That’s most of the amount of money you’d need to house every homeless person in the country ($10,000 to house one homeless x 600,000 homeless).

I want to be able to say people have noticed the Irish/American discrepancy and are thinking hard about it. I can say that. Just not in the way I would like. Many of the elder doctors I talked to in Ireland wanted to switch to the American system. Not because they thought it would give them better doctors. Just because they said it was more fun working with medical students like myself who were older and a little wiser. The Irish medical students were just out of high school and hard to relate to – us foreigners were four years older than that and had one or another undergraduate subject under our belts. One of my attendings said that it was nice having me around because I’d studied Philosophy in college and that gave our team a touch of class. A touch of class!

This is why, despite my reservations about libertarianism, it’s not-libertarianism that really scares me. Whenever some people without skin in the game are allowed to make decisions for other people, you end up with a bunch of elderly doctors getting together, think “Yeah, things do seem a little classier around here if we make people who are not us pay $200,000, make it so,” and then there goes the money that should have housed all the homeless people in the country.

But more important, it also destroyed my last shred of hope that the current mania for requiring college degrees for everything had a good reason behind it.

III.

The only reason I’m picking on medicine is that it’s so clear. You have your experimental group in the United States, your control group in Ireland, you can see the lack of difference. You can take an American doctor and an Irish doctor, watch them prescribe the same medication in the same situation, and have a visceral feel for “Wait, we just spent $200,000 for no reason.”

But it’s not just medicine. Let me tell you about my family.

There’s my cousin. He wants to be a firefighter. He’s wanted to be a firefighter ever since he was young, and he’s done volunteer work for his local fire department, who have promised him a job. But in order to get it, he has to go do four years of college. You can’t be a firefighter without a college degree. That would be ridiculous. Back in the old days, when people were allowed to become firefighters after getting only thirteen measly years of book learning, I have it on good authority that several major states burnt to the ground.

My mother is a Spanish teacher. After twenty years teaching, with excellent reviews by her students, she pursued a Masters’ in Education because her school was going to pay her more money if she had it. She told me that her professors were incompetent, had never actually taught real students, and spent the entire course pushing whatever was the latest educational fad; however, after paying them thousands of dollars, she got the degree and her school dutifully increased her salary. She is lucky. In several states, teachers are required by law to pursue a Masters’ degree to be allowed to continue teaching. Oddly enough, these states have no better student outcomes than states without this requirement, but this does not seem to affect their zeal for this requirement. Even though many rigorous well-controlled studies have found that presence of absence of a Masters’ degree explains approximately zero percent of variance in teacher quality, many states continue to require it if you want to keep your license, and almost every state will pay you more for having it.

Before taking my current job, I taught English in Japan. I had no Japanese language experience and no teaching experience, but the company I interviewed with asked if I had an undergraduate degree in some subject or other, and that was good enough for them. Meanwhile, I knew people who were fluent in Japanese and who had high-level TOEFL certification. They did not have a college degree so they were not considered.

My ex-girlfriend majored in Gender Studies, but it turned out all of the high-paying gender factories had relocated to China. They solved this problem by going to App Academy, a three month long, $15,000 course that taught programming. App Academy graduates compete for the same jobs as people who have taken computer science in college, a four year long, $200,000 undertaking.

I see no reason to think my family and friends are unique. The overall picture seems to be one of people paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a degree in Art History to pursue a job in Sales, or a degree in Spanish Literature to get a job as a middle manager. Or not paying hundreds of thousands of dollars, if they happen to be poor, and so being permanently locked out of jobs as a firefighter or salesman.

IV.

So presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has proposed universal free college tuition.

On the one hand, I sympathize with his goals. If you can’t get any job better than ‘fast food worker’ without a college degree, and poor people can’t afford college degrees, that’s a pretty grim situation, and obviously unfair to the poor.

On the other hand, if can’t you get married without a tulip, and poor people can’t afford tulips, that’s also a pretty grim situation, and obviously unfair to the poor.

But the solution isn’t universal tulip subsidies.

Higher education is in a bubble much like the old tulip bubble. In the past forty years, the price of college has dectupled (quadrupled when adjusting for inflation). It used to be easy to pay for college with a summer job; now it is impossible. At the same time, the unemployment rate of people without college degrees is twice that of people who have them. Things are clearly very bad and Senator Sanders is right to be concerned.

But, well, when we require doctors to get a college degree before they can go to medical school, we’re throwing out a mere $5 billion, barely enough to house all the homeless people in the country. But Senator Sanders admits that his plan would cost $70 billion per year. That’s about the size of the entire economy of Hawaii. It’s enough to give $2000 every year to every American in poverty.

At what point do we say “Actually, no, let’s not do that, and just let people hold basic jobs even if they don’t cough up a a hundred thousand dollars from somewhere to get a degree in Medieval History”?

I’m afraid that Sanders’ plan is a lot like the tulip subsidy idea that started off this post. It would subsidize the continuation of a useless tradition that has turned into a speculation bubble, prevent the bubble from ever popping, and disincentivize people from figuring out a way to route around the problem, eg replacing the tulips with daffodils.

(yes, it is nice to have college for non-economic reasons too, but let’s be honest – if there were no such institution as college, would you, totally for non-economic reasons, suggest the government pay poor people $100,000 to get a degree in Medieval History? Also, anything not related to job-getting can be done three times as quickly by just reading a book.)

If I were Sanders, I’d propose a different strategy. Make “college degree” a protected characteristic, like race and religion and sexuality. If you’re not allowed to ask a job candidate whether they’re gay, you’re not allowed to ask them whether they’re a college graduate or not. You can give them all sorts of examinations, you can ask them their high school grades and SAT scores, you can ask their work history, but if you ask them if they have a degree then that’s illegal class-based discrimination and you’re going to jail. I realize this is a blatant violation of my usual semi-libertarian principles, but at this point I don’t care.

Lately I do the bulk of my coding on a Kinesis Advantage keyboard. Increasingly I’m also making use of the optional 3-switch foot pedal. It’s been interesting watching the effect this has on my priorities for editor keybindings.

Every keypress or key-chord has an opportunity cost associated with it. Some are higher than others. Most traditional hacker-oriented tools make certain assumptions about these opportunity costs.

For instance, most tools assume that the opportunity cost for using arrow keys for navigation is extremely high. This is based on the fact that historically, Unix terminals often didn’t even possess arrow keys, making their opportunity cost effectively infinite. And even on modern keyboards, they are off in a little remote island, forcing the user to relocate a hand away from the home row and then back, even for the smallest cursor motion.

As a consequence, the traditional “hackers editors” have eschewed arrow key navigation. It’s available, but it’s not considered the primary navigation center. So for instance, if there are special bindings for navigating by expression or by function, they are not built around the arrow keys.

Editor developers have also traditionally recognized that modifier keys have a high opportunity cost, since on the vast majority of keyboards they involve stretching a pinkie to full extension while keeping the rest of the hand in position to hit a key. Vim is particularly good about avoiding these digit acrobatics. Emacs is less sympathetic, but even Emacs usually emphasizes contiguous sequences of simpler key combos over multiple-modifier contortions.

The Kinesis keyboard addresses both of these keyboard shortcomings. On the Kinesis, you can comfortably use the arrow keys without leaving home position. It’s still a slightly higher opportunity cost than using Vim-style home-row navigation, but it’s a marginal difference instead of a massive one.

The Kinesis also recognizes what game pad designers have long realized: that the human thumb is an extraordinarily dexterous organ. It is equally at home hitting single keys or mashing down multiple buttons at a time. The Kinesis takes advantage of this fact by organizing modifier keys along with other common non-character keys into “thumb islands”.

And then there’s the optional foot pedal. Using a foot pedal with your keyboard feels impossibly geeky at first. Until you use it for a while, and then you start wondering why you didn’t recruit your feet for help years ago. It’s not like they had anything better to do all this time. Sewing machines have foot pedals. Cars have foot pedals. Airplanes have rudder pedals. Why not computers?

The upshot of all this is that a lot of the work that has gone into hacker editors’ keybindings doesn’t seem to matter to me as much anymore. For instance, I’ve been using RubyMine lot lately (for reasons unrelated to keybindings). People ask me if I use Emacs or Vim keybindings for it, and I don’t. I use the defaults, for the most part. This includes bindings like Ctrl-Left/Right for wordwise navigation, or Alt-Up/Down for navigating by method. And on the Kinesis, it’s fine. It doesn’t bother me.

Similarly, it’s become less urgent to me to explore Vim-style keybindings in Emacs. Key-chords are now relatively “cheap” in terms of effort and comfort. (Although Spacemacs remains intriguing…)

Obviously, keybindings are the tiniest tip of the iceberg we it comes to the capabilities and advantages of an editor like Vim or Emacs. Please don’t think I’m saying navigation keys are the only things that keep me using mature text editing tools. And of course, there’s nothing stopping you from using arrow keys to navigate around in Emacs or Vim.

But it does have me thinking about how much of those editors’ UX is designed around a lowest-common-denominator teletype keyboard, circa 1960.

There’s an argument to be made that this is a good thing. After all, when I take my laptop out on the deck, or to a cafe, I instantly lose all of those Kinesis advantages (heh). Even if I started carrying an Atreus with me, it doesn’t have all the keys of a Kinesis. Let alone pedals. Perhaps I should emphasize muscle memory for the subset of comfortable keybindings that are available to me all of the time, instead of the superset that’s available in my home office.

But I’m not sure that’s such a great idea. A fighter pilot doesn’t use a yoke instead of a fly-by-wire joystick just because sometimes she also flies Cessnas.

Maybe it’s time we started demanding modern programmer-input devices across the board. Instead of designing input schemes around the limitations of a device that hasn’t changed substantially since it was invented for bashing inked hammers into a roll of paper.

UPDATE: It occurred to me that I hadn’t even mentioned the “Home/End/PageUp/PageDown” cluster. This is an example of a set of functions that most hacker’s editors use some kind of key sequence or combo for, since their location is usually as problematic as that of the arrow keys, if not even more so. But the Kinesis puts these keys in the thumb islands, available without moving your hands or glancing down. A lot of editor tutorials will try to wean you off of these keys along with the arrows. But I’m finding I’m using the dedicated keys more and more (and the alternative keybindings less and less), because I’m no longer paying a price for it. Which is nice, because it means I can use the same muscle memory across all applications.

UPDATE 2: Hi Hacker News! Since I don’t feel like wading into the comments over there, I wanted to quickly address a common theme in some of the comments. Namely: the notion that “efficiency” is the only axis that a given keyboard/layout/editor combo might be judged on. If you’re a young hacker you may not presently be much concerned about keyboard comfort; but speaking from the ancient and decrepit age of 34: you will be.

becausedragonage:

makingfists:

It’s like this…

You’re fourteen and you’re reading Larry Niven’s “The Protector” because it’s your father’s favorite book and you like your father and you think he has good taste and the creature on the cover of the book looks interesting and you want to know what it’s about. And in it the female character does something better than the male character - because she’s been doing it her whole life and he’s only just learned - and he gets mad that she’s better at it than him. And you don’t understand why he would be mad about that, because, logically, she’d be better at it than him. She’s done it more. And he’s got a picture of a woman painted on the inside of his spacesuit, like a pinup girl, and it bothers you.

But you’re fourteen and you don’t know how to put this into words.

And then you’re fifteen and you’re reading “Orphans of the Sky” because it’s by a famous sci-fi author and it’s about a lost generation ship and how cool is that?!? but the women on the ship aren’t given a name until they’re married and you spend more time wondering what people call those women up until their marriage than you do focusing on the rest of the story. Even though this tidbit of information has nothing to do with the plot line of the story and is only brought up once in passing.

But it’s a random thing to get worked up about in an otherwise all right book.

Then you’re sixteen and you read “Dune” because your brother gave it to you for Christmas and it’s one of those books you have to read to earn your geek card. You spend an entire afternoon arguing over who is the main character - Paul or Jessica. And the more you contend Jessica, the more he says Paul, and you can’t make him see how the real hero is her. And you love Chani cause she’s tough and good with a knife, but at the end of the day, her killing Paul’s challengers is just a way to degrade them because those weenies lost to a girl.

Then you’re seventeen and you don’t want to read “Stranger in a Strange Land” after the first seventy pages because something about it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. All of this talk of water-brothers. You can’t even pin it down.

And then you’re eighteen and you’ve given up on classic sci-fi, but that doesn’t stop your brother or your father from trying to get you to read more.

Even when you bring them the books and bring them the passages and show them how the authors didn’t treat women like people.

Your brother says, “Well, that was because of the time it was written in.”

You get all worked up because these men couldn’t imagine a world in which women were equal, in which women were empowered and intelligent and literate and capable. 

You tell him - this, this is science fiction. This is all about imagining the world that could be and they couldn’t stand back long enough and dare to imagine how, not only technology would grow in time, but society would grow. 

But he blows you off because he can’t understand how it feels to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and desperately wanting to like the books your father likes, because your father has good taste, and being unable to, because most of those books tell you that you’re not a full person in ways that are too subtle to put into words. It’s all cognitive dissonance: a little like a song played a bit out of tempo - enough that you recognize it’s off, but not enough to pin down what exactly is wrong.

And then one day you’re twenty-two and studying sociology and some kind teacher finally gives you the words to explain all those little feelings that built and penned around inside of you for years.

It’s like the world clicking into place. 

And that’s something your brother never had to struggle with.

This is an excellent post to keep in mind when you see another recent post criticizing the current trend of dystopian sci-fi and going on about how sci-fi used to be about hope and wonder.

No. It used to be about men. And now it’s not.

when you see another recent post criticizing the current trend of dystopian sci-fi and going on about how sci-fi used to be about hope and wonder.

No. It used to be about men. And now it’s not.

Dennis Hastert, the Illinois Republican who served as speaker of the House of Representatives from 1999 through 2007, has been accused of trying to hide the sexual abuse of a male student from when he was a teacher and a high school wrestling coach.

Richard A. Serrano and Katherine Skiba report for The Los Angeles Times:

J. Dennis Hastert stumbled into political power amid a Republican sex scandal in 1998 that unexpectedly elevated the husky Illinoisan to a position just two heartbeats away from the presidency.

He became the longest-serving Republican House speaker in U.S. history, but remained so proud of his days as a small-town high school teacher and wrestling coach that he relished the Capitol Hill nickname “Coach.”

But this week those once-idolized small-town roots caught up with the 73-year-old Hastert, who in recent years has worked behind the scenes as a Washington power broker.

On Friday, federal law enforcement officials said Hastert had paid $1.7 million over the last four years to conceal sexual abuse against a former male student he knew during his days as a teacher in Yorkville, Ill., where Hastert worked until 1981.

Hastert’s alleged misdeeds came to light when he was indicted for lying to the FBI, which was investigating the former congressman due to a history of suspicious bank withdrawals he’d been making since 2010. Apparently, Hastert was withdrawing the cash for hush-money payments to his alleged victim.

Wheaton College’s J. Dennis Hastert Center has been expeditiously renamed. (From a Chicago Tribune photo by Anne Halston. Click pic for full story.)

That means, of course, that Hastert himself may also be the victim of a crime — extortion by, or on behalf of, his alleged victim or victims. We don’t yet know that for sure, just as we don’t yet know for sure that Hastert is guilty of the allegations against him — thus the reliance on the cautious language of “allegedly” and “accused of.”

But while there’s much that’s uncertain at this point, common sense makes him seem very, very guilty of something. It would be strange for him to pay $1.7 million to someone over a false accusation without him contacting the police or hiring a team of attorneys. If I were a multi-millionaire and someone tried extorting millions of dollars from me over a false accusation, I’d hire a bunch of million-dollar lawyers and clear my name in court — not skulk around clumsily trying to sneak them the hush-money they demanded.

Here’s another part of Serrano and Skiba’s report that I don’t quite understand:

The disclosures followed Thursday’s federal indictment against Hastert on charges of lying to the FBI about the reasons for large cash withdrawals he is accused of making to buy the man’s silence.

“It goes back a long way, back to then,” a second [federal law enforcement] official said. “It has nothing to do with public corruption or a corruption scandal. Or to his time in office.”

Thursday’s indictment described misconduct against a person identified only as “Individual A,” noting that Hastert had known the person “most of Individual A’s life.”

When asked about the nature of the alleged misconduct, the second official said, “It was sex.”

OK, yes, a sex scandal is not the same thing as “public corruption or a corruption scandal.” But when a sex scandal leads to extortion, that distinction goes away. A politician who is willing to pay someone millions of dollars to keep quiet may also be a politician who is willing to vote or deregulate or administer their duties in a way that favors those leveraging their secrets against them. And that is the very definition of public corruption.

The alleged sex or sexual abuse Hastert was paying to keep secret occurred before his time in office. He was keeping that secret throughout all of his years in office. There is no sense in which that secret can be said to have “nothing to do with” his time in office.

It’s certainly possible to be in public office while keeping secrets that one does not wish the public to know without being corrupt. But when they’re the kind of secrets for which one is willing to pay millions in hush-money, then they’re also the kind of secrets that one might be willing to exchange political favors to keep. That’s corruption.

And speaking of corruption, how is it that a former high school teacher and coach, who then spent decades in Congress, amassed the kind of personal fortune that enabled him to agree to pay some $3.5 million to keep his secrets hidden? Hastert, apparently, made his fortune by speculating in real estate — including several deals in which his investment paid off due to congressional action, suggesting there wasn’t really anything speculative about them. After his time in Congress, he went on to a lucrative career as a lobbyist — the revolving door through which corporations are able to write a big thank-you check to former congressmen for their years of faithful service. I don’t see how that has “nothing to do with public corruption or a corruption scandal” either.

Meanwhile at Hastert’s alma mater, the former “J. Dennis Hastert Center for Economics, Government, and Public Policy” has been quickly renamed the Center for Economics, Government, and Public Policy at Wheaton College. Hastert resigned from the advisory board of the center on Friday when the allegations against him became public.

Rough weekend for Wheaton, then — taking down signs, recycling letterhead stationery, and having to issue statements mixing pious platitudes with the kind of thing we usually hear from mob lawyers:

“In light of the charges and allegations that have emerged, the College has re-designated the Center as the Wheaton College Center for Economics, Government, and Public Policy at this time,” the college said in a statement on Sunday.

Wheaton has no connection to the recent allegations against Hastert, according to the statement.

“We commit ourselves to pray for all involved, including Speaker Hastert, his family, and those who may have been harmed by any inappropriate behavior, and to continue the work and mission of the Wheaton College Center for Economics, Government, and Public Policy,” the statement read.

… “The Center will continue to serve these purposes in conformity with the highest ethical and academic standards of excellence and integrity in conformity with our institution’s identity,” it stated. “The College respects Mr. Hastert’s distinguished public service record and the due process being afforded him pursuant to the charges that have been filed against him.”

Speaking of public corruption … Wheaton’s not-Hastert center is currently directed by former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias,. He was — according to the official story — fired from that post by the Bush administration for incompetence. That official story is suspect, since no examples of that alleged incompetence were ever cited and Iglesias received excellent performance reviews. But that’s still the official story, because it’s more pleasant than the alternative — which is that Iglesias was fired for having too much integrity to play along with pressure from the Bush administration to use bogus claims about “voter fraud” to intimidate and suppress minority voters.

The apparent firing and replacement of several U.S. attorneys for political reasons led to an investigation into possible perjury by members of the Bush administration whose testimony to Congress on the scandal was unsupported and contradictory. But since this potential perjury merely involved suppressing minority votes to rig elections — rather than something of vital national interest, like a blow job — that investigation didn’t go anywhere.

Which brings us back to Dennis Hastert and his place in history, as summed up eloquently by Orin Kerr for The Washington Post:

If I understand the history correctly, in the late 1990s, the president was impeached for lying about a sexual affair by a House of Representatives led by a man who was also then hiding a sexual affair, who was supposed to be replaced by another congressman who stepped down when forced to reveal that he too was having a sexual affair, which led to the election of a new speaker of the House who now has been indicted for lying about payments covering up his sexual contact with a boy.

Yikes.

thebloggerbloggerfun:

Context: Anon is referring to this post from countersignal​:

also your bizarre superpower of always ending up in places where odd things are happening or w/e, what’s up with that. how do you do that. how. you snake-eating candy shop worker.

Anyway, I have no idea how I do this!  (Or rather, I’m not sure why it happens to me, since most of the time, it doesn’t really feel like I’m doing anything at all.)

Some hypotheses:

• I talk to strangers a lot.  Strangers don’t seem to mind.  It probably helps that I’m a small, nonthreatening, reasonably attractive girl.  I’m sure it also helps that I smile a lot.  But I think the important part is just… talking to a lot of strangers.  Today, I was walking home from work, and there was a guy on the other side of the road, with longish grey hair and a beard, carrying a brown paper bag (which he’d presumably gotten at the liquor store up the road).  I passed a little boy, standing in the street playing drums.  I asked “are those drums?” and he said “yeah!”, and then put them on the ground and started playing a rhythm for me.  But a minute later, the guy with the grey beard walked by, and the little boy screamed “it’s a murderer!” and then ran back inside.  I looked at the man in bemusement, and smiled and said “you don’t look like a murderer to me”.  And he said “I’m glad; I was just wondering how scary I looked!”  I reassured him that he didn’t look scary at all (he really didn’t).  In this particular case, the conversation ended there.  But when I have like 5 of these mini-conversations every time I go for a walk, well, sometimes they turn into longer conversations, and sometimes those turn into adventures.
• I live in Harpers Ferry.  This is a tourist town full of Appalachian trail hikers.  Tourists are likely to be relaxed and open to conversation.  Appalachian trail hikers are likely to be interesting, strange, and up for random adventures.  (But I’ve only lived in Harpers Ferry for 9 months, and this has been happening to me all my life, so, uh.)
• I travel a lot.  When I travel, I stay in hostels.  People at hostels are often up for hanging out with strangers and going on random adventures.
• I have some kind of magickal power that attracts adventures to me, even when I’m not actively seeking them?  Based on a remarkable coincidence of something showing up exactly when it was needed one time, I refuse to discount this hypothesis.
• I make explicit offerings to the adventure gods.  I put myself in mildly dangerous situations without fear or desire for the consequences.
  

I feel rather silly and pretentious writing this post!  I don’t really think of myself as “good at going on adventures”; they’re just something that happens to me.  If I am good at adventures, it’s probably based on something I’m doing subconsciously without even realizing it.  These hypotheses are only guesses.  Aside from making explicit offerings to the adventure gods, I’m not terribly confident in any of them.

jrcabuse:

Proof JRC was shocking us on the board. This was mine. So many other students got this too. See number 3, where it directs staff to make sure the torture is good by being discrete, so the student (me on this one) “doesn’t know the application (shock) is coming”

realsocialskills:

Content note: This post is about the difference between intense behavior therapy and more typical forms of rewards and punishments used with typically developing children. It contains graphic examples of behavior programs, and is highly likely to be triggering to ABA survivors.

Anonymous said to realsocialskills:

I just read your thing about people with disabilities and their interests. Don’t people do the same thing to typical children? Restrict access to things enjoyed until act ABC is completed? For example, growing up, I was only allowed to watch tv for 1 hour a day IF I finished all of my homework and schoolwork related things first.

realsocialskills said:

It’s not the same (although it has similar elements and I’m not a huge fan of the extent to which behavior modification techniques are used with typically developing children either.)

Here’s the difference: Most children actually should do their homework, and most children have interests other than television. Typically developing children are allowed to be interested in things, and supported in pursuing interests without them becoming behavior modification tools.

(Another difference: intense behavior modification is used on adults with developmental disabilities in a way that would be considered a human rights violation if done to typically developing adults.)

Using behavior modification tools for one or two things in a child’s life isn’t the same as doing it with everything in someone’s life. Intense behavior therapy is a violation on a level that it’s hard to describe.

Intense behavior therapy of the type I’m talking about typically involves:

• Being surrounded by people who think that you’re broken, that all of your natural behavior is unacceptable, and that you need to be made to look normal in order to have any hope of a decent future
• Having completely harmless things you do pathologized and modified (eg: having hand flapping or discussing your interests described as “a barrier to inclusion”)
• Having those things conflated with things you do that actually *are* a problem. (eg: calling both head banging and hand flapping “sensory seeking behavior” and using the same reinforcers to eliminate both)
• Being forced to stop doing things that are very important to you, by people who think that they are pointless and disgusting or “nonfunctional” (eg: using quotes from TV shows to communicate)
• Being forced to do things that are completely arbitrary, over and over (eg: touching your nose or putting a blue ball in a red box)
• Being forced to do things that are harmful to you, over and over (eg: maintaining eye contact even though it hurts and interferes with your ability to process information)
• Having everything you care about being taken away and used to get compliance with your behavior program (eg: not being permitted to keep any of your toys in your room)

(Behavior therapy often also involves legitimate goals. That doesn’t make the methods acceptable, nor does it make the routine inclusion of illegitimate goals irrelevant.)

Here’s an explicit instruction from a behavior expert on how to figure out which reinforcers to use for autistic children:

Don’t assume that you know what a child with ASD likes. It is important to ask a child, observe a child or perform a preference assessment. When asking a child about reinforcers, remember that multiple reinforcement inventories can be found on the Internet.

You can also simply sit down with a child and ask them questions like “What do you like to do after school?” or “What’s your favorite food?“or “What toys do you like to play with?”

When observing a child, set up a controlled environment to include three distinct areas: food, toys, and sensory. Then allow the child somewhat free access to this environment.

Watch and record the area that the child goes to first. Record the specific items from this area that the child chooses. This item should be considered highly reinforcing to the child.

Continue this process until you have identified three to five items. Remember that simply looking at an item does not make it reinforcing, but actually playing with it or eating it would.

Notice how it doesn’t say anything about ethics, or about what it is and isn’t ok to restrict access to. This is about identifying what a child likes most, so that it can be taken away and used to get them to comply with a therapy program. (Here’s an example of a reinforcement inventory. Notice that some examples of possible reinforcers are: numbers, letters, and being read to).

People who are subjected to this kind of thing learn that it’s not safe to share interests, because they will be used against them. That’s why, if someone has a developmental disability, asking about interests is often an intimate personal question.

This isn’t like being required to do your homework before you’re allowed to watch TV.

It’s more like:

• Not being allowed to go to the weekly meeting of the science club unless you’ve refrained from complaining about the difficulty of your English homework for the past week

Or, even further:

• Not being allowed to join after school clubs because you’re required to have daily after school sessions of behavior therapy during that time
• In those sessions, you’re required to practice making eye contact
• And also required to practice talking about socially expected topics of conversation for people of your age and gender, so that you will fit in and make friends
• You’re not allowed to talk about science or anything else you’re actually interested in
• You earn tokens for complying with the therapy
• If you earn enough tokens, you can occasionally cash them in for a science book
• That’s the only way you ever get access to science books

Or even further:

Being a 15 year old interested in writing and:

• Being in self-contained special ed on the grounds that you’re autistic, your speech is atypical, and you were physically aggressive when you were eleven
• Having “readiness for inclusion” as a justification for your behavior plan
• Having general education English class being used as a reinforcer for your behavior plan
  
• Not being allowed to go to English class in the afternoon unless you’ve ~met your behavior targets~ in the morning
• Not being allowed to write in the afternoon if you haven’t “earned” the “privilege” of going to class
• eg: if you ask questions too often in the morning, you’re “talking out of turn” and not allowed to go to class or write in the afternoon
• or if you move too much, you’re “having behaviors that interfere with inclusion”, and not allowed to go to class or write
• or if you mention writing during your social skills lesson, you’re “perseverating” and not allowed to go to class or write

Or like: being four years old and not being allowed to have your teddy bear at bedtime unless you’ve earned 50 tokens and not lost them, and:

• The only way to earn tokens is by playing in socially expected ways that are extremely dull to you, like:
• Making pretend food in the play kitchen and offering it to adults with a smile, even though you have zero interest in doing so
  
• You gain tokens for complying with adult instructions to hug them, touch your nose, or say arbitrary words within three seconds; you lose two for refusing or not doing so fast enough
  
• You lose tokens for flapping your hands or lining up toys
  
• You lose tokens for talking about your teddy bear or asking for it when you haven’t “earned” it
• You lose tokens for looking upset or bored

Or, things like being two, and loving books, and:

• Only having access to books during therapy sessions; never being allowed unscripted access to books
  
• Adults read to you only when you’re complying with therapy instructions
• They only read when you’ve pointed to a picture of a book to request it
• You’re required to sit in a specific position during reading sessions. If you move out of it; the adult stops reading
  
• If you rock back and forth; they stop reading
• If you stop looking at the page; they stop reading
• If you look at your hand; they stop reading
• Adults interrupt the story to tell you to do arbitrary things like touch a picture or repeat a particular word. If you don’t; they close the book and stop reading.
  

Here are a few posts that show examples of the kind of thing I’m talking about:

• Would you accept this behavior towards a non-autistic child? (A post by an augmentative and alternative communication specialist about common problems she observes in the way behavior therapists treat children)
• Quiet Hands (an autistic person’s description of an incredibly common violation in ABA therapy, as she has experienced and observed being done to others)
• A post by a JRC survivor with a scan of their treatment plan (the means used to achieve these objectives are somewhat uncommon these days, the target behaviors to be modified are not)
• Teaching Children With Autism To Play (a post by a behavior therapist describing how to make your autistic child play in the ways stereotypically expected by children, and to look typical while they do so)
• Behavior Week: Sensory Behaviors (instructions on how to use positive reinforcement to stop children from doing harmless things like waving their hands in front of their eyes, on the grounds that it “limits opportunities for inclusion”)
• Evidence-based behavioral interventions for repetitive behaviors in autism (an academic paper taking for granted that it is important to stop autistic people from stimming, even though it’s widely agreed among autistic people that stimming serves an important function)

tl;dr Intense behavior therapy has some things in common with methods that are used with typically developing kids, but it’s not actually the same. Intense behavior therapy involves violation and a degree of control that is not considered legitimate with typically developing children.

I was part of a behavior program where I was locked, with only one other child (we were banished from the adolescent unit for being too socially immature or some crap like that, I think the real reason was we’d banded together to take a stand against abuse that was happening in the institution on a daily basis), on the children’s ward of a mental institution,, and not allowed to go outside or walk to the cafeteria or do damn near anything normal unless I earned enough poker chips.  I also had a therapist who systematically struck me harder and harder in the leg until I made eye contact for a certain period of time.  These things are real and they are not like having to do your homework before you can watch TV.  At all.  Even slightly.  

I have some bad news: you say you’re not trying to be rude, but you are 1000% succeeding in being rude!  Here is some real talk on How To Successfully Avoid Being Rude:

1. if you don’t like a thing that’s fine
2. you don’t need to tell everyone
3. you especially don’t need to tell the creator of that thing
4. especially if this is how you start a conversation with them
5. especially if you haven’t even read the whole thing but have seen some parts of it online and are pretty sure you’ve got the gist of it

If you follow these five easy steps now, you will successfully be less rude by the time you’re an adult.  A great rule of thumb is to ask yourself, “If a complete stranger walked up to me at a party and said what I’m about to say, would I leave the interaction saying this?  If so, I may be the one being rude”.  Good luck! 

p.s.: I’m sorry I don’t have time to reply to all three of your messages, but this should also work reasonably well in response to the one that begins “To elaborate,” as well as the one that begins “On a more petty note,”

drst:

vagabondsandconventgirls:

jacquez45:

minim-calibre:

Every single fucking time I see any post about “SO AND SO SMALL CHILD HAS AN IQ HIGHER THAN [Scientist]! AMAZEBALLS!”

I just want to start a fund for said kid’s fucking therapy bills because, well…

1. NEWS FLASH, SO DO I.
2. WHICH IS HOW I KNOW THAT BEING IN THE IQ RANGE GENERALLY ASSIGNED TO FICTIONAL NERD CHARACTERS IN CRAPPY SITCOMS DOES NOT, IN POINT OF FACT, MEAN WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS, AND I AM SORRY I HAVE NOT CURED CANCER YET, ASSHOLES.
3. IQ IS AN INCREDIBLY FLAWED WAY OF MEASURING ANYTHING.

So, yeah. ANYHOW.

I AM GOING TO SCIENCE NOW

Well, no, but I’m gonna TELL THE WORLD (or tumblr) about some science.

PART THE FIRST

Praising kids for being smart fucks them the fuck up, so don’t fucking do it.  Also, having what is called a “fixed mindset” about abilities and intelligence fucks you up and fucks up the people you teach that bull to, LIKE OH SAY A LOT OF KIDS INCLUDING ME. (See the research of Dr. Carol Dweck.)

PART THE SECOND

So one of the exciting bits of genetics research re: intelligence in particular is about mutation load.  The theory goes that the base level of evolution that gave us these huge, expensive brains means that our base level of intelligence is very high AND that almost all humans are carrying around those super-high-brain-function genes. So-called super-smart people are probably just carrying fewer mutations that decrease the functioning of their brains *in the very specific areas that IQ tests measure*.   (See “Rare Copy Number Deletions Predict Individual Variation in Intelligence” by Ronald A Yeo, et al).  Mutation load can affect people in lots of ways, not just this one.  But a lot of people think they’re just stupid, because of things like IQ tests, and they are not.  They’re smart with some stuff going on that makes things harder for them.

PART THE THIRD

SO, when I mash those first two parts together I come to the inescapable conclusion that what is important is that you should try to have a mindset that includes trying to learn and grow and challenge yourself, no matter what some test told you about your “innate” brainpower.  You should work at things that are difficult and not give up right away (a hallmark of children told they are smart, by the by, so DO NOT FUCKING DO THAT). 

You are a human.  You have value.  You can always be learning and growing, no matter what someone else has told you about your brains. 

Also, be compassionate and brave, if you can, and take care of you.

this post is beautiful

Seriously, don’t tell your kids they’re smart. I was super smart as a small kid and then got put into an “accelerated” program where I couldn’t keep up with half the material, but since I was supposed to be smart, it was agony to keep failing over and over. My self-esteem shattered.

Tell them they’re awesome and the important part is to try stuff. Failure is okay, it’s how you really learn.

I have had a gifted IQ age 5, a high but not gifted IQ at age 15, and a low but not intellectually disabled IQ age 22, and I hate when people tell me the or the other isn’t my real IQ. There’s no such thing as a real IQ. The only thing IQ is is a test score. It’s not a mysterious innate trait. My last IQ was 85 (I grew up considered very gifted due to one test score age 5). I’m not ashamed of that and yes it is my real IQ because it’s how I scored on the fucking test.