#and I am sort of broadly defining emotion in this case as 'any sort of subjective non-data-based psychological response'

[ganymedesclock]

I don’t want to say fictional robots “belong” to autistic people because any given fantastical allegory can have manifold and meaningful resonance to all manner of diversities, but something I do think is very interesting about fictional robots as an autistic person is this:

Robots as a plot element or character arc often center on this question of emotions. Do you feel emotions? Now, this is an imperfect argument about humanity/authenticity in the first place since there are plenty of Real Human Beings who experience anhedonia or alexithymia- but I think also, in my experience, a lot of these stories- sometimes in-universe, sometimes only in fandom responses- betray that maybe a lot more people than they think, are not very good at identifying emotions.

Many fictional robots- to be blunt- pour with emotion. They will often have a blunted affect (that is to say, speaking in a monotone, or limited facial expressions), they may use overly technical terminology, but they will make arbitrary decisions based on personal preference, it will be nakedly obvious they have a preference and their preference is determined at least in part by what pleases them. Data from Star Trek adores his cat and cares deeply about art and poetry.

And I won’t say any of these characters are bad people. I don’t want to suggest the goal is to create a character who’s “really” emotionless. If there is a quibble I have with this, it’s that I think we could all afford to be a little more careful and a little bit more imaginative, when considering how other people’s minds work, and how they present details. Not just as a joyless finger-wag of “you should be more responsible!” (though I will say there is some joylessness to it- I don’t really enjoy being shown a character who emotes close to how I naturally do, being fretted over by people asking if that character has a soul, is a real person, or simply an effective mimic; that hurts a little too personally to be fun!)

I was thinking of this because I was reflecting on one of my favorite little videos, My Job Is To Open And Close Doors. It’s a simple little uninterrupted 3-minute monologue about an AI who, well, see title, but has a bit of a crisis of purpose and asks themselves a bunch of critical questions about their role and purpose.

At its core, to me, the AI in My Job clearly experiences an emotion; they see something in the course of doing their job that they have no protocol or instruction to halt before, but feel an incredible misgiving about following through on. In response to this misgiving, in a very human manner, they begin to procrastinate- all the while, they point out to their own mounting confusion that this is a meaningless activity, but it buys them more time.

The voice acting given to the AI is very good, and, to me, cinches the whole piece- the actor very specifically does not leave a neutral-pleasant tonal range, and at several points, rather than asking an obviously “emotional” question, the AI simply hangs up in their own thinking talking to themselves- “because- because- because-” a very mechanical sort of stutter.

And using this flat affect and mechanical quirks, the actor establishes and fits to an emotional vernacular. The thrust of the plot- that the AI isn’t sure why they’re hesitating when their job is straightforwards and clear, that they even take note that this is being recorded as an error by another party- repeats in the sense of the stuttering- just as they procrastinate opening the doors without being sure why, they too “procrastinate” the completion of their statements when they’re unsure of them. The AI believes that the delivery of a solution, an answer, a “point”, is inevitable, so when they do not feel they have an answer they are incapable of saying “I don’t know”; instead, they stall. They procrastinate in the hope of achieving enough time to deliver an answer that meets their standards, that satisfies the parameters either set by their programming, or their own feelings.

My Job also adds in a sense of why emotions are important- in a sense that is not about enjoyment or satisfaction, although the AI ultimately does feel tremendously satisfied at the successful conclusion of their quandary- because without the ability to experience “baseless misgivings”, they would have simply responded to the initial command to open the door and been unbothered by whatever happened. In that sense, you could argue, it’s an ‘emotion’ born from ‘logic’ (that there is something amiss, though it takes the AI time to tease this out of their own thinking) but at that point we’re barking up a fool’s tree of semantics because our “logic” and our sentiments are both chemicals clattering around the same undifferentiated apparatus at the same time and thus inextricably attached to one another.

The thing that kills me about this is- with no hostility to the commenter in question- I scrolled down into the comments of My Job and immediately saw someone talking about how clearly, the AI has no emotions.

To me, this entire plot is about an AI having an emotion. Unmistakable and clear. This is about a door mechanism experiencing a profoundly human response to distress- procrastinating on the completion on a task they have every resource and in fact an active imperative to complete, based on a misgiving they are unable to articulate. This revelation is so profound to them that at the end of the video, they actually reframe their entire objective- “My job is to protect the human. My job is a great purpose.”

So I guess if there’s a tl;dr or conclusion to this sentiment, it’s that I think that while we can and should absolutely tell stories about fictional robots- because they are cool, and because they are also tremendously useful to ask certain existential questions about personhood- I think that it is actually very important to temper both our creation and consumption on these narratives on a more robust theory of neurodivergence, and, “I don’t recognize the way this emotion plays out in this particular person” does not equal “there is no emotion there at all”

[aether-friskets]

Undertale Headcanons: Monsters & Magic

so I don't have any new art to share atm, but I've been revising/writing more undertale headcanon stuff so I'm gonna share that!! Putting it under the cut cuz it's gonna be fairly long.

* Monster Biology

Monsters are, to no surprise, quite different from humans in certain aspects. They come in a wide variety of forms, from things akin to animals, to humanoid sentient fire, to incorporeal ghosts. However, there is an obvious unifying trait between all kinds of monsters: magic. They are made of it in part, and its use trickles into many aspects of their society and culture.

The first subject I am going to delve into here are the types of monsters. Broadly speaking, all monsters fall under four categories (which I’ll be touching on in a moment), defined by certain traits in common.

Creature Monsters

Monsters falling into this category are, as the name suggests, those with vaguely animal-esque appearances. This includes more strong animal links like Froggit, more humanoid ones like Alphys or Undyne, or ones that aren’t a clear animal link but still resemble a living creature (ie. Loox). These monsters have a ratio of about 60 - 75% magic vs other matter. This makes them one of the more physically durable types, but with the drawback of a lesser magical potential.

Abstract Monsters

These monsters are those that don’t fit into the creature category (such as rocks, fire elementals, or even skeletons), but still exist in a corporeal fashion. Some speculate these monsters are an offshoot of ghosts, but it’s hard to be certain. They typically have a ratio of ~80 - 95% magic, making them more fragile than creature monsters but also more magically inclined.

Ghost Monsters

Despite the name, ghost monsters are not the spirits of the dead. They are a species of monster made entirely of magic, incorporeal and therefore unable to be injured or killed by non-magical means. However, ghosts are a rare occurrence, formed by either strong emotional “residue” of sorts in an area, or from two ghosts combining their efforts to create offspring. This second option is less common, as most ghosts eventually find an object to fuse their SOUL with and become corporeal, making them essentially like abstract monsters. Since ghosts are pretty rare and often eventually become corporeal, some monsters are unaware that they even exist.

Boss Monsters

Aging in Monsters

Unlike the others, boss monsters do not have a single category of appearances in common. Theoretically they could appear as any kind of monster. The difference comes in their magic ratios, among other important things. First off, they are very uncommon, perhaps more so than ghost monsters. They are often large, containing a stronger than average SOUL and a perfect 50-50 split of magic to other matter. They are more powerful than the average monster both physically and magically, so they naturally take on leadership positions often. Asgore, Toriel, and Asriel are the only known Boss Monsters within Undertale.

Two factors determine the lifespan of a monster: the type of monster they are, and their individual emotional state. As previously established, monsters are made up of a mixture of magic and "dust" (essentially whatever other matter their bodies are made of). As a monster grows older, the magic holding them together loosens. The rate at which this happens varies between types, but ultimately their lifespans tend to be longer than human ones. However, as I mentioned, emotional state also plays a factor in monster longevity— or lack thereof. Hopelessness and similarly negative feelings cause the monster's magic to weaken, speeding up the rate at which the stuff keeping them together loosens.

Ultimately, death comes from a monster being no longer able to hold their body together. This may be from the pain of serious injuries, old age finally catching up, or the obvious but sad reason. Whatever the case, they still can live quite some time if they really want to, as evidenced by Gerson, who's over 2,000 years old!

There are two notable exceptions to these "rules". That being ghost and boss monsters. Ghosts, being made entirely of magic and being incorporeal, are effectively immortal (unless they become corporeal). Boss monsters on the other hand, age through the passing of “life force” so to speak from parent(s) to child. This means that when a boss monster is born, they will age until the death of their parents. At that point they are “frozen” at the same physical age until they have a child of their own. If a boss monster has multiple children, that transfer of “life force” will be altered to compensate on both ends. Same goes for if a boss monster loses one parent but the other is still alive.

One positive element of monster aging is that they have a certain amount of unconscious control over their bodies. As a monster matures, they will start to take on a form reflecting how they want to see themself. This even includes a monster’s gender. Once a monster reaches adulthood they change more gradually as their form is more settled, but it can still change over time.

Death & Aging (Culture)

 Death is a rarer occurrence for monsters than it is for humans, and since it has such a strong tie to emotional state, many monsters are not well-equipped to handle the topic. It's often seen as something going wrong that could've been avoided, despite the fact that it's still an inevitable fact of life. Although death is still tragic for humans, we tend to be more accepting of the idea that it's inevitable comparatively.

Emotional health and emotions in general are also taken especially seriously by monsters, since a particularly bad state could be the difference between life and death in some cases. They don't speak much of the dead, certainly do not make jokes or otherwise speak ill of them, even many years after the fact. Death in general is a touchy topic for many, so phrases like "fallen down" are usually used to soften the subject.

In a similar vein, monsters don't catch illnesses, so the idea is somewhat alien to them. It can be difficult to separate the idea of an ailing body from an ailing SOUL, so it's common for a monster to interpret an ill human as being particularly upset at the time.

When a monster does inevitably kick the bucket, it takes a few days at most for their body to become dust, after which their funeral will occur. As established in canon, rather than burying the dead, monsters spread the dust of the deceased over an object/objects of particular significance to that person. That way they can “live on” in that thing, in a way.

Monster Reproduction

Aside from boss monsters, all monster types are sexless (but not genderless, although ghosts are considered agender at birth). To create a new monster, two monsters come together and combine their magic externally, both giving up a small amount of matter and energy to create a new being. It’s a pretty taxing process on both monsters involved, both contributing equally. The resulting child will be a mixture of both parents' features as well, similarly to humans. All kinds of monsters are able to reproduce with one another, except for incorporeal ghosts. The mass-magic composition of the child will be based upon the parents, being an average between the two. The monster with a higher percentage of mass will contribute more of the matter, whereas the one with a higher percentage of magic will do the same in regards to magic. If the two monsters are effectively even, this contribution will also be effectively equal. This means that monsters of similar ratios have a less taxing experience than those who are more varying. Of course, it’s still possible regardless.

Boss monsters are special in the regard that they have biological sexes, and procreate in a (somewhat) similar way to humans and other animals. However, since they’re still somewhat magic-based, they’re able to mix with other monster types. This isn’t super common, but the resulting child has a 50/50 chance of being either a boss monster or the type of the other parent. In fact, generally if any two kinds of monsters create a child, the result has an about equal chance of being either kind, depending on the distribution of magic.

Since monsters and humans are fairly different in terms of biology and how they reproduce, it’s unlikely they could create a cross between the two. If it were somehow possible, the resulting child would likely either be a boss monster or some kind of hybrid, but it's hard to say.

Offspring (Culture)

Although the process of creating a child is faster for monsters than humans, it's mentally and physically taxing on both sides. Making the child may not take long, but there's still a recovery period afterwards to recuperate such a sudden dip in magic and physical matter from the process. On top of this, their long lifespans means most are in no rush to have a kid right away. Due to these factors, it's pretty common to only have one child, if any. 

* Magic in Monsters

Last names are also pretty much non-existent, unless a monster particularly wants to carry on a family name (ie. The Royal Family). As a side note, striped shirts on children became a very common thing due to the fact that monsters come in such a variety of shapes and sizes, that it’s helpful to be able to differentiate at a glance. Basically no monster over 18 wears striped shirts.

Magic is a big part of monster life. They’re made of the stuff, and can do many things with it. It reflects who they are, and one can’t fully understand them without it. Magic is a lot about intention and emotion (as reflected in much of monster biology), so a lot of the training in the use of magic involves knowing what you want to do and being able to properly channel that.

All monsters are naturally capable of all types of magic, but will have certain type(s) they’re best at. Of course, the strongest monster is the most well-rounded one, so those looking to really up their skills will often practice forms that are direct opposites to one another (or close to it). Despite being potentially capable of all types, the specific forms that magic takes is often very personal to that monster. Be it a reflection of the species they are, some aspect of their personality, or a combination thereof.

What ARE these types of magic, you may ask? Well, broadly speaking, they can be split into seven distinct categories:

Spellcasting

This form of magic is the most abstract, taking the form of simple shapes (like crescents or spheres for example). It generally doesn’t take as much effort to produce as other similar magic forms, which is usually supplemented with more complex bullet patterns.

Elemental

As one would expect from the name, this covers magic that resembles elemental forces, like fire or electricity. While it is still made of magic, things in this category actually mimic aspects of their respective element (rather than simply looking like it).

Conjuring

This takes ideas from both elemental and spellcasting, while being its own thing entirely. Conjuring magic is a very widely used form, taking on the appearance of real things (like frogs, donuts, or bones), and sometimes mimicking elements of them (eg. a conjured frog will be made of magic and is not alive, but it’ll hop around like one).

Bodily

Magic that affects the body. This can manifest as things like stat changes (including healing), as well as shapeshifting. This type of magic is likely a component to how monsters change form as they age.

Weapon

The name pretty much explains this one, it’s magic that takes the form of weapons. A notable difference between this and conjuring is that the weapon forms are more durable than things made with conjuring, able to be used as actual weapons rather than essentially fancy projectiles. Notably, creating a projectile weapon (like a gun or bow) would require combining weapon magic with other forms, like spellcasting or conjuring, to achieve the proper effect.

Soul

Magic in this category affects the SOUL. This includes the “SOUL modes” used by various monsters in Undertale, like the green soul mode in Undyne’s fight. They are commonly used on another person, but can be used on the caster as well. Notably, a user’s SOUL magic tends to take the form of a SOUL trait they are lacking in comparatively (monsters still have all the traits humans do, just in smaller amounts and are not displayed in their SOULs). For example, Undyne, while a good person, is not particularly kind by monster standards. She uses a Soul-altering magic of the green Soul, which represents kindness.

Colour

This one is more of a pseudo-category. It encompasses magic applied to other types, which give them a different colour and special effect to boot. It seems to pull from other categories (eg. green attacks heal, meaning they are combining bodily magic with whatever type is being used to create the attack). It’s a bit more like an adjective than a noun of magic, in a way. It smooths out the combination process a little, while bringing a little something of its own to the table.

Any two or more magic types could theoretically be combined, to various results. Some combine better than others. Surprisingly, this isn’t super well-explored. Another side note, all the magic forms are represented by these sigils (which have no real significance for monster magic… but more on that in another post).

[yellowocaballero]

Not Your Queer-Coded Disney Villain: Annabelle & Web!Jon Ficlet

Got bored again today and forced myself to write something that wasn’t gratuitously long. Set in the same universe (or, one of the universes) as The Convention on Chronographer Lane, but it’s completely unnecessary to have read that one before this. 

Content warning for (apparent and fake) predation of a student by a teacher, body horror, and spiders. REVERSE content warning for A PSYCH 101 LECTURE WRITTEN BY SOMEONE WHO WAS A TA FOR PSYCH 101. ACCURATE SCIENCE, BITCHES. 

“What am I turning into?” Annabelle asked, after a half-second of rapid thought. “Who are you? And what do spiders have to do with any of this?”

Jon smiled again broadly, grey eyes dancing with a barely hidden delight. “You’re fully aware that these are all the same question.”

“Then answer them. You said you’re here to help me. Then help me.” Annabelle narrowed her eyes. “We’ll negotiate a price later.”

“This one is a freebie,” Jon said. He leaned back, face fading into the shadow of the dim yellow light of the hanging light. “You’re turning into something much akin to myself.”

In the darkness, Annabelle saw Jon open his eyes. And his eyes. And his eyes. And his eyes…

Annabelle was sleeping through Psych again.

In her defense, she was really tired. The nightmares had been getting worse every day, and yesterday she hadn’t gotten more than forty minutes of sleep without jolting up in the middle of the night. She had flipped on the light five times during the night, hysterically convinced that bugs were crawling over her and earning the eternal ire of her roommate. Whatever - Irene would forgive her once she bought her an iced coffee from that campus shop she liked. If Annabelle gave it to her later at night, she’d stay up later and would be less likely to bitch when Annabelle inevitably made a stink at three am again.

It didn’t matter. Psych was tediously easy anyway. Not that everything wasn’t tedious, but there were few things more boring than listening to the drone of Mr. Sims’ voice. She had no idea how that guy had a fanclub. Emmanuela Odugawa had asked her if she thought that he recited Piaget’s developmental stages in bed. Barf. 

Thankfully, Annabelle had mastered the art of sleeping with her eyes open in class and barely aware enough to recognize when somebody called her name a decade ago, and she ruthlessly used this skill now. She dropped into a half-doze, and was only startled into awareness when she heard the word that had been running in a nonstop track loop through her mind for the past month. 

“Phobia: an extreme or irrational fear or aversion to something.” Mr. Sims adjusted his glasses, pressing a button on his laptop that advanced the slides. “It’s an interesting definition, in my opinion. Like many things in Psychology, it is almost infuriatingly vague. How do you define ‘extreme’? How do you define ‘irrational’? Oftentimes, that label is determined by society, science, and our therapists. However, I believe you can argue that phobias are the most rational thing of all.”

Annabelle rubbed her arms, suddenly cold. These auditorium classrooms were always freezing. 

“The concept of aversion is heavily rooted in evolution and biology. Anyone here ever eat any bad shrimp?” He didn’t wait for a response. “The smell of seafood probably made you sick for weeks afterwards. Our bodies are primed to detect poison, just as they are to detect danger. Phobias rooted in modern, abstract concepts - clowns, elevators, airplanes - are easy to extinguish. But phobias rooted in real, present, perpetual dangers, the sort of dangers that threatened the lives of cavemen, are far more difficult to ignore.” 

Despite herself, Annabelle found herself awake. She found herself listening. 

“Snakes. Heights. The Dark. Dogs, bears, large animals. Storms, driving, insects.” Mr. Sims’ looked up at the auditorium, and Annabelle could have sworn that he was looking right at her, he was looking at her. Annabelle’s breath caught, her heart thumping in her chest - a little differently than it used to. “Spiders.” 

A horrible clicking echoed in Annabell’s ears. She was afraid that it was her. 

Then he looked away, and the spell was broken. “Phobias are one of the most powerful and motivational forces in human evolution. Like mental illnesses, pack bonds, and emotional needs, the perceived weaknesses of the human mind can frequently be some of the most powerful forces that allow the survival of the human species. It isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. I find that a useful way to think of humanity, and of ourselves: that our weaknesses can make us very strong indeed. Next slide…”

If Mr. Sims said anything after that, Annabelle didn’t hear it.

She didn’t pay any attention to anything he said until the end of class, when she shrugged on her cute little silver backpack and merged into the stream of students filtering out of the classroom. A few students had stayed behind to talk to Mr. Sims, and he appeared wrapped in conversation with the giggling girls, but somehow he picked her out of the thick crowd. 

“Annabelle?” Mr. Sims asked. “Stay after, please.”

So she leaned against the long sweep of desks, left with nothing to do but squint at Mr. Sims as he spoke with another student about the requirements for the upcoming paper, wondering why he looked so familiar. 

All of the other students had assumed he was in his late twenties - “total DILF”, they all inanely assured her - but Annabelle wasn’t so sure. Despite the already graying hair, small glasses, and severe expression, she really wouldn’t put him any older than 23.

Maybe his greying temples were hair dye. Or stress did that to you, right? Annabelle squinted. But when Annabelle looked closer, if she really focused, then she really wasn’t sure it was his hair color at all. 

So she looked closer. Her eyes had been itching for the past week. She had caught her skin flaking and peeling, and instead of pink raw skin underneath there was hard and scratchy black necrosis. Her eyes itched now, as if they were striving to split apart, and if Annabelle only let them then they would burst. And as her eyes itched in a horrible, visceral pain, she thought that maybe the white at Mr. Sims’ temples was the thin, sticky webs of spider-silk. 

“Annabelle? Are you alright?”

She snapped back to attention, fairly embarrassed. She had been zoning out more in the past month than she had her entire life. Her older siblings had said that college would be rough, but she hadn’t known it would be this rough. This wasn’t like her. None of this was like her. 

“I’m great,” Annabelle said reflexively. All of the other students were gone, and Mr. Sims was staring at her over his glasses. “Sorry. Is this about my test…?”

“No. You did quite well on your test. Best in the class, actually.” Mr. Sims smiled at her, as if this was a compliment or important. “Is that why you’ve been so bored in class?”

Ah. Busted. A rare thing for Annabelle. She affected a faux-abashed posture and expression. “Sorry, Mr. Sims. I’ve been staying up ‘til two every morning trying to get my homework done on time. If I’m ever going to go to med school…”

“I thought you were a poli sci major,” Mr. Sims said cheerfully. Annabelle fought a shudder - how did he know so much about her? This class had 200 students.

“Double major,” Annabelle said blithely. “I’m sorry about sleeping in class, I’ll manage my time better. It won’t happen again.”

“Yes, yes.” Mr. Sims waved her apology away, as if that wasn’t what he had been looking for. Then what had he been looking for? “I’m afraid I had somewhat of an ulterior motive for speaking to you today.” He leaned in a little, pulling his glasses down, and his foggy grey eyes - same color as the grey at his temples - focused solely on her. Annabelle made her eyes bigger, and she leaned in too, adjusting her posture so she looked smaller. “You’ve been doing very well in class. I actually wanted to invite you to a meeting. About...oh, your potential for med school. I’m excited to see you succeed. I think you could do quite well in whatever field you choose, and I’d like to help. It would be just us, of course.”

Ding ding ding. Annabelle affected a giggle. “I could totally use the help! Like, in your office? Or, like...lunch, or…?”

“I was thinking dinner, actually,” Mr. Sims smiled. “How’s Bombay Bicycle Club?”

Restaurant and bar, with a casual yet dignified atmosphere. Not formal enough to put up anybody’s guard, but nice enough that a freshman girl could feel treated and be impressed. Most importantly, it was popular among the businessman crowd and almost nobody on campus visited it. Annabelle used it herself to meet up with her sugar daddies all the time. 

For a brief, strange moment, Annabelle felt as if he did - but of course he didn’t. But it wasn’t impossible. But if he knew, then why wasn’t he blackmailing her? Was the blackmail for later, once he got her alone? This was probably a power play, getting her off balance by insinuating that he knows but not being explicit about it. He’d probably pull out the blackmail, ‘I’ll ruin your reputation you slut etc’, once they actually got there. Not that he could - Annabelle had contingency plans - but she would have to be careful to actually record him propositioning her anyway. Worst case scenario they had a MAD situation, best case she could squeeze him. Probably not for very much money, since grad students were poor as dirt, and she didn’t exactly need him to boost her grades...get him to slip her the test key and sell the test key? That could work. She could probably get him to strategically cut grades, which was a service that Annabelle could probably sell to students with a grudge…

But then Mr. Sims smiled at her, as if he knew what she was thinking, and Annabelle realized that she had been silent too long. She wanted to come off as panicked, maybe desperate, definitely flattered. 

“Sure!” Annabelle said, barely having to feign the anxious creak in her voice. “What time? I have night classes, so…”

“Next Friday at six,” Mr. Sims said instantly. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“Me too.” Annabelle affected Smile #35 - shy virgin. Mr. Sims’ grin widened. Annabelle silently put aside the ‘Catholic schoolgirl’ outfit for Friday. “See you then!”

She turned around, gave him a shy smile, and bounced off. She had just opened the heavy door out of the room when she heard him speak again, freezing her in her tracks. 

“Oh, Annabelle - how is the study with Dr. Bates going?”

And his question panicked her so much, made her heart change rhythm and made her skin itch as if something was straining to come out of it, made her eyes itch and crawl and burst, that every calculated move went out the window. She didn’t answer his question, didn’t even give an excuse - she just ran out the door, bright purple vintage boots thumping against the linoleum, breath catching in a chest where she was no longer sure she even had ribs. 

Most of her was already calculating. She was already two months into uni, she had to start establishing her power base. The minute her sorority accepted her she’d have greater access to money, popularity, and influence, but she needed reach with the administration too.  Mr. Sims was her in. This was a good thing. 

But part of her was disappointed, because she had liked him, and she felt a little used. Feelings of disgust, as strong and vivid as in her nightmares, rose in her chest. She squished far down in her chest, familiar with the feeling and effortlessly repressing it.  

Annabelle was good with disgusting things. 

She had another session with the Arachnophobia study on Monday. Which went fine. It was fine! She didn’t wake up that morning so sick with nerves that she almost threw up. She didn’t stare at her email inbox for thirty minutes, begging herself to cancel and drop out of the study. Nope. 

She distracted herself by befriending all of her roommate’s friends and dropping faux-concerned gossip about how cranky and anxious Irene’s been lately, have you noticed she’s been blaming me for how badly she’s sleeping? It was really super sad, frowny face, how do you think I can help, frowny face frowny face frowny face? 

So Annabelle went to the Arachnophobia study (it was fine), had increasingly realistic and vivid nightmares about her chest caving in and a nest of spiders crawling out of her chest and eating her eyes, and slept through class. It was all fine. 

She should have gone to Oxford. It still made her a little bitter. She had been smart enough to get in, but she hadn’t been smart enough to get the full scholarship. She couldn’t afford it, so instead she was stuck in University of Surrey, where dreams went to die. Future politicians should go to Oxford. Yeah, Surrey had some peers and Parliament members, whatever. She needed better, Oxford and awards and money. From there, from some swotty school or another, it was easy street. Annabelle deserved easy street, and she deserved Oxford, and it just wasn’t fair -

After another three am nightmare, Annabelle blearily scrolled through her sibling groupchat. Barney was doing great in med school. Tricia had posted her maternity photos. Wow, look at that, Robin had gotten a commendation at his law firm. Whatever. 

No hope of distinguishing herself in the world. No hope of distinguishing herself in her stupid family. She was smarter than any of her siblings, brighter and better than those doctors and lawyers and accountants, but nobody cared. Mum and Dad were living their retirement in comfort and cooing over their grandchildren, finally rewarded in old age for all their hard work. 

If Annabelle dropped off the face of the earth, nobody would even notice. 

It should have been a depressing thought. The idea that nobody cared about her, not really, that nobody knew the real her. But somehow it just made her heart beat faster in excitement. 

The idea of disappearing from all of this, of cutting herself free from a thousand threads that brought her plummeting down to earth...in the cold hours of that dark morning, to an eighteen year old terrified and alone in uni, it was a siren song. 

It was a siren song that sounded, oddly, like the chittering and scuttling of a thousand tiny bodies, but Annabelle was learning to look beyond that. 

By the time next Friday rolled around, Annabelle was considering breaking her self-imposed rule against drugs and popping a Xanax. But that wouldn’t help her exhaustion, the persistent bone-deep frazzled sensation of going a week on almost no sleep whatsoever, so she settled for an espresso as she wriggled herself into a tight, slinky plaid dress paired with a puffy olive green windbreaker. She wasn’t sure if she owned any clothing that was made after 1990 - a habit born from a childhood of shopping from thirst stores, and continued voluntarily into high school when she started making her own money online fleecing suckers. It was her, so much as anything was. 

“Hot date?” Irene asked, bending over her Physics textbook without looking up. She glanced at her vibrating phone, scowling. Poor baby - her friends were staging an intervention. “New guy or old guy?”

“New guy,” Annabelle said vaguely, carefully picking out a bold red lipstick - or did that seem too forward? Should she go for a natural look? “If I’m not back by midnight call the police. I’ll text you a picture of his car.”

“Roger.” Irene flipped a page of her textbook, oblivious to the fact that she was one of the few people Annabelle genuinely liked. Not enough not to screw with her, but she liked her. “He’s not good enough for you, something something.”

“Darling,” Annabelle said, winking into the mirror, “nobody is.”

She hoped Irene believed it. She didn’t. 

It wasn’t a frequent occurrence that Annabelle wished she was stupid, but today she wished she was stupid enough to take a power nap during her ten minute Uber ride. Her mind felt frazzled and frayed, as if it had been taken out of her scalp and spread out with a rolling pin onto a floured countertop. She felt as if she was melting, her vision spiralling into fractals or blurring out. She wanted to sleep. God, she’d do anything for some sleep -

So she blared Bad Romance in her frayed earbuds instead, clutching her iPod Touch tightly, pulling herself together. Gaga, give her strength. 

By the time that she tipped her driver, effortlessly found Mr. Sims’ car in the parking lot of Bombay Bicycle Club and texted Irene the license plate (Volkswagen, obviously), she had dragged herself into focus. She stapled on her confident posture and walk - no, we’re going with ingenue today, make it shy and hesitant - and slipped inside the restaurant, making a show of holding her clutch tight to her chest and looking around with big eyes. 

She saw him instantly. He was sitting in a corner booth, head down and texting on his phone with a half-smile. The corner booth was poorly lit, light dampened by the wood panelling and soft leather seats, and half of his face was draped in shadow. 

Great. She had even arrived ten minutes early just so she could pick a brightly lit, intimate little table in the center of the room. This guy - he was almost like her. He was almost like her, but he was better. 

Annabelle fought the urge to grind her teeth. She smiled instead, waving cheerfully until he raised his head. He smiled back at her, wriggling his fingers, and Annabelle wove around the tables until she could slide into the seat across from him. 

“This is cozy!” She said brightly. “Thank you so much for inviting me out, Mr. Sims. It’s been ages since I got away from my books -”

“Oh, cut that shit out,” Mr. Sims said, bored. “I’m not going to sleep with you.”

Annabelle’s mind shut down. Error 404, blue screen of death. 

“I’m sorry,” she said pleasantly, smile frozen on her face. “What?”

But Mr. Sims just shrugged listlessly, slumping against the cushioned wall. His expression was no longer fond, indulgent, haughty. He just looked bored now, as if he was too tired and underpaid to deal with eighteen year olds. “I don’t want to sit through this entire dinner fending off flirting. We have actual business to talk about, and I am uninterested in beating around the bush when there’s no point. You aren’t even subtle.”

“Excuse me -” Annabelle started, enraged, but Mr. Sims put up a hand and cut her off. 

The change was instant. On a dime, Mr. Sims straightened his posture, swept a finger through his hair to transform it from slicked back professor type to windswept, adopted a friendly and casual expression, and leaned in as if he was happy and excited to be sitting with Annabelle. In a moment he dropped ten years. Barely a second after his transformation the waiter approached them, holding a notepad, and Annabelle realized with a start that he had noticed the waiter coming before she did. 

“How are you two doing tonight?” the waiter asked politely, smiling at the both of them in a rote routine that Annabelle remembered from her own days waitressing. 

“Doing great!” Mr. Sims said, and even his accent was different, closely matching her own. He glanced back at Annabelle, nothing but open and friendly. “Mum says get whatever you want, dork. It’s on her bill, so let’s run her out of house and home.”

Instinctually, Annabelle shot back, “Aren’t you old enough to take me out to eat with your own money, loser?”

“Not with your stomach!” Mr. Sims laughed, and the waiter chuckled along too. Mr. Sims effortlessly rapped out an order for the waiter, before Annabelle even got a chance to look at the menu, and when she floundered Mr. Sims just rolled his eyes and ordered for her too. It was, somehow, her favorite food. 

He waited for the waiter to move onto the next table, eyeing him carefully, before he let the persona drop. Mr. Sims sagged again, dropping the friendly act, sizing her up from half-lidded eyes. 

“How did he even believe that,” Annabelle said flatly. “We don’t look anything alike.”

“White people will believe anything,” Mr. Sims said, rolling his eyes. “I have the Belgian government convinced I’m an Iraqi scientist and most high profile Australian celebrities think I’m Egyptian royalty.”

“...does Egypt have -”

“Nope.”

Annabelle was beginning to feel a little like the star actress in the school play who got upstaged in every way by the villain’s performance. Nobody did what she did. Nobody did what she did, but better. 

“Don’t feel insecure,” Mr. Sims said, as if he could read her mind. “I’m a good actor, and I’m excellent at reading people. But I can’t plan or plot like you do. I’m shit at thinking three steps ahead, much less thirty. You can keep plots and schemes going for years - decades, even, if I were to guess. I’m not sure how someone as competent as you can have self-esteem issues.”

Annabelle bristled. “You try having nobody care about you for - how do you even know that shit about me?” Something terrible occurred to her. “Are you some kind of stalker, Mr. Sims?”

Mr. Sims shuddered in real disgust. “It’s Jon. And no, of course not. You just aren’t as subtle as you think you are.”

Yes, she was. She was subtle to everyone on the planet - everyone save, maybe, Jon. Annabelle narrowed her eyes. “What do you want?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Jon said immediately. 

“Liar. Everybody wants something.”

“I’m here altruistically,” Jon said, the perfect picture of innocence. “Really. I’m here to help you, Annabelle.”

“You are stalking me.” Annabelle leaned forward, but Sims didn’t move. “Are you even a real graduate student?”

“Absolutely not. I’m twenty three, I got my Psych degree last year and I’ve been bouncing odd jobs since.” Jon shrugged, as Annabelle felt silently vindicated. Nothing about this man acted like a twenty three year old - she remembered her siblings at twenty-three, there was nothing adult about them - but it was probably just another persona. She wondered how far she’d have to scratch to get to the real Jon Sims. 

“So you were just at Surrey to spy on me,” Annabelle said slowly. “I don’t know what country you’re from, but in England that’s definitely stalking.”

“I’d call it scouting,” Jon said. The waiter dropped by to place their drinks on the table - Jon had gotten a mule for himself, and he had ordered water for Annabelle in a move uncharacteristic for a sketchy guy. He waited until the waiter left to continue. “Call me a recruiter.”

“For who? What kind of job recruiter teaches a class for two months just to get to me?”

“How’s your study with Dr. Blake going, Annabelle?” Jon said, almost randomly, and Annabelle shut up. He must have seen something in her eyes, because a sharp little grin stretched in the corner of his narrow and sharp face. “Thought so. What do you dream of, Annabelle? In the cold corners of night, what fears come to life in the dark recesses of your mind?”

Maybe, Annabelle thought inanely, this was a dream too. Just an extended nightmare, one she hadn’t woken up from. It felt like that: distant and strange, hyper-real and unreal. This strange man sitting in front of her, who swapped faces so easily even Annabelle couldn’t keep up, was far too out of place to truly exist. 

Or maybe he was the first real person she had met in a very long time. 

Jon continued talking, as if she had responded. Maybe she had. “I am not a hero in this story. If I was, I would have come earlier. I would have deleted your name from the pool of subjects, and I would have made it so that you never got that call.” Jon looked away from her for the first time, letting a little sadness show on his face. “I couldn’t. No - no, I could have, I simply chose not to. You’re important, Annabelle. And I didn’t want to rob you of something that you may grow to treasure. I’m afraid that the choice you make now may not be much of a choice at all - but, perhaps, there is still a chance. At the very least, I would like to make this transition a little easier for you. It is a terrible thing, to have to do it alone.”

That…

“That was so vague it was completely meaningless.”

Jon barked a laugh, strangely delighted. “It’s not fair to speak in circles to somebody who’s gone a week without sleep!”

“But you’re doing it on purpose,” Annabelle said, too dead inside to feel mad.

“Oh, absolutely. I am not taking the risk of taking you on at full power.” Jon smiled at her, as if they were friends sharing a joke. “I saw what you did to that Walker boy in secondary.”

Despite herself, Annabelle smiled. “Hear he gets out on parole in five.” Something else occurred to her, a bit belatedly. “You are stalking me!”

“Does a spider stalk the fly that strikes a string on its web?” Jon asked cheerfully. “Or is it simply investigating an encroachment into its territory?”

“Does that mean that you’re going to eat me?” Annabelle said archly. “Thought you said you didn’t want to fuck me. Rude, by the way.”

Almost hilariously, Jon wrinkled his nose. “Sex is a waste of time, resources, and my attention. Can’t imagine why people are so obsessed.”

“I know, right!” Annabelle burst out, before she could help herself. “Do you have any idea how much money I get a month from guys just to talk to me? It’s like they’re aliens! Why do people fuck or date if it’s not to manipulate someone?”

“Right! It’s ridiculous.”

It was the first time anybody had ever agreed with her on that. It was the first time she had even told anybody she felt that way. For a brief second, Annabelle felt connected to Jon. It was the first time that happened in...a very long time. 

Jon was the first person Annabelle had ever met who was like her. Everybody in Annabelle’s life had always been either useful or useless. Jon seemed above that, somehow. To be beyond utility, to exist on your own power...what did that look like? To be the powerful, instead of the powerless?

No matter how hard she tried, no matter how many puppet strings Annabelle tied around her fingers, she was never powerful. Not really. She was eighteen, from a nothing family, and no matter how many molehills she made herself queen of she would never rule the mountain. She couldn���t get as far as she wanted with what she had. The only reason she had even volunteered for the stupid Arachnophobia experiment was because she needed to crush out weakness in herself, erase the hidden flaws in her mind.

But Jon said her flaws were strengths. What made her weak could be turned into power. 

Annabelle needed more, more, more. She needed everything, if she was to have anything. She needed what Jon had. 

Everything Annabelle said had a purpose. Every word she used was chosen carefully, every little gesture or body language was calculated. She said nothing without thinking, and she could do it so quickly nobody even noticed. Jon would notice, a con man as perfect as she was.

Let him. Give her two straight days to sleep, and they’d have a real battle of wits. In the meantime, she just had to pick her questions strategically.

“What am I turning into?” Annabelle asked, after a half-second of rapid thought. “Who are you? And what do spiders have to do with any of this?”

Jon smiled again broadly, grey eyes dancing with a barely hidden delight. “You’re fully aware that these are all the same question.”

“Then answer them. You said you’re here to help me. Then help me.” Annabelle narrowed her eyes. “We’ll negotiate a price later.”

“This one is a freebie,” Jon said. He leaned back, face fading into the shadow of the dim yellow light of the hanging light. “You’re turning into something much akin to myself.”

In the darkness, Annabelle saw Jon open his eyes. And his eyes. And his eyes…

All eight of Jon’s glittering black eyes shone in the darkness, straining her own and making her head thump. It was wrong, outside of humanity or reality, and it felt as if the very sight was straining the fabric of her delicately maintained life so tight it would tear. It felt as if it was tearing her, right in two, ruining her forever. Her eyes felt like they were going to burst out of her head. 

She didn’t want to know what would replace them. But she had the feeling that she already did. 

“Then what,” Annabelle gritted out, “are you?”

“I am the eldest and most treasured Son of the Mother of Spiders,” Jon said. He smiled at her, just a little, almost apologetic. “Sorry about that. I know you’ve always wanted to be an only child.”

Ah. Duh. Obviously. She should have known.

“...do I want to know who the Mother of Spiders is?”

“Your mother, should you choose to accept her,” Jon said cheerfully, leaning back into the light, and his face was normal again. Human as ever. Strange and foreign as ever - possibly everything, possibly nothing. “I know you aren’t strictly in the market for adoption, but you may not have much of a choice. You’ve felt her scratching beneath her skin. She’s going to tear out of you, and soon. Did you know some species of wasp lay their eggs in the body of spiders to provide food for the grubs?”

“During the next experiment,” Annabelle said dully, already filtering out Jon’s useless tidbits of information. That was a guy who spoke for the sake of hearing himself talk. “That’s when it’s happening. When I’ll...change.”

“Yes. It’s a painful process,” Jon said, and it was almost apologetic. “My own happened when I was fifteen - quite young, all things considered. I still remember the sound of my bones snapping as -”

“Don’t.”

“Of course! Anyway, I thought I’d make sure you had...to use the psych term, informed consent, before you entered the crucible. Our - my, sorry - Mother often foregoes true consent in our operations. The beauty of nature!” Jon laughed, as Annabelle felt sick. “Agnes wanted to put together a pamphlet, but then we let Gerry go wild on the clipart and...well, it’s better if I just explain. I can’t give you the full story now, but I’ll tell you as much as your mind can comprehend.”

Annabelle wasn’t sure she could even comprehend this. It was so much, and she was so tired. She had just heard that her body was going to rupture like a cocoon and give birth to a giant spider that may or may not also be her, and all she could think about was the fact that she wanted to go back to bed. Somehow, all she could ask was -

“Why?” She asked, so stupid and pointless, as if she was stupid, as if she wasn’t her at all. “Why are you doing this?”

“It’s like I said.” In the dim yellow lighting, Jon’s eyes glittered pure black, and in that brief and stupid second Annabelle felt as if they were the same in that way. “Nobody should have to go through this alone and ignorant.” Then the moment was over, and his eyes were a human grey again, just left of normal. “Besides. Siblings stick together, right?”

“I hardly need more siblings,” Annabelle snapped. 

“You’re about to lose seven of them real soon,” Jon promised, extremely worryingly, “so I’d take what you can get right now, Annabelle.”

“Are you going to kill -”

“Unfortunately, you may have to fake your own death!”

Then their food came, and Annabelle received her first lesson in the class of hard knocks. 

They talked for hours. It took hours, to even just get a picture of the story. Jon was patient, answering every question, and Annabelle strained so hard trying to fight through her exhaustion, trying to understand the answer, Jon’s motivation in answering it or what he could be leaving out, that by the end of it she felt as if she had run a marathon. She had never felt so tired in her life, in the most dangerous situation in her life, with the most dangerous person she had ever met. 

By the end of it, Irene was texting her to ask if she was dead, and Annabelle was falling asleep at her chair. Jon cut an end to their conversation when he slid out his wallet, covered the bill with a black Amex card, and slid a business card against the table. Annabelle squinted down at it. 

The text in the center just said [FREELANCERS]. That was it. She stared at it.

Underneath the vague word, she saw a phone number [555-555] and an email [email@organization.gov]. Annabelle looked up to stare at Jon. “Are you for real?”

“Almost never,” Jon said cheerfully, “but the card will make sense when it needs to. Let me take you back to your dorm, alright? You can get some sleep in the car.”

If he was a creep, she was dead anyway. Annabelle didn’t bother arguing. She grabbed her jacket and got in the passenger seat of his car, and true to his word Annabelle drifted asleep almost immediately. She even felt as if the ride took longer than ten minutes, as if he drove in circles just waiting for her.

For the first time in a week, Annabelle slept uninterrupted, and had no dreams.

Annabelle wanted what Jon had. 

And a week later, she took it. 

Shivering in an alley, clothing ripped to shreds, her own skin hanging off her triple jointed limbs, she dug out a creased and torn business card. She had been worrying at it intensely over the weekend, staring and it and clenching it tightly as if it was her only lifeline. It was, of course. But Jon had known that.

The card looked different now. The text now looked handwritten, but with a beautiful and old-timey slanted handwriting. It now just read: 

‘To Annabelle, with love. From your new friends Gerry, Jon, and Agnes’. There was a number underneath, and Annabelle frantically dug in her tattered leather jacket pocket to draw out her cracked phone. 

Annabelle hated taking favors from people. Everything she had, she had fought for herself. She would scrape, borrow, beg, and steal whatever she had to. But, when it came to siblings...maybe, then, it was okay.

Dizzily, as Annabelle let the phone ring, she thought: this is my supervillain origin story. 

The thought sent a slow smile crawling across her inhuman and warped face. 

Sounds like fun. 

[nuestkings]

NU’EST interview with Arena Homme+

(Trans: Melodia_Muse | Original Article: Arena Homme+)

What does the door leading to adulthood look like? Nine years into their debut, we met up with NU’EST, who are returning with The Nocturne. We asked them what growth means to them, and we received wise answers. Right now, five men are singing about night.

Behind the Scenes - The Presence of NU’EST

Now in their ninth year together, NU’EST is on the path to the top. They experienced all sorts of ups and downs for such a long time but were able to overcome them and rise up, and the five handsome men became closer, their bond stronger. The fandom that has walked that path with them has become stronger as well. Maybe that’s why NU’EST has a formidable amount of “ride or die” fans. Those fans become strong and powerful roots for NU’EST to rise up even higher.

Despite the photoshoot taking place right around their comeback, none of them looked tired at all. Starting with JR, they stood in front of the camera one by one. The photographer captured each of their expressions, gazes, and movements slowly. Under his guidance, the photoshoot took place in a calm and detailed way. Each of them definitely have their own unique aura. Oh, they are are similar in some ways too. They all have an unconstrained masculine beauty. It’s not the boyish charms of a boy group that is still blooming, but the energy of youths who are already in full bloom. And then in an empty space, they sat with the right amount of distance between them. The empty space above them, their positions, and their relationship with each other all came together to become one. This felt like the presence that NU’EST has that you can’t deny.

JR

Memories of night

JR: The Nocturne is an album that expresses night. Interestingly, inspiration would find me quite often at night while working on the album. Even when I was walking home after rehearsals, I would look up at the night sky. I would look closely at how the shape of the moon was different from yesterday. I wanted to be true to the emotions I felt, and I brought back memories of when my emotions had come closest to the surface. I vowed to take out those emotions again one day, and imagined how I would use them. I worked on this album by taking moments of night that are engraved in my memories and adding more imagination to them.

Be prudent with decisions

JR: I started my social life quite early. I learned at a young age what kind of place society can be. I was able to define standards on things like how I should live and what actions were right. For my personality, I think starting my social life early was helpful. I’m usually quite prudent when making decisions, and I sometimes think of the worst-case scenario when I’m faced with a choice. If there’s a story I really want to tell, I tend to make a choice in its favor even if success can’t be guaranteed. It would be fantastic if things ended up working out, but everything can have variables. I tend to run simulations of various situations in my head when faced with a choice.

Source of confidence

JR: Making sure I have an alternative plan has been so helpful to me. It makes me feel more at ease. Feeling at ease makes my confidence grow. The confidence comes from knowing that even if this decision fails, I still have a back-up plan, so it’s okay. It gives me the strength to push forward with my decision until the very end.

Start again from the beginning

JR: There was a time when no matter how much effort I put in, I felt like I was woefully lacking compared to other people. I was facing a wall, and I turned to those around me for advice in order to overcome it. I asked for advice on how to overcome a slump, and that’s when I heard something that became a turning point in my life. “Go back to the beginning and start again.” It really spoke to me. After hearing that, I looked back on everything I had done up to that point and started from the beginning again. Of course, I had to reinvest my time and energy, but I was able to get over that wall in the end. Because I had that experience of reaching my limit, I was able to have a smooth start [the second time around].

Perfectionist

JR: Up until quite recently, I was a perfectionist. I didn’t want to put on a performance that wasn’t perfect. But there are times when imperfections can be pretty. I learned that perfection doesn’t always mean that everything is what it needs to be. Now, I’m trying to see things more broadly. I’m learning so much.

There is no right answer

JR: I think you become an adult when you start thinking of others first. Then again, there’s no right answer to the standard or conditions of what it means to be an adult. But once you reach the level of being able to think of others, you find that you’re able to look back on yourself as well.

Because we’re in our 9th year

JR: Now that we’re in our ninth year, there aren’t many people who will sternly critique things for us. Many of the people we work with are either younger than us or they haven’t been doing this as long as we have. Because of that, it must be difficult to give us directions or tell us things we need to fix when we’re rehearsing. But there are times when we need that kind of teaching. In moments when I’m not sure if I’m going in the right direction, I wish I had that kind of guidance, but the number of people who can give that to us continues to decrease.

Power source of growth

JR: Realistically, it’s lessons. (laughs) Through lessons, I’m learning and growing. I guess you could say that my growth comes from working on things that I had been idle about in the past. Now, I really enjoy learning. The more I learn, the more I feel like I’m building something up within me. My thoughts have changed a lot as well. The reason I find lessons fun is because my teacher critiques me. I love how they point out exactly what I need to do.

In the future

JR: I’m energized by seeing people listening to and enjoying me, my performances, and my songs. It’s in those moments that I feel glad that I became an idol. I want to keep being someone who makes others happy. Whether it’s on stage or elsewhere, whether it’s through a performance, a song, or anything else, I’ve left all possibilities wide open. When I see our fans being happy, it makes me realize that all of the efforts we’ve put in weren’t in vain.

Current concerns

JR: I’m in the process of thinking about how I should utilize everything I’ve learned until now. There’s a big difference between learning something and applying what you’ve learned. To complete the learning experience, I’m focusing on self-improvement and thinking about what I can do.

Unwavering faith

JR: Whenever we release an album, I show it to my parents. After playing the songs, I show them the music video and then the choreography, but I didn’t do that this time. I just wanted to do what I wanted rather than asking for someone else’s opinion. You could say that’s how much faith I have in this album. I’m confident that it will do well.

Ren

Preciousness

Ren: I wrote the lyrics for Must with my grandfather, who passed away, in mind. I was writing the lyrics when the realization hit me, about the depth and sincerity you bring when interacting with others. The Nocturne is an album that made me realize the preciousness of people.

In our 9th year

Ren: I experienced a slump around our fourth or fifth year. I couldn’t see any hope, and I even thought that this might not be my path. Being a celebrity is a job that hangs on people’s interest in you. We were supposed to be growing and gaining more recognition as time passed, but what we faced was diminishing response from the public. I used to call my friends and talk out my frustrations for three hours at a time. It was in the encouragement and comfort from the people around me that I found hope.

Inner thoughts

Ren: I’m very close with my family, so I don’t really share my inner thoughts, in case they worry. My parents have lives of their own. I don’t want to add baggage to their busy lives. Even when I was struggling, I would only tell them good things. I had no choice but to mature at a young age, because I started my social life at the age of 16.

The process of becoming an adult

Ren: It was always shocking. At first, I thought that once I became a trainee, I would live this flashy, shining life. But my days were filled with sweat and getting told off. (laughs) It was shocking going from being showered with love at home to being pushed so much. I thought to myself, this is reality, this is the process of becoming an adult.

Super positive

Ren: I didn’t have any complaints, though. Life is different for each of us. I’m just grateful to have been born. From a young age, I’d often follow my grandma to the temple. I heard a lot of good things and I learned how to meditate. I think that’s when I started to have a positive mindset about life.

Staying true to Choi Min Gi

Ren: I want to be someone who stays true to who Choi Min Gi is. I want to live a life where I do everything I want to do and I’m not held back by anything. I don’t want to care about what other people think, because this is the only life I get to live. Even if the results aren’t great, I have no regrets because it’s the path I chose and the challenges I decided to take on.

Guiding light

Ren: From a young age, I learned a lot from my grandparents. They were always such upstanding people who strove for perfection. See them made me want to be someone with good manners who listened closely to others.

Curiosity

Ren: I’m curious about our comeback and my musical, especially for the musical. It’ll be my first time in that field, so there are so many things I’m curious about. Oh! The musical is called Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. It will also be a story about growth.

Moments I want to reflect on

Ren: If I’d worked harder and taken on more challenges as a trainee, I’d probably be even greater than the person I am today? That’s something I always think about. I regret being lazy when I was younger. If I could go back to that moment in time, I would work harder. Foreign languages, dancing, singing, all of it.

To the mountains

Ren: There have been many moments when I wanted to run aways. Whenever I have thoughts like that, I just let them run their course and I go to a nearby park, mountain, or ocean and find peace. Breathing in fresh air and letting the wind blow past me helps me to change my mindset.

Half worried, half excited

Ren: There are times when I worry about what will happen next, but the future also brings new opportunities to take on, which excites me. Maybe I might end up not being a celebrity anymore and doing something else. Because I’ve been in this industry for a long time, I think I could be a producer or a stylist. Often, I think about wanting to be a producer for someone. I think it would be fun.

Happily

Ren: I hope that when people see me, they feel joy and happiness. I know it can be very difficult. (laughs) I think I’m able to spread happiness to people right now, but I want to be someone who can have a good influence on more people in the future.

Minhyun

My summer

Minhyun: My birthday is in the middle of summer. I’ve never really like hot weather, but summers have become special now because I celebrate with fans. Last summer, I held a birthday busking event at the Children’s Grand Park. The notice went up just three or four hours before the event started, and it was raining so much, but lots of people gathered celebrate with me. One night, I was suddenly struck with the desire to describe fans as my summer. I opened up my notebook app and wrote down lyrics. If I ever get to put a solo track on an album, I’d like to use these lyrics.

Clean

Minhyun: I can’t stand things being messy. I make sure to clean myself up first, and then I’ll tidy my surronudings. I feel like if I do that, I won’t catch colds and I get sick less often, and my quality of life gets better. If I don’t have anything scheduled for the morning, I usually wake up around 10 and clean. I try to get my cleaning done around then because of the noise that my vacuum cleaner makes. If it’s a nice day, I’ll open up my windows and get air circulation going as I clean, and it makes the day so refreshing.

Disciplined life

Minhyun: I don’t drink that much alcohol or coffee, and I don’t smoke. Our job is one where our appearance is important, so I have to maintain myself well. I want to always present myself in a cool and pretty light. That “disciplined life” title is one that was given to me by the agency as they watched over my trainee days, and thought I think it perfectly describes me, it can feel like a burden at times. Because I feel like if I limit myself to that title, I won’t be able to have a lot of different experiences. But I still think it’s true. (laughs)

Flaws

Minhyun: The people who are really close with me will know, but I have more flaws than people would expect. Although I try to be perfect when I work, I’m quite clumsy in my daily life. My fellow members and staff will tell me that side of me is so funny, but it’s not something that comes out that much when I’m on variety shows. I think I’m still not ready to show every aspect of myself in front of a camera.

No ups and downs

Minhyun: I don’t have a lot of ups and downs in my emotions. I rarely cry and if something bad happens, I’m able to brush it off after a few hours. When I see a malicious comment, I’ll think, “Why do they think this way?” but I’ll forget it a minute later. I sleep pretty well, too. If I put my mind to it, I can fall asleep in 30 seconds. Maybe that might sound like my mind is a bit blank, but I’m able to have a good time and not get stressed out because of that aspect of my personality.

Can’t let emotions bleed into attitude

Minhyun: I do have my own concerns, but I don’t let those concerns get in the way of other work or change my attitude. I always tell myself that I can’t let my emotions bleed into my attitude. Just because I’m not feeling good doesn’t mean I should make it obvious to those around me or negatively affect them.

Faith

Minhyun: On our fourth or fifth year, we faced difficulties both financially and mentally. We were holding lots of overseas concerts, but I could feel our venues getting smaller. But even then, I had faith that things would work out for me eventually. I didn’t want to waste the time I had, so I would go to the practice room every day and study Japanese when I got home. I’ve always had steadfast faith in my heart, so I can’t really say any moment was dark. That’s why I didn’t really experience growing pains when things worked out well. I always knew I would become a great star one day. (laughs)

How to live up to expectations

Minhyun: From a young age, I was a kid who always listened to his mom. I would study hard because my mom wanted to see good results, and I never swore because mom really hated swear words. I wanted to live up to my mom’s expectations. I worked hard, not for my own future, but because I wanted my mom to be happy. Now, fans have become that kind of presence in my life. I want to keep growing and showing a better side of me so fans don’t regret liking me. It’s because of our fans that were able to belatedly shine, so I feel even more gratitude and affection for them.

Seniors

Minhyun: We really are seniors at music shows now. There are so many more juniors than seniors when we go. But I don’t really see myself as a senior, more of a colleague. We have a lot to learn from our juniors as well. Even though Aron is older than us in our team, he has an American mindset, so things are more relaxed like we’re same-age friends. We’re all in this together, so I just want everyone to have fun without worrying about senior-junior hierarchy or age. Having that kind of heavy air between you can be uncomfortable.

Becoming an adult

Minhyun: I’ve grown up a lot. In the base, I would just do as I was told, but now I think of what I need to do. We choose our own set lists and we express our thoughts more now. I think perseverance is important when it comes to becoming an adult. I’s because of that perseverance that I’m able to stand on stage now. I’m an adult now.

Friends and foe

Minhyun: I treat other people well. Being sure to greet people is a given, and I say “thank you” a lot. I’m not very good at saying anything that may be unpleasant, but if it’s necessary, I’ll try to be soft-spoken about it. I try to not make enemies if possible. If I do have enemies, I try to win them over to my side. Maybe someone might not like me if they don’t know me well, but I can win them over once they get to know me. I’m confident about that. (laughs)

Small smile

Minhyun: I hope the music, projects, and whatever content I appear in will bring a small smile to people’s faces. I think it would be too greedy of me to hope that people can gain strength from me. I just want to be someone who makes people feel better and smile a little.

Baekho

Expectations

Baekho: What kind of response will this album get? Will our fans like it? We worked really hard to make it, and how will it sound? What will it be like on stage? I’m filled with these kinds of expectations these days. I’m excited to see each and every reaction.

Driving force

Baekho: When I meet with fans, a lot of them tell me, “In this song, these lyrics spoke to me. I liked that song because it felt different,” and hearing reactions like that brings me the biggest joy. Also things like, “It’s so nice to listen to this song on my way to work. It’s so nice to listen to this song before I go to sleep.” I’m grateful that our songs have naturally become a part of our fans’ lives and it makes me want to devote myself more [to our music].

Embrace the night

Baekho: This album is centered around the theme of night. I’m usually active at night. I usually work out, write lyrics, and compose music at night, and I though a lot about night while making this album. This album shows various different aspects of night, of me, my fellow members, and others.

Observer

Baekho: I thought long and hard about where I get my inspiration when I make music, but I don’t think I find it in a specific thing I can pinpoint. It sounds so simple, but I’m inspired by life around me. The people I meet, the thoughts I have while exercising, the landscapes that I’m seeing... small moments of daily life come together and become my music.

The power of habit

Baekho: Nowadays, I don’t feel refreshed if I don’t end the day with a workout. It’s not that I set myself a hard goal that I have to exercise, it’s more like an unconditioned reflex. The same goes for music. Working on music has become a habit for me, like how Kobe Bryant would practice his shots every morning.

On the right track

Baekho: These days, working on music is the greatest source of enjoyment for me. It’s just so fun. As there are many people who are waiting, I keep working as long as my body allows me to. I’ve been running nonstop since last fall’s The Table, but I’m not tired at all. People listen to the music I work on and share many different interpretations, and I find joy in watching that happen.

Classic

Baekho: I like classics. Rather than anything too shiny, I like things that have been worn in and have a story to them. That’s why I got myself an old car. It’s a Galloper that was at least 20 years old, and I added design elements that I wanted. Driving that car around made me fall deeper for the charm of classics. It’s such an old car that I had to send it to my hometown in Jeju because of emissions regulations. My brother drives it around now. I wanted to have it for longer, it’s a shame. If I start something that I like, I’m the type of person who will see it through until the end.

Silently

Baekho: If I look back on my trainee days now that we’re in our ninth year, I’ll probably feel like I had a hard time back then, but in that moment, it was the norm for me, so it wasn’t hard. Just like I do now, I used to eat food and drink coffee back then too. I just silently lived my daily life and that’s gotten me to where I am now.

Teamwork

Baekho: In our early debut days, we bickered a lot. Now that we’ve spent so much time together, we just accept each other for who we are. Even if another member things or acts differently, we just accept each other’s differences. He’s him and I’m me. So we don’t really have a reason to fight anymore. Things that aren’t possible alone become possible when the five of us get together. When we are all together, things don’t just increase by a multiple of five, it feels more like an infinite something is opened up to us.

Growth diary

Baekho: After our debut, we experienced some tough times. We belatedly grew thanks to our fans. I went back to my roots when I appeared in the variety show Let’s Go, Man Soo Ro. Watching over the soccer players as they did their best to go somewhere higher, I saw a lot of overlap between them and me and my members. They were probably tired and worn out from chasing after their dreams, but they never lost their smiles. Through Let’s Go, Man Soo Ro, I experienced yet another growth.

Role

Baekho: I want to be a good source of energy for our fans. It’s a small wish of mine, but I think I’d feel such a big sense of accomplishment if our songs are able to even get a small huff of laughter out of people. I want to show more growth in our music and ourselves in the future so that people can feel a sense of happiness. That is our role.

Aron

Noah and Kkotsooni

Aron: When I’m resting, I spend time with Noah and Kkotsooni. My pets became my source of motivation in life. I have to work hard so I can give them good food and snacks.

Music I listen to

Aron: I usually sleep late, but I recently began trying to go to bed earlier. I turn on peaceful music and I find myself falling asleep to it. So these days, I look up music that induces sleep, so I can immediately fall asleep the moment I start playing it.

Concerns these days

Aron: Our fans’ reactions. I’m always curious and worrying about it. That’s why I try to always be perfect, whether I’m recording music or standing on stage. Other than that, I don’t really have any concerns. If there’s one, it’s that I need some rest. We’ve had so many scheduled activities these days without any time to rest. Even just for one day, I want to hand out at home with my dogs without a care in the world. Take them out for walks, small things like that.

Greatest weapon

Aron: Whenever we’re recording for songs, our composer always tells me I have a great sense of rhythm. It’s why I’m usually in charge of the parts with a tricky beat. So I think my greatest weapon is my sense of rhythm.

Change in food preferences

Aron: Maybe it’s because I lived in the US, but I used to prefer western food. I still like it, but I recently opened my eyes to Korean food. Grilled short rib patties, bulgogi, and any type of meat dish is an automatic yes from me, and I also like raw abalone. I cook at home, too. From kimchi fried rice to soybean paste stew and kimchi stew. By the way, I prefer to put ham in my kimchi fried rice and not tuna.

Precious memory

Aron: We have fans who stayed by our side even during difficult times in our early debut days. I remember each and every one of them. They recently came to our concerts during our tour and I was so happy to see them. I got choked up thinking about how they’re still by our side. I’m grateful.

Things that have changed and things that haven’t

Aron: I think I’ve gotten much better at commanding the stage than when I first debuted. I’ve also grown in terms of my gestures and my visuals. It I was more childish in the past, I have a more adult aura to me now. And being with the other members has taught me to be more understanding. Now, I try to take care of others before I take care of myself. Something that hasn’t changed is how I never stop making an effort. I worked hard then and I still work hard now. Another thing that hasn’t changed is my height? My weight has changed, but my height is still the same.

Night over day

Aron: I prefer night over day. On a quiet night, I feel like I can do everything I want to do. After a long day, it feels so nice to wash up and lie down once I get home. I lay on the couch and watch TV, and I guess you could say that’s when “me” time starts? It’s really healing.

Desire

Aron: As someone who stands on stage, I want to show an even better and more mature side of myself. There are so many things I desire and want to achieve. I don’t want to disappoint my fellow members and the people who are precious to me.

Moments I want to cherish

Aron: When we performed for the first time at the KSPO Dome, I was so happy by nervous. I was overwhelmed by the sight of all our fans in front of us like a panorama in that large venue. The cheers we heard there were a big source of energy for me. It was a stage we’d dreamed of and it had taken us eight long years to get there. That might it such a meaningful and precious moment.

Music that brings happiness

Aron: I want to be a singer who always brings happiness to our fans. I think if our fans feel even a little happiness from listening to our music, we’ve done all the we need to do.

[preserving-ferretbrain]

The I in Vampire: Joss Whedon and the Philosophy of Identity

by Dan H

Monday, 21 September 2009

Dan almost manages to say something nice about Joss Whedon~

Recently I did two things. I read The Pig That Wants to be Eaten - a nicely accessible book of philosophical thought experiments – and I watched Series five of Angel (review forthcoming from Kyra or myself, special exclusive spoiler preview, it’s shit).

One of the infuriating things about S5 of Angel is its blatant disregard for any of the show’s prior mythology (to be fair, this was partly due to network pressure). The girls at Boils and Blinding Torment get particularly furious about this, complaining about the way it craps all over the notion that vampires are in any way different to regular people. To quote them quoting Buffy

To paraphrase almost every character in Buffy ever: A vampire is not the person they appear to be. They walk like them, they talk like them, they have access to their memories, they might even do their hair like them, but it’s not them.

Which is pretty darn clear, and is, as the girls observed, spelled out in the first episode, and about every five episodes thereafter.

The thing is, while it’s spelled out like that, it’s pretty clear that it’s not like that. Jessee pops up in the second damned episode and seems quite convinced that apart from being “connected to everything” he’s still the same guy he always was. Angelus, while evil, still has a lot of Angel’s basic personality traits (“it’s just … you’re still the only thing he thinks about” is I believe how Willow describes it). Not only is there textual evidence against the whole “demon in a Xander suit” theory (and very little to support it except maybe that scene in series two where Angel’s “inner demon” beats up that other demon inside Angel’s body), there’s also some fairly fundamental problems with the whole idea of something that has your appearance, memories and personality being, in any meaningful sense “not you”.

Memory, Continuity, and Tom Riker

The question of who “you” actually are is a horrendously difficult one in philosophical terms. In practical terms, you know that you’re you, other people aren’t you and that’s an end to it. In the world of the philosophy of identity it’s far trickier.

One of the thought experiments presented in TPtWtbE is the teleporter problem. Suppose you go through a Star Trek matter transporter. It scans your body, and reduces it to data. Then it blasts you into atoms, and reconstructs you miles away from (presumably) completely different parts. None of the characters in Star Trek seem remotely bothered by this but it raises a lot of difficult questions. If the person who is reconstituted at the other end of the teleporter is made from completely different atoms from the person who went in, in what sense are they the same person?

The problem is compounded by the fact that the person who goes into the teleporter and the person who comes out are in fact capable of living independent lives. In a relatively famous episode, it is discovered that exactly that had happened to Riker. A transporter accident had split him into two people, both with exactly the same memories and experiences, and both believing themselves to be the “original” Will Riker. The Trek episode neatly dodged a lot of the nastier problems involved with this kind of conundrum by having the “other will” be one who had been stuck on a remote planet for several years, making it fairly clear to one and all that the Will Riker who has been, y'know, on TV all this time is the real one.

A similar idea crops up in The Prestige - Tesla's teleporting machine doesn't destroy the original, so you always get two copies, an Hugh Jackman solves the problem by drowning himself. This creates a terribly haunting image in the original film, but it's interesting that in many ways the machine functions identically to the “real” teleporter in Star Trek. It's just that the way it disposes of the “original” is less neat.

I understand that the way a lot of philosophers resolve such issues is with a concept called “Continuity of Consciousness” - broadly speaking if the individual coming out of the transporter remembers being the person who went into it, they can be said to be the same person.

Of course there are arguments against this definition (the two Rikers and the Tesla machine highlight one of them) but it's still extremely useful, and it's very interesting when applied to Buffy vampires.

The Buffy vamp remembers its human life. This is described in early episodes as “having access” to the human's memories, with the implication that the vampire knows itself to be a demon, and simply uses the human's memories to trick people into thinking it's something else, but this is clearly untrue. We witness the transformations of several vampires, and all of them clearly genuinely consider themselves to be the person who got bit, not some alien parasite. They have, in a word, continuity of consciousness. Not only that, but no vampire ever displays knowledge or memory of having existed independently as a demon.

Of course once a person becomes a vampire they are changed - they lose their soul (which seems to have a rather nebulous effect, certainly it doesn't seem to alter their sense of identity very much) and become Evil, but you can't really say that they're different people except in the metaphorical sense that we are all “different people” when we are – say – drunk.

This has particular consequences when it comes to little things like moral culpability.

Blame, Responsibility, and Evil

Even if you accept that vampires, whatever the show might say, are the same people they were when they were alive, it's still perfectly reasonable to say that they are the same people but evil(it's also perfectly reasonable to argue that the “but evil” segment of that sentence renders them not the same person at all, what isn't reasonable is arguing that they're suddenly a demon occupying somebody else's body – whatever the text says, Buffy vamps clearly don't work like that).

But even here we run into a bit of a stumbling block. Okay, vampires are evil. They kill people, because that's what they do, hence the slayage. Except that repeatedly, starting lest we forget in series two when Spike turns against Angelus, vampires have shown that they are capable of choosing to do good – or at the very least not to do evil. Now frequently they choose it for selfish reasons: Spike helps save the world because he likes being evil in it, and later fights demons because he enjoys hurting demons. The vampires at the dodgy place Riley goes to avoid killing people because it helps them stay under the radar. Harmony goes on the cowblood because it's a condition of her employment at Wolfram and Hart.

Now on the one hand, this makes the vampires that actually do kill people way more reprehensible. On the other hand, it makes killing vampires on spec a little bit dodgy. Yes, some vampires kill people, but a great many of them don’t, either because of artificial constraints (a chip in the head) emotional constraints (I haz soul! It make me sad if I do the killing!) or rational self-interest (killing people will get me fired, killing people will make them less likely to let me feed on them repeatedly). These, not to put too fine a point on it, are pretty much the three reasons that regular people don’t go around committing murder.

Now true, vampires are still much more likely to kill people than humans, but to get all formal logic about it, you can’t say that all vampires are killers – they are clearly capable of choosing not to kill – which leaves you only with “some vampires are killers” which is kinda useless. This means that staking vampires the moment they rise is basically a form of racial profiling. It’s effective racial profiling, to be sure, since they’re mostly going to go on to be mass murderers, but it’s much less cut and dried than the original remit of “a demon in the body of your friend”.

Dolls, Identity, and Consent

The whole philosophy of identity issue gets even more interesting (and even more problematic) in Dollhouse. Is that me saying something positive about the show? Well yeah, sort of. The actual philosophy of identity bit is kind of interesting – and on some levels it seems to be what Joss is interested in (q.v. the “it makes humanity irrelevant” speech in Man on the Street) – unfortunately because Joss is pathologically incapable of writing a show that doesn’t have EYE YAM TEH FEMINISTS scrawled all over the front in crayon, he muddies the water by making it something that is also about the abuse of women by men who aren’t him.

The problem with Dollhouse (why yes, I am recycling content from an old article) is that it brings up a whole lot of important rape myths and then not only fails to challenge them, but dips the whole thing in a the kind of abstract philosophy that dickheads use so that they can accuse feminists of being “too emotional”.

To quote one blogger whose name, weblog, and other identifying features I have totally forgotten: “the thing I love about this fandom is that you can always find somebody willing to argue that it isn’t rape if she was brainwashed”.

The problem is that “it isn’t rape if she was brainwashed” is actually part of several interesting philosophical questions about identity, free will, and perception. The problem is that rape is not in any way the right subject to be using as a vehicle for these questions. The concept of consent and complicity is complex enough in real world rape cases that it doesn’t need imaginary supertechnology muddying the waters. The abstract philosophy of the Dollhouse contributes to, rather than challenging, the prevailing notion that consent is so vague and ill-defined that anything short of a clear “no” counts.

One of the things I really liked about The Pig that Wants to be Eaten was the way in which it tempered its abstract content with pragmatism. In its discussion of the

Ship of Theseus

, for example, the author points out that the identity of the “real” ship depends on what you want to do with it. If, for example, you were looking for forensic evidence in a murder investigation, you would want the physical components that had been present at the time of the crime. If on the other hand you were looking for Theseus himself, you'd want the ship that was actually in his possession.

The abstract, philosophy-of-identity stuff in Dollhouse is at odds with the simple, practical fact that the Dollhouse is all kinds of fucked up. If the Dollhouse was more benign and less rapetastic, it could explore some of the interesting ideas about identity which are – in theory at least – part and parcel of the show. Unfortunately the nature of the Dollhouse makes abstract theorizing about identity an offensive disservice to its victims. Yes, you can wonder to what extent Echo's imprints are real people with volition, and to what extent therefore they are moral agents in their own right capable of, amongst other things, consenting to sex. The problem is that the house's “brainwash and bone” routine is so close to real-world date-rape that it becomes genuinely uncomfortable.

Which is a shame, because the actual ideas are rather interesting.

Themes:

TV & Movies

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

,

Whedonverse

~

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~Comments (

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Arthur B

at 14:18 on 2009-09-21

A similar idea crops up in The Prestige - Tesla's teleporting machine doesn't destroy the original, so you always get two copies, an Hugh Jackman solves the problem by drowning himself. This creates a terribly haunting image in the original film,

Uh, actually

the novel came first

. Though you are right that there's a particularly striking image that results from this, if it's the same one from the novel I'm thinking of.

That's a nitpick though, and I completely agree with the rest of your points here. I think the conclusive thing is that, whilst not a compulsive

Buffy

-watcher, I've seen at least a season or two's worth of episodes, and I've

never

even caught an inkling of the idea that vampires are not basically the same people they were before the Embrace (TM White Wolf) but with kewl powerz, simply because I never saw an episode where it was explicitly stated. Which I suppose is another good philosophical question: if you cut out the episodes which make the "they're different people" thing explicit, and a viewer can't work out that vampires are different people from the humans they used to be through observation, can it really be said to be true?

(The best example of using this plot point right, in my book, is

Dracula

; part of the reason the vampirisation of Lucy is so horrifying is that vampire-Lucy is so utterly different from normal-Lucy.)

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Dan H

at 15:36 on 2009-09-21Sorry, you're right, the use of the word "original" in that sentence is entirely specious. I think in my head i was using "original" to mean "before it was co-opted to be an example in a short article about the philosophy of identity".

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Niall

at 22:37 on 2009-09-21Must ... resist ... urge ... to debate ... Buffyverse ... mythology and metaphysics ... must ... resist ...

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Jamie Johnston

at 23:36 on 2009-09-21Ooh, interesting. Hmm. Yes.

Two very

obiter dicta

:

On the rape / brainwashing point, I sometimes wonder whether it wouldn't help to make the same sort of distinction as is made in law between theft (taking another person's property without permission) and fraud (using deceit to trick another person into giving you his property). The word 'rape' was until only a few decades ago almost entirely confined to violent and plainly non-consensual violation. That, of course, is only because society hadn't got far enough in reducing toleration of that extreme form of sexual abuse for it to even begin seriously looking at less obvious forms. But it does also, rightly or wrongly, cause a certain trickiness when we use the same word to denote sex where there is ostensibly consent but the consent is vitiated by, for example, incapacity. On the one hand using 'rape' in this broader sense is strategically shrewd because, now that everyone pretty much agrees that 'classic' violent rape is wrong and is a real problem, saying that something else is also rape immediately challenges people to think again about that other thing and may well shock them into new understanding. But on the other hand, as with assertions like 'meat is murder' or 'property is theft', there is a risk that people simply say, consciously or unconsciously, 'No, that's plainly not literally true and therefore I can ignore whatever point underlies it'. Whereas more progress might be made by treating the two things as separate and concentrating on getting people to acknowledge that the second is also bad. One might say that to some extent this panders to the tendency to regard 'fraud-type-rape' (if I can for the moment call it that without seeming to imply an actual analogy or to trivialize the whole business with my sloppy terminology) as less bad than 'theft-type-rape', it might at least make more progress in solidifying a consensus that 'fraud-type-rape' is actually wrong to some degree. I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a time when theft was recognized as bad but fraud wasn't; nowadays, though, fraud is often regarded as actually worse than theft because it involves an abuse not only of the institution of property but also of human trust. Anyway, perhaps this isn't the right article for this line of thought...

The second thing is that the two links in the article don't work because in each case the URL they're trying to point to has somehow got the URL for the Ferretbrain articles index tacked onto the front, in addition to the usual quotation-marks-coming-out-as-'&8221' problem.

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http://belmanoir.livejournal.com/

at 00:47 on 2009-09-22Actually, the Tesla machine functions entirely differently in the book--the duplicate that is created in the book is not really capable of functioning independently, so the philosophical/ethical issues are still present but very different. The movie DID come up with the image Dan is discussing.

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Arthur B

at 01:25 on 2009-09-22Ah, I was thinking of the image right at the end of the book, but now it occurs to me that that only happens in the framing story, which wasn't included in the film.

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Robinson L

at 22:00 on 2009-09-24It's perfectly simple, Dan. Removing the soul counts as an involuntary alignment shift to either Neutral Evil or Chaotic Evil (I don't think there are many vampires I'd characterize as Lawful Evil). Side effects may include some changes in personality which go beyond those associated Character Alignment, although this has only been documented in one case (Angel), and as you point out, it's not like he's a different person—more like the same person under radically different circumstances.

Now, vampires can act outside their Alignment (Harmony trying to stay friends with Cordelia in Season 2 or 3 would be an even better example), although Spike takes it to ridiculous levels in

Buffy

Season 5. Evil is just the default.

Contrast with Russel T Davies' depiction of the Daleks and Cybermen in the new

Doctor Who

. You kind of have to admire the guy for sticking to the concept that they're without personality and totally evil—no matter how blisteringly dull this makes them as villains, or the stories they appear in. Whedon, on the other hand, through out the whole “vampires without personalities” angle (probably without even realizing what he was doing) pretty much as soon as it threatened his ability to tell an entertaining story. There's probably a lesson to be learned in all that.

Interesting question about whether vampires can be considered monsters in the moral sense, even without souls. Of course, ever since Season 2 (still referring to

Buffy

), I was wondering why the couldn't just restore the souls of all the vampires they encountered. Or at least a couple, like the Alternate Willow from Season 3.

If the Dollhouse was more benign and less rapetastic, it could explore some of the interesting ideas about identity which are – in theory at least – part and parcel of the show.

Yes, but they would also have to make the plots and characters and dialogue and trivialities like that more

interesting

, too. Even without the unfortunate implications of the Dollhouse-as-human-trafficking angle, there's still the

Dollhouse

-as-fecking-boring-tv-show issue to contend with. Without an engaging

story

with which to prevent it, all the deep philosophizing in the world is so much wasted screen time.

@Jamie: Really? The links work just fine for me.

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Jamie Johnston

at 22:54 on 2009-09-24

Really? The links work just fine for me.

This is because someone has fixed them. Presumably for the sole purpose of making me look silly. :)

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Rami

at 06:37 on 2009-09-25

This is because someone has fixed them. Presumably for the sole purpose of making me look silly. :)

Not at all. I've added some smarts to the Ferret so it shouldn't happen again.

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Arthur B

at 15:04 on 2009-09-25I confess: I used

seeecret poweeers

to dive in and fix the links for everyone's short-term convenience.

Which isn't to downplay the importance of Rami's unique ability to alter the ferret at will, or Jamie's keen bug-spotting powers.

TEAMWORK!

(picture of Captain Planet and cast goes here)

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Jamie Johnston

at 16:04 on 2009-09-27Go Planet!

Incidentally, I do wonder sometimes whether it would be kind to newcomers if it said somewhere on the site who has the secret powers. Or indeed who the editor is. But most of the time I enjoy the fact that it doesn't.

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http://pozorvlak.livejournal.com/

at 22:19 on 2009-09-29You might be interested in the Less Wrong post

Timeless Identity

. Spoiler warning: it turns out to be a sales pitch for cryonic preservation. But it's good up until that point.

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Dan H

at 11:18 on 2011-01-10Sorry, I know this is an old post but I was just playing with the Random Article function and I've just found the article linked from the bottom of this comments section.

ARGH ARGH QUANTUM BULLSHIT RAGE!!!

Firstly: you know somebody is a nutbag when they say "as we have seen in..." followed by a link to a post on their own blog.

Secondly: you can't solve the transporter problem by reference to quantum mechanics. Not only does quantum mechanics not really apply to macroscopic bodies, but it ignores the fundamental question of what identity is by clinging to the (completely false) notion that it is somehow impossible to distinguish between particles.

Thirdly: I love how this long winded nonsense about "rationality" ends in something little better than Pascal's Wager - sign up for cryonics because if you're right you get to be immortal and if you aren't you don't lose anything.

Fourthly: GAAAAH QUANTUM BULLSHIT RAGE!!!

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at 17:41 on 2011-01-10The "less wrong" guy, Eliezer Yudkowsky, is fascinating. A lot of his stuff seems to be totally nutty, or at the very least exceedingly pretentious, like "the ten virtues of a rationalist." That said, some of his writing is really good.

http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth

is a hilarious essay on epistemology that I found pretty convincing.

He also wrote a Harry Potter fanfic:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality

which I thought was quite funny as well, even if he occasionally stops the story to complain about JK Rowling's plotting.

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Dan H

at 18:43 on 2011-01-10

The "less wrong" guy, Eliezer Yudkowsky, is fascinating

Fascinating he might be, but I find people who cite "quantum mechanics" in support of their personal ideologies extremely irritating. Quantum mechanics says nothing about the nature of identity except as it relates to sub-atomic particles. You certainly can't use quantum mechanics to prove that psychological continuity is the essence of human identity and you certainly-certainly can't use quantum mechanics to prove that psychological continuity is the essence of human identity by using it to argue, falsely, that physical continuity exists where it doesn't on the basis of the erroneous belief that all electrons are really the same electron.

Quantum mechanics *does* say that "identity" is not a measurable property of particles - when I say "this electron" what I really mean is "the electron that currently has these properties" and if I look at the electron again and its properties have changed I cannot meaningfully describe it as being either the same electron or a different electron.

The same ideas can be applied to human identity as well, and funnily enough they have been for years going back to the original Ship of Theseus. Quantum Mechanics doesn't offer us any new insight into the issue. Just because it is true that the identity of a sub-atomic particle depends only on its quantum numbers, that does not mean that the identity of a person depends only on the quantum numbers of the particles in their body (certainly it cannot be a *necessary* component of identity because I am pretty sure the quantum numbers of the particles in my body are changing all the damned time).

Sorry, personal bugbear.

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at 19:03 on 2011-01-10I don't disagree with any of that--I just really wanted to take the opportunity to pimp his epistemology essay, which is not about quantum.

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Dan H

at 19:21 on 2011-01-10Yeah, the epistemology essay is pretty cool, although it gets a bit straw mannish towards the end. Then again, if it's good enough for Galileo...

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at 05:16 on 2011-01-11I see I should have specified why I find him "fascinating" in my first comment. I was going to, but didn't because I was too hungry.

On the man's main website he says that he "wears two hats." One writes about the "fine art of human rationality." Now, this is an insufferably pretentious way of putting things, and some of his articles follow suit, but most of his writings are actually quite good. What particularly strikes me is his phrase, "intelligence and learning are worth nothing if used to defeat themselves." He talks about the danger of trying to confirm ideas, various cognitive biases, and then, (this is the one that really got me thinking) the fact that even studying psychology is dangerous if you're not scrupulously honest, because the more you know about how people rationalize, the more easily you can find reason to discredit anything you don't want to believe.

The other hat is "concerned with artificial intelligence." And everything he says about this appears to be goats on fire. He supposedly works for the "Singularity Institute," a "public charity funded by individual donations." Sounds like a con man, except he's too obsessive.

It's just a jarring juxtaposition. I can't wrap my head around the existence of a person who can write at length about how to do good science, the cognitive flaws that generate wishful thinking, and the difference between a real explanatory theory and vague pseudoscience--then turn around and hit you with cloning, quantum baffle and singularities.

[theoriesontheory]

But HOW does it make you feel?

Looking at methods of understanding conveying and experiencing emotions in music

Earlier this week I wrote a blog post looking specifically at sadness and how it is conveyed in music. Here this and know I am Sad I looked at Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears in Heaven’ looking at how Clapton builds an empathetic persona, himself in the case of the song after having lost his son in a tragic accident. My analysis was based on part of Allan Moore’s work in ‘Song Means’ (2012) and is just one example of how musicologists and musicians can analyse and study the emotional effect of music.

Leo Tolstoy once said that Music is the shorthand of emotion. While it is accepted that music has the power to have an emotional effect on listeners the exact why and how seems to be up for debate. I have looked at four examples of researchers and musicians explaining some element of emotion and music, each with a different stance on the reason listeners experience emotion when listening to music. Broadly the four identified categories are; feeling emotion from music is based on a social conditioning, there is a biological element to our emotional responses, there is a music theory reason for major sounding happy and minor sounding sad and our perspective of a separate historical and cultural music tradition. After unpacking their framework for understanding emotion in music I will offer my thoughts on their theories and discuss my understanding now I have done this research.

First, presenting the idea that emotional responses to music are based on our social understanding PBS Idea Channel. In Is Sad Music Actually Sad? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios the idea is presented that there is nothing inherently in the music theory of songs that makes something happy or sad. A major chord is no happier than a minor chord but rather we have been trained to understand it this way. They present the idea of imitation theory, that is music imitates the qualities of a feeling, wide intervals feel expansive but this idea is immediately challenged in the pointing out that the same can not be said of other media, going upwards is not always positive in a film scene. They then go on to suggest a biological explanation but then challenge this notion with music that is considered beautiful by some cultures and ugly by others, who is wrong there. The assertion is made that to be affected by music we as listeners have to have an assumption of a message to be shared and receptiveness to that message, this is something that we are culturally taught to do. However, this receptiveness is metered by our personal experience, our experience of a song in a social and cultural context. (PBS Idea Channel, 2013) This perspective on emotion in music is by far the most post-modern understanding of emotion in music in that the final answer to how is emotion expressed and felt in music? Is; everyones experience will be different and you will never truly be able to control it. As a creative I agree with this to some degree but do think there is room for other perspectives on the matter.

The second perspective is that there is a biological element to some sounds that trigger certain primal instincts in humans. Sideways takes a biological approach in their video How To Make Music Sound Scary which is framed as an instructional guide for composers. After a brief discussion of the cheapness of a jump scare and the finesse required to even do that well the discussion dives into cognitive dissonance and the “creepy baby music” effect where in horror films music that is supposed to be soothing and comforting are placed in a scary context creates a sense of unrest in a listener. From here they move away from film theory and into purely sound based fear, explaining that evolutionarily low sounds represent something bigger than you, therefore something that can eat you. Inversely high sounds represent something close but not dangerous. Usually the presence of high sounds is good, there is nothing close that anything else is scared of. By creating a piece that has a low, predator representing sound and a high, safe, non-lethal representing sound a composer will create cognitive dissonance, being confused by the two sounds together but also start filling the middle space triggering a panic response. (Sideways, 2016) I find this perspective on emotion in music interesting and would argue while it is the most tuned to being universally effective, it has the most limited scope as far as what you can do with it. There are so many primal urges that can be tapped into that would have auditory elements tied into them meaning the expression of emotion you would be limited to would be quite basic and primitive.

The third approach centres around an understanding of music theory to understand how to use “brightness” when composing or performing. Adam Neely in Why Major is “happy?” unpacks the concept of brightness, which is defined as the relative size of intervals in a scale in comparison to other scales. Major scales are brighter than minor chords, therefore more happy… However, an augmented scale would technically be brighter than a major chord and rather than sounding happier sounds dissonant and harsh. Adam suggests that there is a balance of brightness that can be used to express different emotions and goes into ranking the modes based around Dorian, declared ‘neutrally bright’ and assigning each other mode a value based on it’s brightness in relation to the brightness of Dorian. Adam also goes on to unpack that if you move upwards (in fifths) through the circle of fifths in context it sounds like you are getting brighter or more open. While this is a model that I have heard before and have actually used in my composition I think that there are a couple of shortcomings in it. First is the fact that all of this is framed on our 19th century Western European understanding of music and emotion as filters through which we hear intervals and chords. The second is I would argue that even a chord that is the same ‘brightness’ like an E5 played on a Grand piano across three octaves and played on a beaten up telecaster as a power chord will sound different and probably illicit a different emotional response.

The final broad perspective that I have found is that a listeners understanding of an ‘other’ piece of music will be framed by their own cultural understanding, which can result in a new understanding of the work. In looking at Why Miyazaki’s Films Sound Pretty Sideways discusses the work of Joe Hisaishi the composer for lots of the music used in Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli films. In trying to understand why the music was “pretty” it was compared to Debussy’s impressionist work with parallels drawn to the way that the conventional rules of resolution weren’t always followed, giving the pieces an etherial sense. But while there are many parallels to be drawn between Hisaishi’s work and Impressionist composers like Debussy, the line up isn’t perfect enough to be considered a perfect match. In listening to some of the scores there are even elements of modal jazz that can be heard in the music. Essentially, the history of Japan, the way music was taught and learned, the way scales and modes can be constructed and changed within a piece of music and the “standardisation” practices of composers and musicologists to make the theory look more like western theory creates compositions which for Japanese audiences would sound familiar and almost certainly hold emotional resonances western audiences don’t fully understand and is translated in the western brain to be ethereal and pretty because that’s what we associate with the closest reference points we have, Debussy and modal jazz. I think this theory is framed more on broader cultural influences rather than individual experiences, unlike the first point. I think it is hard to argue with this point, I often think the use of “middle eastern” or “Asian” music in films is interesting and almost always associated with something mystical or sinister, whereas in a different context those sounds are normal. This video was very helpful in breaking down the complex history of Japanese music theory and explained the scales system very well so I recommend going to watch the video if you are interested, but having a knowledge to this depth anytime you listen to a piece you don’t have the exact cultural understanding for sounds like an exhausting way to listen to music and I think that there is some argument to be made for some sort of universal feeling of certain musical phenomenon.

After reviewing these four approaches as exemplars for models of understanding music and emotion I feel like I know much more about the field yet am no closer to fully grasping the core concept. With each approach there were gaps, often gaps identified by the people making the videos. I also find it interesting that each video was focusing on a different genre of music and coming from it in a very different ways, as researchers, composers, performers, and listeners. I think the only conclusion I feel safe drawing here is that each of these approaches has their merits and depending on the situation as a researcher and musicologist I would feel confident in applying different methods at different times. However as a practitioner the question stands, how much of this, if any, is relevant to my compositional practice. Should I be thinking of references and sounds that a lot of people resonate with, should I be tapping into primal urges with my compositions, should all my happy songs move in fifths and all my sad ones move in fourths or should I use scales from other places to make my music mysterious? I think with understanding and research that all of those things could be achieved, I don’t know that I will be actively thinking about them for very long, or that I even realise that I have but in making music that elicits an emotional response in me, it would stand to reason that it might illicit an emotional response in someone else.

References:

Moore, A. F. (2012). Song means: Analysing and interpreting recorded popular song : analysing and interpreting recorded popular song. ProQuest Ebook Central

Neely, A. [Adam Neely]. (2016, May 31). Why is major “happy?” [Video} YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rEqrPwVITY

PBS Idea Channel. (2031, May 9). Is Sad Music Actually Sad? | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWWYE4eLEfk

Sideways. (2016, August 27). How to Make Music Sound Scary [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-u9YDDrTFo

Sideways. (2017, November 30). Why Miyazaki’s Films Sound Pretty [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bZ19hnr8vc

[columnistmagazine]

On Judging and Being Judged

Nandu Rajagopala

Victoria Street’s charms extend beyond the colourful buildings that grace its borders. The grocer, the cheesemonger and the tailor broadly define the mood of the area. It is not tradition that sets the street apart; in fact, it is the mix of tradition and modernity, of boutique and mainstream that gives it its unique character. Despite the rain, and possibly because of Market Day and Time Out’s designation of the site as a go-to shopping centre in Edinburgh, masses of tourists filled the street. French, Spanish and German words wafted through the area like freshly brewed coffee. I trudged along, quietly cursing the weather, worried about my sagging level of fitness; the street’s curves were easy on the eye but were hardly a boon to anyone physically out of touch.

Further ahead, I noticed one particular store receiving disproportionately more attention than the others. A crowd thronged the entrance and their laughter pointed to an unmistakable air of revelry. The bunting in front of the store only added to the carnival-like spirit. Walking up from Grassmarket, it was nearly impossible to miss the store as its distinctive magenta façade beckoned to every pedestrian. Curious, I walked faster and got to a point where I could observe more closely. The store turned out to be some sort of eatery that specialised in Scottish hog roasts. To lure crowds and possibly to demonstrate what a hog roast was, the meal on offer had been laid out as a display. The dead animal took up an entire window’s worth of space and there were quite a few drooling over its rubbery splendour. In all honesty, I was not sure if the display pig was real or artificial, but, being a vegetarian, that was the last thing I wanted to know.

As I prepared to move on, I heard a gruff Scottish-accented “Yo!”. I looked back and saw a macho, tattooed man by the display window tucking into something, presumably a portion of the hog roast. “It’s POOORK, mate”. At first, I thought he might have noticed my curious look and was trying to shed light on the subject. But his tone was not quite right nor was his strange emphasis on the word ‘pork’. Our eyes met. Cold and unfriendly. His face then twisted into a sneer. Moreover, his friend was openly throwing me a look of suspicion. I mentioned earlier that it was Market Day; to be clear, it was the Saturday after the Parsons Green bomb attack. The situation and the timing had me thinking: is this some Muslim-driven display of hatred?

To put things in context: I am not a Muslim, and I do not have any issues with being seen as one. I have tanned skin, black hair and a black beard, so I realise that it can be all too easy to draw conclusions about my — or anyone’s — country of origin or religious affiliation based on such superficial details. Yet what bothered me at that instance was the sense of guilt that I felt. I call it guilt, but I find it hard to put a name to that emotion: a sinking feeling, something that resonated with both pain and shame at the same time. Is this the feeling that drives many Muslims to pronounce themselves as “moderate” every now and then? By extension, is this what drives ethnic minorities in most countries to prove themselves to be one of the ‘good’ ones? Whatever the answer to these questions may be, no person deserves to constantly have to reaffirm their innocence in order to fit in, to feel safe, to live their individual lives. At the same time, no person has the right to judge another based on outward appearances or hold them accountable for the actions of the few.

Humanity by its nature is such that there would always be bad eggs amongst us. And it might be the case that these problems are thrown at us to create a compelling narrative out of our lives. The least we can do is not make matters worse by rushing to conclusions, by judging when the full facts are not in our possession. At the end of the day, who amongst us is not without sin to cast stones at others? Until such a mature mindset becomes the norm, there would be many a silent victim, most of whom would probably react the way I did: a sense of baseless guilt followed by a delicate shrug, before walking away as fast as possible.

Illustration by: Hannah Riordan

[toomanysinks]

Tia launches a clinic that places the menstrual cycle at the center of care

Tia, the company which launched with an app providing health advice and period tracking for women, has launched its first clinic.

From its first location in New York, the two founders of Tia hope that they can build a network of care facilities that integrate all of the information that their app collects with the benefits of having in-person consultations with physicians that have a holistic view of their patients’ health.

For founders Carolyn Witte and Felicity Yost the hurdles women need to overcome to receive adequate treatment aren’t theoretical — they’ve faced them directly.

Witte and Yost met a decade ago in college and remained friends ever since. It was when Witte had to diagnose herself with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), a condition which affects nearly one in ten women, that she first realized how broken the healthcare system was for over half of the population of the U.S.

“It’s one of those classic issues in healthcare that’s really difficult to diagnose… I spent three years seeing gynecologists, who were treating the symptom and failing to connect the dots,” Witte recalls. “I found myself at age 25 at a fertility specialist in NYC after I diagnosed myself on the internet… and got this really unfortunate diagnosis.”

As a someone who worked at Google and had access to what was supposed to be the best healthcare services in the world, Witte realized that there was significant gaps between the understanding of healthcare for men and women. “Here i am feeling completely alone and confused… that was the moment for me when I said there has to be a better way.”

Witte moved back to San Francisco and moved in with Yost and began working on what would become the Tia app.

Initially the app was focused on providing advice to women around sexual health and gynecological issues, eventually expanding to include a period tracker and other tools. Now, with the expansion into the clinical space, Tia’s founders see it as the culmination of their evolution as a company.

“I wanted to build a brand company that makes women feel heard,” says Witte. “We wanted to build a one-stop-shop solution that solves the lack of soul in healthcare.”

With that mission accomplished, the next step is to grow.

Growth at the kind of scale that Witte and Yost envision requires capital, which the two women have received in the form of $6 million in capital commitments from a slew of some of venture capital’s best investors including John Doerr, Homebrew, Combine, Compound, Torch Capital, Canaan Partners, and Define Ventures (Lynne Chou O’Keefe from Kleiner Perkins).

“Tia is a revolutionary company that is changing the way women view and access healthcare. Now, with the launch of the first Tia Clinic, they’re introducing a new model of women’s care that will shift the landscape with convenience, compassion, and personalization,” said Lynne Chou O’Keefe, in a statement.

That sentiment is bound up in the branding of the business. Although neither woman is latinx, they called their company tia after the Spanish word for aunt — which, can be expanded to include any trusted relationship among women (whether or not they’re actually related), according to Witte.

The decision to expand from an application into physical clinics was bound up in the use cases that the two women saw when they launched their service. “We found very quickly after launching the product that women were hacking Tia and bringing their phones into their gynecologist’s office,” Witte says.

At the newly launched Tia clinic which opens today at its first location in New York near Madison Square Park, the company is providing full-stack care delivery including gynecological exams, primary care, and wellness.

The company charges a $150 membership fee, but its services are covered under insurance. Tia currently accepts Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Oscar, United Oxford/United Healthcare, and Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Treatment at the Tia Clinic is informed by the data that the company’s application collects on its users, both Witte and Yost say. Women can come to the clinic for services ranging from holistic annual exams to IUD insertions to treatment for chronic migraines, alongside more mundane services like flu shots and strep throat treatments.

If Tia users track their cycle and daily health and wellness through the app, that can be shared with their Tia Clinic physicians to inform care. The medical service at this point doesn’t integrate other period tracking apps into its health data.

At the center of Tia’s clinical care is the notion that the menstrual cycle is broadly associated with physiological and emotional manifestations that can inform and effect treatment. 

Tia isn’t the only company that is trying to bring information and data specific to women’s health into a clinical setting. In Oakland, NextGen Jane is using tampons embedded with sensors to diagnose severe health problems like endometriosis.

And investors are pouring money into period tracking and fertility apps and services around the country and around the world.

As we wrote earlier this month:

Femtech, a term coined by Ida Tin,  the founder of another period and ovulation-tracking app Clue, is defined as any software, diagnostics, products and services that leverage technology to improve women’s health. Femtech, and more specifically the businesses in the fertility and contraception lanes, hasn’t made headlines as often as AI or blockchain technology has, for example. Probably because companies in the sector haven’t closed as many notable venture deals. That’s changing.

The global fertility services market is expected to exceed $21 billion by 2020, according to Technavio. Meanwhile, private investment in the femtech space surpassed $400 million in 2018 after reaching a high of $354 million the previous year, per data collected from PitchBook and Crunchbase. This year already several companies have inked venture deals, including men’s fertility business Dadi and Extend Fertility, which helps women freeze their eggs.

“In the last three to six months, it feels like investor interest has gone through the roof,” Jake Anderson-Bialis, co-founder of FertilityIQ and a former investor at Sequoia Capital, told TechCrunch. “It’s three to four emails a day; people are coming out of the woodwork. It feels like somebody shook the snow globe here and it just hasn’t stopped for months now.”

It’s a new era for fertility tech

For Tia, the benefits of understanding menstrual health extend far beyond fertility.

“Women’s health is cyclic and changes every single day of a woman’s cycle,” says Yost. With that said, the company is only just now starting to do clinical research to test the validity of its thesis. “For us to be able to do any sort of clinical research on women is very very challenging,” says Yost. “All of these things can take a really long time because it takes so much information to diagnose.”

For investors like Homebrew’s Hunter Walk, companies like Tia sit at the intersection of a few promising trends — but the investment was driven by the passion the founders expressed for the mission they were on.

“Women and specifically millennial women and younger are increasingly becoming targeted by venture backed companies,” says Walk. “For years and years and years that audience was unrecognized and underserved… [But with Tia] what we saw was a checkbox on the founders and their abilities. They checked the box on the audience… and because they were going not just with generic women’s health but cycle-targeted women’s care, we thought that was the right and differentiated approach thinking about healthcare for women.”

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/06/tia-launches-a-clinic-that-places-the-menstrual-cycle-at-the-center-of-care/

[fmservers]

Tia launches a clinic that places the menstrual cycle at the center of care

Tia, the company which launched with an app providing health advice and period tracking for women, has launched its first clinic.

From its first location in New York, the two founders of Tia hope that they can build a network of care facilities that integrate all of the information that their app collects with the benefits of having in-person consultations with physicians that have a holistic view of their patients’ health.

For founders Carolyn Witte and Felicity Yost the hurdles women need to overcome to receive adequate treatment aren’t theoretical — they’ve faced them directly.

Witte and Yost met a decade ago in college and remained friends ever since. It was when Witte had to diagnose herself with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), a condition which affects nearly one in ten women, that she first realized how broken the healthcare system was for over half of the population of the U.S.

“It’s one of those classic issues in healthcare that’s really difficult to diagnose… I spent three years seeing gynecologists, who were treating the symptom and failing to connect the dots,” Witte recalls. “I found myself at age 25 at a fertility specialist in NYC after I diagnosed myself on the internet… and got this really unfortunate diagnosis.”

As a someone who worked at Google and had access to what was supposed to be the best healthcare services in the world, Witte realized that there was significant gaps between the understanding of healthcare for men and women. “Here i am feeling completely alone and confused… that was the moment for me when I said there has to be a better way.”

Witte moved back to San Francisco and moved in with Yost and began working on what would become the Tia app.

Initially the app was focused on providing advice to women around sexual health and gynecological issues, eventually expanding to include a period tracker and other tools. Now, with the expansion into the clinical space, Tia’s founders see it as the culmination of their evolution as a company.

“I wanted to build a brand company that makes women feel heard,” says Witte. “We wanted to build a one-stop-shop solution that solves the lack of soul in healthcare.”

With that mission accomplished, the next step is to grow.

Growth at the kind of scale that Witte and Yost envision requires capital, which the two women have received in the form of $6 million in capital commitments from a slew of some of venture capital’s best investors including John Doerr, Homebrew, Combine, Compound, Torch Capital, Canaan Partners, and Define Ventures (Lynne Chou O’Keefe from Kleiner Perkins).

“Tia is a revolutionary company that is changing the way women view and access healthcare. Now, with the launch of the first Tia Clinic, they’re introducing a new model of women’s care that will shift the landscape with convenience, compassion, and personalization,” said Lynne Chou O’Keefe, in a statement.

That sentiment is bound up in the branding of the business. Although neither woman is latinx, they called their company tia after the Spanish word for aunt — which, can be expanded to include any trusted relationship among women (whether or not they’re actually related), according to Witte.

The decision to expand from an application into physical clinics was bound up in the use cases that the two women saw when they launched their service. “We found very quickly after launching the product that women were hacking Tia and bringing their phones into their gynecologist’s office,” Witte says.

At the newly launched Tia clinic which opens today at its first location in New York near Madison Square Park, the company is providing full-stack care delivery including gynecological exams, primary care, and wellness.

The company charges a $150 membership fee, but its services are covered under insurance. Tia currently accepts Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Oscar, United Oxford/United Healthcare, and Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Treatment at the Tia Clinic is informed by the data that the company’s application collects on its users, both Witte and Yost say. Women can come to the clinic for services ranging from holistic annual exams to IUD insertions to treatment for chronic migraines, alongside more mundane services like flu shots and strep throat treatments.

If Tia users track their cycle and daily health and wellness through the app, that can be shared with their Tia Clinic physicians to inform care. The medical service at this point doesn’t integrate other period tracking apps into its health data.

At the center of Tia’s clinical care is the notion that the menstrual cycle is broadly associated with physiological and emotional manifestations that can inform and effect treatment. 

Tia isn’t the only company that is trying to bring information and data specific to women’s health into a clinical setting. In Oakland, NextGen Jane is using tampons embedded with sensors to diagnose severe health problems like endometriosis.

And investors are pouring money into period tracking and fertility apps and services around the country and around the world.

As we wrote earlier this month:

Femtech, a term coined by Ida Tin,  the founder of another period and ovulation-tracking app Clue, is defined as any software, diagnostics, products and services that leverage technology to improve women’s health. Femtech, and more specifically the businesses in the fertility and contraception lanes, hasn’t made headlines as often as AI or blockchain technology has, for example. Probably because companies in the sector haven’t closed as many notable venture deals. That’s changing.

The global fertility services market is expected to exceed $21 billion by 2020, according to Technavio. Meanwhile, private investment in the femtech space surpassed $400 million in 2018 after reaching a high of $354 million the previous year, per data collected from PitchBook and Crunchbase. This year already several companies have inked venture deals, including men’s fertility business Dadi and Extend Fertility, which helps women freeze their eggs.

“In the last three to six months, it feels like investor interest has gone through the roof,” Jake Anderson-Bialis, co-founder of FertilityIQ and a former investor at Sequoia Capital, told TechCrunch. “It’s three to four emails a day; people are coming out of the woodwork. It feels like somebody shook the snow globe here and it just hasn’t stopped for months now.”

It’s a new era for fertility tech

For Tia, the benefits of understanding menstrual health extend far beyond fertility.

“Women’s health is cyclic and changes every single day of a woman’s cycle,” says Yost. With that said, the company is only just now starting to do clinical research to test the validity of its thesis. “For us to be able to do any sort of clinical research on women is very very challenging,” says Yost. “All of these things can take a really long time because it takes so much information to diagnose.”

For investors like Homebrew’s Hunter Walk, companies like Tia sit at the intersection of a few promising trends — but the investment was driven by the passion the founders expressed for the mission they were on.

“Women and specifically millennial women and younger are increasingly becoming targeted by venture backed companies,” says Walk. “For years and years and years that audience was unrecognized and underserved… [But with Tia] what we saw was a checkbox on the founders and their abilities. They checked the box on the audience… and because they were going not just with generic women’s health but cycle-targeted women’s care, we thought that was the right and differentiated approach thinking about healthcare for women.”

Via Jonathan Shieber https://techcrunch.com

[noirceurparfaite-blog]

#2 - the anti-fascist movement in 2017

I expected to have published the second Noirceur Parfaite long before now, but for at least two reasons, it didn’t happen.

The first reason is that I felt like kind of a dick after the first one. I more or less stand by my comments, but the reaction elicited from at least one person involved in the @news project wasn’t what I was expecting, and I felt bad about it. One of the problems with anarchist discourse right now is that we tend towards being assholes with one another – or at least, it often feels that way. I don’t like this or want this. If anything, I’d say that I would prefer to be a force in the world that works counter to this tendency, and moves us all along to All Hanging Out and Smoking Weed (the second part being a stand-in for whatever fun activity you like). This is not a realistic project, but that’s not the point of it.

The second reason is that I was busy. Thankfully, I had the advantage of a vacation recently, which I spent in southern Ontario – but I expect I will remain busy with other projects in the next days. Hopefully there will be time to keep working on this column, and to make it more regular, but I’m not entirely sure how realistic a goal that is.

In the time since the last column, a friend asked me to “facilitate” a discussion about anti-fascism – or more properly, a discussion about “Beyond Anti-Fascism”, as it would end up titled. (How many workshops, discussions, etc. have I done in which someone else puts the word “beyond” in the title?) I put the word “facilitate” in air quotes because it was unclear to me what this would mean. What ended up happening is that I introduced the discussion, and really made very little effort to facilitate anything; I did not take stack, I did not try to draw out themes, nothing of the sort. Instead, I made two requests of those listening: let’s avoid any efforts to define fascism, and let’s avoid talking about specific events, primarily demos. Then I expressed my own ideas for a little over five minutes, and from there, other people started to talk too.

The conversation was all over the place, but I actually liked it in this context. People talked about what they wanted to talk about, and I wanted to know what others’ priorities were. Really, we were having a conversation about the context, and the referent “anti-fascism” was just a gateway to that. There was some discussion of the established practice of counterprotesting La Meute whenever those fucks decide to go to the Lacolle border crossing (as happened most recently on September 30), but there was also wild and enthusiastic talk of squats in the countryside and the deep woods where the spook of citizenship would be proactively, decisively negated. Others wanted to talk about anarchist cultural visions versus nationalist ones, and at least one person wanted to talk about conflict with the Maoists. Eventually, there was a break-up into smaller discussion groups, some of which had a more practical focus than others.

For me, “Beyond Anti-Fascism” was a chance for me to voice some ideas I’ve had in my head for awhile, to a somewhat larger and more ideologically diverse audience than the people who often sit on the couch in my living room, and in a more complete way than those argumentative bastards I share my life with will often allow. The rest of this section will go through these ideas, including a few that I didn’t have time for in the discussion, in arbitrary sequence.

The first three points elaborate a possible understanding for what anti-fascism actually is – or, at least, how we might usefully conceive of it and talk about it.

1) Anti-fascism, like any social movement, is a constant. This is to say, it is a social movement with a long history – not a fad, but something that some people have been doing for a long time. Obviously there was an anti-fascism of a sort even in the days before Mussolini was invited into government, but we don’t need to start there to put the present moment in proper perspective. It should suffice to think only of North America, and to start from the 1980s or ‘90s. During this entire time, there have been people concerned about fascists and fascism – which is to say, for the purposes of this text, some combination of:

small organizations with specifically racist or otherwise oppressive politics;

larger movements with politics that are less defined but generally amenable to these organizations’ agendas; and

not infrequently, but particularly during Republican administrations, the executive branch of the United States government (the governments of Québec, Arizona, and a few other U.S. states might occasionally be identified as fascist as well)

During this entire time, there have been discussions of this “fascist threat” (its composition, its activities, its capacities, etc.) and a consistent trend of people taking action against it.

2) Anti-fascism, like any social movement, is a space. Meetings, public demonstrations, and gnarlier actions comprise the bulk of this space, which is broadly non-fixed in geographic terms and non-subcultural with regards to the people present – i.e. it does not correspond to where certain people (in the Montréal context, the stereotype would be francophone skinheads who like to drink and talk about the working class) decide to spend their Saturday nights. Like any space that exists in the real world, a concept of purity simply does not apply. The range of ideas present within anti-fascism is extremely diverse, and made all the more so in any moment when participation spikes.

3) In 2017, anti-fascism is experiencing greater visibility and a higher level of participation than normal. This obviously has something to do with the electoral campaign of Donald Trump and its success, though it cannot be reduced to that either. Suffice it to say, though, that the incoherent conceptual category of fascism feels more relevant to people, and more people are saying it, including those with the largest capacity to broadcast their thoughts. This creates a feedback loop of sorts, which might not necessarily correlate to higher rates of participation in anti-fascism, but which has certainly done so in this case. The demos are bigger, and more frequent. More people are involving themselves in anti-fascism, either for good reasons or bad, and this makes it “bigger”.

Accepting this elaboration, a comparison can be made between anti-fascism in 2017 and anti-austerity in 2012 – that is, in the Montréal context, the time of “the student strike” or “le Printemps érable” or whatever other historonym we might prefer. The anti-austerity movement – or more narrowly, the so-called “student movement” aiming for free tuition at Québécois public universities – had a long history before 2012, and its history did not end there, either. The fourth article in the “After the Crest” series from CrimethInc., reflecting on Montréal anarchists’ experience in 2012, concerns itself primarily with what led anarchists of various backgrounds and persuasions to engage with the movement in 2012 and the years immediately adjacent; this articles also imagines forms of disengagement and distancing that might have been, at times, more empowering than straightforward participation as agitators and bodies on the ground. The remaining points aim at an analysis of anti-fascism in 2017 with the same priorities at the fore.

4) The baseline objective of the anti-fascist movement, while obviously limited from a critical anarchist perspective, is entirely consistent with anarchist aims. More elaborate articulations of this goal by those with agendas that go beyond the aims of the movement, such as Maoists or liberal democrats, will probably not be consistent with anarchist aims – but these other tendencies do not define anti-fascism as a whole anymore than anarchists do.

Trying to perfectly define the baseline objective of the movement is an exercise in futility. That said, I would consider it a broad effort to do away with the forces itemized in point #1.

5) Engagement with the anti-fascist movement can serve to satisfy both the emotional and practical needs of anarchists. Like many others in society, we find the activities of fascists to be monstrous and abhorrent, and we may find ourselves with a desire to “do something” about it; this is true even for the most rhetorically nihilist among us, who present as very aloof but who may nevertheless find themselves beset with righteous fury when an acquaintance gets stabbed, a mosque gets shot up, or a family member starts promoting reactionary ideas on Facebook. These emotions can be rationalized away, or they can be used. Regarding the practical, there is too much to say. There are new friends to be met, plenty of opportunities to practice new skills, and social energy that might be harnessed towards any number of interesting avenues. Even if your goal is just to shit-talk leftists, some level of engagement will provide your critiques a touch of authenticity.

The above two points are fairly banal, I think, but they probably need to be said. The remaining points should challenge many participants in the anti-fascist movement, and perhaps actively antagonize a few of them, so I want to make it clear right now that these points are offered in solidarity, and that I am mostly contemptuous of the purist rhetoric from certain anarchists (largely the issue of certain tendencies, though I won’t name names) that reject engagement with anti-fascism out of hand. If you’re one of those purists, cut it the fuck out.

6) Petitioning the government is useless; direct action gets the goods. For years, Solidarity Across Borders has organized an annual demo in Montréal under the slogan of first STATUS FOR ALL! and then, more recently, OPEN THE BORDERS! These slogans articulate as demands, necessarily directed at the Canadian government, which is arbiter of status and maintainer of borders in this territory. These demands, even if we imagined them voiced or embodied by a hundred times more participants in a SAB demo, will not directly affect government policy. This truth is well-understood by anarchists, both those who participate in SAB demos and those who do not. But when it comes to fascists doing essentially the same thing, articulating a demand for mass deportation or the like, these same anarchists can get very worried – namely, by imagining a clear causal relationship between the petitioning action and a dreaded government policy outcome. It is fine to be disgusted by racist petitioners standing in front of the National Assembly or gathering at some other visible or symbolically important site (the Quartier des spectacles, Montréal City Hall, the Lacolle border crossing), and it is perfectly fine to attack them (in strategically sound ways, of course). At the same time, it is problematic to understand any manifestation of civil discourse as an urgent threat and attendance-obligatory. A call for a demo in a residential neighbourhood with a visibly Muslim character, or to march on the Olympic Stadium at the moment of its usage by refugees, indicates a risk of a pogrom – in other words, direct action.A proper threat assessment would understand such calls as more urgently threatening than, for instance, the passive and virtue signaling public activity of La Meute.

7) Under Canadian law, the state guarantees the right of citizens to peaceful assembly and peaceful expression of political opinion. Thus, any attack on such rights is simultaneously an attack on the state itself. It is absolutely possible to attack the state and succeed, but it is a difficult operation, and one that demands a great deal of resources – of which, it is quite likely, the attackers do not have an abundance. It takes many fewer resources for the other side to pull off some kind of passive event. If one demo is blocked, they will call another on another day. Or they will hide in a parking garage for awhile, then emerge once the attackers have gone home.

The above two points comprise the core of my disagreement with the strategic imperative that goes by the name “no platform”, currently in vogue among many influential participants in anti-fascism, and which provides an undesirable negative affect to the anti-fascist movement as a whole. No platform, as a project, is comparable to the project of policing as articulated by Tom Nomad in The Master’s Tools. The exigency is to be everywhere at once, to prevent any instance of violation of non-situational placidity, a project which is necessarily impossible. For the state, the effort to realize this impossibility is, at least, productive. For anarchists in the anti-fascist movement, it is probable that we have better things to do, either inside or outside of the movement, in lieu of devoting all our time and energy to a project that will inevitably fail, and which will likely leave us feeling weak because of that failure.

8) Anarchists should not feel okay about marching behind Maoist banners. This is meant literally as well as figuratively. After the death of Heather Heyer, there was a memorial demonstration in Montréal, which began with a rally at Square Phillips. PCR-RCP cadre were there in force, as well as many anarchists. We found ourselves in the same place, largely for the same reasons, and this is actually fine; it is important for us to have spaces of encounter with those whom we do not like, rather than simply become more isolated from one another than we already are. But when we left the square, the Maoists did what they always do, which was to hoist their banners and hammer-and-sickle flags in the air, and thereby very effectively mark the demonstration as theirs as far as any spectator would be able to tell. This didn’t need to happen. Anarchists could have marched out of the square in a different direction. We talk a lot of shit about Maoists, and other tendencies, in our living rooms – but on the streets that day, we reflexively actualized left unity, rather than do something to develop our own autonomous capacities, and visibilize the ideas we presumably think to be superior to those of Maoism in terms of strategic, ethical, and even aesthetic thinking. Besides, our mutual distaste would have had practical benefit today, namely by making the anti-fascist movement less intelligible, less centralized, less repressible. Let’s give kudos where it is due, and say that PCR-RCP cadre are ready and willing to fight cops and destroy property in pursuit of their aims. It is always better to have two potentially rowdy crowds wandering downtown Montréal than one. A chaotic movement is a stronger one.

9) Anarchists should deviate from easy narratives that frequently fail to compete with the narratives propagated by fascists. As soon as anarchist discourse becomes populist, it loses what makes it distinctly more valuable than the discourse of liberals, who have – through television and thinkpieces, podcasts and blog posts – propagated a powerful idea of what it means to be a good and ethical person in affluent, urban, and secular societies. Broadly speaking, The Guardian and your average Netflix sitcom actually have it quite right vis-à-vis their vision for compassion, empathy, and solidarity amongst people who are just struggling to survive in this world, same as anyone else. Alas, it is not enough to be right; the populist rhetoric of many fascists, which appeals to different emotions, is often more successful in shaping the collective action of the masses. Given that anarchists acting populist today will not provide an outcome of popularity tomorrow (such is the power of authoritarians institutions’ ideological conditioning), we should embrace our outsider status and, with it, the freedom to call things as we see them. This is, in some ways, a terrible freedom, because oftentimes the way we see things will be absolutely misinformed, and provide no immediately positive outcome. Regarding anarchists’ involvement in the anti-fascist movement, perhaps the most relevant topic here is Islam, which many anarchists broadly oppose (usually along with all religion). The nature of this opposition, of course, is extremely varied, and it is certain that many espousing such a position are also woefully ignorant of even basic concepts relevant to the subject matter. In this, many anarchists are the same as white Québecois who have concerns about at least some aspects of Muslims’ beliefs and practices. Anarchism needs to be a space where it is possible to voice those concerns, which might begin a dialogue that corrects some misconceptions, and maybe suggests that there are bigger things to worry about than what some imam said one time. Fascists claim to be the only ones in society who will speak matter-of-factly about Islam-associated problems, while in fact routinely propagating conspiracy theories and other false information. There is no serious possibility that either liberals or Leninists will ever demonstrate by example that the fascists’ claim to this effect are wrong, so the task is up to anarchists who are willing to take responsibility for saying things that other people (including people who can make credible claims of being more oppressed) may not want to hear.

10) The only way to stop random and autonomously planned violence is better policing. Such better policing is, in fact, more or less the projectual aim of some particularly dedicated members of the anti-fascist movement, who investigate incidents of fascist activity, identify who is responsible, and take action against them. This project is entirely laudable, especially to the extent that it is motivated by genuinely altruistic sentiment – unlike the vast majority of activities pursued by actual cops, i.e. the state employees of whom every last one is a bastard. But the volunteer efforts of flawed and underresourced people who have bills to pay, addictions to nurse, all the rest of it, will never prevent atrocities like the Québec City mosque shooting from reoccurring. Rather than indulge in honeyed talk of how this problem will disappear in the context of total anarchist triumph, it should be acknowledged that what will prevent such atrocities is better surveillance, better regimes of punishment and reward for bad and good behaviour, better algorithms to preemptively identify the person about to shoot someone. Obviously the medicine is worse than the disease, even if that’s easier for some of us to say than others. There is a place for hunting down individual fascists and making their lives more difficult, which will remain the main activity of some people and which others should try to celebrate, but it is problematic for this to become a markedly favoured tactic of the movement, never mind a strategic-ethical imperative. Not because the anti-fascist movement would have become “a state in waiting” or an arm of the extant state, but because making the world a safe place for everyone is a project beyond our capacities. The degree to which we can respond effectively to things is largely limited by cultural and geographic distances, and if we decide that we have our own lives to live, too, which will not be well-served by developing the mentality akin to that of a heroic but tortured cop, then the burden of that personal choice is that we will be more limited in our capacity to effect social change.

11) Theories of fascism are politically and emotionally motivated. In other words, they are never entirely honest. In intellectualizing fascism (and its relatives: crypto-fascism, proto-fascism, quasi-fascism, Nazism, etc.), the intellectual is typically unable to separate personal bias and agenda from the work at hand. This is why many anarchists call Leninists “red fascists”, why Leninists might say anarchists are “fascists in effect”, why the enemies of the anti-fascist movement proclaim that “antifa are the real fascists”. None of us are actually wrong, because wrongness can only be measured against the definition being used. Occasionally, a clinical definition emerges, usually in an academic tone or an overconceived blog post, which takes out all the moralizing and provides a rigorous and well-reasoned diagnostic framework – but such rarefied definitions never catch on in common discourse, because the pragmatic function of the word “fascist” is to rally groups of people to destroy an enemy that deserves no ethical consideration; people will continue to identify things they don’t like as fascist, never mind what any expert says. Without imagining that we can delete the word from English or French, or even from our own speech (for our emotions will sometimes demand that we denounce a thing in the strongest possible terms), anarchists should use different terms, preferably more precise, to identify the enemies of the anti-fascist movement wherever possible. When we choose to use the word “fascism”, we should be clear that our choice is informed by convenience and, to some degree, arbitrariness – not truth (for if we do think that our choice of words is “true”, we have a bigger problem, which is that we have constructed a semantic reality for ourselves that satisfies our own desire to always be right). In this move away from theories of fascism, which are typically too large in scope to be practical, we can:

encourage a less alienated relationship to people’s very reasonable hatreds, which do not need to be justified with historical narratives or political ontologies;

build a cultural resilience against the immanent threat of anarchists being identified as “fascists” by authoritarians who want to control everything, a predictable outcome of the contemporary and largely Leninist-animated anti-fascist movement achieving broad success in its goals; and

continue to use the word “fascist” in much the same way as we have been doing, but perhaps with fewer frustrations with ourselves and others as to whether the word is being used correctly

12) Participation and engagement will produce better knowledge of the anti-fascist movement than intellectual approaches ever will. Don’t trust anyone who has a pretense to superior knowledge of history, metaphysics, and how to live your life. That includes yourself. Walk with the anti-fascist movement for a bit, or don’t, as you like – but do it as anarchist.

I have one reading recommendation to conclude with, which is “Combating the Reactionary Forces of Liberalism” by Common Cause Anarchist Organization, published in Mortar #3 in 2015. It is an imperfect article, but it does a very good job at identifying the difference between La Meute and a smaller outfits like Adelante or the Fédération des Québécois de souche – namely, that La Meute lacks a revolutionary and anti-systemic core, that it is in fact perfectly willing to work within the general framework of the Canadian state. Thinking to the United States, it seems that many defenders of the Confederate flag would probably fit this description as well. Common Cause’s argument is that these people require a different response than fascists do, and I think I buy that, though I don’t think there will ever be much hope of establishing a clear vision of who, precisely, is or is not a “reactionary liberal”, as opposed to those who come from a genuinely revolutionary and anti-systemic perspective, albeit a pessimistic nationalist one. It is clear enough that many people with one foot in the anarchist scene have another foot in the social-democratic scene, but it is harder to speak of actual individuals with any certainty. Our capacity to tell the difference will be even more difficult when assessing the anti-fascist movement’s street-level enemies, but Common Cause has made the best effort I’ve yet seen at realizing a practical taxonomy.

Peter Gelderloos and Seattle Ultras, respectively, provide two decidedly more lively texts that I think warrant some attention: “Fascists are the Tools of the State” in the first case, dating from 2007, and “Class Combat” in the second, from this year. Both of these take a decidedly less intellectual approach than either myself in this text – I promise I am less aloof from the matters I like to discuss if you hang out with me in real life – or the collectively written, democratically approved text produced by Common Cause.

Finally, I recently had the opportunity to see a few well-preserved magazine issued out of Toronto in the late 1990s, antifa forum. The first thing to say is that, rather than it being some brand-new phenomenon, the North American anarchist scene has been fascinated with terminology issued from the German radical scene for well over two decades (and of course, this is where we get some other terms, such as “black bloc”). Secondly, I think a lot of people would benefit simply from being aware of the existence of older materials like these, even if they have no particular interest in the content. I found many of the theoretical questions and tensions of today coming out in these older texts. I suspect that for younger radicals, like myself and those born even later, these older printed materials will provide a historical sense of the issues that we otherwise just aren’t going to get anywhere else.

And with that, I suppose I’ll conclude. As always, please feel free to discuss these points in the comments, tell me how much I suck, point me in the directions of the best gay saunas in the North American anarchist scene, and tell me what you’d rather I talk about.

[angstandhappiness]

Fellow autistic here, you put to words EXACTLY what I've always felt.

I don’t want to say fictional robots “belong” to autistic people because any given fantastical allegory can have manifold and meaningful resonance to all manner of diversities, but something I do think is very interesting about fictional robots as an autistic person is this:

Robots as a plot element or character arc often center on this question of emotions. Do you feel emotions? Now, this is an imperfect argument about humanity/authenticity in the first place since there are plenty of Real Human Beings who experience anhedonia or alexithymia- but I think also, in my experience, a lot of these stories- sometimes in-universe, sometimes only in fandom responses- betray that maybe a lot more people than they think, are not very good at identifying emotions.

Many fictional robots- to be blunt- pour with emotion. They will often have a blunted affect (that is to say, speaking in a monotone, or limited facial expressions), they may use overly technical terminology, but they will make arbitrary decisions based on personal preference, it will be nakedly obvious they have a preference and their preference is determined at least in part by what pleases them. Data from Star Trek adores his cat and cares deeply about art and poetry.

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