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takebugs · 2 years

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My Unhinged Theory That Paul Is a Liar and Actually Instigated the Fateful Meeting Between John and Himself

I will open this tinhat tirade with an invitation to absolutely rip me to shreds with hard facts and discredit the ever loving shit out of this post. Please, please prove me wrong. Please let this be just the insane chain linked events that my mind has conjured all on its own. I only ask that you review the evidence (albeit based on personal anecdotes rife with their own inherent bias) and my own interpretation based on my (woefully limited) knowledge of one Paul McCartney. If you dare to get into this crazy hellhole, then please read on...

tl;dr Paul went through hot girl summer and then scammed Ivan into introducing him to the hot Teddy Boy he kept seeing around.

Alright so we’ve all heard the age old story of how Paul and John met. It was July 6th, 1957, fate intervened and all that jazz. Or in the words of Paul:

“My memory of meeting John for the first time is very clear. … I can still see John now - checked shirt, slightly curly hair, singing ‘Come Go With Me’ by the Del Vikings. He didn’t know all the words, so he was putting stuff in about penitentiaries - and doing a good job of it. I remember thinking, ‘He looks good - I wouldn’t mind being in a group with him.’ … Then, as you all know, he asked me to join the group, and so we began our trip together. We wrote our first songs together, we grew up together and we lived our lives together. And when we’d do it together, something special would happen. There’d be that little magic spark. I still remember his beery old breath when I first met him here [Woolton church fete] that day. But I soon came to love that beery old breath. And I loved John. I always was and still am a great fan of John’s -Paul in Bill Harry’s, The Paul McCartney Encyclopedia, 2003

Another account of the meeting by Paul is as follows:

“I remember coming into the fete and seeing all the sideshows. And also hearing all this great music wafting in from this little Tannoy system. It was John and the band. I remember I was amazed and thought, ‘Oh great’, because I was obviously into the music. I remember John singing a song called ‘Come Go With Me’. He’d heard it on the radio. He didn’t really know the verses, but he knew the chorus. The rest he just made up himself. I just thought, ‘Well, he looks good, he’s singing well and he seems like a great lead singer to me.’ Of course, he had his glasses off, so he really looked suave. I remember John was good. He was really the only outstanding member, all the rest kind of slipped away.” -Paul McCartney, Record Collector, 1995

But let me posit a different take on that day.

So we know for a fact that Ivan Vaughan was the one to “officially” introduce Paul to John. He was a boyhood friend of John’s and later a schoolmate, and friend, of Paul’s. We also know Ivan was a sometimes member of the Quarrymen himself, playing tea-chest bass. So as the story goes he invited Paul along to the fete to see the Quarrymen perform, and during a break in their sets he brought Paul back to meet the group (although I have seen variations of the exact time at which the meeting occurred).

Here are some quotes that I think shed some good insight (although likely biased and likely subject to the fault of anyone recalling past events) on the actual meeting:

“Just then the side door opened and Ivan breezed in, panting for breath as though he had just run a marathon. “Hi there, fellas. Look, I’ve brought Paul along.” The next figure to step through the doorway was Paul McCartney carrying his guitar. I think I was the only person in the group to look up as Paul walked over. John, by this time, had gathered another chair for himself and had his feet up, intent on replacing the broken string on his guitar. I knew Paul from the Institute and he recognised me. “Hiya, Paul, glad you could make it,” I said. Paul’s face relaxed a little as he saw a face he knew. “Hiya, Len.” There was no response from John; he didn’t even look up. After Ivan had introduced Paul to the other members of the group, he then approached John, who was still engrossed in tuning up the guitar string he had just put on. He looked up as if to say: “What are you bothering me for now?” It was an impatient sort of look. “John, this is Paul. Paul McCartney, you know. I told you that I would bring him along.” John took his feet off the chair and said simply, “Hi Paul,” then carried on tuning his guitar. There was no shaking of hands, and he didn’t stand up to greet him. Paul just stood there. “Hello John,” he said in his polite manner. “Do you need any help with that?” John pulled up the now vacant chair. “Yeah, okay. Sit down.” Paul sat down, took John’s guitar and handed him the guitar that he had brought along. Paul’s guitar was left-handed and so his guitar was strung the opposite way to that of a right-handed guitarist, but that didn’t matter when it came to the simple tuning of a guitar. “Hey,” exclaimed John as he inspected Paul’s guitar. “It’s strung the other way round.” “Yes, I play left-handed.” Paul then took a pitch pipe guitar tuner out of his pocket, playing the first in an open manner and at the same time blowing into his tuner. “There, that’s better. I’ll just check that the other strings are in tune.” The rest of us looked on admiringly as Paul showed his dexterity with the guitar. “Hey fellas,” said John, looking at us, “he’s good – we’ll have to have him in the group.” As I explained previously, this was our joking response to anyone that ever showed musical talent, rather than a serious or literal proposition. He was not as yet officially inviting Paul into the group. Ivan looked on happily with an expression which seemed to say: “There, you see, I told you he was good, didn’t I?” “Thanks Paul, it would have taken me ages to do that,” said John sincerely.” -Len Garry, John, Paul, and Me: Before the Beatles, 1997

“Right off, I could see John was checking this kid out,” says Pete Shotton, who was standing behind John, off to the side. “Paul came on as very attractive, very loose, very easy, very confident – wildly confident. He played the guitar well. I could see that John was very impressed.” -Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography, 2005

“Paul must have picked up on it, too. He seemed to zero right in on John, whom he recognized as the band's legitimate front man. Not wanting to lose his edge, he launched into his own rendition of "Be-Bop-A-Lula." It impressed John that Paul knew all the words; John could never remember them, preferring to make up his own as the rhyme scheme required. Paul's version of the song drove harder, was sharper, bringing the tonic fifth in on cue, which the band had simply ignored. And he sang it with all the stops pulled out, belting it with complete abandon, as if he were standing in front of his bedroom mirror, without anyone else in the room...” "It was uncanny. He could play and sing in a way that none of us could, including John," Eric Griffiths recalls. "He had such confidence, he gave a performance. It was natural. We couldn't get enough of it. It was a real eye-opener." After listening to Paul play, John recalled, "I had thought to myself, 'He's as good as me.' Now, I thought, if I take him on, what will happen? It went through my head that I'd have to keep him in line if I let him join [the band]. But he was good, so he was worth having. He also looked like Elvis. I dug him." -Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography, 2005

“I also knocked around on the backstage piano and that would have been ‘A Whole Lot Of Shakin” by Jerry Lee. That’s when I remember John leaning over, contributing a deft right hand in the upper octaves and surprising me with his beery breath. It’s not that I was shocked, it’s just that I remember this particular detail.” -Paul McCartney from Philip Norma, John Lennon: The Life, 2008

So what exactly about any of this is important? Okay so here is where my theory comes into play. I present the theory that Paul went to this fete with the sole intention of meeting John and performing for him. Why, you may ask, am I making this assumption? Well let me provide you with some further information.

Paul McCartney, as interviewed by Sean Ono Lennon for Lennon at 80, revealed to Sean that he had actually known of John prior to their first official meeting. You can listen to the full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCe8fdBeTCs&ab_channel=GisselaPereyra

But for the sake of this deranged rant here are some quotes:

“The funny thing about your dad was that I'd seen him around a couple of times, because I realised later what it was, my bus route, he would take that bus, but he would be going to see his mum who lived kind of in my area. And then he’d take the bus back up to his Auntie Mimi's. So I'd seen him a couple of times and thought, ‘Wow, you know, he’s an interesting looking guy.’

“And then I once also saw him in a queue for fish and chips and I said, ‘Oh, that's that guy off the bus’.” “I’m talking to myself, in my mind I thought, ‘I saw that guy off the bus, oh he’s pretty cool looking. Yeah, you know, he’s a cool guy.’”

Asked if he knew John was a musician then, the Beatles star replied: “No, I knew nothing about him except that he looked pretty cool.

“He had long sideboards and greased back hair and everything…it was the Teddy Boy look, yeah.”

“My friend Ivan, who I knew at school, was a friend of John's and took me up to the village fete, introduced me there.

“So it was like, ‘Oh, that's that guy who I've been seeing.’”

“And then obviously I knew he was a musician because he was in the little band, The Quarrymen, and I got to sort of hang with them in the interval.”

-Paul McCartney, Lennon at 80

So we know that Paul knew John before the fete, not only that but he was clearly interested in John. Paul thought John looked hot cool and wanted to get to know him. And then seemingly did nothing about that for years until the fateful meeting? I think not.

So the second part to this unhinged hellscape is Chubby McCartney. Yes, my friends, Paul McCartney believes in hot girl summer.

In an interview with Russel Harty from 1984 (you can watch the interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoqWlb2lXXs&t=2221s&ab_channel=sirpaulru) Harty talks to Paul about how he was a “fatty” (yikes). Paul seems visibly uncomfortable when a picture of himself as a 14 year old appears showing a cute, chubby version of himself. They kind of move past the topic quickly, as Paul explains it was a touchy subject for him.

If you are wondering what exactly Paul looked like then here you go:

This, my dear, dear friends, would have been the Paul that encountered John prior to the fete. We do know, however, by the time Paul joined the Quarrymen he was much trimmer and taller as often happens with teenagers.

Sure there’s still the baby fat in his face, but a much more acceptable, or what I'd assume Paul thought was acceptable, look.

Based on the above information this is my theory:

Paul was embarrassed and uncomfortable with the way he looked. He saw John, a teddy boy, around Liverpool that he really dug but was afraid to talk to him because of how he (Paul) appeared. Over the course of a year or so he managed to grow into himself more and no longer felt as self conscious about his appearance.

Paul is friends with Ivan who is a member of John’s group. There is no way Paul would be unaware of Ivan’s involvement with the Quarrymen. How would Ivan know Paul would be interested in seeing the Quarrymen unless there was some level of awareness? Sure, maybe they were friends who didn’t talk about those things, but don’t you find it way less likely that Ivan, part of a musical group, wouldn’t tell Paul, someone who clearly enjoyed music, about his involvement in a musical group?

So yes, even if Paul did know about the Quarrymen that wouldn’t necessarily mean that he would know that John was the same person he had been seeing around Liverpool. I acknowledge that big black hole of doubt that throws a wrench into this whole depravity of thought, however the level to which Paul performed at the fete just won’t leave me alone. Not only that, but wouldn’t one assume that if Paul was friends with Ivan he would have gone to watch him perform with the group at least once?

Either way, by all accounts of that “first” meeting Paul didn’t just play something for the heck of it -he went out of his way to show off. He played the guitar backwards, sung not one, not two, but three songs?? One of which was the same song John had just finished performing??? He fucking tuned John’s guitar with a tuner he just so happened to be carrying with him? How could anyone just pull any of that out at the drop of a hat if they weren’t trying to be impressive, or impress someone? It’s almost as if Paul had been prepared to give a show, almost like he knew he would be performing with the intent of making a strong impression. He even fucking wore a sparkly white sports coat, who the fuck does that if they aren’t trying to look their best for SOMEONE!!??

Also, in the Len Garry quote he mentions Ivan saying he had told the group he would be bringing Paul around. Doesn’t that sound like a purposeful introduction? Doesn’t that seem like a premeditated, planned out event instead of some fateful encounter???

GUYS WE ALL KNOW PAUL CAN BE A MANIPULATIVE BITCH, SOMEONE WHO IS KNOWN FOR GETTING HIS WAY BY MANUEVERING PEOPLE. IS IT REALLY SO FAR FETCHED TO MAKE THIS ASSUMPTION!?

So, to make an incredibly long theory short, I believe Paul went through a glow up, convinced Ivan to introduce him to the Quarrymen with the sole intention of showing off to the hot cool teddy boy he had seen around town, then ghosted them until he got back from camp (what about the time we met? well, I suppose that you could say that we were playing hard to get) and joined the group.

Thank you and goodnight.

#i'm so sorry for all of this #tinhat theory time #john and paul #paul and john #mclennon #my theory #please roast me #please correct me #ridicule me #john and paul's first meeting #I just can't not believe that the og john girl paul wouldn't be capable of this kind of next level stalker shit #the beatles

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off-in-the-moors · 4 years

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It is not the responsibility of art to be morally instructive. It is 100% YOUR responsibility to research something if you know you are a sensitive person, take responsibility for your self. Art does not need to be some clinical sanitized morality play, get over your weird Puritanical obsession that all art must conform to your specific world view. Either engage in challenging works or stick to children’s cartoons where you can feel ‘safe’.

Dear Anon,

I’m truly confused by this. I have no idea what are you referencing and what “inspired“ you to send me this “ask“. But I will do my best to give you something.

(It only took me this long to answer, bc I don’t log in very often.)

Let’s start with your assumption of me.

I’m not a sensitive person, in any meaning. I actually love reading and engaging in media that’s morally questionable or straight up morbid and disturbing. Some of my favorite thing are: paintings by Goya and Beksiński, folklore/mythology (in it’s most unchanged form), “Perfume“ both film and book, Hannibal tv series, true crime, to name a few. Your assumption that I’m just “a girl obsessed and only enjoying modern cartoons“ is insulting.

I actually do agree with you that art, in any form, isn’t responsible to be morally instructive, but every work of art is made to send some form of message, be an obvious one or hidden between pages. In my opinion, authors and writers should be aware of what message they want to send with their works and what messages they are sending with what and how they’re presenting.

On your “It is 100% YOUR responsibility to research something if you know you are a sensitive person, take responsibility for your self“ this is also true. But on the other hand, given media should provide you with some kind of warning and not a third party entity. For example, if I pick-up a YA book from a bookstore, bc of its synopsis or someone (be a person I know or a creator) recommended it to me, I don't expect "spicy" scenes or blatant a*use of a character by its love interest or just "torture p*rn" scenes in it but here they are. With no warning. Is it my fault? Partly yes. Is it the media's fault for not giving me any warnings? Also yes.

Even with researching "warnings" isn't that simple. When it comes to books, the only way is reading reviews or recommendations. With reviews, they're either positive and say nothing book related or are negative and full of spoilers. Recommendations nowadays most of the time don't even give you what the story is about, just "it has x, y and z in it", let alone "warnings". From my own experience, they either don't tell you about "unappropriated" stuff (be r*pe, d*ug a*use, a*use, etc.) or they down play them and in worst cases, excuse it or say "it gets better/it's addressed in the next book/later in the series".

But if you feel the need to micromanage everything you engage in, go for it. But most people don't and a warning would be nice.

(This of course doesn't apply to thing and character's actions deemed "problematic". If said stuff is well handled and addressed, it's perfectly ok to portray it. But again, if it addressed and/or showed as wrong, and not ignored, excused, or played as a joke.)

I don't know from where you took the "your weird Puritanical obsession", bc 1) I never petitioned for that in my posts, and 2) I'm actually against censuring and sanitation of media.

Now, on to what "inspired" you to write this.

Again, I have no f-clue. So here are my best guesses:

If it's about Pathologic: I only have problem with people forcing their politics, modern sentiments and opinions/interpretations on to something they don't fully understand, because they're from a different cultural climate. An American can't fully (or in some cases, refuses to) understand something made by Europeans (in this case Russians) for Europeans in mind. I don't want to mix myself into the fandom discourse/drama, because I don't care what people think or how they interpret stuff, even if it's taken from something minor or from nowhere with no support (or even is debunked) in canon. I don't care if people like or hate this one character. Just don't police people for liking things, you don't like. Nor do public shaming or send people on those you don't agree with. You don't like a pixel man on platform shoes? Fine. Just don't bully and attack people who do.

If it's about my post about B*rdugo's adult book: I will admit, the wording and presentation wasn't the best. I was writing it from a place of strong emotions, but I'm still standing by my opinion that some things should not be presented with graphic details in a book without any type of warning. Here we could have a discussion about trigger warnings in books, hers response to the idea of putting them on her book and what is consider "too far", but this isn't about that. I actually have a lot of problems with B*rdugo and her fan-base, besides that. Her use of Russia, it's history, religion iconography and culture only for aesthetic and not doing proper research (she called her series "Greg's trilogy") or showing any respect for it (with characters, how are not main and secondary characters, a Slavic stereotype); her portray of dyslexia and how the fandom likes to use it as a joke in relation to this character; or people shielding her from any form of criticism with "She's is xyz, so she can write this". But I don't care about her and her works.

I stopped reading YA books, because I can't stand them any longer and their "handling" of topics, with people holding up every-single-one as "the best book ever written", not because of the quality or story but because the author is xyz, and spitting at every book written before 2000s. I'll get flag for it but YA novels are the Pulp fiction of our times (of course not all, but most of the popular ones are). I stopped trusting people recommending them to me, because 90% of the time, I'm just disappointed by them.

If it's about K and TRC: I already said so much about this. Margaret isn't aware of her audience, she writes for herself (which she admitted on a podcast) and refuses to change it to please anyone. She created and killed K for two reasons: to further Ronan's character arc (to be used for teaching him to dream better and a (not working) foil of him (or Adam... or Gansey)) and as her weird catharsis of killing everything she hates (who she apparently was; "fratty boys and chortling men") personified as one boy (and yes, boy, because this fandom likes to forget he’s only seventeen, the same age as the Gangsey. If you excuses their actions, like Ronan and Adam’s racist jokes or Gansey’s toxic behaviors towards Adam with “they’re just teenagers”, why K is excluded from being a stupid teen?). With Jordan, it's now obvious that she has a bias of suffering/dealing with your trauma (and addiction) "in the right way", of which in her eyes, K wasn't. She could not create K or she could not make him a harmful stereotype of a Slav, but she did. In a book targeted at 13-18 year olds, we have a drug-addicted boy committing a public s*icide and being demonized and forgotten by everyone.

But I'm done with this fandom, I never had a place in it. TRC fandom is 80% P*nch with a 1% being about K, but even this little corner is "too much" for the stans. I left for a reason, the only thing I regret is not apologizing for my out-burst. If someone who knows what I’m referencing is reading this, I’m truly sorry.

So, yea. I hope, I addressed your issue, Anon.

#ask anon #ask #pathologic #anti leigh bardugo #anti trc #anti maggie stiefvater

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freshlybakedspiderbread · 4 years

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I brought up hanyang type 88 here and i said i’d explain, so here I am!!

okay so first off here’s a bunch of likely useful context about girls frontline. There is this feature in the game called digimind upgrade, or mod 3, where certain t-dolls can be upgraded past the normal maximum levels and stats, and at the same time gaining whole new abilities and also a new design. Basically a reinvention. There are like hundreds of playable characters in the game, and only a fraction will get mod 3s, typically the ‘main characters’ who are relevant to the major ongoing plot.

two things about getting a doll who has the ability to do digimind upgrade, to actually do that. One, is that it can be very costly in terms of in-game materials. like, maybe i just played the game wrong but I would have to grind for weeks in order to amass the materials to upgrade just one doll to mod 3. So even though by now there are dozens upon dozens of dolls who are capable of this feature, i’ve only actually done so with like, less than one dozen. A normal player probably has to be picky.

secondly, and this is the big one, every t-doll’s mod 3 comes with story cutscenes that become available for you to view upon upgrading them. Personally, i think most of the only worthwhile mod 3 stories are the ones that are associated with the actual major characters of the main story, especially since their upgrades actually happen in-canon and their mod 3 stories fill in blanks or otherwise expand upon the regular story chapters.

for the t-dolls who aren’t major characters that get digimind upgrades, their associated stories tend to follow a very basic pattern. They’re feeling like they are falling behind other T-Dolls in abilities or are otherwise experiencing a drop in confidence in their abilities, but then find the resolve in them to either change themselves or stand by an aspect of themselves, and this leads them to heading to the lab to get upgraded. obviously theres some nuances here and there depending on the character, but a lot of them, from what i saw, follow this basic pattern.

hanyang type 88 has a mod 3 but i certainly never wanted to see it. Firstly, using the feature at all takes up resources are kinda precious so i wasn’t just gonna use it on anyone. Secondly, she is just one of many one-off t-dolls that basically dont ever show up in any actual main story cutscenes or even funny events. Thirdly... you saw what she looked like in the linked post, i was in no rush to make use of her.

That being said, even if you don’t ever upgrade a t-doll, simply having them in your possession allows you to at least view the first of four parts of their mod 3 story, which nets you a small amount of those materials needed to see the rest (its a pretty fiendish system, huh o_O). I was lacking in some materials to upgrade a doll i cared about, so i just mucked around, eventually happened upon type88 again and decided that instead of just immediately feeding her to the furnace, I’d watch the first chapter of her mod 3 story. I watched it, it made me just curious enough to look further, and well. ...I got into it. Exactly what I got into, i shall now just elaborate and summarise the whole thing in my own way! Warning, it’s long!

(disclosure: my summary will bias towards my own preferred interpretation whenever any aspect is somewhat vague.)

The story starts with type 88, or as she is called by others in griffin base, Ai, working her shift in the base’s cafe, because what else would she be doing.

i hate looking at her! Anyway, its just a pleasant peaceful day and Ai is taking the logistic person, kalina’s order when suddenly in the middle of a conversation, Ai freezes in place and starts making worrying sounds.

kalina here and the t-dolls present in the cafe are concerned, and talk about how Type88 has actually been crashing like this more and more frequently lately, yet has not reported any of this to the maintenance crew despite the advice of her friends. They try rebooting her on the spot, but it has an even more concerning effect, because she starts erratically acting like she doesn’t recognise the others, and talks about how she is a maid in “Jiangcheng Cafe”. Afraid that her neural cloud (her mind) has been scrambled, they put her to sleep and bring her to the repair bay.

Its in the repair bay where they explain exactly what is wrong with type88. She is a fairly old doll, and her processing capacity has been severally clogged up for a long time. Her internal memory is overflowing because many large sections of her mind is filled with very large encrypted files (memories that she stored away). she is likely to keep crashing and possibly even cease functioning entirely one day if those encrypted files are not deleted, but nobody is really keen on just deleting parts of her mind without her consent. For now, kalina just opts to try and decrypt the files and see what they are.

And from here, we watch type88 memories from her perspective. Sort of. Kind of. It gets complicated later but for now, we view the first memory of her life, not as a combat t-doll type88, but...

...as 59898, a doll designed to be what is basically a ‘crash test dummy’ for testing artillery technology in a research station. With a purpose like this, 59898 has an (ostensibly) rudimentary AI. Her learning ability is intended to be used to better aid the results of their testing, but she also knows how to understand and even imitate specific human gestures in order to better respond to instructions or conversation, even though she herself has no voice module to speak with. She is assigned to assist one specific person.

first off, i was pretty shocked right off the bat that this story above so many others actually has unique assets to it. The above two sprites don’t show up anywhere else in the game, i don’t think. Secondly, this woman’s name is only ever spelled with those white squares, so I’m stuck with having to just calling her ‘the pilot’, as dry as that sounds... I just don’t want to type out weird characters every time, or call her ‘triple cube’...

Anyway, so 59898 is assigned to help this woman in testing artillery tech (stuff like mechs and tanks). I should mention really quick that in the game’s story, during this point of time is when world war iii is happening, but that’s just a backdrop for robots to eventually gain more prominence. Anyway, we move on to the second memory, where some time has already passed. At the beginning of this memory, the pilot is visibly depressed, which 59898 takes note of.

Her ‘comfort mode’ consists of patting the pilot on the head, who while surprised, actually is grateful. She feels comfortable enough to talk about her worries aloud to the doll, mentioning how she is a war refugee and has to make a living in the research base because she can’t go back to her home in china, at least not before making enough money for a very expensive and exclusive train ticket. She continues to talk at length to the doll...

...not that the test doll is capable of responding to anything she says. The pilot insists that she’s happy just to have someone listen to her though, since she feels like she can’t really express her feelings to any other person on the base. Despite that-

That aside, the pilot says that referring to 59898 by her serial number all the time feels a bit weird, so she decides to give the doll a name. (I sure wish the story would give this woman a name too, other than ‘three white squares’ but oh well...)

She talks more with Jiangcheng Ai, or just Ai, after that, asking her if she’d like a change of clothes sometime, like some casual clothes, or an old maid outfit from an old cafe job she used to have (I guess they had to throw in any explanation for that outfit somehow) Point is, more and more time passes.

As time passes though, and we go into the third memory, the pilot brings up complaints to her superiors about how the more recent testings, becoming more increasingly intense and frequent, are putting a great strain on Ai, and even repairs can only help maintain her chassis so much. She insists on wanting to take Ai’s place in the testing, but they refuse because, well, Ai’s entire purpose is to take the strain of these tests so that the human pilot doesn’t have to, and the doll is just a tool there to pave the way for the pilot to eventually take over the mech in action

The next time Ai wakes up from her most recent repairs, the pilot is there to greet her, and Ai can tell straight away that she’s unhappy and tries to comfort her again. The pilot is not surprised at this and talks about how this is how Ai has been since they first met. She goes on to say how all the other people on the base don’t know her half as well as Ai does. Ai tries to understand and determine what the pilot’s intentions with saying all this is, but she cannot do so and can only listen while offering ‘executing - affirmative nod’.

The pilot talks about how once the war is over, she’d like to take Ai back home with her, where they could go to all sorts of gatherings, and the pilot would introduce Ai to her friends.

Ai reviews her personal data, confirming that she has no owners or obligations other than the pilot, so she executes another affirmative nod, and the pilot says this:

As Ai tries and fails to further determine this, something bad happens! if you’ve read this far, i’m sure you’ve already guess what happens next...

At that exact moment, a warning goes out and the research base is being attacked by nebulous enemy forces. With no time to talk anymore, both the pilot and Ai head out into their first real fight.

They spend a good long while repelling enemy forces, working well together and apparently using all sorts of wacky anime weaponry like beam blades and whatever ‘retrograde evasion’ is!

obviously though, you already know this isn’t going to end well for them... When the pilot takes a breather, Ai moves to protect her, but at a critical moment, a sudden high-speed projectile comes her way. In the next instance there’s a crash, and we move onto another memory. Where its all fire and debris, and Ai can’t move.

^ this text box actually repeats several times, indicating that she is repeating her scan for life signs over and over. She gets an internal warning from her systems (differentiated with red text) that she has insufficient power and it warns her to immediately cease ineffective operations. [Unable to detect owner life signs] repeats again.

At this point, uuuuh, its a little stupid actually? because two humans show up, reusing generic ‘bad guy’ sprites from other events that don’t match the current environment and situation at all (one is in a suit and the other is in casual clothes). but the reason they’re here is to provide exposition out loud about what happened. It looked like the human’s mech took a hit for the doll and was blown to bits, though they talk about how that doesn’t make any sense.

Ai at this point tries to execute a bunch of different actions like hugging [target not found] and screaming [no relevant module] but they all fail, and her internal systems tell her that her power is running out and she will cease to function in 30 seconds.

So in those last 30 seconds, Ai decides to quickly review her internal files. the damage she took has corrupted her memories and she doesn’t have the time to properly go through them, so she executes a ‘simulated processed records’, which basically mean she’s just filling the blanks of those memories herself with simulations.

And I have to say. I was decently into and enjoying this little story so far, but its this part that’s the reason i became forced to make this stupid giant post. the first ‘memory’ loads up, and we see the pilot.

Different ‘memories’ of the days spent with the pilot are loaded back to back, each are very short and only last a few lines. Across these files, the two of them talk comfortably with each other, Ai is invited to go get coffee with her, the pilot talks about how going alone is boring and would rather spend time with Ai, Ai saying back with her own words that she always likes spending time with her, etc etc etc.

And then finally, she loads one last ‘memory’, from earlier that same day, before the explosion and the fighting.

and she shuts down.

i passed by this scene the first time all calm, but an hour or so later when I was in the bathroom replacing shampoo bottles, i started thinking about it and I literally started sobbing. And then again later that night when i was in bed. I hate this game!!

so that’s the ‘end’ of that, and the next scene opens, once again in griffin base’s cafe, except...

Ai is sporting a brand new (ugly) look. She says she’d like to take kalina’s order but she was just leaving on other business, as she likes keeping herself busy with all sorts of work around the base ever since she got upgraded into a gundam gajinka. and after she leaves, kalina talks with the other dolls about how Ai used to have some cache issues because her neutral cloud was too full, but upgrading into this new chassis easily fixed that and even allowed her to make use of her old locked away abilities.

Because of the way this scene in the cafe opens up exactly like the very first one at the beginning, it makes me believe that this final scene is also a simulated ‘memory’, that is, Ai filling in the blanks of her corrupted memories with what she wishes to be reality. And i feel confident in believing that because after the scene fades to black, we see more of her internal system monologue.

She (the system) says that the priority execution is to preserve those encrypted memory logs. She does so, and the neural cloud upgrade is complete with confirmation of no loss files. With no risk of deletion in this new form, she executes the command to unlock the encrypted memories. And finally...

[spiderbread dies]

i still wouldn’t use her in gameplay because i can’t stand looking at her design but i told you all i eat up robot with feelings stuff and this is like prime example of exactly that... and if i didn’t make this post, i think my own neutral cloud’s cache would be at risk of overflowing x_X!

#spider bread crumbs #gfl

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yurimother · 5 years

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A Late Night Ramble on Death of the Author and Queerness in Yuri

I was sleepless, so I decided to do some reading late night reading and perused Kastel’s article on Barthes’ Death of the Author. A fantastic piece of writing, although one I somewhat disagree with, mainly in their statements on how separating authorial intent from a work depoliticizes it:

When conservatives apply [death of the author], they assume that this ultimately means divorcing the intentions of the author from the artwork. This means if, say, an artist may have fascist beliefs that it is possible to focus on the art itself and not the author. This depoliticizes the artwork and thus the death of the author.

I consider this to be an “excuse” by conservatives to not critically engage with the work. It assumes that the ideologies inherent in the work are normal and that an apolitical criticism is the only way to go.

This passage refers to how conservatives use death of the author in a malicious attempt to remove politics from art and literature, a futile task, in my opinion, as all work is political. They are correct in this point that some justify, nonexistent, normalcy in art by removing the author and their intentions, and thus their politics, from it. However, Kastel creates a false absolution in observing how these conservatives use the concept, a statement that separating the intent of the creator from the work is always in an impossible attempt to destroy politics.

There is great value in separating a creator from their creation. Removing an author and their intent from art does not remove politics from the work; instead it creates space for it and its politics to be interpreted outside of the author. Thereby the reader can analyze the creation and determine its politics based on its content and presentation, not the transcendent “author” figure idolized behind it. To use the bluntest of examples, Mein Kampf is not fascist garbage because Hitler was fascist garbage, but because Mein Kampf is fascist garbage. Even when separating the author from the work, it does not remove the politics present withing. Still, they can now be seen and interpreted by the reader’s perspective without being distorted by the clouded lens of the authorial figure.

There are certainly times when using death of the author in such a manner is inappropriate. Take my job for example. In reporting, it is not only tricky but irresponsible to detached the creator from their work. My responsibility is to inform consumers of the goings-on with various works in the yuri genre, and developments within the genre as a whole. To deny the information about those creating within this genre is one, lousy journalism (if one can truly call what I do that) and two, robs the consumer of their choice to interact with work with or without the presence of the author.

In my own personal time reading or when I incorporate a work into my analytical writings, I make a choice to separate the author from it (or not). There are times when I do not, such as when exploring work from a familiar creator, “I suspect The Rain and the Other Side of You will make me uncomfortable because Moto Momono’s creations always do,” or “I am reading this because Morinaga Milk wrote it and I like her stuff.” However, the majority of the time, I separate the two, to the extent that it is possible.

Vampeerz is a perfect example of yuri that I treat differently in reporting and reading. It is a yuri vampire manga, but the author, Higashiyama Shou, is, from my, and I believe prevailing wisdom’s, point of view problematic. He has been accused of tracing artwork in Prism and creates ped*philic manga. If I so choose, I can read Vampeerz for myself, or I could use it in an article analyzing vampires in current yuri manga without thinking of the creator or his “politics.” However, when I seek to teach and inform others, usually this occurs within reporting and occasionally reviews, I have to acknowledge both Higashiyama Shou’s action and how my bias colors my perspective and reporting on him negatively.

Even when I am not considering the author’s actions, the work does not become apolitical. Vampires, like every piece of literature, has politics, actions, and statements. In my view, they are not the same as those of the creator described previously. If they were to become so, if Vampeerz began advocating ped*philia, then I would have to comment on them even in my own reading (outside of reporting) as even with the author separated, ped*philic “politics” (using that word loosely here) exist within it.

In short, removing the author from their art does not remove politics from it, it is just a state of mind for readers to critique what is present within the work, including its politics, without outside influence.

Now then, to tie this all into yuri, I shall replace politics with queerness. I have mentioned this briefly before, but to remind everyone, yuri does not necessarily equate to LGBTQ. In fact, yuri historically and continuously often robs characters from queer expression or identity. However, if we use death of the author to divorce the creator’s identity and their intentions about making a queer work (or not) from it, queerness moves to the eye of the beholder. A manga or anime series is not a yuri or gay, because the creator said so or because Seven Seas has labeled it as “Yuri” on their website. It is because the content of the work is queer. Of course, this works both ways, and often products not created nor advertised as queer become so in the reader’s eye.

Princess Principal provides us with the perfect framework for examining these ideas. Many people, myself included, notice romantic actions between Ange and Charlotte in the anime. However, the creators have gone on record saying they did not intend for their relationship to be sapphic. Ultimately, their statements are irrelevant, as the readers’ interpretation based on what is present in the book holds the same weight. In fact, before yuri became its own genre in the past decade or two, it exists primarily as a feature of text in the reader’s mind. Here is where I can incorporate aspects of death of the author into my reporting. Even though Princess Principal was not intended to be queer and Journey of Elaina is not labeled as yuri, I still report on them because, in my mind, there are.

Just as using death of the author to separate the creator from art is situational, it only works for certain people. Take the writings of another yuri critic, Erica Friedman. Take the following with a grain of salt, as this is merely my perspective on another human. Friedman has an uncanny ability when consuming media to detect the creator's queerness and intention. In other words, they can watch an anime or read something and know if it was made by or for queer people. This is an essential factor for them in their critique and enjoyment of media, and rightfully so. It is how their mind works, it is how they consume and love yuri.

I suspect that Friedman’s incorporation of outside queerness in the form of the author or intent is one of the critical ways we, two people who share some tastes in the genre, disagree on many works. I am more lenient of problematic elements in works, a fact I believe we both recognize, then them. In effect, they hold works and creators to higher standards than I because the ways we look for and identify queerness are different. It is the reason that we can look at the same work, Citrus, and I can say “here are some problematic elements, but it has a lot of great stuff and some queer elements” whereas they say “this is unrealistic and unacceptable.” Note that I believe both our interpretations and methods are valuable and valid.

Just so, whether one removes the “creator,” or the concept of the creator, from a work or not is entirely a matter of choice and a legitimate method of examination and reading. However, no action can add or remove politics or queerness intrinsically present or absent in a work which are interpreted and filtered through our individual and collective experiences and perspective. However, because it is the interpretation of the text is what matters, there can be no one absolute truth or politic in a work of art.

If you do not already go read Erica Freidman’s amazing work on Oakzu and check out Kastel’s essay on their blog.

#essays #yuri #death of the author #ramble #literature #culture #lgbt #lgbtq #queer #gay #wlw #girls love #gl #citrus #manga #anime

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terfslying · 5 years

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‘ROGD’ is done. Debunked. Over. Here’s why.

I’ve posted before that ‘ROGD’ isn’t proven by any means, but might indicate some stuff. But it looks like I was wrong - there are so many more methodological flaws with ROGD than I thought, and it doesn’t even have a shred of reliability. This info was found via a link sent to me by @dumatsquiet

Article: Methodological Critique of Littman’s (2018) Parental-Respondents Account of ‘Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria’

Published in: ‘Archives of Sexual Behaviour’ as commentary 22 Apr. 2019. This journal is peer reviewed and is the official publication of the ‘International Academy of Sex Research’.

Author: Arjee Javellana Restar, a PhD student from the Department of Behavioural and Social Science at Brown University in Providence, USA. This article on her seems a little outdated but it indicates her main areas of study are public health and behavioural interventions for LGBT, trans and gender-non-conforming people of colour.

Tbh there are probably a lot more problems - these are the highlights that I could reasonably easily quote and make out in Restar’s paper, and I am not by any means an expert in this area. But that being said, lets begin!

Littman’s premise was available to parents before they completed the survey, allowing them to self-select & introducing bias into the way parents would respond

“The premise of the study is also stated at the beginning of the consent form […] and introduces risk for participant’s self-selection bias and survey response bias. […] Providing this premise prior during the consent process provides an opportunity for motivating a specific group of parental-respondents, particularly those who agree with the premise, to elect to participate in the survey. Furthermore, providing the premise of the study in this way sets expectations of the survey before parental-respondents can even begin to provide their answers, which can bias their response towards support for the premise.”

Despite the fact that the parents were asked if their children had ‘ROGD’, they were given absolutely no criteria or definition for what ‘ROGD’ was

“Littman asked parents to indicate based on their observation if their adolescent child has “ROGD” and whether it started during or after puberty. Littman also provided definitions for “gender dysphoria,” “transgender,” and “coming out/announcing as transgender,” but not specifically “ROGD” and “puberty.” It is unclear whether parents were informed how “ROGD” and puberty were operationally defined and conceptualized in this paper. Specifically, what makes gender dysphoria a sudden or rapid phenomenon solely based on parents’ accounts of adolescents and young adults’ announcement of their trans identities?”

Littman asked the parents to diagnose their children based on a simplified-language version of the DSM criteria. The simplified language used was never made public, and we have no idea if it had bias.

“Littman also asked parents to perform two independent ‘diagnoses’ of their child’s gender dysphoria using DSM-5 criteria for gender dysphoria in (1) childhood and (2) in adolescence and adulthood (i.e., current age); Littman also noted that the language for these measurements was simplified or adapted for parents. Littman neither provided examples of this simplified version of the DSM-5 nor offered evidence about whether best-practice methods for measure adaptation were used prior to administering the survey […] Without methodologically confirming the new versions of these two independent diagnostic criteria prior to administration of the survey, instrument bias may have been introduced.”

Littman asked parents to DIAGNOSE their kids. That in itself is a problem. Weirdly enough, psychiatrists actually are trained in stuff that your average parent doesn’t know!

“[A]nother fundamental methodological error Littman makes is using parental-respondents accounts of ‘ROGD’ to generate interpretations and conclusions about clinical conditions like gender dysphoria. Part of the DSM-5’s diagnostic measurement for gender dysphoria also requires an evaluation of its association with clinically significant distress. Unless parents in this paper received formal training and have licenses to conduct clinical psychiatric diagnoses, parents enrolled were not classified to classify any persons, including their children’s gender dysphoria. […] As such, relying on parental-respondents’ accounts introduces a significant bias that affects their ability to ‘diagnose’. It has been previously suggested that parents are less capable of conceptualising and interpreting their children’s emotional and physical experiences in a manner that is conducive to an operational report, such as an online survey.”

The parents’ retrospective diagnoses were based on their memory (completely unvalidated by outside sources) from up to 6 years prior to the survey

“Asking parents to recollect information on this time frame [up to 6 years prior] places a substantial burden on memory. […] While developmental research has utilised recall methods in the past (Dex, 1995; Hardt & Rutter, 2004) the paper did not provide information on whether there were any tests performed to examine the accuracy of the recall information.”

The sample of parents was heavily skewed towards white, college-educated, middle-aged parents, and specifically sought out parents already advocating ‘ROGD’ as an idea from 3 websites with prior discussion of the idea.

““The parental-respondents displayed a very narrow demographic stratification despite being sampled from a very specific venue: 82.8% were female sex at birth, 91.4% were White, 99.2% were non-Hispanic, 66.1% were aged 46-60, and 70.9% had attended college. Notably, 86.5% believed their child’s trans identification is not correct, and recruitment relied heavily on three particular web sites known to be frequented by parents specifically voicing out and promoting the concept of ‘ROGD’. Thus, these are not just ‘worried parents’ but rather a sample of predominantly White mothers who have strong oppositional beliefs about their children’s trans identification and who harbour suspicions about their children having ‘ROGD’. […] There is very little evidence that this sample is representative of the diverse parents of trans youth and young adults.”

“While descriptive studies frequently use convenience sampling, there is a clear distinction between convenience sampling and biased sampling that is not acknowledge by Littman. […] As noted earlier, Littman recruited specifically on three Web sites solely because these venues are attracting a specific demographic of parental-respondents who are already subscribed into, are selecting into (i.e., self-selection bias), are promoting the concept of ‘ROGD’, and agree via consent form with the premise of the study.”

Littman did not control at all for bots, trolls, multiple identical responses, multiple responses from the same parent, etc. etc. She also provided no information on if any parents filled out multiple forms, as they were permitted to.

“In addition, as the survey was administered online, Littman made no mention of best-practice strategies for conducting web-based survey. For example, there was a lack of description of online security against robots and/or Internet ‘trolls’. […] There was no description in the article that conveyed the survey had a de-duplication protocol that flags possible multiple responses from the same parental-respondent […] In fact, as evident in the consent document, LIttman decided not to collect IP addresses and explicitly stated that multiple responses from the same parental-respondent who reported having more than one child they suspect to have ‘ROGD’ were allowed [… but] Littman did not provide any evidence for controlling or weighting for multiple children from the same family in the analysis and failed to report whether any parental-respondents did indeed have multiple children they observed to have ‘ROGD’.”

Littman invented her own methods of measuring distress, function at school, coping mechanisms, etc. and none of them were validated.

“Littman made no references or citations to other valid instruments [than the DSM simplified for parents] and problematically used non-validated measures throughout the paper to support the study premise and hypothesis. For example, as Littman was interested in coping mechanisms, for which there are an already established battery of validated measurements available, it is questionable that Littman chose to craft survey questions without any statistical psychometric validation instead of using or adapting validated coping measures.”

Littman reported the parents had pro-LGBT attitudes in 2 areas, but neglected to include information on the additional LGBT attitudes gathered by the test used in the method. These items included whether they would support or oppose transgender non-discrimination laws.

“Littman reported that 85.9% [of parents] were in favour of [gay marriage] and 88.2% believed that “transgender people deserve the same rights and protections as others.” However, these were only two of the four gender and sexual minority-related attitude items included in the survey. IT is unclear why these two specific items were selectively reported. The two items not reported concerned parental beliefs around whether it is a good or bad thing (or neither) in society that more gay and lesbian couples are raising children, and whether parental-respondents would support or oppose a law to protect transgender people from discrimination in employment and housing.”

Littman’s responses indicate that pubertal blockers and cross-sex hormones are too easily available; but this completely contradicts significantly more methodologically-sound research that indicates the opposite.

“Littman found a small portion of the parents sampled (23.8%) reported that “[their] child was offered prescriptions for puberty blockers and/or cross-sex hormones at the first visit”. This finding is alarming given that it runs contrary to WPATH’s Standards of Care as well as in contrast with the current literature. Some studies [on the topic] have documented difficulties of accessing hormones and care due to multiple barriers, including limited and delayed access to pubertal blockers and cross-sex hormones, and a lack of access. Other studies have found that providers are substantially less comfortable or reluctant in providing hormonal care. As such, it is important to elucidate the results of the Littman paper in light of its methodological limitations as well as alongside the body of transgender health literature.”

Littman claimed to follow ‘grounded theory approach’, but included her hypothesis in the consent form. ‘Grounded theory approach’ is based on the idea that you shouldn’t develop your hypothesis until you have the data.

“Littman states the use of a ‘grounded theory approach’ to analyse open-ended responses […] The a priori biases present in LIttman’s framing of the study and methodological biases identified in the sampling approach, informed consent language, and item selection violate the essential principles of grounded theory. A hallmark and a necessary research process of grounded theory is the inductive analysis of data (rather than deductive theory-driven analysis) in order to formulate a hypothesis”

#terf safe #tag for sources #rogd #long post

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alexafaie-asd · 5 years

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Just some me rambling stuff.

Did some colouring for the first time in ages. Was kinda inspired by seeing some artists on youtube who I follow doing stuff for Inktober and drawing isn’t something I’m good at (and practising it isn’t something I enjoy so...) so I thought to colour in with stuff that could be classed as “ink” at least loosely. Nothing fancy, just some of the pages from a daily colouring calender I got in 2016 which I had planned to do each day, but just like everything I try I managed to keep to the “schedule” for like a week or two at the most before it collapsed and then I felt bad about not finishing it. So of course I got a more complicated colouring calender the next year because I never fucking learn.

Anyway... had a bit of sort of fun maybe colouring in a couple of pictures.

I’ve been feeling a little bit bleugh the past few days since however long ago Thursday was (I don’t know what day it is right now). I got the response from the PIP people about my Mandatory Reconsideration. I spent absolutely ages writing up the letter to explain just how the assessor had misrepresented what I said or just outright ignored my difficulties, pointed out the inaccuracies with the factual stuff (as opposed to anything that could be considered to be that word that means “different people might see it different ways”) and also explained how their failure to treat my difficulties as real was discrimination against my particular disabilities (they’re so called hidden/invisible ones like mental health issues) especially with how they used “high functioning” to claim that I can’t struggle with the things which they agreed I struggled with last time I got assessed and nothing has changed since then except that I have an extra diagnosis now.

Their response was rude, blamed the length of time it took on me even though most of the time was taken up by me waiting on them responding, giving me the face to face appointment date etc. And in response to me telling them how stressful the frequent reassessment periods are and how much anxiety they provoke & how they worsen my conditions, they said “Although the health Professional has recommended a 2 year review period, as you are no longer entitled to PIP then there is no review period required.” Previously I was awarded PIP at the appeals stage because they found my doctors note that they claimed didn’t arrive in the post until then, even though we sent it recorded delivery and we knew for a fact that it was signed for less than a week after it was sent out. Without the doctor’s note they had tried to say that I didn’t qualify, but with the doctor’s evidence I suddenly did. In this letter they are saying that as the findings of the current assessment are “so different” than that of what was decided at appeals before, they’re using the more recent assessment as they believe its a more “accurate” reflection of my condition and so “supersedes” the previous findings. Except the assessor this time made HUGE mistakes and that’s what I wrote in to explain. But they are treating the assessor’s report as medical evidence even though she was a nurse with no training other than the 10 day course they send them on (and I’ve seen the information for autism - the PDF they are given as recommended reading but not required, is outdated from the early 90s and still uses terms which are no longer in use diagnostically). They are placing more weight on her interpretation of what my difficulties are than the actual medical specialists who have dealt with me personally.

My boyfriend phoned up to complain and ask to start the appeals process (they didn’t include the information on how to appeal in with my letter and the whole letter was written as if I wouldn’t even try and should be glad I no longer qualify as if I’m suddenly not disabled because they say I’m fine). He asked how even with the information and corrections we sent in, they still came to the same conclusion, most of which was a direct copy and paste from the original assessment report. It turns out that because we had complaints about the assessor’s report, they went back to ATOS to get a new person there to look over my case. “So why did they find the same thing with the new/corrected info given to them?” my boyfriend asked. They had even repeated the bit on how I apparently “was not offered alternative treatments or therapy, suggesting you don’t need them” even though we pointed out that in the letter we had originally sent in to them, the people I saw at the multidisciplinary assessment after my autism diagnoses had written that there were two other meds I could try for my bipolar disorder and that they had put in a recommendation, sent to my GP, that I be referred to one on one talking therapy. He said that surely they must have seen us point that out in the letter I sent in asking for the mandatory reconsideration. And it turns out that none of that information was sent to ATOS. So the new person at ATOS only saw what the first person at ATOS wrote about me and came to the same conclusion. When we pointed out that it is the PIP team who are meant to balance things out, they just deflected all the blame to ATOS and said the matter was “out of their hands” as ATOS is a third party organisation so they don’t have any control over what they do. BUT THEY CHOSE TO EMPLOY THEM TO DO THE ASSESSMENTS!! So yeah, they do have control over what ATOS do and are entirely responsible for any outcome if they choose to base the entire thing on what one person who met the claimant for less than 2hrs has to say about what the claimant struggles with.

Its ridiculous! How the hell did they think it was ok to totally ignore what I sent in other than to belittle me when I expressed how stressed and anxious the whole process made me and how demeaning it felt. Their response was just to demean me some more. When asked what provisions there were at the appeals stage (which involves standing up in court in front of three judges who are total strangers) for people who are autistic and struggle in social situations, especially with speaking in public, and they said that they had no idea whatsoever, but as far as they knew there wasn’t anything special. And that we’d have to contact the courts directly. Not that we have any of those details because nothing was included in with the letter they sent. They couldn’t even get the page numbers correct at the bottom of the pages. The last page was numbered Page 7 of 4. Yes that’s right, there were seven pages out of four. How did they manage to break an autofiling section of a document like that? They take that little care with these assessments they can’t even get the documents to be constructed correctly.

When I got the letter I just totally dissociated from everything I would have been feeling. And so its been a rough few days as bits and pieces of emotion have been popping through and washing over me in waves of feeling really shitty. I’m trying hard not to think about the whole appeals process because I know it scares me shitless and I can’t do anything about it now anyway. But its just so hard to cope with people just dismissing my difficulties. Its ridiculous because the criteria have not changed. In fact they got in trouble with the courts for being biased against people with mental health issues as their disability (focussing only on whether a person could physically do a thing and ignoring their criteria of “requires prompting”) and so were made to make changes to discriminate less. Obviously the major fines and telling off did fuck all. Its just so frustrating because my difficulties haven’t changed (unless they’ve got worse) and previously I was deemed to be entitled, so why should that have changed just because I now have an extra diagnosis that even better explains the problems I have? Like previously they tried to claim that bipolar disorder didn’t cause the particular difficulties I have, so I missed out on points in one area. However now I also have the autism diagnosis, that category I was denied points in before is now the only category that scored any points. So its like they are totally ignoring that I have more than one thing going on, and that previously I was still autistic so if I was entitled then, I should be now!

When we pointed out how they were being discriminatory in my letter, they responded not by apologising for what I felt was discrimination, but by telling me that the “Gray Report” concluded that the “Health Professionals” (from ATOS who do the assessments) are trained to a sufficient degree to do the assessments without bias. So I’m there pointing out bias and being told “no, that can’t have happened, this report we had done says there’s no problem.” Except I have looked it up and Paul Gray, responsible for the reports actually wanted changes like making the assessment report results sent out immediately to claimants, but the government is refusing to do so. So how exactly are they meeting what his report asks of them? They aren’t! The Gray Report says that they need to do more to gain the trust of claimants because they are currently so inconsistent that is confusing at best and detrimental at worst. Like his entire report is basically “some of these changes are positive, but there is so much more that needs to be done such as x, y, and z” and the government has said “ah that means we are perfect and doing no wrong.” Like his report didn’t even look at the assessors in great detail. It just says that they should be trained to an adequate level, not that they are. And that they should be unbiased, again not that they are. So why quote that report at me?

Just.... urgghhh. I’m so sick and tired of having to fight past what I’m sensibly able to do just to get what feels like nowhere. Like they even wrote in response to me saying that my executive dysfunction is so bad that if the washing up needs to be done, and I can’t cope with all the steps required to do that, then I don’t have anything clean with which to prepare and cook food and therefore won’t eat. They wrote that those things are “outside the scope of the assessment criteria” and so won’t be considered as evidence. So because I can’t clean the house and can’t then cook the food, that’s ignored as a reason why I don’t eat the food. I must therefore be able to cope with preparing and eating food unaided all the time. How stupid is that? I also wrote how my sensory sensitivities affect my ability to wash and to brush my teeth, so I’ll go days without brushing my teeth when I can’t cope with those feels (or am too depressed) and they said “brushing teeth isn’t covered under bathing, so we won’t consider that”. Like they are both forms of personal hygiene. Arguably keeping your teeth clean is a MAJORLY IMPORTANT thing which can impact your health in so many ways (like you can die from an infected tooth, or from a gum infection). But it can’t be used to build up a bigger picture about how far reaching my disabilities are?

And they said that the section on being able to communicate only counts if you can physically speak and physically hear what is being said to you. So my sensory processing disorder which affects how my brain perceives auditory information and how it therefore responds to said auditory information? Doesn’t count. So the times when I can’t tell what is being said because there is a fan making noise in the background? Doesn’t count. The times when there are multiple people talking and I can’t pick out the one important conversation and everything blurs into one droning sound that is overwhelming and causes me to avoid social gatherings that involve many people? Doesn’t count. My inability to tell what tone of voice I’m speaking with and inability to correctly modulate my tone of voice appropriately so I fail to communicate effectively due to it? Doesn’t count. My sensory overload causing me to shut down and go nonverbal for long periods of time so I can’t verbally communicate? Doesn’t count. Apparently. Even though in the criteria available online on the government website for how they are meant to assess disabilities for the different categories, it really should count. But all they mean is “are you deaf and dumb”? (Sorry for the old derogatory terms, but that is literally all they seem to think counts and the way they seem to be approaching this).

And just I have all these feels and they are not nice feels. And I’m trying to remain strong and positive, and trying to remember that I’m trying to want to exist. But its so so hard. And just reminds me how much I hate my life and how I hate how noone (in the “noone” kind of way, obviously some people) seems to care how I feel and how I struggle. And it really doesn’t keep me away from feeling suicidal. :(

#actually autistic #discrimination #disability discrimination #hidden disabilities #actually bipolar #actually cPTSD #I don't like feeling bad

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samstiels-deactivated20201212 · 5 years

Link

The Entire Article Under The Cut

Game of Thrones, in its eighth and final season, is as big as television gets these days. More than 17 million people watched the season’s opening. Judging by the fan and critic reaction though, it seems that a substantial portion of those millions are loathing the season. Indeed, most of the reviews and fan discussions seem to be pondering where the acclaimed series went wrong, with many theories on exactly why it went downhill.

The show did indeed take a turn for the worse, but the reasons for that downturn go way deeper than the usual suspects that have been identified (new and inferior writers, shortened season, too many plot holes). It’s not that these are incorrect, but they’re just superficial shifts. In fact, the souring of Game of Thrones exposes a fundamental shortcoming of our storytelling culture in general: we don’t really know how to tell sociological stories.

At its best, GOT was a beast as rare as a friendly dragon in King’s Landing: it was sociological and institutional storytelling in a medium dominated by the psychological and the individual. This structural storytelling era of the show lasted through the seasons when it was based on the novels by George R. R. Martin, who seemed to specialize in having characters evolve in response to the broader institutional settings, incentives and norms that surround them.

After the show ran ahead of the novels, however, it was taken over by powerful Hollywood showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Some fans and critics have been assuming that the duo changed the narrative to fit Hollywood tropes or to speed things up, but that’s unlikely. In fact, they probably stuck to the narrative points that were given to them, if only in outline form, by the original author. What they did is something different, but in many ways more fundamental: Benioff and Weiss steer the narrative lane away from the sociological and shifted to the psychological. That’s the main, and often only, way Hollywood and most television writers tell stories.

This is an important shift to dissect because whether we tell our stories primarily from a sociological or psychological point of view has great consequences for how we deal with our world and the problems we encounter.

I encounter this shortcoming a lot in my own area of writing—technology and society. Our inability to understand and tell sociological stories is one of the key reasons we’re struggling with how to respond to the historic technological transition we’re currently experiencing with digital technology and machine intelligence—but more on all that later. Let’s first go over what happened to Game of Thrones.

WHAT STORYTELLING IT WAS AND WHAT IT BECAME IN GOT

It’s easy to miss this fundamental narrative lane change and blame the series’ downturn on plain old bad writing by Benioff and Weiss—partly because they are genuinely bad at it. They didn’t just switch the explanatory dynamics of the story, they did a terrible job in the new lane as well.

One could, for example, easily focus on the abundance of plot holes. The dragons, for example seem to switch between comic-book indestructible to vulnerable from one episode to another. And it was hard to keep a straight face when Jaime Lannister ended up on a tiny cove along a vast, vast shoreline at the exact moment the villain Euron Greyjoy swam to that very point from his sinking ship to confront him. How convenient!

Similarly, character arcs meticulously drawn over many seasons seem to have been abandoned on a whim, turning the players into caricatures instead of personalities. Brienne of Tarth seems to exist for no reason, for example; Tyrion Lannister is all of a sudden turned into a murderous snitch while also losing all his intellectual gifts (he hasn’t made a single correct decision the entire season). And who knows what on earth is up with Bran Stark, except that he seems to be kept on as some sort of extra Stark?

But all that is surface stuff. Even if the new season had managed to minimize plot holes and avoid clunky coincidences and a clumsy Arya ex machina as a storytelling device, they couldn’t persist in the narrative lane of the past seasons. For Benioff and Weiss, trying to continue what Game of Thrones had set out to do, tell a compelling sociological story, would be like trying to eat melting ice cream with a fork. Hollywood mostly knows how to tell psychological, individualized stories. They do not have the right tools for sociological stories, nor do they even seem to understand the job.

To understand the narrative lane shift, let’s go back to a key question: Why did so many love Game of Thrones in the first place? What makes it stand out from so many other shows during an era critics call the Second Golden Age of Television because there are so many high-quality productions out there?

The initial fan interest and ensuing loyalty wasn’t just about the brilliant acting and superb cinematography, sound, editing and directing. None of those are that unique to GOT, and all of them remain excellent through this otherwise terrible last season.

One clue is clearly the show’s willingness to kill off major characters, early and often, without losing the thread of the story. TV shows that travel in the psychological lane rarely do that because they depend on viewers identifying with the characters and becoming invested in them to carry the story, rather than looking at the bigger picture of the society, institutions and norms that we interact with and which shape us. They can’t just kill major characters because those are the key tools with which they’re building the story and using as hooks to hold viewers.

In contrast, Game of Thrones killed Ned Stark abruptly at the end of the first season, after building the whole season and, by implication, the entire series around him. The second season developed a replacement Stark heir, which appeared like a more traditional continuation of the narrative. The third season, however, had him and his pregnant wife murdered in a particularly bloody way. And so it went. The story moved on; many characters did not.

The appeal of a show that routinely kills major characters signals a different kind of storytelling, where a single charismatic and/or powerful individual, along with his or her internal dynamics, doesn’t carry the whole narrative and explanatory burden. Given the dearth of such narratives in fiction and in TV, this approach clearly resonated with a large fan base that latched on to the show.

In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life.

People then fit their internal narrative to align with their incentives, justifying and rationalizing their behavior along the way. (Thus the famous Upton Sinclair quip: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”)

The overly personal mode of storytelling or analysis leaves us bereft of deeper comprehension of events and history. Understanding Hitler’s personality alone will not tell us much about rise of fascism, for example. Not that it didn’t matter, but a different demagogue would probably have appeared to take his place in Germany in between the two bloody world wars in the 20th century. Hence, the answer to “would you kill baby Hitler?,” sometimes presented as an ethical time-travel challenge, should be “no,” because it would very likely not matter much. It is not a true dilemma.

We also have a bias for the individual as the locus of agency in interpreting our own everyday life and the behavior of others. We tend to seek internal, psychological explanations for the behavior of those around us while making situational excuses for our own. This is such a common way of looking at the world that social psychologists have a word for it: the fundamental attribution error.

When someone wrongs us, we tend to think they are evil, misguided or selfish: a personalized explanation. But when we misbehave, we are better at recognizing the external pressures on us that shape our actions: a situational understanding. If you snap at a coworker, for example, you may rationalize your behavior by remembering that you had difficulty sleeping last night and had financial struggles this month. You’re not evil, just stressed! The coworker who snaps at you, however, is more likely to be interpreted as a jerk, without going through the same kind of rationalization. This is convenient for our peace of mind, and fits with our domain of knowledge, too. We know what pressures us, but not necessarily others.

That tension between internal stories and desires, psychology and external pressures, institutions, norms and events was exactly what Game of Thrones showed us for many of its characters, creating rich tapestries of psychology but also behavior that was neither saintly nor fully evil at any one point. It was something more than that: you could understand why even the characters undertaking evil acts were doing what they did, how their good intentions got subverted, and how incentives structured behavior. The complexity made it much richer than a simplistic morality tale, where unadulterated good fights with evil.

The hallmark of sociological storytelling is if it can encourage us to put ourselves in the place of any character, not just the main hero/heroine, and imagine ourselves making similar choices. “Yeah, I can see myself doing that under such circumstances” is a way into a broader, deeper understanding. It’s not just empathy: we of course empathize with victims and good people, not with evildoers.

But if we can better understand how and why characters make their choices, we can also think about how to structure our world that encourages better choices for everyone. The alternative is an often futile appeal to the better angels of our nature. It’s not that they don’t exist, but they exist along with baser and lesser motives. The question isn’t to identify the few angels but to make it easier for everyone to make the choices that, collectively, would lead us all to a better place.

Another example of sociological TV drama with a similarly enthusiastic fan following is David Simon’s The Wire, which followed the trajectory of a variety of actors in Baltimore, ranging from African-Americans in the impoverished and neglected inner city trying to survive, to police officers to journalists to unionized dock workers to city officials and teachers. That show, too, killed off its main characters regularly, without losing its audience. Interestingly, the star of each season was an institution more than a person. The second season, for example, focused on the demise of the unionized working class in the U.S.; the fourth highlighted schools; and the final season focused on the role of journalism and mass media.

Luckily for The Wire, creative control never shifted to the standard Hollywood narrative writers who would have given us individuals to root for or hate without being able to fully understand the circumstances that shape them. One thing that’s striking about The Wire is how one could understand all the characters, not just the good ones (and in fact, none of them were just good or bad). When that’s the case, you know you’re watching a sociological story.

WHY GOT PAUSED KILLING MAJOR CHARACTERS

Tellingly, season eight shocked many viewers by … not initially killing off the main characters. It was the first big indicator of their shift—that they were putting the weight of the story on the individual and abandoning the sociological. In that vein, they had fan-favorite characters pull off stunts we could root and cheer for, like Arya Stark killing the Night King in a somewhat improbable fashion.

For seven seasons, the show had focused on the sociology of what an external, otherized threat—such as the Night King, the Army of the Undead and the Winter to Come—would do to competing rivalries within the opposing camp. Having killed one of the main sociological tensions that had animated the whole series with one well-placed knife-stab, Benioff and Weiss then turned to ruining the other sociological tension: the story of the corruption of power.

This corruption of power was crucially illustrated in Cersei Lannister’s rise and evolution from victim (if a selfish one) to evil actor, and this was clearly meant also to be the story of her main challenger, Daenerys Targaryen. Dany had started out wanting to be the breaker of chains, with moral choices weighing heavily on her, and season by season, we have witnessed her, however reluctantly, being shaped by the tools that were available to her and that she embraced: war, dragons, fire.

Done right, it would have been a fascinating and dynamic story: rivals transforming into each other as they seek absolute power with murderous tools, one starting from a selfish perspective (her desire to have her children rule) and the other from an altruistic one (her desire to free slaves and captive people, of which she was once one).

The corruption of power is one of the most important psychosocial dynamics behind many important turning points in history, and in how the ills of society arise. In response, we have created elections, checks and balances, and laws and mechanisms that constrain the executive.

Destructive historical figures often believe that they must stay in power because it is they, and only they, who can lead the people—and that any alternative would be calamitous. Leaders tend to get isolated, become surrounded by sycophants and succumb easily to the human tendency to self-rationalize. There are several examples in history of a leader who starts in opposition with the best of intentions, like Dany, and ends up acting brutally and turning into a tyrant if they take power.

Told sociologically, Dany’s descent into a cruel mass-murderer would have been a strong and riveting story. Yet in the hands of two writers who do not understand how to advance the narrative in that lane, it became ridiculous. She attacks King’s Landing with Drogon, her dragon, and wins, with the bells of the city ringing in surrender. Then, suddenly, she goes on a rampage because, somehow, her tyrannical genes turn on.

Varys, the advisor who will die for trying to stop Dany, says to Tyrion that “every time a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.” That is straight-up and simplistic genetic determinism, rather than what we had been witnessing for the past seven seasons. Again, sociological stories don’t discount the personal, psychological and even the genetic, but the key point is that they are more than “coin tosses”—they are complex interactions with emergent consequences: the way the world actually works.

In interviews after that episode, Benioff and Weiss confess that they turned it into a spontaneous moment. Weiss says, “ I don’t think she decided ahead of time that she was going to do what she did. And then she sees the Red Keep, which is, to her, the home that her family built when they first came over to this country 300 years ago. It’s in that moment, on the walls of King’s Landing, when she’s looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to make this personal.”

Benioff and Weiss were almost certainly given the “Mad Queen” ending to Game of Thrones by the original writer, George R. R. Martin. For them, however, this was the eating-ice-cream-with-a-fork problem I mentioned above. They could keep the story, but not the storytelling method. They could only make it into a momentary turn that is part spontaneous psychology and part deterministic genetics.

WHY SOCIOLOGICAL STORYTELLING MATTERS

Whether done well or badly, the psychological/internal genre leaves us unable to understand and react to social change. Arguably, the dominance of the psychological and hero/antihero narrative is also the reason we are having such a difficult time dealing with the current historic technology transition. So this essay is more than about one TV show with dragons.

In my own area of research and writing, the impact of digital technology and machine intelligence on society, I encounter this obstacle all the time. There are a significant number of stories, books, narratives and journalistic accounts that focus on the personalities of key players such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey and Jeff Bezos. Of course, their personalities matter, but only in the context of business models, technological advances, the political environment, (lack of) meaningful regulation, the existing economic and political forces that fuel wealth inequality and lack of accountability for powerful actors, geopolitical dynamics, societal characteristics and more.

It’s reasonable, for example, for a corporation to ponder who would be the best CEO or COO, but it’s not reasonable for us to expect that we could take any one of those actors and replace them with another person and get dramatically different results without changing the structures, incentives and forces that shape how they and their companies act in this world.

The preference for the individual and psychological narrative is understandable: the story is easier to tell as we gravitate toward identifying with the hero or hating the antihero, at the personal level. We are, after all, also persons!

In German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s classic play, Life of Galileo, Andrea, a former pupil of Galileo, visits him after he recants his seminal findings under pressure from the Catholic Church. Galileo gives Andrea his notebooks, asking him to spread the knowledge they contain. Andrea celebrates this, saying “unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo corrects him: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”

Well-run societies don’t need heroes, and the way to keep terrible impulses in check isn’t to dethrone antiheros and replace them with good people. Unfortunately, most of our storytelling—in fiction and also in mass media nonfiction—remains stuck in the hero/antihero narrative. It’s a pity Game of Thrones did not manage to conclude its last season in its original vein. In a historic moment that requires a lot of institution building and incentive changing (technological challenges, climate change, inequality and accountability) we need all the sociological imagination we can get, and fantasy dragons or not, it was nice to have a show that encouraged just that while it lasted.

#got #wank for ts #sort of #SOMEONE PUT IT INTO WORDS

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theamazingsallyhogan · 5 years

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The show did indeed take a turn for the worse, but the reasons for that downturn goes way deeper than the usual suspects that have been identified (new and inferior writers, shortened season, too many plot holes). It’s not that these are incorrect, but they’re just superficial shifts. In fact, the souring of Game of Thrones exposes a fundamental shortcoming of our storytelling culture in general: we don’t really know how to tell sociological stories.

WHAT STORYTELLING IT WAS AND WHAT IT BECAME IN GOT

WHY GOT PAUSED KILLING MAJOR CHARACTERS

WHY SOCIOLOGICAL STORYTELLING MATTERS

In German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s classic play, Life of Galileo,Andrea, a former pupil of Galileo, visits him after he recants his seminal findings under pressure from the Catholic Church. Galileo gives Andrea his notebooks, asking him to spread the knowledge they contain. Andrea celebrates this, saying “unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo corrects him: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

#game of thrones #game of thrones spoilers #got spoilers #got #spoilers #scientific american #long post

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schmergo · 7 years

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I went to the Museum of the Bible

Okay, buckle in, because this is gonna be kind of a lengthy post. My mom got free tickets to the highly controversial new Museum of the Bible in DC and I, with heavy misgivings, decided to come along and see what was up. I have to say, I thought it was a lot better than I expected, though I am still suspicious and cynical of several aspects of the place. So here is my detailed review! Here's what you need to know about the museum first: 1. It was founded and funded by Steve Green, the President of Hobby Lobby, aka the company that went to the Supreme Court because they didn't want to cover employees' birth control, saying it went against their religious beliefs. 2. He was also fined $3 million for smuggling artifacts from Iraq (which did not appear in the museum's collection). 3. The museum is technically non-sectarian (though with a Protestant bias), and does not address hot-button issues like evolution/creationism, abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, or how the Bible "should" be interpreted. Its galleries include tellings of the stories from the Bible, the history of the compilation and transmission/translation of the Bible, and the impact of the Bible on history and culture. It always hints at a Christian interpretation but does not outright evangelize. Some people may find this claimed non-political and nonsectarian interpretation more insidious than an outright Christian oriented museum. 4. The museum is free, but with a suggested donation. I would personally not suggest donating anything if you're interested in checking it out so as not to put money in the Hobby Lobby Guy's pockets, but that's just me. Now, I have to address my own personal biases. I am a Protestant Christian (United Methodist, to be specific), but I'm also strongly opposed to what constitutes contemporary "American Christian culture." I'm a believer not only in God but in human rights, evidence-based science/evolution, separation of church and state, charity, equality, and empathy. To me, these values are compatible with studying Jesus' teachings, and I'm deeply critical of people who use Christianity to justify selfish and narrowminded decisions. I also am an elementary-age Sunday school teacher who likes to emphasize the importance of Biblical literacy in self-professed Christians, which this museum champions (you'd be amazed how many Christians aren't actually familiar with the Bible), and in studying not only the stories, but the themes and lessons behind them (which this museum does not do. It allows guests the freedom to interpret the material according to their own beliefs- again, some might like this and some might dislike it). This museum is huge. We were there for about five hours and still didn't see everything. It was also absolutely PACKED with guests. The line to get in snaked down the block, and there were some long lines to get into the "hottest ticket" exhibits. We started off our day in the most popular, multi-media exhibit, The Hebrew Bible, which is a mix of videos and walk-through visuals with exciting lighting, animation, and voiceover, telling the narrative of major Old Testament stories. This exhibit is a pure storytelling "experience" and does not display any artifacts or purport to be a factual account, which I actually love because it is not claiming that all of these accounts are literally true or trying to show historical evidence. It's a little cheesy but less cheesy than you might expect- it feels like an elegant Disney World attraction but with a more artistic and slightly more abstract style. I especially liked the burning bush (the voice of God was represented as multiple voices in unison, at least one of them female), the white room full of rainbow light after the ark, the Red Sea made of string and projected waves, or the watercolor style of art of the Judges/Samuel movie. This experience is as non-controversial as possible, though the one issue is that it portrays the entire Old Testament as a consistent story about how God's people moved closer to and farther from God throughout history, fluctuating in loyalty, which I've heard is contrary to how the Tanakh is generally interpreted. This also implies that the New Testament completes "the story," which shows a Christian bias. The next exhibit was a recreation of the village of Nazareth, which WAS cheesy and Disneyesque, but fun. It felt like the museum at Jamestown Settlement, where you can walk in the little houses and see how people lived in another time. There were living interpreters there, and I liked that the people who played the villagers were racially diverse. There was a mikvah, an olive press, a temple, and typical Jewish homes. Less diverse was the short movie about John the Baptist and King Herod, who were both played by white actors- in fact, Herod was John Rhys-Davies (aka Gimli) in all his bellowing rolled-r scenery-chewing glory. He seemed to be having a grand old time. The New Testament movie was poignant but a slightly more cartoonish style of animation than the Old Testament films. Its art style reminded me of the illustrations on Pottermore. There are a lot of contradictory versions of stories in the Gospels, which was not acknowledged in this movie, but they kind of found a way around this by having the movie told from the perspectives of different people who encountered Jesus in first person (John, Saul/Paul, Mary Magdalene, Thomas, a centurion at the crucifixion, etc), showing them as varying accounts rather than one narrative. I know about the differences between the Gospels, but not everyone does, and this could be interpreted as an oversimplification. One thing I loved about this movie was that they never showed Jesus' face. They allow the audience to imagine him as they see fit. My family got lunch after this. There's a big restaurant called Manna on the top floor that serves middle-Eastern inspired foods and it was quite good. (There are vegetarian, vegan, and kosher options.) I had a platter with falafel, salad, and pickled vegetables, as well as some mango juice. This place gets CROWDED and there are long lines, but you can't re-enter the museum once you've exited unless you get back in the big queue around the block, so you can really only eat here or at the coffee shop downstairs. There's also a biblical garden and observation deck up there. Next, we went to the floor that talks about the history of the Bible, and this is where things get complex. I am less knowledgeable about this stuff than the actual text of the Bible itself, so I can't tell you what was of questionable accuracy here and what was legit, but this floor was definitely poised as being more serious and academic, while the one above it was more about narrative and entertainment-- so obviously, I was side-eying it more. This exhibit is definitely slanted toward the concept that the Bible has been transmitted and translated throughout time with remarkable accuracy, but also explores the differences, inaccuracies, and variations between different Bibles. It starts with a collection of ancient tablets and documents. I have read that some of these have questionable provenance and authenticity, especially fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls. Some of the signage alludes to these questions, some does not. Many items are on loan from other institutions, while others are replicas and facsimiles of items in museums like The British Museum (always labeled as such). The articles of the museum I've read are very severe about questions of authenticity/provenance, partially because of the Hobby Lobby scandal, but also because this is such a new museum. Museum practices have changed over time, and many of the artifacts at the British Museum and the Met are unethically acquired, too. Bear that in mind when visiting any museum (I could rant to you about the Parthenon marbles!) Still, a new and expensive museum like this one should be more careful. The most interesting ancient items in this exhibit were accounts from non-Jewish ancient cultures that told a different version of events than the Bible-- a king claiming to have killed a Hebrew King and thanking his own gods for the victory, while the Bible says that God punished that Hebrew King for not being devoted to him. It was cool to see two sides of the same story. But what I REALLY loved here was the collection of Bibles from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, because I love old books. Like, I took a class at the Folger Shakespeare Library about this stuff. There was a Gutenberg Bible, some absolutely gorgeous illuminated manuscripts (including one belonging to Henry V's great-grandmother and in immaculate condition), Tyndale Bibles, one of the very first edition of the full Bible in English... It was sobering to see that Henry VIII commissioned churches to display Bibles in English two years after Tyndale was executed abroad for translating the Bible into English. My favorite thing in the entire museum was a "Wicked Bible"- a reprint of the King James Bible that accidentally left out a crucial word and said, "Thou shalt commit adultery." Needless to say, most of them were destroyed, and the printers got in trouble, but this one survived. I also liked the small exhibits on which books were included in which versions of the Bible and which were left out/ considered apocrypha. The "Drive Thru History." introductory movie here is incredibly annoying and trying too hard to be cool, by the way, so feel free to skip that one if you go. It does a disservice to a serious collection of books. I also popped into the second floor exhibits before I left, but I didn't stick around for long. This has exhibits on the Bible's impact on US history and on culture in the world. The culture one honestly was so overwhelming and sprawling that it hurt my brain (especially since I had already been in the museum for 4.5 hours), but I did get a kick out of seeing Elvis Presley's Bible. This might be the most propaganda-Y part of the museum, but I didn't take much time to find out. There's also a video booth where people can share their own feelings or experiences about the Bible. The American history section was interesting and surprisingly daring, though. It talked about how the Bible was used to back up positions on different sides of issues through history- pro- and anti- slavery, women's rights, whether to be independent from England. It showed that the Bible has been used for good and bad throughout history and has some cool documents on display- a first edition copy of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's "Women's Bible," the handwritten manuscript of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. The displays let the public vote on tricky questions like whether they agree with Thomas Jefferson's decision to cut up the Bible and keep the parts that he felt applied as advice to daily life. (73% say no.) Also, in a section about politicians making reference to their personal faiths, there is a clip of Barack Obama singing "Amazing Grace." Nice to see that this museum explicitly denies the "Obama is a secret Muslim" conspiracy. There were more exhibits that I didn't get to see, including some traveling exhibits on loan from the Vatican, an Israeli museum, and a Bavarian museum. They also have a full-stage production of the Broadway musical "Amazing Grace." I will say, I gave a hard side-eye to the large gift shop, through which visitors exit, with the "Museum of the Bible" logo branded on everything from mugs to t-shirts to sunglasses. I would have preferred a tasteful bookshop with maybe a few knick-knacks like cross necklaces and Noah's Ark toys, but I guess I'm an old party-pooper. Overall, I actually had a lot of fun at this museum and got to see some very cool and rare books, but I also was naturally more critical toward this museum's decisions than I normally would be when visiting a tourist attraction. I was happy to see a crowd diverse in age and ethnicity who were discussing the exhibits rather than just zooming through (I did see one guy in a MAGA hat, though- frankly, I thought there might be more). The employees were all really nice and helpful even though the place was outrageously crowded. Would I recommend visiting this museum? Maybe! I think I would recommend it to Christian people who are already knowledgeable about the Bible and willing to think critically about what they read and see. I think it would be a good place to bring kids (mid-elementary and up) and talk seriously about some of these topics and controversies. The kids in my Sunday school class seem to have a hard time remembering sequence of events in the Bible, thinking Moses was the same time as Jesus, calling King David a 'Christian,' etc. This might clarify some stuff. I saw a lot of little kids there, and they were having fun, but I feel like I wouldn't take kids that young there because they wouldn't be able to understand the more complex topics. I don't want to just give them candy-coated pretty stories! I probably would not recommend this museum to people who come from very different faith traditions or none at all, whatever this museum's attempts at secularity. I will say, I'm unsure what the Museum of the Bible's agenda is, because it certainly doesn't seem built to convert anybody. The more cynical part of the says it's built to spread the message that the Bible is so important to history and culture that it should be taught in schools. The less cynical part says that it's built to encourage Christians to explore and become more knowledgeable about their faiths, because we're from a time when the majority of Americans identify as Christian, but very few have read the Bible or can answer basic questions about it. I think that's dangerous, because lots of people seem to adhere more to "Christian" culture than Christian scripture, and that leads to a mindset completely divorced from what I see as Jesus' teachings. I don't personally have a problem with its location near the Mall and the Capitol, because if anything else, I see it as a sign of the separation of Church and State. The museums on and around the mall explore different cultures and fields of study, so does one-- but I hope people who visit DC for this museum also visit some of the Smithsonian museums. Learn about Natural History, African-American history, Native-American History, not just the museum about your own religious faith. Please feel free to ask me any questions about the museum!

#washington dc #museum of the bible

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guncontrolessay886 · 4 years

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Nursing Paper Writing Service But I only point out flaws if they matter, and I will ensure the evaluation is constructive. Using a duplicate of the manuscript that I first marked up with any questions that I had, I write a short summary of what the paper is about and what I feel about its solidity. Then I run by way of the specific points I raised in my abstract in additional detail, in the order they appeared in the paper, offering page and paragraph numbers for most. Finally comes a listing of really minor stuff, which I try to keep to a minimal. I then usually undergo my first draft trying on the marked-up manuscript again to verify I didn’t miss something necessary. And I checked the originality through Copyscape, I have a colleague with an account there, he says it is the most effective business plag detector. I ordered the Editor's Check for my scholarship utility essay. Got it back in 4 days with like three dozen amendments. To me, it's biased to achieve a verdict on a paper primarily based on how groundbreaking or novel the outcomes are, for instance. Also, I wouldn’t advise early-profession researchers to sign their critiques, no less than not till they either have a everlasting position or in any other case really feel stable of their careers. Although I consider that every one established professors ought to be required to sign, the fact is that some authors can hold grudges in opposition to reviewers. The paper reviewing course of may help you form your personal scientific opinion and develop critical considering expertise. When you deliver criticism, your feedback ought to be honest however all the time respectful and accompanied with ideas to enhance the manuscript. I'm aiming to supply a complete interpretation of the standard of the paper that will be of use to each the editor and the authors. I suppose plenty of reviewers method a paper with the philosophy that they're there to identify flaws. The detailed studying and the sense-making process, in particular, takes a very long time. Also, sometimes I discover that one thing just isn't fairly proper but can’t quite put my finger on it till I have properly digested the manuscript. I begin with a quick summary of the results and conclusions as a approach to present that I have understood the paper and have a common opinion. I all the time comment on the type of the paper, highlighting whether or not it's nicely written, has correct grammar, and follows a correct construction. Grammar mistakes, writing style and terminology, formatting flaws – nothing went unnoticed. At least early on, it is a good idea to be open to evaluate invites so that you can see what unfinished papers seem like and get conversant in the evaluation course of. Many journals ship the choice letters to the reviewers. Bear in thoughts that one of the harmful traps a reviewer can fall into is failing to acknowledge and acknowledge their very own bias. It will also give you an summary of the brand new advances within the subject and help you when writing and submitting your personal articles. So although peer reviewing positively takes some effort, ultimately it will be value it. Also, the journal has invited you to review an article based mostly on your experience, but there shall be many stuff you don’t know. If I feel there may be some good materials within the paper but it wants a lot of work, I will write a pretty lengthy and particular evaluate mentioning what the authors have to do. If the paper has horrendous difficulties or a confused idea, I will specify that however won't do a lot of work to attempt to suggest fixes for each flaw. I print out the paper, as I discover it simpler to make comments on the printed pages than on an electronic reader. I learn the manuscript very fastidiously the primary time, attempting to observe the authors’ argument and predict what the following step could be. At this primary stage, I attempt to be as open-minded as I can. So in case you have not fully understood one thing in the paper, do not hesitate to ask for clarification. It can take me quite a long time to write down an excellent review, sometimes a full day of labor and sometimes even longer.

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essayorganization874 · 4 years

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write my research papers

About me

The Problem With Argumentative Writing

The Problem With Argumentative Writing At least early on, it is a good idea to be open to review invites to be able to see what unfinished papers look like and get familiar with the evaluate course of. Many journals ship the decision letters to the reviewers. Reading these can provide you insights into how the other reviewers seen the paper, and into how editors evaluate critiques and make selections about rejection versus acceptance or revise and resubmit. Bear in thoughts that some of the harmful traps a reviewer can fall into is failing to acknowledge and acknowledge their own bias. To me, it's biased to achieve a verdict on a paper primarily based on how groundbreaking or novel the outcomes are, for example. Also, generally I discover that something isn't fairly right however can’t fairly put my finger on it till I even have properly digested the manuscript. I begin with a quick abstract of the results and conclusions as a way to present that I actually have understood the paper and have a general opinion. I all the time touch upon the type of the paper, highlighting whether or not it's well written, has right grammar, and follows an accurate structure. When you ship criticism, your comments should be sincere but always respectful and accompanied with ideas to improve the manuscript. I'm aiming to supply a complete interpretation of the quality of the paper that will be of use to each the editor and the authors. It will also offer you an outline of the brand new advances in the field and assist you to when writing and submitting your own articles. So although peer reviewing definitely takes some effort, ultimately will probably be value it. Also, the journal has invited you to evaluate an article based in your experience, however there might be many stuff you don’t know. I learn the manuscript very fastidiously the primary time, making an attempt to comply with the authors’ argument and predict what the following step could be. At this first stage, I attempt to be as open-minded as I can. Also, I wouldn’t advise early-career researchers to signal their evaluations, no less than not till they both have a everlasting position or otherwise feel secure of their careers. Although I believe that all established professors ought to be required to sign, the fact is that some authors can maintain grudges against reviewers. The paper reviewing course of can help you kind your own scientific opinion and develop important thinking abilities. If the paper has horrendous difficulties or a confused concept, I will specify that but is not going to do lots of work to attempt to recommend fixes for every flaw. I then delve into the Methods and Results sections. Are the strategies suitable to research the analysis question and test the hypotheses? Would there have been a better approach to check these hypotheses or to investigate these outcomes? Using a replica of the manuscript that I first marked up with any questions that I had, I write a quick abstract of what the paper is about and what I really feel about its solidity. Then I run via the precise factors I raised in my abstract in additional detail, in the order they appeared in the paper, providing web page and paragraph numbers for many. So in case you have not totally understood something in the paper, don't hesitate to ask for clarification. It can take me quite a long time to write down a good evaluate, sometimes a full day of labor and sometimes even longer. The detailed studying and the sense-making process, specifically, takes a very long time. Could I replicate the results utilizing the knowledge in the Methods and the outline of the evaluation? I even selectively examine particular person numbers to see whether they're statistically plausible. I additionally fastidiously take a look at the explanation of the outcomes and whether or not the conclusions the authors draw are justified and related with the broader argument made within the paper. If there are any features of the manuscript that I am not acquainted with, I attempt to learn up on these topics or consult other colleagues. I print out the paper, as I discover it easier to make feedback on the printed pages than on an digital reader. Finally comes a listing of actually minor stuff, which I attempt to maintain to a minimal. I then usually undergo my first draft looking on the marked-up manuscript again to make sure I didn’t leave out something essential. If I really feel there's some good material within the paper but it needs plenty of work, I will write a reasonably long and particular evaluation stating what the authors have to do. I think lots of reviewers approach a paper with the philosophy that they are there to determine flaws. But I solely point out flaws if they matter, and I will ensure the review is constructive.

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knightofbalance-13 · 7 years

Text

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZzVHlhsEeA

Wow, just wow.

It’s like FMF heard how I said that I found a WORSE RWBY reviewer than him...

Then proceeded to go “BUT this isn’t even my FINAL FORM!”

0:54 No, your group RWDE is terrible because you have no morals. You’re only limit is not what is right or what you stand for, but what you can get away with. RWDE only reposnded well because they had literally no other options without outing themselves as uncaring. You however can use the combined echo chamber to ignore reality and pretend like your lies are truth so you won’t realize what you’re eating is shit.

1:04 Well if he did that Lord Fatass, you’d call him a Nazi and then say he fucks his dog because you said so. I mean, that’s what you do to your own critics, which just kind of proves you know what you are doing is wrong and you don’t want to face it.

1:32 Bullshit Slick, I’ve seen you in RWDE. You get involved ALL the god damn time.

1:37 Wow, how knew friendly fire was enabled?

1:44 Now does Jess have any opinions aside form yours? Or does she just spoonfeed you what you already think? Because considering YOUR interactions with anyone who doesn’t think exactly like you: I don’t trust you.

1:52 By talking to them. About this topic. Which is exactly what you tried denying a few seconds ago. So you’re lying before we even get to RWBY. Great.

3:01 No, they are willing to talk. It’s just they can’t or else the assholes you people created and encouraged will rise up like zombies and tear them limb from limb. I’ve seen it happen so you can’t deny it.

3:12 “The idea of a homosexual character being a villain-it’s just thrown in there”

... This is the people who RWDE praises as the height of intelligence: Dumbasses who think that gay people cannot be bad, as though they are somehow any different that straight people.

3:29 Ah huh, so literally ALL THE OTHER SCENES WITH ILLA never happened. Because that proved she had depth already. And Illa had rather explicitly romantic interactions towards Blake with favoritism towards Blake. It wasn’t tacked on, you just tacked THAT on to pander to your RWBY hating audience.

3:37 Hi Lord Fatass. I see your IQ has dropped since we last met. No fucking wonder, all the energy needed to generate that hot air must leave your brain lacking.

Seeing as she was SENDING BLAKE TO ADAM: it wouldn’t affect her motivations at all. If she loved Adam then yes but she doesn’t, so no. But let’s see what snake oil you’re gonna try to sell us.

3:41 https://youtu.be/56Z6po1woq0?t=12m19s

“Literally” huh? Seems like that came well past the Adam section. Almost like it had NOTHING to do with it.

4:00 SO you people didn’t even fucking KNOW what you were talking about. FOur minutes in and you’ve proven yourself unreliable.

4;13 Problem is, you assholes abuse Death Of The Author so much that it has lost all menaing, You gusy don’t get to have interpretations due to your immense bias and untrustworthy behavior as well as a tendency to lie your asses off.

You guys get to show facts and make statements about them SOLELY. I’m pretty sure it’s illegal for you to do so otherwise with RWBY.

4:17 No articulation: No credit.

4:27 And we should trust you...why? You just got done saying that she was doing stuff to get Adam to notice her by your shock that the looking comment was about Blake, showing that you don’t know what you are talking about. So your “feeling”could be you misreading the scene or lying about it.

5:03 So did you not watch the Blake CHaracter short or a good chunk of Volume 5/ Because saying Illa’s motivation is to fuck Blake shows you are spewing shit.

5:13 Yeah, it is...so you being a RWBY fan and ignoring the actual motivation don’t fit. SO which is it? Are you lying or do you hate the show so you make up shit?

5:27 Minus the sociopathy. And the selfishness. And the edginess. And the self serving motives. And the personal investiment in the White Fang. And the dick. And the sword. And the anima traits. And the backstory. And the result...

What do they have in common again aside from being White Fang members?

5:35 I see. SO this isn’t four people talking, this is one person talking and three meat puppets. Well, at least I’m only tormenting one person then.

6:01 Fifty bucks says he bites himself in the ass.

6:07 Do I get extra money if he bites himself not even ten seconds later?

6:31 And nothing changed with Illa. She still hates humans. She still cares for Blake. She still doesn’t know what to do. She still doubts herself. She still fights for the Fanaus. And she still has her morals. That’s a hundred bucks now.

6:32 Which is why the character short in which we had her motivation said nothing about Blake and was about her parents.

7:43 Considering SlickSlick is Tumblr and you’re massive following here: You are. In fact, you’re the root of tumblr’s bullshit in RWBY. I should get to tearing them out sometime...

7:54 Here’s more proof you are indeed Tumblr. You can only see in race, gender and ethnicity. Not diversity of thought but rather superficial diversity. Just like Tumblr. Also: All four of you are straight, white and male. You have no room to talk.

8:11 And the shovel official has more IQ than you Fatass since Adam clearly wants to kill humans for Fanaus supremecy, not to fuck. Just like Tumblr, you cannot separate WHAT a person is from WHO a person is.

8:27 Doesn't matter if Illa is gay. Her viewpoint has NOTHING to do with her sexuality

8:33 “all on the unrequiented love”

Was relevant for 43 seconds. I counted. Check for yourself. I do have a link to the moment: Just count the seconds until it changes topic.

Proof you have no idea what you are talking about.

9:11 Precisely what they did. But that can’t be bitched at so here you are, denying reality. Pathetic.

9:36 A. Wasn’t relevant until now (do yo0u wlak around saying “I WANNA FUCK WOMEN!” all the damn time?)

B. Catmen never came out. Incompatible. You just wanna draw a connection to Cartmen to pass off his infamy to Illa while being a clown. Well you fialed both Lord Fatass.

10:05 He can’t eb Edgy lord Extreme.

Fatass is there.

10:11 Considering the actual commentateries don’t rely on echo chambers and edited footage and ignorance to make points, you people need a red pill.

10:17 The fact we are the same species sickens me. It reminds me I can never escape your shit because it’s in me. And it’s disgusting.

10:29 Yeah, people who call others beta are usually omegas themselves. Alphas don’t nee dto assert their dominance or prove themselves, that all comes naturally and they naturally get it. You guys won’t even speak out anywhere that doesn’t give you the advantage or shows weakness. MurderOfBirds cries on screen and is humble enough to thank his fans and acknowledge his flaws: You people put ona façade, act like your hot shit and never own up. You’re all weaklings.

10:43 Illa never abused Blake in a relationship. Illa never killed out of spite (in fact, she saved out of love). Oh wiat, not your narrative. Sorry, I forgot you’re all delusional.

11:14 I think you meant to see “We’re all equal shit”. Considering yoru just Fatass’ drones: Yes you are.

12:16 And the fact that you are gonna act like that is any different than America having all white casts proves you ain’t peak Tumblr...how?

12:23 When you assholes became Tumblr.

12:49 Not like that’s exclusive to RACE asshole. An Asian growing up in America is not gonna have Chinese values. And a white person leaving in China will not have the same culture as a white person in America.

13:14 Thing is: They ain’t all the same thing. Blake is a Fanaus, Weiss is from Atlas-You have three differnet sides there. And even then, again: Not bound by race.

13:59 Not if they hate each other “because.” Just like getting along for no reason is boring too. You don’t understand how writing works. Then again, you never did so you’re still going shit!

15:19 NO, THERE ISN’T. Race, Gender and Sexuality mean NOTHING to WHO a person is unless they let it and even then, that a part of PERSONALITY. Only people who argue that those do have an affect are the bigots or idiots. Oh wait, you’re the second one...

15:53 Oh so NOW different culture sdon’t matter huh? Never occurred to you that THEIR society doesn’t work EXACTLY THE SAME as ours? That maybe, they don’t care about that?

How are you all not Tumblr again?

16:45 Not all shows wanna do that and certainly not all people want to watch it. Only people who do are, surprise, hyper Tumblrs!

16:53 Actually you do: Illa. She says nothing about it, she doesn't mention it, she doesn’t act like it, she has no trouble aside form the usual and being gay itself isn’t shocking. SO there you go.

17:19 Easy: Care about something else. The society doesn’t care and you shouldn’t.

18:35 FOr all of you actually since you show no variety in opinion and are notorious for echo chambers.

You just keep saying “We should judge people based on sex, sexuality and race! Taht’s how thinsg work!” without thinking about how so many people want to IGNORE all that.

And taht’s all. Final Thoughts: As expected, they make up bullshit and actm like it’s reality. It’sm RWDE in pure, concentrated video form and surprisingly, they don’t wanna admit it.

Basically: worthless opinions by untrustworthy and stupid people. So laugh at them, make him flip out and dig themselves a hole to be stuck in and leave.

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audio-luddite · 7 years

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Number 2

Speakers.

I have been an audio enthusiast for decades. I have heard a lot of good stuff. I think the equipment I own today is good. I am often bemused by the claims of pundits and reviewers who do not actually have to pay for the equipment they praise. Then there are people who invest so much on new equipment or accessories it must be good to justify the investment. Too often there is psychology involved. For some people it is bragging rights. For others it is desire to achieve the unachievable at any cost.

Once I was in a high end audio shop looking for some equipment and they were demonstrating a very expensive setup. It had Wilson Watt / Puppy speakers (If you heard of those you know it’s expensive, and good if stupidly named) Mark Levinson electronics (also good and expensive) playing a very good CD. It sounded awful. The system cost a fortune. It may have been the room or something broken, but it was horribly harsh and it hurt my ears. A serious and well-heeled client was listening intently and the salesman had all but convinced him this was nirvana. I said nothing but left the room to stop the pain.

The interaction between various components is complex and very often the results are imagined if not due to some obscure electronic interaction. That interaction may happen in setup A but not in setup B. Very high end boutique devices are often unstable under certain conditions. If the effects are real they are probably due to hidden incompatibilities of equipment.

Then there is the phenomenon of confirmation bias and prejudgement. Confirmation bias is negating evidence that does not agree with your pre-existing opinions and giving exaggerated weight to things that support it. There were famous blind auditions of equipment where experts failed to discern which premium device is which. Apparently it is easy if you can see the labels. Myth and legend are real factors in this world.

Very subtle issues can justify often extraordinary expenditures.

So we come to speakers. They are arguably the most difficult equipment to design and build well. They can be very easy to build mechanically, but the quality of performance is the issue. Electronics can be tested and measured and certified to be almost perfectly faithful to the signals they process. Speakers have distortion and response errors several orders of magnitude worse. An Amplifier may have 0.01% distortion and be considered poor. A Speaker can have 15% - 30% distortion and be considered great. It is a kind of art. Part is the art of persuasion.

Speaker designers are therefore somewhere between artists and engineers.

The artist side interprets some fundamental concept then the engineer side executes their best try to achieve it. The fundamental issue maybe be based on observation or even science, but the interpretation is usually something else entirely. Being guided by skill or experience I prefer to call it art as science tends to focus down to a common point and eliminate bullshit with numbers. In that case they would work to a single optimum solution and there would simply not be the huge variety of devices sitting in people’s homes. There are many philosophies resulting in a large variety of products.

There are successful and respected speakers built using many different approaches. One designer will advocate an idea that others will cheerfully ignore. Sometimes it makes little difference in the marketplace as there are always some people who enjoy the particular result.

One idea is that Omni-direction is the secret. You want a perfect driver that puts out the full range of sound in every direction. There are two variants of this. The first is the ideal Sphere, the second is the perfect line source. One represents an idealized mathematical point the other being a mathematical line. There has been a lot of effort put into these with varying degrees of success. You can buy examples of serious attempts on it.

Many speakers are measured in anechoic chambers to determine and adjust their response to maximize quality and performance. An Anechoic chamber is a profoundly unnatural condition and unless you make your listening room anechoic it is also an invalid design assumption for speakers for your home. It is interesting that many affluent owners will have large sound absorbing arrays installed in their rooms to help their systems sound better. They try to approach the anechoic condition or at least compensate for the problems in the basic speaker design philosophy.

The concept of omnidirectional speakers came out of those chambers. A famous example is the Ohm Walsh drive. It is a narrow cone of various materials mounted vertically and you listen to what would conventionally be the backside. The usual front of the cone in enclosed and the “back” is now outside and visible and radiates 360 horizontal degrees. It is a conceptually brilliant execution of Omni direction. It is a difficult speaker to place and power. It is good only if the underlying concept is valid, which it really isn’t. I explain why later.

Another classic design is the imperfect and famous Bose 901 speaker. The foundation principle was the observation that 90% of the sound in a concert hall was reflected from the walls and only 10% was direct from the performer to the listener. Dr. Bose the designer was an MIT professor in Boston and just as brilliant as one would expect an MIT professor to be. Boston has a famous concert hall which may be where he made his observation or discovery. Thing is this 90% - 10% factor is not a scientific test result. It was just something he thought of.

If you go to a concert and hear an orchestra the proportion he claimed may have been true from some seats. But if you listen to an opera singer and you have a good seat the proportion may be reversed. Also for chamber music or jazz or any recording that does not involve a big concert hall it is simply an invalid assumption.

The 901 had 8 small full range speakers on the back intended to bounce 90% of the sound off a wall and one speaker of the same type shooting forward. It also had an electronic equalizing circuit to correct the bass and treble compensating for the limits of the drivers. It was well thought of and basically worked if you had a suitable sound reflecting wall to use. Those people that liked them liked them a lot. Those that did not, did not. The material and finish of your back wall had as much effect on the sound as the speaker drivers.

Another philosophy is a perfect sound producing sheet. Imagine a curtain between a performance and the listener which radiates the perfect image of a recording. This has been tried in several products. Most electrostatics and planar magnetics start from this philosophy. They have fans and detractors. All have some degree of compromise or putting a positive spin on the “optimization” of features. It is a play in the physics of drivers. Usually the size is the main compromise as they have never produced a full room width of speaker for a consumer. They have come close. Large planar speakers are really large. The major flaw of this approach is that these are dipole radiators. Everything coming out the front is also coming out the back inverted and reflecting on the walls of the room. That moves a lot of air and is a seductive effect. Moving a lot of air is a good thing and helps to create “presence”.

I know this concept intimately. I once built full range electrostatic speakers with a full one square meter of radiating surface per channel. The finished devices were 4 feet tall, 4 feet wide and 8 inches deep. They were in many ways spectacular but in others they fell short. For a time I loved them, but I knew there were problems including taking up huge chunks of apartment space. I still have most of the parts for them in storage.

A fundamental advantage large planar speakers have is they move a very large area of air and couple to the room well. This can be expressed as good acoustical impedance matching. Good matching means the speaker energy is very well transferred to the air in the room. Yet the dipole effect is not really an advantage due to reflected waves and cancellation. There is just as much sound coming off the back as the front and those waves bounce around and interfere with the sound in front. Fans of the type will say it is all about placement, but that is an avoidance strategy.

Often the physical construction of large planar speakers has its own sound. I once auditioned a large expensive and successful electrostatic speaker that if you tapped the frame you heard a distinct “bong” sound. It was a combination of the metal frame and the fact it was a drum head in its own right. Not good behaviour to have, yet a highly respected and expensive speaker.

The place we return to time and again is some type of box with some kind of motor that pushes air around. This is easy to build and convenient to live with in most cases. The box can be simple or extremely exotic. I saw one spectacularly expensive box that looked like an enormous scale model of the inner ear canal. It was very artistic, very expensive, and very silly. The motors were high quality examples of the ordinary cone stuff you get in common boxes. It was still a box, and likely the shape was pure artistic interpretation as there is no logical reason to mimic it.

Every speaker I have heard has some starting idea be it the perfect sphere of sound or the infinite line of radiation or the curtain of truth. You have to buy into the idea to justify the cost of execution. The single biggest problem is actually the room you place them in. A close second is you have to live with them and if married you need that person to buy into it too. Ugly and large is not good in that case. I take this seriously. I have built my own speakers for decades. I do so as I firmly believe I can buy better parts for a given price than in a commercial product. I have learned some tricks. Some things work, some do not. I do not think there is a single perfect solution. Specifically I have never seen or heard one.

Almost a century ago a clever man named Klipsch designed a speaker that took very little power and used the walls of the room in such a way that the room became part of the speaker. It was primarily driven by the fact that in that era the power of amplifiers was very limited. He used horn loaded drivers which use power much more effectively than cone drivers because the horn is an acoustic impedance matching device. The problem he solved was limited power of amplifiers and this required a large horn for the bass frequencies. Using the room walls was expedient. They also are in many ways spectacular but in others they fell short. They produce the bass tone of drums and tone of brass instruments magnificently, but the human voice is distorted. They require you have a decent size room with available corners. He is long dead but his company lives on at least as a brand and you can still buy the Klipschorn speaker.

This is a dynamic field for manufacturers and hobbyists. Some solutions work fairly well but look weird. I have seen a popular hobbyist design that looks like an awkward assembly of plumbing parts. It may sound good to their ears, but it looks embarrassing. There is an emotional tie in for the hobbyist. If you invest much time and money as a consumer or a hobbyist you are not likely to admit your system is less than ideal. My giant electrostatic speakers were the result of long hard effort and expense so I was emotionally invested in praising them even if they performed marginally in some respects. And there is the question of what actually is good.

If you listen to live music it is not radiating from perfect spheres or planes or lines. Usually it is from one or two people or a large group of performers doing what they do on a stage or in a room. Speaker design philosophy is not considered on stage or in a recording studio for that matter. Can a speaker create a convincing image of a jazz singer with just a piano accompanist and of a big band, or even a symphony orchestra? That is quite a trick for the speaker. I have a small inexpensive speaker set that does the solo jazz singer voice very well, but would go up in smoke if you asked for the orchestra or a rock band. Also recall that aside from full choirs and classical ensembles most performers sing or play directly into microphones that catch just them and are “mixed” into stereo channels by another person in the chain. You hear what they let you hear. Realism is not really important to that chain.

There are a few recordings out in the wild that are different and try to be true to the idea of honest sound. Many recordings from the 50’s and 60’s for classical music tried to preserve the concert hall experience. There are newer attempts. One example is, “Trinity Sessions” by the Cowboy Junkies. It was recorded in 1988 using a single multi-channel microphone direct into a digital recorder. It was done in a Church in Toronto famous for nice acoustics and natural reverberation. The band was set up around the microphone and had amps and guitars and PA basically as it would be in a small club. If you listen to it with honest speakers you hear a room and a band as you would have heard if you had been there. To hear this you need honest speakers.

I consider all dipoles and line source and reflecting speakers as dishonest. Add to those any speaker set far enough from a wall to create reflections that vary with direction. The simple reason is that you are hearing things that are not in the recording but may be pleasant effects. They may sound good, but they are not on the recording. A dipole sends significant energy out the back which bounces off a wall back to you and makes at best a clumsy reverb. At worst it upsets the tonal balance with cancellation of waves. It is an accepted truth that reverberation sounds nice which is why every Karaoke bar uses it to tame the evil squawks of the average customer. It is mixed into popular singers voices like sugar on breakfast cereal. Since all dipoles do that they can sound unnaturally nice and let’s call it sugar coated.

Same thing for omnidirectional speakers with the difference being the rear wave is in phase rather than out of phase. It is still a reflected sound reaching your ears that is not on the recording. This is additional information created by the interaction of the speaker and the room. This is not just limited to speakers as the normal type of distortion in Vacuum Tube circuits is even harmonics and is often described as “air”. If you add tube amps to dishonest speakers, as many audiophiles do, you get a double dose of sugar. These things are popular and sound pleasant but they are not honest. The question then devolves into one of honest vs dishonest. Real sound or sugar coated.

The source of the problem is not the quality of the equipment or its execution. It is the philosophy of the design and how it works in the room. Speakers that have significant reflections off of walls are to be avoided. That includes box speakers set away from the walls or that have extra drivers pointed in strange directions. (I have built those too.)

#audiophile speakers

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silver-and-ivory · 8 years

Note

You suggested Yudkowsky in a previous ask. How do you respond to the accusations that he is a crank? People make these accusations for a variety of reasons. For reference, consider rationalwiki's less than flattering article on him and his work. I am asking this question from a sincerely unbiased and simply curious standpoint. Thank you for receiving it, and, if you choose to respond, thank you for responding.

Hmm.

First of all, thanks a lot for how polite this was! Thank you for asking, and I am happy to respond for you. :)

I have in fact heard of these accusations.

To be perfectly honest, I don’t think these allegations are at all relevant to the validity of his philosophy in the Sequences. Ideas should be judged on their own merit; of course, we don’t have infinite time, so we have to use heuristics to figure out who to listen to, such as general correctness of beliefs; but I have already read Yudkowsky’s ideas and find him compelling. Since you (probably?) think I have relevant and non-terrible opinions, the heuristic “follow recommendations from your favored authors” (or whatever) should override the weaker heuristic about what to draw to your attention.

But I want to address the accusations in more detail, since they seemed interesting and I don’t think it would be satisfying to you if I didn’t. Keep in mind that I’m not qualified to evaluate many of the technical claims (like around physics or AI) in terms of knowledge or expertise. I’ll mostly be defending the idea that Yudkowsky’s ideas in the Sequences have merit independent of whatever weird shit he got into otherwise, but I also will make an effort to refute exaggerated or inaccurate claims.

So let’s get into discussing the accusations in question (long ass post below):

From what I’ve heard, they’re mostly as follows:

Roko’s Basilisk Debacle. I have no idea what happened here. Yudkowsky may have made a mistake in his comportment or in his logic, but it seems to be a sincere attempt to make the world better.

MIRI Work Inconsequential, Sub-par: Again, I don’t know anything about AI. I’ve never met Yudkowsky or MIRI at work, so I can’t really evaluate how hard they’re working or whatever.

AI Apocalypse is a Bit of a Sketchy Theory: I don’t know anything about AI, but the arguments I’ve seen are very unconvincing. After all, making the leap from “machine that does preprogrammed stuff really (really (really) (etc.))) quickly” to “thing with ability to manipulate, self-modify, and seep into the darkness of the internet to achieve its goals” doesn’t seem to be as easy as the arguments assume.

On the other hand, Yudkowsky might well be 1) operating off information I don’t know 2) concluded different, but equally reasonable (at this point in time) things from the information we share such that AI stuff is a major risk 3) giving into the bias that the things he’s interested in are Really Important or 4) something I didn’t think of that nevertheless doesn’t make him unreliable.

He might be wrong, but that doesn’t necessarily say anything about the other aspects of his ideology/philosophy. People make mistakes, they follow their biases too far, they get obsessed with strange things, they get stuck in bubbles. It’s erroneous to conclude that all of his ideas must be wrong just because he failed to live up to it.

Alternatively,, he could be doing it for personal gain - such as for fame - and therefore lying, which would bring his entire ideology into doubt as one could not know where he fabricated ideas versus where he was sincere.

Argument With Hanson: I honestly don’t care if he disagreed with Hanson over who the rightful caliph was AI foom. Ratwiki says:

It was immediately after this debate that Yudkowsky left Overcoming Bias (now Hanson’s personal blog) and moved the Sequences to LessWrong.

This insinuates a kind of foul play or bad faith on Yudkowsky’s side. I notice that it is unsourced, and secondly that Hanson and Yudkowsky both seem on still be on reasonable terms (as far as I know). Perhaps the split was already in the works, and Hanson and Yudkowsky regularly had similarly intense debate which was only “remarkable” because of the leave. Perhaps they believed it was confusing for readers to see a blog arguing with itself.

And besides, Yudkowsky couldn’t have decided based on this incident to create LessWrong in that short a time-span, which makes it highly unlikely that it was a petty reaction or whatever.

Yudkowsky Has Not Achieved Much:

Quoting from ratwiki here:

Yudkowsky is almost entirely unpublished outside of his own foundation and blogs[12] and never finished high school, much less did any actual AI research. No samples of his AI coding have been made public.

It is important to note that, as well as no training in his claimed field, Yudkowsky has pretty much no accomplishments of any sort to his credit beyond getting Peter Thiel to give him money. Even his fans admit “A recurring theme here seems to be ‘grandiose plans, left unfinished’.”[13] He claims to be a skilled computer programmer, but has no code available other than Flare, an unfinished computer language for AI programming with XML-based syntax.[14] His papers are generally self-published and have a total of two cites on JSTOR-archived journals (neither to do with AI) as of 2015, one of which is from his friend Nick Bostrom at the closely-associated Future of Humanity Institute.[15]

His actual, observable results in the real world are a popular fan fiction (which to his credit he did in fact finish, unusually for the genre), a pastiche erotic light novel,[16] a large pile of blog posts and a surprisingly well-funded research organisation — that has produced fewer papers in a decade and a half than a single graduate student produces in the course of a physics Ph.D, and the latter’s would be peer reviewed. Although Yudkowsky is working on a replacement for peer review.[17]

I really do not care how many successes Yudkowsky has had. His ideas are the issue here, not his actual abilities. Some of the more grandiose claims (”optimize the universe!”) are perhaps, well, grandiose; but that doesn’t undermine the other aspects of them.

(And in fact Yudkowsky has been able to create an entire movement of people, with highly influential members such as Scott Alexander and the Unit of Caring, which I notice is far more than is typical.

As for the allegations about MIRI, see above.)

Whether Yudkowsky considers himself a genius is unclear totally clear; he refers to himself as a genius six times in his “autobiography.” However he admits to possibly being less smart than John Conway.[18] As a homeschooled individual with no college degree, Yudkowsky may not be in an ideal position to estimate his own smartness. That many of his followers think he is a genius is an understatement.[19][20] Similarly, some of his followers are derisive of mainstream scientists, just look for comments about “not smart outside the lab” and “for a celebrity scientist.”[21] Yudkowsky believes that a doctorate in AI is a net negative when it comes to Seed AI.[22] While Yudkowsky doesn’t attack Einstein, he does indeed think the scientific method cannot handle things like the Many worlds Interpretation as well as his view on Bayes’ theorem.[23] LessWrong does indeed have its unique jargon.[24]

Yudkowsky may or may not have an overly large ego. I don’t think this is relevant to his philosophy.

Disagreement with Yudkowsky’s ideas is often attributed to “undiscriminating skepticism.” If you don’t believe cryonics works, it’s because you have watched Penn & Teller: Bullshit!.[25] It’s just not a possibility that you don’t believe it works because it has failed tests and is made improbable by the facts.[26]

I notice that “often” is doing a lot of work here. The citation links to Yudkowsky’s article on Undiscriminating Skepticism, in which he does not make the claim that “if you don’t believe cryonics works, it must be because you believed in Penn & Teller: Bullshit!”. Instead, he makes this (verbose and difficult to parse) claim (emphasis mine):

To put it more formally, before I believe that someone is performing useful cognitive work, I want to know that their skepticism discriminates truth from falsehood, making a contribution over and above the contribution of this-sounds-weird-and-is-not-a-tribal-belief. In Bayesian terms, I want to know that p(mockery|belief false & not a tribal belief) > p(mockery|belief true & not a tribal belief).

If I recall correctly, the US Air Force’s Project Blue Book, on UFOs, explained away as a sighting of the planet Venus what turned out to actually be an experimental aircraft. No, I don’t believe in UFOs either; but if you’re going to explain away experimental aircraft as Venus, then nothing else you say provides further Bayesian evidence against UFOs either. You are merely an undiscriminating skeptic. I don’t believe in UFOs, but in order to credit Project Blue Book with additional help in establishing this, I would have to believe that if there were UFOs then Project Blue Book would have turned in a different report.

And so if you’re just as skeptical of a weird, non-tribal belief that turns out to have pretty good support, you just blew the whole deal - that is, if I pay any extra attention to your skepticism, it ought to be because I believe you wouldn’t mock a weird non-tribal belief that was worthy of debate.

Personally, I think that Michael Shermer blew it by mocking molecular nanotechnology, and Penn and Teller blew it by mocking cryonics (justification: more or less exactly the same reasons I gave for Artificial Intelligence). Conversely, Richard Dawkins scooped up a huge truckload of actual-discriminating-skeptic points, at least in my book, for not making fun of the many-worlds interpretation when he was asked about in an interview; indeed, Dawkins noted (correctly) that the traditional collapse postulate pretty much has to be incorrect. The many-worlds interpretation isn’t just the formally simplest explanation that fits the facts, it also sounds weird and is not yet a tribal belief of the educated crowd; so whether someone makes fun of MWI is indeed a good test of whether they understand Occam’s Razor or are just mocking everything that’s not a tribal belief.

But I do propose that before you give anyone credit for being a smart, rational skeptic, that you ask them to defend some non-mainstream belief. And no, atheism doesn’t count as non-mainstream anymore, no matter what the polls show. It has to be something that most of their social circle doesn’t believe, or something that most of their social circle does believe which they think is wrong. Dawkins endorsing many-worlds still counts for now, although its usefulness as an indicator is fading fast… but the point is not to endorse many-worlds, but to see them take some sort of positive stance on where the frontiers of knowledge should change.

But it’s dangerous to let people pick up too much credit just for slamming astrology and homeopathy and UFOs and God. What if they become famous skeptics by picking off the cheap targets, and then use that prestige and credibility to go after nanotechnology? Who will dare to consider cryonics now that it’s been featured on an episode of Penn and Teller’s “Bullshit”?

So Yudkowsky isn’t saying that everyone who disagrees with him on e.g. many-worlds or cryonics is a P&T-thumper. Instead, here’s my interpretation of what he’s saying:

1. You can easily accumulate Skeptic Points by having certain views that don’t actually require that much mental effort to come up with, such as “homeopathy is dumb”.

2. These are not really relevant to your actual level of credibility.

3. Certain organizations, like Penn and Teller, have accumulated a lot of Skeptic Points by mocking things like homeopathy.

4. Mockery is not an argument. Organizations like Penn and Teller often mock things based on them being weird, which means that their mockery should mean absolutely nothing.

5.Unfortunately, due to the Skeptic Points that Penn and Teller has, their mockery has an outsize influence, which is bad.

6. If you want to assign Skeptic Points to actual credible people, you should test to make sure they’re not just parroting back their ingroup’s talking points.

The ratwiki interpretation is astonishingly uncharitable, and it also lacks substantiation for the claim it makes.

Note that I don’t know how accurate EY’s interpretation of the facts about cryonics and Penn and Teller is. It’s just that he didn’t say anything like what ratwiki characterizes him (an internet dweller? a random asshole on the bus?) as saying in the link, and that’s not how the principle was intended.

Yudkowsky Has Weird Viewpoints That Are Controversial:

Quoting again from ratwiki since I am very irritated at this point with them:

Despite being viewed as the smartest two-legged being to ever walk this planet on LessWrong, Yudkowsky (and by consequence much of the LessWrong community) endorses positions as TruthTMthat are actually controversial in their respective fields. Below is a partial list:

Transhumanism is correct. Cryonics might someday work. The Singularity is near![citation NOT needed]

Bayes’ theorem and the scientific method don’t always lead to the same conclusions (and therefore Bayes is better than science).[27]

Bayesian probability can be applied indiscriminately.[28]

Non-computable results, such as Kolmogorov complexity, are totally a reasonable basis for the entire epistemology. Solomonoff, baby!

Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics is correct (a “slam dunk”), despite the lack of consensus among quantum physicists.[29]

Evolutionary psychology is well-established science.

Utilitarianism is a correct theory of morality. In particular, he proposes a framework by which an extremely, extremely huge number of people experiencing a speck of dust in their eyes for a moment could be worse than a man being tortured for 50 years.[30]

Yudkowsky believes some strange controversial things! Also, some people on the internet have presented evidence that doesn’t agree with Yudkowsky’s conclusions! Shock! He must be a total crock of shit!

Ironically, this falls into appeal to mockery, the same issue EY addresses in the essay linked above.

Again, I don’t agree with everything EY says, but it’s incredibly uncharitable to characterize his beliefs this way. For example, the dust-speck problem isn’t meant to be Obvious Truth- there was a massive debate around it on LW, in fact, and it appears to be construed specifically to be difficult to answer.

A wrong belief on something doesn’t make you discredited. It just makes you wrong on that thing.

Of course, you’d expect someone as smart as Yudkowsky to have a lot of correct opinions. But I don’t know whether his opinions are correct or not since I’m not an expert in his field. I recommend him based on my personal experience applying and thinking about his philosophy, not based on any particular object-level accuracy of his.

Yudkowsky Once Wrote a Story Where Rape Is Legal and It Wasn’t a Dystopia (rape cw):

Also, while it is not very clear what his actual position is on this, he wrote a short sci-fi story where rape was briefly mentioned as legal.[31] That the character remarking on it didn’t seem to be referring to consensual sex in the same way we do today didn’t prevent a massive reaction in the comments section. He responded “The fact that it’s taken over the comments is not as good as I hoped, but neither was the reaction as bad as I feared.” He described the science fiction world he had in mind as a “Weirdtopia” rather than a dystopia.[32]

Yes, and the point is?

Yudkowsky doesn’t go around raping people - though his non-rape-related philosophy wouldn’t necessarily be wrong even if he did - and he doesn’t go around advocating for a society like this.

It may or may not be morally wrong that he does not address it seriously. This wiki article doesn’t make any argument about that, though.

This is also irrelevant to his meta-philosophy.

In Conclusion

The ratwiki article on Yudkowsky managed to insinuate various terrible things about him which are often implausible, inaccurate, or technically-true but with false implications. It is nothing other than a mockingly snide attempt at character assassination.

It has little or nothing to do with Yudkowsky’s actual philosophy, and manages to strawman him badly.

I continue to recommend Yudkowsky for (critical, skeptical) reading. Thank you again for asking.

#Anonymous #asks #the rightful caliph #rape cw #big yud #philosophy #effortpost

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durfeehtbelloraco98insuranc-blog · 5 years

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