#but bubble blower does the same thing but slightly better..

[maraschinotopped]

me, holding both the jumping jack powerup and bubble blower powerup: ..these... these do the same thing. which one do i scrap.

[dogtoling]

What is a Special Weapon? (a speculation)

So let's get straight into the post. (LONG post under the cut)

A Special Weapon is: - the weapon itself: a powerful ink battling weapon manufactured and regulated specifically for this purpose (Bubble Blower, Sting Ray, Inkstrike, Inkzooka etc.) OR - a specialized attack or response treated as a special weapon (Kraken, Splashdown, Booyah Bomb etc.) - Supposedly uses the Inkling's own ink - debatable, but highly likely based on evidence

Before we can get deeper into the special weapon lore, we must look into what comes BEFORE a special weapon. That's the special gauge.

There are multiple ways to fill up a special gauge: - Inking turf - Having control over an objective in Ranked Battle - Being in an underdog situation in a match (Tenacity) - Equipping a Canned Special What happens when the special is then activated? The meter slowly depletes, and once it is fully drained, the special ends. In practice, what IS the special meter? Now, when looking at the meter objectively, it looks as if it's filled with ink. That alongside its function in powering Special Weapons, as well as draining like an actual Ink Tank, can give the impression that it is LITERALLY a secondary ink reserve the player is filling up. This is in order to then use all of that ink as ammo for the special. And this actually makes a lot of sense. well now it's time to open a whole new can of worms (or weapons i guess)

CANNED SPECIALS Canned specials are literally, well, canned specials that make an appearance in Splatoon's single player modes as well as the Battle Dojo from the first game.

(From the splash screen of the first game, we can see that they are approximately the size of an actual tuna can.) Upon obtaining a canned special, your special gauge immediately fills up and you gain the ability to use said special weapon, which heavily suggests that the special weapon itself is stored inside.... the tiny can. You know, stuff like a force field, or a 7ft ink cannon. Or a pressure washer that includes more ink than the volume of an Inkling. Yeah. Right. So this implies insane hammerspace technology if it IS to be taken at face value - although i find it odd that there's not a single official art or tidbit of lore that acknowledges that inklings in fact obtain their specials from tiny hammerspace tins. (Even sub weapons and their inner workings make a tiny appearance in official art. Specials are never elaborated on too much, unfortunately...)

As an alternative, there is the concept of the cans holding a specific amount of condensed ink enough to power any of the included specials that you could then pop inside the weapon. That is not at all how it's implied to work, but it's a cool alternate explanation that makes slightly more sense - and if we take some liberties and assume that the cans are a LIIITTLE bit bigger, we could even argue that the cans could be THE special gauge itself. Looking at the special gauge, it IS designed to be round, just like a tin. I don't recall what it was modeled after if anything, or if it's just a coincidence, but food for thought.

Oh yeah also here's a picture of a NORMAL main weapon can that you can get at Kamabo Co. They have one for like every weapon type as well as some bombs which implies that weapons are oftentimes stored inside cans (although these might be bigger cans). Either way, the ink tank idea might be down the drain considering the implications of this one.

Anyway, moving on. Hi guys! I brought you guys all the way through that wall of text... just to dunk on that literal ink tank theory and dump it in the trash because there is another theory that makes more sense on like every scale possible. I'm so sorry. (But I also really like the idea of the special gauge being a literal ink tank that you fill up, so I had to include it, because it's not like it doesn't hold a lot of ground.) I'll get straight to the point. The other theory is that the special gauge is only a hypothetical concept created for the sake of gameplay and balancing, and in reality, it is simply the buildup to what I'll refer to as the "special rush" state of an Inkling. It has no physical value, varies between Inklings, and has no ties to actual points at all. Observe these bits from the art books 1 and 2:

1. Some Inkzooka trivia. Although the entry refers to SPECIFICALLY this weapon, it is very likely that the same is true for all special weapons - or at least the ones that primarily use ink (so not necessarily things such as the Bubbler and Echolocator).

(Ignore the random lines. Those are my notes lol) This Baller entry tells us a LOT and i mean a LOT of what we needed to know. First of all, the Inklings' ink output breaks the laws of physics there is no way a single inkling has enough ink inside it to even fill THAT ball at least 4 times the volume of its body NOT TO MENTION producing enough ink to fill one SEVEN TIMES THAT SIZE anyway the important part is the one where it confirms that Inklings produce an abnormal amount of ink while they are using a special weapon. Because the Baller was specifically developed for the purpose of containing all the excess ink, there is a big implication that the ink is originating from the user itself, specifically in the moment of using a Special. Then why is this? Well now we get to the concept of the "special rush" that I mentioned before. It refers to this state that we see Inklings enter when their special gauge fills up:

Their tentacles will glow, bubble up as if boiling, and they will look as if caught in an epic dramatic action movie wind at all times. This is when they're able to use their Special.

I think it's safe to say that this is "a heightened emotional state". As opposed to for example the Kraken which could be a repurposed panic response (if you haven't seen my post about that, that exists too) the special rush is likely a similar all-out response, although caused by getting really in the zone of battle. So to put it simply, a POSITIVE chemical response, in which the Inkling's body starts pumping more ink through channeling one's fighting spirit and yadda yadda yadda.

To put it shortly here; this "rush" likely evolved as a response to intense territory disputes or even hunting. More ink means more defense AND more offensive power. In Turf Wars, reaching this rush means that Inklings can - and probably have to - channel this excess ink elsewhere, which in this case is into special weapons that quickly gobble up all of the excess ink (with part of it going in the ink tank).

A lot of the weapons second this excess ink theory by including a heightened coating of ink across the user's whole body (Ink Armor, Booyah Bomb, Splashdown) or even rounding up the excess ink that's built up into an offensive endeavor (Splashdown, Booyah Bomb, other specials utilize it as ammo). Once all the ink is used up, the Inkling's emotional state stabilizes and the cycle soon starts over again until they hit the high mark again. (For a second ignoring the fact that it is physically impossible for them to produce this much ink. I guess I'm not ignoring it since I'm drawing attention to it here but it bothers me so much. My work is never done lol) So I guess this theory makes sense, but why is it inherently BETTER than the "special gauge is an ink reserve" one? Let's see the arguments for the ink tank version: 1. The Special Gauge is literally filled up with ink as the game is played. This is potentially something that happens as the weapon is shot, and some of the ink is channeled into the special gauge instead.

> It doesn't make much sense for this to be the case. The ink is being SHOT OUT, not stored; at least not stored anywhere visible and although you really have to have room for imagination when trying to draw logic for this game, i would really assume the developers would include a physical indicator of the gauge if it was meant to be literal.

2. There is potential for the Canned Specials to BE the gauge itself, as something that attaches or "fuels" the special. The gauge could be designed the way it is to reflect this.

> The canned specials are a weirdly inconsistent thing in the world of Splatoon, appearing ONLY as insta-fills in single player campaigns and the Splatoon 1 battle dojo. True, there are some on the player's desk in the splash screen of the first game, but we also don't know if those are for Turf War, or the dojo, or from Hero Mode. There's not even any for sale at Ammo Knights, whereas entire special weapons outside of cans very much are. Even if the special gauge isn't a can, it also doesn't mean that a can as an ink tank can't essentially serve the same purpose of providing the ink needed for a special. 3. The gauge fills up with a very distinct ink graphic, so it could literally mean it's ink!

> This one is true! But taking into consideration one thing; as a hypothetical gauge, the connection with ink is STILL there, as by the time the gauge is finished, the Inkling is basically overflowing with excess Ink. So rather than an external tank being filled with ink, the player itself is. 4. The gauge fills, then it's full, and it slowly depletes as a special is used. Basically the perfect flow; and a perfect reasoning for where all the ink comes from, and WHY you need to fill up the gauge to be able to use a special.

> This same reasoning still makes complete sense for the hypothetical gauge. The graphic goes up to indicate how close the Inkling is getting to the rush state, clearly shows when they are IN the rush state, and then the state slowly wears off as the ink is used. Where the ink comes from is directly explained in canon at this point; an Inkling in its special weapon state emits a crazy amount of ink - according to what the art book shows, more than like 10 times the volume of the inkling itself. Which makes zero sense whatsoever but, well, it does explain where the ink comes from. 5. The special meter being hypothetical wouldn't be good because it wouldn't be consistent at all. Some people surely get way more pumped WAY faster and use way more specials than others! No balance!

> The special meters aren't consistent to begin with, even in the game. People who stack Special Charge Up will sometimes use a special upwards of five times per 3-minute-game. People who get splatted a lot may literally never get to use a special once. Just like people's personalities in real life, the rates at which different Inklings would "charge up" can vary by a mile. And furthermore...

We see examples of the "special rush" outside of the gameplay!

Pearl, in the ending of Octo Expansion, enters a special rush mode seemingly out of nowhere (though you could also maybe say she might have used a canned special) after getting pumped to literally save the world. So does Agent 3; DOZENS OF TIMES, in both iterations of battles against them. They use a bunch of special weapons completely out of left field, take way more hits than the player and continuously use Splashdowns. This is because they're continuously triggering their Rush in the midst of intense combat, and especially under mind control, during which most of what they probably have is survival instinct, which means drastically raised ink production upping both offensive and defensive capabilities. But wait, there's actually even more that supports the theory of the special gauge referring to a buildup to a rush state: - Tenacity as an ability. This ability makes it so that your special gauge will automatically fill itself up if your team has fewer players on the field than the enemy team. This ability makes very little sense in the situation that the special gauge is literally an ink tank, as you're not actually shooting ink at all for it to fill up. However, as an emotional thing, a player that is also an underdog is SURE to be really giving their all in the competition and thus building up their rush faster. - Your special gauge supposedly fills up passively while your team has control of the objective in Ranked (I literally didn't know this because I barely play ranked ever). Again, this has nothing to do with actual inking. But what it DOES have to do with is potentially winning the game, and that totally gets you pumped. - Again, the inconsistencies in a special gauge. If it was an ink tank, you would assume the amount of ink needed for each special weapon was a very specific amount. Instead, players fill their special gauge at different rates, and getting splatted cuts down the gauge... again, depending on your abilities. Losing ink from a pre-filled ink tank that is being specifically saved up for a weapon doesn't really make sense as one gets splatted, but getting demoralized and frustrated when getting splatted makes a whole lot of sense, which would also set you back in reaching your special rush.

In conclusion: The Special Gauge is a hypothetical meter that exists for gameplay purposes; in practice, it only conveys how close or far a player is to their "special rush" state, in which their senses and emotions are heightened and their ink production is greatly increased due to a surge in fighting spirit.

1. When a battle starts, no one has their rush going on because everyone is only just warming up. Different people with different objectives and personalities may get their rush very quickly, very slowly, very frequently or only once. You get the picture.

2. As players find themselves doing intense physical activities, participating in tense combat and so on, they build up towards their rush state (likely building up endorphins, dopamine and adrenaline or the like), which increases the body's ink production. It is likely that contact with ink also naturally increases one's ink production.

3. When players hit this rush state and the "special meter" is filled, they can channel all the excess ink into a special weapon. Once the ink is used up, the rush subsides into a less intense emotional state, until the cycle may start again soon after.

Well, there's my thoughts on specials and mostly the special gauge and what it means. Thanks for reading yet another one of these essays.

[gusticeleague]

Morty’s Mind Blowers review

Oh thank god, it’s an easy one.

I was surprised that this turned out to the the answer to Interdimensional Cable this season. I thought Tales from the Citadel was going to be it, since it basically had the same anthology structure but more focused and less based on vignettes.  

Actually if anything, the episode Morty’s Mind Blowers most reminds me of is the parasite episode, given that it focuses on the unpleasant memories you have about your mistakes or your family that you wish you could erase but have to live with because that’s a part of your shared history, for better or worse.

I can totally buy from a character perspective that Morty would want to erase the terrible things he does and Rick would allow him because when Morty gets emotional, it interferes with Rick’s work. I especially love the idea that Rick erases any evidence that he isn’t a hyper-capable genius in Morty’s mind (and that beating him at checkers is one such slight deserving of memory erasure to him). My one gripe though is when they hit the amnesia angle halfway through. It works for what the episode is trying to do because it means we get to see more Mind Blowers, but I’ve never been a fan of amnesia plots because they don’t really tend to use that opportunity to teach us anything new about the characters and just expect the audience to laugh at the characters rediscovering who they are, which is never as funny to me as putting characters in new environments or familiar but slightly off versions of them, which is where Tales from the Citadel really succeeded.

As good as all those Mind-Blowers were (I don’t think there’s a bad one in the lot), I kind of felt the framing story could have leaned into similar thematic territory. If you’ve read my rankings of Rick and Morty episodes from the first two seasons, you’ll see a pretty big disparity between the two Interdimensional Cable episodes. To my mind, Rixty Minutes works better over Interdimensional Cable II: Tempting Fate because while they both lean into the escapist power of television to distract you from getting involved with complicated family drama, Rixty Minutes uses that conceit for one of the most life-affirming character moments ever put to television and a thesis statement for the entire show, while Interdimensional Cable II takes what could have been an interesting reason to have all the characters watching television (to distract from worrying about a mortally diseased Jerry) and proceeded to do nothing interesting with it. I can’t really blame them though. From what I’ve gleaned about that episode’s production, Interdimensional Cable ran out of steam as a concept pretty quickly, as they initially thought was going to be their answer to Treehouse of Horror but then decided against it when they realised that they couldn’t make that lightning strike twice. And so instead we have Morty’s Mind Blowers, which gives the writing team time to really hash out a solid joke rather than rely on any random thing that Justin and company want to riff on in the booth.

There’s not really a whole lot to comment on here, so I’m probably just going to bullet point the rest of this one out. A freeform anthology review, if you will.

I’ve been trying to think of what regular episodes could count as mind-blowers, but then I realised that all of them take place after Jerry left, because he isn’t in any of them other than one brief one at Morty’s 13th birthday. Which is also an interesting continuity note, because Morty is 14 by the time the show starts and Rick had already been with the family for about a year prior to that point, since the anniversary of his coming back was in the first Council of Ricks episode. I’m guessing the 13th birthday one is either due to Rick’s shitty filing system and/or Rick deciding to remove that memory from Morty’s mind sometime after Jerry left, maybe because Morty reminded him about it and then removed it out of spite.

Hey look, it’s Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. This show is full of Endless possibilities. Also, the Truth Tortoise said “I’m a Beatle, Paul is dead” backwards, because of course it did.

I love how Jerry has a crappier version of the Mind Blower helmet with VHS tapes instead of vials of memory goo. One of them’s labelled “Sleepy Gary”.

They were pretty spot on with those Men in Black II jokes. “Save it for Youtube” made me chuckle, and also a little ashamed at the fact that I do spend a good chunk of my time online watching video essays.  

Anyway, it seems like that The Ricklantis Mixup took up the majority of the time and budget and was an emotional gut-punch to boot, so Morty’s Mind Blowers is meant to serve as a breather for the fans and the writers before we get to what I assume is going to be a gut-punch Beth and Rick episode and a climax to either Rick-Shank Redemption or The Ricklantis Mixup. And structural nit-picking aside, while The Ricklantis Mixup was a better anthology this season, this one had enough good clips in it that it passes the bar. Not Rixty Minutes good, but not Interdimensional Cable II bad. Probably somewhere in the ballpark of Lawnmower Dog.

Episode MVP: Summer, for not getting paid enough for this shit.

Favourite bit character: Poor Beebo. If only it were Venzenulon Nine, then he wouldn’t have died in vain.

And instead of best joke, here’s my:

Top 5 Mind Blowers

5) Beth’s Choice

Only including this one because it got such a reaction out of me. I’ve mentioned before how I find Beth one of the more interesting characters on the show because of how the writers base her psychological profile out of Rick leaving her as a child and how that affected her ability to relate to people, including Jerry and her own children. Choosing Summer over Morty feels in line with that. It kind of the inverse of that bit in Malcolm in the Middle where Lois says if she was to choose between saving Reese or Malcolm, she’d choose Reese, because he needs all the help he can get while Malcolm is smart enough to look after himself since he’s smart and Reese is an idiot. Whereas Beth would choose Summer since she’s more capable and less of a hassle to look after than Morty, who I think she sees as a smaller Jerry and she probably made that Sophie’s Choice a long time ago in her mind.

4) Talking to Animals

RIP Erica Henderson and Ryan North’s mentions. I’m really only including this on the list for the hummingbird’s thoughts, since it reminded me of The Far Side. I find the idea of animals secretly plotting against us kind of rote because it is almost always something cute and innocuous like a squirrel or a rabbit or a dolphin, and never something more genuinely benign and out-of-left-field like...I dunno, anteaters. Also turns out Rick and Morty have hopped realities again, which at this point they could only really do as a throwaway joke, cause there’s no way in hell they’re going to be able to top the end of Rick Potion #9.

3) The Whole Enchilada

Speaking of hell, the bait-and-switch of the alien having has an actual objective afterlife was excellent, and something I’ve always wondered why that hasn’t been explored more. Especially if a species were to have a soul and what their notion of “life” would be if they know it continues to exist for them after their tangible existence. That’s been done, right? Trek’s probably done it, surely.

2) Wrong Light Switch

Great set-up, excellent punch-line. The less you explain it, the funnier it is.

1 ) “True Level”

My favourite kind of joke is to take an ordinary activity or thing and ramp it up to a ridiculous science fiction version of that thing. My favourite kind of Rick and Morty joke is to have Rick be the one to introduce the sci-fi version of a thing to Morty, only for Rick to get frustrated at Morty’s inability to wrap his head around it. My second favourite kind of Rick and Morty joke is to have a character gain a sudden cosmic revelation and having it crush their spirit so completely as to be permanently emotionally crippled, usually while woefully lamenting their own insignificance. So this is basically the perfect joke to me. My true level of jokes.

It does feel a little familiar though, mostly because I think I can tell that Dan Harmon wrote this segment. Rick’s rant about judging level with “your naked caveman eye and a bubble of fucking air” could have been taken from any first five minutes of a Harmontown episode, and the whole premise seems incredibly similar to that Community joke about the room where they get room temperature from. Be that as it may, there’s no sin in being familiar, and “REALITY IS POISON!” made me laugh my ass off, so it’s a very easy hit to my funny bone regardless.

Final Rating: 3 out of 5 grapples

[uncomfortableisok]

How a NZ crowdfunding CEO improved my self-awareness

Recently I spoke with Anna Guenther, CEO and chief bubble blower of PledgeMe, a New Zealand based crowdfunding platform “helping Kiwis fund the things they care about”. I’d been wanting to chat with Anna for quite a while, her name was on the “potential awesome podcast guests” list that I keep for myself. I’d been reluctant about reaching out as I’d heard she was super busy and had thought, “Why would a CEO give up their time to chat with me if I’m just reaching out to them cold?”

Thankfully one day I managed the courage to reach out to ask if she’d be interested in coming on the show. The reply I received back the next day was awesome “Ha! I’m pretty used to being uncomfortable! I could catch up early next week if you’d like?” We caught up down at Creative HQ in Wellington and sat down to find out a bit more about each other over a cup of peppermint tea before the meeting room we were going to chat in freed up. I don’t know what I’d felt so uncomfortable about as we discussed favourite podcasts, why we liked them and why we didn’t, as well as what we were going to try at “Wellington on a Plate”.

When we got stuck into the podcast conversation we talked a bit about Anna’s background, her accent belies the fact she is from Dunedin. Then we got into the origin story of PledgeMe, it’s an interesting story and you can listen to it here. But as you know it’s the uncomfortable stuff around it that I find interesting. Anna discussed heaps of great ideas, but these ones are popping up for me at the moment with where I am at.

“That felt like the validation point where we could really start telling people about it”

There came a time in the development of PledgeMe that Anna and her co-founder were convinced that this was something that could really work. The idea was validated in their minds and they could really start to push it. It’s a tipping point that I’m sure a lot of us face when we come up with an interesting idea. I know it was when I started up podcasting. I had all sorts of thoughts going through my head; Who is going to want to talk with me on the show? Who is going to want to listen to me? Do I have the technical skills to pull this off? Do I have enough interesting things to talk about to pull this off?

The easiest things to measure were, if I could get people to come and have a conversation with me, and how many people were downloading the episodes. For some reason I set myself the target of getting 10 people to speak with me before putting out any episodes. I figured that if I could convince 10 people that I might be interesting to chat with, then I could probably go on convincing people. Looking back, I’ve put out over 70 episodes to date and have spoken with over 60 guests. I’d also set myself the target of trying to get 50 downloads for each episode, I have no idea why I chose that as my validation number (although I do have a big family, so maybe I thought that if I had that many at least someone that wasn’t related to me was probably listening). The first few episodes hit that number quickly and all of the others have surpassed it, some by quite a significant amount.

Hitting these validation targets is important as it helps with our confidence levels and keeps us engaged and the momentum going on our ideas. The challenging thing is where this validation target lies? Set it too close and it may be an idea that you keep pushing towards that you should let go. Set it too far away and if you don’t hit it early then you might find yourself getting disheartened and drifting away from a great idea. I don’t have any earthshattering advice about this, instead focus on a target that is a decent challenge for you to hit, but still well below where you want to end up

“There is healthy stress which makes you think differently and push harder”

We talk about stress often, and I don’t know about you but for me the word often brings up negative connotations. The concept of stress is often frame in a way that it is bad to experience. This isn’t always the case as having some stress is often a good thing when we are working towards something.

Think about a deadline of something you have been working on, this deadline creates a sense of stress around time for us. Being in this state of stress will often increase my effectiveness and my creativity. It forces me to focus my energy and concentration on the topic at hand, getting the job done. Having this pressure on me often forces me to come up with slightly different ways of doing things to the way that I would normally just plod through a task, sometimes this new way increases my efficiency or output in the future. If I didn’t have this stress on myself then I find my concentration wandering off and getting distracted with a whole lot of sparkly things. As a bit of a test I’ve set myself a time deadline to write this post by to see if I can train my focus by putting myself under some stress. It seems to be working so far. I’m perceiving this stress as a beneficial stress for me. I know it’s not damaging and I can use it for my advantage to get something productive done.

The problem is when I don’t manage my stress levels well. This healthy stress that use to my advantage, called Eustress, can turn into distress. The stress is the same in this instance, I have a deadline coming up. However my response to it differs. I perceive the stress as negative, that it is problematic to me. When I do this I find myself getting flustered, my ability to perform drops away and I get distracted easily. My ability to manage my stress levels depends on a lot of things, what I’ve been eating, how well I’ve slept, what else is going on in my life, if I’ve moved my body recently. But the largest influence on how I manage is my perception of the stress as either positive or negative. If I can ship my perspective so that this stress is a positive thing for me, then I can harness it to improve my performance.

It’s not good to be under stress all the time, even if it is the healthy kind. It’s important to have time when not stressed to relax, but also to reflect and take away learnings about how I handled the situation and what I might do differently next time. Each time I am under stress it’s an opportunity to train myself to get better at dealing with it.

“We should be having robust conversations about everything, diversity of perspective is so important”

BOOM! Not so long ago it was thought everything that was known was all that there was. How things have changed, the earth is no longer flat, the sun does not revolve around the earth, and women are capable of making at least as informed choice about who to vote for as men are.

I used to be very guilty of adhering to just one perspective. In my early to mid-twenties I was stuck in a very fixed mindset and thought that the way I was doing things was the way I was supposed to be doing things. It didn’t serve me well, and I ended up being a pretty boring, unhealthy person, some may even argue a bit of a dickhead! Over the years since then, my perspective has gradually changed. It’s changed through conversations, whether this being through having robust discussions with people, or listening to differing viewpoints.

This is the way the world has changed over time, through having these discussions. The things I mentioned before have all been proven, but when the concept was first floated they hadn’t been and it was only though robust conversation that the world was convinced.

Now I try my best to jump into robust discussion about topics. I may not always change my perspective as a result of having these discussions, but at least I’m at a point now where I recognise the importance of taking the time to listen and engage.

Listen to the full episode here.

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Host: Chris Desmond

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Check out this episode!

[newsever24-blog]

She’s 26, and Brought Down Uber’s C.E.O. What’s Next?

New Post has been published on http://newsever24.com/shes-26-and-brought-down-ubers-c-e-o-whats-next/

She’s 26, and Brought Down Uber’s C.E.O. What’s Next?

SAN FRANCISCO —

Susan Fowler was, she recalls, “over the moon” in January 2016. At 24, she had just snagged her dream job as a site reliability engineer at Uber, which had recruited her by telling her the ride-hailing company was a “super-women-friendly” place to work, boasting 25 percent female engineers. And she had her first date with the man who would become her husband, Chad Rigetti, who runs a quantum computing start-up in Berkeley, Calif., and who, she says dreamily, is as “beautiful” as Michael Fassbender. She’s 26, and Brought Down Uber’s C.E.O. What’s Next?

After a movie, she pulled out her phone and opened up her Uber app to get them a car home.

“No, no, no,” Mr. Rigetti told her. “I don’t use Uber.”

“What?” Ms. Fowler replied, thinking he was joking. “But I work there.”

“I only use Lyft,” he said. “Did you read that interview with the C.E.O., Travis, where he talked about how Uber helps him get girls? He’s a misogynist. I could never use his product.”

Ms. Fowler smiles ruefully at the memory, during her first interview since she became instantly famous. As we sit in the Clift Hotel’s lobby cafe, decorated with black-and-white animal tiles, it’s startling to think that this is the woman who pierced the self-indulgent, adolescent Pleasure Island mentality of Silicon Valley, causing the stunning downfall of Travis “we call that ‘Boob-er’” Kalanick and starting a bonfire on creepy sexual behavior in Silicon Valley that, fueled by a report in The Times and cascading stories, spread to Hollywood and engulfed Harvey Weinstein and Amazon’s Roy Price.

Dressed in black jeans, brown loafers, a denim jacket — “the only clothes I can fit into” — and wearing a Fitbit with a hot pink band that cost her $1 on Amazon, Ms. Fowler is 26 and seven months pregnant. She looks so young that people give her “weird looks,” she says, worried that she will be a teenage mother.

She is petite, with an angelic smile and an air of innocence that belies a fierce will. Her Instagram account features a picture of Charlie Brown saying, “Be the best you can be”; a coffee mug with the motto from Apollo 13, “Failure is not an option”; and books she is reading on a wide array of subjects including ants. She describes herself as “an amateur myrmecologist.”

Ms. Fowler did everyone in tech a favor by unmasking the donkeys “worshiped as kings” by the venture capitalists and investors and boards and even the media, felling them with one “epic” 2,900-word blog post “about what happens when a hot company becomes hostage to its increasingly dysfunctional and toxic behaviors.”

No doubt when Mr. Kalanick met the wide-eyed Ms. Fowler at the office Christmas party soon after she started, it never entered his head that she would become the disciplinarian who effectively confiscated his car keys for reckless driving with one blog post.

Yet it was a role that Ms. Fowler had been preparing for her whole life. The Peter Pan libertines met their match in a sweet Stoic.

She had what she calls an “unconventional upbringing,” the second child of seven in a small town in rural Arizona called Yarnell. Her father was an evangelical Assemblies of God preacher who sold pay phones on weekdays and, with his wife, home-schooled Susan and her siblings. She ended up never going to high school.

“So I was kind of on my own,” she says. “I tried to read the classics, would go to the library a lot, tried to teach myself things. But didn’t really have any direction. I really had this dream that someday I could be educated.”

She read Plutarch’s “Lives.” “The Stoics were really what changed me,” she says. “Because their whole thing was about, ‘You don’t have control over a lot of the things that determine your life, so all you can do is focus on becoming the best person that you can be.’ And that really spoke to me because I did feel, especially during my teenage years, that my life was really out of my control. I really wished that I could just learn and do all the fun things and cool extracurriculars that I thought everybody else my age was doing.”

Ms. Fowler worked as a stable hand and a nanny to help support her family. “And I would tell myself, in the times when I would be really, really sad, ‘Once I get out of here, I’m going to do something great.’ And I would just pray at night, like, ‘God, please just let me get out, give me opportunities to get out. I promise I’ll do good with it.’”

At 16, she began “freaking out” about her future. “I had this really intense resolve. I would call universities and community colleges and say, ‘I really want to go to college? How do I get to college. What do I do?’ And they would say, ‘You have to get an application. You have to get letters of recommendation.’ It was terrifying. I had no idea what I was doing.”

She figured out how to take the SAT and ACT. She made a list of all the books she had read and at the top wrote, “Susan Fowler’s Home School” and sent it off to Arizona State University.

“And they actually gave me a full scholarship,” she says, the wonder still in her voice.

The college balked at letting her take math and physics to study astronomy, given her lack of high-school prerequisites. “And I was like, ‘No! I didn’t come this far, now that I’ve found something I really loved, to have my dream smashed,’” Ms. Fowler says.

She applied to the top 10 colleges as a transfer student and was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was told she could study physics and given help with the steep tuition.

After a rough first semester, advisers tried to steer her away from physics. So she walked into the office of Penn’s president, Amy Gutmann, and left a message with her assistant: In a commencement speech, Ms. Gutmann had said that the school would help students fulfill their dreams.

“I heard back directly from the president herself, and she was like, ‘You are right. This is a place for people to fulfill their dreams.’” She told Ms. Fowler she could get back to her whiteboards, and after that, it was “fantastic.”

The Memo That Roared

The essay that shook Silicon Valley was called “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” and Ms. Fowler began by noting that it was “a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story.” Published on Feb. 19, it rocked the world’s most valuable start-up, challenging the mantra that great disrupters are above the law. The blog post was notable for its dispassionate tone, as the young engineer who had left the company after a year walked the reader through everything that had gone very, very wrong in the brozilla culture of kegs, sexual coarseness and snaky competition.

Ms. Fowler was on her first day with her new engineering team when her manager sent her a string of messages over the company chat system.

“He’s telling me that he’s in an open relationship and that his girlfriend is getting laid all the time, but he just can’t because he’s at work all the time,” she says, reprising her blog post with me. “And he’s trying really hard not to get in trouble at work, but he’s really looking for a woman to have sex with. And I was like, ‘What the hell? This can’t be real. How stupid does he have to be?’ But it turned out he’d been getting away with this for so long, he didn’t care anymore. And I feel like so many of these men, they believe that the only reason women get into these jobs is to get a guy.”

Ms. Fowler took screen shots and reported the manager to human resources, thinking, “They’ll do the right thing.” But they didn’t, explaining that the manager was “a high performer” and it was his first offense, something Ms. Fowler later discovered to be untrue.

“Somehow I’m supposed to be like, ‘Oh, he’s a high performer? Never mind. How dare I?’” she says, laughing.

She wrote that H.R. told her she could either find another team to work on or stay on that man’s team and expect a poor performance review. Another manager told her that if she reported stuff to H.R., he could fire her. Amid the manic, sexist behavior, the number of female engineers in the division Ms. Fowler was part of dwindled to less than 6 percent — too few, the company said, to merit ordering them the same black leather jackets they were ordering for the men.

When Ms. Fowler earned some money from “Production-Ready Microservices,” a book on engineering she wrote, she went out to Madewell and bought herself a black leather jacket.

“I didn’t really care if they branded me a troublemaker,” she says, “because I hadn’t gotten that far in my life and overcome all these things to get treated inappropriately. I wasn’t going to take it. I’d worked so hard. I deserved so much better. And I was, like, ‘No. That’s not O.K. You don’t get to do that.’”

In her memo, she says, “I knew I had to be super-careful about how I said it if I wanted anybody to take it seriously. A lot of women have been whistle-blowers in the past, and a lot of them have just gotten torn down and treated terribly. One of the things that kept popping up was this idea that if you do whistle-blow about sexual harassment, then that is what will define the rest of your life. And I kind of struggled with this. But then, to me, I realized, you know what? No. Stepping back, just being in my little Stoicism Susan bubble, if what people know you for is bringing light to an issue about bad behavior, about bad stuff going on and laws not being followed and people being treated inappropriately, why wouldn’t I want that? That’s a badge of honor.

“And I wasn’t just standing up for myself. I felt like I was standing up for everyone else that I was seeing at Uber who was mistreated. It was an extremely demoralizing environment. I would see people who would get harassed or made fun of or bullied and they would go report it, and they would just get ground down by upper management and H.R. And so I felt like, if I can take this on despite the consequences, then I should do it.”

Like women in Hollywood I talked to after the Weinstein collapse, Ms. Fowler thought the new outspokenness in Silicon Valley on sexual harassment may have been spurred by the election of President Trump.

“The second Trump won, I felt super-powerless and I thought, ‘Oh my God, no one’s looking out for us,’” she says. “They have the House, they have the Senate, they have the White House. And so we have to take it back ourselves. We have to be the ones doing the work.”

The only woman on the board then, Arianna Huffington, who had vowed that the culture of “brilliant jerks” must end, had been trying to help Mr. Kalanick by advising him to sleep more and meditate. But he caused another kerfuffle when he chose to meditate in the lactation room.

When Ms. Fowler’s memo exploded, Ms. Huffington oversaw the investigation by Eric Holder, reached out and talked to employees, and said she wanted to “hold the leadership team’s feet to the fire.” Uber later fired 20 people, including senior executives.

“So I was disappointed in her because I expected her to be an advocate,” Ms. Fowler says, noting that Ms. Huffington appeared on TV after the blog post to insist that there’s no “systemic problem” at Uber.

“I had two friends who went to her and Liane Hornsey, who’s the head of H.R., and reported various harassment discrimination,” Ms. Fowler says. “And then I was told that many other women were doing the same thing. And then Arianna went on TV that same week and said, there’s no ‘systemic problem.’ Which I was like, ‘No, a whole bunch of people just went to you this week.’” Ms. Fowler adds that the company’s C.T.O., Thuan Pham, who knew about her complaints, is still in the same job.

Ms. Huffington told me that she agreed that the problem was “systemic sexism,” but that she did not believe there was “systemic sexual harassment.” But, she added, “there should be zero tolerance for even one case of sexual harassment.”

“I was totally supportive of having a full investigation of her claims,” Ms. Huffington says. “That’s why we brought in a former attorney general to investigate. I don’t think you can do a lot more than that.”

Ms. Fowler is not so sure. “The one interaction we had was right after I published the blog, when I started getting calls from friends and family and even acquaintances I hadn’t talked to in years and years who were getting calls about private investigators asking about it,” she says “And I was pretty sure that this was coming from Uber or someone close to Uber. So I sent an email to some of the members of the Uber board because I was like, ‘Look, I don’t know if you’re responsible for this, but hey, if you’re doing this, please stop.’

“And Arianna responded and she was like, ‘Travis has assured me that he did not do this.’ And I replied, asking her, ‘O.K., well, then, could you please go and say publicly, “Whoever’s doing this, stop,” if somebody is?’”

Ms. Huffington told me that “the board had a complete assurance from management that nothing was done like that or would be.”

Speaking to The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, Ms. Hornsey, who joined Uber a month after Ms. Fowler left and a month before the famous blog post, was asked if she had ever reached out to Ms. Fowler.

“I have said, very publicly, ‘Thank you’ to her because she raised some stuff that did lead to change,” she said. “I don’t know whether there would be any benefit in meeting her. I’m seriously working for my employees today; she’s an ex-employee.”

Ms. Fowler tweeted a screen shot of that part of the interview, saying: “Oooh burn” and “She really, really doesn’t like me.”

On the advice of a friend, Ms. Fowler got private security for the first few weeks after she published her incendiary essay.

She thinks Silicon Valley needs to get rid of forced arbitration. “When you join these companies, they make you sign away your constitutional right to sue,” she says.

Ms. Fowler has taken that to the Supreme Court, and as is her wont, is studying the syllabuses of Columbia Law School so she can learn more about her rights.

She now has a job at Stripe as the editor of its tech publication. And she’s working with Verve, a Hollywood talent agency, developing a movie based on her experiences, described by the agency to me as “Erin Brockovich” meets “The Social Network.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Fowler is still reading the Stoics (while Mr. Kalanick is still wrestling with the board about who should control the company he started). “I think, right now especially, with Trump in the White House, who knows what’

[uncomfortableisok]

How a NZ Crowdfunding CEO increased my self awareness

Recently I spoke with Anna Guenther, CEO and chief bubble blower of PledgeMe, a New Zealand based crowdfunding platform “helping Kiwis fund the things they care about”. I’d been wanting to chat with Anna for quite a while, her name was on the “potential awesome podcast guests” list that I keep for myself. I’d been reluctant about reaching out as I’d heard she was super busy and had thought, “Why would a CEO give up their time to chat with me if I’m just reaching out to them cold?”

Thankfully one day I managed the courage to reach out to ask if she’d be interested in coming on the show. The reply I received back the next day was awesome “Ha! I’m pretty used to being uncomfortable! I could catch up early next week if you’d like?” We caught up down at Creative HQ in Wellington and sat down to find out a bit more about each other over a cup of peppermint tea before the meeting room we were going to chat in freed up. I don’t know what I’d felt so uncomfortable about as we discussed favourite podcasts, why we liked them and why we didn’t, as well as what we were going to try at “Wellington on a Plate”.

When we got stuck into the podcast conversation we talked a bit about Anna’s background, her accent belies the fact she is from Dunedin. Then we got into the origin story of PledgeMe, it’s an interesting story and you can listen to it here. But as you know it’s the uncomfortable stuff around it that I find interesting. Anna discussed heaps of great ideas, but these ones are popping up for me at the moment with where I am at.

“That felt like the validation point where we could really start telling people about it”

There came a time in the development of PledgeMe that Anna and her co-founder were convinced that this was something that could really work. The idea was validated in their minds and they could really start to push it. It’s a tipping point that I’m sure a lot of us face when we come up with an interesting idea. I know it was when I started up podcasting. I had all sorts of thoughts going through my head; Who is going to want to talk with me on the show? Who is going to want to listen to me? Do I have the technical skills to pull this off? Do I have enough interesting things to talk about to pull this off?

The easiest things to measure were, if I could get people to come and have a conversation with me, and how many people were downloading the episodes. For some reason I set myself the target of getting 10 people to speak with me before putting out any episodes. I figured that if I could convince 10 people that I might be interesting to chat with, then I could probably go on convincing people. Looking back, I’ve put out over 70 episodes to date and have spoken with over 60 guests. I’d also set myself the target of trying to get 50 downloads for each episode, I have no idea why I chose that as my validation number (although I do have a big family, so maybe I thought that if I had that many at least someone that wasn’t related to me was probably listening). The first few episodes hit that number quickly and all of the others have surpassed it, some by quite a significant amount.

Hitting these validation targets is important as it helps with our confidence levels and keeps us engaged and the momentum going on our ideas. The challenging thing is where this validation target lies? Set it too close and it may be an idea that you keep pushing towards that you should let go. Set it too far away and if you don’t hit it early then you might find yourself getting disheartened and drifting away from a great idea. I don’t have any earthshattering advice about this, instead focus on a target that is a decent challenge for you to hit, but still well below where you want to end up

“There is healthy stress which makes you think differently and push harder”

We talk about stress often, and I don’t know about you but for me the word often brings up negative connotations. The concept of stress is often frame in a way that it is bad to experience. This isn’t always the case as having some stress is often a good thing when we are working towards something.

Think about a deadline of something you have been working on, this deadline creates a sense of stress around time for us. Being in this state of stress will often increase my effectiveness and my creativity. It forces me to focus my energy and concentration on the topic at hand, getting the job done. Having this pressure on me often forces me to come up with slightly different ways of doing things to the way that I would normally just plod through a task, sometimes this new way increases my efficiency or output in the future. If I didn’t have this stress on myself then I find my concentration wandering off and getting distracted with a whole lot of sparkly things. As a bit of a test I’ve set myself a time deadline to write this post by to see if I can train my focus by putting myself under some stress. It seems to be working so far. I’m perceiving this stress as a beneficial stress for me. I know it’s not damaging and I can use it for my advantage to get something productive done.

The problem is when I don’t manage my stress levels well. This healthy stress that use to my advantage, called Eustress, can turn into distress. The stress is the same in this instance, I have a deadline coming up. However my response to it differs. I perceive the stress as negative, that it is problematic to me. When I do this I find myself getting flustered, my ability to perform drops away and I get distracted easily. My ability to manage my stress levels depends on a lot of things, what I’ve been eating, how well I’ve slept, what else is going on in my life, if I’ve moved my body recently. But the largest influence on how I manage is my perception of the stress as either positive or negative. If I can ship my perspective so that this stress is a positive thing for me, then I can harness it to improve my performance.

It’s not good to be under stress all the time, even if it is the healthy kind. It’s important to have time when not stressed to relax, but also to reflect and take away learnings about how I handled the situation and what I might do differently next time. Each time I am under stress it’s an opportunity to train myself to get better at dealing with it.

“We should be having robust conversations about everything, diversity of perspective is so important”

BOOM! Not so long ago it was thought everything that was known was all that there was. How things have changed, the earth is no longer flat, the sun does not revolve around the earth, and women are capable of making at least as informed choice about who to vote for as men are.

I used to be very guilty of adhering to just one perspective. In my early to mid-twenties I was stuck in a very fixed mindset and thought that the way I was doing things was the way I was supposed to be doing things. It didn’t serve me well, and I ended up being a pretty boring, unhealthy person, some may even argue a bit of a dickhead! Over the years since then, my perspective has gradually changed. It’s changed through conversations, whether this being through having robust discussions with people, or listening to differing viewpoints.

This is the way the world has changed over time, through having these discussions. The things I mentioned before have all been proven, but when the concept was first floated they hadn’t been and it was only though robust conversation that the world was convinced.

Now I try my best to jump into robust discussion about topics. I may not always change my perspective as a result of having these discussions, but at least I’m at a point now where I recognise the importance of taking the time to listen and engage.

Listen to the full episode here.

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