#fictional taxonomy chart | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

literaticat · 4 months ago

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If an author writes a book not knowing the genre, will the book fit into a genre when it’s finished—or is it possible for a book to be completely genre-less?

I'm about to GO OFF, so if you just want the short answer:

I presume that if an author is writing a novel and they don't have a specific genre in mind when they are doing it, they are just writing fiction. You can get more specific after you finish the book and figure out where it belongs in the bookstore and how to describe it.

It's not really possible for a book to be "completely genre-less" because that implies that it CAN'T be categorized in a bookstore -- I bet your book can be. (I should hope so, anyway, otherwise how will it sell???) -- but also, uh -- it doesn't really matter? Everyone gets really hung up on these hyper-specific genre labels, but you don't really need to get THAT specific. If your book is just "general interest fiction" that's OK -- so call it a novel and describe what the tone is. (Funny? Realistic? Literary? Fast paced? Tearjerking? There has to be some way to describe it, no? )

Even if your book is just weird as hell rambling about things I would never read about in a hundred years -- guess what, that's a genre, Experimental Fiction. ;-)

Long Answer: Fun fact about the word "genre" -- it comes from the same root as genus, like what you probably heard back in school when learning about the taxonomy of animals and whatnot.

Because I am extra, I decided to do a little taxonomy of books. It's still a work in progress, I might decide to change it a bit, but this is the basic chart.

I'll assume that pretty much any book we're talking about here has the same domain, kingdom, phylum and class, and PROBABLY the same order, too, since most of you are likely writing Fiction.

Within the order FICTION, there are "families", which I here call Categories -- novels, graphic novels, plays, essay collections, short story anthologies, young adult novels, young adult anthologies, middle grade novels, middle grade graphic novels, chapter books, picture books, ETC. Categories in the order NONFICTION include Biography/Memoir, Cookbook, Reference, Religion, History, Science, etc.

Within each Category, there are different Genres -- that is, the type of [novel, or whatever] it is. Genres of novel include mystery, science fiction, horror, realistic, historical, romance, western, etc.

And within each Genre, you can get even more specific with species, which I am calling subgenre/tone. That's the type of the type, in other words. There are well-established subgenres (like Horror could be slasher, or gothic, or psychological. Romance could be historical, or realistic/contemporary, or whatever) -- but it's also acceptable to get more specific with tone or style -- "Comedic", "literary", "commercial" "upmarket" etc. (You can also have books that have both subgenre AND tone -- that's like species and sub-species)

Examples:

DRACULA: ORDER: Fiction > CATEGORY: Classic Novel > GENRE: Horror > SUBGENRE/TONE: Gothic

DON'T LET THE PIGEON DRIVE THE BUS: ORDER: Fiction > CATEGORY: Picture Book > GENRE: Meta-fiction > SUBGENRE/TONE: Comedic

LINCOLN IN THE BARDO: ORDER: Fiction > CATEGORY: Novel > GENRE: Magical Realism > SUBGENRE: Experimental > TONE: Literary

JAMES: ORDER: Fiction > CATEGORY: Novel > GENRE: Historical Fiction > SUBGRENRE: Retelling > TONE: Literary

You get it?

OK SO, in the bookstore, the books are first divided by CATEGORY. All the Cookbooks are together, because that's the Category, but if there are a lot of them, they will be broken up into categories-within-the-category ("genre" if you will). Perhaps they would be grouped by region or style (Mexican cuisine, Middle Eastern cuisine, European cuisine; Health Food; Baking; etc). Mastering the Art of French Cooking would be in Cookbooks, of course -- but in a larger bookstore with many cookbooks, it would likely be found in its region, either French or European Cuisine -- and in a store with a HUGE French cooking section, those books might even be further divided into "French > classic techniques" "French > desserts" "French > postmodern cuisine", etc. So:

MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING: Order: Nonfiction > Category: Cookbook > Genre: French > Subgenre: Classic Technique

And so it goes with Fiction as well; the sections are divided by Category. So all the Middle Grade Novels are probably together. All the Picture Books are probably together. Etc. But for very large categories (like Fiction > Novel), there are enough books that it becomes easier to browse if they give the biggest genres their own shelving. Hence there are probably sections for Mystery, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Romance, etc.

MIND YOU: There are PLENTY of books that fall under "Fiction" and DON'T get separated out into one of those other genres. They are just categorized as fiction. The fiction section is probably the largest section in most bookstores -- it's not weird to write a book that gets filed in the "fiction" section! Those books still have a genre. That genre just might be "realistic" or "historical" or "western" or magical realism" or "postmodern/experimental" or something that doesn't neatly fall into the Mystery or Science Fiction (or whatever) genre categories.

For example: At my bookstore, we ONLY separate out Mystery, Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror, Romance, Classics. So within the regular Fiction section you'll find a huge variety of books -- they all DO have a "genre" -- it just isn't one of those genres that gets shelved separately!

So, no, I don't believe there are books that just *don't have* a category or genre. ALL books have them. We might disagree a little about what they should be -- we might use slightly different words -- new species might pop up here and there -- we might be able to categorize some of them into even more minute niches -- but all books CAN be categorized in some fashion.

#genres

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transmutationisms · 1 year ago

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Hi do you have any brainy thoughts on the disney movie inside out (and the sequel). My family and i went to go see inside out 2 today and i kind of hate it. Theres something about presenting an office, its warehouse and all the associated mechanisms as the objective truth of our minds that i dont especially like, but i dont really care about that ultimately. But what i do hate is the idea that we all feel the exact same emotions which can each be neatly identified and delineated, to the point that they act as entirely separate people in our heads. People who dress and look the same no matter who you as an individual are outside of extremely surface level changes (maybe). But I'm having a hard time articulating precisely what I dont like about it. In your studies have you read about like ... the taxonomy of emotions or sensations ? Many therapists value the idea of each emotion being readily identifiable with a name. They have charts about it. It feels all in service of an understanding of ourselves rooted in flawed psychological frameworks. One in which the literal "mood disorder" exists

congrats on the only disney anon i would probably ever answer. yeah i saw the first inside out in like 2018 or 19 really stoned and this also pissed me off. in general when people start trying to present living things in really tidy taxonomical schemata i am immediately suspicious; what's being done is not 'reading' this or that out of nature but actively interpreting a phenomenon according to some set of predetermined rules or distinctions. in psychology this especially gained popularity toward the end of the 18th century and into the 19th: the notion of discrete brain 'functions' was the foundational assumption of phrenologists, and also intimately tied up with the idea that 'emotions' / affective states could be neatly distinguished, delineated, named, and ordered.

it's a really curious sort of dualism that ends up taking hold, esp in much of the anglo and german literature, where you the subject are configured as, on the one hand, a conscious experience resulting from your material brain, and yet, on the other hand, distinct enough from that very brain to experience a kind of dysphoric disjunction from its operations. in inside out, this is dramatised quite literally, as a conflict between the protagonist and the independent entities that 'are' her emotions (where the medium even allows each to be protrayed by a different actor!)---a better work might interrogate this schizophrenic conception of selfhood and ask, for instance, if such a portrayal of a split self is intended to resonate with many people's everyday experience, what is it that distinguishes the 'pathologically' fractured consciousness, and what does this suggest about what's at stake for those who seek to understand affective experience by naming and categorising it...?

& i do also find the warehouse metaphor odious haha. such a throwaway choice on the part of the filmmakers, but one that really speaks to both a failure of imagination (all forms of social organising must be one that i am already familiar with, even in a fully fictional and animated story) and a somewhat disturbing conception of human interiority (i would argue there's a continuity here from using the labourer-owner metaphor in a dramatisation of the mind, to broader attitudes about human dominion over 'nature').

#inside out

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horriblengrossstories · 2 months ago

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Entering the fandom like a bird flies into a window at full speed

in my humble and chronically sleep-deprived opinion, this fandom operates less like a community and more like a symposium held in a collapsing cathedral where everyone’s arguing about moral philosophy while knee-deep in viscera. i’ve written twelve pages on whether or not ren’s actions constitute premeditated guilt-dissociation,and somehow the takeaway was that i’m a menace to society for enjoying a sprite edit.

you reblogged a dark-haired derek sprite and suddenly you’re holding the bloodied scissors, the dismembered canon in your lap, and a crowd of pearl-clutchers at your door chanting “accountability.” they said, “how dare you enjoy it.” they said, “you’re enabling edits.” they said, “we don’t do that here.” as if you tagged it #makeovermonday and not #derekbutworse.

you didn’t make the sprite. you just had the audacity to say he looked hot, of course they did.

[courtroom sketch of birdie side-eyeing the jury while clutching a derek sprite. twelve ren cosplayers in various emotional stages of collapse. judge bangs the gavel with a fox plush. sentence: one thousand years in the tags, no parole.]

i joined this fandom thinking i could be chill. i came in with my hands up. i said “hi i like horror and morally bankrupt men, can i sit with you?” and the fandom said no but in seventeen callout posts, a google doc, and a carrd formatted like a cia dossier.

i said “he’s hot because he’s a bad person,” and they acted like i’d bitten a baby. i said “this dynamic is deliciously unhealthy,” and three accounts blocked me before i could finish spelling ‘codependency.�� i tried to tag responsibly. i tried to stay in my clown corner. but the minute i breathed in the direction of character analysis, some user named “YKMETTruthers4Christ” threw a bible at my head and screamed “REPENT.”

i was trying to be normal. but now i’m in a trenchcoat made of red flags, sipping blood-flavored capri sun, and posting charts titled “who’s most likely to gut you and call it love.”

this is not a fandom. this is a haunted library with all the exits bricked shut and a fox-boy shrine in the back that bleeds if you touch it.

i asked what strade’s favorite cereal is, not for a moral dissertation on fictional cannibalism, jessica.

Ahem... Unhinged Rant Over: Professor Birdie Time 🐦

welcome to the lecture hall. the lights are flickering. the chairs are bleeding. someone’s weeping in the back but we don’t have time for that because today’s syllabus covers:

why every single character in BTD is a walking psychological sinkhole

why moral panic is fandom’s favorite enrichment toy

and why derek’s untextured jacket is somehow more controversial than murder

i’ll be your host, professor birdie. credentials? none. vibes? unholy. tone? condescending but educational. please turn to page 666 of your required reading: “The Erotic Horrors of Men Who Should Be in Jail.”

“Concrete Hearts and Clickable Landmines: A Sociocultural Analysis of the Boyfriend to Death/TPOF/YKMET Fandom Through the Lens of Emotional Cold War Brutalism” A keynote lecture by Professor Birdie, Department of Unstable Dynamics and Fandom Warfare Studies

Good evening, peeps. I ask that you silence your phones, your doubts, and your shame—this is a sacred space, and we are about to embark on a journey through the jagged terrain of a fandom that defies taxonomy, tact, and sometimes even taste.

Let us begin with a premise: the Boyfriend to Death/TPOF/YKMET fandom is not a fandom in the traditional sense. It is a sovereign microstate. A fractalized nation built not on shared admiration, but on weaponized emotional resonance and heavily-guarded interpretation. To enter it is not to observe, it is to be conscripted. You will be handed your first discourse weapon, likely a sprite edit or an undercooked opinion about Ren’s canonical sexuality, and shoved into a battlefield that already started three years before you arrived.

The governing architectural style of this fandom is best described as Emotional Cold War Brutalism. This is not a metaphor. This is a lived, psychological geography.

Let us examine its three foundational tenets:

1. Concrete Silences Communication within this fandom is conducted through absence. Posts trail off into ominous ellipses. Tags are redacted like classified war documents. Responses are frequently replaced by reblogs with nothing but a blank emoji or a single, passive-aggressive "huh." These silences are not empty. They are fortified. Every lack of response is a smoke signal of implied condemnation, or worse, dismissal. You will hear nothing, you will feel everything.

2. Fortified Headcanons The average headcanon here is not a soft hypothesis. It is a sovereign belief system. It has borders. It has teeth. It has historical trauma. Attempting to engage with one is like knocking on the door of a bunker and asking if they’d consider repainting. Inside, a lonely user stares at their eighth reblog war and whispers, “I just thought Strade might be left-handed.”

And in that moment, their fate is sealed.

The rebuttal will not be a conversation—it will be a 34-part essay with footnotes, a four-slide presentation on trauma realism, and a gif of Ren blinking, captioned: “You wouldn’t understand.”

3. Interpersonal Landmines Discourse is not initiated. It is triggered. You may walk innocently into a thread wondering whether Lawrence wears cologne. You will leave the thread implicated in three fan-court trials, canceled on a private Discord server, and accidentally resurrecting a 2017 argument about kink dynamics and poststructuralism. Every word is suspect. Every reblog is a potential declaration of war. There is no Geneva Convention here—only vague terms of engagement, passed down through cursed tags and emotional inheritance.

Worse yet: the mines are movable. What was safe to say last week is now treason. What was treason yesterday is now canon. You are always behind. You are always wrong. And yet you keep posting. Because you are possessed. Because the game hurt you. Because Ren blinked and it meant something and you need everyone to feel it too.

In conclusion: The Boyfriend to Death fandom is not a place. It is a condition. A psychological architecture built of shame, horniness, intellectualism, and grief, polished into something so disturbingly earnest it loops back into absurdity. We do not participate in it. We survive it. We study it the way geologists study tectonic shifts—squinting at the cracks, praying they don’t open beneath our feet.

Example A:“Shrimp, Strade, and the Semiotics of the Discourse Minefield: A Case Study in Unintentional Theoretical Escalation” A guest lecture delivered from inside a crawlspace by Professor Birdie, still holding a debate club bat from 2008 out of spite

Let us consider the innocent: the passerby. The naïve observer. The user who, fueled by whimsy and perhaps one (1) too many energy drinks, opens their keyboard and types the cursed phrase: “what if Strade is allergic to shrimp.”

What follows is not dialogue. It is detonation.

Within seven minutes, the post accrues responses in fourteen dialects of irony. One anonymous user posts a photoshopped allergy test from a German hospital dated 1994. Another tags it #tw shellfish because someone somewhere once had a moment. Someone else—gender unknown, species questionable—responds with an image of Judith Butler, eyes photoshopped red, with the caption “a masculinity that rejects crustaceans is still masculinity.” You do not know what this means. You do not ask. The walls are already closing in.

Then comes the essay. You did not write it. No one you follow wrote it. It appears fully formed, like a divine punishment, 9 paragraphs long, formatted in Chicago style, with footnotes linking to a 2017 Discord screenshot in which someone named “Beefslasher94” allegedly called shrimp-eaters “complicit in genre collapse.” The original user has long vanished. The essay remains.

The reblogs mutate. Tags fold in on themselves. Someone writes a limerick. Someone else insists you are racist for implying a white-coded serial killer can’t digest seafood. A callout list is posted. Names are named. All of them are yours.

At this point, all semblance of intent is gone. The discourse has grown legs. Crustacean legs. It now walks without you. It has become its own poststructural being, a simulation of discourse without subject or object. This is not just fandom. This is a haunting.

To participate here is to graduate with honors in Navigating Passive-Aggressive Labyrinths, your diploma printed on the back of a 3-year-old callout post annotated in Comic Sans. Your thesis: “Shrimp as Semiotic Resistance: Queering the Digestive Tract of the Slasher Archetype.” Your minor: Muttering “I just thought it was funny” in a locked room while the walls bleed discourse.

Thank you for your time. Please see me after class if you'd like extra credit in “Fanon Interpretation as Non-Euclidean Warfare,” or need help with your thesis on “The Erotic Implications of Strade’s Toolbox: A Case Study in Weaponized Laughter.”

🐦 Professor Birdie, PhD, MFA, PTSD Office hours: 2am–4am, in the vents. Bring offerings. And tea.

Now Then I'm Glad We Could Have a Civil Discussion... Back to Screaming

A Post-Lecture Reflection by Birdie, Who Did Not Pass the Vibe Check

It started with one question. A simple, innocent question. “Do you think Strade has favorite knives?” And before I could even hit ‘send,’ twelve people were typing. Someone posted a spreadsheet. Someone else summoned the ghost of Baudrillard. I lost feeling in my legs and gained tenure at the University of Being Too Online.

Halfway through, a PowerPoint slide titled “Ren and the Crisis of Hand-Kissing: A Semiotic Bloodbath” was projected onto my soul. I nodded, took notes, and cried. I raised a trembling hand to ask and woke up in a digital courtroom where my lawyer was a badly drawn icon of Strade with googly eyes.

They passed around a copy of Discipline and Punish and told me to read it in the original French. I said “bonjour” and they booed.

Someone in the back was sobbing over a .gif of Ren blinking. Someone else was reading from a Zizek quote taped to a plastic meat cleaver. I think someone got married?

you ask a question—“hey what if ren wore mittens?”—and suddenly you’re on trial for war crimes.

there are powerpoint slides. someone’s sharing screen. the background music is Disturbia nightcore.

someone cries. someone quotes Foucault. someone else is livestreaming your cancellation from a minecraft server while crafting a thesis on “fetishization, fragmentation, and the ethics of simping for a fictional taxidermy boy.”

i black out. i wake up enrolled in a graduate course called Ethics in Erotic Violence Simulacra, taught by a PNG of Darqx stapled to a crow.

the crow hisses when i enter. the syllabus is just a jpeg that says “NO FUN. ONLY PENANCE.” i fail my first assignment because i said Strade was funny once and now i’m on a watchlist.

and still still i keep asking questions. what if lawrence had an etsy? what if derek cried into the fridge at 3am like a Victorian ghost? what if the whole fandom was a cursed terrarium and we’re just the bugs who learned to dance in the glass?

someone please throw a rock through a stained glass window before i write a 4,000-word analysis of ren’s breathing patterns again.

— with love, Birdie who nests in your discourse and eats your citations 💌📚🔪

i will make it real. i will write shrimp-based philosophy. i will footnote a discord fight from 2017. i will cite foucault over a jpeg of strade holding a corn dog. you think i’m joking. i’m not. watch me get this peer-reviewed by god.

co-signed by: 🕊️ a pigeon with a postdoc and three unpaid internships in fandom epistemology 🦜 an ex-professor cockatoo who was fired for citing AO3 in a thesis on moral relativism

🐓 the ghost of a chicken who died confused in 2015 while trying to understand Ren's canon height 🪶 a magpie that hoards dead discourse like shiny objects and eats callout posts for breakfast

#the price of flesh #derek goffard #tpof #boyfriend to death 2 #ykmet strade #ykmet

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taxonomicon-idiot-edition · 2 months ago

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Starting Easy: Thoughts towards a Taxonomy of Elves

In another blog I let drop ages ago, I kicked off by looking at some theory and the taxonomy of dragons. [That one, as an aside, was deliberately written with a slightly smug authorial voice and in-universe fictional framing specifically to annoy a certain class of Reddit Guy, which is why I'm dropping the framing device here. At some point I'll port its content over.] Turns out draconic taxonomy is insanely complicated, so lets start with something much simpler and easier, with I'm definitely sure no surprises: the taxonomy of elves.

Our first starting point needs to be to define an Elf in a way that is mostly correct for most Elves. To my mind, that's something that like:

An elf is a featherless biped with two arms and a head that,

Is long-lived,

Maintains regular bodily processes (that is, it is enmeshed in thermodynamic exchange with its ecosystem),

Is usually, but not always, within a range of slightly shorter to slightly taller than the average human comparator,

Is gracile [that is, of relatively slender build taken as an average body plan tendency],

Where magic or similar phenomena exist, is usually naturally inclined towards its use.

This type definition of the Elf is obviously strongly weighted to the post-Tolkien ideal, but that's okay. We're doing Multiple Taxonomy here, so we can offer each Elf we encounter three or even more taxa. The initial scheme I'm going with is as follows:

Descriptive Taxon - habitat, ecological niche, and general appearance. DTs need not follow a full linnaean or quasi-linnean hierarchy.

Phylogenic Taxon - actual shared descent taxa scheme. This one gets tricky in how its executed - my general thought is that unless something is indicated otherwise, all very similar species from across universes belong to a sort of shared meta-phylogeny, even if they're from wildly different worlds. A horse is a horse, of course, of course...

Mythotaxons - old names and taxa that are 'phased out' for the newer ones, letting me play with older mythologies and in-universe taxonomy as a site of contest and context.

Since we have all three, we can define the Common European Elf - our type species for Elves more generally - using these Tolkien-inspired lines, because Tolkien in turn derived them from his hybridization of Christian Angel with Old English Elf. Elves that deviate in one way or another present the fun challenge: Are they a seperate species? Subspecies? Do they belong to an entirely different Genus - even a different Family?

MYTHOTAXA PALEOALFARIDAE

Since Elf in its original sense can be a bunch of stuff that isn't an Elf in our above Descriptive Criteria, those Elves can belong to the shared Mythotaxonic family of Paleoalfaridae - Dwarves are also members Paleoalfaridae because of their shared mythological origins with Elves, while the paleoalfaridae belong in due course to a broader of mirorder, the Chthonifae.

Our hypothetical mythotaxa will look something like this:

Any Elf that fits the mythotaxa goes in the Paleoalfara genus - Tolkien's elves can slot in right beside the Common European Elf, as can, arguably, the Eldar of Warhammer and so on. The goal of the Mythotaxa is not exclusive - it is another place where we can say 'well, that's an elf that derives from the common language of elves' while the phylogenic taxons may place what are still clearly elves in completely different trees due to their evolutionary history and the descriptive taxon is wholly unconcerned with constructing hierarchical systems of taxa. Using all three lets us have the best of both worlds - the flexibility of non-hierarchical taxonomy, the fun of absurdly detailed charts of phylogeny, and an alternative that sees an elf, says 'that's an elf!', and categorizes Elves based on their distinct attributes within the mythotaxic Genus. Next time: The phylogenic and descriptive taxa of Paleoalfara alfar and some thoughts on other kinds of Elf.

[p.s. send me critters you want taxonomized!]

#fantasy taxonomy #elf taxonomy #taxonomy of elves #taxonomicon.theory of taxonomy #taxonomicon.mythotaxa paleoalfaridae #elves

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samaelzdraws · 24 days ago

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People I want to get to know better:

Thanks for the tag @tastytoastz

Last song: original soundtrack from Scavengers Reign, this Sci-fi TV series is one of the inspirations for my ork worldbuilding project. So sad they’ve cancelled season 2

Favorite color(s): Red, green, yellow and purple

Currently watching: I’m rewatching Scavengers Reign and an old Disney cartoon called Recess, it came out in 1997. I really love their way of storytelling and the art style. I’m also watching Bibilaridon’s Alien Biosphere series on YouTube, it offered a great help in my creature design process.

Last Movie: I rewatched the original Lilo and Stitch. After seeing how much of a shit show the live action remake is (I was watching it with my little cousin and even she agreed that the remake was horrible), I need to cleanse my eyes with the original animated version

Currently reading: Fundamentals of Creature Design, as the book title suggests, it talks about how to design a fictional creature and it featured some amazing illustrations and worldbuilding projects like the Birrin project by Alex Ries

Sweet, spicy, savory: Sweet I guess

Current obsession: MY ORK WORLDBUILDING PROJECT! I love my warhammer 40k orks so much I created a literal planet for them and I redesigned their language, sadly the latter one is in a stagnant state because I currently don’t have the time to work on it. I have a shit ton of schoolwork rn but I will get back to them soon.

Last Googled: the Taxonomy chart, I need references

Currently working on: a research paper for the final project of my Academic Writing class, and reworking on some of my fake study logs for my ork worldbuilding project (yes I know I’ve mentioned this throughout this post, you can see how much I’m obsessed with this project, I still haven’t give it a name, I was thinking about calling it the Og Saga or something like that)

No pressure tags: @74rn @exhausted-drone @hatsubara-8chan @sanemeks

People I want to get to know better

Was tagged by @lilliancdoodles thank you for the tag :3

Last Song(s): "Grape street" by Dawaun Parker. I played "Styx: Master of Shadows" a while ago and watched the launch trailer for it and the song was such a bop I had to add it to my playlist!

Favorite color: Yellow! ☀️

Currently Watching: Nothing really, a lot of adeptus ridiculous if watching their slides counts lmao

Last Movie: Rango. Rewatched for the first time since my childhood. Rattlesnake Jake is till a 10/10 both as a character and design! I also watched "asterix and obelix the secret of the magic potion" very recently, and it was quite good!

Currently reading: "Ciaphas Cain: Hero of the Imperium" by Sandy Mitchell. I'm almost halfway through it and dear god do I love it!!! Cain is such a intressting and funny character! I love he's a hero and trying his best to be a good person despite the whole system bascially working against him (even if he promises its all for selfish reasons). He's also such a harsh self critic and has imposter syndrome, charismatic while also being such a coward. I could rant all day but I will reign myself in lmao. Yeah, good book, love the main character.

Sweet, Spicy, Savory: Savory or sweet, I can not handle spice for the life of me.

Current obsession: Warhammer orks still, I'm absorbing every little detail i can get my hands on about them, I find them so facinating and I love these silly little mushroom people so much! I could go on for hours about them and once the Grotsnik book comes out I will devour it in like a week lmao.

Last Googled: "Wolves in Norse mythology" I forgot what Sköll and Hati was named and had to look it up.

Currently working on: A school essay for the moment. I'm writing little on like, 3 different writing prodjects as well, but with school taking most of my time right now it's on the back burner

No pressure tags: @samaelzdraws and @sanemeks

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dearwriters · 5 years ago

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Dear Writers,

Let’s talk about what Dungeons&Dragons teaches us about storytelling.

I am seriously not an expert on this topic. (If you are a DM, you have my full respect. Please share your storytelling wisdom with us mortals!) But there are some significant lessons I think we all can learn just by watching or participating in a D&D campaign, especially for adventure, science fiction and fantasy. Here are just some little things of many:

1. Group dynamic can make or break a story. A diverse cast with different backgrounds and abilities makes for the most interesting group and plot development.

2. There is a taxonomy to evil as well as good. We all know the alignment chart. Maybe figuring out where on the chart your character lands will help you to get a better feel for them. But here's the thing: character development means the alignment can change.

3. Magic needs limits, rules and a price to raise the stakes. And a character growing in power over time is more exciting than a all mighty character.

4. Sometimes characters will meet obsticals that are simply not on their level. Fate can be a bitch sometimes and decisions have consequences!

5. When in doubt, go with what's most fun! Even if it's not the most realistic choice.

Have fun writing!

#dear writers #writing advice #writing help #writing tips #writing project #novel writing #fantasy writing #writing fantasy #scifi writing #science fiction writers #science fiction

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melodysblogs · 6 years ago

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Klurfeld Reaction

James Klurfeld and Howard Schneider’s article titled, “News Literacy: Teaching the Internet Generation to Make Reliable Information Choices”, was very interesting and I have to admit that I didn’t expect it to come out the way it did.

I was hooked into the text when it was mentioned that only 9 out of the 200 students raised their hands to confirm if they took the H1N1 Flu vaccine. This piece of the text really surprised me because I didn’t expect the number to be as low as it actually was. However, what got me more interested in this particular section were the reasons why the rest of the students didn’t get their shots. This is because it’s one of the many examples I’ve seen where people have been misguided due to false information or “fake news” as many would say.

Klurfeld and Schneider have included many examples about how misperceptions on certain subjects can lead to people believing things that aren’t necessarily true. As I was reading, I noticed that this issue is commonly caused by things such as news sources containing opinions and one-sided stories (bias). When I was first learning about the rules of journalism, I remembered specifically that people couldn’t include their own personal opinions into their articles unless they were writing reviews or other columns that allowed them to do as such. If I’m being honest, it actually enrages me whenever opinions are included in news articles because that rule is very simple and I don’t understand why it gets broken so often. As much as I enjoy reading about the opinions of others, I wouldn’t want to read about them in an article that’s supposed to be one-hundred percent informational. When dealing with non-fiction, it’s very important not to include made-up facts in it because it defeats the whole purpose in it being non-fiction in the first place.

I was completely amazed by Figure 1: Taxonomy of Information Neighborhoods because it made me see the different types of information in a different way. I realized how different journalism is from the other types of information such as entertainment, advertising, publicity, propaganda, and raw information. This chart clearly showcases what the purpose of journalism is and what’s considered to be journalism or not. I was honestly fascinated by the information that the chart offered because it reminds me of how much I’ve seen these other types of information and they were claimed to be news or journalism when in fact, they weren’t.

Klurfeld and Schneider impressed me with their experiences and information. This article was very educational and is a great example of journalism in a sense. However, some of the information made me a bit sad because when it comes to the internet, social media, and sometimes news stations, most of it is either biased or false. I definitely appreciated the important lessons that this article had offered to me. I actually would recommend all writers and journalists to read this article so that they could be more educated about these issues.

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orum · 3 years ago

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Yesterday we visited the international Cryptozoology Museum on portland, Maine. The museum is the brainchild of Loren Coleman. A mix of conspiracy theory logic, a longing for the unknown to still exist and pop-cultral skepticism of mainstream science and culture. All displayed in an adorable offhand bric-a-brac manner. Combining untold categories of thing that don't usually go together. Lego figures, authoritative looking charts, full size reconstructions of real & imagined creatures, casts of monster footprints, toys from long forgotten monster movies, factual explanatory texts and fictional account taken overly serious. Blurring the lines between what is usually consider fact and what is regarded af science to produce a weird hybrid that careies an implicit critique of current ideas of knowledge and the categories and taxonomies that humans are so fond of dividing the world into. The museum is the result of more than six decades of field research, travel, and dedication to gathering representative cryptozoological samples and evidence. Topped off with a heavy dose of American can-do spirit and dash of machismo in the shape of its omnipresent founder Loren Coleman. Dotted among the cryptids are self celebratory displays about his exploits, and there are more displays that mention him by name that that do not. Resulting in a museum version of what in the realm on cinema would have been called "auteur". An instution that in both form and content has been brougth about by a very subjective author, rather than a generalised strategy or pre existing framework of ideas. All in all of its subjective quasi scientific messiness the cryptozoological museum seems to me a quinticential American place: impure, imperfect and untrustworthy instution that is the perfect match for its imaginary, homemade, rigorless and contested contents it contains. (at International Cryptozoology Museum) https://www.instagram.com/p/CiTrVuSsnRy/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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atarahderek · 8 years ago

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Temperament groups - they really are meaningless

Okay, so my fellow MBTI nerds have undoubtedly heard the rising number of accusations that the MBTI is basically meaningless, and like me, they’re probably frustrated by now at that oft-made assessment because it’s made solely on the basis that some people misuse and abuse the MBTI. With some of the most notorious being the slew of MBTI pop quizzes prevalent on the internet. The critics’ reasoning is the same logic that was responsible for the era of prohibition. And we all saw how well that worked out. But part of that is our own fault, as we have a natural tendency to condense and simplify the MBTI so that we can present its highlights all at once in the form of brief quizzes or charts listing famous type bearers both real and fictional. But contrary to what the skeptics claim, that tendency isn’t unique to MBTI nerds by any stretch of the imagination. It’s one of the most common traits of humanity. And just because something is categorized incorrectly doesn’t mean the category itself is automatically invalid.

Take taxonomy, for instance. Taxonomy is a pursuit almost as “meaningless” as the MBTI is accused of being, because what we choose to call an organism does not change the organism. And because organisms are always changing and specializing, they are constantly being re-categorized. Why, very recently, the Palestinian viper, believed for decades to be one of the southernmost members of the genus Vipera, was recently reclassified as a member of Daboai that somehow got separated from its Indian cousin, the Russell’s viper. It didn’t change genera genetically; herpetologists simply discovered that it seemed to have more in common with the Russell’s viper than it did with the Eurasian vipers. So what’s the point of taxonomic classification? Simple; it helps keep biologists on the same page, for the most part. With so many species to study, it’s necessary to have a way to organize them all.

Now, obviously, I’m preaching to the choir here. Most of my followers are also into the MBTI, and we all know it is far from meaningless. Buuuuut...it does have its...less than meaningful elements. The most notable of which are the temperament groups.

Those of you who have taken the MBTI quiz over at 16personalities.com are aware that the 16 types are divided into four temperament groups:

The Analysts (NTs)

The Diplomats (NFs)

The Sentinels (SJs)

The Explorers (SPs)

These four temperaments can have other names, depending on which site is organizing them. They may be called the Rationals, Idealists, Guardians and Artisans, respectively. But it doesn’t really matter what you call them, as they don’t really mean anything.

The temperaments are not original to the MBTI. They were added by David Kiersey, who typed subjects based on a sliding scale of four letters rather than by cognitive functions. We all know the obvious problem with this; it’s impossible to get a solid, accurate typing when it’s so easy to be right in between two letters--especially P and J. We also know it’s impossible to be both a P and a J when the middle two letters remain the same. But Kiersey didn’t pay any attention to this fact when he grouped all the NTs together and all the NFs together. He did alright grouping the Sensors by their common Perceiving function, but he should have done the same with the iNtuitives. It would make more sense for all of the NJs to be in the same temperament group, while all the NPs share a temperament group.

But don’t all NFs share a temperament? And all NTs? Well, no, not really. Both Thinkers and Feelers can be analytical or efficient leaders, so it’s really, really not fair to say that ONLY Thinkers are rational and want to reason everything through. Both Thinkers and Feelers are capable of great compassion and compromise, so it’s unfair to claim that ONLY Feelers are capable of negotiating a peace between individuals.

So what makes NPs and NJs more similar in temperament than NFs and NTs? And what makes the latter so dissimilar? Honestly, their strengths.

For the next section, you’ll need to have a passing familiarity with the Strengths Quest/Finder tests.

NPs - These are the types usually strong in Input. Ne is their most developed extroverted function. Ne is the function of imagination, exploration and deliberation. It often creates many, many rich fantasy worlds in which to live and build. It’s easily distracted, and can become overwhelmed when too many options are available to it. It is the most ambiverted function because it takes its inspiration from literally everywhere and everything. For this reason, Ne users hoard information. And I do mean hoard. There is not an Ne user on the planet whose brain is not full of seemingly random trivia that “may come in handy one day.” They all appear very analytical, and they are prone to info-dumping when someone so much as casually mentions one of their passions. Ne users are among the most excitable of the types, despite their ambiversion or strong introversion. And they are almost always either ambiverts or strong introverts.

NTPs are unlike NTJs in that they are information hoarders. NTJs know how to efficiently sift through information that they know they will need, and will either discard the rest or put it aside as potentially useful in the event they need to fall back on it. NTPs want to learn everything about anything that even remotely captures their interest, dissecting it so thoroughly that it’ll be a miracle if anyone can put it back together. NTPs also tend to be very good at finding and endearing themselves to other Ne users who share their passions.

NFPs are unlike NFJs in that they are more expressive--and more volatile. NFJs are masters of tranquil fury. NFPs are decidedly not. Their passion leads them in all things, including logic. NFPs are long suffering, but if you push them to their breaking point, all hell will break loose. While the NFJ will just devise a master plan to get you to walk yourself into hell. Not that NFJs can’t lose their temper; they just generally have much better control over it than the NFP. NFPs take just about everything personally. NFJs know exactly what’s truly personal and what is not. But on the flip side, NFPs can also be de-escalated and brought down to baseline fairly quickly. They are easy to appease with a simple apology because they still desire good relations that allow them to continue to share their passions. They generally forgive easily. And they will grow from the experience.

All in all, the best temperament group title for the NPs would be the Learners.

NJs - These are the types usually strong in Focus. Ni is their main Perceiving function, making either Te or Fe their most developed extroverted function. Ni is the function of focus, gut instinct, and direction. It’s just as capable of imagination as Ne, but keeps that imagination focused on what it deems truly important. Like Ne, it focuses on the future, but it pursues a singular future, combining all possibilities to produce its desired outcome. Ni users tend to be very clever and very driven. They can turn even unfavorable circumstances into a favorable outcome. They are often acutely aware of their abilities, and for that reason may grow narcissistic. They may punish themselves for engaging in personal amusements or “meaningless” pursuits that don’t have a clear end goal (”guilty pleasures”). If they lose their focus, they grow listless and may fall into depression. They are often found closer to the ends of the I/E scale, but a good percentage of them fall toward the middle.

NTJs are unlike NTPs in that they will not allow themselves to be distracted by what they consider frivolous. If they don’t need to know something, they won’t be bothered to learn it. If it has no application in the present or immediate future, it’s probably not important. NTJ passions are much more subtle in nature than NTP passions. And NTJs will only share those passions with those they deem worthy of receiving their bountiful wisdom. If an NTJ chooses you for this purpose, for the love of Jung, pay attention!! The NTJ has selected you not just to be their follower, but to be groomed as a sort of successor, if you will. NTJs want to build something that will outlive them, and they want to make sure someone will be there to carry on their work. Because as far as they are concerned, there’s always room for improvement.

NFJs are unlike NFPs in that they are, quite frankly, much better diplomats. Their Fe gives them a desire for emotional stability within themselves so that they can better serve the emotional needs of those in their care. And their Ni makes them some of the most incredible listeners. NFJs, like all empaths, are capable of manipulating the emotional atmosphere to suit their needs and desires. But NFJs, unlike SFJs, have very specific reasons for doing this. Which is why the NFJ in a position of power is potentially incredibly dangerous. NFJs in power have an uncanny ability to get the masses to do exactly what they want and to love doing it. No matter what you are doing, if you are interacting with an NFJ, there is always the chance that they are subtly directing you to a certain path, and they are probably making you believe it is all your own idea. These types are the most potent for that reason, and can accomplish great good or great evil. It’s a good thing they’re also the rarest types.

All in all, the best temperament group title for the NJs would be the Achievers.

All that said, my groupings are really completely arbitrary. Because the temperament groups are meaningless. You could find a common temperament among all SFs and STs, or group the types according to function stacks and figure out temperament names for those. Knock yourself out! And please, by all means, share with me what you came up with. I value creativity.

#temperaments #cognitive functions #artisans #explorers #guardians #sentinels #rationals #analysts #idealists #diplomats #mbti #carl jung #strengthsquest #strengthsfinder

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maxmollon · 6 years ago

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(via Book Review: Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble – The Chart)

“Think we must! We must think!” — Stengers and Despret, Women Who Make a Fuss1

It has never been clearer than now that we must “stay with the trouble” and actively seek possibilities for recuperation even as we are anxiously learning the great depths of the trouble we face. This is a book concerned with exactly that, with teasing out effective methodologies for moving forward in contemporary times through invention, collaboration, exploration, play, and a willingness to take on the risky business of “follow[ing] the threads where they lead.”2

Donna Haraway, radical thinker of A Cyborg Manifesto fame3, envisions the Anthropocene — along with its aptly named partners the Capitalocene4 and the Plantationocene5 — as a (brief) geologic boundary event, and encourages us to think of a bigger name encompassing all “the dynamic ongoing sym-chthonic forces and powers of which people are a part, within which ongoingness is at stake”.6 She terms this era the Chthulucene. Having nothing to do with Lovecraft’s “misogynist racial, nightmare monster” Chtulu, this Chthulucene (note spelling) is an era of multi-species worlding and “sym-poietic” thinking and making together. Anthropologist, multispecies feminist theorist, environmentalist, and distinguished professor emerita in the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Haraway proffers the action of reaching out and “making kin” as a way to establish new lines of “response-ability” between living beings. She draws actively on new thinking in the sciences and arts to present possible methodologies for inhabiting our world at present.

Already, you’ll see I’ve run through a handful of knotty neologisms; Haraway delights in language, bumping colloquialisms against high theory, breeding slang with scientific taxonomy — part of the pleasure of reading this text is her “bumptious” linguistic methodology: experimental, creative, rich, chewy, and rhythmically vital — thinking new worlds demands thinking new language. If you’re like me, you’ll want to follow and participate in these new inventions as you enter and occupy this terran text. Using the tools of what she terms “SF” — speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fiction, science fact, string figures, so far — Haraway imagines and invents new ways of “living and dying” in our multispecies world. Messy and imperfect, and actively generative, this co-fashioning methodology invites new perspectives on the depths of our connections to each other, our notions of independence, and the inseparable threads we must follow and affirm in perilous times.

Haraway delights in language, bumping colloquialisms against high theory, breeding slang with scientific taxonomy — part of the pleasure of reading this text is her “bumptious” linguistic methodology: experimental, creative, rich, chewy and rhythmically vital — thinking new worlds demands thinking new language.

For we are utterly and hopelessly entangled in this story. The first chapter looks at multispecies storytelling through the lens of string figures as metaphor and engaged games of giving and receiving, and at practices of recuperation via the possibilities of making something together (“sympoiesis”). String figures — the games of making patterns with loops of string between players — enact a rich history of storytelling through physical thinking enacted between two people. Haraway recognizes the complexities of this tool and the possibilities of failure — of dropping a thread, of getting caught in a story that doesn’t function — in the “risky comaking” practices of SF. Deeply challenging our ideas of individuality, the Chthulucene demands we engage sympoiesis, making together, rather than autopoiesis, self-making. Throughout the book, she investigates the work of interdisciplinary artists and scientists who are inventing new ways of working together and with other species, and who are developing new sensitivities and means to fostering collective response-ability.

For example, Haraway introduces her reader to PigeonBlog, the work of artist Beatriz da Costa, her students, and the racing pigeons that flew as part of a Seminar in Experimental Critical Theory at the University of California Irvine and in electronic arts festivals in San Jose, California. Homing pigeons, with their fanciers, artists, and engineers, were engaged to “collect and distribute information about air quality conditions to the general public.”7 Through the informed, careful, and pigeon-loving practices of their fanciers and interested others, a small data collection backpack was created for the pigeons that allowed the gathering of data in order to generate “further imaginative and knowing action” in multiple disciplines and beings. Da Costa “took seriously questions about the cosmopolitics and material-semiotics of collaboration for animals in art, politics, or science. Who renders whom capable of what, and at what price, borne by whom? But she asked ‘Is human-animal work as part of political [and art] action less legitimate than the same type of activity when framed under the umbrella of science?'”8 The project made visible the limited government collection data that focused its attention away from known pollution sources and thus pollution levels, often in working-class communities, near to the ground at the level where humans and other species live and breath.

In a later chapter, Haraway investigates the utter entanglement and disturbing truths regarding both the need of and the production methods for DES and Premarin: hormones for the changing female animal body, human and other “critters”. DES, now a known poisonous synthesized cancer-producing hormone marked unsafe for humankind is prescribed for her aging companion dog. And Premarin, a hormone she once took, is produced by the labor of countless pregnant mares (don’t ask what happens to the foals) via the “animal-industrial complex” and currently relied on by many menopausal women to ease the difficult passage through declining levels of estrogen. In each case, Haraway’s investigation navigates the webbed network of relationships between humans and other “critters” and refuses to turn away from the troubling implications, positive opportunities, and seeming infinite intersections infecting multiple beings. This lack of innocence might inspire new means to multispecies recuperation, she says. “Call that utopia; call that inhabiting the despised places; call that touch; call that the rapidly mutating virus of hope; or call that the less rapidly changing commitment to staying with the trouble.”9

In the times of “The Dithering,”10 this is a call to arms: the many tentacular arms of the octopus and spider, the chthonic sea creatures, and the webbed, interconnecting rhizomic roots of mycelium. The Chthonic beings of the Chthulucene are beings of the Earth whose living and dying are all very much “at stake” together. “Coral and lichen symbionts11 also bring us richly into the storied tissues of the thickly present Chthulucene, where it remains possible — just barely — to play a much better SF game, in nonarrogant collaboration with all those in the muddle,”12 she notes. This collaboration demands we join forces and make kin in order to rejuvenate refuges that allow species continuance and possible flourishing. Haraway draws on the “science art worldings” of new Inupiat story making practices, Navajo weaving at Black Mesa, Arizona, and the Crochet Coral Reef project coordinated by the Institute for Figuring, among others, to seek new models for staying with the trouble and recuperating spaces of refuge. Her call to “Make kin, not babies!” is a call to extend the web of connections beyond those ties of ancestry or genealogy in order to invoke and practice a deep responsibility to many others; she reminds us, “all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense.”13

Haraway’s investigation navigates the webbed network of relationships between humans and other “critters” and refuses to turn away from the troubling implications, positive opportunities, and seeming infinite intersections infecting multiple beings.

“What happens when human exceptionalism and the utilitarian individualism of classical political economics become unthinkable in the best sciences across the disciplines and interdisciplines? Seriously unthinkable: not available to think with.”14 Throughout the book, Haraway urges us to think. Referring to the work of social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern she notes, “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas with.”15 We need new ideas and new ways of thinking, new kinds of stories to think with, because the old ones are failing us as is evidenced not only by the inequities and mania of our resource extracting current economies, the Great Acceleration, and radically increasing human population numbers16, but also made visible within the day-to-day laboratory models of contemporary scientific practices that no longer sufficiently address contemporary conditions. Haraway affirms that speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, and science fiction help us think anew.

The final section of Staying With the Trouble entails a work of feminist speculative fiction, created together with filmmaker Fabrizio Terranova and science philosopher Vinciane Despret, concerning a human-butterfly symbiont. The task entertained by the text is to think ahead five generations, something you immediately sense the gravity of as our predicted event horizons for ice-cap melting, sea-level rise, and species extinctions continue to shrink. In this work, SF inventions are woven into the fabric of a story that imagines our reality based from within current knowledge and experience, culling potential from our current stories to create new ones in stark contrast to the excesses of neo-colonial resource extraction methodologies on a shrinking planet. Cobbled together, and eschewing notions of easy futurist saviors or various head-in-the-sand technofixes — “we cannot denounce the world in the name of an ideal world”17 — Haraway’s inventions take a functional, sited, materialist viewpoint on future possibilities based on working intently with the present moment.

We need new ideas and new ways of thinking, new kinds of stories to think with, because the old ones are failing us.

This is a book that focuses on processes, on possibilities, and on methodology as a commitment to “ongoingness”. It also focuses on situated imaginative revisions to working within the present: staying with the trouble. Outcomes are unknowable; the story is not yet written. This is praxis: engaged “tentacular” thinking; working together with an understanding that it is all unwritten. Embracing our collective conditional futures — our multi-species futures — and thinking together towards something that seeks possibilities for recuperation and rejuvenation, a process of living and dying together in a deeply stressed system evidencing massive extinction events and cascading systemic environmental break downs — is of utmost urgency. This is a text that embraces presence and alert attention to this moment — sticking it out in the here and now to trouble the waters of entrenched capitalist models that collectively contribute to ongoing destruction of the very systems that sustain us in all their rich and challenging complexity.

Inspiring, to say the least. And we are in deep need of it.

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, by Donna J Haraway. Duke University Press, 2016, 296 pages, paper, $26.95, ISBN# 978-0-8223-6224-1

Used throughout the book, via Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret (Women Who Make a Fuss), via Virginia Woolf (Three Guineas) and through Maria Puig de la Bellasca, (“Politiques féministes et construction des savories)

Staying With the Trouble, pg 3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cyborg_Manifesto

Some feel it is more apt to call our era the Capitalocene rather than the Anthropocene, calling into attention an “historical era shaped by relations privileging the endless accumulation of capital.” (John Merrick, http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2360-jason-w-moore-anthropocene-or-capitalocene)

A term for the “devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor.” Scott Gilbert, https://studylib.net/doc/13485101/anthropocene–capitalocene–plantationocene–chthulucene-…

Staying With the Trouble, pg 101

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble; Making Kin in the Chthulucene(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 21.

Haraway, Trouble, 23.

Haraway, Trouble, 114.

Haraway, Trouble, 102. A term introduced by Kim Stanley Robinson in his book, 2312 in 2012.

symbiotic interpenetrating ecological assemblages

Haraway, Trouble, 56.

Haraway, Trouble, 103.

Haraway, Trouble, 57.

Haraway, Trouble, 12.

Human population (currently 7.3 billion) predicted to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, and 11.2 billion by 2100 by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs in 2015. http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/2015-report.html

Haraway, Trouble, 12.

#philosphy #Anthropocene #theory

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foodsniffr · 7 years ago

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https://store.foodsniffr.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Birds-Pop-Chart-Labs-2019-Wall-Calendar.jpg On Sale Now: Birds Pop Chart Labs 2019 Wall Calendar-Calendars.com-Books & Gifts – $14.99 The cutting-edge graphic design team Pop Chart Lab renders obsessions in infographics, turning massive amounts of data into singular works of art. Their debut calendar surveys the astounding variety of North American birds, spotlighting a new species every month in a clean, modern spread that is amplified by crisp, colorful illustrationsﾗlike a taxonomy of Warblers, including the Golden-cheeked, the Blackburnian, and the Orange-crowned. With fascinating facts throughout: Did you know that hummingbirdsﾒ wings move in a figure-8 pattern, and can reach a speed of 34 mph in flight? From the cutting-edge team of Pop chart Labs High quality paper. Full-color pages throughout Includes all major public and culturally significant holidays. Carefully curated images Enjoy a year learning about new birds Perfect gift for any occasion Stay organized all year with your favorite Wall Calendars, Mini-Wall Calendars and Planners. Great for families, students of all ages, and professionals in any field. Perfect at home or in the office About Workman Workman is a publisher of cookbooks, parenting/pregnancy guides, books on gardening, country living, and humor, as well as childrenﾒs books, gift books, fiction, and the top selling calendar line in the business. Workmanﾒs top selling calendar lines include the popular Page-A-Dayﾮ Calendars, Page-A-Dayﾮ Gallery Calendars, Color Page-A-Dayﾮ Calendars, and Picture-A-Dayﾮ Wall Calendars. With such popularity, Workman has expanded their gallery line to include Page-A-Weekﾮ Gallery Wall Calendars. Through all their innovations, Workman continues to product robust, bold, and fearlessly creative calendars year after year. A testament to their staying power and titles. Located in the heart of New Yorkﾒs Greenwich Village, in a converted printersﾒ building, our offices are high-energy and creative, filled with people who are passionate about what they do. Why Calendars? Does your room need some color but you canﾒt decide on a piece of art? Do you want to redecorate but are on a budget and donﾒt want to break the bank? Wall calendars are the world’s most popular calendars with style and unique themes for every interest from art to animals, religion to meditations, family organizers and childrenﾒs themes. Fill your walls with life and keep them fresh all year with a beautiful and affordable calendar. The wall calendar format gives you enough space to keep yourself organized and provide breathtakingly beautiful decor for any room, or surface, in your home. A calendar is easy to glance at and see what responsibilities you have coming up this month, so make sure you stay organized through the year! You can personalize your calendar, too, with different colors for appointments and trips, add stickers or stickie notes for a quick reference, or create your own system of symbols and abbreviations. Track appointments, anniversaries, birthdays and more! Or, cut out and frame your favorite images for year-round art. Wall calendars make great gifts for any and every occasion! The most common wall calendar size is 12″ x 12″ but sizes do tend to vary from large poster sizes to small mini-calendars or desk calendar. Check out each calendarﾒs specifications for an exact size. Shop our vast selection of high quality wall calendars. https://is.gd/TSzLMP #Birds

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djgblogger-blog · 7 years ago

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NHTSA/SAE’s “levels” of robocars may be contributing to highway deaths

http://bit.ly/2qoSP7P

The NHTSA/SAE “levels” of robocars are not just incorrect. I now believe they are contributing to an attitude towards their “level 2” autopilots that plays a small, but real role in the recent Tesla fatalities.

Readers of this blog will know I have been critical of the NHTSA/SAE “levels” taxonomy for robocars since it was announced. My criticisms have ranged to simply viewing them as incorrect or misleading, and you might have enjoyed my satire of the levels which questions the wisdom of defining the robocar based on the role the human being plays in driving it.

Recent events lead me to go further. I believe a case can be made that this levels are holding the industry back, and have a possible minor role in the traffic fatalities we have seen with Tesla autopilot. As such I urge the levels be renounced by NHTSA and the SAE and replaced by something better.

Some history

It’s true that in the early days, when Google was effectively the only company doing work on a full self-driving car for the roads, people were looking for some sort of taxonomy to describe the different types of potential cars. NHTSA’s first article laid one out as a series of levels numbered 0 to 4 which gave the appearance of an evolutionary progression.

Problem was, none of those stages existed. Even Google didn’t know what it wanted to build, and my most important contribution there probably was being one of those pushing it from the highway car with occasional human driving to the limited area urban taxi. Anthony Levandowski first wanted the highway car because it was the easiest thing to build and he’s always been eager to get out into reality as soon as possible.

The models were just ideas, and I don’t think the authors at NHTSA knew how much they would be carving them into public and industry thinking by releasing the idea of levels in an official document. They may not have known that once in people’s minds, they would affect product development, and also change ideas about regulation. To regulate something you must define it, and this was the only definition coming from government.

The central error of the levels was threefold. First, it defined vehicles according to the role the human being played in their operation. (In my satire, I compare that to how the “horseless carriage” was first defined by the role the horse played, or didn’t play in it.)

Second, by giving numbered levels and showing a chart the future, it advanced the prediction that the levels were a progression. That they would be built in order, each level building on the work of the ones before it.

Worst of all, it cast into stone the guess that the driver assist (ADAS) technologies were closely related to, and the foundation of the robocar technologies. That they were just different levels of the same core idea.

(The ADAS technologies are things like adaptive cruise control, lanekeeping, forward collision avoidance, blindspot warning, anti-lock brakes and everything else that helps in driving or alerts or corrects driver errors.)

There certainly wasn’t consensus agreement on that guess. When Google pushed Nevada to pass the first robocar regulations, the car companies came forward during the comment phase to make one thing very clear — this new law had nothing to do with them. This law was for crazy out-there projects like Google. The law specifically exempted all the the ADAS projects car companies had, including and up to things like the Tesla Autopilot, from being governed by the law or considered self-driving car technology.

Many in the car companies, whose specialty was ADAS, loved the progression idea. It meant that they were already on the right course. That the huge expertise they had built in ADAS was the right decision, and would give them a lead into the future.

Outside the car companies, the idea was disregarded. Almost all companies went directly to full robocar projects, barely using existing ADAS tools and hardware if at all. The exceptions were companies in the middle like Tesla and MobilEye who had feet in both camps.

SAE, in their 2nd version of their standard, partly at my urging, added language to say that the fact that the levels were numbered was not to be taken as an ordering. Very good, but not enough.

The reality

In spite of the levels, the first vehicle to get commercial deployment was the Navia (now Navya) which is a low speed shuttle with no user controls inside. What would be called a “level 4.” Later, using entirely different technology, Tesla’s Autopilot was the first commercial offering of “level 2.” Recently, Audi has declared that given the constraints of operating in a traffic jam, they are selling “level 3.” While nobody sold it, car companies demonstrated autopilot technologies going back to 2006, and of course prototype “level 4” cars completed the DARPA grand challenge in 2005 and urban challenge in 2007.

In other words, no ordering at all. DARPA’s rules were so against human involvement that teams were not allowed to send any signal to their car other than “abort the race.”

The confusion between the two broad technological areas has extended out to the public. People routinely think of Tesla’s autopilot as actual self-driving car technology, or simply as primitive self-driving car technology, rather than as extra-smart ADAS.

Tesla’s messaging points the public in both directions. On the one hand, Tesla’s manuals and startup screen are very clear that the Autopilot is not a self-driving car. That it needs to be constantly watched, with the driver ready to take over at any time. In some areas, that’s obvious to drivers — the AutoPilot does not respond to stop signs or red lights, so anybody driving an urban street without looking would soon get in an accident. On the highway, though, it’s better, and some would say too good. It can cruise around long enough without intervention to lull drivers into a false sense of security.

To prevent that, Tesla takes one basic measure — it requires you to apply a little torque to the steering wheel every so often to indicate your hands are on it. Wait too long and you get a visual alert, wait longer and you get an audible alarm. This is the lowest level of driver attention monitoring out there. Some players have a camera actually watch the driver’s eyes to make sure they are on the road most of the time.

At the same time, Tesla likes to talk up the hope their AutoPilot is a stepping stone. When you order your new Tesla, you can order AutoPilot and you can also pay $5,000 for “full self driving.” It’s mostly clear that they are two different things. When you order the full self driving package, you don’t get it, because it doesn’t exist. Rather you get some extra sensors in the car, and Tesla’s promise that a new software release in the future will use those extra sensors to give you some form of full self driving. Elon Musk likes to made radically optimistic predictions of when Tesla will produce full robocars that can come to you empty or take you door to door.

Operating domain

NHTSA improved things in their later documents starting in 2016. In particular they clarified that it was very important to consider what roads and road conditions a robocar was rated to operate in. They called this the ODD (Operational Design Domain.) The SAE had made that clear earlier when they had added a “Level 5” to make it clear that their Level 4 did not go everywhere. The Level 5 car that can go literally everywhere remains a science fiction goal for now — nobody knows how to do it or even truly plans to do it, because there are diminishing economic returns to handling and certifying safety on absolutely all roads, but it exists to remind people that the only meaningful level (4) does not go everywhere and is not science fiction. The 3rd level is effectively a car whose driving domain includes places where a human must take the controls to leave it.

NHTSA unified their levels with the SAE a few years in, but they are still called the NHTSA levels by most.

The confusion

The recent fatalities involving Uber and Tesla have shown the level of confusion among the public is high. Indeed, there is even confusion within those with higher familiarity of the industry. It has required press comments from some of the robocar companies to remind people, “very tragic about that Tesla crash, but realize that was not a self-driving car.” And indeed, there are still people in the industry who believe they will turn ADAS into robocars. I am not declaring them to be fools, but rather stating that we need people to be aware that is very far from a foregone conclusion.

Are the levels solely responsible for the confusion? Surely not — a great deal of the blame can be lain in many places, including automakers who have been keen to being perceived as in the game even though their primary work is still in ADAS. Automakers were extremely frustrated back in 2010 when the press started writing that the true future of the car was in the hands of Google and other Silicon Valley companies, not with them. Many of them got to work on real robocar projects as well.

NHTSA and SAE’s levels may not be to blame for all the confusion, but they are to blame for not doing their best to counter it. They should renounce the levels and, if necessary, create a superior taxonomy which is both based on existing work and flexible enough to handle our lack of understanding of the future.

Robocars and ADAS should be declared two distinct things

While the world still hasn’t settled on a term (and the government and SAE documents have gone through a few themselves. (Highly Automated Vehicles, Driving Automation for On-Road Vehicles, Automated Vehicles, Automated Driving Systems etc.) I will use my preferred term here (robocars) but understand they will probably come up with something of their own. (As long as it’s not “driverless.”)

The Driver Assist systems would include traditional ADAS, as well as autopilots. There is no issue of the human’s role in this technology — it is always present and alert. These systems have been unregulated and may remain so, though there might be investigation into technologies to assure the drivers are remaining alert.

The robocar systems might be divided up by their operating domains. While this domain will be a map of specific streets, for the purposes of a taxonomy, people will be interested in types of roads and conditions. A rough guess at some categories would be “Highway,” “City-Fast” and “City-Slow.” Highway would be classified as roads that do not allow pedestrians and/or cyclists. The division between fast and slow will change with time, but today it’s probably at about 25mph. Delivery robots that run on roads will probably stick to the slow area. Subclassifications could include questions about the presence of snow, rain, crowds, animals and children.

What about old level 3?

What is called level 3 — a robocar that needs a human on standby to take over in certain situations — adds some complexity. This is a transitionary technology. It will only exist during the earliest phases of robocars as a “cheat” to get things going in places where the car’s domain is so limited that it’s forced to transition to human control while moving on short but not urgent notice.

Many people (including Waymo) think this is a bad idea — that it should never be made. It certainly should not be declared as one of the levels of a numbered progression. It is felt that a transition to human driving while moving at speed is a risky thing, exactly the sort of thing where failure is most common in other forms of automation.

Even so, car companies are building this, particularly for the traffic jam. While first visions of a car with a human on standby mostly talked about a highway car with the human handling exit ramps and construction zones, an easier and useful product is the traffic jam autopilot. This can drive safely with no human supervision in traffic jams. When the jam clears, the human needs to do the driving. This can be built without the need for takeover at speed, however. The takeover can be when stopped or at low speed, and if the human can’t takeover, stopping is a reasonable option because the traffic was recently very slow.

Generally, however, these standby driver cars will be a footnote of history, and don’t really deserve a place in the taxonomy. While all cars will have regions they don’t drive, they will also all be capable of coming to a stop near the border of such regions, allowing the human to take control while slow or stopped, which is safe.

The public confusion slows things down

Tesla knows it does not have a robocar, and warns its drivers about this regularly, though they ignore it. Some of that inattention may come from those drivers imagining they have “almost a robocar.” But even without that factor, the taxonomies create another problem. The public, told that the Tesla is just a lower level of robocar, sees the deaths of Tesla drivers as a sign that real robocar projects are more dangerous. The real projects do have dangers, but not the same dangers as the autopilots have. (Though clearly lack of driver attention is an issue both have on their plates.) A real robocar is not going to follow badly painted highway lines right into a crash barrier. They follow their maps, and the lane markers are just part of how they decide where they are and where to go.

But if the public says, “We need the government to slow down the robocar teams because of those Tesla crashes” or “I don’t trust getting in the Waymo car because of the Tesla crashes” then we’ve done something very wrong.

(If the public says they are worried about the Waymo car because of the Uber crash, they have a more valid point, though those teams are also very different from one another.)

The Automated/Autonomous confusion

For decades, roboticists used the word “autonomous” to refers to robots that took actions and decisions without having to rely on an outside source (such as human guidance.) They never used it in the “self-ruling” sense it has politically, though that is the more common (but not only) definition in common parlance.

Unfortunately, one early figure in car experiments hated that the roboticists’ vocabulary didn’t match his narrow view of the meaning of the word, and he pushed with moderate success for the academic and governmental communities to use the word “automated.” To many people, unfortunately, “automated” means simple levels of automation. Your dishwasher is automated. Your teller machine is automated. To the roboticist, the robocar is autonomous — it can operate entirely without you. The autopilot is automated — it needs human guidance.

I suspect that the public might better understand the difference if these words were split in these fashions. The Waymo car is autonomous, the Tesla automated. Everybody in robotics knows they don’t use the world autonomous in the political sense. I expressed this in a joke many years ago, “A truly autonomous car is one that, if you tell it to take you to the office, says it would rather go to the beach instead.” Nobody is building that car. Yet.

Are they completely disjoint?

I am not attempting to say that there are no commonalities between ADAS and robocars. In fact, as development of both technologies progresses, elements of each have slipped into the other, and will continue to do so. Robocars have always used radars created for ADAS work. Computer vision tools are being used in both systems. The small ultrasonic sensors for ADAS are used by some robocars for close in detection where their LIDARs don’t see.

Even so, the difference is big enough to be qualitative and not, as numbered levels imply, quantitative. A robocar is not just an ADAS autopilot that is 10 times or 100 times or even 1,000 times better. It’s such a large difference that it doesn’t happen by evolutionary improvement but through different ways of thinking.

There are people who don’t believe this, and Tesla is the most prominent of them.

As such, I am not declaring that the two goals are entirely disjoint, but rather that official taxonomies should declare them to be disjoint. Make sure that developers and the public know the difference and so modulate their expectations. It won’t forbid the cross pollination between the efforts. It won’t even stop those who disagree with all I have said from trying the evolutionary approach on their ADAS systems to create robocars.

SAE should release a replacement for its levels, and NHTSA should endorse this or do the same.

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alden-jaakola · 7 years ago

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The James Ford Bell rare books library

A library that I really wanted to write about is a little chunk of Wilson library where they have all of the rare and ancient books, maps, and artifacts. I went once as part of an art class that studied wonderment, or the wonder of wandering.

They have maps and charts that are hundreds of years old, where the illustrations are beautiful and filled with sea monsters, some of which are clearly misinterpreted real animals. I really loved these and asked about them at length during that class. I had always assumed that the mapmakers just made them up when they illuminated the maps, but apparently, they are consistent across all maps of their respective time periods. So there must have been a taxonomy in that time of fictional beasts.

When I went to the library this time I found out that it was being moved to a different library on campus. I asked them about it and apparently, I decided to go just the wrong time and the move will be complete sometime this semester. They stopped taking appointments a couple days before I went. I don't know what the policy is going to be about individual student appointments at the new location but I really hope I can see that stuff again sometime.

#umnxlab

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deepestcowboytragedy · 8 years ago

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Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century”

Haraway opens by describing her writing as “an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism” (291), and that the center of this will be “the image of the cyborg (291). Cyborgs are described as “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (291), and Haraway contends that by now we are all cyborgs ourselves. We are made up of both imagined and material realities, with “the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation” (292). Haraway further contends that “The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality” (292). Cyborgs do not follow reproductive norms or biological needs. They do not fulfill the common human origin story of “the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate” (292). Cyborgs thus turn ideas of culture and society on their head. They do not come from or recognize the human origin myth: “the cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust” (293). Rather, “cyborgs are ether, quintessence”(294), and like “our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum” (294).

Haraway next discusses the use of the term “women of colour” by Chela Sandoval as “a hopeful model of political identity called ‘oppositional consciousness’”(296). However, she goes on to explain in detail how “Katie King has emphasized the limits of identification” (296) and that “taxonomies of feminism produce epistemologies to police deviation from official women’s experience” (297), so it’s unclear to me whether she is for or against the terminology. It seems Haraway wants to coalesce outsider traits into identities, conflating them cyborgs.

We are then given a chart of terms that transition from alleged old hierarchical dominations to the newly arisen informatics of domination. For instance, reproduction becomes replication, sex becomes genetic engineering, labour becomes robotics, and mind becomes artificial intelligence. The new items are all not recognizable as natural, but are instead mechanized, technological replacements. Everything, including the home, work, and body itself, “can be dispersed and interfaced in nearly infinite, polymorphous ways” (302). Biology becomes “a kind of cryptology”(303), as science finds more ways to process information and cross boundaries between man and machine.

Haraway goes further into her cyborg identity for women of color. She explains that literacy is a defining characteristic in “the Western myth of the distinction between oral and written cultures, primitive and civilized mentalities, and the phallogocentrism of the West”(311). So, women of color must focus on writing, and about “the power to signify” (311), but cyborg writing must be “about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (311). Cyborgs must retell original stories and de-colonize them in order to subvert their meaning. Haraway gives the example of Cherríe Moraga writing about Malinche (mistress to Cortés) in both Spanish and English, “both conqueror’s languages”(312).

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