#i do think that were i not dyslexic i would still not follow patterns

[milkweedman]

Knitting a freehand bag and started wondering how often people even use patterns, anyway. So--how often do you use a pattern when you make things ? This include knitting/crochet/sewing/weaving/nalbinding/bobbin lace/tatting/etc but also things like woodworking, cooking, and baking. If you want to just pick the thing you do most often that's fine.

I personally do not use patterns as I find them far more confusing than just figuring out the construction of an item and simply making it. I do very occasionally browse ravelry for inspiration but have downloaded maybe 2. In the 5 or so years since I joined. And have followed exactly 1, which I modified every single aspect of. In my defense, dyslexia.

[trashcankitty12]

Stella Headcanons:

You know her. You love her. 

She’s bubbly, she’s fun. (And she’s pretty funny.)

She’s Princess Stella Sol of Solaria. 

(These headcanons are all in relation to my ‘main verse’, which is the New Company of Light/Balance Verse. And it can also translate into my Left verse.)

Under the cut because it’s long.

About Stella:

-Her fear of heights comes from a major fall she took as a child off of her grandfather’s pet dragon. (He was teaching her how to ride and… She wasn’t holding onto it well enough and down she went.)

-Stella is fluent in nearly 56 of the Magical Dimensions languages. (She was to stick to the languages spoken by the realms who interacted most with Solaria.)

-After meeting Bloom and spending a little time on Earth, Stella is also trying to learn a few of the Earth’s languages. (She’s mastered English and Spanish, but she’s still working on French and Russian.)

-She loves sweets. (And food in general. But considering she’s Solarian, that’s to be expected. They tend to eat more than most people in the Magical Dimension.)

-Stella may or may not glow in the dark. (It’s something she can control and she has to be focused to do it. She inherited that gift from her mother.)

-Stella’s mother was religious and has a close relationship to the Moons, while her father, despite being so close in relationship to the Suns of Solaria, isn’t religious. Stella personally has mixed feelings on religion. She likes the idea of spirituality and having a higher power to rely on, but organized religion makes her heart hurt. (They tend to talk down about those who don’t follow a ‘certain’ way of life, which to Stella isn’t a cool thing to do, unless, of course, the other people are actually hurting someone else.)

-She was almost a big sister. Her mother had been pregnant when she was seven. (They don’t ever talk about it. And, as an adult, Stella can see where this was a turning point for her parents and their relationship. Her mother just wasn’t quite the same after losing Diana.)

-Stella is a dog person and was so happy when she finally got a puppy for her birthday one year. (The dog was her best friend and her main confidant.) Unfortunately, Stella’s dog only made it to four years old. (It had an illness that not even magic could fix.)

-Stella hasn’t been able to stomach the thought of another dog since. (However, Brandon may or may not offer for them to get a dog later on. You know, as their “first child”.)

-Stella can spot patterns without trying. It’s so ingrained in her after being around fashion, and the practical applications of pattern spotting have made her life so much easier.

-Here’s the thing about Stella… She’s somewhat dyslexic. Words and reading do not come easily to her. On the flip side, Stella can give one hellova speech. Her charisma and charm make her a natural at hyping up a crowd.

-Stella had a fairy godmother until she was 13. An elderly woman named Glinda. Glinda helped Stella with her shyness and in her first fashion attempts. And Glinda was the one who helped Stella gain her magic winx the first time with encouragement and confidence. (After all, how else should a future queen bring out her power?)

-After gaining her wings, her father gifted her the Ring of Solaria. It was done in a ceremony to the Suns and Moons of Solaria and the Ring had to choose Stella just as it had Radius and their family before them. Once Stella and the Ring bonded, she shifted for the first time in public to show off her wings and magic. Her parents couldn’t have been prouder.

-She went to a private school on Solaria for her elementary and middle school education years, but she was somewhat isolated due to being the Princess of Solaria (making the other kids judge her ahead of time as some sort of prim and proper prep they didn’t want around) and due to some of her ‘uncool’ hobbies.

-(Those uncool hobbies? Stella is actually into comics and superheroes, but until meeting the rest of the Winx, she wasn’t interested in sharing that side of herself. Solarian Comics actually helped Stella with reading because of their writing structure. Stella is also a fan of learning cultures and wanting to see what benefits other places and if it could be replicated to help Solaria. And Stella was kind of a… Horse girl. She spent many, many, many summers and school holidays at her maternal uncle’s horse ranch in the Western Spaces of Solaria.)

-Stella tends to use her solar powers more than her lunar ones. It’s not because she doesn’t feel close to her mother or to her mother’s family, it’s just a little more difficult for her tap into that part of her magic. (Solar magic is easy and tapped into by thinking of warm and splendid times. Lunar magic requires a bit more… Reflection. And Stella doesn’t like having to think too long about things. Not because she can’t, but because if she starts to really think about things, she tends to overthink them which leads her down a dark rabbit hole.)

-Stella’s best friend growing up was Nova Rinae, despite being two years older than the other girl. Nova’s mother is the head of Luna’s guard, and Nova was often in the palace. (Making her one of the few children always around. And because she shared several of Stella’s interests, they clicked rather quickly.)

-(Her parents also encourage this friendship as it’s important to them for Stella to be close to those who may serve alongside her when its time for her to become queen. Friendships can be turned into unwavering loyalty, and that can mean life or death in certain situations.)

-Before she ever got her magic, Stella’s parents thought she may end up being the ‘New Host’ for the Light Dragon. (Bloom was never found, which meant no one could say for certain what happened to the Light Dragon, other than it had to be alive still. Otherwise the Balance would have been off.)

-Because of their thoughts on her having the Light Dragon, Stella was taught basic hand-to-hand skills as a child and was instructed to be wary of “golden eyes” in the shadows. She was also to learn Solaria’s history as well as Domino’s. (Though Stella mostly paid attention to how the two worlds overlapped instead of their separate histories.)

-Stella actually knew Layla, Sky, and Diaspro as children. But because so much can change from being five years old to being 15/16, she didn't recognize them when they met again. (They had all been at a major conference for the realms and while their parents ‘talked shop’, they went to play. It was their first and last time together like that until years later.)

-Despite being a princess, Stella tends to be a bit messy. At least, as far as her room itself. Her workspaces (wardrobe and vanity and tailoring areas) are the most well-kept areas in her care. (She likes to work in clean spaces… But in her room, the space where she lives, she likes it to look lived in.)

-Stella originally got into fashion at about 10 years old in an attempt to get closer to her mother. Her mother always had work to do as a queen, and for her off-time, she went to fashion shows (which in a way, were also work, because as a queen she’s expected to be aware of trends and present herself in a certain way). So to spend more time with her mother, Stella started having an interest in fashion. (Which quickly became a hobby she loved when she found the different ways she could express herself with fashion.)

-In a bid to get closer to her father, Stella took a major interest in cooking. (Her father can bake. He’s messy at it, but by the Dragons do his pastries and cookies taste of heaven.) Granted, Stella didn’t inherit the baking skill, but she can recite recipes and judge pastries and baked goods like its her job. (And for some of Solaria’s festivals, it is.)

-Have I mentioned she’s an expert equestrian in the Solarian Rodeo? Her go-to is barrel racing and square-dancing competitions, and she’s even dipped her toes into riding the bronco and in cattle roping.

-Stella has far-sightedness. She can see things far away, but things up close are blurred. She used to wear glasses, but after elementary school, she swapped to contacts. (However she does still wear glasses and keeps them close by just in case. They’re a stylish silver-blue and not quite thick-framed.)

-Stella has formal training in ballroom dancing. (Her favorite is the Eraklyon Tango. Or at least, it has been for the past few years. Wonder why…?)

-Stella also has a minor fear of spiders. (It’s not really a fear either… More like a squick. She doesn’t like them, but she doesn’t mind them being around if she doesn’t have to see them. It’s because one of her school teachers thought a great Life Lesson would be for the class to witness his pet tarantula eat a live meal. Not fun for little Stella.)

(Not fun for him either, once the parents got a hold of him…)

-Stella lied about what happened during her ‘real’ first year at Alfea. She honestly did blow up the Potion’s Lab… But it wasn’t because she was researching color theories…

-Just before Stella was meant to leave for Alfea, like a week or two before, she found out from Nova, NOVA, that her parents were getting a divorce. Luna and Radius never told her. Her friend told her.

-Stella didn’t want to leave after that, afraid that if she was gone, she couldn’t help them patch things up. (She truly believed they could work this out. She just needed to be there. She needed them to see her and remember why they fell in love.)

-They dropped Stella off, but still didn’t discuss or leave room to discuss the divorce. (Stella didn’t want to let them know she knew because she didn’t want Nova in trouble for listening in on their mothers’ conversations.)

-Which led to a panicked Stella trying desperately to pretend to be okay while in the presence of the others. (She’s a princess, she can’t show despair. Especially without reason.)

-Stella was angry that her parents still hadn’t talked to her and that they had sent her away. She was feeling left out and scared and confused. They were in love. Right?!

-So she started doing small things around Alfea to try and get her suspended. Not expelled, just suspended. (She needed time at home, before the holidays.)

-She verbally attacked other Alfea students, playing up the pompous princess act. No luck. She mocked Palladium. No luck. She even cut classes. No luck. So as a last resort, without having to go to Cloud Tower and stir trouble up there, was to mess around in the potion’s lab. It worked… Too well.

-She was expelled and sent back to Solaria. Her parents were upset with her, and disappointed (which was the worst ever for Stella who really wanted their approval in everything). Stella broke down and finally told them that she knew and that she didn’t want her family to break apart. That she was scared and shaken and angry. Angry that they could pretend so well that everything was fine when it obviously wasn’t.

-Luna and Radius decided to try a form of family counseling to try and help Stella. (They hated seeing their daughter so upset, but they knew in the long run that staying together would have damaged her further. She didn’t need to grow up with constant arguing and avoiding each other, that wasn’t a love story they wanted her to follow.)

-(They also explained the situation to Faragonda and promised to pay for the damages. Faragonda allowed Stella to return within the next school year if her progress with the counselor went well.)

-Stella, even though still upset with her parents’ divorce, was a bit more accepting of it after taking the school year to focus on them as a family. (Even one that was split.)

-Stella does have hope they’ll reunite, but she understands a bit more now why they split up. (And even though they are in separate palaces, Luna taking residence in the Lunar Sections now, she knows they love her very much.)

[sophiainspace]

A Legends fic for Autistic Pride Day (Mick Rory & Sara Lance)

This grew beyond a ficlet (it’s 2k words), which is why it’s a day late for Autistic Pride Day. Hope you enjoy. (Canon-wise, this fic ignores the fact that Sara’s been abducted by aliens, because I couldn’t find any way around that.) I’ll probably put it on AO3 as its own fic. Enjoy.

A Place at the Table

That Saturday morning, Sara is awoken by a crash, over a yell that might be a Fuck!

“Gideon,” Sara hisses, trying not to wake Ava. “What was that?”

“That was Mick Rory, dropping a box of eggs in the galley, Captain,” Gideon replies, just as quietly. 

Sara lets her head drop back against the headboard. “Of course it was.”

Beside her, Ava opens sleepy eyes. “He was fine yesterday,” she murmurs, yawning. “Want me to go and check on him?”

Sara shakes her head. “Thanks, babe. I got this.”

She can hear Mick’s muttering even all the way down the hall. As she turns into the galley, there’s no sign of the broken eggs now. Mick’s standing at the stove, dumping a new batch into a frying pan.

“I see you’re really taking your frustration out on those shells, Mick.” She takes a step inside the galley. “Don’t blame the poor eggs for whatever the last ones did to hurt you.”

He pauses, mid-crack, to lift his eyes in her direction and grunt something unintelligible. Then he turns back to his frying pan. 

So. That went well.

Sara takes another cautious step closer. It’s not just eggs that Mick is working on. He’s got pancakes browning in another pan, bacon in a third. “Cooking for the crew?” she asks, aiming for cheerful.

He just shrugs. 

The sizzle of oil from multiple pans could be intentional, to deter anyone trying to get near him. It might take League of Assassins training to get past that armor, but Sara’s never been afraid of Mick or his posturing. She leans back against the counter, trying to catch his eye. Figuring out how to deal with their resident pyromanic has been a five-year mission all its own, one that Sara regrets she didn’t take more seriously at the beginning. 

She’s not sure when it happened — but at some point during the past few years, Mick Rory became the glue that held this messy, broken family together. It took a lot longer for Sara to begin to understand what’s going on beneath his calloused surface, but she’s getting there. Usually, he’s cheerful when he cooks, or at least as close as Mick Rory gets. Right now he’s slumped over the stove so sadly that it hurts to watch.

“Mick,” she says again.

He keeps right on frying, but he almost smiles. “Ain’t gonna give up, are ya?”

She grins, taking the light tone as permission to reach over and pat him on the shoulder. “What’s up?”

“Dunno,” he says. Then, so quietly that Sara isn’t sure she’s heard right, he adds, “No one’s gonna want this.”

She feels herself frown at him. Then at the pan of eggs. “What, the food?”

A pause, a single nod, and he’s back to frying. 

“Sure they will,” Sara says. “Who doesn’t like eggs and pancakes?”

Dumping a pancake out of the other pan, Mick scowls. “Was making these the way Haircut likes ‘em. I forgot.”

She looks back down at the stack of pancakes. They are indeed done Ray Palmer-style, so light they’ll be almost raw inside. She remembers passing on a few of those pancakes over the years, while Ray cheerfully finished the lot. 

Sara is learning how to push past the solid walls Mick builds to keep out a confusing, dangerous world. But even with his family around him, people he can trust, he doesn’t always know how to unlock the doors of his own personal prison and let himself out. It can take time. She tries to give it to him, that Saturday morning. She sinks into the distant sound of Zari, Behrad and Nate waiting for the bathroom, just being the disaster Legends they are, at their usual volume. And waits for Mick to talk.

“They’re all gone,” Mick says, at last. Somewhere beneath his low rumble, he almost sounds forlorn.

Down the hall, a fight is breaking out over whose turn is next. Grimacing, Sara nods her head towards the door. “Doesn’t sound like it to me.” 

Mick shrugs. “Not the same.”

He means it’s not the same team, she realizes, and suddenly it all falls into place. Her heart breaks a little for him. 

Leonard Snart told her once, a long time ago, that Mick wasn’t good with change. It was something of an understatement. There’s been a lot of reconfiguring of their chaotic little family recently — new people, messy renegotiations of dynamics — but she thought Mick was doing okay with it. After Charlie left, he shut himself away in his room for a couple of days, but then he seemed to get over it.

If Ray Palmer was here, she’d make him lead some team building exercises, if only so Mick could roll his eyes and complain about them. But he’s not here, and that’s the problem.

Mick glares harder at the pan. “All the weird ones have gone.” 

Sara tries not to laugh at that. If anything, the team’s only getting weirder by the day. But Mick seems to need her to listen, so she doesn’t interrupt.

He dumps the last of the food out of the pan, grabs the full plates and strides to the table. Sara follows him, ready to offer to help, but Mick just pauses at the table.

He moves slowly around its curve. “Zari,” he says, as he reaches the first empty chair, staring hard at it. Now that they’ve got their memories back, grieving the first Zari has been complicated for all them, knowing she isn’t really gone. Sometimes Sara passes the other Zari in the hallway, and she gets a bright flash of memory, checked shirts and donuts and sarcasm, clashing hard with the reality of her smiling friend. One more ghost haunting the halls of the Waverider, trailing after her flesh-and-blood counterpart. But Sara doesn’t think she’s heard Mick mention Zari Tomaz yet. She watches as he puts the piled-high plate of eggs down in front of the empty seat. He says, “Over easy with hot sauce on the side,” and frowns. “Hot sauce meant it didn’t remind her of home.”

Sara remembers, now that she can remember. The old Zari had eaten alone for weeks, after she first came onboard. Till Mick had started making her breakfast, working through a dozen new ways to serve it. Zari settled on eggs done in a way that worked for her, and that was how she ate them for the rest of her time on the Waverider. The term PTSD might not have been one either she or Mick would ever have said out loud, but he could relate enough to meet her on their common ground -- food.

Mick moves to the next chair, putting down the stack of pancakes. “Haircut.” He taps the back of the chair. All this talking from Mick Rory is such a rare event, especially when he’s upset, that Sara doesn’t interrupt. “He’d be freaking out now. Saying I didn’t get the pancakes right, or I should’ve set a timer so the eggs were done at the same time.” He glares at the chair. “Like he thought he was the only autistic person on this fucking ship.” 

Sara tries not to laugh, and fails. She takes Mick’s very mild glare as a sign that it’s okay to answer now. “You miss him. And Zari.” The most obviously neurodivergent members of the team. She’s starting to see the pattern. 

But the ship is still full of neurodivergent Legends. If Mick’s feeling alone… Well, he shouldn’t be.

But she thinks she’s catching on. She steps one seat ahead of Mick, placing a hand on the back of it. “Dr. Nate Heywood,” she says. “He’s got ADHD, remember? Hard to forget, when he’s playing that awful music at full blast anytime he can’t concentrate, till my brain starts dripping out of my ears.” She drops into to a conspiratorial tone. “I found him in the cargo bay having a meltdown last week. Don’t tell him I told you.” She moves on the next seat, running a thoughtful hand over it. “John. I doubt he has a diagnosis, but he depths that man can sink to—” and she points an accusing finger at Mick— “more than rival yours.”

“Warlock’s an asshole,” Mick protests, but he’s frowning at the seat like he’s thinking about it.

“And you know the ones who aren’t here right now are still Legends, don’t you?” She taps the back of another seat. “Mona Wu, dyslexic writer and all round excellent person.” She meets Mick’s eye. “You know, even though she loves reading, I don’t think she would ever have had the confidence to write if you hadn’t encouraged her.” Mick huffs, but his face softens at the mention of his friend. 

Sara’s almost run out of seats, now, so she starts a second round of the table. “Nora Darhk—still a Legend, just like Ray, whether or not they’re here right now—and I never met a more courageous survivor, diagnosis or not.” 

And then she takes a risk, and one more step. With her hand on the back of a chair that wasn’t even here back then, in a galley that the man himself would not have recognized, she says “Leonard Snart.” She meets Mick’s dangerous don’t go there glare and holds his gaze. “I don’t know what his deal was—you’d know better than me—but he wasn’t exactly neurotypical.”

With thoughtful eyes, Mick just looks at her. Walls crumbling.

Taking advantage of the silence, Sara walks all around the table, till she’s close enough to touch Mick, and lays a hand on his arm. “Mick Rory.” At his wide-eyed stare, she says, “It hasn’t totally slipped my notice, Mick. It’s my job to know what’s going on on this ship, and you and I have been here a long time.” 

She’s seen him grow so much in that time. She wasn’t fond of the reluctant Rogue who wanted out of Rip’s mission, and when he turned brutal bounty hunter, she thought he’d never come back from it. He did, and it was the first time he surprised her. Once he finally made it past the fallout from that, she watched him grow to become even more. Totem bearer. Unlikely friend to all of them, even the most hopeless strays among the Legends. Her right hand man on the bridge, often enough, as much as he pretends he doesn’t want to be there. Watching him this year, with Lita, he’s made her as proud as any of her family could. It’s been a long five years. The two of them, on board the longest, have watched each other travel the furthest.

“Autistic,” Mick finally replies to her not-quite-question, in a mutter, eyes dropping like he’s ashamed of it.

Sara rubs his arm. She doubts that’s anywhere near the whole story, but maybe saying that chapter out loud helps. She hopes so. “I know some of the people who’ve gone...” She grins, and finishes, “...were the other freaks on this ship who reminded you of you.” She sees his lips twitch, still refusing to smile. “But, one way or another, they’re still here, Mick. And, trust me, there are people on this team who still get you.” 

“Yeah?” he murmurs, to the floor.

And she takes one last risk. Places a hand on her chest. “Sara Lance,” she says, as she looks back up at her friend’s surprised blink. She hangs onto the chair beside her as she forces herself to voice all the things she doesn’t like to say out loud, if she can help it. “Bipolar since I was eighteen. A shipload of PTSD, and the way my life will always be entwined with death doesn’t exactly help.” She sighs, refusing to let that ever-present darkness blot out her light again. “Every time I think I’ve got past that, it just catches up with me.” She feels a hand squeezing her own where it’s still on Mick’s arm, and she blinks something out of her eye, making herself carry on. “First the bloodlust, then Death Witch, and then all that shit with the Loom... All I ever see is death.”

“No,” he says firmly, and she looks up into determined eyes. “That ain’t all you are.”

It’s more of a confession of friendship than she ever gets from him, and she smiles. One more flame to light the way in the darkness. She can never have too many.

He gently pushes her hand from his arm, heading back towards the counter. “Come on. Got food to serve.” He piles a plate high with eggs and bacon, passing it Sara. “For Ava.”

She remembers something, and grins. “I didn’t even hear her come in last night. What were you two watching?”

“American Horror Story. Till three in the morning,” he replies, clearly proud he can keep Ava up that late. He looks at the plate, then sticks another egg on it. “Get her a coffee.”

Sara just smiles. Mick doesn’t mention his odd friendship with Ava very much, but it makes Sara happy.

And she looks at Mick, busy at the stove, and finds herself hoping it makes him happy too. She hopes all his weird little connections across this weird little family make him feel less alone in the wide, overwhelming world that could never make room for someone like him. She hopes he knows there’ll always be a place for him around the Legends’ table.

She hopes she can remember the same for herself.

“You just gonna stand there, or you gonna help?” he asks. “I gotta feed Nate, Behrad and Zari here. It’s gonna take all week.”

Sara laughs, taking another plate to the table as Mick grabs the flour and starts making up another batch of pancake batter.

They’re going to need more eggs.

[utaprifanzine]

Shining Live Fanzine: Concept Pitch

I believe @utapri-idol-hell has already mentioned this upcoming project on her blog so, without further delay, this is the completed concept pitch for an SL-themed Utapri fanzine!

(Note: there is also a link to this post on twitter! If you have a twitter account, please consider retweeting the post from this account so that non-tumblr users can also see this!)

I would like to first put emphasis on the fact that this is a concept pitch. That means this is a presentation of the initial idea to anyone who might be interested in this project. At this point in time, most of the rules and concepts are still malleable - they can be changed and shaped according to feedback from this post.

If you are interested in this project (as either a contributor or as someone who would want to acquire a copy of the zine) please consider filling out this feedback form. Any responses will be useful to determine how the zine moves forward, but the feedback is particularly important in regards to the “Application Methods” section of this post (see below).

There are, however, three rules which are already “set” and would not be changed. They are as follows:

This zine would feature work from both artists and writers.

Due to Broccoli’s history with ordering “cease and desist”s against utapri doujin artists, this would be a non-profit zine. Thus, digital copies would be completely free.

The concept for this zine is based on the intention of it being a fun project that would appeal to the majority of the fanbase. Therefore, some rules are set in place to avoid content that might spark conflict and/or be geared towards a specific audience.

Below the cut, this post is split into three sections: Concept, Rules, and Application Methods. Each section is clearly noted with a header. “Concept” covers the general theme, content, and layout; “Rules” covers additional restrictions and/or allowances for the zine content; and “Application Methods” covers various possible ways a writer or artist could possibly apply to do a page for the zine. That last section is particularly important, because at the moment the application method for the zine has yet to be decided and the final decision will depend feedback.

There’s quite a bit of information below, so for anyone who is dyslexic or has any other reading difficulties, the most important information is in bold.

The ask box is also open for anyone who has any additional questions, or would like further expansion on something mentioned in the following text.

Please also consider reblogging this post so more people can see it!

The initial concept for this zine, was that it would (hopefully) be the first in a series of SL-themed zines that followed the chronological release pattern of the in-game events and gachas.

This seemed to be a good way to establish a kind of content equilibrium, so that no specific character/event/gacha appeared too often or too little. The pages would be themed after the events/gachas and each one would have a specific amount of pages allotted to it. Since KLab has only screwed the rotation once thus far, it seems like an easier method of creating balance.

Originally, it was going to be an annual digital zine with a high page count. However, since people have expressed their interest in physical copies of a zine, the concept was revised into something that would also translate well into physical format.

The following are the revised restrictions/guidelines for the current concept of the zine:

The total page count would be 44 pages. This includes the front/back cover, index and closing pages.

The content would cover from the release of the game (Aug/Sept 2017) up through January 2018. This covers 8 gacha and 10 events, not including the SL UR set which would also be featured.

Each event and gacha would be allotted two A4 pages of content - one for art and one for a piece of flash fiction. The cover and its related story would have double that amount: front/back cover + a two page short story.

The zine would have the potential to run in both physical and digital formats. Digital zines would be completely free (hence, non-profit project) however they will still require the purchaser to put in an order/request for the file. There will be no public download link posted.

All contributors are entitled to a digital copy without placing a request. Free physical copies may be a possibility, but that depends on a number of factors (namely the amount of contributors, zine orders, and if a print run is made at all) so I can’t promise anything at this point.

Print runs would be made if there is enough demand for physical copies, and there would only be one run per zine. This is reduce the risk of Broccoli viewing the zine production as a competitive merchandise and thereby becoming offended by the project.

(The following rules were put in place regarding the intentions and concept for the zine. Since this is a concept pitch, each rule is followed by an explanation of why it exists. If you believe any rule is unnecessary, or flawed, please note that in the feedback form! Passive-aggressively ranting about it on twitter doesn’t help!)

The UR Rule

The featured UR pair (for gachas) or the featured UR/SR pair (for events) MUST be the focus of the piece. Other characters can be mentioned and/or appear, but the piece has to be clearly centered on the two featured characters for that set/event. This is to help ensure the balance of content set by following the release patterns.

This goes without saying, but the pieces must also be themed after the event/gacha for which they are the pages for. A simple mention, hint, or acknowledgement toward the set/event isn't strong enough to be considered a theme.

Non-Shining Live Characters Are Allowed

Although the zine will be SL themed, all other characters that are part of the Utapri franchise can be featured within artwork and fiction pieces submitted to the zine. Since they’re official characters, I see no reason to purposely block them out.

The UR rule still applies, however, so these characters cannot become the focus of the pieces.

Keep it PG 13/15

This is partly in place to acknowledge the younger fans of the franchise (as well as those who aren't big fans of higher rated content) and partly because there is no fail-safe way to verify someone's age over the internet.

There are a lot of minors who consume and produce adult content for this fandom, and while their choices are theirs to make (I'm not the fandom police, it's none of my business), I don't want this project to be held responsible for distributing inappropriate content to minors in case issues do arise.

It's also worth noting that this rule does not only apply to sexual content (because some people think R18 only means sex). A piece depicting other mature themes - such as serious cannibalism, gore, or class A drug use - would not be acceptable.

No Romantic Ships

I feel like this is going to be the least popular rule, so the explanation for this is twice as long. Hear me out for a minute, and, if by the end you still think it’s unnecessary, by all means put that on the response form!

There are two main reasons for this rule.

Firstly, although shipping as a concept is extremely popular within fandom, individual ships still only cater to very specific audiences within the fanbase. No matter which way you twist it, no matter the popularity of any given ship, no single ship is universal. Some fans don't even connect to the idea of shipping in the first place.

Under most circumstances, that's completely fine, but within the context of a fanzine that's intended to appeal to as much of the fanbase as possible, allowing ships starts to seem very juxtaposed to that goal.

Case and point: if I have to include an extra contents page that lists all of the ships mentioned inside the zine so people can pick and/or avoid certain ones, that, to me, completely negates the idea of having a zine that most people can just pick up and read without issue.

Secondly, as I'm sure most people already know, ships are a primary source of conflict and motivator for harassment within fandom.

In terms of problems arising from including ships in a fanzine, I'm mainly worried about contributing artists/writers as well as the other admins getting harassed for content they did or didn't include within the zine. As someone who has not only seen utapri fan blogs run offline because of ship-based anon hate, but has also seen people ridiculed and kicked out of groups for not liking a popular ship, I would rather not risk exposing contributors and admins to that kind of toxic behavior.

When thinking about potential application methods for zine contributors, I realized that the traditional method - where people send in entries and these entries are reviewed/accepted/denied by an admin panel - may not be the best suited for a project that a) is supposed to be fun, not stressful and b) is looking for as many applicants as possible to hopefully be a success.

After brainstorming several alternative ways that applications could be handled, I decided the best possible way to choose one, would be to ask people who are interested in contributing to the zine how they would prefer to apply. After collecting the feedback, the most popular application method would be the one used for this zine.

The following are three different possible application methods. Each has a description of how it would work followed by a list of pros and cons for that method.

Method 1: First Come, First Serve

This method is very well-known, and very straightforward. Essentially, the list of available pages is posted at a specified time and date, and contributors would simply message the zine admins to claim whichever pages they want to contribute for. The first person to claim that particular page is the person who that page is allocated to.

Method 2: Random Chance

There are two variations of this method.

Application for Specific Pages: using this method, applicants would apply for specific pages at any point during the application period. Then, once the period has ended, the contributing artist/writer would be drawn at random for each page.

General Application: using this method, applicants would apply to the zine in general during the application period then, once the period has ended, the contributing writers/artists for all the pages would be drawn from the same pool. Applicants would be allowed to veto certain characters/sets/events and trade among each other if desired.

Method 3: Traditional Application

This is the method that’s most often used to manage and select applications for a zine.

An applicant would send in an entry form during the application period that contains, among other possible things, which pages they would like to apply for and an example of their work. At the end of the period, all entry forms are reviewed by the admins and the contributors for each page are decided by majority/unanimous vote. 

And that’s everything! Please consider filling out the feedback form if you have the time!

[kyxgrey]

storytime:

So I went to public school for three months of seventh grade. During those three months I was in band. Here's the thing I had never been in band and was a self taught percussion player who couldn't read sheet music. Well my teacher didn't know this and I refused to tell her so I taught myself to do it. Anyway not the point.

A week into school they brought in an assistant band teacher. Now I'm 13 at this time and quite frankly I wasn't as sex crazed as most of my classmates seemed to be. To put it simply I was, and always have been, a fucking nerd. Again not technically the point.

None of the class knew this was happening. So when the right side door behind the percussion section opened and a guy walks through we were pretty startled. Except I was flipping out. He was wearing a navy blue suit with darker blue stripes, a simple patterned tie, and fucking converse. It was super strange for all of us as Mrs. C always wore the same uniform we did, khaki pants and a polo shirt. That's still not what got me.

The guy had brown hair and it was styled like he ran his hands through it too much. But it wasn't just that. He looked like he couldn't pass as David Tennant's twin. So me, a avid Tennant fan, was freaking the fuck out standing behind my xylophone trying not to squeak out loud. Mrs. C explains why he's there and then tells us his name. HIS NAME WAS FREAKING DAVID C. (won't say his full last name as I am using his first name.)

Needless to say I was entirely distracted the entire time I was in band class as we didn't play that day. She wanted us to get to know him better since he was going to be there all year. So by the time he got around to us in the back of the room I was completely gone and had no self control and blurted out the one thing on my mind. "You look exactly like David Tennant and it's kind of freaking me out." He proceeded to blink at me stunned. I'm barely breathing at this point cause what the actual fuck Skylar. Then he says something that made me nearly die. "I don't have a clue who that is." HE WAS DEAD SERIOUS.

So me, being the huge nerd I am, began to me like 'oh hell no this will not stand!' This was like my new mission in life or something. "He was the 10th regeneration of the Doctor on Doctor Who." I am expecting this to clear up some confusion. But it just leads to "I've never watched it before, never got around to it I suppose." CUE ME TRYING NOT TO SCREAM WhAT THE FUCK IN MY SEVENTH GRADE BAND ROOM.

I then proceed to say with all my freaking chest "Well you should watch it cause you're his twin. Also from this point on I refer to you only as Ten or Mr. Tennant and no you can't make me change my mind." He laughs and y'all I was freaking out cause OOH and he just smiles at me and with everything in him says "So if I'm the doctor what does that make you then Skylar?" IM LIKe HE DID NOT JUST Do THAT. My heart at this point has fucking exploded cause who the fuck did this man think he was encouraging my weirdness and being happy to do it and taking it in stride. Why was he not getting upset or making fun of me or telling me to calm my imagination? So I answer "Your companion of course." with this 'and there's nothing you can do about it' tone.

Well fast forward like four days of me calling him Ten, The Doctor, and Mr. Tennant. My band teacher Mrs. C over hears me call him Doctor and she practically flies over to us in her speed and proceeds to say "How dare you address a teach by anything other than Mr. or Mrs. followed by their last name!" and I'm like 'holy fuck chill it ain't that deep.' But I've been horrified of her since day one so I'm floundering and He sees this and y'all I've like left my body at this point. He turns to her and goes " Actually it's an inside joke and I don't mind it one bit. I am this Tennant guy's twin after all." AND SHE LOOkS SO ANGRY BUT HUFFs AND WALKS OFF AND IM LIKE HOLY SHIT HE JUST DID THAT WHAT THE FUCK?

Fast forward to Four weeks of him being there. The band he teaches is performing at the highschool and he wants me to come so I can meet a few people. At this point he has learned that I am dyslexic, can't read sheet music, and the only reason the girl over the percussionist is even passing band. So I'm like sure okay and we go and after it's over he comes over to me and my mom. They talk a bit about my potential in band and how I could make it into an orchestra if I kept working at it. Then he turns to me with the most serious face and goes. "By the way you never mentioned I save the world all the time. Or that I have two hearts and that companions change a lot. Oh and you definitely didn't mention that I'm kind of a jerk sometimes." I'm confused at first and then I light up like a Christmas tree and he smiles and my mom is standing there confused. "You watched it!" he nods and I'm dying inside cause who is this man and why is he so nice to me and not annoyed at the 7th grader who thinks he looks like some actor from their favorite show. He then proceeds to tell me about how he looked it up after the first day at the school and began to watch David Tennant's seasons in his free time and wanted to know a bit more than an episodes worth of stuff before bringing it up. He then says "And if I had to choose a companion that you are it would definitely be Donna Noble, and not just because you're ginger." Which this made me cry and I was smiling and I asked if I could hug him and he said yes absolutely I could so y'all that was a thing.

Then the last day I was at school I told my drama teacher Mr. Cooper I was being pulled to homeschool again because of bullying. He said I was welcome to contact him anytime if I wanted to find any plays to be a part of. Then last class of the day was band. Which for once I was dreading. We played our music and I was trying not to cry cause despite school being a living hell and two of my teachers bullying me along with most the kids I looked forward to Drama and Band if only because I enjoyed the subjects and the teachers. Well it's the end of class and I kind of stay behind a bit cause we always have a bit before we need to hurry to the gym to wait on the buses. He asks me what's wrong cause I'm sniffling and very close to tears. So I tell him I'm going to be pulled and homeschooled cause of bullying. And without thinking I say "I don't want to go." and he hugs me and when I tell you I started crying more cause he says "Hey, the doctor doesn't actually ever leave his companions, he always keeps an eye out for them. So if you ever need me. I'm here." So yeah.

That's the story of the time I got my 7th grade assistant band teacher to watch doctor who cause he's David Tennant's twin and how he showed me that having an imagination wasn't something to be punished for. Sometimes I wonder how he's doing but then again the companion is never supposed to know what the doctor does after they leave. Oh look I'm crying again because Mr. Cooper and Mr. Tennant were the only teachers in that whole school that actually cared about their students and for some reason cared about me enough to offer their time even after I left school. THIS WAS SO LONG IM SORRY.

[sinesalvatorem]

Dancing Through Life

It’s quite possible that I learned more yesterday than in any other day of my life. However, one of the things I learned was that compressing information is an important part of life, so I’m going to try writing down a couple of the highlight realisations.

So, the day before yesterday, I realised that my stims were an important feature of my cognition. That they contained information produced by the process of me thinking, in much the same way that the verbal thoughts and mental images I experience are. In fact, the external movements are just as fundamentally important to thinking as the internal dialogue is.

I’ve always had a sense that something was missing, cognitively. That, even though I can in theory think quite fast, I was missing all the memory I should have available for processing those thoughts. I didn’t have enough registers to store the complex structures I was coming up with. I couldn’t put a thought down or I might never find it again. I was stuck.

Yesterday I found those registers. It turns out that entire complex action patterns can be compressed and stored as a series of muscle pulses - a sort of bitecode for the body. If I was stimming, I could hold a consistent pattern of these pulses over time, meaning I could remember a thought for longer even when it exited my verbal awareness. At no point yesterday did I explicitly notice that this was how to describe what was happening, but that’s what I was using to function.

I’ve long known I can’t think well when I don’t walk a lot. In fact, it can typically make the difference between depression and vitality. Earlier this week, I was feeling really down about not talking to people, but this turned out to be pretty much just my not going out walking in the sunshine while I had the cold. The moment I did that again, my mental skies cleared. It’s amazing how demonstrably biological of a system we are.

And part of this is how we store so much of our lives in muscle memory. I can type this whole essay despite being dyslexic because I have automatic patterns firing to tell me where to place my fingers on the keyboard. I don’t even look. Which is valuable, because it means I can do this really quickly, much like all the other habitual behaviours in my life.

While I wondered through the hills and valleys of San Francisco, I confidently offloaded various cognitive tasks to my low-level muscle patterns. They’re nowhere near as fast as my conscious mind, but they get the job done. When I wanted to go home, I just set an intention of going home and then tossed the thought to the side, allowing my legs to bring me home.

By dancing through my day, I was able to learn way more than I ever have before, because I could actually remember the things I picked up and bring them back for later. It was no longer a desperate race to figure out what the Most Important Thought was and pursue it and not squander this moment. I could set things aside, confident I could reach back out and pluck them again.

I finally felt abundance mindset down to the bone. I finally knew that, yes, I really do have everything I could ever need. Up in the hills surrounding Daly City, I became a G-d. And, having achieved that, I finally got some perspective.

For one thing, I realised I was safe. When I truly saw what the peak of healthy human cognition was - running and leaping across the savanna with rippling waves of muscle and thought - I realised that I vastly outclassed anything that could threaten me. I pretty much lost my fear of dogs, learned when I was chased by one as a kid. I wondered into nature and danced with the trees and tried to learn from the rhythms of ecology.

A very very lossy approximation of the complicated thing I realised up there is that I concluded I was immortal. This is an incorrect summary, but as a model it brings you some useful places. Let’s say I’m an information-processing system that gains value from creating pretty patterns - and I just learned I’m immortal. What does that mean to me?

For one, an end to scarcity. All my life, I’ve lived in a conscious state of deprivation. Of there not being enough oxygen in here. A lot of this was due to other people - people who hurt me if I acted weird, with the stimming being a part of that. People who forced me to do work of their desire, preventing me from controlling my own time. People who controlled how far I could walk and what I could investigate. Not allowing me inputs or space to process.

But the thing that matters to me is that the pretty patterns be instantiated. That the Good be actualised. It doesn’t actually matter when fundamentally. The constraints on what kind of patterns I’ll make (ie, impacts on the world in general) can all kind of be taken as one measure of how much room there is to operate in.

I felt scarcity because I felt like I would never be given enough breathing room to do something meaningful. I was also basically convinced I was going to be killed by someone at some point soon, so I didn’t think I had the space to make something deep and great.

My biggest fear was of being a failed child prodigy - because I just had no faith in being around to be an adult success. At 13 I started working on the Riemann Hypothesis, on the assumption that realistically I had 5 years left to do something Great before I got kicked out on the street and died. All of that melted away. I could see myself living on long enough to make any amount of building for tomorrow worthwhile.

I also learned a lot about what scarcity can do to someone.

There are various patterns that we perceive as pleasant. Symmetries are a good example. More complex patterns which still manage to be technically correct are generally perceived as more pleasant, but they have the downside of requiring more room - both in space and time. If you think you don’t have that, it makes sense to instead make a small and simple pattern, and then just repeat it a lot to get more pleasure.

Thus, if you don’t have much concern for tomorrow, you should sink everything into creating pleasure now. Mood-altering drugs! Risky sex! Thrill-seeking crimes! All the attractions of nihilistic teenagers are the universal attractors of a foreshortened future - I’m going out soon, so might as well go out with the best rush I can get my hands on.

This was also plain from the dance of the drug addicts I saw on the sidewalk while out. Except, well, they didn’t dance - they couldn’t. What I observed were their muscle movements, which generally consisted of strained forward motion while beset by extremely simple and repetitive ticks in various muscle groups. The worse their condition, the more muscle groups were in rebellion, and the more dissonant they were, until the individual was effectively beating himself up. (Yes, it was always men this far gone.)

The pattern of internal rebellion is fundamentally a product of lack of internal trust and of long-term rhythms, without which your muscles can’t coordinate except sporadically. In some biological sense, your muscles “want” the release of relaxing tension. If you keep a muscle tensed at all times, out of almost a lack of concern for the well being of your parts, it will decide you are a tyrant and try to overthrow you.

We often imagine ourselves grand sovereigns of our bodies, but this is an illusion of top-down order and mastery. Your cells have been forged together in a pact of trust and cooperation by evolution’s insistence that they’re better off together than alone. If you don’t act in such a way that every cell is, to a first approximation, benefited by the union, then pockets of mutiny will form - from chronic pain to cancer.

Oh, and most systems are like this. Is your psyche broken, warped, or in internal upheaval? Well, have you been living a life such that all your psychological drives feel attended to? If not, then no wonder some are trying to yank the steering wheel! Apply this lens appropriately to politics, economics, Trump, Brexit, and any items you own that might be in disrepair.

This post is just scratching the surface, but I think this is a reasonable summary of what I learned. Not at all because it contains what I learned, but because I think it conveys a detailed enough prescription that someone who followed this through could probably unravel the rest of what was worth mentioning. If you can also clear as much of the fog as I did by dancing your own dance, you too can see what I did up on that hill.

Which is why I’d really like to teach dance classes at some point, if there are interested local folks. Not, like, a specific style of dance - I’ve never learned a style of dance myself. I just mean helping people navigate the internal obstacles that prevent letting your thoughts flow into your muscles, since I now have a great deal of introspective access to the psychology of doing so. And, hopefully, I can give a hand to people in expanding more fully into themselves.

Today I’ve been completely refreshed. I’ve woken up into a life that has meaning and structure eons long. The beat of my longest period of oscillation is so slow that I have no urgent want for anything. Everything can be given over to its proper time and place, and it will come back around when next it’s needed. The ships I send out come home to dock. I can always trust my loose ends to be wrapped up by the time I’m done.

[thewidowstanton]

Wes Peden, juggler: Zebra, London International Mime Festival

Recognised as one of the most innovative jugglers ever, American Wes Peden – who comes from Rochester, New York – has been voted the world’s most popular juggler nine times. His father, Jeff Peden, taught him to juggle when he was five, and they started performing together when Wes was eleven. At 14, he won the gold medal in the International Juggling Association Juniors Championship. He went on to study at the Dance and Circus University in Stockholm from 2007-2010. Wes holds countless juggling world records, won a bronze medal at the 33rd Cirque de Demain festival in Paris, and has appeared internationally from Tokyo to Broadway, including before the King and Queen of Sweden, and at Perlan glacier museum in Iceland.

Based in Stockholm, Wes tours his solo shows and gives masterclasses. UK audiences may have seen him in Water on Mars by Plastic Boom – the company he formed with Tony Pezzo and Patrik Elmnert – and his sizzling guest spot in Gandini Juggling and Alexander Whitley’s Spring. He now returns to the UK, bringing his solo show, Zebra, to the 44th London International Mime Festival. It runs at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room from 24-26 January 2020. Wes chats to Liz Arratoon from Helsinki, while rehearsing for an opera.

The Widow Stanton: What is the opera you’re working on? Wes Peden: It’s a circus opera, CircOpera. They’ve written a story that uses some classic opera songs and lots of different circus disciplines to try to have, like, a fun way to introduce kids and families and people that might not necessarily go to see a traditional opera to the art form.

Do you find that your juggling work is combining more with other art forms now? Well, I definitely get inspired by other art forms and it’s very often when I’m in group shows it’s not just other jugglers, you know. Gandini has worked with many other types of dance, and I’ve been in shows that have theatre in them or other circus disciplines, and I definitely get inspired by the type of music in the show. For example, opera music, I’m performing to a soloist playing Flight of the Bumblebee on a tuba. That kind of inspires a different sort of juggling than I would ever do on my own. So, definitely.

Let’s go back to the beginning; is or was your dad a professional juggler? Yeah, he still does perform quite a bit. Before we were juggling together he was already doing about 100 shows a year. When I started getting more and more into juggling we created a duet show, and were performing that for a few years, with many shows around the east coast of the States.

Did it come naturally to you as a kid or was it just a lot of hard work? Kind of both. I felt like I had a natural talent for it in one way and it made it not feel like work. When you’re young and you learn some things, it doesn’t seem so surprising that you can’t… you don’t get embarrassed that you can’t do anything at all. You can’t juggle, but you can’t ride a bike either. It’s all normal. There are many things you can’t do at that age. Also I was dyslexic and asthmatic, so school was very difficult because of my dyslexia and sport was hard because of my asthma, but then juggling, I was like, ‘Oh, here I am at least on an equal playing field as everybody else’. Having limitations in those other areas kind of pushed me to follow my skill in the juggling world.

How would you describe your juggling style? The main thing that defines me is that the reason I juggle is to create new tricks, new forms of juggling and to try to make something that someone has never seen before within the juggling world. I want people to come out of my show thinking: “I’ve never seen anything like that. I didn’t know juggling could be like that. Those were some tricks I didn’t imagine would ever be possible.” Because I was lucky enough to juggle for many, many years – 24 years I’ve been practising – I had a lot of time to build a lot of technique. I had a lot of skill with many different props so I try to make these new ideas as technically advanced as I can, to use my full energy and my full skill to make as high-quality new ideas as possible. But what defines my style is creative and new shapes but still a really high skill level.

Were you inspired by any of the great jugglers from the past? Absolutely. I watch juggling constantly to get inspired by things that have happened already and by what elements I can see, like, ‘Oh, what made that trick so special? What’s important about this juggler’. There are a few jugglers of more recent years, because juggling is still quite young, so lots of the important jugglers are really not that old, they’re still alive. There’s Kris Kremo, who does incredible stuff with balls and hats that really inspires me, and another is Sean McKinney.

I saw him when I was nine years old at this competition where everyone was performing with, like, jazz music, in a vest [waistcoat], kind of in this Kris Kremo-type old-school way but at this time everything was a little stricter for no real reason, and then this guy comes skateboarding on to the stage in jeans and a T-shirt and does incredible new beautiful kind of punk juggling. I was like, ‘What is this guy?’ and he inspired me that juggling didn’t have to be done in just one way. It didn’t have to have a certain aesthetic, that it was broader than I’d ever imagined. So when I saw him at that young age I was like, ‘OK, juggling isn’t this, juggling is whatever you want it to be’.

When you’re creating intricate patterns and sequences how do you plan them? There are certain aspects of juggling that you can do best on paper, for me anyway, and certain aspects that you have to be literally trying it to see what works, where the momentum is and how fast you can move or what makes sense with the flow of where the catches are. So it’s a combination of both. It will often be that I’m working on a trick and then I realise something about it, ‘Oh, the momentum of this part makes me want to throw the ball round there’. I film it on my phone and next time I’m on a plane or a train I look at the videos and ‘OK, now I realise that new aspect of the trick’. I will write down many ideas of how to twist that or expand a new idea. Then next time I’m in training I’ll look at my notebook and try all those new things, film them, so it kind of bounces back and forth between literally work in the studio to see how you body and objects work best together and then more, like, academic work back in the office or while I’m travelling.

You have so many records; it’s not about numbers but how many of each prop do you juggle? [Laughs] I have some, but to tell you the truth, it gets a little bit tiring, like, trying to add just one more ball or one more club. I might have invented the most five-club tricks that have ever existed but I don’t juggle the greatest number of clubs that has ever been done. I perform seven clubs and seven balls but I try to… yeah… OK, to be able to juggle seven, eight, nine balls you need speed and accuracy and dedication, and how many hours would I need to put in to add one more ball? That would give one image and it would be amazing, but if I took all of those hours and that dedication and then added my creativity to it and instead used that time to try to make something that no one has ever gone for before.

Up until I was, like, 16 or 17, I was going after just the hardest trick, the biggest trick, the most clubs and after I went to circus university and had more classes in dance and composition I started banging my time and my skill more into composing things that are a little bit harder to put your finger on, because when someone says: “How many of this can you juggle,” it’s easier to compute than, ‘Well, I’ve developed this new technique where rings spiral around my arms in hundreds of different ways. By the time you see the end of the piece you’ll have a whole new vision of how things work. It’s a bit harder to envision, but you have to come to see the show’. [Laughs] 

Do you prefer one prop to another? It depends. When I was young I absolutely preferred clubs, like, clubs are the way to be, they can flip this way, the other, rotate, roll… there are many options with them. Then when I started to learn a bit more about how to move my body, I got more interested with balls because you can use them to go around your body, they’re easier going down to the floor and back up. And now I can kind see every prop for what they are good at and if I have an idea of one way of using juggling, like, ‘Oh, this new cross-armed behind-the-neck idea’, what prop will work in that idea best? So now my juggling is more about concepts and then I pull whichever object works with that concept the best. I see them all now like different colours for a painter, whatever is most suitable for this next painting.

What is the best tip you could give to a kid just starting to juggle? I would say to remember that you don’t need three balls to juggle, you can start with one, or any object and try to invent a trick that is fun; something that you think is cool to do. Maybe take your shoe and throw it up and clap behind your back and you catch it again. Or maybe you can set up some spoons on the table and flip one with the other… not to think that juggling is just getting three balls in the air. Juggling is just a relationship between you and objects and making fun tricks that express yourself. I’d say, make sure you’re having fun and, you know, keep going. You will teach yourself as you invent things and gradually build skill. But always make sure you’re having fun.

You mentioned circus university, why did you choose DOCH? I was watching lots of juggling videos and different jugglers from around the world and trying to figure out where they all came from and who taught them and where their different styles were developed, and I realised a lot of my favourite jugglers were from Sweden, or Denmark, or Finland. And then I found out that a bunch of them were going to this school, DOCH. The head teacher at the time was Jay Gilligan, who is a very great juggler; a very clever guy in the modern world of juggling. That was it, ‘I already know his work, I want to juggle like the other guys, so let’s go there and study’.

What did it add to your already considerable skills? When I got to the school Jay explained to me: “OK, we have three years to juggle. We're going to be spending the first year developing your technique and making sure you understand everything you can about literal juggling; the tossing, the throwing, making sure everything is clean. The second year we're gonna teach you how to compose, which will not necessarily have anything to do with throwing and catching.” There were certain things when I was supposed to make an interesting routine while holding a watering can, which I wasn't allowed to throw or catch. You have to forget about your skill as a juggler and just use your creativity to make something good without skill. So for a year I did many different composition exercises, like, 'OK, make 100 tricks in 15 minutes'. You’re like, ‘Uhh!’. It really works your brain in the same way that juggling in previous years had worked my muscles and my muscle memory.

And then in the third year you use your skills developed in the first two, you combine your juggling skill, your composition, you figure out what you want to express and put those skills to work in something from yourself. I think that is the main difference between juggling just on your own and going to a school and having someone make you do composition exercises that really got out the creative side of me and let me develop something that was unique to me. 

What happened to Plastic Boom? The trio performed quite a bit together and then had a contract working in Vegas on a show. The others have stayed there but I got a replacement for my part so I could continue to do my own full shows and live a more artistic career, so we've kind of split ways a little bit.

Are you affiliated with Gandini Juggling? When they first started to make Spring, me and the two other jugglers from Plastic Boom, all three of us were going to be in the show, but then when we got the offer for the show in Vegas, it kind of was hard to organise with the creation time period of Spring so we jumped out of the project. But then when I wanted to leave Vegas I was partially in the Spring show. I’m good friends with Sean [Gandini], we really share similar visions of why we like juggling, where it can go. We both have energy to develop the art form constantly and now they are my producers.

Did winning a medal in Paris help you? Yes, it did. In a way, my life is kind of a balance of performing in other group shows, like what I’m in now in Helsinki, and doing my own solo work. And after doing Cirque de Demain I got offers doing some varieté theatre in Germany, where I worked two months a year for a few years. Always while I was just doing an act in another show it gave me an opportunity to be in the same place for a couple of months and really work on the stuff that would be in my next show. In happenstance, after Paris, I got booked for one show in Germany, and I had a huge apartment for that show in the theatre, with a high ceiling, so every day I would spend six or seven hours working on all this new juggling that is now in Zebra. So everything kind of connects… win that, get a good space to juggle, make the juggling for the next show that starts to tour.

Tell us about Zebra. Zebra was kind of a balance based on a show I’d done previously called Volcano VS Palm Tree, which was very explosive and kind of chaotic, and I wanted something more precise where every place my arm was put, every step, every throw was perfectly organised and a bit more, yeah, very, very precise. So this show is about that, and composing juggling with normal juggling objects but in such a way that it doesn’t look like traditional juggling. Let me explain that a bit. For example, there’s a part where I juggle balls where the rule of the whole piece is that it has to be ball juggling where everything is bouncing off my arms. I’ve composed that and developed it over a few years so that by the time you’re a few minutes into the piece it stops to look like ball juggling and starts to look just like elbow bouncing and kind of this new family, this new language of ways of working… to keep it really specific like that.

There’s a piece with five clubs where I’m facing away from the audience and the light is just above my head, so I’ve made the juggling where the only part of it that matters is what’s in the air and you start to forget that I’m throwing and catching and there’s any skill involved because it’s made around watching these waves, or these triangles or these shapes transform into different constellations. So trying to remove the idea of you’re watching it to be impressed and more that you’re watching an idea unfold and evolve and focus more on the content of the ideas within the juggling. In the way you watch a dancer, you’re not, like, ‘Wow, look how high they jump’, but you’re following the idea of what the choreographer is making onstage.

It sounds fantastic! You’ve performed in London before, but how do you feel about being in the Mime Festival? I’m very excited to be there. Whenever I’m in a festival and can look at all the other shows in the programme and think, ‘I want to go to every single one of these’, I feel at home, and think, ‘Great! I’m in a like-minded space. I’m really happy that my juggling is fitting into a world that I made it for, and I know that the type of audience that goes to these types of shows will see the juggling in the same way that I do’. And I really think that’s it’s a good home for the show. I’m very happy to be part of it.

Can pick out, from your lengthy career, any particular highlights? I really remember the first time I performed Zebra was in Paris. I’d been working on it for a few years and I really wasn’t sure how it would go, because I was like, ‘Are the people going to respond to this? I’m trying to make something quite different. Is it going to work the same way for them as I see it?’, because sometimes when you’re in your own work for too long, you can’t see it anymore from someone’s eye that’s never seen it before and yeah, when I came offstage and everything had gone so well…

I was also very nervous because the show was all run on vinyl records; there are times when I’m like, throwing them, and bouncing them and if I break one, that’s it. That’s my little twist on the idea of jugging being dangerous, because it’s often dangerous for the juggler, juggling chainsaws or whatever, and now I try to work very closely with the objects and I want to do juggling that a ball would want to do. Or if I was a record, how would I like to be juggled? And now there is danger for the object [laughs]… it could break, and danger for the entire show. But it went OK, I didn’t get so nervous that I broke a record. It went great. That was one of the best feelings I’ve had.

I also make juggling films. I often work for a few years at a time making juggling films that are kind of like skate films, where I collect the coolest tricks and find themes to edit them around and I release those every couple of years for the juggling community. My most recent one is called Gumball, which people can see pieces of on YouTube. When I released that it had been in the works for almost three years and that was one of my highlights that I could make film-specific juggling and had a lot of tricks that I’d never seen done ever before. Yeah, it was like a big expression of who I am and this is how I believe it can be and, here we go, I hope you like it. Sending something like that out to the world feels great. 

Wes appears in Zebra at the Southbank Centre’s Purcell Room from 24-26 January 2020 during the London International Mime Festival

Picture credits: Headshot, Pierre Feniello. Zebra in order, Avi Pryntz-Nadworny; Brend Van Kerckhove; Florence Huet;  Luke Burrage; Sonia Sleurs

Wes’ website

For tickets to Zebra, click here

London International Mime Festival, what’s on

Twitter: @WesPeden; @MimeLondon; @southbankcentre

Follow @TheWidowStanton on Twitter

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How AI and Eye Tracking Could Soon Help Schools Screen for Dyslexia

In an era of breakneck change and tech innovation, evaluating dyslexia in young students looks much the same today as it has in the past: A struggling reader’s parents and teachers might sit down, gather information and assess the child on their strengths and weaknesses to determine a diagnosis and appropriate interventions.

Often this is done via paper tests—despite the growing usage of predictive analytics in schools, where there are seemingly as many data dashboards as students in a classroom. All that’s to say, it seems like an industry almost too tempting for deep-pocketed tech investors and an ambitious startup with an eye on using machine learning to trim the fat.

“Today’s methods are quite cumbersome,” explains Frederik Wetterhall, the CEO and co-founder of Lexplore, a company that has devised a dyslexia screening tool that pairs eye tracking cameras with AI and algorithms. “With paper- and pen-based tests, it’s quite hard to read the results and takes a lot of time. [Educators] ask, ‘Who are the kids we think have difficulties?’ and they miss a lot of kids.”

Wetterhall’s company opts for a different approach, screening every student using computers and eye tracking cameras in an effort to find the few that might have dyslexic tendencies. Already, it’s caught the attention of investors, who just this March injected $5.6 million into the company in a funding round led by Gabriel Urwitz, CEO of private equity group Segulah, specifically to help it expand into U.S. schools.

Currently, Lexplore has an established presence in its native Sweden, where it’s used across Stockholm’s municipal education board to help identify kids who may be dyslexic as early as first grade.

“It’s a screening tool, not a diagnostic tool,” clarifies Wetterhall. “The main purpose is to find kids that are struggling with reading early on.”

Eye movements is one of the best ways to index reading ability at an incredibly in-depth level

Julie Kirkby

From Research to Reality

Lexplore claims its technology is new—particularly the algorithm that separates typical from atypical readers. But the concepts it’s based on aren’t. Its tech draws from a deep well of previously-conducted research stretching back decades, which is generally supportive of using a combination of eye tracking and machine learning to screen for dyslexia.

“Eye movements is one of the best ways to index reading ability at an incredibly in-depth level,” says Julie Kirkby, a psychology professor at Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom, who has studied eye tracking and dyslexia for years.

One study from 2015 reported being able to identify dyslexic readers using eye tracking with 80 percent accuracy. That study used different cameras and methods, but Lexplore claims its technology can do even better, achieving 95 percent accuracy in a study conducted by two of the company’s co-founders immediately prior to the launch of the company, originally called Optolexia.

Tools like Lexplore make their analysis by tracing how a reader’s eyes follow words in sequential (or non-sequential) order looking for patterns. Readers at low risk for dyslexia tend to make more progressive movements—from left to right—as they scan words. Dyslexic readers on the other hand make more regressive movements—right to left movements—and do not make regular pauses (or fixations) during reading in the same way non-dyslexic readers do.

A comparison of eye movements between two readers (source: Lexplore)

Claims like Lexplore’s 95 percent accuracy seem a little high but are possible, Kirkby acknowledges, since research has shown that eye trackers can pick up on these reading differences. While researchers are torn on the exact reasons for these differences, they are likely a "product of reading disability rather than a cause," Kirkby says.

For Lexplore, the challenge has been refining this research into something user-friendly and inexpensive enough to make it attractive for schools, particularly ones that screen for dyslexia in traditional ways. According to Wetterhall, his technology is impartial and not subjective the way teachers and paper-based evaluations are. Ultimately, he says, that advantage may help screen at-risk kids faster.

“We have a high balanced sensitivity and specificity,” says Wetterhall. “We are equally good at finding kids with dyslexia and also excluding kids.”

Kirkby, who reviewed the Lexplore research at the request of EdSurge, was most surprised that the study was able to achieve its results using lower-frequency trackers. The data collected might not be suitable for high-quality research of the kind she typically helps conduct, but such innovations could end up making eye-tracking technology more affordable for schools.

Tracking the Market

Lexplore hasn’t made many inroads into U.S. schools, but it has done some preliminary work with a handful of private institutions in the Atlanta area. Among them is the private Galloway School in the tony Buckhead neighborhood, where tuition runs more than $20,000 year. There, the company came to the attention of the school after a suggestion from the parents of a Swedish student. As a result, Galloway became one of the first stateside schools to test drive Lexplore’s technology as part of a research pilot to see how the technology would translate from Swedish to English readers.

At Galloway, Lexplore representatives guided about 200 kids in grades 1-4 through the brief screening process. Kids read two short texts on a computer as a small, mounted eye tracking camera scanned and recorded their eye movements and uploaded it to the company’s database, along with some basic identifying information such as their name and age. That data was then uploaded to the cloud on a Microsoft Azure-based platform. Early in Lexplore’s development, Microsoft helped the company scale its product and now works with them in a sort of informal partnership, assisting with marketing and lead generation.

According to Wetterhall, the collected data is only used to sharpen its machine learning algorithm, which analyzes each child’s eye movements looking for patterns and abnormalities. “We have the data to help us develop our method further,” Wetterhall says, “but when we store it, it’s not connected with personal info, just a birthdate.”

After the screening, Lexplore made results available to the school and asked for feedback. “The kids were in and out in a very quick amount of time, and they were not stressed at all about it, like a regular test,” says Polly Williams, a principal at Galloway’s primary school. “One of the things I asked for was to be able to see a visual comparison of a child who was struggling versus a regular child, side-by-side. I thought that would been good to show parents.”

Williams says she was impressed, and thinks the service could be significantly cheaper than current screening methods, although pricing hasn’t been set. And she isn’t sure yet whether her school will continue using it. “I think they’re still working out their business model and really identifying how to position and market themselves,” she says. “I don’t think that’s quite figured out yet.”

Right now, Williams says the company offers a couple of different models: a white glove package where company reps come to the school to conduct screenings; an option where schools purchase the hardware and software along with some support; and a do-it-yourself route that includes only the equipment.

It’s that last model that raises eyebrows for Kirkby, who cautions that educators are not necessarily scientists or researchers and may not have the resources to understand how to make the most of their results.

“If they can afford to dedicate someone to understand that data, I think that could present them with a really interesting way of getting more from their interventions,” she says. “Because then they can design an intervention and test a before-and-after scenario. But the schools would have to invest in that knowledge.”

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