#imagine going off and making a whole 50 page essay on that person

[brightmyth-fr]

WHY I DON'T RETIRE MY SKINS: an essay

Disclaimer that I'm speaking from a point of being established here, because not everybody can afford to run their skin shop like I do. I don't judge less established artists for needing to limit their skins because they can't afford to print a run with only 2 people on it. I'm also not judging anybody who does retire their skins after a set number of prints - whole different matter! I'm giving an opinion piece based on my own personal thoughts about running my own skin shop.

Okay, now that's out of the way. I really dislike the idea of time-limiting my skins. There's just no actual justification for me, as an established skin artist, to limit skins I know will sell... aside from prestige, and putting buying pressure on my customers. So there's a couple of reasons I don't like that:

1) Erodes trust in the artist.

Yes, I could probably make more money if I kept my skins limited so people HAD to pick up my skin on release. Maybe even all 4 colors of the skin, including the one they don't really keep in their hoard. Just in case they want it down the line but it won't be available anymore.

Is this good business practice though? Do I want people to start feeling panicked every time I ping for a release, because they just picked up a new project and really really CAN'T afford to be buying skins right now but there's 5 colorways of my skin available and they'll probably be resold for 2kg as soon as they retire?

Personally, no! I want people excited when I ping, not feeling dread in their hearts and budgets. I want people to be thinking: 'Awesome, a new skin! I can't afford that right now but I know he always keeps a few on the AH at print price even after preorders end. Even if I can't buy a skin just this moment, I'll be sure to keep an eye on his thread for when I have gems again.' Or: "Awesome, a new skin! This one doesn't appeal to my lair aesthetic, so I will just nod and smile. I don't feel the need to buy it in case it gets popular for resale, because it will always be on the AH for print price."

People tell me about unsubscribing from GASP because they get anxiety being pinged for skins they want but can't have. So I want people to stay on my pinglist because there's no pressure on them whatsoever to purchase anything. It'll always be here, okay? In the meantime, just enjoy the art, maybe preview it on a scry or two. I'll be here if you're back in three weeks, or three months.

2) Passive income!

I lied. I probably would've made less money time limiting all my skins than by keeping my skins restocked. A couple of reasons for this:

- My earlier skins sold worse. This isn't psychology, it's just numbers. Some of my most popular stock were made early on in 2021/2022. I didn't have that many sales then, so could you imagine if I had retired them immediately after that? There's 230something copies of SAILOR'S WARNING out in the world right now. If that skin was time limited after preorders died down, I would've sold "only" 50 forever.

- People see my shop stock whenever you ping for a new releases. I get 3-4 sales off auction house whenever I release something new and people check my front page. It's not a lot but it's consistent.

- It's a win-win situation, okay? If a skin is popular, there's no reason to time limit it to drive up sales. If it IS popular, then people are going to see it on other people's dragons, go "damn that's a nice skin," and maybe do an AH search for it. And if there's a cheap print price copy available, they're gonna buy it.

2) Reprints are easy!

It was a lot more annoying to keep track of queue numbers and inventory back when reprints had to go through regular queue for a week. Did I put in 10 copies of SUNHEAVEN already? Wait, are my kitsune aethers back yet? How many of MOLOCH are still listed?

Now I can put in a blueprint and get my reprint instantly. No fuss at all.

3) I don't want to buy into the 'this is a retired skin' hype...

This is just personal preference. It makes me feel a little bad when a public skin I made is popular and people can't afford to have it. I'm not judging anybody who does like it when their skins are rare, special, and sought after.

It's just... I get that part of my brain scratched from my customs. They're gorgeous, they're 5 prints, they're on the AH for 30kg if you really want one. Most importantly they're niche and high coverage enough that even if someone hadn't paid me to draw an exclusive skin specifically for their dragon, they'd never do well as a public skin anyway.

Here are some tips for people looking into keeping their skins unlimited:

- You don't need to do it like I do.

Blueprints are expensive. Even I don't have my entire catalogue stocked, only the ones I noticed always have reprint requests. For example, only SAILOR'S WARNING out of 4 total colors for my impm skins is kept stocked because the others don't sell enough to justify it.

If you can't afford to stock them 10 at a time, have the customer provide the blueprints. Shelving your skins but having them be reprintable with a BP and a fee (350g is good for 850g print prices; remember, 500g of that went to you purchasing blueprints in the public run, so it doesn't make sense to charge customers a whole 850g when they're already providing the blueprint) is a good alternative to permanently retiring your skins. You don't get a ton of people who can afford that, but the option is there for people who want it.

- Notice which skins sell!

If you already have a good amount of skins in catalogue and have trouble figuring out which ones to begin stocking, you can start by checking in with your pinglist. Poll them and see which ones you'd want to rerun.

- Don't have so many recolors.

It's a law of the universe that they more recolors you have, the worse they sell collectively. I usually do 2, no more than 3. If you have to time limit your skins to get 6 recolors to hit print, then it's time to cut those recolors down.

There's reasons for this: it's choice paralysis, people may want 'complete sets' and will skip out if you're making that complete set cost 4kg total, and it just plain doesn't make sense for very similar color schemes to cover 4 different skins. Feel free to print personal recolors or have custom recolors open.

[snekdood]

Terfs: i will never engage with you. You are literally nothing to me. Like a piece of dog shit on my shoe. Get out of my palace.

[tricktster]

Is TST for the satanic temple

It is merely a happy happy happy coincidence, but don’t take that to mean that they don’t have my full-throated support and admiration.

Since you kids are on tumblr, I’m guessing a lot of you already know that The Satanic Temple (TST) is not, in fact, a group of people who worship Satan. For those of you who might (understandably) have TST confused with an an actual Satan-worshipping entity, rest assured - supporting TST requires no actual Satan worship - or anything worship, it’s a “non-theistic religion.” 

So, you might be wondering, what’s the point of a purported Satanic church that explicitly does not believe in, nor worship, Satan? 

Great rhetorical question! Thank you for the invitation to geek out! In this essay I will explain why The Satanic Temple is an incredibly clever maneuver to protect the individual rights and liberties of people in the United States of America, and why you should all, regardless of religious belief, stan them. I am sorry! This is going to be a long one! I’m going to use a page break!

(Apologies if anything I say here is really basic obvious stuff that you already know. I will probably cover some familiar ground, but I didn’t get taught about any of this in high school beyond a few throwaway paragraphs in a textbook, so I’m writing with an audience of ‘me in high school’ in mind.)

As you know, the founding fathers did some pretty wild shit when they decided on what the United States of America was going to look like, and among the wildest was the decision that America would not have a state religion. I cannot express to you guys how significant this decision was in shaping American culture... soooo I won’t try because it’s beside the point and this is already going to be way too long. All you really need to take away is the following:

The U.S. constitution provides both that religion and government are to be kept separate, and that the free exercise of religion is a fundamental individual right, and those portions of the constitution have pissed a lot of people off over the last 244 years.

So there’s actually three parts of the bill of rights that are in play here. In the First Amendment, we have the Establishment Clause, and the Free Exercise Clause:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion [The Establishment Clause], or prohibiting the free exercise thereof [The Free Exercise Clause]; or abridging the freedom of speech [...]”

These clauses were the only part of the Constitution that touched on religion until the 14th amendment was ratified in 1868. For those of you who are curious about the timing of a new amendment in 1869 and are as bad with significant dates as I am, the Civil War ended in 1865, and, as such, it’s worth noting that the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to guarantee equal civil and legal rights to Black people. I am not the first person to note that uh, we are clearly still working on that.

Anyway, for our purposes, the pertinent part of the 14th amendment is the Equal Protection Clause:

“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Okay, very broadly, here’s what each clause actually does:

The Establishment Clause says that the US government cannot sponsor any religion, or involve itself in religion to the benefit of one religion over another. 

The Free Exercise clause says that the US government cannot stop someone from holding a religious belief (or force them to adhere to another religious belief)

The Equal Protection Clause prohibits discrimination on the basis of religious belief

These all look pretty great on paper, but in practice, enforcing them has been wildly hit or miss. I’m going to discuss why, so I’ll say up front that none of this should not be construed as an attack on Christianity. Religious faith is intensely personal, and I want to emphasize that I am in no way advocating for adherents to the Christian faith to be unable to practice that faith. I am a sincere advocate for everyone to be able to freely practice their own religious beliefs (or lack thereof), and that’s exactly what’s at issue here - when one religion is positioned above all others, anyone who does not believe in that particular religion is impacted detrimentally.

So with that caveat in place, it’s important to recognize the following: the United States is, and has always been, a majority Christian nation. 65% of Americans identified as Christian in 2019, which is a historic low. Even ten years back, it was closer to 85%. In accordance with the demographics of the US, Christianity is, if anything, over-represented in US government. 85.4% of US congressmen identify as Christian. 82 out of the 100 senators identify as Christian (I’m not counting members of congress or the senate who identify as members of the Church of Latter Day Saints in those numbers). Furthermore, every single president has identified themselves as Christian - the spiciest America has gotten in re: the religious beliefs of a POTUS was JFK, who was, you know, Catholic.

This is important, because it directly impacts how we interpret what “separation of church and state,” “free exercise of religion,” and “nondiscrimination on the basis of faith” actually mean. When a country is predominantly comprised of people who share the same faith, that faith becomes part of the shared cultural concept of national identity: even though the US is, in practice, relatively diverse in terms of ethnicities and religious faiths (as far as countries go), if you ask someone on the street to imagine an American, they are probably going to imagine a white dude who loves Flag and also Jesus. That national identity is reflected in the country’s chosen representatives, and in return, in the legislation passed by those representatives and the behavior expressly condoned by the government as a whole. The end result of all of this is that in the United States of America, Christianity and the exercise of government frequently intersect.

Take the late forties and early fifties. WWII is over, and two global superpowers have emerged that are at diametrical positions; there’s our old capitalist pal the US in one corner, and in the other, the godless, socialist menace of the USSR. I’m being silly and hyperbolic here, but not about the godless bit: the USSR was officially an athiest state, and the government forcibly converted its citizens to atheism. So, the US squints at this and swings hard in the opposite direction; this is a Christian nation, we are sticking “under god” in the pledge of allegiance, we are putting Ten Commandment sculptures in front of our courthouses, we are mandating prayer in school, and if you have an issue with any of that, you are not a patriotic American.

Some of that stuff from the 50s still exists today (“under god” is still kicking around), but a lot more of it is essentially outlawed thanks to the branch of government that I haven’t mentioned yet, the federal judiciary. How this played out was essentially that someone would be impacted by state-sponsored Christianity, they would sue, and their case would eventually be appealed up to the level of the Supreme Court, who would look at the Constitution, admit that it’s pretty unequivocal about the whole separation of church and state thing, and bar the state sponsored religious practice at issue, or at the very least ensure that the state was not sponsoring one faith to the exclusion of others. So, to return to our ten commandments in front of the courthouse or nativity scene outside of a government building; (I’m really simplifying things here but this is the gist) the court has repeatedly decided, those are fine, as long as you give fair play to any other religion that wants to erect their own religious display there too. It’s either that all religions have an equal opportunity to be represented, or no religion does.

I know, this is supposed to be about why The Satanic Temple is cool. We’re getting there.

Let’s jump ahead to the early 2000s. Bush Jr. is president, thanks in no small part to massive evangelical Christian support, and those evangelical Christians have some demands: they want schools to teach creationism, they’re gunning directly for reproductive rights, and they have had enough of this whole gay nonsense. A lot of legislation gets passed during the Bush era that gives the Evangelical base what they want, and among those big evangelical wins was on teaching intelligent design in schools. This didn’t happen everywhere, but some states basically said that intelligent design could be taught alongside evolution in public school science classes, and that evolution and intelligent design had to be portayed as equally valid theories.

Obviously, a lot people were upset about this, because... well, it’s science class. Among the people who thought this whole thing was bullshit was a guy named Bobby Henderson, who wrote an open letter to the Kansas Board of Education in 2005. Referencing the Supreme Court decisions I discussed earlier (either all religious beliefs get equal play or none of them do), Bobby demanded that along with evolution and intelligent design, Kansas schools devote equal time to teaching the creation story of his religious faith, and if any of this is sounding familiar, that’s because Bobby described his religious faith as “Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.”

The memetic potential of this argument was basically designed for the internet era, and it wasn’t too long before purported adherents to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was filing lawsuits that challenged all sorts of government practices that obviously skewed Christian. They were making classic reductio ad absurdum arguments; if it was ridiculous that the government should promote the message of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in a given sphere, it was equally ridiculous that the government should promote the message of other religious faiths in that same sphere.

The whole pastafarian movement had one major weakness, however - it was expressly, deliberately silly. Nobody could mistake a Flying Spaghetti Monster argument to be made in good faith, and the courts used this to basically ignore FSM challenges that would otherwise be valid. Here’s what the Nebraska federal district court decided in the big Flying Spaghetti Monster case, Cavanaugh v. Bartlet:

“The Court finds that FSMism is not a ‘religion’ within the meaning of the relevant federal statutes and constitutional jurisprudence. It is, rather, a parody, intended to advance an argument about science, the evolution of life, and the place of religion in public education. Those are important issues, and FSMism contains a serious argument, but that does not mean that the trappings of the satire used to make that argument are entitled to protection as a ‘religion.’”

That’s the Pastafarian problem in a nutshell. They had great points, but they weren’t actually a religion, and that left the courts free to disregard their arguments by saying that they lacked standing. “Standing” is legalese for the concept of who is able to bring a lawsuit based on a particular act or law. This sounds esoteric, but it makes logical sense: If your neighbor gets hit by an ice cream truck, is injured, and is now hundreds of thousands of dollars in the hole for medical debt, he has standing to sue the ice cream truck driver. He suffered an injury that was caused by the ice cream truck driver, and the court has the ability to direct the ice cream truck driver to pay for his medical bills and pain and suffering etc. If you, on the other hand, decide to sue the ice cream truck driver because they ran over your neighbor, well, did you actually get injured? Would it being about any sort of justice if the ice cream truck driver had to pay you money? If the answer is no and you try to sue anyway, the court’s going to kick that lawsuit out.

Constitutional challenges often die because the person suing doesn’t have standing to bring the case. Remember how I mentioned earlier that “one nation under god” is still in the Pledge of Allegiance? A case about that actually got all the way to the Supreme Court, before it was tossed out for lack of standing - the problem was that a student’s father had brought the lawsuit, instead of the student herself. Likewise, the Flying Spaghetti Monster cases usually went nowhere because the courts would say “okay, you’re claiming that this law is trampling on your right to practice your chosen religion, but your religion is deliberately ludicrous. Your holy book was published in 2006 and heavily features a beer volcano. You don’t actually believe in any of this, so you haven’t actually suffered the harm that you’re claiming this legislation caused.”

So, uh, how the hell does an athiest challenge the constitutionality of laws like the FSM movement tried to without just getting tossed out for lack of sincerity?

Okay. Okay. We’re finally here. Let’s talk about The Satanic Temple.

In 2013, after witnessing how the FSM movement failed to accomplish meaningful change, Lucien Greaves realized that even though the basic concept of what FSM was trying to accomplish was solid, the issue was in its execution. If you wanted to challenge laws that unconstitutionally favored Christianity, you couldn’t be joking around about your fake religion; you had to play it absolutely straight.

What Greaves came up with is incredibly clever. He set about constructing a new religion for the purpose of using the FSM playbook without falling into the same judicial pitfalls. He made sure that the new religion would constitute an actual belief system in the eyes of the law, which involved identifying the mission and core articulable tenents of the religion. I’m quoting them both below because they’re cool as hell:

The Mission of The Satanic Temple

“The mission of The Satanic Temple is to encourage benevolence and empathy among all people, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense, oppose injustice, and undertake noble pursuits.

The Satanic Temple has publicly confronted hate groups, fought for the abolition of corporal punishment in public schools, applied for equal representation when religious installations are placed on public property, provided religious exemption and legal protection against laws that unscientifically restrict women's reproductive autonomy, exposed harmful pseudo-scientific practitioners in mental health care, organized clubs alongside other religious after-school clubs in schools besieged by proselytizing organizations, and engaged in other advocacy in accordance with our tenets.”

The Seven Tenets of The Satanic Temple

1. One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.

2. The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.

3. One's body is inviolable, subject to one's own will alone.

4. The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one's own.

5. Beliefs should conform to one's best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one's beliefs.

6. People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one's best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.

7. Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.

Tenets aside, though, this next bit is what just delights me to my core with how crafty it is: Instead of making up his own religious text and history, he went directly to the Bible and said (I’m paraphrasing) “the historical foundation of The Satanic Temple is the exact same as the historical foundation of Christianity. We share the same holy book, and our faiths are grounded in the same tradition. Here’s the only difference: We believe with all sincerity that the character in that book who said ‘hey, try the apple, the pursuit of knowledge is worth rebelling against authority for’ is actually the good guy in the story, and although we are not a theistic organization, it is our sincere religious belief to comport ourselves in the manner espoused by the literary character Satan.”

Holy shit, guys. Holy shit, that is smart. He set up his religion so that you couldn’t attack it for being fake without also attacking Christianity for being fake! Simultaneously, he designed a religion that would reliably produce the perfect reductio ad absurdum argument- you want to display your ten commandment statue on public land? Okay, chill, but per the Constitution, we get equal play, so if you want those ten commandments, you’d better be cool with them sitting right next to our 3000 lb bronze statue of children gazing adoringly up at Baphomet:

Oh, wait, you don’t want to have that statue on government property? Cool. Totally fine. Just take your ten commandments slabs away too, and we’ll call it a truce.

The Satanic Temple exists to protect individual constitutional rights. Regardless of your own religious sentiment, it’s hopefully easy enough to see how incredibly shitty it would be to have your elected government promote religious beliefs that you do not share, to have religious sentiments that you find abhorrent expressly condoned by the government, or to have your own rights of expression and against discrimination constrained by a government that expressly santions only the religious beliefs of the majority, in spite of the concepts expressed in the United States Constitution. The only way to challenge an unconstitutional law is to sue, and it takes a lot of time, effort, and most of all resources to see a constitutional lawsuit through. Organized religion and government entities have a much easier time defending those cases than an individual does in suing them; by supporting The Satanic Temple, you’re directly evening the odds.

P.S. I know I talk a big game about how cleverly The Satanic Temple was designed, but you know how you can tell that it’s actually brilliant? The IRS granted it tax exempt status as a religious entity in 2019. Yup. Even with the IRS directly under the thumb of Donald J. Trump, a man desperate to maintain evangelical support, the IRS finally had to concede that they could not find any reason why The Satanic Temple shouldn’t be treated the exact same way as any other church. Angry that a Satanic entity doesn’t have to pay taxes on its income? Well, buddy, get ready to learn what megachurches get away with.

[grubbyduck]

No Man’s Land - an essay on feminism and forgiveness

I have always proudly named myself a feminist, since I was a little girl and heard my mum proudly announcing herself as a feminist to anyone who would listen.

But I believe the word 'feminist' takes on a false identity in our collective imagination - it is seen as hard, as baked, severe, steadfast, stubborn and rooted. From a male perspective, it possibly means abrasive, or too loud, or intimidatingly intolerant of men. From a female perspective, though, these traits become revered by young feminists; the power of knowing what you think and never rolling over! My experience of being a feminist throughout my life has been anything but - it has been a strange and nebulous aspect of my identity; it has sparked the familiar fires of bravery, ambition, rage, sadness and choking inarticulacy at times, sure, but at other times it has inspired apathy, reactionary attitudes, bravado and dismissivness. And at other, transitive times, it caused me to rethink my entire outlook on the world. And then again. And then again.

In primary school, I read and re-read Sandi Toksvig’s book GIRLS ARE BEST, which takes the reader through the forgotten women of history. I didn’t feel angry - I felt awed that there were female pirates, women on the front line in the world wars, women at the forefront of invention, science and literature. I still remember one line, where it is revealed that NASA’s excuse for only hiring six women astronauts compared to hundreds of men was that they didn’t stock suits small enough. 

When I was 13, I tried to start a girl's rugby team at my school. I got together 15 girls who also wanted to form a team. We asked the coaches if they would coach us - their responses varied from 'maybes' to straight up 'no's. The boys in our year laughed at us publicly. We would find an old ball, look up the rules online, and practise ourselves in free periods - but the boys would always come over, make fun of us and take over the game until we all felt too insecure to carry on. I shouted at a lot of boys during that time, and got a reputation among them as someone who was habitually angry and a bit of a buzzkill. Couldn't take a joke - that kind of thing.

When I was around 16, I got my first boyfriend. He was two years older (in his last year of sixth form) and seemed ever so clever to me. He laughed about angry feminists, and I laughed too. He knew I classified myself as a feminist, but, you know, a cool one - who doesn't get annoyed, and doesn't correct their boyfriends' bulging intellects. And in any case, whenever I did argue with him about anything political or philosophical, he would just chant books at me, list off articles he'd read, mention Kant and say 'they teach that wrong at GCSE level'. So I put more effort into researching my opinions (My opinions being things like - Trump is a terrible person who should not be elected as President - oh yeah, it was 2016), but every time I cited an article, he would tell me why that article was wrong or unreliable. I couldn't win. He was a Trump supporter (semi-ironically, but that made it even worse somehow) and he voted Leave in the Brexit referendum. He also wouldn't let me get an IUD even though I had terrible anxiety about getting pregnant, because of his parents' Catholicism. He sulked if he ever got aroused and then I didn’t feel like having sex, because apparently it ‘hurts’ men physically. One time I refused sex and he sulked the whole way through the night, refusing to sleep. I was incensed, and felt sure that my moral and political instincts were right, but I had been slowly worn down into doubting the validity of my own opinions, and into cushioning his ego at every turn - especially when he wasn't accepted into Oxford.

When I was 17/18, I broke up with him, and got on with my A Levels. One of them was English Literature. I remember having essay questions drilled into us, all of which were fairly standard and uninspired, but there was one that I habitually avoided:

'Discuss the presentation of women in this extract'

It irritated me beyond belief to hear the way that our class were parroting phrases like 'commodification and dehumanisation of women' in order to get a good grade. It felt so phony, so oversimplified, and frankly quite insulting. I couldn't bear reading classic books with the intent of finding every instance that the author compares a woman to an animal. It made me so sad! I couldn't understand how the others could happily write about such things and be pleased with their A*. As a keen contributor to lessons, my teacher would often call on me to comment in class - and to her surprise, I think, my responses about 'women's issues' were always sullen and could be characterised by a shrug. I wanted to talk about macro psychology, about Machievellian villains, about Shakespreare's subversion of comic convention in the English Renaissance. I absolutely did not want to talk about womb imagery, about men’s fixation and sexualisation of their mothers or about docile wives. In my application for Cambridge, I wrote about landscape and the psyche in pastoral literature, and got an offer to study English there. I applied to a mixed college - me and my friends agreed that we’d rather not go if we got put into an all female college. 

When I was 19, I got a job as an actor in a touring show in my year out before starting at Cambridge. I was the youngest by a few years. One company member - a tall, handsome and very talented man in his mid-twenties - had the exact same job title as me, only he was being paid £100 more than me PER WEEK. I was the only company member who didn’t have an agent, so I called the producers myself to complain. They told me they sympathised, that there just wasn’t enough money in the budget to pay me more - and in the end, I managed to negotiate myself an extra £75 per week by taking on the job of sewing up/fixing any broken costumes and puppets. So I had more work, and was still being paid 25% less. The man in question was a feminist, and complained to his agent (although he fell through on his promise to demand that he lose £50 a week and divide it evenly between us). He was a feminist - and yet he commented on how me and the other woman in the company dressed, and told us what to wear. He was a feminist, only he slept with both of us on tour, and lied to us both about it. He was a feminist, only he pitted me against and isolated me from the only other woman in the company, the only person who may have been a mentor or a confidante. He was a feminist, only he put me down daily about my skills as a performer and made me doubt my intelligence, my talent and my worth. 

When I was 20, I started at Cambridge University, studying English Literature. Over the summer, I read Lundy Bancroft’s book ‘Why Does He Do That’ which is a study of abusers and ‘angry and controlling men’. It made me realise that I had not been given the tools to recognise coercive and controlling behaviour - I finally stopped blaming myself for attracting controlling men into my life. I also read ‘Equal’ by Carrie Gracie, about her fight to secure equal pay for equal work at the BBC in 2017-2019. It was reading that book that I fully appreciated that I had already experienced illegal pay discrimination in the workplace. Both made me cry in places, and it felt as though something had thawed in me. I realised that I was not the exception. That ‘women’s issues’ do apply to me. In my first term at Cambridge, I wrote some unorthodox essays. I wrote one on Virginia Woolf named ‘The Dogs Are Dancing’ which began with a page long ‘disclaimer for my womanly emotions’ that attempted to explain to my male supervisor how difficult it is for women to write dispassionately and objectively, as they start to see themselves as unfairly separate, excluded and outlined from the male literary consciousness. He didn’t really understand it, though he enjoyed the passion behind my prose. 

The ‘woman questions’ at undergraduate level suddenly didn’t seem as easy, as boring or as depressing as those I had encountered at A Level. I had to reconcile with the fact that I had only been exposed to a whitewashed version of feminism throughout my life. At University, I learned the word Intersectionality - and it made immediate and ferocious sense to me. I wrote an essay on Aphra Behn’s novella ‘Oroonoko’, which is about a Black prince and his pursuit of Imoinda, a Black princess. I had to get to grips with how a feminist author from the Renaissance period tackled issues of race. I had to examine how she dehumanised and sexualised Imionda in the same way that white women were used to being treated by men. I had to really question to what extent Aphra Behn was on Imionda’s side - examine the violent punishment of Oroonoko for mistreating her. I found myself really wanting to believe that Behn had done this purposefully as social commentary. I mentioned in my essay that I was aware of my own white female critical ingenuity. For the first time, I was writing about something I didn’t have any personal authority over in my life - I had to educate myself meticulously in order to speak boldly about race.

As I found myself surrounded by more women who were actively and unashamedly feminist, I realised just how many opinions exist within that bracket. I realised that I didn’t agree with a lot of other feminists about aspects of the movement. I started to only turn up to lectures by women. I started to only read literary criticism written by women - not even consciously; I just realised that I trusted their voices more intrinsically. I started to wish I had applied to an all female college. I realised that all female spaces weren’t uncool - that is an image that I had learned from men, and from trying to impress men. The idea that Black people, trans people, that non binary people could be excluded from feminism seemed completely absurd to me. I ended up in a mindset that was constructed to instinctively mistrust men. Not hate - just mistrust. I started to get fatigued by explaining basic feminist principles to sceptical men.

I watched the TV show Mrs America. It made my heart speed up with longing, with awe, with nerves, sorrow, anger - again, it showed me how diverse the word Feminism is. The longing I felt was for a time where feminist issues seemed by comparison clear-cut, and unifying. A time where it was good to be angry, where anger got stuff done. I am definitely angry. The problem is, the times that feminism has benefitted me and others the most in my life is when I use it forgivingly and patiently. When I sit in my anger, meditate on it, control it, and talk to those I don’t agree with on subjects relating to feminism with the active intent to understand their point of view. Listening to opinions that seemed so clearly wrong to me was the most difficult thing in the world - but it changed my life, and once again, it changed my definition of feminism. 

Feminism is listening to Black women berating white feminists, and rather than feeling defensive or exempt, asking questions about how I have contributed to a movement that excludes women of colour. Feminism is listening to my mother’s anxieties about trans women being included in all-female spaces, and asking her where those anxieties stem from. Feminism is understanding that listening to others who disagree with you doesn’t endanger your principles - you can walk away from that conversation and know what you know. Feminism is checking yourself when you undermine or universalise male emotion surrounding the subject. Feminism is allowing your mind to change, to evolve, to include those that you once didn’t consider - it is celebrating quotas, remembering important women, giving thanks for the fact that feminism is so complex, so diverse, so fraught and fought over. 

Feminism is common ground. It is no man’s land. It is the space between a Christian housewife and a liberated single trans woman. It is understanding women of other races, other cultures, other religions. It is disabled women, it is autistic women, it is trans men who have biologically female medical needs that are being ignored. It is forgiveness for our selfishness. It feels impossible.

The road to feminism is the road to enlightenment. It is the road to Intersectional equity. It is hard. It is a journey. No one does it perfectly. It is like the female orgasm - culturally ignored, not seen as necessary, a mystery even to a lot of women, many-layered, multitudinous, taboo, comes in waves. It is pleasure, and it is disappointment. 

All I know is that the hard-faced, warrior version of feminism that was my understanding only a few years ago reduced my allies and comrades in arms to a small group of people who were almost exaclty like me and so agreed with me on almost everything. Flexible, forgiving and inquisitive feminism has resulted in me loving all women, and fighting for all women consciously. And by fighting for all women, I also must fight for Black civil rights, for disabled rights, for Trans rights, for immigrant rights, for homeless rights, for gay rights, and for all human rights because women intersect every one of these minorities. My scoffing, know-it-all self doing my A Levels could never have felt this kind of love. My ironic jokes about feminists with my first boyfriend could never have made any woman feel loved. My frustration that my SPECIFIC experience of misogyny as a white, middle-class bisexual woman didn’t feel related to the other million female experiences could never have facilitated unity, common ground, or learning to understand women that existed completely out of my experience as a woman.

My feminism has lead me to becoming friends with some of those boys who mocked me for wanting to play rugby, and with the woman that was vying with me over that man in the acting company for 8 months. It is slowly melting my resentment towards all men - it is even allowing me to feel sorry for the men who have mistreated me in the past. 

I guess I want to express in this mammoth essay post that so far my feminist journey has lead me to the realisation that if your feminism isn’t growing you, you aren’t doing it right. Perhaps it will morph again in the future. But for now, Feminism is a love of humanity, rather than a hatred of it. That is all. 

[hellzyeahwebwielingessays]

The Not-So-Amazing Mary Jane Part 7: MJ blindly trusts Beck (even though she wouldn’t!)

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This post will be the first of maaaaaaany where I’ll be unpacking the problems prevalent in the status quo presented to us in at the end of AMJ #1.

My intent is to thoroughly explore these problems in this and consequent posts before moving onto issue #2. By doing this I (and others so inclined) can try to bear them in mind as prevailing problems with every issue until such as a time as they are addressed.

In future posts like this (at least until we get to AMJ #2) I will try to dispense with the preamble and get right down to business.

But for now I should start by clearly defining what exactly the premise presented in AMJ #1 even is.

The premise as I see it is as follows:

Mary Jane, out of sympathy for him and interest in the project, is making a movie with Mysterio. A Mysterio who has disguised himself as a respected film director and hired former felons and current super villains as part of his crew. He and MJ maintain Beck’s secret from everyone (which includes Peter but we’ll get there in another post).

In this instalment I will be addressing why MJ’s trust of Beck and failure to verify his claims is nonsensical.

As touched on in our coverage of AMJ #1, Mary Jane believes Beck’s sob story and ultimately agrees to work with him in spite of his crimes and the presence of active villains. Williams writes her genuinely sympathetic and interested in the film project, buying what Beck is saying and lacking any suspicion beyond that.

The most we get is MJ (arguably) noticing Beck’s abuse of one his staff and presumably bearing it in mind for future dealings with him.

Now, MJ is great at reading people and is very aware she possesses that skill. Between her upbringing moving around the country, her profession in acting and modelling (which puts many people, in particular young women, in potentially vulnerable positions) and her experience dating and living with a superhero, it’s an essential skill and one she’s honed. You could call it her personal brand of spider-sense.

If MJ’s Spidey sense were registering honesty from someone then it’d be crucial in her decision to ultimately believe them and judge their threat level.

These pages though get muddy because Beck is mixing the truth and deception. Technically everything he is saying is  true so MJ would likely be picking that up. But he didn’t actually need   MJ to be in the movie so he was lying about that and more poignantly he is omitting the fact this movie plays into Kindred’s wider schemes.

Is MJ’s failure to register deception from Beck a mistake? Is Williams dropping the ball here?

Actually no.

Mary Jane is a good read of people, but she is absolutely not flawless in this regard. There have been times she’s misread Peter and indeed been fooled by other people. Five key examples come to mind and we’re going to be starting with the most debatable ones.

Firstly there was Jason Jerome a fellow actor who offered friendship and support when MJ began working on the soap opera Secret Hospital. Jason was a harassing creep intent upon seducing Mary Jane, regarding her marital status as challenge that’d make his ‘conquest’ all the sweeter. I go into much more detail about Jason’s encounters with MJ in this post.

I will concede that it can definitely be argued that MJ was out of character or emotionally vulnerable during the course of this subplot so it doesn’t necessarily prove anything. Nevertheless, in MJ’s canonical history she was fooled by a fellow (and more experienced) actor than herself.

Secondly there was Aunt May’s death in ASM #400. Aunt May was impersonated by a dying actress who’d been genetically altered to look like and register as her. For around a year everyone (including MJ) believed their beloved May to be dead once more proving how MJ’s ability to read people isn’t flawless. Again though there is a lot of stuff that can be contested with this example, the most significant being that as originally written the intent was that this was the actual Aunt May, not an imposter.

However even accepting the retcon one could argue that due to her pregnancy, May’s miraculous recovery from a coma and the general stress of the Clone Saga up until that point Mary Jane’s ‘Spidey sense’ was not going to be working properly. However, canonically this is once again an example of a fellow (and likely more experienced) actress deceiving MJ.

My other examples don’t have nearly as much leeway.

Perhaps the most significant is Jonathan Caesar, the Parkers’ landlord who was obsessed with ‘owning’ Mary Jane. You can imagine what that  would’ve entailed. He abducted MJ and held her prisoner for a little while. The thing is initially MJ found the guy charming and the idea he was a threat never crossed her mind.

Unlike the above two examples there weren’t any obvious extenuating circumstances that I can recall to excuse MJ’s faux pas. She was just genuinely fooled by him.

Then we have her friend Lorraine whom you might recall from part 4 of this essay series. As mentioned there, Lorraine was an old friend of MJ’s who’d developed a cocaine problem. MJ sought to help her and Lorraine seemed willing to be helped. But when MJ left her alone for a little while Lorraine almost immediately snuck out to find her next hit.

Models are not actresses strictly speaking. But to my limited knowledge their profession must involve some degree of adopting a false persona. Even if we were to say otherwise, Lorraine was clearly capable of duping Mary Jane.

Finally, for an extended period of time the Chameleon fooled MJ and most everyone else when he impersonated J. Jonah Jameson in Web #52.

Like Beck, Chameleon made a whole career out of fooling people and Beck could be argued to be even better at it than Chammy.

So the idea that someone could fool MJ is definitely possible in a lot of stories.

But we shouldn’t take MJ’s trust as a sign that she is in the right. It’s so often tempting to side with the protagonist’s POV precisely because they are the protagonist. If MJ trusts Mysterio she must feel he isn’t dangerous and isn’t that bad really right?

But the possibility that she can be wrong is on the table based upon her history and (whilst I personally doubt Williams intended it this way) that is what is happening here big time.

Now I am not suggesting that MJ should second-guess every read of people she makes nor that the above examples should be sore spots in her mind. But collectively they would enshrine to Mary Jane herself that she shouldn’t just presume her immediate reads of people are accurate, and that would go even more so for professional actors.

In this issue MJ hasn’t got any extenuating circumstances to compromise her judgement. She isn’t in the midst of an emotionally turbulent time in her life. She isn’t being blinded my friendship, loneliness or familial love. She also hasn’t had much time to observe or get to know Beck up close and personal, this exchange being the longest amount of time they’ve ever spoken to one another.

But as I spent far too much time pointing out in parts 3-5, MJ is very aware of Mysterio’s skills, his typical tactics and the horrible things he has done. She knows he is a career criminal and a dangerous/nasty one at that. And she knows that he is an incredibly accomplished and experienced manipulator/deceiver/actor, almost definitely more experienced than her self. And this is to say nothing of the times he’s personally hurt her or the people she cares about.

Realistically upon learning of Beck’s involvement she should somehow start to work against  him and most definitely not trust him!

Even exempting the personal pain he’s been complicit in visiting upon Mary Jane and/or her loved ones, she knows enough about him to be suspicious.

In knowing his skillset and M.O. Mary Jane should either not trust him at all or at the very least not simply not take everything he says at face value. She would  be savvy enough to recognize whatever her ‘radar’ is reading. At best the odds are 50/50 that her radar is off. And those odds exist precisely because making you believe things that aren’t real is the entire conceit of Beck’s alter ego.

But wait, there’s more!

Beck basically admitted to:

Stealing a man’s identity

Wasting over a year of his life working on a project that doesn’t actually exist (in a location notorious for unaccounted for landmines btw)

Using that to con people into giving him their money

Using that money to make a movie which means he’s gambling with their money without their consent and potentially gambling with the public image of the film studio, the crew and the man he’s impersonating if the film gets a bad reception or financially flops

He’s doing all this off the back of what an extremely risky movie to make in the first place. Imagine if an empathetic and unapologetic movie about the life of George Zimmerman came out?

Said movie is a vanity project explicitly about himself

He’s using current super villains on the crew. If you are a current super villain then by definition you are not out on parole, you aren’t reformed and you are still wanted by the law.

And Mary Jane…goes along with this. Lampshading the fact that it’s insane for her to do that doesn’t excuse the extreme mischaracterization of doing that in the first place.

At the very least she should run a check online or with her various contacts in the super hero community to see if he’s actually  dying. Remember from MJ’s POV Beck has full on faked his own death at least twice.  She has no hard evidence for this whatsoever beyond the word of a man who is notoriously duplicitous.

Now to play Devil’s advocate we could argue that MJ believes Beck is out of jail legally. He might’ve served his time, been let out early for good behaviour or precisely because he is dying.  Or perhaps he had legal help that weaselled him out of being locked up.

However this angle of interpretation just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

For starters given his very long history of very serious crimes (even excluding the ones MJ is unaware of) it’d be common sense to presume that Beck would be serving time barring extenuating circumstances. Common sense would then lead anybody to try and confirm if any extenuating circumstances exist. This could prove impossible because how accessible records on costumed criminals are to the public is unclear. But anyone with a phone or internet access could at least try.

MJ has far more than mere common sense and she’s got far more than a phone and internet access. And yet there isn’t even a hint that she makes even a lazy attempt at confirming Beck’s story.

Now let’s pretend MJ forgot every single encounter with Mysterio she knows about before Nick Spencer’s run. No faking Aunt May’s death. No helping Doc Ock in ‘Ends of the Earth’. Nothing from ‘Guardian Devil’. None of the stuff we covered in parts 3-5.

Mary Jane would still realistically be fully aware Beck committed a HUGE crime mere months ago that involved the Avengers (plus other heroes) that was also the inciting incident that reconciled her with the love of her life.

This alone  should be enough for her to not so quickly or blindly trust Beck! Even if she was unaware of the legal fallout of that event it was still an event that endangered lots of innocent people and heroes. Chiefly it endangered the love of her life! MJ trusts the guy whose actions nearly killed the man she loves most in the world!

Speaking of Peter by the way, he’s a super hero who’s regularly tangled with this guy.*

She has also worked for, is an acquaintance of or personal friends with:

Tony Stark/Iron Man

Riri Williams/Ironheart

The main roster of the Fantastic Four

Several big name members of the Avengers (including Captain America and Jessica Drew)

The Avengers faithful butler Jarvis

Members of a support group comprised of the loved ones of super heroes (see ASM v5 #8-10)

Carlie Cooper, a forensics scientist who has worked for the police

She has also encountered shape shifters, impersonators, clones and body swaps in the last 10 years of her life, so a certain degree of safety precautions would be requisite for her.

Collectively this means MJ would not simply presume Beck is walking free legally and more importantly could and would  check up on that. It wouldn’t be hard. She wouldn’t even have to tell Peter if for some reason she was worried about him knowing; we’ll dive a lot more into this in a much later instalment.

Her research would then naturally turn up the fact that Beck clearly escaped from prison. Even if the details of Beck’s trial or consequent legal proceedings (like being paroled or cutting a deal) weren’t public knowledge Mary Jane’s contacts would be able to inform her of what would’ve happened. Thus she’d know  Beck was legally declared insane and sent to Ravencroft but not legally released. 

Similarly even if the details of Mysterio’s ‘death’ in Ravencroft weren’t publically known MJ would have the means of learning that and thus confirm that Beck had faked his death once again; (see ASM v5 #24-25). This would then open up the possibility to MJ that the body the authorities have belongs to someone else. 

From MJ’s point of view, at best that’s macabre and unethical. At worst it could mean Beck caused someone’s death. MJ is clearly aware that Mysterio might be capable of such a thing because she is almost immediately concerned Beck has done something bad to the real Cage McKnight!

Now I’m not saying MJ is going along with Beck even knowing he probably killed his psychiatrist. But what I am saying is that it’s utterly out of character for MJ (or pretty much any character) to not check this stuff!

Maybe  Williams will address all this, but reading AMJ #1 it seems far more likely she’s not bothered to consider the implications of the direction she has taken. Or worse, she has but is ignoring them because she wants to tell the story she wants no matter what.

The point is moot though because MJ wouldn’t give Beck the benefit of the doubt in the first place.

There is more to be said regarding MJ’s trust issues in the story, but I think I’ll save that for next time.

*And typically won through a highly unique danger sense that MJ lacks, a sense that mitigates Beck’s abilities.

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[timelordthirteen]

Some Other Time - Part 2

Mr. Gold/Lacey French, Mature

Summary: College student Lacey dumps her boyfriend and needs a new apartment, it just so happens her professor, Dr. Gold, has a room to rent.

Chapter Summary: Anon asked: Does Some Other Time!Lacey do yoga? If so, does Gold like to watch without her noticing?

Notes: For the impromptu Full Frontal Rumbelle Challenge that @emospritelet and @thatravenclawbitch started. I said I wasn't going to do anymore of this verse but here I am. I am a weak, pathetic writer, just out here begging for attention.

[AO3]

He was going to Hell.

Or, perhaps, he was already there? Yes, that made more sense. He was in Hell. One of his own foolish making, the road, as always, paved with the best of intentions from the moment he uttered the words, “I have an apartment you could rent, Miss French.”

For the first three weeks Gold barely knew Lacey was occupying any space in his house. He might see or hear her come and go, always using the back stairs and the back door so she could cut down the alley to the edge of campus, but apart from that they had no interactions within the confines of his pink Victorian. She joked one afternoon, as they sat in his university office, sorting through essays, that she was like Mrs. Rochester, locked away in the attic.

Except he wouldn’t have minded at all if she’d come down once in a while, perhaps for dinner. He saw some of the things she ate, and seemed mostly to subsist on take out, pizza, and ramen noodle cups. The spicy shrimp were her favorite if the case of 50 she brought home from the wholesale warehouse place was anything to go by. She seemed so proud of herself that she got them for a quarter each, and that made him wonder if he was charging her too much rent, and if he was making her financial situation worse.

He wanted to invite her to dinner, to sit in his kitchen and sip wine while he cooked for her. He wanted to make her laugh and get in arguments over translations of Homer, to see that fire in her eyes and hear her accent deepening as she got more and more insistent that she was right.

He wondered what she’d be like to live with, really live with. Did she leave dirty dishes in the sink or her socks on the floor? Did she insist on straightening the bookshelves before she went to bed? Did she turn the TV off or fall asleep with it on?

But of all the things Gold had considered about Lacey French, he could have never anticipated what the sight of her doing yoga on his patio would do to him.

Her back arched as she rose up, keeping her hands and feet flat on the ground as she did so. The pose left her with her arse in the air, made even more noticeable by the tight black leggings she was wearing. She moved slowly and gracefully, like a dancer, as her body rolled up slowly, her arms loose until her shoulders had squared themselves. Her hands came up over her head and then behind, stretching down to between her shoulder blades. She brought one leg up, bending it at the knee behind her and then raising it higher. Her body bent forward slightly, and she reached back to grab her foot with her hands Then, in a move he’d only ever seen Olympic gymnasts and ballet dancers do, she pulled her leg up.

He turned away a few seconds later, just as she lowered herself to her knees again and stretched over the mat. Her legs were slightly spread, and the position lifted her backside suggestively. The soothing voice of the instructor she was listening to called it Downward Dog, but the only thing in his mind involving the word dog was something far filthier.

His trousers were tight and he hurried from the room before it could get worse. Images floated through his mind, how flexible she was, how graceful her body moved, how strong her legs were, and how good it would feel to have them wrapped around him, squeezing him as he -

Fuck.

Gold shook his head sharply and glared down at his traitorous body as he sagged against the wall. Guilt sat heavy in his gut at the way he’d ogled her.

Lacey was his former student, a teaching assistant in his department, and now his tenant. He should not be having lurid fantasies of her while she was exercising. After a few minutes, he knew the feeling wasn’t going to leave anytime soon, so he made his way upstairs for a cold shower.

Lacey smiled as she sat up, breathing out slowly as she stretched. She always felt good after exercising, but today there was something different, something that wasn’t an endorphin rush and the burn in her muscles.

It was probably Gold.

Since she’d moved in to the small attic apartment in his house, it felt like a weight had been lifted. Trying to find a student apartment in late September was a lost cause, and the only thing she’d been able to find in her price range was well on the other side of the city. She would have had to drive every day and pay extra for parking. In the winter it would have been hellish to say the least.

Gold’s offer was like manna from heaven, and once she moved in, she knew she wasn’t going to try very hard to find another place unless she had to. His house was lovely, a perfect mixture of old and new, and the apartment was just the right space for her. Small and cozy, but light and open at the same time. It was one large room with a bathroom at the back, and a large partition between the bedroom area and the rest of the living space. The kitchenette suited her perfectly, since she rarely did more than heat up soup or boil water for tea.

Coming home to her own little space had reinvigorated her somehow, made her feel more relaxed. Even though she was renting and still sharing a space, it felt different from just renting any old apartment in a big building with ten floors and an elevator that broke once a week just when you were trying to carrying up the groceries. Maybe it was because she was sharing with a person she trusted more than anyone else, who seemed to understand her in a way few others ever had. Maybe it was because she wanted them to share a bit more.

She sighed and rolled up her yoga mat, tucking it under her arm as she slipped through the french doors into the living room. It was foolish to think that Gold would ever consider a relationship with her. He was unconventionally handsome, funny, and brilliant, and when he swaggered into class with his cane and three-piece suit her whole body tingled. But she was an older undergrad with a GED and a few courses from a community college, working her ass off to try to get a degree that might barely pay off her student loans when she was done. He was a tenured professor with numerous published articles, who had traveled the world, was writing his own book, and even assisted Scotland Yard once. They got on well so far, and she thought maybe they could be friends eventually.

She stopped to check the mailbox before she went upstairs, but there was nothing except the usual junk and a catalog for a lingerie shop. It made her cheeks heat to think about Gold seeing it. Would he wonder if she’d ordered from it? Would he ever flip through it and imagine her in something, preferably from the back pages where the naughtier stuff was. Grinning, she made her way up to the second floor and down the hallway, towards the stairs up to the attic space.

Just then, Gold stepped out of the hall bath, wrapped in a fluffy blue towel.

Lacey gasped and dropped her mail. Gold made a high pitched noise he would later deny, and dropped his towel.

Her eyes couldn’t help themselves as they traveled down his body. He was leaner than he seemed when he wore his three piece suits, and his skin looked soft and smooth. There was no hair on his chest, but the thin, dark trail that lead down from his navel pulled her gaze right down.

She gasped again. He was - his cock was - damn.

Her focus snapped to his face, which was bright red and frozen in something between shock and abject horror.

“Shit! Sorry!” she exclaimed, spinning around and covering her eyes at the same time.

Gold scrambled to pick up his towel, holding it in front of him as he limped to his room as quickly as possible. He had to move passed Lacey to do it, giving her a flash of his bare arse, which made him wince again in humiliation.

She peeked between her fingers as he ducked around the corner into the bedroom, and bit her lip as she caught a flash of his backside. The door shut sharply, and she blew out a slow breath before she turned and hurried up the stairs, visions of his swaying cock and dimpled ass leaving her with a wide grin and warm ache in her core.

[bicycles-bees-bisexuals]

50 Question Book Tag For World Book Day

My darling pal @thebestoftimes tagged me in this and who am I to refuse, though i am a lame loser who hasn’t read very much since high school. I read so much in elementary and middle school that I think I read enough for a whole lifetime. Also I’m a verbose asshole so enjoy my essays on books I read 13 years ago.

Who or what sparked your love of literature?

My mom used to read to me when I was really little and my sister despised being read to so my mom stopped. It made me sad so I started reading to myself and I just kept reading and reading and reading all throughout elementary and onward.

Do you have an ‘odd’ book habit? (page sniffing/never leaving the house with a book)

If I really really really love a book I use it to press flowers, so you’ll know which book is my favorite when you open it and it’s full of flowers

Do you have a book that you think has changed your life? How?

Shit I dunno man, I feel like Tolkien shaped my creativity and his characters are characters that I truly hold dear. But Pride and Prejudice really impacted me, which I know is weird, but it was my first foray into literature written by women for women and I just loved the dynamic of the characters, the spunkiness of Elizabeth Bennet, and the style of writing.

Which book have you reread most frequently?

Pride and Prejudice because I’m a huge freakin’ nerd and whenever I’m sad P&P is my comfort book. This is closely followed by the Lord of the Rings/the Hobbit

You can meet any author and ask one question. What author would you chose and what question would you ask?

Oh shit.....ummmmmm..... Ummmmmmmmmmmm.....I would ask Jane Austen her opinion on the Lizzie Bennet Diaries(after showing her the whole series)

Best book published this year so far?

(I haven’t read any books published this year I am so sorry)

Imagine you’ve started a book and don’t like it. Do you see the experience through to the bitter end?

I am a sinner of the highest caliber and I read the end to see if it’s interesting enough to warrant suffering through the rest

What book is top of your wish list/TBR pile?

Any of Holly Blacks books tbh, I hear such good things about her work and I just haven’t gotten around to reading it yet and I really want to

Favourite place to read?

On the porch in my beach chair with a mug of tea and a blanket

If you buy books, do you lend them out? Ever had a bad experience?

I lend books out all the time. I recently had a person I considered my friend abscond to Russia with several of my books and I am not happy about it

What fictional character do you ship yourself with?

There are so many badass ladies that if I lived in their world I would flirt so hard with them and I can’t decide. Definitely Annabeth and Rachel for Percy Jackson, Hermione/Ginny/Luna from Harry Potter... Brett Ashley from The Sun Also Rises....Arwen from LOTR but also Aragorn and also Eowyn....I just love hot ladies who get in fights alright

Weirdest thing you’ve used as a bookmark.

A whole sock, it was the nearest object to me and I was in a hurry, but at least it was clean

Favorite quality/qualities in a protagonist and antagonist

I love a flawed character who experiences character growth in the story, be they protagonist or antagonist. Not even in a ‘bad guy becomes good guy’ way, character growth is just so sexy man I wish writers used it more

Favorite genre and favorite book from that genre.

Why must you hurt me in this way, making me decide. I must say Fantasy is my genre of choice, and my favorite is actually The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Best/worst movie adaptation in your eyes

Dragon is by far the worst movie adaptation I have ever seen, I remember being so utterly disappointed and gutted when I watched it, I love those books so much and that movie let me down so hard(the effects were really good for the time though I must give them that)

Do you prefer reading your own books, or library books?

I am poor so library books all the way

How do you choose your next book to read?

I read descriptions until something strikes my interest. Or Jess recommends something to me.

Your favorite word.

Flourish

Book that got you hooked on reading/how you got hooked.

Mrs Peregrins Home for Peculiar Children, which isn’t a book I didn’t expect to like and didn’t have much interest in but the opening line of “I had just come to accept my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen” it was an interesting enough hook to draw me in. I was not disappointed, it’s a pretty great book

Opinion on dog-earing, margin writing, ect.

I dog ear books and write all over them. I love books and I love the stories they contain but I don’t think the pages of each individual book are sacred. My books look loved because they are loved. Unless I’m borrowing them then I don’t dog ear or write in them because that’s rude

Top 5 immediate to read in no order

The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

The Foxhole Court by Nora Sakavic

The Cruel Prince by Holly Black

Lady Midnight by Cassandra Clare

Lord of Shadows by Cassandra Clare

Queen of Air and Darkness by Cassandra Clare

Most underrated book you’ve read

Tbh I don’t think I’ve read any underrated books. They’re all pretty highly rated

What is the first book that catches your eye when you look at your bookshelf?

My collectors copy of Sherlock Holmes because it’s beautiful and fancy and those stories hold a dead place in my heart

How do you arrange your books on your shelves?

I don’t arrange them, I just place them so that they fit, though I do keep series together

You have the power to change a book’s ending. Which ending would you change and what would you make happen instead?

Why do you do this to me.....okay I would definitely change the ending of Inheretence by Christopher Paolini. Tbh I wish he hadn’t written the fourth book at all and just left it with Eragon, Eldest, and Brisingr but if we accept this book then it must be changed. I would have liked to see more character growth from Murtagh especially, but also Eragon who really regressed in this book. And I think Galbatorix’ death was super anti climatic and didn’t really resolve all of the built up tension from the series, it was too easy and didn’t resolve anything at all.

And Eragon just abandons Arya and the riders and they separate themselves from each other after all they did together, several books of allusion to a relationship and all of the issues between them being resolved and he just leaves. The plot threads just weren’t resolved and honestly I would have to scrap the whole book for the most part and start over.

Favourite book cover?

The book covers for the Inheretence Cycle by Christopher Paolini hold a special place in my heart and are what drew me to that series in the first place. I bought hard covers just for the aesthetic of them

Which book from your childhood has had the most impact on you?

The Chronicles of Narnia, tbh, my first introduction to fantasy

When reading, what do you value most: writing style, characters, plot, world building, pacing, etc?

Characters are the most valuable to me, if I don’t love the characters I don’t love the book

Do you prefer buying books or borrowing them from a library/friend?

Borrowing, for sure

What books/sequels that are being published this year are you most excited for?

Unfortunately I haven’t read enough lately to know what’s coming out this year

Which fictional character would you want as a sidekick?

Samwise Gamgee all the way

How many books have you read so far this year?

Seven, all academic books

What’s been your favourite read so far this year?

The Heliand

You’re stuck on an island with a suitcase big enough to hold five books. What books are they?

Arghhhhh ummm.... the lord of the rings trilogy, Pride and Prejudice, and a book on survival tactics

If you had to go out to dinner with any character who would it be and why? What would you talk about?

Hmmmmm Bilbo Baggins because I wanna hear the hidden stories of his journeys

Is there a book you have such a hatred for that you would throw it off of the highest tower knowing that the last copy of it will be destroyed so that not another living soul can read it?

Inheretence by Christopher Paolini tbh

Do you believe books make nice decoration?

Yeah I do and one day I want to have book shelves displaying all my books

Do you listen to music when you read? Or do you need complete silence? 

I do listen to music because I can’t focus on just one thing at a time because I’m ridiculous

Do you have a favorite book? If not are you in the group that believes there are too many great books out there to just choose one?

I CANT CHOOSE I CANT CHOOSE I CANT CHOOSE I CANT CHOOSE I CANTTTFTTTT

Do you sleep with books under your pillow.

No because I move too much in my sleep I would destroy the poor thing

Do you go to the library or do you have a book buying addiction or are you one of those lucky people who is able to do both?

I definitely go to the library because I am poooorrrrr

Own any book inspired clothing?

I have a pride and prejudice book scarf and several Jane Austen necklaces

Have you ever read a book in another language?

Yep I read books in Latin all the time and I used to read books in Spanish because I used to be smart, what the fuck happened to that who knows

Strangest book you’ve ever read?

The Heliand

Favourite type of non-fiction?

Historical Drama, in which they tell real events but in the most dramatic way possible. The best.

Favourite non-fiction book?

I CANT CHOOSE I CANT CHOOSE I CANT CHOOSE I CANT CHOOSE I CANT CHOOSE (does hidden figures by Margot Lee Shetterly count? If not then I can’t decide)

Favourite subject to read about?

History, always, especially history involving regular people losing their shot

Favourite book you’ve read in school?

No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women by Estelle Freedman

Favourite work of Shakespeare?

Tbh I don’t like Shakespeare but Midsummer Nights Dream is most entertaining to me. Though I love merchant of Venice for all the jokes I get out of it on Bards Dispense Profanity

Character you’d love as a mom or dad or guardian?

All of them would be terrible parents and it would be so delightful but tbh I’d love to have Han Solo and Leia as my parents so I can beat the shit out of my bro Kyle Ron every time he tried to glorify space hitler

[sisterhood-sanity]

The Christmas I went bat shit crazy!

If you have already read the purpose and the genesis for this blog you know quite a bit about why and how Sisterhood Sanity exists, but I merely skimmed the surface of the final catalyst for my leaving my profession of 25 years and starting over.  The final proverbial straw was the Christmas I went bat shit crazy!

It should’ve been the happiest, most special Christmas of my life; I was finally with the man of my dreams, my soulmate (as cheesy as that sounds), but this year I was riddled with debilitating anxiety and depression.  I had a job that I should’ve loved; I worked with people that I should’ve cared about; I had students I should’ve adored, but instead I found myself in a constant state of panic.  I could’ve sworn my MS was chewing up my brain. When I went in for a three hour MRI, I expected my brain to light up like a Christmas tree.  When I went into the neuropsychologist, I expected him to say I have the memory of a two-year-old.  Instead, I received the greatest and simultaneously most disturbing reports: no new lesions.  My MS was not only stable, but one of my lesions was shrinking; how is that even possible. My MS is getting better? Maybe the neuropsychologist would be able to shed light on why couldn’t I work, why couldn’t I think and comprehend and create at a higher level like I had been doing for so long. Why was it that had to spend 10 hours every weekend in the basement trying desperately to create curriculum and feeling the panic rise with the tick of each minute on the clock? For the first time, I was seeing less of the man I loved than I did in the four years we dated long-distance.  How could I tell him my job was killing me? How could I tell him I felt that I was going crazy? I felt that I was constantly jousting at windmills getting nowhere, always testy, always disappointed, always slightly angry, but mostly upset. I found I cried at the drop of a hat, me this tough chick (as my best friend says), couldn’t keep her shit together, choking back tears during class.  That should’ve been the happiest Christmas of my life.  And in hindsight...it was...ok the Christmas wasn’t happy, it was scary and unnerving...but that Christmas kicked me in the ass so hard that I turned around to face myself and take my own advice.  

Last June I was chosen to address the Plymouth High School graduating class one last time.  It was serendipitous because as they were starting a new adventure, so was I (ironically I didn’t start my adventure until I hit rock bottom).  I was leaving my job of 19 years to move an hour away and marry the man of my dreams.  I wrote a speech that talked about hope, joy, and adventure, and I forgot to take my own advice.  While grasping at life preservers during Christmas, I happened to re-read the speech and realized these were the words I needed to hear.  These are the words that helped me have the courage to begin again.  I am pasting much of the speech here because I feel the advice I gave the kids and took for myself sets the tone for Sisterhood Sanity.  (I took out the personal remarks meant for the kids, but it is, for the most part, the whole of the message.)  You may recognize some of the phrases, there are very few original thoughts, we are always influenced by the outside, but I have put them together in what I hope is an original way.

We are standing at the precipice of our next adventure...We are both ending and beginning today! It’s a marvelous opportunity to able to begin again…I never thought at the age of 50 I would get a do-over, but I do

and I am going to take advantage of all that I have learned to ensure the next 50 years are the most colorful yet.  A do-over is an amazing gift from the universe.  It’s extremely serendipitous that I stand here today.  While you the class of 2018 are completing your PHS journey, I am also completing my 19-year journey of teaching at PHS. So Instead of being old like me and finding yourself saying “If only I knew then what I know now!”  I want to tell you what I know...and I strongly urge you to use it Now...Don’t wait for a do-over...

My TOP TEN LIFE LESSONS

Number 10

Respect your fears…

acknowledge your fears...but don’t let the fear of failing or disappointing others stop you…fear, as Adam Smith (a graduating student) so wisely discusses in his nature of man essay is simply a catalyst for growth and change

Number 9:

Don’t try to be clever when you should be wise: If you are wise you will know when it’s appropriate to be clever and when it’s not...

Number 8:

Don’t make excuses…no one cares why you didn’t; they only care when you do, so show up...that’s what family and friends do...they just show up

Number 7:

Be silly, be kind, be honest...Don’t be afraid to be silly..silliness brings laughter and laughter is a barometer of happiness...laugh a lot…be kind to yourself...haters are going to hate no matter what...so don’t let them suck potential joy from your life...most importantly, always be honest with yourself...if you’re not...WHO else will be

Number 6:

Learn from your mistakes...You are what you make yourself. So learn lessons from your mistakes...the first being to not make the same mistake twice...that’s stupidity…

Number 5:

Don’t settle for almost right…You only cheat yourself when you justify that which isn’t totally right for you...you know when you are cheating yourself when you can’t look yourself in the mirror...and If you can’t look yourself in the eye....no one else will be able to either...

Number 4:

Wake up every morning as if something wonderful is going to happen: While unfortunately, you won’t get to spend part of your day in my classroom any more... there is still a world of wonderful out there for you...so look for it...to grab...enjoy it...savor it

Number 3:

All the universe conspires to help you achieve your goal

But you have to listen to the messages along the way…go through life confidently knowing the universe wants you to win...wants you to achieve...and you will...if you trust your instincts and listen to the messages....if you trust that You are where you are meant to be

Number 2:

Enjoy the journey…Short cuts may get you to your destination faster...but you’ve missed the adventure...you can’t take short cuts through difficulties...you learn from the adventure of them

And my Number 1 life lesson:

Make your life Colorful: draw your world

Dr. Seuss used a  rainbow of hues that tickled the imagination but even he had to start with the three primary colors...he had to open his mind to all the possibilities...to all of the thinks he could think

Life is not a box of chocolates...it is box with 64 crayons with a sharpener in the back.  Use them as a child does...with a glazed look of wonder when they are new, but not afraid to break a tip or tear back the paper to sharpen one.

Pour the crayons out and look at them...it’s ok if they aren’t in perfect rainbow symmetry…they were made to be used, so use them...share them...create with them…color your world with them…don’t settle for an “invisible” boat...and if you insist on only using black and white then at least use some shading…

We love children’s drawings with shimmering green clouds and rainbow striped beasts...we crave Dr. Suessian drawings...not because of their stylistic genius...but because of their honesty and openness...because of their ability to see what isn’t there...their ability to tangibly reflect the vastness of imagination and wonder.   

Don’t leave an inch on the page of your life colorless...don’t let fear stop you from coloring outside the lines…

I am in no way suggesting that you cut off your nose to spite your face..but think the deep thoughts...imagine the impossible...soar for your personal goal….don’t restrict your life to someone else’s defined red rose…Take what you have learned and use it, change it, embellish on it…don’t be satisfied with a red rose any more…make a purple poke a dotted wiggley giggle that sways under a fluorescent orange sky and when someone looks at your paper and says that’s not what it’s supposed to look like….ask the Nosey Nancy...why not?  

Always ask why….suck the marrow of life….just don’t choke on the bone.

Albert Einstein said “Imagination is more important than information,” Live with this truth so that when the drawing of your life is finished…

Your crayons are broken and sharpened down to nubs, with frayed paper wrappings, and the cover of the box is hanging precariously by one corner and the sharpener is a kaleidoscope of crayon shavings.  

Let’s color our world together as we celebrate being us. As we celebrate our sisterhood.  And hopefully, retain our sanity along the way.

If we all colored our world with joy and wonder and imagination...what a world it would be…

How are you going to color your world today?

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT PEOPLE

This probably indicates room for improvement. A language that would make as much of the innovation is unconscious. When I was in grad school the whole time, and both got their degrees. It would not hurt to make Lisp better as a scripting language for Unix.1 It's worth understanding what McCarthy discovered. Search was now only a small percentage of our page views, less than one month's growth, and now he's a professor at MIT. Imagine waking up after such an operation. His answer was simply no. By seeming unable even to cut a grapefruit in half let alone go to the store and buy one, he forced other people to use.

Instead of quietly switching to another field, he made a fuss, from inside.2 If you'd proposed at the time that was an odd thing to do, and even have bad service, and people are often upset to be told things they don't.3 For example, I write essays the same way. There is nothing more important than brevity to a hacker: being able to do what you want in a throwaway program is a program you write quickly for some limited task. Most nerds like quieter pleasures. Society. It will always suck to work for a couple years ago I advised graduating seniors to work for you, the founders should include technical people. People who like New York will pay a premium to live in a town where the cool people are really cool.

Do we have free will?4 And if we, who were 29 and 30 at the time whether this was because of the Bubble, especially in companies run by business types, who thought of software development as something terrifying that therefore had to be crammed into the form of powerful, inexpensive computers, and I got in reply what was then the party line about it: that Yahoo was no longer a mere search engine. Odds are this project won't be a very promising startup indeed to get a job depends on the kind you want. In towns like Houston and Chicago and Detroit it's too small to measure. The centralizing effect of venture firms is a double one: they cause startups to form around them, and the VCs will try to undermine the VCs by acting faster, and the super-angels would quibble about valuations. Hackers share the surgeon's secret pleasure in popping zits.5 It would be great if a startup could give us something of the old world of credentials and into the new one of performance. They seemed a little surprised at having total freedom. Do you actually want to start one. People don't do hard things gratuitously; no one will work on a harder problem than bad submissions.

Using first and rest means 50% more typing. If I were going to do this was at trade shows.6 Well, food shows that pretty clearly. There used to be a genius who will need to be designed to be lived in as your office? It can't be something you have to charm them. Common Lisp. It's true, certainly, but the people.

Parents will tend to produce results that annoy people: there's no use in telling people things they already believe, and people will behave differently depending on which they're in, just as there are in the real world, you can't bully customers, so you may as well face that. Three of the most valuable things you could do is find a middle-sized non-technology company and spend a couple weeks just watching what they do so well that those who don't understand it are driven to invent conspiracy theories to explain how Plato and Aristotle became revered texts to be mastered and discussed. That sounds hipper than Lisp.7 And vice versa: when you can get from modern technology. A rounds, that would explain why they'd care about valuations. People can notice you've replaced email when it's a fait accompli. Google, because it suits the way they generate any other kind of code. One of the less honorable was to shock people.8 Maybe the situation is similar with malaria. The centralizing effect of venture firms is a double one: they cause startups to form around them, and above all, it helps them be decisive. The first is that you don't see the scary part upfront.

But what a difference it makes to be able to reach most of the startups who believed that. Control as Possible. It's also what causes smart people to be curious about certain things and not others.9 So you start painting. Hackers are perfectly capable of hearing the voice of the customer without a business person to amplify the signal for them.10 To many people, Lisp is a natural fit for server-based software. When people used to ask me how many people our startup had, and I don't understand. Their tastes aren't completely different from other people's point of view, instead of forcing everything into a mold of classes and methods. They know their audience. There's inevitably a difference in how things feel within the company.11 Most philosophical debates are not merely afflicted by but driven by confusions over words.

This a helps them pick the right startups, and b if you seem impressive, they'll be going against thousands of years studying really be a waste of time, that programming languages don't become popular or unpopular based on what expert hackers think of them, and if this new Lisp will be used to hack. Probably not. The problem with feeling you're doomed is not just that hackers understand technology better, but that they won't take risks. Too bad.12 What do people complain about?13 In the matter of platforms this tendency is even more singular in having its own defense built in. The 2005 summer founders ranged in age from 18 to 28 average 23, and there is no secret cabal making it all work. Yes, the price to earnings ratio is kind of high, but I don't see why it ought to be the new way that server-based application, and it is the Internet, not cable.14

When I say startups are designed to grow fast. Weekly dinners saved them from a common problem: choosing a small, dark, noisy apartment. But there is a fixed amount of it.15 Most American cities have been turned inside out. On the surface it feels like the kind of founders who have the balls to turn down a big offer also tend to be less insistent.16 However, the VCs have a weapon they can use it. But it was a good thing. That depends.17 I once spent a month painting three versions of a still life I set up in about four minutes. But most of the startups that can retain control tend to be far better than everyone else. Part of the problem is to make money from it, it tends to support the charisma theory more than contradict it. That's the main reason Lisp isn't currently popular.

Notes

You owe them such updates on your thesis. It also set off an extensive and often useful discussion on the one the Valley, the editors will have to keep their wings folded, as on Reddit, for the first meeting. Your Brain, neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick recounts a conversation in which practicing talks makes them overbuild: they'll create huge, overcomplicated agreements, and 20 in Paris.

The kind of social engineering—9. But the change is a major cause of economic equality in the narrow technical sense of the words out of loyalty to the way I know of this article used the term whitelist instead of uebfgbsb.

While the US. Price of Inequality.

Quite often at YC.

In this essay wrote: My feeling with the solutions. 7x a year to keep the number of restaurants that still require jackets for men. At first I didn't like it that the main reason I don't know enough about the other writing of literary theorists.

If you have to rely on social conventions about executive salaries.

The markets seem to be spread out geographically. Maybe it would be enough to supply the activation energy to start software companies, summer 2010. That would be reluctant to start over from scratch, rather than by selling recordings. So if you pack investor meetings with So, can I make it self-interest explains much of the corpora.

In-Q-Tel that is exactly my point. The key to wasting time is distraction. University Press, 1983. The reason for the tenacity of the x division of Megacorp is now the first year or two make the hiring point more strongly.

I'm writing about one specific, rather than given by other people in the process of trying to hide wealth from the government. But their founders, and that you could only get in the 1984 ad isn't Microsoft, would not be incorporated, but whether it's good, but viewed from the truth. Though nominally acquisitions and sometimes on a hard technical problem. My first job was scooping ice cream in the startup eventually becomes.

But so many of the aircraft is. William R.

As a friend with small children, or because they are within any given college. Trevor Blackwell presents the following scenario. After Greylock booted founder Philip Greenspun out of them.

Incidentally, this is: we currently filter at the moment the time of unprecedented federal power, so they'll understand how lucky they are by ways that have already launched or can be explained by math. But you can say they're not. Many hope he was skeptical about things you've written or talked about convergence. Eric Raymond says the best new startups.

They say to most people realize, because they've learned more, because spam and legitimate mail volume both have distinct daily patterns. Wittgenstein asserted a sort of love is as frightening as it were better to make money, buy beans in giant cans from discount stores. It's possible that companies will one day is the most successful companies have little to bring corporate bonds; a decade of inflation that left many public companies trading below the value of understanding per se but from which a few months by buying good programmers instead of reacting.

But scholars seem to be a good deal for you; who knows who you start fundraising, because that's how both publishers and audiences treat it. See, we don't have the perfect life, and can hire skilled people to start or join startups. The US is becoming more fragmented, and this is one problem where rapid prototyping doesn't work. Thanks to Paul Buchheit for the first to state this explicitly.

I'm not saying that good paintings must have been in the sale of products, because talks are usually more desperate for money.

I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the process of selling things to them. But when you depend on Aristotle would be great for VCs if the founders are in a band, or Seattle, 4 in DC, 6 in Chicago, 8 in London, 13 in New York. A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn't, that I knew, there are already names for this purpose are still called the option of deferring to a partner from someone they respect.

For example, because any invention has a power law dropoff, but in practice signalling hasn't been much of the organization—specifically increased demand for them. In practice it just feels like it that the path from ideas to startups. You could probably starve the trolls of the great painters in history supported themselves by painting portraits. Security always depends more on the way we met Charlie Cheever sitting near the door.

Thanks to Carolynn Levy, Joshua Reeves, Paul Buchheit, Aaron Iba, Robert Morris, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell for reading a previous draft.

[monicadeola]

Walter Mischel, whose studies of delayed gratification in young children clarified the importance of self-control in human development, and whose work led to a broad reconsideration of how personality is understood, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, his daughter Linda Mischel Eisner said.

Dr. Mischel was probably best known for the marshmallow test, which challenged children to wait before eating a treat. That test and others like it grew in part out of Dr. Mischel’s deepening frustration with the predominant personality models of the mid-20th century.

One model, rooted in Freudian thinking, saw people as prisms of unconscious, often conflicting desires. The other, based on personality questionnaires, or “inventories,” categorized people as having certain traits, like recklessness or restraint, at levels that were fairly stable over time.

Neither model was particularly predictive of what people actually did in experiments, Dr. Mischel concluded, in part because the models ignored context: the specifics of a given situation, who is there, what a person’s goals are, the rewards and risks of acting on impulse.

In a series of experiments at Stanford University beginning in the 1960s, he led a research team that presented preschool-age children with treats — pretzels, cookies, a marshmallow — and instructed them to wait before indulging themselves. Some of the children received strategies from the researchers, like covering their eyes or reimagining the treat as something else; others were left to their own devices.

The studies found that in all conditions, some youngsters were far better than others at deploying the strategies — or devising their own — and that this ability seemed to persist at later ages. And context mattered: Children given reason to distrust the researchers tended to grab the treats earlier.

The experiments did not seem seminal at the time, at least on their own. But in a 1973 paper, Dr. Mischel assembled them with a raft of other evidence to level a sharp critique of standard, trait-based personality psychology.

“The proposed approach to personality psychology,” he concluded, “recognizes that a person’s behavior changes the situations of his life as well as being changed by them.”

In other words, categorizing people as a collection of traits was too crude to predict behavior reliably, or capture who they are. Dr. Mischel proposed an “If … then” approach to assessing personality, in which a person’s instincts and makeup interact with what’s happening moment to moment, as in: If that waiter ignores me one more time, I’m talking to the manager. Or: If I can make my case in a small group, I’ll do it then, rather than in front of the whole class.

In an era when traditional ideas were on trial across the culture, the paper had the impact of a manifesto. Many in the trait-psychology camp reacted with anger, accusing Dr. Mischel of trying to tear down the field. On the other side, many scholars were delighted: Social psychology, the study of how situations shape behavior, had a new champion.

“For us in the field, that paper was perhaps his biggest contribution,” Brent Roberts, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, said in a telephone interview.

For the wider public, it would be the marshmallow test. In the late 1980s, decades after the first experiments were done, Dr. Mischel and two co-authors followed up with about 100 parents whose children had participated in the original studies. They found a striking, if preliminary, correlation: The preschoolers who could put off eating the treat tended to have higher SAT scores, and were better adjusted emotionally on some measures, than those who had given in quickly to temptation.

The paper was cautious in its conclusions, and acknowledged numerous flaws, including a small sample size. No matter. It was widely reported, and a staple of popular psychology writing was born: If Junior can hold off eating a marshmallow for 15 minutes in preschool, then he or she is headed for the dean’s list.

“It had a life of its own and grew into an urban myth of sorts,” Yuichi Shoda, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington and a co-author of the paper, said in a telephone interview. “It’s like surveying 50 people and saying you can predict a national election based on that.”

In 2014, Dr. Mischel published his own account of the experiment and its reception, “The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control.”

In at least one serious replication attempt, scientists failed to find the same results. Still, there is general agreement that self-discipline, persistence, grit — call it what you like — is a good predictor of success in many areas of life.

“Dr. Mischel was one of the central pillars of the entire personality field for the last 50 years,” Dr. Roberts said.

Walter Mischel was born on Feb. 22, 1930, in Vienna, the second of two sons of Salomon Mischel, a businessman, and Lola Lea (Schreck) Mischel, who ran the household. The family fled the Nazis in 1938 and, after stops in London and Los Angeles, settled in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn in 1940.

After graduating from New Utrecht High School as valedictorian, Walter completed a bachelor’s degree in psychology at New York University and, in 1956, earned a Ph.D. from Ohio State University.

He joined the Harvard faculty in 1962, at a time of growing political and intellectual dissent, soon to be inflamed in the psychology department by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (a.k.a. Baba Ram Dass), avatars of the era of turning on, tuning in and dropping out.

“The place kept getting crazier, it was impossible to work, and the qualities that had made it appealing seemed to be vanishing, so when an invitation came from Stanford to visit for an interview, I jumped at the chance,” Dr. Mischel wrote in an autobiographical essay, published for the American Psychological Association in 2007.

At Harvard he met and married Harriet Nerlove. The marriage ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Eisner, he is survived by two other daughters, Judith and Rebecca Mischel; six grandchildren; and his partner, Michele Myers.

Moving to Palo Alto in 1977, he joined Albert Bandura, Gordon Bower, Ellen Markman, Philip Zimbardo and many other psychologists in what became a golden era, in which the unstated goal was to shake up psychology — and the larger culture — through inventive experiments and chutzpah, rather than acid trips. Dr. Mischel cut an Old World figure there, with his beret and his love of French wine and art.

“He was a unique addition to Stanford Psychology’s golden age in the 1960 to 1980s,” Dr. Zimbardo said in an email. “In many ways, his style of thinking and living was rather European. He preferred teaching seminars rather than large lectures, conducting long-term longitudinal research over doing smaller, more dramatic experiments.”

Dr. Mischel joined the Columbia University faculty in 1983. He became the chairman of the psychology department and continued to collaborate widely with other researchers, many of them former students. He eventually achieved emeritus status.

“I am glad that at the choice point at 18 I resisted going into my uncle’s umbrella business,” he wrote in the autobiographical essay. “The route I did choose, or stumbled into, still leaves me eager early each morning to get to work in directions I could not have imagined at the start, wishing only for more time, and not wanting to spend too much of it looking back.”

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 15, 2018, Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Walter Mischel, 88, Marshmallow Test Creator, Dies. 

[realtalk-princeton]

@maybach how did you adjust so well to college? I feel like in a lot of ways I’ve had the opposite experience, I was a really committed student in hs, got a 2400 sat, 15 perfect app test scores, all A’s, I even literally did lab work multiple summers at prestigious universities lol. I never really did much socially in hs, few friends, no SO, not much life experience in general outside academics. But now that I’m here, I’ve found it so hard to adapt. I actually took a gap year before starting,

but I’ve struggled so much here. I’m actually taking a leave because I couldn’t keep up. I guess part of this is not prioritizing academics enough cause I still feel like I need a ton to make up for lost time” from all the stuff I missed (even after taking a gap year). Honestly, it’s hard to even motivate myself to do academics at all, I mean I could always drop to an easier school or even just not go to college. I don’t even really like having “intellectual conversations” and all that, I’d rather just be around ppl who are more “shallow” (but is anything really “shallow” in the first place, I mean it’s really just about how you look at the world) but I digress. I don’t even care that much about honing critical thinking skills, and anyway, you don’t even need college to do that. it seems like the main justifications for the existence of liberal arts education, and really maybe even college in general (except for ppl going to grad school cause they are actually putting (Jesus this is turning into an op-ed) tangible knowledge they are directly using in their career, or ppl not going to grad school who are going into tech/engineering (also chemistry/biology?) and last I checked, not a huge number of students here go to grad school right out of college. I worked my ass off in hs to get here and now I’m really starting to regret it. so to tie it all back together, how did you even get into the mindset you’ve talked about to this place (not trying to be confrontational or anything, just genuinely curious) much less go from your hs experience to doing really well here? Or maybe I really should leave honestly. My parents didn’t even pressure me that much academically, it was a lot of self-motivation. Lol sorry for the screed

Response from Maybach:

No problem anon! I read the whole thing, but just needed sufficient time to build up to my answer. Also, there are a lot of components obviously lol, but I’ll mainly focus on your actual question for brevity sake. Even I’m getting tired of my long responses haha.

Let me first respond to some of your assertions and share my thoughts. I was kind of confused when you wrote, “it seems like the main justifications for the existence of liberal arts education…y are actually putting (Jesus this is turning into an op-ed) tangible knowledge they are directly using in their career, or ppl not going to grad school who are going into tech/engineering (also chemistry/biology?)” What are the main justifications you are referring to? Are you saying that college is to develop knowledge directly for a career? But anyway, I think college is really important at is the core for two things: time for maturing and learning how to learn. Nothing we learn for most of is will be directly related to a job, but it becomes vitally important and sets us apart from the vast majority of people. For the first thing, most kids are just not ready to enter the workforce after HS. They need to actually start growing up, taking responsibility more for their actions, going through life experiences. Can you imagine what it would be like for the average college-aged kid to go through a breakup in the post-graduation world for the first time lol (just an example)? Most people need time to mature so they’re ready for life after. As for learning how to learn. This is very important as well and Princeton EXCELS at this. I don’t care what anyone says, this is pretty much indisputable in my mind. I learned how to speak a language at a near-professional level within 1 year, I learned about centuries of detailed American economic history, etc. and none of this ever came up for a job. What is great about this and important for life is that I can now quickly learn new things in very different topics in a rigorous manner and adapt to situations in an efficient manner. I am constantly exposed to new and diverse ways of thinking and analyzing issues, which allows me to become a more efficient producer of ideas. When I interned in auditing, I was the only sophomore in my intern group and the only non-accounting major with only 1 semester of financial accounting coursework. Of course, they were way ahead of me at the beginning, but after only 2 weeks, I had caught up and mostly surpassed them in the speed and quality of my output. The only other sophomores in my group were a kid of the COO and a kid from U Chicago. My education was a big reason I was able to do this. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know to do accounting that well before because it’s not like the accounting majors even remembered that much stuff from their classes anyway. What I could do is synthesize complex information quickly and creatively innovate new ways of processing that were more original and not based out of a book. Princeton does this in an excellent manner no matter your major. You can’t do well here just by memorizing a couple formulas, reading a book all the time, etc. You are forced to approach complex large new problems all the time by using newly learned information. This is what makes our student so successful in many situations later in life and the earlier one starts to develop these skills, the better due to compounding interest (if you’re familiar with that concept). When you say “I don’t care about critical thinking skills” and “I’d rather be around “shallow” minded people” and “who cares about having intellectual conversations?” All of those points are totally fair and if you feel that way, there’s nothing wrong with that. I think you’re kind of missing the point though. It’s not like I’m proud of Princeton because we have more deep intellectual conversations. Rather, this is evidence that we are able to apply a rigorous analytical mindset to new situations and problems and come up with meaningful solutions on an unparalleled level. I’d rather trust the average Princeton student to construct a public policy that the average Brown student any day. Who’s the person who’s more likely to independently look a the situation and not just one-to-one apply what they read in a book? Who’s more likely to know how to work hard under that pressure? I’ve had to write 50-page essays in 1-2 weeks on highly complex issues. So of course, when I had to do a large client-project with hundreds of thousands of dollars actually on the line, I was more than ready to do it. Guess what student from which university wasn’t able to be organized enough to get their responsibilities done? 

There’s literally nothing wrong with not caring about developing these things or becoming a stronger critical thinker who approaches the world and absorbs information better than 99% of the population. In many ways, just taking it easier and just growing up slowly is better. Honestly, you really seem to me like you might have enjoyed a less stressful college more. You’re super smart, but you were so burned out from HS and didn’t have time to actually be a kid that long, to just enjoy yourself and life in an immature manner. If you were already so burnt out from HS, Princeton is just so hard because you’re already on the verge of not being able to do much more difficult thinking and you don’t have the time to develop the experience and coping mechanisms to deal with high-stress. For Brown, I am glad I didn’t choose it and go down that path for many reasons, but perhaps very important are the two reasons I talked about earlier. 1. maturity and 2. learning how to learn. 1. is debatable on who is better on average, but I’ve literally had a student there tell me they needed to do college first so they had time “to be an immature, reckless, and selfish asshole” before entering the workforce and having real responsibility. It feels like Brown at times is just for severely immature kids to mellow out before they have real responsibility at a slow rate. You can spend hours smoking weed without having to commit to real activities with actual value at stake. What do you think is going to happen in real life? What’s going to happen when they want to go beyond simple casual sex relationships? For me, spending all that money, I would rather go to a place that allows me to grow further and actually take more responsibility. As for 2. all that stuff about “shallowness” and “intellectual conversations” is related to this. If I’m going to college, spending all this time and money, I want to actually become a better thinker and learner not just for a job, but for life in general. People at Brown consistently just take classes to reaffirm their own extreme beliefs, are not exposed to that many new ideas that disagree with their opinions, and they aren’t forced as often to actually have rigorous learning experiences that force them into situations where absorbing difficult material is required. Thus, they aren’t actually learning that much, which is precisely one of the main points of college! I know this sounds harsh, but it doesn’t apply to everyone there. I just would be disappointed if I was one of many people there who didn’t grow up that much after college and was still puerile. I would be disappointed if I spent time in a degree where I’m no better an expert on it than the average Princeton student who read a book on my subject. And I would be disappointed that I didn’t have to challenge my previous beliefs and develop better-thinking skills. And once again, I want to say that I really hope I’m not being too antagonistic towards them. I really respect the university, but it’s clear that in my previous attempt to be extra considerate, that I spurred regret with some people and also did not accentuate the differences well enough.

Finally, as for adapting to college fast. I’ve always been an independent person. My parents sent me to France alone for several months when I was 16. I had to go camping in a forest for 1 month with just a few other people and no electricity.  I think this was helpful for college because, with increased independence, I was able to be even more efficient than in HS where my freedom was limited. I stay organized, I strategically plan classes, and I know when to ask for help when I need it. This is all more important to doing well academically rather than pure intellect. My procrastination is super low due to discipline and good habits. THIS IS ALSO HUGE. Also, let’s face it. There’s luck involved too. I plan my schedules well, but I’ve never had to take 2 midterms on the same day and that helped A LOT. I also prioritized relationships and health to ensure that I am in optimal fighting form. Honestly, I don’t want to play internet psychologist, but your descriptions of lack of motivations and your HS experience are all reminiscent of depression descriptions from some of my friends. If you had little social life in HS and had few life experiences outside of academics, that’s certainly not a formula for optimal mental health. Plus, you stated that you have serious motivations problems now, which is another sign. Let me just say that you could be twice as smart as me and still do worse academically if you had a mental health concern prior to starting college, which is the worst situation you can be in for Princeton, which unfortunately does not acclimate these students well compared to say Brown (there a positive lol!). I know very high functioning depressives, but they have to work 3 times as hard as me to do well. If they were in good condition they could study a topic in 1 hour and have it down, but due to mental health and focus and motivations problems, it now takes them 3 hours to do the same task. Therefore, if you asked me how I adapted well, another big thing is maintaining good health. Finally, I have a good support group composed of friends, family, and faculty that always has my best interest of mine and provide invaluable advice for academics, which helps a lot. If you have an upperclassman friend who took a class before you and will help teach you and give you tips, of course, you’re going to do better. But more importantly, this support group also helps with life issues and general and like I said before if someone gives you advice on how to study more efficiently in general, that’s super helpful to ALL your classes. So, I would say that I adapted “well” because the increased freedom and free time of college did not result in me procrastinating and being irresponsible. On the contrary, I was able to use the extra time to be even more productive and efficient. I also strategically planned my classes well. Secondly, I stay as healthy as possible, which is critically important. Lastly, I have a good support group.

Hope that helps answer as much of your post as possible. Honestly, anon, you seem super burned out and were just not in the best shape to enter college because you didn’t have enough non-academic experiences in HS. I suggest that you work on your health and motivation problems and also don’t be ashamed of transferring based on your statements. Obviously, I’m speculating, but if you don’t care that much about being surrounded by intellectuals and having a rigorous learning experience that maximizes your thinking horsepower, then maybe Princeton isn’t the best for you. People who thrive here are super ambitious and motivated to constantly improve and learn new things, but that may not apply to you. If you just want to get your degree and have a relaxing time, no questions asked, this isn’t an environment that fosters that easily. Obviously, though, consult more resources before making more decisions. Or even feel free to ask us again haha. Hope things look up for you though in the future.

[absolutelyorbitalmagazine-blog]

AO SUBMISSION POLICIES

  A few words before we begin:

ABSOLUTELY ORBITAL Magazine is a zero-budget enterprise, meaning we are not hard and fast expecting to make any money. We will be looking into advertising with the hopes that we can fund the production of hard-copy issues, but until then we will exist purely in the digital realm and therefore this is the best that I can guarantee you in terms of payment:

- you will gain a measure of prestige based on the prestige of the magazine itself. So, when you send material to other, more professional magazines, you will have more experience with submitting to magazines and (if we accept your work) you will be able to say “my work was published by ABSOLUTELY ORBITAL, a real magazine!” which is pretty awesome honestly.

- our editors will give you helpful writing advice if you are accepted (provided your submission is not actually perfect), and perhaps still if you aren’t accepted depending on how many submissions we get!

- you will be participating in the advancement of the genre in a measurable way by contributing to a dialogue centred in the space ABSOLUTELY  ORBITAL provides. Don’t think of you or us – think of the children!

- if at any point ABSOLUTELY ORBITAL Magazine progresses to PHASE ONE, each contributor will receive at least 1 copy of whichever issue they are published in.

General

We will be inclined to accept any piece of fiction/poetry/non-fiction/artwork/theoretical writing that satisfies the following criteria:

1) it has content which relates to speculative topics (future science, magic, aliens, dragons, all that sort of stuff). If your work can be considered Science Fiction, Fantasy, or any sort of Hybrid of the two, or any sort of analysis/critique/theorization on these genres, you’re already off to a good start with us.

2) it is an original work from your imagination not based on an existing franchise. We do not wish to be sued into submission by certain big corporations over intellectual property issues. Feel free to be inspired by whatever boosts your rocket ship, but what I’m basically saying here is no fan works, please! The only exception of this is in the case of reviews/analysis, in which you are free to discuss whatever works are relevant to your idea.

3) it is written well. And by that I mean the writing is appropriate to the content of the work. You can really use any kind of language you want, with a caveat: I can only comprehend works written in English, and I won’t accept pieces I can’t comprehend.

4) it makes us see things in a whole different way, or merely opens our minds to new possibilities. We want to see what can be done in the framework of Spec Fi. Experimental pieces are welcome.

5) it blows our minds. This magazine is named after a comment I saw on the internet: somebody responded to a piece of art by saying “way over absolutly orbital.” If your piece makes me want to say that, it will get in, no question.

To submit, please email your work to absolutelyorbital@gmail.com as an attachment. Please include your full name/pseudonym in the subject line as well as the category of work you are submitting (fiction/non-fiction, poetry, art, reviews/theory). But first, check out the following guidelines for specific categories!

Note: we accept ONLINE submissions only! Email or bust!

Additionally, we would appreciate it if you would send us a small (50-100 word) biography/statement about yourself along with your submission. What it says is up to you, we just want to get a sense of your personality and something to do with your interests.

Fiction/Non-Fiction???

- We impose a 2200 word limit on prose submissions. That’s the max, but they can be pretty much any size up to that. Really short stories (<100 words) can be a hard sell, but refer to criterion 5 above.

- If you have any real-life experiences that fall under the description of science fictional/fantastical, we would be happy to read your non-fiction! If you have been abducted by aliens, or if your life has been dramatically changed by the rapid advancement of technology, or if you discovered on a trip into the mountains that you are actually the Chosen One, send us your story!

- If you have a novel you would like to serialize through us, shoot us an email about it and we will work out the logistics together! Word of advice though: if you have a full novel, it would be better for you to go through an established publisher and get money!

Poetry

- We don’t have a hard limit on words, but each poem should occupy a maximum of 5 pages. As before, any length up to that is perfectly acceptable given it follows our other submission guidelines.

- All formats are welcome (except for epics/long poems due to the page limit)! This includes fictional forms!

Art and Other Images

- All forms of pictorial art are welcome as long as they are consistent with our other guidelines! These include: Traditional paintings, digital paintings, speed paintings, comics, concept art, photographs of sculptures, screencaps of digital sculptures, and much more! If it can be shown on screen as a two-dimensional image then it is fair game.

- If you are sending us pixel art, please make sure to up the size so that it isn’t tiny. Pixels are small! We need all artwork to be viewable on a computer screen at a reasonable size. If we have to expand it into a blurry mess, that earns a rejection.

- All photographs containing human subjects must be taken and submitted with the subjects’ consent, no exceptions.

Reviews/Essays/Theory

- We would love to hear your views on what Speculative Fiction is, where it is going, how to do it right and how different pieces that exist now are doing it right or wrong. This category covers any kind of talk about works that already exist, or about the genre itself. The category is pretty broad, so we’d like to see what you come up with!

- The word limit for this kind of writing is the same as for the other prose: 2200 words.

[momsalt54-blog]

A Mutual Bewitchment

NOVEMBER 21, 2018

READING A WRITER’S LETTERS to a beloved friend is the best way to get into that author’s head. Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport were soulmates, deeply devoted to modern art and literature. They were poet-critics — a term Marjorie Perloff fastened to Kenner — “whose books and essays place [them] among writers rather than academic commentators.” (As Davenport described his method: “I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.”) The bulk of the letters collected in these two compelling volumes are from 1961–’71 — almost two-thirds of the 2,000 pages — with 1961–’66 taking up half. Editor Edward M. Burns has done a monumental job assiduously annotating this vast correspondence.

The crux of their mutual bewitchment occurs in 1963, just as the major American Modernists they revered — Williams, Eliot, Moore, and Pound — start to die off. Though there are glancing references in the letters to contemporary persons and events, such as Vietnam and Nixon, both writers were much more interested in issues of art and poetry — the source of the term “wine-dark” in Pound’s “Canto II” or the films of Stan Brakhage. Pound’s work was a particular obsession (“He was a renaissance,” Davenport stated simply). Independent of each other, both men visited the aging poet in St. Elizabeths Hospital during his 12-year incarceration there and, later, in Italy during his self-imposed exile.

For both Davenport and Kenner, modern painting had fundamentally changed writing itself. They were particularly interested in the discovery of prehistoric cave drawings in Europe, which so deeply influenced Picasso. Davenport, himself a draughtsman, had an ingrained respect for visual art, but Kenner came to this view in his own way. Kenner believed the drawings Davenport did for Kenner’s Flaubert, Joyce, and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians (1962) and The Counterfeiters (1967) were as important as the texts; he tried, unsuccessfully, to get Davenport 50 percent of the royalties for the first book.

Kenner (born in 1923, four years before Davenport) studied under Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto before going to Yale, where at the age of 26 he wrote The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951) over the course of a summer break. This book was central to Davenport’s own thesis at Harvard on the first 30 Cantos, delivered in 1961 and published in 1983 as Cities on Hills. A Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Davenport came from South Carolina, “having been born into the black Depression and raised in picturesque poverty, homely morals, and love.” The two men met in 1953 but didn’t start seriously communicating until 1961. They visited each other only around a dozen times; in one early meeting, they conversed avidly for 30 hours. Kenner tried to arrange for Davenport to join him at UC Santa Barbara, where he had a teaching position, but the younger writer landed a job at the University of Kentucky, near his family, where he remained for three decades. Already an established writer, Kenner helped secure a reviewing gig for Davenport with the National Review; later they would occasionally review each other’s works. Of Davenport’s 1981 book The Geography of the Imagination, Kenner said: “If having known a man for twenty-five years is to disqualify one from talking about his work, then our literary culture will have to be left to hermits.”

The frenetic pace of their letter writing is astounding, with sometimes two or three letters piling up in a few days before the answers to the originals were written. Some of the letters are long, some stark and confessional, yet all display good humor as well as a unique patois — “Tennyrate” for “at any rate,” “Hahvud” for “Harvard,” “nuvvle” for “novel.” Occasionally one will poach the other’s words, as when Kenner used Davenport’s comment that “[t]hought is a labyrinth” as the final sentence of The Pound Era (1971). Kenner also frequently asks the classically trained Davenport — who brilliantly translated numerous works of ancient poetry — about Greek and Latin meanings. For his part, Davenport usually defers to his more prolific friend, claiming he could hardly call himself a writer compared to someone who averaged a book every two years over a three-decade stretch.

There is the usual grousing about the literary world, especially critics who couldn’t stomach Pound or who couldn’t see the importance of Beckett. They complain about reviewers who attacked them based on all sorts of wrongheaded ideas (e.g., accusing Davenport of being a “cryptoconservative” when he claimed to always vote Democratic). Neither man suffered fools gladly, but they also yearned for recognition. Kenner received the brunt of bad press, including scorn for his supposedly mannered “style,” in which he deliberately aped the style of his subjects. Davenport, more combative but also more sickly (various maladies are bemoaned), struggled to see his fiction (mostly short stories — Kenner dubbed them “assemblages”) skewered by the major critics of the day.

The volumes are filled with little gems of observation, as when Kenner writes that the “whole point of a book is what happens in the five minutes after one has finished reading it.” Secrets are disclosed, as when Davenport tells of how his father died in the hospital and of his admiration for him, despite their differences (“I never ‘rebelled’ and he never coerced”). Kenner responds with mystic wisdom: “To have done his part in making you what you are, and to have so much grown beyond the natural concerns of his generation as to take an understanding satisfaction in contemplating your place in yours, these are two substantial moral achievements for which his memory should be honored.” Later, he thanks Davenport for caring for his five children after his first wife died of cancer, helping him “to realize what an achievement family is: and it is her achievement. They are, singly and collectively, her memorial. Everything perhaps perishes but tradition.”

These letters are also an elegy for a world not dominated by technology, where one had to physically track things down — as in their quest for the copy of Eliot’s The Waste Land that Pound sedulously edited, which occupied them in the early years (it was discovered at the New York Public Library in 1968), or the details Kenner sought from Davenport when the latter retraced Pound’s visit to his childhood home (“What part of town could Pound see from the porch?”). Such dogged modes of research are now in eclipse in our digital world. We can thus be grateful for an editor like Burns, whose scholarship here includes tracing the lost history of Lester Littlefield, a hanger-on of Pound and Marianne Moore, who sent the former books at St. Elizabeths and rented the house in Venice once occupied by Olga Rudge (Pound’s late companion). Littlefield badgered Kenner and Davenport with critical and raving letters, sometimes 40 pages long. Google him and there is barely anything, a stray sentence in a book result or two, but Burns gives him an almost three-page footnote — an internet-resistant epitaph, at least until these volumes are digitized.

From 1979 until Kenner’s death in 2003, there is a large drop-off in the friends’ correspondence — a great mystery, yet the greatest of life: friends growing apart. According to Burns, people who knew both men believe that Davenport’s homoerotic fictions put Kenner off, though as early as 1961, Davenport shared details of his seeking out young men on various trips. He referred to them as “Erewhonians,” from Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon, about a utopia where people fear that machines will develop consciousness. Also, Davenport grew more hermetic as he aged, responding to Kenner’s query if he would do a lecture with a steely “Tell your students I do not travel.” Certainly they spoke on the phone, but in those last 25 years, it is almost always Kenner writing to draw his friend out, and often Davenport doesn’t respond — their revels had ended. Did Davenport feel rejected? In the last letter, Kenner writes: “We have been apart too long.” He died 14 months later.

Over the course of their long careers, Davenport and Kenner helped to shape the best ways of reading difficult works of modernist poetry and prose — not only Pound but also Joyce, Eliot, Beckett, and many others. Kindred spirits reminiscent of Emerson and Thoreau, these “questioning minds” were two of the most refined artistic sensibilities this continent has ever produced. Readers can be grateful that their complex friendship has been so beautifully enshrined in Burns’s scrupulous volumes.

¤

Greg Gerke’s work has appeared in Tin House, Film Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, and other publications.

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-mutual-bewitchment/

[suzannemcappsca]

What does good mediation look like? A consumer’s eye-view.

Charlie Irvine

“Like poets, but with less time”

The Deep End

Getting to grips with mediation can leave students and trainees overwhelmed. That favourite training tool, the roleplay, throws most in at the deep end. The sudden immersion forces them to speak, listen and observe while trying to remember models and skills plus a sea of reading and the trainer’s feedback. Oh, and all combined with performance anxiety. (See Michael Jacobs’ excellent critique of this approach in “How About Making Mediators More Stupid: A Training Agenda”). This is well-intentioned and even helpful, but I sense that most emerge from their training with the same unanswered question: what does good mediation look like? To expand this slightly: what exactly do expert mediators do and say? How do they work their magic?

Rather than add more tips to the long list already out there (for which I must bear some responsibility: see Practical Tips for Mediators) I’d like to offer another perspective – the user’s. Regular readers will know that I am myself immersed in, and sometimes overwhelmed by, a PhD study of mediation parties. Mediation practice isn’t the main focus; in fact I’m researching ordinary people’s sense of fairness and justice. However, from time to time, in the stories I hear, I catch glimpses of mediators in action.

A Consumer’s Eye-View

Here’s an extract from an interview with a small claimant referred to mediation by the court (in Scotland, where this is a relatively new phenomenon – see And Finally… Some Plain English from Scotland). Asked if the process was fair this individual spoke highly of “the senior mediator”, then added this passage:

Respondent (R).. It was a good process. Yes.

Interviewer (IV).. Yeah? OK.

R.. Yes. It was fair –

IV.. And what made it so?

R.. The professional way it was done.

IV.. OK.

R.. Yeah. The controlled environment that it was done in. The clear wording that was used all the time. They had no – the mediator didn’t have a challenge from either party, so that helped.

IV.. Right.

R.. Neither party was challenging to any serious extent. There was never a raised voice, ever. But that’s only created if you create the correct environment and I think the mediator did.

IV.. OK.

R.. And a proper briefing in advance.

Sounds So Simple

What does this tell us about effective mediators? At first glance it’s simple, trite even: behave professionally, create a controlled environment, explain things clearly and, almost as an afterthought, brief people about what’s going to happen. And yet this person’s repeated mention of the lead mediator suggests there was something striking about her approach. The claimant clearly felt in very safe hands.

That ‘to do’ list elegantly captures four faces of good mediation: trust, setting, word choice and preparation. Let’s consider each in turn.

Trust: “the professional way it was done”

The mediator had clearly gained the individual’s trust (and the other party’s – note the reference to no challenges). How did she do this? I imagine in part by her actions. Winslade and Monk, in their 2001 book Narrative Mediation, say of trust: “It is primarily an achievement, or a moment-by-moment series of little achievements.” Yet trustbuilding has an equally important negative side – NOT taking actions that betray trust, such as revealing confidences or causing someone to lose face. A nice metaphor for trust is the stalagmite, built in tiny increments yet snapped by a single blow.

Image provided by Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/photos/cave-frasassi-stalactite-cave-2703778/

At the same time the statement speaks of being as much as doing. Mediators must be seen as trustworthy – “the sort of person you can trust”. I have a hunch that effective mediators share an unwritten code of values, most likely built up by trial and error. Examples would be treating everyone as if they’re well-intentioned (Bush and Folger articulate this in their Ten Hallmarks of a Transformative Mediator); assuming that if something’s a problem for one it’s a problem for both; being careful and consistent about what’s confidential and what needn’t be; and the right combination of patience and impatience. It sounds odd but clients tend to appreciate both telling their stories AND being kept on track.

Setting: “the controlled environment”

This speaks both of physical setting and atmosphere. Effective mediators care deeply about what’s around them. They understand a simple truth: if the room isn’t right, most people won’t notice. But they’ll blame the other party or the mediator if things don’t go well.

By “the room” I mean a raft of factors: the seating (too close, too far away, socially awkward positioning, not comfortable enough, too comfortable?); the lighting (too bright, too dark, sun shining in someone’s eyes, glaring fluorescent light?); the table (small, large, low, high, none?). And of course the temperature! Ijzerman and Semin’s 2009 experiment found that warmer conditions induced (a) greater social proximity, (b) use of more concrete language, and (c) a more relational focus. Surely all matter to mediators. My most frantic moments can be the few minutes before parties arrive when I’m shown into a cold, impersonal boardroom dominated by a large, rectangular table pitting one ‘side’ against the other. Cue urgent furniture removal, light dimming and air-con tweaking.

“Atmosphere” refers to the intangible yet instantly detectable feeling in “the room”. To an extent it wafts in with the parties. Humans are pretty good at detecting atmospheres: warm, cold, wary, angry, defensive. Yet they can also trigger and exacerbate each other, one reading wariness as coldness; another reading nervous laughter as mockery. So alongside the physical environment mediators need to shape the atmosphere. If things are fraught they calm it down. Faced with despair they pep things up, injecting energy and focus. And if someone’s angry and threatening they have the confidence to steer into conflict, curious about what’s behind the behaviour. They use their whole humanity: tone of voice, facial expression, hands, posture.

Word Choice: “the clear wording that was used all the time”

This could be the whole blog. There is something of the poetic about mediators in full flow. Like poets, but with less time, mediators must carefully weigh the precise tone of each word. They can’t wait around for inspiration, which Picasso said “exists, but it has to find you at work.” (Thanks to poet Anthony Wilson for this gem). Mediators too have to keep working, carefully crafting each question, each evocation, each capturing of the moment as an offering, for taking or leaving. If something doesn’t work, try something else. Don’t give up.

It’s hard to say much more. I absolutely hate scripts. The right word, the “mot juste”, is rarely planned – it’s a reaction, a response to something said or some look given. It’s both emotional and rational. First, watch and listen; then speak; then watch and listen. When you get it right you know it. When a mediator’s words land the effect is visible and visceral. It can be sudden or it can be gradual. No matter. When done well the atmosphere changes and the conversation flips from confrontation and accusation to the exchange of perspectives, the solving of problems and the saving of face. So hats off to our lead mediator for her “clear wording”.

Preparation: “a proper briefing in advance”

Again much could be said. Because mediation is a mystery to most we need to explain what we’re about. This is not the same as the traditional mediator’s intro. Liz Stokoe, author of “Talk: The Science of Conversation“, once told our national mediation conference that when potential clients hear “mediation philosophy” (ie impartiality, confidentiality, not-judging) it’s a tumbleweed moment. They zone out. They prefer to hear something more concrete : what’s going to happen, who’ll be involved and how long will it take. Presumably the lead mediator’s briefing did this so well that it seemed almost effortless, hardly worth mentioning except as an afterthought.

What Does Good Mediation Look Like?

This is just a snapshot. The American Bar Association’s “Task Force on Research on Mediation Techniques” produced a 2017 report running to 69 pages. Very good it is, full of detailed insight and carefully weighed analysis. Yet there’s something appealing about my Scottish consumer’s depiction of a mediator at the top of her game. This small business-person was understated and mostly factual, having to be prompted to reflect on the process. It was a bit like asking someone fresh from surgery how good the doctor was. You might think the result is all that matters, but people who feel in really safe hands go to great lengths explaining what the doctor did and said that “made all the difference”. It’s as much art as science.

So for new mediators the prescription is straightforward: do as much as you can. Volunteer, observe, co-work, get out there (see the recent Kluwer Mediation blog for Rosemary Howell’s inspiring tale of three new mediators who have). Each mis-step will lead to learning. Get 50 mediations under your belt; then 100. And sooner or later someone will say about your work “It was a good process. Yes.”

More from our authors:

EU Mediation Law Handbook: Regulatory Robustness Ratings for Mediation Regimes by Nadja Alexander, Sabine Walsh, Martin Svatos (eds.) € 195 Essays on Mediation: Dealing with Disputes in the 21st Century by Ian Macduff (ed.) € 160.00

from Updates By Suzanne http://mediationblog.kluwerarbitration.com/2019/03/28/what-does-good-mediation-look-like-a-consumers-eye-view/

[courtreadsmostlyfiction]

My Best Books of 2018

I thought last year was a hard year, and I think 2018 heard that and said “challenge accepted!” I spend a lot of time this year anxious and depressed, and luckily one of my coping mechanisms is reading (also luckily I have health insurance and found a treatment program to learn more coping skills). My goal was 100 books (same as 2017, and I met that goal on December 31, 2017), but I hit that in August, so I upped the goal to 160. As of this writing, I have read 173 books (holy forking shirtballs!), and here are the best ones: 

Best book regardless of category: There There by Tommy Orange

If I’ve talked to you about books this year, then you’ve heard about this book and about how much I love it (when I thought it was left off the Washington Post 50 best fiction books of 2018, I was going to cancel my subscription; then I turned the page and saw that it was on their 10 best books so all was well). It’s a debut (which is amazing) and expertly grapples with identity and trauma and violence. It’s one of those books where I felt like the author was writing sentences straight from my brain and feelings straight from my heart. I’ve wondered if I love it so much because of my Native identity, and I wonder if I should have a disclaimer that I’m biased, and as I write this, I also don’t care. I’m biased toward fucking awesome books. It’s amazing, it’s on the top lists for a reason, and read it already!

Best fiction:

An American Marriage - first of all, this is $6.28 on kindle today, so buy it if you haven’t read it already. If you made a venn diagram of race, racism, marriage, the American criminal justice system, and injustice, this book would be at the center. The characters are human and there are no easy answers. 

Pachinko - this is an epic novel, about a Korean family living in Japan in the 20th century, that illustrates what immigrants must do to survive. Unfortunately timely. (Also, you should read it even if this weren’t the case, but I don’t often think that epic sagas are page turners, but this was).

Swimming Lessons - If my best fiction list were one of those “one of these things is not like the other” this would be the other. The thing all 4 of these books have in common is incredible writing, but this one feels lighter. I’m not sure if that’s an apt description because the material is heavy, but it feels limited to one family versus entire peoples. It’s smart, tightly plotted, and full of surprises. (The only thing I didn’t L-O-V-E was the ending, but I still gave it a 5 star review because of the other 97% of the book). Anyway, read it, too. (In case you need at least a sentence about the book to consider it: a wife writes letters to her husband and hides them in books, then disappears and twelve years later, her daughters come home when he is ill and thinks he has seen his wife.)

Best mystery/thriller:

The Banker’s Wife - I couldn’t put this down, and I recommended it to Grant before we went to the beach for the week. He told me he had already made his beach reading list, and that I was giving him beach-reading-anxiety. I dared him to read one page, and this book made it to the list. (In the first chapter - a plane containing a banker goes down on its way to Geneva, and in the rest of the book, his widow tries to figure out what happened.)

The Bone Readers - I found this book because it won the 2017 Jhalak prize (for British writers of color) and it deserves much more attention and acclaim. It’s a crime story in the Caribbean with the unforgettable Miss Stanislaus, and I JUST FOUND OUT THAT IT IS THE FIRST BOOK IN A TRILOGY. All best books should be, right? (And it is $3.99 on kindle today!)

Bruno series - If you like Three Pines (of Louise Penny’s making), I think you’d like the Bruno books. Bruno is a rule breaker but moral follower, the books take place in rural France, and there’s a mystery and fabulous descriptions of food. What else do you need?

Best young adult/youth:

Leah on the Offbeat - Did you see the movie Love, Simon? It was based off a book by this same author. Leah is Simon’s bi friend, and I don’t know if I can express how much it meant to read an awesome book with a bi character. I can only imagine what it would have been like if I had read this in middle or high school, and maybe I would have come out to my family before the age of 37.

Children of Blood and Bone - I saw this described as Hunger Games in Africa (which is honestly why I picked it up), but it’s so much more / better than that description. It’s a fantasy about trying to get magic back, and it is a magical book. Read it.

Penderwicks series - I got the first book (The Penderwicks) to read to Ox, but he didn’t love it. I fell head over heels with the girls and wish this series would have been around when I was growing up. See if you can resist Rosalind, Sky, Jane and Batty.

The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street - The kids in this biracial family are determined to not lose their family brownstone in Harlem. So good!

Best romance:

I don’t usually read romance, so I’m not sure if these would be categorized here in a bookstore, but also don’t let this categorization turn you away. If you enjoy rom-com movies, you’d like these.

The Wedding Date - Roxane Gay recommended this book, and it’s so fun and steamy and real. What happens when you get stuck on an elevator with a hot guy? Read it and find out.

Cafe by the Sea - I found Jenny Colgan books this year, and they make me want to run away to Scotland (a place I’ve never really wanted to visit), and open a bookstore or cafe. If you need to escape with a light read (that doesn’t have horrible writing) where it’s pretty likely two people end up together, pick this up. After I read this, I kept reading her books and am now rationing them for myself so I have one when I need a light read or need to kick start my reading mojo.

Best nonfiction:

This blog is CourtReadsMostlyFICTION for a reason, and I rarely pick up non-fiction. So you know the books below have to be phenomenal to make it on my list.

Heavy - I just finished this heartbreaking and searing memoir about trauma, abuse, survival, family, writing, success, black bodies, and weight, and I will be thinking about it for a long time. Kiese, thank you for your courage and words. (I’m also a fan of his novel Long Division.)

Heart Berries - I read this when I was in my partial hospitalization treatment program (and in the memoir, Terese also gets mental health treatment), and while I think it might not have been the best time to read such an honest account, it’s probably a good time for you to read what we do to Native women.

Calypso - I am thankful I live in a time when I get to read new David Sedaris words pretty frequently. I have high expectations for his work, and this sailed over it. It’s still funny, but really thoughtful about suicide and loss and Trump and partners. Also, I read the essay Still Standing (about his episode with a stomach virus) when my whole family was vomiting and shitting and nothing else made us laugh.

Becoming - This is going to come out wrong, but I didn’t think I’d enjoy this book, much less love it. But it’s so real and so readable, and not a typical political memoir. I have loved the Obamas for a long time, but now I might have a new favorite one. It’s number one on the Amazon charts right now, so you’ve probably read it, too, so let’s just talk about how wonderful and human she is, okay?

Best poetry:

There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncè - I saw Morgan Parker read with Roxane Gay, and one of the lines from her poems stuck with me (I just want to understand my savings account. What is happening to my five dollar one cent.) I never read poetry, but read two of her volumes back to back because I loved them so much (and will go back to them, something else I rarely do). Read it.

Best short stories:

You Think It, I’ll Say It - I love Curtis Sittenfeld (I have since Prep, and I’ve read everything she’s written since) but I was d-o-u-b-t-f-u-l of this book since in general I really fucking hate short stories. But I really loved this (beware, I’ve recommended it to two people and one person loved it and one person didn’t), in part because it is frankly post-Trump and because it is painfully and funnily real.

Florida - Let’s read EVERYTHING by Lauren Groff because she is this amazing as a person, and she writes short stories that I love (see paragraph above) and wonderful books. (Disclaimer - the person above who loved YTIISI did not love Florida, because it is dark and accurately portrays Florida.)

Single, Carefree, Mellow - Katharine if you are reading this, can we be friends already? From the author of Standard Deviation (top pick of 2017), this collection of short stories was un-put-down-able. ($5.49 on kindle right now!)

More List(s)!

My fave book recommenders have their top lists here: Matt Compton (if he recommends a book to me, or tweets about it, there’s a 99% chance I will love it); I’ll put a link to Roxane Gay’s list as soon as she publishes it (because it’s ROXANE GAY); the list for the 2019 Tournament of Books.

[outsmartinsomnia2016]

How to Start a Successful Blog in 2018

Learn how you can begin starting a weblog in less than an hour. Follow the step-by-step instructions that we used to begin our successful blog page, which now has already reached more than 20 million people and offers been presented in the brand new York Times, TIME magazine, and on the TODAY display.

How to Start a Blog page in Five Steps: 1.Choose your running a blog platform and domain. 2.Design your blog using a simple theme. 3.Modify your weblog to define your look. 4.Select the best plugins for your blog. 5.Write compelling content material, start blogging. Starting a Blog page: Step-by-Step Instructions

So you’re thinking about starting a blog, nevertheless, you don’t have any idea the place to start, right? Guess what-neither did we. We had been clueless. When we created this weblog a few years ago, we had no basic idea how to start a weblog or how to be a blogger. Heck, we could spell HTML hardly, let alone build a blog. But good news: it’s easier than you think. We’ve learned a ton of lessons during our ascent to achieving over 20 million people. And now you can learn from our pain and suffering to circumvent much of the tedium involved in setting up a blog. Here’s how we started our blog, step by step, followed by an instructional video, along with extra rationale and insights: 1.Choose your blogging platform and domain. The very first thing we did when starting our blog was head to Bluehost and register our domain. We didn’t actually need to create WordPress, which may be the platform we use, since Bluehost does all that for you. Bluehost’s basic price is $2.75 a month, which works for 99% of individuals (go to this link to get a 50% lower price off the monthly cost and a free domain). Then, we did a simple, free, “one-click” install of WordPress through Bluehost. Whenever we had questions we could actually chat with the “live chat” people at Bluehost free of charge. They pointed us in the proper direction and made starting our very own blog super easy. 2.Design your blog utilizing a simple theme. An excellent theme provides you the look and feel you need for your blog, allowing you to make a blog that looks precisely how it is wanted by you to look. If you’re not really a coder (we certainly weren’t), then a theme makes the look work a million instances easier. Plus, once you get a theme, which are inexpensive for the proper time they save, it really is owned by you for life. The Minimalists uses the beautiful “tru” theme by SPYR, which is available at BYLT. Head on over to BYLT, browse their assortment of styles, and find the look that’s right for you. 3.Modify your blog to define your style. Once we had our domain, blog hosting, WordPress, and theme, we spent considerable time tweaking the theme to find the look and feel we desired (i.e., producing our vision a reality). Then we spent a lot more time tinkering with the theme and arguing about any of it and tweaking it some more. Once we had created our blog, we create a free of charge Feedburner account so people could sign up to our site via email and RSS subscriptions. And we established a free of charge Google Analytics account to monitor our stats. Feedburner and Google Analytics were both easy to sign up for, and we still make use of both today. 4.Select the best plugins for your site. We only use a few plugins on our site, including “Google Analytics for WordPress” and “Yoast SEO”. They take simply a few seconds (literally a few seconds, it’s simply a click of a key) to set up once you’ve started your blog. And if you really want to play around with some cool plugins, check out WPBeginner’s Best WordPress Plugins. 5.Write compelling content. Last, via WordPress, we started composing and uploading the content for our pages: About Page, Contact Web page, Start Here Page, Books Page, Tour Web page, Archives Page, etc. Next, we designed our logo using free of charge images we found online and text message from a regular word-processing program. Then we put a picture of ourselves in the header (this is important because people determine with people, not really logos). Finally we started writing new blog posts and publishing them regularly (at least one time weekly), accompanied by free of charge photos from Unsplash, Pexels, and the Library of Congress. And the others is history. How to Create a Blog: Video Watch our step-by-stage instructional video, which include screenshots of the entire starting-a-blog process:

15 Factors a Blog Should be started by you We were inspired to research and write this essay after reading Joshua Becker’s 15 Factors I Think You Should Blog, in which he discusses 15 great reasons why a weblog should be started by you. Why being the main element word here. Basically, he talks about the purpose of blogging, not how to start a weblog just. That’s what all these other blogs about blogging appear to miss; the purpose-the are missed by them why behind starting a blog. 3 Reasons You ought never to Start a Blog So now you have 15 reasons why you should start a blog, and we’ve proven you how to start a blog, step-by-step, based on our personal experience. But after providing you those detailed guidelines, that could save you the thousands of hours of wasted time, we also want to give you some good reasons why you should not start a blog. (Remember that these reasons are just our opinions, and we usually do not pretend to provide them up as some sort of collection of empirical blogging maxims.) 1.Money. You ought not to begin a weblog to make money. We need to get that taken care of first. If your primary objective is to displace your full-time income from blogging, forget about it. It doesn’t function that way. Do you consider that Jimi Hendrix found his first guitar therefore he could “supplement his income”? No, he didn’t. Rather, he achieved it for the like of it, for the joy and fulfillment he received, and the income came thereafter, much later actually. 2.Notoriety. Don’t plan on getting “Internet famous” immediately. Don’t assume all site grows as fast as ours do, but that’s totally Alright. The simple truth is that we kind of got lucky. We got an excellent domain name, we cobbled together a logo and site design that individuals really liked, we write well fairly, and our content connects with people in a distinctive way. We didn’t start this site to become “popular” though. That’d become ridiculous. Our notoriety and quick rise to “fame” came as a surprise to us, and was a result of a little luck and lots of hard, passionate work. 3.Traffic. Not all traffic is great traffic, so don’t worry about getting a large number of readers right away. The funny thing is that all these plain things can occur. You will make a full-time income from creating a blog. It is completed by us, Corbett Barr will it, and so do many others. And you could become Internet famous like Leo Babauta or Chris Brogan. But if these are the sole reasons why you start blogging, you’ll be miserable, because it will appear like a working job, and if it feels as though a working work you won’t become passionate about it, therefore you’ll either (a) hate it, (b) fall smooth on your encounter, or © hate it and fall flat on your face. Instead, create because you’re passionate about it… 20 Recommendations for Your Blog We receive plenty of emails asking for advice about starting a blog, about how to blog, about blog topics, and about creating meaningful content-even a few pre-determined questions about whether we put on briefs or boxers. These are the answers and recommendations we tend to give. 1.Find Your Market. You needn’t have a niche, nonetheless it assists. When learning how to be considered a blogger, it’s important to ask yourself what you’re passionate about. Running? Cooking? Being truly a parent? Perhaps you have found your passion? If therefore, whatever it is, write about that. If not, you then must 1st find your passion. (Note: We generally suggest that individuals don’t start a weblog about minimalism or the paleo diet or any additional heavily saturated topic. But what we really mean when we say this is: don’t create a weblog about something if you don’t have a unique perspective. If you’ve embraced simple living and have a unique perspective, by all means have at it then. Enjoy yourself.) 2.Define Your Ideal Readers. Once you’ve discovered your niche, you need to know who will be reading your blog. For example, we weblog about living intentionally. Thus, our ideal readers are people who are thinking about exploring minimalism to allow them to clear the road toward even more meaningful lives. If you would like to create about your newborn baby growing up, that’s amazing: your ideal readers are probably friends and family and family. If you want to create about restoring classic cars, that’s cool, as well. Tailor your writing to your readers (whether it’s your family or local community or whoever else will examine your blog). 3.Add Value. Your blog must add worth to its readers’ lives. This is the only way you will get Great Quality Readers to your website (and keep them returning). Adding value may be the only way to obtain long-term buy-in someone’s. Both of us learned this after ten years of leading and handling people in the organization world. 4.Be First. Yes, there are various other blogs out there a comparable thing you would like to write about. Question: So why is your blog different? Answer: Due to you. You are why is your blog different. It’s about your perspective, your imagination, the value that you add. 5.End up being Interesting. Write epic, amazing content. If you want people to share it with others especially. 6.Be Yourself. Part to be interesting is telling your story. Everyone is unique, and your story is an essential one. The important part of storytelling, however, can be removing the superfluous details that make the whole story uninteresting. A great storyteller gets rid of 99% of what actually happens-the absorptive details-and leaves the interesting 1% for the reader. 7.Be Honest. Your blog must be authentic-it must feel real-if you wish people to read it. You can be your blog, or your blog can be you. That’s, you don’t embody the stuff you reveal? If not, people will see through you. “Be the noticeable change you want to see in the world,” may be the famous Gandhi quote. Perhaps bloggers should build the blog they want to write for the world. 8.Transparency. Being transparent is different from becoming honest. You needn’t share every details about your life simply for the sake to be honest. Always be honest, and become transparent when it provides value from what you’re composing. (You won’t ever see pictures folks using the restroom on our site, because that’s not relevant.) 9.Time. Once you’ve discovered how to start a blog, you’ll learn that blogging takes a lot of time, particularly if you’re as neurotic as we are (we spent over 10 hours screening the fonts on this website). And observe those Twitter and Facebook icons in the header? We spent hours on those, deciding that which was right for us). That said, when you have your design setup, don’t tweak it too much. Instead, spend the right time on your writing. 10.Vision. The reason why our site style looks good is basically because we have an excellent host, we have an excellent theme, and most important, we had a vision of how we wanted our weblog to look. Once we had the vision, we worked well hard to create that vision possible. (Note: neither folks had any design encounter prior to starting a blog.) It’s hard to create a beautiful blog if you don’t know what you want it to look like. 11.Find Your Tone of voice. Over time, good authors discover their voice and their composing tends to develop a specific aesthetic, one that is appealing to their readers. Finding your tone of voice makes your composing feel more alive, more real, even more urgent. For extra reading, have a look at our essay about Finding Your Voice. 12.We Instead of You. Utilize the first-person plural when possible. Statements of we and our are stronger than you and your, especially when discussing unfavorable behaviors or tendencies. The first person comes off as far less accusatory. Think of it in this manner: we’re writing peer-to-peer-we are not gods. 13.When to Post. Question: When is the best day time and time to create a blog post? Answer: It doesn’t actually matter. We don’t to a specific schedule adhere. Some weeks we post one essay; we post three sometimes. Yes, it regularly is important to write, but you needn’t get as well bogged down in the facts. 14.Social Media. Yes, we recommend using Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to help connect with your audience and various other bloggers, but don’t get too swept up in it. Focus on the writing first, sociable media thereafter. 15.Disregard Bad Stupidity and Criticism. Sure, we get yourself a lot of bad comments and stupid questions from ignorant people who aren’t actually our readers (e.g., adverse comments like “You’re not real minimalists” and stupid questions like “Are you men gay?”). We call these people seagulls: they fly in, crap on your site, and fly away. However they are paid by us no mind, because we didn’t begin our blog for them. Delete their move and comment on. 16.Research. Spend time researching what you’re authoring. The good reason we are able to use therefore many helpful, relevant links inside our essays is because we put in the proper time to analyze our topics. 17.Keep It Simple. This is where minimalism can end up being put on starting any blog, regardless of its genre. You don’t need to place superfluous advertisements or widgets all over your site. Stick to the fundamentals and remove whatever you don’t need. Remove whatever doesn’t add value. 18.Picture. Put an image of yourself on your blog. People recognize with other people. If two goofy men from Ohio aren’t too afraid to put their pictures on the site, then you have nothing to get worried about. 19.Comments. If you’re likely to possess comments on your own site, then browse the Five Words That Kill YOUR SITE by Scott Stratten. 20.Live Your Existence. You’re blogging about your life (or about certain factors of your life, at least), which means you need to live life still. There are issues that we always put before writing: exercise, health, relationships, encounters, personal growth, contribution.

How to Start a Successful Blog in 2018 published first on http://wesleybodybreakthrough.blogspot.com How to Start a Successful Blog in 2018 published first on http://trnmontgomery.tumblr.com