#like non diverse media is almost never subjected to to such a degree

[biceratops7]

I feel like we don’t really acknowledge the absolutely unhinged levels of moral superiority people hold over fans of ofmd. Like I’m not gonna get into specifics but it’s so completely bonkers to me that people will see enjoyment of MUCH more problematic media and skip along their merry way… But then when a show with a diversity of skin tones, sexuality, gender, ability, AND writers gets popular, suddenly you’ll have people practically telling you to get a red hot poker up the ass if you dare to still like it when it’s not the most virtuous bastion of media to every exist.

Yadada yada yada that Sarah Z video asking why we hold diverse media to a much higher moral standard than we do anything else

[xmanicpanicx]

What it’s REALLY like to major (and master) in Creative Writing

First of all, let me say that this was my own personal experience with a four-year-long B.A. in Creative Writing and subsequent two-year-long M.A. in Creative Writing. This is post is not reflective of everyone else’s experience in the same program or similar programs. Warning: This may sound like a ranty revenge article, but I’m not writing this because I’m bitter. I’m not all that bitter. Just a little bitter, like a splash of vinegar in salad dressing or something. Really, I’m writing this so that anyone who is considering a Creative Writing major can make an even more informed decision, and hopefully this will help them figure out if that path is the right one for them.

I started off with a Bachelor of Arts in English Language, Literature and Creative Writing, and after a semester, I decided to make it a double major with Communication, Media, and Film. I wanted to go into publishing. I held onto that aspiration for a very long time. It had been budding in me since high school.

But as far back as I can remember, I’ve made up stories and wanted to be a writer. Eventually, I got it into my head that if I always spent time working on other people’s writing, I would neglect my own, and I started to feel iffy about going into publishing.

There’s a lot of “advice” from my Creative Writing professors that I am going to challenge in this article, but I think one of the most practical suggestions they’ve ever given me and my peers was to get a job that doesn’t involve a lot of writing.

Not because you won’t be able to find a job doing so. Contrary to popular belief, English majors actually can find jobs after college. Some become technical writers, some go into marketing, some become freelance or ghost writers and editors. The problem is that if you spend your 9-5 being forced to write or edit for someone else, you lose momentum and motivation when you get home. Even if you’re one of those people who think they couldn’t possibly get tired of writing, the fact is that your eyes will be strained from staring at a screen for most of your life and your wrists will develop carpal tunnel syndrome as a result of your incessant typing.

It’s not that you’ll never make any money from the writing you love to do, but you will need a day job, at least for a while. And it is okay to pick something that has nothing to do with writing, something that will make you crave a return to your writing routine at the end of the day or the end of the week.

I understand, though, if you’re really dedicated to your craft and you think that the best way to hone it is to major, and quite possibly get a master’s degree, in Creative Writing. But if you truly are dedicated to your writing, you don’t necessarily have to major in Creative Writing in order to improve it. In my program, people from outside of the department could take the Creative Writing classes if their writing was deemed strong enough. Also, there are plenty of great online resources out there and books about writing that can help you strengthen yours. It can be intimidating to wade through them all, but make no mistake: a Creative Writing major and even a Creative Writing master’s degree won’t cover all your bases.

In my particular undergraduate program, Creative Writing courses started during the second year. We needed to apply with a portfolio showcasing what we believed was our strongest work. Around sixty people would apply, but only twenty would get accepted. Then in the third year, everyone had to apply again, and more people would be eliminated, so we would end up with about sixteen people in class. And then for the fourth year, everyone had to apply yet again, even more were eliminated, and we’d end up with twelve people in the class. By the time I got accepted into the master’s program, there were only six of us. It was kind of like an academic, artsy-fartsy version of “Survivor.”

Everyone was judged anonymously by the committee of Creative Writing profs, based solely on the strength of their portfolios. This sounds ideal, but it’s actually where things got problematic — because “strength,” unfortunately, was a subjective term in this department. We were encouraged to have diverse portfolios, meaning we should try to write in more than one genre. Profs wanted to see both fiction and poetry from everyone, even if some people didn’t want to be poets. Even if some didn’t want to be fiction writers. Creative non-fiction was okay, as well. What wasn’t okay? Genre fiction.

That probably sounds confusing because I just said that we were encouraged to write in a wide range of genres. But not genres within fiction. Literary fiction is what the profs wanted to see. Even after all this time, I’m still not sure I understand what literary fiction is. But I can tell you what it is not. It is not fantasy. It is not sci-fi. It is not romance, chick lit, horror, mystery, or most historical fiction. In other words, aside from the few literary fiction novels and short story collections that win the Pulitzer Prize, it is not popular fiction.

I’ve heard the profs refer to genre or popular fiction in many ways: trash, crap, the kind of thing that you can read while watching TV. One of my profs even said that Nora Roberts wasn’t a real writer. She’s written hundreds of books and has very high ratings from her readers, so what makes her less of a writer than, say, that particular prof I was speaking with?

But this was all stuff that I heard — and silently chafed against — after I had gotten into the very first creative writing class. Because I myself prefer to write popular fiction. I love fantasy. I love contemporary. And I would’ve submitted that stuff in my portfolio if my college boyfriend, who was a year ahead of me in the program, hadn’t warned me that I had to play to the tastes of the professors. What they didn’t like to see: genre fiction, poetry in the same style as Shakespeare’s or Wordsworth’s, and poetry that was left-aligned on the page and had a capital letter at the beginning of each line. What they did like to see: experimental poetry (think e.e. cummings) — HEAVY emphasis on that — short literary fiction, and fragments of literary novels that were strong enough to stand on their own.

Since the professors ran the program, they could ask for whatever they wanted, I guess. But here’s my problem with their preferential methods: as professors of Creative Writing, a term that encompasses almost every genre, their job should be to help students develop whatever kind of writing they’re into. No genre is better or lesser than the others. There are some marvelously-written romance novels out there, while there are some so-called literary novels that are complete disasters. The focus of Creative Writing classes should be to improve writers’ sentence structures, plot holes, character development and dialogue issues, grammatical errors, telling rather than showing, and so on. The focus of Creative Writing classes should not be to create clones of the professors.

And the thing is, I wasn’t alone in wanting to write genre fiction. About half of the people in each class I went through were right there with me. The others, though — the ones who willingly wrote the types of pieces the professors liked — were quite obviously favored. But I guess that was to be expected. What I did not expect was the way the profs, and even fellow students, would sometimes embarrass the people who wrote genre fiction. On top of that, much of their feedback wasn’t helpful.

There was one person in one of my creative writing classes who wanted to write a paranormal romance featuring a broody, mysterious guy. Sure, it’s been done before, but it was what she wanted to write. Instead of helping her improve the story for what it was, the class on the whole tried to make her steer it in a completely different direction. They latched onto a quirk that her protagonist had, something that may have hinted at OCD (I speak as someone with a partial medical diagnosis of OCD). It was just a random detail that she had included, but the rest of the class seemed to think that was the most interesting detail of her story and encouraged her to expand on it. In the subsequent chapter she gave us, the quirks were definitely more flushed out, but it got so far away from the actual point of the story that, to me, the whole thing just seemed like even more of a mess. The class told her what they liked, and she gave it to them, even though it ultimately did nothing to help her. They had their own reading preferences in mind rather than her best interests.

So, knowing that I probably wouldn’t get the type of feedback I needed for the writing I was truly passionate about, I spent years churning out pages that I didn’t care about all that much. I was a faker just to please other people, avoid embarrassment, and get good grades. Normally when you hear of someone “selling out,” it means that they’ve abandoned their style in for the sake of producing something with more mass market appeal. What I truly want to write already does have mass market appeal, but I abandoned that style, and I felt like I had sold out. I shamefully wrote in my preferred genres on the side, in secret. What a waste of time for me and everyone else in my boat, right?

It wasn’t until my M.A. when I took a course on writing children’s literature that I dared to submit a couple things I wanted to or might have wanted to expand into novels someday. My long-time Creative Writing prof gave them the thumbs-up. And one day, she gave me one of the most encouraging compliments I’ve ever received: “I think you’ve got a lot of books in you. Maybe you won’t write a hundred, but I can definitely see you writing thirty or forty.” She did not give compliments out easily, so I knew she meant it. And it was realistic. She didn’t tell me “Yes! Aim for a hundred! You can do it!” Most writers won’t even complete thirty books in their lifetime, so that alone was huge for me to hear.

But I couldn’t help wondering if she would’ve said that to me if, throughout my years in those previous creative writing courses, I had written the stuff I truly wanted to write. Was she encouraging me based on my contributions to the the children’s lit classes, which were closer to my heart? Or was she judging the entire body of my work that she knew of and therefore missing a large part of the picture? I’m afraid to know what she would’ve said about the things I wrote on the side. I have a feeling it would’ve been mean in the most unhelpful of ways.

Yet when these Creative Writing professors (and many students) are asked why they hate genre fiction, they say, “We don’t. It’s fine. It’s just that you don’t need Creative Writing classes to write that kind of thing.” It seemed like a polite way to say that writing for genre fiction doesn’t need to be good; you don’t need to learn anything; those publishers don’t care about quality writing. I thoroughly disagree. I think that the quality of the writing matters across genres. I think characters and plots need to be developed whether you’re writing a mystery novel or a literary novel. People who read genre fiction aren’t stupid. They can recognize poor writing, and to many of them, it matters a lot.

Not every creative writing program out there will have this snobbery, but I have a bad feeling that most of them do.

So here is my advice for anyone looking into a creative writing program for university:

Always do your research thoroughly. Look into the profs’ interests, dare to reach out to the department secretary so they can put you in touch with current students who would be willing to answer your questions, check out the graduates of the program and see if there is anyone you know of whose style you admire. If the professors (or at least some of them) are open to working with your preferred genre and the students don’t feel constrained by arbitrary rules, chances are it’s a decent program. Bonus points if the program has alumni you’re a fan of.

There are specific Creative Writing programs out there in universities for people who want to write genre fiction, if that is your main interest. Look into those.

If you’re considering post-grad education, an M.A. (Master of Arts) is not necessarily the way to go. An M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts) might be a better option for you. Professors will warn against this one because getting an M.F.A. means you can’t go on to pursue a Ph.D., but if you don’t plan to get a Ph.D., that’s not a problem. M.F.A. programs are usually shorter (a year as opposed to two) and have a more intense focus on the craft than on essays.

Consider pursuing your Creative Writing education independently. There is absolutely no shame in being self-taught. You can also find critique partners and writing groups of people who have the same writing interests as you and who will be able to give you solid feedback on your work because they’ll have a stronger knowledge of the genre than a literary Creative Writing professor will. You have to do the same for them, though.

That’s my spiel. Long-winded, but it needed to be said. If you truly care about your writing, remember to put it first. Don’t invest in a program that won’t invest in you. Happy searching! And while you’re here, tell me, what’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever heard?

[itsthelinernotes]

Do I Need To Know About Music If I Want To Write About It?

Somehow everyone likes Music, but simultaneously we can’t agree on what music we like. So what is it that we’re all in agreement about liking? This makes for a strange bit of sociology in terms of how music is approached and talked about. Since music has this odd type of universality it’s seeped deep into our culture and our discussions of it manifest in some strange ways. My love of music, and later love for philosophy and sociology is what led me to studying why music is so universal but not agreed on for six years and two degrees.

All this time studying music has led me to what I now arrogantly believe may be one of the central contradictions of music which is that it is worthless. I’m not trying to say that it’s worth is = 0 nor am I trying to misdirect with a platitude that it is “priceless” meaning that it’s worth is infinite. What I mean is that it simply cannot be defined in terms of having a worth at all. In computer terms you might consider this as being null. I don’t believe this worthlessness is necessarily bad or even good. What I do mean to point out is that it prevents us from thinking clearly about the role of music. When considering we live in a capitalist hellscape this provides a problem because we can’t assign its value at “infinite” nor can we value it at “0”. This is what I think leads to the never ending arguments surrounding the worth of music, musicians, their work.

Before I go on, I should make this clear: I support every musician in their right to get paid. I wrote my Master’s thesis on the labour rights of musicians and how they are abused. However I have a utopian vision where all music is free for everyone. That vision doesn’t jive with our world and until we have some massive societal revolution, musicians gotta eat and we have to play by the rules of capital for now.

The most frustrating way that this valuelessness manifests is that knowledge about music, be it music theory, music history, sociology of music, whatever, is always valued as a secondary skill even in the industries and structures built around music (I pause here again to remind people that I’m a recovering academic writing blogs on Tumblr, what I’m about to describe is personal, I’m mad about it, maybe that’s improper or biased but it’s how I understand my own experiences). Let me give you a few examples.

After entering the hell of the job market with two music degrees I was encountered with a great deal of false hope. There were actually fairly frequent job postings in or around the “music industries”. This was great for living in a small city, albeit one with a rich musical history. What quickly hit me though is that despite all these music jobs no one was actually looking for anyone who knew anything about music. Go ahead and search “music” on a job board, most of the jobs listed will not have “requires a knowledge of music or musical background” unless you’re teaching (I’ll get to this later). Most jobs in music require marketing, business, social media, administration, event planning, etc. Whats more they require experience in those fields so they are not open to most musicians or people who have dedicated their time to the actual music. I don’t mean to downplay those skills or say they are not relevant, I do mean to say that any actual knowledge of music is rarely prioritized. Of course people with passion for music are attracted to these positions but they can also become bloated with people who enjoy music passively. I guess the issue there is that I don’t know a single person who doesn’t enjoy music.

At this point you’re probably shrugging off my frustration as an idiot who thought studying music instead of literally anything else would help me get employed in music. Well you’re right I am frustrated because even the people I know with music degrees who work in music had to get a second degree or diploma unrelated to music to get that job. You might also say “well there are people who write about music who get hired based on their knowledge of music.” But let me dig at that point.

As someone who keeps a close eye on these job postings I can say with relative confidence that most job postings at major music publications (I recently saw one for Stereogum) require experience in journalism first. Their interest is not in proving that you actually understand the content you’ll be writing about but that you’ll be able to produce content on anything. This is most clearly shown in music reviews. Take any review of a new popular album and jot down a one sentence summary of each paragraph. You don’t have to do much to see that not only do these writers bring up the same points in each review, they often do it in the same order. I don’t say this to slander journalists, I think it’s a noble profession, one I don’t have the skills to do. I do this to point out that if you take an incredibly diverse set of information and give it to people who have been trained to write in a certain way, you’ll get largely the same output. If you don’t, you’ll encounter an editor who, having raised through the same ranks will see that it is. Of course it’s not always the case that journalists get hired to write for these publications (for instance, you may just have connections) but it is very common.

I realize this comes across as arrogant and entitled but I think the question of credentials is an important one. After all, I’ve spent six years writing about music under the scrutiny of academia to be told over and over I don’t have the qualifications to write great content like “Every Radiohead Song Ranked” because I didn’t study journalism. I hosted a campus radio show on music for four years to be told the same thing at a radio station. What seems to be happening is that obviously music is important. We’ll create an infinite amount of publications dedicated to the topic. It has worth. But it’s still second to skills that have value to the institution. What I hear from people hiring in music is “Of course music is important... it’s just not valuable”. My encyclopedic knowledge of music is not welcome in the working world unless it’s tied to another skill that can be more efficiently employed. This is because we can’t actually place value on music the way we can on skills with more quantifiable outputs.

This brings me to education. All through my time studying music I got “so you going to be a teacher?” it was something I found frustrating but I do love to teach so I always said “maybe”. Well recently I figured I might as well look into teaching. Where I live, to get a teaching degree you need to have a certain amount of course hours in “teachable” subjects. There’s band class in every school here and luckily I’ve taken a number of conducting classes and have plenty of class hours in music. When looking at the list of subjects considered “teachable” one has an asterisk next to it. It turns out music can only be your “secondary” teachable meaning you have to have majored in another topic and maybe minored in music. I talk to teachers I know in the province and they say that there are barely any music teachers and they regularly have to try and recruit from outside the province. I called one of the univeristies in my area and they assured me that my masters degree was not applicable and that I can’t even apply to be a teacher with only music credits. What I love about this is that I, as arrogant as it may sound, almost certainly know more about music than anyone teaching it in my province (there is a small program at my alma matter that gives degrees in “music education” but having spent a good deal of time with those people I’m not too worried about competition). More people would have education degrees not from the music education program and instead would all have music as a “secondary”. Meanwhile I’m not even eligible to enter most of the teaching programs here at all.

While this article certainly comes off as the complaints of a dumbass, I think there’s an importance in asking these questions. If you decide to pursue the knowledge of music academically, why is that so often viewed as a bonus to a primary knowledge? Why are our priorities in the music world on non-musical skill sets and knowledge, even in careers that are concerned with music knowledge like teaching and music writing? I don’t think it’s anything to do with the well meaning people I’ve thrown under the bus here and everything to do with our way of measuring value. Or better, our deep inability to deal with things that can’t have value assigned to them. Consider also that every LP when it came out was sold for the same price, but immediately some of them became collectable and would exponentially increase in value while others you would struggle to give away. The universality of price of a new LP in the 60s, a new CD in the 90s or an iTunes single in the 00s was because we just can’t place a value on its contents so we had to concede that every song is worth $0.99. Because a good deal of my identity and work has been put into understanding music now my skill set and that of others is in a weird non-value. Afterall everyone loves music, what’s so special about me?

[ppdoddy]

Republicanism

The attached proposed op/ed article is hereby submitted to every print media organisation in Britian and Ireland with a view to getting it published. No fee is sought. ===== Republicanism. A Normative Definition. "If you ask what kind of a man he was, he answers that he lived content with his own small fortune. Bred a scholar, he made his learning subservient only to the cause of truth". (Epitaph of John Locke). After all the recent talk of reclaiming 'republicanism' for the Irish people, I argue that we must first describe what we mean by that term before we can have any meaningful insight into what in fact we are 'reclaiming.' Traditionally, in an Irish context, 'republicanism' has been identified with opposition to 'monarchy,' but it is more. The word comes from the Latin term 'res publica' meaning 'things public' or alternatively 'public affairs.' Plato's 'Republic' is something of a misnomer in that the original title ' politeia' more closely relates to the concept of politics or citizenship. Likewise Cicero's 'De republica' is not taken to accord to any modern definition of republicanism although he did say that 'some sort of free-state' is the necessary condition of a republic. The modern idea of the Republic (in the sense that is widely understood) is drawn from ancient Greece and Rome but it was truly created during the Renaissance when scholars developed what is known as 'classical republicanism'. Classical republicanism rejected monarchism in favour of 'rule by the people' and writers like Machiavelli proposed various versions of such a system of government. However, during the Enlightenment men like John Henry, Thomas Paine and John Locke paved the way for a new understanding of republicanism that ultimately came to fruition in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence in 1776. Familiar from before was Jefferson's call that 'governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.' However, freely elected governments could still lead to the 'tyranny of the majority' where democracy was "nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine." Thus, according to Jefferson, democracy was a necessary but not sufficient factor for republicanism. Necessary too was the concept that each individual (however in the minority) had 'certain inalienable rights.' In order to prevent pure democracy endangering individual rights therefore, Jefferson advocated a republic where individual freedom was protected from democratic rule by a set of laws enacted in a Constitution. Expanding on the concept of the 'sovereignty of the people' Jefferson wrote that the mother principle of republicanism was therefore that 'governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.' Citizens likewise had responsibilities. Implicit here is the idea of active citizenship which stresses the moral duty of 'republicans' to act in the interests of the republic or to be 'patriotic.' The opposite of patriotism consists of the corruption often referred to by such classical republican thinkers as Aristotle and Machiavelli, in which citizens are more concerned with their personal and group interests than with the common good of the political community as a whole. So what has the term 'republicanism' come to mean in an Irish context then? Some years ago while on a J1 visa on Nantucket a friend remarked on the fact that every house on the island seemed to have a US flag flying proudly in the front garden. 'If we did that people would just think we were RA' he remarked. I don't think you would struggle to find somebody of my generation in Ireland today who hasn't been inhibited in expressions of pride in Irish republican values as a result of the uniquely Irish connotations of the term 'republicanism,' even if perhaps they wouldn't have put it quite that way. Consider this from Queens's historian Feargal McGarry; 'the ideological vagueness of modern Irish republicanism, a distinctive political tradition rooted more in an incoherent blend of Fenianism, Catholic nationalism and Irish-Ireland cultural nationalism than the republican principles of the American revolution.. It is only in this sense that figures as diverse as Wolfe Tone (a product of the French Enlightenment) and Patrick Pearse can be brought together in a seamless pantheon of martyrs to sustain and legitimise present day republican objectives'. Tom Gavin has also noted that 'the term republicanism is generally understood in Ireland as a sort of shorthand for insurrectionist anti-British nationalism rather than any particular ideological or philosophical principles'. On this question there can be little doubt, although I have yet to hear a single commentator in the Irish media make this point. Yet the importance of this question is central to the whole debate. Surely we must know what we are 'reclaiming' if we are to have any chance of a legitimate choice with regard to whether we want to 'reclaim' it or not. Suppose as an experiment we took to agree on Jefferson's principle that politicians or governments are 'republican' 'only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.' How would modern-day Irish 'republicans' score on this metric then? Sinn Fein/IRA would surely not score well. Never since the 1920's did the 'struggle' command popular support, so their compliance with the 'will of the people' or even basic democratic principles is surely in single figures. On the personal and ' inalienable rights' of individuals they must score zero by default such has been their callow disregard for innocent life. Ironically, until the Good Friday Agreement, Sinn Fein/IRA have repeatedly been defined and shaped by their opposition to political compromise, and the most inflexible of them have always succeeded in representing themselves as the authentic voice of 'republicanism.' How about the 'republican party' Fianna Fail? How do they score on embodying the 'will of the people?' Well, recent evidence is not encouraging. On February 15th 2003 an Irish Times/MRBI opinion poll showed that without a new UN resolution (which never came) just 21% of the Irish people would approve of allowing Shannon airport to be used by the US military, with 68% disapproving. A republican government therefore would have disallowed the use of our sovereign territory in such an illegal war in accordance with the wishes of 2.8 million of its citizens. 'The Republican Party' in government did the opposite. However, any attempt to assess the extent to which Irish politicians 'embody and execute' the will of the Irish people however is subject to one serious restriction. Even if data on wider citizen preferences were available (which is infrequently the case), such an analysis presupposes that each citizen has all the information at hand required to form an informed opinion. If this is not the case then surely no degree of public acquiescence can confer 'republicanism' on any politician, political party or government. As Jefferson said, 'only when the people are well-informed can they be trusted with their own government.' It may come as cold comfort to those of us who view Irish 'republicans' as having abrogated their political responsibilities to the Irish Republic to say that in the United States the situation is even worse. There, the 'Republican party' was long known for its adherence to balanced budgets, constitutional government, a non-interventionist foreign policy and for keeping government out of peoples personal lives. Today that country has unprecedented deficits, the Bill of Rights has been eviscerated, the army is bogged down in two (and potentially a third) Asian wars and well, in a word, Schiavo. It is perhaps symptomatic of the age that nobody seems to realise that here in Ireland or in the United States we are led by 'republicans' who only seem to share one thing in common, a distain for basic republican values. This can be expressed in terms of democratic values, respect for the individual or advocacy of an informed public. Axiomatically, we don't realise because we are uninformed. We are uninformed (in both jurisdictions) primarily because we live in corporate controlled media environments where the objectives of corporations (legal citizens?) and citizens shall never the mark twain meet. Almost one hundred years ago that Irish patriot James Connolly stated that the struggle for Irish freedom had two aspects, national and social. Were he to analyse the state of Irish freedom in 2006 he would surely have a different focus. Yet if we can agree that a republic is such 'only in proportion as it embodies the will of their people' and that the people 'can only be trusted with their own government when they are well-informed' can we not say that 'republicanism' in 2006 can be interpreted as the degree to which public opinion is informed? I believe we can and we should. Perhaps only then is our true august destiny possible. ===== Morgan Stack is a lecturer at the Department of Accountancy, Finance and Information Systems at University College Cork. He is co-founder of the Irish 9/11 Truth Movement and an independent candidate at the next general election in the constituencies of Kerry North and Cork South Central.

[creativitytoexplore]

Use Your Writing to Subvert, to Inform, to Speak Truth to Power: An Interview with Christina Hammonds Reed https://ift.tt/2CptXGZ

Though our 2020 Literary Debutante Ball has been postponed, we’re still promoting the work of our incredible 2020 Debs. We hope you consider supporting Christina, and all the authors who are releasing books during this challenging time, by purchasing their books.

In Los Angeles in 1992, race relations are reaching a fever pitch. As riots roar through the city in response to the police beating of Rodney King, high school senior Ashley Bennet is facing her own reckoning. The school year is coming to an end, she feels as though she’s losing everyone she loves to other priorities, and a rumor she starts reaches a fever pitch of its own, at her wealthy, predominantly white, private high school. With significant parallels to our current times, Christina Hammonds Reed’s The Black Kids, out now, is about coming-of-age in a fire, both literal and figurative – little sparks of tragedy in a teenager’s life, as the world quite literally, burns around her.

Vanessa Chan: Where were you when you found out The Black Kids was going to be published? How did you celebrate?

Christina Hammonds Reed: I was at my day job at the time, which incidentally was the day job I most enjoyed out of the many random jobs I’ve had over the years. My agent called me so I rushed out of the office to take a “coffee break”. When he shared the news with me, I could barely contain my excitement. I was jumping up and down in heels outside a very corporate building in Downtown Los Angeles. Then I calmly and rather anti-climactically went back to work. I didn’t really share it with people outside of my super close circle of friends. I was terrified it would all be taken away. Eventually, I had various celebratory dinners and drinks with my family and closest friends. But the day itself was especially meaningful to me because I received the news finalizing the deal on the one-year anniversary of my grandmother’s death, so there was so much joy to be had in a day that otherwise would’ve been painful.

VC: Which did you write first, the novel or your short story (published in One Teen Story, Issue #41)? And how long did the novel take you to write?

CHR: I wrote the short story first! I had the idea kicking around in my head as a graduate thesis film back in 2010, but ultimately decided against it. However, the story wouldn’t let me go, and just felt increasingly imperative with the rise of smartphones documenting police brutality and the effects of unequal policing on Black and Brown communities over the last decade. When the short story was published, I was un-agented. My (eventual) agent reached out to me and we had a really great meeting where he asked if I had considered expanding it into a novel. My first impulse was actually to say I’d said what I had to say, and was ready to move on to the next story. But the more I thought about it, it really did feel like there was so much left to explore, specifically as it relates to class, race, mental health and what it’s like to come of age as a Black girl with some degree of relative privilege. The novel took about two and half years to write from outline to submission. I had a job that entire time and was grieving the death of both of my maternal grandparents, so it took me a little longer than I’d hoped. But it also helped me stay focused on something other than grief. The task of completing it felt like a way of honoring them.

VC: In the novel, there is a point where a well-meaning friend tells Ashley that she’s not, “Blackity Black.” A lot of the story references the different ways where Ashley is either “too Black” or “not Black enough.” Why is this part of her identity important to interrogate?

CHR: I think for those of us who grew up in non-Black areas and going to non-Black schools, this is very much part of the microaggressions we were regularly subjected to because the media portrayals of Blackness, up until very recently, have been so limited. Film, music, books, visual art, all of these, seep into our consciousness as a society and when those images are focused solely on Black struggle and degradation, non-Black people will look at a Black person who doesn’t fit that stereotype and say, “Well you’re not that. Therefore, you’re not Black.” Which is absolutely incorrect. The Black community isn’t and never has been a monolith and while we have this powerful shared and unique experience of being Black in America, Blackness doesn’t only look like one thing and never has.

VC: It seems as though this novel is both an homage to and an indictment of the city of Los Angeles. What do you love and mourn for in LA?

CHR: I love the socioeconomic, cultural and religious diversity of this place. I love the geographic diversity of this city. I love that LA in its current iteration was actually founded by Black and Brown folks, as well as originally being the land of the Tongva people. And what I mourn is that these same people who helped make this city as beautiful and culturally rich as it is are being pushed out because of the economic realities of being unable to compete with wealthy transplants, rising housing costs, and a more stratified economy. Even homes in what was traditionally considered the hood up until fairly recently are now going for over a million dollars. Gentrification and revitalization projects are good for some but often they come at the expense of Black and Brown people who get pushed out of places they’ve called home for generations. And really that gentrification has been enabled by years of neglect, of political and economic disenfranchisement in the years leading up to and following the riots, from which many of these Black and Brown communities never fully recovered.

VC: You were eight years old when the LA riots broke out; your character Ashley is a senior in high school. What did it take to imagine her world at the time? What were your resources—your own memory, or conversations with family/friends, or historical research, or anything else? Did you draw from parallels in the present?

CHR: I was young at the time, but old enough to remember the fires, the anger and hurt of people who looked like me on the screen. I remember wondering why they were in pain and how it related to my personal experience of blackness. Similarly, Ashley is questioning herself and her community albeit in a much more mature way. That said, I still had to do a lot of research to make sure I was getting things right, even down to flipping through old issues of Seventeen and Vogue, etc. to see what Ashley and her friends would be wearing. Of particular help was Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and a compendium of articles by the LA Times called Understanding the Riots, among others. I also spent hours on YouTube watching news reports, listening to music, and watching music videos of the era and the stories told therein. I wanted to fully immerse myself in 1992 and what it looked and sounded like. Also, one of the benefits of writing about somewhere where I currently live, is that everyone I spoke to about writing the book would offer memories of what their experiences of the riots had been. It was like we had shared this moment as a community and there was absolutely a desire to reminisce and reflect on it.

Honestly, I didn’t have to try too hard to draw parallels to the present. They’re inherent in this moment, unfortunately. Things have changed a bit, but also as we’ve seen with the recent George Floyd protests and the national and international outcry over the deaths of Black and Brown people at the hands of police, almost thirty years later we’re still grappling with how structural and systemic racism lead to a police force that doesn’t actually protect and serve all of us.

VC: You have a career and background in film and TV production. Did that aid you in writing this book?

CHR: Traditionally, screenwriting is very structured. There are very specific moments at which the inciting incident, rising action, climax, and denouements should theoretically take place in a conventional three-act structure. I relied on that in the outlining of the novel and making sure that I was moving plot along even within the more meandering context of Ashley’s interior shift. That said, I frequently blew up what I thought the plot was going to be along the way, most especially in the third “act” of the book. Mostly, I think it helped me not feel overwhelmed by what at the time felt like a very Herculean task. Especially given that it was my very first attempt at writing a book.

VC: What is the one thing you want your readers to take away when they read The Black Kids? What kind of advice would you give young Black writers?

CHR: I purposefully wrote Ashley as an incredibly flawed character because I thought it was important to illustrate that it’s not about where you start, it’s about where you end up. She makes huge mistakes over the course of the book. She hurts people and herself. She isn’t as informed as she should be. But she grows to be kinder, more empathetic; she takes ownership of her mistakes, and speaks up and out. She starts to love herself and really see herself as part of a larger community. I hope to convey to younger readers that it’s OK if you don’t have all the answers. Messing up is part of life and what’s important is personal growth. And I hope that it builds empathy, awareness and an even stronger desire to advocate for Black lives in non-Black readers who may not have inhabited a world like Ashley’s before.

To young Black writers, I would say, Your stories are important and worthy of being shared and you don’t need to seek validation from the “right” schools or the “right” programs before you can consider yourself a “real writer.” Also, be kind to yourself right now. This is a moment that can be especially stressful for one’s mental health given that not only are we in a pandemic, we’re also in a moment of huge racial reckoning in which the oppression of Black, Brown, and trans bodies is at the forefront of the national conversation. It’s OK to feel drained or depressed and less focused on writing as you normally would. Take care of yourself and eventually, when you feel stronger, use your writing to subvert, to inform, to speak truth to power, and to showcase our joy and our love.

Vanessa Chan is a Malaysian writer who writes about race, colonization, and women who don’t toe the line. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published or are forthcoming in Conjunctions, The Rumpus, Porter House Review, and more. Vanessa is a Fiction editor at TriQuarterly Magazine, an Assistant fiction editor at Pithead Chapel, a reader for One Story, and an MFA candidate at The New School. Her writing has received support from Tin House, Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, Aspen Words, and Disquiet International. She is at work on a novel.

[diamondsassessment]

Final Thoughts

1.  Which fork in the road would you take – craft or future? Why?

Before coming to any conclusions I feel it’s important to consider aspects of both craft and design future on a universal and personal level. To do that, it’s crucial to reflect on and examine what “craft” and “future” are, both fundamentally and through various definitions of my own and from others.

Craft through Don Norman’s perspective is the base expression of human creativity, beauty, and a continuation of tradition which was the basis for “future design” as we know it today. I’m inclined to agree with a majority of these conclusions, however I do not think craft is based solely around beauty.

Craft is an inevitable part of humanity and has throughout history been a means of self-expression, communication, an exploration of our own individual psyche and a critique on the world and society as a whole around us. Through ancient humans carving mammoth tusks, painting on cave walls, and the rise of fine art during the renaissance, and now with things like the Vivid Festival in Sydney, craft has evolved and moulded to each era of human history. This includes the advancements in technology throughout. There have been aspects of beauty in the form of the romantic era paintings, and more grotesque and candid pieces in contemporary art today that often explore not just craft but craft as a form of design.

For example, works by Patricia Piccinini, an Australian artist, often explore the monstrous side and the rapid evolution of humanity through shocking and uncomfortable to look at hyper realistic sculptures. This acts as personal self-expression, societal critique, and practice of craft as a mastery of various, often tangible, forms of skill. While some aspects of beauty can be found in Piccinini’s pieces, they are not the sole focus or intent.

Future design marries these concepts in craft with the rise of modern technology and problem solving, sometimes for humanities gain as a whole (green energy & design), but often with the motivator of profit in our current capitalistic society (think planned obsolescence design). Both future design and craft are intrinsically linked and while the path may split in a fork at each, they both come together later down the line.

I personally feel I’ll be taking the “future” design route, however I’m not sure I’ll ever let go of craft, either. As a creative I find self-expression in art and craft on an individual level, but simultaneously acknowledge the responsibility I have as a designer; thus I have a desire to make an impact on the world through positive and thoughtful means, largely in the form of media such as games and television, which marry both craft and future.

2.  What is the intent of design thinking?

Design thinking started out in the 1960s as an attempt to pick apart and contextualise the process of modern design. Turning it into more of a science to be harnessed than an art form. Renowned art director and current member of the Creative Cloud collective, Natasha Jen describes design thinking as a concept to be flawed and inaccurate; citing that it fails to highlight key processes in a designers’ work such as critique and reiteration.

“Design thinking packages a designer’s way of working for a non-designer audience by codifying their processes into a prescriptive, step-by-step approach to creative problem solving– claiming that it can be applied by anyone to any problem”

Design Thinking as described by many within academic circles is less a description or guide for other designers to follow and more a means to make the industry-standard design processes palatable to investors and outside individuals. The idea of design thinking appears to be largely commercial in concept and execution. This makes the intent and concept of design thinking as we chiefly know it quite a controversial abstraction between individual designers and modern industry; grossly oversimplifying complex processes often aimed at what can often be described as wicked problems.

Don Norman addresses this divide with his own definition of design thinking, likely as a means to redefine the process in a less corporate and more individual way geared towards designers themselves.

“It means stepping back from the immediate issue and taking a broader look. It requires systems thinking: realizing that any problem is part of larger whole, and that the solution is likely to require understanding the entire system. It requires deep immersion into the topic, often involving observation and analysis. Tests and frequent revisions can be components of the process. Sometimes this is done in groups: multidisciplinary teams who bring different forms of expertise to the problem.”

With this definition, design thinking has a far more human-centred intent, taking the corporate jargon of its original incarnation and pulling it into the forefront of human-based design and invention, acknowledging the diverse and ethical responsibility designers have in society today.

Design Thinking has many different concepts and definitions within the design and corporate world. Depending on these definitions and concepts, the intent of the term has seen many iterations and levels of ethicality, however it seems that human-centred design is becoming more and more prevalent when looking at design thinking as a whole between all definitions and intentions. Or maybe it’s corporations evolving to fit this more progressive mould coined by independent designers, for better or for worse.

3.  What are the key principles and methods used in this field of practice?

With the many varying and often contradictory definitions and ideas of what design thinking is, a majority of them at least have some processes and principles in common, many of which revolve around human-centred design.

Design thinking is defined by a set of key steps that encapsulate specific methods of the stages to design. Empathise, Define, ideate, prototype, test. Or discover, define, develop, deliver. Each stage of design thinking follows the process of researching a subject and the group or individuals affected through empathy mapping and industry driven interviews in user-centric ways. Often multiple problems and interdependent factors can be attained through this first stage of research, which then leads into defining the possible solutions using techniques such as persona mapping and pain points. There are no single solutions to major problems (wicked problems), however the second stage of defining usually identifies the degree of significance of each factor that can then be prioritised and dissected further.

This is often when circular design comes in: the practice of redesigning and redefining needs that had been previously met but could be improved upon or completely redesigned from the ground-up. An example of this would be with green energy or the ever-evolving technology all around us in our post-modern society. Through the develop and prototyping stages, systems thinking takes over and varying iterations of a design or product are refined through testing and criticism.

In the end this can hopefully result in a well defined and thought through design, however this isn’t always the case when factors such as an artificial, profit-driven time limit is implemented.

4.  How do you foresee design thinking becoming part of your own design practice?

As someone studying 3D design and animation, design thinking is already a large part of my own design practice. Many assessments and classes at university are structured in such a way where the various methods behind design thinking are natural steps in progression towards a finished product or piece. This assessment itself is putting design thinking into practice through researching, using a blog to finalise ideas, getting class feedback on said ideas, and then creating a final piece to reflect what we’ve learned as a whole.

Assessments like this one have influenced me as a designer to follow these methods outside of class work and into my own personal projects (from illustration, doll customising, to podcasting) through systems of planning that have almost become second nature at this point.

I don’t want to just be an animator or 3D generalist in the pipeline but I eventually want to be an art director. To conceptualise and take control of the bigger picture by exploring all visual aspects to a movie, show, or game that I can, all the while taking artistic and ethical input and inspiration from an entire team of individual artists around me. To do this, I need a strong grasp of many industry and creative concepts, which includes design thinking— both independent designer and corporate definitions.

Even if I were to never achieve this particular dream of being an art director, I would always end up playing a role in the design thinking process as a whole. If I’m making concept art, creating 3D models, storyboarding, or animating, I’ll be working towards the ideation, prototyping, and implementation stages of design thinking. I feel this is inevitable, especially in more industry and corporate environments and work.

Bibliography

https://jnd.org/the_future_of_design_when_you_come_to_a_fork_in_the_road_take_it/

https://jnd.org/design_thinking_a_useful_myth/

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/design-thinking-get-a-quick-overview-of-the-history

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

https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/5-11-march-2018/pentagrams-natasha-jen-design-monster-unleash-fix-world/

https://www.circulardesignguide.com/

https://medium.com/pancentric-people/the-role-of-design-thinking-in-innovation-ba68a3d91683

https://www.slideshare.net/razsadeq/design-thinking-the-big-principles

[loudlytransparenttrash]

Black Protests On Campus

This could easily be a post about feminism on campus as they have had a very similar history but after the many black student activist protests and terror-style administration coups and demands in the recent months, it’s necessary to look into it deeper. Since the late 1960s, college campuses have been plagued by hundreds of race-related protests. Despite all the administrative surrender to their demands, these demonstrations have continued and it could be easy to argue that they are crazier and more consequential now than they have ever been. In order to understand why, we first have to know how it all began. Black students have been part of the college landscape long before affirmative action. Nearly all were admitted into college because they proved themselves academically qualified, they could do the work and they never demanded special treatment, let alone entire departments catering to their racial identities. 

Beginning in the late 1960s however, as a result of the black power movement, race baiters Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and court decrees such as the Bakke decision, schools began admitting huge numbers of blacks. They were required to fill their classrooms with black students, to show everyone that their school isn’t racist. The problem though was nearly all of these students were completely unprepared for college work. So to get around this problem, universities offered a variety of academic remediation programs, such as blacks-only summer school “bridge” programs to teach the basics. When this wasn’t enough to bring black students up to speed, the administrations created a Black Studies Department to help them along, hiring only black faculty. These early outreach programs still invariably failed, since hastily recruited, fresh out of the inner-city street kids could not do the work despite remedial efforts and generous grading by liberal professors. 

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the agenda shifted from increasing the number of blacks on campus and expecting them to do as well as the other students to transforming the campus to make black students feel comfortable and to correct what is seen as ‘whiteness,’ such as the ‘microaggression’ of correcting a black student’s spelling. Diversity was now official orthodoxy, everywhere except for diversity of thought, and it was implemented top to bottom. Universities increasingly focused on retention, so students who once would have flunked out in real subjects now stayed on and even graduated, thanks to the invention of kiddy courses such as Black Studies, where as long as you raise your clenched fist, you pass. This cycle has continued ever since, and all it’s done has created even more entitlement from black activist students. 

Intensified recruitment had failed to attract qualified black students and faculty to be involved in real subjects, so to meet quotas for non-whites, they lowered the bar even further. Since it is impossible to recruit enough competent black faculty to replace white faculty, as students often demand, the problem is solved by hiring black administrators who understand that their cushy jobs depend on keeping the racial grievance pot boiling. So they invent bogus explanations for black academic failure - structural racism, microaggressions, white privilege and stereotyping - anything but themselves of course. And to make matters even worse, further pressure for the removal of whiteness now comes from white students marinated in the “diversity-is-our-strength” dogma.

Consider a typical set of demands: University of California Santa Cruz administrators recently agreed to meet all four demands lodged by a black student group who overran a campus building and blocked the administrators in their office until their conditions were met. They warned UC Santa Cruz had four months to comply with these demands or “more reclamations” will result. After three days of protesting, Chancellor George Blumenthal agreed to give all black students a 4-year housing guarantee to live in the Rosa Parks African American Themed House, bring back the building’s black-only lounge, pay to have its exterior painted “Pan-Afrikan colors” of red, green and black and force all new incoming students to go through a mandatory diversity competency training. The three additional demands are that the university purchase a property “to serve as a low income housing cooperative for non-white students,” that the university allocate $100,000 for a Black Studies department.

Black students at UCLA are demanding $40 million and their own “safe spaces” on campus as compensation for “racial insensitivity.” The first item on the list of demands calls for a physical location on campus to house the black only event planning, which would include “meeting/gathering/safe spaces” and to fund “a comprehensive effort to address the underrepresentation of African-American students, faculty, and staff at our university,” adding that the endowment should also provide financial aid to “dismissed black students.” The list goes on to demand “cultural awareness training” for all incoming students, faculty and staff members. Lastly, it demands “guaranteed housing for black students for 4 years, including on and off campus housing,” arguing that securing housing is only difficult for black students.

Black students at American University demanded extensions on finals for all students of color and no penalization for previous exams. They gathered in a tunnel on campus and blocked traffic from getting through until their demands were met. They claim they will take over a student-operated cafe on campus as a “sanctuary for all people of color” for the rest of the semester. The ultimatum also targeted food service providers, accused the university of having a “white supremacist” curriculum because they read books written by historic white writers, and demands various forms of segregation. “Abandon the white supremacist and colonial curriculum.” Another pushed for segregated campus safe spaces, demanding “the establishment of separate resource centers for Black, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native Americans, Muslim, undocumented students, and queer and trans students.” The list also demands a tuition freeze and training programs for faculty to “deconstruct oppressive behavior in the classroom.”

There are two major factors driving these periodic upheavals. The first is the intellectual deficiency of these students. The second are the incentives for school administrators to give in. They would not protest if they were actually taking their education seriously, keeping up intellectually and studying credible subjects as whites and Asians tend to. It’s very rare you’ll see anyone studying real subjects or high achievers part of these protest groups. The wider the intellectual gap, the more frequent the protests, which can be seen as a kind of “self medication” for these students. After weeks of classroom frustration, it is euphoric to take over the white president’s office and watch him squirm when you present 25 non-negotiable demands. Thanks to social media, the cost for organizing a protest is about zero, and who can resist the instant gratification and media coverage that comes from waving homemade signs and chanting catchy slogans?

It is as if these students believed that administrators have special, almost magical powers that can cause dim students to succeed, so obtaining a degree just requires putting pressure on white functionaries. Campus protestors are unlike professionally run interest groups that have specific goals and negotiate their demands rationally. Protest feeds on itself, like thrill-seekers who must always find new excitement to sustain their high. That’s why after 40 years of this, nothing is still ever good enough, nor will it ever be. But why do school administrators tolerate this nonsense? Why not immediately call campus security and drag their screaming asses away? Mainly because these demands, no matter how foolish or expensive, personally cost administrators nothing. 

Meeting black students demands is actually a bonanza any administrator who measures his status by the size of his budget. Building a cultural center, hiring black psychologists and sensitivity counselors, setting up new departments, adding yet more diversity and inclusion staff, all this means larger bureaucratic empires and even salary increases because of new responsibilities. Furthermore, an administrator who immediately caves in to even the most outrageous demands is likely to be applauded for “managing” potentially violent conflict. The solution is always to spend other people’s money, and college administrators are never fired for being wimps. Any hardliner who ordered arrests would be judged inflexible and insensitive to the plight of blacks on today’s "white supremacy” campuses.

Finally, black student protestors are the perfect useful idiots for radical administrators. For social justice warriors masquerading as a university scholar, having black students advance your agenda, often with the threat of violence, is a godsend. All the campus brouhaha is there to intimidate those who might resist today’s cultural marxism. And it does. Eventually this will end though. More pressure will come from outside, from state legislatures, trustees, or donors, all sick of this embarrassing behavior. What happened at the University of Missouri may be a sign of things to come: the university’s total surrender to of protestors caused thousands of parents to enroll their children elsewhere, and tuition revenue fell sharply. 

This of course does not apply to every black student. There are many highly qualified black students and faculty achieving wonderful things on their own merit. But decades of pandering to demands, affirmative action, rewarding incompetency, this cycle has now led to today’s mania on campus, now unqualified previous students are teaching and guiding today’s unqualified students and they're proving to be the driving force behind today’s ridiculous black activist protests, such as the few examples above. These black protests and their terror-style demands will not end until our colleges return to admitting students and faculty on ability rather than to fill quotas. And this will not happen until we acknowledge the anti-education and anti-white mindset plaguing our black communities. Every year however we become even more determined to deny the obvious. 

[english-ext-2]

hello! just wondering about your thoughts on art degrees - are they really 'useless'? i can't think of any other way to study literature :( thank you!

I have many thoughts on this so it’s best to start with a disclaimer: I’m only speaking from my own experiences, am in no way representative of all Arts students, and definitely don’t represent employers’ perspectives (who might have very different opinions to mine).

Before I go anywhere, the following point is the most important: if you want to study literature, then study literature. There is nothing worse than picking a degree you think will be ‘employable’ only to realise you hate it (actually, what’s worse is becoming indifferent to it).

I’m clearly biased here, but Literature is good and not at all useless, and I would strongly encourage you to study it. I don’t want to say anymore else I’d go on forever, but that’s my position. The rest of my answer is under the cut because boy did it get long.

Arts in General

Firstly, arts encompasses a huge range of disciplines. In terms of diversity of knowledge, arts is far from useless. I’m at Usyd, where the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences is the largest by far. It’s divided into schools, then departments. A single school, e.g. School of Social and Political Science (SSPS), has several departments. My majors fall under SSPS, the Department of Government and International Relations and the Department of Sociology and Social Work. But you’ve got education, social work, philosophy, museum and heritage studies, archaeology, media and communications, linguistics, languages, a whole range of departments under other schools too. Are all these subjects ‘useless’? Nope.

In purely humanistic terms, people with arts degrees have contributed so much to society. Where would we be without novelists, film producers, directors, script writers? Monty Python was a troupe of over-educated nerds who put their Oxford and Cambridge educations to dictionary-altering satirical use (soz Terry Gilliam, I know you’re American), and we’re better for it. Our world would be poorer without artists of all stripes and the insights that sociologists, historians, anthropologists, philosophers, linguists, etc. have made. The ultimate strike: your teachers studied Education, i.e. Arts. Without them you wouldn’t be reading this, and I wouldn’t be writing it either. Even if arts degrees are semi-jokingly characterised as useless, they’re not. (Btw I aggressively do not enjoy the STEM v Humanities debate because it reduces both sides to shitty stereotypes and gives rise to godawful Discourse, has anyone heard of polymaths.)    

Types of Arts Degrees

You also have to consider the type of arts degree. Once I finish this semester I’m going to graduate with the pass Bachelors of International and Global Studies (i.e. your standard three year degree). In terms of tertiary education, it’s the most basic. I chose not to do a combined degree with, say, Law; nor did I choose to do Honours, which would’ve added an entire year to my degree doing a thesis. Arguably, arts honours and combined arts degrees are less 'useless’ than your run-of-the-mill three-year arts degrees because you supposedly gain advanced research skills and the, well, non-arts part of your combined degree (lol). (I would recommend Honours only if you’re truly, honestly looking for an intellectual challenge and are fully prepared to commit, not just riding along for the perceived employability advantage. A thesis is hard work! I have a friend in Melbourne who can testify.) Incidentally, your three-year arts degree will be an infuriating obstacle if you’re thinking of applying for grad school in North America since most universities only consider candidates who have at least a four­-year undergraduate degree. On another note, I actually once met a girl who was doing combined law/arts and took a cinema elective unit because she enjoyed cinema but knew it wouldn’t likely help her find a job.

Employability

But given the state of the job market these days, almost all undergraduate degrees by themselves are next to useless. A freshly-graduated 21-year-old with a single Bachelors and nothing else to their name, no matter the discipline, won’t be zipping up the salary ladder any time soon (would probably struggle to get an entry level job, never mind kickstarting their career). We’re a long way from the days when just having a degree was proof of your knowledge and thus qualification for the job. Higher education is more accessible, and employers’ expectations have changed. The substance of the degree matters less than the transferable, or 'soft’ skills you gain at university. I’m talking leadership, adaptability (a big one), teamwork, written and verbal communication skills, cross-cultural awareness, self-management, time management, problem solving. Your grades are no longer the sole determining factor in your hiring, and may even take a back seat to strong extra-curricular or sporting achievements, or your experience in various casual/part-time jobs. In some ways it’s a welcome change for employers to expressly state they value recruits as people with talents in fields other than academia, and it’s certainly more inclusive of socio-economically disadvantaged students who might not have done well in school but are nonetheless hard workers and have displayed merit in the 'real world’.

From certain other perspectives, the job market is still capitalism, and individuals are still in competition with each other. As soon as employers make it known they’re looking for “well-rounded indvidiuals”, the students with the most cultural capital and financial resources rush off to, say, intern at a law firm, a think tank, the state government, or travel overseas to teach English in a South-East Asian country, i.e. they grab opportunities to expand their set of transferable skills. Doesn’t matter if you’re an arts student; the wealthiest are more likely to have the means to seek out and actively pursue the experiences that’ll enrich their CVs and make them more appealing to recruiters. It takes money to travel, and you need to be from a certain social milieu to know of, if not apply for, valuable career-hopping opportunities (I kid you not, one guy applied to the organisation where I volunteer wanting legal experience because his parents were allegedly dentists and not in the Right Lawyer Circles to get him a paralegal position or clerkship). All of this is a long way of saying that doing arts is but one factor amongst many affecting your job prospects. 

To bring the discussion back to more pleasant grounds, big corporations (read: banks, consultancy firms, your Comm Banks and KPMGs) are recognising the skills and talents that arts students can bring to their companies. The critical thinking skills you gain from analysing those long-ass readings and putting them into practice are highly sought after because they show you’re not just someone who follows instructions, but can analyse, evaluate and synthesise information appropriate to audience, which applies to literally anything in any workplace. Usyd even has a program called ArtSS Career Ready that offers summer/winter internships with various organisations to Arts and Humanities students only.    

It’s implied in the above paragraphs but what it comes down to is that you’re very likely going to end up doing something that has only the faintest relation to your degree. A student who majored in sociology might end up in a consultancy firm; a history student at St George or Westpac. If you’re going to worry about what you’re studying, worry on the basis of whether you’ll enjoy it rather than whether it fits your projected career path. 

Arts Degrees in Context

So far I’ve spoken about arts degrees in very general, abstract terms, disconnected from the institutions that offer them. Does it make a difference if you study English Literature at Usyd rather than UNSW? (Usyd’s English department consistently ranks well in the QS rankings, 18th this year and the highest Australian university if you were wondering, with UNSW at equal 49th.) Though whether an English major from Usyd is more employable than an English major from UNSW, well, Usyd is ranked 4th in terms of graduate employability in the QS rankings but that’s not necessarily reflective of Usyd’s English department. Anyhow, the 'usefulness’ of a degree will rely on its quality, and that quality is directly influenced by two things: the degree structure, and the people teaching your degree. Both will of course vary from uni to uni.

Degree Structure

What do I mean by degree structure? I’m talking mandatory units or majors, and even mandatory internships. Take my INGS degree. The features that differentiate it from your generic Usyd arts degree are:

four mandatory INGS units 

three mandatory language units 

a mandatory one-semester exchange 

a mandatory major chosen from a list (double majoring is optional)

It sounds fancy but if you were a discerning arts student you could take multiple language units and go on exchange; the list of compulsory majors we choose from is not exclusive to INGS students. The real appeal lies in the INGS units, which are themselves an interdisciplinary mix but which in my experience don’t build graduate abilities any more effectively than any other arts unit. Exchange was good though, and certainly useful in the sense I picked up a range of transferable skills (if not applicable in professional contexts then at home; baking soda and vinegar are great cleaning agents.)  

My degree structure wasn’t revolutionary and didn’t necessarily equip me with skills that might make me more attractive to recruiters. Enter mandatory internships. Some universities in their arts degrees make practical experience (internships, practicums, research projects, etc.) compulsory. If this opportunity is already built into your degree and/or discipline, e.g. you have practicums if you study education, then it’s a huge advantage as you don’t have to go looking for one yourself. Macquarie University makes PACE units (Professional and Community Engagement) a requirement of graduating with an arts degree. Students get practical experience in the community with a partner organisation and undertake an “experiential learning activity”. I mention this because I’ve met Macquarie (and UNSW) interns at my volunteer workplace who’ve contributed significantly to various projects - experience that makes them competitive when they graduate. And yes, there’s a PACE unit for English! (I’ll admit that to Usyd’s credit they have the above-mentioned ArtSS Career Ready program.)  

tl;dr not all arts degrees are created equal, the better ones include mandatory practical experience.  

The People 

Secondly, the people teaching your degree. I have thoughts (Thoughts, I tell you) on education as a collaborative effort, which I’ll just boil down to this: your teachers matter. The people you learn alongside with matter. You don’t learn in a vacuum, and yes, while you’re responsible for your education and how much effort you put into readings, assignments, asking questions, and so on, your teachers and tutors play an essential role in how you absorb and understand the material. If you’ve got a lecturer who reads slides out at a catatonic audience, that’s… not helpful. If your course coordinator gives you one-sentence replies to lengthy, well-considered questions, that’s… also not helpful. But if a teacher can engage you with what you’re learning no matter the subject, you’re more likely to develop a genuine interest in it and to do well. Good lecturers and tutors crop up in unexpected places and often at random, and the best way to find them is through word of mouth. In employability terms, these teachers make for sterling referees. If you get to know them enough, they’ll happily vouch for you.

This answer has gotten ridiculously long but I hope it addressed and assuaged any doubts you may have had.

[corbinite]

I think it's time the majority moves away from the model of bigotry as an us-vs-them mentality and towards one of power. I as a gay man do not really have the power to rally together with other gay people to oppress straight people. I just don't, if I tried to introduce new laws or practices which treated straight people as lesser I wouldn't get anywhere, or I'd be severely punished even depending on the course. But if you look at who is in our leadership positions and has all the money, it's largely straight people. I'm not saying that all straight people will actively use power against us but they can is the point, if straight people as a class decided they wanted to they could treat us however they want because ultimately that's where the power lies. That doesn't look like homophobia and heterophobia existing in an us-vs-them dynamic, it's pretty unidirectional. Then you look at actual acts of discrimination. The biggest examples of "heterophobia" anyone can come up with is the safe spaces we've come up for oursleves. Our online communities and our friendships and our clubs. We get called discriminatory against straight people for trying to finally find people who understand us, who understand what we've experienced with homophobia, and we try to do it away from straight people because honestly it's just too much of a risk to try to find those connections otherwise. There's a risk of harassment, and even in straight circles where people say they're accepting there's enough microaggressions that we just can't open up to the same degree as in our gay circles, so being around just other people like us is freeing for once. And... if you really look at it... most of the world is a safe space for straight people. Tv is vastly straight, there's a clear one homo limit in most shows and if you go over it the straight class as a net throws a fit. You always know you can see yourself and almost exclusively yourself when you turn on the tv and based on the pushback against diverse media you seem to like it that way. And at work or in open conversation or with your friends, there's a very high chance that as far as you know it's all straight people (now it's likely that there are multiple non-straight people in any said group but you are likely unaware so it doesn't detract from this experience you have of being in a sea of other straight people like you). You're able to talk about love and sex, maybe not super explicitly but you can bring it up and expect support with zero reservations or discomfort in getting the support, just unbridled participation from your peers who can relate but we never got that, we never got to talk about it and have people fully relate. So we seek out communities of each other so we can emotionally support each other through oppression in ways that straight people quite frankly can't. The other example people love to bring up is when we oppose the so called "freedom" to discriminate against us, that's called heterophobia or a war on religion. I'm going to be frank, it's bullshit. Freedom does not mean the legal or ethical right to mistreat others without consequences. And us protecting ourselves is not "heterophobia" it just isn't, we just want to be protected from mistreatment. Those examples along with the occasional case of a gay person venting frustrations about being mistreated are the best examples of "heterophobia" anyone can come up with. Contrast that with being disowned, being fired, being evicted, being harassed on the street for holding hands, being beaten or killed or raped, being subjected to psychological and sexual abuses as a quack "therapy", being told your whole life that you're a sinner, having people wince at any form of love that resembles yours, never seeing yourself reflected, never being shown or told that it's okay to be this way, growing up thinking you're so gross because you had no model to know it's okay, getting constant subliminal signs that you're gross, that's what gay people have to deal with. Actual acts of discrimination clearly are very unidirectional. Now, let's bring prejudice into the equation. Look at people's actual feelings. Now, gay people certainly can experience a bit of what some would call "tribalism". The way we grow up rejected from straight society that taught us to feel disgust towards ourselves causes a lot of bitterness and it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that sometimes yes we do resent straight people overall for it. Ultimately though that's a reflex that was taught to us by the treatment we got, developed as a defense mechanism to stay sane through our experience. Rather than being heterophobia, any sort of discrimination or true actions taken against straight people, it's all ultimately of a vastly different nature than homophobia. Homophobia however, it's pretty much universal within our society. It's taught to everyone to some degree. Everyone including us gay people. We don't feel true heterophobia but we certainly feel homophobia ourselves. Because picking up at least bits of it is inevitable unless you grow up under a rock and with a perfect family (under a rock because studies have shown that your environment away from home actually has a larger effect on the person you become than how your parents raise you). But no one grows up totally disconnected from the world, no one is an island, we're all contantly learning from each other and transferring ideas including subtle and subconscious attitudes, and that certainly includes bigotry. Even the prejudicial feelings themselves about sexuality are largely unidirectional: always pointed towards non-straight people even within those of us who are the targets. You see, the idea that bigotry is this simple us-vs-them tribalism, it just doesn't check out. It's an attractive notion, I certainly believed in it while I was still in denial of my sexuality and what I had socially were my racial and gender privileges. It's far easier on the conscience to see it that way because it requires nothing of you but to ignore the problem and say it'll go away if we don't feed it with attention. But it just doesn't work that way. Everyone has some level of homophobia. Everyone acts it out in some subtle way at least once in a while. It's inevitable. And I'm going to say: it's okay to notice it in yourself. It's okay to find that you are in fact somewhat bigoted, because you don't live in a bubble and you're not perfect. And the only way we'll progress in our societies is if we look at ourselves and think: are my subconscious attitudes and actions playing right into a power dynamic? Did I inherit a long history and tradition of bigotry? Just try to be a mindful person, being aware of yourself in life is a severely neglected skill in our society, even outside these axes of oppression it's so neglected. No one wants to think they're a bad person so they shield themselves from reflecting on their actions. I did that to an unhealthy degree at one point and I do still sometimes fall back into it because I'm far from perfect. I really was not a mindful person overall in life and it impacted myself and those around me. But I'm trying to be better at it, and I hope other people can too. And if you are a loved one, whatever your relationship to me is or how well you know me, I hope you'll read this and look into yourself for the ways you can be better at removing yourself from bigotry, and even actively challenging it both within yourself and out in the world. Please, for me.

[makingstuffup]

Here’s an argument that we see from ace tumblr on a regular basis. It’s the argument that people not knowing about your identity or believing that it’s real is, in and of itself, a form of oppression (often phrased as “at least people know you exist”). This argument is being used in someone’s blog post to prove a certain point.

[T]here is one more term which I must define, namely that which I call "oppression by omission." By this, I don't simply mean the invisibility of minorities (either "invisibility" in the larger society, or as "invisibility" within minority spaces, such as this blog post about the invisibility of Native/Indigenous people in spaces for people of color). There are countless ways in which minorities of various kinds, and those positions of relatively less social power, are not taken into account, left out of decision-making processes that have an impact on them, etc. Oppression by omission is not "you are so marginalized we do not have to consider how this will impact you," although that plays a role in it. What I am mainly talking about here is the experience of minority groups about whom the master-narrative is "this group does not and cannot exist at all," and when one of the central ways by which oppression is occurring is through society's repeated (even ubiquitous) assertion that people like this do not and cannot exist, and that people who "claim" to be this way are mentally ill, frauds, or are otherwise incapable of accurately relating their own experiences. In some cases, anyone who even accepts the experiences of these people is considered deserving of ridicule. When oppression by omission is occurring, the people impacted by it are very unlikely to "come out" about their experiences, not because there are explicit statutes on the books about people like them, but because the social ostracism, or perceived threat of such, is immense. In subtle and not subtle ways, most of us are taught at an early age that there is something different, or scary, or not OK about our experiences. This ostracism, or perceived threat of such, is almost always also invisible to those who do not see these minorities in the first place. The invisibility begets invisibility; with few to no positive role-models, few to no positive and empowering stories to identify with, and relentless negative messaging (in some cases through spec fic), invisibility can become the only "safe" world we know, and we can be hesitant to challenge it. Oppression by omission can take place on a small scale or a large one, within the larger social framework or within minority spaces, alone or in conjunction with other forms of oppression. It is different from what is usually recognized as "oppression," the more overt and visible forms. But it is not without often profound impact on the people who are thus erased. There have been efforts aimed at challenging invisibility, even challening the oppression by omission, in certain communities. The Asexuality Visibility and Education Network has been doing this work for a decade, and recently a documentary has been made about asexuality and asexual people. Yes, asexuals face considerable oppression by omission: check out the lovely videos made by swankivy, such as here, where you can watch videos she made about her "Asexuality Top Ten." ("You can't really be asexual, you must be...")

What do you think the context of this is? What point is the author trying to make? Take a guess before you read the rest.

This comes from the blog critpsitheory, which aims to combat the oppression of people with psychic powers. The entries date from 2011 to 2013.

It has a long list of bingo cards, a list of how to evaluate media for anti-psi bias, a list of common microaggressions against psi, and more. This is the post the quote came from, and the author goes on to say:

The concept of oppression by omission is also helpful for understanding the invisibility faced by more esoteric minorities, such as Otherkin, therians, psi/sang vampyres, or even what it's like to be part of a multiple system. To some degree, transgender people also face oppression by omission, such as "genderqueer people do not exist," "transmen are really butch lesbians who took it too far," or "trans women are all cross-dressers who want to colonize women's identities and bodies." Bisexual/pansexual people also face it. The list goes on. Now all of these experiences (and many more) are very different, and very diverse within each category. The only parallel I am drawing is that in each instance, the social master-narrative is, at least at times, one of "non-existence," and so each and every time someone tries to come forward with a counter-narrative and express his/her/hir experience of the world, for whatever reason, he/she/ze has to deal with that master-narrative in some way. It might be because someone else is shutting them down or putting them down. It might be because they have to couch their experience in other terms in order to get through someone's filters. It might be because they have to, in some sense, "test out" all the people they talk to about this aspect of their lives to see if they can accept it. It might be that they choose never to tell others, because they know that telling others is fundamentally emotionally, socially or even physically unsafe. (See this video, for example.) What does psi omission look like? It really takes many forms. It can be that psi experiences are omitted from the biographies of famous people, even when these people wrote extensively about their experiences -- such as Mark Twain (for example here, and the several articles linked here) or Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. It can be the dearth, or even total lack, of non-sensationlistic non-fiction produced about the subject. It can be discourse or study that focuses exclusively on whether or not the "claims" are "real," with little to no attention paid to the narratives of the people living with these experiences (except when the purpose is sensationalism, or the entertainment of non-psi people). It exists in the lack of realistic characters, with experiences like ours, present in "realistic fiction" on television, in books and movies, etc. -- characters who are full people (not two dimensional plot devices), characters whose role in the story is not to "do psi things" every week (or simply to be scary, or to stand there and look sexy), characters who exhibit self-determination, characters who can serve as positive role-models. It exists in the complete lack of serious support groups (in the US, anyway) for young people trying to understand their experiences in a world that denies, stigmatizes and ridicules them. It exists in "othering" language and the use of us as rhetorical sarcasm (which I will cover in more depth on this blog).

Now, whatever your personal beliefs on the existence of psychic powers, I hope we can all agree that people with psychic powers are not an oppressed group. The author lists bi and trans people as also suffering from this “oppression by omission,” and I hope we can all agree that bi and trans people actually are oppressed.

What does this tell us? It tells us that this argument is a bad one, and can be used to “prove” the oppression of any identity whatsoever as long as it’s less well known.

This blog came out of the heady days of roughly 2009-2012, when some sectors of the internet collectively discovered social justice in the aftermath of RaceFail. In the naive enthusiasm of those days, many people started creating privilege checklists, bingo cards, etc. for every identity they could possibly think of that faced societal stigma or invisibility or was not considered the norm. 

There was one popular social justice blogger at that time who argued that being able to not drive drunk was a privilege, not being a necrophiliac was a privilege, and not being attracted to your siblings was a privilege similar to straight privilege. This blogger also endorsed monosexual privilege and binary privilege (the word “allosexual” hadn’t been invented yet, but I believe she also endorsed “sexual privilege”). (I’m not going to name her because she no longer endorses those ideas as far as I know.)

There were bloggers, some of them trolls but not all (and plenty of earnest people reblogged and supported the trolls’ ideas), who endorsed the ideas of “transethnic” and “transabled” oppression, which meant that people who identified as a different ethnicity than they were, or who identified as having a disability that they did not have, were oppressed. 

Take a look at this list of personal privileges and oppressions, and “some of the oppressions and systems that kyriarchy is composed of.” (Warning: the author admits to committing sexual abuse.) I think this person was later revealed to be a troll, but they were satirizing a very real and common way of thinking.

The word “queerplatonic” came out of that time, and is representative of the ideas of that time.

“Privilege Denying X” was a popular meme at that time, and in response to the ace discourse - which was going on then and has never stopped - someone created the blog “Privilege Denying Asexuals,” which responds to ace tumblr’s rhetoric with many of the same arguments we are still using. (It’s an interesting exercise to see what’s changed and what hasn’t.)

In roughly 2013, tumblr slowly began changing courses to say that not all forms of societal stigma, discrimination, and lack of visibility were actually examples of a privilege/oppression dynamic. Materialist analysis slowly began gaining the upper hand, and now you’d be hard pressed to find someone on tumblr who thought that drunk drivers, necrophiliacs, “transabled” people, goths, furries, “vampyres,” people with dyed green hair, etc. are oppressed. In most cases where groups like this are concerned, it is no longer common for people to equate the forms of discrimination and invisibility described in this psi post to oppression.

Ace discourse is simply one of the last holdouts of this kind of rhetoric. 

I do not mean to say that asexuals are like drunk drivers in that they are harmful, or like “psychic vampyres” in that the experiences they describe don’t exist. Some of the groups that people claimed were oppressed then are real, some are not; some face real difficulty in society that should be respected, some do not; some are not inherently harmful to others, and some are. People who don’t experience sexual attraction are real, often do face difficulty, and their lack of sexual attraction is harmless to others, but that does not make them an oppressed group, and it certainly doesn’t make them oppressed under homophobia and transphobia, the systems of oppression that the LGBT coalition exists to fight.

[americanmythspring19-blog]

Cults of Personality

A cult of personality is defined as “a situation in which a public figure (such as a political leader) is deliberately presented to the people of a country as a great person who should be admired and loved” and has its origins dating all the way back to Ancient Rome. During this time, the Roman emperors were revered figures and were worshipped almost as gods. This theme continued in Ancient Egypt where the pharaohs were even seen and called “god-kings” by their subjects. However, as technology and social media advanced, this phrase was used less and less as it was harder for monarchs to keep their holy aura. On the other hand, (again because of technology, especially social media and the radio) it has allowed for much more opportunity for these people to project themselves on a massive scale that was never before seen. Many, many of these people are political figures. Nowadays, we still see some cults of personality, similar to that of Buzz Windrip in It Can’t Happen Here. Sinclair Lewis describes how a cult of personality comes to power though the use of media and manipulation of the people. Buzz Windrip uses his charisma and persuasion skills in order to gain support and eventually power, promising the people exactly what they want. However, once he gains power, he simply doe whatever he feels like and completely disregards the wants of the people. He can do this because he was so revered and almost worshipped by his supporters and they just give him their blind trust and support everything he does, regardless of the consequences. This is a prime example of a cult of personality and of our society’s ignorant and selfish nature. The reason cults of personalities can and do work is because they promise the people means to their selfish ways, such as giving them money as Windrip promises. Examples of cults of personalities are seen throughout history and even are seen to a lesser degree today. Prime examples from history are Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Benito Mussolini, and even American president Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even today, while it is on a less scale than in the past, cults of personality find their way into our society and culture. Some celebrities are seen and worshipped as if they are gods walking the earth (Beyoncé), and some political figures have roused this type of following. Donald Trump is a good example. He massed an unbelievable number of followers during his presidential campaign and continues to be admired and loved by many people. However, with our modern, diverse culture and society, cults of personality are harder to be found and cultivated. Everyone in the modern United States has their own set of opinions and beliefs, no two people will agree 100% on every topic. There will always be some people who don’t like what others do (again Donald Trump may have a large number of supporters, but the number of non-supporters is also very high), and thus cults of personality have become more and more scarce as our society develops.

[cryptswahili]

Augur Protocol Overlays: Veil and Guesser. Prediction Markets Made Easy.

Augur is a prediction markets protocol built on top of Ethereum that we previously covered last year on the occasion of its long-awaited mainnet launch. Prediction markets are essentially markets for event derivatives (also known as contingent claims) and as such encompass a wide range of possibilities - from financial or crypto-asset derivatives (such as futures or binary options) to sports betting or, most controversially, outcomes of political events. (Controversy around political betting is arguably what led to the shutting down of Intrade, one of Augur's predecessors.) In any case, Augur's prediction markets layer adds a powerful component to Ethereum's arsenal of financial engineering tools that makes it possible to frame any kind of derivative contract (It's also worth mentioning that the size of the derivatives market on existing financial infrastructure is estimated to be over 1.2 quadrillion USD).

The front page of the now defunct Intrade. "Founded in Dublin, Ireland in 2001, Intrade gained widespread media attention as the world's leading prediction market during the 2008 and 2012 US election cycles for its accuracy in predicting the outcome of those elections", the website claims under "History", citing Augur as its successor in "What's Next?" 

The workings of Augur may seem a bit byzantine at first, but at the core they revolve around two basic primitives: markets and outcome shares. Each Augur market (which anybody can create via the Augur app) is represented by a smart contract on Ethereum which holds the collateral covering that market (in ETH and, as of Augur v.2, Dai) and issues upon deposit outcome shares as ERC-20 tokens that represent market positions (long or short) or answers to questions (yes or no for binary markets, degrees expressed in ETH for scalar markets, etc.)

Recently, a number of dApps built around Augur as protocol overlays marked an important development (for decentralized prediction markets as well as protocol overlays in general). The Augur user interface is not immediately intuitive or as straightforward and uncomplicated for the less technical or inexperienced, non-trader audience. Meanwhile the Augur protocol itself, as noted above, encompasses a wide range of possibilities for different potential user bases (e.g., the trader crowd or the betting crowd, each using different terms for the same things in their respective frames of reference, as well as requiring different kinds of user interfaces that make sense to them, etc.). These front-end dApps offer a less overwhelming interface adapted to be much easier to access and use and focused on a handful of curated market categories (which can otherwise be hundreds at any given time and which can rapidly increase when adoption picks up the pace). 

The lifecycle of an Augur market. There are a number of ways that participants can profit throughout an Augur market lifecycle: creating markets, speculating on them, reporting on the outcomes and disputing them.

These applications (Veil and Guesser for the moment, which we'll go over in this post) exemplify the many ways in which Augur could be integrated as a generic dApp component within the Ethereum ecosystem and potentially set off the beginning of a movement that, by absorbing individual beliefs and knowledge in all kinds of circumstances, could translate many aspects of our culture into liquid financial markets. Before going further though, it might be useful to take a moment and remind ourselves of the origins of the idea of prediction markets and why it is such a big deal in the context of an open, decentralized financial system.

I may have just figured out a killer use for Augur. Short-circuiting circular twitter debates about objective facts by quickly offering to bet (in the form of charitable donation.) Demanding skin in the game seems to make people a bit more careful with their claims.— Ari Paul (@AriDavidPaul) January 27, 2019

Ari Paul brings up one particularly valuable potential use case (especially in an environment like Twitter):  giving people the opportunity to substantiate their claims, opinions or beliefs with something to lose (since talk is cheap, as they say). Prediction markets are supposed to bring back that "skin in the game" and have traders "put their money where their mouths are", conditioning a market behavior that makes up market efficiency (as a consequence of) - or, in the case of Twitter, perhaps more thoughtfulness.  

"The Use of Knowledge in Society" and "The Wisdom of Crowds"

Friedrich Hayek's famous 1945 essay is considered the basis upon which the concept of prediction markets has been articulated. Therefore, it might be useful to cite a few key paragraphs from it that elucidate the matter beyond what may at first appear to some as simple gambling or betting.

The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate “given” resources—if “given” is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these “data.” It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.

If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of decentralization. But this answers only part of our problem. We need decentralization because only thus can we insure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used. But the “man on the spot” cannot decide solely on the basis of his limited but intimate knowledge of the facts of his immediate surroundings. There still remains the problem of communicating to him such further information as he needs to fit his decisions into the whole pattern of changes of the larger economic system."

We must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function — a function which, of course, it fulfils less perfectly as prices grow more rigid. The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.

James Surowiecki, in his "The Wisdom of Crowds" further outlines several criteria that differentiate wise crowds and their aggregated opinion (which prediction markets are meant to extract and put a price on) from the irrational groupthink that tends to enter into bubble trajectories: 

A diversity of opinion. Each market participant should have his own view, perspective or knowledge that adds information to the whole (even if that be just an eccentric interpretation of known facts).

Independence. Opinions should be as little influenced by the opinions of those around them as possible.

Decentralization. In the sense Hayek explains above.

Aggregation. A mechanism - in this case, the pricing mechanisms of prediction markets in a fairly efficient and diversely decentralized market for translating discrete judgments into collective sum decisions.

Prediction markets are very much about economic signaling and market efficiency. There is no single right way to design a prediction market, but as already pointed out censorship-resistance and a degree of decentralized distribution (jurisdictional, circumstantially relevant, geographical-physical, epistemic, professional, cultural, etc.) that is not subject to localized control and a decision-making Politburo are necessary base requirements for even the possibility of prediction markets to be realized as such.

Clearly, decentralized prediction markets like Augur are at an early, experimental stage of development, but they are gaining more exposure and liquidity as more people enter the market, which is driving development. Liquidity and the active participation of as many actors as possible are more conditions for prediction markets to efficiently function as such. Therefore, designing different applications tailored to the interests and needs of different types of audiences (that use the Augur protocol in the back-end) is a crucial step towards developing and refining prediction markets as a public service. 

Veil: An Augur Front-end and Prediction Markets Relayer

Veil is an Augur interface and an 0x relayer for Augur markets which launched on January 15th (triggering a surge in the price of REP which almost doubled by January 19th). Building on top of Augur and 0x, Veil aims to bring prediction markets to the mainstream by providing a more streamlined, easy-to-use version of the Augur platform. However, while Augur itself is a decentralized protocol (with the Forecast Foundation ensuring its continued support and development), Veil is an actual company (based on the Cayman Islands) that hosts products interacting with the set of on-chain contracts constituting the Augur framework. As such, initially, Veil isn't available to some jurisdictions (e.g., the US, Syria, North Korea, Iran, etc.)

From the Veil Discord.

Another defining feature of Veil is its use of the 0x protocol in handling exchange and maintaining a distinct order book specific to Augur's prediction markets. All markets listed on Veil are represented as Augur markets on Ethereum, with ETH used for payments (and Dai to be eventually introduced) and REP as the means for resolution (i.e., the oracle).

Off-chain Order Book and 0x Relayer

One of the drawbacks in using Augur is that every interaction takes place on-chain (thus, slow, expensive and subject to fluctuating gas fees). In aiming to make trading in Augur markets easier, cheaper and faster, Veil implements an off-chain order book based on 0x. 0x allows for giving someone a cryptographically signed message off-chain (on a piece of paper, an e-mail, etc.) that they can then take to the blockchain and complete a trade using the 0x on-chain settlement infrastructure embodied in a set of smart contracts. Veil is as such 0x's first prediction market relayer.

The 0x protocol is basically comprised of a standard order schema in the form of a message (specifying the intent to enter into a trade and a manner of arranging data into a cryptographically signed packet) coupled with a corresponding set of on-chain contracts responsible for the settlement of trades directly on the blockchain. As an open protocol for decentralized exchange, it is intended to serve as a basic building block that may be combined with other protocols to drive increasingly sophisticated dApps.

0x even includes an exchange module for the EVM that allows smart contracts to natively execute trades in a single line of Solidity code (Dharma and dYdX build on top of that).

exchange.fill(...order, value);

Veil Markets: Crypto Derivatives, Meme Economy 

Veil supports binary (yes/no, short/long) and scalar (likelihood expressed in ETH) Augur markets (without categorical/multiple choice ones) and is particularly focused on crypto derivatives (such as Bitcoin futures or Ethereum gas prices). These are interesting, useful markets because they bring exposure to Bitcoin on Ethereum (another mechanism for that is wBTC, or wrapped Bitcoin, the subject of an upcoming article on wrapped tokens), while the gas price and hashrate markets are a robust hedging instrument for relayers paying gas for users. 

Another category is betting markets on the popularity of Internet memes - users can wager on the future popularity of viral images based on the number of upvotes in the /r/MemeEconomy subreddit. Specific Augur markets can also be nominated by users for listing and curation on Veil via the web application.

A useful guide to the Augur market economics is available as a Medium post on Veil's blog.

Veil Ether and Virtual Augur Shares

Since Veil uses 0x for trading Augur shares, they need to wrap their ETH and approve an 0x smart contract for trading and control of the balance of shares. For that purpose, Veil uses Veil Ether - an extended fork of Wrapped Ether (WETH) with a custom depositAndApprove function that deposits ETH and sets an allowance in a single transaction. 

Augur shares, on the other hand, are wrapped as Virtual Augur Shares - a template for ERC-20 tokens approved for trading on 0x and redeemable for shares in specific Augur markets. In other words, these are Veil-specific forks of existing contracts adapted to work with 0x while being interoperable with Augur and the established Ethereum technical standards. 

Both Veil.js and the Veil smart contracts have been open sourced and are available on Github.

Other Features

The leaderboard tracks user performance and activity, while an embedded payout calculator includes estimated maximum losses, gains and a graphical representation of the potential payout in the order form.

Guesser

Guesser is yet another UI (user interface) layer on top of Augur, designed for predicting short-term event outcomes of simple binary markets. It offers the most minimal, basic, stripped down version of Augur - a kind of layman's introduction to the general concept of prediction markets, how they work in practice on an elementary level, and where the fun is in it all.

Guesser just launched on the 29th of January, gradually onboarding the first users onto the mainnet release. (It is not immediately open to the general public at large. They are taking a more cautious, stepwise approach). Also, Guesser will initially curate the markets listed and there will be a total of six markets at a time (dynamically replaced once a market ends).

The goal is to foster a community of market makers and more smoothly onboard the less technical public into Augur prediction markets, so this is thought of taking place through a steady process of gradually getting users accustomed little by little, perhaps eventually becoming acclimatized to the unique trader environment of prediction markets in an age where "data is the new oil".

Guesser on testnet.

Another selection criterion is that markets listed will be kept binary - that is, yes/no, short/long, either/or and "winner takes all" types of markets, the simplest category of Augur markets (to understand, create, and trade). And there is to be a strong preference for short-term markets that end in no more than a week (considering how the sense of urgency is more likely to inspire interest and provoke participation).

The main goal and purpose at this stage are to provide as much liquidity as possible, simplifying Augur to what is easiest and most appealing while at the same time easily accessible and within just a few clicks. For updates and relevant news, follow Guesser on Twitter, otherwise, for official announcements and more detailed blog posts, check out Medium.

Augur 2.0

Like some other Ethereum-based tokens, REP (Reputation, Augur's native token) bestows certain responsibilities and expectations on its holders as token ownership gives holders the right to contribute work to the Augur network. The work REP holders do, reporting on and resolving outcomes of events, is critical to the success of the platform (of course, they also take fees for their services). Which is why with Augur v2 in 2019 a "use it or lose it" feature will be implemented that makes REP holders who don't vote at the end of the dispute to lose their REP.  

Other important upgrades and modifications include integration of Dai, the MakerDAO managed Ethereum stablecoin which decreases the risks associated with exposure to volatility and the wild market swings that often characterize the market space of digital and crypto-assets. Augur tokens will also be ERC-777 (ERC-20 backward compatible) and other contract optimizations will further reduce frictions and gas costs.

Cryptoeconomics of Engineering an Efficient Prediction Market

The crypto-economics of Augur are unproven (and also changing considerably from v1 to v2) and it is not entirely clear whether or not the system will hold up over time or if the incentive model will end up breaking as different (and differently motivated) actors enter the system. Incentivai is a tool for testing incentive structures and mechanism designs of smart contract economies (with ML agents estimating likely patterns of behavior). Piotr Grudzien has posted a write up on the simulation of the Augur economy using the Incentivai tool.

Conclusion and Additional Resources

The Augur white paper by the Forecast Foundation, last updated in July 2018.

Predictions.global, the most popular website for browsing Augur markets (the "Coinmarketcap of the Augur ecosystem"), recently acquired by Veil.

Augur.casino is an independently hosted Augur node via IPFS. One can access Augur via .casino, but it is not advisable to trade or create markets through anything other than the Augur application run locally (though it takes a few hours to sync when running for the first time).

Pdot Index uses decentralized prediction markets to track the status and success of celebrities and public figures (with indexes such as the Donald Trump index, etc.).

Reporters.chat is a service that allows users to easily track Augur market disputes, see who is reporting and staking REP on what outcomes and participate in dispute resolution.

Augur Insider Volatility Index (AIVIX) is found at augurinsider.com.

Logfile.info is a website for browsing dApp log history (similar to a blockchain explorer, but for querying historical logs). It has support for Augur and provides means for figuring out what happened in the past.

Veil and Augur public Discord servers.

"The Fall Of Intrade And The Business Of Betting On Real Life", a detailed article about the unusual story of Intrade.

Augurscore.org, a site for exploring the accuracy of the probability estimates generated by Augur (using the Augur API for pulling data from an Augur node and Python to process the data).

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

[amitstk-blog]

Project Update 1

As I began my research of unraveling the “Immersive experience” I was looking through different books, online articles and texts and different companies that claim to create these experiences. At first I was looking for different definitions for Immersive and here are few gems I’ve found:

"People love the I-word," said Noah Nelson, who produces the noproscenium.com newsletter about immersive theater. Immersive culture, he says, could best be described as site specific, non-traditional or experiential art and entertainment that breaks the fourth wall or otherwise envelopes the viewer. "For me, it means a force, it's all around you but it also goes through you. It's not just a 360-degree set. It makes you part of it."

“ The arts buzzword of 2016:’immersive’ “ , L.A Times Dec 22, 2016

“Immersion is the subjective impression that one is participating in a comprehensive, realistic experience. Interactive media now enable various degrees of digital immersion. The more a virtual immersive experience is based on design strategies that combine actional, symbolic, and sensory factors, the greater the participant’s suspension of disbelief that she or he is “inside” a digitally enhanced setting.”

Dede, Chris. "Immersive interfaces for engagement and learning." science 323, no. 5910 (2009): 66-69.

As I was reading more and more texts I understood that this topic is :

A - incredibly fascinating to me, and has a great research potential.

B - very diverse ranging from theatre to VR : both are leading developers of the field .

C - It lacks clear definitions and research when it comes to the link between experience and technology.

I’ve started exploring “Immersed in technology” , a book of articles from 94’ summing group experimentation with VR leading different immersive projects. I could not think about the fact that now while VR and AR are “exploding” with fundings and projects and no real research is being conducted, or anything similar to what was conducted almost 25 years ago. I feel that new technologies will be able to shade new light on these subjects once again. I hope that my research will be a small milestone in the direction of how to explore these new technologies and how the intersect with other immersive fields as well. I feel like I’m headed on to a great start with great findings so far and I’m very excited to keep working on this.

I’ll finish with another great quote from 94’ that is still relevant as ever by Douglas MacLeod: “Most worrisome of all, a new approach to cultural initiatives suggest that all explorations must have a commercial or revenue-generating potential. While the effects of these pressures remain to be seen, it is very possible that this book documents a project that could never happen again” .

[kingoftabor-blog]

Coming up with Media for 3D Projection Mapping

videomapping In my recent knowledge planning for tremendous canvases (the sides of buildings) I have discovered several helpful guidelines and tips. The objective of this report is to investigate these discoveries with the intention of building 3D projection mapping styles additional effective especially for inexperienced designers. The initial matter that becomes clear when viewing function at these kinds of a large scale is pace. The designs and animation are at first produced and previewed on a computer monitor - significantly less than 2' x 3'. Even preview projections are not often bigger than 20' across. On viewing the very same sequences participate in on a canvas many orders of magnitude much larger the speed at which occasions transpire is drastically magnified. As an case in point, a 3D projection mapping task I intended and directed coated all 4 sides of a 450 foot tall creating. This signifies a a lot more than two hundred fold raise in dimension, as a result aspects and transitions that crawl at a snail's rate on the personal computer monitor, transfer at a velocity that would seem unrelated when executed in the real exhibit. To look at it in another way: transferring 1" on the laptop display screen (a pretty smaller distance relative to the complete monitor) equals a motion of twenty five ft -on a making of this sizing, very a big distance for a spectator seeing from the audience. Editorial transitions are subject matter to the identical issues - there is just much more facts to be processed when this kind of a massive location of ones subject of eyesight is lively. The remedy is basically to modify kinds aesthetic point of reference pertaining to timing. What seems alarmingly slow on a very small computer system display will be just fine when masking the side of a substantial creating. A handful of tactics can be employed to assist in this exercise. The very first strategy is borrowed from visible effects perform for movies, especially 3D kinds in which pacing concerns are related (for comparable causes). Make a actual entire world scale reference in your preview window. An excellent addition to this, beside the noticeable yardstick and neighborhood functions, is scale human beings. A uncomplicated silhouette from the preview screen is very helpful. Employing the zoom functionality, preview the animation at numerous zoom ranges shelling out interest to the measurement of the silhouette relative to your sizing. 1:one will show true velocity (things will usually zip by way of the display screen in a flash - excellent to see), and two:1 and so forth. will give the impact of standing in the back again of the audience with people in entrance of you. This technique can aid in making use of one more (conventional 2nd animators) method - pantomime. Whilst zoomed at a variety of near ratios, find out the choreography as if you ended up pushing the aspects about with your fingers like actors generally do with heads-up displays in large tech Hollywood movies. After the rhythm of the motion is discovered, you can then get yet another pre-visualization help by taking this 'performance' out to someplace there are extremely huge buildings, and 'perform' the choreography as if it was taking place on the making you are standing in entrance of. Bringing your laptop or iPad alongside with the reference film can aid if remembering the rhythms is a new apply to you. A next refinement to this technique can be extra after a relaxed pacing tactic has been arrived at by use of the previously mentioned procedure. This strategy involves the addition of audio. A click on-track (A recorded metronome employed by musicians to keep in sync on overdubbed recordings) can be really handy for developing a 'backbone' speed. This will keep you 'under the speed limit' so to talk and has the more benefit of generating an classy pacing unity. If the click on keep track of is way too monotonous only use it as a reference to select a rhythmic piece of audio at the identical speed. (For non-musicians search up the time period BPM). The other main area of problem for accomplishing high quality on these kinds of presentations is distinction ratios. It is disappointing (to say the minimum) to have types finely crafted visuals switch flat, grey, and desaturated on viewing them in context. The perfect method is to have regulate of the ambient light in the presentation venue. In this highly unlikely and best case, one merely would preserve all competing light sources off at the time of the show, allowing the projections to engage in in the equivalent of a dark theatre. The realities of 3D projection mapping displays are fairly diverse - almost never (if at any time) does one have the chance to current their get the job done in these a pristine environment. Ambient light-weight resources are all over the place and can not be controlled at all. There will likely be nothing ni your exhibit that comes everywhere close to the deep blacks of your computer system display screen. In most scenarios the contrast ratio of the method product have to be modified to engage in agreeably in the context it will surface. If at all achievable, visit the location for the presentation with a camera, and acquire as several photos of the lights ailments as achievable. While the pictures on their own will distort the lights conditions, they will nonetheless be a helpful reminder of the resources and degree of ambient mild existing. Import these images into your preview and use them for reference. Use them as backgrounds. Experiment with adjustments in the distinction of your plan so that the product appears to be like presentable in this context. An exceptional way to examination and preview this, no matter of whether on-web-site pictures is possible, is to do small scale projections in adverse lighting situations. Attempt undertaking previews in wide daylight or if indoors, with function lights on. Eventually, in absence of any of these tests processes, perform it safe and change the contrast ratio (ranges in Photoshop) by 'crushing the blacks' as considerably as you can without having entirely destroying the photographs. This will improve the saturation as properly but almost certainly not sufficient. Following use Hue/Lightness/Saturation (also in Photoshop) to increase the saturation as substantially as possible with no destroying the integrity of the images. Normally talking this is a scenario the place weighty-handed will shell out off - this is not the position for finesse or subtlety. If the previously mentioned screening tactics are readily available, use them to do an A-B comparison involving the pre-colour-corrected materials and the post-corrected content. 9 times out of ten you will discover that the content presents greater with the blacks and saturation 'crushed' and that no important subtleties will be dropped. The magnificence of 3D projection mapping is in the fitting of the materials to to context (area) and the choreography of the narrative - the real projection by itself is a lot a lot more of a brute force physical exercise and optimizing ones method for the issues inherent in the medium will let the finer details of storytelling together with the majesty and virtuosity inherent in the medium, to be appreciated to their fullest. In summary: keep in mind to preserve the pacing appropriate for the scale of the demonstrate. Set up references for relative dimensions and use a rhythmic audio product to evaluate pacing. Verify and evaluate contrast ratios where ever doable and use prevues in challenging lights conditions for examining. Crush the contrast and saturation of your elements, and know that with these critical ideas in spot, the inventiveness and spectacle of your display and types will stand out with out interruptions.

[beebrianna-blog]

Creating Media for 3D Projection Mapping

videomapping In my modern practical experience designing for tremendous canvases (the sides of structures) I have found quite a few beneficial recommendations and methods. The objective of this short article is to discover these discoveries with the intention of generating 3D projection mapping models far more prosperous specifically for inexperienced designers. The initially thing that turns into evident when viewing perform at these kinds of a huge scale is speed. The types and animation are to begin with developed and previewed on a laptop display - considerably less than 2' x 3'. Even preview projections are almost never much larger than 20' throughout. Upon looking at the same sequences participate in on a canvas many orders of magnitude larger the pace at which occasions transpire is significantly magnified. As an illustration, a 3D projection mapping job I intended and directed covered all four sides of a 450 foot tall building. This signifies a a lot more than 200 fold improve in dimensions, therefore aspects and transitions that crawl at a snail's rate on the computer system monitor, move at a velocity that appears unrelated when executed in the true demonstrate. To glance at it in an additional way: shifting one" on the computer display (a fairly small length relative to the overall display screen) equals a movement of 25 feet -on a building of this sizing, fairly a huge distance for a spectator looking at from the audience. Editorial transitions are subject matter to the same considerations - there is only more facts to be processed when such a huge spot of ones field of vision is active. The resolution is only to transform kinds aesthetic point of reference relating to timing. What seems alarmingly sluggish on a tiny pc display will be just wonderful when masking the aspect of a big making. A several methods can be employed to help in this exercise. The very first strategy is borrowed from visual effects work for movies, especially 3D types exactly where pacing concerns are equivalent (for similar factors). Make a real world scale reference in your preview window. An excellent addition to this, beside the obvious yardstick and nearby functions, is scale human beings. A easy silhouette from the preview display is quite helpful. Using the zoom purpose, preview the animation at a variety of zoom amounts shelling out focus to the sizing of the silhouette relative to your size. 1:1 will demonstrate genuine speed (items will often zip via the monitor in a flash - good to see), and 2:1 etc. will give the effect of standing in the back of the audience with men and women in front of you. This technique can support in working with an additional (standard Second animators) technique - pantomime. Although zoomed at a variety of shut ratios, study the choreography as if you have been pushing the elements about with your hands like actors frequently do with heads-up displays in high tech Hollywood flicks. After the rhythm of the motion is uncovered, you can then get an additional pre-visualization aid by using this 'performance' out to somewhere there are really substantial properties, and 'perform' the choreography as if it was going on on the making you are standing in entrance of. Bringing your laptop computer or iPad alongside with the reference motion picture can help if remembering the rhythms is a new follow to you. A second refinement to this approach can be extra once a comfy pacing tactic has been arrived at by way of use of the over approach. This approach involves the addition of sound. A click-observe (A recorded metronome applied by musicians to remain in sync on overdubbed recordings) can be really useful for developing a 'backbone' rate. This will hold you 'under the velocity limit' so to communicate and has the additional benefit of developing an tasteful pacing unity. If the click on monitor is far too monotonous basically use it as a reference to opt for a rhythmic piece of audio at the identical velocity. (For non-musicians look up the time period BPM). The other big spot of worry for obtaining top quality on these kinds of displays is distinction ratios. It is disappointing (to say the least) to have kinds finely crafted visuals turn flat, gray, and desaturated upon viewing them in context. The best tactic is to have manage of the ambient light-weight in the presentation venue. In this hugely unlikely and perfect circumstance, just one simply would preserve all competing light resources off at the time of the display, making it possible for the projections to play in the equal of a dark theatre. The realities of 3D projection mapping demonstrates are fairly diverse - rarely (if ever) does one particular have the opportunity to current their work in these kinds of a pristine surroundings. Ambient mild resources are everywhere and can not be controlled at all. There will probably be nothing ni your show that comes anywhere near to the deep blacks of your computer system monitor. In most situations the distinction ratio of the method materials ought to be modified to engage in agreeably in the context it will seem. If at all possible, check out the location for the presentation with a digicam, and take as several pictures of the lights ailments as doable. When the images them selves will distort the lighting conditions, they will nonetheless be a helpful reminder of the resources and diploma of ambient mild existing. Import these images into your preview and use them for reference. Use them as backgrounds. Experiment with changes in the contrast of your program so that the product looks presentable in this context. An outstanding way to check and preview this, regardless of no matter if on-site images is possible, is to do smaller scale projections in adverse lighting situations. Attempt executing previews in wide daylight or if indoors, with perform lights on. Finally, in absence of any of these testing processes, perform it risk-free and adjust the distinction ratio (degrees in Photoshop) by 'crushing the blacks' as far as you can without having totally destroying the pictures. This will enhance the saturation as nicely but almost certainly not enough. Subsequent use Hue/Lightness/Saturation (also in Photoshop) to enhance the saturation as a lot as achievable with out destroying the integrity of the illustrations or photos. Commonly speaking this is a predicament where significant-handed will pay out off - this is not the position for finesse or subtlety. If the above testing methods are offered, use them to do an A-B comparison between the pre-color-corrected product and the submit-corrected content. 9 periods out of 10 you will discover that the material offers superior with the blacks and saturation 'crushed' and that no essential subtleties will be misplaced. The elegance of 3D projection mapping is in the fitting of the substance to to context (surface) and the choreography of the narrative - the real projection alone is much much more of a brute pressure physical exercise and optimizing types plan for the issues inherent in the medium will enable the finer factors of storytelling alongside with the majesty and virtuosity inherent in the medium, to be appreciated to their fullest. In summary: don't forget to preserve the pacing appropriate for the scale of the show. Set up references for relative sizes and use a rhythmic audio gadget to evaluate pacing. Test and evaluate distinction ratios wherever possible and use prevues in challenging lights circumstances for checking. Crush the contrast and saturation of your elements, and know that with these important ideas in location, the inventiveness and spectacle of your demonstrate and designs will stand out without having distractions.