#negative black whole space in american popular memory

[rotzaprachim]

the great depression is like. such a specific interesting period to look at as represented in american literature because i think to an extent books are almost afraid of it, and it brings up these apocalyptically disturbing issues of capitalist destruction, climate destruction, violent racism, nativism, isolationism, antisemitism, agricultural disfunction, wealth inequality and the (so called) *hypothetical* space of what economic disaster means in real time for ordinary people (notice how the us now flinches from considering economic issues *significant* enough reason to be considered a *refugee). and the 30′s aren’t like the 1920′s, or the 50′s, or even now the 80′s or 90′s in that they can’t be so easily commodified into a saleable aesthetic of *the past* by certain groups and actors or consumed as pure nostalgia (something that, of course, requires stripping the above decades of almost everything that happened in them.) one on hand it’s because it’s perhaps harder to find sale-able aesthetic items in an era whose *aesthetic* if defined in terms of iconic images is marked by depravation, and ingenuity in the fact of depravation: dresses cut from flour sacks, yellowed photos of migrant workers, model-t’s and worn-out buster browns. but who wants to buy the dust bowl? all this accounts for why i think there’s this odd lost decade from the greater portion of american middle-brow literature and filmmaking and straight up pop culture reminiscence of a period that inarguably changed the us. it’s interesting. 

 i say on one hand because on the other, it really struck me how much of the american rendition of *cottagecore* and *getting back to nature/the farm* seems to me to dwell on some of those aesthetics of this period, removed from all context. there’s a lot of similar-silhouetted dresses, with extensive indie natural fibers fabric replacing the flour sacks that were the only thing many people could afford to dress their daughters in, and there’s washing your baby in a bucket, which looks nice, even though you do have running water. there’s an overall technological level that seems about 1930′s to me, and a focus on the kind of aesthetic sides of gardening, *farming*, washing clothes by hand and canning foods in mason jars that ignores the fact those were survival mechanisms for many people, that none of them ever stopped but changed with technology, that every aspect of food production is nuanced, messy, and dependent on extraordinarily complex factors of cost and terroir that make accessibility and sustainability contingent on a great number of local factors that don’t make such aesthetic instagram content. there are biscuit cutters and wringers for laundry and sometimes chickens, but there isn’t making saurkraut in 5-gallon plastic ace hardware buckets, or working in community college greenhouses to revive indigenous plants or food ways, or heritage seed banks, or butchering meat on plastic tarps, or replacing your ground beef with vegan replacements because that’s how you choose to decrease your environmental impact in a city of sixteen million people. and i think it’s interesting, because of the mobius strip of a (white, anglo, wealthy) turning away from so many of the exact issues that caused this aesthetic in the first place at the expense of an obliteration of historical understanding at a time when we have so much to learn from the past and for the present. you can try to sell the great depression, but how do you make money off of migrant workers, farmers watching land go dry with drought, hungry children, and climate refugees? how do you sell the dust bowl? 

[q--uee--n]

So, here’s Part 1 of my shamelessly pandering, fluffy Post-Zero Requiem headcanons/notes because I just want everyone to be happy and content and I don’t care how unrealistic some of these are. fuck

(Note: the following 999.9% disregards Re;surrection and falls in line with the events of the original series.) 

Suzaku (Zero)

• at first throws himself into being Zero and protecting Nunnally, not at all thinking he deserves anything but the misery that’s been placed upon him. 

• mistakingly believes Nunnally hates him for murdering her brother. She ultimately sets him straight, and though they’re fairly close, there are still moments where Suzaku’s guilt becomes an obstacle to their relationship.

• for the first few months, he is cold and stoic as Zero, but as time passes and he grows into the role, he begins to soften. Still, his Zero is relatively distant and mute compared to Lelouch’s grand, theatrical version. 

• misses the hell out of Euphemia and Lelouch (even if his relationship with the latter was more complex than a Rubik's Cube) but, over time, slowly reconciles with their deaths. Slowly especially applies to Euphy’s case. It took a while, but he eventually limits his visits to Euphy’s memorial from once every two weeks to once a month to once every other month to once a year (in the distant future). 

• formally reconnects with Kaguya after she brusquely informs him that she’s aware of his identity. She manages to swindle him into having tea with her. Every week. It’s at one of these meetings where he breaks down and apologizes for all the pain he’s caused her, but she reassures him that she’s just happy they’re together again. They often simultaneously laugh and gag at the fact that they used to be engaged, and Suzaku becomes so attached to her, Kaguya’s guard detail starts to become suspicious of his intentions.

• on the subject of his relationships, he, against all odds, becomes close to C.C. and even closer to Kallen. He and C.C. have a weird understanding based on their love for Lelouch, and he bonds with Kallen (once she maneuvers around her own issues) over their mutual painful experiences, which is where they find common ground. 

• Gino discovers his identity by accident. Milly does so on purpose. Both are rather bizarre, cautionary tales, but as a result of them, Zero’s personal associates are up by two. 

• ironically has a large following among small children, who are at the receiving end of his softest interactions with the public. Mothers everywhere adore him just for that. As do stores that make the most profit selling Zero birthday cakes. 

• unironically has a large following among horny young adults. Is the topic of a popular tabloid, Zero Weekly, which mostly speculates about his sex life and what he looks like underneath the mask. He’s scandalized by the magazine, as are Kallen and Nunnally, but C.C. and Kaguya love it.

• utilizes multiple disguises, in part because Kallen refuses to be seen in a public setting with him while he’s Zero for a second time and the rest is because Nunnally just likes putting together outfits for him. 

• in the little free time he has, his hobbies consist of feeding the stray cats he’s accumulated over the years, reading poetry (it reminds him of Lelouch and a kinder time when they were friends), and watching the ridiculously bad American soap operas he swears he doesn’t watch. Their content should make bad memories surface, but they’re just so horribly acted, the effect falls flat.

• only after years of it being drilled into his head, he eventually accepts that he doesn’t have to be alone if he doesn’t want to and that the whole Zero thing doesn’t have to be completely miserable. 

• still healing from, well, everything but has acquired a loyal support base in the few friends he has, and though he still doesn’t quite think he deserves any happiness he’s found, he’s in too deep to reject it (and there’s no way in hell that anyone will let him). 

• cries the first time someone says they love him, halfway out of disbelief because he doesn’t think he’s worthy of anyone’s love and halfway out of relief because he’d never imagined there’d come a day where the phrase was directed at him again.

C.C.

• hangs around after Lelouch’s death because she can, not because she, god forbid, cares about the people in her life. Nope. Not at all, thank you very much. 

• lives in Suzaku’s quarters in the palace until he gets so frustrated by the pizza boxes piling up in his room that he asks Nunnally to give her her own space. C.C. is more than happy to move when she learns the room is Cheese-kun-themed. 

• formally befriends Kallen after the realization that they’re both assholes with trust issues. They have bi-monthly girls’ nights of epic proportions, ones that usually culminate in a single whopping bad decision. 

• is both intrigued and gobsmacked by the fact that Suzaku is still so cordial to her despite the circumstances and the things she puts him through daily. He’s the opposite of Lelouch in every way, but that’s what draws her to him the most. 

• may or may not be attracted to Suzaku. It’s hard to tell. 

• is online friends with Milly. Neither is aware of the identity of the other, but they’re nonetheless a powerful force that troll the internet with spam and shitposting.

• no one knows her real name. Except for Kaguya, of all people, and no one knows how or when or why they became close enough to be on first names basis, and it just doesn’t make sense at all, to the point where Kallen loses sleep at night thinking about it.

• once recounted the time Benjamin Franklin told her off to Suzaku after he returned from a particularly despondent assignment. Afterward, they stayed up eating pizza and reminiscing over fond memories they had of Lelouch, which allowed Suzaku to see a kinder, more vulnerable side of C.C. for the first time. It also marked the beginning of their weekly sleepovers, though they don’t refer to them as such.

• sometimes goes riding with Nunnally on weekends. The younger girl reminds her of her brother, and like his, Nunnally’s heart is pure and kind. She gives C.C. a warm feeling similar to the one she got from Lelouch.

• is constantly traveling and moving about but always returns to Nunnally and Suzaku’s side at their residence in Japan. 

• is well aware of the fact that everyone she’s come to accept as friends will die while she’ll remain living. This is her biggest point of contention, and she contemplates leaving more often than not, but she stays because she can’t leave.

•  "I said that Geass was the power of the king which would condemn you to a life of solitude. I think, maybe, that's not quite correct. Right, Lelouch?"

• has stopped accumulating experience and started living.

Kallen

• finishes her last year of high school and, soon thereafter, becomes a full-time college student. Focusing on her education, she takes time off the Black Knights but still works as a reserve officer and is never without the key to her beloved Knightmare Frame. Because just in case, and Rakshata is always updating the Guren. 

• resented Zerozaku for months following the Requiem, even though she knew everything that happened was all according to Lelouch’s plan. She overcomes her negative feelings after coming across Suzaku at Euphemia’s grave and realizing he knows the pain she’s suffering. She finds that maybe they aren’t as different as she thought.

•  proves vital in helping Suzaku heal and vice versa. They’re both disasters, and they’re opposite in every sense of the word, but all that means is that they never manage to stunt each other, even when they just can’t understand each other.

• after they become friends, C.C. is her second most contacted person. Milly is her first because that woman cannot be trusted. 

• begins a charity in her brother Naoto’s name with the help of her mother. The charity is dedicated to reuniting families displaced by the war. 

• discovers she has an extremely high alcohol tolerance once she’s of age and could outdrink anyone at any time (”yes, Tamaki that also applies to you. ...Please, Ohgi’s son has higher tolerance than you”) but generally doesn’t fuck with alcohol because she doesn’t like the idea of becoming dependent on it. She makes enough bad decisions on her own, thanks. 

• is, like various other members of the original Order of the Black Nights, a hero of the rebellion and a bona fide celebrity, though she still has to work to support herself and her mother and is a tad bitter about that. Especially considering she has all the other “privileges” of celebrity such as sporadic street interviews while she’s on her commute to work.

• because of that one time she danced with Zero at that one party, everyone assumes they’re together, and the media plays it up. She can’t count the number of times she’s had to call in to news stations falsely referring to her as “Zero’s paramour”.

• “True or false? Are you involved with Zero?” “...Involved with–I’m not–who said–” “Ah. You hesitated. Does that confirm our suspicions?” “I didn’t hesitate because that shouldn’t have been a question” “Well, a source close to you informed us of the fact that–” “Source? What source–?” *cue the moment she realizes that the source is C.C. Or Milly. Or both.

• Gino is the source.

• sleeps over at the palace at Nunnally’s invitation when her mother isn’t home and she’s feeling particularly lonely, sometimes sandwiched between C.C. and Suzaku in his room but the bed is more than large enough. It’s weird but it’s comfortable and it makes her feel that much more secure.

• grows out her hair. By the time she’s twenty-two, it’s almost as long as C.C.’s.

• still loves Lelouch with all her heart, but does eventually become open to pursuing a relationship. (”Gino wants to go out with you, doesn’t he? Why don’t you just say yes?” “Just because I said I was open to dating doesn’t mean I want to date Gino, C.C.” “I suppose you’re right. Although that could be because you want to fu–” “One more word out of you and I’ll put Cheese-kun in the shredder.”)

• changes her legal surname to “Kozuki”.

[shirlleycoyle]

How the Whiteboard Took Over the Office

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

You know something that you probably haven’t had to deal with in a while if you’re an office drone? The whiteboard.

A classic example of what happens when you have a space to collaborate, the whiteboard had a bit of a moment in the late 20th and early 21st century as offices around the world embraced them for writing down ideas and brainstorming with a group of their peers—all things that people now do in the discomfort of their own homes.

But as rumors emerge of people being pushed to go back to the office, the whiteboard might be ready for its big comeback, even if you, personally, might not be.

Let's talk whiteboards, dry-erase markers, and why the chalkboard stuck around for decades after it was made obsolete.

Image: Roman Mager/Unsplash

Before we talk about whiteboards, let’s discuss the dusty nostalgia of the chalkboard

I don’t know about you, but the most drive-me-crazy noise I can think of is nails on a chalkboard. It’s a pretty aggressively painful noise, and I don’t know about you, but when that’s my overarching memory of chalkboards, I’m fully in favor of retirement in most cases.

I will concede chalkboards are great in certain settings, such as when painted on a wall or used in a hipster restaurant or coffee shop, where the artistic value of the chalkboard outdoes the questionable functional value of the material.

But chalkboards were never perfect for their primary use case. Today we may talk about things about our computers in terms of dark mode, but we weren’t using bright, overbearing OLED screens to display information within a foot of our faces—we were trying to convey information using dark blocks of slate, usually black or a dark green and definitely not backlit, to teach students from a long distance. And honestly, it was hard to do—the contrast was simply bad, and it was just not as easy to see as a plain white surface.

For some reason, chalkboards evoke a certain quaintness in dining establishments. Image: Egor Myznik/Unsplash

And of course, chalkboards created lots of dust. And dust, honestly, sucks—a major byproduct of trying to display information on slate. Back in 2011—you know, literal decades after we were fully into the era of whiteboards—researchers with India’s National Environmental Engineering Research Institute researched the impact of chalk dust in a “clean room environment.” and found that while there was no toxic effect, it could create allergic byproducts.

And the research, highlighted in The Guardian by Ig Nobel prize organizer Marc Abrahams, generated this once-in-a-lifetime bon mot: “During teaching, entry of chalk dust in the respiratory system through nasopharyngeal region and mouth could be extensive in teachers due to their proximity to the board and frequent opening of mouth during lectures and occasional gasping and heavier breathing due to exhaustion.”

Which is why it’s probably a good thing that we finally made the move to the whiteboard, which solved the problems with contrast and, at least for some teachers and students, minimized the potential health impacts that came with teaching with such a dusty material.

But it took a while for the whiteboard to finally break through in the classroom. A big reason as to why might very much be tradition—because there is evidence that the whiteboard was introduced more than 80 years ago, and it didn’t take off for decades afterwards.

“The old-fashioned blackboard is on its way out of the schoolroom today. Whiteboards are the newest thing. In fact, the whole idea of going to school is becoming glamorous.”

— The lead sentences from a 1950 Associated Press story reporting on new trends highlighted at the convention of the American Association of School Administrators. (Yes, that’s correct. There was a time we talked about whiteboards like we talked about Chromebooks or iPads.) At the time, the report noted that the primary tool that teachers could use with the writing surface was crayons.

There is an apparent whiteboard inventor who is not getting any credit for his work, despite originating the idea two decades before other claimed inventors

We know that the whiteboard is common today. But who the heck invented it?

This is a classic example of a story where if you simply Google it, you’ll miss out on some clear evidence of prior art. (And if you are a regular Tedium reader, you know the importance of looking past the point where the answer emerges.)

If you look on websites about whiteboards (here’s an example), you will read two names credited for its invention—Martin Heit and Albert Stallion, both of whom came upon the idea in the 1950s. Heit apparently surfaced on the idea after using a marker on a film negative, while Stallion, who worked for a steel company, came upon the idea of putting enamel on steel—an idea apparently met with skepticism from his employer.

Both sparks led to companies that eventually commercialized the devices in the early 1960s. Stallion founded a company, Magiboards, that is still around today; Heit, who died last year, sold his patents to a company called Dri-Mark, which is better-known today for selling the markers used to test whether or not a bill is counterfeit. (Which feels like a Tedium piece in and of itself.)

These two men may hold claims to popularizing the invention and introducing what became common materials for building whiteboards in the modern day, but evidence of putting writable white surfaces on boards predates their work by two decades.

One early claimant that surfaces at least two decades prior is a man named Paul F. Born, a mechanical engineer who (in a syndicated photo and newspaper article) is credited as installing one in a classroom in Elgin, Illinois, where he served as head of the district’s school board, in 1937. Given the chance to write on his invention (using compressed carbon rather than chalk), he wrote:

This “White Blackboard” is dedicated to the eyesight of school students and to the creation of a more cheerful atmosphere in the classroom.

A teacher said of the invention: “Boy, what a relief from the dismal, funeral-like appearance of most schoolrooms.”

If Born did invent it, evidence is relatively strong he was first—as mentions of the idea picked up soon after Born’s experiment surfaced in the news—but he does not seem to have patented the idea. There were differences—rather than plastic or steel, Born’s innovation relied on painted glass. Nonetheless, Born’s work caught the attention of Edward Podolsky, a medical doctor and writer whose book The Doctor Prescribes Colors, published in 1938, nicely dovetailed into Born’s idea.

“Not only is black chalk on white board easier to read, but the white color of the board imparts a decidedly cheerier atmosphere to the entire classroom,” Podolsky wrote of the Elgin experiment. “After several months of use it has been found that besides. relieving eyestrain, the whiteboards combined with light-colored walls make the classroom more cheerful, and learning a much more pleasant adventure.”

This seems to be the general vibe around whiteboards at the time—the first mention of the material in The New York Times, in 1938, seemed to imply that educators and parents alike were ready for a little less blackboard in the classroom. “Yellowboards and greenboards have been tried and found wanting,” the short editorial comment stated. “But glass treated with white pigment seems to fit the bill.”

And it did nonetheless draw skeptics. After news of Born’s work earned a strong reaction in Texas’ Lubbock Morning Avalanche in the fall of 1937, members of the school board, not understanding that chalk would not be necessary for a white blackboard, expressed concerns that “things would get pretty dirty” if black chalk was used. (To be fair, the newspaper made it seem like black chalk was necessary based on the cutline in the prior day’s paper.)

Of course, if you’re reading this, you most assuredly know that the whiteboard did not enter most classrooms until the 1990s or later. After a few years of early interest—including an appearance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that may have been the first public experience many New Yorkers had with whiteboards—the Times barely mentioned the surface again for more than 40 years afterwards. Personally, I graduated more than 20 years ago, and can’t remember seeing a single whiteboard in my various schools during my time in K-12. (Maybe I wasn’t observant.)

But when I went to college, I remember they were relatively common—though not fully replacing chalkboards. If the whiteboard was clearly better, why did the chalkboard stay so dominant for so long afterwards?

For one thing, we have to talk about the materials used to write on whiteboards.

1993

The year the company Microfield Graphics first released Softboard, a dry-erase board that featured built-in networking capabilities. Basically, you could write on the board using traditional dry-erase markers, and then the board would detect the colors using built-in laser scanners and recreate them for virtual users over a dial-up modem connection. Despite its seemingly niche nature, the tool found lots of use in the federal government during the late ’90s, with FCW reporting that NASA, the U.S. Postal Service, and the U.S. Supreme Court all using the tool. The idea found interest among computer science students who saw an opportunity to render whiteboards obsolete. Oops.

Admit it, this is a familiar setting for you. Image: Slidebean/Unsplash

Why the whiteboard became popular in the corporate world before the classroom

It, of course, took a while to come up with the right approach to solving the problem of blackboards. It wasn’t just having white surfaces to write on—it was also about coming up with a way to clean those boards with the same ease of use as a chalk eraser, dust notwithstanding.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, two competing teams—one in Japan and one in the United States—were working to solve a problem that perhaps threatened the long-term mainstream status of the whiteboard: cleanup.

One inventor working on this was named Jerome Woolf, who worked for a company named Techform Laboratories, who developed the plastic surface and the general concept of the easy-drying and quick-erasing ink from the markers. The other was the Pilot Pen company, which perfected the ink that became the key element of dry-erase markers.

“The writing ink of the present invention is designed to dry almost immediately after being applied to an impermeable writing surface of metal, plastic or ceramic material, yet retain sufficient water after drying so that the ink may be removed from the writing surface by wiping with a dry erasing material even under conditions of low humidity,” the Pilot patent stated.

The dry-erase marker has become an overly common part of the business-world experience. Image: Mark Rabe/Unsplash

And once that problem was solved, the whiteboard found its way into businesses, becoming a hot commodity starting in the 1980s, but schools—where whiteboards were first implemented—proved much slower to embrace the technology. As a 1987 New York Times piece noted, whiteboards faced more practical concerns in schools that businesses generally didn’t have to worry about:

Whiteboards have not caught on well in schools because of higher prices and the tendency of students to walk off with the markers. But in corporate offices and conference rooms, it has been bye-bye blackboard, as the screech of the chalk and the cloud of chalk dust fade into memory. Aside from permitting color presentations, whiteboards can double as projection screens for slides or transparencies.

Whiteboards moved into schools slowly, however, and part of the reason for this is that they often weren’t retrofitted into old schools, but added to new ones, because it was treated as an element of the school’s design.

There’s also the element of permanence. For many businesses, whiteboards developed around thin layers of plastic are fine. But teachers were often working with whiteboards or chalk boards for hours each day, and their work needs to hold up for long periods of time. Which means that whiteboards in schools need to be made of higher-quality materials than whiteboards in offices.

Ultimately, when you break it down, a modern chalk board is not all that dissimilar to a modern whiteboard—these days, they’re both treated sheets of metal, something called a “porcelain” surface, which tends to cost more than the plastic sheets but is much higher quality. (After all, if you’re a school and whiteboards are essential to your teaching, you don’t want the cheap stuff.)

But the difference is what goes on those sheets; whiteboards tend to use glossy enamel, while chalk boards have moved away from slate and now use a less glossy, more ceramic enamel.

And, of course, there’s the whole nostalgia element of this. A 1996 Hartford Courant piece pointed to this when interviewing teachers critiquing the differing surfaces. One teacher told the newspaper that the familiar sound of chalkboards was important to them (and that they hated the smell of the markers), while a company that sold traditional chalkboards made the bet that they wouldn’t stick around.

“I think that the markers are just a fad,” said Dave Allen of the Connecticut Blackboard Company, which was still selling slate boards to schools.

That feels like a bad bet.

In the 1970s, artist John Baldessari perhaps created the first work that lived up to the whiteboard ethos, a self-explanatory document called “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art,” in which the phrase is written numerous times in a cursive script, not unlike the way that Bart Simpson wrote on chalkboards in the intro of The Simpsons.

As part of a broader artistic project at the school where he taught, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Baldessari had his students write the phrase all over white walls, and he did some of that writing himself. (He also disowned his earlier works, so there was no turning back. The boring art was dead.)

Baldessari’s approach, something of a modern art rallying cry, was basically dry-erase art without a dry-erase board. It looks like the kind of thing that people create with whiteboards today when they’re looking for some kind of mental spark that leads them to their next big idea. In a lot of ways, Baldessari was brainstorming at the widest possible scale.

These days, the whiteboard has found increasingly novel contexts, beyond the office or the classroom, and even the pandemic hasn’t entirely dampened its potential. A popular note-taking tool, the RocketBook, has gained popularity by mixing the best elements of whiteboards (that is, the erasability and reusability) into something that looks like a traditional notebook, offering a little of the manual and the automatic in one package.

But the thing is, whiteboards are amazingly well-suited to office environments, as they encourage deep thinking in a setting where anyone can pick up a dry-erase marker and go. Compare it to, say, journaling. Some people’s brains just work better that way.

My favorite collaborative moments involving a whiteboard didn’t involve a meeting or a discussion session, but a game of hangman on a wall of whiteboard paint during Friday-night happy hours. It created a way for us to mentally meet up with our coworkers over a beer and have a little fun that had nothing to do with impressing a client.

Whiteboards became a tool for collecting the storms of our brains in groups, a powerful element of discussion that went far beyond what we could do with paper and pen alone. And even in an era of screens, sometimes the handwriting just carries more power.

But let’s give some credit to the guy who made a pitch for them first, because it seems like he deserves a lot more notice than he’s been getting.

How the Whiteboard Took Over the Office syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/