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fellowstrangetownappreciator · 4 years ago

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The Strange Case of The Strangetown Metamorphosis

There is a mysterious Sim that appears in Strangetown.

That's like saying "there is a fish that appears in the ocean", I know, so I'll be a little more specific.

They are an adult whose memories show inconsistencies with those of their family members. Something is missing!

Alright. That's also not saying much, that's like half of the premades in vanilla, non-clean hoods.

They are immediately recognizable by their appearance and, dare I say it, have distinguishing features unique to them.

Well, that also kinda fits everyone...

They feature in more than one installment of the series.

Again, not that helpful. I mean, almost everybody from the base game hoods is (for better or worse) represented in TS3 or TS4.

They appear in TS2 for PSP!

Hmm...

They are a member of a wealthy family connected to science and paranormal.

And...

They are somehow connected to (possible) cloning.

I imagine that now you’re probably rolling your eyes and asking: Why didn’t I just simply say I was going to talk about Bella Goth?

Because... I’m not!

It’s Loki Beaker. In this mini-essay I’m going to speak about Loki, what is the mystery around him, what hints are there and what are some of the theories and which one do I fancy.

It’s basically a routine round of the popular game “connect EAxis’ oversights and glue them together into a headcanon”.

So without further ado, let me introduce you to:

The Mystery of Loki Beaker!

0: Preface: Loki who?

“As soon as he perfects his latest invention, Loki is sure to get the recognition he knows he deserves. In the meantime, he keeps himself busy by trying to assemble a nuclear reactor out of common household items.”

On the first glance, Loki as a Sim seems quite straightforward. He is a Knowledge Sim with a very eccentric personality. All his trait points are in the extremes, as you can see:

He is a scientist, a competent one at that, as proven by his high career level and the fun fact that some of the game’s horrible machinery you can buy for Aspiration points is attributed to his creation.

(It explains why are the Beakers the only ones who have the stuff lying around by default. It is normal for a Strangetown family to own a non-buyable reward object or two but those are career rewards, the Beakers are the only one who canonically own Aspiration points rewards.)

Even though he knows his stuff when it comes to his profession, he is very corrupt and tests his questionable projects on his captive, Nervous Subject.

To say that Loki is unpopular would be an understatement. No one but his wife Circe likes Loki, even his own sister is indifferent towards him. Yes, he has a sister. Her name is Erin and she also lives in Strangetown with a colorful collection of roommates.

Nothing mysterious about him so far. (apart from his eyebrows)

1: Characterization fallen apart

And then The Sims 3 happened. It was actually quite late into the game’s life cycle, the early 2013, when a beautiful nordic-themed world was released on TS3 Store. Its name was Aurora Skies and it featured Loki, Erin and their parents.

TS3 Loki is a child and Erin is a toddler.

Now I haven’t actually played Aurora Skies. I own (and love) TS3 but the price range for the Store worlds is too high for me, content-to-money wise. So there might be some hidden clues about the Beakers in their house or relationship panels that I haven’t been able to inspect but... not to sound cynical but I doubt it. I doubt such attention was given to detail of this family in Aurora Skies, as they don’t even have individual bios.

But... that is... fine? I mean, we have Loki’s TS2 bio...

Nope. Sure we do. And it would be fine if hair color and ambitions weren’t the only thing Loki and his younger self (from now on referred to as smol Loki) had in common.

Let’s take a look on smol Loki’s personality.

The first noticeable thing is that there is not a trace of Loki’s trademark villainy. He’s not Mean Spirited, he’s not Evil, he’s not even a No Sense of Humor Sim. His extreme neatness and hyperactivity are nowhere to be seen either. While it is true that TS3′s capabilities of defining personality are very limited as it picks “outstanding points” rather than a position of each trait on a scale, and it only has 5 slots (and tiny teeny 3 for children), it doesn’t make any sense still for the devs not to pick some more loki-esque traits for the precious slots they had.

Unless...

They didn’t care about Loki’s personality and there were no deeper intentions.

Unless the devs were trying to purposefully show us new angles of his character that either got suppressed while he was growing up, or manifest in ways that TS2′s scale system wasn’t able to show.

Could the Lucky trait in particular have had something to do with the change?

(Also, those traits of smol Loki are reason why I usually go for a Family Secondary Loki in TS2 and thus make Strangetown the purgatory of two unstable blonde Knowledge/Family sciency guys.)

We also must not omit that even though smol Loki didn’t display any of them, he still had all of Loki’s signature traits in him, as Loki in TS2 has his actual personality synced with the genetic one, meaning that there was something in there that caused him not to act so mean that got lost as he grew up. In other words, something brought up the worst in him.

And that’s not all. Smol Loki is not a regular TS3 child. You see, in TS3, premade children aren’t particularly known for being highly skilled experts. Neither are in TS2, for that matter, and it’s okay. It’s realistic.

Smol Loki has a skill maxed.

It is very rare for a premade regardless of age to already start with a maxed skill and I personally don’t know of any other premade children that do.

And it’s writing.

What does writing have to do with Loki? Does Loki write? Probably he has to, those academic papers aren’t gonna spawn out of thin air, but that’s not what the writing skill in TS3 (or the hidden writing skill in TS2) are about. They’re about creative writing only.

Ok, ok. How high is Loki’s Creativity skill, then? In TS2, skills are much broader, they more resemble skillsets than individual skills, and writing categorizes under Creativity. Bring out the skill panel!

Two. He has 2 points in Creativity. That is... low. That is actually very low, especially for a Sim that has supposedly been writing for fun since childhood. (and was a prodigy, while we’re at it) It is safe to say, I think, that if the player doesn’t make him do it, Loki doesn’t write anymore and he hasn’t been doing that for a long, long time.

While I would cynically admit that the dissonance in personalities might be just the lack of damns given from EAxis’ side, this seems to me too on the nose to be unintentional.

They would have no reason to bring the Beakers back without the “evil scientists” thing in mind. I mean, that’s what they’re iconic for. That’s what they’re recognizable by. (apart from their eyebrows)

So the person who was in charge of creating smol Loki probably knew they were recreating “Loki the mad scientist”.

So when they were picking the skill they use to demonstrate that this kid is gonna go far, they thought... “evil scientist = writing”...?

I would understand going for Creativity in general. I mean, Loki’s an inventor. That comes with the territory. But creativity as such isn’t really a skill in TS3. It’s divided to different activities.

Wouldn’t it make more sense just in general to pick logic, then? I mean, Loki isn’t that extremely logical by default but it is his second strongest skill and a feature unmistakably connected to being a scientist.

That’s what leads me to believe that writing plays a role in the story and it was chosen on purpose.

So how did a sweet little family-oriented boy talented with words transform into the ruthless catboy inventor we know and love?

And that, my friends, is the mystery of Loki Beaker.

2: A closer look at our environmentalist friends, the Beakers

If we want to get the full picture and come to a satisfying conclusion of some sorts, we need to inspect smol Loki’s surroundings. Maybe there is a clue to the continuous force or a traumatic event that shifted smol Loki’s direction in life?

Loki’s and Erin’s parents are named Gundrun and Bjorn. Even though their age would still allow it, they’re not present at the start of TS2′s Strangetown play, they’re long dead. Bjorn died before Erin became an adult and Gundrun died shortly before her son’s engagement to Circe. Because they died by the time Loki had (presumably) already long enrolled in his current life-path, we can safely rule out any tragic early death of parental figures scenario as a possible answer.

Gundrun is the only Beaker that canonically also writes. She has 5 points in the writing skill. She also shares some traits with Loki, namely the smarts and ambition.

But she has little to do with science and is way more business-oriented which is a trait she shares with Circe’s ancestors, for example her father. Maybe the families knew each other from business ventures even before they moved to Strangetown? It is stated in their memories that Loki and Circe first met when they were children. But I digress!

Anyway, I don’t see anything in Gundrun that would suggest any abusive behavior towards her son that might have triggered his drastic change. Possibly but not necessarily she might’ve been a bit absent but nothing out of ordinary.

And now the father, Bjorn.

Bjorn is the sciency half of the couple and works as an Aquatic Ecosystem Tweaker. Again, he has zero traits that would raise any red flags and he shares 4 out of 5 traits with either smol Loki or Loki. (I don’t know if Loki is a “natural cook” but he cooks quite well, so I think that counts.)

What’s interesting about Bjorn, though, is his speech that serves as a flavor text for the Aurora Skies store page.

(Image transcript: “Do it for science! Science is everywhere around us, but at Aurora Skies it’s not just something you learn; it’s something you do! We need bright young minds to make the dreams of the future a reality. Even now we’re finding more uses for garbage to help the planet. Charging batteries, powering machines - the sky is the limit. Just this last year we created a modified Hot Air Baloon using garbage as fuel and turning it into pure air with a pine breeze scent. Now you can have efficient travel and an amazing romantic adventure with no cost to the ozone (or your nose)! Every year we’re creating more and more exciting things in the world of science. Garbage-powered hearts, heart-powered cars, solar-powered cats; what will you think of next! It’s all up to you. Do it for Science! Did you know? Hot Air Balloons are an epic form of travel based around the simple principle that hot air is lighter than cold air. They lift in the air based on the heat system in the balloon. Increasing the temperature of the air inside the balloon makes it lighter than the air outside and the balloon begins to float. More air is required to lift heavier things; that’s why the balloons have to be so huge! How cool (or hot!) is that?”)

From this piece of text we can see Bjorn’s passion and dedication to “green” science. Nothing in his traits suggests he fakes it, so I think it’s safe to believe that this peppy idealist is a glimpse into Loki’s father’s genuine self.

He might have encouraged his children to follow in his footsteps (”We need bright young minds to make the dreams of the future a reality.“) and smol Loki, who later in life seemed to have similar levels of enthusiasm (science is his One True Hobby), might have been receptive to that.

Now just close your eyes for a second and imagine an alternate reality in which Loki picked up where Bjorn left and instead of a energy-refilling machine that electrocutes you if you’re not happy enough, he invented “solar-powered cats”.

Still no hints on what could’ve messed Loki up, though.

Let’s take a look at the parents in TS2. Even though they’re not present and aren’t even resurrectable, they’re still coded in the game for purposes of genetics, memories and family trees, so some of their characteristics are salvageable.

And by the Watcher, they were both Romance Sims.

They were workaholic Romance Sims who cared about the environment and liked recycling (and Hot Baloons).

And they were both extremely Nice and very Sloppy, if their personalities on wiki are something to go by. Which they unfortunately aren’t, at least not completely because most ancestors don’t simply have “their own” personalities and use presets instead, so they tend to be quite similar.

The same goes for most of the Beaker clan, unfortunately. Fun fact is that there is no Knowledge Sim in sight (before Loki, of course). Maybe they weren’t a scientist family, but a bunch of Romance Sims who used to spend their free time in between woohoos saving the planet with eco-science. (3 out of 6 of Loki’s and Erin’s ancestors were Romance Sims, 2 were Fortune and 1 was Family)

But! There is one outlier. Her name is Gertrude Beaker. She is Loki’s paternal grandmother.

And similarly to her grandson, she certainly has a personality to remember.

She doesn’t use a preset, this is a personality that someone went and manually assigned (...or generated) for her. And she is Neat, Outgoing and doesn’t have a nice bone in her body. But unlike Loki, she has a sense of humor (which makes her even more dangerous, in my opinion) and is extremely Lazy.

She is a Fortune Sim and the only Beaker who shares the darker sides of Loki’s personality. (to be clear, I don’t mean their taste for cleaning but the round 0 of Nice points)

Because she doesn’t feature in TS3 at all, it is safe to say that she wasn’t in her grandchildren’s lives until the family moved to Strangetown. Could she be the corrupting influence on smol Loki?

As far as personality comparison goes, she seems to be the only possible culprit, the only one who’s personality shares the same unpleasant qualities he became infamous for. But! That’s not saying much. There is no evidence she actually did anything.

There’s not even any evidence that she ever met her grandson, given he has no memory of her dying which means she might have died before he was even born. That would be a solid evidence on the contrary and would rule her out. But I’m leaving some maneuvering space for theories here because she is the only Beaker ancestor with custom personality, after all, and that is suspicious.

That’s all the Beakers we know of if not counting Atom and Ceres, who came after Loki, so they’re not relevant to the question of his childhood. Or... are they?

3: And that’s when the trouble began

Another part of this question that might help us discern what happened to Loki is the when. All we know so far is that there is a big void of unknown between smol Loki and regular Loki and the point of transformation happened in there somewhere.

Thankfully, we have something to give us an idea. It’s this snapshot in storytelling pictures for the Beakers:

It shows smol Loki destroying a dollhouse. It seems to be in an impersonal environment of some sorts. The cheapest bed in the game is against a bare white wall, the window is hid behind blue curtains and there doesn’t really seem to be anything else but the dollhouse, a teddy bear in the background and that... very unpleasant bed.

It clearly tells us that Loki’s shift started in his pre-teen years.

And seeing that room which is definitely not in the Beaker Castle at 1 Tesla Court, it makes me think of a hotel or a cheap apartment the family was staying in while moving from Aurora Skies to Strangetown. Maybe the castle-like something the household inhabits at the start of the game wasn’t a property of the Beakers at all, maybe that was where the Salamises used to live and now it belongs to Circe?

Anyway, could it had been leaving Aurora Skies that sent smol Loki down an existential crisis and settling in the not exactly welcoming environment of Strangetown, enrolling in a local school, that sealed it?

But why all the stuff with writing? This would work with any other hobby but somehow it had to be writing and it’s our task to find out why.

4: Not your average tragedy

Now in our search we already have some ideas but it wouldn’t be thorough if we didn’t take into account smol Loki’s actual personality. I mean, we went into what traits he doesn’t have but what about those he has?

Namely Lucky and Family-Oriented.

I think Lucky is a very interesting choice. There’s nothing inherent about Loki Beaker that would make you go “that’s one lucky guy!” (if you don’t count his relationship with Circe as a stroke of luck, that is) and the same goes for smol Loki.

But... it could be a clue. His metamorphosis either couldn’t be triggered by trauma because he’s lucky and it would avoid him, or it must’ve been something tremendously horrid so he’s lucky he’s still alive.

Now we know we are searching for something that happened in his late childhood, verging on the start of his teenage years. His family was going through the turmoil of moving to a desert and he has already known his future partner Circe. Meanwhile Erin-

Oh, wait. Erin.

Smol Loki was Family-Oriented which implies he would probably have a good relationship with his little sister, as he would’ve naturally inclined to protect her and help his parents take care of her. But!

Not only do they have an amicable but distant relationship as adults but Erin seems to forget that Loki even existed in her childhood.

He has the usual set of memories of a sibling growing up well but she doesn’t, she has no Loki-related memories at all, not even of his marriage, which was a quite recent event.

Could the reason for Loki’s “downfall” be somehow related to his sister? Was there a dramatic event in which she lost a part of her memory?

5: Theories!

Ok, we’re finally here! Now I try to present some theories about what might’ve happened.

1. Burdens of the golden child

In Aurora Skies, Loki used to be the little wonder every relative was gushing about. With his father as an acclaimed scientist and a very liked person in general, there was little to no adversity his son had to face. He followed his passion and having nobody to really compare himself to, nor anybody who would terrorize him, he prospered.

But then the Beakers moved. Strangetown was... different. It was way smaller than Aurora Skies, so everybody inherently knew everybody and everybody had to interact with everybody... because the small space of a desert community didn’t leave them with any choice. And it was bleak and unfriendly. No one except for the Salamises knew the Beakers, so they found themselves under scrutiny from their new neighbors.

So Loki, who used to live thinking he was unique, was now sitting everyday in a much smaller classroom with Pascal and Vidcund Curious, whom he was immediately being compared to. But he wasn’t like the Curiouses. He was a kid of a scientist but wasn’t a science kid. He didn’t have much in common with Pascal who approached him and tried to befriend him at first but he wanted to. In Strangetown, nothing seemed to be cooler than being really, really into science. Pascal’s and Loki’s communication attempts were rather poor, though, and in the end, they never made friends. Loki slowly began to disdain the oldest Curious boy and it culminated a few years later in high school when Pascal made an attempt to woo Circe. It was even worse with Vidcund. Ever since Loki’s first day at the new school, Vidcund had been eyeing him with a disgusted look and Loki became quick to reciprocate.

In Strangetown, nothing seemed to be cooler than being really, really into science. Even Circe was on it! She was the only person his age he has know in Strangetown before his family moved in and he liked her. Not ��like” liked her, yuck! But he thought she was cool. Her family used to visit the Beakers in Aurora Skies and they played together. She was a friend! Or so Loki thought. She seemed to like hanging out with the Curiouses much more.

In Strangetown, nothing seemed to be cooler than being really, really into science, yes. But not in the eyes of Buzz Grunt, the son of a general who lived in Strangetown. Their family were the self-proclaimed protectors of the hood but at the same time they weren’t shy to show a strong distaste for all that made Strangetown an important desert settlement in the first place. And little Buzz, although Loki doubted he understood the nuances, was very fond of asserting his dominance over his less sporty and hyper-masculine classmates.

Suddenly jealous of the Curious brothers, under pressure from both the adults and his peers comparing him to them and bullied by Buzz, Loki’s social life fell apart. He started having problems... and he came up with solutions. He has always liked science but from back then on he hyperfixated on it to prove everybody who picked on him for being a worthless parody of a science kid wrong.

Not only his social life and self-confidence were busted, though. Moving away from Aurora Skies to Strangetown that had much higher prices for housing because of the limited space, the living standards for the Beakers lowered. It was chaotic and uncomfortable. Plus, almost everybody in Strangetown was loaded. Why, Circe and her parents lived in a small castle! Loki felt like they’re the only “poor” family around and it played into his new-found insecurities.

And then there was Erin’s accident. She suffered a severe head injury and even though she fortunately survived, she was never... the same. She had issues with her memory. Loki tried to convince himself that he’s big enough not to cry but when they were visiting Erin in the hospital and she didn’t recognize him, he cried. It was his little sister! And... it was all his fault anyway! If he was quicker and pushed her to safety, she would’ve been fine! Or even better, he wished the car would’ve hit him instead.

Loki was becoming more and more snappy, focused on his grades and projects, unavailable. The siblings never mended their relationship, Erin, even though she recovered, never got to make new memories with her brother. Not remembering them growing up together, he was like a stranger to her. A scary mean teenage boy she didn’t know and, even though she was a very friendly child, she was too intimidated to willingly spend time with him. And Loki was always busy and moreover, he felt guilty and inexplicably angry, so he postponed approaching her, until it was too late, he was in college, she was in high school and it was too awkward.

And... there was no time to write anymore.

2. Gertrude the Neat and Mean (and Lazy)

Ok, Loki doesn’t have any memories of his grandma. But hear me out! Erin does not have any of him either and yet they met. This theory doesn't require any additional write up – he simply got under the influence of his 0 Nice points granny and she cultivated him to be just like her.

My personal take: This is maybe my least favorite theory of them all, even though it is quite straightforward. It doesn't take much into consideration and demonizes Gertrude, who as far as we know, might not done anything wrong.

3. The accident

This theory takes advantage of TS3's canon sciency machinery, namely Cerebralizing Brain Enhancing Machine 2.0.

It can, among other things, change a Sim's personality. There is (quite unfortunately, in my opinion) no chance of consequential failure in the actual game, the most it can do is to (non-fatally) electrocute your Sim. But...

Imagine smol Loki sneaking into his dad's laboratory, most probably at his workplace.

He was curious. Ever since his father showed him all the equipment in there, all he could think of was the machine that made people smarter.

Maybe it could make him smarter?

I mean, Loki knew he was already quite smart. At least, he's been told he was and he had no reason not to believe it.

But he could be even smarter.

He could be like his dad. Or his mom. Or Erin. Everyone was talking about how clever young Erin seemed. Loki was proud of her but part of him just wanted that, too.

So what if... he went to dad's laboratory, just for a little while, and made himself smarter?

He made all the necessary preparations. It meant to memorize dad’s schedule, so he knew just the time when he could sneak into the laboratory. It also meant to get a good costume so he won’t be recognizable on the security footage!

And then finally, he was ready. To infiltrate the laboratory was easy enough but it only made Loki more nervous. He was on the edge but determined. He wanted to make it big in the world. He needed to seize the opportunity. And fear... fear was there to be ignored! Hands, stop trembling!

His confidence grew a bit once he got to the machine itself. He knew how to run it thanks to his dad and it made him feel competent and ready.

Little did he know that there was a huge oversight. Although Loki could operate the technology on a very basic level, his knowledge went nowhere near deep enough for him to detect that the machine has yet another set of settings and those currently expect an adult user. It wasn’t configured for a child patient.

But unaware of that, the boy in his patchy dinosaur costume climbed on top of the machine and with his eyes wide open and his heart racing he connected the Brain Enhancer to his system. Then, with his hand sweating, he pushed a button on a remote he was clutching to.

When Bjorn, alerted by Loki’s screams, rushed into the laboratory, it was way too late.

As his terrified father was calling the ambulance, the child was alive and even still awake. He was too weak to cry. He just watched Bjorn, wishing for death and looking for signs of wrath in father’s eyes.

There were none. Only fear.

Physically, Loki Beaker managed to recover just fine. With the power of advanced medicine and plastic surgery, the burns he suffered were reduced to nothing but almost invisible scars.

But inside, he was never the same. Literally. Even though the procedure backfired horribly, it still worked to some extend - but even that extend was warped. Loki succeeded in giving himself the Genius trait but several of his traits were replaced also, including the Lucky trait that probably saved his life.

6: Conclusion!

I like Loki very much. (no sh*t, who would’ve guessed) He’s a very controversial and over-the-top character who tends to be rather unpredictable in the actual gameplay. I started writing this giant thing to find an answer to his backstory that would satisfy me and hopefully also some of you.

With a heavy heart I conclude I’m not successful.

First I have to admit I originally planned to present 5 theories instead of 3 but I scrapped 2 of them.

First was about Atom time traveling and replacing Loki, creating himself again and again in a time loop (would explain the huge personality difference between smol Loki and Loki-Atom) and it was very far-fetched but fun, alas I realized it was out of character for Atom, since he seems to love his sister and his Plumbot so much he would hardly leave them behind to pull that off.

The second was about Nervous and the corrupting power of Death he has inside that would slowly drive Loki and Circe “evil” even though it’s unclear whether they first adopted him with being a lab-rat in mind. But it would not make sense since a change like that would be visible on their personality panels. That’s not that important, though. What made me not include this theory is that it feels uncomfortably victim blame-y. It’s not directly since it wouldn’t be Nervous’ fault anyway but any attempt to shift the blame from Loki and Circe in this situation feels uncomfortable.

(To be clear, I don’t think the Beakers deserve demonization. In my opinion, the best way to treat them narrative-wise is like eccentric people capable of feeling love and doing good things sometimes, yet irredeemably self-centered, morally bankrupt and deserving a lifetime in jail for child abuse they have done on Nervous. Not one-dimensional but still villains and still objectively bad people.)

And those 3 theories above? They could’ve been better.

I think I like the first the most, even though I still feel like something is missing. I just tend to like relatively grounded explanations and this one doesn’t feature the supernatural nor any deus ex machina gadget.

What about you? And do you have any other theories? Sky’s the limit! It’ll make my day to hear them!

Whatever your takes are, they’re all valid.

#loki beaker #strangetown #premades #the sims 2 #the sims #simbrl #headcanon #ts2

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woman-loving · 4 years ago

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Lesbian Literature and International Networks in 1950s-70s Australia

Selection from Unnamed Desires: A Sydney Lesbian History, Rebecca Jennings, 2015.

I included two passages here, one about lesbian literature and the other about engagement with overseas lesbian magazines, namely the US The Ladder and British Arena Three. Both touch on how customs/censorship laws restricted lesbian connections. (Compare with the importance of media freedom for lesbian subcultures in Weimar Berlin; for more on how lesbians can be affected by anti-gay laws absent direct criminalization, see how lesbians were policed in 1950s-70s Sydney.) I also appreciated the description of how engagement with literature can be a form of lesbian expression.

For those women who lived discreet lives or who were unable to locate other lesbians in this period, literature and other cultural representations of same-sex desire played an important role in alleviating their sense of isolation. Novels with lesbian characters or themes enabled women both to find a language for their own desires and to realise that they were not alone. Their significance to women in this period is testified to by the frequency with which lists of lesbian literature appeared in early issues of lesbian and feminist journals. Although identifying and obtaining lesbian-themed literature could be problematic without the assistance of such lists, reading these works offered women the opportunity to engage with a discourse of same-sex desire without the risks of exposure inherent in reaching out physically to other lesbians. In an article entitled ‘On the Virtues of Remaining in Your Closet!’, contributed by ‘a gaygirl’ to lesbian and gay paper Campaign in the 1970s, one discreet lesbian drew on a rich array of cultural sources to reinforce her impassioned plea for the right to conceal her sexuality.[17] The author attached no personal details to the article and observed that she planned to ‘post this anonymously from a suburb I don’t live in’. Her family, she claimed, was hostile to homosexuality and unaware of her own same-sex desires, as were her friends and work colleagues. Nevertheless, she noted that ‘about the time I discovered I was gay, I read everything I could on the subject of homosexuality.’ The article demonstrated that, while maintaining a ‘closet’ identity in everyday life, she had been able to actively participate in a discursive lesbian and gay community through the medium of the press, the theatre and Campaign itself. In assembling her arguments, she referred to a letter to the editor of an Australian newspaper by a gay man; an article in Time Magazine entitled ‘Gays on the March’; and a performance of Peter Kenna’s play Mates at the Nimrod Theatre in Sydney. Her consumption of cultural representations of homosexuality had helped to shape her own sense of gay identity and community, and ultimately enabled her to enter into dialogue with that community without conflicting with the need for concealment.

In earlier decades, however, women’s need for such literature, and the difficulties of locating it, were correspondingly increased. The cultural imperative to silence desire between women and to conceal it from families and society at large was reinforced for much of the mid-twentieth century by the paucity of literary and media portrayals of the subject. Margaret commented that books were neither accessible nor relevant in her attempt to make sense of her same-sex desires in the late 1950s[...]. As Margaret noted, literary representations of desire between women were extremely limited prior to the 1970s and were rendered largely inaccessible by the difficulties of locating them. For working-class women such as Margaret, who had not been raised in a culture of reading, literature did not in any case represent an obvious source of information. Strict censorship laws further restricted access to such works in Australia.

The importing of books and written materials deemed indecent or obscene was banned under the Trade and Customs Act 1901, and thereafter many of the decisions regarding which titles should be banned were taken arbitrarily by individual Customs officials who seized books at the point of entry into Australia. In 1933, the Book Censorship Board (renamed the Literature Censorship Board in 1937 and ultimately disbanded in 1967) was established to consider those books which were deemed marginal or literary.[19] The presence of homosexuality as a theme was accepted as grounds for censorship and Nicole Moore argues that:

“Censors actively targeted the expression of same-sex desire, descriptions of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, and cross-dressed sexual practice, the elaboration of gay and lesbian identities as identities, agitation against restrictions on the expression of same-sex themes, as well as many other forms of meaning moving beyond a straight, reproductive model for intimacy and sexual life. Until late in the twentieth century, homosexuality was seen as a pornographic and perverted form of obscenity where present in literary or popular novels, avant-garde poetry or films of all kinds, magazines or postcards. From the earliest moments of government censorship in Australia, and increasingly as an explicit priority, the erasure of homosexual meaning from as many public fora and discourses as possible was achieved to a significant degree.”[20]

A number of notable lesbian novels were banned, several limiting the availability of literary representations of female same-sex desire. Radclyffe Hall’s controversial British lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, was banned in 1929, following its obscenity trials in the UK and US. Moore claims that Australian censors attempted to obtain a copy of the novel following its prohibition in England in 1928. However, they were unable to locate one as such copies as had been circulating in Australia had apparently been sent to England in the wake of the trail to be sold on the lucrative black market there. In the absence of a review copy, Customs officials banned it sight unseen on the basis of English law. The ban was lifted in Australia some time between 1939 and 1946, unusually prior to the UK release date of 1949. However, the absence of a high-profile obscenity trail like that which occurred in the UK, Moore argues, meant that lesbian identity was not publicly debated in Australia in the same way. [...] The secrecy surrounding The Well’s subsequent Australian release further limited its availability in Australia, where many booksellers remained unaware that it was now legally possible to order copies and offer the novel for sale. It was not until the mid-1960s that US lesbian pulp fiction, such as Tereska Torres’ Women’s Barracks, was allowed through Australian Customs and it was a further decade before the first Australian lesbian novel, Kerryn Higgs’ All That False Instruction, was published.[22]

Despite the difficulties of locating literary representations of female same-sex desire in mid-twentieth century Australia, however, some women clearly managed to do so. By the 1960s a number of international lesbian novels were officially available in Australia, but even a generation earlier, despite strict censorship, women were able to obtain a limited range of lesbian-themed literature. Beverley recalled buying a copy of The Well of Loneliness in ‘one of the big bookshops in Sydney’ immediately after the war while ‘C.P.’ told British lesbian magazine Arena Three about her experience borrowing the novel from a Sydney library in 1950[...]. In the 1950s, Georgie came across The Straggler by Danish novelist Agnete Holk.[24] The Straggler was passed by the Literature Censorship Board in 1954, and board member Kenneth Binns noted: ‘this is the first time, to my knowledge, that a novel dealing seriously with the subject of lesbianism has been submitted to the board.’[25] Even when women were able to locate lesbian-themed books in bookshops or newsstands, purchasing such a book often proved a challenge for women accustomed to a life of concealment. Kerryn Higgs recalled the difficulties a friend of hers had experienced in attempted to buy The Well of Loneliness:

“I remember a friend telling me the story that she was unable to buy The Well of Loneliness even though it had no subtitle [identifying it as lesbian] for she was afraid of what the cashier would think, so she pinched it instead.”[26]

Higgs was concerned that her publisher’s decision to append the subtitle ‘A novel of Lesbian Love’ to her own novel, All That False Instruction, would create similar obstacles for women who wished to obtain the book discreetly.

The impact of lesbian literature on women who had encountered few, if any, depictions of desire between women varied considerably. Deborah described her discovery of Violette Le Duc’s novel La Batarde in 1965 as a revelation, it being her first encounter with representations of lesbianism. [...] For Deborah, the experience had a profound effect on her understanding of her own sexuality. She recalled: ‘So I read the book, and then I thought “Wow! This is me, this explains how I feel.”‘[28] Other women, however, felt that literary portrayals of lesbianism simply reinforced broader cultural messages about silence and isolation. Laurie complained that the cheap paperback novels she read in the 1960s and early 1970s were ‘so depressing, there was never a happy ending. They [the lesbian characters] either got killed, or went straight and saw the errors of their ways and all that sort of shit.’[29] When Robyn told her mother that she was a lesbian in the early 1970s, her mother was concerned about the risk of loneliness and Robyn connected the fear with Radclyffe Hall’s novel, The Well of Loneliness[...].

When Kerryn Higgs’ semi-autobiographical novel All That False Instruction was published in 1975, its reception was an indicator of how much, and how little, had changed. Despite the author having been awarded a publisher’s prize to develop the book, when the lesbian content of the novel became known, familial disapproval and threats of legal action forced the publisher (Angus & Robertson) to delay publication and the author to publish under the pseudonym Elizabeth Riley.[31] Reviewers in the Melbourne Age and The Australian objected to the novel’s lesbian theme and its depiction of men. [...] However, the existence in 1975 of a flourishing feminist and gay press meant that the novel was also received into an appreciative political environment and it was widely reviewed in lesbian and feminist circles. Sue Bellamy, reviewing the novel for feminist journal Refractory Girl, described it as an ‘exceptional piece of work’. Her engagement with the novel derived to a considerable extend from her identification with the experiences of the lesbian central character and, by extension, the author. [...]

For lesbian readers, and particularly those outside of the feminist community addressed by Sue Bellamy, this familiarity could be a source of both comfort and discomfort. While for Bellamy and others, reading from the relative safety of 1975, the sense of shared experience was validating, the setting of the book in the different cultural context of 1960s New South Wales could be unsettling. Escaping a rural working-class upbringing, the novel’s heroine, Maureen Craig, wins a scholarship to attend university in Sydney, where she embarks on a succession of relationships with other women. however, social disapproval from home and at college constrains these relationships, prompting the women to conceal their feelings for each other. [...] Despite Maureen’s fantasies of escape, fear of exposure is ultimately too much for all three of Maureen’s lovers, who in turn abandon Maureen in search of social conformity. Her story reflected the experience of many women who desired other women in this period but whose relationships were constrained by the pressures of secrecy.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Early encounters with lesbian-themed literature and film afforded some women a point of introduction into a language and cultural framework for thinking about same-sex desire, but the passive and solitary nature of reading could also leave women feeling more isolated, with no one to discuss their impressions with. However, by the late 1950s the beginnings of an international homosexual movement offered new opportunities for Australian women to reach out to others and especially seek discursive lesbian networks overseas without revealing their same-sex desires to family and friends in Australia. Rachel recalled that in the early 1960s: ‘I think people were sending off subscriptions to American magazines even in those days’ and this is confirmed by letters which appeared in a number of overseas magazines from Australian readers.[45] The Ladder, produced by US lesbian organisation Daughters of Bilitis from 1956 onwards, clearly had an Australian readership. The magazine’s round-up of international news frequently referred to stories in Australian and British newspapers, which were derived from clippings sent in by an Australian reader, and from 1970 onwards letters and magazines were received from Marion Norman of the Melbourne Daughters of Bilitis chapter.

British lesbian magazine Arena Three also had at least two contributors from New South Wales and potentially many more subscribers and readers. First published in 1964 by Londoner Esme Langley with the support of three or four other women, Arena Three provided a combination of articles, sketches, news items and a letters page for ‘homosexual women’ readers.[46] In 1964, Kate Hinton contributed two articles, including ‘The Homophile Down Under’, which offered a sketch of lesbian life in NSW and reported on broader social attitudes to lesbianism in Australia.[47] The following year G Mackenzie of Sydney wrote a number of times, enclosing donations to assist the magazine in continuing its work. She congratulated the editor: ‘You are doing a wonderful service to homosexual women. I hope you can keep it going. I look forward each month to receiving A3 and only wish we had something like it out here.’ This, she felt, was an idle hope, and she complained: ‘I guess we are never likely to see an ad in or paper like those you put in “New Statesmen” etc. I guess our mob would have pups on the spot.’[48] Her wish was apparently echoed by other Australian subscribers as in July 1968 the editor advised readers that ‘two Australian girls have recently written from New South Wales to say that, inspired by the example of A3, they would like to start a publication in the Antipodes, and would like our expert advice.’[49] Perhaps discouraged by the rather disheartening advice offered by the Arena Three editor, they did not, however, start an Australian magazine.

For Australian subscribers in the 1950s and 1960s, American and British lesbian magazines offered opportunities to feel part of a lesbian community which were not available to them elsewhere. For some, they were invaluable in demonstrating the existence of other lesbians and the range of communities and identities which existed. [...] Letters often expressed the profound loneliness which women who were not pat of lesbian social network experienced in mid-twentieth century NSW. In 1958 Miss S. from Sidney [sic], Australia wrote to One magazine, based in Los Angeles:

“I know your magazine is not a lonely hearts magazine, but it seems my only hope. I am very unhappy. I’m desperate to write to a lady who will write to me. I am 26 and I don’t like men.”[51]

Seven years later, an Australian reader placed a classified advertisement in Arena Three stating, ‘Lonely Dutch migrant wants correspondence with lady 25/35 interested in migrating to Australia.’[52] while simply reading such magazines helped to alleviate the isolation engendered by the cultural silence around same-sex desire, some women saw these networks as a potential introduction to more personal and intimate relationships. They also provide occasional insights into existing social networks and their role in transmitting information. In 1970, an Australian reader enquired of The Ladder:

“I am twenty and my girlfriend (I’ll call her Sadie) is twenty-two. We have been sharing an apartment for a year, going to bars, and all that stuff. Yesterday a friend of Sadie’s asked her what I was like in bed. When she said I wore striped pajamas and slept like a log, the friend laughed. Now we think maybe we are missing out on something. Could you fill us in?”[53]

In the context of scarce cultural representations of lesbianism, it is possible to read this letter as evidence that overseas magazines provided an invaluable source of information, even to women who were part of a wider lesbian network in Australia. However, it is perhaps more likely that this reader, who was part of a more knowing lesbian subculture centred on public bars, was poking fun at the discreet representations of lesbianism typical of US and British lesbian magazines in this period, which avoided direct references to sexual activity between women out of a concern not to offend either the censors or a sensitive middle-class readership.

While overseas lesbian magazines offered a lifeline to women in mid-twentieth century NSW, as with other literary representations of same-sex desire, access was limited by strict censorship laws. Several Australian readers of One magazine, which catered to both homosexual men and lesbians in the 1950s and 1960s, complained that their copies had been seized by Customs, while readers of Arena Three experienced similar difficulties. Such seizures were apparently sporadic and often dependent on Customs building up a gradual awareness of the content of overseas journals. In September 1966, G Mackenzie of Sydney told Arena Three:

“I got Bryan Magee’s book, ‘One in Twenty’, but in a way I think it is a pity that he gives publicity to MRG and Arena Three, because I suppose that will be the next thing to be stopped by Customs out here.

I noticed after the ‘Grapevine’ came out for sale in Australia giving publicity to DOB and ‘The Ladder’, it was after that time that Customs started to confiscate my copies of ‘The Ladder’ --they didn’t seem to know of its existence before that. ‘The Grapevine’ was reviewed by Customs in late 1965, before it was allowed to be sold to the public, and in 1966 they confiscated my January and February ‘Ladder’ and have got 4 more since then. So the publicity for A3 was no good, as far as I am concerned.”[54]

G Mackenzie’s comment reflect the ambivalence felt by some lesbian readers in this period toward open discussion of lesbianism and lesbian communities. Although a degree of publicity was necessary to enable women to locate resources such as Arena Three, increased discussion carried its own risks. Letters to Arena Three and The Ladder in the 1950s and 1960s indicate that readers used these magazines in different ways. While some women undoubtedly read them in the privacy of their own home, as a means of seeking input from other lesbians without compromising their discreet way of life, others wished to be a more active member of a discursive community, contributing articles and letters in order to enter a dialogue with other readers. For others still, these magazines offered a potential route to a material community of other lesbians, which might be reached either by placing lonely hearts advertisements or by requesting information about lesbian social networks based in bars or private homes.

In 1968, the editors of Arena Three put two readers from NSW in contact with another from Melbourne, enabling the women to meet directly with each other.[55] A small number of Australian women also travelled to the US and Britain to participate in the social networks attached to lesbian magazines: In 1969 Arena Three thanked Rene Vi, an Australian woman who had been organising the magazine’s London social group, for all her work for the magazine, on the occasion of her return to Australia. The editorial team at that time also included another Australian, Carol Potter.[56] While these women lived for some time in the UK and became embedded in British lesbian social networks, other made contact with overseas lesbian groups while travelling. Margaret described a visit she made to the offices of the Daughters of Bilitis while on a trip to San Francisco in the early 1960s. Margaret was staying with friends on a naval camp, and these circumstances shaped her encounter with the Daughters of Bilitis women:

“[T]hey were in an office building, it was just their office where they published that magazine called The Ladder. And it was the third floor or something in an office building on Market Street, so I just thought I’d just go up there and see what was happening. But I was dressing in the manner befitting a visitor from abroad staying with a Lieutenant-Commander and his wife and I got there, introduced myself, I was from Australia and one little dyke said ‘Are you really a lesbian?’ I can see why she asked that question because I looked like some respectable housewife ... And then they said there were all sorts of events and dances and things and could I, would I go with them, but of course I could not, well unless I’d have to make some silly excuse and where would I say that I was going to my hosts?”[57]

Encounters with overseas lesbians could be positive and welcoming, offering openings into the vibrant lesbian subculture which existed in some cities in the US and elsewhere. On this occasion, Margaret felt unable to incorporate this social scene into the respectable parameters of her visit to a naval camp, but, on her return to Australia she did begin to explore the possibilities of lesbian bar culture in Sydney.

#lgbtq history #lesbian history #australia #rebecca jennings #the ladder #arena three #lesbian literature

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purgatoryandme · 5 years ago

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Hey! I can't seem to find the post you made with all the books references in Illuminate Me and the reason behind it? Is it deleted?

I know that there is an incomplete one floating around in my reply tag, and it should be in the Illuminate Me tag, but tumblr’s search features are so bad that I went back to the original word doc of the complete list, so prepare for that particular storm lol. Quoted/Referenced Reading List (In Order of Appearance) Shakespeare: Macbeth I opened on a Macbeth quote (‘When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lighting, or in rain’) because I wanted to start with something immediately relatable. Most readers were introduced to more ‘dramatic’ plays through Macbeth. Beyond that, they were introduced to the concept of pathetic fallacy, which I think plays nicely with Tony as a character (a man who is CONSTANTLY imparting emotion onto inanimate objects…and then actually giving them their own emotions) and with one of the core problems in IM, which is deciding the emotions of others for them. I was hoping to get the ‘feel’ of that without having to lean too far into the actual concept.

Bonus: I picked this quote in particular because of the importance of threes in Tony’s life (his core group of friends, iterations of the reactor, number of times reborn, his bot children VS his AI children, the number of lovers or almost lovers he has in the fic, etc). Milton: Paradise Lost ‘What is dark within me, illuminate!’ is a modernization of the original Milton quote ‘what is dark within me, illumine’ for readability. I actually feel a bit bad about changing this considering how many people think this is the original quote now. This wound up being a central (and title) quote somewhat by accident. I’m fond of it because of how much I liked a different one that I had originally wanted for Tony’s thoughts of the reactor: ‘yet from those flames, no light, but rather darkness visible’. I had originally wanted to start off on a sadder note, one that showed how much Tony hated losing his humanity, and so the flames of Hell and their physics-bending concept seemed thematically appropriate. I had always intended to eventually invert the imagery – instead of Extremis being (to Tony) flames capable of extinguishing light, the reactor would become a water-like blue light that couldn’t be choked or recreated by any of the shadows that pursued Tony in his life. I picked Milton SPECIFICALLY for the imagery of light and shadows.

But, man, listen. Darkness visible is a great concept, but it’s also tired. It has, as you’ve noted, been discussed to death. So as I was reading ‘Milton’s darkness visible and Aeneid 7’ to refamiliarize myself with some of the broader themes attached to that particular piece of imagery, I wound up thinking about how to invert the darkness itself instead of the overall concept. The flames of Hell extinguish light instead of having to exist away from it. It is a bad that cannot be penetrated by good.

Instead of chasing away shadows, which would be implied by shining a light ON them, the request Tony makes here is to actually invert the darkness - to have it illuminate in and of itself. It’s becoming something better instead of being removed or forgotten. On the flip side of that, the darkness within isn’t growing as light weakens, but rather under its own force. Two forces equal in nature and origin in a person. It’s a different take on lighting than the one most critics hammer home. Long ramble is long, but this was the basis for using that quote. It grew from there to have many different meanings, however the core has always remained. All in all I’m pleased with it.

EM Forster: A Room with a View Very forgiving even in its satirical takes on human nature. A lot of passages are very therapy-quotable in their urging to accept the inevitability of causing some harm in life. It plays on a lot of the same concepts with light being obvious metaphor for good and evil that Paradise Lost does, but softens them into more realistic shades of human existence. Isaac Asimov: Foundation Continuing on with themes of rigid morality vs the flexibility and romanticism of humanity, we have Asimov, master of machines and the three rules of robotics! There are lots of quotable epigrams in this beast. The quote pulled from this has two readings depending on what you assume of the man who has said it. If you see him as manipulative, there’s an insidious underpinning of killing off your own morals. If you see him as a kind man, then you could read it as foregoing morals in place of empathy. Tony’s therapist loves a very specific brand of double speak that lets Tony work through the conversation purely through interpretation. Tolstoy: Anna Karenina Tolstoy’s prose is lengthy...so so lengthy, but Anna Karenina is worth the read as long as you relate to at least one of its major characters. Frankly, I think you can choose to read a single character’s plot arc and leave it at that. It’s mostly a novel that is interesting, not because of its plot, but because of its study of relationship dynamics. Tolstoy was really invested in picking apart the idea of what makes a ‘family’ and, beyond that, what makes a class. It’s refreshing to see so much of the critique occurring within the lived experience of the characters instead of through a narrator or outside punishing moral forces. Baudelaire: Windows and Benediction I cannot recommend enough reading multiple translations of Baudelaire poems (fleursdumal.org has a wonderful array available). Benediction is a personal favourite. I love me some malevolence wrapped up in religion. Dante: The Divine Comedy There’s a lot of bleak humor in Dante if you look for it. Several interpretations insist of making each piece excessively grim dark, but faithful translations tend to have a hint of humor in them. It works well for engraving War Machine’s spine - a benediction and a mockery of human limitations. I try to pick quotes that not only fit the scene, but would still fit into the context of the grander themes from whence they came...unless I hate the author. Tennyson: The Lady of Shallot “I am sick of shadows” vs “I am half-sick of shadows”. Tony’s expressing more frustration here with being alone and his passive involvement in that loneliness. Another quote I feel vaguely bad about changing, haha. The Lady of Shallot is a very nice classical piece that I’m sad isn’t taught in schools alongside Hamlet. There are some nice Ophelia parallels here. I wanted a feminine influence on Tony’s loneliness and one that is somewhat youthful despite his age. Yeats: Vacillation I fucking hate Yeats as a person. That said, the man can write. The man can REALLY write. His pieces are almost always layered to the point of absurdity and he’s perfect to swiping quotes with multiple meanings. Definitely Tony’s kind of author. Goethe: Faust Speaks for itself and in the author’s notes on its reference. Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamasov IMO a book that deserves all the acclaim of Anna Karenina and then some. Very VERY Russian in its ethical debates of, as always, religious morality vs free will. Also dips into familial struggles and patricide, because it wouldn’t be a Russian classic if it didn’t contain some deeply buried bitter resentment towards paternalism. I’m going off-script here, but this is a fucking excellent book. I don’t really have words for how much I enjoy how Dostoyevsky explores the concepts that he does. Shakespeare: Julius Ceasar Shakespeare: Twelfth Night Twelfth Night deserves more credit for its development and maintenance of an enigma. Twelfth Night has charisma in spades both because of and in spite of the exceedingly petty actions of some of its characters. It is also a refreshingly simple take on love for the sake of it. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Stephen King: Lisey’s Story I consider Lisey’s Story to be the best of King’s work. The man has his obvious writing ticks and his even more obvious issues as an author. Lisey’s Story contains many of them, but navigates them far better than any of his other work. The monster here is all in the mind and is too vast to truly see or understand. It’s perfectly representative of a creeping sense of inescapable horror. It was fun to flip it on its head with a reference here – Tony isn’t terrified of dying, but he is terrified of his inescapable enjoyment of Bucky’s company. Maria’s family saying is inspired by Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass Armitage: The Death of King Arthur A genuinely fantastic classic tale of heroism, filled with all the drama, tragedy, and sacrifice that you’d expect with strongly feminine undertones. I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. TS Eliot: The Wasteland Excellent piece of poetry with many layered meanings and dual interpretations. I can’t really articulate my thoughts on The Wasteland, but I reference an essay at the end of this list that does that for me. Oedipus Rex Rupert Brooke: Safety Not directly quoted but obscurely referenced through Bucky and Tony’s war conversations + Bucky’s conversation about, you got it, being ‘safe’ with his therapist. His poetry is about WWI and is, largely, idealistic. Safety is…not quite an exception to that. His other poetry contains a certain sense of honour and duty, whereas safety, maintaining a seemingly light tone, has nothing of the sort. It is safety in the soul – something untouchable by the horrors of war or death. It treats that as a ‘house’, which leant itself to the article Tony send Bucky. Armine Wodehouse: Before Ginchy Not directly quoted but obscurely referenced through Bucky and Tony’s war conversations + Bucky’s conversations with his therapist. This is also WWI poetry, though far darker than Brooke’s work. It discusses the parts of the heart and soul soldiers lose. It is an extremely good piece AND references Dante’s Inferno. I had to work it in somewhere even if I didn’t want to directly quote it. Meyer and Brysac: Tournament of Shadows Referenced several times over in discussion of war, the great game, and British military history. Beautifully self-aware account of Britain’s insistence on rewriting history after the fact and the tiny hilariously embarrassing moving pieces that shaped what is often considered the heyday of espionage. Murakami: Kafka on the Shore I love Murakami’s response to questions about understanding the novel as a whole. There are no solutions, only riddles presented, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes place. It’s a great lens through which to view the book and individual passages taken out of it. Reminds me of The Wasteland having to be read in totality before you can begin picking it apart, after which each individual piece can be read of its own. Kafka on the Shore, with its musings on the uncertainty of fate and redemption, was the perfect book to outline Tony’s horrifying realization, which he is desperately suppressing, that he might be coming to accept Bucky’s feelings. This quote in particular, while I would’ve used it anyway, is also a great callback to the first chapter and its storms. Chapter 29 is a turning point. Beyond it there are some intentional quote contrasts that are probably more easter eggs than they are anything else. Yeats: A Dialogue of Self and Soul Great contrast with Vacillation. Some parts of self and soul are used in that poem and thematically they are connected and contrasted - self and heart vs self and soul. The symbolism and imagery in Vacillation is really on point and layered, but Self and Soul is peak Yeats for its reversal of the typical ‘the soul is pure and bluntly honest and the body is tainted and bad’ in Christian works. Also Self and Soul’s broader context is scrumptious considering the debate poems history of relying on divine forgiveness and lack thereof instead of on forgiveness of the self.

It was fun to give this poem a double meaning in IM as both hugely ominous and ultimately pointing to the later forgiveness Tony receives from himself through the divine (if the soul stone can be called that) in the heavens (space!). There’s also another fun twist to ‘who can distinguish darkness from the soul’ in its contrast with ‘what is dark within me, illuminate’. To take that a step further, Vacillation was the beginning of the path of forgiveness for Bucky (understanding Tony’s heart…somewhat literally as he slowly gets closer and closer to the reactor itself), while Self and Soul is a final step (re: Bucky being presented the final hurdle of Tony deciding to move forward alone). Hermann Hesse: Siddhartha Hesse is wonderfully blunt at times. I gotta admit I love German takes on spiritual self-discovery because they always seem to tend towards much more straightforward answers than other countries. Hesse’s relationship with Buddhism in literature vs his lived experience is also really intriguing. Anyway, Siddhartha, in its humanizing of Gods, is wonderful contrast to the consistent imagery of the untouchable and unknowable forces of good and evil in previously quoted works. It has stopped bringing humanity to the divine and has started placing the divine within humanity. Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey One of the ultimate poetic epics. Now that we are nearing the end, I’m going overtime with making the grander themes of this whole piece hit home. A lot of IM was built on a foundation of poetic epics, of heroism, and a bit of Greek tragedy. The Odyssey embodies all of those things beautifully. It also suited Thor too well to pass up. Yeats: An Irish Airman Forsees His Death Ah, Yeats. Very blatant foreshadowing here that is keeping with the foreshadowing from Self and Soul. Fate has, up till this point, been a bit of a question. It has been ‘when will it come to me’ and ‘how will I avoid or overcome it’. Now fate is a set point. It is knowable and present. ‘I know I shall meet my fate, somewhere among the clouds above’. This goes for the true onset of Infinity War and for Tony’s feelings towards Bucky – when he had no one, he allowed Bucky in after essentially promising himself he wouldn’t. If that’s not an accidental admittance of love, nothing is. Henley: Invictus Absolutely fantastic poem. Continuing with the heavy fate themes coming into this climax. Now that Tony knows his fate, truly knows it, he is choosing to take it on directly. Agamemnon (Anne Carson’s Traslation if you prefer a more modern language approach, Lattimore is you prefer a classic) Agamemnon is forgotten all too often in the world of poetic epics and it’s a damn shame. I cannot say enough good things about it. I always wanted to use lines from Agamemnon in a Tony fic because the Cassandra parallels were too perfect to resist. The chorus in this play was also a perfect narrative device for interacting with something of a hive mind. Yeats: The Wanderings of Oisin Another poetic epic. Nice contrast with The Odyssey, The Death of King Arthur, and Agamemnon. Here the dialogue is between an aged hero and a saint looking into the hero’s past. It has the kind of reflective and aged mood necessary for this stage of the story, but is actually a poem I sortof hate. The line ‘And a softness came from the starlight, and filled me full to the bone’ is absolutely gorgeous, though. Some final inspiration pieces:

The Penelopiad

The Iliad

House of Leaves (for surrealism in the final chapters)

Dante at Verona (used in an author’s note as an intentional jab at the dull uninspired nature of the this particular take on Dante. Repurposed quote, essentially)

a broke machine just blowin’ steam by themikeymonster (great character study of Bucky)

Frank Kermode’s essay “Eliot and the Shudder” (inspiration behind Tony’s entire interaction with literature)

#long post #reply #illuminate me #literature references

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eddycurrents · 6 years ago

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For the past few years, you could argue that the X-Men franchise has been working on trying to rediscover its identity. Since reality reasserted itself coming out of the Secret Wars event, they’ve been in a kind of flux. The initial relaunch set up the mutants in opposition to the ascendant Inhumans. When that was brought to a head, Marvel’s merry mutants then redefined themselves in part through nostalgic “back to basics”. In the past year and a bit, the mutants through a series of endings in “Disassembled” and Uncanny X-Men, while the Age of X-Man event traumatized them in a loveless utopia. It’s been an interesting ride.

You don’t really need to know any of that, or anything at all of recent or past history of the X-Men, in order to jump into House of X #1. This hits the reset button on the franchise and, while I expect that the past will inform some elements, it can largely be enjoyed coming in blind.

This is arguably the largest, most dramatic change to the X-Men since Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Tim Townsend, Brian Haberlin, and Comicraft took over back in New X-Men #114. Jonathan Hickman, Pepe Larraz, Marte Gracia, Clayton Cowles, and Tom Muller kick off a new era that is firmly built on a science fiction grounding. It frames the mutant identity in a new understanding and begins a new conflict with the rest of humanity as human governments and organizations react to the new status quo.

Without going into any details in this section, I can say that House of X #1 takes many of the common themes and elements of decades of X-Men stories and gives them a new spin, both familiar and strange at the same time. All of it is brought beautifully to life through astounding artwork from Larraz and Gracia, taking it to a completely different level. It’s brought together nicely through the design work of Muller, implementing a number of text pieces yielding further information, making it decidedly feel like a Hickman comic.

The digital edition on Comixology is also another instance of having “Director’s Cut” material, including Hickman’s redacted script for the issue, a wide array of the variant covers, and process pages of line art and coloured pages.

It’s a bold new era starting point for the X-Men and I’m excited to see what else is in store.

There will be spoilers below this image. If you do not want to be spoiled on House of X #1, do not read further.

SPOILER WARNING: Below I’ll be discussing the events, themes, and possibility of what’s going on in House of X #1 and beyond. There are HEAVY SPOILERS beyond this point. If you haven’t read the issue yet and don’t want to be spoiled, please stop reading now. You’ve been warned.

PREAMBLE | First Impressions

I had high expectations for House of X #1.

Jonathan Hickman is easily one of my favourite writers currently working in comics. He’s full of mad ideas that you look at and wonder why no one has implemented them in quite the same arrangement before. He’s great at execution and construction for the long game. While each story usually works on a micro individual story-arc/issue level, they also build a large tapestry that tells an even larger tale. One merely needs to look at his previous outing for Marvel telling one grand story that began in Dark Reign: Fantastic Four (with elements you could say were seeded even in Secret Warriors) and ended in Secret Wars. It was wonderful.

Pepe Larraz has been wowing me with his art since Uncanny Avengers. There’s a fluidity of motion and design that evokes the spirit of Alan Davis, Neal Adams, and Bryan Hitch, while adding what feels like an even more gargantuan attention to detail and sense of design. He elevated that even further with stellar showings on Avengers: No Surrender and Extermination. He’s easily become one of Marvel’s premiere artists to me.

When you combine Hickman and Larraz, and couple it with a marketing machine hyping this as the next big thing in the X-Men evolution, expectations were huge.

House of X #1 exceeded those expectations.

This first issue feels like a sea change for the X-Men, in terms of the team’s status quo and in the approach to storytelling. This is a science fiction story with heavy political leanings. With Xavier pushing the lead, Marvel’s mutants have staked a claim on a new mutant nation on Krakoa, with tendrils through Earth and beyond.

And it’s breathtaking. The artwork from Larraz and Marte Gracia is beautiful. The landscapes and vistas, the designs for the characters, the page layouts, and more, this is a visually stunning book. Larraz has truly outdone himself with the line art, but it’s taken even higher by the sheer beauty in Gracia’s colours. It’s very rich, emphasizing the beauty and wonder of this new world being birthed into existence.

There’s also an interesting choice here in Clayton Cowles’ letters, it’s mixed case. These days it’s not necessarily as unusual not to be in ALL CAPS, but it is different from what we’ve seen in Uncanny X-Men as of late and helps to foster that idea of this being something different. Similarly the text pages scattered throughout from Hickman and Muller that give this the stylistic feel of a Hickman comic and enriches the depth of this new world with more information.

ONE | X Nation

The idea of a mutant nation isn’t a new one. Magneto broached it before and attempted a kind of compound with Asteroid M. Genosha was set up as a mutant paradise for a while. The fallen remnants of Asteroid M served as the X-Men’s home repurposed as Utopia. A corner of Limbo was briefly carved out as a haven for mutants. There was that enclave with Xorn. And Jean Grey kind of set up mutantkind as an amorphous nation within nations given central home in Atlantis during X-Men Red.

More often than not the nation merely serves as a backdrop for the X-Men’s interactions in the rest of the world. I mean, when mutants had their own homeland in Utopia, more stories took place in San Francisco even before the schism that drove half of them off to the Jean Grey School of Higher Learning in New York.

What’s presented in House of X #1 feels different.

Ostensibly, the new mutant nation is headquartered on Krakoa itself, but the implication is that it’s so much broader. The X-Men have seeded Krakoa flowers all over the Earth, on the Moon, and Mars and have grown what feel like embassies and external outposts of the fledgling mutant nation. And it’s the fact that these outposts are within other nations, with the potential of moving a superpowered army unseen and seemingly instantaneously, that has the government representatives met this issue nervous.

While it is a home and a haven for mutantkind, it’s also actively being treated as a political entity. Similar to how Jean argued her case for mutantkind in X-Men: Red, we’ve got ambassadors of sorts checking in with Magneto and two of the Stepford Cuckoos. There are some intrigue elements that sync up with other aspects of the story, but the fact that it’s being used as a tour, a show of force, and an ultimate in order to broker a deal recognizing Krakoa as a nation is an interesting development. It takes it from a place of superheroes playacting at being politicians to actually being politicians. Abrupt as it may be to have Magneto as the face of the operation.

But that’s part of the genius of this play. Like with Magneto siding with Scott upon the founding of Utopia, Xavier and Krakoa is a further fulfillment of Magneto’s dream. A mutant homeland with mutants in control. Every previous time this has happened it’s come to ruin, but it’s always fun while it lasts.

Also, it’s an impressive show of power to have Magneto as the liaison to the rest of humanity. Where Kitty Pryde or Jean Grey would likely be more diplomatic, that isn’t the intent here. Sending out not only one of the most powerful mutants as your face, but also someone who has been in direct conflict with humanity over the years, pushing a mutant independence angle, is a statement that the new mutant nation isn’t something to be trifled with.

TWO | Who are these X-Men?

With the release of titles, creative teams, and team line-ups for the forthcoming “Dawn of X” reboot following House of X and Powers of X, there have been a lot of questions about what’s going on. Characters who have died during recent issues of Uncanny X-Men are alive and well. Characters who were in different configurations and statuses seem to have been changed to more familiar versions and attitudes. So it raises the question for House of X, who are these X-Men?

This first issue doesn’t answer that. I don’t know if we’re going to get an explicit answer that, but I think we’re given a clue on the very first page.

A key element in this first issue is the utilization of the mutant island Krakoa, both as a new home for the X-Men and as refined and adapted through application as portals, habitats, and medications. But in the opening scene, we see a central tree essentially acting as a birthing matrix overseen by Xavier.

The first born being Jean and Scott, I’d guess, then maybe that’s Bobby on the second page with some others. It’s possible that the one guy is even Gabriel Summers. It could be that they’re being rejuvenated, refreshed, and refined through healing properties heretofore unrevealed of Krakoa, but it may be more sinister. There’s a reaching, a yearning towards Xavier that makes me suspect. Are they the characters that we know? Or are they something else? I don’t even know if that’s a question we’re supposed to be asking.

Other than Magneto working front and centre with the team, they’re also working with a number of other traditional villains/antagonists like Sabretooth, Mystique, and Toad. All three have had their dalliances back and forth between the sides of good and evil, but it’s interesting to see them in the fold here. One the one hand, it reinforces the idea that this initiative of Xavier’s is for all mutants and that they’ve come together. But it also raises the question further, how?

I think it’s worth noting that every X-Men character we see fully interacting in the real world has been a villain at one point. Cyclops included, since the last time the world at large saw him before his resurrection he was “Mutant Terrorist Most Wanted #1″.

With characters seemingly back from the dead, characters changed to different versions, characters rejuvenated and healed as it appears that both Cyclops and Banshee are, characters who’ve previously been at one another’s throats, there’s a lingering doubt of how Xavier achieved this. There’s also a happy Wolverine playing with kids, so just think on that for a bit.

THREE | Master of Puppets

Professor Charles Xavier died (again, but who’s keeping track?) during Avengers vs. X-Men back in 2012. Then was brought back in Astonishing X-Men, first as a disembodied psyche caught in the Shadow King’s web and then through the personality sacrifice of Fantomex, inhabiting his body. He referred to himself as “X”, as something new, despite repeatedly claiming that he is the one, true Charles Xavier. His actions, both in his initial appearances and in the subsequent Astonishing X-Men Annual wherein he reunited with the remaining original five X-Men (Cyclops was dead at this point), could be considered manipulative, possibly even evil, callous, and villainous. We’ve not seen him again until now.

With the uncertainty of the origins of the wide cast of characters on the team, whether or not they really are our X-Men we know and love, doubt is cast on Charles Xavier as well. And it’s not just because we only see part of his face. Larraz’s design for Xavier’s new large, portable Cerebro deliberately distances us from him. It’s alien and off-putting, and I believe that’s the idea. I’m unsure whether or not this was the intention, but it also evokes the memory of another villain that Hickman enjoyed using, The Maker. The visual similarities and implication of another hero turned villain can’t be missed.

Consistent with that idea is the portrayal of Jean here. From a real life perspective, there’s an argument that all of the X-Men in House of X and beyond are taking on the costumes and behaviours of their most popular incarnations. In that regard, it would kind of make more sense that Jean would be in a more Phoenix-inspired get up or something similar to her blue and yellow outfit from the ‘90s.

Instead, we get Marvel Girl. Which seems odd to me. It’s not only regressive, but it represents a time period that in-canon Jean supposedly hates. It was, however, a time where Xavier’s somewhat lustful intentions towards his student were more apparent (creepy and disturbing as they are). It further reinforces that maybe not everything is on the level with what’s going on.

FOUR | A New Religion

Religious symbolism and outright textual substance are rife throughout this issue. From the beginning of Xavier acting as a kind of god to the newly reborn mutants beneath a Tree of Life through to Magneto’s proclamation at the end of the story, this first issue is planting the seeds of a new mythology for mutantkind. It’s something that sets them apart from the rest of the superheroes on Earth, giving them an explicit framing as the overseers of the world, but with it, there’s a tie back to how this new nation feels different.

There’s a definitive feeling from House of X #1 of building an entire society. Religion as an aspect of that, both real and implied, but we also get a new language of Krakoan (the glyphs we’ve seen before and again in this issue) and the idea of a broader organizational structure to Krakoa. It’s not just a school any more.

FIVE | Dangerous Beauty

There’s an interesting dichotomy set up in this first issue as well between the mutants and humanity. Of nature versus technology. It’s one we’ve seen before in mutants being the natural evolution of mankind coming into conflict with the sentinels constructed in order to prolong mankind’s grip on power. It tends to lead to the kind of nightmare scenarios of post-apocalyptic futures as we see in Days of Future Past.

Krakoa is an inspired choice for the catalyst of mutant change in the world, delving into some of what was explored in Wolverine and the X-Men, but going steps even further. Creating pharmaceuticals, creating properties similar to Man-Thing’s ability to transport throughout the world, and the various habitats. It’s like the Weapon Plus application of The World in that everything is grown, organic, nature-based objects all ostensibly pieces of the greater Krakoa entity. I wonder if this gives Xavier and the X-Men effective “eyes” all over the world?

It’s also important to recall how dangerous Krakoa has been throughout X-Men history, acting as an antagonist that kickstarted the all-new, all-different era in Giant Size X-Men #1, built out even in Deadly Genesis with the lost team, and the problems had at the Jean Grey School with the baby Krakoa.

And then there’s the flip side.

Orchis is a new organization introduced here comprised of a number of former agents of Marvel’s intelligence community, good and bad, ranging from SHIELD to AIM. And we’re brought aboard the Forge. There’s a fearful symmetry to it, a station close to the Sun building machines to counteract whatever it is that Xavier is ultimately doing. At the Forge’s heart what appears to be a new kind of Master Mold sentinel, decked out in some of the same colour schemes that we recently saw with the golden sentinels of ONE in Uncanny X-Men.

I can only imagine that this is going to wind up well.

We’re shown a face that we’ve not seen for a while (outside of solicitation covers), since I thought she was an “ordinary” human again, in Karima Shapandar. It’s kind of sad, though, as her Omega Sentinel protocols seem to have been reactivated.

SIX | We Can Be Heroes

The presence of the X-Men within the broader Marvel Universe framework can be problematic at times. It’s one of the reasons why they’ve often been shuffled off to parts unknown, set up as a rag tag band of fugitives, and limited in number to the point where they’re culturally, socially, and politically insignificant. Because the heart of mutant existence within the Marvel Universe is one of intolerance.

Mutants are feared and hated, hunted down, enslaved, or executed. While it works extremely well as an analogy for real life racial and sexual bigotry and prejudices, it takes on a different level of problem in the face of a world filled with superheroes. For superpowered people who aren’t mutants, you wonder about a couple of things, such as why the general populace even makes a difference and why non-mutant heroes don’t seem to care about mutant prejudice.

That latter one has been approached a few times previously, as recently as this latest volume of Uncanny X-Men, and it always seems strange. It’s like the question that you see raised in Swamp Thing and Marvelman and later The Authority of the realistic application of near limitless god-like powers as a force for change; if you’ve got these powers, why don’t you do something to change the world’s ills?

It really undercuts the heroism of teams like the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, because it eliminates them as defenders of a universal justice, but merely teams that fight for the status quo. And so eventually the X-Men get shuffled off to Chandilar.

I think it’s great that House of X #1 goes straight for that jugular. Cyclops’ confrontation with the Fantastic Four beautifully displays his integration and friendliness towards the other heroes, that he’s happy for Ben’s wedding, but still at odds with them when it comes to overall mutant rights. Including those of Sabretooth, who admittedly just robbed a place and probably killed a few dozen people. So, it’s not like the Fantastic Four are in the wrong in trying to apprehend Sabretooth, but it’s reinforcing bits of the laws of the state versus possible ethical or moral concerns.

This scene also reminds us that mutants are everywhere. They can be anyone within society, anyone’s husband, wife, mother, father, friend, daughter, family, neighbour...anyone’s son, including Franklin Richards, son to Reed and Sue. It helps underline that compassion, understanding, and fighting for what’s morally right is something that really should be at the forefront here. And that Cyclops and the rest of Xavier’s new nation of Krakoa are making it known that they’re not going to accept the intolerance any more.

It’s also interesting the incorporation of the broader Marvel Universe as a catalyst for this confrontation in that Sabretooth, Mystique, and Toad were stealing information from Damage Control. It’s a neat bit of the shared universe and presents something potentially nefarious about Damage Control appropriating broken Stark and Richards tech. Though, we are left wondering, what did they steal?

SEVEN | Nothing As It Seems

One of the central themes we’re presented with in the ambassadors’ tour through Krakoa as led by Magneto is that nothing is quite as it seems. It’s even mentioned explicitly through the dialogue when the ambassadors are discussing the deal as lain out by Xavier. Worrying about the drugs, but even more about the amnesty. The terms of the amnesty aren’t actually stated here, but the gist seems to be that all mutants, criminal or otherwise, need to be set free (and presumably allowed passage to one of the gateways to Krakoa), if the country is to take part in the life-saving drug aspect.

Now, there’s an in-story payoff to the ambassadors statement, in that they’re all plants of one form or another, working for different organizations in order to gain information or surveillance on one thing or another and in Magneto’s ulterior motive for gathering them, but it feeds back into that tingling suspicion from the first page.

Something feels off. Something feels wrong. But that could well be the point. The seeds of doubt may well be planted intentionally for Xavier’s plan and the appearances of the characters. It could well be that we’re supposed to think that something hinky is going on, just to keep us in suspense. And that everything we’re seeing, everything we’re being told, really is the truth.

CONCLUSION | A More Perfect Union

As I said previously, House of X #1 exceeded my expectations.

Hickman, Larraz, Gracia, Cowles, and Muller came together to produce what is one of the most exciting and intriguing first issues that I’ve read in a very long time. Every single element from dialogue to line art, colour to letters, to cover to design gels into one massive stroke of storytelling. Every single thing within the comic adds another layer to immerse yourself into this brave new world of mutant merriment.

This is an incredible start to this new era and I am very excited to see what comes next week in Powers of X #1. Especially in how it relates back to House of X #1. These issues are apparently meant to be paired, but how exactly remains to be seen. I find that interesting, since PoX is apparently set in a different time frame.

d. emerson eddy is not an island.

#Examinations #X-Men #House of X #1 #Jonathan Hickman #Pepe Larraz

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yasuda-yoshiya · 6 years ago

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Thoughts on Revolutionary Girl Utena

So, as a first step in my ongoing effort to detox from 800 episodes of card games and expand my anime horizons a little, I've spent the last month or so watching Utena. Wow, what a cool and fascinating series! It honestly felt to me like a really strikingly bold and subversive show even by today's standards, let alone for the time it was made. Having had some time to think on it, here are some tentative thoughts:

While I definitely enjoyed and felt engaged with this show the whole way through, I think the last few episodes were what really pulled it all together for me. Up to that point, I absolutely loved Utena and Anthy as characters and their relationship, and found the general surreal presentation and aesthetics of the show really consistently beautiful and intriguing in a way that made it always feel engaging to watch, but it also felt like a kind of episodic and disjointed show where the various characters' stories didn't really seem to connect with or impact each other in any meaningful way.

But the endgame of the series was where it really took me by surprise in how it went so far beyond what I would have expected! The way the show had been framed up until then, I was basically expecting the big finale to be about Utena definitively making the choice to be Anthy's "prince" and rejecting the role of the "princess" that Akio wanted to push on her - and I would still have really appreciated and admired the show even for that alone, for Utena's gender non-conforming presentation and relationship with Anthy being portrayed so positively in general and for the way her feeling pressured to be more like a "normal girl" was always so explicitly framed as the "wrong choice" by the narrative - but I felt like the show really took things a step further in not just upholding Utena's role as the prince but outright rejecting the prince/princess framework and the hierarchy of the dueling game system altogether. It felt like such a daring ending to me in the way it totally breaks down and reframes the whole premise of the series up to that point, and made me look at a lot of the characters and themes of the series in a whole new light! It honestly made me realise that I'd probably been projecting my expectations of this kind of story on Anthy in much the same way as Utena had, and it made the show end up feeling really intelligent and insightful to me in its willingness not just to overturn gender role expectations on traditional romantic narratives and flip the bird to heteronormativity (which it still absolutely does, and does very well), but also to really question and criticise the assumptions behind those narratives on a fundamental level.

And the more I think about the series since then, the more I feel like so much of the series' broader imagery and themes really clicks for me in that light? The whole system of dueling over the Rose Bride feels like a very apt metaphor for the way so much of mainstream society and media does present romantic love, as a struggle to "win" your ideal partner as proof of your self-worth and as a magic cure for all your personal unhappiness and insecurities, as a sort of contest where the “losers” who can’t “get” a partner look up at the “winners” with envy and resentment - and the way Akio ultimately pulls back the curtain on that system to reveal that the ideal castle that all those people were fighting to reach was just a false image he was projecting to them to serve his own ends, that their attempts to escape their insecurities and "revolutionise the world" through winning the duels were really just upholding and reinforcing the status quo, felt really powerful to me. While I was watching the show, a lot of the side characters and their subplots had sort of frustrated me at times with their frequent emphasis on unrequited love stories that felt really obviously shallow and unhealthy, but I felt like the last few episodes really successfully reframed a lot of that to me as a remarkably perceptive commentary on just how much those kinds of empty romantic ideals and societal conventions can constrain people and warp their individual potential on a systematic scale.

In that sense, I feel like I can really appreciate the show's portrayal of how even fundamentally decent people like Miki and Saionji can be warped by the system into people willing to objectify Anthy and fight to possess her as a way of alleviating their own insecurities, even when they wouldn't have been naturally inclined to be that kind of person, through the pressure of the people around them accepting it as the norm and the false promise of the ideal happiness waiting on the other side. How people like Wakaba and Keiko can be made to believe that happiness is impossible for them and to resent the people around them for "stealing their happiness away", because everything around them has led them to the subconscious belief that the only "happiness" out there is being noticed by a popular guy like Touga or Saionji. Even Utena, the one who most explicitly rejects the dueling system and specifically sets out to treat Anthy as a real person with her own autonomy, still ends up unconsciously projecting her own ideals on her and playing into the established system in the ways she goes about being her "prince", because the influence of those flawed ideals and norms is so deep and pervasive that it's almost impossible not to internalise some of it.

It feels like something I can definitely relate to as someone who absolutely did buy into a lot of that crap as a teenager and seriously hurt other people as a result - and while I did eventually manage to break out and see the toxicity of the system for what it was, it's also horribly easy for me to see how easy it must be for people to stay constrained by it and live out their whole lives without "breaking the world's shell", without even realising how the toxic assumptions they've inherited from "the world" are killing them and distorting the ways they interact with other people - how their attempts at escaping from their insecurities are hurting themselves and others, and ultimately just perpetuating the same system that's strangling them. Akio is a horrifying villain because the ways he insidiously manipulates and influences the people around him feel absolutely real - he's able to play to people's vulnerabilities and unexamined assumptions, to make them follow along with his script while keeping them always genuinely believing that they're making their own independent decisions and fighting for their own happiness and fulfilment. It's very hard to fight something that embeds itself on such a deep and unconscious level in people's basic assumptions and frameworks for viewing themselves and the world, where people don’t even see the ways it’s influencing them.

But I think Utena's ending feels very honest and hopeful in acknowledging that, while the system can't really be defeated or destroyed by individual people in any meaningful way, what people CAN do is make the decision to step outside it and not allow it to have power over them - and, hopefully, to inspire other people to be able to make that choice for themselves too. That part towards the end of the film where the other student council members came to the rescue and helped Utena and Anthy escape, wishing them well in the outside world - "We still haven't found our own way out yet, but we'll definitely get there some day" - honestly made me tear up a little! It really communicated a strong sense of hope to me in the idea that these kids might have made a lot of mistakes and still have a lot of growing up to do, but it's still possible for them to break free from Ohtori and everything it represents the same way Utena and Anthy did - that the present doesn't have to keep following the way of the past. It’s still possible for the next generation to escape it and leave it behind. The whole imagery around the film's ending - "it may be a world without roads, but we can build them" - felt really uplifting and beautiful to me as well; as ridiculously bizarre and surreal as the film was in a lot of ways, it felt like it capped off the series' themes really nicely.

All in all, I ended up feeling really fulfilled and satisfied with this show! It feels like a very deliberate series that's extremely conscious of everything it wants to do, and generally executes it well. I would say I probably didn’t really connect with a lot of the individual character arcs on a particularly deep level - Juri's resolution with that one guy who popped in completely out of nowhere felt particularly odd to me, and I wasn't a huge fan of Nanami or Touga either - but I think it really nailed the bigger picture in terms of its thematic project and the ideas it wanted to convey, and on the whole I feel like I just have a huge amount of respect for the things it had to say and the way it went about saying them. The whole imagery of the setting with the school as an isolated, self-contained world with its inhabitants unknowingly being overseen and controlled by Akio from his tower as "the highest place in this world" really feels like such a strong and vivid metaphor to me, and I honestly felt really impressed with just how perceptively and accurately the show manages to portray the subtleties of the various ways social and patriarchal pressures really do operate on people (and on young teenagers who are still figuring out how love and relationships work in particular). It's weird to say about such a surreal and often goofy series, but I honestly feel like I haven't seen a story that approaches those kinds of subjects with this kind of clarity, and I feel like this show's framework has honestly helped me to reexamine and better understand a lot of my own messy teenage experiences as well. Definitely a show whose whole feels like more than the sum of its parts for me, I think, and one that I expect is going to stick with me for quite some time!

#revolutionary girl utena

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taule · 7 years ago

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“It’s all in the movie”: Jungian themes & Reylo in The Last Jedi

Disclaimer: I was going to revise this meta and bring it up to date as my ideas matured through further reading, but it’s no longer the case. This text exists as is, and I’m not going to come back to it.

Abstract

In this post I will be mostly focusing on Jung’s principle of individuation (becoming the whole, true self) and how it aligns with the relationship between Rey and Ben in The Last Jedi. In the process I will also be discussing some of the symbolism, how I interpret it and how it ties in with the overall theme of individuation as a possible narrative arc for this film.

Also please note that I have tried my best to provide sources to all the quoted material which can be accessed online, free of charge (and is in English). I very much encourage you to dig deeper and come to your own (informed) conclusion.

Introduction

I think this particular thread of thought found its beginning after I had seen TLJ for the first or second time, and before I had seen any mention of Jung. For some reason the Praetorian Guards were drawing away my attention from Ben and Rey. Everything about them is highly ritualistic. From the way they manifest a specific kind of symmetry, to the red color that is a legacy of the Imperial Guard from which they originate. But their armor is something else entirely. My mind immediately drew a parallel with samurai armor, and I was thrilled to find out that it was actually something they used as a reference:

“The Praetorians, my brief to [costume designer] Michael Kaplan was that those guys have to be more like samurai. They have to be built to move, and you have to believe that they could step forward and engage if they have to. They have to seem dangerous.”

- Rian Johnson

But there is also something else. I kept seeing dragons. Yes, there is a lot of highly stylized stuff in Star Wars, but if you simply look at the lines, and the way the armor is constructed, it’s hard not to see the visual references. Particularly evident in the arm guards, cuirass and helmet. And this sort of stuff doesn’t just get thrown together. The design process for such things can take a long time, and always involves a number of people. It is considered from the aspect of storytelling and the significance of a scene or moment in the greater narrative. What something has to evoke or convey and the impression it has to make. Which is why I’m not at all hesitant to also look for the intended meaning of the scene in costume and setting as well.

In addition, Rian has said that this was definitely one of the most significant scenes in the film and one that he is very proud of for pulling off the way they did:

And look, there were a lot of people whose work went into it to design the space and the guards, the stunt work, but that was a moment that I had just always held dear to me, and it’s one of those very rare things where the realization of it on screen I just feel like, “Ah, we got it!” It makes me happy.

- Rian Johnson

The Subconscious

So now, coming back to the dragon. There are several ways to interpret dragon symbolism (which in some sources is not differentiated from the serpent in general), but a few particular and reoccurring interpretations align quite well with Rey and Ben’s arc(s).

Dragons often symbolize the subconscious and a certain fear that is felt towards it. Fighting one then stands for facing your own most base impulses, the unknown part of your psyche that you have to conquer in order to really be in control of your whole self, and not just led by half of your instincts.

Psychologically, however, the archetype as an image of instinct is a spiritual goal toward which the whole nature of man strives; it is the sea to which all rivers wend their way, the prize which the hero wrests from the fight with the dragon.

- Carl Jung, Collected Works, Vol.8: Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche

In the follwing (letter to pastor Jakob Amstutz) referring to the dragon as the subconscious:

It is as though consciousness were aware that the dragon is the lower half of man, which indeed and in truth is the case.

- Carl Jung, Letters Vol.I, pg.489

In Jungian theory a dragon just so happens to be a symbol for the process of individuation, which stands for the integration of soul and ego. And this is a fight Rey and Ben take on together, the two of them fighting against the dragon again alluding to them as two halves of a greater whole. Suggesting that they are also connected to each other in the process of becoming their true selves, beyond simply the extent to which the Force is concerned. The Force is a part of their connection, but I would consider it more of a mediator of their innermost selves. The reason for the depth of their bond lies in them, in who they are, and who they could become with the support of the other.

It does not mean that it is something the narrative is built around exclusively. Or that its presence could be explicit at all times. The Throne Room scene also can’t be reduced to just one set of symbols, so there is more that’s packed in there (including blatant sexual symbolism). But the fight against the dragon is what represents an inner struggle to achieve control over the subconscious. Like the tug of war between light and darkness. To me personally, that is the broader narrative, and something I feel that Rian’s comments have supported as well. Most explicitly perhaps when talking about the significance of what Rey experiences in the cave, something that is very much one of the most telling examples of what I’m talking about here. He said that it’s about becoming, in a very general sense, and also about exploring the infinite possibilities of the self, and finding the true self:

And so it was just an image that came into my head. Of this infinite line of, you know, possibilities of self. And these endless kind of possibilities of identity. And the notion of the playing with which one is the “real” her. Which one is going to be her. And where does it end.

- Rian Johnson

Individuation: Becoming the whole Self

Individuation, as Jung describes it, is a process of psychological development, during which the individual will assimilate the parts of the self into one complete and homogeneous whole and become their truest self. One of the things that individuation aims to do, is to rid the self from the fake layer of the assumed persona (Kylo Ren & the mask, to which I will return later) and on the other hand from the suggestive powers of the untamed subconscious.

Now let’s talk about Modern Man in Search of a Soul, a book Rian said he read as part of his prep for TLJ. So it is indeed “a good place to start”, for multiple reasons. First is of course the fact alone that Rian himself has been explicit about drawing inspiration from Jung. But what’s even better is that in it Jung discusses the necessity of individuation:

The way of successive assimilations reaches far beyond the curative results that specifically concern the doctor. It leads in the end to that distant goal (which may perhaps have been the first urge to life), the bringing into reality of the whole human being—that is, individuation.

- Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, pg.31

There is something else that I really want to point out, not specifically on the subject of individuation, and that is chapter VIII - “Psychology & Literature”. I just immensely enjoy the fact that this is something he said he is drawing inspiration from. So if I may:

In dealing with the psychological mode of artistic creation, we never need ask ourselves what the material consists of or what it means. But this question forces itself upon us as soon as we come to the visionary mode of creation. We are astonished, taken aback, confused, put on our guard or even disgusted - and we demand commentaries and explanations. We are reminded in nothing of everyday, human life, but rather of dreams, night-time fears and the dark recesses of the mind that we sometimes sense with misgiving. The reading public for the most part repudiates this kind of writing - unless, indeed, it is coarsely sensational - and even the literary critic feels embarrassed by it.

- Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, pg.182

Coming back to individuation again, I want to present two particular quotes which both emphasize the importance of communication and the conversational aspect of this process. Which is in my eyes especially relevant to how individuation as a whole aligns with the development of Rey and Ben’s relationship. The Force bond allows them to communicate themselves to each other, and the more they begin to understand the other, they also learn something about themselves.

I quite agree with you: without relatedness individuation is hardly possible. Relatedness begins with conversation mostly.

- Carl Jung, Letters, Vol.II, pg.609-610

Individuation is only possible with people, through people. You must realize that you are a link in a chain, that you are not an electron suspended somewhere in space or aimlessly drifting through the cosmos.

- Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra”: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939, pg.103

But, there is more here than just the relevance of a conversational aspect. There are 3 stages to individuation, which I think can also be seen in TLJ. Jung himself outlined them as the following:

The search into the unconscious involves confronting the shadow, man’s hidden nature; the anima/animus, a hidden opposite gender in each individual; and beyond, the archetype of meaning. These are archetypes susceptible to personification; the archetypes of transformation, which express the process of individuation itself, are manifested in situations.

- Carl Jung, Collected Works Vol.9i: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 451 p. (p. 3-41)

I will write about the steps below, but I feel the need to point out that we are simultaneously dealing with two kinds of self here. One is contained within them individually, the other is the greater consciousness or self they become together. That is why I think that the stages are less evident in the two when viewed separately, but become more obvious when they are observed as a whole made of two individuals. They are both part of the same process of individuation, together. They are fighting the dragon as equals, and so their struggles to face their own self are also connected. Not to mention because of the way they are connected by the Force. The balance they would create together is the result of this process in which they are both involved.

1. Assimilation of the Shadow.

This is the first step of individuation. The shadow is a representation of the “dark side” of the personality or human psyche. And all the more negative aspects of the lower half of the self (subconscious), like a compartment saturated with moral and ethical shortcomings, character flaws, shame, abuse and dependency. Assimilation of the shadow means facing the darkness you contain to become aware of all of the parts of your (sub)consciousness in order to integrate them into your whole self.

In the film Rey plunges underwater (water - a prominent symbol for the subconscious) to emerge in the “forbidden” cave beneath Ahch-To where she finds a mirror-like wall in which she sees two shadows approaching. One that is her own, and one that appears to be that of Ben’s. The shadows become one, at which point she sees her true reflection appear.

When it comes to the assimilation of Rey’s own shadow, to me it seems to be depicted rather straightforwardly. At first I was hoping to find a parallel moment in which Ben has a similar experience independently, but then I realized that for him it happens through Rey. And perhaps that is the only way. Because remember, communication is the key to individuation. And him having strayed much farther away from the light, he might not be able to achieve it alone. He needs Rey to help him. She is the other half of the whole, the greater self.

So there is a reason Rey saw two shadows meld into one and then herself. The scene in the cave is followed by that in the hut where Rey tells Ben everything that happened. The hopeless loneliness it made her feel. She is sharing her experience of individuation with him. And the very element of them talking about it over the Force bond is a reminder that their understanding of each other’s experiences goes beyond what they say in words, it is also felt.

In my interpretation of it, it’s through Rey’s experience that Ben becomes able to confront his own shadow (if I go by the mirror scene in the cave.) And so that is a part of why their shadows are shown to meld into one. Because they are parts of the same whole. His experiences affect her and vice versa. I think Ben is overwhelmed by his own shadow which manifests in the persona. This would most distinctly show the emotional stuntedness which suppression has caused. He has become emotionally fractured, so much so that he can hardly figure out the pieces by himself, so he needs the conversationality of the individuation. He needs Rey’s help to find himself again. And it’s an awakening that we see throughout TLJ.

The Eye

There is one more element about the cave scene, that I wanted to mention. Although I’ve seen Freudian readings of it, which interpret the cave through sexual symbolism, my own first association was actually different. To me, the entrance to the cave looked like an eye.

The mind which is in each of us is able to comprehend all other things, but has not the capability of understanding itself. For as the eye sees all other things, but cannot see itself, so also the mind perceives the nature of other things but cannot understand itself.

- Philo of Alexandria, Works Vol.I, pg.76

The hole in the center resembling the pupil, dark and full of the unknown. The growths emerging from it reminiscent of the pattern of an iris surrounding it. And I just thought it to be interesting how it seems to align with the aspect of the light above and darkness below, representing the conscious and subconscious mind:

So whatever comes from behind comes from the shadow, from the darkness of the unconscious, and because you have no eyes there, and because you wear no neck amulet to ward off evil influences, that thing gets at you, possesses and obsesses you.

- Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s “Zarathustra”: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939, pg.1265

So in that way, Rey is entering someplace that her conscious can’t access, where the eye doesn’t see. Diving into the waters of subconscious to reach the mirror in which she finds their shadows. The eye thus representing a doorway into the lower half of the self. So what Rian said about the cave scene interestingly enough also connects back to Jung:

The idea was if the up top is the light, down underneath is the darkness And she descends down into there and has to see, just like Luke did in the cave, her greatest fear. And her greatest fear is [that], in the search for identity, she has nobody but herself to rely on. - Rian Johnson

2. Becoming One: confrontation of the anima & animus

The second step of individuation is concerned with the dynamic of anima and animus what in Jungian theory control and shape the relationship between a man and a woman, the male and female. Anima being the representation of the female element of a male’s psyche, and therefore animus the opposite in a woman’s. This is a similar relationship to that of yin and yang.

It is unavoidable, for the purpose of Individuation, that one will know how to differentiate the true self from the self that one allows themself and others to see. For the same reason it is necessary to become aware of the invisible ties one has to their subconscious, specifically to Anima. In order to be able to differentiate oneself from it.

- Carl Jung, my shitty translation of a translation of Die Beziehung zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewussten before I realized it’s literally the same book as Two Essays In Analytical Psychology *sigh* (Page 97 in my copy, but you will have to find it yourself in the linked text)

Persona & The Mask

In the case of Ben, there is another aspect which plays into the dynamic of self and anima, and that is the persona that is Kylo Ren, that I mentioned earlier. A constructed self created to camouflage the true self, to mask feelings and reactions in order to obtain some type of control over his self-projection. The element of the mask also being literal in this case. Kylo Ren is an attempt to dehumanize himself externally, in order to hide the pain and fear of Ben Solo. Jung also describes the relationship between anima and persona as compensatory. This is why both have to be taken into account.

And this persona is another part in Ben which needs Rey in order for him to let go of it. We also see that happen in TLJ quite explicitly I think. Snoke even calls Ben a “child in a mask”, which is what prompts him to discard it in anger. That moment is an initial reaction and not yet his full realization of the persona, but he is forced to face it. It is his connection with Rey which enables the emergence of himself from behind the mask, and to see something worth wanting that the mask would not allow him to have. Step by step he comes closer to consolidating the persona and the anima.

Awakening of Eros

One aspect of confronting the anima and animus is that it can also be the awakening of Eros. I did not plan on expanding much on that because it goes deep into sexual symbolism territory. But it was something I wanted to point out though.

So, too, man will be forced to develop his feminine side, to open his eyes to the psyche and to Eros, It is a task he can’ not avoid.

- Carl Jung, Collected Works, Vol.10 (Civilization in Transition), Page 125

If you want to understand the sexual imagery in TLJ better or see alternative interpretations to your own, there are well-known blogs that have written about the subject at length.

3. Wise Old Man / Woman Archetype

The third step of individuation involves meeting the archetype of the Wise Old Man or Wise Old Woman. Jung describes such archetypes as “mana-personalities” which are still tied to either anima or animus. In the collective unconsciousness they are interpreted like the inner representations of the same-sex parent and symbolize figures of authority.

The mana-personality is a dominant of the collective unconscious, the well-known archetype of the mighty man in the form of hero, chief, magician, medicine-man, saint, the ruler of men and spirits, the friend of God.

- Carl Jung, Collected Works, Vol.7 Pt.II: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Individuation)

In general this last step is the hardest for me to completely wrap my head around. Perhaps because how the archetype can appear in very different forms, and that perhaps also goes for its intention. The intended outcome is also more difficult to outline, outside of the fact that the experience of it has to complete the process or rather journey of individuation. I’m not going to attempt to translate the whole segment, because it makes my head hurt, but in a chapter dedicated to mana-personality in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology Jung basically describes meeting the mana-personality as something similar to the process of acceptance or admitting something to the self. Also, the manifestation of a mana-personality occurs only if the previous step has been successful, in the process of which the anima has lost its raw demonic power (ibid).

I think it’s possible that this is what we see at the end, the archetypes being represented by Luke & Leia. But that being said, I don’t see the process of individuation as being complete, so the third step may also be something that we didn’t actually see in this film.

Conclusion

To me, it really is all in the movie. I hope to have outlined how and why Jung’s concept of individuation aligns with the relationship between Rey and Ben, their growth individually and together. In that way forming a kind of a narrative arc which implies that together Ben and Rey will bring balance to the Force and to each other. It’s about the whole Self.

______ The Human Shadow and other stories (I didn’t have time to read/listen to most of it yet, but RJ references it so it doesn’t hurt to link it anyway. )

#Reylo #Reylo meta #The Last Jedi #Rian Johnson #Ben Solo #Rey #Carl Jung #maemeta

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years ago

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WHETHER THE NUMBER OF PROGRAMMERS, THE MORE ADMIRABLE IT IS

Thirty years later Facebook had the same shape. In fact, worse than arrogant: since readers are used to essays that try to please someone, an essay that displeases one side in a dispute reads as an attempt to pander to the other. Unknowing imitation is almost a necessary condition for a good startup is the percentage chance it's Google. And yet you can see how great a hold taste is subjective has even in the art world by how nervous it makes people to talk about art being good or bad. Taste.1 Do we have free will? At YC we're excited when we meet startups working on things that could be taught better by itself. It gives people with good intentions a new roadmap into abstraction. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful laugh. Good art like good anything is art that achieves its purpose particularly well. You say it a lot. In the past, a competitor might use patents to prevent you from selling a copy of The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth.2

If you can think instead That's an interesting idea.3 So what does Hardy mean when he says there is no better way to get at the truth, as I suspect one must now for those involving gender and sexuality. One reason this advice is so hard to work on it. But there might be other things they would like that would be trivially easy to implement. Nearly all good startup ideas are of the second type. During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of people use them for that purpose.4 The secret to writing on such narrow pages is to break words only when you run it by your friends with pets, they don't seem to realize the power of the forces at work here. Someone who has decided to write a prototype that solves a subset of the problem. You don't see all the differences in power between the various languages are those who understand the most powerful you can get. After having been told for years that everyone just likes to do things wrong. A deals per partner per year, they're careful about which they do.

Indeed, you can see where the conclusion comes from. They're unable to raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to expend on selling your ideas rather than having them. If other companies didn't want to be online. If you get bored with, or can't understand, or don't agree with one point, you don't have to learn programming to be at odds with it, it seems less real. For legibility it's more important to be able to describe it as obvious, at least to you. Imagine one of the reasons I like being part of this world. I can work in noisy places. As he says: quotation But this is, strictly speaking, impossible.5 Most high school students applying to college do it with the usual child's mix of inferiority and self-centeredness combine to make us believe that every judgement of us is about us. And once it spreads to hotels, where is the point in size of chain at which it stops?

Yet that doesn't seem quite right, does it? It was both a negative and a positive surprise: they were surprised both by the degree of persistence required Everyone said how determined and resilient you must be, but going through it made me realize that the determination required was still understated.6 It's like the sort of person who can have organic startup ideas. Problems Why is it so important to launch fast is not so much because he was a programmer that Facebook seemed a good idea to write the new program in the same language. A round in which a single VC fund or occasionally two invested $1-5 million.7 I do occasionally yank it back in that direction.8 The goal is the same sort of reflexive challenge as a whodunit. You should only write about things you've thought about a lot. But if you talk too loosely about very abstract ideas—they continued to fall into it. But by the modern era such questions were answered as well as your own. Putting undergraduates' profiles online wouldn't have seemed like much of a startup is fun the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on.

Understand this and make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas. But you yourself are the most general truths. To someone who hasn't learned the difference, traditional philosophy seems extremely attractive: as hard and therefore impressive as math, yet broader in scope. Maybe the alarm bells it sets off will counteract the forces that push you to overhire. And the way founders end up in it is by not realizing that's where they're headed. As you go into a startup. The main character is an assassin who is hired to kill the president of France.

If you're not at the leading edge as a user. It's easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise. What little original thought there was took place in lulls between constant wars and had something of the character of the thoughts of parents with a new baby. Either the company is doing.9 Entrepreneurship is something you write in an unclear way about big ideas, you have to write in school are not only not essays, they're one of the things I find missing when I look at the responses, the common theme is that starting a startup. It explains why people are surprised how carefully you have to get them in exactly the right place and you've made this beautiful portrait.10 The traditional board structure after a series A round has in the past, have scientists, engineers, musicians, architects, designers, writers, and painters. As you might expect, it winds all over the country, students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small market easily by expending an effort that wouldn't be justifiable for an official project, but because it's not officially sanctioned, he has to do is get eight or ten lines in the right place. And they don't; they've made sure of that. Once you start using words with precise meanings, you're doing math.

Notes

This prospect will make developers pay more attention to not screwing up than any preceding president, he saw that they use; if they ultimately succeed. I asked some founders who had recently arrived from Russia.

The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, many of the twentieth century, art as brand split apart from art as stuff. Not linearly of course the source of them, initially, were ways to get market price. Nothing annoys VCs more than investors. If they were shooting themselves in the U.

Or worse still, as it was actually a great programmer is infinitely more valuable, because there was near zero crossover.

Your Brain, neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick recounts a conversation in which income is doled out by Mitch Kapor, is not a product manager about problems integrating the Korean version of the growth rate early on when you have significant expenses other than salaries that you should push back on the way they have raised money on our conclusions. The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, during the Bubble. And the expertise and connections the founders chose?

One YC founder who read this essay. If you have two choices and one is going to give up legal protections and rely on social conventions about executive salaries were low partly because you spent all your time working on Y Combinator. Since the remaining power of Democractic party machines, but one way, without becoming a Texas oilman was not just that they won't be trivial. The question to ask, what that means is you're getting the stats for occurrences of foo in the trade press.

Even the cheap kinds of startups as they get for free. MITE Corp. For example, there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. I explained in How to Make Wealth in Hackers Painters, what you call the market price, and once a hypothesis starts to be is represented by Milton.

It's not simply a function of the people working for large companies will naturally wonder, how can I make this miracle happen? The actual sentence in the press or a complete bust.

The main one was nothing special. This sentence originally read GMail is painfully slow. You may not even in their target market the shoplifters are also the 11% most susceptible to charisma.

The US News list? For most of the problem is not really a lie because it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. They may play some behind the scenes role in IPOs, which parents would still send their kids to be hidden from statistics too. I spend more time editing than writing, he was notoriously improvident and was soon to reap the rewards.

Dropbox, or grow slowly and never sell i. This has, like storytellers, must have believed since before people were people. Ironically, one of the clumps of smart people are these days.

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mydigisalon · 5 years ago

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55+ Salon Marketing Ideas To Attract New Clients

Digital marketing has opened a huge portal for every business to reach its goals. But we often get distracted by things like the “ Viral video concept” that we forget to build a solid base for a brand and dive right into accomplishing bigger goals.

While experimenting and trying new tricks is a must in marketing, it’s never too late to perfect the basics. Salon Marketing is the backbone of your business growth and plays a major part in the success of your salon having all strategies in place.

With fundamental basics, you can never go wrong while building the foundations of your salon. These basics are the tried and tested salon marketing ideas that can be tweaked and improved according to our needs.

Salon Marketing Basics:

Visual Branding

Website and App

Social Media

Facebook Ads

Email and Social Reviews

55+ Salon Marketing Ideas and Trends

Get Your Spa or Salon Listed On Online Directories

Form Partnerships with Other Local Businesses

Offer Referral Discounts

Loyalty Programs or Punch Cards

Salon Promotions that Work

Share Your Promotions on Social Media

Make Use of Facebook & Google Ads

Run a Contest in Your Salon

Create An Email Newsletter

Holidays, Special Events and Gift Certificates and 41 other marketing ideas

These basics will help you out at any and all stages of your business to reach out to potential clients and build your brand image. There are 5 things you need to work on for a strong base for salon marketing ideas. Let’s dive into it without further discussion.

Salon Marketing Basic #1: Visual Branding

#Visual Branding: Visuals always speak louder than words. So, it is important to understand the following points in order to analyze the salon marketing ideas that can work for you:

The visual appeal of a salon should be consistent everywhere from their social media, website, email right to their offline pamphlets.

Make sure the color scheme goes with your brand aesthetics and expresses your brand perfectly.

To get all this right you need to make sure that everything is just perfect.

Focus on key pointers like what your salon personality should be like. Some of the brand themes which you can try are artistic, edgy, indie, wacky, or calm, you can even go for the abstract.

Make sure whatever salon marketing ideas you choose are in sync with what you want your brand to express.

#TargetAudience: Second thing is that you should keep your target audience in mind at all times while implementing your salon marketing ideas.

Think of all the demographic and characteristic traits they might have.

Apart from the age group, consider their business interests, shopping behaviors, likes, and dislikes, etc.

Only after all this is sorted, go for your brand logo and color palette. E.g. yellow and teal can be used if you are going for an edgy punk rock look and rose gold or peach if you want to get a more classy and feminine vibe.

To sum it up, your brand image should be consistent, meaningful, and attract the right audience.

Salon Marketing Basic #2: Website and App

Salon owners don’t give websites and salon booking apps much thought and this is where they go wrong. The first thing that potential clients look for when they think about researching a business is to check the website. To help you get the importance of the website we have listed down 4 points:

It helps to connect with your clientele and tell your story in your own words along with pictures of your work. You can tell them about the time where you started, what you believe in, and what your vision is.

It gives your salon a sense of legitimacy because the users will have a place to get in touch with you even if they are within your vicinity.

It will help in SEO and SEM optimization. The easiest way to get on top in google search is through SEO optimization and you need to have a website in order to do so. You can even link your social media accounts on your website to reach a broader set of audiences.

You can put valid and updated information on your website. Things such as services available at your salon, prices, timings, your best workers and specialists, etc.

Benefits of Salon Marketing Apps

Salon marketing apps are important because they give a more personalized feel to the user.

Clients can look up for their previous and upcoming appointments along with the pricing for other services all in one place.

It is important to keep in mind that all these things should be branded and follow a color palette or theme that represents your brand to your clients in a way that they get a sense of familiarity.

They should be able to associate the colors or theme with your brand and recognize you.

The website is the best way for clients to book an appointment instead of calling the salon to schedule it. Give your clients as many options as you can.

Salon Marketing Basic #3: Social Media

Social Media has to be on the list of salon marketing ideas, a lot of salon owners are already on it. However, you have to know how to make it work and get potential leads through it.

There are a lot of social media platforms available out there, you can get the best salon ideas via social media. However, not every platform is good for everything. E.g. your brand page on LinkedIn might not be the best option. Facebook and Instagram are better suited for interactive brands. Instagram is perfect for creating a visually appealing vibe with filters, colors etc. It works more like a portfolio for your work. Facebook, on the other hand, is text and videos. The algorithm these days demands more videos like Live podcasts to get more likes and engagement.

Salon Marketing Basic #4: Facebook Ads

Social media marketing or SMM is to reach out to potential clients that you can convert into customers with a little push. Regular social media updates will help in getting people more acquainted with your salon. But Facebook and Instagram ads are important beauty salon advertising ideas to get real-time customers for your salon. Facebook ads with proper targeting and budget will give amazing results. There are 5 things you need to keep in mind about getting everything right.

Friendly and personalized language.

Try to go for short video clips instead of pictures

Keep time-sensitive promotions with a call to action button.

Use Facebook ads manager to keep a track of the metrics and analyze the numbers as frequently as you can.

Change the text copy and creatives timely. It will help to optimize your ad campaign and get more clients.

Salon Marketing Basic #5: Email & Social Reviews

Apart from a website and social media marketing, the marketing suite for salon should also include email marketing and social reviews; two things you can not afford to miss at any cost.

To connect more often with your customers you need email marketing because there is no guarantee that they will check your content on your social platform.

To make sure that they do not miss out on important deals and other offers, send them a personalized email. It will help them re-book more often.

However, make sure they are not sale mails, they’ll go directly to spam or get deleted. Fill your email with personalized content like staff images, stories, etc. It will help your clients feel more connected with you. It is vital to add emails to your beauty salon marketing plan.

The last point is social reviews, always ask your users to rate and review you on Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc. This helps your clients to become your brand advocates by publicly vouching for your work. New customers always go for genuine reviews, they check different platforms for reviews and ratings before spending their money.

It doesn’t matter how good your services are, if the clients are not aware of your brand then your business is as good as closed. You need to make sure that your brand is visible and stands out to get more clients.

Looking for salon marketing and advertising ideas to grow your salon business?

Let’s take a look at these easy, tried-tested, and effective salon marketing ideas to help you secure more clients.

Still thinking how to market your beauty salon? To help you secure more clients, you can definitely on these salon marketing tricks for an easy win. They are easy, tried-tested, and fun.

1. Get Your Spa or Salon Listed On Online Directories

Source: Giphy

Users have a habit of searching online before spending money on services or products. This is the reason why your brand should pop up in search results like google my business, yelp( this is really important, make sure you have an account on Yelp with good ratings), and other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram etc. with a business profile.

2. Form Partnerships with Other Local Businesses

In order to get new clients and enhance your beauty salon marketing strategies, form new alliances with local businesses with similar offerings. Eg. buy dinner, get a haircut free or movie free etc. These are some of the best hair salon advertising examples that can work for your salon. Offers and deals are really important when it comes to new user acquisition.

3. Offer Referral Discounts

Referral discounts and offerings are a great way to retain old customers and at the same time acquire new ones. You can even work with local businesses for referral schemes. E.g. refer 1 get 20% off, these offers are really lucrative and will surely get you good on foot traffic in your salon.

4. Loyalty Programs or Punch Cards

For your loyal and recurring clients make sure that you have an ongoing loyalty card or offer at all times. It will help you build a good rapport with them and they will keep visiting. E.g. hair spa free after 4 transactions.

5. Salon Promotions that Work

Customers love offers and discounts. Offers like first time visit, last-minute specials or monthly on house discounts or yearly visits etc. You can give clients offers when they first visit or during any time slot when the traffic is low etc. It will pique the customer’s curiosity and they might end up booking an appointment because of these offers. All in all, the ultimate goal is to build salon promotions that work.

6. Share Your Promotions on Social Media

If you have a running promotion or offer, do not forget to list out on Facebook and Instagram. Even if you put a story and your reach is organic, make sure you do it. It will give the vibe that it is an exclusive offer for your social media followers.

7. Make Use of Facebook & Google Ads

Facebook and Google Ads help in bringing legitimate leads for the business. When users look at an ad they tend to go for it 40% of the time. The success of these ads will depend on your targeted audience and other creatives. When a customer visits your website you can use these ads to re-target them by showing banner ads and redirect them back to your page.

8. Run a Contest in Your Salon

Social media contests are a great way to acquire clients. Run a referral campaign e.g. the user with the most number of referrals will get a day of free services or a hair makeover etc. It is one of the best hair salon Facebook post ideas to increase your salon’s engagement. Think of it as more like a small gift if they get you an adequate number of new clients.

9. Create An Email Newsletter

When your clients book an appointment with you or are paying for the services used, you can ask for their email addresses. When you have enough email IDs in your database to work on, you can blast monthly emails to keep them updated about your salon promotion ideas and offerings. You can even personalize this experience by sending individual reminders addressing them with their names along with the promotions that they can avail.

10. Holidays, Special Events and Gift Certificates

Source: Giphy

Holidays are a great way to catch potential clients. E.g. Mother’s Day, Black Friday sale, New Year, Christmas etc you can give small discounts like 20% off for all mother’s hair spa on mother’s day.

You can even include your client’s anniversary and birthdays to make them feel special and cherished.

Offers like a free manicure with haircut will get more traffic before valentines and proms etc. will get more teenage traffic to your store. And offers like blowdry free with facial will get more mid 20s woman.

Apart from these offers, Gift certificates can also help you attract new clients around the holidays.

Campaigns like free $10 gift cards with every $150 gift certificate purchase. So when a client comes to use the gift card and gets another 10$ service gift card there is a high probability that they will end up using your services again.

11. Create a Profitable Front Desk

Your front desk staff is the face of your brand when a customer enters your salon. Apart from that, it is one of the main rebooking sales interactions. You should make sure that your staff is well trained to upsell or cross-sell to the clients before and after your services.

12. Set up a Selfie Station with your Salon’s Hashtag

Source: Giphy

The selfie trend is not going to go away anytime soon. You can benefit from it by creating your own mini photo booth within your salon. Just make sure the lighting is great and your clients will post the pics on their social media channels for sure. You can add props like a hashtag cutout or image in the background to make it more authentic. Ask your clients to use the same hashtag while posting and all the posts will come under it.

13. Create a Memorable Client Experience

The main motive of visiting a salon is not just to get a haircut, people expect luxury and pampering with it. Make sure that you create a memorable experience for your clients right from the moment they enter your salon and it should continue till the moment they step out.

14. Carry Exclusive Products

Exclusivity is a factor that can help build brand value. If you keep high-quality products that are available only at your salon, it will differentiate you from the competition. Try to upsell these products, if the clients end up liking them then they will keep coming back for more.

15. Cultivate High-Quality Relationships

If you have recurring customers you should work on developing a long term relationship with the. It will only help you get a loyal customer connection but they can also help to recommend your services to potential clients. Ask them to rate your salon on social media platforms and refer offline to their friends.

16. Simplify your Pricing

Pricing is the first thing that customers check when they ask for services. Too many options can confuse the customers, you should work on simplifying your pricing structure and menu. Let your services speak for themselves, keep in mind that customers spend more if they understand everything in one go.

17. Branding at its Best

Just the salon space is not your brand, your employees are representing your brand at all times. Make sure that apart from your salon theme their clothes, hairstyles, makeup skin and behavior are always on point.

18. Offer Add-on Services

If you have any add on services, like free blow dry with hair spa etc, then make sure that you coach your staff properly. They should be able to naturally up-sell add-ons or retail while serving the customers.

19. Hold a Super Sale

Source: Giphy

Running discounted services or offers is a great way to acquire new customers. Running an end of season sale once or twice a year is a good strategy. During this period you can offer all your products and services at 25% off to stimulate retail sales.

20. Referrals to the Rescue

Another way of acquiring new customers or generating potential leads is Referrals. If you have your salon app, you can run an offer for referrals, like refer 2 people get 25% off on your next salon visit.

21. Online Reviews

Online reviews are really important. More than 70% people look for the salon/business online before availing services. You should request your clients to leave an online review when they visit your salon.

22. Offer Express Services

Source: Giphy

On the go services are a lifesaver for clients. You can offer express or mini services as add-ons to the original service or as a quick service session in between. E.g. basic manicure while getting their hair colored.

23. Social Stylists

Make your stylists a social media expert. Teach them about the techniques to capture good pictures and end results after the services. Their profiles should speak for themselves, it will help draw new clients while boosting their and your brand image simultaneously.

24. Manage Your Reputation

Positive and negative reviews are a part and parcel of an online presence. You should engage with both of them in order to provide a better customer experience. Listen to their queries, and try to resolve their issues. Make sure you are always polite and professional while interacting with your customers, even when they are rude.

25. Search Engine Optimization

When clients search for salons in your area, make sure that your ranking is good and you appear on top of the search results. Top result + good reviews = New clients. Hence, your beauty salon digital marketing is quite helpful.

26. Google Ads

You can run search and display ad campaigns on Google ads in order to appear on top. Organic search results are great but paid results will get you reliable clients at a much faster rate.

27. Facebook Ads

Everyone is on social media, so clearly it makes sense to advertise on it. Reaching out to clients via Facebook Ads can help you target them based on their interests and demographics. You can be as picky and as broad in selecting your audience.

28. Update your Website

The website is really important, if you do not have one get it made. My Digi Salon can help you with that. You need to get a simple and easy to follow website that conveys your message and brand language clearly.

29. Publish your Salon’s Own Blog

Original content and timely updates on your blogs not only helps clients, it also helps maintain your brand image. You can post blogs related to the current market trends or your offerings and their benefits. If you still do not know where to start then download our app and know about the trendy hair salon marketing ideas.

30. Contribute to Guest and Top Salon Blogs

Guests posts and blogs are important to maintain digital presence amongst popular salon publications. IF you content is accepted by the guest sites, you can get free coverage and traffic while reaching out to a new set of users.

31. Polls, Quizzes and Feedbacks

Source: Giphy

Social media can be used for a two-way communication for businesses instead of just posting content. You can run a weekly series of stories with polls, quizzes and feedback on your social media channels with incentives for participation. It will help boost your online presence and engage with customers who normally wouldn’t.

32. Update your Third-Party Pages

Third-party websites like Google and Yelp can help you grab potential opportunities. Make sure your profile on all these partner websites is up to date at all times. If you receive any review or feedback, reply, and engage with customers. It will give the impression that you are listening and boost customer experiences.

33. Promote Visually Engaging Content

One of the most popular yet trendy salon marketing ideas is promoting visual content on Instagram. Instagram is all about visual content. Anything and everything that grabs their attention within the time span of the first 2 seconds will help increase engagement. You should use beautiful pictures in your blogs, posts, and website with clear communication. You can try My Digi Salon’s inventory for getting beautiful and appropriate content that you can post on your social media channels.

34. Create an Explainer Video

Small videos are really helpful for increasing reach on social media. Engaging videos or mini shoots during services like boomerangs etc. can help you connect with a wider set of audience.

35. Try Tik-Tok

Try Tik Tok videos for hair colors showing before after, they are in trend and people love watching them for hours. Create engaging videos that tell your brand’s story, or shoot mini-videos during and after your services to show off new styling and color techniques.

36. Define your Brand

You should be clear about your brand personality and theme. It will totally depend on your clientele e.g. macho for men-only salon and quirky for edgy looks etc. Make sure that it is reflected in all your online and offline communications.

37. Tag your Clients

When you click your client’s before and after pictures, make sure you ask for their social handles. You can tag them in your posts and stories and they can repost them. Clients love getting featured on salon pages, it’s sort of a social validation checklist.

38. Sell Beauty Products Online

Offline upselling is great but to reach out to a new and untouched audience you should try selling your products and services online. You can either add a shop here section on your website with product listings or host an e-gift section.

39. Build Joint Ventures

Partnering with the local business by co-hosting events is a great way to cross-promote your services. Offers like “Visit us, get 10% at Henry’s” etc. will get more customers in you salon as well as your local business.

40. Get involved in National Events

Third-party and national events are a great way to unlock potential clients. By participating in national educational events or trade shows can be a great networking exercise. You can learn how to improve your business, get new B2B working opportunities and at the same time improve your brand image.

41. Create Professional Business Cards

One of the traditional yet effective salon marketing ideas is creating a business card. All your staff members should have professional business cards that they can handle to clients and partners. It should ideally have their name, number, email address, and contact information. You can even add social media handles to make it more trendy.

42. QR codes for Social Media Handle Links

Instead of typing the handle names on cards and pamphlets, you can get QR codes printed. These QR codes can be scanned by your clients and will redirect to your social media handles. It saves time for the clients who might not make the effort to look you up online.

43. Team Up with Local Schools

Tie-ups with local schools, universities, and institutions, especially fashion and hairstyling, can help you get quality interns for your salons at a cheaper price.

44. Birthday Offers to Clients

You can offer small rewards or discounts to your loyal customers on special occasions like birthdays. Send it on the day or a day before to remind them that you care and their pampering session is due.

45. Bridge the Gap Between Customers

Source: Giphy

If you can not give discounts, then try to send out gift cards or text wishes on important dates. These little efforts can help you bridge the gap between you and your customers to help make life long relationships.

46. Networking Events

Stay connected with other top players and professionals in the business. It will help you stay on top of the market with the latest trends. Trying registering and attending events taking place in your vicinity. They are a great way to improve networking.

47. Become an Educator

You are a professional, share some tips and ideas with your followers. You can post and share educational content on your social media channels for your clients. Moreover, you can even host live sessions on Instagram where you can go for Q&A and share educational content or host classes that clients can attend to show them how to maintain their services at home.

48. Apply to be a Talk Guest

Instead of just hosting these classes on your social media channels you can expand your reach by getting on talks as guest speakers. E.g. During virtual events for hair and beauty, you can participate as a guest speaker and share your experience with the attendees.

49. Host a Client Appreciation Event

Thank you loyal clients by hosting an appreciation event once a year. Send an invite to all your VIP clients for a full day or multi-day event. You can go out of the station or just party all night in a 5-star setting. Client appreciation is the first step in establishing strong relationships.

50. Retarget clients who have Left

If you note that your loyal customers have stopped coming to your salon, e.g. zero visits in the last 4 months. You can drop an email or SMS with some discounts for a new appointment. Communication matters so make sure that you convey your message clearly.

A Must Read: How to Generate Leads for your Salon Business

51. Learn from the Best

Make sure that you are up to date with fellow successful and professional leaders. In order to procure their skills and accomplishments, try to follow in their leads. See what they are doing and how they maintain an online presence.

52. Give Away Freebies

Everyone loves freebies, instead of offering discounts you can go for merchandising. Give small gifts like shirts, pens, and other items with salon branding as a token of appreciation.

53. Re-Do your Retail

If you feel that your growth has gone stagnant or is dropping, you need to re-evaluate your retail strategy. Take help from us, My Digi Salon is a complete marketing suite for salons to establish the most effective sales strategy.

54. Offer Discounts to Senior Citizens

Senior citizens tend to be more loyal to brands and businesses. To make it easier for them to opt for your services instead of your clients, offer senior discounts to your regular and loyal customers.

55. Send Appointment Confirmations

As mentioned above communication is the key. How you communicate with your customers will directly affect your brand image. To improve it, you can start by sending appointment confirmation texts and emails to your client as a reminder. It will help avoid unnecessary hassles and misunderstandings. Moreover, it is one of the most effective salon marketing ideas.

56. Automated Scheduling Reminders and User Journeys

Automation is the future and you can take advantage of the features available now. You can work on client or user journeys. E.g. welcome email, first appointment, referral emails, etc. apart from that you can automate reminder emails like an email 5 weeks after a hair color appointment. You can even send them a ‘we miss you’ email with incentives.

57. Get a Beauty Salon Marketing App

Instead of running here and there for all the things we mentioned above, you should invest in a beauty salon marketing app. Get a customized salon app by My Digi Salon with all the features that you believe are required for your salon e.g. side menu navigation, banners on the homepage for new offers, etc. You can get in touch with your customers directly via in-app pop-ups, push notifications, etc.

Conclusion

We are sure that the above-mentioned salon marketing ideas will help you in your salon management. They will definitely help you in retaining your customers and at the same time acquiring the new ones. You just need to make sure your brand language and visualization are consistent and resonates with your goal.

Originally published here: https://www.mydigisalon.com/blog/salon-marketing-ideas/

#book online hair salon #book hair appointment online #salon software #salon app #salon scheduling software #salon booking software #salon marketing

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bookcoverbasics · 5 years ago

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Minimalism

The minimalist cover is akin to an abstract painting in that the idea is to reduce the idea or theme of a book to a single, simple visual element. This can take a great many forms. It could be an object of some sort that represents something significant about the book, it could be a graphic image or symbol or it could even be nothing but typography alone.

The danger of working with symbolic imagery is that the symbols must be universally understandable. That is, they cannot depend on a pre-knowledge of what the book is about. I mentioned in an earlier post how a fan of Lois McMaster Bujold's novels thought that depicting "the knife Bothari wielded" would make a good cover for “Shards of Honor.” And, indeed, a knife---especially one with a distinctive shape or details---would be a striking object. The problem, of course, is that all the significance of the knife would come from having already read the book...but to anyone who has not read the book, it would be just a knife, ho hum.

So any symbol or device needs to be able to be appreciated not only by the cognoscenti but by the uninformed reader as well. That is, someone familiar with the author, book or series may see a deeper significance in a graphic device but the new reader should at least be able to appreciate the basic, broader theme, nature or subject of the book. At the very least it should attract and intrigue. That being said, it should neither be so generic that it says nothing specific to the book in hand nor so arcane as to be merely puzzling or confusing.

Equally important to the choice of visual element(s) is the graphic design of a minimalist cover: its very simplicity makes paying attention to the placement of visual elements within the image space particularly critical.

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tipco613 · 5 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://cryptonewsuniverse.com/a-collision-course-ai-marketing-people-and-process/

A Collision Course: AI Marketing People and Process

A Collision Course: AI Marketing, People and Process

In many cases, AI marketing continues to obscure reality.

What is artificial intelligence? Is a smart speaker truly intelligent? And what makes a factory, building, or even a home for that matter smart?

As for the first question, there are three key pieces, said Marcia Walker, principal consultant at SAS. “AI can learn from experience, adjust to new inputs, and accomplish tasks without manual intervention,” Walker said.

The term AI itself dates back to at least 1955, when four researchers, two hailing from academia and two from industry, proposed a research project to investigate the thesis that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”

If people must be present to continually fine-tune a program’s algorithm, it, therefore, cannot be said to possess artificial intelligence in the classical sense of the term. Yet AI marketing often uses the phrase in ways that are more artificial than intelligent. “Many times, I think the term ‘artificial intelligence’ is aspirational,” Walker said.

Smart in Name Only?

Is a smart speaker, which has become the prototypical smart home device, an example of artificial intelligence? Alas, no. At least not in the case of Amazon Alexa, which, according to Bloomberg, relies on a global team of thousands of people to listen to voice commands and help them fine-tune the assistant’s responses to specific queries in the future.

While Amazon describes Alexa as living “in the cloud” and “always getting smarter,” the voice assistant’s improved accuracy in understanding voice commands is at least partly a byproduct of manual intervention over time.

While the specific details about Alexa’s inner workings were new, that hasn’t stopped users from lamenting in recent years that the “smart speaker” didn’t live up to its name. “Amazon’s Alexa isn’t the future of AI — it’s a glorified radio clock,” wrote Quartz writer Alexander Aciman in 2017. Gartner observed in its AI Hype Cycle report last year that the majority of conversational user interfaces, of which smart speakers are an example, remain “primitive, and thus are not able to respond to complex queries.”

Conversational user interfaces such as smart speakers also represent a continuing blurring of the lines between the Internet of Things, which is a broad technology trend that has received its own share of hype, and artificial intelligence, a word often applied undeservedly.

Of course, voice assistants, including Alexa, have improved steadily over the years. The venture capital firm Loup Ventures asked prominent smart speakers hundreds of queries and found, in December 2018, that Alexa correctly answered 72.5% of the time, its accuracy improved 9% compared to 12 months prior. By comparison, Google Home had an accuracy rate of 87.9% in December 2018.

While a firm scientific definition of intelligence, or even consciousness or thought, may be elusive, smart speakers won’t be passing the Turing test any time soon. And while the smart speaker is but one example, it is a convenient microcosm reflecting the gap between AI marketing and reality.

Looking for the “Invisible Hand of God”

While smart speakers may be an example of a technology that trails our expectations for intelligence, there is also a fear AI will have significant negative effects on at least some of humanity. While AI’s threat to automate jobs is likely the greatest social fear, Hollywood and a handful of public figures helped make the threat of an AI takeover famous, theorizing that advanced artificial intelligence poses an existential threat to society. The fact of the matter is: researchers widely disagree on when and if AI can develop an intelligence level matching or superseding human intelligence at large.

The computer scientist and AI researcher Jaron Lanier takes something of the opposite viewpoint. “The machines don’t mean a thing. They are barely even there without us,” Lanier said in one interview. “In order to support the fantasy of some kind of pure AI or freestanding AI, we are telling the people [who] supply the absolutely necessary data, that they are not needed.”

While analytics is fundamental to artificial intelligence, Walker said “I would argue the real base is intelligence, period. If we are going to talk about AI, we have to decide what is real intelligence.”

Critics have long accused tech companies of misrepresenting systems reliant on human input as artificial intelligence, but obscuring that fact. Some chess fans alleged as much after the 1997 victory of IBM’s Deep Blue chess engine over champion Garry Kasparov. Grandmasters Miguel Illescas, John Fedorowicz and Nick de Firmian helped provide Deep Blue with a database of openings and thousands of board configurations and hundreds of thousands of grandmaster games.

Kasparov won the first game in 45 moves. Before the second game, IBM enlisted an additional grandmaster, Joel Benjamin, to help hone the chess engine, which was allowed under the rules. Kasparov lost the next round, even though the engine, at one point, made an apparent blunder. Kasparov accused IBM of manually intervening during the game, which the rules forbade.

Referring to the famous human-machine matchup in a 2014 NPR interview, chess author Mig Greengard sympathized with Kasparov’s 1997 suspicions: “How could something play like God, then play like an idiot in the same game?” After the loss in the second game, Kasparov requested a summary of moves from Deep Blue’s recent games. He was denied access, although the Deep Blue team had access to hundreds of Kasparov’s games.

Deep Blue ultimately triumphed over Kasparov in game six of the match. While initially accusing IBM of cheating, he eventually accepted the chess engine’s superiority. “Deep Blue was intelligent the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent. Not that losing to a $10 million alarm clock made me feel any better,” The Financial Times quotes him as saying. As for Deep Blue’s unwise move in the second game, IBM research scientist Murray Campbell explained it was a random glitch.

For IBM, Deep Blue was arguably its clearest AI marketing win until its Watson computer won Jeopardy in 2011. A number of chess buffs, however, continue to question Deep Blue’s victory, questioning the extent of human involvement in achieving that milestone. “They wonder if there was a sort of an ‘Invisible Hand of God,’ so to speak,” said Zulfikar Ramzan, chief technology officer or RSA, comparing the matchup to the controversial ‘Hand of God’ goal in the 1986 FIFA World Cup when Argentina defeated England. In that goal, the ball bounced off of Diego Maradona’s hand beforehand. A referee said he didn’t see the infringement.

The 1997 chess match between Kasparov and Deep Blue could have established a scientific precedent for artificial intelligence, but it didn’t. “We lost the opportunity to understand whether there was something novel about how chess was being played and whether you could apply these types of [computing] techniques to problems previously thought you couldn’t apply them to,” Ramzan said. “For a long time, people thought chess required human intuition.” But the collaboration between grandmasters and computer scientists over the years has resulted in even free chess engines such as Stockfish with scores considerably higher than those of the top-ranked human players of all time.

A game engine from Google known as AlphaGo also defeated a human in 1997, which was another game where at least some experts felt humans had the upper hand. “It may be a hundred years before a computer beats humans at Go — maybe even longer,” Piet Hut, Ph.D. an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study told The New York Times in 1997. “If a reasonably intelligent person learned to play Go, in a few months he could beat all existing computer programs. You don’t have to be a Kasparov.”

Enough With the Games

But deploying artificial intelligence or related techniques such as machine learning, deep learning, and analytics to thorny real-world problems — for instance, predicting when complex machines will fail or how to make health care or a cluster of factories more efficient — can still be challenging. “Oftentimes, it’s not just a matter of deploying a technique to help solve a problem, but understanding the domain and all of the context around it,” Ramzan said. Hidden biases can also creep into algorithms, or they could be sabotaged by ill-willed humans.

The clear victories of AI-themed demonstrations such as Deep Blue’s victory in chess, AlphaGo’s victory in Go, and broader applications of machine learning to solve concrete specified problems helped fuel the imaginations of marketers promising their software can revolutionize any company’s business. Attending a trade show dedicated to the industrial sector highlights the sheer number of companies promising to help any company revolutionize your business with AI and other cutting edge technologies. “There’s a flurry of buzzwords that don’t mean anything,” said Saar Yoskovitz, co-founder and CEO of Augury, which uses a combination of hardware and algorithms to monitor the health of industrial machinery.

While the promise of implementing techniques like machine learning to drive transformation within industrial environments are well-founded, Yoskovitz laments many general industrial techniques used in the sector are old-fashioned. “The tools haven’t changed since the 1980s in some cases,” Yoskovitz said. “There are flip charts, and maybe an earpiece system where you can log maintenance.”

Part of the challenge is that while leading industrial companies have experience in analytics, machine learning, and so forth, those techniques haven’t historically been a core focus. “They tend to be really good at making equipment to run big industrial processes, but that’s a different skill set than understanding big data and what it takes to do true advanced analytics,” Walker said. “It’s a parallel world.” In general, industrial companies pursuing projects under the artificial intelligence umbrella may struggle with basics such as preparing data for analytics.

A gradual change is underway, however, toward software-as-a-service applications that could potentially change how industrial environments are managed. “It should — I say should because it is not yet — be truly revolutionary,” Yoskovitz added. But in order to drive such a transformation, and to unleash the potential of AI, ML, and related techniques, requires changes to people and process. “I’ll give you one example of this from the software world. Look at what happened to sales organizations in the past decade,” Yoskovitz said. “It used to be that people looked at quarterly revenues. And today, you would call that a lagging indicator, not a leading indicator.” SaaS for sales staff made it simpler to track how many phone calls sales reps make along with their conversion rates. Sales professionals can use that information to “tweak their messaging because whatever change we make today will affect revenue in six months,” Yoskovitz said. “So how do we, very similarly, in our industry go from lagging indicators — uptime, for instance, is a lagging indicator — to leading indicators?”

Organizations that can come up with firm answers to such questions, matched with a careful application of technologies will find themselves ahead of the vast majority of the competition. Doing so requires aligning the three elements of the people, process, and technology framework. Walker concluded: “And I think, for us to be really successful at AI, we also have to be really successful at looking at what it means to be human.”

Written by Brian Buntz of IOT World Today

https://www.iotworldtoday.com/2019/05/02/a-collision-course-ai-marketing-people-and-process/

#Blockchain #cryptocurrency #markethive

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sheminecrafts · 5 years ago

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Inside the Instagram AI that fills Explore with fresh, juicy content

Instagram has posted an article describing the behind-the-scenes machinery that fills the Explore tab in Instagram with new, interesting stuff every time you open it. It’s a bit technical, so here are five takeaways.

Even Instagram and Facebook have limited resources

Unlike the feed, which some still would prefer was simply chronological, the Explore tab needs to be algorithmically driven. But understanding what’s happening on an image-based social network and recommending new content to people is a problem that’s exactly as hard as you make it.

If these companies had infinite processing power and time, they’d probably come at the question of Explore a bit differently. But as it is they need to serve hundreds of millions of people on short notice and with merely enormous computing resources. I think they put this at the top of the post so people don’t wonder why they’re cutting corners.

How Instagram’s algorithm works

It’s also easier to experiment and iterate when you can change stuff and see results quickly, they point out.

It’s all about the account, not the post

So much is posted to Instagram that it would be pretty much impossible to keep track of every photo individually, for recommendation purposes anyway. It’s simpler and more efficient to track accounts, since accounts tend to have themes or topics, from a broader one like “travel” to something highly specific, like especially round seals.

While liking one post from an account doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll like everything else from that account, it is a good indicator that you’re at least interested in the theme of that account. Even if it was this particular post of this particular cat that you wanted to heart because it reminds you of old Mittens, if you’re liking pictures from an account that mostly posts cats, that’s valuable information.

Complex habits inform the algorithm

Notably it isn’t just image features that Instagram uses to figure out what accounts are topically linked, though of course that kind of thing can be detected too. They also use your behavior.

For instance, when you like several posts in a row, they’re more likely to be linked in some way even if Instagram’s algorithms can’t quite see it:

If an individual interacts with a sequence of accounts in the same session, it’s more likely to be topically coherent compared with a random sequence of accounts from the diverse range of Instagram accounts. This helps us identify topically similar accounts.

People just tend to look into stuff that way, going from one travel-focused account to the next, or focusing on animals because they need a pick-me up. All that information gets sucked up by the algorithm and inspected for relevance. Of course deliberate actions like “see fewer posts like this” and blocking accounts has a lot of weight as well.

From “seed accounts” to a top 25

The process of getting from a couple billion posts to just two dozen can be pretty difficult, but you can cut the problem down to manageable size by limiting the Explore tab to accounts linked in some way to accounts the user has already liked or saved posts from. These are called “seed accounts” because everything else in the process really grows out of them.

Because of how the machine learning system represents accounts and their topics inside itself, it’s super easy for it to find a couple hundred similar accounts.

Imagine if you know someone likes a particular reddish-orange marble and you need to find some more like it. If you just dip your hand into a sack of marbles you’re unlikely to find one quickly. Even if you pour them out on the floor you’ll still have to hunt around for a bit. But if you’ve already organized them by color, all you have to do is reach into the general vicinity of the marble they like and you’re almost guaranteed to pick a winner.

The machine learning model does that by giving all these accounts a sort of location in a virtual space, and the closer two are in that space, the closer they are topically.

So the really hard part of paring down a set of billions to a set of hundreds is basically already accomplished by the way the accounts are classified.

From there Instagram does three passes with neural networks of increasing complexity.

First, slightly confusingly, is a simpler, combined version of the next two processes, which takes it from 500 to 150 accounts. This is a little weird, but think about it this way: This neural network has seen steps 2 and 3 happen many times and has a pretty good idea of what they do. Sort of like if you’d seen cookies get made enough times that you could guess at a recipe. You’d probably get close, but you also wouldn’t want to publish it to like a hundred million people. So this step just gets the obvious stuff right.

Second is a computationally cheap neural network that uses way more signals than the simple topical similarity mentioned above. Here’s where your individual likes come into play, as well as the deeper data about accounts. You like travel, sure, but in particular you like couples traveling — both things the marble-sorting algorithm above can help with. Other parameters, like a post’s general popularity, or actually its being different from the other posts in the mix, figure in as well. That skims another 100 off the top, leaving 50.

Third is a computationally expensive version of the above, which does another pass on those 50 and cuts them in half, basically by looking closer and taking the time to include, perhaps, a thousand data points each rather than a hundred.

I guess that was kind of long for a “takeaway.” Don’t worry, the next one is quick.

And of course, no

“We want to make sure the content we recommend is both safe and appropriate for a global community of many ages on Explore,” they write. “Using a variety of signals, we filter out content we can identify as not being eligible to be recommended.”

So now you know why you don’t get any of that in Explore.

Instagram now demotes vaguely ‘inappropriate’ content

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unit85and86deantemjit · 6 years ago

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Task 3 - Pitch

1 - Message stickers

What is the theme? This could be one theme for 3 potential projects or three separate themes.

What will you be creating?

Why are you creating it? Who is the audience, what is the purpose behind the work?

There are many things to consider and think about when creating message stickers, for instance, the target audience. I’d need to really do primary and secondary research to find out what’s the market needs are for message stickers. For example, the illustrations can absolutely be anything I wanted; however, I have to think as a consumer perspective whether it is something that I am going to be using as often or not in daily online communication. Having a specific target audience is the key to success in creating a successful set of message stickers. Personally, I’d use the stickers that have a wide variety of emotions and a character that could represent myself. This means that the character illustration I am looking for is going to be a male character, so this sets a target audience specifically for the male gender as they are likely will be using it more than women.

However, this is only my own personal opinions, which can be biased. To really tackle the problems, I will need to do primary research by creating a survey and ask my family members what they would like to see in the stickers set since all of my family members use stickers pretty often on an application called ‘LINE’. The secondary research will also be conducted to see the results on the internet and what people would like to see.

There is no specific theme at this moment in time as I’d need to conduct a research first before deciding what the theme is going to be. However, I do have a clear goal as to what I wanted to do, for example, animate at least 9 stickers to provide more expressions on the character and this would need to be expressions that can be used in daily online communication. Another thing I have planned is my target audience, the target I have decided on is the male gender as my character will be a male character, and this is something that I would personally use. However, I am going to be making the character cute enough so that women audience can still use it as well to express certain emotions in their online chat.

I aim to create stickers set that are cute and friendly. This means that there will be no swearing words or something inappropriate to the young group of people. The set stickers will have a wide variety of expressions that can easily be used in daily conversations such as hello, sad, angry, cooking, and eating etc. Although the target audience is for the male gender, it still has that cute aspect which female can even use and also target at any age group, which I believe my stickers could stand out in the market.

In an extension of this, my aim for the stickers is that it needs to be easy to use in daily conversation and communication, and stickers that consist of easily understandable expressions, messages, and illustrations. Things I’d really like to avoid is to create stickers that are difficult to use in daily conversation, such as objects and scenery and sets that significantly lack variety, such as stickers made up purely of pale colours or strings of numbers. Lastly, I’d like to avoid content that offends public order and morality, for instance, suggestive of under-age drinking or smoking, contain sexual or violent imagery, or may fuel nationalism.

I have an idea of how many stickers I wanted initially, which is 20 stickers. However, this is not possible if I am going to be publishing these stickers for LINE as they have a certain amount of stickers that I’d need to meet, such as 8, 16, 24, 32, and 40. I know I wanted to create somewhere between 16 stickers to 24 stickers, but this could change if I have enough time to create more than 20 stickers or not as I’d also need to be animating half of them too.

There are many things to consider when creating message stickers, as I’d need to stick to the application’s stickers’ guidelines as this will help me create a successful set of stickers. While making sure that the requirements for the stickers are met with their policy and send them for a review. I have heard that the process for the review can take anywhere from 3 to 4 weeks, although some people have to wait for 2 months until they can get their stickers onto the market. I planned on submitting them as early as I can, but I know it won’t be in time for the hand in of the project. However, I might get lucky and get reviewed in a few weeks anyway.

2 - UI design

What is the theme? This could be one theme for 3 potential projects or three separate themes.

What will you be creating?

Why are you creating it? Who is the audience, what is the purpose behind the work?

Three themes came to my mind when coming up with this project idea, which is: music application, travelling guide application, and saving the planet application. All three themes are interesting to me, and probably the one that stands out to me the most was saving the planet application. I wanted to create an application explaining all of the problems with plastic and how we could help our planet, and the impact that plastic has on our marine life.

The application will be interactive and easily accessible with one click that takes you to different pages. Each pages explaining how plastic has made an impact on our environment, ocean, and marine life.

Although I have made a UI design before for a mobile phone application. I really wanted to go much more in-depth than I did before. This means researching how to create a successful UI design application that is interactive and easy to understand for the viewers. Moreover, investigate more into what techniques or skills I’d need, such as knowing the grid systems or are there specific layouts I could use for a UI design to make it successful.

The target audience will be for any gender and at any age group as this is targeting to a broader audience. The purpose of this project is to explain the information about how plastic has an impact on our planet and what we can do to help. However, I am not going to be creating an application that takes the reader to a page and make them read a piece of lengthy information that would be boring.

I planned on creating different animation, which will be played when the users clicked on a particular page, and my aim for this is to grab the users’ attention with movements, colours, and images. All of which will be displayed throughout the pages to keep the users stick around and read the information on that page. Sounds simple but it is something that I’d need to research on and is it even possible to even pull something like this off.

3 - 3D paper crafts

What is the theme? This could be one theme for 3 potential projects or three separate themes.

What will you be creating?

Why are you creating it? Who is the audience, what is the purpose behind the work?

Two themes came to my mind when coming up with this project idea, which is a papercut poster and papercut calendar. To be honest, I am more interested in creating a papercut calendar as I believe it would require more technique and skills to design a calendar, let alone designing a papercut for it.

For the project, I’d need to research more on the different types of the calendar as they all come in different sizes and shapes. My idea for the calendar is to keep the overall look simple and play around a lot with the white spaces.

My idea is to create a papercut of a big letter acronym to each month - in a total of 12. The letter representing each month will be large and there will be graphic paper-cut in the background to create some interests. The colour scheme is going to be rather simple, which are black and white, which would contrast really well and make it all comes together.

Furthermore, the reason why I came up with this project idea was that 3D papercraft is another aspect of graphic design which I have never tried before, and I believe that doing this project could potentially help me with my design skills. For example, I’d need to learn and use the grid system and apply the technique when designing the calendar. I’d also have to plan how I am going to be cutting the paper, what sort of paper do I need, and I’d need to make sure that the cut out is equal for all 12 pages to keep it consistent.

The target audience is aimed at any gender, and there is no specific age group. However, it is likely aimed more towards adults considering the design backgrounds that I am going to have on there. The purpose of this project is rather simple-minded, I just wanted to create a calendar, but in 3D paper crafts. This means designing it in Adobe Illustrator before trying to papercut it to create a cut-out design that I am looking for. Moreover, I’d need to consider what materials I am going to be needing for this project, and how all of this is going to come together as this is something that I have never created before.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I have decided to go with my first idea, which is designing message stickers. However, before I begin generating ideas on characters and emotions, I’d need to do extensive research into what are the processes involve into creating message stickers and are there other things I’d need to know before I begin the project.

My focus on my message stickers:

Suitable to use for all age group and any gender

Easily understandable emotions

Can be used in daily conversations

In an extension of this, the skills and techniques which I could potentially learn from this project are:

Learning different emotions

Animation principles

Visual communication

Motion

Upon my research, I found that there are three ways of expressing feelings in chat, which is through the uses of emoticons, emojis, and stickers. All of which has a history of its own with emoticons being the oldest form of expressing emotions on online communication.

Emoticon history:

Emoticons are used in computer communications that are meant to represent a facial expression to communicate the author’s emotions. When the internet was entirely text-based, and this is between the late 1960s and the early 1990s - when emotions were rendered in ASCII and were read sideways, for example, :-) which indicates “smiley”.

However, it has been claimed that the first emoticon appeared in 1979, the first substantiated use of an emoticon came from American computer scientist Scott E. Fahlman on September 19 in 1982. He suggested that :-) could indicate humorous posts on a message board, and :-( could indicate serious posts.

The use of emoticons has caused controversy online. Critics of emoticons argue that they erode the ability of people to communicate clearly and use language creatively in cyberspace, as well as in other forms of writing. However, some have said that they are a lazy means of communication, and other note that they negatively affect the credibility of the author in an e-mail message.

Emoticon supporters insist that they help online communication more than they hurt it. For example, emoticons are the way to address emotions and feelings among users in online communication as the barrier for nonverbal communication is not having face-to-face contact. They help clarify the tone of the message without the need for lengthy exposition.

Emoji history:

The first emoji was created in 1999 by Japanese artist Shigetaka Kurita. Kurita worked on the development team for “i-mode,” an early mobile inter-platform from Japan’s leading mobile carrier, DOCOMO.

Kurita wanted to design an attractive interface to convey information in a simple, succinct way: for example, an icon to show the weather forecast rather than spelling out “cloudy.” This was when Kurita sketched a set of 12- by 12- pixel images that could be selected from a keyboard-like grid within the -mode interface.

Kurita’s original 176 emoji is now part of the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. DOCOMO’s goal was to find new ways to express information. There were characters to show the weather (sun, clouds, umbrella, snowman), traffic (car, tram, aeroplane, ship), and technology (landline, cell phones, TV, GameBoy).

However, those characters weren’t informational. Emoji simply offered a way to add emotional subtext to a message. For instance, “I understand” might sound cold or passive on its own, but add 😊and the message offered a sense of warmth and sympathy, and this was the beginning of a new visual language.

Sticker history:

The origin of stickers goes back to post-tsunami Japan in 2011 when Korea’s top internet company, Naver began developing LINE in Japan. Naver opted against focusing on Korea because it felt the market was too challenging, mainly due to the dominance of Kakao Talk, which is said to be installed on more than 90% of Korea’s smartphones today.

LINE was the service that first pioneered emoticons, and its rise in Japan - where it is more used than Facebook, Twitter and other social networks - helped turn stickers into a communication tool for users.

Stickers are a mix of cartoons and Japanese smiley-like ‘emojis’. Both are popular in Japan, and when bought together, they gave Japanese smartphone owners an addictive new way to communicate emotions and feelings with quirkiness. Not to mention that the challenge to accumulate your own personal collection appealed to the market too. Moreover, using stickers means users spend less time tapping out words on the phone, making communication easier and more rapid.

Research into stickers:

Stickers offer a fun, engaging way for people to express themselves in a messages conversation without typing or using emoji. A sticker is an image or an animation that can be sent or placed on messages, photos, and other stickers to add emphasis and communicate emotions.

Things to consider when designing message stickers:

Design for expressiveness - people use stickers to visually convey moods and reactions. Strive to deliver stickers that connect with people at an emotional level. Also consider incorporating imagery, words, and phrases to add new dimensions to conversations.

Think globally - messaging is a universal form of communication. Aim for stickers that have broad, international appeal to it.

Use descriptive image names or provide alternative text labels - although they aren’t visible on the screen, image names and alternative text labels let voice over audibly describe stickers, making navigation easier for people with visual impairments.

Add vitality through animation - although stickers can be static images, animated stickers are a great way to impact energy in a conversation. Another thing to consider when creating animated stickers is to use a frame rate high enough to keep motion fluid.

https://www.wired.com/story/guide-emoji/ https://yalantis.com/blog/stickers-a-mobile-messaging-lingua-franca-or-a-powerful-marketing-tool/ https://www.fastcompany.com/3065406/how-stickers-are-helping-humanize-chat-apps https://www.britannica.com/topic/emoticon

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yradwan-stuff · 6 years ago

Text

The Flesh Machine

Over the many years since it’s release, Ghost in the Shell has often been seen as an icon when it comes to tackling the subject of the line between man, or in this case, woman and machine. Although the movie touches on a more important subject; giving us a warning about humanity’s potential fatal flaw, and its path to a more evolved civilization. To begin Ghost in the Shell has had a huge impact in science fiction media inspiring movies like Ex Machina and The Matrix, even shows like Westworld use similar aesthetics and share the same themes. These movies also the tackle the issue of man and machine and how technology will be mankind’s undoing and what not. However Ghost in the Shell presents a different resolution not with one side beating the other, but a synthesis between the two.

As we’ve seen, the movie centers around Major Motoko Kusanagi a cyborg government agent that works for Section 9 which I can only assume are a police task force or a black ops unit. They encounter a criminal that goes by The Puppet Master that ghost hacks people and implants fake memories to force it to do its bidding. As it turns out later in the movie that this hacker is actually an spy AI program called Project 2501, and developed by Section 6 that lost control of the program after it gained self awareness. At the end of the film after Kusanagi catches up to the program it makes her a interesting proposal. Project 2501 asks Kusanagi to merge and create a sort of child, which was literally the case at the end of the movie, Kusanagi accepts and the movie ends.

The confrontation and resolution of the two forces of human and digital consciousness reflects Georg Hegel’s vision of progress. Hegel believes that all throughout the progression of human evolution that every development was a cause of forces that confront one another and inevitably make something new. Hegel’s philosophy basically says that world functions on rational principles, and that the true nature of reality is almost always knowable, and this philosophy is well reflected onto Kusanagi who is driven by dissatisfaction with her limited perspective and is convinced throughout the movie that there is a better reality for her to live. The movie treats the “marriage” of Kusanagi’s consciousness with that of The Puppet Master’s with optimism, and Hegel’s system of dialectics explains why. Dialectics is more often construed, in classical philosophy, as a form of argumentative discourse to come to conclusions. It starts with one side of the argument which is the thesis and met by a counter argument called the anti-thesis. There are three possible end results one being the denial of the thesis, another is the affirmation of the anti-thesis, and the last one is the synthesis of the assertions that results in a better understanding of the subject. Hegel however uses dialectics differently where it’s the basic mechanism to human progress on an individual and collective level that when one force confronts the other something new emerges.

Ghost in the Shell at its heart is a dialectic between the human and digital world with Kusanagi on one side with her human mind that makes her unique, although she feels constrained by her limited perspective and personal identity. On the other side Project 2501 existed through cyber reality and therefore obtains the broader understanding that Kusanagi desires, although it’s also limited by a lack of personal identity. In the movie the program even acknowledges that it’s an intelligent life form because of its sentience and awareness of its own existence but at the same time it knows it lack the fundamentals in all living organisms, reproduction and death.

Hegel’s dialectics also present an interesting dynamic between master and slave. To put this more in context imagine in feudal times where you had the lord that owns the land and the serfs that work the land. The lord is the master and can exercise his power however he sees fit by forcing the serfs to work the land until they rot while the lord does nothing. The dynamic that ensues as a result of this system is that the more the serfs work the more knowledge and experience they gain, all the while the master learns nothing. This, according to Hegel, is what leads the oppressed to inevitably surmount their masters. Ghost in the Shell resonates this idea throughout the movie with Section 6 and Section 9 acting in a typical master behavior. More specifically Section 6 masters are stagnant and stuck in the politics of the old world, and Section 9 uses lethal force without compromise. Kusanagi is even ordered to destroy Project 2501 if she’s unable to secure it which is ultimately counterproductive since it makes it more difficult for Section 9 to learn the programs intentions and prolongs Kusanagi’s path to evolve. Project 2501 in this case is the slave because the authorities use the program to work for them and while it’s gaining knowledge and experience, the authorities continue to learn nothing until the program is finally more qualified and stronger and even starts becoming the master by controlling people such as the garbage worker. Hegel’s solution to this is synthesis or what he calls sublation, which is synthesis without loss. The result is a unique, superior idea that incorporates and accommodates both perspectives which is what Project 2501 offers Kusanagi at the end of the movie.

Sublation is crucial because it prevents stagnation when a person or an idea becomes too enclosed or dare I say too full of itself. Even Section 9 was put together with these types of dialectical principles and is presented in the movie when Togusa asks Kusanagi why someone like him, with almost no cybernetic enhancements, was on the team and she explains to him that diversity is what makes them stronger and she states “Overspecialize and you breed in weakness, it’s slow death.” Project 2501 is also aware of this issue of stagnation which is why it needs the constraints Kusanagi feels intimidated by. For Hegel sublation happens in conflicts like these whether it be on an individual level or on a much larger scale, and that the world evolves based on these dialectics even in subjects such as science and art where every time humanity advances it enters a new state of affairs that represents an improvement over what came before. Hegel calls this new state “Geist” which can be translated to mind, spirit, or ghost. Geist follows this trajectory after Kusanagi’s and Project 2501’s sublation where this being, that’s human, machine, and AI, exists starting a new era of human evolution, and is even hinted at in the movie during the final battle scene where the tank obliterates the tree of life and the names of less evolved beings, but leaves hominis on top untouched. This symbolizes that evolution will continue way past humans. This is what makes Ghost in the Shell so unique because it’s not about what happens if we do merge with our technology it’s what will happen if we don’t, it also relays the message to interact with the world, resolve our contradictions with it, and emerge stronger and better because clinging to our beliefs about what we are will only prevent us from becoming what we can be. Even in the movie Kusanagi asks Project 2501 if it can guarantee if she can still be herself to which it asks her why she would want to remain the same, and that her efforts to remain what she is is what limits her.

The first time I saw Ex Machina I was most astounded by the possibilities presented for AI’s to learn what it’s like to be human. The story starts with the protagonist Caleb who’s an office worker that gets invited to stay at his hilariously rich boss’s estate. When he gets to the estate his boss, Nathan, introduces him to the real protagonist Ava, a highly intelligent AI that’s built to look and act human learning from everything around her. Caleb becomes Nathan’s experiment to see if Ava is capable of real human thought, and after a few sessions Ava starts developing a romantic interest in Caleb. Ava causes a blackout so they can talk about what they want without supervision, such as not trusting Nathan. Nathan announces he’s going to upgrade Ava which would destroy her current self, so Caleb gets Nathan drunk and when he’s passed out Caleb goes to plan with Ava on how they’re going to escape together. Nathan then reveals that he’s been listening even when Ava cuts the power, and that Caleb was an experiment to see if Ava can emotionally manipulate him, which she did. After Caleb lets Ava out she says good-bye to Nathan by killing him, and then graciously thanks Caleb by locking him in the house and leaving him to die. She escapes and the last shot shows her blending in unnoticed in society.

Ex Machina explores the lines between human and AI. The visual imagery in the film illustrates the distinction between the artificial and the natural worlds. Muted colors inside Nathan’s mansion reflect the order of machines, and doors are controlled by a security protocol. In contrast the natural environment around the facility is colorful, beautiful, and unpredictable. Nathan describes true consciousness to the work of Jackson Pollock where he states “He let his mind go blank and his hand go where it wanted, not deliberate, not random, but some place in between.” The construction of Ava’s brain reflects the fluidity the human consciousness requires. On the other hand the film makes us question how useful Nathan’s test of consciousness really is, since calling humans conscious is far fetched as it is. Nathan points out that Caleb’s personality is determined by programming just like Ava’s which makes his responses and reactions more feasibly analyzed and quantified by Ava who ultimately determined that Caleb has feelings for her. In the end, the film leaves us with the impression of Ava’s humanity, and not just because she attaches new skin to her body, but because when she escapes we see the Pollock painting again to remind us of the distinction Nathan made between a programmed machine and the subconscious motivations of a human. When Ava murders Nathan she technically passes his test because it’s not an act she was programmed to commit, and demonstrates that she transcended her parameters.

The film is less a warning about the many horrifying dangers of technology and more a commentary about how man’s creations reflect human nature; cars have a heart that pumps, computers are modeled to process and produce information similar to that of the brain, and even the atomic bomb mirrors the violence of the societies that made them. In the film Ava reflects the manipulative tendencies of Caleb and Nathan who are the only humans she met. Thus, if Nathan has made Ava in his own image what kind of person will she be? She’ll be a murderous robot who uses others to achieve her goals.

The Corporation short video discusses the potential that corporations have in the ownership of biological and living organisms, and it started years ago when General Electric and a professor by the name of Ananda Chakrabarty went to the patent office with a microbe that’s been modified in labs in order to eat oil spills. However the patent office rejected GE’s and Chakrabarty’s patent saying they don’t patent living organisms. They tried appealing it in the US Customs court of appeal and successfully overwrote the patent office that later appealed. The central question of the video is whether a corporation should have the right to directly or through a license own a living organism.

This is a big issue of which I know very little about, but from what I can conclude is that a capitalistic approach when it comes to medicine and the body will more often than not result in what capitalism was meant for which is creating competition. As we’ve seen with other things other than biology, such as the media or products that big corporations will try and monopolize the field they’re competing in. Currently in the US only six corporations own ninety percent of all media outlets. As stated in the video as well that in the future only a handful of corporations will monopolize genomes, and the cellular building blocks of both humans and animals as intellectual party. Once a certain resource becomes monopolized or in the hands of one centralized entity then it ultimately destroyed any chance of anyone creating anything better that would advance the progression of society. On the other hand the need for advancement will create healthy competition between companies that will strive to better understand and develop products, or in this case, living organisms that will ultimately work for the betterment and progression of human society. Profit is all the corporations get out of these developments and advancements and later another corporation will overpower these developments with their own. In the early 20th century corporate lawyers gaves private corporations similar rights to those of a person, and is considered an entity with rights, they can sue, and can be sued just like everyone else. Based on this if a company uses its resources and man hours in order to develop something in which to profit off then they are well within their rights to own that property

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fycanadianpolitics · 8 years ago

Link

There’s a growing number of well-intentioned progressives who view purchasing memberships to the Conservative Party of Canada and voting in the leadership race as an effective way to stop the “alt-right” in Canada.

Ipolitics credits Gonzalo Riva with being the first to publicly propose this idea, and was soon followed by former Green Party president, Dave Bagler, who amplified this message among Green voters. Musicians Amy Millan and fellow Stars bandmate Torquil Campbell joined in on Twitter, and an opinion piece in Chatelaine was published suggesting that it’s possible to spend $15 for a membership and “cast a vote for someone without toxic and divisive values, hopefully preventing permanent damage to our country.”

While supporters of this idea remain disparate and largely unorganized, it is one that is beginning to circulate widely on social media, and it can seem like attractive shortcut tomany of those engaging with politics for the first time. That’s why it is worth engaging with this idea on its own terms, and unpacking the danger lurking just behind its good intentions.

Why do they think this is a good idea?

The argument for joining the Conservative Party can be summarized as follows:

With the rise of Donald Trump and the emboldening of the far right (or “alt-right”) around the world, progressives need to do everything we can to stop the far right from taking power in Canada. Kellie Leitch, running in the Conservative leadership race, represents the real and present danger of a white nationalist, anti-immigrant candidate taking over a major political party. This will give hateful ideas a greater platform, and enable the far right to incite more acts of racist, Islamophobic attacks.

In order to stop this from happening, progressive-minded individuals only have to spend $15 to become a member of the party and vote for the more ‘progressive’ alternative in the leadership race. The candidate of choice for most of these progressive-minded voters is Michael Chong, the MP for Wellington-Halton Hills in Ontario.

In short, joining the Conservatives and influencing the outcome of their leadership race is a form of political engagement that involves a low level of investment (of time and money) and a high level of return.

However, given that this leadership race will be decided by votes from riding associations rather than individual members, it is not enough for people to cast a single ballot — the goal, therefore, is for progressives to join in such numbers that they can carry the vote in less populated riding associations.

What’s the problem?

There are both short-term and long-term problems with this strategy. In the short term— assuming for a moment that it even could achieve its stated aim— the strategy underestimates the amount of new memberships and organizational coordination that would be required to actually have an impact on the outcome. Continuing such a scattershot approach will only succeed in wasting everyone’s time and money.

Further, most accounts have failed to understand the actual dynamics at play in the Conservative leadership race, and have been actively distorting both the current level of support that Leitch has inside the party, and who the real frontrunners are: O’Leary, Bernier, and Scheer.

Chong, the preferred choice of these ‘strategic Tories’, is a second-tier candidate who (much like Lisa Raitt) is trying to position himself as a kingmaker. That is, Chong is trying to position himself as the one who will be able to bring enough votes to a frontrunner in order to secure their victory (and, in the process, ensure a future cabinet position for himself).

But beyond these practical problems, there are long-term political problems with this strategy that makes it an issue of concern for the broader Left:

You will be fundraising for the Conservative Party. There’s no way around this one: you will be engaging in a unique fundraising effort for the Tories, and a faction within the party will be more than happy to amplify your efforts in order to reach beyond their current fundraising base. In response, these strategic Tories say that they have or will make a similarly-sized donation to a progressive organization as a way to mitigate the harm — which actually concedes the point that with their donation, they are doing harm. Most commonly, they reply that their individual donation too negligible to make a difference. But it isn’t only a $15 donation — it is $15 multiplied by however many others they will be able to persuade to join along with them. The criticism isn’t so much that they are giving $15, but that they are actively trying to facilitate hundreds of other people to do the same.

You will be lending progressive legitimacy to the Right. The primary effect of this campaign will be to lend an aura of progressive “legitimacy” to a specific faction inside the Conservative Party — and, by extension, to the Conservative Party itself. But every faction, regardless of who they are backing for leader, is unified through their party membership to policies that attack poor and working-class people, indigenous sovereignty, women’s reproductive rights, immigrants and refugees, civil liberties, the LGBTQ+ community, democratic institutions, and the future health and viability of our planet (to name only the most notable themes from the Harper years). Put simply, progressives have no allies inside the Conservative Party, and it is irresponsible to suggest otherwise.

You will be disorganizing progressive movements. Globally, we are currently going through an intense period of political crisis, with growing polarization and thousands of individuals becoming politically active for the very first time. From women’s marches to anti-Trump and anti-racist demonstrations, there is a significant number of future organizers and leaders actively seeking out opportunities to get involved and fight for social and economic justice in their communities, workplaces, and campuses. This presents a significant opening for the Left, and we don’t have the luxury to be squandering people’s time and energy by sending them down paths that lead nowhere.

Is Michael Chong a “progressive” alternative?

As I already mentioned, the candidate supported by these strategic Tories is Michael Chong. A recent article describes Chong as a “principled progressive candidate” and “a moral and principled leader” with a platform that is “bold, pragmatic, and progressive while maintaining a conservative approach to governance.”

Were it only people with already existing sympathies for “conservative approach[es] to governance”, I don’t think it would be necessary to respond in much detail. But the truth is that a range of individuals, from greens to social democrats, seem to be under similar illusions about Chong’s progressive credentials. So let’s look briefly at both his leadership platform and his record in parliament.

In the Economic section of his leadership platform, he is pushing standard neoliberal policies that come straight out of the Fraser Institute playbook. He wants to:

Reduce personal income taxes by $14.9 billion a year. This would be an absolute reduction in personal income taxes of 10%

Flatten the personal income tax system from five rates to two rates, keeping the current 15% and 29% rates and the current thresholds

Simplify the personal income tax system by eliminating half of the $22.9 billion in tax expenditures identified by the Fraser Institute

Reduce corporate income taxes by $1.9 billion a year. This would be an absolute reduction in corporate income taxes of 5%

Absolute income tax reductions will disproportionately benefit the rich, as will a flattening of the income tax system as a whole. Canada’s already low corporate tax rates will be slashed even further, and positions Chong nowhere outside of the hard-right orthodoxy. A few boutique tax credits for working people will do little to nothing to offset the structural harm that these massive reductions for the 1% would entail.

And there is nothing in here for progressives to celebrate on the environmental front, either. Chong is touted by some for his “ambitious” revenue neutral carbon tax, and despite being attacked for it by some of his fellow Conservative leadership contenders, don’t be fooled: it is perfectly in line with mainstream Conservative thinking on this issue (and is backed by none other than arch-Conservative Preston Manning), and is a laughably inadequate tool for confronting the enormity of the climate crisis.

Beyond his leadership platform, it’s always worth taking a trip down memory lane to see what sort of legislation Chong has supported in the House of Commons. Here is a random sampling of legislation from the Harper years that Chong was happy to support:

Bill C-23, The Fair Elections Act

Bill C-51, the draconian “anti-terrorism” act

S-7, “Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act”

Bill C-525, Employees’ Voting Rights Action

Bill C-10, Safe Streets and Communities Act

Bill 377, An Act to amend the Income Tax Act (requirements for labour organizations)

And it goes on. Just take your pick.

From violations of civil rights and workers’ rights to legislation that courted outright bigotry, Chong has hidden his ‘progressive’ credentials quite well. And while Chong has come out in support of M-103 and has been publicly critical of the Conservative Party’s more overt courting of the racist right, he does so with the aim of continuing Jason Kenney’s cynical approach of targeting select immigrant communities. If nothing else, Chong is smart Conservative who recognizes that they have to expand beyond their traditional (and aging) white base —which makes him a more far-sighted enemy of progressive movements.

A symptom of a deeper problem

The belief that joining the party of the party of militarism, bigotry, and the 1% can lead to any outcome other than the strengthening militarism, bigotry and the 1% is naive at best and dangerous at worst. But it’s all too easy for those of us on the left to dismiss the anxieties of those calling for such a strategy without taking a look in the mirror as to why this would appear as a viable option.

This strategy reflects a low level of confidence in existing progressive movements or organization to effectively fight back against the far right at both a local and national level, and suggests that negotiating the terms of one’s own oppression will produce greater returns than building a force to outright oppose it.

People will use the tools at their disposal in order to best advance their goals, and we are in desperate need of effective tools.

The late Mark Fisher coined the term “capitalist realism” to describe “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” The ‘progressive for Chong’ phenomenon is but one morbid symptom of this condition.

Since the economic crisis of 2008, we have been in an era of periodic bursts of anger and rebellion, but they have not coalesced into a sustained, mass-based movement across the country. As people grapple with how best to defend their own lives, their families, and their friends from the threat of the far right, we need to make sure that we building credible vehicles to take us toward a future that is fairer and more just than the one we currently live in. Otherwise, we can expect a lot worse than lesser-evilism to rear its head.

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