#so my reach is theoretically a little broader

[gamebunny-advance]

Huwah~

I don't like that it's so difficult to find out who exactly has retweeted my posts.

I don't even get a notif if someone leaves a reply. I feel like that website is basically useless to me.

Edit: Resolved. I'm just a moron, but I'll keep this post up in case I forget how to do this again.

[mdhwrites]

Since you watched Hazbin hotel, you maybe have watched Helluva Boss too. I have a question, cause im curious.

Do you think that Stolas's marriage was retconned to victimize him?

So I'm going to swerve this at first to just talk about the fact that what they did with Stolas is nothing new, it's just essentially twin tropes smashing together at the same time. Both are ways people use family to humanize someone, and in a broader context two ways in general used to humanize someone. His daughter is essentially "Save the Cat" where by showing a gentler, warmer, more caring side of himself, we know there's nobility in him which can paint some of his better actions in a kinder light. Meanwhile, his wife shows the pressure and cruelty upon him, the way life crushes him, that makes his crueler actions seem perhaps more like coping mechanisms. It's like giving an alcoholic a tragic backstory so you understand that he doesn't drink himself to oblivion because it's fun for him and he doesn't care about the harm it does to others but because he needs it to survive and function at all, at least in his eyes.

Neither of these tropes are bad either. Done with less awful character traits, you get stuff like the silly person who covers their trauma by being over the top and maybe ignoring reality more than they should. I myself literally used saving a cat as a way to humanize my noble main character in Little Miss Rich Witch because while she was dismissive of others and seem annoyed at many people's actions, now she was willing to hurt herself by reaching into a bush of brambles and help a kitten find safety. It theoretically can help assure the reader that a better person is under there and going to emerge eventually.

...Which brings us back to Stolas. Now the first thing I have to mention is that you're actually incorrect. I have not watched Hazbin but I mention a lot of shows that I've seen enough analysis, discussion, etc. for and feel comfortable enough mentioning some broadstroke elements that resonate with what I'm discussing. I HAVE seen some of Helluva Boss but ended it on the episode where Blitzo and Moxxie get kidnapped so I'm not ignorant on these subjects but I didn't really see when life went to complete shit for Stolas...

And I do not give a fuck because neither of these tropes function when there is no better man to speak of. I mentioned Rich Witch not just as self promotion but because of a REALLY important element that fails with his daughter: Follow through. Azu, the noble girl, puts herself in danger of breaking the rules because her busy schedule means that in order to bring the kitten to a shelter, she first has to bring it to school the next day. Then we find out that while she's tsundere about the reasons for working there and doesn't think animals like her, she actually volunteers at that same shelter so this is hardly the first animal she's saved in some way. This makes what is essentially virtue signalling an actual part of the fucking character. Stolas on the other hand, in the SAME EPISODE that we introduced to Octavia, has seemingly neglected his daughter's interests and the fact that she's been growing up for roughly a decade. Hell, even then, he still hires his boytoy to guard them so he can focus on being horny than his daughter and on other childish pleasures that he enjoys. So... Yeah, he gets a really sweet song with her but it's hardly like that's some small nugget smoldering at the core of his character as that fire burned out long ago.

Which brings us to his wife. Hey, why does the alcoholic have a tragic backstory instead of saying, "I beat my wife because she's a bitch and that's why I drink"? It's because the latter doesn't feel like a justified response. At that point, you are a horrible human being with little care for others, you're just bitching and moaning so that you can justify your terrible behavior. This is what Stolas is doing to his wife. "You're a bitch so I openly, confidently, CONSTANTLY cheat on you with someone I do not actually act like I give a fuck about except for his dick because otherwise show him basic human decency." At that point, the only reason the show manages to frame Stolas' wife as worse than him is because she never gets a song with Octavia so it comes across like only one tried to be a good parent before things went to hell and... That's just narrative bias, not strict fact. Not from what I saw.

These tropes only work when there is a better man underneath it all. There is no better man to Stolas. It's akin to how Blitzo has this tragic backstory, life has clearly dealt him a terrible hand... And he's just a complete horrid monster when it comes to those around him. Moxxie despises him for what he does to his privacy, his boundaries and his own personal life and for what? Because Blitzo gets off on it? Luna is a trying too hard goth chick and she isn't actually that mean or cruel or the like. Not even the fucking succubi that act as an antagonist for an episode are as bad to their people as Blitzo is to his and that's without getting into how that episode's proper antagonist is actually Blitzo, both because of past actions and present.

There is at no point, besides shallow backstory (which as always, backstory does not actually a character make because their present actions matter WAY MORE), where we really have a reason to think there's good people in there anymore. That's also why I dropped the show. I wanted to continue but it clearly was going to focus on its worst characters rather than anyone with an ounce of likability. Or, better yet, anything actually compelling about them several episodes into the series besides "Uwu, look at my tragedy while I harass the people around me."

I'm sorry, that just makes you the asshole. See you next tale.

======+++++======

I had initially considering answering this privately since I don't know all the nuances about Blitzo's marriage... But also I watched 7 episodes (including the pilot), more than twice as many as most people tell you is a fair shake, and these were my impressions. At that point... Sorry, you have an uphill battle to prove your sexual harassment in story is somehow justified. The CONSTANT sexual harassment that is not just because they're in hell since Moxxie and Millie prove you don't have to be like this. It's still a choice.

I have a public Discord for any and all who want to join!

I also have an Amazon page for all of my original works in various forms of character focused romances from cute, teenage romance to erotica series of my past. I have an Ao3 for my fanfiction projects as well if that catches your fancy instead. If you want to hang out with me, I stream from time to time and love to chat with chat.

A Twitter you can follow too

And a Kofi if you like what I do and want to help out with the fact that disability doesn’t pay much.

[bug-the-chicken-nug]

Bug's RWBY Worldbuilding Series 1

Hey, look, something nobody asked me to do! I'm about to start a multi-part post on my AU-but-theoretically-at-least-decently-applicable-to-canon idea of Aura/Semblances/Dust/Magic, in that order, in a system that should help unify and streamline them while still making there be an actual difference in what Magic is. I will also repeat myself sometimes in later posts, just so that each post can still be understood on its own without going to every link I'll add as I update this series The tag will be #Bug's RWBY Worldbuilding Series Without Further Ado, Part 1: Aura <- You are here. Part 1-B: Active Aura

Aura is a form of energy produced by all living things, and can diffuse into the atmosphere and surroundings as a wave/particle (it is both, much like photons). Passive Aura is the main thing produced, being akin to "infrared". The exact intensity and frequency of its production also directly coincides with an organism's physical and emotional state. So, when Grimm "sense" negative emotions, this is actually *what* they sense. The specific pattern of Aura produced by a person in distress. Active Aura would be "ultraviolet" in comparison, giving it new properties and abilities thanks to having much more energy to work with. (more on that later!) For now, we're focusing on the broader role and importance of Aura in Remnant, rather than the more specific combat-related things. That comes in my next installment. The Aura passively produced when you experience negative emotion is also what Grimm "eat", meaning that Grimm do not actually have any need to kill humans, however, the act of terrorizing and then killing humans allows them to become stronger at an accelerated rate. The traumatic death of a person produces massive blooms of the "negative" Aura they feed upon. Therefore, it unfortunately serves as their kind's most lucrative feeding strategy, even *with* the energy and risk that must first be invested into hunting and killing prey. Aura particles linger after they are produced, and reach a point where they "cool" (lose energy) to a sort of "ambient" energy level rather than losing all of it, leading to a "background" Aura field that surrounds and permeates the entirety of Remnant. However, the Aura does not simply diffuse itself calmly and evenly throughout Remnant, and then lie still and passive. Aura forms myriad invisible currents, vortices, jetstreams, and eddies throughout the world, much like air or water, although Aura also can and does phase through solid obstacles as it flows. In ways that are not yet well understood, this also has a profound impact on Remnant's ecosystem. Areas where Aura currents converge, or where dense currents flow, can often seem richer than others. This leads to phenomena such as how certain settlements can exist with little physical protection: For instance, by developing the means to discern areas that are within fast-flowing "rivers" of Aura, one can create settlements and trade routes in which negative emotion is typically "washed downstream" faster than it attracts Grimm. Even though Grimm can and do follow the Aura "upriver", especially if negativity gets truly out of hand, they will typically be distracted by the "runoff". Strong vortices and gyres of Aura can also accumulate a dense enough concentration of energy to allow for a very steady "low-level" activation of Dust deposits without any living creature's direct input, allowing for locations like Lake Matsu's floating islands to exist. Dust itself also attracts low-energy Aura, while higher-energy Aura becomes increasingly resistant to its pull. As such, it is not only affected by Aura currents, but the global actions of Dust across the world, all "pulling" unevenly on the background Aura field, contributes heavily to the formation and distribution of currents.

Such a phenomenon can be used as a simple and low-tech way to locate "rivers" as well: If a Dust crystal, especially one held at a considerable distance from anyone's person (such as up upon a flag or banner, for instance), begins to take on a slight glow by itself, and/or starts to weakly exhibit its inherent elemental property on its own, it's a clear sign that you are within a strong Aura current. More advanced applications allow for people to place specially-prepared Dust crystals in machinery and electronics and have the tiny, subtle fluctuations in the Dust's output be read carefully enough to be useful for myriad purposes, measuring and visualizing what might otherwise be almost entirely opaque to human senses. However, human activity and Dust industry can and does alter Aura currents, and sometimes disrupt even those currents which were thought to be too large and stable to *be* disruptable. This can be harmful, as was the case for the Great Vacuan Gyre, whose dissolution greatly worsened and accelerated the region's environmental degradation through an incredibly complex string of unforeseen chain reactions. Little could be done, as little was understood about just how important the invisible Aura currents can truly be to the environment. However, it can also be harnessed in intentional ways. Aura "dams" and Aura "diverters" can be built to increase security, although they do not outwardly look like the kinds of "dams" you may be used to at all, as Aura is not "dammed" by creating physical barriers. By extension, background Aura can also be used to generate power. This is almost always done by using Dust as the middleman, however, which also means the Dust will eventually be expended. Dust industries across Remnant are, of course, keenly against efforts to develop a way to harness atmospheric Aura without a Dust-based intermediate. Also, note that I haven't even gotten into explaining *active* Aura yet. That'll be next.

[yeats-infection]

Hi!!! I know its basically ancient history now but im rereading source codes again because i really do love it very very much and i wanted to ask you how you wrapped your head around all the magic theory stuff? The gold thread and resonance and things like how the latinisation of spells condensed and lessened the power of them iirc (havent reached that bit yet, i think its in part 2 of the fic). What were your inspirations/thought processes for that aspect? Also the scene with riley song in sirius’ office is one of my favourite fic scenes ever i just love every line of it wow ❤️❤️

thank you very much for asking! i say this any time anyone asks me about those stories but there is a lot that i would do differently if i was writing them now. chiefly i feel they are too gooey. but i remain very proud of the magical theory stuff and the worldbuilding around that. i honestly have little to no recollection of writing those stories though it was happening around this time exactly five years ago. i remember being very hot and being totally obsessed. it basically took me four months to write almost two hundred thousand words.

the resonance thing is totally based on a feeling i get (which you may have experienced too) of being in a beautiful place and feeling you're being watched or there's someone else with you. i have also thought of it as "the presence feeling"... i find that this feeling is very different in the places where i've experienced it... the version in new york / new england is entirely separate from the version out in the western U.S. the one in the northeast is pretty much the witch in the woods from centuries ago...

as for the stuff about latinate spells... idk putting the screws to canon a little will make you think about these things, in my experience. like are we meant to believe that the roman empire invented magic? this just seems ridiculous to me... if magic exists it must have always existed. i like thinking about how there might be a colonial politics to this (like this giant empire taking over the world and needing to regiment magic in order to understand and control it)... and then i like thinking about how a word is necessarily a condensed version of a thought... like the thought is broader and then it is corralled in words... so logically magic must be similar...

the big cool idea i had for a theoretical part 3 of this story was relating to another big worldbuilding concept/headcanon i have which is that in the 1960s at a magic college in western massachusetts a student accidentally opened a portal to death... and that this has basically informed american wizarding politics for the rest of the 20th century and beyond...

[somejack]

Twister (1996) Reboot Part 2 - a new villain

Do we need a new villain?

No! We don’t! Shockingly enough, this movie predicted with wild accuracy a current theme in analytical meteorology, which is the pervasive reach of privatization. Private firms like AccuWeather currently have the capacity to provide subscription-based weather alerts for private individuals and companies that pay for the service; whereas the National Weather Service is floundering under a lack of funding. John Oliver did a really good summary of the issue here, but I 100% reading further into it.

So we can keep the villain as a meteorologist-driven-by-capitalistic-desire-rather-than-altruism and keep the story relevant and compelling. Jonas as Twister’s villain has only a thin connection to the heroes as an acquaintance from college. We can go in two directions from this: make a broader story by creating a villain closer to AccuWeather, or make a more personal story by making a villain -even an explicit antagonist- with a better defined relationship to the heroes.

More on my take on a Twister reboot villain below the cut

For my reboot, I would want a more personal story. One of the greatest disaster movies of all time, the Norwegian Bølgen, focuses only one one family and the people they tangentially interact with during the eponymous disaster wave. This setup makes for a very compelling story with memorable characters. Keeping the scope of the narrative small (reminder that Twister takes place over the course of a single day and is never more than a half an hour from Wakita) is always good if you want your movie to float like a butterfly in terms of pacing, and sting like a bee in terms of action.

For the sake of a little zest in what would otherwise be a potentially repetitive narrative, lets make the villain an active antagonist who opposes the main group. Under the guise of chasing the same storm system, this villain was sent as a saboteur to stop the heroes from collecting the necessary data. They set up roadblocks that force the heroes to take detours that may or may not be trespassing, then call the police when they trespass.

What’s their motivation? Is it pure greed-driven malice and desire to be better than their counterparts? That worked well for the original Twister, but I never felt satisfied with Jonas as a character. I felt he was important to the narrative, but his decision making was inconsistent and he didn’t deserve the end he got. Let’s make our villain something just a little more complicated. Went to the same school as one of the ensemble protagonists (not the main protagonist) but didn’t get the same financial aid. Whereas the protagonist they know could get on with their life and do what they want, the villain needed to take the highest paying job to start taking care of loans, and that brought them here.

If I wanted to make a very entertaining villain, I would make them a good person who could have been one of the heroes in another life, had college tuition not forced their hand. Show them concocting schemes to derail the protagonists in the same scene that they help people who were struck by an earlier tornado.

In the end they just get beat. They’re outmaneuvered by the heroes, or maybe in all of their scheming they failed to realize they drove directly into the path of a tornado and end up being thrown out of the movie. The only good part of Jonas in the original movie is that he didn’t take up a lot of time, whereas in this theoretical reboot more dedication would be needed to properly develop then remove a sympathetic villain-by-circumstance.

tl;dr - the real villain is America’s crippling student loan debt and privatization problems.

[epic-potato-crisp]

Courtship [1/2] (AjinWeek2020/3)

Day 3: Favourite Ship/Romance/Lover

By: @ryokasmagic

Note: I have two OTPs in Ajin (Tosaki/Izumi and Kou/Kei) and I honestly can’t pick between them. Decided to go with KouKei for this one though. This has two parts, so far part 2 is supposed to be posted for Day 7. I hope you enjoy!

…..

“You’re amazing.”

And ever since that fateful day, the words haven’t left Kei’s mind.

At first, he thinks there is nothing redeemable about Nakano.

He is too loud and gets overly excited about everything, always barging into Kei’s private space. He seems earth shatteringly optimistic and ready to take on whatever obstacle the world is ready to present him with an energy that Kei can barely begin to comprehend.

In hindsight, this might have been what has fascinated him about Nakano so much to begin with.

They gradually begin spending more time together, but then, this is bound to happen, Kei thinks, when you’re stuck in one hideout with eight other people with little choice in the matter.

It has nothing to do with the fact that he actually enjoys Nakano’s company.

No, he certainly hasn’t stooped down to that level.

Of that he is certain.

…….

It starts innocently enough.

They’re sitting outside the hideout, taking a break after hours of training.

“What if we weren’t Ajin?” Nakano Kou asks.

“What?” Kei frowned, “That is the most stupid question I’ve heard in weeks.”

“No, think about it.” Kou gestures with his orange popsicle. “What if we were…you know, normal high schoolers.”

“We are normal.” Kei frowns. He is a perfectly respectable member of society, thank you very much. He may have an above average regenerational ability that might classify him as “immortal” in some instances, but he has no duty to disclose that to anyone.

He isn’t a dropout runaway that can barely memorize the kanji required to graduate.

“You know what I mean.” the other boy says, “Like…what if we weren’t on the run from the government?” His gestures got broader.

“That’s a rather pointless scenario. You might as well ask me what would have happened if I hadn’t gotten hit by that truck.” Kei rolls his eyes and moves his hazelnut-chocolate cone out of reach, away from potential Kou-induced hazards.

He catches Kou eyeing him from the side.

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, seriously.” the redhead replies indignantly, giving him a light nudge that has Kei scowling, “Isn’t it fun to think of what-ifs?”

“No, it isn’t.” Kei replies, and then relents under the expectant stare. He takes a bite of his ice.

“Well, fine. Let’s say I wouldn’t have gotten hit by the truck.” He pauses, considering the possibility and comparing it with his schedule at the time. “I would have had to turn in a physics project that week. Write a biology exam the week after. Not to mention our assignment in history about the reformation of- “

“Dude, I mean like, fun things.” Kou says, exasperatedly, “Like, you know. The next party you got invited to- “

Kei is excellent at politely turning these invitations down-

“Or like, an outing to a karaoke place or an arcade after school?”

After-school is reserved for math-club-meetings and further study-

“Or like, you know, getting a girlfriend!”

“I never had one.” Kei replied bluntly.

“What?!”

Kou’s shocked enough that he drops his popsicle. It rolls a few feet away from them, out of the shade and into the scorching afternoon sun. He stares wistfully at its departure.

“Oh man, I was going to finish that.”

“Get a new one.”

“Noo, they’re rationed. In any way I don’t feel like walking anymore than I need to today.” He pouts, slumping against the cooling wall.

Kei sighs, before wordlessly offering him his chocolate cone.

“Really, dude?”

“Call me dude ever again and you’ll have bigger problems than this.”

“Thanks, man.” Kou says, which isn’t much better and gives him a genuine smile that Kei wishes wouldn’t make him so happy on the inside.

“Yeah, whatever.”

“So, coming back to the topic at hand- “

Kei suppresses a groan. He has been relying on the convenience of Kou’s short-term memory to prevent them from ever continuing the previous conversation.

“What about it?” he asks instead, reaching for the water bottle and taking a large sip.

“Like, really? Never?”

Kou looks a bit like a Golden Retriever whose owner has forgotten to take him on a walk.

“No.” Kei shrugs, “Is that so weird?” It’s a serious question.

He’s never considered that his social life could be boring, by others’ standards, being far too focused on becoming a diligent student that represented his family well.

“Ah, no, no, it’s cool.” Kou waves him off, words encouraging, “Not everyone has to have a girlfriend in High School.”

Kei doesn’t let him notice any of the relief he feels at those words.

“Some of us just aren’t dating our homework, ya know?” He breaks out into laughter.

“Die.”

“I can’t. I swear man, I’ve tried!” Kou throws up his hands in desperation, shaking his head and Kei turns away so that he can’t see the traitorous hint at a smile on his face.

“Would you ever want one, though?”

“What?” Kei arches an eyebrow.

“What do you think? “

A day full of peace and quiet, with no training or social interactions, preferably locked away in my room, Kei thinks, but he’s certain that’s not what Kou’s referring to.

“A girlfriend. Or, you know, a boyfriend.” Kou shrugs, and Kei feels the blood freeze in his veins.

His friend-by-default notices his incredulous expression.

“We’re in the 21st century, right? It’s not that weird.”

Kei doesn’t dignify that with an answer.

“You’re expected to marry someone of the opposite gender.” he says, remotely, “Unless you can avoid it.”

“In theory!” Kou has finished his ice cream and wipes his hands on the grass, “Like, maybe it’s not that you just haven’t found the right girl? Maybe you’re just- “

“Okay, enough.” Kei cuts across him. His heart thunders in his chest and thoughts of Kaito resurface in his mind, which is more than he can bear after hours of training exhausting him to the bone.

“Are you too much of a chicken to find out?” Kou’s grin is teasing, and competitive.

“Find out what?”

“If it’s perhaps not just girls you’re interested in?”

“When would I find that out?” Kei answers, ignoring the inexplicable jump his heart takes all of a sudden, “We’re fugitives in a battle. We barely have time for this.” He gestures vaguely and checks his watch, “Speaking of, we should get back to training.”

“Come on, ten more minutes.”

“You said that half an hour ago.” Kei deadpans, “No ten more minutes. This second.”

“Is that what you want me to say when you refuse to get up in the morning and want me to cover for you?” Kou teases.

Unfairly, he has a point.

“Whatever.” Kei sighs, chalking it up to the heat that he doesn’t feel like debating Kou on this particular topic.

“I propose a challenge. No, a bet. If you chicken out, I’ll assume you’re too much of a coward after all. Ready?” Kou asks, pointing at him, brimming with self-confidence.

“And what makes you assume I care?”

There’s the Golden Retriever look again. “Oh, come on, Kei.”

Kei sighs. He’s a good person, he tells himself, a respectable member of society. He’s doing Nakano a favor by not subjecting him to alienation from the only one in his peer group and the devastating consequences that might have for his social development.

“Okay, tell me what it is.”

“We pretend to be boyfriends for a week!”

Kei stares at him, dumbstruck, but before he can get a word in edgewise, Nakano cuts him to the chase: “No, wait. I’m serious. Nothing, strange, like, ya know.” He blushes scarlet, clearing his throat and Kei thanks the Gods above that he doesn’t elaborate on the subject.

“Like hand-holding and that stuff. Maybe a date night where we watch movies.”

“That sounds dumb.” Kei replies before he can stop himself.

“Dumb, but not impossible?”

“We don’t even have time for a…” Kei pauses, wrestling with the unfamiliar word and its embarrassing implications, “date night where we watch movies. We have to train. Fight Sato, in case you forgot?”

“Consider it a team-building exercise!” Kou grins widely.

“I could think of a way more interesting exercise where my IBM gets to practice attacks on you.”

Kou laughs.

“Yeah, we have to train.” he admits, “You’re right. But seriously. Do you really…not want to try it out? Or does it just sound unusual to you?”

Kei bites his lip. He can’t believe that Kou goaded him into this conversation.

“If we were, theoretically- “he cuts in sharply, as Kou’s eyes widen in excitement, “To try that out. We would need to have some rules.”

“Sure, definitely.” Kou nods along.

“And it would not cross a week.”

“Nope, that’s the idea.”

“And if I didn’t like it, we could end it at any time.”

“Yeah.” Kou replies without skipping a beat, “Consider it, like…a social project.” He stretches out his hand. “You’re on board?”

Kei has to admit he’s not completely adverse to the idea. He’d pay money to see the expressions on the others’ faces when he told them about their plan.

And also, for some strange, unspeakable reason, having a movie night with Kou doesn’t seem like the worst of ideas.

Kei clears his throat.

“It’s a deal.” he says.

[woofieheadintranslation]

Translating Meng Haoran’s Lodging At Jiande River

Hello, and thank you to *checks notes* the two of you who left likes on my previous post. I’m very aware that these appeal to an extremely niche audience, haha, so I didn’t start doing these with the intent to have them read, but I’m glad that they aren’t going totally unnoticed! 宿建德江 (sù jiàn dé jiāng), sometimes translated as Stay-Over at Jiande River, is one of 孟浩然 (mèng hào rán)’s most famous poems. The last two lines, especially, are ones that everyone will know. The only one of his poems that is more famous is probably 春晓 (chún xiǎo), Spring Morning. I was actually going to translate that one, but it’s too famous, and also I couldn’t get past the first line because the Chinese school memories were so strong. (For those of you not in the know, 春晓 is one of the first Chinese poems Chinese children learn, and they hammer it into you until you can recite it in your sleep, after running a 10k marathon, and on your deathbed.)   Some background information on Meng Haoran: Like Wang Wei, he’s part of the Landscape (山水) school of poets. He’s considered the first of the High Tang poets, and he was a good friend of Li Bai, who wrote actually wrote several poems for him. One of them (Sending Meng Haoran Off At Yellow Crane Tower) was actually the first of my translations.  This is a wujue, a five character four line poem.  Chinese Text:  宿建德江 孟浩然 移舟泊烟渚， 日暮客愁新。 野旷天低树， 江清月近人。  Word by Word Translation:  move/boat/moor/smoke/islet, bank sun/dusk/traveler/grief, sorrow/new wilds, wilderness/vast, far-reaching/sky/low(ers)/tree river/clear/moon/near(s)/man Due to its fame, there are many different translations. I’m going to be using three. 

Translation 1- Witter Bynner (The Jade Mountain):  While my little boat moves on its mooring mist,  And daylight wanes, old memories begin... How wide the world was, how close the trees to heaven! And how clear in the water the nearness of the moon! There are some words in this translation that aren’t present in the original, and I think we can do better in terms of imagery. I especially dislike when words like “while” are added; it adds temporality and narrative that isn’t in the spirit of Tang poetry.  Translation 2- Wai-Lim Yip: (Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres) *I’m determined to get as much as I possibly can out of this book*:  A boat slows, moors by beach-run in smoke. Sun fades: a traveler’s sorrow freshens. Open wilderness. Wide sky. A stretch of low trees. Limpid river: clear moon close to man.  I really like this translation, I think it’s great. Honestly, I really can’t do better. I am going to do it differently though (which honestly is probably going to make it worse, but oh well.)

Translation 3- http://www.learnancientchinesepoetry.org/2017/07/31/meng-haoran-stay-overnight-on-the-jiande-river/ (the site is learnchinesepoetry.org, and it’s an amazingly comprehensive resource, I recommend you check it out):  Move the boat, cast anchor in misty islet Sunset, this traveler with new sadness, homesickness Landscape and sky vast and empty, bare trees Moonlight on the clear river my friend.  As you can see, these translations are all very different! This one separates the poem into two groups of two. I think it captures the feeling of the original quite well, though translation 2 is more polished and accurate, both grammatically and in terms of fidelity to the source. Line 1: 移舟泊烟渚 (yí zhōu bó yān zhǔ) 移 (yí) means “to shift” or “to move”. 舟 (zhōu) is “boat”. Due to the ambiguous nature of Chinese, this could be “The boat moves”, “the moving boat”, or “move the boat”. Yip translates it as “the boat slows”. This is not the most accurate translation of 移, but considering the boat is described as “mooring” later on, it’s a logical extrapolation. I considered translating it like this as well, but I’m a huge stickler for accuracy.  I’ve discarded the “move the boat” option, because that’s a direct command, which I think feels pretty out of place in a landscape poem that’s about the poet and not really addressed to anyone.  There are really no good options here. I ended up going with “a boat moves”.  泊 (bó) means “to moor”, or “to anchor”. I’m going to use “to moor”, because it just sounds more poetic. Also, it’s more accurate. The poet is travelling across a river, presumably on a small boat- I don’t think it would have an anchor.  烟 (yān) is “smoke”. In this case, it’s referring to the mist that collects near the surface of the water. This one gave me a headache. Yip simply used “smoke”, but I honestly think that might be confusing. Yip has greater trust in his readers than I do, I guess. If this were a metaphor in the original, I would probably have left it as is, but a secondary definition of 烟 is actually “mist”. (My Chinese dictionary says 像烟的东西：～雾. In English, this is “something like smoke: smoke-fog.) I ended up using “mist”, which also happens to give me some nice alliteration.  渚 (zhǔ) means “islet”, as in a small island in a river or a lake, but it can also mean “bank”. I’m not sure why Yip has translated it as “beach-run”, which is not actually a word. I’m going to go with “bank”, which could theoretically be either an islet in the river or the bank of the river itself.  Translation: A boat moves to moor by misty bank.  Line 2: 日暮客愁新 (rì mù kè chóu xīn) 日暮 (rì mù): 日 refers to “sun”, and 暮 refers to “dusk”, “twilight”, or “evening”. Honestly, the 日 is kind of unnecessary. But anyways, I’m going to translate this simply to “setting sun”. “Sun fades”, as Yip translated it, is honestly kind of confusing. I wanted to translate it simply as “dusk”, but I ultimately decided against it because it breaks up the pattern set up by the first line. Also, I wanted to incorporate the 日. 客 (kè) means “guest” or “traveler”, and likely refers to the poet himself. “Traveler” works fine.  愁 (chóu) is a bit of a complicated word. It usually means “to worry”, as in the case of 发愁 (fā chóu), but it’s a bit broader than that, and encompasses a bit of what we would call “grief”, or “sorrow”. I'm going to translate it as “griefs”, plural. “Grief” is too specific, but “griefs” is slightly broader. 

新 (xīn) means “new”. I’m going to translate it as “renew”, because it could theoretically mean “to be renewed”, as in to be freshened, but it’s slightly less specific than simply “freshens”.  Thus: Setting sun- a traveller’s griefs renew. I would actually prefer to simply write “traveller” instead of  “a traveller”, but unfortunately because I used “a boat moves” in the previous line, I need the “a” here too for continuity.  Line 3: 野旷天低树  (yě kuǎng tiān dī shù) These lines are so famous (for good reason), that it’s very important to me that I get them right.  野 (yě) means “wild”, “wilds”, “wilderness”. 旷 (kuǎng) means “open”, or “vast”. 天 (tiān) means “sky”, 低 (dī) means “low” or “to lower”, and 树 (shù) is “tree”.  Due to the structure of Chinese, the 旷 (kuǎng) can be referring to the 野 (yě), the 天 (tiān), or both. It could be “open wilderness”, it could be “open sky”, or it could be both. This is why Yip has essentially doubled the 旷 (kuǎng), translating it into “open” for “open wilderness” and “wide” for “wide sky”. Similarly, translation 3 has put “landscape and sky vast and empty”, and Bynner has put “the world” is wide. If I were to do this, I would probably go the same route as Yip. However, I think all of these translations feels too much like adding something that isn’t there. I think the interpretation of 旷 (kuǎng) applying to both 野 (yě) and 天 (tiān) is a secondary interpretation, because most Chinese wujue poems are meant to be read in a group of two followed by a group of three.  If 旷 (kuǎng) applies to 野 (yě), the three characters 天低树, “sky low(ers) tree(s)” is a distinct unit. Unlike the Yip, “a stretch of bare trees”, and translation 3, “bare trees”, the sky is connected to the trees. This can be interpreted as “sky lowers to trees”, as in “the sky is close to the trees”, as with “...how close the trees to heaven!” in the Bynner translation.  I’m going to translate this line like this:  Open wilderness: sky lowers to trees.  I think if I translate it like this, the imagery of the “open wilderness” carries over enough to “sky” to have the same implication. Also, the use of the colon implies that the “sky lower(ing) to trees” is the open wilderness, which should technically make the “open” also apply to the sky.  Line 4: 江清月近人 (jiāng qīng yuè jìn rén) Same problem with this line! (Makes sense, because it’s parallel to line 3).  江 (jiāng) means “river”, 清 (qīng) “clear”, 月 (yuè) “moon”, 近 (jìn) “close” or “near(s)”, and 人 “person”.  You can see that Yip has done the same thing as the previous line, where he translated 旷 (kuǎng) twice, into “open” and then “wide”. Here, he translates 清 (qīng) into “limpid”, as in “limpid river” (江清), and then “clear”, as in “clear moon” (清月). I, on the other hand, am going to do pretty much the same thing I did in the previous line.  近 (jìn): This is a word that feels very immediate, so I don’t want to use “close to”, which has a sense of distance.  This line is a bit more complicated than the previous. This is because the last three characters of line 3 and line 4 can be interpreted as logically following the first two characters in their respective lines. So, for example, instead of two distinct images of a clear river, and then a moon close to a man, you can follow logical causation. Let’s say you do this with line 3. It’s is pretty direct: because the wilderness is vast and open, the sky appears low as the trees. However, in this line, there’s an added layer of reasoning: because the river is clear, the moon is reflected upon the river. Because the moon is reflected upon the river, it’s closer to the poet in his boat. Thus, moon nears man.  Because of this, I don’t want to just use “moon nears man”, even though it’s the most poetic option and I’m really sad I can’t use it. It gives the moon agency, which pretty effectively kills the interpretation of the moon’s reflection on the river being what causes it to appear closer.  Thus, I’m actually going to translate it as:  Clear river: moon nearer to man.  Oh, and also, I’m translating 人 as “man” because “person” just. Doesn’t work. And “human” is even worse. Why, English, are you like this. I hope you can forgive me on the basis that the poet is likely talking about himself, who is in fact a man.  Final Translation:  A boat moves to moor by misty bank.  Setting sun- a traveller’s griefs renew.  Open wilderness: sky lowers to trees.  Clear river: moon nearer to man.  Ah, it’s really hard to get across the beauty of the final two lines in translation. Also, the first line still doesn’t feel right, but I really can’t think of anything better. Welcoming suggestions! Experimental Translation:  Moving boat, mooring  in smoke by the shore.  Dusk- a traveller’s griefs renew.  Wilderness vast-  Sky lowers to the trees.  River clear-      moon nears                     man.  I rate this poem 3/10 in Wangxian applicability. It is kind of a Wei Wuxian and Yunmeng mood though. I can see this working in a CQL post-canon fic, possibly involving a Yunmeng Shuangjie reconciliation. 

[patricianandclerk]

Sometime

My Ask | My Ko-Fi | My Ao3 | Requests always welcome!

Pteppicymon XXVIII stirred in his bed, squinting into the deep, velvet darkness of his bedroom. He was very frustrated. It was a freezing winter’s night in Ankh-Morpork, and he had lain in his bed shivering, even with the fire lit and the door closed and a hot water bottle warming his belly: hours had ticked by before he had finally gotten to sleep, and now?

A noise had woken him up.

Young Assassins had their own bedrooms. It was simply easier than dormitories, in the scheme of things: although in recent years, the tendency of the students and guild members to murder one another in their beds had faded somewhat under the capable command of Doctor Cruces, and then especially under Lord Downey, one still liked to avoid the mess and bother of schoolboy pranks.

It hardly mattered whether it was a pool of blood or a pool of something more embarrassing, intended to humiliate: it was best to keep these things to individual rooms, rather than allowing them to happen in a dormitory, where many people might be disturbed from their sleep at once.

“Hm?” Teppic asked the darkness, sleepily.

“Dreadfully cold, my boy,” said the voice of Chidder, somewhat close to Teppic’s bed, and Teppic groaned, dropping his head back onto his pillow and huddling in his blankets. It was cold. It had taken him ages to get to sleep, even in the thick flannel of his pyjamas, which had actually been a gift from Chidder this Hogswatch[1], and the thick fur blanket.

“Go away,” Teppic grumbled.

“No,” Chidder said, and Teppic felt the mattress shift as Chidder slipped into the bed beside him. Six years being schooled alongside Chidder had left Teppic somewhat used to his self-confidence even in the most bizarre behaviour, but this was a bit beyond the pale.

“Chidder!”

“Gods, you’re warm,” Chidder said into Teppic’s hair, his chest – which was broader and, Teppic had noticed in recent months, somewhat hairier than Teppic’s own – pressing up against Teppic’s back, and one of his arms drawing tightly around Teppic’s own chest. Teppic almost struggled, but then he took a moment’s pause. Chidder was quite warm himself, actually. His body, beefy and heavy like a tom cat’s, even as it retained a wiry grace, was different to Teppic’s own, which was leaner, and more compact. Even if Teppic was taller[2], Chidder was bigger, and, apparently, a good deal better at retaining some of the heat in that big body of his. “Are you wearing your socks?”

“I was cold,” Teppic mumbled.

“Yeah, but can you sleep like that, Tep?”

“I managed it before you woke me up, didn’t I?” Teppic demanded, his voice a bit sharper than he meant for it to be, but he let his hand touch against Chidder’s arm where it wrapped around him, feeling the hair that grew there. Chidder was hairy. The royal family of Djelibeybi, of course, had body hair, but it was much sparser and lighter, and Teppic only grew thick patches of it at his crotch, on his head, and a little in his armpits, but Chidder? Chidder was like a bear. He was only going to get hairier, he had said to Arthur when the other boy had brought it up in the school sauna, but Teppic hardly knew how: touching his arm, now, he felt a veritable forest of surprisingly soft hair along Chidder’s arm.

“Kick ‘em off,” Chidder murmured. His breath was hot on the back of Teppic’s neck.

“I’ll kick you off,” Teppic said.

“Well, you haven’t yet,” Chidder pointed out, but his retort was playful in tone, and Teppic caught his toe in the ankle of the sock, reluctantly dragging it off. “You can put it against my calf.”

“I’m not having a calf in the bed as well,” Teppic muttered, even as he did so, and sighed at the warmth of Chidder’s hirsutely carpeted leg, radiating through his sole and making his freezing toes sting with abrupt heat.

“Just a kid then,” Chidder murmured, and Teppic heard his smug little laugh as Teppic shoved both his feet up against Chidder’s calves, shoving up his pyjama bottoms in order to reach. “Feeling warmer?”

“Mmm,” Teppic hummed, his eye closing, and he let his fingers curve around Chidder’s wrist. It occurred to him, in that lazy and yet utterly comprehensive way ideas sometimes do, when one is half-asleep, that this was very unusual. It was, perhaps, even a dream, although Teppic wasn’t sure about that: Chidder’s body felt far too wonderfully warm against his own, and he didn’t know that he’d make it quite so pleasant, were he dreaming it up. Young men weren’t meant to warm the beds of princes – not to actually warm them, anyway—

The thought zapped Teppic somewhat awake, and he coughed.

“I’ve been thinking,” Chidder said.

“That’s novel,” Teppic said.

“Naughty,” Chidder purred in his ear, squeezing him across his chest, and Teppic felt a strangely electric heat run down his spine. “No, no, I’ve been thinking, Tep. We should have sex.”

There was a long pause as Teppic took this in, wide-eyed in the darkness, very, very aware of Chidder’s size, his even breathing, his warmth. “Now?” he asked, finally.

“No, not now,” Chidder murmured, nosing against the back of his ear and making Teppic’s eyes flutter shut. Teppic thought of Chidder, going home with girls – going home with women – at dances, charming them, being charming— “It’s far too cold for that sort of thing, Tep. I’d need to undress you, and then get you all wet and slippery to play with. You’d freeze, afterward.”

The words wet and slippery, not heretofore words that had been filed under “sexually appealing” in Teppic’s mind, were now blaring as if the words had been written in fire on the inside of his skull – and, quite possibly, on the inside of his belly, where another blaze was coming abruptly to life.

“But… sometime,” Chidder said.

The cogs that made up Teppic’s mind had been somewhat overlubricated by Chidder’s warm voice in his ear, and were struggling with logical thought, in the moment. Visions of Chidder in various situations wet and/or slippery were making themselves known to him in ways they had never done before, and Chidder was rather rudely taking the place of men and women who, in previous fantasies, had been quite faceless.

“Is this, er,” Teppic began, his tongue feeling clumsy, fat, and stupid behind his teeth, “sort of thing, where you want to teach me how to be seductive? As a… a skill, or something?”

“Not really,” Chidder said, his tone musing. “I just thought it might be rather fun. Besides, I hear it’s rather nice, when you do it with someone you actually love.”

“Love?” Teppic repeated, his voice somewhat choked.

“Well,” Chidder adjusted, not sounding bothered at all, his confidence never faltering, “I suppose love is the wrong word… but I rather like you, at times. I think I could come to like you quite a bit more, lying down.”

“I’m not feeling very seduced, Chidder,” Teppic said, surprised by the affront in his own tone.

“Whatever do I want to seduce you for?”

“To have sex with me! It’s all very well seducing women, Chiddy, but I’m rather offended if you don’t think I’m worth the effort, and you can just swan into my bed, all warm, and propose sex as if you’re asking me to lend you a fiver.”

“Would you lend me a fiver?” Chidder asked, sounding amused, and Teppic elbowed him in his flat – but comparatively soft, not like Teppic’s, which was very hard indeed – stomach. Chidder grunted in pain. “You’re not a woman, Teppic,” he said reproachfully.

“No, I’m a prince,” Teppic retorted. “I shan’t just be— Just be, sort of, had.”

“Well, you’re not having me,” Chidder said. “I’m bigger than you.”

“What? That’s not what I meant,” Teppic said, feeling a hot flush burn in his cheeks. He knew, of course, how it worked, theoretically, but he’d never put much thought into the practicality of it… And he’d be damned if he’d allow such thoughts to distract him now. “No, I meant— I shall be seduced, Chidder, if it’s all the same to you.”

Chidder exhaled against the back of his neck, and then wriggled closer, nosing past the locks of Teppic’s hair, although he was, frankly, getting rather frustrated with growing it out, and was rather close to cutting it all short again. He was especially amenable to that sort of prospect, if it meant Chidder’s mouth was going to drag against the small of his neck like that.

“Fine,” Chidder said, and kissed him there. “I’ll seduce you. Very demanding, for a prince.”

“Commanding.”

“Come, is it?”

Teppic snorted, and Chidder laughed, rich and honeyed against his hair, and then he went relaxed and quiet, pulling Teppic in against him. Teppic’s feet weren’t cold at all, anymore, and Chidder was very warm. He turned over in his place, and shoved Chidder onto his beck, so that he could use him as a pillow.

He was a very good pillow, and better than that, Chidder’s hand was stroking idly up and down Teppic’s back.

He was asleep a lot faster, this time around.

[1] He had informed Chidder that he didn’t celebrate the holiday, but Chidder had assured him, with his typical self-confidence, that that was hardly the point.

[2] Which, at the moment, he was, by almost a half inch!

[wardoftheedgeloaves]

Of Sound Laws, Shortcuts and Sloppiness

I want to expand on Tocharian Irredentism’s last post regarding the decline of historical linguistics (as it’s short, I’ll quote it here in its entirety):

I don’t know what it’s like in the hard sciences, but my impression is that, past a certain point which we may or may not have already reached, the rate of progress in historical linguistics wouldn’t change much with the addition of more manpower because you need a lot of motivation and brainpower to do it right, and to the extent that anyone with those qualities isn’t already there it’s because academia is a raw deal nowadays. Adding more people would probably just result in more ‘work’ like Blevins’s Indo-Vasconic, where many of the proposed IE etymologies are straightforwardly wrong, or premature internal classification, or ~computer-aided statistical methods~. There are only so many people who are going to bother to learn four languages or spend years doing fieldwork on Malaria Mountain, especially since you could instead bung together some computer program and golly would you look at that, Japonic must be related to Ainu and Korean!

A lot of science is sort of fake, and if you add more people who are just going to do fake science, you’re not going to get anywhere – and it’ll be harder for the people who aren’t doing fake science to find each other, keep up with the papers, and so on, since the signal-to-noise ratio will change unfavorably.

What could increase the rate of progress is improving access to information. UPSID was useful, PHOIBLE is useful, Index Diachronica could end up being useful and that was put together by random people on a forum. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit! But how well does academia incentivize doing the infrastructure stuff? In many fields, not so much.

...............

About a year ago I had a conversation with a guy who was doing his doctorate at one of the top grad programs in the US for linguistics. He explained solemnly to me that the reason it was Important always and everywhere to transliterate Greek into the Latin alphabet was that otherwise the literature wouldn't be accessible--accessibility being the lodestar of linguistics (and other fields more broadly) in our modern age.

Never mind that many, many, many of these articles and monographs are paywalled at exorbitant prices. It's self-evident to me that transliterating Greek into the Latin alphabet in an article that costs $29 for any non-academic to look at isn't about "accessibility" at all, and that anybody who thinks it is is either blind or willfully disingenuous.

But more broadly I think the whole "accessibility" obsession is symptomatic of a broader loss of...it's not rigor and I want to make it clear that I'm not accusing the wider linguistic community of lack of rigor. It's something else. I think there's a big difference between how historical linguistics is done and how many other forms of linguistics are done, that this difference runs very deep, and that both the obsession with "accessibility" and the decline of good historical linguistics are symptomatic of. Consider the way theoretical syntax or sociolinguistics are done. You have a broad theory (minimalism, X-Bar, sociological observations about code-switching or class differences in language use), and you fit a case study into it: A Minimalist Analysis of the Syntax of Guaraní; Gender Differences in Spoken Egyptian Arabic; Class and Language Use in Brazilian Portuguese; The Morphosyntax of the Nivkh Verb (A Generative Approach). The case study is generally fairly self-contained and, although obviously references will be made to the existing literature (if you're doing a Minimalist analysis of Burmese, you'll probably be referencing a Minimalist analysis of Yoruba or Kurdish at some point), it's a case study: fit language A into theory B.

I don't say this to imply that these approaches aren't intellectually rigorous or valuable--they absolutely are! But they break down in the face of historical linguistics, where to figure out why a particular form in Celtic appears to show a lengthened grade it helps to be able to reach into the back of your head and pull out an obscure paradigm from Luwian or Tocharian, or where to explain why a particular word almost but doesn't quite fit the known sound laws you want to be able to rack your entire mind for neighboring forms looking for a dialectal borrowing or analogical reshaping. And if you can't find the form in the back of your head, you'd better have the patience to rummage through five or six dictionaries until you have a good picture of what might have happened. It is not a field that lends itself to doing anything quickly, by halves, or with corner-cutting, and it encourages, indeed almost requires, the ingestion of hundreds of individually meaningless factoids about individual words, sound changes, or morphemes--each factoid nigh-useless on its own, but enabling the historical linguist to make incisive and wide-ranging analyses by bouncing from factoid to factoid in one's mental or physical library until a slightly less murky picture emerges.

This is the fatal flaw in the fashionable attempts at macro-comparison exemplified by Blevins' attempt at Proto-Indo-European-Euskarian (a lengthy title--Indo-Vasconic works just as well, surely?) or the Automated Similarity Judgment Program. By not putting in the tedious spade-work of individual analysis at the word level the new approaches are doomed to see connections that aren't there and miss connections that are. An example from Blevins' newly published monograph on Indo-Vasconic is a proposed reconstruction *okho:

I won't comment on the Basque lemmata--I know very little about Basque. But PIE *ko- 'together, with, by' must have had a palatovelar, as Lithuanian sù (with unexpected depalatalization, but a clear etymology) and OCS съ readily attest--but PIE *ḱ goes back to *khi- in Blevins' PIV.

How about Tocharian oko? Here's Douglas Q. Adams' Dictionary of Tocharian B on the matter:

Probably cognate to "acorn", from a form *h₂ógeh₂- or thereabouts, with reshaping here and there. But under Blevins' framework PIE *g must go back to PIV *g.

Or take this entry:

But Greek τῑμή can't be from *t- anything; *t before *i *u or their glide counterparts yields σ in Greek (compare Latin tū with Greek σύ and Sanskrit tyájati with Greek σέβομαι. (Should I be writing all my Sanskrit examples in Devanāgarī? Perhaps, but there seems to be less of a tradition to do so--and there's certainly no such tradition for Tocharian). Instead τῑμή must be from the zero-grade of *kʷeh₁y-, probably with laryngeal metathesis, in the same family as τίω 'I honor'--on this Beekes and Chantraîne are in agreement. The development of the Greek consonants is hardly an obscure matter--the palatalization of the labiovelars before front vowels and sigmatization of *t before high ones are well-known.

Now it is all very well to propose "I think I'm right about these words, and the established etymologies are wrong, and here's why." But Blevins doesn't do that. τῑμή and oko indeed look like the other forms to which they are connected, but it is well-established that they are not related at all. Well-established etymologies are of course overturned from time to time. But you cannot overturn a consensus judgment without confronting it, and the consensus judgments here are not even mentioned.

And what of the Automated Similarity Judgment Program and similar attempts to do historical linguistics by bringing in Big Data, the Delphic oracle of our time? Anything a human can do, a computer can do faster; and insofar as the goal is to draw surface-level connections between similar-looking words that will fall apart upon closer inspection, these programs may be said to be successful indeed. Consider the way the ASJP codes sounds (Appendix C): all the sounds of the world's languages have to be mapped onto 41 characters. But the groupings are not made with reference to what sound changes and correspondences are actually found. For example, <i> is used for all four of /i ɪ y ʏ/ and their lengthened versions; but /y/ corresponds to /u/ in related languages far more often than it does to /i/, because /y/ derives from /u/ much more often than from /i/ (consider French, Ancient Greek, Dhegiha Siouan, Germanic umlaut, and California English). By using a simplified toy model of phonology with little reference to what actually happens, the deck is going to be stacked in bias of certain sound shifts and correspondences before the cards are even dealt. But the broader problem is that same as that seen in Indo-Vasconic above: historical linguistics does not deal in chance resemblances but in the historical derivation of lexemes and morphemes. A computer program is doomed to ring true on English bad and Persian بد (bæd), English day and Latin diēs, PIE *h₁ed- 'eat' and Mongolian идэх; it's similarly doomed to ring false on wheel and cakrá-, day and foveō, hear and ἀκούω.

Of course, you can always give it extra information, telling it to undo Grimm's Law with Germanic data, for example. But where does that extra information come from? It comes from the tedious nuts and bolts of real historical linguistics, thumbing through dictionaries, making lists of misbehaving words, for which there is no substitute and never will be.

Real historical linguistics is hard. Real historical linguistics is tedious. Long live historical linguistics, and long live historical linguists, who can't be replaced by computers--not until the computers are really reading through dictionaries and thinking about reshapings. More broadly, I think both the Indo-Vasconics and the Big Data-driven approaches are driven by the desire to make historical linguistics work more like generative syntax, the application of a theory to a well-defined, self-contained case study.

I'll leave everybody with a quote from the inimitable Ives Goddard's 1981 article Against the Evidence Claimed for Some Algonquian Dialectical Relationships (bolding mine):

The problem with Proulx's claim is that it is made without any explicit formulation of what the historical rules are that are taken to derive the attested languages from the protolanguage. But to do comparative linguistics by making reconstructions without formulating the subsequent historical developments that convert them into the attested languages is completely invalid, since the reconstructions are not ends in themselves and are only as valid as the histories that they imply. It is a widespread misunderstanding to consider the comparative method a method for reconstructing protolanguages or proving languages to be related. It is not. It is a method for doing linguistic history.

And that is the crux of the issue. To connect Basque okho to Tocharian oko, or to propose linguistic relationships based on a computer's similarity judgments among a list of forty words picked from the Swadesh list, without reference to the real historical work on the languages involved, is like asking a computer to write a history of the United States based on a random subselection of the literature while ignoring out a vast field of very important work on the subject. It wouldn't fly in history and it shouldn't fly here.

(A final word on transliteration of Greek? It's an OK norm to adopt, I suppose, if you're really concerned about accessibility. But I remain convinced that it's not really about accessibility. Rather--and this is a very unusual attitude for an academic to have--there are a lot of linguists who for some reason just don't want to learn how to read the Greek alphabet. I agree that there's a bit of Eurocentrism and arbitrariness in that e.g. we traditionally transcribe Sanskrit and Tocharian but not Greek or Cyrillic; but it is what it is. And much more often accessibility is made more or less possible not by the format of what is being written or even by paywalls but by the literature on which the subject is founded. There simply is no doing comparative Indo-European at anything approaching an academic level without knowing the Greek alphabet or indeed being able to make your way through an article in German, with a dictionary if need be. Absent a monumental effort to translate and transliterate two hundred years of literature, that won’t change.)

[please-just-f-blog]

Typology: MBTI

MBTI function dichotomies:

Perceiving:

Sensation: rich and close connection to the immediate environment

Intuition: abstract and loose connection to the immediate environment

Judging:

Feeling: prioritization of values in decision making

Thinking: prioritization of knowledge in decision making

Direction:

Introversion: specifying, zooming in, personalizing

Extraversion: generalizing, zooming out, expanding

Specific Functions:

Each function, i.e. Sensing (S), Intuition (N), Feeling (F), Thinking (T), owns a specific term for each direction, i.e. Introversion ( i ) and Extraversion ( e ), which is notated post-fix, generating the eight cognitive Functions:

Introverted Sensing (Si):

closest connection to personal experiences, therefore inclined to highly value memories of past experiences; however, it may be explicitly mentioned that this has nothing to do with conservatism

excellent feeling for most situations, meaning, knows comfortable, fitting places for any activity; quite demanding in this sphere

explains, understands things first through their effect on her/him; initial reaction might be weak at first, growing with subsequent reflections, gaining sharpness and significance

Extraverted Sensing (Se):

closest connection to the immediate situation, therefore inclined to value activities for their capacity to fully indulge in them

most realistic view of ongoing actions; attentive, curious and altert in fast paced, detailed or particularly aesthetic environments; stimulated. Gets depressed very quickly, as well as bored in absence of these conditions

explains, understands things through their effect on the current situation, its immediate possibilities; quick to act and react; memories of past events lack the original thrill of the moment

Introverted Intuition (Ni):

closest connection to far reaching implications of current ongoings; selective in this, meaning, implications are entirely subjective; therefore inclined to see things how she/he wants them to be

least realistic view of ongoing actions; “things are what they mean in a broader sense”; is, however, because of this, likely to discover underlying patterns and trends first

little reaction to immediate thrills or possibilities; slow to act; likes to be prepared well

Extraverted Intuition (Ne):

closest connection to abstract possibilities of momentary ongoings; “things are the synthesis of all the things they are connected to”; therefore, inclined to understand things in relation to others

bad feeling for most situations; combination of being scattered, curious and optimistic leads to unreliability in quick decisions

memories posses little significance; instead, the information extracted out of past situations is valued, i.e. what she/he learned from it, what ideas she/he generated from it

Introverted Feeling (Fi):

sphere of personal values, identity

sharp in judgements of authenticity

inclined to sacrifice solidarity for authentically representing own values

“the conformist has to prove himself by the value of the idea he is following”

Extraverted Feeling (Fe):

sphere of group values, solidarity

sharp in judgements of disruptions of common sentiments

inclined to sacrifice authenticity for generating social coherence

“the outcast has to prove himself by the value of the idea, for which he is abandoning the group values”

Introverted Thinking (Ti):

sphere of specified, individual connections of knowledge

sharp in judgements of theoretical falsity

inclined to sacrifice adaptability for theoretical consistency

“it just works because the underlying principles are satisfied”

Extraverted Thinking (Te):

sphere of general, solid connections of knowledge

sharp in judgements of practical applicability

inclined to sacrifice internal consistency for broad adaptability

“the underlying principles are satisfied, simply because it works”

The Types:

While it is self-evident that every individual is capable of using all of the upper eight cognitive functions, the MBTI typology is entirely based on the assumption, that people tend to prioritize them in a specific order, up to a point, where it makes sense to assign them to a specific cluster, i.e. a type.

Actually, the image of two specific functions building a specific function-axis might help here: A function-axis can be imagined as a spectrum between two poles, given by two functions. So for eight functions there are 4 axes. Each pair of poles is determined by the following rules:

An axis can be either Judging or Perceiving

An axis has to contain both Directions, i.e. Intro- and Extraversion

An axis has to contain both kinds of Judging/Perceiving functions.

generating the axes:

Perceiving axes: Si — Ne  //  Se — Ni

Judging axes: Fi — Te  //  Fe — Ti

Each MBTI type is just the prioritization of two axes (one Perceiving, one Judging), over the two remaining axes, meaning, just four functions are valued, always containing one S, N, F and T.

One function leads any type, meaning the function may not be most valued, but most used to getting used frequently.

The function making the pole diametral to the leading function is repressed. It is used to getting used rarely, maybe even only involuntarily, making it quite sensitive, sometimes coming off as even valued more than the leading function.

Now the axis containing the leading function on one end, with the repressed function on the other, builds an outer ring in the, so called, function stack. The axis is stretched, leading to a high tension between the two poles.

The other axis, containing the remaining two valued functions as poles, is placed in between this first axis, making it more balanced, meaning, the poles are working more or less together and do not hinder each other in an unhealthy way.

The inner axis has to be placed in such a way, where the direction of the functions has to alternate from place 1 to 4 between ( i ) and ( e ). The second function is called auxiliary function, the third tertiary function.  This way it is possible to generate 16 types, each one with a specific combination and order of its four out of eight valued functions.

Listing of types with functions, from leading (left) to repressed (right):

ISFJ  <=>  Si — Fe — Ti — Ne

ISTJ  <=>  Si — Te — Fi — Ne

ESFP  <=>  Se — Fi — Te — Ni

ESTP  <=>  Se — Ti — Fe — Ni

INFJ  <=>  Ni — Fe — Ti — Se

INTJ  <=>  Ni — Te — Fi — Se

ENFP  <=>  Ne — Fi — Te — Si

ENTP  <=>  Ne — Ti — Fe — Si

ESFJ  <=>  Fe — Si — Ne — Ti

ENFJ  <=>  Fe — Ni — Se — Ti

ISFP  <=>  Fi — Se — Ni — Te

INFP  <=>  Fi — Ne — Si — Te

ESTJ  <=>  Te — Si — Ne — Fi

ENTJ  <=>  Te — Ni — Se — Fi

ISTP  <=>  Ti — Se — Ni — Fe

INTP  <=>  Ti — Ne — Si — Fe

I plan to add specific posts about function axes, each type, my understanding of some common misconceptions about typology, its capacities and limits. Feel free to tell me your thoughts / your understanding of the functions!

[melyzard]

The Princess Rebel

So multiple people (I can remember at least @brynnmclean, @rain-sleet-snow, and @crazy-fruit, but I think there were more) tagged me in the “get to know me better” meme, which had such questions as “Favorite colors, favorite tv shows, and last movie that you watched.” Well, I already wrote some short rebelcaptain stories for just about every one of those questions, but the “last movie” question sparked off something in my brain, because the last movie I watched just happens to be one of my favorites, and I’ve chatted before with @youareiron-andyouarestrong about a rebelcaptain AU version of it. So in honor of that conversation, here’s a scene I wrote for that:

Theoretically, Jyn should have considered that the man in black would be well muscled, despite his slender frame. After all, she was no slouch at endurance, having trained every day since she was eight (and that was every bloody day, no days off for headcolds or national holidays or freak forces of nature), but the man in black had fought her to a standstill. So it made sense that he would be a lot more muscled than he seemed at first glance (or second glance, or third, although Jyn Erso would be damned before she admitted to anyone that she had looked more than once).

So yes, she thought as she staggered across the top of the wall, ducking to keep a low profile as speeder patrols whizzed overhead nearby, Jyn should have known that the man in black would be bloody heavy. His head lolled against her shoulder and knocked against her jaw, his arms hung awkward and stiff on either side of her body (although not as stiff as they’d been before, when she’d thought he was All Dead and her heart had constricted in her chest like a small, screaming animal curling up in a vain attempt to shield herself from the pain – but she was not thinking about that right now). Worst of all, his long legs dragged on the ground behind her, as still as his non-breathing chest. Or his mostly-non-breathing chest, if the blind Miracle Man was as good as Baze claimed, if his strangely familiar-looking blonde apprentice hadn’t been lying when he’d smiled and handed her the pill, if the Force was willing to give her just a little bit of good luck to offset all the rotten luck of her life, if, if, if…

“Jyn,” Baze grunted from behind her, his voice hoarse but not breathless. It occurred to Jyn that maybe she should have let her larger, broader, more muscled companion carry the dead weight (mostly dead weight, Chirrut had promised) of the man on which she currently hung all her hopes. But she had already been right next to him at Chirrut’s hut, already been clinging to his arm with an almost vicious grip because if he had honest-to-peanuts up and died on her she was going to reach into the Force and drag his sorry ghost back out again.

And since she’d already been holding on to him, well, it had just made sense that she would be the one to pick him up and sling him over her back and march him straight here, to the fortress that held the Princess of Alderaan and the man Jyn had spent her entire life training to kill.

“Jyn,” Baze called again, a little louder. She paused and shuffled a little awkwardly around to peer at her friend over the man in black’s slumped shoulder. “There’s more than thirty.” He jerked his shaggy head towards the main gate below them, and Jyn craned her neck up to look over the edge of the wall.

Damn, he was right. “It doesn’t matter,” Jyn snapped, and decided that this spot was as good as any. With a stifled groan, she dropped to her knees and rolled her passenger to the side, planting him a little unkindly against the low wall in an undignified heap. “We’ve got him,” she pointed at the sad pile of the very still man in his torn black clothes. Baze looked from her to the man in black, and his face took on that distinctly troubled look it always did when Jyn was trying to force the world into a shape different from the one it already was. She scowled at him, because now was not the time for another ‘Jyn, you can’t stab your way to happiness’ lecture and anyway, yes, she could, thank you very much. It had been working for her so far.

“Hold his head,” Jyn ordered, fishing through her pockets for the miracle pill. “We’ll have to force-feed him.” Let’s see, blade oil, brass knuckles, tracker device (now broken), favorite dagger, spare dagger, spare spare dagger, bottle from the last whiskey she had ever drunk (and all the bad memories it represented), extra length of cord for her kyber necklace when it frayed, spare spare spare dagger…ah, there it was. Lumpy chocolate covered miracle pill. Hopefully miracle pill. Possibly full-of-weeds-and-gravel sham pill. No, she couldn’t go down that road. Her vengeance was so close, and the memory of the cold weight on her back too close, painfully close. If this pill had even the slightest chance of bringing him back, and then bringing the man in white within her reach... “Tilt him back a bit more,” she told Baze, voice sharp to hide the worry laced through it. “And open his mouth.”

“It hasn’t been an hour,” Baze grumbled, although he tilted the man in black’s head back and worked his thumb into his slack jaw to hold it open. Jyn glanced at Baze’s fingernails and hoped the man in black didn’t mind the taste of ginseng tea and gun oil. “The Miracle Man said we had to wait an hour or it wouldn’t be fully potent.” Baze paused, considered, and his face turned slightly ruddy under his thick beard. “He said that several times. One hour for potency.”

Jyn rolled her eyes at him. “I think he mostly just liked saying the word “potent” to you,” she smirked as the ruddy tint grew brighter. “Probably because you blushed every time.”

Baze scowled at her. “It hasn’t been an hour,” he repeated stubbornly.

“We can’t wait. The execution is in half an hour. Sorry, the wedding is in half an hour,” she snarled on the word, and shot a glare over the side of the wall at the crowd of guards below them. “The execution will probably take another ten minutes or so, if the groom is in a hurry.”

“A poor groom, to rush the wedding night,” Baze said, and Jyn paused with the miracle pill halfway to the man in black’s mouth, staring at him. He looked at her serenely, the flush now gone.

“Sometimes,” Jyn told him, “I do not know if you are teasing or dead serious.”

“If I come to a door,” Baze replied, “with two guards, and one always tells the truth, and one always lies, what question do I ask?”

She sighed. “Yes, yes, alright. Truth is relative, nothing is real, I’m sorry I brought it up. Alright, here, I’ll pop it in, you hold his nose.”

“How will holding his nose work,” Baze asked as she stuffed the pill as far down into the dead (mostly dead) man’s throat as she could. “If he’s not breathing anyway?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

They sat in silence, regarding the limp form on the wall, the seconds crawling over Jyn’s skin slow and slimy, like a slug or a politician. Next to her, Baze hunkered like a shaved bear and glowered as if the man in black’s lack of life signs were a personal insult. “How long do we have to wait?”

Jyn shrugged and opened her mouth to answer, but before she could get a word out, the man in black suddenly jerked like he’d been shocked by a live wire. His dark eyes flew open, his slack face suddenly and abruptly tightened into harsh lines, and he took a deep, gasping breath. “¡No me jodas! Puedo cocinar pepinillos en vinagre!”

Then his eyes locked on Jyn and Baze, the dazed film clearing, and he snapped, “I beat you two apart, I’ll take you both together!”

Calmly, Baze reached out and wrapped his large palm over the agitated man’s mouth. “I guess not very long,” he said dryly.

Jyn had to bite back her smile and will her idiot heart to slow down. It had worked. He was alive! She was mere minutes from finally killing the monster that had murdered her father, and the only man she really trusted to get her there was alive! Over Baze’s thick fingers, his dark eyes met hers, and then, finally, she saw some flicker of recognition filtering through. Then the tense lines around his eyes seemed to soften, and the hot rage cooled into relieved warmth. He was relieved to see her. She swallowed hard and tried not to read too much into it.

Slowly, Baze dropped his hand. In the small silence that followed, Jyn hunted for something to say, but all she could come up with was, “Welcome back, Cassian.”

“Jyn,” he said softly, and then he blinked, his features sharpening again as the reality of his situation finally filtered through his hazy mind. “Why won’t my arms move?”

Alright, she would have to break this gently to him. Maybe start with the last time they had been together, when she had told him –

“You’ve been dead all day,” Baze informed him bluntly. “Mostly dead,” he corrected.

Cassian turned an incredulous glare at Baze, clearly not believing it, but Jyn rested her hand on his chest, light as a butterfly and twice as nervous, and he swung his gaze back to her. “We had the Miracle Man Chirrut make a magic bacta pill to bring you back,” she said, fighting to keep her voice level and calm, as if his death and resurrection were every day occurrences and no more noteworthy than losing a handkerchief and finding it again in a coat pocket. From the look on his face, she was not doing a very good job of it. (Under her hand, his heart was beating, thump thump, thump thump, as regular and unremarkable as any heart, and yet a greater miracle than any she had ever dared hoped for in her short, lonely life. He was alive, he was alive.)

“Where are we?” Cassian asked at last, and his eyes dropped from Jyn’s face to his legs, splayed uselessly in front of him on the duracrete walltop. “What happened to the Princess?” He paused, his eyes tracking back up to Jyn, focusing on the sloppily-bandaged slice across her shoulder. “Who gave you that?”

“Let me explain,” Jyn held up a finger, and then paused. “No, wait, there’s too much. Let me sum up. Princess Leia is marrying Tarkin in a little less than half an hour, and then she’s going to be found dead in her quarters as soon as he can get his boney fingers around her throat. Bodhi managed to get in disguised as her personal manservant, but he’s just as trapped as she is and will probably get a sword in his gut if he tries to free her.” Jyn recognized the bitter tone in her voice, and forced herself to breathe in, breathe out. Hatred had blinded her before, but she could not, would not, allow it to blind her now. Not when she was so close to her goal. Not when Cassian was alive again. “So all we have to do,” she went on, “is get in, break up the wedding, steal the Princess, save my brother, and make our escape. After I kill the man in white,” she added quickly, because her hatred was under control but her fury burned healthy and strong.

Cassian’s face had settled into that hooded, thoughtful expression, the one that had driven her mad with irritation but now made her heart quicken and her muscles tense with anticipation. Beside her, Baze nudged her side with his elbow, and she realized that she was leaning towards Cassian, like a falcon braced on her perch, ready for flight. “That doesn’t leave us much time for playing,” Cassian murmured, and tapped his thigh absently with one finger.

“Well done,” Baze said encouragingly. When Cassian raised an eyebrow, Baze nodded to his hand. “You just wiggled your finger. Good job.”

“I’ve always been a quick healer,” the man in black said flatly. He turned back to Jyn. “What are our liabilities?”

“Only one unsealed entrance. All the rest are powered down and physically barred.” She jabbed her finger over the top of the wall, behind Cassian, who flopped his head back gracelessly to look. Obligingly, Baze grabbed his arms and half lifted him, letting him peer over the top of the wall. “But it’s guarded by,” she took a quick head count and grimaced. “Sixty men.”

Baze thumped Cassian back to the wall. He grunted, but didn’t complain. “Our assets?”

Jyn shrugged. “Your brains. My skill. His strength.” Silently, Baze held up his repeater. “And weapons,” Jyn conceded, nodding to the repeater and tapping her own long blade meaningfully.

Cassian’s frown deepened. “Impossible.” He said coldly, and Jyn’s heart dropped into her stomach. He must have seen it in her face (damn him, he always saw it; when no one else in the world could read Jyn Erso’s expression, this man looked right through her and knew everything going on in her head). The hard denial in his eyes melted into weary sorrow, and he shook his head slowly at her. “If I had a month to plan it, Jyn, maybe I could come up with something, but this…” he sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“You just shook your head,” Baze said into the pained silence. “Congratulations.”

“My brains, her skills, your strength – and some weapons – against sixty men and a locked gate, and you think a little head jiggle makes me happy?” Another speeder patrol buzzed somewhere nearby, and Cassian glared in it’s direction as if it were responsible for all his troubles. “I mean, if I had a droid, or even most of one, that would be something.”

Jyn’s heart skipped an excited beat. She turned to Baze, who was looking at Cassian as one looked at a petulant child, with tolerant disappointment. “Where did we leave that KX unit I deactived? The one the deathtrooper had?”

Baze shrugged. “With the deathtrooper, I think.”

Cassian’s head whipped towards them. “Why didn’t you list that in the first place?”

Internally, delight mixed with relief and warred with anxiety in Jyn’s head, temporarily distracting her from the never-ending roar of her rage. He was already moving better, his spine holding him up a little straighter, his neck less…floppy. Deep under the riot of her other emotions, the fragile, sweet voice of hope began to whisper, he’s going to be alright, we’re going to get through this together, and then maybe after this we will –

And that was where she cut it off, because there was no after that she could afford to consider. She had saved the man in black, and now she had to kill the man in white. Everything else was…extra. Fluff. Unnecessary.

Cassian closed his eyes and leaned his head back, exposing the long line of this throat (which she was not thinking of kissing, because that was – oh, Force help her, she was an idiot. Life-long struggle for revenge, Jyn. Man in white. Murdered my mother, imprisoned my father. Trying to start a huge war. I am here for vengeance. I am here for vengeance and death. My vengeance, his death, I mean. I am here for -

“What I wouldn’t give for a heat-shielded Fenelar cloak,” he murmured, his voice husky from disuse and stress. He gave a low, frustrated growl that rolled right through Jyn’s chest and down her spine like a sweep of his hand.

I am here for that sound.

No, no, wrong. Guarded fortress gate. Princess. War. Man in White. Vengeance!

“What about this?” Baze reached into his armored chest plate and yanked, and to Jyn’s shock, a long ream of slightly shimmery red and black cloth came pouring out.

“Where did you get that bloody thing?” She demanded, staring at the Fenelar cloak.

Baze shrugged again, although the red flush was back on his face with a vengeance. “Chirrut – I mean, the Miracle Man gave it to me. He said…I mean, it…fit me nice, so he said I could keep it.”

Jyn gave him a skeptical look. “He said you looked nice in it, didn’t he?”

Her friend glared at her. “No sooner spoken than broken,” he warned, his favorite riddle when she sassed him to the edge of his patience. She grinned.

“Silence,” Cassian answered absently, and then, “Alright, let’s go. Help me up.”

She tried not to let herself read too much into it, tried not to let the relief and hope soar up into her chest and balloon her foolish heart. She couldn’t quite manage it, and when Cassian tried to push himself up and mostly just managed to roll himself inelegantly to a slump, she lunged forward a little faster than was strictly necessary to catch him. His weight over her shoulders felt significantly lighter, despite the fact that his legs were just as useless and Baze had to push him more or less onto her back. (Once again, it occurred to her that her larger friend might be better suited to this task, but she stabbed that thought cleanly through the gullet and tossed it happily away).

“I’ll need a blaster, eventually,” he said quietly, and his head was hanging so close to her neck that she could feel his breath on the sensitive skin there.

Jyn clamped her jaw tight and asked in as detached voice as possible, “Why? You can’t even lift one.”

“Well, that’s hardly common knowledge, is it?” He replied a little testily, speaking mostly to her collarbone. Baze reached up and grabbed the top of his head, pulling his face upright enough that he could see forward. “Thank you,” Cassian replied in a tone that implied he was grateful but not terribly pleased with the situation. “And we might have some trouble getting back out of the fortress, once we’re in.”

“You don’t say,” Jyn grunted, doing her best to carry him as smoothly as she could down the nearby stairwell. What she wouldn’t give for an elevator right now. “How do I find the man in white? How do we get the Princess away from Tarkin? And once we do that, how do we escape?”

“Don’t pester him,” Baze chided her, leaning Cassian’s head to the side so he could talk to her over the man in black’s head. “He’s had a hard day.”

She glanced at Cassian’s carefully blank face under Baze’s hand, and for the first time in a week – in years, really – she wanted to laugh at loud. “Right,” she managed to choke. “Sorry.”

He sighed, and suffered Baze setting his head back against her shoulder without comment.

“Jyn,” Baze said as she carefully maneuvered down the stairs, her friend at her heels and her…other friend warm and breathing against her back.

“What?”

“I hope we win.”

 -

NOTE:

Since @youareiron-andyouarestrong and I didn’t really think Baze seemed the “rhyming” type, we went with riddles instead. Chirrut the Miracle Man does something similar, although his riddles are much, much harder, and tend to hit a little below the emotional belt.

“¡No me jodas! Puedo cocinar pepinillos.” = “Don’t fuck with me! I know how to make gherkins!” (Or close enough, anyway. Look, the man was Mostly Dead all day, okay? You try making sense first thing in the afterlife morning.)

Fenelar armor is not explicitly said to be fireproof. So I’m going to say it is, because no one can prove me wrong.

[zuziasuchor]

Negotiated Self Directed Work Proposal Form

BA (Hons) Contemporary Arts Practice BA (Hons) Creative Arts

 YEAR 2

Zuzia Suchorska

394733 (student number)

What are you intending to investigate or explore by making this body of work? 

A beloved artist of mine, Joan Gardy Artigas, made a speech at the University of Wisconsin where he stated that, "for any beginning artist, especially a sculptor, the fundamental problem is that of choosing the kind of medium in which to work. This might not be the essential problem, but it is the one which will determine all his or her future creations. He might therefore say that it is, indeed, the essential problem." It is time for me to hone my practice in a manner that incorporates my background as a painter into ceramic surface.

My primary body of work last academic year was a deep study of landscape and place- specifically an exploration of our perception of space, and the ‘thought plane’ sheltered by time spent within certain environments. I’d like to expand on this and further develop my interpretation of Andrea Zittel’s Dynamic Panels, where there is a constant relationship between energetic accumulators (horizontal planes) and ideological resonators (vertical planes).

What will be your main areas of research?

Conceptualism and functionality are still at battle in my mind, and there are many theoretical ponderings that have not yet reached their conclusion; therefore, sustaining a conversation regarding these 'issues' is essential for me at this time, and building on this foundation of thought will be constant. I want my body of research to be a balance between theoretical, cultural, and technical information. I am becoming aware of how little I know, and so broadening my understanding is always going to be a priority.

Do you foresee any need to use specialist equipment and, if so, what?

I want to build a bridge between painting and ceramics, and therefore I plan on developing my throwing skill and utilising vessels as canvas. In order to do so, I need to thoroughly work on glazing- as this is my biggest downfall and disappointment.

What are your anticipated strengths in this area and how might you draw on them?

Research and inquiry have been indispensable, and therefore I have learnt to fully incorporate research into my practice over the years. I’ve recently realised that my analytical temperament is a strength, and maybe even a blessing in disguise.

What are your anticipated weaknesses and how might you overcome them?

Documentation needs to be incorporated into my process. It must become second nature to record process and technique, in whichever format that may be- video, image, notes or sketches. Documentation is vital for my growth as a maker, offering both process material to reflect upon as well as a thorough insight into my decision making- which is hard to decipher once I have stepped out of the studio. Time dances in locksbrook; planning and essential studio ponderings morph into aimless wandering when undocumented. Not helpful at all and incredibly frustrating when I cannot recall a reason for certain decisions. I'm going to force this habit onto myself with all my will and document the making/studio frame of mind extensively by keeping a small notebook in my toolbox, and taking photos with my phone. I have made a pact with myself to not to see a decision through unless it has been jotted down, and the process photographed, for my own reflection at a later time.

 I stray away from time management and planning, and usually when working I arrange my time to suit how I feel. I don’t want to change this completely, because planning every hour of the day is not how I function and sticking to a schedule has failed numerous times. But I need to change how I approach time management and adapt it to work for me, and I think the best way is to through broader weekly planning, where I'll map out what I'd like to complete. I'm a long way from where I want to be as an artist; the more I learn, the more realise how much more there is to learn. So, in order to not get overwhelmed by this, time management and planning will be vital. This overwhelming excitement of wanting to make all the things was a pitfall in first year, because I truly didn't know where to start.  

 But, a vital place to start is tackling the intimidating process of glazing. The finish of my work has been frustratingly poor, and the limited knowledge or ability to comprehend glazing makes me feel like ripping my hair out. I feel as though because glazing and the finish of my work has been so incredibly poor, this is where I need to start first. I'll be incredibly pleased to not be washed with disappointment when work comes out of the kiln after it has been glazed. Luckily, I have a number of small pots that had been bisque fired before lockdown, which will serve as glazing practice. 

 Student signature

Zuzia Suchorska

Date

28/9

[we-speak-english]

London: Iconic and Fictionalised Environs

I have been to many cities, both inside and outside of America, and none are quite like London. Maybe it’s the rich history—few cities (particularly in the US) can compete with the sheer quantity of history stacked up on top of itself (sometimes quite literally) and folded together in such a small area. But I think it has more to do with how iconic (and, in some cases, how fictionalised) I see the geography of London as being.

A few weeks ago, I was walking along the bank of the Thames and looked up and saw Tower Bridge. I had already seen Tower Bridge several times, of course, and I knew exactly where I was in the city, but, somehow, it surprised me. Just—there, clear as day, Tower Bridge! The one! The only! Right there. And then I remembered, all of sudden, that I was in London, and when did I forget that?

Part of it has to do, I think, with the idea of hereness and thereness. This is something I feel a lot, some bizarre quirk of geography that never quite clicked with me. Here is always wherever I am, so it always seems very familiar and immediate. Currently, I’m sitting on a sofa waiting for my laundry to finish drying, and here is the laundry room. There is everywhere else, everywhere beyond my easy grasp: central London, Minneapolis, the moon. But then, when I get into a car or a plane or a train, I’m not truly here or there anymore. I’m in a no-man’s land that encompasses only the interior of the vessel of transportation. Even when speeding through the English countryside, here isn’t truly the fields outside the window, here is the bus, and the English countryside might as well be on a television screen, as distant as it is to me. I think this has to do with lack of agency in most modes of transportation; I usually don’t feel this way as much if I’m the one driving the car. It’s a passive act that makes it a no-man’s land, because you’re not doing anything, so how can you, and, by extension, your here, be moving?

So then, when we arrive at Cambridge and I finally disembark, and my feet touch the ground and I breathe in the air—not the no-man’s land air of the bus but the proper air of the place I now am—it all feels much realer. Now my here is where I physically am. It actually jolts me a little, sometimes, the abrupt switch between here being my flat and here being Cambridge, with that spatially-defying no-man’s land in between.

So maybe London creeps up on me because I do a great deal of walking in it. If I walk westward through Whitechapel, I can literally see the Gherkin at the distant end of Mile End Road, and if I kept my feet turned that direction, eventually I would reach central London. When I walk, here follows me, so theoretically it shouldn’t be surprising when I realise I have reached the place I was walking to. Occasionally it still is, if I space out while walking, but I don’t think that’s the reason I was so surprised to see Tower Bridge.

I think that response was because of the sheer extent to which Tower Bridge is iconic. London has always been so far away for me, always in the untouchable, unreachable there, and Tower Bridge is such a symbol of London that it too seems untouchable. Somehow my mind temporarily lapsed on the fact that my here was London, so when I saw the bridge, I immediately associated its proximity with the proximity of London as a whole. This resulted in me being rather abruptly reminded of exactly where I was, in local and broader geographic terms.

A similar thing happened when I first visited St James’s Park, as I alluded to in an earlier post, but St James’s Park really isn’t iconic in the way that Tower Bridge or even Hyde Park is. If I see a picture of Tower Bridge, my next thought is London, but that might be the fifth thing I think about when I see a picture of St James’s. So why did I have a similar experience, if it wasn’t iconic association and my here- and thereness being crossed?

I think it’s because, in some weird, half-subconscious part of my brain, St James’s Park isn’t real. Hear me out. This is a phenomenon I think would only occur for me with London, because of the particular way I think about London. Budapest is a city I know practically nothing about, and though I’m sure I would have a lovely time there, I don’t think it would continuously surprise me the way London does.

I’d been to London before, some five years ago, and I don’t think it had quite the same effect then. I was enthralled by all the cultural differences (which I, being rather young, had no proper concept of), but it was surprising because it was new, not because it was real. This leads me to posit that my current state of surprise is because I’ve completely fictionalised London in my mind. I blame this entirely on the influence of Good Omens, Rivers of London, my own Good Omens writings, and, to a lesser extent, Sherlock and Doctor Who.

Sometimes, when I walk around particular areas of London, it feels unreal, and those places tend to be those that, in my mind, are primarily associated with unreal events, ie., works of fiction. Consider Berkeley Square. It doesn’t even feature particularly heavily in either Good Omens or Rivers of London, and literally all I know about it is the ‘a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square’ line, but I’ve managed to associate it with both GO and RoL nonetheless. It’s important to note that those fandoms were very much in my mind when I did my extensive pre-travel study of London. And I mean extensive. I hand-drew an entire map of central London in incredible detail for a book cover for a RoL fic I co-wrote, and every time I write a GO fic that sends a character out into the city, I extensively follow their every movement on Google Street View. Nothing will fictionalize a place like sending fictional characters there to do fictional things.

So when I finally visited Berkeley Square, it was a strange mix of emotions. Firstly, I noticed that it really was nothing special. London has many squares, and they literally all look the same. It was also nothing like I had imagined it—it was one of the few places I hadn’t scrutinized on Google—but yet it was simultaneously everything I had ever wanted it to be. There was a sign there, saying ‘Berkeley Square,’ and here the square was, the real, the original, in the flesh, as it were, in my here, and how could it possibly be wrong if it was the original? This same impression, but stronger, was what I got when I visited St James’s and the Ritz. For those places, even though I’d looked at photos beforehand, my vague visual images of them in fictionalised settings (i.e., in my head when I visualise scenes as I’m writing) were stronger than my literal memory of the photographs.

And then you compound all that, all the fictional, much-loved places of my mind, so many of which have been in London lately, and then I walk the streets of London and it’s like all my imaginings have come true. It’s as though I’ve walked onto the set of a film whose script I wrote, and it’s not quite how I imagined it and yet it’s perfect, real and physical and here in a sense that immaterial words never could quite be. It feels unreal because, to me, it is unreal.

[thousandmaths]

Day 33: Gröbner Basics Redux

Today I continued my journey of reading Chapter 15 Commutative Algebra with a View Toward Algebraic Geometry by Eisenbud.

[[ Standard disclaimer: these are reading notes and may not make any sense without referencing the book, and honestly even that might not help much. ]]

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Eisenbud

Reader’s Note: After the reading today, I’m still deep in the middle of Chapter 15. However, I think that I’ve reached the end of what Eisenbud calls the “Gröbner Basics” portion of the chapter. Since the school year is already so close to starting (which probably spells the end for the reading course), it’s entirely possible that I just skip the rest of the chapter to get a little bit broader coverage.

The majority of section 2 is this kind of stop-and-go collection of “how relevant is this really” observations related to monomial orders, until we finally hit the definition of a Gröbner basis, and suddenly we immediately get a ton of payoff.

From here the chapter progresses at a brisk pace, and one way to frame this next portion is that we look for an effective method to compute syzygies, i.e. the linear relations within a module $M$, i.e. the kernel of a surjective map $F\to M$ where $F$ is a free module. (In this chapter, “module” always means “module over a polynomial ring $k[x_1,\dots, x_n]$ with $k$ a field”.)

The method used to compute syzygies is essentially to compute a Gröbner basis for $M$, and then do some extra polynomial divisions. After doing that, you have enough information to just mindlessly write down the syzygies. The algorithm used for computing Gröbner bases is the one developed by Buchberger, which in term pretty much just comes down to doing a lot of polynomial divisions.

Hence, everything rests on the “Division Algorithm” of section 3. This is a multivariable generalization of the Euclidean division, better known by its grade school pseudonym “division with remainder”. It’s worth noting that ordinary Euclidean division consists of both an existence and uniqueness statement. On the other hand, the uniqueness statement can be formulated in the multivariable setting, but it often doesn’t need to be for practical purposes— which is good, because it’s annoying.

Section 6 heralds the end of the Gröbner Basics part of the chapter, as Eisenbud takes the time to provide a one-page account of the early history. In particular, he highlights the work of Hironaka, which was done roughly independently of Buschberger’s, and treated the case of power series (rather than polynomials).

---

My first exposure to Gröbner bases was at the ACSB, where they were described to me— read: my even more algebraically naïve self— as “doing for rings what ordinary bases do for vector spaces”. Eisenbud doesn’t make reference to any similar analogy, but does observe that in the case of a zero-variable polynomial ring (i.e. a field) the Gröbner bases for vector spaces (and their subspaces) are ordinary bases which are also lower-triangular. The division algorithm for Gröbner bases also gives an “easy” solution to

Eisenbud’s comments on Buchbacher’s algorithm even include a very light discussion of asymptotics, which are, in a word, awful: generally, as bad as $\mathcal O(n^{n2^n})$... so yeah. Despite this, the algorithm seems to work well in practice. This kind of unreasonably excessive disconnect between theory and practice in algorithm runtimes have been encountered before, most notably in the simplex method for solving linear programs. Eisenbud says that “there is a partial understanding of why this is so”, giving references but no additional details.

I also started reading section 7, which argues that the reverse lexicographic order has some particularly nice qualities among the possible choices you could make for a monomial order. In practice these qualities have more than theoretical value, and allow for rather more efficient computation. Something that struck me is that the details of these arguments had some superficial similarity to Section 3.4 in Björner and Brenti. This isn’t terribly surprising since both are playing around with lex order, but it’s interesting to me because I haven’t seen lex order used in applications before, and I think I’m starting to gain an intuition for the types of arguments into which it fits well.

[fireleaptfromhousetohouse]

So I see people are not only doubling down on ‘it’s ok to punch people for the opinions they hold’, but trying to aggressively expand the category (and explicitly this time!).

Just as planned. See, I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to publish these two-and-a-half essays I wrote (in a fit of blind fury/sexual confusion after reading the book of Fight Club) about who it’s ok to fucking murder. Everyone on board with that? Everyone all good with some animals being more equal than others? After all, this is what’s cool now, right?

Why it is moral for the poor to murder the rich

We all heard of Ethan Couch, the young man in Texas who killed four people while drink-driving. At trial, his lawyers (doubtless good ones, given Couch’s wealthy family) used Couch’s privileged lifestyle as a defence, arguing he did not fully understand the consequences of his actions and would benefit more from expensive therapy than a custodial sentence. This subsequently became known as the ‘affluenza’ defence.

Couch was given probation. This involved a (minor) custodial sentence once he was no longer a juvenile. Couch only received this custodial sentence after violating his probation terms and fleeing to Mexico, prompting a manhunt.

There are plenty of other lurid, salient details to make this case seem even more unjust. The judge who sentenced Couch, for instance, had previously handed down a 20-year sentence in a similar case in which the defendant killed one person, not four. Couch himself had apparently driven himself to school since the age of thirteen, making his shaky driving ability even more damning, and had previously been under probation at the age of fifteen, having been caught intoxicated in his vehicle with a naked, unconscious fourteen-year-old girl.

One could attempt to defend this lenient sentence. One point raised was that his obscenely wealthy parents could afford effective therapy (this having been an element of his defence). Another was the speculation that the judge was banking on Couch violating his probation, so that once he reached the age of majority they could throw the book at him. My point is this – had it been your friend or relative mowed down by a spoilt little date-rapist, who was put on trial for it and walked free to return to his comfortable pre-frat-boy lifestyle, you’d probably feel it was unjust. That the justice system was letting down its end of the bargain, that it hadn’t fulfilled the terms stipulated on its end of the social contract.

Now a thought experiment. You and Ethan Couch are walking on the same street. Were he to suddenly pull out a gun and shoot you, or get in his car and run you over, or stove your head in with a baseball bat (deliberately or accidentally), would he face material consequences for this? What if he were still under-age? What if he were a serving police officer? What if his family were even more wealthy than they are, say Kennedy- or Bush-dynasty level wealthy? (I note here that Laura Bush, wife of the 43rd President, did indeed kill a man in a car accident at the age of 17, and was not charged for it.)

And what if you had dependants? What if Ethan Couch condemned your children to starvation – or the cruel mercies of state care – with one pull of the trigger, and faced no comparable degree of condemnation himself? What if they tried to take revenge, to themselves redress the injustice of your death, and found themselves being handed quite draconian punishments for it? Is that justice? Or, if you have no children, what if your parents had to bury you? Can you imagine their grief at losing their child by the hands of someone who – by nature – will feel no remorse?

What I would like the reader to take away is this – if you see a wealthy person, at any given moment they could murder you, and it would be very much up in the air as to whether they would be punished for this. Therefore you should strike first. Get them before they get you – kill them or at the very least disable them to the point they are no longer able to harm you. This is not simply self-defence, you understand, this is for the sake of your dependants, your innocent children who have done nothing to deserve the rank injustice of being told their parent is dead and the killer is walking free.

Why it is moral for weak men to murder strong men

In the previous essay I outlined how, if you are confronted with someone who can kill you without penalty, it is best for the sake of you and your family to kill them first.

To begin with a simple statement of fact: society has nothing but scorn for weak men.

You can see this in how they are invariably described in feminising terms. Broadly speaking, patriarchal societies hold the feminine as inferior, but these weak men lack even the scant comforts women enjoy. When women are in pain they are comforted (albeit in a paternalist, condescending way), when men are in pain they are mocked – mocked further, in the case of already-feminised men.

Young men learn this quickly. Despite societal boilerplate about condemning violence, the physically strong will be encouraged and praised for attacking the physically weak, on the basis that they are correctly performing what society thinks of as masculinity. They are gifted social capital, and are found attractive by heterosexual women, all for the ‘achievement’ of having been born bigger and stronger than their peers. And with a majority of teachers being women, small wonder that this seems so obvious it is barely worth commenting upon to any man who has been through a school system. To them it is part of the landscape, as integral to society as architecture.

This does not extend to the legal system, which will grudgingly prosecute strong men for assault, but even that seems more like some sort of bizarre exception than the rule. The state itself sanctions violent men in the form of soldiers or police (two careers, incidentally, held to be inherently worthy of respect, and the latter of which is necessary to prosecute those charged with assault). The media is full of tales of violent men – or, as we refer to them, the ‘heroes’ of any given work of fiction – killing those around them with gun and knife and bare fist, and only a tenuous moral justification. In the world of sports, very few other athletes reach the level of fame that boxers and martial artists do (this is not even limited to men – cf. Ronda Rousey). And within geopolitics (to look at this in a much broader manner), once a nation-state can credibly threaten sufficient violence, it can then commit whatever atrocities it wants without fear of intervention – the benchmark of this generally being whether or not the nation-state is a nuclear power.

So, let me present you with another thought experiment. If you were a physically weak man, and a physically strong man were to punch you apropos of nothing, what do you suppose people’s reactions would be? Would they be more likely to intervene, or to laugh? If a heterosexual woman witnessed it, would she find the strong man unattractive? To return to the legal sphere, if the strong man were to be judged by a jury of his peers, and their role was not to determine whether or not he committed that act, but whether he should be punished for it – do you think they would punish him? And in all these eventualities, do you think the people around you would be likely to begin speculating that you had invited this attack in some way? Would they, for a moment, consider whether he committed that act because it bolsters his performance of masculinity, and because he could get away with it?

As with the wealthy, if you see a strong man he could strike or kill you, and quite possibly face no consequences – indeed, he might even be lauded for doing so, particularly if you are socially unpopular for whatever reason (ugliness, say). Once again, you must get them before they get you. Strength is not the same thing as invulnerability, the strongest man is as vulnerable as anyone to a traffic accident or a house fire. And for the reasons I have outlined above, I would recommend that the hypothetical weak man reader start as young as possible – crucially, before they reach the age of criminal responsibility. The confidence of knowing they can alter their own circumstances will likely serve them well as they move into late adolescence.

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

So, what did you make of the above essays?

There follows a brief reading comprehension test, before which you may wish to re-read the essays. Ready?

- Add one point if you noticed that the justice system usually does not take ‘lurid, salient details’ into account.

- Add one point if you noticed the logical leap between Ethan Couch receiving a non-custodial sentence, and the later claim that he received ‘no material consequences’.

- Add one point if you noticed the reference to Laura Bush was disingenuous, particularly given that at the time she had not married into the Bush family.

- Add one point if you noticed the paragraph concerning your hypothetical dependants was little more than Helen Lovejoy’s notorious rhetorical sledgehammer ‘think of the children!’

- Add one point if you noticed that if you kill a rich person, that yes, it absolutely isn’t ‘simply self-defence’.

- Add one point for each of the following generalisations that you noticed:

- ‘society has nothing but scorn for weak men’ - ‘the majority of teachers are women’ and the insinuation that for that reason the majority of teachers will be aroused by their violent male charges - the idea that the legal system only ‘grudgingly’ prosecutes strong men for assault

- Add one point if you noticed the attempt to radicalise children under the age of criminal responsibility.

- Add five points if you noticed that it would have been easy to take, as the subject of a theoretical third essay, the fact that heterosexual male victims of domestic violence are figures of ridicule and that their attackers tend to receive slaps on the wrist at most, and to go on to make the argument that any given man should attack any given woman before she attacks him.

- Add five points if you noticed that the endgame of these essays seem to be the weakest, poorest person on the planet surrounded by a mountain of corpses.

- Add five points if you noticed that – while the essays explicitly attempt to justify attacking the rich and the strong – were a rich or strong person to read them, their takeaway might well be that they already have carte blanche to attack and kill those weaker or poorer than them.

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Kidney Experts Say It’s Time to Remove Race From Medical Algorithms. Doing So Is Complicated.

Alphonso Harried recently came across a newspaper clipping about his grandfather receiving his 1,000th dialysis treatment. His grandfather later died — at a dialysis center — as did his uncle, both from kidney disease.

“And that comes in my mind, on my weak days: ‘Are you going to pass away just like they did?’” said Harried, 46, who also has the disease.

He doesn’t like to dwell on that. He has gigs to play as a musician, a ministry to run with his wife and kids to protect as a school security guard.

Yet he must juggle all that around three trips each week to a dialysis center in Alton, Illinois, about 20 miles from his home in St. Louis, to clean his blood of the impurities his kidneys can no longer flush out. He’s waiting for a transplant, just as his uncle did before him.

“It’s just frustrating,” Harried said. “I’m stuck in the same pattern.”

Thousands of other Americans with failing kidneys are also stuck, going to dialysis as they await new kidneys that may never come. That’s especially true of Black patients, like Harried, who are about four times as likely to have kidney failure as white Americans, and who make up more than 35% of people on dialysis but just 13% of the U.S. population. They’re also less likely to get on the waitlist for a kidney transplant, and less likely to receive a transplant once on the list.

An algorithm doctors use may help perpetuate such disparities. It uses race as a factor in evaluating all stages of kidney disease care: diagnosis, dialysis and transplantation.

It’s a simple metric that uses a blood test, plus the patient’s age and sex and whether they’re Black. It makes Black patients appear to have healthier kidneys than non-Black patients, even when their blood measurements are identical.

“It is as close to stereotyping a particular group of people as it can be,” said Dr. Rajnish Mehrotra, a nephrologist with the University of Washington School of Medicine.

This race coefficient has recently come under fire for being imprecise, leading to potentially worse outcomes for Black patients and less chance of receiving a new kidney. A national task force of kidney experts and patients is studying how to replace it. Some institutions have already stopped using it.

But how best to assess a patient’s kidney function remains uncertain, and some medical experts say fixing this equation is only one step in creating more equitable care, a process complicated by factors far deeper than a math problem.

“There are so many inequities in kidney disease that stem from broader structural racism,” said Dr. Deidra Crews, a nephrologist and the associate director for research development at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity. “It is just a sliver of what the broader set of issues are when it comes to both disparities and inequities in who gets kidney disease in the first place, and then in the care processes.”

Why Race Has Been Part of the Equation

Kidneys filter about 40 gallons of blood a day, like a Brita filter for the body. They keep in the good stuff and send out the bad through urine. But unlike other organs, kidneys don’t easily repair themselves.

“There’s a point of no return,” said Dr. Cynthia Delgado, a University of California-San Francisco nephrologist who is leading the task force working on the national recommendation to ditch the racial part of the equation.

Furthermore, it’s hard to gauge whether kidneys are working properly. Gold-standard tests involve a chemical infusion and hours of collecting blood and urine to see how quickly the kidneys flush the chemical out. An algorithm is much more efficient.

Buoyed by activism around structural racism, those seeking equity in health care have recently been calling out the algorithm as an example of the racism baked into American medicine. Researchers writing in the New England Journal of Medicine last year included kidney equations in a laundry list of race-adjusted algorithms used to evaluate parts of the body — from heart and lungs to bones and breasts. Such equations, they wrote, can “perpetuate or even amplify race-based health inequities.”

In March, ahead of the national task force’s upcoming formal recommendation, leaders in kidney care said race modifiers should be removed. And Fresenius Medical Care, one of the two largest U.S. dialysis companies, said the race component is “problematic.”

Until the late 1990s, doctors primarily used the Cockcroft-Gault equation. It didn’t ask for race, but used age, weight and the blood level of creatinine — a chemical that’s basically the trash left after muscles move. A high level of creatinine in the blood signals that kidneys are not doing their job of disposing of it. But the equation was based on a study of just 249 white men.

Then, researchers wrapping up a study on how to slow down kidney disease realized they were sitting on a mother lode of data that could rewrite that equation: gold-standard kidney function measurements from about 1,600 patients, 12% of whom were Black. They evaluated 16 variables, including age, sex, diabetes diagnosis and blood pressure.

They landed on something that accurately predicted the kidney function of patients better than the old equation. Except it made the kidneys of Black participants appear to be sicker than the gold-standard test showed they were.

The authors reasoned it might be caused by muscle mass. Participants with more muscle mass would likely have more creatinine in their blood, not because their kidneys were failing to remove it, but because they just had more muscles producing more waste. So they “corrected” Black patients’ results for that difference.

Dr. Andrew S. Levey, a professor at Tufts University School of Medicine who led the study, said it doesn’t make intuitive sense to include race — now widely considered a social construct — in an equation about biology.

Still, in 1999, he and others published the race equation, then updated it a decade later. Though other equations exist that don’t involve race, Levey’s latest version, often referred to as the “CKD-EPI” equation, is recommended for clinical use. It shows a Black patient’s kidneys functioning 16% better than those of a non-Black patient with the same blood work.

Removing the Race Number

Many patients don’t know about this equation and how their race has factored into their care.

“I really wish someone would have mentioned it,” Harried said.

He said it burned him up “knowing that this one little test that I didn’t know anything about could keep me from — or prolong me — getting a kidney.”

Glenda V. Roberts curbed her kidney disease with a vegan diet and by conducting meetings as an IT executive while walking. But after more than 40 years of slow decline, her kidney function finally reached the cutoff required to get on the transplant waitlist. When it did, the decline was swift — a pattern researchers have noted in Black patients. “It really makes you wonder what the benefit is of having an equation that will cause people who look like me — Black people — to get referrals later, to have to wait longer before you can get on the transplant list, but then have your disease progress more rapidly,” she said.

Roberts, who is now the director of external relations at the University of Washington’s Kidney Research Institute in Seattle and on the national task force, said a genetic test added to her feeling that a “Black/non-Black” option in an equation was a charade.

“In fact, I am not predominantly of African ancestry. I’m 25% Native American. I’m Swedish and English and French,” said Roberts. “But I am also 48% from countries that are on the continent of Africa.”

The Black/non-Black question also doesn’t make sense to Delgado, the University of California nephrologist. “I would probably for some people qualify as being non-Black,” said Delgado, who is Puerto Rican. “But for others, I would qualify as Black.”

So, theoretically, if Delgado were to visit two doctors on the same day, and they guessed her race instead of asking, she could come away with two different readings of how well her kidneys are working.

Researchers found that the race factor doesn’t work for Black Europeans or patients in West Africa. Australian researchers found using the race coefficient led them to overestimate the kidney function of Indigenous Australians.

But in the U.S., Levey and other researchers seeking to replace the race option with physical measurements, such as height and weight, hit a dead end.

To Crews, the Johns Hopkins nephrologist who is also on the national taskforce, the focus on one equation is myopic. The algorithm suggests that something about Black people’s bodies affects their kidneys. Crews thinks that’s the wrong approach to addressing disparities: The issue is not what’s unique about the inner workings of Black bodies, but instead what’s going on around them.

“I really wish we could measure that instead of using race as a variable in the estimating equations,” she said on the “Freely Filtered” podcast. “I don’t think it’s ancestry. I don’t think it’s muscle mass.”

It might not be that Black bodies are more likely to have more creatinine in the blood, but that Americans who experience housing insecurity and barriers to healthy food, quality medical care and timely referrals are more likely to have creatinine in their blood — and that many of them happen to be Black.

Systemic health disparities help explain why Black patients have unusually high rates of kidney failure, since communities of color have less access to regular primary care. One of the most serious consequences of poorly controlled diabetes and hypertension is failure of the organ.

Direct discrimination — intentional or not — from providers may also affect outcomes, said Roberts. She recalled a social worker categorizing her as unable to afford the post-transplant drugs required to keep a transplanted organ healthy, which could have delayed her getting a new organ. Roberts has held executive roles at several multimillion-dollar companies.

Delgado and Levey agree that removing race from the formula might feel better on the surface, but it isn’t clear the move would actually help people.

Studies recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology noted that removing the race factor could lead to some Black patients being disqualified from using beneficial medications because their kidneys might appear unable to handle them. It could also disqualify some Black people from donating a kidney.

“Fiddling with the algorithms is an imperfect way to achieve equity,” Levey said.

As researchers debate the math problem and broader societal ones, patients such as Harried, the St. Louis minister and security guard, are still stuck navigating dialysis.

“One of things that keeps me going is knowing that soon they may call me for a kidney,” Harried said.

He doesn’t know how long his name will be on the transplant waitlist — or whether the race coefficient has prolonged the wait — but he keeps a hospital bag under his bed to be ready.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Kidney Experts Say It’s Time to Remove Race From Medical Algorithms. Doing So Is Complicated. published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/