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moonlighttfoxx · 3 years

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The girl with the golden eyes: Prologue

Summary: Steve Rogers hates Y/N - the way her golden eyes sparke, the way her hair falls down her shoulders, the way she smells and most of all he hates that she screwed him over in a mission, working with Hydra. Caught between the hatred and the desire he feels for her, what will happen if they are forced to live and work together not as enemies, but as a team?

Story type: Series

Pairings: Steve Rogers x OC

A/N: This is my first try for an Avengers fanfic. All comments(even the negative ones) are welcome. I’ll try to post regularly. Keep in mind that I’m not a native English speaker, so I apologize for any mistakes that might occur in the story. :)

Warnings: Language, smut, adult content, 18+

Steve looked around the room full of people. His eyes were rapidly scanning everyone until they landed on the person he was looking for – a tiny plain guy in his thirties. It was easy to miss him, given that he was no one special at all, but he used to be a S.H.I.E.L.D. employee and right now he was a great threat for them all. He had to give the order for that guy to be taken down. He needed to be taken down one way or another, but Steve wasn’t willing to risk the lives of all those people. So right now the only thing he could do was patiently wait for the former employee to leave the event and then he would give the order to the agents that were surrounding the area around the event center.

Holding his drink in his hand, his eyes still casually going around the room, stopping for a second on each face – some of them familiar, others not so much. Rich gentlemen from the high classes with their polished wives showing off their fortune, parading with their marriages – shiny on the outside, broken and sad on the inside.

A sudden shiver pulled him out of his thoughts, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Surprised by that weird reaction of his body, he became even more alert and he started searching frantically for the cause of it. It was then, when his eyes were met by light brown intense almost magical orbs. Blue into golden.

______________________________________________________________

You were walking in the room, moving slowly and gracefully in between the crowd. The long burgundy dress was hugging your curves perfectly. It was just the perfect combination of classy and sexy – it wasn’t showing too much flesh and yet it was enough for the mind to wonder what’s underneath it.

You took a quick look at the people in the crowd, but still kept your focus on the person you were here for tonight. Jim Brooks was right in front of you. Your eyes were set on him and you were doing your best to remain focused. You were well aware of the fact that you were being watched by the handsome man at the other end of the room. You also happened to know exactly who that was – you’d seen him on TV a couple of times. You blinked once and tried to bring your attention back on your mission. Your eyes found your target quickly – Jim Brooks was a few feet away from you. You smiled to yourself. It was show time.

You moved past him, bumping into his shoulder accidentally on purpose, which caused him to spill his drink all over his shirt. He turned around to face you, looking annoyed as hell, but the moment he looked at you, his expression softened and his eyes travelled down your body.

‘Oh, my God. I’m so sorry, Sir. I’m so clumsy.’ you said sweetly. You looked down at his ruined shirt and then back at his face. You put your hand over the wet spot on his shirt, caused by the spilled drink. You moved your hand over it slowly, gently rubbing it. ‘Oh… look at that. It’s going to leave a stain. I really am so so sorry.’

‘Well, I’m not.’ Jim smiled widely at you. ‘But how about you make it up to me by letting me get you a drink.’

‘I guess it’s the least I could do. Thank you’

‘Oh… trust me. It’s my pleasure, miss…’ Jim looked at you questionably, waiting to hear your name.

‘Lilly. Lilly Sparks’ you said sweetly. That was your alias. The name you used when you were on a mission.

‘Well, miss Sparks that over there is my table. Why don’t you wait for me there while I go and get you that drink’

______________________________________________________________

Steve was curiously watching the peculiar encounter taking place in front of him. He wasn’t sure what was happening. Jim Brooks was supposed to leave the event, but he got distracted by the beautiful girl with the golden eyes and what was the strangest part – she seemed interested in him. Something was definitely fishy. There was no way a girl like her would have a slight interest in a simple plain man like Jim Brooks.

Steve was getting slightly irritated. This mission should have ended by then. They should have already taken the flash drive from Jim and called it a night. That lady was slowing the mission down and that was a problem. Fortunately, he had an idea how to quickly deal with the situation. He downed his drink and straightened his tie, then stood up from the bar and headed directly towards the girl. Truth be told, that idea wasn’t his favorite, but it was the first thing that came to his mind.

‘Excuse me, Miss’ he said when he reached the table where she was waiting for Jim. She looked at him, her golden eyes shining under the artificial lights of the room expectantly, obviously waiting for what he had to say. God, she was beautiful. ‘I was wondering… would you like to dance with me?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Sir. I’m waiting for somebody’ now that was new for Steve. The ladies usually would throw themselves at him. He definitely wasn’t prepared for that answer. He started thinking of what to say next, but he didn’t have much time, because a moment later Jim was back to the table with a drink in his hand.

‘Is everything okay here?’ he asked, his eyes nervously looking at Steve. Jim’s hand slowly slid to his right pocket. Obviously however stupid that might be, the flash drive they were looking for was there.

‘Yes, everything’s great. Would you like to dance?’ the girl asked looking at Jim.

‘Oh, yes’ he nervously answered, putting down the drink he was holding, then took her hand and led her to dance floor, where a few other couples were already moving around under the beat of some slow song. Steve couldn’t do anything, but just watch. The golden eyed girl pressed her body against Jim, she was whispering in his ear, giggling at his responses. She was probably just another stupid girl, looking for a sugar daddy. That was the only logical explanation of her interest in Jim.

They continued to dance for some time with Steve watching them intently. Eventually they came back to the table. Both of them looked at Steve questionably.

‘Oh, captain Rogers. You are still here.’ Jim said. ‘Is there anything we can do to help you?’

What was happening with him? Of course if he continued to just stand there, it would look suspicious. Come on, Rogers, you are better than that. If he didn’t get his act together, he was going to blow it.

‘Nothing. I was just leaving. Enjoy the evening you two’ Steve smiled and walked away.

He sat back at the bar and continued to casually watch the interaction between Jim and the girl with the golden eyes. They were talking and laughing for good 20 minutes. Then the lady took out a piece of paper from her purse and gave it to Jim. Steve assumed it was her phone number. Then she hugged him and gave him a light peck on the cheek. With that, she turned around and headed for the exit. Steve’s eyes lost her in the crowd a few seconds after.

Jim stood there at the table, smiling at himself. That fool. He finished his drink, straightened his suit and also headed for the exit.

‘Okay, guys ‘Steve said almost cheerfully, speaking to his teammates through the device in his ear. ‘Stay on position. He’s coming.’

He waited a few minutes himself and started making his way through the crowd, going for the door.

‘Uhm… Sir’ he heard one of the agents speak in his ear. ‘He’s got nothing on him.’

‘What?!’ Steve almost yelled. ‘What do you mean nothing? It should be in his right pocket!’

‘It’s empty, Sir’

Where was the flash drive? He could have sworn it was in his pocket. It was visible from the camera footage and from his behavior tonight. It should have been on him unless…

______________________________________________________________

You walked to the limo waiting on the side of the event center. The driver smiled at you and opened the door for you.

‘Thank you’ you smiled and got in the car.

‘So… do you have it?’ Brock Rumlow asked, looking at you intently.

You raised your hand, holding the flash drive in it and smiled, saying:

‘Hail Hydra!’

Chapter 2:

https://moonlighttfoxx.tumblr.com/post/646685308063219712/chapter-one

#steverogers #oc #fanfic #avengers #steverogersoc #buckybarnes #captainamericaoc

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sugar-petals · 4 years

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Hav u done predictive readings for who the boys will end up with & how their career will go etc?

a 2020 career prediction i’ll publish at the end of december! their future partner we’re doing now. i added some angel oracle cards today ♡ those describe the theme of their relationship.

Jungkook: QUEEN OF CUPS

Hallelujah! Oh yeah. That’s an ideal card, picture perfect. The Queen of Cups is quite possibly one of the best partner allegories to have because a) Cups rule smoothness of relationships and emotions and b) she’s a royal card which indicates a highly developed state of mind where things finally come to fruition unlike with the aces and pages. Jungkook will mean so, so much to his partner. That’s a twin flame or soulmate connection we’re talking here. A really beautiful and dignified person, a little touchy feely, but experienced with love. They can really depend on another. Maybe they’re from Busan like him or the shore generally, the sea plays an important role for the Queen of Cups. There are tiny little cherubs on the card, I’m thinking he’ll be treated like an angel. It’s a very healthy relationship that leaves nothing left to be desired. As for looks: It might be a blonde, taller person whose favorite color is blue. There are cliffs on the card that remind me of Cornwall’s coast. The English theme is pretty consistent in his readings lmao we’re dealing with an excellent speaker. And, because it’s a court card with quite abundant imagery, it’ll be a S/O of quite some status. I am sure the person will be known to us already, or at least a big deal within his or her family. It’s queen energy, so the mom friend is right on their way into JK’s heart. Another aspect is that his partner might be rather spiritually inclined — mind you, every person is spiritual, how aware you are makes the difference — or even psychic. Water signs ahead; Pisces, Scorpio, Cancer.

— angel card: “Playfulness — To bring about romantic feelings, allow your youthfulness to shine with delight.”

Taehyung: THE EMPRESS

Yet another powerful female archetype, this reading does not mince words. And also a very wholesome outlook, it’s very similar to the Queen of Cups vibe, or Queen of Pentacles if we’re looking at other tarot suits. I was really happy when I saw this card come out. The Empress almost always signifies kids, the theme is fertility. Taehyung will live a very lavish life with this partner. The card has so much opulence and positivity on it. Nature, food, pillows, ample garments, jewelry, good weather, and harvest time. And, of course, the Empress is fairly curvy, so expect either Taehyung gaining weight in the future or his partner being chubby. It’ll be the good life, in a good place, with the right person. There’s a settled and satiated feeling there. Stagnation could be possible after a while because this card gets too cozy. However, loyalty and a ripe sexual life are like glue to the union so I don’t see Taehyung stress anytime soon there. The card gives me plenty of clues how his home will look like as well, it’s highly decorated and comfortable. Interestingly enough, we see a huge wheat field surrounding the Empress — hence the card symbolizes fertility — so I wonder whether Taehyung’s dream of getting involved in farming will play out. I mean… coincidence? The countryside will take on an important role in any case, maybe with photography as well. Tae marrying a farmer’s girl, who knows! Beautiful card, definitely. It’s a good prospect for him. The Empress is major arcana so, this state of happiness will last him for a giant while and it’s destined. The boy will shed a tear no more.

— angel card: “Attraction — you receive love by enjoying the moment.”

Yoongi: KNIGHT OF SWORDS

It’s the fastest card of the tarot! The power of swords paired with a knight on his speedy horse is quite a combination. Yoongi’s future partner is not going to waste time to charge right into sweet honey boy’s life. We’re dealing with a hothead, athlete, extrovert. I don’t think Yoongi has to do as much as crook a single finger to get things going. In fact, he’s the one waiting it out. He’ll just lean back and poof there is his significant other bursting into his life. Though I gotta say, the Knight of Swords has a detriment and that is: He leaves as fast as he arrives, and you have to be sure of your boudaries. Major burnout dangers there. The relationship might be short compared to say Namjoon’s or Tae’s reading. It’s Yoongi’s part to make this last if that’s what he’s going for. It’s a sword card, there have to be efforts and mental clarity involved to solve the problem. Though, someone rushing towards their love interest with so much passion has a good reason why he or she does that. Yoongi could get snatched away by someone else, with so many people interested in him you really have to be determined. With the archetype being a knight I also know it’s going to be someone younger than him, there’s a certain rebellion to the card. It has military energy. Yoongi’s partner will be one outrageous and direct person. They are 100% unafraid to face off with Yoongi, they have better comebacks than the master of sharp remarks himself. When it comes to sex, Yoongi will probably forget his own damn name after that ride. This person is wild as hell. It’s not a fellow sleepyhead as we saw in the ideal type reading, but a S/O bringing him out of his dreamy world. There’s a strong encouragement for Yoongi to achieve a lot more when he enters that relationship, it’s a power up to be expected here.

— angel card: “Worth the Wait — Divine timing predicates your relationship.”

Namjoon: TEN OF PENTACLES

Nice! Wow. The tarot says Namjoon is blessed. This is the card of wealthy, happy old age. He’s headed right for it already. In all tarot suits, the 10 indicates fulfillment. E.g. the Ten of Cups shows relationship completion because cups stand for love, the Ten of Swords shows total defeat because swords symbolize conflict, the Ten of Wands signifies complete effort/exhaustion since wands represent impetus. So the Ten of Pentacles equals coming full circle in terms of material things as pentacles are responsible for all tangible value in life. He’ll be living blissfully with his S/O. Everything is cared for. We’re talking long-term relationship here. The card shows an old man settled in his favorite coat and spot. Namjoon has a kind of master plan to gently arrive in his 80s, 90s. It’s not a surprise, we know he looks ahead, the tarot is aware of it, too. And yes: He will finally be able to answer his question “Who the hell am I?”. Ten of Pentacles means: Identity found. I had to wipe away a tear for that one man. I think it has to do with the location. The setting of the card is like a polished type of town with castles. A bit Italian, Mediterranean. Not as modern as say Seoul, bigger cities. It could be him moving to a warm country where things are slow, antique, and indulgent. I once said Namjoon has a type of European mindset going on, if he moves there it with his loved one or his partner is European it wouldn’t be shocking. There are two dogs on the card so, Joon will have pets involved in the partnership. The 10 of Coins also shows a couple immersed in a chat. His S/O is primarily someone he can talk to about the world, it’s a very conversation-heavy union. Now, the old man on the card could also show that he finds another old soul— we’ve had that topic come up in the other readings as well, the tarot is sure he’ll meet someone on par. Earth sign energy here.

— angel card: “Love Without Fear — Open your heart to give and receive the highest of energies.”

Hobi: THREE OF PENTACLES

Even more pentacles. Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn is possible. His partner is a darn good team player, their friendship bond is strong. First thing that came to my mind, they’ll build a house together or get busy working around their home in some kind of way, that’s interestingly enough the central theme I get from the card. Distribution of chores and general tasks is a big thing, and they’ll be planning a gazillion industrious things from what I got through the imagery. There’s an abbot, architect/craftsman, and monk seen on that card working on a church wall embellishment. One gives directions, the other has drawn a sketch that illustrates what kind of decor the abbot wants to have on the church wall, and the third guy does the crafting, hammer and chisel in hand. It’s not a love-related card per see so it’s important to point that out. It could hint at some pretty huge artistic collaborations coming our way instead. If you combine that, it could happen in a way like… Hoseok gets with someone he collaborated/collaborates with sometime soon, or a little later. Yup. Chicken noodle soup with Becky G on the side! Their chemistry is amazing and she is so cute, it’s very much possible. Or, in a wider sense, it’s someone from an upcoming project. That’s interesting. It seems quite sure that Hoseok won’t retire after BTS even if he’s pretty damn rich already, he’ll stay in the industry and foster (=embellish) his career with a strategy behind it much like the abbot on the card. We’ll get to know his partnership(s) along the way, but the tarot says it’s not top priority. Pentacles are earth sign energy so Mercury, Saturn and Venus are what will dictate that union, it’s the overall pragmatic energy that’s taking center spot. Also, since the church is so prominent on the card, Hoseok is working towards marriage nine times out of ten.

— angel card: “Fresh Love — A new person has stirred your romantic feelings.”

Jimin: FIVE OF SWORDS

That one is… sigh. The odd one out in this post. How do I put it. It’s a series that just doesn’t break. Jimin constantly gets the messy cards and not so love-friendly swords when I do relationship readings on him. There is something going on and I kind of hate it already. But the tarot is being adamant so we have to decipher what’s going on and see the resolution, there’s more to it than just the cards doing him dirty. The Five of Swords pictures a battle aftermath with a mischievous winner and two defeated parties walking away sore. The winner picks up the weapons left behind to hoard then. So when it comes to his future S/O, we’re talking someone wants to play win-lose with Jimin’s insecurities and will get away with it because they’re strong, sly, and full of themselves. They don’t have his best interests in mind, especially when quarrels go down. Lack of harmony overshadows the relationship. There’s some major bullshit and that’s scary. The partner is like a leech, leaving only Jimin pissed, it’s not a lose-lose situation, things are wholly unequal. Picking on Jimin leaves their ego inflated and intensifies resentment. Working against each other over working with another is going on. Jimin has to walk away from that situation and mend his wounds, and never return. It’ll be a period of growth in his life ahead where he becomes aware just how giving too much and being defeated by that does him no good, as well as learning how to spot douchebags who don’t care about him. The Five of Swords is among the quintessential breakup card, it’ll be what defines his future relationship unless or until he has the grit to stop the fight and search for equity and affection instead of put-downs.

— angel card: “You Deserve Being Loved — You’re worthy of love.”

Jin: SIX OF PENTACLES

Pentacles, pentacles everywhere. I see that the hyungs have some financial themes going on, Jin’s card is emblematic of that. First let’s have a look what’s going on with the imagery. A wealthy man holds a scale on this card. He distributes coins to poor men kneeling before him. It’s an interesting symbol for a relationship, if not for another more important area of Jin’s life which could very well be philanthropy. He is the wealthy man on the card, sharing in just ways as the scale indicates. That could be providing for his partner a lot or simply doing charity together with them. I do have to say, and that is similar to Hoseok’s card, I don’t see too much of a romantic theme here which is surprising, but the tarot knows its ways. Some members might be doing partnerships much later in life or eschew them. With Jin here, I get a sense that business relations and deals will be an overarching theme in the near future. It could be the situation with his dad’s business in Germany the card is hinting at, and if marriage is involved, there’s a major exchange of valuable ideals and things involved between parties. A recurring theme is class difference though, the same popped up in the last reading. Jin’s status will be much, much higher but he can tip things into balance with a fairness mindset, Libra energy. A huge gap will be bridged. Last but not least, mea culpa: I think I’ve been missing the obvious interpretation there. The signs are everywhere in the cards for his readings, and oh my god: Jin is the member who’ll get together with a fan.

— angel card: “Children — Kids will have an influence on your love life.”

#PS: i already pulled the career reading cards this week and i can say #u can def look forward the results were interesting #bts tarot reading #anon #cub mail 🐅#tarot #bts tarot #bts

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gayregis · 3 years

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boppinrobin replied to your post: “Question. Part 1. Hi. I like your blog and your analytical analysis of books,”

aauuuughhh tysm for ur analysis as always

thank you for reading and liking it!!

arinasassymessi replied to your post: “Question. Part 1. Hi. I like your blog and your analytical analysis of books,”

Thank you again for your response! I wrote anonymously because I was a little embarrassed by my English, but to be honest, I've been reading your blog for a very long time, and I've always wanted to discuss some topics with you. Thank you, I feel more confident now. First of all, I apologize for the fact that I considered this scene pro-life.

The thing is, I've reread the witcher books countless times (mostly because of Regis, lol). And if in the first times I was so fascinated by the plot and characters that I did not notice any obvious sexist/homophobic moments, then after rereading the books more consciously, I caught very unpleasantly, conservative motives, which Sapkowski is not shy about.

I remember that the first time this scene, even though it caused a bit of misunderstanding, still touched me with its warmth and how Geralt emotionally supported Milva, helping her make a rather difficult decision. And the way Regis was pleased with his actions, smiling at him, awww.

But after studying the books in more detail and the messages that Sapkowski puts in them, it seems to me that I began to see a catch everywhere. At first, I was also delighted to learn about Ciri's relationship with Mistle, wow, progressive author, LGBTQ+ representation! But after seeing this relationship "live," I felt cheated, and since then, I have returned to this scene with Milva.

I thought, oh no, isn't everything here the same as I believed? Most of all, I was afraid of Regis because he is my comfort character, the voice of reason, and a progressive medic. Does Sapkowski put pro-life ideas in his mouth?.. After a couple of discussions with friends, this fear only took root.

However, after reading your in-depth analytical analysis, I agreed with it, looking at the facts in a new way, and was glad that my first guesses and feelings from this scene were close to the truth. Now I can rest in peace, lol.

About "medicament/medicine" and "agent." I have read books in Russian, and now I am rereading "Baptism of Fire" in English to practice. I think the difference between the words "medicament" and "agent" in English is somewhat unclear, and it is impossible to say precisely which of them has a negative connotation.

Both of them sound entirely neutral and normal to me, but again, I'm not a native speaker, correct me if I'm wrong. In Russian, instead of the word "agent," we have the word "snadobye" (the closest translation is 'potion,’ and in Polish, it is 'ziola’). And while "medicament" means only medicine, a remedy, the word "snadobye" can also mean medicine, but has more folk properties (?).

It is brewed from herbs and a synonym to a potion/drug — a poisonous, magical, and forbidden drink, usually attributed to witches and wizards. For me, Geralt's refusal to use the word "medicament" — neutral and scientific-medical — in favor of a word that has a more magical/negative connotation seemed rather strange. But again, this is just my guess.

I consider the Russian translation closer to the Polish one because it belongs to the same language group, but I don't have access to the original to check what words were used there. In any case, I think that since Geralt decided to use one instead of the other, they should differ in some way, but it is not known in favor of which word this works. I also like your version.

I also had a lot of questions about Milva and her actions. She's probably my second favorite character after Regis, and I didn't understand her actions until a certain point. She was not satisfied with a woman's position in her society, so instead of the usual role, she decided to participate in Geralt's journey?

I was also not very clear about their conversation and Geralt's conclusion: "someone else's child for your own, life for life." Why? After all, she could stay in Brokilon and give birth, but if she didn't want a child, she could have an abortion (for example, she rather cruelly compared her child to young wasps that eat caterpillar alive).

Recently, the Russian Witcher community posted a short theory that Milva was in love with Geralt and therefore went after him. Milva's thoughts in Brokilon speak in favor of this — she finds Geralt attractive (although she felt something similar for Cahir when they were waiting for Geralt and Buttercup to be released from prison at night).

*not Buttercup (have no idea what is it), JASKIER

Also, their conversation outside Regis' hut at night, when Milva bitterly remarked that Geralt needed another woman — a scholar, a wise one, a beloved one (Yennefer), desire to get emotional support exactly from Geralt and and insisting on his presence during the miscarriage, her further refusal to marry the baron, and perhaps Sapkowski's sometimes ANNOYING idea that any woman should go crazy in Geralt's company. But again, these are just guesses, and I would be interested to hear your opinion.

I also didn't know that tumblr has a word limit in comments, so my replays look pretty stupid now, lol.

yes!! i also read the books first just for the plot and then went back and later, when my mind was clearer, noticed a lot more of political views in the writing. it’s the fact that a lot of sapkowski’s other takes are shitty (re: feminity, lgbt individuals and relationships), or at least come off as shitty because they are not explicit enough to actually be a progressive opinion, compounded with the fact that the scene with milva is not very clear on exactly what regis is asking geralt, why he is polling them, why geralt is upset, or what they even intend to do. i think also, because the subject is so important and people have very intense opinions about it, it makes you nervous to see it come up in a fictional story, even if the author is promoting a good message - it’s the feeling you described of, “oh no, isn't everything here the same as i believed?”

and yeah, you’re right, in english i’d say medicament and agent both have neutral connotations, “agent” to me sounds more scientific, somehow? like it would be used in an experiment? i think i have usually heard it more in descriptions of products, like “cleansing agent” in relation to something dealing with chemistry... but then again, i am not a scientist, doctor, beautician, etc...

and about milva - agree, i love her too :D!! these are my personal opinions and takes on her character motivations but:

i think her ‘not being satisfied with a [traditional] woman’s role in society’ extends beyond not being satisfied, it’s being disgusted with it - in tower of the swallow, she describes how she as a teenager experienced sexual assault at the hands of her stepfather, and her mother didn’t do anything (assumedly because of the societal roles involved, and you can (unfortunately) see this occur in real life as well, mothers don’t protect their daughters from the men they stay with). milva beats him to death and runs away, and never goes back to that life. additionally, in baptism of fire, she talks about her name - milva, and why she changed it, and she says that her original name, maria, along with a lot of other “feminine-sounding” names beginning with M (this is at least what i got out of it, they sound like sweet names given to peasant girls), get your ass pinched in taverns (this is my best recollection of the quote).

it’s clear that she has not only experienced discomfort, but really just blatant violence at the hands of “traditional feminity/women’s societal roles,” and so she goes to rely on only herself at first, hunting in lower sodden, and then finally being ‘adopted’ (kind of) by brokilon and eithne, becoming affiliated with them and working for them and the scoia’tael. this makes sense to me, because of course brokilon is a matriarchy, and the elves are mentioned to raise (and thus, treat) male and female elves the same way.

i won’t rule out that sapkowski intended for milva to have romantic interest in geralt, but i think that even if he did, it wasn’t interesting and i disagree with that direction for her character. my takes continued are that:

re: "someone else's child for your own, a life for life." in this conversation, she talks to geralt about the differences between “milva” and “maria,” her two identities that seem to be at ends with each other. she didn’t want to stay in brokilon to have the child, because by societal means, she is no longer a “woman” in the traditional sense - she’s milva, not maria - she kills, she laughs as she pulls out the arrowheads from corpses, etc., like her chosen name, ‘milva,’ she is a red kite, a bird of prey.

she doesn’t fit the societal expectations of a woman, and was never trained in being a mother (she ran away from home as a teenager, she hasn’t done ‘traditional woman things’ like keep house and cook, raise and deal with children, weave (?) and work in a house since she was 16, and she is older than that now (i’d say she’s at least past her early 20s, because she is described as a “young woman” compared to angouleme’s “very young woman” in lady of the lake, and angouleme is approx. 18-19). but since she doesn’t fit these expectations, how can she expect herself to raise this child? thus, she likely wanted to drop the baby, but since she was raised in a conservative rural society in which women are expected to bear children and not have abortions, she may have felt guilt and shame for wanting to do so. thus, she wanted to follow geralt - although she would have intentionally lost her child, she would have intentionally saved another, absolving her of her guilt. it’s like as regis described to geralt in the middle of the book, about penance and running up debts, this is a large theme of the book - a baptism of fire, fire which not only purifies, but burns (a challenge which absolves one of guilt, but it is painful).

these are just my takes, i think sapkowski’s intentions were more along the theory that milva had a crush on geralt, but as i said i think that’s just boring and the “easy way out.” he also did that with cahir and ciri, making heterosexual love the motivation for a noble deed, and it’s just like... these characters have so much other depth and serious individual issues, and you want to reduce their motivations to just simply “they were in love”? okay... so yeah i don’t think sapkowski really may have intended any of the above, or if he did, it was to a lesser degree, but this is my interpretation of it.

#arinasassymessi #replies

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straykidsupdate · 5 years

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Stray Kids are shaking up K-pop’s status quo

The South Korean pop band Stray Kids are clustered around a laptop for a Skype interview, pale in the screen’s glow as heavy rain turns New York City to grey. It’s a fitting backdrop for the group: from their 2017 pre-debut release “Hellevator” to the latest single, the snarling, trumpeting EDM of “MIROH”, the K-pop group have made similarly dystopian environs their visual backdrop, where neon and CCTV screens flicker and the group are hemmed in by skyscrapers, tarmac, and tunnels as they attempt to escape or defy their surroundings.

This concept – of attaining freedom – is central to the group, and it’s an idea that’s rooted in reality. The group’s leader, Bang Chan, handpicked each member for the group from their parent label JYP Entertainment’s roster of trainees, a process unheard of in K-pop, where that power lies with executives and creative directors. Stray Kids write and produce all their material, too, and are one of the few idol groups to do so. Their music focuses unflinchingly on their youth – the anger and frustration, the ecstatic highs and ragged lows – while questioning their own shifting sense of identity.

With bleached bangs falling into one eye, Bang Chan recalls not the gravitas of the opportunity to form his own group, but the pressure of picking wisely. “There was a lot on my mind,” says the 21-year-old, speaking during the band’s run of sold-out North American concerts. “Choosing the right people was a must, because I’m going to be with them for a long time. Because I’d been a trainee for so long,” – seven years – “I think I had the ability to figure out what potential they had.” He turns to his bandmates and namechecks them: Woojin, the eldest at 22; Lee Know; Changbin; Hyunjin; Han; Felix; Seungmin; and the youngest, I.N, who turned 18 in February. “With everyone around me right now, I’m really glad we’ve become this team.”

Bang Chan and 18-year-old Felix, whose cavernously deep voice is at odds with his Bambi-innocent looks, were both raised in Australia, and the broad twang of their accent conveys a cheerful, anything-is-possible resonance. It’s the former who helms the conversation. He’s an engaging speaker and a careful listener, stopping to translate questions for the non-English speakers. At times he falters, and at others he deflects to well-worn answers (a reflection of their newness), but he’s unmistakably a leader, a role he wears effortlessly.

As a whole, Stray Kids are known for their friendly, indefatigable rambunctiousness, but with nearly a dozen rookie awards and five EPs in just over 12 months, it’d be foolish to underestimate their tenacity. Their start was a baptism of fire. On Stray Kids, the eponymously-named survival TV show that they were formed through, they were required to write tracks and perfect performances to short deadlines, then ruthlessly critiqued by the CEO of their label, JYP Entertainment. Two of the group members, Felix and Lee Know, were initially eliminated, although eventually reinstated in the final episode via a public vote. Felix, axed due to his less-than-fluent Korean, hasn’t forgotten the sting. “I still think about my Korean and how I use the language,” he sighs. “I try to learn, and fix it.”

You can see his determination when Stray Kids appear on Korean variety shows to showcase their work and their personalities. Felix’s shyness in speaking had resulted in less camera time but, in recent months, his studying has appeared to pay off and he’s a far more confident presence, able to convey the charm that's endeared him to their fans. It’s the result of constant help from his bandmates, he says, radiating positivity (which is, delightfully, Felix’s default setting). Lee Know, however, who’d had only a short idol training period and was cut early in the series, favours a more stoic approach. “I think I’m here thanks to that feedback. I worked really hard then, and I’m still trying to work hard now too,” he says, and although his small smile seemingly hints at something more pronounced, he settles on a double thumbs up and sits back.

“Choosing the right people was a must... With everyone around me right now, I’m really glad we’ve become this team” – Bang Chan, Stray Kids

Their rough-meets-polished sound was set up by the darkly anthemic “Hellevator”, but the thundering EDM and guitar riffs of their official debut, “District 9”, cemented them as a fresh force in K-pop. In its music video, they flee a clinical-looking prison and use a school bus to smash through to the safety of the titular District 9, although even there they’re left searching. “I don’t know who I am, it’s frustrating, it always worries me / Answer me, then give me an answer that will clear it all,” Hyunjin raps with a volatile urgency.

This ceaseless quest weaves through last year’s EP trilogy (I Am NOT, I Am WHO, I Am YOU) and into their latest EP, Clé 1: MIROH, the clear narrative allowing for sonic experiments (from the minimalist electronica of “3rd Eye” to the bright pop drawl of “Get Cool”) without losing momentum. In their song “NOT!”, they celebrate breaking out the “system” – the status quo – and the strength of being different. For Stray Kids, this is more about ambiguous storytelling than holding a deliberate ’us versus them’ mentality. “We usually don’t compare (ourselves) to others,” says vocalist Seungmin, in English. “Like in the song ‘My Pace’, we’re saying we don’t care about others’ (achievements), we’re just talking about Stray Kids’ own way.”

While Stray Kids have definitely created a richly empathetic musical tapestry, their chosen path raises a pertinent observation: in breaking out of one “system”, they’ve joined another. The idol system that they’re now a part of often appears more restrictive than the one they leave behind, and as they move towards the bubble of fame and money, there’s also the potential to lose a sense of oneself. Both feel paradoxical to their story. Bang Chan pauses. “Well, honestly, we wouldn’t call it a system, let’s say a ‘world’, and we’d call it a decision that we made. In order for us to get out of the main system, we chose being idols, and through K-pop we can show the message we want to express.”

Han, the 18-year-old rapper, singer, and songwriter/producer, drapes himself, cat-like, over Felix’s head and neck to get close to the camera. “I think fame and success can be dangerous to a person, depending on how they feel about it, but we’re going to try to always be positive and good natured about it,” he opines, gesticulating rapidly. “We’re still lacking so much, but we’re going to try really hard to understand other people’s feelings and be a good influence.”

Given Stray Kids’ formation, creative freedom, and growing success makes them something of an anomaly, might their presence provoke change in the idol world? Bang Chan furrows his brow. “I suppose so,” he says with the questioning tone of someone presented with an unfamiliar concept. “I guess it’s up to how people take it in.”

Stray Kids, evidently, have been more preoccupied with looking inward, and, when examining their new EP, it’s apparent their gaze has been in flux. Clé 1: MIROH, which Bang Chan describes as “us being really confident because all nine of us are together”, presents a new fearlessness on tracks like “Boxer”, “MIROH” and “Victory Song”, where Han triumphantly raps:“A laidback victor, a smile spreads on my face / Who else is like me, there’s no one.”

“When I was becoming a singer, some people didn’t support my dreams, so I was sad. I remember that and put those feelings into this song” – Changbin, Stray Kids

They pose fewer existential questions than on previous EPs, but, says Bang Chan, “if you look at tracks like ‘Chronosaurus’ and ‘Maze Of Memories’, it shows nervousness or anxiety, and a feeling of being lost as well.” The latter, its doomy hip hop propelled by tense piano and bursts of foreboding strings, was an emotional outlet for their silver-tongued rapper, Changbin. “When I was becoming a singer,” he says, in English, “some people didn’t support my dreams, so I was sad. I remember that and put those feelings into this song.”

Yet despite sieving emotions and thoughts through the music, their biggest questions, says Changbin, remain unanswered. “But we’re trying,” he smiles. He points to the close presence of their fans, known as STAY. “Maybe we can find the answer soon, through STAY.” How does he intend to discover deeply personal epiphanies through others? “I’m young and lack a lot of experience,” replies Changbin, reverting to Korean. “There are still a lot of childish elements about me as well. By watching those around me, I can find out what I like through them. I feel like I can find myself through (others’ journeys).”

For now, Stray Kids simply continue doing what they’ve done so well thus far – capturing the human condition, including tackling difficult subjects like depression (“Hellevator”), anxiety (“Rock”), and negative thoughts (“Voices”), all of which, Bang Chan says, they’ve experienced first-hand. The group’s core writing team (Han, Changbin, and Bang Chan, together known as 3RACHA) have not only refined their style over the past year but, according to I.N, “improved on their speed of making songs. They’ve gotten really fast,” he says with a sunny grin.

3RACHA’s Soundcloud days are far behind them, although, to their credit, they haven’t deleted the handful of songs that were posted pre-debut. Some will remain just enthusiastic learning curves, but others were raw and powerful, such as “Broken Compass”, which was refashioned into “Mixtape #4” for Clé 1: MIROH.

The “Mixtape” songs, which are only found on the physical versions of their EPs, are where, Hyunjin says, “we all contribute, and fill our individual verses with our personal stories”. In January, 3RACHA revisited a few songs during a Vlive broadcast, and cringed to the point of sweating profusely. As Changbin and Han crease up, Bang Chan covers his face, mock-groaning. “We can’t listen to them now!” But there’s a glint in his eye. “We do have to do episode two of that,” he adds, grinning.

It’s not just the songwriters who are evolving; from being wide-eyed, ambitious and nervous trainees who didn’t always get along, as Hyunjin recently revealed, Stray Kids have become compelling performers with close bonds. They’d clung tightly to Bang Chan during their survival show, but do Stray Kids today feel less lost – or at least more secure in their responsibilities? “I’ll just leave the room so the guys can talk more freely,” jokes Bang Chan, even as Changbin, owner of a bone-dry sense of humour, simply yells, “No!” Vocalist Woojin leans in. “He was very good to us while we were filming the show. At that time we always followed him very well, and relied on him a lot.”

“I don’t have a lot of confidence but when he’s next to me, I know I can do this,” adds Felix, as they ready to depart for the next schedule in a packed day. “But,” Woojin says, “now we’re all developing our own selves, too.”

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#stray kids #190606 #era: clé 1 miroh #t: article #dazed

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manjuhitorie · 5 years

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Hitori-Escape Tour 2019, they're at the halfway point, so time to post reports!

消せます！

Disclaimer: These were all pilfered, ransacked, polished and ravished from my JP Twitter mutuals,,,, Who are all such kind souls,, Not only have they used their memory skills to seed Rie's words, but they even bothered to share the concert's happenings with the world wide web, AND they have urged me forward to keep on translating them... So I'll take the liberty to post them organized here... When you pass by any JP Rie fans on twitter, click hearts...💘 Shinoda’s name is shortened to SND, ygarshy’s to yg(a), and Yumao to Yu(ma) throughout...!

1 Hitorie's Hitori-Escape Tour, 9/3/2019 at Takutaku in Kyoto! Report!

Yumao's tweet "Our tour starts today! I have cut my hair too short."

The first show, the first step….

SND looked back at both of the members to say “Let’s do our best guys.” Yg nodded back. Yuma started it up…

●SND played FAST guitar while singing, yg howled out harmonies on [a] chorus. Yu snickered at one of SND's slips.

SND used Leader’s jaguar on a [very very special song].

They did their best…

●SND “Its hoooot... We always came to Takutaku in the winter so now I’m experiencing Takutaku in it's true form.... Can I take a drink break, fwaaaaah, it's hot y'know? I'm even properly hydrated y'know? This water is gonna churn in my stomach, gehh I feel sick....”

SND: "RAISE THE AIR CONDITIONING!!!!!!!!!! I DON’T GIVE A DAMN IF ALL OF THE POWER IN KYOTO GOES OUT!!!!!! GIVE TAKUTAKU ALL THE ELECTRICITY!!!!!!!!!! LIKE IT'S OPERATION YASHIMA!!!! (*In reference to the wonderful Evangelion episode: https://evangelion.fandom.com/wiki/Episode:06).

●Shinoda’s band introduction was “On bass ygarshy, on drums Yumao, and on guitar and vocals is I Shinoda. Music and lyrics brought to you by wowaka.”

●SND “Umm…We have merch…But the towels? T-shirts? They all sold out… No seriously I’m just…. We really did bring a hefty load of stock…Thank you all… Also what else sold out?” Crowd “The cap! Pens! DVD! Pouch!!” Shinoda “‘OK, whatever..... Thank you…’” ←That is exact verbatim, SND spoke in English. All that Netflix watching is showing.

●SND “By the way ygarshy, did you know they’ve stopped selling HimoQ?" yg: ....... >>>*BWOON*<<< *responds with only the sound of his bass* *HimoQ is an old school gummy candy by the brand Meiji, and-

--yg turned away with a smile that couldn’t be concealed. While behind them Yumao was playing his drums while just repeating “HimoQ.... HimoQ..... Why HimoQ...”

●Lastly there were also many reports on people being showered on by SND’s sweat. Stay hydrated please sensei

●Nishimaki Taichi their cameraman’s comment: I was drenched in the sweat of Takutaku’s splintering heat until just a minute ago, yet now that I’m almost back home, this whole day feels like it could’ve been a dream. Lol

This is the start of a fabulous new year.

●Shinoda’s comment My ears are still pulsing,,, Takutaku of Kyoto, thank you so much. I’m glad I was able to come and be a part of your 45th anniversary, I’m happy I was able to see everybody’s faces. The journey begins. We’ll be in Okayama tomorrow, hope to see you there.

●The setlists I won’t repeat, just to avoid spoilers for any possible goers!

2 Hitorie's Hitori-Escape Tour, 9/4/2019 at CRAZYMAMA 2nd Room in Okayama! Report!

All members have interactions, I'm relieved..

●SND “Yesterday was so hot I thought I was going to puke, I’d only ever been to Takutaku in the winter not the summer… I came to Crazymama today shaking in fear but… Air conditioning is the BEST! The number one necessity for any venue is!!!! heavy-duty!!!! Air-conditioning!!!!!”

●As soon as SND started talking about yesterday, Yumao dashed up front in a rush to talk. He asked to borrow SND’s mic so he could join in on the MC,

The way they were standing next to each other got them called out for looking like a stand-up comedy duo.

●Yu “Yesterday I mouthed the words ‘Were concerts always this painful?’ to ygarsh 5 whole times and he didn’t understand me,” SND “Well of course not (laughing).” Afterwards when Yu did ask him, ygarsh responded with "They aren’t." Yu thought he was the only one dying, ah sweet relief~, he says.

●Yesterday did Yuma really get exhausted enough to collapse against the wall? Did SND slide atop speakers to then stick the landing, singing with his knees against the floor? It's out there...

●Yu and SND bickered with each other over who watches more Netflix. (They both praised the Netflix show The Naked Director etc. on Twitter recently also).

●SND “By the way ygarshy did you know that cicadas actually live longer than 1 week?”

ygarsh “BWOON♪”

(Cicada’s having only a life span of one week is a common myth in Japan. Also this interaction mimics yesterday, is SND subtly taunting yg in new ways the new staple for the Mannequin intro? Amen.)

●SND tweet: "Thank you Okayama, after doing 2 concerts in row, I see that I really am capable of singing. We'll be back,, until then,,"

●Katou Haruhisa, the founder of LUCK'A Inc. who’s produced Rie’s merch for so many tours, QRTed today's official backstage photo and strutted with pride: "They're all wearing great shirts lol #I made this"

3 Hitorie's Hitori-Escape Tour, 9/12/2019 at the five morika in Iwate prefecture! Report!

Yumao's tweet "Tomorrow is Morioka. The next day is Sendai. I hope to see you there!"

●In a small box with but a platform as the stage and a metal bar between the rockstars and the crowd, what happens if a SND sizzles up and sits down on the bar, gets up and gets down on the floor? FAN SERVICE. LOTS OF FAN SERVICE, THAT'S WHAT. SND was poked by fans, clapped by fan, had his head pet by a fan…. Amazing..

●SND praised the drama "Methanol” he watched on Amazon Prime. ●SND blessed the cool air of Morioka and rebuked the weather up in Tokyo. "I've still been walking around in shorts and sandals." *Looks down and checks himself out* "I ate such a ridiculous amount of grilled meat yesterday, I'm worried about my figure" "We all ate a ridiculous amount"

●SND "By the way ygarshy did you know that honeybees' body temperature can go up to 50 degrees celsius?"

　yg "....*BWOOON*" (goes into bass intro)

(The series...It's certain.. last time it was SND's provocative tidbits about a snack discontinuing.. then long-living cicadas, now..this.)

4 Hitorie's Hitori-Escape Tour, 9/13/2019 at Sendai darwin in Miyagi prefecture! Report!

●All the effects smoke made Yumao, in the back of the stage, look like a mirage... Yumao got up and called himself a mirage... Yumirage bamboozle... From there the crowd was riled up into cheering: “Yumao~ Yumao~ You’re so cute Yumao~”

Yuma kept posing and hugging his hands against his chest* “Thank you...” SND “You pretty boy...” Yuma “I'm snatched everybody... My wig is like snatched...” SND “Snatched, snatched... What are you a Twitter fangirl.” (*Yumao was using the fujoshi term "尊い".) ●During encore intermission the electric fan next to the stage picked up yga’s shirt and blew it up, exposing yga. Laughter was induced among the crowd, and SND, who missed the whole thing, was left all confused as to why everyone was laughing—. ●SND “By the way ygarshy, it’s Friday the 13th but, did you know that Jason doesn’t actually use a chainsaw?”

　yg “*BWOOOON*” ●Someone dived during the last song... As in, a fan started climbing up on other fans and rolling around up there. Staff handled it, and their love for Rie is blazing but... Etiquette and respect for the show space is the best way to enjoy the best show!! Please... SND’s tweet: “Sendai performance complete. Thank you, thank you, thank you”

5 Hitorie’s Hitori-Escape Tour, 9/25/2019 at Koube VARIT in Hyougo prefecture! Report!

Yumao's tweet "Today is Koube, tomorrow shall be Hiroshima. I hope to see you there!"

●SND MC speech "Did you guys have fun today? I think there's a lot of mixed emotions right now. If you didn't have fun, know that we're coming back here again. And then if you still don't have fun again, we're still coming back here again." ●Encore intermission! Crowd as they were walking back out "ygarshy! Yumao! Shinoda!" Yumao, pretending to be a person in the crowd in a scheme for instigation: “Yumao~~!” The crowd “Yumao….?” Yumao “Yumao…? Yumao!!!” Crowd “Yumaooo~~~!” SND “You sound like a Pokemon, crying your own name as if you’re a Pikachu.” Yumao “Yumao!" SND "Can neither of you (or yg) talk normal on mic."

Yumao *Goes and sits down at his drums* Crowd "Yumao~" *Plays a drum trick* “Yumao~~~” *Plays an even more flavorful trick* “Yumaoooo~~~” *EVEN MORE* “YUMAOOO~~~~”

SND “He’ll keep doing that if you keep it up, so keep pampering him.”

●SND “Backstage, they have redbull right, so before the show I couldn’t get over how delicious it was and I kept glugging, and so I was ready to burp throughout the whole first song. SND tweet after: I was in danger of deranging into the wet pants monster. ●Also Shinoda was hopping around playing guitar and he bumped into ygarsh at some point, of who seemed super annoyed—. ●SND “Remember last show, I mentioned Jason, I said there's actually no chainsaw? Well I watched the second movie and, he gets attacked by a chainsaw in that one!” yg *Makes a face as if questioning if that gag was his queue* SND *Nods* yg *>BWWOOON<* (Into the Mannequin intro)

●In the post concert photo Yumao seems to be drinking a Chocola BB, a vitamin B2 supplement to help with acne, mouth sores, and overall exhaustion....

●SND tweet: Koube concert: complete, thank you all. Playing at VARIT is, truly, fantastic,,, I’ll meet y’all in Hiroshima tomorrow. Until then,,,

6 Hitorie’s Hitori-Escape Tour, 9/26/2019 at Second Crutch in Hiroshima prefecture! Reports!

●SND “By the way ygarshy-kun, did you know that Mocomichi Hayami started a youtube channel!”

yga *>BWWOOON<*

(*Mocomichi, dubbed “The olive oil fairy“, is an actor who gained internet fame after his displays on the TV show ‘MOMO’S Kitchen’ where he would dump HUGE AMOUNTS of olive oil over his food, ignore the recipe requested of him, and then praise his cooking like crazy in the end. He was a riot! And he’s truly skilled at cooking! He's won Gourmand cookbook awards, he loves olive oil, he has his own kitchen brand, he was in the Kamen Rider 555 movie where he got killed by monsters halfway through, he loves olive oil- Anyway his channel is here.)

+ SND used wowaka’s red jaguar guitar in today and yesterday's concerts. Introduced (W)HERE with "As Hitorie we only make good songs, we only make God songs. And this is a good one even out of the good ones".

●Crowd “What did you guys eat for lunch!” SND “For lunch I ate soba.” Crowd “Booo! Eat okonomiyaki!” (*Hiroshima is famous for it) “Screw that assholes!!!” “Whyyyy just try it!!!”

THEN YG TALKED

SND “And ygarshy gave Yumao an egg sandwich.” yg “… ...Uhm..” Crowd “!?!?!? Woooahh!!!” yg “Shut up for a second.” Crowd *Still bustling, not listening* yg “Over something so silly…. why are you all excited….” yg “… So uhm I just wanted to say that…. Yumao likes eggs.”

Post show Yumao tweeted “I like eggs.”

●SND tweet “The Hiroshima show: done. A rare event occurred today huh. Y’all were lucky… in a way? That aside I had fun. Thank y’all. I’m off to have a drink.”

7 Hitorie’s Hitori-Escape Tour, 9/26/2019 at Sapporo SPiCE in Hokkaido prefecture! Reports!

Yumao's tweet "Today is Sapporo. I hope to see you there! Ahh the first magnitude stars".

●SND ”Hokkaido, you’re so full of spirit! It’s ‘cause RSR had to cancel the first day, isn’t it!? How many of y’all missed out on seeing Number Girl?” *Hands rising all over* SND “Muahaha!!!! Well I already got to see them!!! Poor you!!!” (*Rocking Sun Festival last month was canceled due to Typhoon 10 hitting Hokkaido).

●Shinoda rued and revered the heat. Said that Sapporo’s been the second sweatiest show after Kyoto. Crowd “Let’s make it the hottest!” SND “No! You can’t beat it. That was a traumatic experience, I thought I was gonna die. But we can still make the excitement levels the hottest!”

●Encore intermission and the usual outfit change: SND “Aren’t you hot in that?” Yumao “Yeah, this sweatshirt is way too big for me. Oh, because it’s Shinoda’s” It was too hot for SND so he made Yumao wear and promo the official merch. SND opened his mouth to make a comment when the crowd slipped in with “Yumao you’re cute wearing that~~ so cute~~!” cheers. SND “Shut up I’m talking!!” SND “….I’m sorry for yelling!” ‘Apologizes before things go downhill’ Crowd kept the spirit high by asking ygarsh if he wanted to eat pizza, yg nodded his head, then scooted towards the mic as if to say something- but turned back... He tricked everybody! Rie weren’t going to let him get away with that, they had to pick on him for revenge!

Crowd “Hello! [At yg]” SND “What?! You’re resorting to teaching him the basics of conversation?” (SND and Yu laughing out loud) SND “He’s not an AI y’know??” (Yuma has his hands on his stomach at this point). yg *Still not talking* SND “Ahh what are we gonna do with him” SND “yga~rshy~kun~, have some fun with me~~!”

　yg “*>>>BWOOOOON<<<*

●SND tweet: Sapporo concert: complete!! That was way too fucking hot!! Damn ridiculous! That’s what makes it so good. Thank you.

8 Hitorie’s Hitori-Escape Tour, 10/10/2019 at UMBER in Shizuoka prefecture! Reports!

Yumao's tweet "Today's Shizuoka!"

●A wild cockroach appeared before Yumao and SND backstage during the intermission.

It was a huge one, scurrying across the stage walls throughout the end of the show regardless of its own size.

●yg offered Yuma the rights to his front stage mic for Yuga and SND to be able to talk about it together, so he pulled at his mic in front of him…. Only for the cable to come spiraling out, yanked from the jack, off went the XLR connector, and all. yg's power move left him laughing hysterically. yga laughed!!!!! He laughed as he gave Yumao a powerless mic!!

●With the power move to piston off of, “Professor Yumao” was on the case to give a “lecture” with his cockroach wisdom! He told us about how the ones with the perfect figures come from the outside and live under trees, german cockroaches like to stay inside and come from the inside...

SND “Back when I used to live in a rundown apartment in Nagoya, there was 2 perfect cockroaches always waiting for me in front of my apartment”. Yu “Outside, right!!”

yga *Frozen up and now hiding against the wall*

●Prof. Yumao also gave another lecture about Shampoo from the anime Ranma 1/2, complete with “Ne!” imitations, SND piped in also until he realized something- and then got angry at Yuma because only few will know who he’s talking about....

SND “So tell me, what time is it?” Yu “Time to talk about things everybody will understand!” SND “No it’s encore time!” Yu " :O "

yg *Still hiding against the wall away from the nerds*

●SND “ygarshy! Ygarshy! Get a good look at this!” yg *Nods at him* SND *Proceeds to pose like the Dragon Ball Z Kamehameha* “Hah!” yga “>>>>*BWOOOOOOOOON*<<<”

●SND tweet: “Shizuoka show: complete, thank you so much. I had a lot of fun. We’ll be back. Nagoya will be tomorrow. Until next time,,,”

9 Hitorie’s Hitori-Escape Tour, 10/11/2019 at SPADE BOX in Aichi prefecture! Reports!

●Hasegawa-san, the drummer of SND’s past past band “Dr. Right” from around 2007 (See video of youngin SND and crew performing: https://nico.ms/sm11604475?ref=share_others_spweb…), he also payed a visit to the show!!!! And took pictures with SND! >See https://twitter.com/toshiya230/status/1182631585230704640

●First song SND immediately messed up the first note and the music halted, Yu and the crowd had to urge him onward-!

●SND “Hitorie is great. Hitorie’s songs are great. Only badass songs. Before I joined, Leader sent me demo versions and said “I want to do songs like this”… Electricity rushed through my veins, this is gonna be a revolution, am I really going to be a part of this?! I thought.”

●The stage at the venue is one that shook like crazy from everyone’s vigor, Rie seemed to enjoy the ride.

●SND “I left Nagoya, went up to Tokyo, and now I’m back in Nagoya, singing nonetheless... I’m not embarrassed carrying the mic to sing non-guitar songs anymore."

●SND "After 9 shows doin’ this, it's really hit me. Hitorie really make great songs! But even among all of them this one is peachy… Wait no one says that? This one’s at the tippy-top. ….Wait no one says these words in Tokyo, nor Nagoya?? Ah whatever let’s go” (The original words were ドンズバ and ダントツ, both old niche words).

●Encore intermission, Yumao came out in front of the mic then… Clenched his fist up into the air and stood stout! SND “You’re not gonna talk, now, what are you doing?” Yu “Freddie Mercury, is in the house!!”

“This move isn’t in Bohemian Rhapsody, b/c once the scene starts he’s already on the piano but, before the show Freddie does the *poses again*!!! SND “So that’s what you were doing? Even though you play drums? Drums aren’t a piano?” Yu *👌* SND “They are a little bit similar huh hahaha”

●Rie wished everyone safe travels home through Typhoon 19! They even cut the MC short to ensure swift departure- SND “I bet y’all would go off tweeting “Their chitchat was so long I couldn’t get home! Fuck them!” Well we’re fortunate, one day later and it would've been cancelled.."

●Then, the usual Thing.... SND “ygarshy, ygarshy! A fly seems to have sorta, landed on your bass over there!” yg *>BWWON*< (Interrupting SND’s sentence with a rushed note).

●SND tweet "Nagoya concert: complete. SPADEBOX shakes like crazy, it's such fun. Thank you so much. Make it home safe y'all. And let's meet again. Until next time."

🍕~~END~~🍕

((((((Shinoda, constantly: "I have a phobia of bugs" Also Shinoda, constantly: *His ways to provoke ygarsh involved cicadas, bees, cockroaches and flies.* + *Advises people dealing with heartbreak to go watch videos of giant hornets VS Japanese honeybees.* + *Draws super detailed cicadas in his manga Chikyuu Monogatari.*

Shinoda you maso.)))))

Ahhhh also! If you're a member Hitori-Atelier!-- (Which you should be!!! Because not only are Hitorie snazzy and there's the upcoming message campaign, but ALSO because Rie is always seeking more vigor which I KNOW YOU GUYS HAVE, I've seen your liberal usage of the almighty exclamation marks and emojis. You can't hide it, so show 'em some more of your energy!!!!!🙌🙌🙌)

--Shinoda has been periodically blogging about backstage tidbits and I've been translating those for fun so, plop: https://privatter.net/u/boat_manju

#ヒトリエ #long post

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popliar · 7 years

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K-Con Australia, 20170922-23

The first Australian K-Con was held over the last two nights in Sydney, and @proteinscollide and I were there. I'm very behind on everything else as a result! I need to watch Knowing Bros! ANYWAY, short version: IT WAS SUPER FUN. Lots of rambling under the cut as usual.

22 September: SF9, Pentagon, Victon, Girl's Day, Exo

23 September: SF9 (again!), Up10tion, Cosmic Girls/WJSN, Wanna One, Monsta X

Overall this was an extremely well produced show and a really fun show - I had such a good time! Okay, the "convention" part not so much (I'll talk about this a bit at the end of the post) but at both evening shows, the concert ran like a slick machine, stage following stage with no pause, good sound and no technical hitches. Visually the show looked great, with massive screens giving good views of every performer as well as fantastically atmospheric backdrops.

It didn't sell out on either night, and again I'll talk about possible reasons for that more later, but as a vehicle for hallyu and for promoting Korean culture this is potentially such a powerful instrument. One of the most striking K-Con images for me is the footage of K-Con Paris from 2016 - the pan from the section of the crowd for the French dignitaries and delegates, all politely seated and clapping, to the massive auditorium of French youth going absolutely wild for these pop groups from the other side of the world. This show didn't have that element of official endorsement, it was much more a straight-up pop show, but hey you never know, that might come…

Soft power has its limits, for sure, but within those boundaries Korea is working so very hard at being the very best it can be. I admire the gumption, and more importantly to Korea I am happily consuming the product! Give me more product! I'm here for this!

As far as line-up goes, this K-Con wasn't the best. Exo are absolute stars of course and there were other notable groups like Monsta X and Girl's Day; on balance however this was a really rookie-heavy sausage-fest. The prevalence of rookies is probably partly bad timing - the show coincided with the DMC Music Festival (which was eventually cancelled anyway due to labour disputes, argh, we could've had it all!).

But the boy-heavy line-up? Frustrating. Apparently WJSN and Girl's Day are the first girl groups to perform here since 4 Minute some three-four years ago. WHY? Perhaps there's a perception that since Western fans are mostly girls then they'll only turn out for boybands - I know in Korea the audience for girlgroups is skewed towards boys. However, here in the West, pop as a whole is coded so heavily female that I'm sure wouldn't be a problem. I've been to many Western female pop star concerts and trust me, the girls SHOWED UP. Hell, at this very same arena, Little Mix are performing later this year. Besides, this argument falls flat if you look at other K-Con line-ups which, although boy-heavy, still manage more than a measly 2 girl groups. Gosh I'd have been so happy with the addition of any ONE of Red Velvet, Mamamoo, Blackpink, Pristin, Gfriend, Twice, etc…

...that was a long intro. Let's talk the show.

Chanyeol (EXO)

Night 1

The first night of K-Con began with a pre-show of kpop dance cover groups (they were all good but some were REALLY GOOD) and Kevin from U-KISS as MC (did u know he looks like Lee Pace around the eyes?), doing his cheesy best to hype up the crowd and also promote the con's primary sponsor.

Then the show got started with a VCR, featuring Monsta X's Minhyuk in a sort of spaceship-themed narrative? I don't know what I saw but apparently K-Con's first Oceanic showing needed heroes or defenders or something, i.e. kpop groups? Whatever cool. I do know it involved Minhyuk looking at a picture of a kangaroo so we're all good.

Also apparently Sydney is the city of "arts and culture" and also "romance"? I'm flattered on behalf of my home, and I can assure you we have plenty of all three, but really?? Those are not, like, the first words I associate with Sydney. But ok, you do you K-Con!

Exo's Suho and Sehun then came on as the night's special MCs to deliver a brief introduction and be cute together and make the crowd scream. Naturally, there were Exo jerseys and banners and lightsticks all over the place; earlier in the day I got handed a cute banner to celebrate Chen's birthday, which I then promptly used to test proteinscollide's knowledge of Exo band names. (She improved greatly through the evening!)

First group up were rookie boyband SF9 - I've enjoyed their songs and MVs without knowing much about them. This rapidfire 3 song performance made me more of a fan! They just hit all their beats really well, both in terms of performance and in their brief introduction ment, advantaged by one member who was a fluent English speaker. Their line distribution is kind of weird - there's maybe three members who dominate the vocals and the dancing, especially Taeyang who I kept thinking of as "that one guy who looks like Shinee's Jonghyun" - but not enough to detract overall. I have no favourite but maybe my favourite is the rapper with currently red hair who reminds me of SVT Jeonghan and Pentagon's E'Dawn.

Something like K-Con is the perfect platform for a rookie group to get this kind of exposure. My own first exposure to kpop (aka the reason for my eternal downfall) was winning free tickets to a Boyfriend & JJCC show - I knew nothing about them, knew next to nothing about kpop, and JJCC were a hot mess sorry - but seeing the groups in person and live was enough to make me want to know so much more. I feel like this SF9 set functioned in much the same way. It was SO much more impactful than just an MV or a youtube clip or a gifset. This is how fans are made! (That said… I'll get to it, but SF9 got two bites at the cherry. Why?)

Next up were Pentagon and their brief set was great. Their songs are such bangers - I SAID BANGERS, DON'T AT ME - and they were really polished and powerful. Kino's opening dance solo was super charismatic, and E'Dawn (aka the only one I can consistently recognise) was working that jawline of his so well, lol. He does the bad boy thing very well! I admire it! For their ment, they played the "Pinata" game as seen at other K-Cons this year, i.e. a random game was selected. (Would the game be 'Propose'? It was not propose, but one member did get down on one knee to E'Dawn anyway, good job good fanservice.) In this case it was a random dance play, and it was very amusing and silly.

Probably my favourite thing about Pengaton is how far and fast proteinscollide has fallen for them. Can you believe at this time last year she didn't even know all the MX member names? Now the student has exceeded the master! Post your Pentagon post bro!

Sehun and Suho came back to introduce a special stage: Exo's Chanyeol in duet with WJSN's Seola, for his OST track Stay with Me. This was a nice, pretty interlude and a bit of a breather after the fast pacing of the first two sets.

Seola (WJSN)

Third rookie group Victon bopped cutely to a very Australian-themed video backdrop and they were very entertaining, without necessarily making me want to seek them out further. I think that's more to do with their concept being more cute than Pentagon and SF9's, so less appealing to me on those grounds. But they have their charms and most importantly one had a mullet! I'm HERE for the mullets, don't even think I'm joking.

Next up were Girl's Day. They're down to 4 members now but their experience and their casual confidence made them so enjoyable to watch. They played their hits including Something, Expectation and Ring My Bell with such a sense of fun and sexiness, dominating the stage and playing to the crowd with the relaxed ease of vets who have nothing to prove. There was a hunger to the rookies that gave them more edge but sometimes you just wanna watch really talented ppl relaxedly doing their very talented thing.

With everyone acutely aware there was only one act left to take the stage, a couple of SF9s came out to MC a special stage. They did the usual "how are you guys enjoying the show" and "we love Australia" and all that jazz, and then made the fatal mistake of asking an open-ended question:

SF9 MCs: so who is Australia's favourite boy group? Crowd: BTS!!! MCs: Yes, Exo!!! #awkward

I lol'd! I am sorry! Bless you Exo but c'mon!

This was followed by a brief VCR of Australian fans naming their favourite boybands, and then a really fun special stage of boyband covers: Pentagon covered GOT7's Hard Carry; SF9 covered Exo's Monster; and Victon did BTS's Fire.

At last it was time for EXO - MUCH CHEERING FROM CROWD! Exo-Ls were out in force. There were also tons of lightsticks in the crowd and everyone was hyyyyped.

Now some context for my reaction: I can name all the Exo's and I like some of their songs, but I don't quite click with their aesthetic/dynamic in the way that I do with BTS, etc. They were also at something of a disadvantage, with D.O absent from the line-up (I had to count them twice to make sure sob) and Lay MIA from this entire comeback (though I guess that's no longer surprising).

So let that be the background for me saying that I was totally entertained and impressed by their set. Starting with Power and ending with Ko Ko Bop, they came out and gave a great show. They are after all professionally charming and who was I to resist?

For me again it's that idea of a live show being so much more powerful than a video, even for something as preplanned and artificially constructed as pop. A concert is such a powerful reminder that it's more than the performer, and it's more than the audience too - it's about the relationship between the two, that alchemy of atmosphere and act that you only get in that specific environment.

Yes, Kai was deadly with his fucking winks and seductive looks (how dare you sir), but the way the audience reacted to his performance is what made the show go off. Xiumin aka Cat Pirate was also a scene stealer for me, and it was very darling when Chanyeol threw confetti at his head at the end awwww.

(I just wish, like, SM were less SM-y. I got a message from proteinscollide after the show - "Girl walking thru car park: shout out to SM who never give reasons for why members aren't there and if they're ok". Um, yep. I had to check on twitter to find out that D.O was off filming a movie.)

Ending stage was as usual with everyone coming out as tons of confetti rained down. I think a SF9 hugged a Victon? AWWW FRIENDS. A good night.

Night 2

We started again with dance cover groups - colour me EXTREMELY impressed by IME Dance Studio - and Kevin from U-KISS giving away a prize to whoever in the crowd did their best impression of their favourite thing to do in a hotel room. This led to a really hilarious scenario as the cameras zoomed in on 2 girls "dancing" together. "Yes, they're dancing!" Kevin said, "of course they're dancing!" Everyone just cracked the fuck up, Kevin included. They got the prize, bless them, which was - ofc - a free hotel stay!

The show started with the same VCR as the day before and then I was EMOTIONALLY DESTROYED by Monsta X's Jooheon and Shownu taking the stage together to drop an absolutely fire performance. Jooheon's duality is amazing - cuddly scaredy-cat off stage, fucking monster on stage - he was SO GOOD. Shownu's dance break was great as expected and I cried tears in my heart bc I love them.

SF9 returned for the second evening - again, they were slick and impressive, and they namedropped kangaroos and meat pies in their intro ment, good work on ticking off those keywords lol. But I really don't know why they got sets on both days? Did FNC decide they really wanted to build that fanbase and made the necessary commercial arrangement with the promotors? Like I said, stages like this can be real turning points in making a fan. So that's fascinating. If anyone knows, lemme know?

Daehwi (Wanna One)

Three Wanna Ones then took the stage to briefly MC. It was definitely Kang Daniel and uh, two other Wanna Ones! *hastily googles* It was Daehwi, who was the most fluent in English and was super cute & cheesy, and Minhyun, who was also cute but I don't remember much? Sorry team. The only Broduce bro I can 100% identify is Daniel, and sometimes Jaewhan. But! I think I'll remember Daehwi from now on - he was pretty memorable and did the most heavy lifting in the ments. Anyway they delivered some potted intros and then on to the next one.

WJSN then performed a special stage, covering two Kylie Minogue songs as two subunits - Locomotion (which I note came out in 1988, older than every single K-Con performer except for Sojin of Girl's Day) and I Can't Get You Out Of My Head (2001 - there are rookies debuting born in 2001! And younger! God i'm so old). Firstly much love for preparing a special stage with local appeal that didn't feel pandering and really spoke to the long history of amazing women in pop, and secondly THEY WERE SO GOOD. Fun, bright, poppy - I love them.

They were followed by Up10tion who did a high energy set and I remember why I liked them! They're good! I don't quite click with all their songs, especially their more recent ones which I feel are a bit hit and miss, but just like every other group in this K-Con they delivered their set with professionalism and skill and charm.

There was then a brief interlude with MX's Kihyun and I.M, MY TWO LOVES, MCing an audience dance game. We got to see Kihyun doing the Twice TT dance and my world was made. Gosh I love them.

WJSN

WJSN then came back for their set and I just really like them so much. They have that sleekness that I've come to associate with Starship because of them and MX, with both groups always having good choreo and catchy hooks. I like their concept a lot too - they're cute sassy cheerleaders, yes, but I also feel like there's this very cool edge to them, they could easily cut you! I love that! As they acknowledged in their ment, 2 members couldn't make it due to filming schedules (I think it was Cheng Xiao, the dancey/gymnastic one? And Mei Qi, possibly? I'm sorry, I don't remember) but they were still very good and I enjoyed their set a lot. And their main rapper - god, I'm sorry, I don't know if it was Bona or another member - she was SO GOOD? She had so much stage presence. Gosh. I need to find out her name.

Next up were Wanna One. Now, ofc, Produce 101 never officially aired in Australia. We had to watch it on the internet like a bunch of animals. And yet out of all the groups on both days, their fans were definitely the most intense and the most scream-y - yes, more intense than the Exo-Ls and the Monbebes!

I only ever saw snippets of P101 and as I said I can only ID Daniel with certainty, but I was, hmm, not surprised I guess that they turned out to be endearing? CAN U IMAGINE, a group of young men voted for according to their charms turns out to be extremely charming?! The shock! (From a purely commercial standpoint, what a brilliant exercise this has turned out to be. I think the limited timeframe for Wanna One to make bank lends an edge of urgency to their fandom and means their machine is also geared to maximum efficiency. Make! Bank! Now!) And because they're young and new, there was a certain edge of rawness and spontaneity to them which is naturally part of their appeal too. I still don't quite know what I feel about Kang Daniel - like I know he's very fond of cats and therefore a good person, and he has this easy, cocky stage charisma which makes his appeal seem very straightforward. But I think I found him most endearing when he missed a step at the end of his dance solo and there was just the cutest expression on his face, like "my bad."

For their Pinata game, they did photo time with hyung line posing "cutely" and maknae line posing "sexily" followed by some kind of free for all - A HOT MESS, lol.

Daehwi also went off script - or at least, he said he went off script, but can you ever really know? We need to go deeper! - and wished happy birthday to Kuanlin, getting the whole audience to sing along too, awww. As I said: what a group of charming young men; the self-awareness that they were constructed to charm ultimately means nothing.

FINALLY MONSTA X. They're, like, my second favourite group after BTS so I think I would've been just fine if they'd shown up and waved at us and sang like a song or two. But they didn't! They were really, really good. As headliners they had a signficant chunk of time and I think I was smiling from start to end, non stop.

They've turned into such good performers - with something similar to that same easy confidence that Girl's Day and Exo had - and I felt like they really did the most, on the second night, with connecting to the audience. Their performances were all on point, and everyone of them looked and sounded great but Jooheon especially killed me with swag and Wonho's collar & cleavage can fuck right off, ISTG. It just made me so happy to see them doing these songs and choreo I love so much - Shine Forever and Beautiful and Fighter - and they ended with Hero, my very first MX song, which was amazing. (I am a little sad they skipped All In but ok I can live with it.)

For their ment, they played the proposal game, with three members doing their very best fanservice lol. A very happy woman in the standing area got to be audience surrogate as I.M laid on cheesy lines (something about angels and heaven, IDK, why is he like this and why do I love him so much), Kihyun sang a ballad to her (next to me proteinscollide died a death), and Wonho came down to the barrier to to give her a heart, selfie & cheek kiss. It was so! Cheesy! And Wonderful! #the selfawareness does nothing

Everyone then came out for the goodbye, though MX were the only ones who felt relaxed enough it seems to actually get silly with the confetti and do some more spontaneous bows & waves to the crowd. By comparison to every other group on the 2nd night, they must be the old hands at K-Con by now - they've done SO many. Gosh I hope they come back to Australia for a full show. I love them so much.

Fuck, I'm now at 3300 words so let's wrap this up quick:

Unlike other K-Cons which seem to have a proper programming and convention stream, the "convention" part of this was really a disappointment. Minimal programming, minimal stalls (less than 10 vendors), all in one room. It was free entry which is fine I guess except that people were queuing up forever to get inside due to the limited capacity and it was H O T (over 30 C each day) out there. In the end I queued for an hour, and spent about 15 minutes inside. It was really not worth it. Luckily proteinscollide & I had options and just went away for a few hours to pass the time before the show, but I imagine there were a lot of kids left hanging around Olympic Park all day with nothing to do.

The shows didn't sell out. What does this mean? Possible thoughts:

-It was really expensive and the audience skews young. Like, the premium tickets were REALLY REALLY expensive and good tix were expensive. I could afford decent tix, but if I were in my teens? No way. I'd have had to ask my parents for it.

-Sydney has had a run of shows including an Australian-exclusive BTS show. If you're interstate and you already spent $$$ going to BTS, or for that matter $$$ to go G-Dragon in your own state, how much money do you have left over for concerts in this year? There is a limited capacity for this audience to keep spending. Promoters should be careful not to spread us too thin. Put more shows on in Melbourne! (Though I don't know - are there more Koreans and east Asians in Sydney? I suspect there are. The audience, again, skews heavily to those of us who are Asian-Australian.)

-Exo, MX, and Wanna One are very popular but don't have the same mainstream reach in Australia as BTS. BTS also had the advantage again of being earlier in the year, only the 2nd major kpop tour in the year I believe. Since then there's been other kpop and khip-hop shows for people to spend their money on. I really thought Exo would give BTS a run tho, given how well their latest album performed on Australian iTunes charts.

...that was not a quick wrap-up.

TO CONCLUDE: I HAD A GOOD TIME, THANK U FOR READING.

#kcon australia #exo #monsta x #wanna one #girl's day #wjsn #cosmic girls #pentagon #sf9 #victon #up10tion #sydney #kpop #actually using tumblr as a blog how strange #this is really really long #i'm sorry lol #kpop shows

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smartwebhostingblog · 5 years

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Want to Know How to Build a Better Democracy? Ask Wikipedia

New Post has been published on http://ritzywordpressthemes.com/want-to-know-how-to-build-a-better-democracy-ask-wikipedia/

Want to Know How to Build a Better Democracy? Ask Wikipedia

Pity the poor public-relations specialist hired to influence what is said about his clients on Wikipedia. The sprawling, chaotic storehouse of knowledge is governed by thousands of independent-minded volunteers committed to being neutral and allergic to self-serving manipulators.

The barriers are formidable, but so is the temptation to do some reputational polishing there. What appears on Wikipedia matters. Daily traffic to the English site has barely grown in years, but that is because Wikipedia articles are so reputable that they are baked into the Internet—particularly Google’s results pages. A biographical capsule Google publishes on me, for example, has all its facts taken straight from Wikipedia, except for my age being 20, which Google came up with on its own. When YouTube tried to contain proliferating conspiracies, it turned to Wikipedia. Of course men landed on the moon, it says so right here on Wikipedia!

Attempts to influence the site are, as the recent college admissions scandal shows, sadly inevitable; there are few areas immune to power of wealth and status. How long can Wikipedia resist?

Noam Cohen

About

Noam Cohen is a journalist and author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball, which uses the history of computer science and Stanford University to understand the libertarian ideas promoted by tech leaders. While working for The New York Times, Cohen wrote some of the earliest articles about Wikipedia, bitcoin, Wikileaks, and Twitter. He lives with his family in Brooklyn.

Throughout Wikipedia’s history people have tried to nudge the content in their favor. There have been elaborate nonprofessional campaigns to promote nationalistic causes, such as what to call the Sea of Japan/East Sea. Likewise, there have been examples of stealth editing, presumably by the subjects of Wikipedia articles, as well as contributors secretly paid to polish the reputations of certain clients. These actions are considered conflicts of interest, prohibited along with a bunch of other sketchy practices as a threat to the Wikipedia’s ideal of a neutral point of view.

A recent account in The Huffington Post highlighted a novel approach by one marketing executive hired to influence what appears on Wikipedia: Instead of paid editing, Ed Sussman provides paid advocacy. Sussman, who is CEO of the marketing firm Buzzr.com, represents a range of clients, including the Axios news website, NBC, and the Facebook PR team. For NBC, he has focused on minimizing controversies, such as the question of whether NBC News handled allegations against Matt Lauer properly. In the case of one Facebook executive, Sussman’s goal was to get an article about her published.

For his fee, Sussman does not personally publish or edit the articles his clients care about; he won’t do that, he explains, because he has an obvious conflict of interest. As he writes on his Wikipedia user page: “If you ever think any of my work doesn’t conform to Wikipedia policy, please let me know and I’ll do my best to fix it!”

Instead, Sussman, who is a lawyer by training, prepares drafts of revised articles, or in the case of the Facebook executive, the entire article, which he posts on the pages used to discuss how to improve Wikipedia. His work is well written and well sourced. He then tries to persuade editors to make those changes themselves. After all, a frequent concern of Wikipedia editors is that articles are too short and too thinly sourced, and Sussman is doing his part to reduce that problem.

Indeed, for many dedicated volunteers, Sussman poses few problems, because he is so transparent about his motives. On reading the HuffPo headline, one Wikipedia administrator, Swarm, wrote that the news seemed “extremely alarming, and I was ready to crucify this guy.” Digging deeper, Swarm came to the opposite conclusion: “Most of the supposed ‘whitewashing’ seems to be mundane matters that don’t harm articles at all, if not actual improvements.”

The flip side of this embrace of transparency by Sussman, however, is that Wikipedia editors have tried, and in at least one case, succeeded, in transparently informing readers that the articles have been advocated for by a paid Wikipedia editor. The Axios article was edited to mention the news site had hired an advocate to “beef up its Wikipedia page (mostly with benign—if largely flattering—stats about Axios’ accomplishments).” Including such a sentence, of course, somewhat defeats the purpose of hiring an advocate; the best lobbyists blend into the background.

When Wikipedia editors complain about Sussman they, in essence, say he is behaving like an overly excited, and legally trained, flack. His arguments are long and have oodles of sources. One editor, kashmiri, a non-native-English speaker, pleaded for mercy: “May I kindly ask you to be more concise? I agree English is a beautiful language, but requiring other editors to read walls of text from you on every single issue is tad daunting, sorry.” While a good advocate tries to make every argument they can think of, in case one of them sticks, among Wikipedians the tactic is called bludgeoning and is frowned on.

Taking a step back, what could be wrong with making a case for a client with rigor and a broad range of sources, hoping that it gets adopted by the community? It’s not the careful attention that is the problem, but that the careful attention only goes to those who can pay. When different standards apply based on status and wealth, in areas as important as education and criminal justice, as well as relatively trivial ones like Wikipedia, poof, there goes the fairness crucial to a functioning democracy.

Wikipedia’s approach is collective, not individualistic. To come up with a solution, the community deliberates and seeks a consensus. Those deliberations, ideally, are driven by people far removed from the issues and parties involved. There is a belief in a type of karmic justice for those who try to game the system, which played out in the Axios article. It’s called the Streisand effect, so named in the wake of Barbra Streisand’s attempt to suppress photos of her Malibu home. Her efforts to deny access to those images only created more interest. Imagine a world where the more you try to manipulate the system, the more you are exposed!

By contrast, we know that large social networks respond to manipulations by those who have power and ignore those who don’t. Facebook, for example, fails to hire translators as genocide rages in Myanmar, yet personally apologizes in front of Congress when called out by conservatives for determining that the extreme rhetoric from a pair of Trump supporters, Diamond and Silk, was not safe for its community. Likewise, Twitter’s decision to allow President Trump to break its community standards for harassment and bullying, because as president what he says is newsworthy, is the ultimate example of a two-tiered system.

Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has witnessed firsthand how Facebook bends in the face of a powerful critic—herself. Facebook took down a Warren ad for supposed technical violations and then quickly restored it after an uproar. The experience left a bad taste: “You shouldn’t have to contact Facebook’s publicists in order for them to decide to ‘allow robust debate’ about Facebook,” she wrote on Twitter. “They shouldn’t have that much power.”

Perhaps the just-the-facts folks at Wikipedia can teach us all something.

More Great WIRED Stories

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cap-ironman · 7 years

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The Cap-IronMan Beta Reader List

Once again it is time that we update the beta readers list and this time we will migrate it to a gdoc, like we did with the The List of Podfic-friendly Steve/Tony Writers.

Many people are working on projects and may be looking for some help from willing beta readers. This list is going to replace the old one, and it will be linked to on the LJ and tumblr sidebars. If you would like to be added to this list, fill out the info below and email us at [email protected]. You can also comment on the posts on our Dreamwidth or Livejournal communities.

Being on this list doesn't obligate you to beta anyone's fic. It's simply a place for interested writers to try to find someone who will beta read their work before posting. After you're added to the list, we may contact you periodically (no more than once a year) to confirm you're still active, and you can contact us at any time to let us know if something changes. If something changes for you and you want to indicate that you don’t want to be contacted for a time, let us know. We will also remove you from the list if you no longer have an interest in beta reading.

Name: Method(s) of contact: (email, lj message, tumblr ask, etc) Turnaround time: (optional) (how long it usually takes you to beta a fic - one week? One month? One day?) Contact me for: (optional) (ex. canons you'll beta for, SPaG, characterization, dialogue, flow, plot arcs, long fics, short fics, action scenes, sex scenes, types of genre, kinks, etc) Don't contact me for: (optional) Other notes: (optional) (ex. 'not available during summer months')

List of Steve/Tony Beta readers in alphabetical order

This is not the place to post 'looking for beta' ads. Please contact betas directly.

If you need some guidelines on working with a beta as an author or being a betareader, here are some things to keep in mind when working with or as a beta:

Communication is key. Be up front with the kind of help and advice you're looking for, and what sort of timeline you're on (and authors, make sure you get your draft back with a few days left before your due date!). Talk about what's going to happen--what the author wants, what the beta is willing to do. Make sure you both have similar ideas of what's expected. If there are specific sections or aspects you're worrying about, tell your beta. Maybe even mark it in the text with a comment or some highlighting. If you're using Word or LibreOffice or similar, we suggest using Track Changes (it's usually under the Edit menu in the toolbar), or in GoogleDocs you can use Suggestion mode. The comment tool can also be really useful.

And authors: when you get your story back, go through it! Look at the work your beta did and decide whether or not you want to keep the changes. If they asked questions, answer those questions, but also think about WHY they asked and what you could do to change your text so that your readers aren't left with the same questions. If you still have questions for the reader perspective, ask. Communication doesn't have to end just because you got the draft back. This is a collaborative process, and it goes on for as long as you both want it to.

Authors, make sure you thank your betas. Even if you disagree with everything they changed, they just gave you their editing skills for free and used their time to help you improve your story! Whether you say thanks privately, when you post, or both, be sure you express your appreciation. Betaing is a very behind-the-scenes part of fandom, and just like any other part of fandom, manners and acknowledgment are important in building both good friendships and good writers.

Betas, ask questions! Don't feel like you have to confine yourself to grammar and syntax, think about the feel you get off a story and where it might be going. What would it take to really get it there? Does the characterization fit? Are there any universe-breaking problems that the story doesn't adequately address? If you have an idea of something that could be tweaked or added, suggest it. Even if the author doesn't like it, it might get them thinking of something else that really brings a scene together. Are you confused? Tell the author! Did you love a certain bit of dialogue? Definitely mark that. Even emoticons will do.

Authors want their stories to be read and enjoyed, and the more positive feedback you can give them now, the more strength they're likely to have to really polish that draft up and make it shine. You're probably the only person who's going to read it anything like as closely as they are, and it can be a great opportunity to express the sorts of reactions that are difficult to distill into comments. "This scene is great!" noted next to something specific can hold a lot more weight than a general "I really liked this" comment on the fic over all.

Even if you get the rawest rough draft you've ever seen, find something good to say. Pick out things you liked. Sandwich negatives with positives when you can. Be constructive in your criticism, even if the author asks for the most detailed, scathing editing job you've ever done. This isn't an anonymous copyedit service, this is fandom, and fandom is about connecting and enjoying something together.

A first-time read can be great for really getting the major ideas and emotions of the work, and you're hopefully giving yourself enough time to do a second or third reading for the work of corrections and suggestions. If you make a change that's not simple grammar, note WHY you're making the change. If you find you're making the same grammar change over and over, maybe explain the rule. Not all fanfic authors are native English speakers, and some of us who are have forgotten little details like how important commas can be :)

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Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 6: All the sounds in all the languages - The International Phonetic Alphabet

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 6: All the sounds in all the languages - The International Phonetic Alphabet. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 6 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, the podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: and I'm Lauren Gawne. And today we're going to be talking about the International Phonetic Alphabet. But first -- it was International Mother Language Day in February and even though it was a couple of weeks ago now on February the 21st, I think it's still worth saying a belated 'Happy Mother Language Day' to you Gretchen!

Gretchen: Happy Mother Language Day to you! Which we are wishing in our of mother languages of English, which is kind of boring.

Lauren: Both wishing it our mother languages. Do you have any other heritage languages that you wish to acknowledge?

Gretchen: I mean, technically Scottish Gaelic is probably a long time ago a mother language for me, but my ancestors were lowland Scots so it's a really long time ago.

Lauren: Well happy Scots Gaelic day

Gretchen: Do you have any other?

Lauren: My grandmaternal language is Polish and thanks to generally typical Australian attitudes towards non-English speaking in the 1960s that wasn't passed on to any of my mother's generation at all. So yeah it's still a very recent part of our family history. I'm the only grandchild who ever learnt enough Polish to speak with my grandmother in her mother tongue

Gretchen: Oh that's cool

Lauren: Which is cool, I wish I still spoke that much

Gretchen: Well I mean it's cool that you learned it, it's not cool that no one else did

Lauren: It's probably questionable how much Polish I remember today. And yeah, I always like to think of my Nan and my lack of opportunities to learn Polish on February 21st. What have you been up to or what's coming up?

Gretchen: Well, by the time this episode goes out I will have been to South by Southwest, where I will have done a panel with Erin Mckean and Jane Solomon and Ben Zimmer

Lauren: How are you not going to like die of fangirling at people?!

Gretchen: Because I've already met all of them anyway?

Lauren: Awwww I'm so jelly

Gretchen: But they're really cool and I'm really excited to be on a panel with them! We're going to be talking about 'Word curation: Dictionaries, tech, and the future' which will happen by the time you guys get this episode so you can check out the hashtag that I'm sure will have some action on it and we'll link to that in the show notes.

Lauren: I'm really excited for that panel. I'm looking forward to it hopefully - is it going to be recorded? Am I going to be able to see it as a non South by Southwest attendee?

Gretchen: I think there's going to be an audio recording on soundcloud that South by Southwest is going to put up online because they've done that for previous years. So I can't promise that they'll do that again but they seem to like doing it in previous years, I don't know why they wouldn't do it again so we'll link to that if we have it.

Lauren: Yay, excellent!

[Music]

Gretchen: So there's a problem when you learn to spell English, which is that it's really hard to spell English.

Lauren: It's really a lifelong learning process as far as I'm concerned

Gretchen: It's a lifelong learning process. You know, some languages don't have spelling bees because their spelling systems are so consistent they don't need them - we can only wish! So, the English spelling system is especially ridiculous, it's got silent letters, it's got something around 14 vowels but only five letters to write them in.

My favorite demonstration of this is that there's a phrase that has all of the English vowels and the phrase goes - I have to have to say it in a non-rhotic accent because it only works that way - the phrase goes 'Who would know aught of art must learn, act and then take his ease'. And each of those words has a different vowel in it.

Lauren: Cool!

Gretchen: And that's one way of remembering the vowels

Lauren: That's a nifty sentence!

Gretchen: Yeah, but if you try to write that down in English it's hard

Lauren: With the English orthography that we have, or the English writing system - orthography - that we have

Gretchen: And spelling systems are also inconsistent across different languages. Even languages that are consistent in themselves are often inconsistent when you compare them with each other. So, some languages use the letter J for the /dʒ/ sound [as in Jane], some languages use it for the /ʒ/ sound like French [Jean], some languages use it for the 'y' /j/ sound like German as in 'Jan' or 'Johann Sebastian Bach', some languages use it for the /x/ sound as in Spanish like 'Juan'. There's a whole bunch of different sounds you can use the same letter for depending on your language

Lauren: There's a really great tumblr post that kind of encapsulates this variety in the ways different alphabets that are based on the same alphabet English is based on, use their orthographies in different ways which we'll link to. When I first read this I was like oh look someone's just posting in Norwegian or Danish or something, but then if you sit there and read it and you know the orthographic conventions in different languages it says something along the lines of 'I wonder if English speakers will notice that I'm writing this in English but using the spelling conventions of my language'

Gretchen: And yeah a whole bunch of people have certain different versions of it - there's a Finnish one which is pretty good, there's an Irish one which is fantastic

Lauren: It's good, because once you know what the phrase is that gives you a feel for what the conventions are in different languages. For example I found the Polish one really easy to read and then for some of the others I was just basically guessing because I knew what the sentence was, and it really nicely illustrates this problem that we have that we all learn different spelling conventions for different languages

Gretchen: And we're not the first people to have noticed this problem! In fact people have been realizing this problem for quite a long time, as long as people have been writing with different systems. And it became especially apparent as writing systems became standardised in the 1700s and 1800s, when dictionaries are becoming popular and people were starting to write in a standardised sort of way and looking at other languages and realising that their standardisations were converging on something different

Lauren: I really love that historically there was no consistent spelling conventions, and so in Old English text we actually have a good idea of the different common literate dialects of people who lived in Mercia or people who live in Cumbria and because the way that they wrote English really reflected the way their accent worked. Once spelling systems became standardized that stopped being the case

Gretchen: It also became really difficult people for who are trying to learn English because even if you learn the spelling systems, then you pronounce the words the way they look and people look at you like "that's not actually how it's pronounced" and you're like "how was I supposed to remember that?" Various people came up with various proposals for spelling reform for either just like a more phonetic way of writing English in total, or for ways of adapting English words so that it could be used for specialised purposes like people who are learning the language, or people who want to write down specific things and annotate exactly how they're said

Lauren: And some people went for massive 'let's create an entirely new alphabet', some people just wanted some small reforms. So Noah Webster is probably one of the people who had the most impressive effect on English especially on American English. It was Webster who decided to take and consistently use conventions like 'i-z-e' instead of 'i-s-e' and using words like colour without the 'u' instead of with the 'u' as part of this attempt to make English spelling more realistically reflect the language that was being spoken

Gretchen: Yeah and there were other British reformers that were trying to do this, so there was a guy named Henry Sweet who came up with an alphabet called the Romic /ɹomɪk/ alphabet or the Romic /ɹɑmɪk/ alphabet, I'm not actually sure how to pronounce the name of this alphabet, which...

Lauren: If only was written down some where in a consistently pronounceable script!

Gretchen: If only! He didn't seem to actually write the name of his own alphabet anywhere in a consistent script so that's a shame. And that was based on mostly Roman letters but with adaptations for sounds that English had and Latin hadn't. And then there was Alexander Ellis who was apparently the real-life origin of Henry Higgins from 'My Fair Lady'

Lauren: Really?!

Gretchen: I dunno, that's what Wikipedia says!

Lauren: Okay, because I'm going to invoke the supremacy of David Crystal, if that's okay. I don't know if Crystal officially trumps Wikipedia, but in his book called 'Wordsmiths and Warriors' he says if Higgins is anyone it has to be Daniel Jones who is a phonetician who is very influential in terms of like codifying the vowel system. So what we think of is the modern International Phonetic Alphabet vowel space kind of started with Daniel Jones' cardinal vowels

Gretchen: I mean I don't know it could have been a composite or something

Lauren: I think to be honest that the most likely is that there was a genre of gentleman academic at the time who's very interested in these topics. Anyway, there was a lot of work being invested in generating some kind of writing system that accurately reflected speech

Gretchen: Yeah and so they made the International Phonetic Association in the late 1800s, which confusingly enough also has the acronym IPA, and they had some meetings and they were like, “yeah, we need to come up with a system for this”

Lauren: So the IPA is where the IPA was created

Gretchen: Yeah I hope they were all drinking IPA but I can't guarantee that

Lauren: In our reenactment that is definitely what's happening

Gretchen: Yeah, when we when we all get dressed up in historic costume (bagsies Henry Sweet), then we will all drink IPA

Lauren: I'm Daniel Jones apparently - no wait, I'm going to dress up as Cardinal Vowel, I always thought that would be a great linguist costume

Gretchen: Ah that's great! Were cardinal vowels invented yet?

Lauren: Well it was Daniel Jones who did that, I don't know when he was working

Gretchen: Oh ok good

Lauren: I mean we'll have to have a whole episode just talking about vowels and how they work, but that was kind of a thing that was figured out at the time

Gretchen: Yeah and they came up with some principles for future development of this International Phonetic Alphabet and these were: each symbol should have its own distinctive sound and the same symbol should be used for the same sound across all languages

Lauren: So instead of having the J sound sounding like /dʒ/ or /ʒ/ or /j/ or /x/ across different languages, every time that sound was used it would be used for exactly the same sound

Gretchen: Every time that *symbol* was used

Lauren: Yes sorry every time that symbol was used it would be used for the same sound

Gretchen: They also came up with some principles that influenced which symbols ended up being chosen for which sounds. So they decided to use as many ordinary Roman letters as possible and to have a very minimal number of new letters, and to use what they called quote unquote “international” usage to decide the sound for each symbol

Lauren: So they wouldn't like, take the symbol that we have for 's' and decide 'oh we're going to make that the sound for 'l' because we're crazy people'

Gretchen: Yeah, they didn't do that. But the other thing is, so if we look at the vowels, the IPA vowels look kind of weird from an English perspective. So the IPA uses the letter that we think of as 'i' to represent the 'ee' /i/ sound and uses the letter we think of as 'e' to represent the 'eh' /e/ sound and so on. And this doesn't make sense for English, but it does make sense when you look at a whole bunch of other languages like Spanish and Italian, and the way the Roman alphabet has been used for non-European languages generally falls along these principles as well. So they said, “Look, even though we're English speakers we're going to not do the English things”

Lauren: Okay, so they really did go with this kind of international general preference

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, they're still eurocentric, they're still starting with European languages and kind of working their way outwards, but they were at least not completely Anglo-centric, which is helpful here, because English does some weird stuff with its sounds

Lauren: Yeah and we only have 26 letters in the English alphabet, a few more if we kind of pull everything from across European languages, and there are so many more sounds that the world's languages can make, so once we've run out of kind of standard letters where do we go from there?

Gretchen: Where we are from there is often Greek letters or Latinised looking versions of Greek letters because those were familiar to these creators. Another thing that they did was they would rotate letters. and this was partly because the shapes are still familiar if you do that and partly because this is the 1800s and people were typing with metal bits of type. So if you just take a lowercase 'e' and turn it upside down, you can just print your new character by flipping or rotating an existing metal type bit rather than casting a new one

Lauren: I have a really nice example from Australia, so I was at a workshop the other day and a colleague was showing me a booklet of Kamilaroi, so it's a language from the New England area of New South Wales in Australia, and William Ridley was working on this language in 1856. So this is even before the IPA was codified. And these languages have a sound like an English sound but you may not notice it in English because it's a sound at the end of words like 'sing' or 'bring', that /ŋ/ sound, but that sound can occur anywhere so you can have it at the start of the word as well as at the end. This /ŋ/ sound now has a symbol in the IPA that looks like an 'n' with a little tail and it's called an 'engma'

Gretchen: Yeah kind of like an 'n' with a 'g' tail shoved on it

Lauren: Yeah, and Ridley is one of the first people who adopted this symbol for use in his describing languages work in the 1850s, which was before the 1880s when the IPA was established. But this symbol had begun to be used for this /ŋ/ and it makes sense because it's like an 'n' and a 'g' squashed together. But when he sent it to the typesetters for his booklet they didn't have a /ŋ/ and so they just turned a capital 'G' upside down which sounds a bit crazy and it looks a bit crazy it looks like it's just full of upside down 'G's, but it meant that that was a way that they could represent this /ŋ/ sound. Apparently he sent it to some other journal in Europe and they just turned it all into a 'z'

Gretchen: Wow, a 'z'!

Lauren: Yeeeah

Gretchen: Wow, that's really bad! So I guess that's why it's good that another principle the IPA had was that the look of the new letters should suggest the sound they represent, so once you've learned the kind of basic ones and if you see a couple languages and you have a sense of what's used in other languages then you can often guess fairly accurately what an IPA letter is going to be like. So it's better to have a symbol for /ŋ/'that looks like an 'n' and a 'g' shoved together because that's how it's often written in different languages, a bit like an 'n' sound, a bit like a 'g' sound.

Another one of their principles was that diacritics should be avoided where possible. So adding extra little like accent marks or other types of small bits on top of letters was something that they tried to avoid for their basic sounds. Diacritics were only was supposed to be for if there's a modified version of a sound, but not for basic sounds in general. So in the current IPA, you still get these rotated letters, which must make the IPA very difficult for people who are dyslexic; you get small capitals; you get Greek stuff like the Greek letter theta is used for the 'th' /θ/ sound, and the runic and ultimately Icelandic sound /ð/ -- so the symbol that looks like an 'o' with kind of a cross above it, that’s from Icelandic and it used to be in English before the Normans came, that got borrowed back in -- so borrowing from other established systems. Because then you could just go to Iceland and grab some of their metal type bits, I don't know, or go to Greece and get some from them

Lauren: It's something that was a problem with the original metal type but it's also been a problem for a long time with modern software. So for a long time computers didn't really have fonts that expanded beyond the kind of really basic font set of like English and French and some diacritics and some special things. If you have some older software or if you look at older digital documents you have, y’know, people using capital 'A' for particular vowel sounds, vowel characters in the IPA that are symbols in the IPA that aren't in regular type or y’know schwa would be a capital 'E' for example

Gretchen: Yeah you can even see this on some old websites, people will use a different system that only uses the basic 26, plus capitals to do the extra stuff or maybe some places use like an 'at' sign @ to indicate a schwa, because we've also had a different version of this encoding problem with technology

Lauren: So it's not just the metal type it's also modern computing

Gretchen: It's also the byte! It's the type and the byte!

Lauren: The type and the byte have been a problem, it's getting better

Gretchen: It's getting better thanks to Unicode, thanks Unicode! So yeah the first version from 1887 was designed to work for sounds in English, French, and German because that's what they were doing at the time. It's a bit weird compared to the modern IPA because we're used to seeing it as a chart and they just gave a list of symbols and keywords that stuff was found in for various languages. So they'd say something like okay this 'a' symbol is going to be like the sound in English 'father' or this symbol is going to be like the sound in German 'Bach' and they just give the keywords like sometimes you see in the front of the dictionary. And then later, so they kept on working on it in the late 1800s and then by the year they expanded, published a version that included Arabic and a few other languages’ sounds, that’s when they finally publish it as a table for the first time

Lauren: So why would it be in it table, for people who aren't familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet?

Gretchen: The cool thing about the table is -- so our English alphabet that you learn as a kid is 'ABCD' in no particular order, that's just the order it is, that's just for historical reasons -- but the table is ordered based on how the sounds are produced. So sounds get produced with constriction in various parts of the mouth and with different degrees of constriction once you're in that place

Lauren: So it's a nice feature based table of all the kind of combination of features in particular places

Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. If you superimpose a mouth onto that table, it looks a bit weird but you can kind of do it and you can see where each of the sounds is produced

Lauren: I have a link somewhere to an audible IPA chart so you can click on the sounds and hear what they sound like, but the ones on the very left side are all produced with just the lips like /p/, and the very front of the mouth. And then the ones at the very right edge are all the way back at the far back of the mouth, and that's things like your velar sounds like /g/ get made with that soft bit there or your uvula like right down in the very far back in the mouth

Gretchen: Yeah, it goes from your lips, through your mouth along the roof of your mouth and back into your throat. And the weird thing about this version from 1900 is that it's a mirror image of that so it has 'p' and 'b', your labial sounds on the right instead of on the left

Lauren: Oh no, that would confuse me so much

Gretchen: You can see an image of it on Wikipedia, it's all like typewritten, we'll link to that

Lauren: Wow, awesome

Gretchen: But it looks really weird, and they also have the vowel chart and the consonant chart on the same chart

Lauren: Right, okay!

Gretchen: They just have like a really wide section where the vowels go

Lauren: How weird!

Gretchen: Yeah, which is something else that changed later

Lauren: So there's now a table for the consonants, there's a few consonants that don't even fit, and then there's a vowel chart that's a separate thing, but it's very similar principle like it starts at the front of the mouth and goes back

Gretchen: Yeah, and what's cool is that the version that we use today is actually very very similar to the version that was solidified in 1932, which was quite a while ago. There were some adjustments made in 1989 and then after that it's just like 'oh well we need to add this one symbol because we found some languages that use it' but pretty much it stays very similar for quite a long time once it's established

Lauren: Nice. So it goes from left to right all the different places in the mouth, and then from top to bottom there are different ways just looking at the consonants, the ways to pronounce different consonants so you have the very plosive sounds like /b/, /k/, /d/, /t/ - we call them stops - along one row and your nasal sounds, so your /m/, /n/, /ŋ/, sounds along another row...

Gretchen: It kind of goes in order of how much you need to drop your jaw. So if you think about the sounds in the top row, your mouth is the most closed when you're making like a 'p' or a 'b'. You have to literally close your mouth for a second, you have to close your lips to make those sounds. Whereas if you're making a sound like 'r' /ɹ/ you don't have to actually close anything you're letting the sounds kinda come through. So the 'r' /ɹ/ sounds are near the bottom, but the /p, b/ sounds are near the top

Lauren: I mean that's the thing I found super neat about it when I was studying the IPA in undergrad was just how elegantly it captures all these different parameters in one table

Gretchen: Yeah, just to realize that someone has thought this through, thinking 'ok what are all the permutations you could put your mouth in and which ones do people actually use and let's organize this'

Lauren: And English just uses one subset of it

Gretchen: Yeah, every language is going to pick some subset of the sounds in this table, or if it doesn't we have to add something. So one of the cool things that you can do with the IPA because it's based on different positions the mouth can be in is adapt it to other mouth stuff. For example, Lauren Ackerman, who has the linguistics blog 'Wug Life', has made a table of emoji with their mouth positions as if they're making sounds in the IPA. So you can look at this table and she has things like the surprised emoji, which has kind of a round mouth and so that's like an 'oo' /u/ sound because you have to round your lips for that, and the 'ee' /i/ is kind of like a smile, and it is completely ludicrous but also great

Lauren: These are the important things that linguists do with their downtime

Gretchen: Yeah and the other cool thing you can do with the IPA is because you can use it to represent mouth sounds is you can write beatboxing in IPA, because beatboxing is done with the mouth

Lauren: Oh yeah, that must look amazing!

Gretchen: It looks so cool! I have a picture of it, of a chart that some beatboxing linguist researchers made

Lauren: That is awesome

Gretchen: So we'll link to that too

Gretchen: I mean we both have a lot of love for the International Phonetic Alphabet, obviously it's something we engage with a lot in all varieties of linguistic work. I think it's worth mentioning though that like, it's not perfect for everything, it can get really annoying sometimes.

Gretchen: Yes!

Lauren: Particularly, as I mentioned in terms of the fact that font encoding on computers is still a problem, you still occasionally will get proofs back from a publisher for a journal article and all the engma, they're all mysteriously like really ugly still, we haven't quite got there with them being part of the font set for every single font

Gretchen: Yeah and it can be hard to write on a normal keyboard

Lauren: Yeah it's also really annoying to write on a normal keyboard sometimes. Also especially in the vowels, like I get a bit of like IPA anxiety when I use IPA and share it with people publicly, especially for long passages of text it's not always that easy to transcribe things

Gretchen: Yeah, and as fluent writers we've gotten used to the Byzantine nature of the English spelling system and we we also know how to talk, but thinking about how you talk in a more conscious way to say 'what sound am I saying here, what sound am I saying there' -- that’s different. So it can be hard to write extended passages in IPA. I know if I make a blog post that has an English sentence or two in IPA, I'll inevitably get some corrections from a linguist or something that says “I think you're probably producing this sound here” and I'm like “Oh yeah you're right” because there's no spellcheck for IPA

Lauren: Yeah and also even if there were a spellcheck, you and I would produce different IPA transcriptions for our own pronunciation of things

Gretchen: Yeah and we're pretty good with understanding people's different pronunciations of things when we're hearing them, because I guess humans have a lot of evolutionary practice at that, but for reading things we have a fairly standardised system. I remember when I was still a young linguist back when John Wells's phonetic blog was active. He's a well-known British linguist who's involved in some of the history of the IPA and he used to keep a blog and he would sometimes write full posts in IPA. And they were really interesting for me to read, to practice but I also found them very difficult because he would be transcribing his own accent. And he was British and so he wouldn't write all these 'r' /ɹ/ after vowels that I would, so I had to figure out where all these /ɹ/ were supposed to be. I'd end up reading his post out loud to myself and hearing the British accent being like “oh yeah this is what he's trying to say”

Lauren: You would be saying it in his accent?

Gretchen: Yeah, I'd be saying it in his accent, because you can write someone's accent, which is the cool thing but also the more challenging thing about reading IPA

Lauren: Linguists also talk about broad IPA and narrow IPA transcription - so like, you can do a kind of rough-and-ready, mostly correct transcription, or actually if you are a phonetician and you're looking really closely at how people actually articulate things, you discover all kinds of things that you need to transcribe to capture the correct and accurate transcription but which people don't hear kind of consciously or would find really weird when you've represented it to them

Gretchen: Yeah or don't notice

Lauren: And there's often like phonological processes, like when you tell people that the vowel that they use in the middle of 'handbag' is actually, for native speakers if they say it quickly, it often becomes 'hambag'

Gretchen: 'hambag', like a ham sandwich

Lauren: Yeah, like a bag-o-ham. If you write it out in IPA, people are like ‘that's incorrect,’ and you're like 'well that's what you said'

Gretchen: There's a fun story about that, so English speakers also often say 'sammich' instead of 'sandwich' because the 'm' the like the nasal sound becomes like the 'w'. Except for Anglo-Italians; so in Canada there's like Italian Torontonians and Italian Montrealers and people who grew up in those communities often have a particular accent. So in that accent they say 'sangwich' instead of sammich' because in Italian the 'w' sound is kind of more velar whereas in English it's more labial and so it like pulls the nasal along with it to be a different sound

Lauren: And when you start transcribing things in really close IPA you can see those distinctions, it's really cool

Gretchen: Yeah and we often just reduce the vowels in words that we’re saying quickly or in the small unimportant function words we often reduce the vowels all to schwa or something like that

Lauren: I still remember in in my undergraduate class learning that English vowels will often change into schwa, this is the /ə/ sound in unstressed syllables and it just made me realize that for a certain set of words, that's why I was really bad at spelling them. Because you sit there and you're like 'is it amu... amuni ammunition?'. I mean, is it ammunitiON or is it ammunitiAN? That’s not a great word to use as an example but it's the first one that came to mind. For certain vowels, because it's unstressed and it's a schwa, it’s possible that any of the vowel letters could be used to spell it. So you just have to memorize what the spelling is because your pronunciation doesn't help you. And that's why I tell people I'm bad at English spelling - it’s not my fault, it's the fault of my stress system and orthography!

Gretchen: The other thing is, is sometimes English orthography gives you useful cues to distinguish between certain words or when a suffix who's added sometimes the stress changes and you have to recover vowels that are kind of there but had turned into schwa. So if you take a word like 'electric' which becomes 'electricity' - in some senses it's weird that it's spelled with a 'c' and not with a 'k' or an 's' because 'c' is completely redundant, it always makes one of those two sounds, but it does reflect that when it's 'electric' with the 'k' sound and then when you add an '-ity' to it, the 'k' sound becomes an 's' sound because that's what happens with 'c', but it doesn't happen with 'k'. Or the vowels also change - with 'electric', 'electricity' you get different sorts of vowels. So it's kind of useful to have some of this stuff there that was historically there and has changed in its sound. But it also creates this extra layer of complication. Or you can get used to speed reading because a word always looks like the same in spelling whereas if you had to speed read a whole bunch of different accents then an unfamiliar accent might be harder to speed read, but then again it's harder to learn spelling in the first place if you have an accent that's less similar to the spelling system

Lauren: But we still love the IPA for all of the occasional detriments that occur

Gretchen: We still love it and it's still useful to have it as an option to write something very specifically even if you don’t want to do that all the tim. I find if I'm meeting somebody and they have a name I haven't heard before, then I write it in IPA and then I can pronounce it correctly when I'm talking back to them. People like it when you pronounce their names correctly.

Lauren: That's handy. The Journal of the International Phonetic Association used to accept articles written in IPA, which blows my mind. So people would write about some feature of phonetics and they would do the whole thing in the IPA. I think it very quickly became apparent that that was more labour both to produce and to consume than there was any benefit in doing that, for many of the reasons that we've already mentioned

Gretchen: Like, 'hi I'm going to write about like long vowels in Sussex' or something and that whole thing would be in IPA

Lauren: Yes, I think academics clearly had more time on their hands 50 years ago.

Gretchen: I mean, to be fair, I have played IPA Scrabble, which is like Scrabble, but you do it in IPA

Lauren: Do you just kind of argue for your own pronunciation or do you have to do it in your own dialect?

Gretchen: The way that I've done it is I combined IPA Scrabble with Descriptivist Scrabble, which is a little bit like those bluffing games, so as long as you can convince other people that it's a word then it's a word

Lauren: Ah, I like that

Gretchen: Yeah, because like, dictionaries are arbitrary authorities anyway, so with Descriptivist Scrabble you can just use whatever means you have at your disposal to convince people that it's a word. Of course choosing an obvious word like dog or something is going to be easier to convince people than saying--

Lauren: blergh?

Gretchen: Yeah, than saying “blerg is a word, honestly it means a colour kind of like grey and blue at the same time” but you can try!

Lauren: There are heaps of cool things people have done with the IPA including someone has made a set of IPA Scrabble

Gretchen: Yeah so I posted on All Things Linguistic a set of frequencies and scores that you can use for IPA Scrabble tiles, because I made it with a friend in undergrad and we had figured this out. We just cut out bits of cardboard to make them, and then some undergrads at Yale came across this post and decided to get their friend who has like a wood cutting machine to cut these out of these gorgeous wood tiles and they sent me some photos which I've also posted. You can see those on the blog, they're amazing, so yeah so someone has made a wooden IPA set that I still have not played but it’s really cool

Lauren: IPA characters also make for popular tattoos because they're quite beautiful, so I've definitely seen a schwa tattoo and I've seen a glottal stop which is a little bit like a question mark - it's our logo!

Gretchen: It is also our logo. Do people get whole words in IPA or like phrases in IPA tattooed on them?

Lauren: Mmm I haven't seen any but if anyone has we will definitely be interested in seeing it

Gretchen: If you know any IPA tattoos please send them to us

Lauren: Well I've seen a couple but not that long

Gretchen: There's also a whole version of Alice in Wonderland that's published in IPA - so this takes us back to the Journal of Phonetics - and she's like talking to the Mad Hatter and so on and it's all in IPA. The weird thing about this particular version is that this publisher decided to also have capital letters

Lauren: Huh, interesting

Gretchen: And of course they had to make capital versions for all of the IPA letters

Lauren: Wow, that's commitment

Gretchen: Because you know if you think about it capitals are redundant, they don't add any extra phonetic information to a sound, so the IPA doesn't use them. And sometimes the IPA uses small cap versions of a letter to indicate a different sound because it's an extra symbol. And so instead this person decided that no, if I'm going to write it as a book I'm going to make capitals and so yeah it's very interesting how they decided them.

Lauren: Yeah, there you go. My IPA nerd craft activity was to cross stitch the consonant chart, I did that quite a few years ago and it's a very useful adornment in the office when you just need to quickly refer to some of the symbols. I also was going to do the vowel chart but the modern vowel chart is very very complicated and messy which is why I went with Jones's much more elegant original cardinal vowels

Gretchen: Ahh so you did a simplified version

Lauren: Yep I'll put links to those in the show notes

Gretchen: And you also did a cookie cutter, right?

Lauren: Oh yeah! I made a schwa cookie cutter for Christmas last year, just what you need, and it's a 3D printable cookie cutter, so you can also download that design and print your own and make your own gingerbread schwa or shortbread schwas.

Gretchen: That's great. There's also an IPA version of the game 2048, which came out when the game 2048 was popular - so that's the one where you like slide the tiles around and you try to combine to make bigger and bigger things. And so you start with a schwa and then you combine them to make an engma, which makes no sense phonetically, and then you combine them to make an esh. Again, this won't teach you anything about phonetics

Lauren: But it goes into more and more elaborate and less frequent forms

Gretchen: Yeah it does get to more and more elaborate stuff, like you end up with like a glottalised bilabial click or something like that

Lauren: Right, it doesn't officially teach you anything about the IPA but it is a good excuse for a distraction

Gretchen: You should not do it if you're a student and you're about to write an exam on the IPA, this is not a good way to procrastinate

Lauren: Official warning!

Gretchen: Instead you should play IPA scrabble

Lauren: Much better way!

Gretchen: Which will teach you some more about the IPA

Lauren: Or read Alice in Wonderland

Gretchen: There's also a fun sketch from the sketch comedy show John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme, which is a sketch where some characters encounter some skeletons and the skeletons are pirates but these skeletons cannot tell you that there are pirates because they don't have any lips, so they cannot produce the 'p', sound so they call themselves 'kirates',

Lauren: Awww

Gretchen: And the characters who encounter them are very confused, like 'what are you?' 'we're kirates, I said we're kirates!'. Anyway, I am probably not doing it justice but you should listen to it, we have a link to that as well

Lauren: Excellent

Gretchen: Although they don't make the point which I kept thinking, which was like 'Well, if the don't have any lips, they probably don't have any tongues either, so they probably can't produce any sounds because they're skeletons'

Lauren: They probably don't have any kind of pulmonic air flow ability

Gretchen: Like all they can do is clack

Lauren: Yup, Morse code?

Gretchen: Yeah! So skeletons can communicate with us in Morse code, there we go

Lauren: Yeah. I was going to say sign language just because I always seem to want to mention sign languages because they're always cool

Gretchen: Oh yeah please do

Lauren: it's worth pointing out that like obviously the IPA is for all spoken languages, if you haven't figured that out by this point in the podcast, I'll just make that abundantly clear. It’s for all oral languages. In individual sign languages people talk about like phonemes and morphemes in terms of hand shapes so there are some hand shapes that are possible in some sign languages that don't occur in others. And so you have a similar kind of basic feature sets that you can refer to in in sign languages. But because it uses a more complex modal articulation system and it isn't just limited to the mouth, then it's a bit more complicated cross-sign-linguistically, but they do have their own kind of equivalent of phonemes or phonetics

Gretchen: There's a couple different standardised sign transcription systems, I don't know if any of them have caught on at an international level in the same way to the IPA has, I mean to be fair there there are other phonetic transcription systems that aren't the IPA, it's just the IPA has caught on more than the others. But you can transcribe signs, there's a couple different ways of doing that. There's also the fact that sign languages have alphabets that they use to borrow words in from spoken languages among other functions and within that there are sign equivalents of at least some IPA characters, which I know because I've been to linguistics conferences and seen interpreters signing talks and they will sign a particular IPA symbol when the person who's giving the presentation is talking about that particular IPA symbol

Lauren: There you go

Gretchen: Yeah, I cannot recite any of them for you, but I remember noticing it and thinking 'huh, ok I guess that's what they're doing’

Lauren: Man, awesome!

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode go to Lingthusiasm dot com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow at @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo

Gretchen: And I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter and my blog is All Things Linguistic dot com. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, our producer is Claire and our music by The Triangles. Stay Lingthusiastic! [Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #ipa #International Phonetic Alphabet #phonetics #phonology #lingthusiasm #episode 6 #transcript #transcripts #podcast #accessibility

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vasilinaorlova · 7 years

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hologram and flamingo, superimposed / anatomy of hysterics

uncanny valley. spooky. translucent you are a bunch of hypocrites. you would swear you love me but still won’t buy my book. I am not drinking that coffee with you, nor do I eat that cheesecake I promised you to share with you one day. what?! I cannot possibly humanly supposedly theoretically hypothetically reasonably wait this long. “vinyl” is veritably the strangest word in the whole English language. the more you look at it the stranger it is. I know you cannot marry me for a variety of overwhelmingly silly reasons, but buy my book. It’s almost the same, only twice better. In fact it brings all the privileges of the named arrangement but none of its horrific downsides. I was about to throw a tantrum, conduct a scene, an instance of hysterics, a scandal, but– thank you who bought or plans to buy my book; when you have just published something, there is always this great anxiety. *wipes out traces of cheesecake from her cheeks with a tablecloth’s ridge*

I will drink coffee with you and I will eat that cheesecake *another one* that I promised I’ll eat with you one day. sigh. Billy Collins, I hear–and he’s one of the most successful poets at least among those who look like something recognizable as poets, for there are perhaps more successful ones, but their identity as poets is under a sort of question, a pending identity, as it were–Billy Collins sells some 18.000 copies of his poetry books a year, and earns $44.000 a year of royalties–which are ridiculously low numbers for one of the most famous poets alive of the huge English-speaking world. just how much more he’d earn if he wrote prose. or how even more he’d earn if he wrote self-help books. in some sense it is a privilege to be a poet in the Western society, to afford to be a poet. either you have nothing and you can therefore afford to be a poet, or you have to have a lot–a (preferably tenured) position in a good university by the very least, connections, time to and understanding how to submit endlessly carousels of your poems to journals (might be a full-time job in its own right), a lit agent at least, a publisher, etc., etc., etc. poetry is a completely thankless trade, a vain business (yet in another sense the most rewarding too).

hologram and flamingo, superimposed

(I am looking for a title for my streams.) hologram and flamingo: invariance theorem (another variant)

my writing career started in another language, another time, and in another country. there I was lucky to be absorbed momentarily, as soon as I gave the first glimpse of myself, into existing writing community. to be sure, an impoverished community it was, a community which had next to no power, no assets, not much of a political voice or any other kind of significance beyond its own imaginings, but a community consisting of viciously ambitious writers who are professionals of the Russian letters for what it is worth.

this community is relatively small in comparison to English-speaking writing communities, but it is also dense and centered around several dying literary journals. I publish my work in these journals and used to have books coming out regularly from publishing houses which predate on these journals as well.

the journals are treasures of writings that are barely read; their authors suffer constantly and viscerally from being un-demanded by the society. plainly put, there are no adequate infrastructures in existence, for the un-reader of said journals also exists, but laments the absence of good literature.

this un-reader dismisses the journals without reading them, because journals are the remnants of the previous epoch, surviving well into the new times in forms that seems to be outdated. (the irony of it, however, that they are just fine–in the Western world such professional journals look exactly the same). it is quite a world. pretty much everything I have ever written in Russian is published, except for diaries and things like that–something that I write for my own endless references.

I moved to the English-speaking world in 2010, and struggled with the language for quite a while (I continue struggling with it, every day is another challenge). here my successes are quite modest, at least they are not in any way in comparison with what I had in Russia.

now is a luminous, liminal moment: I have everything in endless drafts. tons of work. I like this work sincerely. my best pages are written in English, no doubt. however, there is a lot of difficulties with getting it out there. everything requires another round of revision. additionally, the services of a professional editor are extremely expensive, and I have to consult a highly skilled native speaker professional for any of my writings I attempt to advance. I asked friends to help me several times, but they cannot possibly run such a charity, and I am not entirely comfortable asking them all the time. …yes. this is about it. everything that appears in this book (Holy Robots) at some point was given away “for free,” as you put it, that is to say, was posted. I have no secret storages of writings that somehow exceed in mastery or ferocity what you see every day. however, the preparation of the book does involve selection, revisions, polishing, and, most importantly, building of sequences of poems, which is a crucial part. I try to compose my books so that each division in them has its own logic, and together they form a complex but permeable system. I believe the book should have a breathing; for the poetry book it is extremely important to think about the rhythm, architectonics, and harmony of the whole corpus of texts. I don’t know in what degree I succeeded with my task but I tried. a text into which it is easy to slip my old-time dream is fulfilled. when I was asking myself many times a day if I ever master the English language, the image of a remote room, the inhabitant of which would one day perhaps listen to my words in silence, was something that kept me going. don’t forget to write me an explicit report. Holy Robots consist(s) of eight divisions: “Holy Robots,” “Necromancer,” “Emperor,” “Missionary,” “Poems in a Male Voice,” “Alchemist,” “Paper Flowers,” and “Mirrors." Six poems out of the “Poems in a Male Voice” series were out in Figroot Press web literary journal December 2016. This is approximately one fifth part of all the Poems in a Male Voice. I am happy with this book but I am also tired of it. It took me a long time to put it together because I kept adding poems to two sections, “Poems in a Male Voice” and “Alchemist.” By the end of it I was thoroughly exasperated. I hope I will never write another Alchemist poem or Poem in a Male Voice. I am so done with both, I cannot even tell you. The tomb of the unknown writer Is a faceless obelisk {obscene] {obsidian] Amidst a deserted landscape, Surviving by pure chance, Rising alone, Throwing a straight shadow Like a sundial For no one to measure time; No flowers, And a path [petulant} Overtaken by virulent verdure. Infinite Jest traveled with me to Russia–Moscow and then Siberia–in 2013. It was the only book in English I took to that travel of mine. I rather liked and disliked the book. It is a writing as much fascinating as it is disappointing. Ulysses is another matter; one cannot really dislike it–it is already pretty much a monument covered with beautiful stains of respectable moss. (Who knew it’ll happen so soon.) German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s masterpiece is a trilogy consisting of “Bubbles. Spheres Volume I: Microspherology,” “Globes. Spheres Volume II: Macrospherology,” and finally “Foams. Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology.” Sounds like a life pleasantly spent. “…what Clément describes as a punitive adoration of female singers: "They suffer, they cry, they die.”“ –Alex Ross (”In Extremis,” The New Yorker, Jan.9, 2017) very true in regard to writing as well (Ross is talking about music) the female writer is constantly on the edge. inasmuch as the female writer is her character, she suffers terrible blows from life, even if as a person she’s perfectly fine. she follows through the enfilade unfolding: from one excruciating story into another. it’s a never-ending cascade of stairways, an endless kaleidoscope. the key is to sustain this spectacular falling for years without (or preferably with) the harm to the mental health. everything should fall apart to blow the reader away. if you don’t have tragedies in your life, forge them. exaggerate what little you have. keep them fascinated with the tragic sublime. be a figure of constant emaciation. a silhouette of the unbearable. sustain endless hysterics of writing. be a cascading cry, a carousel of terrible losses. "wake up from a nightmare into another nightmare.” feed vultures of déjà vu. pick worst lovers. pick lovers who would prostitute you on the agora. age tragically in one night. age irreversibly. choose strong betrayers. arrange a failure out of the most enduring friendships possible–a female friendship. bury relatives. divorce husbands. have a drug-addict child. nothing is too gross. don’t forget to die from your own hand.

#stream of consciousness #prose #poetry #hologram

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businessguide12-blog · 5 years

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A Secret Storytelling Weapon For Your Business - Tips by Matthew Luhn

New Post has been published on https://businessguideto.com/trending/a-secret-storytelling-weapon-for-your-business-tips-by-matthew-luhn/

A Secret Storytelling Weapon For Your Business - Tips by Matthew Luhn

I had the pleasure of meeting and talking to Matthew after he gave his speech at the combined stage of Filmteractive and UX Poland in Warsaw last year. In his lecture “The Power of Story,” he talked about how we can use storytelling in business in order to build better brand communication and influence the brand’s audiences, as well as how to combine two seemingly separate worlds – fantasy and business—to win over the hearts of clients and engage them in a dialogue with a firm. I have further explored this topic during my interview with Matthew Luhn—writer, story consultant, and speaker.

Matthew Luhn: So we’re going to talk about story for business.

Edyta Kowal: Yeah, exactly. First of all, thank you for your speech because it was really cool and I’ve heard from my friends that they loved it, and I loved it too. I’m really impressed by the way you tell stories.

ML: I better do that or I’d be in trouble [laughs].

EK: It’s really cool, because Polish speakers often can’t do that, I think. And it’s sad. But that brings me to the first question: how to become a famous keynote speaker? You started as a Disney animator, and now you’re this guy who teaches people all over the world about storytelling. Does it take some special exercises, or…?

ML: Well, you know, it’s funny because I haven’t been called a famous speaker before, uhm… I would say that I… I’ve always been someone who kind of speaks from my heart and I did grow up with a family that were definitely good at being storytellers and sharing some funny and sad moments that were happening in their lives. So, I think I was surrounded by people who were comfortable with telling stories. So that’s the first thing. But I would say that when I was a kid, you see, my mom was in Germany, right? And so when my mom came to the States, she did not speak any English. This was early 1970s; everyone in Germany speaks English right now. When I was a little kid I had speech problems. By the time I was in school and I was 10 years old, I had to go to speech therapy, because I was at difficult time speaking in front of people, and I would get words mixed up, and then I became very insecure, so whenever I was asked to go up in front of class to talk or do a report I would turn right red. And it was even worse because my cheeks were very “German-red,” you know, the red things here [pointing to his cheeks]. It probably was because when I started working at Pixar, on Toy Story, you have to go in front of everybody and you have to pitch a story to people at the company. You have the director, Steve Jobs, the ambassador… And then on top of that I had all those pimples—I had really bad acne… But you know what? You do that a thousand times, you end up stopping fearing. And then, when I would be asked to do things like this, I first off get to know the topic well. And when you do anything thousands and thousands of times, you start to become more comfortable, and then you start to really, let’s say… You test out certain things on the audience to see how they react. And then you’re like, “Oh, I’m not going to do that next time,” or “I’m going to add something new this time.” And so, yes, the answer is—practice.

EK: Okay, but how many times, I’m curious, you repeat your speech before going in front of the audience?

ML: I’ve given this talk a couple of times, so when I first started giving these kinds of talks, I would sit in the hotel bathroom and I would put a chair in front of the mirror where the sink is, and I would put a timer on the sink and I time myself. Like yesterday, there was no clock, they told me I had 45 minutes and when I walked off stage and I looked on the clock in the back of the stage—it was 45 minutes. Because I’ve done it so many times, practiced it. But the thing is that while I give it, I know that sometimes the audiences are different so I may have to talk about something, to elaborate on something, or leave something out. So I always have to change it a little bit, also to make it greater for me. But I do realize that there are certain stories out there that would connect to the people all around the world. That no matter what culture, age or gender, it’s universal. So, those are my little tricks.

EK: Do you think that everybody can learn how to tell a great story—as good as you do?

ML: I think you can get better at it. And, you see, when we were all little kids, like when we were all five years old, everybody (for the most part) was comfortable being an artist and being a storyteller, and singing and dancing. When we were about 4–5 years old. There’s something that happens that once we get into school, things start to become competitive. And you start to see that someone else draws better than you, or writes better then you. And so you say “I’m not an artist, I’m not a writer,” and then you stop. It’s because of the fear of failure that you start shutting down your natural gift of being a greater person. So I feel that everybody has a natural gift inside, but there are people that never gave it up, and so they’ve had all these years to practice.

But one of the things I do is I have this little tool that I use that helps people to be able to get better at storytelling. And it takes them back to how they told stories when they were kids with “Once upon a time…,” and “every day…,” and “and then one day…,” and what I do is I say that everyone’s a storyteller, you just have to follow these, right? And so, you can end up creating a story, and all you have to do is just answer each one of these questions and continue it. Each one of these little statements forces us to have a beginning and an end. You see, “Once upon a time,” and “Every day” and “Until one day,” that’s Act One. And because of that because of Act One there is an Act Two, and then “Until finally,” and “Since that day” and there’s Act Three, and the moral of the story is the theme.

EK: Okay, so here we have the perfect structure of a story.

ML: Right there. And it doesn’t scare a person, because they’re like, “I remember, this is like when you tell a story when you’re a kid.”

EK: You’re a consultant for filmmakers, but also for businesspeople. Do you teach them in the same way as filmmakers?

ML: So, then when you use this and you say, “OK, how can we tell the story of our company?” And you say, “Once upon a time there was an athlete whose name was Adi Dassler, and every day he would love to do sports and compete, until one day he was trying to help another athlete who wanted to run faster. So he figured out a way to put spikes on the bottom of his running shoes, and because of that other athletes came to Adi Dassler—“How can you help me to perform better in my sport, not just running—perhaps football?” And because of that, Adi Dassler continued. He started a company that helped build products to make people perform better at sports. And because of that he ended up partnering with his brother, who was very passionate about fashion, until finally they created their company—Adidas. And since that day, they have made shoes and products for people to be creative on and off the field. And the moral of the story is “When you follow something you’re passionate about, you can make a great company.”

EK: Is it the story you’ve came up with for Adidas?

ML: I do work for them a lot. So what I do is I will use this and companies should use this to be able to tell the story of their founder and how the company was started. You could also use this to tell a story around the product, let’s say a shoe. Well, how can you tell a story about a shoe? When you look at a shoe you want to connect it to a person, because the shoe is a tool that should be able to help a person to become a better athlete or feel more confident about themselves. So, I’ll tell you one more story: “Once upon a time, there was a 20-year old girl in the U.S. called Katherine Switzer. And every day she loved to run. Until one day, she wanted to win a race that women were banned to run in, it’s called the Boston Marathon. Because of that in 1967, she decided, ‘I’m going to sneak into the Boston Marathon race.’ And because of that the referees and the judges tried to push her out—physically push her out of the race. And because of that she continued to run it, she had some of the other people who were running in the race that were her friends pushing the judges and the referees away until finally she finished the race. And since that day the Boston Marathon race is for all genders, and also the races in the United States and in other parts of the world are not just for men. They can be for anybody. And the moral of the story is that competitive sports should be for everybody. And the shoes that she wore during that race were her favorite shoes, a pair of Adidas shoes. See? That’s what I do.

EK: You said that once upon a time your father wanted to become a Disney animator but then he saw you make a couple of drawings of him and so he decided that you will live his dreams and become a Disney animator. How did this animation adventure help you become this guy you are today?

ML: Well, you know what, I started off with a family that was all about business. We sold toys, but it was about business. And then I was this kid who wanted to make movies and draw, I still am, but through working in film and TV I realized this could be for anybody, not just for entertainment but for business. My family had toy stores, which they still do. Another one just opened up this month. And so my job in the toy store is to create the experience, the feeling. How to get people into the store when they walk down the street. What’s the hook? What do they see in the window, the sign, what music do they hear coming out of the store so they’d go, “Let’s go in this store,” right? And then, once they get in the store, what kind of experience do you create in the store, from the things they see, the music they’re listening to, what they smell, what they get to touch, to what stories they get to read on the walls. To make them think: “Oh, I though all stores are the same, like Toys’R’Us, but this is making me feel different about what a toy store could be like.” And it’s authentic because up on the wall is the story of Jeffrey’s Toys, all the way back to the 1940s, and they’re making a connection with the toys because they’re like, “I used to have that toy,” and then they feel good because we have a popcorn machine, and it’s making popcorn (everybody loves the smell of popcorn). And they love the music because the music is like Pixar music and cartoon music playing, and all of the sudden they feel good, and when you feel good you buy things. It’s not a trick.

EK: You did it again, you used some patterns to tell another story and here is my next question for you – can you use these patterns with businesspeople and brands too?

ML: Absolutely. You know, when you decide which shoes to buy, and you’re looking at different shoe brands like Nike, Adidas, Under Armor, or New Balance. They’re all, you know, about the same amount, and then the reason why you buy a particular pair of shoes is because they make you feel a certain way. Either I like all the history of the company, I like the sports figures that are behind it, or the entertainers that are advertising the shoe. The main reason why you buy a product is because it makes you feel a certain way. That feeling is a story. A story being told through the history of the shoe, the brand, the people who made it. And people, especially from Europe, when they see a Nike shoe, they’re like, “That’s United States, that’s like Michael Jordan, it’s basketball which is very much from the States—If I wear that, I’m walking around with a little bit of the good parts of the U.S.” There’s a story being told. And with Adidas, the story being told is—it’s multigenerational, it’s the oldest shoe, sports shoe, right? It’s not just for sport, it’s for entertainment. It’s like everything from Run-D.M.C. to Kanye West, Thrill Williams. This is the same thing that happens when you buy a car, same thing that happens when you buy a computer, or if you’re a businessperson and you want to get people to give you money to make your startup company. And you go to a meeting with investors and you’re one of twenty different companies that are going to come and ask for money. Where are you going to make yourself memorable from the twenty other companies that are going to pitch? It’s going to be your story, your company story, your brand story that is going to be memorable. And if you just share with them how much money they’re going to make, that would be forgettable. You want to be able to seal the deal by making a personal connection with them. Personal touch. And we all know that we like to work with people that we like, we like working at a company that we feel proud about – that’s important to us. And when they also end up paying you well, it’s the bonus. But that is what great storytelling does. Can you tell about your journey? Why did you want to start the company? Like Adi Dassler? Can you tell how your product is going to change people’s lives? Like with Katherine Switzer and the Boston Marathon? And then the final thing I use storytelling for is to paint a picture of what a person’s life would be like if they decided to invest in your company or buy your product. What will their life be like? How will they be changed? And that’s when you end up sharing with them how much better their lives are going to be, how they will be more successful, happier, everything, if they end up investing in your company or you as a person if they hire you.

EK: Can I get a better job by being a better storyteller?

ML: Absolutely you can. I mean, storytelling is about educating people with information, it’s about entertaining people, but most importantly is about inspiring. And when you tell a memorable personal story you end up inspiring people and they want you around. They want to be a part of that story.

EK: You mentioned being proud of your company. Imagine you’re a great company with a great story behind, and you hire Matthew Luhn to learn how to tell that story better to the world. And you have employees, you have people working with you. How to engage other people in the company in telling that story together with you?

ML: Well, the first thing you need to do is you have got to make sure that everybody knows what the company is about. In eight seconds, can you describe what the company is doing? Take Tesla for example. What they’re doing, in eight seconds, is that they’re trying to create fossil fuel-free vehicles that look cool, and I think that’s it. What if a company could create fossil fuel-free vehicles that looked cool? That’s what the company is all about. Can you describe in eight seconds what is your company all about? And if you can do that then everybody at the company will be like, “I know what my company is about.” And then the next step is, can you describe what your job is within the company? See, a lot of times people feel disconnected from where they work because they don’t really know what their company is doing, they’re big-purpose and making the world a better place. They don’t really know what their job is within the company. They’re like, “I know I do human resources,” or “I’m a programmer,” but what they don’t know is how to answer a simple question of “Why am I really here?” And if you don’t know what your company story is or you don’t know your story within the company, or how your things are changing people, then all of the sudden you’re just coming in to get a paycheck. And then all of the sudden your heart is not into the job, and when you have a bunch of employees like that, your company has no direction and no heart. So what I do is, when I’m trying to get all the employees to be working together and be productive and happy, I make sure that everybody knows what the story of the company is, why they’re there and how they’re going to change the world. I know it sounds very simple, but it does take a storyteller sometimes to help remind them. And so I would go to a lot of companies to help clarify what their company does, what people do at the company, and how they’re going to change the world.

EK: Have you ever had a tough case, a company that you weren’t able to help or that one that didn’t end up using your advice on how to tell their story?

ML: A lot of times companies call me in to help them, and I’ll work all day with them or a couple of weeks with them to help them do this, then it’s up to them if they decide to stick to it. Or they have me come in to make sure they’re on the right track. Adidas has done a great job. I came in and started to work with them a year and a half ago and their stock just doubled last year. It’s because their story, of their company and their products, is starting to resonate with people. They’re just not trying to be Nike, what their story is, in eight seconds, that what if there was a shoe and apparel company that helped you to be the most creative you can be on and off the field. Not just a as sports person, but in all aspects of life. That’s what their story is now. And now everybody knows that and they can have better time understating what their job is at Adidas.

EK: And that was an example of a success story.

ML: Now, I would say that a lot of times, companies – especially the ones that have been around for a long time—have a little bit of a harder time saying, “Let’s do something new.” Like BMW. They’ve been around a long time, they’re very successful, so they are thinking, “Why should we change?” But the thing is that technologies change, the environment changes, things change in our social environment, and you need to make sure that you are adapting, that you’re innovating. So you just say to yourself, “We’re going to keep making diesel vehicles.” And now Germany is like banning diesel. And now BMW is like having to figure out, “Do we make electric cars when they’ve been laughing at Tesla; that will never pay off!” And now they are kind of shitting their pants. When you get to this place where you start saying, “No, we’ve never done it that way before”—that’s bad. You need to constantly be adapting and innovating. And to be able to do that you need to be constantly coming back and asking yourself, “What is the story of our company? What is our vision? What is the story of our people within the company? What is the story behind our product (even a car)?

EK: When you run a company, what is the right moment to think about this kind of strategy? About storytelling?

ML: I’d say that definitely before people start asking for it, this is when you want to innovate. You want to start seeing if you’re starting to get locked in to certain patterns. So, at Pixar Toy Story was very successful. It’s a “buddy” story. You must have seen some buddy stories: two characters that hate each other at the beginning of the story, they get stuck with each other in Act Two and have to work together and then in Act Three they become best friends. Like half of the movies every year in the whole world are buddy stories, right? So Toy Story was successful, but then there were another buddy story, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo, and Cars. And at the Studio we were like, “We are starting to make a formula, we are making almost all buddy stories. We better do something different before people start saying to us, “Guys, all your films are the same.” So that’s when we started making films like The Incredibles, which was not a buddy story. Or we started doing things like Inside Out where there was no traditional villain. You have to constantly be forcing yourself to take chances, to take risks that may fail in order to be a truly creative company. And this is not just for entertainment, it’s for business as well. So when Adidas decided, “We are going to end up making shoes that are not going to be connected to an athlete,” like Kanye West with the yeezy shoe which is the most popular shoe this year, people would say this is crazy: “Who’s going to buy a shoe for like a thousand bucks?” But the thing is that, to be a truly creative company, you need to be disruptive. And when you just say, “I’m going to copy what other companies are doing; I’m just going to blend in”—you are not being disruptive, you are just doing what everybody else is doing. You need to take risks. Risks are scary, especially for big companies. They don’t want to lose their image that they’ve worked so hard building. Or all of their money stored in their treasure pile. But if you don’t do this, slowly your company is going to go from successful to just now doing this, a slow death. You need to constantly be reinventing yourself.

EK: Speaking about image and about my target group, PR professionals. Polish PR pros are now speaking very loudly about how they’ve engaged in content marketing. They want to be closer to it, but I have an impression that they’re not creating any content at all. But they’re trying to show that content marketing is what they’ve been doing all the time. Would you have any tips for them?.

ML: Well, I would say, going back to the roots of storytelling, of what makes a great story, and I would imagine that even in a newsmagazine, you always want to make sure that you have a hero and a goal, and a set of obstacles, and how they were changed. I’d imagine you need that in every news story. I know people want to sell magazines and all that but you still need to put a good story in it. I would imagine everybody working at a newspaper or magazine should have a good sense of storytelling and know the basics of not just writing and dialoguing and that stuff but how to craft a good story, I imagine that would be important. You guys can always call me up if you’d like [laughs]. You know, some of my favorite instructors and teachers that I have learned from about storytelling are people like Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell is great in a way that he has put together all the universal themes of stories people have been telling to each other for thousands of years. He’s great. Also looking at not just great directors and writers but at people who are great at teaching it, like David Mamet. He has written a lot of great books on how to write. Those are the people that I’m always learning from. But there does come a point where you just need to write and to learn from your mistakes. Just know that practice will make you better.

EK: In one of your interviews you said you felt like a “story prophet.” What is the most difficult thing about being a story prophet?

ML: Well, I would say that it’s important in every industry to make sure that you’re sharing what you have learned to be able to help people. I think it’s very bad when, as an artist or an inventor, or someone in business, you learn things and you just keep it to yourself. Pixar has done very well and The Simpsons have done very well, especially the early part of both of those companies, and I want to share what I’ve learned with people. To be able to help them be able to do whatever job they do better, for entertainment or business. The difficult thing with that is that everybody wants me to come out and do talks and share all that and I need to make sure that I still give myself time to continue to create. It’s important that I’m teaching and sharing it with people, but I don’t want to stop creating myself. I want to still continue to do things, the only problem is that there’s only so many hours in a day and I’m working on a couple of movies with studios that I’m a part creator of and I also have three children and a wife, so the biggest challenge for me is time.

EK: But you don’t drink four bottles of wine every night…

ML: No, I’m a very busy, very “German-work-ethic” kind of person so I’m very smart about using the time I have. So I do most of my writing on scripts in airplanes, I use that as my writing time, so then when I’m with my family it’s just family time. So, that’s the challenge for me.

EK: I’m glad that you said that you’re still doing a lot of animation work and staying on top of things in your field because I think that many people who are experts at the beginning and then become keynote speakers finally stop doing what they’ve been all along. And people end up hearing speeches from the same Coca-Cola guy about all the cool things he was doing in the 1960s.

ML: Yeah, that could be a dangerous thing because it can make you rest on your laurels, just talking about the things that you’ve done. I think for me, that’s why I’m trying to do both of them: I’m working on films that are going to come out and teaching still, because I do love to travel, I won’t lie. I love going to new places and meeting new people. But I’m still an artist, I’m still a creative person, I can’t stop doing that or a part of me would die.

EK: What will you be doing in 10 years?

ML: What I think I would like to do is I want to continue to be working in film or TV, I want to continue working on things that have a good story, I don’t know if they’re going to be family entertainment or if it would be more selective but I do know that whatever I’ll be doing in 10 years, it’s going to be something creative. And I will be working until the day I die. I will never be retiring because that sounds really boring. And I hope that I will be able to do this with my family somehow, that I can work them into that.

EK: So a family-run creative business then…

ML: Well, my wife is still at Pixar, she’s been there 10 years and she’s also a writer and a story artist. We do the same job. And it would be fun if we ended up creating something together as a team. That could be fun.

EK: Can’t wait for the results. Fingers crossed! Thank you very much.

ML: My pleasure.

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How To Turn “Once Upon a Time” Into A Secret Storytelling Weapon For Your Business

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