#think of something so I starting reading something on jstor about it which made me thing more about the last chapter & now I’m just.

[sourkitsch]

*fishes something out of my pocket*

“Kafka what do I do?”

“Get the fries. You’ll need the energy for the coming days.”

[nat-of-personifs]

i dont normally send asks but i came across ur blog and you have some really cool ideas when it comes to personification stuff,, ur like one of the few other ppl ive found that actually includes polandball and countryhumans in personified fandom stuff so id love to hear ur ideas abt them!! as someone with a fascination with fandom history id be down to discuss stuff more with u if u wanna

uh *checks notes* I am going to assume you mean their dynamic/hcs about each!! I’ve never delved very deeply into Countryhumans fandom history/her dynamics with the others because. Controversy but I still do have lots of ideas about her. And she is *the* quintessential Canonless G(A) fandomspirit to me, probably because she’s the first one I was part of. You get into G(A) through Hetalia, Countryhumans, or Polandball mostly and they’re the faces of the whole place so,,, very well defined House triad here.

What I do say is CH is PB and Hetalia’s conceptual daughter (her premise is kind of both of theirs mashed together) but Hetalia and the other two are separated by the Canon-Canonless divide (and the fact that he has a husband) and thus don’t talk as much. (Which is funny because his two actual sons, Fandomstuck and Socialstuck, are both Canonless.) Also, he gets into Reality more often because he has more cosplayers. But their dynamic is more like older-younger sibling, they swing back and forth between working together well (sharing headcanons and Netizens) and actually beating each other up (raids). From what I’ve seen, and I’m mostly saying this from CH’s POV, he’s more likely to start it than she is.

Both of them are a little scared of each other, PB because he has a lot of overlap with her and is the closest to seeing inside of her brain (he’s read her writing before) and is uncomfortable around it, CH because she can never tell when PB is being sarcastic and when he actually means what he says. She usually assumes he’s being serious.

Also, fandomspirits don’t get as possessive of their people as much as OTJs do, which, considering the way they feed, is probably a good thing. So they don’t fight about who gets the food; they’re content, and CH even likes receiving less because it’s made her swings less severe.

I have no idea what’s going on with her right now because I can’t check her tag and no longer use Wattpad (her Wattpad room is way more active than her AO3 room from what I remember) for personal reasons, but is the Save the Countryhumans Fandom thing still happening?

Fun fact: she’s the second fandomspirit of Countryhumans. The first one was the Country Guardian, Nadia. She got thrown into temporary leave for killing another Guardian which she felt (feels) guilty about even with most of her memories wiped.

CH’s rooms in G(A) are vandalized to hell and back. She’s used to it.

What I meant about swings: she has periods of making shipping Whatever the Hell She Wants (btw in the personifverse G(A) is technically RPF) and then periods of feeling incredibly guilty about it.

Wikipedia, Britannica and JSTOR are her favorite places.

All of her spin-offs (Statehumans, Planethumans, social media humans (subordinate of Socialstuck in the twins’ journalism business)) live in her head but can manifest bodies at will. Planethumans is the most independent one.

She’s jealous of Centricide because they get to unironically ship Nazis and Communists without people yelling at them.

Actually she’s jealous of pretty much every other G(A) member.

Physically 14 because that’s what everyone sees her people as. Russian-Brazilian, I think? Russian definitely (VK). But no one knows exactly where she came from. Also Korean. Maybe. Everyone sees something different.

Oh!! Oh!! She’s thinking about sending ambassadors to Collab Horror (where SCP lives). I’m the result. I’ve been tasked with giving her another child :) I’m trying I know I don’t talk to her a lot anymore but I still love her

I know you came here half for PB but I don’t have many headcanons about him :( he is definitely the face G(A) would most like to show to the public, and really good at art (terrible at writing) except he can’t be bothered to try mostly. (I’ve been on some of his subreddits some of the pictures are pure eye candy)

I hope this doesn’t spark an argument because I don’t want this to be the third site I kick myself out of.

Sorry for taking a while to reply, I blame the Great Ira-Aaron Angstfest of 2023.

[solradguy]

I'm kinda scared of saying I kin anything because I'm not sure how that works. if it's not too much trouble, could you explain it to me, please?

Ah man... It's complicated and the identity itself is massively decentralized so I'll do my best to kind of explain what I've been able to dig up and what it means to me. Most of this information was gathered from essays written by therians or animal/mythological beasts kin. There is not much information about or written by fictionkin, which is... a complex source of frustration for me.

So, at its core, otherkin is a spiritual identity. Nearly every essay I've read on it has very clearly stated in the opening paragraph that the author is fully aware that they are not physically the thing they are kin with. But there's this deep connection to the thing they kin ("resonance") that goes beyond it just being a way to say that character/animal/concept/etc is their absolute favorite. One essay I read ("We are spirits of another sort") that did touch on fictionkin a little described it as being an archetypal or metaphorical identity alongside being a spiritual one.

For example, with my relation to Sol, obviously I'm not actually physically him, he isn't real, and I wouldn't want to ever go through the things he's been through. But still it's uncanny how relatable he is and it's easy to sort of filter or explore myself through him, I guess. This is something I didn't realize I did with characters throughout my whole life until recently with Sol. It started as a bunch of jokes my friends made at my expense (lovingly, I promise) which made me look into otherkin stuff more and, yeah, that's apparently what this is.

To some people this identity can feel extremely real though. A sense that maybe in a past life they were the animal they have a connection to now as a human is a common one. Recurring themes in dreams too. Some others even get phantom limb sensations to varying degrees for limbs humans don't generally have (wings, tails, absent horns or antlers, etc). Not everyone gets these and those that do don't always experience them the same way. I get some of these but I'm not going to elaborate on them on this blog. This part of the identity specifically makes me wish there was a real scientific study done on it since there's definitely something neurological going on here.

I suppose if you see a lot of yourself in a character/animal/whatever then you might also be a type of otherkin too. I highly recommend looking for information on this identity outside of Tumblr though. Its meaning has been distorted a bit on here and there's a lot of weird drama around it with very little actual conversation. Making a private sideblog or journal to try to sort out your feelings and thoughts towards what you think you might be kin of has helped me a lot too.

There are essays on otherkin.net that I found useful in my initial dive into this in their featured articles tab:

For something slightly less anecdotal, "We are spirits of another sort" by Joseph P. Laycock was also informative. It's on JSTOR and you'll have to sign in to an institution to read/download it but I can upload a PDF of it somewhere tomorrow if you don't have a method of reading it for free.

A couple otherkin/therians have Neocities sites with essays on their experiences too. Doing a search for "otherkin" should bring them up. I'm replying to this on mobile or I'd link some, sorry...

Even if you read a lot about it or try applying the identity label to yourself for a bit and it doesn't work out, just remember that that's alright. It's good to test out and explore things and with something "open source" like otherkinity, there truly is no "wrong" way to identify with it. Just do what feels right or most comfortable to you.

Some briefer definitions:

Otherkin: This is a blanket term for all these kinds of identities but most often means someone kin with an animal, mythological beast (dragons, unicorns, demons, etc), or concept (weather patterns, inanimate objects). Conceptkin seem especially fringe.

Fictionkin: Otherkin with a fictional character or species. Formerly called "mediakin".

Therian: An exclusively animal-based identity. Almost shamanistic? The reincarnation aspect seems strongest with therians, with a feeling of an animal soul displaced in a human body.

[stagkingswife]

hello! i find that there is a lot of info out there about reaching out to a deity for worship but im curious about tutelage that you mentioned? im feeling drawn to the idea of reaching out to apollo for divination tutelage and i would loove to hear some tips and tricks on how to start and how to uphold such a relationship? what amount of energy is needed vs traditional worship?

It’s been a pretty rough pain week and change over here in Stagland, and Tumblr lost my work on this ask not once, but twice. So I appreciate your patience on this ask. I hope this response is as good as I think the first attempt was!

If you’re looking to read about tutelary spirits you may not find anything depending on where you’ve been looking. If you’ve been looking just on social media and in the “New Age Spirituality” section of book stores it’s not a popular term there. Try looking at academic publications, particularly in the Anthropology of religion, Folklore, and Classics realms. That’s the world that the term comes from. In the academic field of Classics the term tutelary spirits is most often used to refer to patron/guardian/mentor entities of particular places, cities, or even individual people. You may also find some helpful information in ethnographic studies of various shamanic practices around the world. I know JSTOR, Google Scholar, and the local college library aren’t the place everyone starts their research, but for this subject that’s where I would recommend.

As for tips and tricks, that’s a little bit harder… I’m oathbound to not discuss the details of most of what I Oisin taught me in our time together as master and apprentice. I’ll try to paint a vague image for you from which you can extrapolate and still answer your question.

It’s not clear from your ask if you already have a relationship with Apollo, but if you don’t I would recommend striking one up. I had worshiped the entity that I would come to know as Oisin for a few years before he took me on as his apprentice. We had a very solid relationship before any tutelage began, and I think having that pre-established trust is very important. This isn’t likely to be true of all spirit mentors, but Oisin was not a gentle teacher. He would often give me difficult or vague tasks or tests with little preparation or context and expect me to figure it out, sometimes with the help of an ally or guide, but often alone. It sometimes made learning feel like a series of dangerous adventures and perilous quests in the Otherworld. Here’s a retelling of one example of such an adventure that I was allowed to write up. This worked fantastically for me, and I can’t say if this was a lucky match in learning style and teaching style, or him knowing that I would respond well to it. But I feel that it was critical to this process that I trusted him before he ever set such a test or task. I never doubted that I was supposed to learn from these tasks, or that I would be able to manage whatever he set me, no matter how daunting it seemed.

Having multiple reliable communication methods with your teacher is also something I would highly recommend. If you aren’t confident in multiple methods of communication maybe that is something you could add to your “lesson plan.” My line of thinking is that this is going to be a long and important relationship, you don’t want to put all of those eggs in just one communication basket. You’ll want ways of communicating symbolically, directly, and of confirming and checking those first two.

For me being Oisin’s apprentice was a much bigger commitment of energy and time than worshiping him, or even being his spouse. He was an exacting teacher, and expected a lot from me, and I was prepared to give my all. I swore my oath to him because I knew he could teach me what I wanted and I was prepared to go to whatever lengths he asked to get what I wanted, and because I already trusted him. This doesn’t have to be the case, you can arrange schedules, limits, and boundaries with your tutelary spirit, just like any other entity - I just chose not to. There may be spirits who are “my way or the highway” when to comes to teaching, learning from them will be a bigger commitment than worshiping someone on your own schedule in your way, but there’s no way of knowing an entity’s teaching style until you approach them about the subject. Luckily there are a lot of entities who can offer divination tutelage, so if the first one you contact isn’t a good match you can try others! Find a mentor that works for you and what you need.

[clare-with-no-i]

Hi! I always wanted to ask you what was your research process for Theogony because i marveled at how good your writing and knowledge are !! What books and authors did you read ?

hi hi hi!! this is very sweet and I'm sorry I held it captive in my inbox for so long!

so, one thing about me is that I love research, lol. I've worked for going on four years as a research fellow and as a private researcher for historians, so I am very comfortable throwing myself into a good bit of online research for the fun of it.

for theogony, I pretty much just started with going into google scholar and looking up anything I could find about 5th century BCE Greece and, more specifically, Athens. I wanted to make Lily seem like she could believably be a PhD student in Classics, which meant that I myself had to familiarize myself with at least some level of classical literature. I read a bit of Xenophon, some Herodotus, and luckily enough for me Michel Foucault incorporates a lot of Greek philosophy into his works on sexuality (and others, but I started those because it was the most relevant).

for the most part I stuck with online articles from historical / anthropological journals, but thanks to the amazing @stonecoldhedwig I am now the owner of a book called By The Wine Dark Sea by James LaFond which has really helped me shape my understanding of the era! the only other book I read was Paul Cartledge's The Battle of Plataea book, which came in handy specifically for this latest chapter.

my process was really quite simple, which I think is something that throws people off a bit, lol: I would hone in on whatever aspect I felt I needed to research to give an honest portrayal (for example: I needed to look up if there was such a thing as a charge of false prophecy in Ancient Greece), go into an online archive like JStor or even Google Scholar, and search with key words. before even starting the story, though, I made sure to have a relatively solid enough background that I could rely on my own instincts rather than look up every single detail. my bookmarks page looks like this HAHA:

see? this is a mess.

and if you're ever curious about what I used in any particular chapter, I always have a little bibliography-type-thing in my chapter endnotes!

thanks again for this question! and thanks for reading!

[cappymightwrite]

What draws you to incest ?

*sighs* Ok, here we go. I'm a real card carrying Jonsa now aren't I?

Anon, listen. I know this is an anti question that gets bandied about a lot, aimed at provoking, etc, when we all know no Jonsa is out here being all you know what, it really is the incest, and the incest alone, that draws me in. I mean, come on now. Grow up.

If I was "drawn" to incest I'd be a fan of Cersei x Jaime, Lucrezia x Cesare, hell Oedipus x Jocasta etc... but I haven't displayed any interest in them now, have I? So, huh, it can't be that.

Frankly, it's a derivitive question that is really missing the mark. I'm not "drawn" to it, though yeah, it is an unavoidable element of Jonsa. The real question you should be asking though, is what draws GRRM to it? Because he obviously is drawn to it, specifically what is termed the "incest motif" in academic and literary scholarship. That is a far more worthwhile avenue of thinking and questioning, compared with asking me. Luckily for you though anon, I sort of anticipated getting this kind of question so had something in my drafts on standby...

You really don't have to look far, or that deeply, to be hit over the head by the connection between GRRM's literary influences and the incest motif. I mean, let's start with the big cheese himself, Tolkein:

Tolkein + Quenta Silmarillion

We know for definite that GRRM has been influenced by Tolkein, and in The Silmarillion you notably have a case of unintentional incest in Quenta Silmarillion, where Túrin Turambar, under the power of a curse, unwittingly murders his friend, as well as marries and impregnates his sister, Nienor Níniel, who herself had lost her memory due to an enchantment.

Mr Tolkein, "what draws you to incest?"

Old Norse + Völsunga saga

Tolkein, as a professor of Anglo-Saxon, was hugely influenced by Old English and Old Norse literature. The story of the ring Andvaranaut, told in Völsunga saga, is strongly thought to have been a key influence behind The Lord of the Rings. Also featured within this legendary saga is the relationship between the twins Signy and Sigmund — at one point in the saga, Signy tricks her brother into sleeping with her, which produces a son, Sinfjotli, of pure Völsung blood, raised with the singular purpose of enacting vengence.

Anonymous Norse saga writer, "what draws you to incest?"

Medieval Literature as a whole

A lot is made of how "true" to the storied past ASOIAF is, how reflective it is of medieval society (and earlier), its power structures, its ideals and martial values etc. ASOIAF, however, is not attempting historical accuracy, and should not be read as such. Yet it is clearly drawing from a version of the past, as depicted in medieval romances and pre-Christian mythology for instance, as well as dusty tomes on warfare strategy. As noted by Elizabeth Archibald in her article Incest in Medieval Literature and Society (1989):

Of course the Middle Ages inherited and retold a number of incest stories from the classical world. Through Statius they knew Oedipus, through Ovid they knew the stories of Canace, Byblis, Myrrha and Phaedra. All these stories end more or less tragically: the main characters either die or suffer metamorphosis. Medieval readers also knew the classical tradition of incest as a polemical accusation,* for instance the charges against Caligula and Nero. – p. 2

The word "polemic" is connected to controversy, to debate and dispute, therefore these classical texts were exploring the incest motif in order to create discussion on a controversial topic. In a way, your question of "what draws you to incest?" has a whiff of polemical accusation to it, but as I stated, you're missing the bigger question.

Moving back to the Middle Ages, however, it is interesting that we do see a trend of more incest stories appearing within new narratives between the 11th and 13th centuries, according to Archibald:

The texts I am thinking of include the legend of Judas, which makes him commit patricide and then incest before betraying Christ; the legend of Gregorius, product of sibling incest who marries his own mother, but after years of rigorous penance finally becomes a much respected pope; the legend of St Albanus, product of father-daughter incest, who marries his mother, does penance with both his parents but kills them when they relapse into sin, and after further penance dies a holy man; the exemplary stories about women who sleep with their sons, and bear children (whom they sometimes kill), but refuse to confess until the Virgin intervenes to save them; the legends of the incestuous begetting of Roland by Charlemagne and of Mordred by Arthur; and finally the Incestuous Father romances about calumniated wives, which resemble Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale except that the heroine's adventures begin when she runs away from home to escape her father's unwelcome advances. – p. 2

I mean... that last bit sounds eerily quite close to what we have going on with Petyr Baelish and Sansa Stark. But I digress. What I'm trying to say is that from a medieval and classical standpoint... GRRM is not unique in his exploration of the incest motif, far from it.

Sophocles, Ovid, Hartmann von Aue, Thomas Malory, etc., "what draws you to incest?"

Faulkner + The Sound and the Fury, and more!

Moving on to more modern influences though, when talking about the writing ethos at the heart of his work, GRRM has famously quoted William Faulker:

His mantra has always been William Faulkner’s comment in his Nobel prize acceptance speech, that only the “human heart in conflict with itself… is worth writing about”. [source]

I’ve never read any Faulker, so I did just a quick search on “Faulkner and incest” and I pulled up this article on JSTOR, called Faulkner and the Politics of Incest (1998). Apparently, Faulkner explores the incest motif in at least five novels, therefore it was enough of a distinctive theme in his work to warrant academic analysis. In this journal article, Karl F. Zender notes that:

[...] incest for Faulkner always remains tragic [...] – p. 746

Ah, we can see a bit of running theme here, can't we? But obviously, GRRM (one would hope) doesn’t just appreciate Faulkner’s writing for his extensive exploration of incest. This quote possibly sums up the potential artistic crossover between the two:

Beyond each level of achieved empathy in Faulkner's fiction stands a further level of exclusion and marginalization. – pp. 759–60

To me, the above parallels somewhat GRRM’s own interest in outcasts, in personal struggle (which incest also fits into):

I am attracted to bastards, cripples and broken things as is reflected in the book. Outcasts, second-class citizens for whatever reason. There’s more drama in characters like that, more to struggle with. [source]

Interestingly, however, this essay on Faulkner also connects his interest in the incest motif with the romantic poets, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron:

As Peter Thorslev says in an important study of romantic representations of incest, " [p]arent-child incest is universally condemned in Romantic literature...; sibling incest, on the other hand, is invariably made sympathetic, is sometimes exonerated, and, in Byron's and Shelley's works, is definitely idealized.” – p. 741

Faulkner, "what draws you to incest?" ... I mean, that article gives some good explanations, actually.

Lord Byron, Manfred + The Bride of Abydos

Which brings us onto GRRM interest in the Romantics:

I was always intensely Romantic, even when I was too young to understand what that meant. But Romanticism has its dark side, as any Romantic soon discovers... which is where the melancholy comes in, I suppose. I don't know if this is a matter of artistic influences so much as it is of temperament. But there's always been something in a twilight that moves me, and a sunset speaks to me in a way that no sunrise ever has. [source]

I'm already in the process of writing a long meta about the influence of Lord Byron in ASOIAF, specifically examining this quote by GRRM:

The character I’m probably most like in real life is Samwell Tarly. Good old Sam. And the character I’d want to be? Well who wouldn’t want to be Jon Snow — the brooding, Byronic, romantic hero whom all the girls love. Theon [Greyjoy] is the one I’d fear becoming. Theon wants to be Jon Snow, but he can’t do it. He keeps making the wrong decisions. He keeps giving into his own selfish, worst impulses. [source]

Lord Byron, "what draws you to—", oh, um, right. Nevermind.

I'm not going to repeat myself here, but it's worth noting that there is a clear through line between GRRM and the Romantic writers, besides perhaps melancholic "temperament"... and it's incest.

But look, is choosing to explore the incest motif...well, a choice? Yeah, and an uncomfortable one at that, but it’s obvious that that is what GRRM is doing. I think it’s frankly a bit naive of some people to argue that GRRM would never do Jonsa because it’s pseudo-incest and therefore morally repugnant, no ifs, no buts. I’m sorry, as icky as it may be to our modern eyes, GRRM has set the president for it in his writing with the Targaryens and the Lannister twins.

The difference with them is that they knowingly commit incest, basing it in their own sense of exceptionalism, and there are/will be bad consequences — this arguably parallels the medieval narratives in which incest always ends badly, unless some kind of real penance is involved. For Jon and Sansa, however, the Jonsa argument is that they will choose not to commit incest, despite a confused attraction, and then will be rewarded in the narrative through the parentage reveal, a la Byron’s The Bride of Abydos. The Targaryens and Lannisters, in several ways excluding the incest (geez the amount of times I’ve written incest in this post), are foils for the Starks, and in particular, Jon and Sansa. Exploring the incest motif has been on the cards since the very beginning — just look at that infamous "original" outline — regardless of whether we personally consider that an interesting writing choice, or a morally inexcusable one.

Word of advice, or rather, warning... don't think you can catch me out with these kinds of questions. I have access to a university database, so if I feel like procrastinating my real academic work, I can and will pull out highly researched articles to school you, lmao.

But you know, thanks for the ask anyway, I guess.

[studythenight-away]

Hello! As finals season (aka 5-research-papers-due-in-a-week season) dawns on many of you, I thought I would share the process I used to write papers in college. This made writing long research papers much less daunting (but can also work on shorter papers). I really hope this helps some of you who feel stuck. Especially during these ridiculous times, when you're stuck at home and might have other uncontrollable factors affecting your mental health, a clear framework of what to do could be helpful. Good luck, my friends! You got this.

About me

I graduated college in 2018 with degrees in Political Science + International Studies and will be starting law school this fall. I wrote nearly 20 15 to 25-page papers, never earning below an A. I loved researching about my topics but hated writing. It's tedious, takes so much time, and everything I write sounds bad at first. Plus, I was a terrible procrastinator so most of these essays were written in under a week. Talk about stress.

Over time I found a process that worked for me, one that made churning out a paper seem straightforward, like going through a factory line rather than this terrifying concept of writing 10,000 words. It kept me sane without decreasing the quality of my work (or more importantly, how much I learned!) 

I'm thinking about making a short video to show this in action… let me know if that could be helpful!

Step 1: Research

How you organize your research is a key step in keeping you sane. Usually I'll have a pile of 20 books in my dorm along with dozens of JSTOR tabs open on my laptop, and that can get overwhelming very fast. Right now just focus on collecting ideas, not developing an argument or even an outline! As with most research papers, you could be starting with little to no background information on the topic, so it is still too early to be thinking about an argument.

Put all your research in one document

Open up a new doc: this will be the heart of everything. For a 15-page paper I usually end up with around 14-18 pages of typed research, 10 pt font, single spaced, tiny margins. This seems like a lot, but essentially all I do is type up anything I read that seems relevant to my topic, so luckily this step does not require that much brain power. Just type type type!

Use the table of contents

Find the chapter(s) that are actually relevant instead of skimming through the whole book. Time is of the essence here!

Use Zotero, cite right away

You can also use easybib or whatever you're used to, but keep track of your sources. I like Zotero because I can keep a log of all of my sources and copy the footnote or bibliography version whenever needed. Before you even begin reading, cite the source and copy it into your research doc. This will save you so much time later when you have to put in your citations in the actual paper. 

Here is an example of what my research doc looks like:

Full citation is my heading for each source just so it’s crystal clear

I ignore all typos (I don’t think there are any in this part though, go me!) because my head is buried in the book just trying to get all the info down

I always start with the page number so I know what to cite when I go back

Create a shorthand 

While typing up research, you might think of something that the author didn't talk about that you'll want to write in your paper. Or perhaps a few sentences already start to form. Put them all in one place, with your research, so you know what source you'll have to cite to then lead into your idea. I type "!@#" before anything that is strictly my own idea so I'm never confused. It's fast and stands out.

This is an example: the two bullet points above are evidence from my source, which made me think of this argument I could make, which I noted with “!@#”

Step 2: Read Your Research

Now that you have all your information, go back and read through it all. Every time you read about a new theme/person/event, write it down somewhere. You may come up with a list of 20+ different ideas in your research. No matter how small, as long as there is something about it, write it down. Each of these mini themes is going to end up being a paragraph in your paper or combined with another mini theme. 

Once you’ve made your list, look for larger overarching themes. In the paper I’ve shown you, I had mini categories like “political party x” “religion” “labor groups” “little organization” and “hierarchy.” When I looked back I though, hey these are all groups and how groups are working together, so they each became their own mini paragraph under the subsection of “Alliances.”

As with most research paper structures, I try to find three general themes/subsections (like an extended version of that 5-paragraph essay we wrote in middle school). It makes the paper less messy and also makes sure I’m not covering things that are beyond a reasonable scope.

During this step, you are also searching for your thesis. It won’t be your final version. As you fill in your outline in the next step you may make slight changes. But this is definitely when you start thinking about it.

Step 3: Outline

We’re ready to outline! Once I’ve collected all my different themes and organized all my subsections and paragraphs, it’s time to fill in that outline. I start a new doc just for the outline and take advantage of google doc’s headings function to make a clear document outline.

Here comes the fun part, I read through my research one more time, this time copy and pasting all my research into each section of the outline. The document outline in google docs makes this easy because I can just click on each subheading to get me there (super helpful when you’re dealing with 15+ pages of research).

Here is what it looks like:

Let’s say I need to add something to my outline about labor groups. Boom, labor groups. Also, the typos are really abound here haha

Step 4: Write the Paper

Okay, I get it, easier said than done. BUT! You already have everything set up. Your outline is essentially just a list of your paragraphs and all you have to do is paraphrase, cite, and create a topic sentence. And that’s how you should think about this: you’re essentially transforming bullet points into sentences and adding footnotes. 

In high school my English teacher introduced us to Sh*tty First Drafts for creative writing, but honestly the same applies to research papers. Sometimes I’ll even have phrases like “wait no that’s not what I meant but basically...” and when I go back to edit, I realize that what came after “but basically...” is fine! And I keep it. So just start typing.

How do you cite while you write? Because we’re trying to get a constant stream of writing going, inserting proper footnotes after each sentence you type is too bothersome. I usually split screen with my outline and my paper so I just copy and paste a few words from my bullet point into my footnote, like so:

(This is from a different paper about cluster munitions.)

Step 5: Edit the Paper

I work best when I print out my first draft and make all edits in red pen. I feel more productive and can visually see where I want to move sentences and what I need to change. The more red there is the better I can feel the paper getting. (Whether or not that’s true doesn’t matter. We’re trying to stay motivated here!) When it’s all digital I don’t really see the progress. Plus, once I finish all the red, I get another moment of passive brain work, where all I’m doing is transferring edits rather than thinking. And at this point in the process, that kind of relief is much welcomed. 

The good thing about this process is there’s not usually a need to cut entire paragraphs or pages because the paper you end up with is just a formalized version of your outline. Because you started with such a detailed outline, the cutting and editing now is just to refine your word choices and get rid of the “but basically”s. You’re almost there!

Step 6: Replace your citations

Now it’s time to go back and replace your footnotes with actual citations. Zotero makes this easy because in Word you can just insert and add the page number, and it’ll automatically do “Ibid.” for you when needed. Ctrl+f in the original research doc to quickly find the source.

Step 7: One More Read-Through and Submit!

Congratulations!! You’ve got a fully-researched and well-backed paper! Of course, even though the process is straightforward, it’s still a lot of work. In ideal situations I would start researching two weeks before the deadline, but if need be, I believe I’ve done this all in three miserable panic-filled days as well. 

Please message me if you have any questions at all! I really hope some of you find this helpful! Good luck!

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

Hello! I just found your yt channel (it's amazing) and watched your video on writing diversely. What an awesome video, I learnt and took away a lot from you and your thoughts, especially as a white writer. I am still however a little conflicted on one thing. Not just writing the characters as another race or gender or identity of any kind from the writer, but the actual main character. Would it automatically be offensive and destined for failure for a white author to write a black main protag?

Hi there! I’m happy you found the video helpful, thank you for watching! This is a link to the video if anyone reading this has not watched it.

To be honest, I think I explained this as concisely and accurately as I could in the video as it’s truly the thesis of the video itself. I don’t want to fully reiterate what I said in the video because I feel like I won’t be as accurate/coherent, so I urge you to rewatch the video and take care to look at the timestamps as that may clarify your particular question, first and foremost! Taking a look at some of the comments too might also be helpful.

Stay in your lane as a detrimental, albeit well-intentioned, mantra

As I say in the video, it’s not as easy as saying “white people can’t write XYZ main character” or “we can write whatever we want”, nor is it as easy as and saying “stay in your line” , which may inadvertently enforce the majority as publishing is majorly white (stats are in the video). I believe I did address main characters too in that video, but whatever I said about characters in general 100% applies to POV/main characters as I was rebutting the well-intentioned, but perhaps detrimental idea that it’s only appropriate for a marginalized POV character to be written by someone marginalized in the same way (IMO, long-term, this will cause an influx of white POV stories which is the opposite of the intention [people say “stay in your lane” will allow marginalized folks to represent themselves rather than have white people represent us] as the publishing industry a) is mostly white and b) only seems to care to actively publish white people. “Stay in your lane” may also inadvertently define the role a marginalized person should play in the writing industry [responsible for writing stories about their marginalization]).

Writing POC main characters = automatically offensive/destined to fail?

If you’re viewing or questioning if writing a POC MC is “automatically offensive” or “destined for failure” I really urge you to rewatch the video because this is covered quite extensively but particularly take a look at the “trade fear for empathy” section as this question in itself is laden in a black and white binary of right versus wrong. If you’re asking this question, it might be that you are lacking the empathy to understand what I’m saying in the video (which is okay! there are many others who I’ve further discussed with in the comments). Writing POC isn’t something that’s destined to fail just because you’re a white author IF you do your research, be respectful, write empathetically and craft well-rounded, complex people. If you’re thinking you might automatically fail in this department because you are a white person, I did mention in the video that you may not be ready to write diverse characters in the respectful, robust ways necessary because you may be viewing POC as a “pass or fail” system which is obviously not what we are. If you want to write a diverse POV character and you do your research, write empathetically, speak to those people from that community (with their consent) and be willing to adjust your representation with that feedback without getting defensive, I don’t see how this would be automatically offensive or destined for failure, just like anything else that requires research.

Disproportionate amounts of white versus POC writers being published

In terms of publication failure, white people are actually the ones being majorly represented to write marginalized stories (when they don’t share that marginalization), so you probably wouldn’t have a problem getting a POC-lead story published (not saying I think this is right) because publishers treat diversity as a quota/marketing tactic and IMO, don’t seem to actually care about representation on a structural level, but rather on a topical, superficial level (which is why my main point in that video is that publishers, not individual writers, need to be held accountable).

White writers accidentally “dehumanize” POC in a misguided attempt at being empathetic

I think some white people, (and I don’t exactly want to use this word because it is quite severe but illustrates what I mean) may accidentally “dehumanize” people of colour in worrying that whatever move they’re going to make is automatically going to offend us, when in reality, if you take the time, and put in the effort to research and get to know people of colour (from my comments, these worries often stem from white people who don’t know many people of colour IRL), you will see that yes, we are different from you and difference is good, but no, this difference does not make us an untouchable, unknowable species. I don’t mean to make this seem like an “I don’t see colour” or “the only race is the human race” argument, which would be harmful, but rather a reminder that people of colour are also human beings and as you would write a white character with empathy, integrity, and vigour, you should also do the same when writing characters of colour (I address this in more detail in the video).

Doing personal research in times of confusion

I understand that as a white person, thinking about and understanding these issues may not be particularly easy, and even after a nearly hour long video of me expressing these thoughts, I genuinely do understand why someone who is not affected by these issues daily may still struggle with grasping these concepts. That’s because anti-racism is not something you can accomplish by watching one video, or reading a few articles--it’s a lifelong commitment, and so that’s when you would take your privilege as a white person to do more digging before you ask questions to those who have to expel emotional labour to answer them for you (not saying I have any problem answering your question at all, but putting this out there because there are many well meaning white people who I’ve encountered in my comments that do ask me or other BIPOC questions before turning to other resources that wouldn’t require free labour). Take some time to ruminate with this info, and then do some digging of your own. If you haven’t checked out these, these are my favourite anti-racism resources, all of which are free to access (noted otherwise):

Jane Coaston - The Intersectionality wars

A pretty comprehensive place to start with Kimberle Crenshaw’s theory of Intersectionality

Peggy McIntosh - White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack

Wonderful place to start in understanding white privilege for those who don’t understand the differences/nuances between race VS class VS gender privilege etc

Article that explores white privilege beyond McIntosh’s ideas

It’s really important that white people also learn the systemic ways in which they benefit from white privilege and not just the “bandaids are made in my skintone” examples (though those examples are often used first because they’re the easiest to understand for a white person who is affected by other intersections, i.e. class, sexuality, gender, who does not feel they are privileged in other ways i.e. race).

Documentary on white privilege (Jane Elliott’s Brown Eyes VS Blue Eyes experiment)

Angela Davis - How Does Change Happen?

bell hooks - Ending Domination: The Struggle Continues

Abena Busia - In Search of Chains Without Iron: On Sisterhood, History, and the Politics of Location

I was able to access this reading through my university but IMO it is a must-read, especially for non-POC who may not fully understand the privilege of whiteness.

Claire Heuchan - Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Racism in the Feminist Movement 

**Absolute must-read: “The theory did not emerge in order to aid white women in their search for cookies – it was developed predominantly by Black feminists with a view to giving women of colour voice (Heuchan).”

Tamela J. Gordon - Why I’m giving up on intersectional feminism 

Powerful perspective on Intersectionality and how it’s been used in white feminism

Jennifer L. Pozner - How to Talk About Racism, Sexism and Bigotry With Your Friends and Family

Really good place to start if you have loved ones in need of education.

Maria Lugones - Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception

This is the absolute crux of my points in writing empathetically.

"The paper describes the experience of 'outsiders' to the mainstream of, for example, White/Anglo organization of life in the U.S. and stresses a particular feature of the outsider's existence: the outsider has necessarily acquired flexibility in shifting from the mainstream construction of life where she is constructed as an outsider to other constructions of life where she is more or less 'at home.' This flexibility is necessary for the outsider but it can also be willfully exercised by the outsider or by those who are at ease in the mainstream. I recommend this willful exercise which I call "world"-travelling and I also recommend that the willful exercise be animated by an attitude that I describe as playful" (Lugones 3). 

^^^ For writers struggling with the prospect of diversity and trying to find a place to start in what I call in my video "letting go of fear and voraciously welcoming empathy" I highly recommend this article as it is a powerful account of travelling across each other's "worlds". Read it for free with a free JStor account or through your institution, like your public library.

How to BLACK: An Analysis of Black Cartoon Characters

A FANTASTIC video that is an absolute must-watch (covers writing empathetically, writing with care)

If you have not already, read through the sources I used to formulate and argue my thesis in my video (much more detailed than I could do in an hour!):

Corinne Duyvis (ownvoices creator) on # ownvoices

CCBC - "Publishing Statistics on Children's/YA Books about People of Color and First/Native Nations and by People of Color and First/Native Nations Authors and Illustrators"

Hannah Heath - "5 Problems Within the Own Voices Campaign (And How to Fix Them)"

Saadia Faruqi - "The Struggle Between Diversity and Own Voices"

Kat Rosenfield (Refinery29) - "What is # ownvoices doing to our books?"

Lee and Low - "Diversity Baseline Survey 2019 Results"

Vulture - "Who Gave You the Right To Tell That Story"

School Library Journal - "An Updated Look at Diversity in Children's Books"

TL;DR: if you’re more overcome with the fear of offending people (often grounded in white fragility) instead of making the active, albeit sometimes uncomfortable, decision to do the hard work necessary to empathetically represent someone outside of your marginalization in fiction, I don’t think you’re ready to write POC in the nuanced, complex, empathetic ways necessary for good representation, and I would encourage you do more independent anti-racist work. (Note that “you” is not individualistically aimed at the asker!!)

Questions like this don’t necessarily have a clear-cut answer, and that is essentially the point of my video (I know, not super helpful, but I hope that makes sense!).

Hope this helps!

--Rachel

[encfinalproject]

Revision

Social Media: A new day and age

           Over the past year or so we have seen some crazy things happen in this world, the shutdown of sports, restaurants, and basically, anything that you were used to doing daily did a complete 180-degree U-turn. So, like anything bad we’ve experienced, we started to find ways to work around these things. With that being said, it was presented as one of the hardest things that I’d ever have to do in almost twenty years of my life. Specifically figuring out ways in which my studies; sports management, can find ways to work around it. This is where we saw social media start to play a role in the everyday lives of individuals in the world of sports, and not just the world of sports but also companies, celebrities, etc. There are many reasons social media has received such good output, but there are also some negatives that revolve around it and I will also be going over some of those. It gave us as raving fans a different way to look at the game and it has taken over in that aspect. Giving us visuals through Instagram and YouTube, as well as applications like Twitter as a way for fans to communicate amongst themselves. Social media is truly changing the game and it proved that over these past 16 months where we thought nothing was possible.

           To begin with, Sports teams themselves have started to use these online instruments very religiously to connect with the fans more. Social media has seemed to change the name of the game in a lot of ways. Connecting the fans to the players like nothing we’ve ever seen before. Nowadays, there’s nothing like commenting on your favorite team's Instagram and them commenting back to you. People love it and it's awesome to see that. Even players themselves have started YouTube channels and Tik-toks as a way to see them as actual people and not just football or basketball players etc. Social media has seemed to change the name of the game in a lot of ways. An article titled “Social Media and Football Fan Culture,” explains just how awesome social media has been in connecting fans with players, explaining that “Social media marketers and sports journalists could never have predicted how hugely important the internet has been with opening up a line of communication between sports stars and their fans”. I have even caught myself doing this, if you love watching these players on television, you love hearing them postgame and all these other things. Then watching them later in their own home where they feel the most comfortable. You get a whole other side to their story; it becomes personable and I believe that’s the biggest factor in this. It is one thing to know a person as a superstar but it’s a complete game-changer to get to know them as an actual person. This is something I think the limelight does is it blocks us from the fact that these people are human and not superheroes, and we must respect them for what they do behind closed doors.

           To add on, I got the opportunity to interview Kyle Schackne who is the operations manager for both the Tampa Bay Rays and Tampa Bay Rowdies. As an operations manager, his job is to oversee the facilities that the team offers, helping out with events hosted by the teams, working with the social media team, and generally just being a Swiss army knife for the organizations. Kyle went to Flagler college where he played division two baseball and studied sports management. He is also an avid user of social media and believes in what it has done as far as connecting us the fans to these superstars that we all look up to. Explaining that the pros outweigh the cons as long as you are using it the right way and choosing the right direction when doing so. He talked about how awesome it is that they can build their resume on the field where they make their money and off the field in the way they interact with their fans. In an example,  he explained how he is an avid Ohio State Buckeyes fan living in Florida and for obvious reasons struggles to keep up with what happens on campus and the social life behind it. But with social media, he can connect with the teams and the students wherever he may be in the world. In another example he gave me he says how much more personal the game of sports is today with what social media has given us. It was great to talk to Kyle and get an expert opinion on my topic, and I’m very glad that we could both agree without even shaking each other’s hands. This also shows just how impactful social media is outside of my general topic of sports management.

           In addition, as I start to read more and more about social media and the way that it has impacted players and organizations. It seems that athletes either love what social media has done or they hate it. Some players have these YouTube channels while others are too scared to make a post on Twitter. In an article I was reading a player stated that “But as a professional athlete, in my case, sometimes it’s better not to post.” What does this mean exactly? It means that there are people out there that want to ruin your entire career, digging up tweets from the past and most of the time telling lies about these players. Social media although it has its pros, brings to the table more cons than you would think. In the age of Instagram and Snapchat news spreads in the blink of an eye and before you know it your life’s work could be at risk. This goes for everything though, not just these professional athletes, you have to be careful what you say and when you say things on social media. I believe that one of the biggest reasons for this is how high of a standard these people are held to, and for good reason. There are kids and kids especially wanting to be like just like Lebron James or a Lionel Messi, and just for this reason, they have to watch every single word they say. One mix-up in what is trying to be said and you may never hear the end of it. By nature, we are very invasive creatures and don’t like to give people their space especially when they need it. Being in the spotlight isn’t easy work for these athletes and that’s all the more reason why maybe social media isn’t the best idea for this group of people. In another article published by Zipper Studio, it talks about athletes and their personal life explaining “Should athletes be allowed to live a personal life? Absolutely. We think that’s all the more reason why they should not be involved in the social media space!” I completely agree with this and it sums up what I was trying to explain before. The spotlight is a lot of work and it should be enough work for these players. Social media has turned this world upside down and from an article written by Jarred Prier he exclaims “how social media is a modern tool for information-age warfare.” This is the foundation of understanding what information you are reading, by this I mean understanding what you believe is right or wrong. Something that in this day and age is very hard to understand. Leading you to many misdirections that you may not even be able to understand in the slightest. These are the many cons of social media but I hope the pros give you more hope.

           Nevertheless, I still believe in what social media does for us as fans, fortunately for us, we aren’t the ones that have to worry about what we post as much as stars have to. That’s not to say we should take to the screens and voice every opinion we have but gives us reassurance that we aren’t being attacked like these athletes and stars are. As I was scrolling through Instagram just now, I again saw the effect that social media has on our society. A sideline reporter for the NBA was removed due to the recent backlash she received on her social media accounts. She has made multiple comments about another person and just like that she is on the hot seat of losing her job. I just hope as you have read this you have taken a step back at the harsh reality of social media. I’m not telling anyone to delete social media, I’m just hoping to raise a little more awareness of the negative effects that it can have on your own life. I still believe in what social media has set out to do and I love to watch some of my favorite stars and athletes. Although the many different cons that it brings along for the ride, the pros outweigh them completely. Just don’t let your emotions take over when using these applications, take a moment to sit back and think about what you’re saying. Because it’s not like you’re in front of thousands of people and need to say something on the spot. You are the only one that controls you’re Instagram so there’s no excuse in saying something that just doesn’t need to be said. Keep those harsh opinions to yourself and you may just find the good in what social media has to offer. A JSTOR article titled “Sport and Society” written by Frey and Eitzen mentions “that once an entity is displayed on television the sports organization is forever changed.” This is exactly what I have preached this entire essay, don’t make that dumb decision that could alter the course of your life. I know I have been explaining this in my world of things, consisting of my major and my hobbies. But this goes for anyone using social media whether it’s a professional athlete, big business owner, and even just everyday people. As I’ve repeated over and over again social media has brought our world closer to each other. As long as you are doing the right things online and not being a nuisance then there is no reason, we should see athletes and others stop using Instagram and Twitter among others. One thing I leave you with comes from an article titled “Social Media” which explains what it means to be “out of touch.” This means that you aren’t following trends in the world, not following trends in the world generally means you aren’t present in social media, and after reading what I have to say why the heck aren’t you?

[captawesomesauce]

Thoughts at 8am...

my brain doesn’t work anymore on these meds...

I want to write about 2 things 

1) my brain not working, how it’s different now, how i think differently now, how i miss how i used to think, how i relate/understand what others say now.

2) how I never want to be like the guy i met yesterday.

I’m going to try and write about #1 now.

On SAT’s and psyco-educational tests a major component is always to read a paragraph and understand it and answer questions. I used to fucking LOVE those, and actually wondered why they even existed because like.... what was the point? You just skim... see the key points and main words and you just understand the information! 

That’s how my brain worked. It was a SPONGE for information. I could skim wiki articles, PubMed journals, academic articles, news sites, books, magazines, and god I loved JSTOR! 

I’d click.. read.. KNOW. I’d open something up... skim... and KNOW. I’d turn something on, listen, KNOW. I’d go to an event, take notes... KNOW.

My brain absorbed, made the connections, linked other information... it did it so well. 

It also did something else really well that is a skill all teachers harp on at ever level of education - Critical Thinking & Decision Making. 

I could look at information, especially multiple pieces of information and think critically about various topics and choices and make good decisions, especially about purchases or plan out my next day of what i want to accomplish and the best way to get it done. Like where to park, how to get there, order of things.It was easy for me. I just knew exactly the right order and way to plan a day to get stuff done, and still be flexible. 

My brain just worked that way... it just did that! 

It doesn’t do that now

It’s absolutely broken on these meds. 

Reading articles and I feel overwhelmed by “too many words!!!!” which is a feeling I’ve never felt before in my life. I don’t know where to look, where to start, where to find the information I need. None of it seems to be information, all of it seems to just be words! 

Same with educational talks... stop talking, say something!!! Why did you say that? How is that relevant? How is that related??? How is that even close to being part of the topic???? What is that word??? What is this??

I’ve never been like this... even instructions on the side of boxes and stuff are harder.. 

I don’t feel like me at all. I always had a broken body... my brain was 99% of who I was... and now... my brain is broken. 

I have a lot of options for todays plan... I still haven’t picked one.. I feel paralyzed and kind of just want to go back to bed.

The thing is... it’s a combination of brain fog from the two medications, plus the other issues from the one med, plus the headaches. Before it was just the headaches and I could push through that. I could deal with headaches and eye aches pretty well... but the combo... i can’t... at least not yet. 

I’m gonna take a break now.... I’m not going to be able to get to #2

#3 for later or another day is how much I miss communicating. how not being able to talk has been really hard too. Typing isnt the same. 

[ponderingsofbck]

Pondering the Enigma that is Mental Health

The date was April 14, 2020, and the whole world, but especially the United States, was under a lockdown, due to a global pandemic called Covid-19. Nothing had become more evident at that point, about a month after everything except essential businesses had shut down, than the fact that the lockdown itself could become a risk. Therefore, I thought about how we can handle the mental health of ourselves and those around us, not only for the present, but also for the foreseeable future, as mental illness seems to be on the rise in general.

I then began the task of formulating specific questions to ask in my process of pondering this topic. I asked questions such as how bad is the mental health problem? What are the causes? What are the effects? What can be done to help those suffering with mental health problems and mental illness?

I also thought about why these questions matter to me personally. My answer to that question was that I do not think anyone should have to go through the emotional distress, that can be caused by mental illness, alone. Having struggled in my own life with depression and anxiety in my teen years, I know what it is like, and I would not want that for anyone else. I have also read into the issue a lot to try to better understand it myself. I am an empath by nature, so whenever I read or hear about someone giving up after going through something alone because they felt like they could not talk about it to anyone, I tend to wish that I could have helped in some way. It had only become more personal to me after a woman, and her neighbor in my town, were killed by her estranged husband during the Covid-19 crisis and lockdown. I did not know her or her family personally, but my heart went out to them, and I began wondering how we can all keep our mental resolve from breaking in what can essentially be complete isolation for some.

Next, I considered what I already knew about the subject through my own experience as well as reading about it over the years. I understand personally that it is a complex and sensitive issue that many people simply do not understand, or even care to address properly. At their core though, mental health issues tend to lead to feelings of isolation and the misconception that one is alone in their struggles. I also understand that there have been many so-called solutions given in the past, which we would now deem inhumane and rightly so.

Thus, I had the foundation for how I would approach my research into the topic of mental health, it was not a nebulous, general concept, but rather more of a focused specific goal. It was a concrete reality all around me given the recent events in the world, and the fact that some were starting to break under the pressure of the lockdown.

I had begun my research by thinking about the exact search terms that I would be using for the most effective search as well as which database sites I would be searching. I avoided using google, as I have not had very good luck finding anything excepts ads and products for sale on google recently. I used my school’s online database search resources and went to a few different database sites, beginning a process of elimination for which sites I would use. I had eliminated some of the database sites from my search process due to technical difficulties at the time, and others I had eliminated as it was just entirely too difficult to sift through all the information given, with the time that I had allowed myself, even after narrowing the search by year, subject etc. After searching through the different database sites for a while I decided to use the JSTOR for my sources as it had the least technical difficulties at the time, as well as being a bit easier for me to search and find relevant information.

In the search process I decided to focus more on mental health as a general and global issue, though there are plenty of experiments and studies that focus on one aspect or another of mental health and mental illness. I also had tried to look more into possible solutions, cures, and programs as well as what I could do to help to alleviate the problem. I started out just searching for the term “mental health,” but that gave me to many results with specialized studies and experiments. I then searched for solutions related to mental health and added the specific term “peer support” into my search query. Those terms helped to find more relevant results, and I further narrowed my focus to articles that were current from within the last five years.

I had three articles which I decided to use, two of which were from Scientific American Mind, and the last of which was from Foreign Affairs. All three of the articles mention different aspects of the effects of mental illness and how it is handled in society. They also mention how even in recent decades mental health and illness have been rather enigmatic and were not handled as sensitively as they should have been.

Here is what I found in the articles which I had decided to use. I will start with the one from Foreign Affairs, titled “Darkness Invisible,” directly below the title it says, “The Hidden Global Costs of Mental Illness,” it was written by Thomas R. Insel, Pamela Y. Collins, and Steven E. Hyman. In this article the authors point out that mental illness is actually a serious problem which should garner more attention than it gets, as it is so far reaching that it effects the global economy. It is also asserted by the authors that this will have no small effect on the world’s economy in future decades as the total amount that it had cost the economy at the time of the study was expected to reach $6 trillion by the year 2030. The authors would also point out in this article that people and governments misunderstand how much mental illness effects society and the economy, and that it is not only a first world problem as mental illness can be debilitating regardless of what one’s vocation may be. The article continues with the authors presenting a number of facts and statistics on mental health, and the prognosis at this point does not look very advantageous for the global economy, there is however a glimmer of hope. The authors would offer a number of possible solutions which are being researched and developed. According to the authors some of the remedies being considered and tested include the use of web-based counselling and integrated mental and general healthcare.

Next I will briefly mention my findings from the two Scientific American articles. The first one that I will mention is titled “Patients Helping Patients,” it was written by Karen Weintraub. In this article the author focuses on the struggle and experience of one Pual Bradford, who had suffered perhaps a bit of a mental breakdown in the early 2000s. The author continues recounting that Bradford’s experience with the mental healthcare at that time was actually rather traumatizing, so much so, that Bradford decided that it was his calling to be a part of the solution. The author then explains the concept of peer counselling, which seems noble, as it is former mental health patients offering help and counselling to current patients. The author then explores some of the pros and cons of this concept, one advantage would be that peer counselors would have more empathy, though one con would be that sometimes people only have peer counselling when they need regular counselling as well.

Last there is the article titled “First Aid for Mental Health,” written by Aliyah Baruchin, in which the author elucidates on many of the points made in the previous two articles which I had mentioned above. The author brings out how detrimental mental illness can be when the victims of it break, citing a number of incidents. However, the author seems to focus on something that could vastly improve the situation, even if it has reached a point of major deterioration, a tactic called “Mental Health First Aid.” According to the Author this tactic allows the responder to approach the patient in a non-threatening and objective manner which has proven successful in many cases already, with some police departments and other agencies enrolling in the certification classes for the tactic since.

In conclusion, what I had learned form my research only confirmed my prior knowledge that mental health is indeed a sensitive and complex issue, which needs to be approached with caution and care. I am more aware that there are a growing number of resources to help with averting the crisis of mental illness. The biggest thing that this has reinforced for me though, is the idea that simply talking to people and being there for them when they are going through something could prevent a catastrophe in the future. I do not think that anyone should have to go through anything mentally destressing alone, whether we truly understand it or not. I intend to sign up for the MHFA (Mental Health First Aid) certification at some point in the foreseeable future, as I can see an increasing need for that in the world around me.

       Works Cited

Baruchin, Aliyah. “FIRST AID FOR MENTAL HEALTH.” Scientific American Mind, vol. 26, no. 2,       2015, pp.            68–73. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24946499. Accessed 9 May 2020.

Insel, Thomas R., et al. “Darkness Invisible: The Hidden Global Costs of Mental Illness.” Foreign   Affairs, vol. 94, no. 1, 2015, pp. 127–135. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24483225.       Accessed 4 May 2020.

Weintraub, Karen. “PATIENTS HELPING PATIENTS.” Scientific American Mind, vol. 26, no. 3,        2015, pp.            60–63. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24946458. Accessed 4 May 2020.

[the-irish-mayhem]

Happy Fosterson Week Day 2: Outside POV! This fic stemmed from my love of fake academia, but also my absolute desire to never write an academic paper ever again. So I found a bit of a middle ground. Fair warning: Both Jane and Thor have passed away in this. But never fear, their life together was long and happy.

A generation later, a budding social scientist tries to figure out Jane and Thor.

Read on AO3.

Legacy.

Post Thread Created: 1/23/01 Originally Posted: 1/23/01 Post Edited: 10/30/04

Edit 10/30/04: WOW, I did not anticipate that this post series would blow up the way it did! Thank you to all who shared this and supported me in this journey, and if you’re wondering, yes, my book is now out! You can get your copy of The Dynasty That Never Was: A Biography at your local retailer, the Bionic Press cloudstore, or at your local library.

Just a little bit of context: this was very early in my thesis writing process, back when Jane and Thor were only planned to encompass a single chapter of my book (ha!) and I was planning on writing a straight cultural analysis rather than the cultural analysis-slash-biography it became.

Okay, now on with the original post!

Good morning, fellow New Asgard Anthropologists. For any newcomers, my name is (future Dr.) Melanie LaComb, and the purpose of this blog has been to share my research on a little more of a ground level, record my process of writing my thesis, and talk/write through some problems and put them up for community collaboration. It’s also nice to be able to shed the academic discourse for just a few minutes and write informally. So much freedom! So many exclamations and I statements! Anyway, I’m writing this new post to talk my way through a bit of a new thorn in my research. The late Thor Odinson and Jane Foster.

A lot of academics have kind of scoffed at this problem of mine—they were two extremely famous individuals! Integral to so many galactically significant events! Of course there is absolute mega loads of information on them! There must be dozens of biographies and at least two definitive autobiographies for beings of such impressive historical stature!

This may shock you, but NO there actually isn’t. Or, I suppose in some ways there is but not in the ways that would be most useful for me. For Odinson, who grew up on Old Asgard, the destruction of the planet meant the destruction of many records kept from his years before the Greatest War Against Thanos. His years afterwards are better trackable, but hardly centralized and hardly the more personalized records I am (now trying to get at. Foster, known on Midgard as Dr. Jane Foster and colloquially throughout the galaxy as “Jane the Thinker” or “Jane the Brilliant,” is surprisingly easier to get a handle on. Her fame wasn’t contingent upon her marital status, and she was well-known in scientific circles even before the first battle of the War in the year 2012.

So the root of my problem is this: fitting this pair into my New Asgard diaspora research. Because they are….. how do I say this…. not fitting? With my methodology? (I went to the school of redundancy school, but F*ck I’ve been writing and writing and writing for like 8 hours today already and I’m not changing it so THERE.)

So most of my research deals with the formation of a New Asgardian identity, and it relies heavily upon the shared cultural experiences of the Dark Elf Invasion of Old Asgard and the death of Queen Frigga (an aside, but one of my classmates, Korla Majer, wrote a really stellar article on why the Dark Elf invasion should be included as one of the major battles of the Greatest War, and how the dismissal of the event by most historians actively hurts our understanding of galactic politics at the time and I absolutely 10/10 would recommend you go read it after you finish this blog post) as well as the battle for and destruction of New Asgard. For beings so long lived as us, Asgardians have proven that we can make our memories as short as we need to, and those two events seemed to create the largest basis for the new cultural identity forged on Earth. (For some obvious reasons, namely being the events that led to the planet being destroyed and necessitating the move to Midgard, but ANYWAY.)

But I can’t really deny Jane and Thor’s place in the New Asgardian identity because their effect on the masses is well-documented. There are libraries full of memes, old paper magazines with paparazzi photos paired with barely-real stories that say a lot more about the readership than they do the subjects, even some old FanFiction that I was able to dig up that is in some ways more helpful than all the academia from that time period combined XD

In my roundabout way, the problem I’m trying to sort through is this: HOW do I tackle the Jane/Thor chapter?

Because in my original outlining of my thesis, I had planned on their chapter being a quick summation of how they met just before the Greatest War’s beginning, courted through the course of it, and married at its conclusion. Then, I’d give some context on their influence on galactic politics (because despite what some people erroneously think, they actually were not the monarchs of New Asgard. They remained advisors only after Thor abdicated the throne and named Brunnhilde [of house Dragonfang, an extremely old and well-respected Old Asgardian family] his successor. There was the five year gap of the Blip where Thor was officially King, but it was hardly a politically significant time as for much of this period Thor was gone from New Asgard), how some political maneuvers affected the general New Asgardian populace, and then move back to the cultural study portion of things. But the more sources I gather about them, the more I think this chapter might need to be extended, or made into some… sub point of my main thesis.

Because while I said earlier that information on them is hard to find (because it is!!! You try making document requests to 17 different universities on 15 different planets!!!! Alfheim literally delivered what I asked for in a light spectrum file format!!!!!!!! Like WHAT!!!!!! AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH THIS????? HOW DO I CONVERT THIS INTO A PDF OR EVEN JUST MAKE IT COMPATIBLE WITH HOLOREADERS) it’s not always the quantity that’s the issue, it’s the content. I found myself longing to know more about who these people were and why they did the things they did. I’ve always found that I've done my best research when I follow my gut feelings, and research things that I’m passionate about. New Asgardian diaspora culture? I’m living it, baby! I’m very interested because my generation is the first generation to have never set foot on Asgard, and that’s something worth exploring!

And now here I am weirdly fascinated by an almost-king whose magical powers are pretty legendary who was banished and fell in love with a woman (who was 100% human at the time, by the way) whose scientific theories were so advanced that her own people thought she was a bit of a kook until all of her theories started getting proven right. From a non-academic perspective, that sounds like a freaking romance novel or epic movie or something. (Which, by the way, it was! There were at least 6 separate pieces of media [film, novel, television show] that were based on their story that I can find on record.) So on a personal level, here I am wondering why two people in the past got married in spite of wildly different life circumstances/why one of them abdicated a throne that was his birthright, and on an academic level A) trying to figure out how to fit this weird fascination into my thesis B) how did these two political and cultural figures shape the cultural landscape C) was their effect on the cultural landscape more or less significant than the two events which have been taking the most of my focus for the last year? D) how productive is it to even ask the question of more or less significance?

*screaming*

A few people have asked me if I should just switch my track to talk about how they affected Brunnhilde’s rule over New Asgard (which, in case you missed previous posts, Brunnhilde is a huge part of my current thesis as she essentially presided over what I’m terming “The New Asgardian Cultural Renaissance” and was absolutely critical to how things were shaped.) I’m hesitant to do this because this has actually already been done. I’ll stick JSTOR links in the endnotes, but Dr. Hamel Radley literally wrote this. “A King For the Ages: Brunnhilde’s First Three Decades.” Also, Dr. Leslie Storn’s “A King’s Court: Brunnhilde’s Advisory Council.” AND Dr. Jorseph Naulty’s “King Brunnhilde’s Surprising Advisory Council: Steady Hands, Scientists, Military Minds, and Galactic Politicking.” Look, there’s a LOT on Brunnhilde’s rule, and a LOT written on her advisory council. She was the ruling monarch, so it’s pretty par for the course.

But for how politically and culturally significant they seemed to be, there’s not really much specifically on Jane and Thor. Their cultural influences are given lip-service, and that’s it. (Again, Jane has been scientifically significant in a way no one has achieved since Albert Einstein, so in that way she’s more famous than her husband, but scientific notoriety isn’t the same as recognizing the fullness of her cultural contributions.)

I brought this stuff up to my advisor, and she said to keep pulling this thread because I’m on to something here, I just need to figure out what.

So my next research goal is to reach out to their descendents. They have a few children and grandchildren living, and hopefully at least one of them is willing to speak to me about them as people so I can get that portion of things nailed down before I go insane.

My almost-insanity probably bled into this post a little bit because it’s redundant as heck and you can bet your bum I am not spell-checking or proofreading. I need a break from that garbage. The life of a doctoral student continues.

Here’s to pulling the thread. Hopefully something useful unravels.

-(Future Dr.) Melanie LaComb

Reply posted by: Winsome34, 1/23/01 08:23

Melanie--this is a super interesting track, and your advisor was absolutely right when they said to follow it. I think it would be really interesting to read a sort of half-biography, half-cultural analysis piece. Would be really unique, and I’m sure any doctoral committee would find it an engaging topic.

Not sure if you’ve tried the Avengers Museum and Historical Library yet, but that might be a good place to go for some more primary sources, since Thor was a founding member and Jane was closely tied to them throughout their life. They have a really solid amazing librarians there who know the stacks backwards and forwards. I relied heavily on them when I was researching my last paper about racism against superheroes of color in the early 21st century.

Reply posted by: KorlaMajer, 1/23/01 10:22

Thanks for the shoutout boo ;) Your thesis is gonna be amazing!

ALSO: I have a light spectrum file converter from my dad. He does a ton of business with Alfheim and they are NOTORIOUS for sending incompatible LSFs.

Reply posted by: Chloe Durbin, 2/2/01 20:40

Hey! My mom is actually really tight with Thor and Jane’s oldest daughter Valkyrie. I think they knew each other from school or something back in the day, but she’s really awesome and basically my aunt, so if you need an intro or a number to call, I’ve got you! Just shoot me an email chdurbin02@naun.edu. She’s really approachable if you don’t mind walking up to a lady who is literally 6’8” and looks like she literally HAS killed a man with her bare hands. But super nice though!

Universal Reply posted by: Blogmaster, 5/3/01 06:27

Thank you everyone for the tips! It’s going to help so much! The Avengers Library has actually been majorly helpful (I never even thought to look there, honestly!) and Valkyrie has agreed to sit down to an interview (of sorts) so everything is seriously looking up. And THE LSF CONVERTER WORKED LIKE A CHARM.

[ogygia]

Hello, what resources do you have on Chinese spirituality and folklore/magic? Where should I look for these resources?

Hi! Sorry if you’ve been waiting forever for an answer – never know how to check my asks inbox, but here we are now. 

I’ll answer those three things as three separate categories – if only because to me they are three distinct things, even though the lines do blur – but not in that order …

1. Magic

Resources for Chinese magic in English are scarce, by and large, primarily because it is shrouded in a lot of secrecy; traditionally Chinese magic is practised in initiated lineages, although given its age and the Chinese obsession for writing everything down, there is a fair amount of information in the public domain. But then there’s a second problem: the language is often impenetrable even to a native speaker, so translating the material is a deeply difficult task. The third problem is that Chinese magic is a broad church, given its age and its diversity, so how useful a resource is will depend on what you’re looking for: there’s internal alchemy (the closest analog would be yoga, but especially pranayama), ritual/ceremonial magic and also fu (or talisman) magic, among an assortment of other things. 

That said, it’s not all hopeless. One day, when I have a bit of money, I will splurge on all of Professor Jerry Alan Johnson’s books, but for now my main port of call would without question be Benebell Wen’s fantastic The Tao of Craft, which is about the most comprehensive, authentic and accessible resource you will find on the subject. Benebell herself learnt her craft by way of a lineage, if I’m not mistaken, so that puts her way above me in terms of authority for a start, but being Taiwanese-American she’s also deeply engaged with the contemporary occult community, and is very good at explaining Chinese magical concepts in Western terms. She backs up everything she asserts with both primary and secondary sources, so it’s easy to construct your own reading list of sorts from her book with just a tiny bit of effort.

A book that comes up a lot when you look into the subject is Richard Herne’s Magick, Shamanism & Taoism. I’m reluctant to recommend this book, as it often feels like a slightly bastardised, inauthentic approximation of Taoist magic, blended with other slightly out-of-place elements from various magical practices – or stuff that simply seems made up. The suggested rituals feel very limited in their scope, there isn’t quite enough theory to form a confident basis to build your practice on and Herne feels a little too eager to connect Taoism and Taoist magic with Thelema. On the other hand, it occasionally covers ground that Benebell doesn’t cover which is authentic enough to be useful, so my suggestion is to only pick it up once you’re au fait with Benebell’s book and have a little bit more confidence in your knowledge to weed out what’s bullshit and what’s not.

Outside of these books, the next best resource would be academic texts relating to the subject. JSTOR, Google and a little bit of discernment should take you a long way, even if you don’t read Chinese. That’s the lucky thing about being interested in a deeply literate culture that has been studied by Western academia for centuries.

P.S. AVOID TIN YAT DRAGON – THE BLOG, THE YOUTUBE VIDEOS – LIKE THE PLAGUE. There are numerous testimonies across the Internet that the proprietor is a fraud, possibly an outright sexual predator. The fact that he spends a lot of his videos attacking and poo-poohing tradition and claiming the supremacy of his own practice is a massive red flag.

2. Spirituality

Chinese magic is a varying blend of Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism and folk practice, as is Chinese spiritual thought for that matter, and so it’s hard to really pin down such a thing as ‘Chinese spirituality’. My own world-view was handed down to me by my parents and through my contact with Chinese-language culture and society. But if you want to get an idea of what that world-view looks like – again, I am being deceptively simplistic here with that term – your best bet would be to explore the key body of texts that form the basis of the major Chinese philosophies. 

I’m not going to try and cover everything here, but for Taoism there is no better place to start than the Tao Teh Ching. Legge’s translations are classic but don’t limit yourself; classical Chinese philosophical texts, especially in Taoism, are notorious for being slightly vague and obscure and – others might disagree! – there is some value in searching for a translation that speaks to you most on a deep, poetic/spiritual level. I’m personally keen to read Red Pine’s version, with selected commentaries. You can then move on to Chuang Tzu. 

You should almost definitely study the I Ching: it’s a lifetime task to begin with, but you wouldn’t go wrong with reading even just a primer on it. I would personally highly recommend Deng Ming Dao’s The Living I Ching. Spend some time using the system, and get to grips with the eight basic trigrams. I’m still working on that myself.

I’m not at all the best source for anything Buddhist so my suggestion is to pick up a primer or introduction of some sort – even the Wikipedia page will do – and then proceed from there. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to pick up a sutra – the Diamond Sutra, Lotus Sutra and Heart Sutra are among the most well-known – as they are ultimately intended to be profound expressions of Buddhist spirituality to meditate upon. I have an affection for the Heart Sutra myself.

3. Folklore

Chinese folklore is – in my experience – something so variegated and embedded in the culture and language that it’s hard to encapsulate in a book, so it’s always worth keeping that in mind when reading up on this subject. That said, something like Teach Yourself’s Understand Chinese Mythology wouldn’t be a bad place to start (and it also covers a bit about spirituality as well). The great literary classics like Journey to the West – even if it is technically a novel – are also a fantastic way to get a sense of how the contemporary Chinese perceive their deities. You could almost argue that these fictional texts have influenced how we think about the gods, rather than the other way around.

One of the most important classics that explore the gods in detail is Investiture of the Gods, but as far as I’m aware no authoritative translation of this text has ever been produced. There does appear to be a collection of adapted extracts called Tales of the Teahouse but I have yet to read it. I intend to at some point, however!

Might be a bit of a niche academic resource, but I’ve been reading Richard von Glahn’s The Sinister Way. It’s a fantastic exploration of how spirits are perceived and classified in Chinese folk cosmology. Man, we really are a weird bunch of people.

Hopefully that should be enough to get you started. I will no doubt have left out a lot of stuff (e.g. Mantak Chia, which I’m not nearly familiar enough with to have any opinion on), but that’s the joy of a subject as wide-ranging as this. My only caveat when reading up on this stuff is to be wary of anyone who has something to sell (even though it may not always necessarily be a red flag).

[irarelypostanything]

Studying on the Fourth of July

I scheduled an important exam right after the fourth of July, so in hindsight I’m not sure how I had expected to spend tonight.  We could have been at the Embarcadero, or maybe one of the various hills like Mt. Davidson.  It’s almost like, for one night, hilly San Francisco seemed tailor-made to allow everyone to watch fireworks without paying.

Studying tonight isn’t going to be fun, but I signed up for this.  It’s kind of like when we complain about doing our jobs, in spite of the fact that when we were in college we lined up just for a chance to talk to job recruiters.  Everything was an opportunity.  Maybe entitlement is the root of unhappiness.  If I study really hard, for lots of hours, it’s not like something entitles me to pass.  

*****

I started the day by reading a Nextdoor post about illegal fireworks.  It was extremely eloquent, especially by Nextdoor standards.  Basically, it discussed how our use of illegal fireworks is a callback to the spirit of our country, and remembering the resistance the first Americans took against tyranny so that they could break free from the king.

I don’t personally agree, but it was still eloquent.  She talked about visiting those historic sites, and in believing in our country and its perseverance, but the top response to it said that people who light illegal fireworks probably aren’t doing so for profound reasons.  Someone who said he was a veteran reiterated: If you want to celebrate this country’s independence, do it legally.  Go to a park and watch fireworks.  Light something legal.  This is fire season.

So I was thinking about that, and studying for this exam made me also think about intelligence, IQ, and...er...stupidity.  I think there’s a natural human tendency to think people are stupid when we disagree with them, when in reality the truth is often a lot more complicated.  Political problems are multivariable problems.  The realms of science and engineering are often more simplistic and contained than the problems of politics, which are rooted in tightly-held moral beliefs.  Increasingly it seems like the country was split in two, each side radical by the standards of a decade ago.  But talking about nuance doesn’t imply intelligence.  Not being decisive and taking a side is probably worse than being 100% committed to one way.  Not taking in facts and not forming opinions is the definition of ignorance, and yet...sometimes it seems like people are determined to reduce the world to simple truths.  It narrows the perspective.  It starts to lump seemingly unrelated issues together.  And always it feels like someone else is doing the thinking, and we’re just in for the ride.  Clicking the videos recommended.  Reposting stories we didn’t write ourselves.

******

Studying for an exam is an interesting college throwback.  It kind of makes me nostalgic, remembering what it was like in college - we were there, and we were living with our own fridges and buying our own groceries, and everything was surreal and perfect until some calculus professor defined the delta-epsilon definition of a limit, and at that point our innocence died.  Then came the titrations, the 3D math problems, the asymptotic complexity.

And I don’t think we were alone in that.  I think we all dealt with our demons.  Maybe for the pre-meds, it was organic chemistry.  Maybe for the English majors, it was The Crying of Lot 49.  That was a completely incomprehensible book that only made sense after a third reading, a couple papers accessed on JSTOR, and three bottles of beer.

College was humbling.  College taught us how smart or stupid we really were, unless we breezed through it...in which case the work field taught us how smart or stupid we really were.  I really want to pass this, but it’s just another thing.  It’s a stack of flash cards.  It’s a bunch of YouTube videos.  It’s a book I should really read, even though the practice exam question modules are right there, for free. 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

#5yrsago RIP, Aaron Swartz

  To the extent possible under law,       Cory Doctorow   has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to   "RIP, Aaron Swartz."

Update: Go read Lessig: "He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you."

My friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday, Jan 11. He was 26. I got woken up with the news about an hour ago. I'm still digesting it -- I suspect I'll be digesting it for a long time -- but I thought it was important to put something public up so that we could talk about it. Aaron was a public guy.

I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. He was working on XML stuff (he co-wrote the RSS specification when he was 14) and came to San Francisco often, and would stay with Lisa Rein, a friend of mine who was also an XML person and who took care of him and assured his parents he had adult supervision. In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with a kind of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are.  

But he was also unmistakably a kid then, too. He would only eat white food. We'd go to a Chinese restaurant and he'd order steamed rice. I suggested that he might be a supertaster and told him how to check it out, and he did, and decided that he was. We had a good talk about the stomach problems he faced and about how he would need to be careful because supertasters have a tendency to avoid "bitter" vegetables and end up deficient in fibre and vitamins. He immediately researched the hell out of the subject, figured out a strategy for eating better, and sorted it. The next time I saw him (in Chicago, where he lived -- he took the El a long way from the suburbs to sit down and chat with me about distributed hash caching), he had a whole program in place.

I introduced him to Larry Lessig, and he was active in the original Creative Commons technical team, and became very involved in technology-freedom issues. Aaron had powerful, deeply felt ideals, but he was also always an impressionable young man, someone who often found himself moved by new passions. He always seemed somehow in search of mentors, and none of those mentors ever seemed to match the impossible standards he held them (and himself) to.

This was cause for real pain and distress for Aaron, and it was the root of his really unfortunate pattern of making high-profile, public denunciations of his friends and mentors. And it's a testament to Aaron's intellect, heart, and friendship that he was always forgiven for this. Many of us "grown ups" in Aaron's life have, over the years, sat down to talk about this, and about our protective feelings for him, and to check in with one another and make sure that no one was too stung by Aaron's disappointment in us. I think we all knew that, whatever the disappointment that Aaron expressed about us, it also reflected a disappointment in himself and the world.  

Aaron accomplished some incredible things in his life. He was one of the early builders of Reddit (someone always turns up to point out that he was technically not a co-founder, but he was close enough as makes no damn), got bought by Wired/Conde Nast, engineered his own dismissal and got cashed out, and then became a full-time, uncompromising, reckless and delightful shit-disturber.

The post-Reddit era in Aaron's life was really his coming of age. His stunts were breathtaking. At one point, he singlehandedly liberated 20 percent of US law. PACER, the system that gives Americans access to their own (public domain) case-law, charged a fee for each such access. After activists built RECAP (which allowed its users to put any caselaw they paid for into a free/public repository), Aaron spent a small fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public domain. The feds hated this. They smeared him, the FBI investigated him, and for a while, it looked like he'd be on the pointy end of some bad legal stuff, but he escaped it all, and emerged triumphant.

He also founded a group called DemandProgress, which used his technological savvy, money and passion to leverage victories in huge public policy fights. DemandProgress's work was one of the decisive factors in last year's victory over SOPA/PIPA, and that was only the start of his ambition.  

I wrote to Aaron for help with Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother to get his ideas on a next-generation electioneering tool that could be used by committed, passionate candidates who didn't want to end up beholden to monied interests and power-brokers. Here's what he wrote back:  

  First he decides to take over the whole California Senate, so he can do things at scale. He finds a friend in each Senate district to run and plugs them into a web app he's made for managing their campaigns. It has a database of all the local reporters, so there's lots of local coverage for each of their campaign announcements.

Then it's just a vote-finding machine. First it goes through your contacts list (via Facebook, twitter, IM, email, etc.) and lets you go down the list and try to recruit everyone to be a supporter. Every supporter is then asked to do the same thing with their contacts list. Once it's done people you know, it has you go after local activists who are likely to be supportive. Once all those people are recruited, it does donors (grabbing the local campaign donor records). And then it moves on to voters and people you could register to vote. All the while, it's doing massive A/B testing to optimize talking points for all these things. So as more calls are made and more supporters are recruited, it just keeps getting better and better at figuring out what will persuade people to volunteer. Plus the whole thing is built into a larger game/karma/points thing that makes it utterly addictive, with you always trying to stay one step ahead of your friends.

Meanwhile GIS software that knows where every voter is is calculating the optimal places to hold events around the district. The press database is blasting them out -- and the press is coming, because they're actually fun. Instead of sober speeches about random words, they're much more like standup or the Daily Show -- full of great, witty soundbites that work perfectly in an evening newscast or a newspaper story. And because they're so entertaining and always a little different, they bring quite a following; they become events. And a big part of all of them getting the people there to pull out their smartphones and actually do some recruiting in the app, getting more people hooked on the game.

He doesn't talk like a politician -- he knows you're sick of politicians spouting lies and politicians complaining about politicians spouting lies and the whole damn thing. He admits up front you don't trust a word he says -- and you shouldn't! But here's the difference: he's not in the pocket of the big corporations. And you know how you can tell? Because each week he brings out a new whistleblower to tell a story about how a big corporation has mistreated its workers or the environment or its customers -- just the kind of thing the current corruption in Sacramento is trying to cover up and that only he is going to fix.

(Obviously shades of Sinclair here...)

also you have to read http://books.theinfo.org/go/B005HE8ED4

For his TV ads, his volunteer base all take a stab at making an ad for him and the program automatically A/B tests them by asking people in the district to review a new TV show. The ads are then inserted into the commercial breaks and at the end of the show, when you ask the user how they liked it, you also sneak in some political questions. Web ads are tested by getting people to click on ads for a free personality test and then giving them a personality test with your political ad along the side and asking them some political questions. (Ever see ads for a free personality test? That's what they really are. Everybody turns out to have the personality of a sparkle fish, which is nice and pleasant except when it meets someone it doesn't like, ...)  Since it's random, whichever group scores closest to you on the political questions must be most affected by the ad.  Then they're bought at what research shows to be the optimal time before the election, with careful selection of television show to maximize the appropriate voter demographics based on Nielsen data.

anyway, i could go on, but i should actually take a break and do some of this... hope you're well  

This was so perfect that I basically ran it verbatim in the book. Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill, and intelligence about people and issues. I think he could have revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still yet do so.

Somewhere in there, Aaron's recklessness put him right in harm's way. Aaron snuck into MIT and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around MIT, and though Aaron wasn't an MIT student, he was a fixture in the Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part of that gang, and Aaron hadn't done anything with the articles (yet), so it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out.

Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of theories: the feds who'd tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories. A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron would go to jail.

This morning, a lot of people are speculating that Aaron killed himself because he was worried about doing time. That might be so. Imprisonment is one of my most visceral terrors, and it's at least credible that fear of losing his liberty, of being subjected to violence (and perhaps sexual violence) in prison, was what drove Aaron to take this step.

But Aaron was also a person who'd had problems with depression for many years. He'd written about the subject publicly, and talked about it with his friends.  

I don't know if it's productive to speculate about that, but here's a thing that I do wonder about this morning, and that I hope you'll think about, too. I don't know for sure whether Aaron understood that any of us, any of his friends, would have taken a call from him at any hour of the day or night. I don't know if he understood that wherever he was, there were people who cared about him, who admired him, who would get on a plane or a bus or on a video-call and talk to him.  

Because whatever problems Aaron was facing, killing himself didn't solve them. Whatever problems Aaron was facing, they will go unsolved forever. If he was lonely, he will never again be embraced by his friends. If he was despairing of the fight, he will never again rally his comrades with brilliant strategies and leadership. If he was sorrowing, he will never again be lifted from it.

Depression strikes so many of us. I've struggled with it, been so low I couldn't see the sky, and found my way back again, though I never thought I would. Talking to people, doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, seeking out a counsellor or a Samaritan -- all of these have a chance of bringing you back from those depths. Where there's life, there's hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot.  

I'm so sorry for Aaron, and sorry about Aaron. My sincere condolences to his parents, whom I never met, but who loved their brilliant, magnificently weird son and made sure he always had chaperonage when he went abroad on his adventures. My condolences to his friends, especially Quinn and Lisa, and the ones I know and the ones I don't, and to his comrades at DemandProgress. To the world: we have all lost someone today who had more work to do, and who made the world a better place when he did it.

Goodbye, Aaron.

https://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html

[rainaweather]

Hello! As finals season (aka 5-research-papers-due-in-a-week season) dawns on many of you, I thought I would share the process I used to write papers in college. This made writing long research papers much less daunting (but can also work on shorter papers). I really hope this helps some of you who feel stuck. Especially during these ridiculous times, when you’re stuck at home and might have other uncontrollable factors affecting your mental health, a clear framework of what to do could be helpful. Good luck, my friends! You got this.

About me

I graduated college in 2018 with degrees in Political Science + International Studies and will be starting law school this fall. I wrote nearly 20 15 to 25-page papers, never earning below an A. I loved researching about my topics but hated writing. It’s tedious, takes so much time, and everything I write sounds bad at first. Plus, I was a terrible procrastinator so most of these essays were written in under a week. Talk about stress.

Over time I found a process that worked for me, one that made churning out a paper seem straightforward, like going through a factory line rather than this terrifying concept of writing 10,000 words. It kept me sane without decreasing the quality of my work (or more importantly, how much I learned!) 

I’m thinking about making a short video to show this in action… let me know if that could be helpful!

Step 1: Research

How you organize your research is a key step in keeping you sane. Usually I’ll have a pile of 20 books in my dorm along with dozens of JSTOR tabs open on my laptop, and that can get overwhelming very fast. Right now just focus on collecting ideas, not developing an argument or even an outline! As with most research papers, you could be starting with little to no background information on the topic, so it is still too early to be thinking about an argument.

Put all your research in one document

Open up a new doc: this will be the heart of everything. For a 15-page paper I usually end up with around 14-18 pages of typed research, 10 pt font, single spaced, tiny margins. This seems like a lot, but essentially all I do is type up anything I read that seems relevant to my topic, so luckily this step does not require that much brain power. Just type type type!

Use the table of contents

Find the chapter(s) that are actually relevant instead of skimming through the whole book. Time is of the essence here!

Use Zotero, cite right away

You can also use easybib or whatever you’re used to, but keep track of your sources. I like Zotero because I can keep a log of all of my sources and copy the footnote or bibliography version whenever needed. Before you even begin reading, cite the source and copy it into your research doc. This will save you so much time later when you have to put in your citations in the actual paper. 

Here is an example of what my research doc looks like:

Full citation is my heading for each source just so it’s crystal clear

I ignore all typos (I don’t think there are any in this part though, go me!) because my head is buried in the book just trying to get all the info down

I always start with the page number so I know what to cite when I go back

Create a shorthand 

While typing up research, you might think of something that the author didn’t talk about that you’ll want to write in your paper. Or perhaps a few sentences already start to form. Put them all in one place, with your research, so you know what source you’ll have to cite to then lead into your idea. I type “!@#” before anything that is strictly my own idea so I’m never confused. It’s fast and stands out.

This is an example: the two bullet points above are evidence from my source, which made me think of this argument I could make, which I noted with “!@#”

Step 2: Read Your Research

Now that you have all your information, go back and read through it all. Every time you read about a new theme/person/event, write it down somewhere. You may come up with a list of 20+ different ideas in your research. No matter how small, as long as there is something about it, write it down. Each of these mini themes is going to end up being a paragraph in your paper or combined with another mini theme. 

Once you’ve made your list, look for larger overarching themes. In the paper I’ve shown you, I had mini categories like “political party x” “religion” “labor groups” “little organization” and “hierarchy.” When I looked back I though, hey these are all groups and how groups are working together, so they each became their own mini paragraph under the subsection of “Alliances.”

As with most research paper structures, I try to find three general themes/subsections (like an extended version of that 5-paragraph essay we wrote in middle school). It makes the paper less messy and also makes sure I’m not covering things that are beyond a reasonable scope.

During this step, you are also searching for your thesis. It won’t be your final version. As you fill in your outline in the next step you may make slight changes. But this is definitely when you start thinking about it.

Step 3: Outline

We’re ready to outline! Once I’ve collected all my different themes and organized all my subsections and paragraphs, it’s time to fill in that outline. I start a new doc just for the outline and take advantage of google doc’s headings function to make a clear document outline.

Here comes the fun part, I read through my research one more time, this time copy and pasting all my research into each section of the outline. The document outline in google docs makes this easy because I can just click on each subheading to get me there (super helpful when you’re dealing with 15+ pages of research).

Here is what it looks like:

Let’s say I need to add something to my outline about labor groups. Boom, labor groups. Also, the typos are really abound here haha

Step 4: Write the Paper

Okay, I get it, easier said than done. BUT! You already have everything set up. Your outline is essentially just a list of your paragraphs and all you have to do is paraphrase, cite, and create a topic sentence. And that’s how you should think about this: you’re essentially transforming bullet points into sentences and adding footnotes. 

In high school my English teacher introduced us to Sh*tty First Drafts for creative writing, but honestly the same applies to research papers. Sometimes I’ll even have phrases like “wait no that’s not what I meant but basically…” and when I go back to edit, I realize that what came after “but basically…” is fine! And I keep it. So just start typing.

How do you cite while you write? Because we’re trying to get a constant stream of writing going, inserting proper footnotes after each sentence you type is too bothersome. I usually split screen with my outline and my paper so I just copy and paste a few words from my bullet point into my footnote, like so:

(This is from a different paper about cluster munitions.)

Step 5: Edit the Paper

I work best when I print out my first draft and make all edits in red pen. I feel more productive and can visually see where I want to move sentences and what I need to change. The more red there is the better I can feel the paper getting. (Whether or not that’s true doesn’t matter. We’re trying to stay motivated here!) When it’s all digital I don’t really see the progress. Plus, once I finish all the red, I get another moment of passive brain work, where all I’m doing is transferring edits rather than thinking. And at this point in the process, that kind of relief is much welcomed. 

The good thing about this process is there’s not usually a need to cut entire paragraphs or pages because the paper you end up with is just a formalized version of your outline. Because you started with such a detailed outline, the cutting and editing now is just to refine your word choices and get rid of the “but basically”s. You’re almost there!

Step 6: Replace your citations

Now it’s time to go back and replace your footnotes with actual citations. Zotero makes this easy because in Word you can just insert and add the page number, and it’ll automatically do “Ibid.” for you when needed. Ctrl+f in the original research doc to quickly find the source.

Step 7: One More Read-Through and Submit!

Congratulations!! You’ve got a fully-researched and well-backed paper! Of course, even though the process is straightforward, it’s still a lot of work. In ideal situations I would start researching two weeks before the deadline, but if need be, I believe I’ve done this all in three miserable panic-filled days as well. 

Please message me if you have any questions at all! I really hope some of you find this helpful! Good luck!