#to international phenomenon and still publishing work that is so obviously personal and has so much effort in it even if its weird or smth

[noriakicatkyoin]

I think look back is just like personally my favorite thing fujimoto has ever created and it gives me so many emotions and i cry so much every time i read it not even bc of the ending but different things throughout . Fujino dancing in the rain and finding the passion in what she loves again . Kyomoto thanking fujino for helping her socialize and live outside of herself and share her life with another person for the first time . The two of them trudging through snow to see if they even got an honourable mention after doing so much work together. Sickening. Evil and twisted. Fujino and kyomoto you will always be famous

[nagisasstunningpersonality]

I posted 114 times in 2022

That's 25 more posts than 2021!

58 posts created (51%)

56 posts reblogged (49%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@decadentrot

@raimeiii

@fo-the-deadlineholic

@zlimzlap

@nagismells

I tagged 44 of my posts in 2022

#assassination classroom - 43 posts

#ass class - 43 posts

#ansatsu kyoushitsu - 33 posts

#karmagisa - 18 posts

#karma akabane - 14 posts

#nagisa shiota - 10 posts

#akabane karma - 6 posts

#ask game - 6 posts

#shiota nagisa - 2 posts

#adhd - 2 posts

Longest Tag: 39 characters

#can you tell i wrote a paper about this

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

Behold - Assassination Classroom Iceberg

This is just my opinion obviously, and things I thought were kind of relevant. Explanations below cut!

Tier One

Shounen Jump - the weekly manga magazine Assassination Classroom originally was published in Yuusei Matsui - the series creator Nagisa's gender - in reference to the amount of people who think Nagisa's a girl for some period of time

Tier Two

Ramen gun meme - a viral tumblr post using the clip of Gastro preparing ramen with a gun which blew up far outside the fandom Koro Q - The fantasy chibi spin off manga and anime Manga only villains - Numerous characters (usually assassins) who only appeared in the manga 365 Days - The movie, featuring adult Karma and Nagisa remembering their days in class Toonami rerelease - Recent broadcast on an anime channel which has caused a sharp increase in new fans

Tier Three

Live action movies - two movies adapted from the ass class story Kunudon - the nut mascot of the school. Featured in weird BDSM situations within Koro Q Sonic Ninja - movie (loved by Karma and Nagisa) in the series. Has a whole trailer post credits in one of the episodes Nagisa's gender (controversy) - in reference to the portions of fans who fetishize him, write him as a female etc., and the fans who push back against it Pop culture references - numerous references to other anime like One Piece, Naruto, etc., but also other properties such as Pirates of the Caribbean Asano's mother - a character who barely exists aside from one manga panel, where you can see her back

Tier Four

Mobile game - a card collecting app/game where multiple illustrations of all the characters were released. No longer running. 3DS game - game based on the main story. Wasn't released outside of Japan nor translated Korotan - four book series for teaching English, but also included short stories. Most significant is Korotan D, which features the kids after graduating high school 7 years later manga - a number of short manga pages featuring a few characters in the future found in the Graduation Album. Karma discourse - never ending internal fights about whether Karma is a good person or not, especially over his Nagisa jokes

Tier Five

Korosuu - similar to korotan books, but focused on maths. Less well known due to incomplete English translation (i know im still working on it i swear-) Everyone owns the mountain - lesser known fact that E Class used their money to legally purchase the 3E class building and mountain Hachiouji - the real life city Kunugigaoka is based on Korosensei's nationality - more so because it's unknown, though there are a lot of fan theories OVA - an adaptation of the Kyoto arc before the anime was made, featuring a different voice cast and art style

Tier Six

Yada is LGBT - it's subtle but this is canon, and so she's the only definitively not straight character in the series Bonus songs - the releases of the OPs came with some bonus tracks sung by the cast (you can find them on spotify) "half middle two" - the worst translation in the series, of Karma's codename. It was meant to be a reference to the cultural phenomenon of a teenager living in a fantasy world where they're the best at everything. The shed - cursed location (i.e where Irina gets 'helped' by Korosensei) Timeline - for Aguri to have been the 3E teacher, the school year has to have lasted more than a full year Takada and Tanaka - two bully characters often seen from main campus. Weirdly implied to be gay for each other.

Tier Seven

Fuwa meta - Fuwa often breaking the fourth wall (esp in the manga), and implied to be the writer of Koro Q Bitch Sensei and Karasuma's daughter - Introduced in the seven years manga, but a lot of people missed that they have a canon child Kayano's dad is evil - a theory but with decent proof that Aguri may have been somewhat forced to marry Yanagisawa

Tier Eight

Commodore Matthew Perry - the historical commodore who came to Japan in the 1800s and forced the country to open up borders for trade (basically one of the most important Japanese historical events). In the manga, his image is shown when Bitch Sensei is teaching how to seduce foreigners. Karasuma's dead sister - referenced on the ass class wiki, with little explanation or general fandom knowledge as to who, how, or when Kayano pregnant - a theory some fans had due to the positioning of her hands in the final manga chapter

96 notes - Posted January 7, 2022

#4

Hey, Toonami people, just for you I'll explain Karma's codename.

Long story short they localised this terribly.

The Japanese is actually "chuunihan" and comes from the phrase "chuunibyou" or "second grader disease". It refers to middle schoolers who develop a kind of fantasy coolness complex where they think they're super self important - sometimes so into anime/games that they outwardly act like they're a protagonist.

The "han" here means half, so basically they're saying that Karma has protagonist kun disease but he goes about it in a half assed lazy way

111 notes - Posted January 17, 2022

#3

Never forget

There are a lot of people who believe that this man is heterosexual.

I repeat.

People genuinely believe

See the full post

139 notes - Posted October 28, 2022

#2

The AUs I have fully developed at this point but will probably never write

- Nagisa is an assassin who murders Karma, but this comes back to bite him in the ass when Karma turns into a ghost and starts haunting him. At first he sticks to poltergeist shit, but somehow he ends up falling in love

- Karma, being an edgy teen, decides to summon a demon to do his bidding. Considering he doesn't know what he's doing, he ends up summoning Nagisa, an incubus. Except, this is literally Nagisa's first job. Then there's the fact that Karma has no interest in doing incubus... stuff. He just wants Nagisa to fetch him food, mess with Gakushuu etc. They end up having to hug alot so Nagisa doesn't starve. Surprisingly innocent and wholesome

- A straight up Barbie in an Island Princess retelling, just with Japanese flavour. Nagisa, the son of a samurai lord, comes across the long-lost prince having been sent to scour some nearby islands. A bunch of intrigue and plot occurs, but the most important parts are that Karma is feral enough to sleep in trees, and he can still talk to animals for some reason.

- Percy Jackson AU (because I'm trash) where Nagisa is a child of Thanatos (or Hades, I haven't decided) and Karma is a son of Nemesis. Honestly, I feel like that alone speaks for itself.

- Assassin Nagisa and lawyer Karma. Nagisa's on trial for murder, and Karma falls in love with him over the course of trying to defend him. He ends up pulling out all the stops, and by some kind of magic gets Nagisa off the hook. After which, Nagisa tells him he was guilty the entire time.

- The super cool Harry Potter AU I came up with before we found out how cursed JK was. Like this one I'll definitely never write, but Nagisa as the actual heir of Slytherin just chatting to snakes in his sleep...

- An AU where they both actually had good parents. AKA, Karma's a kind, respectful, emotionally balanced kid. Nagisa's far less unnerving. They were dating but broke up when Nagisa went into E Class, and this time Karma never got suspended...

Long story short, my ability to make literally anything into a karmagisa au is frightening. The worst part is I could write DETAILED posts on all of these too.

156 notes - Posted February 23, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

What’s this about koro Q and karmagisa?

Okay strap yourself in. This became a Karma sexuality meta. warning for koro q spoilers.

This centres around Bitch Sensei and her 'charm' ability. Note that Nagisa 'charms' (read: he doesn't actually, everyone just thought he was hot) 3E in chapter two, but what I'm talking about here is the sort of mind-control ability, which is consistently represented by a heart around the head.

This section of the panel speaks clearly. You can only be charmed if you're attracted to women. Hell, "are you gay" is right there (I don't have access to the Japanese rn so I can't double check the exact wording).

See the full post

264 notes - Posted July 18, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[hcpefulmarshmallow]

Hello friends, this is just a thing that I wanted to mention real quick (you: “stop it Jenny, we know you don’t do real quick”) because it’s been playing on my mind for some time. Trigger warning for mental illness.

 To begin, a (somewhat) brief preface. When I talk about what’s a ‘real’ diagnosis and what’s not, I’m referring to what exists in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-V); and the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).

 The most recent edition of the DSM-V was published in 2013 by the American Psychiatric Association, and the most recent edition of the ICD-11 in 2018. They are both common diagnostic tools for mental disorders, offering clear, standardised criteria. The DSM is more commonly used in America and is more universally known, while the ICD-11, despite being less common knowledge, actually has a wider reach professionally and is used more in Europe and other parts of the world. It also has a broader scope than the DSM, covering overall health instead of just mental disorders.

 Please bear in mind that I have not read either resource in their entirety, this is just what I can work out from more general research of the two, compared to patterns in writing that I see all the time. And just know that I’m not calling anyone out or trying to police anyone’s creativity. Consider this an information dump, and inspiration to research what you write.

 So, with all the boring stuff out of the way: what’s my damn point? Why did I take on the mammoth task of reducing a complicated and very nuanced issue to a single post? In fact, what is the issue at hand? 5 paragraphs in and I’ve still not addressed it, I’m a great essayist.

 Well, it all started with the song  “Sweet But Psycho” by Ava Max. And no, I don’t know it -- and neither does my sister who seems to think she does, because I hear the first four lines sung out loud more than I ever needed to: “Oh, she's sweet but a psycho / A little bit psycho / At night she's screamin' / I'm-ma-ma-ma out my mind”. And when you have that catchy but annoying tune in your head, the things you hate about it are inescapable. 

 At this point, you’re probably thinking this is another rant about the glorification (or even, gasp, the cutesification) of mental illness around us and, uh...sort of? Like I said, I’m not here to police anybody. And I don’t think almost anything is truly bad in isolation -- it’s the trend that scares me. There’s not much I, a lowly internet dweeb, can do about the mainstream, but I do think I can educate my fellow peers. And what I want to educate you on today is the use of words that don’t mean what we think they mean, as an example of why we need to mind the subject matter we handle.

 So. ‘Psycho’. In terms of writing, most people use it to refer to their characters who are your batshit off-the-wall cutesy crazy types. Your Yanderes and Jeff The Killers of the fandom world. It’s usually short for two different terms: either Psychopath or Psychotic, and in neither case does this do anybody any favours. Let me explain.

 The term ‘Psychopath’ is often used to describe someone who is cruel, violent, has no care for others, and is often bloodthirsty. These characters are usually presented in one of two ways: as someone who can blend into wider society until their true dark nature is triggered, at which point they become deadly and dangerous; or as someone who is simply unapproachable at all times. Psychopath also has a sister term it’s often treated as interchangeable with, of which I am sure you’re aware: Sociopath. A ‘Sociopath’ is someone who cannot or simply does not experience empathy, sympathy, all those wonderful emotions that make us caring and considerate towards others. As a result, a ‘Sociopath’ often winds up doing radically hurtful things to other people.

 The trouble with both of these words is that, medically, they do not exist. Not how we think they do. We just made them up to be mean to each other. That’s right, you can’t be diagnosed as a Sociopath, or a Psychopath. Yeah, I was shocked too. I got so used to hearing people described like this, I thought they must be real.

 And I’m not saying that these words are invalid, just because they’re not real diagnoses. That’s not how words work. The beauty of language is that we invented it, and we can keep on reinventing it. If people use the term ‘Psychopath’ in this way, it will inevitably come to mean this exact thing, no matter what psychology says. And that’s fine. The trouble is that they are often conflated with real mental illness. Used in the place of a genuine diagnosis so we can still have our crazy villain type without the constraints of real, attributable illness. Because you gotta keep ‘em guessing!!1! In the same way they become real words if we use them like they are, they become interchangeable with actual mental issues if we use them that way. The ‘symptoms’ of being a Psycho- or Sociopath are oftentimes just exaggerated forms of symptoms belonging to actual, diagnosed illnesses. And like I said, trends are worse than individual problems, but when we see a combination of symptoms in an illness, whether that illness is given a fake name or not, in exclusively characters who we’d never want to meet in real life, the real sufferers suffer. It puts a stigma in our minds whether we mean for it to or not; it closes us off to conversations, to understanding these people and how to help them.

 The worst cases are when writers take the opportunity to justify their use of the word by ‘diagnosing’ the character themselves, which takes on a whole new level of Yikes. We’re in such an awkward place in terms of representation at the moment, and I know it’s hard to navigate. I have all the love for people who do so with pure intentions. If, for example, you have a straight character, it’s easy for that character to be themselves. But if you have a gay character, everything they do is Gay, and it’s a representation of the Gay Community, and you will be held to a higher standard because of that. That is the lens through which we look at media right now, and it sucks for everyone, and is so easily exploited, but it is what it is. In much the same way, if your character is the only character in your story with a certain illness and they’re also your Big Bad, or someone who would be genuinely terrifying to approach -- well, I don’t think I need to explain why that could be seen as a major disservice. And of course, if your character is the only one in a whole darn genre...yeah. This is why trends matter. And why the trend of mental health getting misrepresented is so troublesome.

 But I digress: because remember, I did say there were two uses of the word Psycho, and the second is grounded in reality. The word ‘Psychotic’ is, medically speaking, a real thing. Again, used to mean someone who is deranged, possibly murderous - and like I said, if a word is used a certain way, it will come to mean a certain thing. But the term has a psychological basis. Psychotic describes someone experiencing Psychosis - a mental disorder in which the sufferer experiences a break from reality. The most classic case is a war veteran who thinks he is suddenly back on the battlefield.

 But obviously, a sufferer of a serious and damaging phenomenon isn’t what we think of when we hear ‘Psycho’ or even ‘Psychotic’. I don’t want to lean too much into the impact on mental health as a whole; that the idea of being neurodivergent is subsequently glamourised and demonised at the same time; that people latch onto labels that have real, practical use, all for the sake of feeling special. I want to keep it basic now. I want to ask: do terms like these have a place in writing? Specifically, in RP, since that is the form with which I am most acquainted right now. Obviously I can only answer with my own opinion, since there’s no Holy Doctrine to tell us one way or another.

 I’m not going to sit here and demonise everyone I think has mishandled subject matter. Believe me, I’ve not always been good at it -- I’m still not always good at it. And as someone actively playing a character whose mental issues are a major part of his characterisation, and who does things that make him unlikeable because of those mental illnesses, I know the pressure to get it right all the time. That unsteady balance between realism and demonisation, glorification and representation. The desire to put labels to traits, to have an understanding of what’s going on in such a complicated mind. It’s tricky. Everyone’s experiences are different. And I’m not saying we need to get rid of “crazy for the sake of crazy” characters, or view everything through the lens of “but who will this hurt??”; or get rid of these terms altogether. Like I said, societal meaning is still meaning. And I personally like to believe that most authors have good intentions, even those with poor execution. And I’m certainly not trying to shame anyone for falling for societal opinion. Everyone has about something at some point.

 If there’s a point to this at all, it’s this: research. Learn. Adapt. Not even my information is perfect and correct. I’ve seen everything above done a million times in so many ways, good and bad. If you want to follow a trend in writing or in storytelling, do, but try to understand it first so you can execute it better. Give it a purpose, and a place. Seize your right to be creative, by all means, but also take the opportunity to learn something new. And in turn, use your art to not only express and entertain, but educate.

 Tl;dr: The best premise in the word can still be executed poorly, but likewise, a poor premise can be executed well. No subject matter has to be wholly off limits, and not everything has to be a statement about something. But handling matters, so handle your work with respect. Do your research and understand what you’re saying before you say it. Make something you’re proud to stand by.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

I'VE BEEN PONDERING STOCK

And are English classes even the place to do it. By definition they're partisan. Would the transplanted startups survive?1 One of the best in the business. The other reason the number of startups started within them. Do they let energetic young people get paid market rate for the work they do.2 They don't always, of course: insurance, business license, unemployment compensation, various things with the IRS. But if I have to pause when I lose my train of thought. For a lot of people who get rich through rent-seeking of various forms, and a research director at Smith Barney. An essayist can't have quite as little foresight as a river. And so began the study of ancient texts had such prestige that it remained the backbone of education until the late 19th century.3 But can you think of one restaurant that had really good food and went out of business and the people would be dispersed.

A wimpy little single-board computer for hobbyists that used a TV as a monitor? Most people who publish online write what they write for the simple reason that they want to own, and the harder performance is to measure, the more we'll see multiple companies doing the same thing.4 At the other extreme are publications like the New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place. But only graduation rates, not how much students learn. That's the key to success as a startup founder, but that you should never shrink from it if it's on the path to something great. I seemed awkward and halting by comparison.5 And they're going to be developing it for people like you. And since all the hackers had spent many hours talking to users, we understood online commerce way better than anyone else. Almost by definition, if a startup succeeds its founders become rich.6 The main reason they want to. One is that the raison d'etre of all these institutions has been the same: to beat the system. Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh or Raymond Chandler is too obviously pleasing to seem like serious work, as reading Shakespeare would have been there without PR firms, but briefly and skeptically.

This does happen. This is called seed capital. This seems a common problem. Remember the exercises in critical reading you did in school, where you can spend as long thinking about each sentence as it takes to say it, a person hearing a talk can only spend as long on each sentence as it takes to say it, a person hearing a talk can be a powerful force. And the days when VCs could wash angels out of the picture. Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back?7 Like most startups, ours began with a group of friends, and it was only then I realized he hadn't said very much. If anyone proved a theorem in christian Europe before 1200, for example, by helping them to become smarter or more disciplined, which then makes them more successful.8

Sometimes I even make a conscious effort to remind oneself that the real world you can create wealth as well as as apportioning the stock, you should either learn how or find a co-founder. Our offices were in a wooden triple-decker in Harvard Square.9 But this is a situation where it would really be an uphill battle. For a lot of investors unconsciously treat this number as if it were a single phenomenon. Reading P. You have more leverage negotiating with VCs than you realize.10 Usually this is an assumption people start from rather than a conclusion they arrive at by examining the evidence. We should fix those things.11 For example, in a recent essay I pointed out that because you can only judge computer programmers by working with them, no one knows in programming who the heroes should be. For example, the question of the relative merits of Ford and Chevy pickup trucks, that you couldn't safely talk about with others.

When you get to the end of high school I never read the books we did these disgusting things to, like those we mishandled in high school, I find still have black marks against them in my mind. The path it has discovered, winding as it is, represents the most economical route to the sea. A few years later I heard a talk by someone who was not merely a better speaker than me, but a famous speaker. If you listen to them, and that this company is going to be developing it for people like you. Design, as Matz has said, should follow the principle of least surprise. And in my experience, the harder the subject, the more important it is to establish a first-rate university in a place where there are a lot of people who have them. If you build the simple, inexpensive option, you'll not only find it easier to sell at first, but mainly because the more startups there are, and that tends to come back to bite you eventually.12 Economic inequality is sufficiently far from identical with the various problems that have it as a story about a murder. This was also one reason we didn't go public. Often they're people who themselves got rich from technology.13

Financially, a startup is to run into intellectual property problems.14 By the end of that year we had about 70 users. They seemed wrong. And there are other topics that might seem harmless, like the idea that we ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves.15 But for nearly everyone else, spoken language is better.16 So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people start to act this way there, so you can say with certainty about Jaynes is that he was one of the biggest startup hubs in the world. Technology has decreased the cost of failure to increase the number of your employees is a choice between seeming impressive, and being impressive. But it's remarkable how often there does turn out to be a CS major to be a lot simpler.17 So what's interesting? And when readers see similar stories in multiple places, they think there is some important trend afoot.

Notes

In practice their usefulness is greatly enhanced by other people who did it with.

It's hard for us to see.

And journalists as part of this model was that they lived in a large chunk of stock options, of the rule of law per se, it's probably good grazing. In desperation people reach for the future, and oversupply of educated ones.

Together these were the seven liberal arts. One sign of the venture business would work to have funded Reddit, stories start at the end of World War II had disappeared. Interestingly, the best ways to help a society generally is to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a wink, to sell the bad groups and they unanimously said yes. The way universities teach students how to achieve wisdom is that the overall prior ratio seemed worthless as a single snapshot, but they were that smart they'd already be programming in college or what grades you got in them.

Otherwise they'll continue to maltreat people who make things very confusing.

When the Air Hits Your Brain, neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick recounts a conversation in which multiple independent buildings are traditionally seen as temporary; there is undeniably a grim satisfaction in hunting down certain sorts of bugs, and in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Oxford University Press, 1996.

One of the War on Drugs.

But a couple predecessors. I think it's confusion or lack of transparency. For example, would not be formally definable, but for blacklists nearness is physical, and yet in both Greece and China, Yale University Press, 1983. 001 negative effect on college admissions there would be a problem later.

Wufoo was based in Tampa and they would never come face to face meetings. We tell them what to do video on-demand, because at one remove from the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is actually from the most recent version of this policy may be that some groups in America consider acting white. Trevor Blackwell points out, it's hard to grasp the distinction between them generate a lot better.

Apparently there's only one founder is in the sense of the web. In practice formal logic is not yet released. 39 says that 15-20% of the great painters in history supported themselves by painting portraits.

Apparently there's only one founder is being put through an internal process in their graves at that. For example, the transistor it is.

Loosely speaking.

As he is much into gaming. It would have become direct marketers.

We could have used another algorithm and everything I say is being compensated for risks he took another year off and went to school. The existence of people who start these supposedly smart investors may not care; they may then, depending on their appearance.

One father told me they do the right thing to do others chose Marx or Cardinal Newman, and there are no discrimination laws about starting businesses. But if so, why did it. Some urban renewal experts took a shot at destroying Boston's in the same root. Default: 2 cups water per cup of rice.

Like early medieval architecture, impromptu talks are made of spolia. 4%, Macintosh 18. 5%. If Bush had been able to resist this urge.

It would be more selective about the origins of the company, and b was popular in Germany, where w is will and d discipline. Unfortunately, not conquest. Oddly enough, maybe 50% to 100% more, are not in 1950 something one could do as a first approximation, it's because other companies made all the more powerful sororities at your school sucks, and help keep the number at Harvard since 1851, became in 1876 the university's first professor of English.

Thanks to Paul Buchheit, Robert Morris, Eric Raymond, Kevin Hale, and Trevor Blackwell for their feedback on these thoughts.

[ponyregrets]

No One Told You Life Was Gonna Be This Way

Kabby social media AU, 3200 words, T

did u know that 1. it is @kane-and-griffin‘s birthday 2. she accidentally went viral for ranting about Friends and 3. once I start thinking about how A Thing (random example: Marcus Kane writing viral Friends tweets) would go down I cannot stop until I just write the thing

anyway happy birthday claire!!

Marcus Kane is, unfortunately, very familiar with the Nice Guy phenomenon.

It's an occupational hazard of writing science fiction, especially in the internet age; all he has to do is look for his most obnoxious fans, and he finds an unfortunately loud contingent of entitled mostly white men who believe that the world owes them women and happiness without any effort on their parts. It's something he tries to combat as much as possible, wherever he can, and he knows it works in some cases. For every reader who's turned against him for being an SJW cuck (whatever that means), he has another who's expressed appreciation for his opening them up to perspectives they hadn't considered and broadened their empathy and understanding.

That's what sci-fi should do, as far as Marcus is concerned. The heart of science fiction is acceptance and unity.

Which is why he tells Bellamy, "I need you to do one of those Twitter threads for me."

"For what?" Bellamy asks, wary. As Marcus's assistant, he seems to think his most important duty is talking Marcus out of interacting with social media. And he may be right.

"Ross Gellar."

It takes him a second. "The guy from Friends?" he finally asks.

"Yes. I want to explain to my followers why he's bad romantic lead and role model."

To his shock, the response is instant. "Okay."

"No arguments? No lecture on how that isn't what Twitter is for?"

"No, fuck Ross," he says. "What do you want to say? I'll make it happen."

Marcus clucks his tongue. "I'll write up a statement."

* Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Last week, while ill, I watched Friends on Netflix for the first time. So, a thread on friendship, romance, Joey Tribiani, and Ross Gellar.

O @o-so-cool reblogged Sometimes my brother's boss is pretty okay.

raven @queenreyesthefirst reblogged brb adding @kanemarcus to non-sucky white dude sci-fi authors and shipping him with @scalzi

Finn Collins @finnishfirst reblogged this is kind of interesting but way too hard on ross. he does a lot of good things! see thread

Bellamy @bradburybell reblogged this is not nearly hard enough on ross

Clarke Griffin @clarkegriffin reblogged Relevant to your interests @ark-abby

*

"So here's what I think happened," says Bellamy. He's brought Marcus a coffee without being prompted, so whatever it is must be bad.

Marcus takes a sip of the drink. "When?"

"With your Twitter rant."

"Ah. I assume there are a lot of protests from the louder, stupider portion of my fanbase about how I've allowed the liberal fake media destroy my mind and masculinity?"

"Yeah, there are some of those. But, uh--it went way past your fanbase."

"Excuse me?"

"This is your most retweeted post ever. Not even close. It's viral. You've got people fighting you, people telling you it's a revelation, and about a thousand new followers already. In the last day."

He frowns. "Is Friends really still that popular?"

"Apparently." He shrugs. "Clarke says you made Buzzfeed and a couple of the other aggregator sites too. She and Raven have been texting me updates. They think it's hilarious."

"What does that mean?"

"Honestly? I don't fucking know. I told you when you hired me I'm not actually good at this stuff. I tried to warn you."

"You did." He takes another sip of coffee. "So, what do you think happened?"

"My sister retweeted it, and she spends about ninety percent of her time thinking about her social media brand, so she's got a ton of followers. Then Raven picked it up from her, her tech friends got a hold of it, and after that--" He shrugs. "You got out of your niche and into broader Twitter, and I'm not going to be able to find anything useful in your notifications for weeks. It's all Ross/Joey shipping discourse. Clarke's words, not mine," he adds.

"Should I be concerned?"

"I don't know. I guess we'll find out if it actually sells more books. And Clarke thinks we should try to leverage it into more publicity, she's got an idea for that."

Marcus hasn't actually met most of Bellamy's friends, but he references them enough that he knows who they are. Octavia, sister, Raven, ex-girlfriend, Clarke, current girlfriend. He also knows that all of them are more familiar with social media than Bellamy is, so he's not surprised that he consulted them.

Mostly, though, he still can't believe anyone really cares about this.

"An idea to leverage the Friends discourse?"

Bellamy shrugs. "Apparently this fit into an ongoing conversation she's been having with her mother. Abby Griffin? She writes for Ark AV. She did that think-piece about what mainstream science fiction gets wrong about female characters."

"Ah," says Marcus. He remembers the article, which had been harsh but ultimately fair, and an interesting take, once he'd gotten over the initial hurt of being used in a not entirely positive light. "I didn't know that was Clarke's mother."

"Yeah, I figured I'd tell you later. Once I didn't think you were going to call her up and argue with her about how much better you've gotten."

"And now you don't think I will?"

"Honestly, I don't care. I just want to see you guys fight about Friends," he says. "That sounds awesome."

"So, you have no ulterior motives here. Just looking out for my best interests."

"Obviously."

"If she's Clarke's mother, I assume she's local? Or will I be fighting her on a podcast?"

"We were thinking Starbucks on Saturday. Caffeine and lots of witnesses."

Marcus finally lets himself open up Twitter, now that he's had enough coffee. He almost always has some notifications when he looks; he's a public figure with a passionate fanbase, he's used to people trying to talk to him on Twitter. That's why he has a Twitter in the first place. But the number of notifications has never been so high, not in his memory. And, as Bellamy said, it really is a lot of passionate Friends discourse, both for and against his opinions. It's an overwhelming amount of love, hate, and passion. Like discovering an entirely new world.

He thought he understood fandom, but apparently he has a long way to go.

"Starbucks would be fine," he tells Bellamy, a little faintly. "I'd enjoy that."

*

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus A lot of new followers today. Here are a few notes for you:

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus I am a published science fiction author. Those of you telling me to just write a book instead of many tweets, I have written many books.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus You can find the link to purchase them in my header.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus I have never claimed to be an expert on Friends. This was my first time watching, and these are my impressions based on one viewing.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus My opinion on the Friends canon does not invalidate yours. Yours is as valid as it ever was. But if you feel threatened, examine that.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus My ideas may have merit you're reluctant to fully accept because of your own perceptions of how things should be in relationships.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus If you followed me for more Friends content, please be aware this is an outlier. I usually talk about science fiction.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus On that note, would anyone like to discuss the Hugo Awards?

Masper @gogglesdonothing Replying to @kanemarcus ross/rachel is forever tho

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus and @gogglesdonothing I'll take that as a no.

Jonty @themediumgreen Replying to @kanemarcus and @gogglesdonothing I'm so sorry Mr. Kane just ignore him I want to talk about the Hugos tell me all your favorite winners do you like Chuck Tingle

Jonty @themediumgreen Replying to @gogglesdonothing I CAN'T TAKE YOU ANYWHERE

*

Marcus will admit he does not feel broadly prepared to seriously enter the Friends discourse. He is, after all, a neophyte. If there are scholarly works on Friends, he has not read them. If there's any academic discussion of these issues, he is not familiar with it. His knowledge is vague and still forming, but for some people, this show was a huge part of their development. It matters to them on a deep, personal level.

For him, it was a decent use of his time while he was sick and confined to his couch. He had a fever for most of the first season. He's not sure he's prepared to fight anyone about it. Based on his mentions, he has many, many fewer horses in this race than other people. But maybe that's a good thing. Maybe his perspective as an outsider is valuable.

Or maybe he just wants the chance to sit down with Abby Griffin. Because instead of spending the past week either working on his next book or even familiarizing himself with Friends and the criticism surrounding it, he's mostly been researching Abby Griffin herself. He'd done it some after the first article Bellamy sent, curious to see her other work, but he'd been busy with a deadline and hadn't really had much time for that, had barely scratched the surface of this woman.

He doesn't have time for it now either, of course, but it's at least relevant to something in his life. And, as Bellamy and his friends have pointed out, this is at least good publicity. It's not a complete waste of time.

The Abby Griffin stalking might be a waste, but he can't help it. She's interesting. The pop-culture writing is, apparently, a side job, something she never intended to get seriously involved in. The website had been her husband's, and when he passed away, Abby and Clarke had taken over its upkeep, and Abby had started producing content when she had time. Given her full-time job is as the director of internal medicine at the hospital, he's frankly amazed she has as much time for content as she does.

And it's good content. She and Clarke have a weekly column where they discuss a movie they went to see together, and the female characters in science fiction piece was apparently part of a series. Her taste is good and her opinions are interesting, and by the time he's meeting her, he has one big question, and one only.

They get through introductions and are settled in at the table before he finally lets it out. "Honestly, I don't understand how you can like Ross."

She lets out a surprised laugh. "Excuse me?"

"Bellamy said he was looking forward to us fighting over Friends, but I have trouble believing you disagree with my opinion of Ross. I don't know what we'd be fighting about."

She smiles into her mug. He'd known she was beautiful from the picture he found on the hospital website, but it's different to see in person, and more awkward. Bellamy and Clarke are hanging out at their own table, pretending not to eavesdrop; it's not an ideal time to be caught staring. "I don't know what he told you, but I didn't disagree. It was an impressive rant. Well reasoned and accurate. I was more interested in discussing why you posted it and the reactions you got. I saw it wasn't popular among some of your readers."

"To say the least."

"One of the things I've been curious about since getting involved in online fandom is what counts as acceptable ways to interact, especially for those of us over thirty or so. I saw a lot of people asking why a heterosexual man in his late forties would care this much about Friends at all. As if that was the problem."

"Judging from the angry responses, plenty of heterosexual men are very invested in Friends. Although I'm not sure how old they are," he grants.

"Age is the biggest issue, in my experience. You'd been participating in an acceptable way, as a creator, but once you show yourself to be invested in Friends shipping--"

"I stepped into the wrong part of fandom."

"That's my thesis, yes."

He considers. "Am I on the record?"

"I'm not a reporter, Marcus," she says, sounding amused. "I'm not trying to trick you into saying something I can use against you. But if you'd like to officially be off the record, we can say that you are."

"My hope with that post was that it would make some of my readers rethink their attitudes towards women and romance. The number of responses I got to Valena's story in Bright Sky Morning that boiled down to her being wrong for not returning Pavel's feelings even though he'd been so devoted to her was--staggering. And depressing."

"Did your female readers appreciate it?"

"They did. Apparently Jin was a much more appealing partner."

Abby smiles. "I certainly thought so."

It's not his first time meeting a fan, of course, and she might not even be a fan, in the sense they're talking about. But she's read his work and has opinions on it, and that's always a little bit flattering. Especially when they align with his. "I'm glad. I was hoping he would be." He clears his throat. "So, you'd like to talk to me as a forty-eight-year-old man who publicly had opinions on shipping."

"And to get your thoughts on Monica and Chandler," she says, all innocence. "If you don't mind."

He can't help smiling himself. "Not at all. I'm all yours."

*

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Expanded my horizons this weekend with the High School Musical trilogy. A curious cultural phenomenon.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus I appreciated that Troy and Gabriela didn't go to the same college, but still stayed in the same general area.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus I still don't think the couple has much of a future, but in an unrealistic movie, I appreciated that nod to practicality.

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus Very disappointed about the last-minute attempt to cement Ryan's heterosexuality. Let children have LGBT role models.

Murphy @firstnameredacted Replying to @kanemarcus If you're seriously going to be talking about Disney movies from now on I'm unfollowing you, I don't give a shit about this

Marcus Kane @kanemarcus Replying to @kanemarcus and @firstnameredacted Please do.

*

"Look," says Bellamy, two months after the first Friends rant, "I'm not going to pretend I'm good with crushes, but it would be a lot easier to just ask Abby if she wants to get dinner off the record instead of coming up with new weird shit to have opinions about on Twitter every week."

"I assume the timing of this isn't a coincidence," Marcus says. He was just getting his coat on to go meet her.

"You've already got a standing coffee date. Turn it into a real date. I'm begging you."

"You don't enjoy my opinions on the High School Musical series?"

"I actually do, I'm just getting tired of blocking people. Also, I don't know if you're aware, but dating is awesome. You should try it."

"I appreciate your concern. You don't think it would be weird for you if your boss was dating your girlfriend's mother?"

"No weirder than whatever's actually happening right now. And don't even try to tell me you're not asking her out because you're worried about how it would affect me."

It does sound absurd, when he puts it like that. "No. That wasn't a major factor."

Bellamy rolls his eyes. "Just ask if she wants to come check out the Descendants franchise with you next weekend. Definitely a solid pickup line. Chicks dig it."

"The what?"

"It's like the spiritual successor to High School Musical. I'll send you a link. You should know this stuff if you're really going in on this."

"I should give you a raise."

"That too. Say hi to Abby for me."

It's not entirely accurate to say that he thinks about what Bellamy said as he walks over to his weekly meeting with Abby. Every time he walks to her favorite coffee shop near the hospital, he's thinking these same kinds of thoughts, so it's not really Bellamy's fault. He enjoys Abby's company company and would be happy to see more of her. He already knew that. But it's been a long time since he navigated anything like this.

If only Friends had prepared him for this kind of romance.

"Marcus," says Abby, giving him a smile when he sits down across from her. As usual, she's surrounded by papers, and he sometimes doubts that she'd even have time for a relationship. She does keep herself busy. "I enjoyed your meditations on High School Musical."

"I'm glad to hear it. Bellamy says it gave me a net loss of followers, but not as much of one as he thinks I deserved."

"I'm not surprised." She considers him. "I didn't mean for our friendship to hurt your career."

"I don't think it is. Plenty of people just read my books and never even find out I'm on Twitter. It's not a large percentage of sales. You're blaming yourself for the High School Musical tweets?" he adds, curious. They are her fault, broadly speaking, but he wasn't sure she knew.

"If you don't keep coming up with hot takes, we don't have much to talk about."

He laughs. "I hope we'd come up with something."

"I hope so too."

The conversation lags, but it's not a bad lag. It feels like she's given him an opening, and it's his job to figure out how to take advantage of it.

The easiest way would be to simply propose a dinner date, as Bellamy suggested. But he's never been good at simple.

"You know, you never told me your favorite relationship on Friends."

"I didn't?"

"No, we usually talk about my opinions."

She levels her gaze at him, considering. "Do you know what I think when I watch Friends now?"

"No."

"They're all so young. And don't get me wrong, I met my husband when we were young, and the two of us were happy, but--sometimes it worries me how much emphasis we put on meeting people early in life. The younger you are, the more romantic it is. And that's one kind of romance, but it's not everything. It makes me want to shake all these kids and tell them that life doesn't end at thirty, or forty, or fifty. You'll keep on meeting new people, and you can still be happy."

He lets himself reach for her hand, and relief floods him when she lets him take it, even turns it over so she can squeeze his fingers. "So your favorite relationship on Friends is the one Rachel has when she's forty-five and Ross is dead?" he teases.

"I hope you're not comparing my husband to Ross."

He has to laugh. "No. I would never."

Abby's smile is warm, and it's suddenly so easy to not be nervous at all. "Good. Because the rest of that was right."

"Good," he agrees. "I was hoping you'd say that."

*

Sky Crew Reviews @kaneandgriffin New list from @kanemarcus: top 10 YA sci-fi books for adults! Up next, top 10 adult sci-fi books for teens. Age is nothing but a number.

Murphy @firstnameredacted Replying to @kaneandgriffin I will pay you to stop

Bellamy @bradburybell Replying to @kaneandgriffin and @firstnameredacted when are you actually going to unfollow like you keep saying you will? asking for a friend

Murphy @firstnameredacted Replying to @kaneandgriffin, @firstnameredacted, and @bradburybell I keep hoping I'm going to come back and he'll be normal again

SJW Cuck @kanemarcus Replying to @kaneandgriffin, @firstnameredacted, and @bradburybell Don't hold your breath.

[stretchjournalemerson]

The Rise of YouTube Sub-Genres and their Impact on the Media Landscape

By Eitan Miller - 

“Cinema is a passive medium. It might well have fulfilled many of the expectations of an audience of our fathers and forefathers prepared to sit back, watch illusions and suspend disbelief, but I believe we can no longer claim this to be sufficient. New technologies have prepared and empowered the human imagination in new ways.”

-Peter Greenway, Lecture at the Dutch Film Festival, Sept. 27, 2003

In the years since 2005, the media landscape has changed drastically due to YouTube. Prior to the rise of internet video streaming, filmed content, for the most part, was created at a distance from its consumers. Unlike forms of entertainment like theater where the artist interacts with the art, audiences would watch films in immediate detachment from their creators. YouTube was one of a few platforms that allowed audiences to interface with creators and additionally encourage creators to communicate with each other. This led to the birth of new genres of film. Additionally, it is important to remember that this change was prompted by the technological revolution of digital cameras.

All of these changes led to a change in the way consumers view media and prompted shifts in alternative forms of media. As a person who has witnessed the rise of these new genres and as a filmmaker myself, I have been interested in the changes taking place. I have followed the growth of multiple creators, commented on some of their videos, and made some of my own. While the new styles of filmmaking present on YouTube are well recognized within the YouTube community, I found it interesting that there are very few academic papers detailing the stylings and impacts of this phenomenon. Many researchers seem tentative to consider the wide ranging effects of these changes. Over the course of this paper, I want to explore the rise and the impacts of this new genre of filmmaking and how it is impacting media generation and consumption today.

In the article “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production” published in the journal Critical Inquiry, professor and respected researcher Lev Manovich writes, “Surely, never in the history of modern art it has been doing so well commercially. No longer a pursuit for a few, contemporary art became another form of mass culture” (Manovich 329). As the internet is experienced visually and audibly, much of what viewers see is a form of art. The merits of the “art” that the internet has allowed people to create are much debated, but it is undoubtedly an unprecedented change in the media landscape. In what many researchers, including Manovich, describe as “Web 2.0,” the internet’s content changed from primarily publication and searchable data to a more communicative and interactive platform, encouraging “viewers” to interact with the content they were seeing. This led to the rise of YouTube in 2005, a platform where users could upload their own video content and comment on the works of others.

In “Everyday, Bro? Authenticity and Performance Intersections in the Vlogs of Jake Paul,” authors Pernille Rosenlund and Susanne Lisberg Jørgensen published their research on YouTube celebrity vlogger Jake Paul in the peer-reviewed journal Otherness: Essays and Studies. They write, “...vloggers on YouTube need to shift between authentic and staged intimacy on the same medium; they have to straddle the line between the familiar and the other. By doing this, vloggers not only transgress audience expectations for authenticity and an intimate connection but blur the lines between reality and fiction resulting in a form of performance art” (Jørgensen and Rosenlund 69). The rise of video blogging, or “vlogging,” was a new form of entertainment and communication, formed out of the new media opportunities that YouTube presented. As Jørgensen and Rosenlund explain, vloggers attempt to be personal and authentic enough for viewers to feel like they are seeing into the vlogger’s lives, but they do this in a performative manner, adapting themselves in some cases into a character, or at least characterized version of themselves. Further complicating the balance between performance and communication is the fact that viewers can interact within the comment section and interface directly with the creators of the video. This technology impacted the art that could be created and thus the experience of its viewers. Over the years of YouTube’s existence, this format expanded, encompassing new sub-genres of the vlog. Vlogs blur the line between entertainment, communication, and often, education.

Many sub-genres of vlogging have their own trademark styles and techniques utilized to create them. One successful example of a filmmaker who developed a unique style in order to stand out is Casey Neistat, with over eleven million subscribers and billions of video views as of this writing. Neistat blended YouTube vlogging styles with some aspects of traditional film production, in addition to incorporating some experimental and traditionally rejected filmmaking techniques like jump cuts. He helped evolve a unique filmmaking vocabulary that served his storytelling style, and this vocabulary was even highlighted on filmmaking website Nofilmschool.com. Notable film editor Sven Pace breaks down aspects of Neistat’s style in a YouTube video, coining the “Neistat Cut-Off,” “The Neistat Zoom,” and the “Neistat Montage,” among others. Further interesting is the fact that Pace used a YouTube video to make this analysis on his channel “ThisGuyEdits,” demonstrating the power YouTube holds over bringing analytical almost academic content to a widespread audience. Furthermore, videos that explain how to replicate the “Casey Neistat style” allow other viewers to understand how creators do what they do, replicate it, and expand upon it. Other creators reference the notable style in their own works. Vlogger Justin Escalona (PlayTheGameFilms) even titled an episode of his daily vlog, “IF CASEY NEISTAT MADE MY VLOGS,” and referred to an airport montage video he included in his vlog, “flew across the country to go to the SUPREME STORE,” as a “Casey Neistat montage.” Escalona was clearly impacted by Neistat’s visual style, which he incorporated more subtly into his own. He uses dialogue cuts in Neistat’s trademark style and incorporates cuts between one conversation in multiple locations. Still, Escalona brings his own twist to his vlogs, utilizing slow motion B-roll sequences which he often refers to as “cinematic sequences.”

Escalona is not the only one expanding on the work of others to stretch genres. Filmmakers such as Sam Kolder and Peter McKinnon, among many others including Escalona, have collectively developed what may be referred to as the “cinematic vlog” style. In my research, I have not found any academic papers or definitions of this style of filmmaking, which was a prompt for me to create one. Widely recognized within the YouTube community, the “cinematic vlog” style utilizes a mixture of “cinematic” footage, blended with the subject talking at the camera like a traditional vlog in order to create a sense of authenticity. The “cinematic” portions typically include slow motion videos shot on prosumer to professional quality filmmaking cameras, often letterboxed to replicate the aspect ratio of anamorphic film and to aesthetically separate the cinematic portions from the vlog portions. Typical vlog footage includes the stylistic editing standard of a “normal vlog,” like jump cuts and the “Neistat cut off.” It is difficult to track the progression of the style completely given that it was birthed from a community of creators.

One of the most prominent filmmakers of this style today is Peter McKinnon, who like Escalona uses the term “cinematic sequences” to refer to the slow motion footage that breaks up his vlogs. One thing that differentiates cinematic vloggers from other vloggers is that they tend to consider themselves to be “filmmakers.” Many, specifically Peter McKinnon, provide expansive amounts of tutorial style content, where they explain filmmaking techniques that they utilize in their videos. An interesting observation I had after watching countless videos in this style was their blend of entertainment with education. McKinnon regularly blends in magic tricks and discussion about his love for coffee within the same videos where he explains technical filmmaking and photography techniques. This blend creates a fast-paced video that keeps viewers entertained as well as informed.

Researchers Stuart Cunningham and David Craig discuss the rise of social media entertainment, or “communitainment,” in their article, “Online Entertainment: A New Wave of Media Globalization?” published in the International Journal of Communication. They write, “[I]t is possible to posit a new wave of media globalization based on the global availability and uptake of YouTube—and other major social media platforms, which are increasingly encouraging the upload of video content—which is relatively frictionless compared with national broadcasting and systems of film and DVD licensing by territory (Craig and Cunningham 5411). This globalization definitely exists; people all over the world can both upload and view content (with the exception of government established firewalls) identically to anyone else with internet access. However, this also leads to non-traditional formations of discourse communities that form within a genre or shared interest. The research of Cunningham and Craig is interesting, as it seems tentative to define concrete conclusions. Obviously, as internet entertainment has an essentially global reach, it must be a new form of globalization. Yet, given the title of their research alone, they appear tentative to reach that conclusion.

While globalization through geographically separated YouTube discourse communities are largely responsible for many traits of these new genres, not all of these stylistic choices are based around the musings of their creators. A precursor to the rapid stylings and fast cuts of many vlogs is the MTV Style. Professor Kay Dickinson defines rapid cutting from shot to shot as critical to the “MTV aesthetic” in her book Movie Music, the Film Reader. This originally jarring and unorthodox filmmaking style did not concern itself with spatial continuity, and utilized a frantically fast paced editing style. While the content and production style of vlogs are quite different, a few key similarities remain. Both jump cuts and speed of talking match the frenetic pace of the “MTV aesthetic.” This style has morphed into speech in an attempt to grab viewers. In an interview with Julie Beck for The Atlantic, linguistics professor Naomi Baron notes aspects of what Beck calls “YouTube Voice.” Some key aspects are overstressed vowels, long vowels and consonants, and adding extra vowels between consonants. Baron says, “What’s interesting is how similar people end up sounding, rather than sounding like themselves. In an attempt to make yourself sound special, you end up sounding like this whole genre of other people,” quoted in (Beck). This illustrates an interesting phenomenon I have been addressing throughout this paper: the impact internet communities can have on members of that community in shaping the art they create, despite physical geographic barriers.

Beyond simply the vlog, there is much more innovation within genres and communities. While I have not found research to cite this phenomenon, I witnessed the rise of the “cinematic travel video” as well in recent years. Key characteristics include incredibly fast paced editing, attention to sound design, slow motion and speed ramping, establishing drone shots, and creative transitions between shots. One typical feature is the hyperlapse, a timelapse where the camera moves slightly every frame of capture. This technique was only popularized within the last few years, and due to the communities of YouTube, has become a staple in cinematic travel videos. JR Alli is one notable creator of cinematic travel films with over two hundred thousand subscribers as of this writing. One fan, Stuart Spicer, commented on a recent video, “This is what I love about Youtube at the moment. The likes of JR, Kolder, Benn TK, Andreas... they’re all pushing & inspiring each other to improve & they’re all delivering” (Spicer). In response, Alli wrote, “[E]ven being mentioned in those names means a lot, it’s all about pushing the envelope so we can evolve the content. Really [l]ove the community of filmmakers on youtube” (Alli) This illustrates two key aspects of the changes that YouTube is bringing towards the media landscape. First, creators are working “together” despite operating in their own geographic locations in order to adapt and expand upon each others art, and pushing the barriers of what can be created. Furthermore, interaction with fans and between YouTubers themselves drive the popularity and power of these videos. Interaction with fans encourages creators and gives them instant feedback on their art, and interaction between creators encourages them to “[push] & [inspire] each other” (Spicer).

According to YouTube itself, over one billion hours of video are watched every day. Furthermore, content is available in ninety countries and eighty languages. This encompasses a wide variety of content, far beyond what any individual could be familiar with. Throughout this essay I have highlighted some stylistic attributes of genres forming based on those who consider themselves “filmmakers,” as that is a category of videos that greatly interests me as a filmmaker myself. However, the impact and innovation that YouTube has allowed transcend any one topic. Genres such as “the video essay” allow audiences to learn about a wide variety of topics through engaging narration and visuals, and new sub genres are being developed all the time in order to create a form that fits the content presented. The extent to which YouTube and similar interactive web-based video platforms have impacted society is massive. Additionally, the extraordinarily wide variety of topics of YouTube videos leads to the logical conclusion that there must be many more sub-genres than any one writer could have the knowledge to discuss. There are many questions to think about when considering the impact of YouTube on global culture. How will technology impact collaboration in the future? Should the globalization of knowledge changed the role of schools and our education system? Is there a net benefit to society because anyone can upload and share content of their own? How does internet media content impact more “traditional” media like Hollywood films? The implications of this change in media landscape are clearly wide reaching and applicable to many attributes of society. While many of these questions are highly debatable, one thing is clear. YouTube as a medium is changing not only what creators are making, but how they create.

Acknowledgments:

Thank you to the many people in WR 121-03 who looked at this research essay and gave me feedback that was instrumental in shaping its creation. Specifically, Kayla Randolph’s feedback and professor Mary Kovaleski Byrnes’ advice was incredibly helpful in crafting this essay. Finally, I would like to thank the many YouTube creators whose videos I watch, who are changing the media landscape as we know it.

Works Cited:

Alli, JR. “EGYPT- Like Never Before.” Comments section, Apr. 2019. Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvzWNwJ41_k  

Beck, Julie. “Why Do So Many People on YouTube Sound the Same?” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 7 Dec. 2015, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/the-linguistics-of-youtube-voice/418962/.  

Cunningham, Stuart, and David Craig. “Online Entertainment: A New Wave of Media Globalization?” International Journal of Communication, vol. 10, 2016, ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/5725/1832.

Duskin, Daniel, director. Mixing Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" on an Analog SSL Console - GoPro POV. YouTube, YouTube, 21 Dec. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em9EwVQy-6s.  

Escalona, Justin, director. Flew across the Country to Go to the SUPREME STORE. YouTube, YouTube, 10 Mar. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGOWcGhlh6Q.  

Escalona, Justin, director. IF CASEY NEISTAT MADE MY VLOGS - EPISODE 101. YouTube, YouTube, 7 Jan. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rP8pehpkUE.  

Escalona, Justin, director. This Video Is about Love... (Feat. Anthony Russo) - EPISODE 4 - JUSTIN ESCALONA. YouTube, YouTube, 5 Dec. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTJQk31Kor0.  

Greenaway, Peter. “Toward a Re-Invention of Cinema.” Variety, Variety Media, LLC, 1 Oct. 2003, variety.com/2003/voices/columns/toward-a-re-invention-of-cinema-1117893306/.

Manovich, Lev. “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production?” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 2, 2009, pp. 319–331., doi:10.1086/596645.

Moore, James. “Mixing Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" on an Analog SSL Console - GoPro POV.” Comments section, Feb. 2019. Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Em9EwVQy-6s  

Neely, Adam, director. 5-Hour Major Scale Practice Routine. YouTube, YouTube, 27 June 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=gog7xtXvndI.

Neely, Adam, director. Intro to East Asian Music Notation. YouTube, YouTube, 2 Apr. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpJPnCaIy80.  

Neistat, Casey. “CaseyNeistat.” YouTube, YouTube, www.youtube.com/user/caseyneistat/about.  

“Pop, Speed, Teenagers, and the ‘MTV Aesthetic.’” Movie Music, the Film Reader, by Kay Dickinson, Routledge, 2007, pp. 143–150.

Renée, V. “7 Storytelling Techniques You Can Learn from Filmmaker & YouTube Star Casey Neistat.” No Film School, NONETWORK, LLC, 27 Aug. 2016, nofilmschool.com/2016/08/7-storytelling-techniques-you-can-learn-filmmaker-youtube-star-case y-neistat.  

Rosenlund, Pernille, and Susanne Lisberg Jørgensen. “Everyday, Bro? Authenticity and Performance Intersections in the Vlogs of Jake Paul.” Otherness: Essays and Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, Dec. 2018, www.otherness.dk/fileadmin/www.othernessandthearts.org/Publications/Journal_Otherness/Othe rness_Essays_and_Studies_6/EntireIssue_6.pdf.

Spicer, Stuart. “EGYPT- Like Never Before.” Comments section, Apr. 2019. Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvzWNwJ41_k

Stuckey-French, Ned. “The Video Essay.” American Book Review, vol. 33, no. 2, 2012, pp. 14–15., doi:10.1353/abr.2012.0011.

This Guy Edits, director. CASEY NEISTAT UNMASKED: His Editing & Storytelling. YouTube, YouTube, 27 Aug. 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxZPNxvqNsI.  

“YouTube for Press.” YouTube, YouTube, www.youtube.com/yt/about/press/. 

[sleepymarmot]

I still have about 200 queued posts (bear with me... and sorry followers on mobile), but I want to quickly publish some of my post-binging thoughts before the new episode comes out. (Because I get overwhelmed by other people’s opinions and can’t remember what my own were unless I write them down. It’s easy to recall which parts I simply loved for what they are because other people did too and I can reblog their posts; it’s harder to not forget my own perspective outside of that.)

I didn’t actually expect to post these opinions because I don’t feel comfortable criticizing TAZ the way I tear apart big franchises like ME. But I did write it down, so what the hell. Let’s start with the biggest piece of negativity then. I can't name a favourite arc but I think the last place is Petals to the Metal. The racing sequence was spectacular enough that I didn't mind the pacing that much, but the final episode was really disappointing. A combination of not actually explicitly confirming the pairing in canon (I seriously expected that would be the culmination of the arc) AND Bury Your Gays (yes, I know Griffin dealt with the feedback gracefully, that doesn't fix the actual story though) AND some extreme railroading AND deus ex machina/Power of Love (at least the latter was retconnet as in not retroactive continuity but retroactive context). That actually put me off the show for some time. I think this moment encapsulates my problems with Hurley's writing pretty well. She really comes off as a Mary Sue written by a self-aware male writer who feels the need to put female characters on a pedestal -- certainly not the most objectionable phenomenon, but still makes my eyes roll. I feel the same about Carey and Killian in The Crystal Kingdom and the recurring remarks about "competent women". (I mean, I understand the gameplay reason for that, it's not that I'm asking for super detailed fights between NPCs, but I didn't like the way it sounded in the story.) Thankfully Carey got some development with Magnus, Killian had a good introduction before that glorification thing started cropping up, and their relationship's good obviously; plus, thankfully, Lucretia is completely free from this (she actually might be my fave NPC in terms of writing).

I think my least favourite part of The Suffering Game is the final past bosses battle? It's not just repetitive -- this repetition, needless in this case, devalues the other instances of our heroes facing the past. The first big one was Noelle (great: surprising, touching, important for the overall plot as we now know), then we had the three robots (I was pretty delighted to see Jenkins and Magic Brian again) even it was more about combat than meaningful facing of past mistakes, then the destruction of Phandolin was seen again in The Eleventh Hour, and only a bit later the setting of the first arc will be revisited once more. So even not counting this scene, it was starting to get a bit navel-gazey, and the complete lack of story relevance of that battle diluted things even more. It kind of sounded like running out of ideas -- I'd prefer any other challenge or just a repeat of the random monster generation. (Btw I totally expected to see the crab from Rockport Limited in that lineup. It's kind of special to me because back I went "Ah a floating crab, yeah feel you boys, I hate fighting Praetorians too, at least this thing doesn't shoot lase--" and then it started shooting fire, lol.)

Back to what I wanted to talk about: I have lots of thoughts/feelings about consequences re: the last episodes. The spoilers I've seen gave me so much anxiety! Like I've read that Magnus loses memory so I completely expected him to lose everything. So I spent a lot of time in complete dread, and when I read "Magnus forgets" in the summary my heart dropped, and then it wasn't that bad at all so I thought "that's it?" and felt relieved until the fucking clone tank. At which point I thought "No, this is it" especially because all of the players interpreted it that way. So I was very surprised and relieved that he kept everything, and that Griffin was so kind to him. But that kinda brought me to another problem -- that the new body undid Magnus's sacrifices. He didn't lose a finger or 10 years of life; the only loss was the identity of his nemesis which a) is a sad thing and he might be happier without it -- I would; and b) the boys promised to take care of that. Meanwhile, Taako and especially Merle have to live with their sacrifices. That's unfair. I was pretty thrilled when I realized the sacrifices were For Real, and was feeling real dread and anxiety about them (can't say if in a wholly good way) and I don't like devaluing that. Though of course I'm pretty jazzed that the character who is at the moment my favourite got treated so well. That scene was cathartic as hell! But back to the sacrifices: I'm intrigued by the problem of balance of hurting the character in a way that's good for narrative and/or game balance (yeah the intent of "let's nerf them a bit" was easy to see) but not compromising them as a piece of writing. I didn't give a shit about max health or dexterity penalties, but the story significant things about losing body parts and especially memories sounded brutal and cruel to me. I actually laughed when during one of the commercial breaks Griffin said something like "I hope this isn't causing you too much anxiety" because I was rushing through this arc because of that anxiety! But in the end, as it often happens, the half-misinterpreted spoilers made everything sound worse than it actually was. And I was very glad and relieved to hear Griffin specifically clarify that he's not going to take away important parts of a character.

But despite what I just said, when I started The Suffering Game arc I was actually amazed because it was second arc in a row built around my personal favorite tropes! I really appreciate Doctor Who-ish journey through genres (that doesn't take itself seriously but also has an epic underlying plot. All my fandoms are the same...) Murder on the Rockport Limited also counts in that category. So if I had to pick a favorite, they'd probably be among the candidates? Well I don't know how to count Reunion Tour for that. I really liked The Eleventh Hour, time travel/time loop stories are like my #1 fave. And it's a closed room mystery too (like Rockport Limited). That was the point where I started listening much faster because I needed to learn the truth. (Also, the Lunar Interlude before that arc, with the three separate stories, was freaking revolutionary and started a new level of character development for the show in general.) But I was kind of disappointed by the lack of a Holmes speech-type explanation of everything in the end. Because a big part of enjoyment was the expectation that it'll all click together beautifully in the end -- and some pieces still didn't fit. I'm still not sure if I missed something or that wasn't explained. Why was Isaak, like our heroes and unlike everyone else in the town, aware of the temporal loops and free to act? What was the interaction between Taako's spell and the code word -- did the spell have any effect other than almost drowning everyone, would "Junebug" have worked by itself? I had some more questions I thing, but right when I was going to pause/think/rest, everything was swept away by the freaking Red Robe Magnus cliffhanger, so I continued to run forward internally screaming "Explain! Explain!" like a Dalek, and then that was joined by the aforementioned Suffering Game anxiety. And that's the story how I marathoned the last part of the show three or more times faster than I planned to.

I really loved listening to TTAZZ, both of them, it was really good meta! I think I started to appreciate the show more after the first one. I can see where the fan criticism re: representation is coming from, but I myself also belong to the category of people who can never visualise their own (or anyone's, really) characters and therefore really love the freedom of interpretation. I'm also a bit sad about the commentary on racism in the new one, which, in addition to the comments about the Taco Quest in the first one, made me pretty sure that storyline/running joke is not coming back. I found it really funny back then in the beginning of the show -- more so because I, myself, have no freaking idea what tacos are actually like. I mean, we might have some mexican food places over here, but I've never been to one. And I intentionally didn't look it up after starting the show because it was funnier and kind of immersive this way lol. But they sound pretty committed to non-committance about the enthnicities, and raising the topic in canon again would force the issue, so I think they're just quietly abandoning it. Story-wise, I'd love to hear something like "Taako had invented a dish and named it after himself, but the voidfish baby ate the recipe so he couldn't recreate it until now" because I'm a sucker for justifying jokes and tying them into the main plot/emotional storyline. But in general I'd prefer any option that offends people the least. I was kind of surprised when Justin talked about abandoning Taako's early "dumb" characterisation, because I hadn't actually thought it was "officially" thrown away. I assumed Taako was just really bad at paying attention, and got better at managing that as a part of organic character development. I actually found that kind of relatable, plus "absent-minded professor/wizard" is a classic trope. Also TTAZZ made me wish even harder for the lost awesome adventure of Magnus and Kravitz in the astral plane. And it was already slightly souring my excitement about the totally awesome & touching scene we got instead.

I didn't really get the exposition about the planes in The Crystal Kingdom, and the long explanation in the latest two episodes require more attention than I gave them. Hope today's episode will make things clearer. Some things I hope to hear explained soon:

Why has Merle died more times than Magnus or Taako?

Also, looking forward to the promised explanation of how Gundren can be Merle's blood relative lol

Why was the Chalice so much more self-aware and civil than the other Relics? Is it related to the fact that its creator has some special connection to the (a?) voidfish?

Was Magnus a wizard before? Being a lich, creating a Grand Relic... If so, why doesn't he have magic now?

If Magnus is a lich, can he one day die and stay in the astral plane with Julia like an ordinary human, like he wanted? If not, that's a pretty big and tragic turn of events for him. (Granted, this might be more of a D&D mechanics question...)

(I actually just found a Reddit thread starting with the same question, discussing whether all 7 are really liches or not, so these two points might not be even valid haha)

(I also saw someone theorize that Lup invented the taco recipe -- and damn I really do want to see that now. Imagine trying to figure out something and later realize that it was created by your dead sister who named that thing after you.)

(I was confused about LichBarry’s reveal because I thought at the end of PTTM he was mind-controlling Captain Captain Bane to poison THB. Someone had the same question and another person answered that Barry’s spell was only to make Captain drink the poison, and the murder attempt was on him. I totally didn’t get that. Between this and my question about “Junebug”, either mind-control spells are not very clearly explained in this show, I suck at understanding them, or both.)

(Shit, this list has transformed from future episodes wishlist into reactions to Reddit lol)

Since I was talking about Taako and Lup, here’s another passing thought: remember how Taako immediately wanted to be Like Them when he saw the lich duo? You know, the elven brother and sister?!

Not related to anything, but I just realized I can wear jeans as a stealth fandom reference and it's delightful :D

[nagisasstunningpersonality]

Behold - Assassination Classroom Iceberg

This is just my opinion obviously, and things I thought were kind of relevant. Explanations below cut!

Tier One

Shounen Jump - the weekly manga magazine Assassination Classroom originally was published in Yuusei Matsui - the series creator Nagisa's gender - in reference to the amount of people who think Nagisa's a girl for some period of time

Tier Two

Ramen gun meme - a viral tumblr post using the clip of Gastro preparing ramen with a gun which blew up far outside the fandom Koro Q - The fantasy chibi spin off manga and anime Manga only villains - Numerous characters (usually assassins) who only appeared in the manga 365 Days - The movie, featuring adult Karma and Nagisa remembering their days in class Toonami rerelease - Recent broadcast on an anime channel which has caused a sharp increase in new fans

Tier Three

Live action movies - two movies adapted from the ass class story Kunudon - the nut mascot of the school. Featured in weird BDSM situations within Koro Q Sonic Ninja - movie (loved by Karma and Nagisa) in the series. Has a whole trailer post credits in one of the episodes Nagisa's gender (controversy) - in reference to the portions of fans who fetishize him, write him as a female etc., and the fans who push back against it Pop culture references - numerous references to other anime like One Piece, Naruto, etc., but also other properties such as Pirates of the Caribbean Asano's mother - a character who barely exists aside from one manga panel, where you can see her back

Tier Four

Mobile game - a card collecting app/game where multiple illustrations of all the characters were released. No longer running. 3DS game - game based on the main story. Wasn't released outside of Japan nor translated Korotan - four book series for teaching English, but also included short stories. Most significant is Korotan D, which features the kids after graduating high school 7 years later manga - a number of short manga pages featuring a few characters in the future found in the Graduation Album. Karma discourse - never ending internal fights about whether Karma is a good person or not, especially over his Nagisa jokes

Tier Five

Korosuu - similar to korotan books, but focused on maths. Less well known due to incomplete English translation (i know im still working on it i swear-) Everyone owns the mountain - lesser known fact that E Class used their money to legally purchase the 3E class building and mountain Hachiouji - the real life city Kunugigaoka is based on Korosensei's nationality - more so because it's unknown, though there are a lot of fan theories OVA - an adaptation of the Kyoto arc before the anime was made, featuring a different voice cast and art style

Tier Six

Yada is LGBT - it's subtle but this is canon, and so she's the only definitively not straight character in the series Bonus songs - the releases of the OPs came with some bonus tracks sung by the cast (you can find them on spotify) "half middle two" - the worst translation in the series, of Karma's codename. It was meant to be a reference to the cultural phenomenon of a teenager living in a fantasy world where they're the best at everything. The shed - cursed location (i.e where Irina gets 'helped' by Korosensei) Timeline - for Aguri to have been the 3E teacher, the school year has to have lasted more than a full year Takada and Tanaka - two bully characters often seen from main campus. Weirdly implied to be gay for each other.

Tier Seven

Fuwa meta - Fuwa often breaking the fourth wall (esp in the manga), and implied to be the writer of Koro Q Bitch Sensei and Karasuma's daughter - Introduced in the seven years manga, but a lot of people missed that they have a canon child Kayano's dad is evil - a theory but with decent proof that Aguri may have been somewhat forced to marry Yanagisawa

Tier Eight

Commodore Matthew Perry - the historical commodore who came to Japan in the 1800s and forced the country to open up borders for trade (basically one of the most important Japanese historical events). In the manga, his image is shown when Bitch Sensei is teaching how to seduce foreigners. Karasuma's dead sister - referenced on the ass class wiki, with little explanation or general fandom knowledge as to who, how, or when Kayano pregnant - a theory some fans had due to the positioning of her hands in the final manga chapter

[kidsviral-blog]

Two Years After KONY 2012, Has Invisible Children Grown Up?

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/two-years-after-kony-2012-has-invisible-children-grown-up/

Two Years After KONY 2012, Has Invisible Children Grown Up?

In March 2012, a human rights organization’s documentary about a central African despot became the most viral video of all time, and the ensuing furor resulted in its leader’s bizarre public meltdown. On the second anniversary of the phenomenon, everyone involved is still figuring out what it all means.

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Jason Russell in his office in September. Photograph by Sam Hodgson for BuzzFeed

Jason Russell is tan. Genuinely and exotically tan, even for a lifelong Southern Californian. He almost immediately apologizes for it, explaining that he’s just come from a wedding in Turks and Caicos. Later that afternoon, he’ll walk through the Barrio Logan, San Diego, headquarters of his nonprofit Invisible Children, burnt and barefoot in a neon orange tank top and shorts, rain whipping the office’s industrial windows. The interns will giggle, fondly: “That’s a guy who takes his workout seriously.”

This is Jason Russell today — 35, training for an Ironman, home every night by 6 p.m., never away from his family for longer than five days a month. This is not the raving man of two years ago, stomping down a San Diego sidewalk, slapping the cement with his bare ass to the sky. But part of him is here too.

“Every day for two minutes, I will think, Oh my god, I had a naked meltdown,” Russell says, stretching and snapping a rubber band between his fingers on his glass desk. “I will think that and be like, how did that happen? How in the world is that a part of my story and history forever?”

Russell today is healthy, or says he is. He went to therapy. He was on Oprah’s Next Chapter. He’s still theatrical and jovial, still prone to hyperbole, still enthusiastically earnest in a way that’s completely inspiring to half the world and nails on a chalkboard to the other. But after Russell’s psychotic episode, he spent six months figuring out who he was going to be, how and when and whether he would return to the nonprofit he founded in 2004 and nearly brought down in 2012 with the release of “KONY 2012,” the most viral video of all time — an impassioned, idealistic call for American youth to make Joseph Kony, the leader of central Africa’s militant child-kidnapping group Lord’s Resistance Army, in Russell’s words, “famous.”

For a majority of the 100 million who viewed “KONY 2012,” it was the first time they’d heard of Invisible Children, then an eight-year-old organization with a website that couldn’t handle its new traffic. Information gathering was a free-for-all; here was Jason Russell, the video’s narrator, describing Invisible Children as “the Pixar of human rights stories” to the New York Times. There he was telling CNN, “We are not these other organizations that do amazing work on the ground. If you want to fund a cow or you want to help someone in a village in that component, you can do that. That’s a third of what we do.” Here was a fairly embarrassing musical promotional video for a 2006 event called the Global Night Commute. There was Russell describing his personality: “If Oprah, Steven Spielberg and Bono had a baby, I would be that baby.” Here was an appearance on The 700 Club, an interview at Liberty University, and an audio clip of Russell at a Christian conference describing Invisible Children as a “Trojan Horse in a sense, going into a secular realm.” And everywhere was the photo of Invisible Children’s founders posing with tough faces, guns, and members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

The ammunition was boundless and critics ruthless. Counterprogramming was one thing, but character assassination was another, prompting Time magazine’s Alex Perry to describe much of the backlash as “malicious online ‘takedown,’ most of whose participants were utterly uninterested in truth but focused instead on a point-scoring, trashing and hurting, the digital pogrom of the unaccountable, anonymous Invisible Mob.”

“I think that’s what really made me lose it,” Russell says. “They were attacking me personally: my voice, my hair, my face, my family, my friends … I didn’t realize what 15 minutes of white-hot fame looks like. And I got to see it. And it is not pretty.

“It’s” — he knocks on his desk — “not” — knock — “good” — knock. “It’s so dark. I was obviously not sleeping and definitely kind of losing my mind, for sure, but I would seriously start crying when I thought about, like, Lindsay Lohan, or even Sarah Palin, or these people who’ve been in the spotlight and been ridiculed by everyone in the world. Most people will say out of their mouths, ‘Lindsay Lohan should die.’ And then I was reading that about myself.”

After 10 days, it was reportedly “extreme exhaustion, stress and dehydration” that drove Russell to that San Diego sidewalk, and later a hospital on a 5150 involuntary psychiatric hold order. A week later, his wife Danica announced the early diagnosis was “brief reactive psychosis.”

And then the conversation stopped — and with it, all the debate, conspiracy theories, and think pieces about Invisible Children’s methods and motivations. Some threads continued, of course, but it was as if the media saw Russell’s breakdown and slowly backed out of the room, switching off the lights before comically bolting away.

Russell was marked, even after his recovery tour. The organization was marked too. And yet they both have endured, largely off the millions KONY 2012 brought in, but also because of significant changes made in response to KONY 2012, and a desperately sustained belief that the LRA’s end is near — a belief motivated by the fear that if it’s not, theirs may come first.

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David Ocitti, a former child soldier from Uganda. Photograph by Sam Hodgson for BuzzFeed

Eight years before KONY 2012, there was Invisible Children: Rough Cut, the documentary Russell made after graduating from film school. Russell and his friends Laren Poole, then 19, and Bobby Bailey, then 20, spent months saving money and petitioning family and friends, and their floppy-haired origin story has been told and told again: “All we really wanted, more than anything, was a compelling story,” Russell says. They found one — plus a few bouts of malaria.

Rough Cut focuses on “night walkers,” or rural Northern Uganda children who used to walk into town each night to sleep in public and avoid capture by the LRA. It largely follows one former child soldier, Jacob Acaye, who watched his brother die after the boy tried to escape.

“We wanted to go to Sundance and be the documentary darlings. And Sundance shut us down,” Russell says. “In a way, we were like, ‘We don’t need no stinkin’ Sundance.’ I’ve been [there] enough times to know that even if there are great movies there, they often do not get seen by more than a couple thousand people. And we felt our story was powerful and important enough that we were going to, in a way, force people to watch it.”

And so they held screenings on the West Coast, forming a charity with a mission statement to “raise awareness and [educate] the U.S. about the atrocities, exploitation and abuse of invisible children throughout the world.” According to financial documents, Invisible Children brought in $331,783 in 2004, its first year. In 2005, as screenings ramped up, the organization made more than $3 million. The founders hired a CFO, Ben Keesey, a UCLA graduate who turned down a finance job at Deloitte & Touche after a post-finals trip to Africa. The money helped take Rough Cut on a national tour in 2006 and produce Global Night Commute, a concurrent rally in 130 cities, where an estimated 80,000 Americans walked to their city centers and slept outside.

As a newly IRS-certified nonprofit in 2006, Invisible Children continued to stage dramatic events, produce short films, and host thousands of screenings, raising money through donations and selling Ugandan-made goods. Celebrities began lending support; in 2007, Invisible Children had a storyline on The CW’s Veronica Mars, starring longtime supporter Kristen Bell (and Russell’s brother-in-law Ryan Hansen). In 2007, Fall Out Boy filmed a music video in Uganda, and Invisible Children joined Warped Tour.

On paper, business was good; revenue climbed from $7 million in mid-2007 to $8.25 million in mid-2010. Program expenses were divided into essentially two pots: one for U.S.-based events, film production, lobbying, and awareness tours, and another for programs in Uganda, including scholarships, teacher exchanges, and a seamstress program for former LRA abductees. (Generally, the U.S. pot was more full than the Uganda pot, by anywhere from $50,000 to $1.7 million.)

But internally, there were growing pains. “I remember going through a couple painful periods and having to let go of friends,” co-founder Bobby Bailey says. “During the summer months, we thought, There’s no way we were going to make payroll. We were never good at reaching out to high-level donors to pay for our overhead. Most of our money came from kids buying products.”

Bailey left Invisible Children in 2009 — an emotional, messy exit that began with The Rescue, a 100-city event during which participants “abducted themselves” in an attempt to get high-profile figures to voice public support for helping child soldiers. Bailey pushed for it and raised the money, and the event got Invisible Children on Oprah’s radar. But Bailey says he was overwhelmed by the planning and implementation of the event.

“These massive events that brought out 80,000 people almost crushed us and killed us, financially but also because we worked people so hard,” he says. “To be honest, I couldn’t do it. I was tired, I felt frustrated, I was just burnt, and I couldn’t figure out how to make the event happen. It was just a big blow to me and my ego.”

“It was difficult,” goes Russell’s version. “I mean, it was just a power struggle. That’s all. He’s an amazing filmmaker and so creative. But because we’re very entrepreneurial, a lot of his ideas wouldn’t get traction. And so he was super frustrated with feeling like people wouldn’t listen to him.”

The Rescue was a turning point for Invisible Children, not only because of Bailey’s exit. The organization received substantial media attention for the first time, but also attracted its first major wave of criticism.

“My initial reaction was that it was goofy and self-serving and a disturbing over-simplification of the issues,” says Kate Cronin-Furman of the international issues blog Wronging Rights. At the time of The Rescue, she wrote (with co-blogger Amanda Taub) that “choosing to simplistically define … Ugandan children as ‘The Abducted’ constrains our ability to think creatively about the problems they face, and work with them to combat these problems.”

“The cavalier first film did the trick,” wrote Chris Blattman, then an assistant professor in political science and economics at Yale. “Maybe now it’s time to start acting like grownups.”

To Blattman, the “idea of rescuing children or saving of Africa” was “inherently misleading, naive, maybe even dangerous … The savior attitude pervades too many aid failures, not to mention military interventions.”

Ben Keesey, who became Invisible Children’s CEO in 2007, calls this kind of criticism “low-hanging fruit.”

“Like, of course it’s detailed, nuanced, and complicated how you actually contribute responsibly to seeing an end to a conflict like the LRA,” he says. “But the statement that wherever you are in the world, however old you are, you have the ability to help end a war in Africa? I stand by that. And I think it’s the necessary statement to actually get a lot of people to do something.”

Invisible Children’s first legislative victory came in 2010, when President Obama signed the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, leading to the deployment of 100 U.S. advisers in LRA-affected areas in 2011. That year, Laren Poole left Invisible Children to move to Uganda, fundraising and strategizing for the Bridgeway Foundation, which hires private military contractors to train Uganda’s army.

“We left the Oval Office after the bill was signed, and we stayed out much too late and were drinking dirty martinis and having the best time,” Russell says. “I brought up the question, ‘What’s the dream for your life?’ It’s something I always ask people, and Laren said, ‘I want to be a Navy SEAL.’ And then I started laughing, because we were like, ‘Dude, you’re always so sick. You’re already 29 years old. You’re not going to be a Navy SEAL.’ And Laren is the type of person that will say, ‘Watch me.’”

The move left Russell in full control of the organization’s creative direction, which he had always fought with Bailey and Poole over. And as 2011 ended, he was bringing together a campaign that would become bigger than he — a “lifelong dreamer,” disciple of Oprah, and permanent summer camp counselor — could have anticipated.

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Photograph by Sam Hodgson for BuzzFeed

“KONY 2012” went live on Monday, March 5, 2012. Noelle West, Invisible Children’s director of communications, switched the YouTube video from private to public — a fairly insignificant moment she may actually remember for the rest of her life.

“I don’t know if you’ve been in a media shitstorm, but I’ve never been, none of us had ever been, and it was the most traumatic and overwhelming crisis-bringing thing that ever happened to any of us,” says West, a fast-talking, sporty 31-year-old with long waves of brown hair.

The KONY 2012 campaign wanted a youth uprising — through tweets, rallies, and late-night poster blitzes — that would encourage the U.S. government to increase efforts to help Ugandan forces find and capture Kony. The video was told from Russell’s perspective, as he explained Kony and the LRA’s tens of thousands child abductions to his wide-eyed blond son, Gavin Danger, then 5.

Between the versions of “KONY 2012” on Vimeo and YouTube, the 30-minute film received 100 million views in six days — surpassing Susan Boyle’s Britain’s Got Talent performance (which took nine days to reach 100 million) and Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance video (18 days), according to audience data service Visible Measures.

And for a minute there, it seemed to be incredibly well received, particularly if you had any Facebook friends in the 16–24 demographic. Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Ryan Seacrest, Nicole Richie, Diddy, and the Kardashian sisters all tweeted their support. In San Diego, one intern in Invisible Children’s fulfillment department had 500,000 orders of $30 “action kits” to process. One intern in public relations had 4,000 emails and counting incoming from media outlets. Russell flew across the country for TV interviews twice in 48 hours.

But as millions clicked beyond the video, Invisible Children’s website crashed. And the lack of information left an incredibly open opportunity for critics to offer counter narratives.

The controversy wasn’t a surprise, West says. “But it got too big for us to talk to people who were upset. We’ve always simplified the issue down to a very understandable, non-academic, non-complex issue, which is offensive to some academics because they think you’re trivializing it. But for us, that is just the entry point. We’re trying to attract people into this issue but make it accessible for them. ‘KONY 2012’ was not trying to be a very P.C., well rounded, in-depth piece.”

To academics, this simplification was still deceiving, relying more on emotion than facts. Wronging Rights’ three-year-old criticism of Invisible Children received nearly 500,000 views in one day. By Friday, a Tumblr called Visible Children had nearly 2.2 million views. The blog’s creator, Grant Oyston, wasn’t a qualified expert on African issues; he was a 19-year-old Canadian political science student who offered some commentary, but mostly linked out to others’ criticism of “KONY 2012.” His influence, however, warranted comment from Invisible Children’s newly hired New York PR firm Sunshine, Sachs & Associates, who told The Canadian Press that the “things he’s written are important but are a little misinformed and naive.”

“I thought that was strange. It had this air of, ‘You young people don’t understand,’ but their whole target was young people,” says Oyston, who eventually got a call from an “emotional” Russell, offering to fly him to California or even Uganda to see Invisible Children’s programs in person. (He declined.) But Oyston still takes issue with being labeled anti-Invisible Children, admitting the charity has done some good work, and finds himself criticizing the entire cycle of KONY 2012 — praise, backlash, and all.

“I found it troubling how quickly people read my criticism and other more informed critiques and responded by giving up and not caring,” Oyston says. “This video made them excited about helping victims and then they read something on a blog and they said, ‘Never mind.’ I found that disheartening. “

No one denied that Kony was a criminal who should be brought to justice, but many were critical of the call — from young, white Americans — to help Uganda address a problem already generally thought to be resolved in that country. Uganda’s government spokesman even issued a statement: “Misinterpretations of media content may lead some people to believe that the LRA is currently active in Uganda. It must be clarified that at present the LRA is not active in any part of Uganda. Successfully expelled by the Ugandan Peoples Defence Forces in mid-2006, the LRA has retreated to dense terrain within bordering countries in the Central Africa area. They are a diminished and weakened group with numbers not exceeding 300.”

Michael Wilkerson, a freelance writer and one of KONY 2012’s earliest critics, encouraged KONY 2012 supporters to consider the “potential collateral damage.”

“In previous offensives by the Ugandan military that didn’t quite catch Kony, what [happened] was the LRA ransacked and massacred vengefully as it fled, killing hundreds of civilians in the Congo in the winter of 2009,” he told NPR.

Others were offended by the portrayal of Uganda, down to the word “invisible,” including writer Dinaw Mengestu: “To claim [the children] were invisible because a group of college students traveling through Uganda happened to stumble upon a war they were too ignorant to have known of before going to the region is, to put it mildly, patronizing. By the time the organizers arrived in Uganda and created Invisible Children, northern villages such as Gulu were crowded with NGOs and aid workers and the largest humanitarian concern, by far, was the housing conditions of the more than one million people living in camps for the internally displaced.”

“That’s a tough one to talk about,” Keesey says today. “Of all the critiques that we got, it was the one that I never saw coming. Is Joseph Kony, who’s the world’s most prolific child abductor, worthy of a campaign to stop him? Is that a worthy pursuit? To see the LRA disarmed and to see these communities free from fear? That one took me off guard.”

Two weeks after “KONY 2012”’s release, Teju Cole wrote in The Atlantic about the “white savior” who “supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening,” and those who financially support him — without considering U.S. foreign policy’s role in the conflicts that yield large aid movements, or the wishes of those receiving the aid.

“I disagree with the approach taken by Invisible Children in particular, and by the White Savior Industrial Complex in general, because there is much more to doing good work than ‘making a difference,’” Cole wrote. “There is the principle of first do no harm. There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them.”

Cole’s analysis was smart and personal without overt hostility — something other critics couldn’t resist, particularly when it came to Russell’s role in the film. It resonated, and when talking about the backlash today, Invisible Children staff still cite the phrase “white savior industrial complex.”

“Our biggest mistake,” West says, “was we should have had supplementary materials that showed how much we really know. We should have had that secondary video that has all of our regional staff who are in fact from the regions in which we operate. It’s not a bunch of white California kids out in the region. These are professionals who have lived through this conflict their whole lives. We should have had that stuff in front when people came looking, but we were just too underwater to even figure that out.”

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Photograph by Sam Hodgson for BuzzFeed

Russell says he still hasn’t grasped how many people saw the clip of his naked rant. (Somewhere around 4.5 million, only counting the most popular versions on YouTube.) But he’s distinctly aware of the mark it left on Invisible Children’s internal culture. On his office bookshelf, next to thick, beat-up journals from his first Africa trip, Russell has a blue binder, where dozens of cards and press clippings and notes from friends and strangers and co-workers are collaged together. On the cover of the binder is a cut-out headline from Entertainment Weekly: “This was the year that… EVERYONE GOT NAKED.” The article didn’t include Russell, but he thought it was funny anyway.

“Coming back to work,” Russell says, “I think it was strange to hear a lot of people be like, ‘I was gonna move on, I was gonna get another job, I was gonna stop the internship, but I’m here for you to make sure you’re OK. I’ve stayed here for a year to make sure you’re OK.’”

On his first day back, one of Invisible Children’s writers wrote him a letter, which he picked out of all of the notes to show me:

“Welcome home. I’ve literally had dreams about this day when I would see you for the first time in Noelle and Heather’s office — slow motion hug and tears — and now my literal dreams are literally coming true. A couple things I didn’t realize about you ‘til you weren’t in the office anymore: Your ideas and designs push the envelope, yet you have the key skill of getting people on the same page in spite of your ideas’ extremity. You break convention but somehow make peace and bring everybody together over it. I miss that.”

“She’s saying, ‘I dreamt of you coming back,’ and I’m not even like that good friends with her!” Russell laughs. “I just … Yeah. I feel most at home here, so I always felt like I would come back if they would have me.”

Was that a question?

“Obviously if someone does what I did, they’re getting advice from a lot of people saying distance yourself as much as you can, ‘cause he’s really the thing that took the campaign off the rails. So I think they had to really think about what my position would be like, get a lot of advice, and figure out if it could work.”

Russell and I spoke for an hour before he made any reference to his faith, and only when I asked. In the past, he’s talked openly about his evangelical upbringing and its influence on his life and work — Russell’s parents are the founders of the national chain Christian Youth Theater; he and Poole and Bailey are definitive Christian bros. But after several critics accused Invisible Children of being a secretly religious and even anti-gay organization — including an Atlantic story accusing Russell of “secretly pulling our consciences towards Jesus” — he has notably scaled back the God talk. In October, when he was at Catalyst, the annual church leadership conference, Russell says he turned away questions from a Christian Science Monitor reporter who approached him.

“I feel so manipulated by people who think, I’m gonna get the scoop because I think he’s secretly trying to do this spiritual thing. Like if we really were the illuminati, how much more exciting would your article be? If we’re working with Jay Z? We’re in a homeless neighborhood — give me a break, we’re not illuminati.”

Russell says he watches service on TV and goes to church once in a while, but not on a consistent basis.

“Maybe this is a cop-out, but if you want to know about my spirituality, I’ll totally tell you. I can talk about my faith. I’m not afraid of it. But Invisible Children is not a faith-based religious organization at all. People forget that something like 80% of Americans call themselves a believer in God … So to have like 30% or even half of our staff have some kind of faith is just a demographic. No one’s trying to push an agenda.”

Russell believes — of course — that everything happens for a reason. On his bulletin board is a printed-out email from Oprah (her email address blacked out, much to certain visitors’ chagrin). Russell wrote her last year after reading that she recognized the symptoms of her own nervous breakdown after interviewing him.

“Hi Jason, I received your beautiful letter,” he says, more performing her email than reading it out loud. “Isn’t it beautiful how we’re all angels for each other and messages to heal come in all forms? Thank you for taking such fine care and reaching out to me. I hold you in the light — exclamation point!”

“So you saved Oprah?” I ask.

“For me, it’s like, OK, my breakdown was a shitshow. We all know that. But I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me and said, ‘I’ve had a breakdown. I’m on this medicine.’ It’s this dark secret that we’re all struggling with our mental health, and I think we should be vulnerable and honest and tell the truth. If my next 10 years ends with having to do with mental health or encouraging a generation to be real and honest — it’s the only way you’re gonna get free — then the breakdown was probably necessary for me to become something of an expert.”

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Russell speaks to roadies and staff, kicking off a tour at San Diego’s Mt. Soledad Veterans Memorial on Sept. 17, 2013. Photograph by Sam Hodgson for BuzzFeed

Ben Keesey, a towering 30-year-old with slicked-back hair, likes conversation; he wants to know about your day, where you grew up, and what your job is like. But he bounces, sometimes ungracefully, between youthful energy and political pragmatism, stuck between a world of San Diego interns who end every sentence with “awesome,” and D.C. lawmakers who don’t. He is relentlessly idealistic, a trait he embraces despite how often it’s been used against him and Invisible Children.

After KONY 2012, Keesey would say during interviews, “How do I show you my sincerity? How do I just show people my actual heart? Can they just tap into it for 10 minutes, so they can see we really do care about the people we work for?”

“There are times when I get sad,” Keesey says. “Because a lot of the concerns or skepticisms that we weren’t able to overcome put a lot of people on the sidelines that I believe want to be involved. At times, I actually personally process it as feeling very responsible and saying, ‘What more could I have done? Did I fail? Did I fail this organization and this cause by not being able to properly justify our actions or our integrity?’ It’s a very heavy burden on my heart.”

In the controversy’s aftermath, Invisible Children had difficulty booking school tours for the first time in years. The money wasn’t there like it used to be, with young fundraisers experiencing resistance — “from their families, their friends, people spitting on them, people calling them liars, people calling them stupid, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” Russell says. “Before KONY 2012, our organization was predominantly seen as, Good job! You guys are inspiring, keep going, we believe in you. And all the sudden it flipped on its head — You guys are liars, you’re a scam factory, you’re fake, you’re embezzling the money, or whatever.”

By mid-2012, Invisible Children had nearly $26.5 million in revenue and $17 million in net assets. By mid-2013, the organization had $4.9 million in revenue (their lowest since 2005) and less than $6.6 million in assets. Sixty-five employees in the San Diego office became 29. Two floors of a building became one. About 130 staffers in Africa — 95% of them from the region — became 108.

And yet, KONY 2012 was objectively the organization’s most successful campaign ever, both in its mission — making Kony famous, even if on the other end of punch lines — and in policy.

On April 20, 2012, when KONY 2012 supporters were supposed to “cover the night,” a directive from the film to blanket city centers in posters and other anti-Kony propaganda, turnout was abysmal. But that month, President Obama announced the extension of a military advise-and-assist mission to central Africa. The European Union, as part of a declaration of support, established a Joint Operations Centre to assist central Africa’s counter-LRA regional task force. On Capitol Hill, Invisible Children’s reputation went from “very young film students” to issue experts invited to White House roundtables, according to The Enough Project, a policy-focused group that says it helped Invisible Children overcome “stumbling blocks” in its early lack of expertise. In January 2013, Congress passed the Rewards for Justice Bill, authorizing $5 million for information leading to Kony’s capture. It was at the bill’s signing in the Oval Office that Keesey asked Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, to speak at the 2013 Fourth Estate Summit, Invisible Children’s second-ever conference of more than 1,000 supporters. She accepted, starting the speech — her first since being appointed ambassador — with “O.M.G.”

“KONY 2012 created the most opportunity and movement around this issue more than all the eight years before it combined,” says Noelle West, who spent a not insignificant amount of her time immediately after KONY 2012 responding to critical comments on charity database GuideStar, Reddit, and social media networks. “To know that’s what happened and still feel punished for it is strange.”

“It was game changer for the profile of the issue and for the movement at the international level,” Keesey says. “It’s absolutely caused us gigantic organizational challenges, personal challenges, ones that we’re still working through. But I think on balance, net net net to the mission, it was helpful. And from that standpoint, I would do it again.”

There are regrets, of course, in how the backlash was handled. From all vantage points, Invisible Children didn’t know how to talk about itself. The messages — and messengers — weren’t consistent.

Grant Oyston (and many others) cited his fundamental problem with Invisible Children as “their relentless focus on advocacy over action,” a criticism heightened by Invisible Children’s director of ideology Jedediah Jenkins’ post-KONY 2012 comment that “we are not an aid organization, and we don’t intend to be. I think people think we’re over there delivering shoes or food. But we are an advocacy and awareness organization.” (Later in March, a video of Jenkins joking around and drinking — or pretending to drink — while celebrating Invisible Children’s $1 million grant from Chase Community Giving made it to TMZ. Jenkins has since taken a break from the organization to go on a bike trip from Oregon to Patagonia.)

“That comment is a bit of a half-representation of even who we were in 2012,” Keesey says. “But at the same time, this conversation in itself illuminates the challenge that we have describing who we are, because who we are has changed, and changes and will change.”

Still, accusations surrounding the organization’s financial integrity remain the stickiest: that so much of its money is spent on travel and film production, that so little is spent on overseas programs, that it kept money from the KONY 2012 action kits.

“We were very much accused of financial impropriety,” Keesey says. “The feeling of potentially being scammed is one of the worst feelings in the world. And it’s not possible to reach back out to the amount of people that heard that message in the wake of KONY 2012 for them to feel rock-solid confident that we do get our finances audited every year, and 100% of our audits have come back with an unqualified opinion. We’ve had no legitimate cases or even accusations of actual fraud. That doesn’t exist.”

COO Chris Carver says when Invisible Children tried to explain its finances, he wishes he had “put out not just the literal components, but how much we felt this strategy was important, this allocation of funds to domestic education versus international operations — how much we believe in that.”

And yet Invisible Children substantially reallocated funds last year, spending about $4 million in the U.S. on media and mobilization efforts and nearly $7.8 million on Uganda recovery and protection programs, according to its annual IRS filings. The only other year Invisible Children gave more money to Uganda than the U.S. was in fiscal year 2009, but the difference was just under $750,000. This reversal was Keesey’s direction, made with consultation from the staff in Africa.

According to independent evaluator Charity Navigator, Invisible Children has spent at least 80% on programs since 2009, contradicting a widely circulated 32% figure that one interpretation of their finances (which discounted U.S. educational programs) yielded during KONY 2012. But Charity Navigator’s accountability rating of Invisible Children in 2011 — two of four stars — was another reason the organization’s finances were called into question, and largely a result of Invisible Children not having enough independent voting board members at the time. The rating was restored to four stars in 2012, after more members were added. (Invisible Children was also questioned for not filing with the Better Business Bureau, another voluntary measure of nonprofit transparency. Carver says the “Better Business Bureau stamp was just something that we haven’t gotten around to doing, because it takes a lot of time.”)

Carver estimates this year’s revenue will continue to be lower than Invisible Children’s past highs. There can never be another surprise Susan Boyle performance, and there can never be another KONY 2012, which cost in total $2.8 million. The organization very simply doesn’t have the resources, financially or emotionally: “To fool ourselves into thinking that we’re gonna convince the world that this is different is not the best use of our time,” Carver says.

Invisible Children’s only fundraising campaign in 2013 was ZeroLRA, which Russell calls “the least inspired I have been and everyone around here has been, even though we worked our butt off to make it happen and inspire our fundraisers and supporters.”

The problem comes down to originality, Russell says. Invisible Children has been telling stories about the LRA’s abductions for 10 years, over 12 documentaries. “How many different ways can you cut the cake? How many different ways can you actually approach the conflict and keep it fresh and exciting?”

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Photograph by Sam Hodgson for BuzzFeed

The most important question, two years on: How did Invisible Children spend its KONY 2012 millions?

The answer: mostly on what it considers attack-prevention programs in known LRA activity regions, including one that uses helicopters to drop defection fliers — “truth campaigns to psychologically woo them,” as Keesey says, out of the jungle and to safe-reporting sites. Of last year’s 83 known defectors, 79% referenced the fliers, Invisible Children says. (In December, 19 LRA members defected together, the largest mass defection since 2008.)

Invisible Children has also been investing in data-gathering since 2010, when it launched the LRA Crisis Tracker, broadcasting LRA movements and attacks based on information relayed via 71 high-frequency radios. The community reports are vetted through regional experts and updated to the tracker twice daily. The tracker provides an email subscription service, which Invisible Children says is used by state and military officials in the U.S. and central Africa, local communities, and other NGOs, including those providing health services to rural communities.

Invisible Children’s community-improvement programs in Uganda — the “recovery” piece of the organization’s four-part model — have expanded and matured, too; there are now 401 students enrolled in its legacy scholarship program, up from the 135 in its inaugural class, and 4,025 adults enrolled in the village loans and adult literacy programs, up from 400 in its inception. (When asked for their opinions on these recent developments, many critics of “KONY 2012” told BuzzFeed they haven’t kept up with Invisible Children since the controversy two years ago.)

This year, Invisible Children will go after grants from government and philanthropy groups, like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the LRA Fund, a small group of foundations supporting projects in LRA-affected communities. Keesey says the organization needs about $6.2 million this year to continue its programs and keep the lights on. Some of that will come from Invisible Children’s 10,230 monthly donors (with help from interns who make hundreds of calls a week) but not enough. The staff has come to accept that.

“We don’t need the masses, the gigantic grassroots movement, as much as we have in the past,” says West. That may change from time to time — Invisible Children is pushing an upcoming Senate resolution encouraging Obama to “finish the job and not reduce the amount of resources or commitment until we see a full dismantling of the LRA,” and will ask supporters in key districts to call or write to their senators.

But the reality is that Invisible Children can’t survive off the masses anymore. There will be no films or campaigns or tours this year — no 10-week trips led by interns (or “roadies”) screening films and spreading the word of Invisible Children around the U.S. There will be no large-scale Fourth Estate Summit, either — the conference Russell once described as “a TED talk, mixed with a music festival and a film festival, all mixed in a Justin Bieber concert,” with an average attendee age of 16. That means no 1,315 kids in T-shirts and bracelets spending $325–495 each, and no “spectacular wink and a nod to showmanship,” as Bobby Bailey, who attended the summits in 2011 and 2013, puts it. (There will be a smaller version of the event this year, an Invisible Children spokeswoman told BuzzFeed after this article’s publication.) Maybe Invisible Children will never return to that kind of showmanship; maybe it will never be able to afford to.

This scaling back has brought a certain restlessness to San Diego. Russell hasn’t been to Africa in two years; “There hasn’t been a real need for me to go out,” he says, with dozens of workers already on the ground. His next trip will likely be when Kony is caught or killed and the LRA is disbanded. Then, Invisible Children will either close its doors or change into something else entirely, with a different mission and different players.

“We all want to go do other amazing things at some point in our life, and we don’t want to hold ourselves back from that,” Carver says.

In “Move,” Invisible Children’s first film after “KONY 2012,” West says she was afraid that the backlash and Russell’s breakdown was the “beginning of the end … What if all this time we spent, all these things we built, are just, done?” It was certainly an option in 2012, but despite all its losses, Invisible Children wants to “work to put itself out of a job,” or so goes its spin line.

“I would love to shut the doors,” says West, who’s transitioning from communications director to an in-house consultant for companies seeking advice on viral campaigns. “I would love for there to be a big black screen when you come to IC.com after Kony is caught and there’s a process in place for rehabilitating the region so the LRA can’t come back. I would love for IC to be turned off. Why do you need us anymore? That’s just me, though.”

West wants to build furniture. Keesey is mulling over going back to school for sociology or psychology. Russell’s future may lie in some form of mental health advocacy — a field that may be a little more sympathetic to his intuition to put himself in his stories.

The 10 years they’ve spent on this single issue, maintaining all that swaggering idealism, has left the staff in a state of constant anticipation. They firmly believe the LRA’s demise is within sight and that they get closer every day to someone, somewhere, spotting Kony. And with that expectation comes an even stronger hope for vindication.

“It would be such a big deal. And people would come back to the cause and say, ‘Yeah I’ve been supporting you all along. I wanted Kony to be captured too,’” Russell says. “We definitely know that we need that win, and that the future of Invisible Children and the cause and the work that we do is completely reliant on believing that the win will happen soon. If he’s captured or killed in 2024, I would have a hard time believing we could sustain the narrative for much longer.”

Russell says there’s only one film he’s working on, currently plotted out on his big office whiteboard: the one he’ll release when Kony is gone. Whenever that is.

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Photograph by Sam Hodgson for BuzzFeed

Corrections: An earlier version of this article misrepresented Invisible Children’s office layout. The article has also been updated to clarify the LRA Crisis Tracker was launched in 2010, and that according to an Invisible Children spokeswoman, there will be a Fourth Estate Summit this year, contrary to earlier comments made by the staff. (3/10/14)

Update: On Dec. 15, Invisible Children announced it will put in place a strategy to close by the end of 2015.

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/two-years-after-kony-2012-has-invisible-children-grown-up

[foursprouthappiness-blog]

12 Hard Things You Need to Hear About Your Attitude

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/happiness/12-hard-things-you-need-to-hear-about-your-attitude/

12 Hard Things You Need to Hear About Your Attitude

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the mind is your ultimate battleground.  It’s the space where the greatest and fiercest conflict resides.  It’s where half of the things you thought were going to happen, never actually happened.  It’s where your inner resistance buries you with negativity.  And, when you allow these thoughts to dwell in your mind, they gradually succeed in robbing you of peace, joy, and ultimately your life.  You think yourself right into nervous breakdowns and bouts of depression, time and again.

I know because I’ve been there.

Honestly, we’ve all been there at times.

But, what can we learn from our trials?  A whole lot!

There’s so much about our lives—and our fate—we can’t control, it makes absolutely no sense to focus all our energy on these things and then neglect everything we CAN control.  We can decide how we spend our time right now, what we choose to focus on, and whom we share our energy with.  We can choose our words and the tone of voice in which we speak to ourselves and others.  We can decide what we will engage in, read and study next.  We can choose how we’re going to respond to challenging life situations when they arise, and whether we will see them as curses or opportunities for growth…

And most importantly, we can choose our attitude, which influences pretty much everything else.

Of course, none of us are immune to occasional mood swings.  But that doesn’t mean we have to succumb to them.  Whether your negative attitude is a common occurrence or just a sporadic phenomenon, it’s critical for your long-term happiness and success that you choose to recognize when your mind is in the gutter, and then consciously make adjustments.

Here are some hard things you need to hear and learn about your attitude (these are the most common attitude issues we’ve seen plaguing our newest course students over the years) and some tips to get you thinking straight again:

Your attitude often reflects a certain level of self-centered self-victimization. – We all have the tendency to put ourselves at the center, and see everything—every event, conversation, circumstance, etc.—from the viewpoint of how it relates to us and only us.  And this can have all kinds of adverse effects, from feeling hurt when other people are rude, to feeling sorry for ourselves when things don’t go as planned, to doubting ourselves when we aren’t perfect.  Obviously, we are not really at the center of everything.  That’s not how the universe works.  It just sometimes seems that way to us.  So, be sure to shift your focus when it makes sense.  When you catch yourself feeling like a singled-out victim, think about other people you might help.  Finding little ways to help others can snap you out of your self-centeredness, and then you’re not wallowing in self-pity anymore—you’re starting to think beyond yourself, for your own good.

Your attitude is still greatly affected by old stories. – In the present moment, we all have some kind of pain: anger, sadness, frustration, disappointment, regret, etc.  Notice this pain within yourself, watch it closely and see that it’s caused by whatever story you have in your head about what happened in the past (either in the recent past or in the distant past).  Your mind might insist that the pain you feel is caused by what happened (not by the story in your head about it), but what happened in the past is NOT happening right now.  It’s over.  It has passed.  The pain, however, is still happening right now because of the story you’ve been subconsciously telling yourself about that past incident.  It’s simply a process of your thinking.  Do your best to see it for what it is.

Your attitude often reflects your inner resistance to reality. – Most people make themselves unhappy simply by finding it impossible to accept life as it is presenting itself right now.  Do your best to catch yourself.  Be mindful.  When you accept the reality of the moment, regardless of how painful, you allow yourself to grow and heal.  Ultimately, happiness is not the absence of problems, but the ability to deal with them.  Imagine all the wondrous things your mind might embrace if it weren’t wrapped so tightly around your struggles.  Always look at what you have, instead of what you have lost.  Because it’s not what the world takes away from you that counts, it’s what you do with what you have left.

Your attitude gets caught up in fearing and hiding from change. – Sometimes, no matter how hard it is to admit, there are things in your life that aren’t meant to stay.  Change may not be what you want, but it’s always exactly what’s happening.  Earth does not stop spinning.  And sometimes saying goodbye is the hardest thing you will ever have to do.  Or, saying hello will make you more vulnerable and uncomfortable than you ever imagined possible.  At any given moment, change can seem almost too much to bear.  But, over the long run, change is ultimately the only thing that allows you to learn and grow and succeed and smile again.  So, remind yourself that life gradually changes in each and every moment, and so can YOU, for the better.

Your attitude is affected by your passivity and procrastination. – So many of us waste so much of our time and energy waiting for the ideal path to appear.  But it never does.  Because we forget that paths are made by walking, not waiting.  We forget that we shouldn’t feel more confident before we take the next step—that taking the next step is what builds our confidence.  And so, we hesitate, procrastinate, and ultimately succumb to the same old routines that have been driving us nuts for far too long.  Truth be told, there are thousands of people who live their entire lives on the default settings, never realizing they can customize everything.  Don’t be one of them!  Don’t settle for the default settings in life.  Find your loves, your talents, your passions, and embrace them.  Don’t hide behind other people’s decisions.  Don’t let others tell you what you want.  Design YOUR journey every step of the way!  The life you create from doing something that moves you is far better than the attitude you get from sitting around wishing you were doing it.

Your attitude reflects your aversion to discomfort. – Many of us don’t want to be uncomfortable, so we run from discomfort constantly.  The problem with this is that, by running from discomfort, we are constrained to partake in only the activities and opportunities within our comfort zones.  And since our comfort zones are relativity small, we miss out on most of life’s greatest and healthiest experiences, and we get stuck in a debilitating cycle.  Let’s use diet and exercise as an example…  First, you become unhealthy because eating healthy food and exercising feels uncomfortable, so you opt for comfort food and mindless TV watching instead.  But then, being unhealthy is also uncomfortable, so you seek to distract yourself from the reality of your unhealthy body by eating more unhealthy food and watching more unhealthy entertainment and going to the mall to shop for things you don’t really want or need.  And your discomfort and attitude both get worse.

Your attitude is often rooted in unrealistic ideals. – You aren’t perfect.  It’s OK.  Despite what you keep hearing inside your head, you can disappoint people and still be good enough.  You can fail and still be smart, capable and talented.  You can let people down and still be worthwhile and deserving of love and admiration.  Everyone has disappointed someone they care about at some point.  Everyone messes up, lets people down, and makes mistakes.  Not because we’re all inadequate or incompetent, but because we’re all imperfect and human.  Expecting anything different is setting yourself up for confusion and discontent.

Your attitude easily defaults to self-contempt. – Next time you catch yourself wallowing in self-contempt, remind yourself that you were not born feeling this way.  That at some point in the past some person or experience sent you the message that something is wrong with you, and you internalized this lie and accepted it as your truth.  But that lie isn’t yours to carry, and those judgments aren’t about you.  And in the same way you learned to think negatively of yourself, you can learn to think new, positive and self-loving thoughts.  You can learn to challenge those false beliefs, strip away their power, and reclaim your self-respect.  It won’t be easy, and it won’t transpire overnight, but it is possible.  And it begins the moment you decide there has to be a better way to live, and that you deserve to discover it.  Make that decision for yourself!

Your attitude gets hung up on longstanding self-limiting beliefs. – Think about a self-limiting belief you have—an area of your life where you believe you are destined to remain stuck.  It can be about any part of your life you hope to change—your weight, your career, your relationships—anything at all.  What’s one thing you’ve essentially decided is a fact about your position on Earth?  And then I want you to shift gears and think about ONE time, one fleeting moment, in which the opposite of that “fact” was true for you.  I don’t care how tiny of a victory it was, or even if it was a partial victory.  What’s one moment in time you can look back on and say, “Hey, that was totally unlike ‘me,’ but I did it!”?  Once you identify the cracks in the wall of a self-limiting belief, you can start attacking it.  You can start taking steps forward every day that go against it—positive daily rituals that create more tiny victories, more confidence, gradual momentum, bigger victories, even more confidence, and so on.  (Note: Angel and I build positive daily rituals with our students in the “Goals and Growth” module of the Getting Back to Happy course.)

Your attitude often reflects a lack of presence and self-awareness. – One of the hardest challenges we face in life is to simply live in our own skin.  To just be right here, right now, regardless of where we are.  Too often we use compulsive work, compulsive exercise, compulsive love affairs, and the like, to escape from ourselves and the realities of living.  In fact, many of us will go to great lengths to avoid the feeling of being alone in an undistracted environment.  Thus, we succumb to hanging-out with just about anyone to avoid the feeling of solitude.  For being alone means dealing with our true feelings.  Acknowledging this fact is the first step to healing it.  Begin right now by just noticing with curiosity, and without judgment, all of the ways in which you avoid being in your own skin, right here, right now, in this present moment we call life.

Your attitude has been bruised by inconsiderate people. – At some point, we’ve all been walked on, used and forgotten.  We’ve let people take advantage of us, and we’ve accepted way less than we deserve.  But we shouldn’t regret one moment of it, because in those moments we’ve learned a lot from our bad choices.  We’ve learned who we can trust and who we can’t.  We’ve learned the meaning of friendship.  We’ve learned how to tell when people are lying and when they’re sincere.  We’ve learned how to be ourselves, and appreciate the truly great people and things in our lives as they arrive.  And even though there are some things we can never recover and people who will never be sorry, we now know better for next time.  Remember this.  None of the injustice you’ve experienced is evidence of some fundamental flaw on your part.  None of it makes you unworthy.  It all just means that some people aren’t very good at looking beyond their own egocentric bubble.  But the fact that you are—that despite the darkness you feel, you have the ability to share your love and light with others—is an incredible strength.

Your attitude is often submissive and waits for validation from others. – You won’t always be a priority to others, and that’s why you have to be a priority to yourself.  Learn to respect yourself, take care of yourself, and become your own support system.  Your needs matter.  Start meeting them.  Make your own happiness a priority.  Don’t wait on others to choose you.  Choose yourself, right now!  Breathe in.  You are enough.  You have enough.  You do enough.  Breathe out… let go, and just live right now in the moment with a self-validating, self-loving attitude.  (Note: Angel and I guide our readers though the process of self-validation in the Self-Love chapter of our brand new book.)

Closing Exercise — Attitude Reflection

If you’re feeling up to it, I’d love for you to openly reflect on your attitude:

Which attitude issue mentioned above often gets the best of you?

Who would you be, and what else might you see, if you shifted your attitude in that area of your life?

In other words, think carefully about that specific area of your life and what’s been troubling your mind, and then visualize how your life would be different if you made a positive shift in your attitude:

How would it change your outlook on your present life situation?

Would you treat yourself and others differently?

How would you feel?

How would you behave?

What else might you be able to accomplish?

Leave a comment below and share your thoughts.

Also, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.

[nancygduarteus]

Why Sign-Language Gloves Don't Help Deaf People

Along with jet packs and hover boards, a machine to translate from any language to any other is so appealing as a fantasy that people are willing to overlook clunky prototypes as long as they can retain the belief that the future promised by science fiction has, at last, arrived. One particularly clunky subspecies of the universal language translator has a rather dismal history: the sign-language glove, which purports to translate sign language in real time to text or speech as the wearer gestures. For people in the Deaf community, and linguists, the sign-language glove is rooted in the preoccupations of the hearing world, not the needs of Deaf signers.

The basic idea dates to the 1980s, when researchers started exploring how humans could interact with computers using gestures. In 1983, a Bell Labs engineer named Gary Grimes invented a glove for data entry using the 26 manual gestures of the American Manual Alphabet, used by speakers of American Sign Language. But the first glove intended to make interactions between deaf and non-deaf people easier was announced in 1988 by the Stanford University researchers James Kramer and Larry Leifer. It was called the “talking glove,” and the entire system cost $3,500—not including the price of the CyberGlove itself.

The first sign-language glove to gain any notoriety came out in 2001. A high-school student from Colorado, Ryan Patterson, fitted a leather golf glove with 10 sensors that monitored finger position, then relayed finger spellings to a computer which rendered them as text on a screen. Patterson received considerable attention for his “translating glove,” including the grand prize in the 2001 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair and a $100,000 scholarship. In 2002, the public-affairs office of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders effused about Patterson, sneaking in the caveat only at the end: The glove doesn’t translate anything beyond individual letters, certainly not the full range of signs used in American Sign Language, and works only with the American Manual Alphabet.

Over the years, similar designs—with corresponding hoopla—have appeared all over the world, but none has ever delivered a product to market. A group of Ukrainians won first prize and $25,000 in the 2012 Microsoft Imagine Cup, a student technology competition, for their glove project. In 2014, Cornell students designed a glove that “helps people with hearing disabilities by identifying and translating the user’s signs into spoken English.” And in 2015, one glove project was announced by two researchers at Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute, and another by the Saudi designer and media artist Hadeel Ayoub, whose BrightSignGlove “translates sign language into speech in real time” using a data glove.

The most recent project is from July 2017, when a team at the University of California, San Diego, published a paper in PLOS One describing a gesture-recognizing glove. The project was headed by Darren Lipomi, a chemist who researches the mechanical properties of innovative materials, such as stretchable polymer-based solar cells and skin-like sensors. On July 12, the UCSD news office promoted Lipomi’s publication with a story proclaiming, “Low-cost smart glove translates American Sign Language alphabet and controls virtual objects.” The next day, the online outlet Medgadget lopped “alphabet” out of its headline, and reports of a glove that “translates sign language” again spread far and wide, getting picked up by New Scientist, The Times in the United Kingdom, and other outlets. Medgadget wasn’t entirely to blame—Lipomi had titled his paper “The Language of Glove” and written that the device “translated” the alphabet into text, not “converted,” which would have been more accurate.

Linguists caught wind of the project. Carol Padden, the dean of social sciences at UCSD and a prominent sign-language linguist who is also deaf, passed along a critique of the sign-language glove concept to Lipomi’s dean at the school of engineering. The critique she gave him had been written by two ASL instructors and one linguist and endorsed by 19 others. It was written in response not to Lipomi’s paper, but to a notorious sign-language-glove project from the year before. In 2016, two University of Washington undergraduates, Thomas Pryor and Navid Azodi, won the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for a pair of gloves that recognized rudimentary ASL signs. Their project, called SignAloud, was covered by NPR, Discover, Bustle, and other outlets, but was also answered by vociferous complaints in blog posts by the linguists Angus Grieve-Smith and Katrina Faust.

“Initially, I didn’t want to deal with [SignAloud, the UW project] because this has been a repeated phenomenon or fad,” says Lance Forshay, who directs the ASL program at UW. “I was surprised and felt somehow betrayed because they obviously didn’t check with the Deaf community or even check with ASL program teachers to make sure that they are representing our language appropriately.” But after SignAloud received national and international media attention, Forshay teamed up with others in his department to write a letter. He gathered input for the letter from the Deaf community and Deaf culture experts.

Their six-page letter, which Padden passed along to the dean, points out how the SignAloud gloves—and all the sign-language translation gloves invented so far—misconstrue the nature of ASL (and other sign languages) by focusing on what the hands do. Key parts of the grammar of ASL include “raised or lowered eyebrows, a shift in the orientation of the signer’s torso, or a movement of the mouth,” reads the letter. “Even perfectly functioning gloves would not have access to facial expressions.” ASL consists of thousands of signs presented in sophisticated ways that have, so far, confounded reliable machine recognition. One challenge for machines is the complexity of ASL and other sign languages. Signs don’t appear like clearly delineated beads on a string; they bleed into one another in a process that linguists call “coarticulation” (where, for instance, a hand shape in one sign anticipates the shape or location of the following sign; this happens in words in spoken languages, too, where sounds can take on characteristics of adjacent ones). Another problem is the lack of large data sets of people signing that can be used to train machine-learning algorithms.

And while signers do use the American Manual Alphabet, it plays a narrow role within ASL. Signers use it “to maintain a contrast of two types of vocabulary—the everyday, familiar, and intimate vocabulary of signs, and the distant, foreign, and scientific vocabulary of words of English origin,” wrote Carol Padden and Darline Clark Gunsauls, who heads Deaf studies at Ohlone College, in a paper on the subject.

And the writers of the UW letter argued that the development of a technology based on a sign language constituted cultural appropriation. College students were gaining accolades and scholarships for technologies based on an element of Deaf culture, while Deaf people themselves are legally and medically underserved.

Also, though the gloves are often presented as devices to improve accessibility for the Deaf, it’s the signers, not the hearing people, who must wear the gloves, carry the computers, or modify their rate of signing. “This is a manifestation of audist beliefs,” the UW letter states, “the idea that the Deaf person must expend the effort to accommodate to the standards of communication of the hearing person.”

That sentiment is widely echoed. “ASL gloves are mainly created/designed to serve hearing people,” said Rachel Kolb, a Rhodes Scholar and Ph.D. student at Emory University who has been deaf from birth. “The concept of the gloves is to render ASL intelligible to hearing people who don’t know how to sign, but this misses and utterly overlooks so many of the communication difficulties and frustrations that Deaf people can already face.”

Julie Hochgesang, an assistant professor of linguistics at Gallaudet, said she rolls her eyes when another glove is announced. “We can't get decent access to communication when we go to the doctor. Why bother with silly gloves when we still need to take care of the basic human-rights issues?”

So why do so many inventors keep turning to the sign-language glove concept?

One reason is pretty obvious: Despite the popularity of ASL classes in American colleges (enrollment in such courses grew by 19 percent between 2009 and 2013), non-signers often don’t know that much about sign language. They may not even realize that ASL (and other sign languages, such as British Sign Language, Chinese Sign Language, and dozens of others) are distinct languages with their own grammars and phonologies, not word-for-word reformulations of a spoken language. Additionally, says Forshay, “People have no knowledge of the culture of Deaf people and how signed language has been exploited and oppressed over history.” As a result, they’re not aware of why the issue would be so sensitive.

An equally potent but less immediately apparent reason is the way engineers approach problem-solving. In engineering school, students are taught to solve only the mathematical elements of problems, says the Virginia Tech engineering educator Gary Downey. In a 1997 article he noted that “all the nonmathematical features of a problem, such as its politics, its power implications for those who solve it, and so forth, are given,” meaning they’re bracketed off. Students are prepared to focus on sensor placement or algorithm design, but often not the broader social context that the device they’re designing will enter.

The specific application of Lipomi’s glove as an accessibility device seems to have been an afterthought. The project’s purpose, he wrote on his blog later, was to “demonstrate integration of soft electronic materials with low-energy wireless circuitry that can be purchased economically.” The American Manual Alphabet was chosen because “it comprises a set of 26 standardized gestures, which represent a challenge in engineering to detect using our system of materials.”

However, engineers seem to be hearing and responding to linguists’ complaints. Pryor and Azodi, the inventors of the UW SignAloud project, signed on to the UW open letter. And when Darren Lipomi heard about the linguists’ criticisms, he changed the wording of his paper with an addendum to PLOS One and wrote a blog post encouraging researchers to be more culturally sensitive. “The onus is thus on the researcher to be aware of cultural issues and to make sure ... that word choice, nuance, and how the technology may impact a culture is properly conveyed to the journalist and thence to the public,” he wrote.

Still, as long as actual Deaf users aren’t included in these projects, inventors are likely to continue creating devices that offend the very group they say they want to help. “To do this work, the first rule you have to teach yourself is that you are not your user,” says Thad Starner, who directs the Contextual Computing Group at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The group develops accessibility technologies for the deaf, such as a sign language–based educational game to train the working-memory abilities of deaf children.

That’s not to say that Deaf people don’t have futuristic fantasies that involve technology. For example, Kolb says a dominant fantasy among her friends is for glasses that would auto-caption everything that hearing people say. Several teams of researchers are working on algorithms to make signing videos on YouTube searchable. Even more thorough, higher-quality captioning and better interpreting services would improve the lives of many.

And, Kolb added, technology could create ways to encourage hearing people to use ASL and become multimodal as well as multilingual.

“That would open up the possibilities of communication for all of us,” she said.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/11/why-sign-language-gloves-dont-help-deaf-people/545441/?utm_source=feed

[ionecoffman]

Why Sign-Language Gloves Don't Help Deaf People

Along with jet packs and hover boards, a machine to translate from any language to any other is so appealing as a fantasy that people are willing to overlook clunky prototypes as long as they can retain the belief that the future promised by science fiction has, at last, arrived. One particularly clunky subspecies of the universal language translator has a rather dismal history: the sign-language glove, which purports to translate sign language in real time to text or speech as the wearer gestures. For people in the Deaf community, and linguists, the sign-language glove is rooted in the preoccupations of the hearing world, not the needs of Deaf signers.

The basic idea dates to the 1980s, when researchers started exploring how humans could interact with computers using gestures. In 1983, a Bell Labs engineer named Gary Grimes invented a glove for data entry using the 26 manual gestures of the American Manual Alphabet, used by speakers of American Sign Language. But the first glove intended to make interactions between deaf and non-deaf people easier was announced in 1988 by the Stanford University researchers James Kramer and Larry Leifer. It was called the “talking glove,” and the entire system cost $3,500—not including the price of the CyberGlove itself.

The first sign-language glove to gain any notoriety came out in 2001. A high-school student from Colorado, Ryan Patterson, fitted a leather golf glove with 10 sensors that monitored finger position, then relayed finger spellings to a computer which rendered them as text on a screen. Patterson received considerable attention for his “translating glove,” including the grand prize in the 2001 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair and a $100,000 scholarship. In 2002, the public-affairs office of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders effused about Patterson, sneaking in the caveat only at the end: The glove doesn’t translate anything beyond individual letters, certainly not the full range of signs used in American Sign Language, and works only with the American Manual Alphabet.

Over the years, similar designs—with corresponding hoopla—have appeared all over the world, but none has ever delivered a product to market. A group of Ukrainians won first prize and $25,000 in the 2012 Microsoft Imagine Cup, a student technology competition, for their glove project. In 2014, Cornell students designed a glove that “helps people with hearing disabilities by identifying and translating the user’s signs into spoken English.” And in 2015, one glove project was announced by two researchers at Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute, and another by the Saudi designer and media artist Hadeel Ayoub, whose BrightSignGlove “translates sign language into speech in real time” using a data glove.

The most recent project is from July 2017, when a team at the University of California, San Diego, published a paper in PLOS One describing a gesture-recognizing glove. The project was headed by Darren Lipomi, a chemist who researches the mechanical properties of innovative materials, such as stretchable polymer-based solar cells and skin-like sensors. On July 12, the UCSD news office promoted Lipomi’s publication with a story proclaiming, “Low-cost smart glove translates American Sign Language alphabet and controls virtual objects.” The next day, the online outlet Medgadget lopped “alphabet” out of its headline, and reports of a glove that “translates sign language” again spread far and wide, getting picked up by New Scientist, The Times in the United Kingdom, and other outlets. Medgadget wasn’t entirely to blame—Lipomi had titled his paper “The Language of Glove” and written that the device “translated” the alphabet into text, not “converted,” which would have been more accurate.

Linguists caught wind of the project. Carol Padden, the dean of social sciences at UCSD and a prominent sign-language linguist who is also deaf, passed along a critique of the sign-language glove concept to Lipomi’s dean at the school of engineering. The critique she gave him had been written by two ASL instructors and one linguist and endorsed by 19 others. It was written in response not to Lipomi’s paper, but to a notorious sign-language-glove project from the year before. In 2016, two University of Washington undergraduates, Thomas Pryor and Navid Azodi, won the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for a pair of gloves that recognized rudimentary ASL signs. Their project, called SignAloud, was covered by NPR, Discover, Bustle, and other outlets, but was also answered by vociferous complaints in blog posts by the linguists Angus Grieve-Smith and Katrina Faust.

“Initially, I didn’t want to deal with [SignAloud, the UW project] because this has been a repeated phenomenon or fad,” says Lance Forshay, who directs the ASL program at UW. “I was surprised and felt somehow betrayed because they obviously didn’t check with the Deaf community or even check with ASL program teachers to make sure that they are representing our language appropriately.” But after SignAloud received national and international media attention, Forshay teamed up with others in his department to write a letter. He gathered input for the letter from the Deaf community and Deaf culture experts.

Their six-page letter, which Padden passed along to the dean, points out how the SignAloud gloves—and all the sign-language translation gloves invented so far—misconstrue the nature of ASL (and other sign languages) by focusing on what the hands do. Key parts of the grammar of ASL include “raised or lowered eyebrows, a shift in the orientation of the signer’s torso, or a movement of the mouth,” reads the letter. “Even perfectly functioning gloves would not have access to facial expressions.” ASL consists of thousands of signs presented in sophisticated ways that have, so far, confounded reliable machine recognition. One challenge for machines is the complexity of ASL and other sign languages. Signs don’t appear like clearly delineated beads on a string; they bleed into one another in a process that linguists call “coarticulation” (where, for instance, a hand shape in one sign anticipates the shape or location of the following sign; this happens in words in spoken languages, too, where sounds can take on characteristics of adjacent ones). Another problem is the lack of large data sets of people signing that can be used to train machine-learning algorithms.

And while signers do use the American Manual Alphabet, it plays a narrow role within ASL. Signers use it “to maintain a contrast of two types of vocabulary—the everyday, familiar, and intimate vocabulary of signs, and the distant, foreign, and scientific vocabulary of words of English origin,” wrote Carol Padden and Darline Clark Gunsauls, who heads Deaf studies at Ohlone College, in a paper on the subject.

And the writers of the UW letter argued that the development of a technology based on a sign language constituted cultural appropriation. College students were gaining accolades and scholarships for technologies based on an element of Deaf culture, while Deaf people themselves are legally and medically underserved.

Also, though the gloves are often presented as devices to improve accessibility for the Deaf, it’s the signers, not the hearing people, who must wear the gloves, carry the computers, or modify their rate of signing. “This is a manifestation of audist beliefs,” the UW letter states, “the idea that the Deaf person must expend the effort to accommodate to the standards of communication of the hearing person.”

That sentiment is widely echoed. “ASL gloves are mainly created/designed to serve hearing people,” said Rachel Kolb, a Rhodes Scholar and Ph.D. student at Emory University who has been deaf from birth. “The concept of the gloves is to render ASL intelligible to hearing people who don’t know how to sign, but this misses and utterly overlooks so many of the communication difficulties and frustrations that Deaf people can already face.”

Julie Hochgesang, an assistant professor of linguistics at Gallaudet, said she rolls her eyes when another glove is announced. “We can't get decent access to communication when we go to the doctor. Why bother with silly gloves when we still need to take care of the basic human-rights issues?”

So why do so many inventors keep turning to the sign-language glove concept?

One reason is pretty obvious: Despite the popularity of ASL classes in American colleges (enrollment in such courses grew by 19 percent between 2009 and 2013), non-signers often don’t know that much about sign language. They may not even realize that ASL (and other sign languages, such as British Sign Language, Chinese Sign Language, and dozens of others) are distinct languages with their own grammars and phonologies, not word-for-word reformulations of a spoken language. Additionally, says Forshay, “People have no knowledge of the culture of Deaf people and how signed language has been exploited and oppressed over history.” As a result, they’re not aware of why the issue would be so sensitive.

An equally potent but less immediately apparent reason is the way engineers approach problem-solving. In engineering school, students are taught to solve only the mathematical elements of problems, says the Virginia Tech engineering educator Gary Downey. In a 1997 article he noted that “all the nonmathematical features of a problem, such as its politics, its power implications for those who solve it, and so forth, are given,” meaning they’re bracketed off. Students are prepared to focus on sensor placement or algorithm design, but often not the broader social context that the device they’re designing will enter.

The specific application of Lipomi’s glove as an accessibility device seems to have been an afterthought. The project’s purpose, he wrote on his blog later, was to “demonstrate integration of soft electronic materials with low-energy wireless circuitry that can be purchased economically.” The American Manual Alphabet was chosen because “it comprises a set of 26 standardized gestures, which represent a challenge in engineering to detect using our system of materials.”

However, engineers seem to be hearing and responding to linguists’ complaints. Pryor and Azodi, the inventors of the UW SignAloud project, signed on to the UW open letter. And when Darren Lipomi heard about the linguists’ criticisms, he changed the wording of his paper with an addendum to PLOS One and wrote a blog post encouraging researchers to be more culturally sensitive. “The onus is thus on the researcher to be aware of cultural issues and to make sure ... that word choice, nuance, and how the technology may impact a culture is properly conveyed to the journalist and thence to the public,” he wrote.

Still, as long as actual Deaf users aren’t included in these projects, inventors are likely to continue creating devices that offend the very group they say they want to help. “To do this work, the first rule you have to teach yourself is that you are not your user,” says Thad Starner, who directs the Contextual Computing Group at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The group develops accessibility technologies for the deaf, such as a sign language–based educational game to train the working-memory abilities of deaf children.

That’s not to say that Deaf people don’t have futuristic fantasies that involve technology. For example, Kolb says a dominant fantasy among her friends is for glasses that would auto-caption everything that hearing people say. Several teams of researchers are working on algorithms to make signing videos on YouTube searchable. Even more thorough, higher-quality captioning and better interpreting services would improve the lives of many.

And, Kolb added, technology could create ways to encourage hearing people to use ASL and become multimodal as well as multilingual.

“That would open up the possibilities of communication for all of us,” she said.

Article source here:The Atlantic

[csrgood]

Ashridge Executive Education: 'Action Research' Method Trains Business Leaders to Make Impact

The challenges facing us – population growth, migration, globalisation, shifting centres of economic power, increasing inequality of life and the deterioration of the environment – are pressing. Now, many advocates for change have realised that change and innovation is predominantly a socio-technological phenomenon and that the standard approaches no longer work.

So perhaps it is time for a more radical approach to the dynamics of stability and change? Leaders should take a look at themselves, as well as their organisations, when they are asking how we do good business as a global community.

The Executive Doctorate in Organisational Change at Ashridge Executive Education, at Hult International Business School, is not for the faint-hearted. Through the discipline of ‘Action Research’, it throws students – be they CEOs, managers, entrepreneurs or individuals – into the lions’ den and pushes them to research themselves as much as their corporation or organisation.

“As a business school we’re obviously rooted in business, but at the same time we’re challenging business,” says Dr Steve Marshall, Academic Director. “We are deliberately radical and we are looking for people who want to change their organisations – be it a church or charity, a hospital or a multinational – for the better. What really interests us is how the individual, the researcher, can bring about change in existing social systems.

“We rate our students on the impact they have, not the number of times someone reads their research,” he says.

The key buzzwords here are research with, not research on, Marshall explains. ‘Traditional research, the ‘Expert Model’, involves coming up with a hypothesis, working out the methodology and going into the field. Researchers will go into an organisation, for example, study its practices, conduct focus groups, opinion polls or surveys, and come up with a diagnosis. The researchers keep control of the research while the participants are held at a distance. The researchers reach the conclusions.’

The Ashridge method, ‘Action Research’, is a three-pronged personal approach based on First Person, Second Person, Third Person. “First, we look at ourselves as researchers, understand our interest and motives in this research, how we are seeing the problem and why?” says Marshall. “Our concept is that first the researcher must know themself before going on to work with others.

“Secondly, in the ‘second person’ part, we explain our ideas to the participants and get their feedback on the research and our methods so that they share the issues and the research is as participatory as possible. If researchers simply fire questions, it is another case of the subjects being told what to do and you are far less likely to achieve anything of consequence. If, on the other hand, we convene the community and ask: what’s the best way to get this knowledge? and we join with the participants as co-researchers and co-inquirers, they will be more likely to speak up and the results will be more valuable,” he continues.

“And ‘third person’ means we take our research out into the world and make sure it has impact. While the doctorate is academic, this is nevertheless research for positive change – rather than research for publishing in some arcane journal and adding only to our theoretical knowledge.”

“In the thesis,” says Marshall, “we are looking for the impact of the individual, at how they have convened a conversation in a different way so as to make a difference and change an organisation.

“It is so easy for individuals to think “but what can I do? How can I make a difference?” and feel deflated, but individuals can make an impact, Marshall insists.”

He quotes the example of a doctoral student who had two very sick children whom she felt were being treated as ‘numbers’ by an overstretched NHS. She began to examine how this depersonalisation could be avoided in a large medical organisation. “She invited other parents, doctors and nurses to a group discussion to co-inquire and today she is addressing large audiences on the same issue.”

 Another difference from conventional research is that the research question can often change during the research as students examine their own roles as researchers. For example, a senior policeman inquiring into better leadership in the police force discovered that there was a gender issue that prevented this happening. “The topic of the research changed,” says Marshall, “and the methods and questions shifted as we went along.

“Our aim is not to prove or disprove a hypothesis that is set in stone at the beginning.”

Action Research has its beginnings as far back as the end of the Second World War with the emancipatory philosophies that started to look at what makes a worthwhile organisation, says Marshall. Today, as social responsibility and sustainability are coming to the fore in the corporate agenda, as well as new concepts of civil society, an increasing number of people are realising that the conventional change models are not working. They want to know: what do we do now for the greater collective good; how do we do good business?

“We, at Ashridge, see ourselves as consultants for change. Our role is not to oppose business but to challenge it and we believe that helping to develop individuals and training people to go out and change the world is the most important work we can do.

 “Many people reach the stage when they question what they want to do with their life, and how they can meaningfully contribute to the good of the global community,” says Marshall, “and this doctorate is precisely for those who want to initiate and sustain change within their organisations. It is aimed at those who want to make a unique contribution in their chosen field.”

The Ashridge doctorate programme challenges participants’ implicit and explicit assumptions and the implications of those assumptions for their practice. Students undertake this research in collaboration with like-minded peers and the support of like-minded tutors.

It is, warns Marshall, a radical doctorate. “Getting people to speak out, break the rules, be creative and challenge hierarchies can have consequences. When we get students to subject themselves, as well as their organisations, to research, to challenge their own motives and practices, they can change in ways that are shocking even to themselves.

“This is a very developmental program and this, in itself, carries risks and can put students in a vulnerable position. We, as a faculty, are very aware that our role is as much in supporting students as in challenging them.

“Some will end up changing their own roles – even their whole lifestyles – quite significantly.”

THE COMPANY:

Ashridge has contributed to the success of thousands of individuals, teams and organizations by helping to develop their leadership capabilities. As part of Hult International Business School, one of the world’s truly global business schools with seven campuses around  the world, Ashridge has an unrivaled international platform to deliver teaching. Ashridge Executive Education attracts clients from every continent and is in the 1% of providers globally to be accredited by all

three major executive education bodies: AACSB, EQUIS and AMBA. We work with more than 800 companies from over 60 countries. Ashridge Executive Education programs are consistently ranked amongst the best in the world by the Financial Times.

COMMENT: By Simon Webley, Research Director, Institute of Business Ethics

There is growing evidence that the ways organisations are doing their business in the developed world are being challenged. Considerable changes are taking place with increasing acceleration. Ashridge’s new program is a prime example. The acceleration is partly due to the application of new technological knowledge which is challenging the traditional ways that products and services are produced and distributed.

How far is business education keeping up with changes like this? Only spasmodically. Too many are still concentrating on yesterday’s issues and outmoded approaches to ways forward.

It is therefore, refreshing to hear of Ashridge’s doctorate course that involves participants in actual consideration and resolution of genuine change challenges. Its program moves past inadequate traditional models, especially when a question is raised like “how do we do good business?” in a difficult situation.

Post graduate students in this type of programme need effective support: it is provided!

Points of note:

• Motives for a research project are considered

• Information is gained by discussion rather than questions

• Initiation and sustainability of change is at the heart of the programme

• Research is collaborative

source: http://www.csrwire.com/press_releases/40244-Ashridge-Executive-Education-Action-Research-Method-Trains-Business-Leaders-to-Make-Impact?tracking_source=rss

[lana-del-briaridyl-blog]

#2 - August 2, 2017

X,

First of all, notice that I’ve changed our url. And that’s because I’m a big fucking klutz and I accidentally liked a post on ZG’s new girlfriend’s blog while on this account. Just hand me a gold medal for being the world’s shittiest Tumblr stalker. ZG texted me and her girlfriend changed her url. Yikes.

I’m literally writing this at work right now. Getting paid by the hour. *money barf emoji*

About the self-sabotage/crushing on straight guys thing: It could be that you’re subconsciously going for people you know are unattainable, which is scary, but I think that’s actually a pretty normal tendency and I wouldn’t be too worried (if that helps at all?). Crushing on celebrities/older people/people in relationships can be a safe testing ground for us to figure out what we like and what kinds of people we’re into without the pressure of trying to make something happen. The problem is, in your case, you have to live with this guy AND a relationship is something that you actually want right now.  

Also, the feeling that everyone else is getting all of the experiences in dating/sex/romance and you’re not is LITERALLY THE WORST THING EVER. Like, it has so much power to bring up the “yo is there something wrong with me tho” feelings.

SO. A few things (gonna bullet point because paragraphs are whatever):

To be honest, a lot of things about dating really suck. The honeymoon period goes away eventually, and a lot of times you’re kind of left with this dynamic that feels more like when you and I would sit in the N*ckCave in high school and put in a pizza and talk about what to watch on TV/YouTube for 30mins before just sitting on the couch and doing whatever than it does ~romance~. I’m not saying there’s not value in that dynamic (there really, really is — having someone you can love and feel comfortable doing next to nothing around is important and wonderful), but I’m just trying to demystify the whole ~~relationship~~ thing that often feels like surrounded by its own magical fairy dust from observers. Falling in love is exciting but, from my experience at least, it’s one of those things that exists in the extremes of micro and macro. You notice it in tiny tiny things and you acknowledge its larger arc over time. The in between bits haze over and get lost in the everyday.

The point of that point (eyyy) was that relationships aren’t inherently meaningful. My tendency is to think of a romantic relationship as some fated match of kindred souls coming together, but that’s LOL NOT HOW IT WORKS S*PH**. More realistically it’s just two people who were like “sup dude you’re cool I’m cool lets make something together” and then they do and it grows or it doesn’t. And the beautiful part is that thing you make and take care of. Not just the fact that you’re two people who are attracted to each other. And maybe it’s fate but if it is we can’t think of it that way.

And you’re over there in California like “HI HELLO WORLD I AM *READY* TO BUILD THAT MOTHERFUCKING FIRE” and you’re just getting echoes with a side of straight frat boys hollering “pu$$y pu$$y pu$$y marijuana” and it’s frustrating for me that I can't help you more with the literal finding-of-a-person-to-love situation. I can’t manifest a perfect partner for you (would if I could, boo), but I’m trying my best to use this space to complicate some of the assumptions about what the value of a relationship is, and why sometimes we feel such a lack (of love, of security, of power, of time left in our lives to *find* love/security/power) in our lives without one.

The TP/RS thing (wishing you’d had the chance to have an experience like theirs early on — or at all) is actually something that’s come up in my own anxious relationship thoughts. Part of me wants to say to you, “No, those early, stepping-stone relationships are bullshit, timing doesn’t matter, there’s no such thing as ‘learning’ how be in a relationship because it’s different every time with every person, TP and RS probably aren’t any better people or partners for it, etc.” and part of me wants to say, “Yo ok but let’s not try to downplay the significant social capital and external validation they gained from being a public couple at R**s*v*lt and into later high school years. Dating has STRONG inertia, and it’s as easy to slide from relationship to relationship when you’re in one/just got out of one (lol hi hello it’s me) as it is difficult to break out of feeling static when you're single. Though likely not all too deep within the relationship itself, the fact that it got the ball rolling for both of them both in their sense of confidence in dating *and* in others’ perceptions of their respective ~datability~ is legitimate.”

So what I think I’ll land on with the TP/RS thing (you know that I’m just using them as an example to talk about the concept of having dated while still under your parents’ roof, basically) is this: Yeah, not having done it does stunt your growth a little. And I think this phenomenon is particularly common and particularly evident for queer/gay people who were either not out in high school or didn’t date for other reasons. I’ve read more than one ~thinkpiece~ (don’t laugh at me) about the consequences for queer people in particular of barriers to dating during teen years. Maybe this is why the culture of hookups seems to exist for gay men and the culture of “U-hauling” exists for gay women? Like two extremes of dating, either no commitment or a TON all at once due to fear of not having the right “skills” to build a steady partnership?

(I have a huge fucking bone to pick with the lack of safe, non-alcoholic queer spaces for young people. But that’s a topic for another post.)

BUT the area in which not having had relationships stunts your development is one that 1) has been overblown and glamorized in its significance and 2) probably has influence over your sense of relationship confidence more because of external social dynamics that validate couples over single people than because it gives you real life skills that make you a better partner. Did that make any sense? What I’m trying to say is that TP/RS relationships help you develop and that’s REAL but not in the way that you think, and the way that they help you develop doesn’t lend itself that well to the *stuff* that makes relationships juicy and loving and good. More social capital than internal growth. Same with JC/ZH.

On to the stuff that I think makes relationships juicy and loving and good: Vulnerability — the blind trust in someone to take pieces of your literal warm guts and soul out of the part of your stomach that hurts when you’re embarrassed and put them on the table and feel the discomfort and, like, roll in it. Bloody fucking gross but bloody fucking good. The cool misty calm of the patience, space, curiosity that it takes to stay in tact as an individual human and united-yet-not-swallowed alongside another person (you can’t have all of your guts on the table or you’d die, ya know?). There’s a different kind of vulnerability (this is the one that I’m less good at, lmao) in trusting silence and allowing privacy and distance and unknown and allowing for a slower meshing, I guess. Also, willingness to embrace and respect mundane — having enough faith in your mutual connection to know that it’s there even when it’s not right in front of you. Obviously there’s a lot more than those three, but I feel like anything else I could list would kind of fit into one of those categories.

I don’t think any of those skills (can you call them that?) are exclusive to romantic relationships. You can explore those concepts within yourself and notice your own ability to give/receive vulnerable words and actions, your own tendency to desire an all-consuming or all-giving bond with someone regardless of reciprocation (gas refilling?), and what feels scary and what feels safe and why. What are the parts of you that you’re excited/ready to share with another person? What are the parts of you that you want to share with another person but (possibly) feel scared to give? And what are the parts of you that feel so precious that you want to keep all to yourself? What do you want or not want to receive  If there are any ~stepping stones~ toward a meaningful partnership, I think it’s asking yourself these questions.

I hope I’m not getting too theoretical or too preachy here. This is for you but it’s also for me. Putting these words on a page feels nice because shit if I know how love works.

I can’t take away the pain and the SHITTYNESS that comes with watching everyone around you navigate hookups and dating and love while also having unrequited feelings for someone. That’s like a double fucking punch in the stomach. And I also felt like sharing ~practical dating tips~ would be kind of dumb because our environments are so different and I can’t really promise that anything I would have suggested would actually help you get what you want. But I hope these thoughts can at least give you something to chew on? I hope they can complicate some widespread assumptions about what relationships are and why we think (/are told) they’re somehow higher than other forms of love.

Currently, I’m feeling a little too winded by the nauseating Uber pool ride that is my internal life right now to write it all down and flesh it out. Today, things feel calm and relatively stable (by “things” I mean: my mental health and its inevitable connection to how secure I’m feeling in my relationship with PL, my lingering not-relationship-not-friendship-but-not-not-something with ZG, and my attraction to GL — text me if you need explanations of initials, but I think you got it). Last night, PL gave me a packet and reading of five poems from the last few months that all have to do with me/our relationship. I think I’ve told you this, but she’s a published and super talented legit poet, so these aren’t just sappy love poems I’m dealing with here. I cried and I didn’t know how to respond to her poem-words with my mouth-words and I told her that I love her.

The I-love-you thing has been something we’ve opened conversation about before. When I explained to her my complications with feeling like I got into this relationship too fast after ZG and that I’m still dealing with leftover feelings and love for ZG (It’s been an intense couple of weeks for PL and me. Did I tell you about this conversation we had? I also told her about GL — not by name because I think that would make things really tricky, but I told her that I have feelings for one of my close friends), one of the things that hurt her the most was that I was so freely saying how much I still “loved and cared about” ZG when “I love you” still isn’t a thing that PL and I regularly say in our relationship. I told PL that it wasn’t that I didn’t feel that way towards her, but I just didn’t feel ready for whatever reason to say it, even though it gets expressed in different ways.

But I think the real reason why I’ve been hesitant to say it is that in a lot of ways it feels like the last thing I can hold onto about my relationship with ZG. As if only having said “I love you” to one romantic partner ever kept ZG’s and my relationship alive in some way, and that sharing those words with someone else (even if I felt it) would start the real fading-away process of that past relationship.

Last night I felt it, and I said it, and PL said it back, and like… nothing exploded. Love is not finite! You LITERALLY cannot run out. It’s cool. I just have to keep reminding myself that loving a new person doesn’t diminish or disrespect previous loves. Then we had sex on her parents’ couch.

I love you and I miss you and write back when you can.

Sincerely,

Just Wants Lots Of Friends Who Invite Me To Their Parties (aka Y)