#working on big complex projects often in a team taught me one thing and that is that you never get to think about everything

[sygneth]

The confirmation that Harry's squad abandoning him is just poor writing just so the player can continue doing shit on their own is the fact that it never gets explained. Harry even tries to bring it up but kim just. Shuts him up about about it is so so sooooo absurd. Jean's inaction could also harm him but he just makes harry drop the subject? C'mon folk it could have not been more obvious that the writers simply did not come up with that part 💀 I wish people would just take things as they are: de is not really a detailed novel. It's a fuckin game. With excellent writing, excellent characters and worldbuilding, but still a game

I don't think there is much to add here anon. This is a very solid point.

EDIT: I figured it may be worth adding that this is about the posse leaving on the day of the mercenary tribunal, not before the events of the game

[heliads]

Neighbour

Bucky first moves into the apartment building because it’ll provide him a safe home away from the dangers of his work as an Avenger. He doesn’t plan on meeting Y/N, the girl down the hall.

masterlist

The apartment building is the perfect fit. It’s four blocks across and three blocks down from the Avengers Tower in New York City, far enough away that Bucky can easily walk to the building and close enough that the tower’s shadow still chills his back. It’s nice to be able to have a place to live that isn’t a part of the Avengers, like almost every other aspect of Bucky’s existence. 

It also doesn’t hurt that it seems to calm Tony down to have Bucky away from him- he supposes the Civil War situation and the unmentionable crimes he’d committed as the Winter Soldier still tighten an invisible noose around Tony’s neck whenever the billionaire looks at him. The more time Bucky has away from the entire Avengers world, the better. The separation of church and state; except, in his case, more like the separation of government secrets and any potential relaxation at home. Although Bucky’s never been one for relaxation.

His few meager possessions have finally been moved into this new apartment building, and they decorate a few sparse shelves. The rooms aren’t quite luxurious, nor bare, more somewhere along the lines of furnished. This isn’t due to lack of funding- no, Steve and everyone else had made sure Bucky had more than enough money to support himself. This was all his choice- maybe born from a habit of only needing a few things so he could pack up easily for a life on the run, maybe even from before then, when scrimping and saving for wartime efforts were commonplace.

Money didn’t form the decision as to why Bucky chose to live in an apartment building, though. That was purely for protection. The thoughts had spiraled into his head as soon as Bucky had begun considering a future living situation. A house by himself was no good- even with neighbours, he would still be easily targeted. And if he lived alone, with few neighbours? Even worse- he could be singled out and killed by any decent strike team. Living without anyone around would cause Bucky to be a lone wolf, separated from the protection of the pack and left to the mercy of a none too benevolent world.

An apartment complex, on the other hand, would do nicely. There are 15 stories, about 275 total apartments but only 260 in use. There are enough people in the building to hide Bucky, enough inhabitants coming and going to ensure that one war-worn soldier in particular would be disguised in the crowd. No sniper, no matter how well trained, would risk firing into the building at him. No strike team could excuse a raid on his room, and thus Bucky ensures his safety as best he can by living here.

This being said, Bucky still flinches at the sound of a knock at the door. No one should know he was there, and any coworkers would only speak to him at the Avengers Tower or some other S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters to guarantee no suspicions were raised as a result of high-profile government agents coming to his apartment. Bucky walks slowly over to the door, back hand moving silently to grab a knife hidden in a discreet pocket on his belt. His hand closes around the ridged rubber handle and the blade shines in the light from an open window. Bucky glances once in the peephole in the door, then groans under his breath, putting his knife away hurriedly before opening the door.

Standing before him is a cheerful young woman, holding a cloth covered plate in her hands. When she sees him, her smile grows even broader, if that was possible. “Ah, you must be Mr. Barnes. I’m Y/N, your neighbour from down the hall. The door next to the window?” Bucky forces a smile, still confused as to why she was there. “Bucky. Uh, I go by Bucky.” The woman nods. “Bucky it is. Well, I always bring new neighbours some freshly baked cookies. I figure it’s a nice way to start off your first few days here, right?”

She carefully unwraps the cloth from around the plate, revealing a small mound of chocolate chip cookies, still warm from the oven based on the steam just beginning to emanate from the plate. Bucky tries not to stare- he hasn’t had homemade cookies in what feels like years. Could be decades.

He takes the plate from her after standing there for a moment. “Thanks, Y/N. I appreciate it.” Y/N smiles at him again. “No problem! Hey, if you ever need something, even just someone to talk to, I’m right down the hall. Apartment on the left of that window there. Just knock.” Bucky nods slowly. “I’ll, uh, keep that in mind.” The woman waves goodbye, then heads back down the hallway once more, leaving Bucky standing in his doorway holding the plate of cookies. So that was his neighbour.

After Bucky manages to make it back inside, he sits down in one of his newly purchased chairs, thinking. He hadn’t planned on speaking to any of the other inhabitants of the apartment building- he’s always been taught that friendships with non-Avengers or other agents were risky. Too big of a chance of them being double agents or hurt because of him, so Bucky had decided not to talk to anyone else in the building. Yet here he was, already telling Y/N his name. Hey, at least her cookies were good. 

Bucky finds himself stumbling up to his apartment building after a long, rough day. The problem with his line of work is that it constantly left him questioning everything he did. When he helped use his skills to track someone down, was it worth it? When he had to go in on missions and infiltrate HYDRA bases, who was benefiting from it? When he looked into someone’s eyes and pulled the trigger, was he killing a criminal or murdering an innocent?

Bucky’s head is a swirling mess by the time he finally gets to his floor, and his feet drag him out of the elevator without being directed by a single thought. His eyes latch on the shape of his front door, but Bucky realizes that the last thing he wants right now is to be alone. Unconsciously, his head turns to face another door, one near him. It’s bathed in a light from the window right next to it. 

Y/N.

Her words rise, unbidden, from some unknown depths of his memory. If you ever need something, even just someone to talk to, I’m right down the hall. He doesn’t know why he stops by her door, doesn’t know why his hand rises to knock twice on the hard wood, doesn’t know why the door knob twists open under the guide of his fingers when she calls for him to come in.

Y/N’s apartment looks a lot like his. It faces the bustling streets of the city, the junctures of the streets. She has art hung around the walls, and tall bookcases are wedged in the corners. A faded blanket is draped across a pale green couch, and light from an antique lamp paints the room in a bright coat of gold. After a second, Bucky’s eyes find Y/N, bent over her kitchen counter. He can see now why she couldn’t answer the door herself- her hands are covered in flour, busily kneading a mound of dough in front of her.

She smiles when she sees him approach. “Hey, Bucky! Sorry about this- I’m just finishing a loaf of bread.” Bucky chuckles softly in spite of himself. “Didn’t realize you like baking this much.” Y/N laughs, a soft sound like the chiming of bells. “It’s a habit.” Her hands methodically fold the dough in front of her, pushing it forward only to pull it back over itself once more. Light motes of flour occasionally drift up from the counter.

It takes Bucky a moment to realize she’s looking at him expectantly, and he clears his throat. “Right. I just wanted to- I remembered you said something about-” Y/N glances up at him with her lips curving into a smile, and he suddenly can’t finish his sentence. She reaches into a tall plastic container next to her, and dusts her dough with a pinch more of flour. “Well, no matter the reason, I’m glad you stopped by. I’ve been meaning to ask someone about this program I’m supposed to be reviewing for work. It’s not that long, only ten or so minutes. If you don’t mind, I’ll put it on while I finish up the bread and you can tell me your thoughts.”

She crosses the kitchen to rinse off her flour-powdered hands, and after dashing a towel about them, pulls up a short video on her TV. It’s actually quite interesting, some overview of a project regarding city planning. Towards the end, Y/N puts her bread in some warm drawer (“to proof so it will rise!” or whatever that means) and cleans her hands once more before perching on a chair next to him.

Once the screen fades to black, she turns to him. “So, what do you think? I’ve got to decide in a few days whether or not to support this guy and his project, but I’m not sure. I mean, more space for the hospitals would definitely be useful, but if it keeps encroaching on park land like that, it won’t be great for the environment.” Bucky frowns. “What if he extended it in the other direction instead? He’s got more room around the east side of the building.” Y/N furrows her brow in concentration, playing back the video so she can see what he’s talking about.

He ends up staying for half an hour more, spending almost the entire time discussing the proposed project. He didn’t mean to stay that long, but it’s so easy to talk to Y/N that he barely felt any time pass at all. When he eventually heads out, after promising to drop by again soon, he closes the door behind him with more reluctance than he had realized. His chest feels strangely light, and there’s an odd expression on his face. A smile.

The weeks fly by in his new apartment, coming and going far faster than Bucky had expected. He ends up visiting Y/N often, and they quickly become fast friends. For someone who’s not supposed to be engaging with civilians, Bucky’s breaking his own rules quite easily. 

He’s at work at the Avengers Tower when he first hears about it. Bucky had noticed a sudden increase in commotion outside of his station, and he hadn’t considered it much before Steve had come bursting into the room. All his friend had to do was hold out the case file in his hand and Bucky’s heart rate had gone through the roof.

Y/N was missing. No, Y/N was captured. By HYDRA agents. Because of him. There were photos of her in some cell, hands tied behind her back. She was being held ransom to hurt him, to punish him for defecting from his title as HYDRA’s Winter Soldier. It hadn’t taken long for Bucky to put together a team and find out where she was being held, but the entire time he was preparing Bucky felt a constant twist in his stomach, a pain like a knife being slowly stabbed through him.

The HYDRA outpost where Y/N is being held is small, barely large enough to trigger S.H.I.E.L.D. sensors. Yet there it is, guards posted outside the door and everything. Bucky barely says a word to his team, already taking out the guards and storming inside. It’s strange- enemy soldiers in the halls look terrified at the sight of him, and Bucky doesn’t realize why until he comes face to face with his own reflection in a polished metal door. He looks like a wild animal, emotionless and cold, seconds away from a kill. He looks angry- no, furious. Beyond furious. What was dear to him had been taken away, and he was ready to do anything to get her back.

The HYDRA structure is small, and so it doesn’t take long for Bucky to find Y/N. She looks up when she sees him, and he can see the confusion and relief warring in her eyes when he walks through the door. He doesn’t say a word while they’re leaving the building, and neither does she. It’s only when they’re both alone in a closed off room on a Quinjet leaving the HYDRA compound that Bucky finally opens his mouth to speak.

“I’m leaving the apartment building. I’ll probably never see you again.” Y/N jerks her head up, shocked. “Because of the attack? Why wouldn’t you see me?” Bucky methodically takes off his armor, removing mics and thick pieces of armored uniform. “It’s not safe for you. I’m not putting you in any position when you can get hurt.”

Y/N laughs harshly, a strange, discordant contrast to the bubbly laugh he’s used to hearing. “Bucky, you not seeing me won’t make a difference. I knew that when I first met you, and I decided to get to know you anyway. I was the first one to take this risk, and I’m not letting you walk away from me because the consequences have been made real.” Bucky looks at her, confused. “What are you talking about? You knew who I was?”

Y/N nods, turning her head away so Bucky can’t see her face. “I knew you were the Winter Soldier. James Buchanan Barnes. I knew that being anywhere remotely near you would be dangerous to me, but I stayed because you were important to me. Please, don’t give up on me because of what might happen.”

Bucky throws his hands in the air, frustrated. “What might happen? Y/N, it already did happen. You could have been killed-or worse- all because of me. This is for the best. Don’t think I want this to happen, because I don’t. I just-” His voice cracks on the last word. “I just need you to be safe.” Y/N walks over to him, gently taking his hands in hers. “I will be safe. If you’re there with me. Bucky, we both know they won’t try something like this again, not for a while. Not after their first attempt went so badly. It’s alright to be worried, but please, don’t leave me.”

Bucky looks at her, earnest eyes meeting his tense ones, then sighs. “Fine. I won’t go. Just promise me you’ll be careful? You’ll contact me if anything seems wrong?” Y/N smiles at him. “Of course I will. As long as I’ve got you, I know I’ll be alright.”

[superlinguo]

Linguistics Jobs: Interview with a Developer Advocate

I often talk about how Linguist Twitter is a great place to hang out. Twitter can be a big, confusing, noisy platform, but I’ve enjoyed building a little world full of linguists, and one of those excellent people is Rachael Tatman. It has been great to follow Rachael as she completed her PhD, got a job in data visualisation with Kaggle, and then moved on to chatbot maker Rasa. Rachael is not only a great linguist, but a thoughtful linguistics communicator. Her blog Making Noise and Hearing Things has a wonderful back catalogue covering data science, professionalism and emoji. You too can follow Rachael on Twitter (@rctatman).

What did you study at university?

My BA is in Linguistics and English Literature (I double majored) from William and Mary (in Virginia, USA) and then I went to the University of Washington for grad school. I got my PhD in linguistics in 2017, and my dissertation was "Modeling the Perceptual Learning of Novel Dialect Features". Over the course of my PhD in particular I moved more and more into natural language processing, although I was still pretty much calling myself a computational linguist.

What is your job?

I'm a senior developer advocate for a company called Rasa. We make an open source framework for building chatbots/virtual assistants and free software for improving your assistant over time. (If you're a business using the free software and want additional fancy features, we also have a paid enterprise version.) Developer advocates are basically peer-to-peer technical educators. Our job is to help make it as easy as possible for developers to use whatever product it is that we support. So my day to day involves a lot of developer education–things like writing blog posts, giving talks and making videos–as well as providing technical support and product feedback. Because I have a research background and Rasa has a research team I'll sometimes help out with research projects as well.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

It helps me every day! One great example is that it's given me a good idea of the typological diversity of languages in the world. Since Rasa is a language-agnostic platform (we want to be able to support as many languages as possible) knowing what sort of differences there are between languages is very helpful. My linguistics training also taught me how to communicate complex topics succinctly and accurately which is a huge part of developer relations and related fields, like technical writing.

Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

Be really kind to yourself, especially when you're on the job market. There's a large emotional regulation component to searching for jobs that I don't think gets talked about enough. Find something that helps you disconnect from thinking about work or looking for work and commit to doing it often. That could be something as simple as following along with yoga videos in your room or setting up a weekly time to play video games with your friends or just taking a walk outside every day, maybe with your children if you have them. Building a brain break into my routine and keeping it stable really, really helped me both in graduate school and when I was on the job market.

Also: your goals and identity will change over time. You may think of yourself as an academic now but won't in 5 years. That's ok. It's normal. And it's also normal for those shifts to come with a grieving process, especially if you weren't expecting them. Give yourself grace, and time, to feel your feelings. And know that you can have a rich, happy fulfilling life that looks nothing like what you're planning for yourself right now.

Any other thoughts or comments?

The great thing about studying and having a fascination for language is that it's everywhere. Your linguistic training will give you a set of lenses you can look through for the rest of your life, and that's a thing to celebrate and cherish in its own right.

Related interviews:

Interview with a Product Manager

Interview with a Senior Content Project Manager at Transparent Language

Interview with a Linguistic Project Manager at a Language Tech Company

Recent interviews:

Interview with an ESL teacher, coach and podcaster

Interview with a Juris Doctor (Master of Laws) student

Interview with the Director of Education and Professional Practice at the American Anthropological Association

Interview with a Research Coordinator, Speech Pathologist

Interview with a Dance Instructor and Stay-at-Home Mom

Check out the full Linguist Jobs Interview List and the Linguist Jobs tag for even more interviews  

[whumpinggrounds]

Gotcha Day

my first non-Febuwhump piece of writing! here goes :) this is set before the last day of Febuwhump (You Have To Let Me Go) and i mean i really don’t need to explain much i don’t think bc it’s fairly self-explanatory but i am nervous so. yes

tagging @shapeshiftersandfire and @killtheprotagonist ! lmk if you want to be added/removed from being tagged it is a lot a lot of content so sorry about that

CW: lady whump, pet whump, dehumanization, memory loss, discussion of scars, past burns, implied non con,

Director Hammond’s office is much like the Director herself – alternately welcoming and terrifying, depending on what mood has struck her. Today, the curtains are open, the room is filled with light, and the Director has a bouquet of flowers on her desk in a vase. That’s good, right? All of that is good.

Mara still feels the nerves in her stomach buzzing like a hive.

“I don’t want to drag this out,” the Director begins, and Mara’s heart sinks. It’s some polite dismissal, something like that. There’s a self-satisfied little smile playing around the woman’s lips, and Mara tries to brace herself, folding her hands neatly in her lap and staring down her doom with icy eyes. “We have decided to let you train her. 067493.”

Stunned, Mara stares at the Director. There are no words in her mouth, no words in her head. She wants to speak, knows she should speak, but she can’t. An incredulous smile starts to curl up her face.

“Now, before you get too excited, there are some conditions.” Despite her lecturing tone, there’s a smile on the Director’s face – probably because of Mara’s huge ferocious grin. “She’s not your pet, technically speaking, not until the trial period is over. Obviously, she’s coming with what we call a factory defect, so you got very lucky there, otherwise we’d never let her go. She’s not fully trained, but honestly, Ms. Langford, we’re not going to spend the money and time to finish out the training on a model that we’re essentially giving away.”

“Yes.” Mara’s head is nodding on her neck like a bobblehead. “Yes, okay, that’s fine. That’s okay. That’s so okay.”

Amused by her eagerness, the Director nods. “Good. Now, primarily, Ms. Langford, we want to explore two things with 067493, and we feel that gifting her to an employee, while highly unusual, will give us an opportunity to answer some outstanding questions.”

“Okay.” Mara’s heart is racing. God, she feels like she’s going to pass out any second. “Okay, so, so, um, what are those questions, then? The things…what it is you want to, um, explore?”

The Director smiles at her, fondly, warmly. “First of all…” she pauses for effect, “some of the higher-ups loved this therapeutic aid idea. If it’s workable, there could be a strong market there. Of course, we’ve been trying to work a caregiver angle for a while, but the medical stuff is often just too complex for pets. This emotional approach could give us a very similar sector, but with none of the concern about pets operating medical machinery incorrectly.”

“Y-yes.” Mara’s breathless, dazed, struggling just to keep up. “Yes, definitely-”

“Now, not everyone is convinced, but enough of us think that it’s worth a try. Which brings us to our second objective.”

Here, the Director pauses long enough that Mara can stop focusing on her breathing and look up inquisitively. Finally, tentatively, she prompts her superior. “Ma’am?”

The Director shakes her head as if to clear it. “Yes, well. What we are interested in is…is…” she purses her lips, clearly wondering how to explain. “Pets who may end up living with someone they know or recognize from their former life. As you know, pets are prone to false memories.” Mara nods dutifully, despite knowing full well there’s no such thing. “We want to see if our Boxies can be taught and trained in such a way that they can be…reintroduced to their old life, or one like it, while maintaining good behavior and accurate memory blocks.”

“That sounds…” Mara swallows. “That sounds…difficult.”

“Indeed.” For the first time, the Director looks grim. “Of course, that’s exactly what you’re attempting with 493, and if you could pull it off…we’ve had some interest. People who want to…serve their loved ones in a more straightforward and simplified fashion.” For just a moment, Mara tunes out, thinking with a sort of horrified fascination on the kind of environment that would lead to someone wanting to erase themselves while staying where they were.

Or, even worse, Mara pictures someone coming in asking for a loved one to be erased, returned sweet and pliable and empty. She barely represses a shudder. Ignorant of Mara’s internal monologue, the Director forges on.

“We are proposing that you take 067493 home as your Domestic. You will be responsible for making her into a…a prototype, essentially, for this therapeutic aid program. You will also be expected to report any aberrant behaviors that could conceivably result from…ah, memory confusion.”

“I can do that.” That all sounds absurd, and difficult, and unfair, but Mara doesn’t care right now. All she cares about is getting Jude and taking her home and, and having her. Having her back.

“We’re going to allow you an adjustment period, and then we’re going to ask that you bring 067493 in for regular checkups, where we’ll be looking for signs of this memory confusion, as well as updates on your progress.”

“That…yes, that sounds very doable.”

Once again, the Director smiles fondly across the desk at her, and Mara has a funny, frightening feeling that she’s become Barbara Hammond’s newest little pet project. “I believe that it is, Ms. Langford. Despite the cosmetic defaults, she seems like a sweet thing. I can’t wait to see what you do with her.”

___

When Handler Collins leads Jude out, Mara’s heart about stops in her chest. There she is. There’s Jude. There’s…Jude, and not Jude.

A pair of black shorts, a WRU white t-shirt over skin that’s much paler than last time Mara saw it. Her stocky frame diminished, all her old rugby muscle losing or lost. She looks like...Mara hates the cliche, but she looks like a ghost of her former self, literally. Skinnier, paler, a whole lot more haunted. Her hair, her hands, the freckles and the way she walks just a little pigeon-toed – that’s Jude, that’s Jude all the way. The flat, false calm in her face and the fear in her eyes…that’s someone else. Swallowing, Mara clasps her hands together in front of her, trying to quell the urge to reach for her girl.

“Here she is!” Handler Collins throws his hands out grandly from his place beside the boxgirl. “All yours.”

“Wow,” Mara manages. “Uh…wow.”

Collins shakes his head. “Wow is right. But, hey, wait – you want to check the damage?” He’s still grinning, like it’s no big deal, like it’s all a joke. Mara sucks in a deep breath. The-the Box Babe in front of her is wearing a t-shirt, but Mara can see her cracked reddened palms and wonders what the thin cotton over her chest is hiding.

“I…I guess, yeah. I mean, I’m taking her either way,” she mutters, trying for a joke. Collins is more than happy to laugh at her.

“Shirt off, 493.”

Hesitantly, the trainee obeys, darting a wide-eyed glance at Mara as she does. The cotton goes over her head and oh.

Oh. There, on the right side of the girl’s chest, is the burn, red and angry and raised, covered in blisters. The scarring is worst on her collarbone, but the pink, stretched, destroyed skin crosses her neck below the line of her collar in one direction, creeps toward her armpit in the other. Mara’s horror must show on her face, because the girl flushes, looks down.

“That’s um. That’s pretty bad.”

Handler Collins shakes his head. “You don’t have to tell me. Fucking Underwood. Fuck.” He spits on the ground near the trainee’s bare feet. “She’s finished the antibiotics she’s supposed to be taking. The vet thinks she should be set. Just uh, she’s got this stuff she’s supposed to spread on it.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Mara can’t stop staring at the burn, at the way it glares out, crimson and furious, from Jude’s pale, freckled skin. With effort, she tears her eyes away, to the downturned head of the waiting boxgirl. “Put…uh, put your shirt back on.”

The girl obliges quickly, and, Mara imagines, gratefully. She’s too well-trained to even wince when her movements stretch and ripple her healing skin. Mara’s eyes move hungrily over her face, her skinny body, searching for the parts of Jude she recognizes. The girl keeps her eyes on the ground but her cheeks go pink under the scrutiny.

“Doc, I gotta say.” Collins is shaking his head, and reluctantly, Mara turns her attention to him. “I don’t know how you got this one past the Director. I mean – a Box Babe for free? After what, ten months of working here?”

“Fourteen,” Mara corrects, a little too quietly. She clears her throat and tries again. “Over a year, Handler Collins.”

Rolling his eyes, Collins dismisses her with a flap of his hand. “A couple months, a year, whatever. A matter of months and you’ve got yourself a bonus worth tens of thousands? You must’ve shrunk the Director’s head to get her to agree to this one.”

Mara manages a tight smile for him. “I’m definitely…I definitely feel lucky.”

Leaning in, eyes gleaming conspiratorially, Collins puts his mouth near Mara’s ear. “You have good reason to feel lucky, Doc. Me and the guys – well, you’ve given some good advice, these past few months. It’s helped. And business is up. Company’s talking about padding the paychecks a little, and you’re a part of that, you know?” He gives her a hearty slap on the back and Mara forces a smile. “You’re part of the team! And the pet’s a gift from the company, but we thought, hey, why not a little something from us handlers, for our good doc?”

A shiver runs down Mara’s spine. “What…” she wets her lips, tries to sound amused, curious. “What did you do?”

“We only had a week or so to do it. Director Hammond decided so late, and all. But, but look, we crammed in some Romantic training, just for you.” Collins’ leer is too much. “None of the positions, of course, that shit’s extra, but a few of the lines, a few, ah…habits you might like.”

Mara thinks about him touching Jude and wants to tear the grin right off his face, wants to snarl and scratch and chew him out right there. Instead, she finds the girl’s eyes, searches there for some help, some hope, some recognition. Anything.

Her new Box Babe looks back at her with eyes that are flat and dull and empty.

[kweinkleprocessjournal]

Creativity is a muscle.

Everyone has one and the more we exercise it, the stronger it gets, and the easier it is to call upon.

I would have described creativity earlier in life as a synonym to being artistic, and most people likely still have this impression. A “creative” person is someone who “makes things.” But over the past several years of applying creative practices and methodologies in a very technical engineering setting and learning new tools to open up creative thought processes, I can see a shift happening. The creative mindset is now becoming understood as a trait everyone possesses and can tap into to solve problems, even if they aren’t exactly aware of it. My perspective has shifted too: having studied visual arts and then pursuing a career in sustainability that was initially only focused on project management, it is only recently that I have been able to see and define my true value as a facilitator of idea-making and problem solving. 

We could say that creativity is the muscle of invention, and that to keep it in shape, we have to regularly engage with play, curiosity, experimentation and reflection to stay fresh and in shape. In my life I have a variety of creative processes and practices that differ depending on the situation but in every case, the creativity is energizing and therapeutic for me and always has been.

 At work, I’m often getting in a room with other people and writing out the problem we’re trying to solve and then prompting activity among the team to go way out into the wild with ideas before honing back in on a focus for what feels like the right next steps toward a solution. In my art practice, I may start with an idea and write, research a concept deeply or on the other end of the spectrum, wander aimlessly, enjoying working with my hands, watching materials interact and become something entirely new. One consistent tool that always gets me going has been to work big: I keep an 18x24 inch sketchpad around for brainstorming, drawing and doodling. I find that the more room you give yourself, the more you can expand, make linkages, and discover new uncharted territory.

I was inspired by the part of Tina Seelig’s presentation where she talks about the active imaginations of children before they are taught 5+5=10 rather than ?+? = 10. It feels imperative that in an ever changing world where we will need to solve increasingly complex problems, and also improve the quality of life for all, that our educational mindset must evolve to foster imagination and equip people with skills that can mix solid facts with abstract exploration to create a newly conceptualized world (and beyond). 

[neocab]

Translating the Cyberpunk Future

I'm a video game translator, and I love my job. It's odd work, sometimes stressful, sometimes bewildering, but it always provides interesting and inspiring challenges. Every project brings new words, slang, and cultural trends to discover, but translating also forces me to reflect on language itself. Each job also comes with its own unique set of problems to solve. Some have an exact solution that can be found in grammar or dictionaries, but others require a more... creative approach.

Sometimes, the language we’re translating from uses forms and expressions that simply have no equivalent in the language we’re translating to. To bridge such gaps, a translator must sometimes invent (or circumvent), but most importantly they must understand. Language is ever in flux. It’s an eternal cultural battleground that evolves with the lightning speed of society itself. A single word can hurt a minority, give shape to a new concept, or even win an election. It is humanity’s most powerful weapon, especially in the Internet Age, and I always feel the full weight of responsibility to use it in an informed manner.

One of my go-to ways for explaining the deep complexity of translation is the relationship between gender (masculine and feminine) and grammar. For example, in English this is a simple sentence:

"You are fantastic!"

Pretty basic, right? Easy to translate, no? NOT AT ALL!

Once you render it into a gendered language like Italian, all its facets, its potential meanings, break down like shards.

Sei fantastico! (Singular and masculine)

Sei fantastica! (Singular and feminine)

Siete fantastici! (Plural and masculine)

Siete fantastiche! (Plural and feminine)

If we were translating a movie, selecting the correct translation wouldn't be a big deal. Just like in real life, one look at the speakers would clear out the ambiguity in the English text. Video game translation, however, is a different beast where visual cues or even context is a luxury, especially if a game is still in development. Not only that, but the very nature of many games makes it simply impossible to define clearly who is being addressed in a specific line, even when development has ended. Take an open world title, for example, where characters have whole sets of lines that may be addressed indifferently to single males or females or groups (mixed or not) within a context we don't know and can't control.

In the course of my career as a translator, time and time again this has led into one of the most heated linguistic debates of the past few years: the usage of the they/them pronoun. When I was in grade school, I was taught that they/them acted as the third person plural pronoun, the equivalent of the Italian pronoun "essi." Recently, though, it has established itself as the third person singular neutral, both in written and spoken English. Basically, when we don't know whether we're talking about a he/him or a she/her, we use they/them. In this way, despite the criticism of purists, the English language has brilliantly solved all cases of uncertainty and ambiguity. For instance:

“Somebody forgot their backpack at the party.”

Thanks to the use of the pronoun "their," this sentence does not attribute a specific gender to the person who has forgotten the backpack at the party. It covers all the bases. Smooth, right? Within the LGBT circles, those who don’t recognize themselves in gender binarism have also adopted the use of they/them. Practically speaking, the neutral they/them pronoun is a powerful tool, serving both linguistic accuracy and language inclusiveness. There's just one minor issue: We have no "neutral pronouns" in Italian.

It's quite the opposite, if anything! In our language, gender informs practically everything, from adjectives to verbs. On top of that, masculine is the default gender in case of ambiguity or uncertainty. For instance:

Two male kids > Due bambini

Two female kids > Due bambine

One male kid and one female kid > Due bambini

In the field of translation, this is a major problem that often requires us to find elaborate turns of phrase or different word choices to avoid gender connotations when English maintains ambiguity. As a professional, it’s not only a matter of accuracy but also an aesthetic issue. In a video game, when a character refers to someone using the wrong gender connotation, the illusion of realism is broken. My colleagues and I have been navigating these pitfalls for years as best we can. Have you ever wondered why one of the most common Italian insults in video games is "pezzo di merda"? That's right. "Stronzo" and "bastardo" give a gender connotation, while "pezzo di merda" does not.

A few months ago, together with the Gloc team, I had the pleasure of working on the translation of Neo Cab, a video game set in a not too distant future with a cyberpunk and dystopian backdrop (and, sadly, a very plausible one). The main character is Lina, a cabbie of the "gig economy," who drives for a hypothetical future Uber in a big city during a time of deep social unrest. The story is told mainly through her conversation with the many clients she picks up in her taxi. When the game’s developers gave us the reference materials for our localization, they specified that one of the client characters was "non-binary" and that Lina respectfully uses the neutral "they/them" pronoun when she converses with them.

"Use neutral pronouns or whatever their equivalent is in your language," we were told.

I remember my Skype chat with the rest of the team. What a naive request on the client's part! Neutral pronouns? It would be lovely, but we don't have those in Italian! So what do we do now? The go-to solution in these cases is to use masculine pronouns, but such a workaround would sacrifice part of Lina’s character and the nuance of one of the interactions the game relies on to tell the story. Sad, no? It was the only reasonable choice grammatically-speaking, but also a lazy and ill-inspired one. So what were we to do? Perhaps there was another option...

Faced with losing such an important aspect of Lina’s personality, we decided to forge ahead with a new approach. We had the opportunity to do something different, and we felt like we had to do the character justice. In a game that's completely based on dialogue, such details are crucial. What's more, the game's cyberpunk setting gave us the perfect excuse to experiment and innovate. Language evolves, so why not try to imagine a future where Italian has expanded to include a neutral pronoun in everyday conversations? It might sound a bit weird, sure, but cyberpunk literature has always employed such gimmicks. And rather than take away from a character, we could actually enrich the narrative universe with an act of "world building" instead.

After contacting the developers, who enthusiastically approved of our proposal, we started working on creating a neutral pronoun for our language. But how to go about that was a question in itself. We began by studying essays on the subject, like Alma Sabatini's Raccomandazioni per un uso non sessista della lingua italiana (Recommendations for a non-sexist usage of the Italian language). We also analyzed the solutions currently adopted by some activists, like the use of asterisks, "x," and "u."

Siamo tutt* bellissim*.

Siamo tuttx bellissimx.

Siamo tuttu bellissimu.

I’d seen examples of this on signs before, but it had always seemed to me that asterisks and such were not meant to be a solution, but rather a way to highlight the issue and start a discourse on something that's deeply ingrained in our language. For our cyberpunk future, we wanted a solution that was more readable and pronounceable, so we thought we might use schwa (ə), the mid central vowel sound. What does it sound like? Quite familiar to an English speaker, it's the most common vowel sound. Standard Italian doesn’t have it, but having been separated into smaller countries for most of its history, Italy has an extraordinary variety of regional languages (“dialetti”) and many of them use this sound. We find it in the final "a" of "mammeta" in Neapolitan, for instance (and also in the dialects of Piedmont and Ciociaria, and in several other Romance languages). To pronounce it, with an approximation often seen in other romance languages, an Italian only needs to pretend not to pronounce a word's last vowel.

Schwa was also a perfect choice as a signifier in every possible way. Its central location in phonetics makes it as neutral as possible, and the rolled-over "e" sign "ə" is reminiscent of both a lowercase "a" (the most common feminine ending vowel in Italian) and of an unfinished "o" (the masculine equivalent). The result is:

Siamo tuttə bellissimə.

Not a perfect solution, perhaps, but eminently plausible in a futuristic cyberpunk setting. The player/reader need only look at the context and interactions to figure it out. The fact that we have no "ə" on our keyboards is easily solved with a smartphone system upgrade, and though the pronunciation may be difficult, gender-neutrals wouldn't come up often in spoken language. Indeed, neutral alternatives are most needed in writing, especially in public communication, announcements, and statements. To be extra sure our idea worked as intended and didn't overlook any critical issues, we submitted it to a few LGBT friends, and with their blessing, then sent our translation to the developers.

Fast forward to now, and the game is out. It has some schwas in it, and nobody complained about our proposal for a more inclusive future language. It took us a week to go through half a day's worth of work, but we're happy with the result. Localization is not just translation, it's a creative endeavour, and sometimes it can afford to be somewhat subversive. To sum up the whole affair, I'll let the words of Alma Sabatini wrap things up:

"Language does not simply reflect the society that speaks it, it conditions and limits its thoughts, its imagination, and its social and cultural advancement." — Alma Sabatini

Amen.

[whoinvitedt-blog]

Archivists race to digitize slavery records before the history is lost

Abu Koroma is the archivist in training at the National Archives of Sierra Leone — and he’ll remain the archivist in training until one of the two senior archivists retire.

“That is how it is done,” he laughed.

When Koroma started at the archives in 2004, Sierra Leone was emerging from civil war. He was fresh out of high school and his parents had died, so he needed the small salary badly. And the archives fascinated Koroma. They date back to the first treaty regional leaders made with British colonists in 1788. After Britain outlawed participation in the slave trade in 1807, British administrators in colonial Sierra Leone filled books with descriptions of each liberated African.

“Most times when I’m in the archives alone, I think I want to be a professor, and I will start writing books.”

“Most times when I’m in the archives alone, I think I want to be a professor, and I will start writing books,” Koroma said.

Instead, in his 15 years at the archives, Koroma has helped many other professors and researchers with their work. They began coming in droves from all over the globe in the 2000s, when they realized technology had become cheap and accessible enough to digitize documents and put information into databases. Those databases and many others about the historic slave trade will soon be publicly accessible for the first time, in one place. That may revolutionize the way the history of slavery is learned and taught here and abroad, and allow African descendants more insight into their family histories.

“So much of them were coming,” said Koroma, speaking of the influx of researchers at the archives.

Related: Amid 1619 anniversary, Virginia grapples with history of slavery in America

There was one basic question many researchers wanted to answer first. For a long time, historians struggled to estimate the size of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. So, the first big database they put together was meant to reveal an answer, and it did: It’s estimated that at least 12.5 million people were abducted from Africa and sold as slaves between 1500 and 1875. As many as 10.7 million survived the dangerous passage on slave ships.

“Inevitably, if you're descended from one of the 10.7 million people who survived the Middle Passage, there's going to be a point where there is no more data.”

“Inevitably, if you're descended from one of the 10.7 million people who survived the Middle Passage, there's going to be a point where there is no more data,” said Katrina Keefer, an adjunct professor of history and cultural studies at Canada’s Trent University.

She says that’s what academics wanted to know next — how to trace enslaved Africans back to their home village or tribe. Keefer recalls thinking about that when she was in graduate school: If researchers could discover where enslaved Africans came from, their descendants wouldn’t have to have a family history that began with slavery.

“And I remember sitting in a classroom and thinking, ‘but the answer’s right there,’” Keefer said. “‘It’s literally right there on people’s faces.’”

Related: Pirates brought enslaved Africans to Virginia’s shores. Where, exactly, is debatable.

During a teenage obsession with dressing Goth, Keefer had developed a fascination with the physical ways people mark themselves to show identity. That led her to see something others didn’t when she looked at colonial British records. Their descriptions in many cases include drawings of facial scars made by Africans to show their origins and identities, which after they were enslaved, served to represent where they came from — what village or ethnic group. The markings were often a series of straight lines of different lengths and patterns across the face and neck.

“Initially, people kind of blinked at me. There was a lot of ‘well yes, of course,’” she said. “‘Oh, we never thought of that.’”

Keefer is using information in the Sierra Leone archives to develop a computer program that can recognize and catalog the scars.

“We're hoping to essentially allow people to feel a greater connection to their ancestors and a greater realization of what their true origins are.”

“We're hoping to essentially allow people to feel a greater connection to their ancestors and a greater realization of what their true origins are,” she said.

But then again, a scar can only tell you so much.

“Any one data point like a scar is great,” said Dean Rehberger, director of Matrix: The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences at Michigan State University. “But it's only one data point.”

That’s why the scar database is meant to feed into a massive, new information hub created by Rehberger and his team with a $1.5 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“In doing the project, we found a number of institutions and places that are holding data that people don't even know about,” Rehberger said.

The project — named Enslaved — will attempt to gather research about historic slavery in one place. Until now, much of that information has only been in books or museums, or scattered in corners of the internet in different languages, hidden behind broken links. The Enslaved project is standardizing all that information, so it’ll be searchable and accessible.

“We're coming right at the point where we can actually take literally billions of records and put them together in the same home — what we're calling a hub and then be able to search over them,” Rehberger said.

The project goes online in 2020, with three interfaces: one, the Enslaved Hub for searching the data and visualizing; the second, the Enslaved Publishing Platform for academics and the public to contribute data and publish data; and the third, called Enslaved Narratives, a selected set of linked, enslaved narratives.

“It's fair to say it's the first time that this could happen at this scale for the amount of funds we have,” Rehberger said. “At the same time, people around the world who are working on this see the real benefit of coming together and working together.”

Critics point out that the information being gathered is from the point of view of enslavers and colonialists. But institutions around the world are participating. The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University is contributing a database with details drawn from 1,500 biographies of people who were enslaved or connected to the slave trade. The database draws on essays in three biographical dictionaries edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and several others. The books' executive editor, Steven Niven, says previously, the information was behind a paywall.

“The print set costs about $1,200,” he said.

The Enslaved project is supposed to go online next year, and Niven expects the sudden influx of accessible information to revolutionize the way people learn about slavery and teach it.

“By using biographies, and by using a large number of biographies, we can tell complex stories, local stories, to get a grip of what is hard history — you know, the forced history of 12 million people, and then systematic exploitation for several hundred years in the Americas,” Niven said.

But that’s still just scratching the surface. In Sierra Leone, archivist Koroma says there’s a lot of unexplored history left. History that’s at risk of being lost: the original documents in the Sierra Leone archives are being kept in buildings with broken windows, frequent power failures and no air-conditioning. The papers crumble easily.

“Most of the pages, like if you turn them, they will break,” Koroma said.

Many of the researchers who visit try to help with money for improvements or to digitize the papers. But Koroma feels like those efforts usually just sputter out.

“They will do their best to help the archives. But it’s normally not enough,” he said. “We want to keep these things alive. Because other people have volunteered to keep them alive before us.”

Koroma worries that no one will volunteer to care for the archives after him, since archivists in training earn so little. He believes that for the true history of slavery to survive and be told, the original evidence must be preserved, and protected.

[scoutshonor56]

American History

Capitalism

 To me, capitalism is one of those concepts that, in theory, is sound and based on common sense.  After all, at its core it is a monetary system of reward for hard work and initiative, often involving significant risk.

Those willing to dedicate and apply themselves are rewarded proportionally, often leading to advancement, growth and prosperity – sounds fair to me.  Certainly everyone, regardless of effort, shouldn’t be rewarded equally.  Many folks, myself among them, are pretty much content to hold down a steady job that provides a modest, comfortable income and at the minimum, some type of health care and some basic “bennies”; everyone is different, and this works out well within the system.

 The problem starts when this system goes unregulated, and the opportunity becomes not fairly available to all.  When over time, this dream becomes a runaway money train with only a small, select group of privileged passengers.  In short, unlimited greed while the rest are exploited; the “rest” are left to build the tracks and walk.  

 So, where did it all begin?  Well, here in America anyways; what gave America the template for big corporations and their punitive relationship with their labor force? There are a lot of facets to the horror and history of human slavery in this country, but to be honest, I was surprised to find out that this was one of them.  I became aware of this thanks to a recent piece featured in the NY Times, which is running a series of stories this month entitled “The 1619 Project” to mark the 400 year legacy of slavery here in America.  It’s quite a lengthy read, so as best I can I will cover the basics, and of course, for the full story in detail you can refer to the article.  

 To lay the groundwork for this blog:  

 Did you know almost half of the American population makes under $15/hr? That middle class wages (when adjusted for inflation) have been stagnant since the late ‘70s while CEO wages and benefit packages have increased exponentially to obscene amounts?  That the number of Americans receiving food stamps has increased 40% over the last ten years, yet we have over twice as many billionaires?  That the richest 1% of America owns 40% of our nation’s wealth, while a larger share of working age people live in poverty here than in any other nation belonging to The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.)?  

 This impartial organization also rates its capitalist members in the category of worker rights and how easy it is to fire them. As far as worker’s rights, the U.S. shares second to last place with Malaysia, and out of 71 nations, the O.E.C.D. scores our country #1 in ease of being able to fire workers.  In other words, “You’re Fired!” isn’t just our reality show president’s favorite tag line.

 So let’s crack open the history book you won’t find in your average school curriculum, because here in America we much prefer our taught legacies with plenty of smoothing out, touching up, masking of flaws, and finishing with a thick, glossy coat of varnish.  

 There was a time, just before the Civil War, when the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States.  Cotton grown and picked by slaves was the nation’s most valuable export, a font of phenomenal wealth.  New Orleans suddenly had a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City, and the backbone of all this selective wealth was the thriving slave trade, where the combined value of slaves exceeded that of all our factories and railroads.  Can you imagine?  An enterprising person with an entrepreneur’s spirit and ambition finding himself in a new world of seemingly endless natural resources, cheap land, and free labor? Its a capitalist’s Disney World of profit, filled with promises of limitless growth.

 Well, OK, that was hundreds of years ago – what does that have to do with the workings of large, modern corporations today? Well, other than the obvious Golden Rule of Capitalism: maximum productivity out of your workers while spending the least amount of money on wages, health care and benefits…

 Have you ever fired up your PC or laptop at work in the morning only to see yet another memo from management?  A memo that came from your “team leader”, who got it from lower management, who got it from mid-level management, who got it from upper management, who got it from regional management, who got it from the “Big Boss”, who first had to get it OK’d by the BIG, BIG Boss?  Well there you have it, the inner workings and corporate-like hierarchy of a typical slave labor work force on a typical large plantation.

 The owner (or group of owners) supervised a top lawyer, who supervised another lawyer, who supervised an overseer, who supervised multiple bookkeepers, who supervised a group of enslaved head drivers and specialists, who finally supervised hundreds of slaves.  Like today, accountability was foremost and strictly adhered to.  Laborious and complex spread sheets were developed by hand for the first time in American industry, and volumes of data were kept to breakdown all aspects of bale production.  Everything was tracked, recorded, quantified, analyzed, and accounted for, including meticulous record-keeping of a slave’s age, sex, when bought, performance, expected productivity over the years, potential value, breeding history, etc.

 Sound familiar yet?    

 Who hasn’t endured the sweat inducing “performance review”, where you are essentially forced to appear before the low-end management judge to plead for your job, bringing evidence of your worthiness to the company?  You may want to feel lucky that today you might get an upbraiding, maybe a negative mark that will go on your record.  The poor black slave was faced with walking that fine line of performance, where his production must be maintained at a level of competence and profitability without being too much of a pacesetter in the fields; that not only got his fellow workers a cruel beating, but himself included if he (or she) didn’t maintain that level every day.

 More than once over the years, when reading about the millionaires through our history, the billionaires and mega-billionaires of today, I’ve pondered the question: when is enough, enough?  Is there even such a thing as “enough”?  Is there ever a point where you sit back, think about throwing in your cards and spending the rest of your life enjoying your bottomless bank account and investments?  

Kind of a moot point.  A person who had a single billion dollars at their disposal today would have to spend $40 million a year for 25 years before they ran short of cash; which would mean burning through $3 million a month, or over $100K a day.  And that’s just a single billion… I recently read an article that shed some light, or clarity onto this supposition, and according to the author, at some arbitrary point it does become no longer about money.  It becomes all about power and position among your peers.  Your image, your perceived position in this exclusive pack – who are the big dogs at the front of the sled.

 My apologies if you find this all too unsettling, or uncomfortable; in which case feel free to refer to one of those Board of Education sanctioned history books where you can read the softer, more palatable version: how white Europeans came over to the New World, claimed it theirs (in the name of Manifest Destiny), got rid of those indigenous  savage heathens who were ignorant of the one true god and didn’t know how to exploit the land properly anyways, and soon began shipping over the “darkies” from Africa to give them a much more fulfilling life on our cotton and sugar plantations, where they could contently live out their lives singing happy spiritual songs in the fields and enjoying a higher standard of living, thanks to the largess and Christian charity of “the masta’”. For those interested in the harsh truth, you can check out all of the chapters in this series so far at The 1619 Project.

[jarrettfuller]

Put a bird on it

Prologue The most challenging design projects, they say, are the ones you do for yourself. Without parameters and constraints, timelines and clients, you miss the checks and balances that can often guide the process. The markers that tell you you're on the right track, moving in the right direction, are absent. When I was an undergraduate, I had a class where we had to design personal logos we could use on letterhead, stationery, and business cards in preparation for our impending job searches. It was honestly the hardest project of my college years.

Part 1: A Love Story On January 8, 2017, I proposed to my girlfriend, Eurry. It was three years to the day since our first date. We had met over a video conference when we both were working at Facebook; I was in San Francisco and she was in New York. I was a designer and she was a data researcher. One day in the middle of December, my team's project manager asked if I had some time to work on a small data visualization project for someone on the data team in New York. I reluctantly agreed. 'Small projects' always seemed to turn into 'big projects' and this was a team we hadn't worked with before. But a meeting was scheduled and I walked in knowing nothing. I was caught off guard when a cute girl wearing a black and white striped sweater from the New York office popped up on the video screen. I vaguely remember saying something to my project manager when we left the meeting about how cool Eurry seemed. I immediately sent her a Facebook friend request.

A few weeks later she was in the California office and we met in person to go over updates on the project. The meeting quickly turned into friendly conversation about our lives, discovering all sorts of shared interests. I didn't want the meeting to end. The next time she was in town, we went out for drinks and we have talked every day since, beginning what became a multi-year, bicoastal long distance relationship. We became best friends and fell in love.

We both eventually left Facebook — I went to graduate school and she went to work on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. We traveled, tried countless new restaurants, met each other's families, watched a lot of movies, and laughed a lot. We started talking about marriage, about moving in together, about our future. And then on a freezing, snowy morning last January after I pulled a ring from my pocket, I asked her to marry me. Through tears she said 'duh'.

But the story I'm writing here is not one of our relationship or of planning a wedding or even our wedding day. That's a story we want to save for our friends and family. Our married friends told us how all-consuming wedding planning can be so we decided early on that we'd share the planning responsibilities and take ownership over the parts we respectively cared more about. Eurry has stronger opinions about drinks, for example, so she'd handle the bar menu while I cared more about music and was tasked with choosing songs for our first dance and processional. You probably see where this is going: I was in charge of the visual design. And the visual design, it turned out, would be a special kind of challenge. This is a story about that process.

Part 2: Location, Location, Location Designing for our wedding became the hardest design project I've ever completed; certainly more challenging than those personal logos I did in college. It wasn't just about how I could represent our wedding visually but how to represent our entire relationship visually. We knew we wanted it to feel different — we wanted something casual and fun, informal and nontraditional. And we both desperately wanted to avoid the cliche calligraphy so dominant in wedding design these days. Almost immediately after we got engaged, I created a massive Illustrator file where I began setting our names in nearly every typeface I own in search of an interesting lockup or style that might emerge (perhaps something interesting with the double R's in both our names? Nope, too obvious), but for a long time it felt like I was going in circles, unable to figure out what our wedding should look like.

The biggest decision we had to make, however, was where we wanted to get married. One weekend last spring, we were sitting on the couch with our laptops looking at potential venues when Eurry found the John James Audubon House, located right outside Philadelphia and just forty-five minutes from where I grew up. We immediately knew this was where we wanted to get married. Audubon was a naturalist and a painter, most known for his paintings of birds. In an ambitious quest, he set out to paint every bird in North America, discovering at least twenty-five new species in the process. These paintings are collected in his famous book, The Birds of North America, which is considered the best ornithological work ever completed. This was Audubon's first home in North America and has since been converted to a public park, bird conservatory, and museum in his honor. We scheduled a visit a few weeks later and fell in love with the property — there was a beautiful apple orchard where we planned to hold the ceremony and an old barn perfect for a party. We picked a date and booked it.

It feels like cheating, but the venue helped clarify the visual design. The Audubon Society has made most of Audubon's paintings available in the public domain and offers high resolution reproductions as free downloads. I could use these images in the design! We both have love of birds and have a secret ambitions to get into birding. In fact, very early in our relationship, we laughed in amazement at how both of us had similar framed images of birds hanging in our apartments. Add the owl references from our favorite show and our love of Portlandia, a bird-themed wedding seemed perfect.

Part 3: Put a Bird On It With the venue booked and a library of high-resolution bird paintings on my hard drive, the design started to take shape. I went through countless typefaces — some were too formal and others too playful. I settled on ITC Serif Gothic for the logotype and Pitch for the accent typography. Serif Gothic is a typeface I've always admired but had yet to find an appropriate use for and Pitch has become a favorite monospace. Paired together, they immediately gave the design something that felt unique — blending the classic with the casual, the fun with the traditional.

I knew this would have to be treated like a brand — as it would be applied to everything from save the dates to name tags, invitations to menus — and needed to be flexible enough to work across mediums and scales. I decided we could allow design system to slowly reveal itself — using the incremental mailings, save the dates, invites, and RSVPs, to allow the entire aesthetic to unfold, each piece to increase in complexity and vibrancy as we got closer to the wedding day. The Save the Date cards that went out to our guests six months before the wedding were a simple black and white card, printed on a crisp white 130lb paper. A small vector bird perched atop an 'r' in Eurry's name hinted at the larger theme, the forest green envelopes previewed the color palette.

We directed guests to visit our website — eurryandjarrett.com — for travel and hotel details, links to our gift registry, and more information about the day itself. We used the website to introduce the venue and Audubon's paintings. The colors — forest green, a silvery-blue, and light pink — were pulled from a few of our favorite birds.

Three months later, the official invitations went out. Packaged in light blue envelopes, the invitations first appear to be black and white: the nameplate we introduced on the Save the Dates is on the front and opens for more information and RSVP details. But the invitation folds out one more time to reveal a large poster featuring a collage of Audubon's paintings, including the birds from which we pulled our colors as well as the state birds of California (where Eurry was born and where we met), Indiana (where I was born), New York (where we live now), and Pennsylvania (where I grew up and where we were getting married). We wanted something memorable — something that might not just be hung up on the refrigerator or thrown away after the wedding, but a piece of art our guests could remember our wedding by.

Part 4: The Day The design came together in a 20-page booklet I designed in place of a traditional program that included not only details about the day but also family photographs, a few of our favorite recipes, fun facts, and thank yous. Again, we wanted something people would want to keep — a scrapbook of sorts that our guests would feel invested in as they found photos of themselves and learn more about us and our story. The cover of the book expanded the collage from the invitation to include images of some of our favorite things and memorable moments in our relationship: the flowers from Eurry's bouquet, Twin Peaks and Portlandia, doughnuts, succulents, the Facebook sign, gummy bears, and ice cream.

Collage has become a go-to visual style of mine and is central to my own design process. For our wedding, I realized it could once again allow me to include everything we love instead of trying to find a color or style that somehow represented all of us. A key in the back of the book gave descriptions of everything hidden in the collage. This gave us variety in the design system while retaining a clear, distinct style; at once simple and diverse.

The venue offered their own signage, menus, and table numbers but we swapped them out for custom designs to match our design system. For dinner, three dishes were offered — chicken, fish, and vegetarian — and we asked our guests to select their preference on the RSVP cards. Their selections were noted on the name tags with small iconography to help the servers. (One of my favorite details: one couple brought their young child, who was served chicken fingers, and we noted his selection with a baby chick!). The florist decorated the tables forest green table clothes, navy napkins, and natural arrangements of ferns, succulents, and monstera. I designed table numbers that had Audubon's birds wrapped around each number, set in Serif Gothic that were placed in each arrangement. A small box with custom labels of black cherry gummy bears were set at each guest's plate as a small gift of thanks.

Beverages were offered before the ceremony started and were labeled with matching signage and drinks menus were displayed at the bar giving details on the wine and beer offerings. For the visitors who came in from out of town, a small gift bag was left in their hotel room with a few of our favorite things and a small postcard detailing the event (including the school bus that brought guests from the hotel to the venue!) and thanking them for coming into town. As if designing a brand system, every interaction our guests had at the wedding had been customized to match our design, from arriving at the hotel to the thank you notes sent out after. Each piece was fully branded and could stay on its own yet when brought together, created a narrative of our relationship.

It was fun to see it all come together and I enjoyed watching people read the booklets before the ceremony began. We couldn't have done it without the amazing team at Audubon and Jeffrey Miller Catering, who put it all together exactly like we wanted it. You can see more images of the design here.

Epilogue At the beginning of the summer, we got married in a barn in front of the people we love the most just as it began to rain. As we were pronounced husband and wife, Carly Rae Jepson's I Really Like You started playing. We moved to the pavilion where speeches brought us to tears; we ate and drank and thanked every guest for being there and being a part of our lives; we danced into the night as the rain poured outside.

The entire day feels like a blur to me. It was hard to take it all in. All the planning, all the designing, all the celebrating felt like a whirlwind. You know you've been to a good party, I think, when you have no pictures to remember it by. You were so in the moment you forgot to stop and document it. When we talked to our families the next day, none of us had any photos. So when we got our wedding photos back last week, we poured through every single one, reliving the day as spectators, piecing together the memories we had made. The same is true of the design. Designing for my own wedding was easily the hardest design project of my life because this wasn't another design or branding project but a scrapbook of our lives so far and a commemoration of our new life together. This was how we'd remember the day. Working on these pieces consumed our lives for the few months leading up the wedding and though it was just a small part of a day filled with friends and family and laughing and dancing and eating and drinking and birds and love. They serve as markers in time, totems for ourselves and our family and friends. Another way to remember a perfect day. It was the best day of my life. The next day, my face hurt from smiling so much.

[crookedtreepoetry]

Data Scientist Job Profile

Some of the big employers have information science graduate training schemes, which usually last round two years. You'll follow a structured coaching programme, studying in regards to the business and endeavor work placements to build your technical and enterprise skills and industry knowledge. She has a stack of resumes to read through and she has a number of questions that have to be answered before she decides to arrange telephone interviews. However, Paula is conscious of that curriculum vitae typically don't align with the abilities and experience wanted for a Data Scientist position. She may see many CVs from school graduates, she may see many resumes from women and men with several years of labor experience but without any practical data science expertise.

Advance your profession in analytics by studying Tableau and the way to greatest use this coaching in your work. This Data Scientist course covers intensive Data Science training, combining on-line instructor-led courses and self-paced studying co-developed with IBM. This Data Science certification course concludes with a capstone project designed to reinforce the learning by constructing a real business product encompassing all the important thing elements learned all through this system.

In addition to the top general information science course picks, I even have included a separate part for extra specific information science interests, like Deep Learning, SQL, and other related matters. These are programs with a more specialised method, and don’t cover the entire information science course of, but they are still the highest decisions for that topic. These further picks are good for supplementing before, after, and during the primary programs. Online knowledge science competitions, similar to those hosted by Kaggle and Topcoder, are utilized by employers to spot new and emerging expertise. Also, look out for occasions and conferences that you could attend as these might help you gain data and supply great networking opportunities which will result in employment.

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You’ll learn many of crucial statistical skills wanted for data science. Overall, the Data Science specialization is an ideal mixture of theory and utility utilizing the R programming language. As far as conditions go, you need to have some programming experience (doesn’t need to be R) and you have a good understanding of Algebra. Previous data of Linear Algebra and/or Calculus isn’t needed, but it is helpful. Some companies may offer further coaching in their operating procedures or encourage you to attend sector-specific events to help your understanding of potential points, new developments or emerging trends. This data can then be used to better apply your problem-solving expertise to related initiatives.

In most firms, training is finished on the job and you'll typically have the opportunity to learn from skilled colleagues. You'll be anticipated to learn and develop new abilities your self by staying up to date with new and rising applied sciences and strategies. Work is often collaborative in nature, so you'll develop your knowledge by sharing concepts and options to issues with different team members. Some large employers supply information science graduate training schemes, which tend to take around two years to complete.

Tableau, R programming, Python, Statistics, Artificial Intelligence are the important core subjects included in the knowledge science courses syllabus. Some of the best colleges for information science courses are talked about below within the desk. The common course charge for UG information science programs ranges between 6-10 lakhs. BSc Data Science and BCA Data Science are the 2 hottest UG information science programs in India. UG Data Science Courses are full-time diploma applications for three to four Years. These can be found in the domain of engineering and sciences and are provided along with other specialization topics such as machine learning, and Artificial intelligence.

Finding an acceptable job in Data Science is easier if you have networking abilities as the businesses require a candidate with extra skills. A development has been noticed wherein networking professionals are seeking better career options in Data Science, although the tools and developments utilized in each domains are extremely different. Not all clouds are the same and based on the totally different wants of the person, there are several completely different models, sorts, and cloud computing services. Artificial intelligence certificate and diploma programs admissions are usually on a first come first serve foundation or advantage.

They need a strong understanding of statistical evaluation and mathematics, which are essential pillars of information science. A good understanding of these concepts will assist you to understand the essential premises of data science. Machine learning is a useful device to search out patterns in massive data sets.

Some of the core ideas anticipated from a business analyst are causation, correlation, and the way to statistically check hypotheses. Some information of linear algebra and calculus is certainly required. BTech or BE in specialization with artificial intelligence or MTech or ME in artificial intelligence along with machine studying and data science is the degree courses out there in synthetic intelligence. Machine studying diploma programs are BTech and MTech in machine learning together with data science, and synthetic intelligence as specializations.

Can you explain complex findings to someone who doesn't have a technical background? Many information scientists work in cross-functional groups and should share their outcomes with people with very completely different backgrounds. If this feels like a fantastic work surroundings, then it may be a promising career for you.

If you’re rusty with statistics and/or need to be taught more R first, take a glance at the Statistics with R Specialization as properly. An different pathway is to affix a start-up company and work on initiatives outsourced by larger organisations. The expertise you purchase are transferable across a variety of sectors so it could be comparatively easy to move into completely different firms. Depending on the kind of company you work for, you presumably can anticipate a great work/life balance.

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[nsfmc]

A checklist for computer science undergrads

influenced by john regehr's 'basic toolbox' post about this topic, i thought i would throw my hat into the ring given that my experiences have been different than john's and seem to be at odds with what i have observed from working with many competent developers.

As i was leaving grad school, a friend of mine suggested to me that a winning strategy in Industrial Design had been to pick some medium that you worked well in and focus on doing all your work with that. The rationale here was that starting anew each project with a new medium invariably impacted the execution of the final deliverable distracting your prof/critic/peers from the high-level feedback you actually wanted on your work, creative vision, etc.

The advice there is to focus less on the tool and more on using a tool efficiently to communicate your ideas. In most cases it does not matter what the tool is as long as you can deploy it to solve problems in your domain.

Much of the tooling that exists in CS is directed at very specific users: working programmers. using these tools correctly as an undergrad is aspirational, but often their execution is distorted in academic contexts.

Every lab or workplace should expect to bootstrap new hires on internal tooling/workflows and almost none of them should assume prior knowledge. Depending on the aims, the only hard requirement should be ability to program in a language or framework similar to the one being used.

Core skills

A single programming language

You do not need to be ultimately proficient in every language, you just need to be able to sketch out and implement a solution to most problems you encounter in one language you enjoy working in. Which language you pick does not matter. If you are in john's classes, however, you should probably ensure that you know two languages: a compiled/systems-ey one (rust, go, c, java, swift, clojure, etc) and a scripting language (python, ruby, javascript, clojurescript, elm, mathematica, anything goes here as long as it has a repl or runtime that you can use to hammer out solutions to problems).

If you're not one of john's students, typically the scripting language will suffice (although it is generally rare to finish a cs program being exposed to only one language).

s/Text Editor/Touch Typing/i

The advice to be familiar with a text editor is largely a request from others who expect you to competently pair-program with them at their pace. The point of knowing an editor is much the same as knowing at least one language passably: it should not be something that gets in your way.

More essential than being comfortable with a specific editor (it honestly does not matter which one as long as you like using it and you are productive with it) is being comfortable touch typing. In the event that slack or other IM platforms have not made you a better touch typist, it is well worth investing time if only so that the act of writing anything is no longer a major time hinderance.

At some point, you may find yourself bored or in need of procrastination and decide you want to customize your editor: that is a perfect time to try something like sublime or atom or vi or emacs.

rough shell experience

you should be able to navigate around a filesystem, make directories, read directory listings and read the cli help documentation for most commands.

you absolutely do not need to know the details of your shell's preferences around glob expansion or how to write legible shell scripts. you can learn that, but after a certain point, all the obscure functionality ends up beng more "dev-ops" style knowledge that rarely pays any dividends except when developing commercial developer-facing internal tooling.

incidentally, getting students past the hurdle of commandline BS is almost certainly a job of an advisor (or postdoc). Ignoring it helps nobody and if a research project's documentation (q.v. below) is poor or nonexistent, the PI only has themselves to blame for this ongoing time commitment.

reading documentation

this is probably the weakest skill i have seen from folks coming out of undergrad. nobody expects you to know all of a language, all of its quirks, etc etc. what you are expected to know is how to find the answer to any reasonable question around your language or toolchain of choice.

A useful skill: you should be able to, given a stylized block of shell commands, paste those into your terminal one-by-one in order to bootstrap some project i.e. ./configure && make && make test. nobody should expect that you understand autoconf unless your research project is specifically devoted to it in some obscure way (i'm sorry if this is the case).

Specifically, you do not need to know how to parse an excel-formatted csv, but you should know where to look (or be able to find a solution) in order to do that in a reasonable amount of time. You do not need to know what an ideal runtime serialization format is for your language, you only need to call back on the terms you learned in your cs classes: marshalling, serialization, persistence, writing data, etc. although it can be useful at the extremes, be skeptical of the amount and quality of programming language trivia you know offhand.

writing documentation

no, this is not technical writing. this simply means you should be able to write a plain text file for each project that outlines

how to build some program

what its implicit dependencies are

what its arguments are

what the exposed/public api is

aside from being useful to others, in roughly six weeks or half a semester, this will invariably be of use to future-you as well.

a good acid test here is pointing a friend to the project and asking if they can build it and understand how they might use it. at some point you will embed this knowledge into a Makefile, shell script, or some other dsl, but until then it is infinitely more useful to write down the steps.

html

unless this is your job (or you intend it to be) you only need to know how to make an academic-level webpage which requires only the most basic knowledge of semantic html: h1, h2, ul/ol li, p, a, img, pre, strong, em (optionally hr, dl dd & dt). avoid css. if anyone gives you shit, you can invoke "Default Systems" giving you a perfectly valid excuse to stop devoting any more attention to design after you have mastered those tags.

reproducing errors

it is unclear when you are an undergrad or novice if you have encountered a truly exceptional case or if you simply have no idea what you're doing. Make a habit of reproducing and then writing down steps to reproduce edge cases you encounter and share them with people you ask for help from.

above and beyond, if you can identify the specific step (or code or whatever) that you invoke that (seemingly) causes the error, you will have an easier time teasing apart the nature of bug as you are telling someone else about it.

the most basic of data visualization skills

all this means is that nobody is actually good at doing this and everyone thinks that two hours peeking at ggplot2 has made them wizards at communicating the complexity of some dataset or results. it hasn't.

in many cases it suffices to be able to graph something from mathematica, R, d3, mathplotlib, or google sheets / excel. again, nobody cares how you do it as long as you do it and it doesn't take you all day. if your lab or workplace has some in-house style for doing this, they will need to train you how to do that anyway.

nonlinear spider-sense

the single reason "big o" notation is taught in school is so that at some point you can look at a performance regression and say "ha, that almost looks like a parab—o.m.g." the ability to recognize code or performance that appears nonlinear (or pathologically exponential) is probably one of the core things that i think undergrads should try to hone because during almost no other time will you be asked repeatedly, and at length, to explain the space/time complexity of arbitrary blocks of code.

computers are fast enough that you can usually be blasé about performance but eventually you'll start looking. being able to recognize something that is accidentally quadratic is often the most practical day-to-day application of cs theory—hone this spider sense.

Nice to haves

Version Control

there is a large chasm between "git for one" and "using git as a team" and that harsh valley is almost certainly due to the large amount of human communication and coordination required to work on a project as a team. Most people stress learning git, but this is largely useless advice because most of git or hg's corner cases and weirdness only come up when you're trying to integrate your work successfully among your teammates. It is good advice to perhaps become vaguely competent using git or mercurial or rcs, that experience will almost certainly pale in comparison to the massive flail when you are trying to set up multiple worktrees to create integration branches that contain the contents of multiple prs (each likely with their own rebase/merge/squash quirks).

to that end, you should learn to, say, create a commit and push your work, but everything else beyond that is almost certainly guaranteed to be complicated by whatever your team's workflow is (github prs, phabricator, gerrit, etc). i have rarely met people outside of professional or open source contexts that are capable of producing sensible chained commits or sane pull requests, it is simply not a skill that is required outside of contributing to open source or working on a commercial application. When people ask for git experience they secretly crave this flavor of professionalism that it took months to acquire at each of their prior jobs or internships.

A Presentation Tool

the baseline here is very low, you only need to be able to make a presentation and in all likelihood if you are still an undergrad, you easily have ten-plus years of doing this already. worry about fonts/design/transitions/etc once your content is solid.

most people produce terrible presentations making the needed baseline here quite low—it is more important that you know how to practice giving a presentation than it is to actually create the slides for it.

debugger knowledge

i have met many successful professional working programmers that have little to no idea how their language's debugging tools work. if you are a gdb wizard this sounds shocking on its face but lots of developers make do just fine without them. This is not to say that you should be willfully ignorant of debuggers or eschew them (especially if this is part of your curriculum), but nobody should look down on you if you learn (or are taught this) On The Job.

many of these tools are technically robust but have a ui only moderately less hostile than an opaque box of loose razorblades and chocolates. much like git, most developers internalize some form of stockholm affection for these tools despite their poor design, nonexistent editor integration, and often incomplete terminal support.

you should understand roughly what a debugger is and what it can (and can't) do, but it's almost certain that you won't need to have mastered debugger internals straight out of college.

build systems

this is honestly a "top of maslow" need. This is great knowledge if you are planning to distribute code or need it to build dependably/reliably on others' computers, it is absolutely inessential for an undergrad to understand to do this level of orchestration except as documentation for others to evaluate that your project actually builds etc etc. if your advisor or boss asks you to learn something like make or whatever, then by all means.

You should know what a make tool is for and when it is necessary, but you should not expect that to apply to the lion's share of work you do in school.

working for a period of time before asking for help

although this should be a core skill many adults are incapable of doing this effectively. there is a tradeoff between "i'm learning" and "i'm being unproductive." In an academic lab, arguably much of your experience will appear to be some quantum state that simultaneously inhabits both extremes but your goal should be attempting to independently arrive at a solution and after some time cut-off (which you should negotiate with your advisor/postdoc/pi/whatever) you should say "i tried $A, $B, and $C to accomplish $GOAL and was unable to make any progress because $ERR_A, $ERR_B, and $ERR_C."

even the act of noting down "what i am trying to accomplish, how i tried, what went wrong" may in itself lead you to a correct solution, but without having done that due dilligence and outlined those aspects, it will be difficult to receive good feedback from somebody that is trying to help you.

unit/integrated/etc testing

if you find that something like TDD is useful for you as a productivity or refactoring tool, keep doing that! most working software people cannot even agree on what the point of testing is, so it feels unfair to burden undergrads with this. in a professional context, you will be in a codebase with some established testing norms, you need only mimic those until you have determined what works for you.

there are lots of sane and sensible resources for writing tests or thinking about tests. understand that everyone does testing slightly differently so your best bet will be to figure out how testing plays a part wherever you go. in most cases, that codebase will have a specific incantation to invoke tests, your best bet is to ask how they do things there are just go from there if the setup is not obvious.

understanding scope

most academic projects are poorly managed because they have inconsistent pressure to be profitable beyond whatever funding inspired them. simultaneously, many academic advisors are not trained well to manage or lead a team (remember, most were hired to write grants and produce research papers (or possibly to teach)). management is something an advisor is literally picking up "on the job".

If you are unsure what exactly you are supposed to do, you should clarify as soon as possible what deliverable is expected and when it is due. This seems obvious, but because communication is complicated you may end up assuming you need to, for instance, resolve outstanding cli argument parsing bugs rather than only needing to add support for a new one. Understanding the scope of a project you've been assigned prevents you from doing redundant work or opening prs that will never get merged.

language idioms

If you are cozy with a programming language, the natural evolution here is to begin learning what idiomatic programming is like for it: what are common libraries, do people tend to program it functionally or imperatively, for or map?, what patterns are awkward or hard to read, what are common tools in its toolchain, how do people use it to write web services, how do people use it to avoid shell scripting, what are its peformance pathologies, etc. this is the extension to knowing how to read the documentation: it is developing intuition about the language to avoid doing counterproductive work in the future.

Many developers learn one language and become fluent in its quirks then proceed to apply those to every language they see later on. if you encounter this as a novice, it may appear that they are simply Better Programmers and not, instead, people who are speaking a pidgin-python with a heavy haskell accent.

To recap

It is something of a mistake to hope that a cs student will have the gradually developed and refined skills of a professional tradesperson. Graduating cs students often do not have strong professional software development experience (this is what internships are meant to accomplish) but are good at thinking about design/architecture. if, at the very minimum, as an undergrad you can churn out some ruby and have the runtime execute it, you're usually in great shape.

most cs programs do not train students to develop tightly crafted applications with industry-tested documentation/syntax/structure/workflows etc. bootcamps, however, do stress this sort of thing, which causes a confusing periodic wave of "college is dead, long live bootcamps."

when looking at job descriptions or other checklists, it's useful to try to gaze back at the abyss and ask "why was this listed here?"

John's research is compiler-focused, deals with undefined behavior, and often invokes llvm, c, and other "low level" toolchains. a strong undergrad cs student will be able to intern with john productively because the core of his research focus is mostly general to computer science: correctness, compiler behavior, etc. someone with deep knowledge of C, llvm, compiler design/internals, etc is almost certainly in a position to become one of his graduate students or postdocs. I think john's list is interesting, but i think it emphasizes details that are often foreign to developers at all skill levels.

finally this list is biased itself, so take it with a grain of salt: all my work experience is in design and frontend/backend web development and the skills listed here represent the qualities i've observed from successful interns and developers i have interviewed and worked with in the past ~ eight years. my experience is clearly n=1, but among the things i've noticed is that it's easy to get people to learn git, but it's hard to get somebody to internalize recursion, nonlinear growth, or canonical architecture patterns within the same time period. i'm not saying it's impossible, but if you're a cs student, this is 100% what the point of most cs programs is.

[rilenerocks]

I’m not exactly a nautical type. I’ve been in a variety of boats. I’ve paddled a canoe and rowed a row boat. Someone taught me how to come about on a sailboat many years ago. I’ve driven a motor boat, one of the few positive benefits of having my in-laws who owned one. I’ve traversed lakes and rivers on paddle boats, pontoon boats and riverboats. I’ve been on a hydrofoil and a whale watching boat. I’ve been on a cruise ship a couple of times and the smaller tenders that transport you from ship to shore and back. I’ve even been on a faux submarine that felt like being in a washing machine, plus one retired battleship. These were all good and interesting experiences but truthfully, I’d rather be in the water than on it.

I try thinking back to what led me to think about trying to keep an even keel. Maybe growing up close to the lakefront in Chicago had an impact on my marine-themed psychological reference for stability. I can’t count how many times I traveled on both south and north Lake Shore Drive. I remember always having my eyes glued to the water which was endlessly interesting to me. Full of life and  mystery. That’s the place where I learned to swim. Maybe I’m somewhere in that black and white photo, trying to copy those people who actually knew what they were doing. My family wasn’t big on swimming. Usually on steamy summer days, when we were broiling in our un-air-conditioned third floor apartment, we headed to the beach and set up camp in the grassy park area. After a while, I always fled to the water. 

My high school had a marine theme because of its proximity to the lake. South Shore High. The athletic teams were called The Tars. The yearbook was The Tide and the newspaper was The Shore Line. Deep blue and teal green were the colors I associate with that school, thinking particularly of my senior yearbook. When I attended my 50th high school reunion, I had some temporary teal streaks put in my hair, just for fun.

I’m not exactly sure whether the origin of my goal of keeping an even keel is important. Thinking about it is typical of my internal process as I always seem to be pondering something. Sometimes when I wake in the morning with a subject already on my mind, I wonder if I’ve really been asleep. I’m not sure my brain is ever empty despite my intermittent meditative efforts. I have to laugh. From the beginning of our relationship, I was always asking Michael what he was thinking about. Frequently, he’d say “nothing.” “What?” I would shriek. “That’s impossible. You have to be thinking about something.” He’d smile and say, “Some day toward the end of your life, you’re going to realize that all the mysterious thoughts you believe I’m concealing really were never there. You’ve just spent your life with a basically shallow guy.” Of course I never believed him and of course that wasn’t true. But it was a point well taken. Everyone isn’t afflicted with thinking all the time.

I’m pretty sure all this perpetual  cogitating began when I was a little kid. I was always tuned in to the emotional currents going on around me. I found them alarming and uncomfortable. I wanted to be a step ahead of everything. My family seemed to constantly be responding to crises which for me, as a little child, was just plain scary. As I got older, I developed strategies for getting ahead of the curve. I believe control is the operative word here. I wanted as much control as I could get. None of this aimless bobbing like a cork in the water, buffeted by random waves and currents for me. I figured if I thought hard enough I could keep an even keel, no matter what I ran into along my course. Obviously, that wasn’t entirely possible. Anyone with feelings can’t get away unscathed by those waves that ram into most people at some point or other in their lives. But trying to hold steady has been a good life strategy for me. I gravitate to my center and move forward from there. I’m not fond of operating from positions of weakness. So if I stay focused, I can manage. Most of the time.

Last week, I gave myself a special event. Pete Yorn was doing a livestream acoustic guitar performance of my favorite album of his, Musicforthemorningafter. In addition, there was new and unique merchandise to go along with the show. Part of the proceeds were going to Covid19 relief, particularly in the way of food. I was so excited. I decided that after Michael died, I was going to go to as many concerts, plays and places as I could afford. The intervention of the virus has put a big hitch in my plans. Sometimes I wish I could be less conscious of the considerable risks it poses to my health and then, obviously, to my family and anyone else whose path I might cross. But I can’t. I’m constantly reasoning with myself, trying to stay rational instead of being impulsive. I don’t believe that most of the people who are breaking all the science rules are being deliberately malicious and uncaring about public health. Mostly I think they’re either not able to conceive that one bad move can be enough to change their lives or someone else’s. Having constant awareness of vulnerability is hard and exhausting. I think my life made me good at this heightened awareness. I often remind myself that everyone is just a phone call away from life-altering tough news. Frankly, it’s not my favorite thing to be self-aware. In my coronavirus dream journal, I’ve noticed an interesting pattern. Mostly, I’m in unfamiliar places, but I’m almost always with Michael and our kids. Usually it’s between 15-20 years ago, so our little nuclear family is intact. But there’s always something threatening near us and I’m trying to protect one person or another. Invariably, I’m required to navigate a dangerous area, usually a narrow walkway, bridge or balance beam-like path. Water is on both sides of me and it’s usually active, with waves lapping over my feet. So far, I’ve always gotten to the other side. I’m thinking this subconscious process is a metaphor for this time.

The world around me can be simultaneously simple and complex. I’m my best self when I’m in my garden, listening to music, watching the behavior of the insects, birds and little mammals out there in my habitat that I’m still trying to improve every day. Part of the reason for that is to do my share of being a healthy influence on nature as it groans under the weight of climate change. I also am trying to help my future self as the work around here will only get harder. Maybe I’ll have a healthy decade in my 70’s or maybe not. If I design my outside for as little maintenance as possible, my chances of staying uninjured improve. That project is keeping me occupied in the dance of staying balanced. There’ve been 50 bird species that have shown up here this year. I’m working on my list of butterflies now. I finally got a few photos of the speedy goldfinches and an amazing first, a video of monarchs mating. The simple part of life.

This piece of my life is satisfying. I wander around for hours, headphones on, listening to music, old and new. But there’s a darker side. I’m worrying about lots of people I know and ones that I don’t. I have friends dealing with cancer, their own or their loved one’s. That’s a road I can walk with them, albeit carefully, as I’ve learned well the limits of my abilities. Friends’ parents are dying in this lonely time when the virus separates people when they should be together. Many people I know are depressed and lonely. The incessant alone time gives many who weren’t satisfied with their lives too much time to reflect on their negatives. That’s another road I can walk partway before stepping back. I’ve experienced a lot of loss, both parents, a sibling, a best friend, a former lover and of course, my life partner. Sometimes I think that I’ve already experienced the worst thing that could happen to me. But then I remind myself that for me, the loss of a child could overwhelm all my internal resources. So my private inner dialogue continues.

Then there are all the people on the streets. I’m seeing more of the homeless and the hungry. I buy sandwiches and hand them over but it’s so terrible to know how insignificant is that act which only provides the most temporary respite. I’ve handed out water bottles on hot days. But I feel helpless and overwhelmed and angry. This is a rich country and the economic gaps between the top and the bottom are just wrong. I rail away on social media about everything. Then I feel guilty that all I share is anger and rage. So I go to Instagram, a most peculiar place indeed. I follow scientists and nature photographers so I can share some beauty instead of simply vitriol. I also check on a variety of news outlets and conservation groups. I confess that I do the fan girl thing, following Roger Federer, musicians and the television character who reminds me of Michael, at least the  Michael he’d have been as a Scottish Highlander in the 18th century. But Instagram’s a weird place with all these influencers who seem mostly vapid to me, and then the lonely souls out there who send me private messages and ask to follow me them though my account is private. My profile photo is flattering but do these mostly middle-aged men think that anything substantive could develop in this peculiar forum? Maybe that actually happens for some people. I delete all those requests. I do wonder about them. But I’m sticking with my Outlander hero who reminds me of my guy, absent the kilt.

So, up and back I go, or rather I shift from side to side, trying to hold steady in the midst of this strange time. I hope I can keep that keel firmly centered, while knowing full well, I can be knocked off my course in a split second. You know, that’s really how it always is but thinking that way round the clock is too hard – taking a break from dwelling on the uncertainty is necessary for survival.

The Delicacy of an Even Keel I’m not exactly a nautical type. I’ve been in a variety of boats. I’ve paddled a canoe and rowed a row boat.

[robotloveskitty]

Good news and Bad news!

Ahoy there! It’s been awhile since you’ve heard from us, we’ve been very quiet on here since trouble began. 

Thank you for sticking around, we have really lovely fans, I don’t know what we did to deserve you all!

I have good news, and I have bad news, I’ll give you the bad news first. We are putting Upsilon Circuit into the “Cupboard of Lost Games” indefinitely.

The good news is that we aren’t giving up, and have a new game we’ve been working on called Super Tony Land that brings some elements of UC with it. ..But more on that later.

It was incredibly hard to write anything about UC. It’s been nearly a year since we initially halted production, but it still makes my chest tighten up thinking about it all. It took me 6 tries, but I did my best to write this, because I feel like I owe everyone the best explanation I can muster. I tried to really be open, because so often game cancellations offer very little real information.

Since this was a 3 year journey, it’s a long tale, so get comfortable!  

The concepts for UC grew from a small idea we had because I really enjoyed watching people livestream our (then) newly released game Legend of Dungeon. It grew into an exploration of mortality in games, and so much more. We loved and still love all the things that UC was supposed to become.

So, if we loved it, then why did it get cancelled?

If passion was all it took, I’m sure many other games would exist. Money, time, and luck seem to be big factors based on what we’ve seen and experienced. And the bigger your project, the more you need of each.  

It was an incredibly ambitious project for the two of us. We knew failure was very possible, and I’m proud that we tried anyway.

Why did UC fail?

The oversimplified answer would be that the scope of the game was too ambitious and we underestimated the time and money needed. In reality, for any project, there are many things that can go wrong that influence these things.

As with anything, it’s.. ..complicated.  But the big troubles for us were: Scope, pushing beyond our capabilities, jumping into a partnership for funding, and overwhelming stress.

The scope:

UC’s concept had many game elements highly intertwined and reliant on each other, so cutting features without changing the functionality and direction of UC was impossible. It was also difficult to explain fully to people, including our team.

Pushing beyond our capabilities:

We are just two self taught indie game devs. To make UC, we hired people, signed with a partner/incubator near the end, and then managed a large team, all for the first time.

In hindsight, these were things that we not only didn’t know how to do well, but also made the two of us very miserable.   

Jumping into a partnership:

Instead of scaling the project back when we realized our money would run out long before release, we pushed ourselves harder and kept going, and eventually signed with a partner to help fund the last leg of UC’s journey.

Signing with a partner or publisher and bringing in a larger team are very normal things to do in the industry. However.. they were entirely new to the both of us. Learning (about setting and meeting Milestones, dealing with various issues, and managing a large team) on such a complex project turned out to be very bad for us and UC. No one really did anything markedly wrong, but nothing seemed to go the way it was supposed to. Which in part led to the next point..

The overwhelming stress:

New to running a team stress. New to having partners stress. Crowdfunding stress. Partners pulling out mid failing crowdfunding stress. Having to tell a team “sorry and goodbye” stress. So much stress.

We felt like we had something that could change the gaming world forever, and we were so passionate about it. When things went belly up in the third year, the emotional hit was debilitating.

Bleh!

We really wanted to find a way to finish Upsilon Circuit anyhow, but the truth is, even if it wasn’t saddled with stress and emotional burden.. we’ve already put too much of our money into it. We can’t even support ourselves for long enough to complete a game this big right now.

Looking back on it all now, it’s hard not to feel like we were making a game that the world didn’t want. We knew that it was an out there idea, but that was why we felt that making UC was so important.

We knew publishers wanted something less experimental and risky.. But it was a bit surprising when the gaming community showed so little interest, since articles about UC had reached millions. 

When we lost our partner and shut down our crowdfunding campaign, we made a Patreon, and reached out to the tens of thousands of people on our newsletter. We didn’t get enough pledges to cover the cost of our shared office space, let alone paying even one person.

While there were people who were very generous and amazing, it felt pretty terrible to see something people had seemed so excited about struggling so much to get support when it was truly needed.

When we finally shut everything down, we both thought we might never enjoy making games again. We felt like garbage. We drowned in that for a long time.

You can learn a lot from failure, and we certainly did.

Things we learned from our failure (your own mileage may vary):

Take the project’s timeframe, and triple it. Then triple it again.

A unique idea can add an “I need to get this out before someone else does it” feeling. Let. That. Go. No good choices were made from that feeling.

Don’t bring on full time artists or audio people until the project is really ready for them, use placeholder art and sounds, when you can. Things change, and we redid a lot of our art.

Make sure all contracts clearly state what happens if things get cancelled, or situations drastically change.

Hiring more than one or two people means managing them part time, or full time. We now know that we hate managing people, and are terrible at it.

No matter how smart and awesome your team is, if you can’t get someone 100% behind your idea, your project will suffer.

Having a partner or publisher is a lot like having a boss while also being a boss. Some people like it, but we will likely stay indie or die trying.

Don’t sacrifice your own well being or happiness for a dream. Yes, we’ve sacrificed a lot in the past, we lived in a tree house in the woods so we could keep making games before. But there is a limit, and we found it with Upsilon Circuit, and we stubbornly ignored it and payed the price mentally.

Kittens make things a lot better.

If we had it all to do over again it would have been a very different game, but maybe we could have finished it, or at least avoided some of the worst moments.

So what now?

It’s been a year, and after many conversations, we have found no solutions for bringing back UC. ..But we have healed a little, so we are taking the ideas, story and world, and building them into our future games

We started working on a new game called Super Tony Land this year, and it will be part of UC’s legacy in its own way.

Super Tony Land is a physics platforming adventure game that has many worlds, a story, and easy access to user created levels and entire game worlds. Imagine if Cave story, Mario Maker, and Besiege had a dynamically lit baby.

In Upsilon Circuit the story was something we wanted the players to unfold and influence.. To give creation to the audience, experience it ourselves, and encourage Streamer/audience connectivity. To give real power to the players.

For Super Tony Land we’ve designed an extensive level editor, with visual programming blocks and NPC/Story tools. Anyone can build worlds or challenges in the free editor that we will be releasing alongside the game. We hope that communities and content creators will build and share their own universes, and we are looking forward to playing them!

Here’s the teaser trailer we just released! 

If you’ve been with us for the long haul, you might notice that this is actually a sequel to Tiny Plumbers!

This new game won’t be a lot of things that UC was, but it will be the game that the two of us made that helped us remember how important making games is to us.

It will be available on Steam this spring!

That’s about it for news!

Both of us are thankful to our team during UC’s development, and to our community and friends that have been there encouraging and supporting us throughout this journey. 

We will keep doing our best to make the games we want to see exist, for as long as we are able to make games.

Here are a few links you might want:

If you want to stay up to date on all things RLK, jump on Twitter!

If you want to chat with us or catch streams we have Discord

If you want to support development we have our RLK Patreon here

Thanks for your continued support and understanding!

Your co-pilot, 

Kitty

[queermikehanlon]

Sweet Caroline (The Losers Club)

Summary: The losers spending time with each other in a diner.

Words: 2,703

ao3

A/N: I got this from @grownups-are-the-real-monsters post about the losers in a diner listening to the juke box (x). Also, there aren’t any prevalent ships in this fic, a few are implied, but nothing outright. (It’s weird to post writing because I haven’t posted any writing in so long.)  

It was a small diner. It was a town over from Derry in a different small Maine town. It was one that the losers loved, because they weren’t losers there. They were the group of teenagers who went to the public places and were a little louder than the workers would like but not too bad because they tipped (unlike most teenagers) and were nice to the people they encountered.

The diner was a small one called ‘Track’s End’ because it was near the end of the train tracks and mostly catered seasonal workers who worked on the train line and the occasional families that lived nearby in the apartment complexes; and not to forget the group of seven teenagers who come in about every two weeks.

The losers considered it their loser time to hang out and be losers together. Sure, they all see each other often, but sometimes the losers didn’t see each other often enough. Bill and Stan had one class together, but Bill is starting his soccer season soon. He, over the summer after their freshman year, began working hard, wanting to join. the losers helped him on the sort of cool and grey days, working with him to help his foot work and with his saves (Bill had wanted to become a goalie) and with all of their hard work Bill made it on to the team, but now his days were filled with cleats and late dinners.

Stan spent his after school days with the Derry’s raptor club, volunteering at the local bird sanctuary. Sometimes when Ben or Mike wanted to hang out with Stan they joined him and he introduced them all to the different hawks and owls (and the few snakes that they held, which Mike loved and Ben tried to stay far away from).

Beverly spent time with Mike the most, surprising everyone at least a little bit. Beverly liked hanging out on his family’s farm in the middle of the fields. Mike learned how to draw from Beverly when she started drawing random buildings and trees on his property for art projects. Mike taught her about the animals and the food they grew and Beverly learned why Mike is vegan.

Ben and Bev also hang out, Bev going to Ben’s house to help him with erector set, building things more and more daring to see if it would even work. Bev sometimes makes things just to see if it holds for a while. Ben would paint Bev’s nails and when Bev wasn’t feeling good because of the bruises on her arms and stomach Ben handed over one of his many hoodie that swallowed her whole.

Eddie and Richie had almost every class together- so much so that their names were said as one word: EddieandRichie. Eddie and Richie spent most of their time together- along with the other losers, but mostly together. They didn’t do many after school things- Richie sometimes stayed with Stan for the chess club and Eddie stayed behind sometimes for tutoring (he helped some students with their science while they helped with his English).

Every two weeks on Sunday the seven got together and climbed into Eddie’s 1972 Vista Cruiser (even though they barely had enough seats to hold all of them) and drove off somewhere to be the losers club, at least for a little bit). This Sunday they went to the roller rink in the same town as the Track’s End diner. They all rented skates and rolled around, holding hands and moving around the rink. there weren’t many people there considering it was a small town on a Sunday night, so the losers had the rink and the arcade games to themselves.

It wore everyone out, Eddie made sure he had his inhaler on him and Richie made sure he had his back up inhaler. Beverly and Stan tried their best but looked like baby deer as they skated with wobbly legs and their arms stuck outwards to brace themselves as they fell. Bill, of course, was a natural even though he had only skated a handful of times in his life. Mike, who had never put on a pair of skates ever, held hands with Bill for almost the entire time he was out on the rink because Holy shit, this is so slick!

Richie and Eddie skated and played games back to back when Eddie’s asthma was acting up or when Richie’s ass hurt when he fell down one to many times from going too fast. (If you don’t slow the fuck down, then I’ll make your ass hurt in a different way, Richie Tozier! – Promise?) Richie also took his time to help Ben around the rink because Ben stuck to the wall and tried to walk with his skates rather than glide like you were meant to.

The losers lived for their Sunday night hang outs. They went to crappy golf courses and hung out at the Derry Mall. They hung out and made dams in the B8arrens like they used to when they were in elementary school. It made them feel better, almost younger, except they didn’t feel like they were kids, they felt like they were themselves, if they were ever themselves after the summer when they were thirteen, more innocent maybe? It was only like this sometimes between them. Stan felt phantom scars on his neck and face and sometimes when Eddie took a look at Bill or Richie his right arm would ache a little bit like it did when it was about to rain.

All their childhood shenanigans and all their childhood mistakes led them to themselves. these seven were meant for each other in no other way possible. In their amazing and unparalleled time together, they landed themselves in Track’s End.

The diner itself was small with seven booths and maybe ten seats at the bar. The only people besides the losers who were in the diner were a younger woman and a child- a girl about the age of five, and two older, middle aged men sitting at the bar. The losers piled into the biggest booth the diner had with Bill squishing into one side, though no one complained. Elbows bumped together and accidental (and purposeful) games of footsie were started, but they were left unnoticed as the conversation was booming with laughter and good jabs at each other.

They ordered breakfast for dinner in big heaping piles, knowing that most of the plates would be shared with each other (Stan, Eddie, and Mike didn’t share much- Stan and Eddie because of all the hands on their plates and their food and Mike because most breakfast food sold in a small town diner isn’t vegan so he couldn’t share much of the loser’s food).

Bev and Richie were actively arguing over music that they would play in the juke box. Ben, Mike, Stan, and Eddie were talking about the two page book report that was due on Monday about Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Bill was sitting on the end, listening to both and pitching in on either conversation.

“But how can you even compare Come On Eileen to Sweet Child O’ Mine?”

“Bradbury wasn’t f-fucking F. S-scott Fitzgerald. N-not every-ything is meant to suh-symbolize God.”

“How can you hate Come On Eileen?!”

“Come on, at least the metal dog was supposed to be some sort of God, right?”

“No, the dog was supposed to represent the society that they lived in with all of the judgement and stuff, right?”

“I don’t hate Come on Eileen!”

“I don’t know why she didn’t just give us Lord Of The Flies I can bullshit a paper on that book, but I have no idea where to start with this.”

“You gotta another quarter then?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I don’t want to read books at all, give me the grammar shit and let me do that for the rest of the semester.”

“Let’s play both our songs, yeah?”

“Okay.”

Just as Bev and Richie were going to push Bill and Mike off the edge of their seats to go to the jukebox across the diner, the woman, the mother, had taken her own quarter and played a song. It filled the diner completely, the music. The thump of the beats and brass music. Richie, who listens to the radio more than any average person should, groaned as the losers quieted their bickering to listen to the music.

“Are you kidding me?” Richie spoke, being careful enough so that the mother across the bar didn’t hear him as she moved to the beat with her daughter. “Neil fuckin Diamond?”

The losers didn’t respond, just listening to the music as they waited for their food. However, it was Ben who started it.

For every thump within the song, Ben’s finger tapped on the table. it was barely noticeable, because Ben didn’t have long fingernails like Bev did. they were tiny taps. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

“Was in the spring, and then a spring became a summer,”

Mike was next to succumb. he didn’t know the words to lots of songs played on the radio, but he could remember the tunes to most. He didn’t want to admit that he knew the song because Richie might make fun of him for it. It was a slight hum; a hum you couldn’t control. It slipped out of him and even Ben, who was sitting the furthest away from him, couldn’t hear it. It was low and soft.

“Who’d have believed you come along?”

Stan, uncomfortable and awkward with music to begin with, began to nod his head along with Ben’s finger taps. Stan couldn’t hold a tune and if the beat relied on him he always seemed to mess it up, but Ben was right next to Stan tapping his fingers and Stan watched Ben’s fingers and bobbed his head along. Stan could hear the faintness of the hums, but couldn’t tell if it was coming from Mike or from Bill, but he grinned under biting his lips nonetheless.

“Haannddss,”

Bev was mouthing the words, knowing it from the music her mother played while they were cleaning the house when he father was gone over the summer. It reminded her of good times with her mother, and days at the quarry with the boys when Richie brought his pocket radio to practice his DJ voices. The Neil Diamond song reminded Bev of hot summer days and dancing around, so sure, Bev sang along to the words, even if Richie would give her more shit for her music taste.

“Touching haannddss,”

Bill was swaying in his seat, hitting Bev in the side every other beat. It started with his head, like Stan, but instead Bill continued it as the song was building, making it so his entire top half was swaying left to right, into Bev and looking off in the distance.

“Reaching out,”

Eddie was swaying too, like Bill, but Eddie was sat next to Richie and didn’t want Richie to know that he was enjoying himself. He swayed a few times, but resituated himself so he was sitting on one of his legs in the booth. When he caught himself swaying again, he tried to make it look like he was staring at something out the window as the day was becoming night. His fake fidgets didn’t fool anyone however, they all knew he was swaying along with the song like most other losers.

“Touching you,”

Richie was about to burst. Sure, he was quick to make fun and pick at the song, but when all he wanted to do was make funny voices and sing along at everyone in the booth with him. As much as he loved making fun, he couldn’t expose himself as a hypocrite, especially in the sense of his own musical taste, of which he was fighting with Bev not two minutes ago. Truly, Richie was trying his hardest, biting his lips to keep himself from singing.

As the song came to its chorus all the teenagers looked at each other and their own ways of following along to the song. They were taking all their willpower to hold themselves together, but they couldn’t hold themselves together, laughing they sung.

“SWEET CAROLINE!”

Richie leaned into Eddie’s ear and screeched, “BA BA BUM!”

“Good times never felt so good! So good!”

The losers sang so loud, into each other’s faces, passionately holding one another, dancing in their seats. Their earlier exhaustion from skating and reservation from singing the first verse seemed nonexistent as they sang to each other. They became loud and rambunctious, hopping in their seats and trying to be as exaggerated and as animated as they could be, giggling and cackling to each other.

Bev’s curly red hair bounced as she bobbed her head. Bill was using his body weight and swaying it into Bev’s side, which then acted as a pendulum into Stan, who then knocked into Ben who replaced using his fingers with his entire hand, becoming the drummer of the group as he beat on the table and the window sill.

Stan was headbanging the mop of curls on the top of his head, enjoying himself thoroughly. Mike joined in the singing, and danced in his seat, trying to wiggle his bottom half. Richie and Eddie were nose to nose, keeping eye contact as they sang; they played with an unspoken rule that if they blinked or broke eye contact they lost.

During their song, the waitress came by with the large tray holding all their food and they calmed down only for a tiny bit. The losers continued to sing to themselves quietly as hands and arms were across the table moving and passing around plates of food and refills on their drinks until they had all of their food and began to dig in. Stan still bobbed his head, Eddie and Bill still swayed, and Mike still hummed, but their mouths were too full with their food to continue singing.

As the song faded out, all the movement stopped. They didn’t do anything and ate as nothing had happened. You could hear the scarping of metal on ceramic plates and the clinking of ice against the glass of their cups. Mike glanced up from his food to side eye everyone else and he caught Bev’s eyes doing the same thing. He swallowed his hash browns took a drink. Bev leaned over Stan and took a piece of Ben’s sausage with her fork. Bill hummed a different song, one that he’s had stuck in his head for most of the week.

The diner was quiet now. except-

“Come On Eileen is the greatest song to exist and you can’t say a fucking thing that would change my mind.”

“You can’t believe that’s true,”

The other boys listened to Bev and Richie’s conversation (or rather argument) and joined in.

“Okay, I love Come On Eileen but it’s not the greatest song I’ve ever heard,”

“B-blasphemy.”

“You can’t believe that!”

“Finally! A good man on my side! Come over here Big Bill, give me a sweet kiss!”

“Beep, beep, Richie.”

“Can it Stan the Man. You know you’re on our side!”

There in-diner concert was ignored but not forgotten as they all began to argue over what should be played on the jukebox next. They really did love their Sunday hang outs and whenever they hang out. Something linked them together- something in their souls made them right for each other.

“Don’t even fuckin try to convince me otherwise!”

“God, Rich, do you have to be so aggressive?”

“Haystack, tell me you love Come On Eileen!”

Ben threw a piece of bacon and it hit Richie’s glasses, leaving a grease smudge mark on the lenses.

“Well, thanks for the meat Benny, I’ll come by your house later and you can give me some more.”

“Beep, beep, Richie.”

Mike laughed and it started a chain reaction. The seven teenagers sitting in the diner cackled at each other and the few of Richie’s jokes that were actually funny. They ate, argued more, and enjoyed their time, as they would for as long as they hoped.

[gizedcom]

Long Road To Hollywood: Why Actors With Disabilities Have Yet To Be Recognized

A pedophilic circus performer. A comedic womanizer. A killer.

These were just a few of the roles that Danny Woodburn was offered when he began auditioning for film and TV roles in the early 1990s. Woodburn, a self-described little person, quickly found that nearly every character he portrayed was “miserable,” broken or evil.

“The go-to, I think, for little people is to make them creepy or animalistic,” the actor and producer told HuffPost.

Even after landing a recurring role on “Seinfeld” and scoring gigs on shows including “Watchmen,” “Jane the Virgin” and “CSI,” Woodburn said he still came across casting opportunities that recycled tiresome tropes invoking pathos for “the sad little man.” Just a couple of years ago, casting agents tried to pitch him on a role in a Christmas special by saying he’d get the chance to kiss a famous performer.

“The big selling point was that I’d be able to make out with this well-known actress,” Woodburn said of the project. “I was like, ’Who cares about that when you’ve created this horrible, stereotypical character and the idea is that I should be so lucky to have this opportunity as a little person to be in the arms of this well-known actress and making out with her on screen?’ They were looking down on little people in that sense.”

Woodburn turned down every role that he found to be demeaning toward people with disabilities, determined not to contribute to objectifying portrayals of disability.

“It’s cost me a lot of jobs, but at the same time it’s given my career longevity,” he said. 

Jerod Harris via Getty Images

Danny Woodburn attends a Television Academy and SAG-AFTRA event in North Hollywood on Sept. 11, 2018.

The entertainment industry has always struggled to provide authentic representation of people with disabilities. In 2016, only 2.7% of characters in the 100 highest-earning movies were disabled, according to a report from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. And if people with disabilities are depicted at all in film, television or theater, they tend to be in polarizing narratives that portray them as objects of pity or inspiration. Stories approaching disabled characters through a holistic, neutral lens are few and far between.

It also takes creative people with disabilities significantly longer than their nondisabled peers to get their big break, if they do at all. 

Disabled people are often shut out of Hollywood because they “miss a rung on the ladder” early on in their careers, casting agent Gail Williamson of KMR Talent said last year at ReelAbilities, the largest festival of films for and about people with disabilities.

For some people, that means being shut out of a writers room. For many, it means dealing with unsupportive film schools or a casting director’s blunt preference for abled artists. And for others, a missed career opportunity can be attributed to nothing more than a damn broken elevator. 

Accessible, But Not Really

In January 2019, Fuchsia Carter signed up for an audition that specifically said performers with disabilities were welcome. Carter, a trained actor who uses a wheelchair, emailed the production company to ask whether the building was accessible. “Regrettably, the space we perform in is only accessible by stairs,” the company’s team wrote back, noting they were “delighted” she wanted to audition. 

Carter has had dozens of similar experiences over the course of nearly a decade. She has turned up for auditions only to discover the building doors weren’t wide enough, the elevator was out of order or there was no parking.

When she does finally make it to an audition, casting agents often assume her wheelchair is a prop. They’re floored that a wheelchair user could also be a professional actor.

“I often get asked if I can show able-bodied actors how to use a wheelchair convincingly,” said Carter, recalling one incident when casting agents for a crime show asked her if she could give lessons to another actor up for the same role. “I’m like, no, you can either hire me as the actor for the character or you can go jump.”

Even at the most basic training level, actors with disabilities are denied opportunities to hone their craft.

Actor Christine Bruno, who received degrees in acting and directing in 1998, said dance movement classes were typically a requirement for her programs — but that she didn’t have the opportunity to take them.

“They wouldn’t teach me because they didn’t know how to teach me,” said Bruno, a little person who has since been cast in “Law & Order” and, most recently, the CBS series “God Friended Me.” “They probably didn’t want to be responsible for whatever liability they thought that that would bring, so basically they refused to allow me to take their classes.”

When she asked the administration if there was another way she could fulfill the requirement, they told her not to worry about it.

“I was like, wait a minute,” she said. “I’m paying all this money for an education. I want to be afforded the same education everyone else is getting.”

I often get asked if I can show able-bodied actors how to use a wheelchair convincingly. Fuchsia Carter, actor

Other disabled professionals in the entertainment industry said they’ve faced similar roadblocks while studying the arts. 

Carey Cox, a theater actor with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, said directors in her movement classes “would physically put their hands on my body and try to adjust [me] or get me to do things I was uncomfortable with.”

“If I fell or couldn’t hold my balance, it was brought up in my evaluations,” she said.

Dominick Evans, a filmmaker, said one of his theater instructors in 2009 only gave him monologues of characters with disabilities — including a deaf character and a blind character from “Oedipus,” even though Evans is a wheelchair user. He left the school the following year and didn’t finish his program.

He graduated from a different film school a few years later, calling the experience “hell” because of inaccessibility and the fact that he was told by one professor that other instructors didn’t want him in their vocal classes because they “didn’t know what to do with me because of my wheelchair.”

That same year, Evans began hosting a Twitter chat using the hashtag #FilmDis and met dozens of other people who were upset about the lack of disability representation on screen. He turned the discussion into an organization with the same name, which released a white paper in March that found that cisgender white men made up the majority of disabled characters on TV during the 2018-2019 TV season.

“In film school they taught us, ‘write what you know,’” Evans wrote during one #FilmDis Twitter chat. “And yet all these films that feature disability are not by us.”

A Steep Climb

When marginalized performing artists are absent from the creative process, both the art and the community suffer. And that’s especially true when nondisabled actors are cast to play characters with disabilities.

In “Me Before You,” a 2016 film based on a bestselling romance novel, a woman takes care of a quadriplegic man who has chosen to die by assisted suicide (played by Sam Claflin, who is nondisabled). The movie also plays out the trope that it would be better for everyone if people with disabilities were dead. 

“The Upside” received widespread criticism for casting actor Bryan Cranston as a wheelchair user and maintaining “a weakness for sentimentality, a reliance on clichés and caricatures,” as the Los Angeles Times wrote in 2019.

Most recently, “Come as You Are,” a movie about three disabled men taking a road trip with a nurse to a brothel for people with disabilities, faced significant backlash for casting all nondisabled actors as the main characters.

But there is some evidence that the tide is beginning to turn. In 2018, for example, about 20% of disabled characters on TV were portrayed by actors with the same disability — up from just 5% two years earlier, according to a study from the Ruderman Foundation, which promotes full inclusion of people with disabilities.

Lauren Ridloff, who plays a deaf character on “The Walking Dead,” is set to become Marvel’s first deaf superhero in 2021′s “The Eternals.” Zack Gottsagen, star of “The Peanut Butter Falcon,” became the first actor with Down syndrome to present an Oscar in February. Ryan Haddad portrays a student with cerebral palsy in “The Politician.” And last year, Ali Stroker became the first wheelchair user to win a Tony Award.

Frazer Harrison via Getty Images

Actors Kumail Nanjiani, Lauren Ridloff, Brian Tyree Henry and Barry Keoghan attend Go Behind the Scenes with Walt Disney Studios in Anaheim, California, on Aug. 24, 2019. Ridloff, part of the cast of “The Walking Dead,” is set to be a Marvel superhero in “The Eternals.”

Many actors, casting directors and other industry figures said they’re increasingly seeing disabled actors playing more dynamic characters — which has naturally led to more authentic, groundbreaking and complex storytelling.

In “Raising Dion,” a Netflix drama series about a kid superhero that premiered in October,  Esperanza (played by newcomer Sammi Haney) builds a friendship with Dion (Ja’Siah Young) and helps him save the world. She also happens to use a wheelchair, but that’s just one facet of her character’s story. In one episode, she tells Dion that his play tent isn’t accessible to wheelchairs in a way that shows how assertive, confident and witty she can be. In another, she gets upset when Dion assumes Esperanza wishes she could walk and teaches her friend that just because someone is disabled doesn’t mean they want to be cured. 

Becoming The Norm

The increased representation of disability on screen is a result of decades of advocacy work to recognize disability as part of the greater movement for diversity in entertainment — not a separate cause. 

In 2011, for example, Woodburn and several other members of the SAG-AFTRA Performers With Disabilities Committee teamed up with the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers, a trade union representing workers in the entertainment industry. Together, they created a task force aimed at creating more opportunities for disabled performers, which has led to new relationships with studios and better industry practices on disability hiring.

Many advocates said it’s important for nondisabled people to be involved in pushing for change. Disabled people, after all, are all too cognizant of how underrepresented their community is.

Most recently, the movie “Come as You Are,” about three disabled men, faced backlash for casting all nondisabled actors for the main characters.

In late January, the Ruderman Foundation released an open letter to Hollywood executives and production companies, urging them to cast more people with disabilities. Dozens of people in the industry — including Marlee Matlin (who in 1987 became the first and only deaf actor to win an Oscar), Danny DeVito, Eva Longoria, Mark Ruffalo and Glenn Close — signed on, and the foundation has since partnered with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the Oscars, to recruit students with disabilities and from other underrepresented communities who are looking to break into Hollywood.

The Cincinnati chapter of ReelAbilities, the film festival for and about people with disabilities, relaunched in 2018 as the Over-the-Rhine International Film Festival. The name change came as part of an effort to make disability part of a larger dialogue around inclusive storytelling.

The festival drew in nearly eight times as many people as it had before the rebranding, Jack W. Geiger, the event’s managing director, told HuffPost. 

“It’s raised the level of consciousness across the board,” he said, adding that more than half of the films at the festival still feature disability-related storylines. “Since the rebranding, it’s allowed us to expand the awareness of disability to a much wider audience.”

The best part of my ‘General Hospital’ dream coming true is that the character is not written as disabled. She is because I am.” Maysoon Zayid, comedian and actor

Also in 2018, the Casting Society of America hosted its first open casting call for actors with disabilities. More than 50 casting directors participated and auditioned at least 900 disabled actors as part of the call, according to Variety — showing that the common misconception that there aren’t enough disabled actors to fill roles simply isn’t true.

“The industry has an extraordinary opportunity to do work that’s truthful,” said Lynn Meyers, a member of the Casting Society of America who has also worked on casting calls for Over-the-Rhine.

“I think that’s all of our responsibilities as producers, writers, directors and actors, knowing that there are people that want to work with them and not giving up,” said Meyers, who has cast movies including “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” and “The Shawshank Redemption.” “It’s easy to say that; much harder for somebody to break through that.”

But even as disability has become increasingly visible on screen and behind the scenes, disabled people of color — including women and LGBTQ folks of color — are often left out of the narratives.

“Anytime you do see disability, it’s a white boy,” said comedian and actor Maysoon Zayid, referencing Ryan O’Connell in “Special,” RJ Mitte in “Breaking Bad” and Micah Fowler in “Speechless.”  

Astrid Stawiarz via Getty Images for Together Live

“The best part of my ‘General Hospital’ dream coming true is that the character is not written as disabled. She is because I am,” said Maysoon Zaid, shown here at a New York City event last November.

“I love them and I support them, but maybe we could see some more women, huh?” she said. 

Even on “groundbreaking” shows, she said, directors and screenwriters need to ask themselves, “Who am I missing?”

Zayid spent the first year and a half of her career auditioning for movies and TV shows. When nobody wanted to cast her, a Palestinian Muslim woman with cerebral palsy, she started performing stand-up instead. Acting opportunities were sparse, and she landed only a few small roles. 

Last year, she got a recurring role as an attorney on “General Hospital.” It had taken her more than 17 years to get to that point. 

“The best part of my ‘General Hospital’ dream coming true is that the character is not written as disabled,” Zayid said. “She is because I am.”

Advocates hope that the industry will get to a point where disabled artists are taken seriously and given opportunities to play characters that have complex backstories, story arcs, personalities and lives that don’t solely revolve around their disabilities.

“I don’t want to be given a job because I’m disabled,” said Carter, the actor who was shut out of inaccessible auditions. “I want to be given the chance to show that I have talent.”

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[midnightshowing-acm420-fall2019]

Week 16 - Alex - Dénouement

--- Opening Thoughts:

Here we reach the end of the story of this project; the final knot, which took so many threads to tie, yet seemed not long ago to be little more than a tangled mess.  This week, our group achieved more than what seemed achievable, given the time constrains and pressure. And although so much could have gone wrong, this was truly a very ‘right’ conclusion to an epic semester-long project. I’m so very, very thankful, and proud, of each and every member of our our group - without whom this film would never have been possible. And I’m honored to have been a part of what may very well be one of the finest films produced here in ACM Animation since its inception. I also would like to give a huge thanks to all the colorists who made the production pipeline go so much smoother and faster - sacrificing their own time and effort to be a part of something amazing! I also would like congratulate our terrific voice actor Justin Bendo, for his incredible work as the voice of Angel. And to our composer Joshua Namba, who breathed life and vigor into our film through his music.

--- Weekly Deliverables

For my work this past week, a lot has happened, as most of our group can probably agree to. It’s difficult to bring to memory every individual thing, but the core tasks were these: Coloring Sq13s6, a shot I originally roughed for. Although the final version would go on to have some major alterations to Angel, I’m happy to see it least one rough of Phantom I did pretty much stuck all the way to final:

Colored Sq13s16; took a heck of a long time even using pre-programmed inputs for the coloring process. But it turned out good, and due to me needing to use base layers for the characters, Gavin came up with an interesting blending mode for the Old Man which we can see in the final film:

For the next two shots I finished line from last week, plus color and shading for this week. They turned out pretty good I’d say:

We ran into some technical issues when it came to rendering out certain files, and one in particular that comes to mind is Sq9s16, as imaged below.

I don’t know how it was possible to even work on a file this large on Photoshop, with the hardware we have. It was so big that most of our group’s computers couldn’t even open it. Mine struggled big time to load it, let alone render it as an uncompressed .mov. I had to clear almost all my ram, and even then it crashed before finally managing to render it, which only took around 10 minutes (for one shot mind you,) and then uploading it which took a solid three and a half hours. 

This one file almost stopped our whole production. It was amazing, kind of hilarious, and a bit scary, but we managed to pull through. I added a clipping mask to the fire’s lineart to make it orange.

The next thing which ate up a lot of time and energy this week was sound. Basically, I expected have sound done in maybe 5 or 6 hours over the weekend. Turned out it required almost two full days to finalize. Me and Gavin met up to discuss corrections and adjustments, and after some last minute feedback, all the retiming work was done, and we got an incredible audio track. Even though it was a heavy tax on my very tight finals week schedule, I think having those two days to work on it really raised the fluidity and creativity to provide something almost of a remaster to the animatic audio track we’ve been using up to this point. The premiere file itself is kind of a convoluted mess:

Nevertheless, it gets the job done, and taught me a whole lot about sound editing and design over the course of the semester (except organizational skills.)

--- Last Reflections

This semester has been such a momentous one for so many reasons. If 320 taught me “how to work on animation,” then 420 taught me how to work on animation for real. The jump is so tangible, not necessarily in a “workload” sense (although that may be part of it) but more so as an appreciation for the art of animation itself as a collaborative medium, and a visually exploratory one.  I am much more aware now of every element that goes into a piece of work, and I think I can see the great value in attempting to discerning the purpose behind everything we see in Animation, as with any art piece. While it was easy to get away with seemingly arbitrary choices of shape, color, motion and such in the past, it has become especially necessary now to be deliberate in making choice, since the workload falls on someone else’s shoulders.

- Adjustments to the Process in the Future:

Not all of this is necessarily in my control, nor should this be held against anyone or any part of the film making process here, since after all we’re learning and exploring how to work in teams with new techniques. That being said, one thing I would aim to sharpen in the future is the pre-production estimates of workload times/levels, as well as the overall film length. I think I speak for most of us when I say that the film’s scope grew a lot over the course of the semester. And I’m not saying having a large or ambitious idea is bad - that’s my favorite kind of project! But it can become a bit of an issue when it grows to such a scope that we are having to recruit outside helpers and dedicate most or all of the 24 hours we have in a day to be able to manage finishing on time. Basically, just have a more rigid plan from the start, and be very cautious towards anything that adds unnecessary levels of complexity. That’s something that can be addressed at the animatic stage. Beyond that, being more cautious with the estimates of time and energy requirements per shot would help. I noticed that some (or maybe most) of the shots required quite a bit more time than originally intended to be roughed, lined, colored, and shaded. That’s not taking into consideration all the revisions they may go through as they are reviewed, given feedback, and trade hands between group members. Production schedule-wise, it’s much better to undershoot I think, and have a lot of extra time to hammer out details, maybe refine shots, and properly apply feedback versus feeling the dread of being behind schedule and cutting years from your life due to the amount of sleep lost to try and catch up. A general rule of thumb is that specificity helps. Despite how meticulously we planned, we would still occasionally run into issues such as what color a prop might be, or how the shading might change between environments. Or another example might be how a character’s physical attributes such as stretchiness might change or remain consistent throughout the film. Although these were minor things that got addressed in the end, baring those details in mind in the future would be of great help I think.

- Words of Advice to Future 420 Students

You have three options: either become a cyborg, learn to hate sleep, or adapt to being powered by copious amounts of coffee every day. As for me, I took something from all three of those this semester. Joking aside, these are some general pointers I would give to incoming 420 students: -Choose your story and teammates carefully: This semester can be as fun (or unfun) as you make it to be. No matter what though, the people you have at your side are the people you’re stuck with. Hopefully by this point in the major you would be familiar with your teammates and their individual strengths and quirks, so if you’re having trouble picking a team in the beginning, go with the people you feel are the most self-determined, hard working, and whom you can adapt to their mold (not necessarily vice versa.) If you hate your team, you will hate your semester. But if you love your team, it doesn’t matter how tough the work gets, because you can still come to class with a smile (a very dead inside smile.)

-Come in with a strong concept: Even if your idea doesn’t get picked, being able to receive other people’s ideas and represent them faithfully is vital to the overall success of the production. The better you understand the idea you are working on, the better prepared you will be to make it a reality. Also, simple designs and ideas tend to get picked more often. Keep that in mind when developing your idea.

-Diversity is a strength: Having a broad skillset on your crew is incredibly important. Ideally, everyone can functionally perform any given task on the production. But having specialists assigned certain specific tasks is very helpful. It serves to balance the workload more or less equally among members based on their strengths, and the result is a product where you have good work reflected in all aspects of the film.

-Be prepared to change your schedule: Unless your group’s idea is ridiculously simple, chances are you will be losing sleep, possible questioning your choice of major, and being forced to change both when and how you are available to people and things you care about in the world outside the borders of your computer screen. It is not a joke to say that this course can affect your health, your diet, and maybe even the way you view other people - or even yourself! If done properly, this class should challenge you in the way you live and handle work. It should force you to adapt to an animator’s lifestyle. Not that you need to forsake life to be an animator necessarily, but to give you a taste of what the industry may demand of you through certain seasons of life.

-Be able to take a joke: By the end of the project, you’re going to be throwing shots at each other left and right. It is a crazy, whacky time - and you may find yourself forgetting this is all for a school project. Learn to enjoy acknowledging your own weaknesses, and have fun pointing out the flaws in others, when its appropriate. This makes the experience not only more enjoyable, but in a strange, ironic way it makes us become comfortable with our shortcomings, and enables/pushes each other to genuinely improve our skills, and ultimately create a better product.

-Communication is key: You need to keep up with your group. Period. If you are our of the loop for even a day, it can throw things off big time. Setup a chat group via text, setup a Discord server, or find some other means to talk to one another that is reliable. Even if you don’t always feel like chatting, just be ready when somebody needs you (which will happen quite a lot.) Also, having a system of file sharing such as Google Drive is indispensable. You may find yourself keeping certain tabs open and rarely closing them, just to check for updates and be able to send/receive files when you need them. 

-Practice makes perfect: I don’t care how good or bad you think you are at animating up till this point; if you do your best in this class, you will grow. You may find yourself drawing in a different art style than you’re used to, and implementing work methods and software that you’ve never used before. And that’s wonderful! Be open to experimenting and exploring new styles of work. I’ve found that is a big part of what makes animation enjoyable and inexhaustible. Just when you feel like you’re set in your ways, the moment you step into something new, it’s a whole other world, and you just might find something you like about it.That opens the door to not only other ways of being creative, but on a practical level, makes you a much more viable component to a team when being considered for hiring. Don’t let the early hardships bog you down; with time and practice, there’s nothing you can’t do. -- Well that pretty much wraps up this last blog post and the semester for 420. The experience has been life altering, no joke. I have no regrets, and I’m so thankful to have had the chance to work so closely with everyone. In my experience, this class has been the difference between being an animation student and becoming a professional animator. Even though it was as a real challenge emotionally and physically, I would take the class again if I could, and I very much look forward to working with you all - my fellow animators - in our continuing classes, as well as our careers beyond. You all have been my family here while I’ve been without one since moving all the way out here for school.

Thanks to Brittany for teaching our wonderful class! And to everyone who has fought through this semester together and made it something special, right up until the very end. Until next time my friends, this is the Undercover Animator signing out.