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boomerangtransportation23 · 6 months

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"On the Move: Wheelchair Transportation and the Gateway to Independence"

Navigating the world from a seated position often requires more than just determination – it requires accessible and inclusive transportation. For individuals reliant on wheelchairs, the availability of wheelchair-accessible transport is not just a matter of convenience; it's a lifeline to independence. In this article, we explore the transformative impact of wheelchair transportation on fostering autonomy and inclusivity.

Breaking Down Physical Barriers:

Wheelchair-accessible transportation serves as a key player in breaking down the physical barriers that can limit the mobility of individuals with disabilities. It opens doors to a myriad of opportunities, allowing people to seamlessly move from one place to another, just like anyone else. Whether it's navigating city streets, public spaces, or traveling between destinations, accessible transport ensures a smooth and barrier-free experience.

Liberty to Explore:

The freedom to explore one's surroundings is a fundamental aspect of leading an independent life. Wheelchair-accessible transport liberates individuals from the constraints of traditional transportation, offering the freedom to explore new neighborhoods, visit friends and family, or simply enjoy the outdoors. This newfound mobility is not just about reaching a destination; it's about the journey itself – a journey that contributes to a sense of adventure and independence.

Enhancing Social Connectivity:

Social interactions are at the heart of a fulfilling life, and accessible transportation plays a crucial role in enhancing social connectivity. Whether it's attending social events, gathering with friends, or participating in community activities, individuals using wheelchairs can do so with greater ease and independence, fostering a sense of belonging and community inclusion.

Empowering Employment Opportunities:

Access to reliable and wheelchair-friendly transportation is a game-changer for employment opportunities. It enables individuals with disabilities to commute to workplaces, attend job interviews, and engage in professional activities without facing insurmountable challenges. The result is not just financial independence but also the empowerment that comes from being an active and contributing member of the workforce.

Improving Mental Well-being:

Beyond the physical aspects, wheelchair-accessible transportation significantly contributes to mental well-being. The ability to move independently fosters a sense of self-reliance and confidence. It reduces dependency on others for transportation needs, alleviating feelings of isolation and enhancing overall mental health and resilience.

The Road Ahead: Challenges and Solutions:

While advancements have been made in wheelchair-accessible transportation, challenges persist. The need for more universally designed vehicles, infrastructure improvements, and increased awareness about the importance of accessible transport are ongoing priorities. Advocacy for policy changes and continued innovation will further pave the way for a more inclusive transportation landscape.

Conclusion:

Wheelchair transportation is not merely about moving individuals from one location to another; it's about unlocking the doors to independence. By investing in and prioritizing accessible transportation options, we create a society where everyone, regardless of their mobility challenges, can move through the world with dignity and autonomy. It's not just about getting around – it's about breaking barriers, fostering inclusivity, and enabling a life filled with possibilities.

About The Author

Boomerang Transportation is founded over 10 years ago in Mountainside, New Jersey, we’ve grown from a team of two to an entire fleet of custom-fitted vehicles operated by trained and certified care providers

With our roots in wheelchair transportation, we’re at the forefront of mobility assistance sector in New Jersey and all surrounding areas. Over the years, we have invested in providing a safe, affordable, punctual, and compassionate service to those with disabilities and special needs.

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thelistingteammiami · 1 year

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Making the Beach Accessible For All: Is Your Vacation Home ADA Compliant?

Accessibility is an important feature for vacation rentals, especially in unique environments like the beach, where navigation is more difficult. The Americans with Disabilities Act ensures people with disabilities have the same rights as everyone else when buying or renting a building — including hotels, resorts and vacation homes.

Is your beach vacation home ADA-compliant? If not, you should take steps to make it welcoming for all. Here are some updates you can add to make the house accessible and draw more customers.

1. Start With Exterior Upgrades

Your vacation home’s exterior is a good place to begin making handicap-friendly upgrades. After all, people with disabilities can’t enjoy their stay if they can’t get inside. For starters, doorways must be at least 32 inches wide to accommodate those with wheelchairs and crutches. Here are some other must-have features to improve your vacation home’s exterior accessibility:

Wheelchair ramps with grab bars

Curb cuts

Signage for blind and deaf patrons

Flat, paved driveway and sidewalks

Handicap-designated parking spaces closest to the entrance

Some states also have unique ADA guidelines for doors, ramps and railings. For example, California requires ramps to be at least 48 inches wide and landing areas to be 60 inches wide. All walking surfaces must also consist of stable, hardened materials. That means gravel, sand, tanbark and other loose materials are off the table.

2. Open up the Floor Plan

Getting around a cluttered house is extremely difficult for people with disabilities. You must open up your vacation home’s floor plan to help guests move around and perform routine tasks. Start by spreading out the furniture and establishing clear walking paths. Knocking down a few walls might be necessary to maximize interior accessibility.

One way to make furniture rearrangements much simpler is to buy lightweight chairs and tables that guests can easily move around. Disabilities come in many forms, so your vacation home must have flexible seating options.

The ADA recommends many interior upgrades to remove barriers and improve indoor handicap accessibility. These upgrades will have the greatest impact on the guest experience:

Grab bars for showers, bathtubs and toilet seats

Roll-under sinks

Raised toilets

Full-length mirrors

Firm nonslip flooring materials

Cabinets, shelves and landline telephones with low heights

Remember to take pictures of these features and highlight them in your listing’s photo gallery. Potential guests with disabilities should have full assurance that the building is ADA-compliant. They will see the photographic evidence and be more likely to choose your rental over competitors.

3. Brighten up the Property

Visibility is a crucial element of handicap accessibility. You need to brighten up the property and ensure people with sight or walking disabilities can safely move around. Start by maximizing the presence of natural light with features like skylights and window walls. The interior will be bright and inviting throughout the day.

Floodlights are great additions to your vacation rental’s exterior. They are highly effective at illuminating large areas like parking lots and backyards. Bollard or pathway lights are valuable additions that brighten sidewalks and ramps. They are low-voltage, so you can leave them on all night with little energy expenditure.

All your lighting additions should include LED lightbulbs. They use up to 90% less energy and last 25 times longer. You can cut back on your vacation home’s utility bills and make it more accessible at the same time.

4. Provide Outdoor Activities

Not all beaches are accessible. Some have boardwalks, sidewalks and specially designed sand wheelchairs, but it’s still difficult for people with disabilities to get around. That’s why you should provide plenty of outdoor activities at your vacation home. Guests that can’t go to the beach deserve other attractions.

Many beach houses have outdoor recreation areas such as pools, hot tubs, basketball courts, pool tables and grilling areas. The ocean should be just one aspect of the guest experience.

5. Allow Service Animals

You should institute a policy that lets disabled individuals bring their service animals. The ADA only recognizes dogs as service animals, so you don’t have to allow obscure creatures like snakes and lizards if you don’t want to. Service dogs serve various important roles, including mobility assistance, seizure alerts and allergy detection.

This policy will also help you accommodate people with mental or psychological disabilities — not just physical ones. According to a collection of surveys, an estimated 500,000 people use service dogs in the United States alone. You can open your vacation home many more potential guests simply by allowing them.

Make Your Beach Rental Accessible to All

Your vacation home is in a prime location near the beach, but location isn’t everything. Accessibility is another make-or-break factor when people are browsing online rental listings. Following ADA guidelines can help you make your beach rental accessible to all guests, regardless of disabilities, so everyone can have an enjoyable experience.

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downtomyunderoos · 4 years

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Favorite Musings Challenge!

As writers, we’re usually our own worst enemy. However, there are times where we just read over something we wrote and acknowledge “Oh...that’s good.” and you may or may not end up restructuring the whole reply to fit that one line just cause it was so good, and you spend hours trying to make it work haha...ha.

Anyways, go through a few of your threads/replies/drabbles/any piece of writing you got. Pick out 5 of your favorite lines that you’ve written for your character(s), and in turn tag 5 (or however many others you want) to do the same!

Repost, don’t reblog. And I’m linking my threads to where these lines came from but you don’t have to do that!

tagged by: i stole this :)

tagging: MY DASH IS DEAD JUST STEAL FROM ME

1. At first he didn’t particularly notice their difference in strides down the single path especially since he focused on getting to the source of this madness. Be it because of his nature, but keeping Shirogane close to him like this unconditionally made him felt comfortably protective. Yet realization slowly ceased his steps. Their situation that was clinging together now branded as security and a yearning for independence certainly clashed, and Akihiko bashfully peered down from the flaw.

2. A petrifying chill surged through that frail spine when Mitsuru’s dainty foot somehow channeled the strength of a gorilla, cannoning her victim into a coffee table eager to body slam itself. How dirty that was, her kicking him while he was down. Penthesilea’s barrier was unneeded, for Akihiko was dead, but suppose the icy apparatus would make a decent cooling unit for a cadaver.

3. The contrast between a clean, metallic faux of a gun and a defiled forehead was stark. Akihiko, maintaining focus, flaunted a weak yet dangerous smirk, one encircled with hardening blood. His former master in the form of a vexed shadow was confronted by a man whose composure was akin to a god’s.

Pleasurable apathy consumed him. Despite every threat life offered — much like bayonets perfectly aligned at an unarmed mortal — they meant essentially nothing. This was freedom. Akihiko calmly shut his eyes, which were confined by pigments that defined his worst as well as his best; he refused to falter. This was fine. He was fine the way he was.

4. Yet this was exactly why Akihiko was frequently transferred, for his former team deemed themselves inferior and fed up failing to keep up with his pace. As such, his reputation had spread fast within the P.D. as a one-man force to reckon with. Crimes have their stories, but so did everyone who had the displeasure of working with Sanada Akihiko.

5. He sighs; a shaky breath carries sadness. His heartbeats drum in his ears, and for a second he’s confused at his own involuntarily reaction. Like it could predict the future, what he’ll reveal — a weakness he’s so stern to conceal and conquer on his own. It’s getting louder, from the back of his mind to up the throat.

“There are people in this world who truly mess up.. and that’s when being alive is a sin.”

Akihiko slowly shifts, bringing, squeezing his arms closer to himself. He feels smaller, like the boy he used to be. This triggers his resting head to pivot towards her with a penetrating gaze as he stares into fire. “I know.”

The lights turn on. The little girl who’s never known luxury vanishes, and a Kirijo’s presence startles him back into the present.

edit: added 5 more

6. Time waited for no one, yet it’d stop under the involuntary command of a girl who achieved her revival. An overwhelming burst, one which targeted Akihiko as source for her temporal fuel. Minako lashed with a vicious rattlesnake’s speed and within her abrupt grip he was pulled, no – yanked, in. Her words had the air of a poetical death sentence, with indisputable sincerity as her delivered judgement. Her breath scalded, and his was stolen. Evident against her breast were ceased heartbeats from whom she restrained.

7. His destiny is to remain fixed and unable to speak for her power chord summons personal shockwaves from head to toe. An electrocuted hand, barely able to reach to her figure, is too disoriented to lead him on the pursuit. Akihiko could just watch as her hair aggressively jounces from behind her head, with each sharp sway spitting insults and acid on the path she paves behind. An entrance door opening and indignantly slamming shut is the sequel to a chair’s clatter, freeing Polydeuces from being disabled while the piercing sound tells of her suffering.

8. Concealed sight makes for a stronger sense of hearing. Her voice especially haunts him; patronizing words carry like Mitsuru’s except Minako scalds instead of freezes. She petrifies yet Akihiko refuses to hold himself back from fire, enduring her burns while he swiftly wheels and grabs her shoulder before auburn hair flips at him and dwindles like a flame into the night.

9. He dips his head solemnly as he speaks. Every word he’ll say is capable of blowing up in his face, like tiny fires. He couldn’t trust the flames since he always finds himself with figurative burns in the end. Akihiko might as well compare the meaning of his existence to that of an arsonist. But as cursed as he is, he never wanted to burn bridges.

10. If there was one thing she’d receive credit for, it was catching Akihiko off guard. Unfortunately for her, he now had his heart on his sleeve. Logic and empathy didn’t work nor did allowing her to come at him. What– she wanted space now? Her eyes were so on the prize that nothing he said or did went through that thick skull of hers. Bet she didn’t see him stomping over until the side of his fist slammed an inch away from her head, into the wall.

His shadow cascaded over Chie as he breathed into her face, like a carnivore ready to devour what they cornered.

“Why are you so persistent to throw yourself to the wolves?” Fierce lines chiseled beneath his silent glare and between brows. It seemed impossible to be as dismayed as Akihiko appeared to be yet maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t only about acting professional. That to him, this was becoming personal.

#ooc:meme #long post #4/5ths of these are from really old threads but i still think about them #i felt mad with power #i'm limited to 5 but i could do a part 2 post another time

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hollybourneauthor · 4 years

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“How Teen Fiction Can Change The World”

The Patrick Hardy Lecture has been running annually since 1989. Guest speakers from the world of children’s books, including the likes of Jacqueline Wilson, Meg Rosoff, Juno Dawson, and Michael Morpurgo, have taken to the lectern, and this year I had the overwhelming privilege of speaking to those who work in the industry.

“How Teen Fiction Can Change The World” Holly Bourne, Patrick Hardy speech, 2020

Before I get going, at the risk of sounding like a yoga teacher, I want to ground us all in this room. Right here. In this moment. It’s a Wednesday night in winter, you’re sitting in a library, and you’re about to listen to me give a lecture about stories. So, high chances are...you really like books. At some point in your life, you stumbled across a story that won you over. You became consumed by the magic of fiction, and could never go back. There are probably a few key books that you’ve read that you honestly believe changed you. Improved you. And reading those books may have led to you making a number of small decisions throughout your life that paved the way for bigger decisions, that, all collected together, led to this very point in your life. Right now. This room. The people sitting around you. Your passion. Maybe even your career. Reading is likely the part of your identity that you feel the proudest of, and the most nourished by. I know that’s true for me.

So, I just want you to take a few moments to think about the books that led you here today. Directly, or indirectly. The books that you’ve no-doubt read and reread countless times. The books that you feel are etched onto your soul. That made you who you are. That helped you through life and steered you towards becoming someone you’re proud of… And I’m going to go out on a limb here and say, I’m guessing that those books – those life-changing books – are books that you read as a teenager.

This is the topic of my speech today. How I believe teen fiction doesn’t only have the power to change a young person’s life. But how that magical transformation can start ripples that can actually change the world for the better. I truly believe that YA books – writing them, publishing them and distributing them – is an act of activism that can start huge, positive, social change.

But how?

Before I talk about teenagers, I want to explore the powerful nature of stories themselves. Our brains are wired for stories – they are how we learn to survive in the world. Human survival needs two things – the basics of how to keep yourself out of danger, and how to keep in favour with the social group around you. We are pack animals. We need the surrounding community to survive. And we constantly tell each other stories about how to live. Information is more palatable if it’s in the form of a story. Rather than saying to someone “Don’t eat those red berries”, we’re much more likely to engage with that life-saving information if someone says, “Did you hear about Ig, the caveman from next door? Oh my God, it was AWFUL. He ate those red berries on the bush outside, and his stomach exploded ALL OVER THE CAVE. It was so gnarly. They’re still cleaning it up…”

The same is true with instructions on how to be socially accepted by others. Linguistic experts have found humans spend most of their conversation time gossiping about people who aren’t there. Telling stories on each other. Gossip is actually narrative that instructs humans on what is and isn’t acceptable in their social group. Again, we’d get bored of an information manual. But if someone comes over to you, wide-eyed, saying, “Have you heard that John left his wife for his twenty-two year old secretary? And now everyone has turned on him and he isn’t welcome at the Safari Supper any more,” you’d be lapping it up. But you’d also be learning important lessons about how to behave. Instructions are boring, but stories are riveting. Our brain rejects one, and embraces the other. And, through narrative, we learn how to survive – both emotionally and physically – in this world.

I find the work of Sigmund Freud hugely influences how I write stories, and how to ensure they connect with my readers. Some of you in this room will, no doubt, have done English degrees and will be familiar with how Freud’s theories relate to narrative. So apologies if this is a recap, but it’s something I try to remind myself of whenever I’m writing.

Freud believed all humans lived in a state of constant conflict between three parts of our psyche – our Id, our Superego and our Ego.

Our Id is the totally subconscious, primitive and instinctual part of us. It’s our selfish desires. Our animal selves. And it’s always there.

I’m hungry.

I want that.

I want to have sex with that person. NOW.

A newborn baby is completely Id-driven – at the mercy of its desires. And that part of us never goes away. The Id is always with us, steering us to survive. Utterly reactive and animalistic.

Whereas the Superego is there to tame the Id. The Superego is the cocktail of messages we marinate in throughout our lives, telling us what a person should or shouldn't do. The Superego is about consequences. It’s your values. Your moral compass. Don’t steal. Don’t snatch. Don’t dry-hump that person on the Tube even if you really fancy them. Essentially the Superego socializes us. The most powerful influence on your Superego comes from your parents and your early childhood experiences. But society has a part of play. Laws are part of the Superego – telling us what is and isn’t legally acceptable. And culture plays a huge part in shaping it too. What should a man be? What should a woman be? What is right, or wrong? And the Superego isn’t always a good thing. It provokes a lot of guilt in us, and, if taken too far, feelings of shame can make us unhappy.

And, finally, the Ego is the navigator of these two conflicts. It’s the “weigher-upper” – listening to the Id and the Superego and making the best judgement it can. I like to believe that the Ego is essentially who we are as a person, based on the decisions we make as a result of this eternal internal conflict. Rather than beating ourselves up for having “bad thoughts”, we should judge one another, and ourselves, on our actions. It’s our actions that make us who we are. We are what we do, not what we think.

We learn about Freud in creative writing because, to some degree, every successful story represents the struggle between the Id, the Superego and the Ego. We are drawn to these stories because they reflect the battle we fight in our heads every day. If you consider the huge, ongoing success of comic book films, you can see how Freud’s theory explains their popularity. Baddies in these stories are often very Id-driven – selfish, compulsive and uncaring of how their actions impact those around them. Whereas superheroes are disguised “Superegos” – representing goodness and morality.

But what excites me most about Freud isn’t how I can use his work to shape my books, but the belief I have that reading powerful stories can actually contribute to a person’s Superego. How the act of reading a work of fiction can actually cause a psychological change in us that makes us better people in our non-fiction lives. And the nature of the adolescent brain makes the opportunities for this even richer.

So why books? What makes fiction the most potent vessel for activism compared to, say, films, TV, video games or even an Instagram caption? It’s because the very nature of reading itself is an irreplicable act of immersive empathy. When I go into schools, I always tell teenagers that novels are like really safe, legal, hallucinogenic drugs. I once read a funny tweet that said that reading a book is crazy when you consider what’s actually taking place. Effectively, you are staring at symbols printed onto a dead tree and vividly hallucinating. That’s pretty magical when you truly consider it. Even with all our technological advances, even with virtual-reality goggles, nothing quite recreates reading. How a reader is effectively transplanted into the mind of someone who doesn’t exist – feeling their feelings as they’re feeling them, experiencing their experiences as they experience them. When written well, and used for good, stories can educate readers about all sorts of social issues by provoking an empathetic and emotional response. You can open a reader’s eyes to the truth of what life is like for people who aren’t like them – from being on the receiving end of racism, to experiencing mental illness, trauma or physical disabilities. In To Kill A Mockingbird, Atticus tells his children that, in order to understand a person, you have to try and crawl into their skin and walk around in it. That’s exactly what books do.

It can also be truly revolutionary and reassuring for a reader to find a book where they see themselves in a main character. Especially if this main character’s hardship or thought processes are something you believed was unique only to you. Being seen, heard, understood – sometimes the first time someone feels like that is through the pages of a novel. Alan Bennett once spoke of the magic of this moment and how it’s like a hand has come out of the pages and is holding yours. And if you’re reading about a main character suffering how you suffer, and yet this character is able to stand up and be brave... Whether that's speaking up, fighting back, or simply just asking for help...well, this connection between writer and reader could well inspire the reader to be brave themselves.

Now, let’s go back to those books you had in your head. Your favourite books that you read when you were younger. The ones that really lodged in. What’s going on there?

There’s actually some neuroscience that can explain this. Scientists have found that during puberty, when a child’s brain is rewiring to become an adult brain, a side effect is that we make memories more strongly compared to any other time in our lives. You can recall and connect with your teen years more easily and potently compared to your twenties, thirties and onwards. I certainly know this to be true for myself. Ask me to close my eyes and remember being fifteen and, yeah, I’m there. Hell, I don’t even need to close my eyes. I can already smell the Lynx Africa, remember who kissed who at the school disco. I can remember the full names of all the popular people in my year group. And yet, if you ask me what I was doing at twenty-five, twenty-eight, thirty-one, I’d have to think about it. Trying to recall what job I was doing, struggling to remember certain people’s names... It’s vaguer, and certainly less visceral.

On top of this they’ve found that teenage brains are hyper-attuned to social stimuli. From an evolutionary perspective, adolescence is when you have to figure out how important you are to your social group and that impacts your chances of survival. This means teenagers are constantly asking themselves: Am I important? Do I matter? Does anyone care about me? Because of this, they’ve found that teenage memories particularly linked to identity and sense of self are even stronger. So if a teenager stumbles across a book that is holding their hand through its pages, just consider the POWER of that memory.

And let’s not forget just how wonderfully malleable young people are. Teenagers are so much more open to change – both in society, and in themselves. They haven’t calcified yet. They haven’t had as many years of repeating unhealthy patterns and gathering biased evidence to prop up unhelpful theories – about the world and their sense of self. I saw a talk once by a psychologist who said we need to stop dismissing our younger years as being unimportant years of freedom that do not matter. Actually, your youth and what you do with it paves the way to the future, and tiny adjustments, over time, can see you end up in a totally different place. She used the analogy of aeroplanes, and I love to think of teenagers as aeroplanes taking off from Heathrow airport. The planes all soar up in the same direction, but with minor changes in angle, they land in New York or Brazil or the Arctic.

I’ve started to see evidence of my books causing angle changes in the journeys of my readers’ lives. I’ve now written ten YA novels, and have built my career by being honest with teenagers about the hardship of their reality, as well as encouraging them to fight for a better future and a better world. I educated them about feminism through my Spinster Club series, asked the question Is mental illness preventable? in Are We All Lemmings And Snowflakes? and, most recently, wrote about an emotional and sexually abusive relationship in The Places I’ve Cried In Public. I’ve been touring the book with Women’s Aid and have become an ambassador for their Love Respect campaign that educates young people about healthy relationships. I’ve always believed that my stories were activism, and hoped they’d create positive changes in the Superegos of my readers. And I’ve now been in the game long enough to see my faith wasn’t misguided.

I met my very first Spinster Club alumni only last week, at a Women’s Aid event I did at Bristol University. After my talk, a young woman came up to me, squealing, and revealed she’d read my Spinster Club books as a teenager and they’d made her a feminist. She then went on to say she’s now studying law, and has got a barrister traineeship and wants to use law to protect vulnerable women. I’m not going to lie – it was probably one of the happiest moments of my life.

And the ability to tweak a person’s journey has never been more evident than in my latest book, The Places I’ve Cried In Public. Since it’s been published, it’s had more crossover appeal than I thought, and I now get several messages a week from women in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and even sixties, telling me their own harrowing abuse stories. They tell me about their PTSD, the university degrees they never got because their partner never let them go, their fights through family court, their lost years, lost self-worth, their therapies and their ongoing recoveries. Each tale is just as heart-wrenching as the last. And all of them write to me, I wish I’d read your book when I was younger, or I wish I could go back in time and give this to my 14-year-old self. They wish they’d known the red flags to look out for that could’ve prevented them from going down a path they’re still on.

And when I talk to teenage readers about the same book…

“Well, those sorts of relationships sound terrible. I’m never going to let myself get into something like that.”

“I HATE Reese. I want to kick him in the eyeballs.”

“The book made me cry so much. I never want that to happen to me.”

I’m not saying preventing awful things is that simple, but, also, maybe it can be? When you combine everything I’ve spoken about, what’s to say we can’t use fiction to nudge teenagers into making healthier decisions that will benefit them? As well as hopefully entertaining them along the way.

When we start reflecting on the power of teenage fiction, as people who work in the industry, we need to ask ourselves: how do we utilize this? Maximize this? And, to me, the most important thing is to remove as many barriers as possible between teenagers and the stories that can change their lives. I see the need to address this in three ways.

Firstly, we need to ensure books are available to all teenagers, regardless of their means. Novels, and their life-changing magic, should never be allowed to become an elitist item. So we need to fight to keep libraries and school libraries open, and to keep trained librarians in position. Librarians are experts at matchmaking teenagers with the best books for them.

Secondly, we need to fight for all teenagers to be able to see themselves in books by making the publishing industry more diverse, and therefore the stories it produces more diverse. The magic of fiction can only work if there’s an authentic connection between writer and reader, and diverse voices are an essential component for this to occur. If we think back to that reminiscence bump, and how memories about identity leave a particularly strong mark, just imagine how it must feel to be a marginalized teenager who finds a book that finally gets them.

And thirdly, we can’t let our own maturity and “calcification” accidentally erect barriers by letting literary snobbery shame a teenager for what they are reading. There is no such thing as good or bad reading – there is only reading. We need to celebrate and reward the books that teenagers are connecting with. It’s the connection that changes a life, not the beauty of a sentence. Yes, perhaps ideally, we want them to read the classics, but they’re much more likely to get there if the world of reading seems like an open, non-judgemental, non-elitist place. Let’s also recognize how hard it is to write a book that’s “easy to read” – the craftsmanship that goes into creating a story that pulls a teenager away from the huge list of distractions fighting for their attention. Literary snobbery is an unhelpful stance that will only inform a teen’s Superego in a negative way, leading to shame and exclusion. In trying to crowbar a teenager into reading a certain type of book, you’re potentially putting them off all books for ever.

I started by grounding us in this room. And now, after geeking out on you for half an hour about brain science and psychology, I want to bring it back to this room. I want us to take a moment to reflect on just how much power sits within these four walls. Collectively we have access to thousands upon thousands of young people, and a passion for the stories we want to give them. Just think of the ripples we can create by the simple, wonderful act of activism which is giving a book to a teenager. I honestly believe that giving the right book to the right teenager at the right time can change and possibly even save their lives. And I also believe that all those teenager aeroplanes, taking off from Heathrow airport, feeling empowered and understood, will go on to achieve remarkable things. Teen fiction really can change the world, and make it a better place.

A long time ago, someone gave you a book that led to you sitting in this room today. Let’s go out and start that journey for others. Who knows who will be sitting listening to the Patrick Hardy lecture in twenty years’ time, and what they will have achieved. But every time I think of this, I feel nothing but hope.

Thank you so much for listening.

#PatrickHardylecture children'sbooks childrenspublishing activism teenageactivism yabooks yareaders hollybourne

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barbex · 6 years

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For mass effect fic purposes, I transcribed what Vigil had to say on Ilos. What a chatterbox he was. Anyway, in case anybody else needs this, here it is. I took it from a video so there are no dialogue tree variations.

You are not Prothean. But you are not machine, either. This eventuality was one of many that was anticipated. This is why we sent our warning through the beacons.

I do not sense the taint of indoctrination upon any of you. Unlike the other that passed recently. Perhaps there is still hope.

(Why aren't you speaking the Prothean language?)

I have been monitoring your communications since you arrived at this facility. I have translated my output into a format you will comprehend.

My name is Vigil. You are safe here, for the moment. But that is likely to change. Soon, nowhere will be safe.

(Are you some kind of artificial intelligence program?)

I am an advanced non-organic analysis system with personality imprints from Ksad Ishan, chief overseer of the Ilos research facility.

(Why did you bring me here?)

You must break a cycle that has continues for millions of years. But to stop it, you must understand or you will make the same mistakes we did.

The Citadel is the heart of your civilization and the seat of government. As it was with us, and as it has been with every civilization that came before us.

But the Citadel is a trap. The station is actually an enormous mass relay. One that links to dark space, the empty void beyond the galaxy's horizon.

When the Citadel relay is activated, the Reapers will pour through. And all you know will be destroyed.

(How come nobody ever noticed the Citadel was an inactive mass relay?)

The Reapers are careful to keep the greatest secrets of the Citadel hidden. That is why they created a species of seemingly benign organic caretakers.

The keepers mantain the station's most basic functions. They enable any species that discovers the Citadel to use it without fully understanding the technology.

Reliance on the keepers ensures no other species will ever discover the Citadel's true nature. Not until the relay is activated and the Reapers invade.

(How do the Reapers survive out in dark space)

We have only theories. The researchers here came to believe the Reapers enter prolonged states of inactivity to conserve energy.

This allows them to survive the thousands and thousands of years it takes for organic civilization to rebuild itself. But in this state, they are vulnerable.

By retreating beyond the edges of the galaxy, they ensure no one will accidentally discover them. They keep existence hidden until the Citadel relay is activated.

(The Reapers can wipe out the Citadel and the entire Citadel fleet in a single surprise attack!)

That was our fate. Our leaders were dead before we even realized we were under attack. The Reapers seized control of the Citadel and through it, the mass relays.

Communications and transportation across our empire were crippled. Each star system was isolated, cut off from others. Easy prey for the Reaper fleets.

Over the next decades, the Reapers systematically obliterated our people. World by world, system by system, they methodically wiped us out.

(The war was lost. If you had surrendered, they might have let you live.)

No offer of surrender was ever given. Our enemy had a single goal: the extinction of all advanced organic life.

Through the Citadel, the Reapers had access to all our records, maps, census data, information is power, and they knew everything about us.

Their fleets advanced across every settled region of the galaxy. Some worlds were utterly destroyed. Others were conquered, their populations enslaved.

Theses indoctrinated servants became sleeper agents under Reaper control. Taken is as refugees by other Protheans, they betrayed them to the machines.

Within a few centuries, the Reapers had killed or enslaved every Prothean in the galaxy. They were relentless, brutal and absolutely thorough.

(What do the Reapers get out of this? Why do they keep repeating the pattern of genocide over and over?)

The Reapers are alien, unknowable. Perhaps they need slaves or resources. More likely, they are driven by motives and goals organic beings cannot hope to comprehend.

In the end what does it matter? Your survival depends on stopping them, not in understanding them.

(I don't understand. Where did the Reapers go after they conquered your people?)

Our worlds were stripped bare, harvested by the indoctrinated slaves. Everything of value--all resources, all technology--was taken.

Certain that all advanced organic life had been extinguished, the Reaper retreated back through the Citadel relay into dark space, sealing it behind them.

All evidence of the Reaper invasion had been wiped away. Only their indoctrinated slaves were left behind, abandoned.

Mindless husks no longer capable of independent thought, the indoctrinated soon starved or died of exposure. The genocie of the Protheans was complete.

(You said you brought me here for a reason. Tell me what I need to do.)

The Conduit is the key. Before the Reapers attacked, we Protheans were on the cusp of unlosking the mysteries behind mass relay technology.

Ilos was a top secret facility. Here, researches worked to create a small-scale version of mass relay. One that linked directly to the Citadel: the hub of the relay network.

The Conduit is not a weapon. It's a back door onto the Citadel.

(How did you manage to stay hidden?)

All official records of our project were destroyed in the initial attack on the Citadel. While the Protheas empire came crashing down, Ilos was spared.

We severd all communication with the outside and our facility went dark. The personnel retreated underground into these archives.

To conserve resources, everyone was put into cyrogenic stasis. I was programmed to monitor the facility and wake the staff when the danger had passed.

But the genocide of an entire species is a long, slow process. Years passed. Decades, centuries. The Reaper persisted. And my energy reserves were dwindling.

(You should have fought!)

We were a few hundred against a galactic invasion fleet. Our only hope was to remain undetected.

I began to disable life support of non-essential personnel. First support staff, then security. One by one their pods were shut daown to conserve energy.

Eventually, only the stasis pods of the top scientists remained active. Even these were in danger of failing when the Reapers finally retreated back through the Citadel relay.

(There were hundreds of stasis pods out there! You just shut them down? You killed them?)

(You were programmed to protect them! Not kill them!)

This outcome was not completly unforeseen. My actions were a result of contigency programming entered on my creation.

(I bet they didn't tell the "non-essentials" staff about this contingency.)

I saved key personnel. When the Reapers retreated, the top research were still alive. My actions are the only reason any hope remains.

When the researchers woke, they realized the Prothean species was doomed. There were only a dozen individuals left far too few to sustain a viable population.

Yet they vowed to find some way to stop the Reaper from returning. A way to break the cycle forever. And they knew the keepers were the key.

(I still don't understand what's going on here. Why is Saren trying tofind the Conduit?)

The Condui gives him access to the Citadel and the keepers.

The keepers are controlled by the Citadel. Before each invasion, a signal is sent through the station compelling the keepers to activate the Citadel relay.

After decades of feverish study, the scientists discovered a way to alter this signal. Using the Conduit, they gained access to the Citadel and made modifications.

This time, when Sovereign sent the signal to the Citadel, the keepers ignored it. The Reapers are trapped in dark space.

(Saren must have some plan to undo everything you did.)

The one you call Saren will use Conduit to bypass the Citadel's defenses. Once inside, he will transfer control of the station to Sovereign.

Sovereign will override the Citadel's systems and manually open the relay. And the cycle of extinction will begin again.

(Is there any way we can stop them?)

There's a data file in my console. Take a copy when you go. When you reach the Citadel's master comtrol unit, upload it to the station.

It will corrupt the Citadel's security protocols and give you temporary control over the station. It might give you a chance against Sovereign.

(Where's the Citadel's master control unit? I've never heard of anything like that.)

Through the Conduit. Follow Saren. He will lead you to your destination.

(If the Reapers are trapped in dark space, how did Sovereign get here?)

It is logical to assume the Reapers would leave one of their own behind after each extinction, a sentinel to pave the way for their inevitable return.

Like those in dark space. Sovereign probably spent most of the last 50,000 years in a state of hibernation. Periodically, it would wake to analyze the situation.

Keeping its existence hidden, it would evaluate the state of galactic civilization. And, when the time was right, it would signal the Citadel and usher in the next Reaper invasion.

But this time, the signal failed. The keepers did not respond. Sovereign's allies were trapped in the void. Alone, it was sorced to try and discover what had gone wrong.

(Sovereign's the largest ship in the galaxy. Why all this secrecy? Why not just attck the Citadel?)

Soverign is not invincible. Revealing its true nature would have united the forces of every orgnaic species against it. Even a Reaper couldn't survive such odds.

But the Reapers are patient. They will not rush into the unknown. Sovereign could have been planning this for centuries, moving dleiberatly, gathering allies.

Slowly, it has assembled the peices of the puzzle, working through agents to keep itself hidden. Saren is the most visible pawn of the Reapers, but I doubt he was the first.

Now, Sovereign has grown bold. Whether from confidence or desperation, I cannot say. But it is determined to reopen the portal to dark space.

(What about the beacon on Eden Prime? And the one on Virmire? What were they for?)

At our apex, the beacons spanned the breadth of our empire. We used them as a single galaxy-wide network, to transmit data and communications rapidly from world to world.

Virtually all the beacons were destroyed during the invasion. But once the Reapers were gone, the survivors here on Ilos decided to risk sending out a message.

We knew it was unlikely there were survivors. But if there were, we wanted them to know about Ilos. We wanted to give them ope, So a message was sent across the network.

(You could have exposed yourself to the Reapers.)

In truth, we didn't expect any of the beacons would still funtion, but we had to try. If there were survivors, we had to reach them.

The message was meant for our own people. It was coded so only organic beings could interpret it. We still didn't understand the power of Reaper indoctrination.

We never realized it could lead an agent of the machines -- like Saren -- to this world. But it has also led you here. So perhaps we did not fail after all.

(So when the REapers created the Citadel, they created the keepers as well?)

A more likely scenario is that the keepers were one of the early harvested civilizations. Perhaps the very first.

Perhaps they responded well to indoctrination or the Reapers simply bred them to be obedient. In any case, they were left behind to operate and maintain the Citadel.

But the keepers are no longer directly controlled by Sovereign ot its ilk. They evolved so that they only respond to the signals emitted by the Citadel itself.

When the Protheans altered the Citadel's signals, they broke Sovereign's hold over the keepers. Now they are completely harmless.

(Sovereign must have realized organic races were difficult to control.)

A likely hypothesis. The keepers evolved in an unanticipated direction. Non-organic servants like the geth would be more predictable.

(What happened to the survivors from the Conduit Project?)

They used the Conduit to gain access to the Citadel, but the Conduit is only a prototype. The portal only links in one direction, so they were trapped on the station.

I do not know what became of them then. It is unlikely they found any food or water on the station. I fear they suffered a slow, grim death.

I only they succeeded in their mission to seal the relay. Your presence here proves their sacrifice was not in vain.

(Saren's got enough of a head start. Grab the data file and let's go!)

The one you call Saren has not reached the Conduit. Not yet. There is still hope if you hurry.

#mass effect #Ilos #Vigil #mass effect transcripts #mass effect fanfiction #ME1 #Mass Effect 1

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eruwaedhiel-iso · 6 years

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How Korrasami Saved Me

I read the initiative for sharing personal stories or experiences of the way Korrasami, well, saved us, when I was scrolling through @threehoursfromtroy‘s Tumblr. Really, thanks to everyone involved in this initiative.

Well, here’s my story, my experience, because, no kidding, Korrasami/Korra/Asami/the entire Avatar universe truly saved me and the impact this animated series in particular has had in my life is beyond any words I could find. But at least I’ll try...

I watched The Legend of Korra’s series finale long after it aired on December 19, 2014. I was familiar with the Avatar universe since I watched The Last Airbender when it aired on Nick and I liked it but I must confess I was never a big fangirl. That’s why I didn’t know anything about Korra when it aired. All my knowledge of Korra was because my brother kinda watched it sometimes and because of Tumblr post here and there.

That December 19 I was like a distant observer in a moment that meant so much for so many people and that, in many ways, paved the way for a better representation in kid’s shows.

The Avatar series always dealt with different issues: disability, mental health, politics, dysfunctional families... the human condition. There’s no denying that it’s a groundbreaking series. But the issue of sexual orientation was always out of the table. After all, it was a cartoon, airing in a kid’s channel and even though it always dealt with complex and mature issues, there was no possible way that the writers and creators could go that way, no matter how much the fandom shipped certain characters. The possibility of those ships becoming canon was slim.

I think that’s why something changed for so many people thanks to Korra and Asami becoming canon after holding hands, facing each other while entering that new spirit portal in the middle of Republic City. I could use a thousand metaphors of what that particular moment meant but all of them seem so small compared with the reality. At last, someone dared to break with the usual writing, the usual storytelling... just that, breaking the usual and give a lot of people something to identify with.

I thinks that’s what it means for me: an identity. What the journey of Korra and Asami mean for me was the way I finally acknowledged myself and what I am.

For many years, I navigated the waters of heteronormativity. I thought that recognizing that some women were good looking was because of the permissibility that society sometimes allows women to think other women are attractive, or kiss each other on the cheek, or have sleep overs without other people thinking they are necessarily lesbians or bisexuals or pansexuals, etc.

Boy, how wrong I was. Now I identify myself as a proud bisexual and finding the courage to accept it, in many ways, was thanks to The Legend of Korra.

After binge watching the entire series in less than three days and fangirling (very lately) about Korrasami, one thing stayed with me: I recognized many of my traits both in Korra and in Asami. I recognized myself in Korra because of her impulsiveness and her vulnerability. In her insecurities, in her self-doubt but also in her strength. In her loyalty and sometimes in how much of a dork she is. Particularly, in that feeling of being “too much”: too intense, too much to handle, too sensitive, too emotional, too intense, too wild. But also, I recognized myself in Asami, in the way she always tried to help others at her own expense. In the fact that both of them were driven by kindness and generosity... they were both so selfless. They became, instantly, an inspiration.

When the two of them became canon, I also recognized myself as what they were: bisexuals. The confirmation of Bryke only ended up echoing in the bottom of my heart. For me, it was like finding the perfect answer to a question that had been lurking in the back of my mind all my life, a question I never truly dared to acknowledge. I was afraid. I was confused. I never thought the possibility of someone being bisexual could exist.

Growing up, everything was confusing. I was never the perfect example of what a girl “should” be. I was never fond of dolls and other “girl toys”. I was never fond of dresses. I loved playing football with boys and playing with Batman action figures, Hot-Wheels and other “boy toys”. I loved wearing over-sized boy’s shirts. My mom always scolded me because I loved getting in trouble and being dirty for playing too much outside, in the mud or climbing trees, getting my knees scraped. I used to play imaginary wrestling matches with my brother and I always ended up bleeding somehow. When puberty knocked the door, I was never a fan of make-up or nail polish, tight clothes or other things that are considered “girly”. That’s why I identified myself with Korra as well. But also with Asami, because I realized that I could be another kind of “girly”. I could like “boyish” things and that didn’t necessarily made me less of a girl.

One time, in Middle School, a boy told me I was a “lesbian” because I was holding one of my friends and she kissed me on the cheek, because I loved playing football during recesses (I know, I was like a walking stereotype). That was the first time I heard that word and I didn’t know what it meant since I grew in a rather traditional family. My parents are both Catholic and though they always taught my brother and me to be respectful towards others, the words “homosexual”, “gay”, “lesbian” (”bisexual” was never a word I heard when I was growing up) and everything they entailed, were like a taboo. After all, Mexican society is very traditional, Catholic, prejudiced, narrow-minded and, sadly, very discriminating.

Growing up, I always accepted the fact that I liked boys but at the same time, I never recognized that I felt the same towards girls. I never knew how to call that. So I kept quiet about it.

I must say that the Internet was like a safe space, it helped me research about what I was feeling, what I always felt but I was never truly able to name it, to identify it. One of my best friends also helped me and I must say that I don’t know how I am going to ever repay him for just listening, hours and hours of just sitting there and listen. I also saw celebrities like Evan Rachel Wood being very vocal about being bisexual. That’s why, because of my best friend, because of what I found on the Internet, because of Evan Rachel Wood... because of Korra and Asami, watching and reading about these two characters being bisexual, meant so much for me. I finally discovered the word bisexual, and I discovered it and saw it in a positive way.

I saw a couple of characters whom I identified with rather deeply, having a happy ending together and for the first time in my life I was sure of who I was, of how I wanted to live my life. It was like a reassurance. Korra and Asami became that, along with everything else. They were a fundamental part of my process, of the way to truly find myself. And it must seem corny and ridiculous, but honestly, representation truly matters. And even if some people STILL deny the fact that Korrasami is real and it’s canon, they can’t deny the fact that they mean so much for so many people out there, people like me, people like you, that see themselves in both of them, that see some meaning in these characters, some purpose, something that speaks to them.

Since then, both Korra and Asami (and the entire Avatar universe, really) have become a refuge, a balm, a salvation.

I’m not going to tell you my sad and rather pathetic relationship record, because, well, it really is sad and pathetic. But last year, when I hit rock bottom after a very bad break-up that left me questioning myself and everything I am, I remembered the words Aang tells Korra when she loses her abilities in the season one finale: “When we hit out lowest point were are open to the greatest change”.

I’ve been dealing with that, not as successfully as I wish, but when in doubt, when I find myself wanting to end everything, when I think my life sucks, I remember these words, I remember everything this series and its characters mean for me and I dare to try again. I dare to stand up once again and be better.

So, yeah, thank you, Korra and Asami, thank you Avatar universe, thank you Bryke, for saving me.

#How Korrasami Saved Me #Personal #Excuse my English #Sometimes I get corny and you have to stop me #Korrasami

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sarscov2imagery · 4 years

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Museum of Covid-19: the story of the crisis told through everyday objects

Lockdown culture

Scrawled signs, neon rainbows, flour mania … the V&A’s collectors are creating a show for our times, targeting the everyday objects taking on new meaning in the coronavirus age

Oliver Wainwright

@ollywainwright

Mon 4 May 2020 06.00 BSTLast modified on Wed 1 Jul 2020 17.32 BST

Before my world was reduced to a two-mile radius from my house, I never realised how interesting other people’s front gardens could be. When your life is confined to the same four walls, with each journey to the kitchen an odyssey, the world outside takes on a whole new allure. I now find myself entranced by all the different varieties of privet hedge, intrigued by people’s choice of gravel size and paving pattern, captivated by the clusters of cacti perched on windowsills. Front doors have become a new form of entertainment, as have the subtleties of window-mouldings and architraves. Who knew there could be so many varieties of mortar on a single street?

There’s nothing like six weeks of house arrest to give you an elevated awareness of your surroundings. And it’s a phenomenon that hasn’t gone unnoticed at the nation’s grand repository of objects, the Victoria and Albert. “The pandemic has this weird way of bringing to the fore objects you would never have thought about,” says Brendan Cormier, senior design curator at the London museum. “Everything becomes heightened.”

With future exhibitions on hold and collecting in limbo, Cormier has turned his team’s attention to thinking about how the coronavirus has reframed the everyday, casting familiar objects in a very different light. Which is why the V&A is just about to launch Pandemic Objects, an online series examining how a range of unremarkable items have become charged with new meaning and purpose.

“There are so many designed objects and inventions coming out of the pandemic,” says Cormier, citing all the hands-free door openers and 3D-printed face visors. “But it’s going to take time to work out which ones are actually useful.” He thinks there’s a danger that some much-touted innovations might end up being “vapourware” – flashy concepts that catch the attention of design blogs, but never come to fruition.

The V&A design department has made headlines with its Rapid Response Collecting, an initiative that has snapped up such zeitgeisty objects as the Liberator 3D-printed handgun, the plans for which were released online in 2013, and one of pink knitted pussyhats worn by half a million attendees at the Women’s March in Washington DC in 2017. But with everything now changing so rapidly, curators have decided there’s some value in slowing down. Instead of rushing out to collect Covid ephemera, Cormier thinks the museum’s time would be better spent looking afresh at what’s right under our noses. “Is the pandemic revealing anything new,” he asks, “about things we take for granted?” One of the first things to catch his attention was the wealth of hastily drawn homemade signs cropping up in shop windows around the world, explaining new delivery services and warning people to keep 2m apart. It seemed to say something about our relationship with technology and public messaging: the 1990s craze for inkjet printers promised everyone the professional finish of a publishing house in the comfort of their own home. Yet, three decades on, most of us seem to have thrown out our printers, sick of clogged-up, eye-wateringly expensive cartridges, and have embraced the paperless society. “In the moment of need, when the situation is changing so rapidly,” says Cormier, “we’ve gone back to pen and paper.”

Putting signs in windows quickly spread to the home, too, as a means of both expressing community solidarity and keeping the kids occupied. Headteachers encouraged pupils to paint hopeful rainbows and stick them in windows, fuelling neighbourly rivalry with evermore elaborate formations, ranging from chalk to neon paint and Lego bricks. It wasn’t long before this homespun movement was co-opted by the art world, with Damien Hirst offering his own butterfly-wing rainbow to download.

Catherine Flood, co-curator of the V&A’s Food exhibition last year, will examine how the pandemic has changed perceptions of certain kitchen-cupboard staples. Flour and yeast, more used to being spilled on surfaces and swept into bins, have become sought-after luxuries, as we all try to channel our inner bakers. Instagram has become the Sourdough Olympics, awash with competitive posts, while flour mills are working around the clock to fulfil demand as wheat prices surge and well-stocked shelves become a rarity.

Traffic to the BBC’s basic bread recipe has risen faster than a cob in a 250-degree oven, with numbers up by 875%. But need does not seem to be what’s driving demand, as bread is still readily available in shops. It’s the therapeutic quality of baking that’s the attraction, Cormier thinks, the tactile and meditative quality of the process, along with a desire to feel self-sufficient.

“Flour is now a privilege,” he says, and he doesn’t just mean being able to find it in shops. “To bake bread, you need to be able to work at home, and have time to invest. It’s probably not frontline key workers who have the pleasure of rediscovering the miracles of baking.”

As research for a potential future exhibition on accessibility in design, curator Natalie Kane has been looking at the door handle – a seemingly innocuous part of the built environment that has become a villain in the age of coronavirus. Since early March, when it was first announced that the virus could survive on surfaces for up to three days, we’ve been elbowing and toeing our way through doors, suddenly aware of just how often we use our hands to navigate through the world. Could the pandemic finally force society to accept what disability groups have been campaigning about for decades – that such things are obstacles rather than aids?

Meanwhile, as travel has been curtailed, the online realm has offered one of the few options for escapism. Some have turned to Google Street View to sate their wanderlust, whiling away hours touring the side streets of far-flung locations or panning through 3D cityscapes. The Canadian artist Jon Rafman has revived his project The Nine Eyes of Google Street View. Begun in 2008 when the medium was still novel, the projects trawls the globe’s virtual streets for alarming scenes – from a moose careering down a highway to a gun-toting gang caught mid-heist, to naked bodies sprawled across the pavement.

Now, these unruly snapshots seem like glimpses of another time, glitches in the lockdown matrix. V&A curator Ella Kilgallon will examine the Street View phenomenon, putting it in the context of such earlier documentary initiatives as the National Photographic Record Association), established in 1897 in an attempt to create a comprehensive record of British life. Taking advantage of the expansion of photography as an increasingly popular hobby at the turn of the century, the association planned to form a countrywide “memory bank” to foster “national pride”. It culminated in 5,883 photographs by 1910. In the last 12 years, Google has captured 10 million miles of the Earth’s surface in 360-degree images, equivalent to circling the planet more than 400 times. Further entries in the Pandemic Objects series will shine a spotlight on toilet paper, streaming services, cardboard packaging, balconies and more, one of the more triumphant stories being the revival of the sewing machine. “Despite all the hype around distributed manufacturing and downloadable customised designs, not many of us have a 3D-printer at home,” says Cormier. “Yet the great 19th-century invention of the sewing machine is still a ubiquitous household item.”

Sales of sewing machines have rocketed in the pandemic, recalling the Make Do and Mend movement of the second world war, as people join the effort to mass-produce face masks. One of the chief obstacles to such community craftivism, says Cormier, is managing production and distribution. After the recent bush fires in Australia, an international callout for people to knit koala mittens and wombat pouches triggered a tidal wave of marsupial mitts, far more than could possibly be used. As thousands of companies and hobbyists have sign up to produce face-shields in the great national struggle for PPE, it remains to be seen how effectively they can be distributed to where they are needed most. Whether it’s a newfound respect for loo roll, a growing suspicion of excessive cardboard packaging, or a phobia of door handles, when the pandemic finally subsides, we may never look at everyday objects in the same way again.

• Pandemic Objects is at vam.ac.uk/blog/

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124globalsociology · 4 years

Text

Sci-Fi Feminists

By Becky and Claire

Background

Science Fiction is all about imagining a different reality. Whether that be spaceships, laser beams, or rights for women.

A common misperception is that sci-fi has always been a genre dominated by men and male protagonists; however, this is not the case. There is some speculation in regards to when the science fiction genre was born, yet many consider the creator of the first sci-fi/horror novel to be Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein in 1816, though even before this Margaret Cavendish wrote The Blazing World in 1666.

Although not necessarily the first sci-fi writer, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has experienced great acclaim for centuries–and for good reason. Shelley openly explored themes of death, isolation, and moral ambiguity. She has since inspired countless authors, including Ursula Le Guin–whose writing challenges the constrictive social norms of binary gender. Also, like those of her time and before, Octavia E. Butler has succeeded in using gender and race as a means of exploration as well as a call to action. These women’s lives influenced their writing in a multitude of ways, which is why many scholars throughout history have analyzed their personal journeys of growth, inspiration, and loss that led them to new and alternate realities.

Here is a good start to the timeline of major science-fiction authors, and here is a list of exclusively female writers.

Prominent Authors: Mary Shelley

When Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus in 1816, she wrote it in response to a challenge. Her father was the famous philosopher William Godwin and it was at a dinner party her father had hosted, with guests such as Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, where the challenge was posed for each esteemed writer to come up with the best ghost story. In the end, Mary Shelley (then known as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin) won, as her early draft of Frankenstein captivated its first audience.

Yet for such a young woman–only eighteen at the time– the themes she wrote about were incredibly complex and macabre. Her life began tragically, as her famous feminist mother died only a month after her birth, a death she would mourn for the rest of her days. When she met and fell in love with the great poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, their romance was only accepted after the tragic suicide of his estranged wife. She continued to experience the loss of three of her four children as well as her half sister.

Plagued by death and grief, Shelley’s dark themes were a cathartic release; the juxtapositions of the living and the dead within her work, as well as the question of morality continue to spark debate to this day. The character of Frankenstein’s monster begs the question: what does it mean to be human, to be alive? Moreover, are humans fundamentally good beings? These questions appear again in Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler’s brilliant contributions to science fiction, where similarly complex topics are asked, such as: what are gender and race? Why do they exist? [Mary Shelley-Source] [Mary Shelley-Source 2]

Ursula Le Guin

Usula Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969 during the second wave feminist movement in the United States, where gender was a heated topic for almost everyone.

Facing her fair share of rejection of publishers refusing to take a woman seriously, let alone a woman writing in the genre of science fiction, LeGuin was determined to share her game-changing novels. As a daughter of a female writer herself, Le Guin knew the value of a good story, and had been inspired from a young age to create her own nonconventional worlds. The Left Hand of Darkness, in addition to the Earthsea Chronicles, are Ursula Le Guin’s best known works. The Left Hand of Darkness and other books in the Hainish Cycle take place in a solar system with many planets whose different environmental factors led to the androgyny and nonbinary nature of the race named the Gethenians.

Her mainstream challenging of social norms opened doors previously percieved as closed for other feminist and nonbinary authors to began grappling with questions of identity, morality, social hierarchy, and even religion. By the end of her life, Ursula LeGuin had written dozens of award-winning novels, poems, and children’s books that had changed the science fiction world forever. These issues brought alien distopias down to earth, as it were. [Ursula Le Guin-Source]

Octavia E. Butler

A facet of science-fiction is the exploration of dystopian worlds that provide insight into the future of our own–no author was more talented at predicting these all-too-real conditions than Octavia Butler. Before her death in 2006, Butler wrote over two dozen novels and short stories that illustrated many scenarios unsettlingly similar to our current political and social climate. From a young age, Butler was surrounded by books brought home from her mother who worked as a maid during the era of segregation in California–books that would transport her to worlds beyond what was possible, at least for now.

These books drove her to create stories of her own that imagined protagonists as empowered black women, as gender fluid shape-shifters, and so on. These works, though fantastical, were also rooted in the struggles of society during her lifetime, and provided essential insight into the Civil Rights Movement and second-wave feminism.

Of course, life was never easy for Butler, who had to balance many jobs at once, and was often underestimated due to her sex and race. Yet after the modest success of her 1975 novel Patternmaster, which envisioned a dystopian world that brought together themes of hierarchy and unity, she traveled across the country to Maryland, and found even more fame and recognition after she published her next work, Kindred.

Butler envisioned worlds that validated and brought to the forefront the struggles of everyday black people, while using fantastical backdrops to tell their complex stories. Today she is known for her afrofuristic themes, with many of her novels being read in university classes regarding queer theory, Black feminism, and disability studies. [Octavia E. Butler-Source 1] [Afrofuturism]

Use of Utopias and Dystopias

These women, and countless other authors, have used their writing to develop the idea of utopian and dystopian worlds. By imagining a world with true, universal human rights, or a society without gender and racism, these women strove to prove that anything was possible.

A utopian world is one that is perfect in every way–but in the process of creating those perfect worlds, dystopias are often born instead. For all the fantastical characters and settings they describe, they are ultimately commenting on our current world and it’s ugly realities hidden beneath the surface. They further present the question, is a utopian world possible? What makes our current world dystopic? As Ursula Le Guin says in her interview with “The Nation’’, “The future in science fiction is just a metaphor for now.” For More information on utopias, check out this TedEd video.

Sci-Fi in Politics

As women and authors, Shelley, LeGuin, and Butler along with countless more feminists work not just for entertainment, they write for the larger community of activism. Activism is a way to gain support for a cause but rarely is it done alone. Margaret Kick and Kathryn Sikkink elaborate in “Transnational Advocacy Networks in International Politics” (from Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, 1998).

Authors in sci-fi are like the transnational networks that Keck and Sikkink discuss, in that they also use the four typologies of persuasion: 1) information politics, 2) symbolic politics, 3) leverage politics, 4) accountability politics. When authors like Shelley, Le Guin, and Butler present the issues most prominent in their lives, they present the information “where it will have the most impact” (p. 281). That space is the public who has the power to influence society.

Furthermore, they use symbols in their writing to make the point that utopias or dystopias really aren’t that different from where we are today. When using leverage politics in writing, authors tend to “call out” major actors such as state regimes, as Margaret Atwood does in her “Handmaid’s Tale”. This can be done explicitly as Atwood does or implicitly as seen in some of LeGuin’s work. Similarly for accountability politics, authors don’t have the power to hold states to their policies; however, they are able to conjure public support behind an issue. For example, if a government claims to have eliminated all racist and sexist language from its governing documents but has not, then an author may use that in a novel to push the government for change.

Sci-Fi for the Real World

When imagining a better world, a world where governments and organizations are held accountable for their actions towards people of color and female-identifying people, we can look to these feminist writers for inspiration. These women paved the way for visionaries from all walks of life to have hope for a better future. Science fiction is an instrument of societal rebuilding, and it can have enormous impact on the way people choose to engage in the world.

Science fiction also has the capacity to challenge racist, sexist, and heteronormative norms that hold our society back from unity and prosperity. In promoting feminism, authors like Le Guin and Butler normalize equality of the sexes, and even allow future generations to take the reins, as it were, and normalize gender fluidity, androgyny, and non-binary people.

As we grow in awareness and knowledge throughout our transformative years at college, we can harken back to these trailblazers and the messages they left in their books. These messages tell us we are powerful in our femininity, that humans are infinitely complex and changing, and that change is necessary for a better future. We can build many aspects of the better worlds laid out before us–and we can learn from the dystopias as well. Our story as humans is far from over, it is not too late for us to embark on a new chapter.

Links used above:

https://www.bl.uk/people/mary-shelley#

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-wollstonecraft-shelley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_vzSgkjBEI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a6kbU88wu0

https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/writing-the-future-a-timeline-of-science-fiction-literature/zjfv6v4

https://library.sdsu.edu/scua/new-notable/early-female-authors-science-fictionfantasy-0

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20200317-why-octavia-e-butlers-novels-are-so-relevant-today

https://haenfler.sites.grinnell.edu/afrofuturism/

https://www.ursulakleguin.com/biography

Bibliography:

Keck, Margaret E., Sikkink, Katheryn. “Transnational Advocacy Networks in International Politics”, Activists Beyond Borders:Advocacy Networks in International Politics, 1998. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

#submission #publicscholarship #global sociology #art #activism #octaviabutler #feminism #racism #scifi #afrofuturism #ursula le guin #mary wollstonecraft #margaret atwood #queer

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oumakokichi · 7 years

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Can you explain how exactly Kokichi Ouma took control of the show from Shirogane? I already know the details of his plan in Chapter 5 but how did this impact Shirogane? She doesn't control Monokuma, does she? What would have happened if Ouma's plan worked and the students convicted the wrong person?

I can certainly try! The mostcrucial part of Ouma’s plan was trying to force the entire killing game to acomplete halt. Most of the reason he acted antagonistically, the reason he leftso many “hints” and “clues” as to the fact that he “was the ringleader,” andthe reason he hits the entire group so hard with the “truth of the outsideworld” was in order to set up a scenario where it was possible for him to wrestcontrol of the game away from Tsumugi herself.

By having pretended to be aforce of hostility and chaos who genuinely enjoyed the killing game, he wasable to completely blindside her in Chapter 5 by trying to stop it instead,phrasing it in terms of “having gotten bored” and “wanting to see the despairon everyone’s faces when they found out he was the ringleader.” Tsumugi neveronce suspected that someone like Ouma would actually have been forgingalliances and working to stop her behind the scenes, because his villain-likeact was so perfect. And she certainlynever expected that he would’ve allied with Miu of all people, given how openlyhe disliked her.

Ouma’s alliance with Miu waswhat paved the way to him being able to really, truly take control of the game.She created electric hammers which could disable the Exisals and electricpanels for doors, card readers, etc., the electric bombs he used to disable thehidden cameras and motion sensors for the press, and, most importantly, theremote control which could hack into and control any electronic device,including the Exisals themselves. That remote not only allowed Ouma toperfectly make himself look like the ringleader—it also allowed him to use theExisals against Monokuma, keeping him under guard for almost all of Chapter 5after he declared to the rest of the group that the killing game was “officiallyover.”

This super strict watch overMonokuma combined with crushing the characters’ desire to return to the outsideworld helped end the main motivators for the killing game to continue. Havinglearned “the truth of the outside world,” the rest of his classmates weredepressed and lethargic, true, but they also completely lost all their reasonto try and leave the school, which is the main way in which culprits have beeninfluenced to kill in every DR game to date. The fear of the killing gameitself and the simple desire to get back to the outside world are the most effective tools in convincingcharacters to kill who otherwise wouldn’t.

Meanwhile, Monokuma isordinarily the one who pops up to try and provide motives and incentives tokill at every opportunity. Ouma himself comments as early as Chapter 2 thatMonokuma always shows up “to torment them” whenever they start talkingoptimistically about cooperating or trusting in one another. By keepingMonokuma trapped between the Exisals and unable to move around the school, Oumawas trying desperately to keep him from providing any new motives to the restof them.

This plan worked for the mostpart because unlike in dr1, where Junko could make as many spare Monokumas asshe wanted and had most of them already hidden and set up around the school,ndrv3 only allows for one copy of Monokuma at a time. Probably this was a ruleestablished as part of the killing game show, in order to make things a littlefairer and less one-sided—Junko, who was controlling absolutely everything,didn’t have a need for that so-called “fairness,” so it makes sense that she’dhave as many Monokumas at the ready as she needed.

In order to make a new Monokumaevery time one gets destroyed, the ringleader has to go to the secret room inthe library and talk directly to the Mother Monokuma inside, telling it theword “create” very specifically in order to make a new Monokuma. No substitute wordswork, and obviously the Mother Monokuma won’t respond to anyone’s voice but theringleader’s.

The Mother Monokuma is a devicewhich receives all data transmitted from the hidden cameras around the schooland can speak and function as a presumable type of AI (somewhat like Kurokumaand Shirokuma). Since it was an AI, it’s assumed that either Mother Monokumaitself or Tsumugi could directly control Monokuma and tell him where to go.

Mother Monokuma reported all ofthe information that it received to the ringleader whenever they would go tocheck in. It’s confirmed that this is how Tsumugi knew about the hidden camerasSaihara and Kaede set up in the library in Chapter 1, as well as the fact thatthose cameras had 30-second intervals between each photo. It’s also how sheknew about Kaede’s plan to try and kill her, and the fact that Amami wassnooping around the library hoping to expose the ringleader’s identity. Tsumugidefinitely knew the same information as the entire Monokuma system did, and wasvery much capable of controlling Monokuma’s movements and using him to spy orinstigate new developments in the killing game.

But of course, there was no wayfor her to move Monokuma around any longer in Chapter 5 once Ouma hijacked theExisals. The Exisals are powerful and impenetrable; even Monokuma hadabsolutely no way of unlocking or entering them, couldn’t pilot them at all,and was unable to do any kind of damage to them. The Exisals were what Tsumugihad been using as tools of enforcement for most of the killing game, so havingthem stolen right out from under her once the Monokumerz were dead wasunexpected, to say the least.

Ouma’s plan to keep the killinggame at a complete standstill likely would’ve continued working, if onlyTsumugi weren’t so incredibly resourceful and quick on her feet. He could takeaway the Exisals and isolate Monokuma from her, but because he himself washoled up in the machinery bay for protection, he couldn’t take away her methodof creating new remember lights. The Hope’s Peak remember light she used inChapter 5 in order to “inspire hope” in the group and convince them all thatOuma was “Junko’s successor” and “the leader of the Remnants of Despair” was abrilliant counter-attack on her part. Because Maki “remembered” those thingthanks to the remember light that Tsumugi very conveniently left lying around,she decided to go and try and torture and kill Ouma once and for all.

As for Ouma’s plan during theChapter 5 trial, that’s considerably different than his plan to end the killinggame. Maki breaking into the machinery bay and poisoning him completely ruinedall his plans the moment she fired that arrow into his arm. He could have drunkthe antidote for himself, let her be executed, and let Momota die from hisinjuries since he was already dying from his illness—but he chose not to,partly because he didn’t want to repeat the same kind of underhanded tactics hehad already used to stay alive in Chapter 4, and partly because he realized hehad a perfect opportunity to throw this all back in the ringleader’s face andcreate a case in which the victim and culprit were both unknown to everyone.

What he wanted to do was forcea mistrial, basically. He created a scenario like Schrodinger’s catbox, inwhich the person inside the Exisal could’ve very well been either him orMomota, and there was no way for anyone else to know. Until the Exisal wasopened, there was absolutely no way for the rest of the group to objectivelyprove whether Ouma or Momota was the one alive; they could simply theorize atmost.

By creating a scenario in whichculprit and victim were both unknown to everyone, including the ringleader andthe killing game audience, Ouma hoped that the best-case scenario would involveMonokuma himself voting wrong in the trial. If that happened and he had votedfor Ouma as the culprit, Momota could have just climbed out of the Exisal afterwardsand proven him wrong.

If Monokuma as the gamemasterwas proven to be running these trials without actually knowing the answers, thatwould undermine the entire basis of a “fair game.” What Ouma realized longbefore anyone else did is that the fact that Monokuma was following the rulesof the killing game so thoroughly meant that the game had to be on display forsome kind of audience, and therefore there would be consequences if those ruleswere broken.

If the game wasn’t fair from thestart, that would call into question Monokuma’s ability to do anything,including lay out punishments to the culprits or rule violators. Even ifeveryone else had voted wrong in the trial, Monokuma wouldn’t have the right toexecute them for it if he also gotthe wrong answer. Even better, this would’ve called into question for just howlong the killing game had been continuing with an unfair basis—it would’ve madethe audience question Monokuma’s objectivity as a gamemaster and perhaps evenput a stop to future killing games.

Of course, Ouma was incrediblygood at predicting things, and that’s why I think he knew this wasn’t a planthat he could really take all the way. There was still always a slight chancethat Monokuma would decide to execute the rest of the group regardless ofwhether he voted for the right culprit or not, and that was a chance Ouma wasn’twilling to take. He didn’t mind putting his own life on the line in order toend the killing game, but he didn’t want to force anyone else to risk theirlives. He could, at most, hope that his shot back at the ringleader with theChapter 5 trial would inspire the rest of them to find the truth and expose theringleader themselves later on—which is in fact exactly what happens in Chapter6.

If Ouma had really wanted tomake a completely unsolvable catbox, he could’ve left considerably less hintsfor the group than he did. He wouldn’t have told Momota to flush his shirt downthe toilet, for starters. He could’ve just had Momota keep it in the Exisalwith him, leaving no indicators as to the fact that Ouma had been poisoned andinjured. He could’ve made it so that nothing stuck out from under the pressrather than leaving Momota’s sleeve like that—the awkward positioning of thesleeve and the fact that it was the opposite arm from usual is part of whathelped tip Saihara off to the fact that something wasn’t right, after all.

Most importantly, if he’dwanted it to truly be unsolvable, he definitely wouldn’t have had Momotaprovide them all with the video recording. Handing them “proof” of “Momota’smurder” on a silver platter turned out to be the absolute biggest hint whichhelped Saihara realize that the person in the Exisal wanted them to think Momota was dead for a reason. That videorecording was the single biggest piece of evidence they had to prove that theswitch between the culprit and victim took place.

Ouma was smart. He would haveknown that these were huge clues he wasleaving behind. Making a single mistake isn’t unheard of, but leaving this manyclues by complete accident isn’t something he’d do. Instead, I think it’s muchmore likely that he left all these clues intentionally to help keep the groupalive, thereby shaking the ringleader while also making sure that no one was actuallyin any danger of getting executed as long as Saihara could still reach thetruth.

Anyway, this got really long,so I’ll leave it at that for now. There’s such a lot to talk about with Ouma’splans and tricks in Chapter 5, it’s hard to know where to stop. I hope I could helpanswer your questions, anon!

#ndrv3 #drv3 #new danganronpa v3 #kokichi ouma #ouma kokichi #ndrv3 spoilers //#my meta #okay to reblog #anonymous

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novelyarmy-blog · 7 years

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100 Reasons to Study:

study-well:

I never expected this “reasons to study” thing to get so many submissions, and as it takes me so long to post them all, I decided to do a bulk post of some so here they are:

(If I haven’t included a url, it was submitted by an anon).

To prove people that “bad” students can become excellent students too.

To expand your knowledge of the world.

To look back on your success in ten years time. (Submitted byadxlastudies)

To not let my mental illness define my grades. (Submitted bymusicandmaths)

I study because I am privileged enough to have the opportunity. I study because I have no one getting in my way telling me I can’t. I study because I want to do some real good in this world. I study because I live in a country where being female has no significant disadvantage; and so, I take this opportunity so that I may make future opportunities for those who don’t have them. (Submitted by crimson-voltaire)

My reason for studying is how I’ll get to where I want to be in my life which is successful, comfortable, and happy.

I study to make my mum happy and proud.

I study to prove my anxiety wrong!

I study because I want to save lives.

I study because my grandpa, orphaned during WWII when he was 8, worked 4 days a week in a mine to learn for 2 days. He’s retired after 40 years of working in diplomacy, for the last 5 years as an ambassador. He’s my role model. And I love him so much.

I study because my primary school teacher from when I was 6 replied “Well who would think that?” when my mother informed her I was going to university. I study so I can tell her “Why would you not think that?”

I study because I want to give myself the best future I possibly can as a black woman. (Submitted by n-marlzz)

I study because my dreams are improbable. But not impossible. I will achieve them. (Submitted by redheadbecool)

I study because even though I can’t imagine having a future, I want one. (Submitted by stxdys)

I study so that I can be surrounded by the right people at school, at home, at work, and on Tumblr. You can only walk the path that you choose for yourself, so choose wisely. Pave your path with bricks, not straw.

I study because last year I was in a mental hospital for young people and I discovered that I want my death to mean something.

I study because diseases have haunted my family for long enough, and cancer deserves to be taken down once for all.

I study because my father left school at age 13 to work to provide for his family and he has been working ridiculously hard ever since so I can have an education.

I study to be self reliant and to get more answers. The concept of being independent is attractive to me, and if i study hard enough, i will be able to live freely without relying on my parents. The thought of getting answers is a huge satisfaction.

I study because I told my ex, “Watch me go to Harvard”. So oops.

Because I want to have a well paying job which means I can eventually travel the world one day.

I study because I love to be productive really just in love with the feeling of it being noon and already have gotten everything done that I needed for that day. (Submitted by revision-babe)

I want and I like to study because I believe that we as humans have the responsibility of maintain and grow the knowledge people developed in the past. How could we waist all those efforts to try know this wonderful world a little better? (Submitted by mochilunar-universe)

I study because my Dad went through a lot of work to get to this country so that I could have a good life and a good education, and I’m not going to waste all his good efforts and take him and my education for granted.

Because I believe I can do it and I won’t let their words stop me. (Submitted by truly-written-by-me)

I study for my own sense of achievement! I’m also really motivated by my boyfriend who is very clever and works really hard. I want to get a first in my masters this year and I will! (Submitted by @orchidbeam)

I study for Nicki Minaj, she would be proud of me, and all the other women in the world. I hope that my degree will put me in the position to make a better world for all my sisters out there and the little ones.

I study because my family isn’t as rich as our family friends, and other families always make fun about what my dad does for a living. I want to change that and make sure the only thing others talk about is how amazing we turned out and what a good career I’m going into.

I study to make my parent’s hardships (moving to America, to provide a better life for my siblings and I) worth it.

My reason to study is to show myself and everyone I am stronger than my mental illness and to prove everyone who said it would stop me from getting anywhere wrong.

I study so I can change the world for the better.

I study because I want to help my family, to fulfil my dreams and save lives.

To be a champion.

I want to study in order to prove myself and people that being dyslexic and dysorthographic doesn’t mean being stupid. (Submitted bybritannicusmyfav)

I love to learn,and I want to know about all the things I missed because of school system. (Submitted by @seshet)

I study because I want to be the first sibling to go straight into uni without transferring from a community college.

I want to study so that I can transfer out from a community college to a really good university so that people won’t think the decision I made to go to community college was bad. Also to make my DAD super proud!

I study because I want to be the best version of myself.

I study to make those who have taken care of me proud, to show them they did a good job. I also study for myself, to prove that I can fulfil my goals and that everyone who has ever made fun of me just pushed me forward instead of putting the boot in. Getting a good job to live with my boyfriend would be a great plus! We all need motivation, and what’s better to motivate oneself than dreams to fulfil! Here are mine. (~Submitted bystudy-littleidlegirl)

I study because I never want to stop learning about myself and the world we live in.

I study so I’m educated enough to take down the haters in an articulate way so I feel accomplished when leaving the situation.

I study to ensure that when I’m actively in politics, only weak minded people will be able to scorn me due to my ethnic background or religion (or something stupid along those lines) instead of the immaculate policies and work I am carrying out.

I study to become successful in my future and because I have a passion for learning. (Submitted by baklavugh)

I study because I don’t have anything else to do. I guess it keeps me so busy that I don’t have time to think how lonely I am.

Because it makes me happy to see my hard work paid off and also ensures a better future than I would have if I didn’t study well. (Submitted by h4rshitaa)

I study to be able to pursue the career I want. For the thrill of knowledge, the security of understanding. For the way it shapes how I interpret the world. I study not because it is something I must do, but because it is something that is a part of who I am. (Submitted by @audesapare)

I study to improve my mind so I can understand deeply the things people thought I was not capable of understanding. I study so I can live the most fulfilled life possible. I take every second of this life as a chance to learn and improve myself.

Because I’m going to prove girls are useful for more then just looks and a sex object.

I study to open doors of opportunity. I study to improve my and others lives. I study to feel good when I go to sleep. I study to feel confident with my ability. I study to prove to myself what I can do.

Because I want to show to my child that everything needed effort and passion. Also I want to show how important knowledge is, as a mom and as a housewife. (Submitted by studymamapartiallyhousewife)

I study because it makes me happy to know I am in control of my future.

I study because I am curious.

So that I won’t have to struggle like my parents are financially. (Submitted by study-sugar)

I study because I want my single mother who has worked so hard for my education to live a better life when she’s older. I want her to look at me in the future, sitting in my office in a law firm and telling herself “it was all worth it”.

FOR NICKI MINAJ. I WILL GO TO A HIGHER EDUCATION FOR YOU.

I study so that I can be proud of the person that I am.

I study because I want independence. After my bachelor’s degree I plan to be able to continue into further study such as an MA and support myself. I am an only child which has always led my family to be over protective and education will always be my way in holding my own in the world.

I study so I can have the freedom to leave where I am now and actually be happy for a change. Without studying I wouldn’t be able to get the job nor satisfaction in life I know I deserve.

I study because it’s the one thing I can decide for myself.

I study because knowledge is power and I never want to feel inferior to anyone or have any regrets. I don’t want anything to hold me back from achieving my dreams. (Submitted by shreestudies)

I study so I’m not so nervous for tests. Also to improve myself and my learning.

I study because I have a huge thirst for knowledge. I love to learn and allow that to change me as a person for the better. I love being able to understand the world around me and contribute my opinions that have been developed from what I’ve learned. (Submitted bymymindssecretpalace)

I want to be a successful person in life. I can use my intelligence to help those in need. Besides, people won’t belittle or pick on my appearance! ✌

I study because I want to help others and make people aware that how important it is to be literate. (Submitted by anashiv)

I study to show that I have potential. I study to show my learning disabilities and adhd is not me. I study because I want to grow. I study to be the person I know I can be, the person I know I am.

I’m so tired of not passing my tests, of feeling like I don’t know the material. I have testing anxiety which prevents me from doing well. I want to study enough that I feel so comfortable with the material and the anxiety goes away. I want to study so I can begin feeling proud of myself and all my accomplishments.

To help those struggling with different mental illnesses and help them see a better light.

Because I want to build that building.

I study because I want to prove all my male teachers and friends, that not only boys are learning the best, and if I want to, I can beat them all!

I want to study to make my parents proud after all the sacrifices they made for me and to succeed so my family and I can live a better life.

I study because I love to learn new things. (Submitted by ki-soonal)

I study to find a solution to stop the passing on of the genes for hereditary diseases. As in to reduce risk of young children being diagnosed with hereditary diseases.

To get that dream job and slay everyone who said it was too difficult for me.

Because education is awesome.

So I can change the world.

To give my mom and dad the life they deserve! (Submitted by samiya-malik)

Because everything is a competition and I must be best. (Submitted by letustudy)

To prove to myself and others that I can do anything I set my mind to. (Submitted by studiousstudying)

So when you are taking a test/exam your anxiety and stress levels are lower. (Submitted by introvertedturtlequeen)

I study because I want to know I’ve earned everything I achieve.

The biggest reason I study is that all of my friends are incredibly smart and when I was younger I wanted to prove to them that I could keep up, but now that I’ve decided that I don’t need to compete, I study just because it makes me feel good. (Submitted by queen-elbow)

I study because the world is an interesting place, and I want to know it as deeply as possible. (Submitted by matchamonstr)

I study because I am so sick and tired of seeing my mom struggle, all because she didn’t have a good education. I don’t want to wake up to a job I absolutely dread, and be paid minimum wage. I want to say “thanks mom, I can take care of you now.”

I study to grow big enough to reach my high hopes. (Submitted by seriousstudygirl)

To see the look on my mum and dad’s face when they see my results. (Submitted by seizethesaturday)

I study because I love to crush my enemies. I like to see the looks on their faces when they see me succeed. (Submitted by dirtylaundry-emptystyrofoam)

I study because I feel the need to prove to the world that I am more than a child prodigy that burnt out one day. I need to prove to myself that I’m just as good, if not better than I used to be. That I’ve got places to go and people to prove wrong.

I study because I love to teach and I want to know everything that I can so that I can more clearly convey things to others, and to be able to make connections across topics to make things personal and interesting to them. (Submitted by the-homework-fandom)

My dream as a little girl was “to be the most smartest person ever” and I still don’t know what else to do. (Submitted by polaroceanographer)

To create room for the real me in the future.

My reason for studying is so I can get into the university I want, and not have to travel away to one. (Submitted by iggythedragonslayer)

To get a well paid job so my children can have the best possible life.

My reason to study is to prove to my parents and myself that I can achieve my goals without the help of others. My reason to study is to gain valuable knowledge, NOT just for a grade. (Submitted by barbstudies)

To prove to myself that I am strong and can reach my goals. (Submitted by scared-robot

I study so I have a chance of getting into the United States Air Force academy…

I study so I am offered to meet interesting people that are also studying the same field as I am. (Submitted by ghostsname)

I’ll study so I can live relaxed as a cat in Hokkaido.

*Shia LaBoeuf voice* JUST DO IT

So I can prove myself that I am, indeed, intelligent and not just some bimbo with a hollow head. (Submitted by study-guerassimovna)

Because learning new things and having a more informed view of the world is beautiful. (Submitted by studism)

101. I study because Literature is what saves me from my mind.

#self motivation #tips

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sour-ghiden · 3 years

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Sometimes (May 7 2021)

(np) So...where do I start this...Last week I took out the "big bad" thing that I figured out must've been real, based on certain things, gathered intel. I had used the rest of the smallest fragment of bypass to do it, but I took it out. Then, a couple mornings ago, I saw an immense shadow glide across the sky in front of me. I saw it physically. I knew it was across the sky because it went behind the stop sign in front of me. I've kept having this thought pop up in my mind that it's to late to do anything. I had hope that it was not...

After talking it out with my demon/kitsune friend and some thinking, I figured it out. I figure out what was going on. I was being distracted...something had fudged up the structure of this universe and messed things all up. So I had to finish my brain work and then fix this mess....but then something arose...

I; both physically and nonphysically, sank into a very deep depression, anxiety, and state of deep despair. I could not sleep, I barely could function. Nonphysically, I had one point where it seemed nothing was helping calm me down. I was considering drinking the feelings away at the cabin. I had a bunch of bottles filled the bar off the kitchen. I stared at them, wanting to drink things away...but knowing how I'd disappoint the people that believe in me, I didn't drink any of it. It hurt so much, I wanted do stop it...I got frustrated and threw all the bottles on the floor, and then proceeded to trash and tear apart the cabin. Kay showed up, along with the doc, haennah, and Lay. They tried to give me something to calm down, but it wasn't strong enough. They had to restrain me to keep me from hurting myself. They eventually gave me something stronger, my mind became numb and I eventually relaxed and passed out. This continued into the next day. That was my break down. I got a little better, and a friend suggested that whatever had, was, or is messing up this universe, had purposefully sank me into this in order to completely disable me. It seems like it was the case, as the reason for these feeling were lacking. I always said...I can either get depressed, or get angry, guess it's time to get angry. That helped.

Then I had this weird...thing. It was like a game, I was in. I was in a car junk yard maze. I wouldn't be noticed as long as I took the correct route. Behind the start of this maze, there were multiple garages. It was like...storage units, but they were detached, and all garages. Instead of going into the maze, I walked over the garages, one had the door wide open. I looked at the nearest wall of car junk. Most of the junk looked the same but then there was this little, cat sized, yellow and orange/brown dinosaur toy sitting, wedged in there. It was a lambeosaurus. I walked over, and kicked it out of the wall and it got up, shook itself off and ran into the garage in front of me. So I ran after it. The rules of the maze applied to the rules of the garages. You make your way through the junk and vehicles in there, and if you pick the right door (there was three or four each garage), then the bad people wouldn't notice...if the door was unlocked, you were ok, if the door was locked, then the bad people would show up. Each door I thought the same, but they all opened up, all unlocked. I got to the last one, the garage door itself was wide open. I could see there was another junk yard across a huge open, flat, gravel covered, paved, parking lot like area. I was trying to plan what I would do if I got out of the garage with no problem, and the only thing I came up with is to just make a mad run for it. I did not go out the open garage door, for some reason I knew that was the wrong thing to do. I was sure I would pick the wrong door, but I went to the door to the left of the open garage...it worked. I had just gotten outside, and was getting ready to make a run for it, when I was yanked back by the sound of Key's voice.

Earlier today I dreamed that for some reason, everyone needed to look at the sky, something about the stars or something. Not sure what it means, or why, but I think it is important. I continue to correct the mess that's been made with this universe. For now, I think things are calm and quiet and I'm gonna use that to my advantage as much as possible.

#sg posts

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zillowcondo · 6 years

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7 Sparkling Thailand Hidden Gems on the Andaman Coast

In a country as vast as Thailand, there are many opportunities to get off the beaten path. Southern Thailand is particularly picturesque, with the glittering coastline of the Andaman Sea and fascinating landmarks. From unspoiled tropical islands to secret beaches, these Thailand hidden gems are not to be missed.

Thailand Hidden Gems

Cape Panwa, Phuket

Phuket is known for its vibrant atmosphere and bustling night market, yet there is a quieter side to Thailand’s largest island. 8 kilometres from Phuket town, you’ll find Cape Panwa, also known as Khao Khat. It has a tranquil, south-westerly facing beach that’s generally uncrowded. It’s bordered by a mangrove swamp and fishermen’s huts and has nice views towards Lone Island. People tend to walk along the beach rather than swim here as it has a stony seabed. The area has been popular with celebrities for many years and hasn’t changed much since then. Many of them including Leonardo di Caprio have stayed at Cape Panwa Hotel, which overlooks the beach. All of the rooms have direct sea views. The hotel is a good base if you wish to explore internationally renowned Phuket Aquarium, just a few minutes away. It’s also worth heading to Khao Khad Viewpoint for 360 degree views over the coast and surrounding area.

Fossil Shell Beach, Krabi

One of only three fossil beaches worldwide, Fossil Shell Beach in Krabi is a fascinating place. Susaan Hoi, to give the site its Thai name, is located at Ban Laem Pho in Krabi. Despite its man-made appearance, its a natural phenomenon that’s 40 million years old. Hundreds of thousands of snail shell fossils have joined together to form slabs which look rather like concrete. At low tide you can sometimes see new fossils being formed. It’s a popular spot for both tourists and locals to take photos. You can access Fossil Shell Beach via the visitor centre on Ban Laem Pho Road. It’s open until 4.30 pm daily and there’s a 200 baht entrance fee to the site. Alternatively, it’s free to enter after 4.30 pm and a nice place to see the sunset. Make sure to wear shoes with a good grip as it can be slippy at certain times of day.

There are quite a few stalls lining the short walk down to the beach, selling clothing and refreshments. The pearl jewellery is great value compared to many places in central Krabi and there are lots of different styles. If you’re staying at the luxurious boutique hotel, The ShellSea Krabi, you can walk along the beach in the early afternoon at low tide.

Khao Ngon Nak Nature Trail, Krabi

Thailand is blessed with 147 National Parks, spread all over the country. If you want to escape the buzz of Krabi town centre, Khao Ngon Nak National Park makes a great excursion. Also known as Dragon Crest Mountain, it’s known for its lush vegetation and viewpoints.

The park is easily reached by taxi from the centre of town or you could stay a few minutes away at Amari Vogue. At the entrance to the park, staff will ask you to fill in a form, so that they can keep track of everyone who is entering the park.

It’s a steep path and not suitable for young children, the disabled or injured. In fact we’d recommend wearing hiking boots rather than sports shoes or sandals. Take water with you, though most of the path goes through the forest and is nice and shady.

You hike four kilometres through the park, passing a small waterfall and stream along the way. It takes several hours to reach the summit, from which you’ll be rewarded with a panoramic view of the surrounding area. 565 metres above sea level, Khao Ngon Nak Viewpoint won’t disappoint. The cliff ledge jutting out from the mountain is closed to visitors as it’s too dangerous, but you can get a great view from the summit’s rock nonetheless.

Koh Phi Phi Don

The Phi Phi Islands are true Thailand gems and extremely popular with visitors. One of the reasons are their close proximity to Maya Bay, where the movie The Beach was filmed. You may have heard that Maya Bay can get rather crowded. That’s certainly true in mid afternoon. It’s therefore worth staying overnight on Koh Phi Phi Don. From here you can take one of the first speedboat tours and be here before 9 am. Out of the six Phi Phi Islands, Koh Phi Phi Don is the only one that is inhabited.

Head to Phi Phi Viewpoint at 186 metres high for fantastic views over Tonsai and Loh Dalum bay. From Tonsai Village, just head towards Loh Dalum Bay and follow the signs. It’s only about 30 minutes to the top and an easy walk as most of the path is paved. There’s a little snack stall at the top although it’s a good idea to take water with you for the climb, as well as around 30 baht for the entrance fee.

Phi Phi Island Village Resort & Spa is one of the best hotels on Koh Phi Phi Don. It’s a tranquil spot on Loh Bakao Bay, also known as Loh Bagao, overlooking the turquoise Andaman Sea. All the accommodation is in traditional Thai style but with modern comforts like air-con and high speed Wi-Fi. The 800 metre long bay faces North East but gets plenty of sunshine. Next to the resort, a path leads to the local village which has quite a few shops and places to eat such as Oasis Bar and Restaurant. At the end of the village, you’ll come to mangroves and a bridge nicknamed The Golden Gate by the locals.

Koh Yao Noi

This unspoiled island is one of our favourite hidden gems in Thailand. The name Koh Yao Noi means Island (Koh) Long (Yao) and Little (Noi). Getting here is part of the fun – you take a speedboat from the very swanky Phuket Yacht Haven. In 55 minutes you’re transported to Koh Yao Noi. Measuring just 50 square kilometres, it has a rural charm. Walking around the island, you’ll see buffalo grazing in the shade. There are many rubber trees being tapped with a bucket to collect the sap. Despite being so tranquil, there are actually several five star hotels on the island. It’s also one of the closest places to James Bond Island, which makes a great day excursion.

Koh Yao Yai is known for its wildlife, in particular the Oriental Pied Hornbill birds. These colourful creatures are distinguished by their yellow beak. They feed mainly on berries, figs and live mainly in tree canopies. One of the best places to spot them is at Paradise Koh Yao Yai. This beachfront boutique hotel is one of our favourite Thailand luxury escapes. They also have a new sister hotel next door where guests can stay in funky treehouses. From here you can kayak around the neighbouring islands or snorkel in the crystal clear waters.

Koh Yao Yai

Although this is the larger of the two Koh Yao islands, Koh Yao Yai is the least populated. Nestled in Phang Nga Bay, it’s just 10 minutes away from Koh Yao Yai by long tail boat, making it an ideal destination for Thailand island hopping. If travelling from Phuket, you can take a speedboat from Bangrong Pier to Klong Hia Pier. Koh Yao Yai is one of the most authentic Thailand hidden gems, with some lovely beaches. You can get around by tuk-tuk or by hiring a bicycle. There are also tours that will show you the highlights of the island, such as the rice paddy fields and a marine lobster farm. You might however prefer to sunbathe on Ao Muang or Son Bay beach, or to get a massage from Dr Saad, a blind masseur based in Ban Lo Po, Koh Yao Yai, who speaks excellent English.

It’s best to stay overnight in order to truly appreciate the island’s beauty. Santhiya is an exceptional hotel in traditional Thai style. Ornate wooden carvings abound and master craftsmen are sculpting more in the lobby pillars. The views from the infinity pool are superb and there are several complimentary classes to initiate guests into Thai boxing and dance.

Loh Samah Bay near The Beach

As we mentioned, if you’re visiting iconic Maya Bay, aka The Beach, it can get crowded. Yet there is a more serene side to Maya Bay, if you know where to find it. Loh Samah Bay is on the other side of the island and accessible by traditional long-tail boat for confident swimmers. In fact, it’s possible to hire your own private long tail boat for the day. You can then travel to various nearby sights such as Monkey Bay, where you will see monkeys in their natural habitat, at the most convenient times. The Viking Cave is also interesting, having some wall paintings which are apparently quite recent.

For those arriving at The Beach itself, once you’ve admired Maya Bay and its limestone cliffs, then walk past the restrooms to Loh Samah Bay on the opposite side of the island. It’s only a few minutes walk. Here you’ll find wooden steps from which you can swim in the azure blue water. Snorkeling in the crystal clear water is a great experience, with a myriad of colourful fish to spot. Just be careful not to disturb the coral.

Check out our vlog for the inside scoop on these Thailand hidden gems.

youtube

As you can see, there are some truly impressive hidden gems of Thailand where you’ll enjoy tranquility and stunning scenery. We uncovered these secret Thailand escapes with the help of Travelbag and the Tourism Authority of Thailand. Which of these gems would you most like to visit? Are there any other hidden Thailand places that you’d recommend to visitors?

Pin for later or share with friends if you’ve found this useful

In association with Travelbag and the Tourism Authority of Thailand

The post 7 Sparkling Thailand Hidden Gems on the Andaman Coast appeared first on Luxury Columnist.

7 Sparkling Thailand Hidden Gems on the Andaman Coast published first on http://bogouzunshang.tumblr.com/

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njawaidofficial · 7 years

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'Awards Chatter' Podcast — Ryan Murphy ('Feud: Bette and Joan')

http://styleveryday.com/2017/08/14/awards-chatter-podcast-ryan-murphy-feud-bette-and-joan/

'Awards Chatter' Podcast — Ryan Murphy ('Feud: Bette and Joan')

“The only difference between me and the ten guys and women who were in my writing group when I first started out here in Hollywood is that I’m the only one of those people who just didn’t take no for an answer and didn’t become devastated over the rejection,” says Ryan Murphy, the writer, director, producer and showrunner best known for creating or co-creating The WB’s Popular, FX’s Nip/Tuck, Fox’s Glee, NBC’s The New Normal and Fox’s Scream Queens, as well as the ongoing FX anthology series American Horror Story, American Crime Story and Feud. As we sit down at the offices of Ryan Murphy Productions on the Fox lot to record an episode of The Hollywood Reporter‘s ‘Awards Chatter’ podcast, Murphy continues, “I think that’s because when I was growing up, I would get pushed down. And what are you gonna do? You gonna stay on the ground? No, you’re gonna get up and you’re gonna keep going. I’ve always had that philosophy: ‘Okay, well, that didn’t work out — and it hurt — so what’s the next thing that might?'”

(Click above to listen to this episode or here to access all of our 165 episodes via iTunes. Past guests include Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, Eddie Murphy, Lady Gaga, Robert De Niro, Amy Schumer, Will Smith, Jennifer Lopez, Louis C.K., Emma Stone, Harvey Weinstein, Natalie Portman, Jerry Seinfeld, Jane Fonda, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Nicole Kidman, Aziz Ansari, Taraji P. Henson, J.J. Abrams, Helen Mirren, Justin Timberlake, Brie Larson, Ryan Reynolds, Alicia Vikander, Warren Beatty, Jessica Chastain, Samuel L. Jackson, Kate Winslet, Sting, Isabelle Huppert, Tyler Perry, Sally Field, Michael Moore, Lily Collins, Denzel Washington, Mandy Moore, Ricky Gervais, Kristen Stewart, James Corden, Sarah Silverman, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Beckinsale, Bill Maher, Lily Tomlin, Rami Malek, Allison Janney, Eddie Redmayne, Olivia Wilde, Trevor Noah and Elisabeth Moss.)

Murphy, 51, was born and raised in Indianapolis — partially by his grandmother, who helped to introduce him to film and TV — as part of “a very rigorous, conservative,” religious, middle-class family. He knew early on that he was gay, but remained in the closet until the age of 15, when his mother discovered love letters that he had exchanged with an older boy and sent him to a therapist. The therapist met with him several times and then told his parents that they could either love him or lose him, and they got on board — but even so, by the time he graduated from high school and college, he knew that he needed to get away. “I always wanted to come to Hollywood, even as a young kid, and I always knew I would end up here,” he says, “I just didn’t know how.”

After college, Murphy headed west “with nothing” but, nevertheless, “instantly loved it.” A journalism major in college, he started out as a freelance writer and eventually graduated to churning out celebrity profiles for Entertainment Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, while doing his own writing on the side. “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but I knew the way in was to write,” he recalls, and indeed his first screenplay, Why Can’t I Be Audrey Hepburn?, was read by an agent and bought by Steven Spielberg. “From that, everyone wanted to meet me,” he recalls. Murphy spent the next two years selling movie pitches and writing scripts, but, he says, “I realized, at that point, that I didn’t really want to be a writer; what I really wanted to be was a director/producer.”

At the urging of Murphy’s agent at the time, he turned one of his film scripts into a TV pitch, and all four networks bid on it. It wound up at The WB in 1999 as Popular, and it helped to put him on the map. He loved much about working in television — “I loved the pace of it and the energy and I liked creating something and writing something and then you were shooting it a week later,” he explains — but his overall experience with that show was “really terrible”: “I had homophobic executives; I was constantly being told to change who I was and what I was writing; and I always felt like I was 15 years old, you know, back pre-shrink.” The show was canceled after two seasons.

At that point, Murphy says, “I just decided, ‘Okay, well, what do you want to do and what do you want to be? You’ve got a foot in the door and your next move has to be pretty good.” In 2003, inspired by Mike Nichols and his 1971 film Carnal Knowledge, as well as an article that he came across about plastic surgery, he created the series Nip/Tuck for FX, marking his first of many collaborations with that network; his first time doing a show that didn’t really fit into any pre-existing mold; and, with the exception of one episode of Popular, his first time directing. “That was sort of the birth of a different part of my life and career,” he says, and he was recognized for it with a best drama series Golden Globe Award in 2005.

With his stock soaring, Murphy poured his heart and soul into Pretty Handsome, a pilot about a small-town gynecologist who realizes he is a woman, but, to his devastation, FX passed on it. However, this proved to be the first of several times when a low moment paved the way for high ones soon after — in this case, Glee and American Horror Story. “Every great success that I’ve had in my life has come from a disappointment that I was devastated by,” he marvels. “From that Pretty Handsome melancholy came these two big hits in my career, and it only happened, I think, because I was forced to get quiet and say to myself, ‘Well what do you really want to talk about?'” (He notes that a similar thing happened years later when FX declined to pick up his pilot Open, soon after which he arrived at the idea for The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.)

Glee was “an optimistic family musical” in which “the underdogs would always win,” Murphy says, noting, “There was a lot of my childhood in there.” Beyond being a musical series, the show — which ran on Fox from 2009 through 2015, arriving, like Modern Family, shortly after the election of America’s first black president — prominently featured LGBTQ and disabled characters, and became a full-fledged hit. “That was one of the biggest shocks of my life, that that show became what it became,” he confesses. Two years into its run, he launched a totally different sort of program — an anthology series in the mold of The Twilight Zone and others from TV’s Golden Age, only with a horror tint — and American Horror Story became an award-winning hit in its own right.

What’s with all the genre hopping, which most TV content creators never get to do because they either have more limited interests or get pigeon-holed into one sort of work? Murphy gets the chance, he says, because “Not everything [I do] does work, but I’ve had enough things that have that shouldn’t have” that he is given the benefit of the doubt. The desire, though, exists for deeper reasons. “I love all different genres and I just sort of bounce around between them because it keeps things fresh for me,” he explains. “And, I guess, maybe subconsciously, in the early days it was a way for me to not be stereotyped, when I have felt, as a minority, that I’m so stereotyped. He adds, “Now, I would say, it really is by design. I really love it.”

Another thing he loves: actors. He has built a veritable stock company over the years, led by his two queens from different generations, Jessica Lange and Sarah Paulson, and also including Kathy Bates, Frances Conroy, Angela Bassett, Lily Rabe, Evan Peters, Emma Roberts, Matt Bomer and Denis O’Hare, plus many behind-the-scenes collaborators. “I think it comes from me having a sense of, ‘I wish that I had more of a close-knit family growing up and maybe felt a part of a community growing up,’ and I didn’t,” he reflects. As for the disproportionate number of women, and particularly older women, with whom he works, he says, “I like writing roles for women over 40 because it just resurfaces them, and they’re great.” This year, he started the Half Foundation, an initiative within his production company, to make 50 percent of his on-set hires women.

Murphy also has used his pedestal to highlight stories about gay people, not only on Glee, but in his short-lived semi-autobiographical NBC sitcom The New Normal (2012-2013) and his HBO TV movie The Normal Heart (2014), on which he partnered with Larry Kramer to bring Kramer’s landmark play to the screen after years of roadblocks. Productions like these would not have been possible less than two decades ago, when Murphy was starting out in the business. “I feel like I haven’t changed,” he says. “I feel what changed is the executives. The executives are now great — like, they want those characters. They know that launching a conversation about anything in visibility means a more diversified audience, which leads to success.”

Recently, Murphy has devoted a lot of his time to launching new FX anthology series in the mold of American Horror Story. He started last year with American Crime Story and its first installment, The People v. O.J. Simpson, which proved a towering success. And this year he did so again with Feud and its first installment, Bette and Joan, an eight-part study of the complicated relationship between the legendary movie stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, two best actress Oscar winners, starring two other best actress Oscar winners, the aforementioned Lange, as Crawford, as well as Susan Sarandon, as Davis. For it, Murphy personally received three Emmy nominations in July — best limited series, best directing for a limited series, movie or dramatic special and best writing for a limited series, movie or dramatic special — bringing his career tally to 23, four of which have turned into wins: best directing for a comedy series for Glee in 2010; best TV movie for The Normal Heart in 2014; best limited series for The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story in 2016; and best short form nonfiction or reality series for Inside Look: The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story in 2016.

Murphy, who grew up obsessed with Hollywood’s Golden Age and the Oscars, interviewed Davis when he first moved out to L.A., and created Feud using information from that conversation, tons of other research and a film script that he and Plan B bought years ago. He insists that the bickering of the two actresses featured on the show was not at all replicated by the two actresses who brought them back to life on his set. “It was a love-fest,” he says of Lange and Sarandon’s interactions. “They actually worked well together and supported each other and had great ideas for scenes for each other, so none of that happened. And hilariously, and thankfully, they were both nominated for best actress, as opposed to poor Joan Crawford, who wasn’t invited to the party [in 1963 for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, when the Academy nominated Davis but not Crawford for best actress]. Jessica and Susan are staunch feminists and believe in equality, and they’re not gonna do that bullshit. They’re just not those people. They’re not interested in petty gossiping. I’ve never met two women less interested in that.”

The one bit of drama that has been associated with Feud has come from the most unexpected of places: Olivia de Havilland, the sole legendary actress portrayed in the film who still is alive today. In June, on the eve of her 101st birthday, de Havilland sued Murphy for, allegedly, defaming her on the show (which she had not yet seen when I asked her about it in April). “I was saddened by it because I felt that I really had written and produced and directed a love letter to these women, and I was like, ‘Oh, no, really? I love her so much,'” Murphy says. “I’m sorry that she feels badly about it, but I don’t know why she feels badly.” In reference to Feud‘s depiction of de Havilland, he insists, “There is absolutely nothing but love — there is no malice, there is nothing said that’s not treating her like a lady.”

Murphy emphasizes, “The other thing that I think people should know about the docudramas that I do — be it Feud or American Crime Story with O.J. or [the subjects of an upcoming installment] Charles and Diana and on and on — you know, we don’t just write those and film them; we write them and lawyers read them and they say, ‘Where did you get this piece of information from? Where is this quote of Olivia de Havilland coming from?’ Obviously, the construct of doing a documentary wrap-around is a device of docudrama that’s been done since God was a boy. But everything that we have Olivia or Joan or Bette saying is, I would say, based completely on existing information, either research or interviews. And in the case of Olivia de Havilland, we have a very long document, as we did with Joan and Bette, where we say, ‘This is where we got this line from. She said this in an interview.’ Is it directly the exact line? No, some of it’s tweaked, but it’s all based on fact, it’s all based on research. And this had been vetted for months before we even shot any episode.”

He notes, “I feel like Olivia de Havilland is a historical figure, and I’m just sad she didn’t love it as much as everybody else seemed to. But I also have the support of Fox, and we have 15 lawyers who have reviewed every claim and think there absolutely is no claim.” But, he emphasizes, “I have nothing but love and admiration for her, and I do think it will all end up okay. Maybe I’ll get to meet her in court, but I hope it doesn’t go that far. The first thing I would do is say, ‘Can I have an autograph? I really love you! I really do!'”

Throughout our conversation, while discussing past traumas, personal and professional, and even lawsuits, Murphy exudes calm, but he says that doesn’t mean he isn’t upset about some of what’s going on around him. “I feel very angry about the state of the country,” he vents, “and I feel like the best thing that I can do is sit up straight and shut up and just write characters that are going through difficulties, so that people can see that and, as human beings, hopefully recognize that pain is pain is pain. That’s what I’m interested in doing as my sort of political activism.”

Glee Primetime Emmy Awards Feud

#Awards #Bette #Chatter #Feud #Joan #Murphy #Podcast #Ryan

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thecloudlight-blog · 7 years

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New Post has been published on Cloudlight

New Post has been published on https://cloudlight.biz/students-teachers-craft-software/

Students, teachers craft software

Today’s astronomers don’t really observe stars or galaxies a lot as photographs comprised of records generated with the aid of mild. If those identical records were used to provide three-D printouts, tactile presentations or sound, would it open the take a look at and pursuit of astronomy to the blind and visually impaired?

That’s the kind of query the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory and its companions will try and answer with the assist of a $2.five million Countrywide Technological know-how Basis provide. Over the subsequent three years, they will expand Afterglow Access—new software as a way to make astronomy greater handy to the blind and visually impaired.

“Brilliant pics of stars begin as numbers on a spreadsheet

And those numbers may be manipulated and provided in myriad approaches,” said Kate Meredith, director of schooling outreach at the Yerkes Observatory and the training lead of Innovators Developing on hand Gear for Astronomy, a new research initiative from the observatory. “We won’t remember ourselves successful except inside 3 years we have advanced new PC Tools with and for the blind and visually impaired that can be used in real programs, mastering situations and scholarly research.”

The Countrywide Federation of the Blind estimates that more than seven million People are visually disabled. Unequal Get admission to quantitative facts and the shortage of vision-impartial Tools presents them with obstacles to having a look at and master astronomy and other STEM topics, Meredith said.

Dangers of Mobile Phone to Students of Secondary School

The secondary faculty is a term used to explain an educational organization wherein the very last level of training, called secondary education and usually obligatory as much as a distinct age, takes vicinity. It follows basic or number one education, and may be observed by means of university (tertiary) schooling.

There are many exceptional kinds of secondary faculty, and the terminology used varies around the arena. Kids normally transfer to secondary college between the ages of 10 and 16 years, and finish between the long time of 15 and 19 years, though there is massive variation from u. S . A . to a country.

Depending on the system, faculties for this period or a part of it can be known as secondary schools, high colleges, gymnasia, lyceums, center faculties, faculties, vocational schools and preparatory colleges, and the precise which means of any of these varies among the structures.

The secondary college students are those students of put up number one studies or as described above.

It’s miles at this degree of lecturers that students lay the inspiration in their destiny. Regardless of what the pupil wants to be in existence, the way is paved at this level this is why maximum mistakes which are not corrected in secondary college lives with maximum college students until the relaxation in their lives. Constructing humans with worldwide ardor are deeply rooted in this stage of schooling.

A mobile smartphone (additionally called cell, cellular smartphone, or mobile cell phone) is an electronic device used for two-way radio telecommunication over a cellular network of base stations called cellular websites. cellular telephones fluctuate from cordless phones, which simplest offer smartphone provider inside limited range thru a single base station attached to a hard and fast land line, for example within a home or a workplace.

A cell phone lets in its user to make and receive phone calls to and from the general public smartphone community which incorporates other mobiles and stuck-line phones the world over. It does this by means of connecting to a cellular community owned through a mobile community operator. A key characteristic of the mobile network is that it enables seamless smartphone calls even when the consumer is moving around extensive areas through a method known as handoff or handover.

Teachers Have a Great Role in the Upbringing of Children

College is an area in which infant learns and gets most know-how and boom throughout the gaining knowledge of the method. It’s also a place wherein his hidden potentials are tapped. This learning process for a kid starts of evolved whilst the mother and father ship the kid to playschool and continues till university where he receives his graduation or publishes commencement.

As we see it truly that a toddler spends nearly 6 to 7 hours an afternoon for the duration of the year (except during vacations) in School, it’s miles apparent that teachers have a terrific role to play in the upbringing of children.

As an infant may be without difficulty molded in a proper way like clay in a potter’s hand, it’s miles important to remember the fact that teachers can correct the kid’s behavior and character, every time and anyplace vital. He can also shape up the kid’s personality with the aid of being a role version in upbringing the kids in College.

As kids are very affectionate, innocent, adaptable and docile

It turns into mandatory for the lecturers to have each expert competency and a very robust ethical heritage as she will gradually impact and form up each infant’s personality with mild persuasion.

As most children have a wonderful admire for their instructors, this gain should be nicely utilized in correcting, advising and upbringing the children by way of leading children during specific hard situations and situations encountered in school rooms.

Besides, a teacher is a second parent to everyone in all her college students. Whether or not the kid is too younger or in his teens, a teacher should be effective in her technique with the aid of being impartial, loving and simultaneously leading through examples in all her endeavors.

As trainer has a crucial function to play in a pupil’s life

It’s miles accurate to mention they’re the people who should create generations altogether. In brief, they’re in some way the builder of our state as they may be uncovered to a mass of students who’re the future citizens of u. S . A .. So, it’s miles very important and essential for the teachers to steer and have an effect on the students apply in every stroll of lifestyles no matter Whether it’s far in a lecture room or maybe out of doors the magnificence.

Instructors ought to additionally inspire their college students to construct them into remarkable persona Whether they emerge as an architect, engineer, docs, instructors, businessmen or any professions of their interest. They ought to additionally shape them to make contributions to the society by way of being upstanding residents of our nation.

The main function a teacher may want to do is to make her class very thrilling by getting almost all the college students worried by way of asking questions or while discussing a topic. The extra involvement, the extra the child learns. This way the studying receives less complicated and thrilling.

Except, even outside the elegance room, she needs to continue to steer and accurate the children by constructing their person in all factors of lifestyles.

Although, it’s far really worth stating that the scholars can be successful in his lifestyles if equal help is backed up with the aid of the figure at domestic as well.

5 Things You Can Do With Real Estate Software

Real property management isn’t always that smooth, particularly if you have so many things to reflect consideration on. With the proper Actual estate software program, however, you will be capable of making the management process clean and clean so you can run your businesses without installing an excessive amount of effort. The best element of the solutions is that you could customize them to fit your actual property desires. software program applications designed for estate industry are scalable so that you are capable of grow with them as your business keeps to grow. There may be so much you could do with Real estate software program and they consist of the subsequent.

1. Manipulate contacts

Using the exceptional software program software, you can Manage details of contacts in defined groups making it less complicated so that you can get right of entry to them any given day. A great software may also make it feasible so as to hold distinctive statistics of clients and customers or even automate proper wishes on their anniversaries, birthdays and other celebrations.

2. Manipulate personnel

if you have software for Real estate, you may easily have a number of customers running within one account. This you can do through developing a couple of worker logins and hierarchies in line with your employer structure. It makes allocation and execution of labor less complicated by means of anyone from admin to managers. Using the machine you may additionally Manage daily reporting of your personnel and on the identical time reveal their overall performance. They then again will be able to agenda belongings inspection, conferences and venture reminders making mission execution greater efficient.

3. Combine Actual property portals and web sites

Out of your CRM account, you may manage your internet site so you have an clean time maintaining it up to date. The estate management answer makes it viable so that it will create and Combine internet portals where you list your homes at once. you can post tasks from property software program to website and build a good brand The usage of professionally designed Real estate web sites. This form of coordination promotes consistency on your Actual property commercial enterprise and this can prefer your management strategies and enhance your emblem photograph.

4. keep reviews and analytics

As a extreme estate commercial enterprise, you should preserve up with what matters maximum to the business. Using the exceptional software program for the Actual property industry, you can without problems fetch every year, month-to-month and each day reviews of enquiries and properties. Using the program you can pair matching reports for residences and open enquires and even categorize the enquiries by means of source. you could also maintain abreast of all pending activities so that you do not depart something of significance out.

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