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sweetwritertanya · 4 years

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Nothing To Be Jealous About (Jimin)

A/N: Hope you all enjoy this last chapter for the ‘Jealousy’ series. I had the idea for this series a good while back and I had a lot of fun writing all the parts. Some of the story-lines came to me a long time ago, others I had to think deeply about, but I am more than happy with all of them and I hope you all are too. If you read all of them, thank you so very much! It means the world to me to know people actually enjoy my stories, so I can’t be thankful enough. Sending lots of love to all of you, wonderful people!

Summary: Dressing up a bit more elegantly than usual, it rises suspicions from the some of the members when they see you walk by. At the conjecture that you might be going on a date after work, Jimin comes to a life-changing realization.

Warnings: ANGST and FLUFF! Just a bit more angsty than I was expecting, but also ends with a lot of fluffy goodness, so it’s okay! The reader is a bit insecure, but nothing major!

Word Count: 2830

The day was warm and sunny for autumn as you walked down the corridors of BigHit’s company. Your strapped kitten-heels closed-toe sandals making a loud clicking and clacking noise as you moved forward. It made you a bit self-conscious, a constant reminder that you weren’t in your favorite sneakers or flat boots like usual.

Turning the corner, you come across the company’s pride and joy group entering their practice room, seven boys and their managers as well as some staff members having just arrived from early morning interviews. Your heart shudders and aches a bit; you were hoping to avoid them all the whole day. No such luck.

Clinging tightly to the folders in your hands, you force yourself to keep up the pace and smile shyly as you approach them, trying to go by as unnoticed as possible.

“Hey, Y/N! Morning!” you hear Taehyung greet before you could sneak by, a gentle smile on his lips and waving politely.

“Morning” you greet back, trying to sound as cheerful as any other day.

“The elevator is still out of service?” Jin joins the conversation, referring to how you were forced to carry the documents in your hands through the hallways and up the stairs instead of just taking the elevator to your team’s floor.

“Yeah, but they should be able to fix it before lunch, I think” you share, already taking a few steps forward as you talked, subconsciously trying to escape as soon as possible.

“What’s that? Fix what?” the person you were most dreading to see joins the conversation.

Jimin comes around his hyung to see what you were all talking about, catching just the end of the conversation. He was wearing some black jeans, a red and black window pane plaid shirt with two pockets at his chest and the first few buttons undone, showing off his collarbone. He had only one or two piercings in his ears, a very casual outfit considering the fashionable looks he wore so much.

“Hi, Y/N” he says as he realizes you were there, smiling friendly like he always did.

“The elevator” Jin responds to his question, capturing his attention for a moment. “You know, the one who shut down yesterday during the afternoon? They’ll fix it in the morning, it seems.”

“Oh, right. Y/N, you…” Jimin doesn’t get to finish what he was about to say, as he looks back and you were no longer there.

Searching, he finds you already down the hallway, determined steps taking you to the staircase. He frowns a bit, confused about why you left suddenly. It is only then that he realizes what looked different in you. Instead of the baggy t-shirts and sweaters, jeans and some sneakers, you were actually in a medi-dress, a tartan white and grass-green plaid over the dark forest green base, singed at your waist, a white blouse underneath the strappy garment and some beige sandals on your feet.

“Say, guys, didn’t Y/N look… different, today?” he asks, eyes still set at the end of the corridor just before you disappeared from his field of view.

“Yeah, she was wearing a dress. She looked pretty cute” Taehyung declares, crossing his arms and shrugging his shoulders.

“I think she looked nice too. I wonder if she’s going on a date or something” Jin conjectured, making Jimin’s head snap in a flash to his side.

“What? Why a date?” his voice is just maybe an octave or two higher than he meant to be.

“Why not? She’s single as far as I know, and that looked like an appropriate outfit for a first date” Jin continued, defensive. “I mean, I’m just guessing, I don’t know.”

The boys all enter the practice room and start preparing, but Jimin is still unable of letting it go. His angelic face is scrunched up in thought, strong eyebrows pulled together as he thinks.

“You know, not all single women have to go on dates! And people can dress up whenever they like, not just to go out with someone!” he continues arguing, next to his friends.

“Geez, Jimin, just let poor Y/N go!” Taehyung whines, patting Jimin’s shoulder.

“Go? Go where?”

Taehyung shares a look with Jin and Jungkook steps into the circle with wide knowing eyes and sucking on a cartoon of milk. Jimin remains confused.

“You do know that Y/N had a crush on your since, like, her first day here, right?” Taehyung asks, chuckling by the end of the sentence.

Jimin’s blank stare and paralyzed stance is all the answer they need.

“Yeah, she always got shy and nervous when you were around, I’ve seen it” Jungkook contributes, nodding his head.

“It was pretty obvious, Jiminie. Which is why I think it’s great if she is really going on a date or something, she’s trying to move on” Jin explains, a wondering look in his eyes as he regards the still in shock Jimin. “You do want her to move on, right? I mean, you’ve shown no interest in her so far, so… right?”

And he hadn’t. Not really, he was just as friendly with you as he was to anyone else. All warm words and smiling eyes, helping hands and soft touches that lasted just a moment and remained in your memories forever. You knew he had no special interest in you whatsoever, you were far from the type of girl he probably saw himself with. Round and bulky, shy and quiet. Romantically, you were sure he wouldn’t look at you twice. And yet, it took you years to finally accept it, to push your own feelings aside and try and move on, find somebody else.

So, here you were. Waiting for the elevator – freshly fixed that morning – about to go on a first blind date with a friend’s friend. You’d put in the effort and got a bit dressed up, put on just a tad more make-up than usual, did your hair and dressed nicely. Somehow it still felt like it wouldn’t be enough.

Shorter days meant the evenings were darker than you were used to. You wished you had the foresight to bring a jacket that morning, as the outside looked a lot colder now. You hugged yourself with hands going up and down your forearms, hoping the restaurant your date had chosen was a warm establishment.

Abruptly, a dark leather jacket fell onto your shoulders from behind, covering your back and arms from the chilly air you were feeling.

“Hey.”

Jimin stepped next to you and suddenly your heart was at your throat and your stomach turned in your belly, taking every ounce of willpower in you to not blush furiously or stutter as you responded.

“Hello.” You took one of your hands to grab the sleeve of the jacket, keeping your eyes set on it rather than at the man you were talking to. “What’s this for?”

“You looked chilly” he shrugged, nonchalant. “I don’t need it and it’s a cold evening, so you can take it.”

“Thank you” you accept with gratitude, trying once more to not read too much into this. Good-hearted gestures like this were what started all this mess in the first place.

The arrival of the elevator saved you from having to continue the conversation for now, as you entered the opening doors and pressed the button to the ground floor.

“Lobby?” you ask him.

“Yes, please. Thanks.”

A few minutes of silence as the elevator starts to descend, your hands nervously grasping and ungrasping the strap of your purse.

“You look very pretty today” he compliments out of the blue, in the softest of voices.

Absolutely shocked, you freeze for a second, ignoring your singing heartbeat and the shiver down your back.

“T-Thank you” is all you could say. Much of all you said to him so far, actually.

“Are you… Are you going out on a date after work?” There’s a crack in his voice for a split second, but he rapidly glazes over it and continues. “Some of the guys said that but I thought they were exaggerating. Could be a family meeting or a friend’s reunion or-”

“It is a date” you clarify, even though you are not sure why you feel like you owe him any explanation. “A blind date, to be exact.”

The elevator is almost to the lobby and your legs are restless with energy as all you want is to leave through the still closed doors in front of you. This conversation hurt, his sudden curiosity hurt, just his mere presence hurt. You wanted, needed to escape.

“What… What if I said don’t go?”

It was barely a whisper, just the smallest of voices coming from the man standing behind you in the small elevator room. The doors ping open but you stay frozen despite the restlessness from before. Slowly, carefully, you turn your head to look back and finally glance at Jimin’s face. He looks serious and slightly scared, plump lips tensely closed, eyes searching yours, arms crossed.

“What?” you whisper back in disbelief.

“Don’t go. On a date.” He presses on, this time in a clear voice.

You turn your back over, looking straight again as a dry chuckle leaves your parted lips. A mixture of anger, embarrassment and hurt make you shake your head as your eyes begin to sting a bit and you march away from him, intent on making your way to the building’s door and reaching the outside road, where your date should already be waiting.

“Y/N! Y/N, wait!”

A hand reaches for yours but you pull it out of reach and stop dead in your tracks as you turn to Jimin, eyes already much too glossy for your own good, eyebrows grimacing and bottom jaw quivering a bit.

“Why are you doing this to me?” you question, almost an accusation. Surely, he knew. He had to. He knew of your feelings and instead of allowing you to move on, he was purposely holding you back. You never knew him to be a selfish person, but there was no other reason possible for him to do this to you.

Thankfully, the lobby was mostly empty aside from the guards and the workers at the front desk. None of them seemed to really noticed you two just yet, so Jimin guided you gently towards the door to the staircase that was no longer used. Once the door closed behind you two, he started pacing, a guilty expression ever-present in his features.

“When they told me-….” He takes a deep breath with closed eyes, forcing himself to stand still in front of you. “When the guys suggested you might be going on a date, I felt weird. Never have I ever felt quite like this before, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I felt sick and betrayed and hurt and-”

“Stop!” you almost beg in a broken voice. You feel your face heat up and your eye vision blurs due to the tears you try to hold back. “Stop. Don’t do this to me. Not now. Not when-!” A sob escapes you in mid-sentence and you try to quickly clean the tear rolling down your chubby cheek. “Not when I’ve been in love with you for all these years a-and I’m finally tr-trying to move on! Y-You don’t have the right!”

If only your eyes had been set on his instead of at his feet, you would have seen the ache your words produced, the way his neck and ears grew red as he was trying not to cry too, seeing you break down like this in front of him feeling the same as if someone clawed their way into his chest and ripped his heart out. Each tear that fell from your beautiful eyes brought more tears to his and it was making it impossible for him to breathe.

“You don’t love me, so you c-can’t say you are betrayed or hurt or anything. Not to me.” You finish expressing, hands shaking by your sides.

Jimin takes hold of your trembling hands in his and raises them up to kiss at the knuckles, a gesture that finally makes you look up at him with uncertainty and puzzlement.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry Y/N, I’m sorry” he says, wanting nothing more than to erase the painful appearance on your face, erase the salty drops that stained your cheeks. “I didn’t mean for this to happen like this. I got jealous and wanted to stop you from going, I didn’t mean to hurt you ever, Y/N.”

You actually laugh with no humor behind it, shaking your head as you look somewhere behind Jimin, rather than at him.

“That’s just it. You don’t even like me and got jealous about me going and giving attention to some other guy. But the thing is, you have nothing to be jealous about. I could go on a hundred dates and I honestly think my feelings wouldn’t change.” You look at him then, with fresh tears drowning your lower lashes and a sad smile. “How pathetic am I, right?”

The jacket around your shoulders suddenly gets pulled forward harshly, making you lose your step and fall right into Jimin’s open arms. Your mind goes blank for a moment, when all your can smell is his herbaceous musky scent, all you feel is the way his arms are squeezing you by your shoulders, pressing your corpulent body against his lean one, all you hear is his tiny voice whispering against your hair.

“No. You’re not. You’re not pathetic, I am. I am.”

Regaining control over your body, you try to wiggle away from him, hands pushing at his chest, trying to get away.

“Jimin, stop it! Don’t feel sorry for me, I don’t need your pity.”

He allows you to get out of his embrace, but only to in turn grab your round face in between his hands, effectively still keeping you in place, standing closely in front of him.

“Hey, it is not pity. Y/N, it’s not pity.” He leans down to force you to look him in the eyes as he says it and you see the importance behind them, the truthfulness.

“What then?”

Instead of answering, you see him press his lips together and eyes stare blankly at your lips in thought. Your heart hammers on your chest as you sense what he was about to do and you panic, shaking your head and about to tell him to let you go, but it’s too late.

Leaning forward, any hint of refusal you had dies at the first contact of his soft lips on yours, mouths joining in a feather like touch before fully merging together, precluding any effort you could even think of to stop it. The rest of the world drowned as a flare of heat bloomed to your cheeks, butterflies sprung to life at the pit of your stomach and a thrill shot up your spine. He traces your lips with his own, claiming your upper lips in little nibbles and then your bottom lip with small bites. Your legs quiver and hands sweat as they hold on to his shirt, heart skittering in your chest.

When his lips detach from yours, they leave the taste of sweet berries behind and you are sure you found a new favorite flavor in the world.

You slowly open your eyes, highly aware of the state you must be in and of his hands on your face, but in turn noticing his own flared up cheeks, even more so than when he was trying not to cry, and intense stare.

“Don’t go on the date with that guy” he requests of you again. But this time, he adds on. “Go on a date with me. Give your attention to me. Love me. Because I might just be in love with you too.”

And it’s all so sudden, so much, so unbelievable, you shake your head in his hands.

“But, Jimin, you never-”

“I was oblivious” he interrupts, knowing what you were about to say. “I’m so sorry it took me this long to see it. I’m sorry it had to be pointed out to me in order to notice, but I know it now. I always liked you a lot, Y/N. I just regret never letting it show and making you think I didn’t. If you let me, I’ll spend as long as you want making it up to you. I’ll prove it to you. Please?”

For once, just this once, you listen to your heart rather than to your head.

“Okay” you whisper, almost afraid of saying it too loud.

Jimin smiles so brightly that his eyes disappear behind his cheeks and he envelops you in a strong embrace again, certainly having twirled you around if he had the strength. Instead, he squeezes your fluffy skin against his and rocks you both side to side, chuckles of happiness escaping you both.

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spectraldragon2024 · 3 years

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Finding Peace Q/A

Questions and Answers: (WARNING: Many of these questions and answers have spoilers for Finding Peace.)

Q: How did Whiteout find out about the Realm Between and the Dream World? I thought only Adder and his close contacts knew.

A: A personal headcanon of mine is that the NightWings were one of the few tribes in Darkstalker’s era that focused on advanced theories in the same way scientists today have theories about Darkmatter. In Finding Peace: One of these theories was about the concept of there being worlds that existed parallel to the world dragons inhabited. Even when the NightWings relocated to the volcanic island, NightWing philosophers did not abandon these theories overnight since it’s implied the volcano did not become active until centuries later. In her twilight years, she would learn about this theory (which came from a NightWing philosopher’s circle that was formed by the students of the Seer Omniscience, a controversial Seer in NightWing history.) While Whiteout was not a Somnus, not knowing the full nature of these worlds, she eventually gained access to the Realm Between. How she exactly gained access to this realm is something I plan to explore in later stories. However, I can explain how she managed to communicate with her brother across the centuries. In the Realm Between: Time is a concept, not a law. This means those who enter the Realm, whether physically or mentally, can communicate with individuals from across time. But to do so requires two individuals to be in the same location of the realm. By sacrificing her foresight, Whiteout was able to use the Realm Between to communicate with Peacemaker through various times. The final time Whiteout speaks to Peacemaker is a month before her passing.

Q: Are we going to see Moon have that important conversation with Qibli? It was left open-ended in the final Winglet.

A: Yes, I can say with absolute certainty that we will see this conversation. However, what will happen after this conversation will be up in the air. Going into the Winglet: I wanted to show that even though characters like Moon and Qibli have their “Happy Ending”, that does not necessarily mean all trials are done when a relationship begins. In Darkness of Dragons, I felt that there were some unresolved points of concern in Moon and Qibli’s personalities that I imagine would cause their newfound relationship to suffer if those concerns aren’t addressed. Ms. Sutherland once said that because both Moon and Qibli are young dragons, anything can happen between the end of Darkness of Dragons and fifty years later. Some core issues that have caused Moon and Qibli to hit a bump in their relationship stems from differing priorities. Moon is a representative and the only active Seer in the world. Her word is valued by not just the Queens of Phyrria, but Pantala as well. But she knows this isn’t just going to be her future, that there is more on the horizon. She wants the perfect ending with Qibli...but she focuses too much on that ending and tries to take steps to make it perfect.

On the other talon, you have Qibli. Despite his love and loyalty to Moon and his friends, Thorn remains the big centerpiece of his world. After all, Thorn was his mother figure who brought him out of an unstable life. He owes everything to her. That means he will be what Thorn needs him to be: An advisor, a soldier...he will be any of those. Unfortunately, this means he puts a lot of other things on the back burner, his relationship with Moon in particular. This causes a lot of distance between the two. Into the Darkness and Our Sanctuary will not show this much-needed conversation, as these stories will follow Turtle, Kinkajou, and Winter’s storylines respectively. But as I write Braving the Tempest, I do hope to write a story that runs parallel to it that shows Winter, Qibli, and Moon...and how their subplot resolves.

Q: In the Winglet that focuses on Tempest's POV: You have her meet Clearsight. During the conversation, it looks like Tempest blames Clearsight for what happened to Darkstalker. I was wondering if you believe this and if you think Darkstalker did nothing wrong?

A: Do I hate Clearsight? No, absolutely not. I thought she was a very intelligent dragon with a good heart. She loved Darkstalker and tried to turn him from the dark path he was on. I do not blame her for Darkstalker's descent into madness. Darkstalker's actions were his own, he had every opportunity to turn back and be happy. He was the only obstacle to his happiness (as Peacemaker pointed out.) That being said, while Darkstalker is the cause of his madness and sadness, I do believe Clearsight could have helped convince him to abandon his ambitions and to just be happy. The scene in question was not meant to be a sign of hatred, but rather a critique of Clearsight's decisions leading up to Darkstalker's descent. When I originally wrote the scene, I wrote it with something in mind that Tui herself once said in a Q/A Biohazardia was in and posted on their Deviant Art page. The Question asked was along the lines of what could have Clearsight have done to turn Darkstalker away from his path. Tui answered that she believed that Clearsight did love Darkstalker, but deep down she did not trust him. That was the point of the earring she had Darkstalker give her in order to keep him from reading her mind. Tui thought that, if Clearsight had shown the visions she was afraid of, then Darkstalker could have chosen a better path. I admit while Darkstalker was to blame for his actions (nobody else made him kill Arctic, that was his decision, and his alone.) I do think things could have been different as Tui said. But I like to think Clearsight knew that if she had trusted him enough to share her visions, then maybe Darkstalker could have changed. Instead of focusing so much on the future Darkstalker (good or bad) and focused on the dragon, she loved in the present, then maybe things could have been different. When Tempest and Clearsight did meet in Tempest's limbo state, Clearsight used the personality she had while she knew Darkstalker as a way to test to see how far Tempest would go for Peacemaker. The reason she tested Tempest, was because the SeaWing had a personality Clearsight wished she had when she knew Darkstalker: And that was to focus on the present. That was the basis of Clearsight's personality after she arrived on Pantala. She urged her descendants to live their lives, day by day. The future was theirs to write. With Tempest, she needed to make sure that she held firm in her beliefs, that she could save Peacemaker even if the future was dark. So while I believe Clearsight could have done things differently, I want to make it clear that I do not consider her responsible for Darkstalker's own actions

Q: Will you explore quantum mechanics in future stories? (i.e. Time Travel.)

A: While I think time travel would be an interesting concept in Wings of Fire, unfortunately, it's not one I will be exploring in The Darkest Eclipse AU. My thoughts on time travel as a plot device are that it is a can of worms, one if not handled correctly can leave the readers confused (I know I have left many unanswered questions in Finding Peace, but that was simply because the answers to those questions I felt would be better explored outside of Peacemaker's POV). While there are ways for individuals from the past to communicate with someone in the future (such as Whiteout reaching out to Peacemaker throughout the story) there is no way for individuals from the future to physically travel to the past. The Darkest Eclipse prophecy focuses more on the Paranormal and how it relates to established magic and laws of physics in Wings of Fire canon (like how Somnus magic interacts with Animus magic.) That being said, if I were to explore Time Travel: I would follow the theory that time is a closed loop (as in the past cannot be changed, it has already been decided, and that any changes done to the timeline must occur in the future). This, I feel, can be properly explained and leave little confusion for the reader.

Q: TempestMaker or PeaceCliff?

A: Wait, there are ship names?

Jokes aside, I will say that at the end of Finding Peace: Peacemaker does not view Cliff or Tempest in a romantic light. He does love them as much as he loves his mother and Moon, they are important dragons to him and he cannot imagine his life without them. But he does not love them romantically. Will this change in the future? Likely. But for now, Peacemaker is not in the right space mentally to have a romantic relationship. He needs to discover what he wants with his life now that he is free to make it, discover what he wants to do with his future. Once all of the uncertainty in his life is cleared up, that could change.

Q: Apple Juice or Orange Juice? Also: Any tips for keeping a decent writing schedule?

A: I like both, but I lean heavily towards apple juice (always nice to start and end the day with something sweet to drink, but nothing too unhealthy.)

When it comes to writing schedules: What I did with Finding Peace was setting up deadlines for myself. I have always worked well under the knowledge that I have a deadline that I need to meet. Now, that being said, my preferred deadlines may not be for everyone. One of my best friends and colleagues, DONOVAN94, is able to get chapters for her stories out in a single week when she has everything planned out and ready! But that is because she has chapters outlined, and afterward all she needs to do is write in critical info. This works for her, but I always focused on posting one chapter a month. Now I explored posting multiple chapters in a month during the tail end of Finding Peace. While it worked out okay, it left me exhausted...and honestly, I am still tired after doing it.

All in all: My biggest advice to writers (whether fanfiction or writers who want to become published) is to work at your own pace. Set deadlines for yourself that you think you can meet, and never hesitate to experiment.

Q: Who is Omniscience? He is only mentioned at the end of the story when you posted The Darkest Eclipse Prophecy.

A: Omniscience was a NightWing seer who lived during the founding of the NightWing tribe, many centuries before Darkstalker’s era. During Darkstalker and Clearsight’s generation: Omniscience is regarded as one of the wisest seers in NightWing history, as well as the most controversial. Omniscience was born on a night when all three moons were full, but entered a “Thrice Lunar Eclipse'', with each moon eclipsing the other. Instead of receiving both mindreading and foresight NightWing abilities, Omniscience received only the power of foresight. However, because all three moons were technically full that night: The eclipse basically “overcharged” Omniscience’s foresight. This allowed him to see multiple millennia into the future with clarity even Clearsight did not have. However, despite this great power: Omniscience suffered from severe psychosis, causing him great difficulty in his early life to tell the difference between his visions, tricks of the mind, and reality. It’s because of his friends and family’s support did Omniscience learn to embrace his entire self, and became one of the wisest seers in NightWing history. He was controversial because of his philosophy that a wise Seer is not one who tries to map out the future for other dragons, but those who embrace the unknown of the future. In his prophecies he did not address large audiences, but instead, his prophecies addressed dragons in the future, offering them wisdom in difficult times he saw them face. The Darkest Eclipse Prophecy is one of his two final prophecies, alongside another prophecy. These two prophecies have long since been stored in a secret archive, somewhere in Phyrria.

Q: Which character was difficult for you to write in Finding Peace?

A: This might come off as strange, but the one character that was difficult to write throughout Finding Peace was actually Peacemaker himself. The reason this is the case centers around the circumstances of his “birth.” While, in canon, he is not the first year-old dragonet we have seen: But he is the first that was born out of Animus magic and his personality was made from that magic. While we have witnessed the perspective of those influenced by Animus enchantments (when Winter very briefly became Pyrite), Peacemaker is different as he will be living his life following an enchantment. Throughout Finding Peace, I had to balance the enchantment’s dictations and, yet, try to write Peacemaker so he was not simply someone being dictated by magic. In the end: I settled for the enchantment is in place in certain areas of his personality, while making Peacemaker strong-willed enough to actually have a choice of what he likes (as seen when he starts to show interest in food outside of strawberries or standing his ground when his friends were harassed.)

Q: Which is strongest: Animus or Somnus Magic?

A: At their core: Animus and Somnus magic are equal and capable of the same things. However, because of the rules around magic in the AU: It is too dangerous to use Animus magic in the Dream World, or Somnus Magic in the Waking World. As shown in Finding Peace: If you use them in worlds where they are not meant to exist, those worlds will seek to eliminate the magic and its user. The only place both magics can coexist safely in is The Realm Between, where it’s believed both magic originated from. In Finding Peace’s climax this happens, and from there: The power of the magic all depends on the skill of the user. So, long story short, neither magic is stronger than the other. While both magics have advantages and disadvantages depending on the realm of existence the user is currently located in when they are on the same playing field both magics would be left at a standstill.

Q: Most Peacemaker centric fics have Peacemaker be best friends with both Prince Cliff and Princess Auklet, why wasn’t Auklet in the story?

A: Truth is, Auklet was originally going to be one of Peacemaker’s friends in the Quartz Winglet. In my original outline: The main trio would have been Peacemaker, Cliff, and Auklet. Tempest was going to be The Jade Mountain Academy’s counselor, in which she used her Somnus magic to see what bothered the minds of the students. However, the more I thought about it, the more I felt Tempest would have a better role as a Clawmate of Peacemaker and Cliff.

Q: Are Tempest and Cliff reincarnations of Clearsight and Fathom?

A: Yes, Tempest and Cliff are both spiritual reincarnations. While they do not physically resemble Clearsight and Fathom, their spirits are connected to the two dragons. When I drafted Tempest and Cliff’s interactions with the spirits of the two dragons who had such a significant impact on Darkstalker’s life, I drew inspiration from the belief that reincarnation is spiritual, rather than physical (like pouring water from one cup into another cup.) Now, it’s important to note that while they are reincarnations of Clearsight and Fathom, this does not mean Tempest and Cliff are actually those two dragons. Rather, it just means their souls are similar. This allowed Tempest to speak with Clearsight, and Cliff speaks with Fathom when they were in a state of limbo.

Q: Where were Turtle, Kinkajou, and Peril during Finding Peace?

A: Peril is currently living in the Sky Kingdom. While she and Clay live together in the Academy, for the last few months Peril has been staying in the Sky Kingdom...waiting for an important day to occur. Once this day happens, she will be returning to her home in Jade Mountain.

As for Turtle and Kinkajou: Their whereabouts during Finding Peace will be addressed in Into the Darkness. But I will say that what is happening by the climax of Finding Peace is not good for Turtle or Kinkajou.

Q: Why did you include Somnus magic in Finding Peace?

A: When writing Finding Peace, I took into consideration how I could allow bits of Darkstalker’s memories and personality could bleed into Peacemaker. Given the nature of the enchantment, it would not be as simple as putting on a copy of Qibli’s enchanted earrings (Tui confirmed that Peacemaker would die if he put on the earrings.) So I needed to come up with a way that could allow Peacemaker’s slow rediscovery of his past life: And that was with the inclusion of Somnus magic and Adder, while also implying Peacemaker’s strong will allowed only part of the enchantment to take effect (it’s been shown that dragons with strong wills can overcome Animus enchantments.) With Adder tormenting Peacemaker’s dreams by pushing memories of Darkstalker into his mind via dreams, Peacemaker would still be Peacemaker, but the Somnus magic allowed that anguish and confusion in his mind to occur. Needless to say, I was nervous about the introduction of Somnus magic, as I felt readers might think I was “Jumping the shark.” In order to make Somnus magic make sense, I focused on the rules and limitations of this magic and how it interacted with Animus magic. This way Somnus magic is not instantly more powerful than magic from canon.

Q: Why did the group of bandits refer to Lynx and Bobcat as “Cursed ones” in the Winglets for Finding Peace? Why is there a group dedicated to killing them?

A: In the Darkest Eclipse AU there exist multiple secret societies that are aware of the paranormal of the world (such as The Dream World and Realm Between, though they are typically named differently depending on the organization.) As for this particular group, the Bandits that raid the border between the Sand and Ice Kingdoms hunt for the paranormal while seeking to make a profit off of them. As for why this organization targetted Lynx, in particular, has less to do with who she was as a dragon, but everything to do with her ancestry. As Qibli and Hailstorm discovered: Lynx is descended from the Somnus bloodline, making her a very distant cousin of Surf’s family. When she traveled from the Ice Kingdom to Sanctuary, the bandits targetted and killed her because of this bloodline...and the fact that she was married to Winter, who has ancestors from a line of animus dragons. As for why the bandits would want to kill Bobcat: in essence, he is a dragonet of the Somnus and Animus bloodlines. While Lynx does not have an active Somnus Gene, and Winter does not have an active Animus Gene, the bandits viewed this union as cursed, as no dragon has ever seen an Animus or Somnus descendant have a dragonet. Fearing what they do not understand, the bandits killed Lynx to prevent the hatching of a dragonet of the Somnus and Animus bloodlines. Ultimately the bandits failed in the objective of killing Bobcat before he hatched: As the last act Lynx did before succumbing to her wounds, was hiding her son’s egg in a place Qibli would find when he, Hailstorm, Winter, and guards of the boarder arrived.

As for if Bobcat’s existence will remain secret to the bandits and other groups like them: That remains to be seen.

Q: Are there any more stories planned for The Quartz Winglet? Will we see Peacemaker’s life in the Sky Kingdom with Cliff, or the Quartz Winglet reuniting during the Winter Solstice festival in the Sky Kingdom?

A: Yes, to all.

Sometime before the summer: I plan to do a short story that takes place two weeks after the end of Finding Peace, in which we see a day in Peacemaker’s life in the Sky Kingdom and how he is faring. I feel this short is important as it will show one last POV dedicated to Peacemaker and how he is starting to rebuild his life.

We will definitely continue to follow The Quartz Winglet in future stories. Braving the Tempest will follow Tempest’s point of view and show the Quartz Winglet reuniting in the Sky Kingdom during the winter solstice festival. The relationships between these young dragons will continue to progress in the sequel to Finding Peace, named Braving the Tempest, and I look forward to showing you all what new adventures they will have in the future.

#Wings of Fire #Fanfiction #Finding Peace #The Darkest Eclipse Prophecy AU #Question and Answer

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8requiems · 3 years

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A Webcomic Review of “Deadlove”: I think I am a Sadist now.

Intro

WHOA WHOA WHOAAAA, before you skip this part, I tweaked the process of how I review webcomics after reviewing the webcomic before this one, “Wizard of Arsenia”. The changes aren’t earth shattering, but I just wanted to put that out there.

If you don’t care. I mean, you can skip reading it. I guess it's cool. I don’t mind...not like I didn’t spend time refining it- but it's OKAY.

Before we get into this review, there are two main parts of the review:

The General Review

This route will give you a simple idea of the webcomic you are about to read. It will naturally include my personal opinions, but they will not be inconsistent to any prior or future reviews I do (in the sense that I don’t do double standards when I talk about said webcomics).

Said opinions won’t really dominate this route because I will be mainly establishing what the webcomic has to offer in each part.

Because of this, my opinions will always be presented at the end of each section.

If need be, I will refer to events that might be considered as “spoiler territory”.

I will read as far as I require in order to get a good idea of the story I am reading, so the amount of chapters I read will vary. At a baseline, I will have read at least 10 chapters.

Granted, I doubt anything too important will change how you experience later chapters since it isn’t as, lets say, a “Season Review”.

The only sections that will be fully opinion within this route is: Execution and Conclusion.

2. Beyond the Border

This route will be available if you scroll to the very bottom.

Think of this route as the “New Game+” equivalent of the review.

I will read further either because the story has me hooked, or if I want to see if my criticisms still hold true.

EXPECT TO SEE SPOILERS. ESPECIALLY IF I GAVE THE REQUIEM TRADEMARK COPYRIGHT APPROVED THUMBS UP.

Disclaimer:

If you decide to skip “The General Review” to read “Beyond the Boundary”, don’t let it affect your opinion of the work too much (if you are easily swayed). Despite how open I am to webcomics, I might have opinions that could contradict with how you might view the webcomic if YOU were to read it.

I do advise that you read “The General Review”, and with that information in mind, proceed to “Beyond the Boundary”, if you so wish.

The Description:

*Ahem*

" They say you can’t run away from your problems... and Joel just learned that the hard way. Talk about having cold feet! Joel is all set to marry Kim, his art school sweetheart, but in a moment of poor judgment he has an affair with his roommate Zoe. Hounded by the guilt, but unable to fess up to his fiancé, he decides the most responsible thing to do is... run away. As far and as fast as he can. He now finds himself selling cosmetics at a shopping mall in New Zealand. Sure, he is homesick, and everything is unfamiliar, but at least he can work through his issues in peace and quiet, right? Wrong. Read this comic to find out how Joel’s plans fall apart, and how he puts himself back together, with the help of an unexpected guest… “

Y’know, this is usually the part where I give my own synopsis of the story, at times because the description is in no way useful.

But, I have nothing to add.

I will say that when I first read “Deadlove”, I don’t believe I read the description, and I think not reading it was a welcome surprise considering that although I was expecting a “Comedy with a simplistic art style that is kind of charming”, I think I got a bit more than I bargained for.

I should also note that if it were not from my blind curiosity, and I were to judge it purely on description and the title art, I probably wouldn’t have read it.

It doesn’t do justice towards how creative the Webtoon itself presents its characters and the story it wants to portray.

But we’ll get to that in a minute. For now, let’s get a good idea of the characters we will be following.

Characters:

Joel:

(A panel in the middle of Chapter 1)

As you will quickly understand, Joel as far as life decisions go is the definition of incorrigible. Despite having many opportunities to confront his problems, or even having moments of foresight. These 5 chapters, if you are one to hate misunderstandings or easily resolvable conflicts, will be hell for the reader.

Maybe it was because I was forcing myself to read another webcomic before getting to this one, but I somehow was not personally annoyed by the way Joel was acting.

Granted, if I read this on ANY other day, I would have been seething and/cringing at the sight of this imbecile.

Which, as Creator Teo reveals in his editors notes at the end of every chapter, will be a very common theme.

(The last paragraph of Chapter 2’s Creators Note ^)

(The beginning of Chapter 3’s Creators Note ^)

I think it’s safe to say that Joel's current situation is the logical extreme of not taking responsibility for your poor decisions and refusing to confront and learn from your mistakes.

I feel like because of how his character is written, everyone is going to be on the same page, regardless of personal views on life when reading this webcomic, specifically because of how comically stupid we as the audience see Joel as.

I mean, at the very least that's how I feel…

At the same time, after reading the first chapter multiple times, I decided to set my personal biases aside just so I could be sure Joel is full of shit.

There were two parts of the Webtoon that caught my eye:

^ For this dialogue portion, the part that caught my attention was him brushing past keywords that we have likely heard before when hearing about cheating: “Love isn’t Binary”, “I thought only assholes cheat”, and “She looks hot”.

Now, I could easily be reading too much into these lines, and I probably am. But this isn’t the first time I have heard or read about someone cheating on someone they love for “X,Y, and Z”, so I decided to look up a random case to see how the cheater in that situation felt.

After reading about it, I felt myself not necessarily thinking he wasn’t an ass, but I did end up feeling bad for Joel. Not because of the lines I just showed, but for the lines in the following panel towards the end of the chapter:

In the case that I looked up, they felt miserable at the development that had come of their new relationship, despite cherishing the one they already had.

Now granted, Joel does say that he isn’t a reliable source of info for the story, but I feel as though the points where he does start deviating from truth are obvious enough to the viewer that we can differentiate it from the real truth.

At least, that’s what I believe, I tried reading back to see if there were any obvious deviations in truth but I couldn’t find any. Maybe you found some? Share what you found in the comments section down below if you have.

I think this simple meme panel that is shown at the end of chapter 1, although very simple, justifies the way I think about Joel as a character:

Execution:

When I first started reading “Deadlove” I thought the charm would come from the simplistic art style, and I wasn’t wrong about it not having charm, but it is certainly not the main appeal of the Webtoon. The way the visual and writing style compliment each other reminds me of my time reading “God of Bath”. But with “God of Bath”, that would moresoe be applied to the gag panels.

For “Deadlove”, it's every panel of every chapter.

Visual Style:

I think my favorite part of the Webtoon would have to be the way Creator Guy makes visually metaphorical jokes, and just the way he decides to show Joel’s interaction with the audience as he breaks the fourth wall.

An example of a visually metaphorical joke would be something Creator Teo actually had to point out for me. Had to do a whole double take:

( ^ A panel in the latter half of Chapter 1 )

( ^ The fourth paragraph of Chapter 2’s Creators Note )

( ^ Joel revealing his wishy washy nature to the audience in a panel towards the end of Chapter 5 )

Although there might be better examples of Joel’s audience interaction, I personally love this one. I can’t help but chuckle every time I remember it.

The Writing:

I rarely consume media that breaks the fourth wall. And even then, they would break the fourth wall for comedic effect, not for telling a story.

Then again, many stories will have a narration at the beginning where they basically guide you in the beginning portions of the story, only to return every now and then.

Joel is telling the story as he is living it. I mean, he does say the story isn’t linear, implying that this isn’t the case, but I still appreciate how the story is written nevertheless.

Conclusion:

Overall, I feel like I’ve communicated how much I love “Deadlove”, and I shouldn’t be surprised considering the talented duo of Creators Teo and Guy have experience telling simple yet fun and captivating stories, such as “The Adventures of God” and “My Dictator Boyfriend”. Both Webtoons that I love.

I already feel like I am someone that Joel is talking to, making me in some way a part of the story too, but having Creator Teo talk say reveal some insights about the Webtoon and giving some giving some thoughts about “Deadlove” shows a connection with me, the reader, that I don’t really feel in other Webtoons, even if they do Q&A’s every now and then.

That being said, I think that Teo’s quick tidbits are a consequence of the very stylized nature of the story itself.

I would suggest “Deadlove” to anyone, even if they would hate a character like Joel. Just because I feel like he is interesting enough to see him continue to make mistakes and follow his overall journey.

#webtoon #Webtoons #webtoon review #WebtoonFeatured #FeaturedWebtoon #webcomics #webcomic #Webcomic review #deadlove #GodofBath #God of Bath #Naver #NaverWebtoon #Naver Webtoon

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years

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What Alternate Reality Games Teach Us About the Dangerous Appeal of QAnon

This story was originally published on mssv.net by Adrian Hon (@adrianhon)

The far-right QAnon conspiracy theory is so sprawling, it’s hard to know where people join. Last week, it was 5G cell towers, this week it’s Wayfair; who knows what next week will bring? But QAnon’s followers always seem to begin their journey with the same refrain: “I’ve done my research.”

I’d heard that line before. In early 2001, the marketing for Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, A.I., had just begun. YouTube wouldn’t launch for another four years, so you had to be eagle-eyed to spot the unusual credit next to Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, and Frances O’Connor: Jeanine Salla, the movie’s “Sentient Machine Therapist.”

Close-up of the A.I. movie poster

Soon after, Ain’t It Cool News (AICN) posted a tip from a reader:

“Type her name in the Google.com search engine, and see what sites pop up…pretty cool stuff! Keep up the good work, Harry!! –ClaviusBase”

(Yes, in 2001 Google was so new you had to spell out its web address.)

The Google results began with Jeanine Salla’s homepage but led to a whole network of fictional sites. Some were futuristic versions of police websites or lifestyle magazines; others were inscrutable online stores and hacked blogs. A couple were in German and Japanese. In all, over twenty sites and phone numbers were listed.

By the end of the day, the websites racked up 25 million hits, all from a single AICN article suggesting readers ‘do their research’. It later emerged they were part of one of the first-ever alternate reality games (ARG), The Beast, developed by Microsoft to promote Spielberg’s movie.

The way I’ve described it here, The Beast sounds like enormous fun. Who wouldn’t be intrigued by a doorway into 2142 filled with websites and phone numbers and puzzles, with runaway robots who need your help and even live events around the world? But consider how much work it required to understand the story and it begins to sound less like “watching TV” fun and more like “painstaking research” fun. Along with tracking dozens of websites that updated in real time, you had to solve lute tablature puzzles, decode base 64 messages, reconstruct 3D models of island chains that spelt out messages, and gather clues from newspaper and TV adverts across the US.

This purposeful yet bewildering complexity is the complete opposite of what many associate with conventional popular entertainment, where every bump in your road to enjoyment has been smoothed away in the pursuit of instant engagement and maximal profit. But there’s always been another kind of entertainment that appeals to different people at different times, one that rewards active discovery, the drawing of connections between clues, the delicious sensation of a hunch that pays off after hours or days of work. Puzzle books, murder mysteries, adventure games, escape rooms, even scientific research—they all aim for the same spot.

What was new in The Beast and the ARGs that followed it was less the specific puzzles and stories they incorporated, but the sheer scale of the worlds they realised—so vast and fast-moving that no individual could hope to comprehend them. Instead, players were forced to cooperate, sharing discoveries and solutions, exchanging ideas, and creating resources for others to follow. I’d know: I wrote a novel-length walkthrough of The Beast when I was meant to be studying for my degree at Cambridge.

QAnon is not an ARG. It’s a dangerous conspiracy theory, and there are lots of ways of understanding conspiracy theories without ARGs. But QAnon pushes the same buttons that ARGs do, whether by intention or by coincidence. In both cases, “do your research” leads curious onlookers to a cornucopia of brain-tingling information.

In other words, maybe QAnon is… fun?

ARGs never made it big. They came too early and It’s hard to charge for a game that you stumble into through a Google search. But maybe their purposely-fragmented, internet-native, community-based form of storytelling and puzzle-solving was just biding its time…

This blog post expands on the ideas in my Twitter thread about QAnon and ARGs, and incorporates many of the valuable replies. Please note, however, that I’m not a QAnon expert and I’m not a scholar of conspiracy theories. I’m not even the first to compare QAnon to LARPs and ARGs.

But my experience as lead designer of Perplex City, one of the world’s most popular and longest-running ARGs, gives me a special perspective on QAnon’s game-like nature. My background as a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist also gives me insight into what motivates people.

Today, I run Six to Start, best known for Zombies, Run!, an audio-based augmented reality game with half a million active players, and I’m writing a book about the perils and promise of gamification.

It’s Like We Did It On Purpose

Perplex City “Ascendancy Point” Story Arc

When I was designing Perplex City, I loved sketching out new story arcs. I’d create intricate chains of information and clues for players to uncover, colour-coding for different websites and characters. There was a knack to having enough parallel strands of investigation going on so that players didn’t feel railroaded, but not so many that they were overwhelmed. It was a particular pleasure to have seemingly unconnected arcs intersect after weeks or months.

Merely half of the “Q-web“

No-one would mistake the clean lines of my flowcharts for the snarl of links that makes up a QAnon theory, but the principles are similar: one discovery leading to the next. Of course, these two flowcharts are very different beasts. The QAnon one is an imaginary, retrospective description of supposedly-connected data, while mine is a prescriptive network of events I would design.

Except that’s not quite true. In reality, Perplex City players didn’t always solve our puzzles as quickly as we intended them to, or they became convinced their incorrect solution was correct, or embarrassingly, our puzzles were broken and had no solution at all. In those cases we had to rewrite the story on the fly.

When this happens in most media, you just hold up your hands and say you made a mistake. In video games, you can issue an online update and hope no-one’s the wiser. But in ARGs, a public correction would shatter the uniquely-prolonged collective suspension of disbelief in the story. This was thought to be so integral to the appeal of ARGs, it was termed TINAG, or “This is Not a Game.”

So when we messed up in Perplex City, we tried mightily to avoid editing websites, a sure sign this was, in fact, a game. Instead, we’d fix it by adding new storylines and writing through the problem (it helped to have a crack team of writers and designers, including Naomi Alderman, Andrea Phillips, David Varela, Dan Hon, Jey Biddulph, Fi Silk, Eric Harshbarger, and many many others).

We had a saying when these diversions worked out especially well: “It’s like we did it on purpose.”

Every ARG designer can tell a similar war story. Here’s Josh Fialkov, writer for the Lonelygirl15 ARG/show:

“Our fans/viewers would build elaborate (and pretty neat) theories and stories around the stories we’d already put together and then we’d merge them into our narrative, which would then engage them more. The one I think about the most is we were shooting something on location and we’re run and gunning. We fucked up and our local set PA ended up in the background of a long selfie shot. We had no idea. It was 100% a screw up. The fans became convinced the character was in danger. And then later when that character revealed herself as part of the evil conspiracy — that footage was part of the audiences proof that she was working with the bad guys all along — “THATS why he was in the background!” They literally found a mistake – made it a story point. And used it as evidence of their own foresight into the ending — despite it being, again, us totally being exhausted and sloppy. And at the time hundreds of thousands of people were participating and contributing to a fictional universe and creating strands upon strands.”

Conspiracy theories and cults evince the same insouciance when confronted with inconsistencies or falsified predictions; they can always explain away errors with new stories and theories. What’s special about QAnon and ARGs is that these errors can be fixed almost instantly, before doubt or ridicule can set in. And what’s really special about QAnon is how it’s absorbed all other conspiracy theories to become a kind of ur-conspiracy theory such that seems pointless to call out inconsistencies. In any case, who would you even be calling out when so many QAnon theories come from followers rather than “Q”?

Yet the line between creator and player in ARGs has also long been blurry. That tip from “ClaviusBase” to AICN that catapulted The Beast to massive mainstream coverage? The designers more or less admitted it came from them. Indeed, there’s a grand tradition of ARG “puppetmasters” (an actual term used by devotees) sneaking out from “behind the curtain” (ditto) to create “sockpuppet accounts” in community forums to seed clues, provide solutions, and generally chivvy players along the paths they so carefully designed.

As an ARG designer, I used to take a hard line against this kind of cheating but in the years since, I’ve mellowed somewhat, mostly because it can make the game more fun, and ultimately, because everyone expects it these days. That’s not the case with QAnon.

Yes, anyone who uses 4chan and 8chan understands that anonymity is baked into the system such that posters frequently create entire threads where they argue against themselves in the guise of anonymous users who are impossible to distinguish or trace back to a single individual – but do the more casual QAnon followers know that?

Local Fame

A Beautiful Mind

Pop culture’s conspiracy theorist sits in a dark basement stringing together photos and newspaper clippings on their "crazy wall." On the few occasions this leads to useful results, it’s an unenviable pursuit. Anyone choosing such an existence tends to be shunned by society.

But this ignores one gaping fact: piecing together theories is really satisfying. Writing my walkthrough for The Beast was rewarding and meaningful, appreciated by an enthusiastic community in a way that my molecular biology essays most certainly were not. Online communities have long been dismissed as inferior in every way to “real” friendships, an attenuated version that’s better than nothing, but not something that anyone should choose. Yet ARGs and QAnon (and games and fandom and so many other things) demonstrate there’s an immediacy and scale and relevance to online communities that can be more potent and rewarding than a neighbourhood bake sale. This won’t be news to most of you, but I think it’s still news to decision-makers in traditional media and politics.

Good ARGs are deliberately designed with puzzles and challenges that require unusual talents—I designed one puzzle that required a good understanding of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs—with problems so large that they require crowdsourcing to solve, such that all players feel like welcome and valued contributors.

Needless to say, that feeling is missing from many people’s lives:

“ARGs are generally a showcase for special talent that often goes unrecognized elsewhere. I have met so many wildly talented people with weird knowledge through them.”

If you’re first to solve a puzzle or make a connection, you can attain local fame in ARG communities, as Dan Hon, COO at Mind Candy (makers of the Perplex City ARG), notes. The vast online communities for TV shows like Lost and Westworld, with their purposefully convoluted mystery box plots, also reward those who guess twists early, or produce helpful explainer videos. Yes, the reward is “just” internet points in the form of Reddit upvotes, but the feeling of being appreciated is very real. It’s no coincidence that Lost and Westworld both used ARGs to promote their shows.

Wherever you have depth in storytelling or content or mechanics, you’ll find the same kind of online communities. Games like Bloodborne, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Dwarf Fortress, Animal Crossing, Eve Online, and Elite Dangerous, they all share the same race for discovery. These discoveries eventually become processed into explainer videos and Reddit posts that are more accessible for wider audiences.

The same has happened with modern ARGs, where explainer videos have become so compelling they rack up more views than the ARGs have players (not unlike Twitch). Michael Andersen, owner of the Alternate Reality Gaming Network news site, is a fan of this trend, but wonders about its downside—with reference to conspiracy theorists:

“[W]hen you’re reading (or watching) a summary of an ARG? All of the assumptions and logical leaps have been wrapped up and packaged for you, tied up with a nice little bow. Everything makes sense, and you can see how it all flows together. Living it, though? Sheer chaos. Wild conjectures and theories flying left and right, with circumstantial evidence and speculation ruling the day. Things exist in a fugue state of being simultaneously true-and-not-true, and it’s only the accumulation of evidence that resolves it. And acquiring a “knack” for sifting through theories to surface what’s believable is an extremely valuable skill—both for actively playing ARGs, and for life in general.And sometimes, I worry that when people consume these neatly packaged theories that show all the pieces coming together, they miss out on all those false starts and coincidences that help develop critical thinking skills. …because yes, conspiracy theories try and offer up those same neat packages that attempt to explain the seemingly unexplained. And it’s pretty damn important to learn how groups can be led astray in search of those neatly wrapped packages.”

“SPEC”

I’m a big fan of the SCP Foundation, a creative writing website set within a shared universe not unlike The X-Files. Its top-rated stories rank among the best science fiction and horror I’ve read. A few years ago, I wrote my own (very silly) story, SCP-3993, where New York’s ubiquitous LinkNYC internet kiosks are cover for a mysterious reality-altering invasion.

CITYBRIDGE/NYC

Like the rest of SCP, this was all in good fun, but I recently discovered LinkNYC is tangled up in QAnon conspiracy theories. To be fair, you can say the same thing about pretty much every modern technology, but it’s not surprising their monolith-like presence caught conspiracy theorists’ attention as it did mine.

It’s not unreasonable to be creeped out by LinkNYC. In 2016, the New York Civil Liberties Union wrote to the mayor about “the vast amount of private information retained by the LinkNYC system and the lack of robust language in the privacy policy protecting users against unwarranted government surveillance.” Two years later, kiosks along Third Avenue in Midtown mysteriously blasted out a slowed-down version of the Mister Softee theme song. So there’s at least some cause for speculation. The problem is when speculation hardens into reality.

Not long after the AICN post, The Beast’s players set up a Yahoo Group mailing list called Cloudmakers, named after a boat in the story. As the number of posts rose to dozens and then hundreds per day, it became obvious to list moderators (including me) that some form of organisation was in order. One rule we established was that posts should include a prefix in their subject so members could easily distinguish website updates from puzzle solutions.

My favourite prefix was “SPEC,” a catch-all for any kind of unfounded speculation, most of which was fun nonsense but some of which ended up being true. There were no limits on what or how much you could post, but you always had to use the prefix so people could ignore it. Other moderated communities have similar guidelines, with rationalists using their typically long-winded “epistemic status” metadata.

Absent this kind of moderation, speculation ends up overwhelming communities since it’s far easier and more fun to bullshit than do actual research. And if speculation is repeated enough times, if it’s finessed enough, it can harden into accepted fact, leading to devastating and even fatal consequences.

I’ve personally been the subject of this process thanks to my work in ARGs—not just once, but twice.

The first occasion was fairly innocent. One of our more famous Perplex City puzzles, Billion to One, was a photo of a man. That’s it. The challenge was to find him. Obviously, we were riffing on the whole “six degrees of separation” concept. Some thought it’d be easy, but I was less convinced. Sure enough, fourteen years on, the puzzle is still unsolved, but not for lack of trying. Every so often, the internet rediscovers the puzzle amid a flurry of YouTube videos and podcasts; I can tell whenever this happens because people start DMing me on Twitter and Instagram.

This literally came a few days ago

A clue in the puzzle is the man’s name, Satoshi. It is not a rare name, and it happens to be same as the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. So of course people think Perplex City’s Satoshi created bitcoin. Not a lot of people, to be fair, but enough that I get DMs about it every week. But it’s all pretty innocent, like I said.

More concerning is my presumed connection to Cicada 3301, a mysterious group that recruited codebreakers through very difficult online puzzles. Back in 2011, my company developed a pseudo-ARG for the BBC Two factual series, The Code, all about mathematics. This involved planting clues into the show itself, along with online educational games and a treasure hunt.

To illustrate the concept of prime numbers, The Code explored the gestation period of cicadas. We had no hand in the writing of the show; we got the script and developed our ARG around it. But this was enough to create a brand new conspiracy theory, featuring yours truly:

My bit starts around 20 minutes in:

Interviewer: Why [did you make a puzzle about] cicadas?

Me: Cicadas are known for having a gestation period which is linked to prime numbers. Prime numbers are at the heart of nature and the heart of mathematics.

Interviewer: That puzzle comes out in June 2011.

Me: Yeah.

Interviewer: Six months later, Cicada 3301 makes its international debut.

Me: It's a big coincidence.

Interviewer: There are some people who have brought up the fact that whoever's behind Cicada 3301 would have to be a very accomplished game maker.

Me: Sure.

Interviewer: You would be a candidate to be that person.

Me: That's true, I mean, Cicada 3301 has a lot in common with the games we've made. I think that one big difference (chuckles) is that normally when we make alternate reality games, we do it for money. And it's not so clear to understand where the funding for Cicada 3301 is coming from.

Clearly this was all just in fun – I knew it and the interviewer knew it. That’s why I agreed to take part. But does everyone watching this understand that? There’s no “SPEC” tag on the video. At least a few commenters are taking it seriously:

I am the “ARG guy” in question

I’m not worried, but I’d be lying if I wasn’t a touch concerned that Cicada 3301 now lies squarely in the QAnon vortex and in the “Q-web“:

Here’s a good interview with the creator of the “Q-web”

My defence that the cicada puzzle in The Code was “a big coincidence” (albeit delivered with an unfortunate shit-eating grin) didn’t hold water. In the conspiracy theorest mindset, no such thing exists:

“According to Michael Barkun, emeritus professor of political science at Syracuse University, three core principles characterize most conspiracy theories. Firstly, the belief that nothing happens by accident or coincidence. Secondly, that nothing is as it seems: The “appearance of innocence” is to be suspected. Finally, the belief that everything is connected through a hidden pattern.”

These are helpful beliefs when playing an ARG or watching a TV show designed with twists and turns. It’s fun to speculate and to join seemingly disparate ideas, especially when the creators encourage and reward this behaviour. It’s less helpful when conspiracy theorists “yes, and…” each other into shooting up a pizza parlour or burning down 5G cell towers.

Because there is no coherent QAnon community in the same sense as the Cloudmakers, there’s no convention of “SPEC” tags. In their absence, YouTube has added annotated QAnon videos with links to its Wikipedia article, and Twitter has banned 7,000 accounts and restricted 150,000 more, among other actions. Supposedly, Facebook is planning to do the same.

These are useful steps but will not stop QAnon from spreading in social media comments or private chat groups or unmoderated forums. It’s not something we can reasonably hope for, and I don’t think there’s any technological solution (e.g. browser extensions) either. The only way to stop people from mistaking speculation from fact is for them to want to stop.

Cryptic

It’s always nice to have a few mysteries for players to speculate on in an ARG, if only because it helps them pass the time while the poor puppetmasters scramble to sate their insatiable demand for more website updates and puzzles. A good mystery can keep a community guessing for, as Lost did with its numbers or Game of Thrones with Jon Snow’s parentage. But these mysteries always have to be balanced against specifics, lest the whole story dissolve into a puddle of mush; for as much we derided Lost for the underwhelming conclusion to its mysteries, no-one would’ve watched in the first place if the episode-to-episode storytelling wasn’t so strong.

The downside of being too mysterious in Perplex City is that cryptic messages often led players on wild goose chases such that they completely ignored entire story arcs in favour of pursuing their own theories. This was bad for us because we had a pretty strict timetable that we needed our story to play out on, pinned against the release of our physical puzzle cards that funded the entire enterprise. If players took too long to find the $200,000 treasure at the conclusion of the story, we might run out of money.

QAnon can favour cryptic messages because, as far as I know, they don’t have a specific timeline or goal in mind, let alone a production budget or paid staff. Not only is there no harm in followers misinterpreting messages, but it’s a strength: followers can occupy themselves with their own spin-off theories far better than “Q” can. Dan Hon notes:

“For every ARG I’ve been involved in and ones my friends have been involved in, communities always consume/complete/burn through content faster than you can make it, when you’re doing a narrative-based game. This content generation/consumption/playing asymmetry is, I think, just a fact. But QAnon “solved” it by being able to co-opt all content that already exists and … encourages and allows you to create new content that counts and is fair play in-the-game.”

But even QAnon needs some specificity, hence their frequent references to actual people, places, events, and so on.

A brief aside on designing very hard puzzles

It was useful to be cryptic when I needed to control the speed at which players solved especially consequential puzzles, like the one revealing where our $200,000 treasure was buried. For story and marketing purposes, we wanted players to be able to find it as soon as they had access to all 256 puzzle cards, which we released in three waves. We also wanted players to feel like they were making progress before they had all the cards and we didn’t want them to find the location the minute they had the last card.

My answer was to represent the location as the solution to multiple cryptic puzzles. One puzzle referred to the Jurassic strata in the UK, which I split across the background of 14 cards. Another began with a microdot revealing which order to arrange triple letters I’d hidden on a bunch of cards. By performing mod arithmetic on the letter/number values, you would arrive at 1, 2, 3 or 4, corresponding to the four DNA nucleotides. If you understood the triplets as codons for amino acids, they became letters. These letters led you to the phrase “Duke of Burgundy”, the name of a butterfly whose location, when combined with the Jurassic strata, would help you narrow down the location of the treasure.

The nice thing about this convoluted sequence is that we could provide additional online clues to help the players community when they got stuck. The point being, you can’t make an easy puzzle harder, but you can make a hard puzzle easier.

Beyond ARGs

It can feel crass to compare ARGs to a conspiracy theory that’s caused so much harm. But this reveals the crucial difference between them: in QAnon, the stakes so high, any action is justified. If you truly believe an online store or a pizza parlour is engaging in child trafficking and the authorities are complicit, extreme behaviour is justified.

Gabriel Roth, editorial director for audio at Slate, extends this idea:

“What QAnon has that ARGs didn’t have is the claim of factual truth; in that sense it reminds me of the Bullshit Anecdotal Memoir wave of the 90s and early 00s. If you have a story based on real life, but you want to make it more interesting, the correct thing to do is change the names of the people and make it as interesting as you like and call it fiction. The insight of the Bullshit Anecdotal Memoirists (I’m thinking of James Frey and Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris) was that you could call it nonfiction and readers would like it much better because it would have the claim of actual factual truth, wowee!! And it worked! How much more engaging and addictive is an immersive, participatory ARG when it adds that unique frisson you can only get with the claim of factual truth? And bear in mind that ARG-scale stories aren’t about mere personal experiences—they operate on a world-historical scale.”

ARGs’ playfulness with the truth and their sometimes-imperceptible winking of This Is Not A Game (accusations Lonelygirl15 was a hoax) is only the most modern incarnation of epistolary storytelling. In that context, immersive and realistic stories have long elicited extreme reactions, like the panic incited by Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds (often exaggerated, to be fair).

We don’t have to wonder what happens when an ARG community meets a matter of life and death. Not long after The Beast concluded, the 9/11 attacks happened. A small number of posters in the Cloudmakers mailing list suggested the community use its skills to “solve” the question of who was behind the attack.

The brief but intense discussion that ensued has become a cautionary tale of ARG communities getting carried away and being unable to distinguish fiction from reality. In reality, the community and the moderators quickly shut down the idea as being impractical, insensitive, and very dangerous. “Cloudmakers tried to solve 9/11” is a great story, but it’s completely false.

Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for the poster child for online sleuthing gone wrong, the r/findbostonbombers subreddit. There’s a parallel between the essentially unmoderated, anonymous theorists of r/findbostonbombers and those in QAnon: neither feel any responsibility for spreading unsupported speculation as fact. What they do feel is that anything should be solvable, as Laura Hall, immersive environment and narrative designer, describes:

“There’s a general sense of, ‘This should be solveable/findable/etc’ that you see in lots of reddit communities for unsolved mysteries and so on. The feeling that all information is available online, that reality and truth must be captured/in evidence somewhere”

There’s truth in that feeling. There is a vast amount of information online, and sometimes it is possible to solve “mysteries”, which makes it hard to criticise people for trying, especially when it comes to stopping perceived injustices. But it’s the sheer volume of information online that makes it so easy and so tempting and so fun to draw spurious connections.

That joy of solving and connecting and sharing and communication can do great things, and it can do awful things. As Josh Fialkov, writer for Lonelygirl15, says:

That brain power negatively focused on what [conspiracy theorists] perceive as life and death (but is actually crassly manipulated paranoia) scares the living shit out of me.

What ARGs Can Teach Us

Can we make “good ARGs”? Could ARGs inoculate people against conspiracy theories like QAnon?

The short answer is: No. When it comes to games that are educational and fun, you usually have to pick one, not both—and I say that as someone who thinks he’s done a decent job at making “serious games” over the years. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it’s really hard, and I doubt any such ARG would get played by the right audience anyway.

The long answer: I’m writing a book about the perils and promise of gamification. Come back in a year or two.

For now, here’s a medium-sized answer. No ARG can heal the deep mistrust and fear and economic and spiritual malaise that underlies QAnon and other dangerous conspiracy theories, any more than a book or a movie can solve racism. There are hints at ARG-like things that could work, though—not in directly combatting QAnon’s appeal, but in channeling people’s energy and zeal of community-based problem-solving toward better causes.

Take The COVID Tracking Project, an attempt to compile the most complete data available about COVID-19 in the U.S. Every day, volunteers collect the latest numbers on tests, cases, hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every state and territory. In the absence of reliable governmental figures, it’s become one of the best sources not just in the U.S., but in the world.

It’s also incredibly transparent. You can drill down into the raw data volunteers have collected on Google Sheets, view every line of code written on Github, and ask them questions on Slack. Errors and ambiguities in the data are quickly disclosed and explained rather than hidden or ignored. There’s something game-like in the daily quest to collect the best-quality data and to continually expand and improve the metrics being tracked. And like in the best ARGs, volunteers of all backgrounds and skills are welcomed. It’s one of the most impressive and well-organising reporting projects I’ve ever seen; “crowdsourcing” doesn’t even come close to describing its scale.

If you applied ARG skills to investigative journalism, you’d get something like Bellingcat, an an open-source intelligence group that discovered how Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down over Ukraine in 2014. Bellingcat’s volunteers painstakingly pieced together publicly-available information to determine MH17 was downed by a Buk missile launcher originating from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Rocket Brigade in Kursk, Russia. The Dutch-led international joint investigation team later came to the same conclusion.

Conspiracy theories thrive in the absence of trust. Today, people don’t trust authorities because authorities have repeatedly shown themselves to be unworthy of trust – misreporting or manipulating COVID-19 testing figures, delaying the publication of government investigations, burning records of past atrocities, and deploying unmarked federal forces. Perhaps authorities were just as untrustworthy twenty or fifty or a hundred years ago, but today we rightly expect more.

Mattathias Schwartz, contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, believes it’s that lack of trust that leads people to QAnon:

“Q’s [followers] … are starving for information. Their willingness to chase bread crumbs is a symptom of ignorance and powerlessness. There may be something to their belief that the machinery of the state is inaccessible to the people. It’s hard to blame them for resorting to fantasy and esotericism, after all, when accurate information about the government’s current activities is so easily concealed and so woefully incomplete.”

So the goal cannot be to simply restore trust in existing authorities. Rather, I think it’s to restore faith in truth and knowledge itself. The COVID Tracking Project and Bellingcat help reveal truth by crowdsourcing information. They show their work via hypertext and open data, creating a structure upon which higher-level analysis and journalism can be built. And if they can’t find the truth, they’re willing to say so.

QAnon seems just as open. Everything is online. Every discussion, every idea, every theory is all joined together in a warped edifice where speculation becomes fact and fact leads to action. It’s thrilling to discover, and as you find new terms to Google and new threads to pull upon, you can feel just like a real researcher. And you can never get bored. There’s always new information to make sense of, always a new puzzle to solve, always a new enemy to take down.

QAnon fills the void of information that states have created—not with facts, but with fantasy. If we don’t want QAnon to fill that void, someone else has to. Government institutions can’t be relied upon to do this sustainably, given how underfunded and politicised they’ve become in recent years. Traditional journalism has also struggled against its own challenges of opacity and lack of resources. So maybe that someone is… us.

ARGs teach us that the search for knowledge and truth can be immensely rewarding, not in spite of their deliberately-fractured stories and near-impossible puzzles, but because of them. They teach us that communities can self-organise and self-moderate to take on immense challenges in a responsible way. And they teach us that people are ready and willing to volunteer to work if they’re welcomed, no matter their talent.

It’s hard to create these communities. They rely on software and tools that aren’t always free or easy to use. They need volunteers who have spare time to give and moderators who can be supported, financially and emotionally, through the struggles that always come. These communities already exist. They just need more help.

Despite the growing shadow of QAnon, I’m hopeful for the future. The beauty of ARGs and ARG-like communities isn’t their power to discover truth. It’s how they make the process of discovery so deeply rewarding.

What Alternate Reality Games Teach Us About the Dangerous Appeal of QAnon syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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algebraicant · 5 years

Text

SO, since nobody asked,

I’m writing this just in case I want to source and have this information all in one place,

TANACON

just watched the series (1/31/2019) -- late, I know

comments I wanted to respond to but were posted 6+ months ago, so like, old news, who cares/ maybe they’ve since learned the answer and don't need my two cents,

Q: where did the money go???

A: Shane said: veep (the company which sold the tickets) told Good Times (Michael) that if any problems occurred, they were keeping the ticket sales (MANY problems occurred) and that Good Times would be responsible for refunding ticket sales (325,000)

Q: (moreso a wrong assumption) Tana and Good Times knew the capacity was set to 1,200! they knew they were selling 4,000 extra tickets and that those people would never get inside!! scam scam scam!

A: Short answer? No.

Long answer? Buckle your seat belts:

No. The capacity was 1,200-- number one, that’s sort of a technicality. That number is for fire safety reasons, and buildings/rooms/etc have to have a capacity (that is determined by guidelines to which idc enough about the specifics to look up rn-- maybe there's a person per square foot ratio idfk it doesn’t matter) in case of a fire emergency,, it's a preventative measure to minimize the chance of a stampede resulting in injury/death. SO, that being said, you CAN fit more people into a room then the stated capacity of the room.

Now you might be thinking: even so, not 4,000 EXTRA PEOPLE. Yes, that is definitely true.

BUT, CONs are not like, say, a ballet/play theater, or movie theaters, etc, where there is a certain number of seats and there’s one person per seat, no more (and hopefully no less), you sit, you watch, you leave. Events like CONs account for foot traffic and the constant cycling of people.

You come in, you walk around, you see X, Y, and Z, and you leave. If the event has expensive food/drink, you may leave to get cheaper options (if the event allows you to leave and re-enter, anyway). The point is, people are coming and going throughout the day, so that allows for others to replace them.

I assume the event creator(s) of TANACON believed there would be higher turn-around than there was.

Still, that being said, 4,000 people was WAY too many extra tickets sold. There was no possible way that there would be 1,000 people coming in for 40 minutes to an hour, and then leaving to allow for the next batch of people. Even accounting for the different arrival times-- some people coming at/before the CON started, people coming closer to noon after a late start-- it's utterly impossible.

In saying that, you might think: How could someone make such a careless mistake?

Keep in mind, THIS PROBLEM HAPPENED AT VIDCON IN 2014:

“VidCon 2014 was held at the Anaheim Convention Center, and 18,000 people showed up for the sold-out get-together for those who love online video.

But getting inside to see their favorite YouTubers has some people complaining about long lines.

One woman and her family say they waited two hours, only to have security cut them off in line before she could get an autograph with her favorite online creators.

On VidCon's Facebook page they do say they cannot guarantee that everyone will have one-on-one time with their favorite creators.

Hank Green, co-creator of VidCon, says they tried to make access as fair as possible, but the demand for signings was higher than expected, with fans camping out.

"We ended up in a situation this year which we should have anticipated, but didn't, that basically we had to queue people up before the queues," said Green.”

etc etc

https://abc7.com/news/fans-wait-in-long-lines-for-hours-at-vidcon/145838/

NOTE: wiki says 12,000 people bought tickets in 2013, and the attendance was increasing every year, but there is no official count on wiki for 2014-- probably because they FUCKED UP and oversold by way too many.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VidCon

The Anaheim Convention Center, where VIDCON was held, has a capacity of 7,000-7,500 people inside. The outside area fits 5,500 people.

Together, the convention center fits 13,000 people inside and out.

VIDCON oversold by 5,000 (18,000-13,000).

ALSO

KEEP IN MIND, that means 10,500 people were outside of the actual convention center (18,000-7,500). These 10,500 people were, instead, either in the outside area (5,500) or in the parking lot waiting to get in (5000).

NOTE: I’m not taking into account the fact that, as I previously stated, the capacity number is just an approximate, and that more people might have actually been let inside, despite the capacity limit. That is because I simply can’t calculate the number extra people that security allowed in past the capacity number (as far as I can tell, that information isn’t public knowledge, IF they even kept count). But for our purposes, even if I speculate, and allow for, maybe 1,000 extra people, that’s still 9,500 people NOT in the venue.

SO THE SAME THING HAPPENED

So, what’s the difference (if any)?

1. VIDCON was already established. VIDCON had existed since 2010 (3 successful years prior to the 2014 VIDCON)

2. VIDCON had already been held at the Anaheim Convention Center the year prior.

Is that good for VIDCON?

yes?

Because VIDCON had been established for 3 years, with 1 year at that particular venue, people, presumably, knew they’d be waiting in line for at least 30 minutes, and maybe several hours. People knew to check the weather, bring sunscreen, water, snacks, a board game, pool noodles, WHATEVER they needed while waiting. (I’m sure some people didn’t plan, but you can’t account for every stupid person in the world, otherwise, you’d work/worry yourself to death. If they didn’t bring water, they could leave, or die of dehydration at that point. Sometimes Darwinism works itself out, what can I say-- I’M KIDDING. Sort of.)

no?

Since they went from 12,000 (which presumably worked) to 18,000 in one year’s time without changing venues/ adding venues, or changing visitor passes (limiting access/time spent at the venue) they royally fucked up. If 12,000 people works for you, you don’t just add 5,000 extra people to the list. Especially knowing only 7,500 people fit inside the center, and 13,000 people fit total. If you want to push it to 13,000... fine. Don’t go 4,000 over (COUGH COUGH, TANACON 2K18).

but, yes?

Because the Green Brother’s apologized (sort of-- they did the “i’m sorry you feel that way” non-apology, apology type shit) and took responsibility and came out with public statements explaining what the issues were and set a fixed limit of people the next year, 2015, (”Next year I think is going to be significantly different in how we handle [things]”) they were able to calm some of the ruffled feathers.

Also, because they had 3 successful years under their belt, they already had a following/ people who trusted them. They also had 3 years of success as proof that their trust was earned, so it was easier for them to say “sorry! this was a blip! a mistake! we promise it will never happen again, just remember the good times, we'll be back to that level of success next year,” and have people believe them.

NOW, compare that to TANACON

1. TANACON was suggested, then created, over the course of a few months.

This doesn’t need further explanation, right? Like, a convention that’s supposed to have food/drink/security/merch/meet-and-greets etc. and FIVE THOUSAND PEOPLE can’t be planned in a few months.

2. Expectations were set too high.

VIDCON already existed, so there was a bar in place. If TANACON wasn’t as good as (or at least close to) VIDCON standards, people were going to bitch. But, instead, it just failed completely, so...

3. Tana wanted revenge on VIDCON. TANACON was a byproduct of that.

So, wrong motives-- already a bad start. She is young, unlike the Green brothers, inexperienced, naive, impulsive, and often, in the past, not held accountable for her mistakes, so she’s got a slight god-complex? possibly? or at the very least, she’s cocky and irresponsible. But, I mean, she was 19/20 at the time, right? Who isn’t a bit cocky and irresponsible at that age (maybe not Tana-level, but still).

I honestly partly blame the ticket buyers (and their parents) for, not one moment, pausing to think: I WATCH Tana’s videos-- part of her appeal (?) is that she’s a fucking mess. That’s what her “Story Time” videos ARE. HER CONSTANTLY GETTING INTO PRECARIOUS SITUATIONS. HAVE SOME FORSIGHT PEOPLE. Also, you saw the video where the TANACON idea was conceived right? You KNEW AHEAD OF TIME this was the result of revenge. When do revenge schemes ever go to plan? Again, HAVE SOME FORESIGHT PEOPLE.

4. Tana and Michael are both early 20′s. And I mean EARLY 20′s.

Tana was 20, so even if this wasn’t made out of revenge, and she wasn’t as much of a mess as she IS, you still should be considering the PROS and CONS of relying on a child.

(For reference, I’m 22. I would never trust myself, or another person my age-- Tana 20, Michael 21-- to be able to successfully plan and execute something of this size. A fan meet-and-greet at Starbucks? MAAAYBE.)

When people go into business with young people/ people who have no experience in the field because they “believe in them” or “trusted them,” is it partly their fault? If you ASSUME that because VIDCON is an established convention that, besides 2014 when they learned their lesson, has been extremely successful, that TANACON will be? That’s your oversight. If you’re pouring your faith and money into a business just because they seem trustful, with nothing to back it up? No past experience? No proof of responsibility in the past? I’m sorry, but that’s your bad. Or worse, you don’t even consider whether it should be trusted at all? You have just always dreamed of meeting youtubers X, Y, Z, and so you jumped without actually considering the consequences, the risk vs reward? Again, that’s your fault.

While your ticket money might eventually get refunded, you still wasted the time (missing work/school/etc) standing in a hot parking lot or a mess of a venue, as well as travel costs you’ll never get back (unless someone pays you back out of guilt-provoked charity), and, I’m sure, a bunch of other shitty experiences. HAVE SOME FORESIGHT.

The only good thing to come out of TANACON is, maybe, you’ll know not to blindly trust some teenaged stranger from the internet (and hopefully be able to apply your new-found caution to other situations as well) in the future.

Tana could have easily found the same information as I did about the VIDCON fuck up of 2k14 and

1. Pointed fingers. “IT’S NOT JUST ME, NOBODY’S PERFECT.”

2. Learned from their mistakes and not repeat them.

I’m aware that: Shoulda, coulda, woulda.

Pointing fingers probably would’ve made the situation more polarized, aka, 1/2 her viewers (the vast majority being people who did not go to TANACON and live through the disappointment) would say “she’s right. VIDCON fucked up too in the past. Sure, she fucked up, but nobody’s perfect. Accidents happen” and 1/2 her viewers (the vast majority being people who did go to TANACON and lived through the disappointment) would say “Tana’s a cunt trying to divert the attention of her huge fuck up onto VIDCON again by making excuses!”

So, the situation really wouldn’t have gotten any better as a result.

and

There’s no point in going down that rabbit hole. She didn’t do the research. She was fueled by revenge and was naive enough to believe Michael, a boy one year older than her, could handle everything simply because he said he could (spoiler: he couldn’t).

It happened. It's over. Nobody died. Nobody got seriously injured.

I feel sorry for the people who wasted their money and time at TANACON (especially those who flew from overseas).

I feel sorry for Tana because she didn’t want TANACON to be a disaster. Now she has to live with the guilt for ruining a lot of people’s day and the repercussions.

I feel sorry for Michael because he bit off more than he could chew and has to live with the repercussions of his actions.

I feel sorry for all the youtube personalities that agreed to go and the guilt of having their fans be let down.

All you can hope for is that the people learn from this disaster and not repeat it again (although, like I said, this happened at VIDCON four years prior, so who knows-- fingers crossed that, because it was such a huge controversy and people love bringing up how controversial people fucked up in the past, people will actually remember, and it’ll take more than 4 years before something like this happens again??).

#boycottthemarriott #? #stillnotsurewheretheylandedinallthis #scapegoat #?

#tanacon #ranting #i love ranting about shit that has never and will never effect my life #this is not demonizing anyone #also i know i say i partially blame the fans but i am well aware that you cant see into the future and you shouldnt stop trusting people #just... think before you act #and if you end up getting let down know that you took the risk #that doesnt diminish the disappointment and pain you went through AT ALL #but just like tana didnt mean for it to go wrong every party took a risk and when it failed everybody suffered #shane dawson #also shane is amazing but that wasn't the rant i was going off on #tana mongeau #old news

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digitalmark18-blog · 5 years

Text

10 Pieces of SEO Wisdom That Will Transform Your Strategy

New Post has been published on https://britishdigitalmarketingnews.com/10-pieces-of-seo-wisdom-that-will-transform-your-strategy/

10 Pieces of SEO Wisdom That Will Transform Your Strategy

Over the past month, I’ve been lucky enough to attend several of the best SEO conferences and learn from many of the brightest minds in our space.

In this post, I will share 10 pieces of SEO wisdom from some of my favorite talks I’ve listened in on recently.

The insights from talks like these allow us to think more broadly about where SEO is headed, and give us the foresight to update and adapt our strategies to be more future-proof.

So without further ado, here are the 10 best takeaways.

1. User-Centric Performance Metrics Must Reflect Real Performance

Speaking about the state of technical SEO at SMX, Bartosz Goralewicz made the case that SEO professionals need to be more technical to keep up with the pace at which new technologies are evolving.

To prove his point, Bartosz exposed some of the major crawling and indexing issues that exist for many large websites.

With regards to web performance, Goralewicz highlighted the need for performance testing to reflect performance in the real world for users.

It isn’t enough to perform standard speed tests in isolation and by looking at load time alone, as this won’t give you the full picture.

To achieve a fuller understanding, real user metrics and objective crowd measured metrics are needed, such as the Chrome User Experience Report (CRUX).

Goralewicz illustrated his point by comparing Hulu and Netflix’s performance in organic search.

While their pages have a similar load time, Hulu only displays the page content once the page has fully loaded, whereas Netflix has a much faster First Meaningful Paint timing and, therefore, a better user experience.

2. Don’t Get Locked Into Thinking You Can Only Optimize Websites

At Digitalzone in Istanbul, Cindy Krum took a broad look at how Google is evolving and how it is trying to move away from using the link graph, with an increased focus on language-agnostic entities.

Google’s aim is to organize everything, and they want to rank more than just websites (e.g., audio, businesses, podcasts, photos, music).

Ultimately, these are all forms of information and don’t necessarily need URLs.

Krum sees the shift to mobile-first indexing as Google’s way of organizing information according to the knowledge graph.

At the center of this change are entities, which are universal ideas or concepts that don’t necessarily require links or websites.

As such, it’s important that we adapt and understand that we are no longer only optimizing and ranking websites.

3. Decreasing Organic Opportunity & 2 Conflicting Truths

Rand Fishkin was the keynote speaker at September’s BrightonSEO, and he took the opportunity to paint a rather bleak picture of the state of search.

Google and SEO professionals used to have a deal where we receive clicks from search in return for organizing the world’s information for Google with our websites.

However, Fishkin argued that this deal is getting worse all the time as Google is increasingly keeping searchers within their ecosystem.

With this in mind, he explained that there are two conflicting truths for marketers:

It has never been more difficult to earn more traffic from the world’s major players, such as Google.

It has never been more important to make your website the center of your campaigns.

Despite this difficult position, Fishkin is optimistic in the long term and gave us 10 ways you can help your websites survive in the future of search.

4. Google May Treat a Subdomain as Part of the Main Domain

In an insightful Q&A between Distilled’s Will Critchlow and Google’s John Mueller at SearchLove London, Mueller tried to clear up the long-standing subdomains vs. subdirectories debate.

Mueller said that Google attempts to understand what does and doesn’t belong to a site and sometimes that does and doesn’t include particular subdomains and subdirectories.

If there are lots of subdomains on a domain, then these might be considered part of the same site.

If Google sees a subdomain as part of the same site, then it is kind of similar to a subdirectory.

5. The Game at the Top of the SERPs Has Changed & We Need to Inherit Google’s KPIs

Tom Capper’s SearchLove talk looked at how the normal rules don’t always apply for the most competitive terms in search, with Google seemingly going beyond our normal understanding of ranking factors.

The results of Capper’s research indicate that backlinks mean increasingly less in explaining rankings, especially for the top five positions. He instead sees backlinks as a proxy for popularity that helps put a page in contention for ranking well.

Capper encouraged us to optimize Google’s KPIs wherever possible (where they are known), such as Time to SERP Interaction and the Pogo-stick Rate back from pages back to search.

6. 55% of Users Will Abandon Your Site If They Can’t Find What They’re Looking For

JP Sherman’s satisfyingly thorough BrightonSEO talk focused on the often overlooked area of optimizing internal search.

Only 18 percent of organizations devote resource to optimizing onsite search, but 55 percent of users will immediately abandon your site if they can’t find what they’re looking for.

The sophistication of Google’s search engine means that searchers have very high expectations of all search engines, so if they don’t find something relevant in your internal site search, this will result in lost revenue.

Sherman broke internal search down into the areas:

Findability.

Passive and active behaviors.

Features.

Result set quality.

Once you understand these areas you can optimize them by implementing functionality including:

Knowledge graphs.

Geo-context.

Auto-suggest.

Auto-complete.

Alternative paths.

7. If You Aren’t Sampling Some Local SERPs, You Aren’t Seeing What Your Searchers See

Rob Bucci and STAT’s superb research on local search was one of the highlights of SearchLove London and has gone some way to significantly advance our understanding in this area.

The research’s key takeaways included:

If you aren’t tracking location in your SERP tracking you’re missing 70 percent of what users are seeing.

Smart segmentation is the key to local SEO success.

Geo-modifiers have a significant influence on organic results, it’s like asking a different question.

You need a good rating to rank in local packs. Google is only letting the best quality results rise to the top.

8. Switch on Discontinued Products to Leverage Lost Link Equity

At SearchLove London, Luke Carthy used his vast experience of ecommerce SEO to show how we can get more out of discontinued products by switching them back on, and reclaiming lost link equity.

Using high-profile examples, he showed how short-sighted decision making in the form of 404-ing discontinued products has caused near irreparable damage to a number of ecommerce sites’ rankings for various products.

To avoid these nightmare scenarios, Carthy set out the benefits of switching back on discontinued products, which include:

Reclaiming lost link equity.

Capitalizing on continuing demand, which carries on long after products have been discontinued.

Better and cleaner UX by transforming 404 pages with alternative choices and a clear next step.

9. Implement Automated Testing to Avoid SEO Horror Stories

Mike King’s BrightonSEO talk started by going through some SEO horror stories that people had shared with him.

Many of these could have been avoided by implementing various forms of automated testing into development pipelines.

King introduced the different types of automated testing including:

Unit testing: Testing of individual functions or procedures to make sure that they work.

Integration testing: Testing how logic comes together to build the bigger system.

UI testing: Testing of the front-end interface.

Conducting an SEO audit is similar to the work carried out by QA Engineers.

Crawling the HTML version is a bit like integration testing because you’re seeing what the software spits out when all of the systems come together.

Crawling the rendered version is a bit like UI testing because you’re looking at the results when the UI is rendered.

An SEO professional’s role is to help plan the tests that QA Engineers, Product Managers, and Developers use to build into systems.

10. The Same Changes Have Different Effects on Different Sites

Dom Woodman’s refreshingly honest talk at SearchLove London took us through many of the SEO tests he has run using Distilled’s ODN.

Interestingly, he found that when a test yielded positive results, it often didn’t have the same impact when implemented across other sites, which suggests we shouldn’t focus too much on the concept of “best practices.”

Woodman urged us to periodically re-challenge our beliefs, as we’ve likely made assumptions that are wrong because they worked on one site.

In amongst his other successes and failures, Woodman learned that if user intent isn’t there then the extra bells and whistles will fail (e.g. structured data). You can’t put lipstick on a pig.

Perhaps most importantly, Woodman has realized that success isn’t just up and to the right, it’s about testing and finding things out.

A negative test rolled back is a bullet dodged, not a failure.

More SEO Resources:

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Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/pieces-of-seo-wisdom/276259/

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republicstandard · 6 years

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When Progressives Exploit School Shootings

I believe the children are the future. Indoctrinate them with neo-Marxist ideology and let them lead the way.

What if I told you that the conversation about gun control in the United States wasn't about guns? A lot of what we're about to look at is speculative- but to be frank the lines that are being drawn between major political actors are far too interesting to ignore. Why I'm writing this is not because I don't care about the victims of mass shootings or even that I'm being paid to do so. This is concerning an exploitative progressive ideology that has thrust kids involved in a mass shooting to the spear-tip of their agenda. What I contend that the following evidence shows is a calculated and cynical political move that has been planned in advance for these exact circumstances.

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This hypothetical mobilization playbook requires the tacit support of the media to keep the focus on the activism following the Florida Parkland shooting and away from the victims. Can you remember the names of those 17 victims? Anderson Cooper says that he does.

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This was the 15th of February, 2018. It is important to remember the people that have died not only for the tragic waste of life that set these wheels in motion but to recognize the utter disregard with which their memories have been treated by those with political agendas.

We know from repeated analysis of gun violence that the United States represents a negative correlation between homicides and gun ownership. To frame this entire conversation as being one of righteous children against the gun-lovin' government requires the influence of powerful political actors- applying an evidence-based approach to the causes of gun violence is unpalatable to Progressives. Exploitation of tragedy is nothing new when dealing with these agents of chaos. We can only be surprised at our own surprise at the quickness the machine moves to capitalize on the deaths of the innocent.

Parkland student: "We are not to be bought by the NRA. ... We are the ones who deserve to be kept safe because we were literally shot at" https://t.co/5yk1EL23q4

— CNN (@CNN) February 16, 2018

As reported by the New York Times on Feb. 18th:

“We want this to stop. We need this to stop. We are protecting guns more than people,” said Emma González, 18, one of five core organizers, whose impassioned speech at a rally in Fort Lauderdale on Saturday drew national attention. “We are not trying to take people’s guns away; we are trying to make sure we have gun safety.”

Ms. González, a senior at the school, said the group was inviting elected officials “from any side of the political spectrum” to join the movement. But she said: “We don’t want anybody who is funded by the N.R.A. We want people who are going to be on the right side of history.”

The right side of history. Who do we know that loves being on the right side of history?

Linda Sarsour speaking at DOJ #NRA2DOJ 18 mile end today: "We are on the right side of history and only time will tell." @lsarsour pic.twitter.com/lb63fJZTiw

— john zangas (@johnzangas) July 15, 2017

It would be a surprise at this point in history to discover that the Women's March was not heavily involved in the politicizing of this mass murder. It is no surprise that March For Our Lives (one of the names for the post-Parkland political movements) has popped up with almost identical web design on Squarespace, who host the lion's share of Women's March affiliated online assets. I do hope that Linda got the kids a good deal.

Statement from @womensmarch YOUTH EMPOWER & @schoolwalkoutUS coordinating in solidarity & also pledging support for #marchforourlives. Our present & future are BRIGHT. #Enough #NationalSchoolWalkout pic.twitter.com/W47IVNQoHD

— Linda Sarsour (@lsarsour) February 19, 2018

Sarsour and her allies have had a major rage on for the NRA for some years, particularly thanks to the activism of Tamika Mallory, women's march organizer and blacktivist.

My life-changing call came when I learned that my son’s father had been killed by a gun. I became a single mother and my son lost his father. I’m proud of @WomensMarchY @schoolwalkoutUS @AMarch4OurLives and all the young people leading the way to say #ENOUGH. ✊🏾🖤 https://t.co/hWzvd2KoKO

— Tamika D. Mallory (@TamikaDMallory) February 19, 2018

In a piece last year entitled When Progressives Embrace Hate recent Twitter pile-on victim Bari Weiss noted that both Sarsour and Mallory embrace racists like Louis Farrakhan and the cop killer Assata Shakur.

Ms. Mallory, in addition to applauding Assata Shakur as a feminist emblem, also admires Fidel Castro, who sheltered Ms. Shakur in Cuba. She put up a flurry of posts when Mr. Castro died last year. “R.I.P. Comandante! Your legacy lives on!” she wrote in one. She does not have similar respect for American police officers. “When you throw a brick in a pile of hogs, the one that hollers is the one you hit,” she posted on Nov. 20.

Knowing their admiration for racial supremacists and literal communist dictators, it is not particularly of note that exploitative activists like Sarsour and Mallory are political bottom-feeders who weaponize tragedy for their own ends. What becomes interesting indeed is what is turned up when the paper-and-cash-trail behind these power-players is followed, as Asra Q. Nomani of the New York Times-affiliated site Women in the World did over a year ago.

What she discovered was that key Hillary Clinton financier George Soros;

"[H]as funded, or has close relationships with, at least 56 of the march’s “partners,” including “key partners” Planned Parenthood, which opposes Trump’s anti-abortion policy, and the National Resource Defense Council, which opposes Trump’s environmental policies. The other Soros ties with “Women’s March” organizations include the partisan MoveOn.org (which was fiercely pro-Clinton), the National Action Network (which has a former executive director lauded by Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett as “a leader of tomorrow” as a march co-chair and another official as “the head of logistics”). Other Soros grantees who are “partners” in the march are the American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch."

Particularly illuminating in the context of Nomani's work is the leaked 2007 memo from John Podesta to George Soros and others that set out the framework for the exact behavior we are seeing today from the liberal media and these spontaneous groups like March For Our Lives.

Podesta wrote to Soros that he wanted to:

better utilize these networks to drive the content of politics through a strong echo chamber.

Control the political discourse. So much effort over the past few years has been focused on better coordinating, strengthening, and developing progressive institutions and leaders. Now that this enhanced infrastructure is in place—grassroots organizing; multi-issue advocacy groups; think tanks; youth outreach; faith communities; micro-targeting outfits; the netroots and blogosphere—we need to better utilize these networks to drive the content of politics through a strong “echo chamber” and message delivery system.

This memo was released with a focus on the 2008 election of Barack Obama. I don't like much agreeing with John Podesta about anything, but he saw back in 2007 that the future of America is about demographics. From the memo:

Ensure that demographics is destiny. An "emerging progressive majority" is a realistic possibility in terms of demographics and voting patterns. But it is incomplete in terms of organizing and political work. Women, communities of color and highly educated professionals are core parts of the progressive coalition.

A message delivery system in service of a progressive movement that combines multiple issues into a sledgehammer against the state. Pure Alinsky.

I don't think at the time Podesta could realize that the explosion of social media influence would convert the liberal media into a progressive blogosphere in the service of his agenda. The media are maintaining attention exactly where I would want them to be looking if I were a Linda Sarsour or George Soros. Keep the eyes of America on the crying rainbow nation teenagers reciting the progressive talking points and milk the 24-hour news cycle for all it is worth. Convert this into a publicly funded war-chest to power a Women's March clone -but this time, for the kids.

With 11 years between that memo and now, can anyone deny that his plan worked perfectly? Up until the ruinous election of Donald J. Trump, Podesta was bullet-proof. Despite that defeat at the hands of populism, the plans of Podesta and Soros have continued, not only unabated but financially and ideologically reinvigorated. Re-energized with new blood and new revenue after the rejection of the Obama/Clinton procession of succession resulted in a billionaire boogeyman against whom the troops can be rallied. The neo-Marxist agenda rolls on with even more money than ever before.

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Imagine then, based on what we know now- is it so impossible that an anti-NRA strategist had this playbook ready to roll when the next school shooting happened? Is it too brutally cynical to suspect people of such callous foresight? Recognizing the weakness in the system is the raison d'être of all acolytes of Saul Alinsky; It is how they have effected change for decades. Crack open the seats of institutional power by holding them to impossible standards- the thirteenth rule is in full effect with this Children's Crusade. I have no doubt that the kids involved truly believe in the justness of their cause- but they are a cat's paw, plunging their young hands into the fires of gun debate for no reward but burned flesh.

Teens between 14 and 18 have far better BS detectors, on average, than “adults” 18 and older. Wouldn’t it be great if the voting age were lowered to 16? Just a pipe dream, I know, but . . . #Children’sCrusade?

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) February 19, 2018

Following these threads backward through time reveal that this moment of what appears to be the investiture of moral right into teenagers is not a spontaneous outcry against gun violence. As we will show in tomorrow's article, the kids who are shooting to fame on the back of a brutal shooting are themselves junior progressive political activists who, willingly or no, are now exploiting the deaths of their classmates to push an agenda that began long before they were born.

Tomorrow we shine a light on the kids who are shooting to fame on the back of a shooting.

Thank you for reading Republic Standard. We publish this magazine and the Freebird Forum because we believe in free speech- but it doesn't come cheap! Will you make a small donation towards our running costs? You can make a difference by clicking here.

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: Against a Feathered Headdress: A Tale of Two Performance Festivals and Native American Voices

Emily Johnson (Yup’ik) leading Umyuangvigkaq, a PS122 Long Table and durational Sewing Bee event at the Ace Hotel on January 8 (all photos by Maria Baranova, courtesy PS122, unless indicated otherwise)

Two simultaneous performance events on January 8 revealed the gulf that still exists between certain New York art institutions in their approach to genuine collaboration and the failure to be accountable to indigenous concerns. While MoMA PS1 struggled to respond to controversy over the use of a faux-Sioux headdress by choreographer Latifa Laâbissi in her 2006 work Self Portrait Camouflage — in which the artist performs nude while wearing the headdress — across town the Yup’ik choreographer Emily Johnson created a space that centered indigenous voices and values to teach the very lessons that the PS1 curatorial team and Laâbissi could have used. Johnson’s Umyuangvigkaq, or “place to gather ideas,” a Long Table discussion and durational Sewing Bee that was part of Performance Space 122’s Coil Festival, modeled sovereign practice and a respect for local cultural protocol. Meanwhile, at the PS1 performance, which was part of the American Realness festival, the artistic right to transgression was pitted against Native American beliefs and values in a false opposition.

Objections to Self Portrait Camouflage, a solo performance by Laâbissi, a French-born choreographer whose parents immigrated from Morocco, were first raised by Rosy Simas, a Seneca dancer and choreographer, in December. Simas saw promotional images of Laâbissi’s performance online and was outraged that a fake piece of regalia held sacred by the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota peoples (collectively known as the Sioux Nations) was being appropriated. In a public letter posted to Facebook she described it as a sacrilegious and “aggressive act of hate speech.” Her letter outlined the traumatic effect of the disregard for Native culture in Laâbissi’s use of the feathered headdress (currently a focus of critiques of cultural appropriation), a particularly charged symbol in light of its cultural relevance to the peoples of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and the ongoing struggles against the Dakota Access Pipeline there. Laâbissi’s performance claims to evoke the imperialist custom of exhibiting indigenous people at World’s Fairs and conjure the silent aggressions at the heart of immigrant experiences through tropes of caricature and the grotesque. But the appropriation of headdresses and “playing Indian” in an American context are long-running acts of aggression that, as Simas pointed out in her letter, contributed to systematic genocide and indigenous erasure.

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While Natives and non-Natives decried Laâbissi’s lack of sensitivity and foresight, Ben Snapp Pryor of American Realness immediately reached out to Simas and began an extensive dialogue. The result was a public response and apology, and American Realness withdrawing its support of the performance. The offending promotional image was taken down from banner ads and Pryor removed the performance from the festival program entirely. American Realness committed to hosting a panel discussion, “Native American Realness,” which took place at ISSUE Project Room on January 7, the day before Laâbissi’s performance at PS1. Rosy Simas and Christopher K. Morgan, a Native Hawaiian choreographer, joined Sara Nash of the New England Foundation for the Arts to discuss cultural appropriation, Redface, and other forms of colonial racism in artistic practice. The panelists took the opportunity to make indigenous values present. For example, the discussion was done in a circle, began with a Native Hawaiian prayer, and participants expressed their lineage when speaking. Morgan told Hyperallergic that he hoped the panel would be like a “drop in the pond that is rippling outward” to the spectrum of non-Native members of the performance community who hadn’t considered such issues up until that point.

Rosy Simas (Seneca) leading discussion at “Native American Realness,” organized by American Realness at ISSUE Project Room on January 7 (photo by Ian Douglas, courtesy American Realness)

However, PS1’s response to the concerns of the Native arts community was unapologetic. A week after Simas published her letter, she spoke with Chief Curator Peter Eleey and Jenny Schlenzka, Associate Curator and the organizer of Laâbissi’s performance. After several phone meetings a Skype conversation was arranged between Simas and Laâbissi, observed by the PS1 curatorial staff, so the artist could hear the concerns over her use of sacred regalia. Simas described the conversation as difficult and ugly. It was clear to her that Laâbissi believed that if she could explain her work, Simas would understand and grant her permission to use the headdress (which Simas, as a Seneca woman, could not give). The dialogue between the two ended with Simas telling Laâbissi that continuing to wear the headdress was a colonial act, which Laâbissi insisted she, as a woman of Moroccan heritage, could not commit. “She could not see that acts of disrespect and oppression can occur even when coming from another colonial context of oppression,” Simas told Hyperallergic.

While PS1changed the promo image from Laâbissi in the headdress to an empty podium draped with a French flag, the conversation largely ended there. Simas began to raise money to fly herself and Dakota elders and educators to New York to address and protest the performance. American Realness and PS1 both contributed some funding, and Simas was able to bring Dakota/Lakota elder Janice Bad Moccasin and Dakota educator Ramona Kitto Stately to attend the weekend’s events. The organizers and artist were silent on whether there would be any change to the performance with respect to the headdress, so a group of Native scholars, artists, and choreographers — many of them in town for for the concurrent Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference — joined Simas to attend Self Portrait Camouflage.

Laâbissi’s performance was a source of surprise, relief, and, eventually, disappointment. She began the piece wearing the headdress and then, for the first time in a decade of performing the work, removed it within the first few minutes of the performance and placed it on the floor in front of the audience. Her body language was suggestive of offering and respect in doing so. It was a clear response to the criticisms she had received, and Laâbissi performed the rest of the work only wearing a red headband that had been underneath the headdress.

The removal of the headdress, though, demonstrated even more the lapse in research and consultation that had gone into the performance. During the ensuing Q&A (a recording of which PS1 provided to Hyperallergic), Janice Bad Moccasin stood to speak to traditional Dakota beliefs and Northern Plains customs. The feathered headdress, fake or not, she explained, is a very sacred and restricted item to be worn only by men in the Northern Plains tribes. Such a right is earned feather by feather, as each feather represents a great deed. Bad Moccasin acknowledged her respect for the work of the artist and commended her for putting the headdress down. But she explained that it was understood in her customs that once Laâbissi had put the headdress down, by letting it touch the ground, she could not pick it back up. “What we learn is that an eagle feather is so important it cannot touch the ground. If it touches the ground it is a fallen warrior, and you may never pick it up again,” Ramona Kitto Stately told Laâbissi. “It’s important that you don’t use that headdress. It hurts my people. It demeans my people. Please leave that fallen warrior. There is a song that is many years old in order to pick it up and use it in a good way. Please don’t use that.” Such an offense could easily have been avoided had any Plains Indian person ever been consulted in the dramaturgy.

Discussion at Umyuangvigkaq, a PS122 Long Table and durational Sewing Bee event at the Ace Hotel on January 8

Despite Bad Moccasin’s and Stately’s pleas, Laâbissi, speaking through a translator, said that she couldn’t commit to not wearing the headdress again. When asked if she had been aware of the problematic nature of the choice to use the headdress when she performed Self Portrait in 2014 at Chez Bushwick, she admitted that she had been. Though she claims she didn’t wear the headdress with the intent of triggering violence, Laâbissi retreated to asking whether art has the right to transgression. The transgressions in her performance that are specific to her experience — including being a nude Arab woman and stuffing the French flag into her mouth, which is illegal in France — were thus equated, problematically, with transgressions against a historically oppressed culture and people.

Christopher K. Morgan attended the performance, and during the Q&A he described the conflict he felt about the work. On the one hand, his Western, liberal arts-educated self bristled at the idea of any potential censorship of individual expression. On the other, deeply inscribed in his blood is his indigenous self’s respect for community and sacred symbols. That tension, which Morgan later described as emblematic of a colonial subject’s experience, needs to be critically interrogated in light of the complex political context Laâbissi entered the work into. Transgression cannot be a responsible defense to a lack of research and consideration, particularly from an artist of international renown with major institutional support. “I would hate to see an artist not want to be extreme,” Morgan said, “but at the same time, the depth of research, respect for community, the objects that you are appropriating from, and how you do that is really critical, especially when it is a people who so rarely get to see their own work in their institutions, if at all. It becomes a facsimile of those people.”

It was not made clear why the headdress needed to be part of the piece’s artistic transgression. In discussion with Laâbissi after her performance, Carole Maccotta — an Assistant Professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at Long Island University specializing, appropriately, in colonial literature and cultural appropriation — could only point to the beautiful aesthetic effect of the headdress. Laâbissi declined to make any statement to Hyperallergic, preferring to let the work speak for itself. However, she noted the centrality of the headdress to the performance in an interview in the Fall 2016 issue of Movement Research Performance Journal:

This dimension of indigeneity is central … . The [headdress] itself is a synecdoche: a part, representing the whole of something broader — indigeneity in this case. Indeed, I am not speaking to the experience of American Indians nor am I trying to draw analogies or equivalences between the experiences of American Indians and those who were subject to French colonial rule. Rather, it is a way of entering into a discursive field, a way of entering into a limited field equipped with visual tropes that are, themselves, loaded with meaning.

But even from an aesthetic point of view that considers the headdress as a visual trope rather than as a culturally specific sacred object, one must consider how the whole range of visual and historical associations impacts the broader audience and interacts with a local context.

There are deeply loaded meanings of the headdress that Laâbissi’s performance and shallow engagement efforts ignore. It is at once an appropriated costume at summer camps and music festivals and a sign of contemporary indigenous resistance in North Dakota; it is a representation of the noble savage and warrior brave topoi that fascinated Europeans and the costume of the commercial endeavors that the likes of George Catlin and Buffalo Bill Cody ran as they toured indigenous bodies around the world. The headdress is part of a history of the display of Others that long precedes and postdates the Human Zoos and Universal Exposition displays to which Laâbissi refers. Most tellingly, the headdress proved so hurtful in the context of the PS1 performance because, as Laâbissi’s chosen representation of indigeneity, it stood for what is so often the very inability of indigenous peoples to represent themselves. The lack of awareness of indigenous contemporary experience in a context normally denied to Native artists (that of a high-profile and well-funded international performance festival in a similarly well-heeled art museum) was represented by a facsimile of a sacred object, a mere copy.

“Native American Realness” discussion with Rosy Simas (Seneca), Christopher K. Morgan (Native Hawaiian), and Sara Nash, organized by American Realness at ISSUE Project Room on January 7 (photo by Ian Douglas, courtesy American Realness)

The reinforcement of such institutional exclusion is nothing new, said Rulan Tangen, a Santa Fe-based Métis choreographer who attended Laâbissi’s performance and then led a Decolonizing Workshop for A Blade of Grass on January 12. “Indigenous people never seem to be invited to the table,” she told Hyperallergic, “it is erasure by absence and intellectual exclusion.” Such a need for genuine collaboration and inclusion will become all the more urgent for Jenny Schlenzka next month when she leaves PS1, where she curated the performance program, to become Executive Artistic Director at PS122. While Schlenzka expressed a deep and humble gratitude to Simas, Bad Moccasin, and Kitto Stately for sharing their knowledge and concerns, neither she nor PS1 offered any apology for the use of the headdress, which presumably will continue in Laâbissi’s future performances. At the post-performance Q&A, Schlenzka admitted that it was a great shortcoming to not see the problematic nature of the use of the headdress.

However, in a statement sent to Hyperallergic subsequently, she defended Laâbissi’s performance as “a stark and highly personal solo performance that draws attention to the aggressions that lie at the heart of the colonial gaze. The questions it raises are important and complex. … I am [grateful] to Latifa for the sensitivity with which she engaged these concerns and incorporated them within her performance.” Whether such a defensive stance will affect Schlenzka’s work at PS122 remains to be seen as she takes over a program that has recently made efforts to engage indigenous artists and communities. Outgoing artistic director Vallejo Gantner and his organization have been in a generative dialogue with Emily Johnson and the Lenape Center for the past year to build acknowledgements of indigenous rights and territories into PS122’s programming. Meanwhile, Simas and other indigenous attendees were left dissatisfied by Laâbissi’s attempts to explain away her use of the headdress and her characterization of the protest and discussion as just a beautiful learning moment. Tangen added: “It is frustrating to see the publicity and notoriety this artist gets for a platform that exploits indigenous images.”

Ironically, it was at the event put on by the organization she is about to take over that Schlenzka and others could have learned what it means to truly listen to and engage with indigenous voices, beliefs, and protocols. Emily Johnson’s Umyuangvigkaq, a free event that took place in the Ace Hotel’s Liberty Hall, created an indigenous space that resulted in a positive discussion of Native and Aboriginal worldviews as they intersect with contemporary art and culture. While difficult moments and points of conflict and tension arose over the course of the six-hour program, the Long Table format proved conducive to shared open dialogue and powerful moments of realization. It was a stark contrast to the hierarchical panel talk-back format used at PS1. A leadership council of indigenous provocateurs led the circle discussion at the Ace Hotel, while the audience was invited to contribute to Johnson’s “Sewing Bee,” an ongoing experiment in public engagement. The patches produced in the group sewing effort are to be part of a 4,000-square-foot quilt used in an all-night outdoor performance later this year titled “Then a Cunning Voice and a Night We Spend Gazing at Stars,” which will combine community action and personal expression through the individual messages written on each patch, storytelling, and First Nations knowledge forms.

Quilt patches sewn for Emily Johnson/Catalyst Dance’s “Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars” as part of Umyuangvigkaq

In addition to Johnson, discussion leaders for Umyuangvigkaq included Sm Łoodm ‘Nüüsm (Dr. Mique’l Dangeli, Tsimshian), Lee-Ann Tjunypa Bucksin (Narungga/Wirangu/Wotjobaluk), Karyn Recollet (Cree), and Vicki Van Hout (Dutch/Wiradjuri), and topics ranged from indigenizing the future to research as ceremony. A set of rules structured the conversations. Firstly, a sign by the door declared that, by entering the space, one was acknowledging that one was on Mannahatta in Lenapehoking (Lenape homeland). “This is an Indigenous led conversation and process,” the sign continued, and “you are here to be an active part of the discussion and change and in so you will listen more than you speak.” To that end, only those sitting in the immediate inner circle of the Long Table could speak, while those on the periphery were asked to listen. Participants were free to move in and out of the inner circle as they chose, self-determining their form of engagement. At the end of every session, Johnson gave any Lenape and indigenous people present the opportunity for the last word, and the resulting dynamic was a fluid conversation with a constantly shifting set of voices.

Perhaps the most essential lesson of Umyuangvigkaq was in the first session, “This is Lenapehoking,” an acknowledgement of the indigenous hosting and welcoming protocols that still exist in Lenapehoking, the Lenape homeland of which Manahatta is a part, and all indigenous territories. Hadrien Coumans and Joe Baker of the Lenape Center called in to provide a welcome to their territory and to acknowledge their guests. Mique’l Dangeli responded by gifting the group with a song in her language and the spreading of eagle down, a symbol of welcome and friendship. “What is your responsibility when you are welcomed?” she asked the group, “How can you bring a critical consciousness to what it means to be a guest?” The first step, she and Tjunypa Buckskin emphasized, is realizing that one is a guest in indigenous land wherever one goes. To acknowledge that in the host’s language — Lenapehoking — is essential, as is not asking for a welcome but rather asking what the people need and want as an acknowledgement. Dangeli noted that, as an indigenous person, she embodies and therefore brings her own protocol with her wherever she goes, as demonstrated by her spreading of eagle down.

“We are so often visitors even when we go home,” Recollet noted, drawing on her own experience as an urban Cree woman. In an exceptional moment of learning, an eleven-year old girl summed up what so few grasp in the face of New York City’s conventional characterization as an open-access blank slate of opportunity. “The land does not belong to me,” she said to the group while sewing a patch for Johnson’s quilt, “but I am its. I belong to the land, to New York.” That response echoed Recollet’s primary provocation of the day, which was to ask attendees to counter colonialism with a radical “decolonial love.” How can love be a reorientation that leads to a decolonizing process? How, she and Johnson asked the indigenous participants in the room, can we make colonial pain part of love, and thus love the internalized ruptures of the indigenous self?

The importance of finding love in the relationship to land and ceremony emerged from Johnson’s provocation “My Dad Gives Blueberries to Caribou He Hunts: Indigenous Process and Research as Ceremony.” Johnson told the story of the first time she witnessed her father hunt a caribou and ritually feed it blueberries at its moment of passing. The event, she reflected, was an important personal realization of the links between survival, providing, and ritual. “How can we bundle for the future?” Recollet asked, referring to sacred medicine bundles. Dangeli responded that indigenous people have always done just that — changed and adapted. “Whatever comes next,” Dangeli said, “will continue to be indigenous, will be the future.”

That Johnson’s event overlapped with Laâbissi’s performance was unfortunate, because it forced many of Johnson and Simas’s colleagues to choose between an inclusive dialogue and the need to provide witness to and support against a traumatic offense. “As indigenous people we couldn’t even have the luxury of sharing the Umyuangvigkaq space where Indigenous worldview was central,” Tangen said, “because some of us had to go deal with what shouldn’t be happening in the first place — allowing one of the most vulnerable populations in our country to be hurt by such artistic entitlement to creative license to appropriate. It felt like a missed opportunity for MoMA PS1 to share space and collaborate.”

Johnson herself had engaged in dialogue with Pryor and Schlenzka in tandem with Simas. She expressed to them that she felt Laâbissi’s event should be cancelled, but she also did not want to detract from the positive message of her own event. Nonetheless, she told Hyperallergic, perhaps the weekend provided a somehow meaningful and beautiful synchronicity. “Why was it that our event,” she asked, “created intentionally to confront invisibility, to focus on (and to bring to light for some) the continuation of Indigenous aesthetic, invention, ceremony, [to consider] research and process as ceremony, and building true ally-ship — was happening on the same day as this other performance, seemingly at odds with every single intention of Umyuangvigkaq?”

Quilting for Emily Johnson/Catalyst Dance’s “Then a Cunning Voice and A Night We Spend Gazing at Stars” as part of Umyuangvigkaq (photo by Maria Baranova, courtesy PS122)

Several of MoMA’s performance curators were in attendance for Umyuangvigkaq, possibly signaling a coming reckoning with previously marginalized artists and subjects. Yet the weekend’s events made clear the need for New York art institutions to take up the call for decolonial love and critical acknowledgement of their duties as guests on indigenous territory. So many Native artists and activists work in New York who could have quickly taught PS1 these lessons, and there is no longer any excuse for keeping indigenous people off the staff and excluded from the programming of major cultural organizations.

Whether Laâbissi has learned that there does not need to be a false opposition between transgressive artistic freedom and an acknowledgement of indigenous values, beliefs, and ongoing political struggles will be seen this week. She is scheduled to perform Self Portrait Camouflage again in Paris on January 19 and 20. But Johnson is hopeful. “I want the discussion to spark change on our stages and in our world,” she said. “I want it to be a place where Indigenous voice, work, deep research, and emotion is heard; I want it to generate an understanding previously incomprehensible to non-Native people; I want it to create relationships with present bodies; and I want it to be a place where healing can be and start. I hope we continue.”

The post Against a Feathered Headdress: A Tale of Two Performance Festivals and Native American Voices appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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