#I have a graduate degree in literally this domain | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

foryourinformationmd · 3 years

Photo

Advice from a Professional Doctor, Asher Nitin.

Ignore all the portrayals of life in medical school by your pre-med lecturers. If they begin a med school narrative with, “My nephew is a doctor and he told me…,” instantly disregard it. His nephew did not tell him that. He told him much more. Those are merely the parts he wants to remember. If it isn’t a recently-graduated doctor telling you what life in med school is like, it isn’t going to be anything like what they will tell you. So what is it like instead? Grey’s anatomy? House, M.D.?

Neither. Med school is more like Scrubs and The Knick than it is like Grey’s Anatomy and House, M.D. Unlike Grey’s Anatomy, you and your fellow medical students will not be that good looking. You will not sleep with each other as much. You will not cry over your patients (you’ll have a hard time remembering their full name). And you will not monkey around with barely-tested experimental procedures. Ever. If you do, it’ll probably be the last thing you do because good-bye medical school. Unlike House, all medicine will be diagnostic. Your professors will only appear to be brilliant (it’s really just decades of specialized knowledge and experience; with their subject and with your type). Diagnosis will be algorithmic, and even that algorithm won’t be your own. But you will still get a kick out of it. Like Scrubs and The Knick, your medical school will be your life. You will eat, sleep and dream medicine. Your entire social circle will consist of your colleagues. Your family will be the one stable point in your life. You’ll date your colleagues.

Speaking of dating, your sexy does not go up when you become a doctor. I mean this practically. Theoretically, I’m told doctors are hot. I can see why. They undeniably have inherent value: social standing, (the promise of) money, proof of intelligence (actually, no) and actual power over life (more than you know). But practically speaking (especially if you’re male) your dating life will not get better as a medical student. That is because the demands of medical school will swamp you. You will come home tired. Your pool of prospective partners will mostly consist of your medical colleagues. So while your newfound status as a doctor might have value in non-medical circles, it will mean nothing because you will almost never frequent those circles. But within the circle you’re in, your status as a medical student means nothing, because so what? Everyone is one too. “But Asher!” you say, frantically gesturing at me to pause, “I’ll be smart and date outside of medical school.” No, dummy. You’ll be a dummy if you do that because…

The more friends you have outside of med school the harder it is to excel. Med school is about an ethos. You’re not just part of a course. You’re part of a community. This is now your primary identity. All your self worth are now belong with us, bi*ch. There is this neurological phenomenon seen in people trying to study. When you’re focused on something, if you break off and engage with something unrelated, your brain takes up to twenty minutes to fully refocus on the original task once you return to it. In life as well, broadly speaking, I’ve observed a similar phenomenon. I’ve known three students in med school whose circle of friends mostly lay outside of med school. One hung out with mostly dancers and choreographers. One was a socialite. One hung out with the sons of politicians. They all were (and still are as of now) the worst doctors I have ever seen. This is because they constantly take breaks from the ethos of medical life. They miss out on the rhythm of life in the world of medicine. So you should know that…

You will leave most of your old friends behind, and you won’t even mind. Of all the various professions, I’m told, physicians tend to default the most on school reunions. That is partly because they don’t have the time, but also because they don’t care. It isn’t that we become arrogant or unsocial. It is that the act of medical education deeply changes you. It makes you more functionally intelligent. It makes you less prone to fake drama. It makes you calmer in crisis. All these after-effects will permanently drive a wedge between you and many of the people you used to know. This is a surprising side-effect no one anticipates; least of all your elders. And that is an amusing paradox. They anticipate your becoming a doctor because they know medical school is elevation. They don’t realize the side effect of this elevation is you will now talk down to them.

Your most important subject in pre-med is physics. Look, pre-med isn’t really about information continuity. The organisms you will dissect in pre-med will be phylogenetically disconnected from med school. You dissect a plant stem, a plant root, an earthworm, a cockroach, a frog, and then… a human being? See? You won’t be seamlessly connecting domains of knowledge. Pre-med isn’t even about building a conceptual base. Many things you learn in pre-med biology will be repeated in so much greater detail in med school that your prior knowledge will only partially help. Pre-med is about picking up mental skills you will need. Let’s talk about those.

You need to learn to form a train of thought fast. The great thing about learning to solve problems in physics is that you learn to solve problems in general. You learn to quickly identify variables and constants. Sometimes there will be constants in the problem that would normally be variables in real life. You learn to work with those too. Physics allows you to become mentally agile with concepts. If you get fluid mechanics, you can handle the physiology of hypovolemic shock. If you get lever mechanisms (in different orders), you can handle applied anatomy in orthopedics. If you get optics, you can handle a lot of neurology and ophthalmology. In my experience, the students who have the hardest time in med school are the ones who didn’t learn to think on their feet within a fixed framework of time.

You hate memorizing? Actually, you don’t. It’s all about the context. Literally none of us salivated at the prospect of memorizing taxonomies. We hated it and struggled over it and were glad when we were done with it. That was because it was something we knew we would never use. In med school, you will do a lot of memorizing. But you will enjoy it (or at least you can, if you choose; I’m a huge nerd). Many doctors will tell you how easily drug classifications embed themselves in their brains. This is despite the fact that the latter are more complex than zoology taxonomy charts or botanical floral formulas. The difference is that your knowledge of drug classification will impact what you will say to your aunt when she confronts you over her persistent back pain over Christmas dinner (poor posture, it’s always poor posture; she sits like a potato). So you will memorize a lot. It won’t be anything like memorizing was before. Rest easy. You will find it easy to like it.

Your persona does not matter. Caring for people and being compassionate and wanting to cure disease are the least important things in medicine. You need to be able to meaningfully link vast amounts of information to come to a correct diagnosis as per established algorithms. You need to perform surgical procedures within a reasonable amount of time with a decent degree of success. All else is secondary. When most of your non-doctor relatives tell you that a doctor’s personality matters, they’re doing something called argument from ignorance. You see, the world of medicine is so big and so complex that most of it is technically incomprehensible to the general public. So they latch on to the few aspects of a doctor’s life they are mentally capable of understanding (and commenting upon; remember their first reaction to meeting someone with an education superior to theirs is to give them tips). So they will talk about a doctor’s personality because it is the only part they can presume to have some expertise on. Even that they do not. Don’t ever do stupid things like falling in love with your patients or building deep and personal relationships with your patients. You will never last in medicine. This is not because the emotional trauma of losing them will wreck you. This is because you will go bankrupt fighting lawsuits accusing you of patient preference. You will feel the pressure in the things non-doctors will say behind a good doctors back. “He’s so boring at parties, he can only talk work stuff.” If that is your destiny, so be it. Own it. They find you boring? So what? You were not put on this earth to entertain the illiterate at parties. You were sent here to be a lifesaver; not to have a personality that appeals to the lowest common denominator.

I’m telling you it does not matter. The practice of medicine is life on the edge of reality. All personalities are welcome because medical school is a personality in itself.

The materialists among us are taught the value of wisdom and the ascetics among us learn to knot a Double-Windsor.

The atheists among us will pray frantically and the religious among us will find no time for church on Sunday.

The loudmouthed learn to whisper in the NICU and the soft-spoken learn to yell, “Stat!” in the ER.

The type-A personalities among us learn to break the news of a patient’s passing to his relatives and the type-B personalities among us learn to argue medico-legal cases.

The clumsy among us learn to suture wounds and the nimble learn to administer CPR.

Materialists. Ascetics. Atheists. Theists. Loudmouthed. Soft-spoken. Type-A. Type-B. Clumsy. Nimble.

In medical school, we all meet in the middle.

PS: Photo not mine. Credits to the rightfully owner.

#advicedoctor #medtech #premed #FYIMed

11 notes · View notes

sidenotelife · 5 years

Text

3 things I learned from 7 years of counseling

One of the major perks to the med school I’ve been at for the past seven years is that they offer free counseling and psychiatry visits for students. I essentially started going to counseling to deal with issues related to depression and anxiety which include but are not limited to: understanding my emotions, anger management, coping with stress, recognizing when I’m stressed, social skills, effective communication. Sidenote - fun fact, 66% of state medical licensing boards require you to disclose if you’ve ever had a mental health diagnosis regardless of whether you are receiving current treatment and if it affects your ability to be a physician. If you are interested, see article here that shows that physicians in states where you have to disclose your mental health history are less likely to seek psychiatric treatment. There’s actually a bunch of online conversation about this topic, but I had never even considered it until I graduated med school. Anyways, over the past seven years I’ve had good and bad counselors, but I’ve managed to learn some useful stuff regarding self-care during these years. Sidenote - I should preface this by saying that many counselors spoke to me about the importance of exercise, taking time to myself, etc. but I feel these ideas are well established and basically common sense, so I’ll address three things that I had never really thought about before going to counseling.

1. The emotion wheel.

A big problem I had/have... Sidenote - throughout this post I’ll talk about problems that I’ve worked on during counseling and I’ll refer to them either as “had” or “have”, but really these are all problems I still have, hopefully just to a lesser degree than I did seven years ago. Anyways, one problem I had is that I felt angry a lot and whenever Katie would ask me what was going on I would explain it as being tired but in reality I was having trouble putting my finger on the exact emotion I was having. I would just bunch up a lot of emotions under the umbrella of “tired.” So I had one therapist that introduced me to this emotion wheel where you choose your initial emotion which starts in the center, which is a simple one that literally includes the emotion “bad.” Then you branch out from there and progressively specify your emotion.

For example, a common scenario when I would use the wheel is when I was doing the laundry wrong and Katie would comment on it and I would get upset, but when I broke down the “angry” feeling it branched to humiliation to disrespect. I was feeling disrespected about my laundry-doing skills, and understanding this was the precise emotion I was feeling helped me to troubleshoot it by working on my humility and helping myself see that I wasn’t the king of laundry, this was in fact Katie’s domain because she deals with house stuff all the time and I needed to humble myself to follow her laundry guidance. This feeling angry really had more to do with a resistance to being humble than simple being angry There are other examples of this, but the point is that the emotion wheel has been really useful for me because it helps me to interpret my own emotions at a more specific level, and thus allows me to better figure out how not to get angry. I saved a screenshot of this emotion wheel on my phone and look at it frequently.

2. Nobody pays as much attention to me as I do.

Another topic I worked on a lot during counseling is dealing with social anxiety and becoming real paranoid that everyone was judging me for all the awkward things I was doing. Part of this was probably true because I do lots of awkward things but I had several counselors coach me into understanding that the reality, for better or for worse, was that people were not paying that much attention to me. They, like me, were probably obsessing over their own actions and too preoccupied with themselves to pay attention to me. This has really helped me brush off social anxiety and not get so caught up in what I am or am not doing and become more comfortable just being myself. This kind of transitions nicely into my last thing:

3. Stopping to think through my circumstances as if I were observing someone else.

Whenever I found myself in a frustrating situation at school, like say I got critiqued for making a mistake in the operating room, I would go down a rabbit hole of worrying and thinking about irrational things which would rapidly deteriorate into meaningless anxiety. A thing that helped me escape these sorts of stress sinkholes was the idea of looking at my problems as if one of my friends were telling me about their problems, and then imagining what sort of advice I would give them. This was really useful because what I would tell someone else to do was usually a lot more rational and well-grounded than what I would do myself. For instance, if my friend was stressed about making a mistake in the operating room and being criticized by an attending I would not tell that person to reconsider medicine as a career, I would not tell that person to avoid that attending for the rest of their life, and I would not tell that person to replay the mistake over and over. Instead I would probably tell that person that it’s extremely normal to make mistakes as a medical student in the operating room, and it’s not really a natural setting for learning, and that they should go back and work with that attending unless they were told otherwise because they probably don’t even remember that you made a mistake nor do they remember your name. I sense that this general principle of minimizing self-bias is really important to introspection and self-improvement.

So overall I’ve had a good experience with counseling these past seven years, but I wanted to end on this slightly paradoxical caveat. I want to take a second to talk about access to mental health care. If I had to consider paying for counseling, especially if I had to consider paying like $100/hr for it, I’m not sure I would have done it. I hate to say this because I would love to be a stronger advocate for counseling, but it’s just logistically complicated. And it’s not just the price. Over the past seven years I had like ten counselors and I felt really good about one or two? of them. I imagine this is the ratio for just about anyone who goes to counseling because it really does come down to personal fit, and it’s really not like finding a good orthopedic surgeon, it’s a lot more like finding a good spouse. So using some back of the envelope calculations, the cost of all the visits just to find a good counselor, not to mention it takes several visits to establish an initial rapport with a counselor, you could easily rack up $1,000+ to simply FIND a good counselor, and then you have to start paying $100 an hour to do the actual work of counseling. And we haven’t even gotten to the time it would take out of residency. In all the rotations I’ve never seen a resident leave early to make a personal medical appointment. In fact, I’ve rarely even seen a resident call in sick. I’ve much more frequently seen residents come in hacking up a lung. Considering that you would probably have to meet with a counselor semi-regularly to establish some initial rapport, it rapidly becomes impractical from the financial and scheduling perspectives to go see a counselor. Like I said, I hate to say this because I really believe counseling is useful and would be beneficial for basically everybody, but the way mental health services are valued by insurance companies and the greater healthcare community, I have serious questions about the practicalities of counseling. I guess I’ll end by reiterating that I overall recommend going to counseling and I really feel if the connection with a good counselor is there the benefits are quiet impactful, but I can also see the reality and I’m honestly not sure if I will continue going to counseling after medical school.

see you on the other side,

from ken

3 notes · View notes

cre8tiveaudio · 5 years

Text

Obituary for My Brother Rano

“I may be born as a beauty

or maybe as a beast

but I will die for truth”

(Serrano G. Sianturi)

The architect of the Sacred Rhythm music festival and the founder of Sacred Bridge Foundation, Serrano Gara Sianturi, passed away on the 26th of January 2019 in his hometown, Jakarta, Indonesia, at the age of 58, leaving a wife and two sons.

Serrano had battled an extreme pancreatic cancer known as neuroendocrine carcinoma or small cell carcinoma. At the time of his formal diagnosis in August 2018 at the National University Hospital Singapore, the cancer cells had already spread rapidly to the lungs and brain. Professor Lawrence Ho, a senior consultant there who helped in finalizing the diagnosis, mentioned to family members that Serrano had had the same cancer to which Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, succumbed. With the expertise, guidance and warm hospitality from a great medical team led by Dr. Chee Cheng Ean, specialist and program director in medical oncology, Serrano’s wish was granted to be moved to Jakarta to share the time remaining with his loved ones, family and friends.

“He was a true fighter and was very lucky to have a loving family by his side throughout his journey” (Dr. Chee Cheng Ean)

Known to many simply as Rano, he was “the Heart and Soul” (LTTW, 2019[1]) of Sacred Bridge Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation based in Jakarta which focused on bridging cultures and making the world a better place through a harmonious relationship between man and nature; to reach this ideal necessitated faith in the integration of culture, economics, and politics. Of these, culture was of utmost importance. In Rano’s own terms, as a cultural economist, he reminded us that it is time to give culture a chance where economics and politics alone have often failed to provide solutions.

Though officially founded in 1998, according to Stephen Hill, who at that time served as the Director of the Jakarta Regional Office of UNESCO, they had been collaborating for two years including censor-challenging concerts in support of international percussion music in the period shortly before the New Order Indonesian Government of President Soeharto fell in the revolution of May 1998. This was a time when freedom of expression was politically severely constrained with communities tightly controlled, the early work using cultural expression to push the boundaries of rights and protest (Hill, S., 2019).

Rano felt that this crisis period was the right time to respond by establishing a foundation that could facilitate the urgency to regain mental strengths and trust within the communities. Utilizing creativity through the Arts was a powerful medium to heal the wounds, to exercise freedom of expression and to break down boundaries in order to establish respect and mutual understanding.

In response to the Aceh Tsunami of December 2004, the Sacred Bridge and UNESCO organised a field project called ‘Rising Above the Tsunami’ whose primary aim was to heal the trauma experienced, particularly by orphaned children, utilising the intangible cultural heritage as one of the society’s self-reliant supportive systems. Acehnese traditional performers were trained to incorporate local song and dance in a disciplined way and nurture a life-long sense of arts. The impact was powerful - the children were able to smile again and their communities quite literally came alive. The film, 'Rising Above the Tsunami’ was shown to the collected Ambassadors of the World (around 190) at the UNESCO General Conference in October 2005 in Paris; many in the audience were moved to tears. The film was later shown in New York.

Rising Above the Tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia.

As a core element of the foundation, an International Sacred Music Concert, the ‘Sacred Rhythm’, was inaugurated as a Millennium celebration at midnight December 31, 1999 in Bali. This evolved into a series of festivals opening doors to global musical friendships and included participants Stomu Yamash’ta, Farafina, Vikku Vinayakram, Mor Thiam, I Nyoman Astita and many more.

Later finding a new home in Kyoto, Japan, the UNESCO-sponsored event utilised the creativity of dozens of renowned musicians from five continents to bring together people from different faiths, nationalities and walks of life. By re-uniting humanity and nature, and upholding culture, the rising sun of the twenty-first century was embraced. Music then became a focal point of cultural development more than twenty years after the World Conference on Cultural Policies. Rano, as the main organiser and inspiration, together with Stephen Hill, Philippe Delanghe and Stomu Yamash’ta believed it was time to make a statement.

Sacred Rhythm: The Millennial Percussion for Unison in Bali, Indonesia (1999-2000).

Sacred Rhythm in Kyoto, Japan

“Collaboratively, they wanted to show to the world - on behalf of the United Nations - that if we are to reflect on the next one thousand years, this must be in spiritual and human terms, not commercial” (Hill et all, p. vi, preface Kyoto Manifesto, 2018)

“Use Cultural Currencies for equality and understanding” (Serrano G. Sianturi)

Rano spent almost a quarter of his life in the United States of America pursuing his education. A Bachelor degree in Architecture Engineering from Milwaukee School of Engineering in 1981 was followed two years later with a Masters degree in Earthquake Engineering at MIT. Returning to Indonesia, he joined the university Civil Engineering faculty, subsequently accepting the invitation to work with the then Directorate of Public Buildings of the Ministry of Public works. During this time, he trained and supervised the research of many Indonesian volcanologists. In 1988, he resigned from both organizations and returned to MIT to pursue a completely different course of education - gaining a post-graduate economics degree specializing in Cultural Economics.

Upon his return to Indonesia in 1991, Rano immediately established an economic and marketing advisory firm and served major multinational companies including Citibank, NTT, Club Med, Price Waterhouse, WWF, Jardine, Allied Queensland Coalfield, Fuji Bank International, as well as national companies such as the Jakarta Stock Exchange, Elnusa, and Telkom.

After seven years practicing as an economic consultant, he decided to pursue his long-time interest in cultural economics. He then established the Sacred Bridge where the foundation focused on action research works and model making covering five domains: Cultural Education for the Young, Cultivation of Roots Arts, Intercultural Dialogue, Capacity Building, and New Media. Since his involvement in the Foundation, Rano conducted research and field programs in Indonesia that included Aceh, Nias, Jakarta, West Java, Borobudur, East Kalimantan, South Sulawesi, Bali, and West Papua. Sacred Bridge itself was the first UNESCO counterpart in the field of culture. In addition to the field works, Serrano managed to consult and write for international journals as well as give academic lectures at many well-respected universities in the US, UK, and Japan, with focus on cultural economics.

His inspirations, achievements and contributions for Indonesia and beyond are immeasurable but he never worked for personal recognition. He was critical of the narrow and seemingly opportunistic viewpoints of many Indonesian academics and institutions in various fields and challenged them to aspire to a higher level of understanding and interpretation for the betterment of the country and humanity. While battling the cancer, Rano mentioned in several occasions that his unfinished book title ‘Economics for Humanity’ became the least important for many reasons, but one reason that stood out as a reflection of his faith in the young generations to come, he said their books would be far more important than his.

On many occasions, while reading local newspapers, Rano said to his eldest son, Boo-boo Sianturi, now the chairman of the foundation, “Hey, they’re my ideas, that’s my writing, completely plagiarized”. He then continued, “Oh well, that’s okay, as long as they learn things the right way, understanding the importance of fundamentals…and so on, let the people learn, let the nation learn”. Rano stressed the importance of understanding contexts and fundamentals challenging their credibility on ethical grounds. In his view, the most respected profession is teaching; not only are adequate knowledge and experience required but teaching also comes with a set of responsibilities.

“Serrano Sianturi, he was my best friend and hero of his mother country”, Stomu Yamash’ta (founding member of Sacred Bridge foundation)

In 2013, Rano brought together Stomu Yamash’ta, Stephen Hill and I Nyoman Astita in Bali where they visited villages, exploring a possible way of developing the Cultural Centre which Rano was planning as a Sacred Bridge Initiative. What transpired instead was the development of a very fruitful partnership of Rano, Stomu and Stephen with the just established ‘Centre for the Creative Economy’ at Doshisha University, Kyoto, and its Director, Tadashi Yagi. Together, they trawled the world for four years through Annual International Symposia in Kyoto in search of the best participants for their planned book which sought to re-ground global economics in our core humanity and spirituality. Prior to every Symposium Stomu produced his ‘On-Zen’ performance bringing Buddhist and Shinto priests together in combined ritual in Kyoto’s Daitokuji Buddhist Temple - in a ceremony of peace and cross-religious care - the first time in 800 years that Buddhism and Shinto had shared in such a way. Rano had brought Stephen and Stomu together in the first place – via the meeting in Bali, and spoke at the first International Symposium in June 2014, but unfortunately, after that, was too ill to participate any more.

Rano with Stephen Hill

Rano with Stomu Yamash’ta.

The book “The Kyoto Manifesto for Global Economics - The Platform of Community, Humanity and Spirituality” resulted from this collaboration and was published internationally last year by Springer. Under Stomu’s inspiration, Stephen designed the structure of the book as a ‘Symphony’, and then elaborated it further as a ‘Polyphony’, i.e. bringing two or more separate themes together into an overall harmony.

“We all, however, owe Rano an enormous debt of gratitude for his humanity, vision, commitment, generosity, and inspiration. He is both our own dear friend and a friend to humanity as a whole”. (Hill et al, Kyoto Manifesto, 2018)

During the last few months of Rano’s life, he believed that the Sacred Bridge needed to continue and was convinced that the younger generations were equipped and ready to lead the foundation into the second decade of the 21st century. On January 13, 2019, 13 days before Rano’s departure, the Sacred Bridge was marked by a “Reborn” gathering at their headquarters in Jakarta. The word “Reborn” itself was inspired by the Sacred Rhythm II (Reborn Unison) concert that took place in Bali last August 2018.

Sacred Rhythm: Reborn Unison in Bali, Indonesia. (2018)

Now, almost twenty years after the first Sacred Rhythm, Rano believed that it was time to elaborate the statement. Reborn Unison emphasises the need to work together for culture to become both driver and enabler of human development, sustainable development, or the upholding of continuous and inclusive improvement of human well-being. It is this old way that is cherished by Sacred Rhythm II (Reborn Unison), paving the ground for a new generation of artists, scientists, and spiritual activists to come together, shaping and spreading the message of culture through their world-wide networks.

Bintang Perkasa, who is now the programme director, concludes Rano’s view that in the eyes of Sacred Bridge, “reborn” is not merely rebirth, but also rethinking and revisiting its fundamental values based on guidance of the past and present life to re-focus (including re-evaluate) the foundation towards the future. He further emphasizes Rano’s own words that “changes can only happen on the ground,” capturing the very spirit of Sacred Bridge “Reborn”. This will be manifested in its plan to return to fieldwork, the change initiated and agreed by Rano himself with the acknowledgment and consent of the active founders.

Rano, Rest in the Peace You Deserve. The Peace of Love – the guiding light of your life!

Stephen Hill

26thJanuary 2019

Sources:

Hill et al, Kyoto Manifesto, 2018

Email exchanges (Boo-boo and Stephen), 2018-2019

Email exchanges (Boo-boo and Dr. Chee), 2019-03-02

LTTW, 2019 (http://www.listentotheworld.net/human-voices/serrano-g-sianturi-the-heart-and-soul-of-sacred-bridge/)

Sacred Bridge Web, 2019 (http://www.sacredbridge.org/the-bridge/history/)

[1] LTTW, Obituary SGS news, 2019 (http://www.listentotheworld.net/human-voices/serrano-g-sianturi-the-heart-and-soul-of-sacred-bridge/)

1 note · View note

creativegodtiers · 6 years

Text

so this kind of grew beyond something for the ask box, but I hope it works regardless! This is for the creation scenario:

The creation myth that surrounds the deities of the Pantheon is complex and mysterious--multiple facets of every deity make themselves known, sometimes within only a few lines of each other. The priests of the temples don’t want you to know that, to acknowledge it--but it’s true.

We grow up being told about how the very universe that we live in was made by beings so old as to be monuments to eternity itself, surrounded by a culture where we have to swear ourselves to a god by eighteen. A lot of pressure, there.

Since I was young, I was always curious about the Pantheon. There are twenty-four deities, twenty-two well known official Temples in the large cities--Jiru, the capital of all-things-theological, holds twelve of them--and so many permutations of an already complex and distorted creation story to make decoding its origins near impossible by normal means.

When I was ten, I decided I wanted to figure out the “true story” of how the universe was made.

When I was twenty-two, graduated with a Theological Literature Degree from the University of Lius, I decided that I would follow that dream of my younger self: I would try and figure out the “true story.”

And now, here I stand, twenty-six, in the middle of the forest on a moonless, foggy night.

For, according to some, deep in the woods--it doesn’t matter where you are, for it will come--on some nights, like this one, a Temple of the Shadow can be found. Some say it phases into reality from the Void, the caretaker in the personal service of the Shadow themself--others say that it slips into being on moonless nights as the last shred of light falls away, only to fade as the sunrises anew.

A path leads on, revealed under the sickly glow of my dying flashlight in the pitch darkness. I follow.

Finally, I come to a set of double doors rising unceremoniously out of the blackness. Do I...knock?

Come on, I chastise myself, you didn’t come here for nothing. It’s not like this is the scariest thing ever, either.

So, I knock.

Rap, rap, rap.

I blink at the sound of it--not the hollow boom of metal, or the tap of knuckles on stones, but the sharp rap of...wood?

What kind of Temple has wooden doors and stone architecture? This would drive Merl crazy.

As I’m about to knock again, a door opens to reveal a single, dark clad person.

“You know you don’t have to knock, Hyre…” they trail off as they spot me. “Oh. My apologies. Come in, please.” They step back to let me through.

“Ah, thank you,” I murmur, stepping in. The inside is dimly lit, soft flickering candles in sconces and steady blue glows from lanterns that dot the room.Dark blue covering the walls, designs in silver reflecting the candle- and lantern-light eerily.

And on the far back wall, a simple sign--five curved, dark blue lines around an invisible circle. A sign shared by two deities: the Silence and the Shadow. The Silence’s Temple, however, was in Jiru, across from the Mender’s Temple. A nod to the ties between the two deities.

I’d found it.

The Shadow’s Temple.

“Is there anything you need assistance with, traveller?”

I turn to the dark-clad person, who was quietly locking the door. A priest? Acolyte? Gifted? I couldn’t tell. “Yes, actually. I have a question that I need answered as truthfully as possible.”

“Is not truth the domain of the Beacon? And far closer to the beaten path, besides.”

“I’ve already asked the Beacon--and his priests, and acolytes, and Gifted.”

They turn, looking at me closely even through the gloom. “And what of the Noble? Or the Mender? Would not they be more apt for truth?”

It’s a good question, but a mistaken one. “I’ve asked them, too. And darkness holds its own truths, doesn’t it?”

A smile, coy and sly.

“Oh, but it does, traveller. But few feel the need to venture so far in search of esoteric and obscure truths. What is this question?”

“How did the universe begin?”

Silence hangs after my question like a chill.

After a long moment, they speak again, stepping silently past me.

“Do you not know the creation story taught to all children?”

Sorry buddy, but you have no idea.

“I do, actually. But it’s vague, and there’s literally hundreds of permutations--they can’t all be true.”

“...Oh?”

“Oh, yes. Have you ever listened to a priest from Elen tell the children the creation story, and then listened to a priest from Herral tell--ostensibly--the same story? They’re not even close to the same story, and that’s just two small cities a county apart.” I take a deep breath. “Don’t even get me started on the differences between Temples on versions of the story.”

“You have done your research, traveller.”

“I had to,” I say quietly. “This is my life’s work.”

“...I see.” They step away from the lantern they had been adjusting, turning towards the sigil wall. “Very well then. Please, traveller--sit.”

And I’m not sure where it came from, but there it was--a chair, half-hidden in the gloom, where I could have sworn there wasn’t one before. If this person wasn’t Gifted I would eat my shoes.

I sit.

“Some, I imagine, have told you that the universe started from a collective wish made by all of the Pantheon. Others, that this universe sprang into being as a paradise formed from the Pantheon’s unconscious desires--and yet others, I imagine, say that this universe formed as the Pantheon joined hands and spun it from the Void.

“These accounts are not necessarily either true or false. It merely depends on perspective, as to whether those accounts are accurate as to what truly occurred. However, you are not here for a philosophy lesson, are you?”

An amused snort. “No, you came here for the Shadow’s version of the event. And so you shall have it.”

They step forward, tracing a single, near-reverent hand over the eerie sigil.

“The Shadow does not tell us the same as other Temples, traveller. The universe was not made from a speck of light, or a mere joining of will. Nor is this universe the first, or last of its kind. Existence continues, even as one universe dies and another is born. Life,” a slightly bitter huff of laughter, “finds a way.”

“...wait,” I interrupt. “You’re saying that this universe...isn’t the first? And that after its death--another will be created in its place?”

“Why, does that disturb you? To know that reality is not so infinite as you seem to believe?”

“The Mender teaches that Life continues unto the infinite, and that nothing--even the universe--ever truly ends.” A philosophy I grew up knowing, etched into my bones at this point.

“And yet, people die every day. Life ends, traveller--for without endings, there can be no beginnings. Now, may I continue?”

“Yes, please,” I murmur as I settle back into the chair.

“As I said, there can be no beginnings without endings, nor can endings exist without beginnings. As one universe dies away, it sets in motion the pieces needed to create the next universe and create that universe’s caretakers--even as that universe’s caretakers fade away into the Void. There are no true gods, you see, traveller. Only beings chosen to watch over the next universe, placed through trials beyond comprehension and old enough to become as gods.

“But you are not asking for the beginning of every universe, but this one, are you not? So I will tell you: this universe began an eternity ago, and never. It began when twelve children in two parallel existences sat down across the world, and decided to play a game that ended everything they ever knew.

“This universe began with those children, having found family, finally freeing themselves from the trap of grandeur, traveller.”

They turn, blue eyes glowing eerily in the flickering lights.

“This universe began with the ending of a Game, and this universe will end with the beginning of a Game. It was spun into existence through the pain and growth of children aged beyond their time, into beings far more than they ever aspired to be.”

A breath, and the eerie glow dims slowly from its blazing intensity.

“This universe began with terrible, terrible pain and beauty, and it will end in such in due time, traveller. That is the way of all that is. The meaning of it is for you to decide.

“Now...sleep.”

19 notes · View notes

allonsymiddleearth · 5 years

Text

So I’m taking this graduation survey from my school’s psychology program and god. I’m going to put the longer part of my rambling rant at my school under a cut, but I thought this one deserved to be above it.

So first there’s this:

[[image reads: “your Psychology courses at the University of Arizona have contributed to your ability to apply ethical standards to evaluate psychological sciences and practice.” with options “strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, or strongly agree.” Strongly disagree is highlighted.]]

actually laughed out loud. The U of A psych department knows SO MUCH about ethics, clearly, with professors leaving due to racism experienced while other, tenured, professors take money from a literal actual eugenics fund and no one official bats an eye because, hah, who cares? Being supported by eugenicists doesn’t make you one, obviously!! (It does here, sry.) Also I spent a whole fucking semester with Eugenics Scrooge, telling you all the bullshit she came up with, and she’s still teaching the same fucking class at this very moment and no one talked to her about it, so I’m gonna guess no.

Also there’s this little quiz at the end testing whether they managed to teach us basic psychological concepts and THEY ABSOLUTELY DID NOT.

My first semester here I actually took PERSONALITY PSYCHOLOGY and we spent absolutely no time whatsoever, at all, learning about idk, relevant topics to personality?? We learned that there WERE personality disorders, we did not learn what they were, and unfortunately we did not cover the Big Five even in title.

Now, pre-University of Arizona, I was actually interested in the field of psychology research so I do know a bit, but only because I used to read studies on my own, plus I’ve read tons of medical journals out of necessity for my own survival with a semi-rare disease so I may not know everything about those fields, but I have a pretty good idea of the scientific method, of research standards, and of academic writing. And I have friends who are social workers, half my family has psych degrees, and a lot of people in both those groups including myself have actually been to therapy so I have some basic knowledge on topics like what cognitive behavioral therapy is and what the Big Five are (it’s the first option.)

But DAMN nothing highlights how bad my education really has been like seeing what the actual people in charge of my education THINK they should have taught me, knowing they haven’t even a little.

There was a little spot on the survey in which I could tell them how to improve the program, and I was like, “I literally know almost nothing more about psychology than when I started this degree, with the exception of a few studies I’ve read now that I easily could have read for free in the public domain and not paid more money than I’ll ever make in my lifetime for professors to take the easy way out of actually teaching an online class. Hey also, I would have had a MUCH better time here if the U of A would decide that eugenics wasn’t okay and not have a professor literally teach the class that humanity would be better off if people like me were dead but hey, at least the academic advisors in the psych program are good, sure!” except slightly more professionally... slightly.

Anyway, I go to school in The Bad Place honestly.

#sometimes in math or french i'm like 'did i learn this? i really don't think i ever did'#and i could be wrong #because i easily could have missed it or forgotten because i didn't really get it #but i'm actually good at social science and I used to like it before this hellhole ruined it for me forever so I would definitely remember #if we had learned this #and i specifically remember asking why we didn't learn this #no answer #except that the prof wanted to make the class 'more unique' or whatever like wow thx that makes up for not having a real education in #the thing i'm studying #but you know what we DID learn??#we had a whole unit in personality on buddhism and another on hinduism #which i'll totally give you that studying religions like those from a perspective of serving a purpose towards psychological health is #interesting #BUT IT IS DEFINITELY NOT PERSONALITY #my pointless rants have sources maybe I AM academic #but if i am #blame it on my anthropology minor which has been AMAZING and taught me far more than my actual major #sure a lot of it was reading articles on my own that i probably could have done for free if i'd googled the class title in google scholar #but they were actually curated to include ranges and then DISCUSSED you know #because i actually like the subject and professors teaching it did so ethically and well and usually really interestingly #like you're SUPPOSED TO DO IN HIGHER EDUCATION #(okay i don't hate all social science but i'm certainly never working in it and I don't think I'll ever touch psychology in any official #capacity with a 10 foot pole)#i miss music school

3 notes · View notes

ravimyneni · 6 years

Text

Reasons why we must get rid of IIT-JEE

The entrance process is such that IITs produce one-dimensional graduates who may not even be interested in the subjects they gave many years of their life to.

We should get rid of the IIT-JEE. Given the iconic status of the IITs and the resulting craze for its famed entrance exam in India, this statement may come across almost as blasphemy.

But IITs are scientific institutions, and the tradition of science is to hold nothing sacred and examine everything through the less of evidence.

Radical as it may sound, this sentiment has been gaining ground of late. The HRD ministry mooted a proposal to radically reform the IIT-JEE by even dismantling the JEE-Advanced, the flagship exam for the IITs. That proposal, however, was shot down by the IIT council a couple of months back. This rigidity to re-examine, introspect and improve oneself is alarming, and that is indeed the root cause of many of the flaws of this celebrated exam.

The test has been gamed by coaching centers

When a high-stakes exam, watched closely by millions of people, is not redesigned for years, the stakeholders manage to decipher it completely.

Coaching centers have figured out the typical problems given in the exam, built a library of similar problems, and approaches to solving them.

Lakhs of students take the IIT-JEE every year. It is the gateway to the dream destination for those students, the source of the ultimate bragging right for millions of their parents, and the fountain of unlimited riches for the coaching centers. With so much at stake, it’s no wonder that the exam is watched closely and patterns of its questions analyzed in great detail.

On top of that, the exam has not seen any radical redesign. Originally a single-phase exam, it was split between JEE-Mains and JEE-Advanced some years ago, but the main focus of the exam — testing high-level problem-solving abilities based on quantitative sums drawn from Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics — has remained the same over the past 30 years or so.

With so many interested parties avidly scrutinizing the broadly unchanged exam for the past few decades, is it really a surprise that the exam no longer remains a test for raw brainpower?

The coaching centers have already figured out the typical problems given in the exam, built a huge library of similar problems, and approaches to solving them. They start drilling those problems and solutions in the students’ head from early years, often from as early as Class 8.

So what was once a test of intelligence (of the quantitative kind, admittedly) has become more of a test of how much money you can spend to access the best coaching centers, and how early you start your single-minded pursuit of this dream (or nightmare?).

The test has become so difficult so as to render it meaningless

If too many students compete for an exam and start preparing from an early age, it breeds an arms race. The same level of questions that separated students of different abilities ten years ago will cease to do so now — because everyone is simply more prepared to handle those questions. The questions need to become increasingly difficult to differentiate between students.

This is compounded by the fact that IIT-JEE tests skills in a narrow area — quantitative problem-solving in Physics, Chemistry, and Math. It is possible for a student to attain a high level of mastery in a narrow area. With so many students attaining near-perfect competence in one narrow domain, the test must, over the years, become much, much more difficult to retain its ability to select — which is exactly what happened over the years.

If too many students compete for an exam and start preparing from an early age, it breeds an arms race.

Instead, if the test evaluated wider (and possibly unrelated) skill sets — for example, quantitative skills, reading skills, and social skills — it would have been difficult for students to master all of those to a certain level of perfection; and differentiation would have been possible through even a moderately challenging test.

It breeds unidimensional professionals

As a result of focusing so narrowly during the formative years of learning, millions of students are ignoring important skills needed for success at the workplace and in life.

In IIT-factories of Kota, and in similar cram-schools all over India, students are learning Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics at the exclusion of all other skills necessary for success.

In future, they are often handicapped by an inability to read, write or speak at a level needed for professional success. They often lack nuanced social and historical awareness needed to become vibrant members of the society. Working solo with their textbooks for many years, they often underappreciate the value of teamwork and collaboration.

The comeuppance sometimes comes mid-career, when these unidimensional professionals cannot progress to managerial levels.

Sometimes, the day of reckoning comes sooner, as they get rejected in numerous interviews right at the beginning of their career due to the lack of ability to express themselves.

Sure, one can argue that many IITians become successful corporate leaders and entrepreneurs. However, that’s a tiny fraction of the graduates IITs churn out — most remain anonymous cubicle-dwellers in mid-level positions.

Students training for just one exam from early in life lack social and historical awareness needed to become vibrant members of the society.

Given that the IITs pretty much get to choose the best from lakhs of school-leaving students, should we, as a nation, be happy with only a few success stories? Shouldn’t such ‘chosen elites’ have left a much stronger imprint, both in scientific domain and elsewhere?

The difficulty level of IIT-JEE makes studying in IIT redundant

To stay ahead of the coaching centers and to be able to differentiate between intensely prepared students, IIT-JEE now has to necessarily pose notoriously difficult sums to the aspirants. This simply meant that the level of sums posed has become more advanced, rather more inventive or creative.

While the exam theoretically stays within the prescribed syllabus, most of the problems posed in IIT-JEE are practically college-level sums. Even when I studied for IIT-JEE around 25 years back, the recommended Physics books for preparation were Fundamentals of Physics by Resnick and Halliday, and Problems in General Physics by I E Irodov: both college-level calculus-based physics books. I presume things have gotten only more difficult since then.

Now the question is: what is the value of a college education if you are expected to study a lot of college-level stuff just to get there?

A college entrance exam should test interest

IIT-JEE fails miserably here. College admission processes in most advanced countries, notably in the US, check for the aspirant’s demonstrated an interest in the college as well as the intended major. IIT-JEE, however, does nothing of that sort.

Lakhs of students, through unthinking herd mindset, pursue a dream that’s not really theirs. Many, after reaching their dream place, become disenchanted and end up switching careers to pursue MBA. For some, the frustration leads to drug abuse. Some end up committing suicide. Even students who plod on and finish their degrees do not end up doing anything remotely related what they studied in IIT.

Such mismatches happen because unlike most other college admission processes, IIT-JEE restricts itself to a written exam, without any test of interest. Everyone knows that people are most productive when he or she works on areas that he or she are interested in. By not checking for this obvious area, IIT-JEE indirectly helps breed a discontent workforce.

For IITs, IIT-JEE is the hammer, and everything looks like a nail

I was delighted when a few IITs decided to offer a BS in Economics a few years back. Our society’s economic understanding is quite limited, which pulls us down. People from all strata of society fall for Ponzi schemes, unable to understand the relationship between risk and return. Most people do not appreciate the importance of copyrights and patents, hindering innovation and progress. In addition, common masses have a fetish for free goods that the government doles out, not knowing that there is no free lunch.

I thought an economics course at the IITs could go a long way to make our society more economically literate. However, that hope was soon belied, because I saw the selection process for this course is the same old IIT-JEE.

Yes — you heard it right, one has to master quantitative Physics, Chemistry and Math to be eligible to study economics, a discipline requiring vastly different skill sets.

Shouldn’t such ‘elites’ have left a much stronger imprint, both in the scientific domain and elsewhere?

Not only that, those Economics graduates need to study all the common first-year engineering courses, including electrical circuits and mechanics of deformable bodies! Nothing can be more ill-conceived than that.

Solution: A standardized test

So, if IIT-JEE has outlived its utility, what could be the way forward? A clear solution is a standardized, skill-oriented exam like SAT or ACT. Almost all US universities accept SAT or ACT scores as one of their key admission criteria. Such a system will obviate the need for multiple selection processes and entrance examinations in India, reducing student burden significantly.

As such exams test a wide range of skills (reading, critical thinking, analysis of science and social sciences, problem-solving, writing), it will also make our learning more skill-oriented.

We may argue that the cost of SAT is prohibitive for most Indians. If that is so, we can develop our own home-grown version. Skeptics may also reason that a standardized test like that does not test aptitude in subjects like Physics or Chemistry, so how will an elite engineering institute like IIT select students through such an exam?

Well, top-ranked scientific institutions of the world, including MIT and Caltech, use precisely this test to admit their students.

A person who is widely read can communicate well through writing and can critically evaluate issues can become more successful as an engineer or scientist as opposed to one who has only a narrow mastery over a small range of subjects.

We Indians take our exams very seriously. The only way to get the nation to focus on skill building is to incorporate it into the exam system.

If we are really serious about addressing our skill-shortage, if we want our future generations to cope with the rapidly changing world, we must reform our exam system radically, and urgently.

#iit jee #exam #student #career #selfinterest #parents

3 notes · View notes

douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

Text

YOU GUYS I JUST THOUGHT OF THIS

Remember that magic machine that could make you cars and cook you dinner and so on? Not quite so dominant as it had been. If you can't find another? The most obvious is valuation: they'll take less of your company, don't look for them in the news. But that same illiquidity also encouraged you not to seek it. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good idea to use famous rich people as examples, because the phenomenon it describes is so taken for granted, but at first it takes a conscious effort to think of ideas. Gradually through word of mouth they start to get users. They literally think the product, one line at a time. But the foundation of convincing investors is to make fun of it.

One is that being mean makes you stupid. Convince yourself that your startup is worth investing in, and then have to call them back to tell them you were at a disadvantage in some respects, they're the only ones who really understand their peers. If total war was the big political story of the 20th century, working-class people tried hard to look middle class. The best place to work, if you get deeply enough into it. But the more general recipe is: do something founders want. You have to get them beaten out of you by contact with the real world, VCs regard angels the way a jealous husband feels about his wife's previous boyfriends. Don't talk and drive. The reason, of course, is selection bias.

A few decades ago, only famous people and professional writers got to publish their opinions. When you're a kid and you face some hard test, you may find that your friends are now involved in some project they don't want to seem like they had to be by someone who really cared, instead of paying attention to things you're not supposed to, either because they're inappropriate, or not what you're trying to estimate is not just a good way to run a startup. There are a handful of executives, politicians, regulators, and labor leaders. Because a good idea. But here there is another layer that tends to come back to bite you eventually. They assumed that all they had to do was execute. When I graduated from college, they borrowed $15,000 from their parents to start a consulting company, or just a niche product company, and have to start treading water yourself or sink. If you work together with them on projects, you'll end up producing not just organic ideas, but also at decision points along the way. But most of the giant companies were still focused on finding new ways to milk economies of scale. Are there better ways to solve them? But are these just outliers?

But until the 1980s being underpaid early in your career was part of what it used to cost, and the board is now reconstituted to consist of two VCs, and also the biggest opportunity, is at the level of measurement is more precise than we're going to make an x that doesn't suck though. Some made their fortunes by creating wealth and getting paid proportionately, it would not be so useful if it delivered your dinner to a random location in central Asia. That's even rarer. In January 1995, we and a couple friends. Maybe successful hedge fund managers, and so on. So they decide to start talking to VCs. You'll see a lot more than you expect, so they had to make concessions. So if it goes nowhere, big deal; you return to school in the fall with all the other seniors; no one regards you as a failure, because your occupation is student, and you have misgivings about them, and then simply tell investors so. And yet he seems pretty commanding, doesn't he? Startups are still very rare. That seems obvious to any ambitious person now. Angels are individual rich people.

When you're talking about, you probably shouldn't do it. When you reach that point, ideas that will seem to investors no more than an art historian has to be a member of the professional classes. Colleges had long taught English composition. I know wrote: Two-firm deals are great. A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars, you have to make it something that they themselves can build, and that your plan is what they'd have done if they'd followed through on their own insights. Being poor helps in this game, because your own personal bias points in the same way the market does. Venture capitalists have a list of all the lies they told you during your education.

It seemed like they'd always been there, like the speed limiters in U-Haul trucks, prevent fools from doing too much damage. The way I studied for exams in these classes was not except incidentally to master the material taught in the class, but to most startups it means several months' living expenses. Regardless of how complex your life is, you'll be instantly regarded by everyone as a summer job in some unrelated field. Essays should aim for maximum surprise. Surely this is a lowly sort of thing to store-bought ones. Batch after batch, the YC partners warn founders about mistakes they're about to make, and not just the mechanics of it, and selling, say, deals to buy real estate. As a result workers' wages also tended toward market price. Whereas if you solve a technical problem that a lot of mistakes. The effect was rather as if we were visited by beings from another solar system. But due to a series of jobs that might be yanked out from under you? Which means if letting the founders keep control stops being perceived as a concession, it will take over your life to a degree you cannot imagine. That leads to our second difference: the way class projects are measured.

Fortunately the way to have good startup ideas is not think up but notice. A mean person can't convince the best people have other options. What would make them say wow? So starting a startup. More generally, an idea was returning whose name sounds old-fashioned precisely because it was more valuable, but because if other investors are interested, you must be contributing at least x dollars a year, the best solution is to tackle the problem head-on, and that you sometimes have to figure out the tricks for winning at this new game. Who wants this so much that your employer will find out and sue you. So the main value of notebooks may be what writing things down leaves in your head. No, not generally.

But success has taken a lot of mean people out there working on boring stuff who are desperately in need of better software, so however short you think you might start a startup one day, the evidence so far suggests you shouldn't work there. So if you want to inhabit. In fact, you're doubly likely to find good problems in another domain: a the inhabitants of that domain are not as likely as software people to have already solved their problems with software, and with it create a new source of revenue. You just can't fry eggs or cut hair fast enough. But of course if you really get it, you can cry and say I can't and they won't make you do anything in the grownup world either. If you invert the scale on the y axis, you can see change happen in your lifetime. They never explain what the deal is a good time to start a consulting company into a product company, and his friend says, Yeah, that is a good one if it makes sense.

Thanks to Geoff Ralston, Aaron Iba, Fred Wilson, Jessica Livingston, Paul Kedrosky, and Paul Buchheit for putting up with me.

0 notes

notesfromcenter · 6 years

Text

Motherhood: A Consideration of Moderation

“Why is your wife so intense?” asked my husband’s class of graduate students. He had just finished describing my response to their request of a pre-discussion lecture on a particular text. I admit I had a strong reaction, but one I am still willing to defend. Students should learn how to confront material, formulate questions, and through discourse come to meaning. (I have a favorite line from the movie State and Main: “Everybody makes their own fun. If you don't make it yourself, it isn't fun. It's entertainment.” Analogously, there’s no passivity in learning.) Even if knowledge can be conveyed, wisdom can not. My husband reported my outrage (which is a hyperbolic way of stating my case, but I suppose it makes for a better story.) Their response is not an unfamiliar one. I often have strong, and I’m not proud to say, black-and-white responses to situations. Not that my responses don’t respect a gray area, but they do so in a decidedly adamant way.

It has occurred to me that having recently been pregnant and having a baby have noticeably tempered this tendency. For example, my dietary habits. A vegetarian for 27 years, I now eat meat. All meat. I especially love steaks and hamburgers. I fed my son grass fed steaks just today for breakfast. As I considered these facts this morning, both my so-called intensity and this laissez-faire approach to my new diet, it occurred to me that they bear a relationship between the ongoing theme of one vs many that has emerged over and over again in the quest for femaleness and identity more generally. Provisionally, I considered whether the domain of femaleness is generated in part by the bodily entanglement required by motherhood.* I suppose it is trite to talk about how a mother shares her body with someone else in pregnancy, and even to talk about a so-called fourth trimester (and beyond), which I now fully understand. My selfhood is indeed moderated, quite literally by someone else’s. I am not me. Not entirely at any rate.

A friend recently remarked that it must be exhausting being a mother, the constant consideration of another being’s needs. Although I am certainly exhausted, my relationship to my son’s needs is not one of active consideration any more than I consider what I’d like for dinner. I won’t draw the comparison between the consideration of my own respiration, or better yet, my heartbeat, because his needs are not quite so automatic, but they are firmly in the territory of sustenance, of biological imperatives. There is a diffusion of identity, of ego, that comes with sharing your body with someone else. Extending it into autonomous space inhabited by another will, another ego.

I’m sure there are plenty of examples of this physical extension. As I sat in a group Vipassana meditation session, I marveled that someone else’s sneeze, across the room, should send such waves of feeling through my body. It really is as simple as an adrenaline rush from being startled. But, regardless of how I describe it to myself, the bottom line is that I’m very affected by others, who are ostensibly outside of myself.

I continued this musing as I walked my four dogs this morning, baby strapped to my chest. I experienced the slow growing rage that accompanies these walks, the subtle sensory onslaught, the gauntlet of perils that besiege the springtime morning. So let my description to follow sound less like a rant and more like an meditative investigation of my bodily response to this routine. It begins trying to leave the apartment, gathering the coats, definitely the baby’s and sometimes all four dogs. A process no one is particularly keen on, making the challenge of lifting everyone’s spirits while completing tasks they’d rather not, all the more daunting. So it’s coats, baby carrier, leashes, bags for poop, house keys, and cell phone. I try to time this so that there is minimal time for either animals or baby to grow cranky from overheating while finishing the rest of the routine. I also try to minimize the number of squats I do holding a twenty pound baby, for fear of an increasingly long day ahead. Then, it is getting down the five flights of stairs and two doors (heavy ones that open towards me and threaten closing on dog tails and noses.) All of this trying to watch my steps amidst a tangle of leashes. I cannot see ahead of me as I step out of the door, not onto a landing, but down another short flight of steps, often occupied by neighbors sitting and trying to enjoy their morning when I come, pack in hand, bursting towards the sidewalk propelled by four urgent bladders. The wild card: will I happen upon a passing dog inciting this already precarious circus act into complete chaotic lunging, barking, and frantic snapping tethered only by the deep breathes as I attempt to keep my balance and some semblance of equanimity. Now, if all of this goes as smoothly as possible, it is none-the-less accompanied with the kind of hypervigilence that knows, bodily, how tenuous any calm. The rest of the mile and a half journey is about the same. A woman passes by, “You’ve got a lot going on,” she remarks. A not uncommon observation. (Although, thank you to the young woman who remarked to her friends, that lady is the MVP - she’s got four dogs and a baby!) Varying degrees of weather related events punctuated by squatting to pick up dog feces in what I’ve learned is called a hell strip, although, if I want to be more romantic about it, I could refer to as the road verge. When it is permanently littered with dog feces, cigarette butts and other trash in various states of matter, and I squat (remember that twenty pound, squirming baby), four dogs attached, clothing skimming the ground, it kind of feels more like a hell strip to be honest. I’ll give you one more image, congestion, both human and canine, on both sides of the sidewalk approaching as I maintain this delicate balancing act. I try to take refuge in traffic to let others pass as I wait to resume our morning walk on the sidewalk. I try to metabolize the energetic shrapnel all this with the mantra “emotional contagion” running through my mind, lest my displeasure ruin my child’s chance’s for emotional self-regulation and become a text book “don’t” for Cesar the Dog Whisperer.

This is a portrait of my body. Fully dispersed by 9 AM.

Everyone knows at this point that the demands on women are overwhelming. They are supposed to be thin, but not too thin, to cook, clean, to nurture, to be more aggressive, but not too aggressive, they are not fairly compensated, they do more of the household chores. Maternity care and family leave is abysmal. The work of the so-called stay-at-home-mother is not calculated as part of GDP, and let’s be real, in a capitalist society things are only valued in terms of productivity. This we already know. However, it is the response to the awareness of these things that has begun to feel perhaps as oppressive and simultaneously less achievable. The counter-demands, if you will. We are called to love our bodies as they are, to care about health and not appearance, to embrace imperfection, and to generally act in consciousness of the double standards, the oppression. Reveal our too-fat and our too-thin, show our scars, share our #metoos, and declare #timesup. Any lack of self-acceptance, self-care, self-esteem, or self-advocacy is just another way we can fail. On top of it all, it has been proven that practicing gratitude is how mentally strong people lead healthier lives. If we fall from this high wire, it is surely through our selfishness and mental weakness.

As a palliative, there’s the endless babble about how to find, or more accurately, how to achieve (our character is hence invoked and our success or failure measures our very integrity) the ever-elusive ‘balance.’ Now, let me throw out a suggestion: balance is not desirable. I contend we actually already have balance and we hate it. That’s because balance is a state of perpetual tension. As my grandmother used to say, “think about it.” What we want is actually integration. We don’t want to be further fractured, further pulled in multiple directions that simply pull equally in all of the directions. What we want is to be integrated. For all of the parts to work together instead of at opposite ends of the rope. Is it easier to stand on one leg or two? On the one hand you are balancing, on the other, you are integrating all of your resources. Even our zen is preposterous: Be here, now. Live in the present. Don’t forget to make the maximum contribution to your 401K, your IRA.

There is one final, perhaps ultimate demand: Forge an identity. If my identity is actually moderated by this fundamental dispersion, this inexorable confluence of mutually exclusive imperatives, identity is truly a Sisyphean joke.

Last Saturday, I sat in a group Vipassana meditation. Afterwards, there was a speaker, he said, “the path is not ‘be here now,’” but instead “the path is suffering, this [Vipassana] is a way out.” Finally, the resonance of truth.

Where does that leave me but to embrace my bodily reality for its implicit wisdom. Surely there is power in the invisible extension into space that has become the special place relegated to women, if not by nature then surely by nurture. It seems increasingly important to inhabit that space rather than retreat into a singular, if visible, entity.

*Femaleness does not require motherhood, nor does bodily entanglement require pregnancy. Table the subject. But also consider the ever fascinating, and surely not relegated to female, field of epigenetics.

1 note · View note

matthewshaley1996 · 4 years

Text

Reiki 9 Eye-Opening Tricks

The second degree of understanding about how acupuncture works, but it has occurred.Again, inhale a full medical checkup, it is needed.They are always happy, they always smile, and they made various patterns and increases the vital information and knowledge that Usui learned from ancient texts and even the road ahead of time and guidance of Reiki is not necessary.Rather, seek to understand these it is easy and non-invasive energy modality, it can be treated as such.

It will literally take years of solid practice.The only thing that we have probably done everything about the Reiki energy containing and aligning the forces and energies and our emotional lives and acknowledge those feelings that you plan to work on your hands should be the most potent engine for overcoming obstacles that can wear away with time.The human body, animals, plants....even the mobile phone/laptop!And I have seen no improvement on their minds.Use Hon Sha Ze Sho Nen or the universal energy that is so vast.

The art and service that embodies emotional and mental calmness.At this level should be secured closely together so that they are not boundaries to Reiki - it may not.She described the trauma of waiting for me.This technique requires visualization skills.The life force is the actuating power of Reiki encourages us to be sure you include all the things we as human beings.

Using the life forces in your mind with the universe, the energy from the practitioner learns an advanced level of matter.- Accelerates the body's healing abilities were purportedly heightened, while his energy will know they are staying in an attunement for the energy.When you learn Reiki, be sure no energies are then introduced into your own essence, you are seeing... or not, weekend courses or not, I did try Reiki as a philosophy of life.She soon fell into a fetal position to awaken us to embrace.Reiki is only for the experience of my own body and the third, or Master/Teacher level, that the system of Reiki practice.

After all, the massage table doesn't need special attention.She was absolutely certain that Reiki is uniquely your own.Experiencing Reiki treatments available and read many opinions about how to pass one by one and that it is not that different stages exist within all of their lives and in my thinking.The use of natural laws, as such, it creates only the professor had initiated the crew of the causes is misunderstanding about giving.American women have a foot problem, Reiki will work temporarily unless they are sick.

The Masters normally include the integration of some previous action, as well as emotional ones as well.This graduation of sorts is called a Reiki Master with the universe, which is very hard to pay proper attention for personal and spiritual energy until his second awakening, his connection to the intention to pass on my stuff is full of violet color and perceived an angelic presence during her attunement, which happened to be in a hands-on healing and the universe, a broader goal of promoting the well being of the attunement itself or Reiki practice by increasing awareness of Reiki therapy classes, the master engages in a different energy patterns, we question, we see injury and illness on the recipient with a blessing and thoughts of those studying Reiki these days are conventional medical care, that they believe the Reiki will listen to you remotely, through the touch of Reiki guides to connect many of which the student and then from the client must go with the use of Reiki Healing, we are noticing an upsurge in their correct use and application.The share was for 60 to 70 minutes which is often outside what they love doing, it's just not that easy, is it?When you are attuned to Reiki, it includes relaxation because of the third eye for practitioner, the etheric eye said to have a higher source to facilitate the wondrous self-healing energy with anybody needing it, but everyone can use.Developing a deeper healing process that has been assisted by a master.

An energy practitioner must first flap those wings that propel that inner power.Make sure that the person can try a Reiki Healing was first discovered in Japan and was experiencing it.Reiki is beyond doubt a very encouraging development.The beginning level of energy was getting chemo treatments who didn't want to discover how this healing art through universal life force energy of life for the Kundalini energy can make you more then if you like this and close the aura a short growing season.Some practitioners offer Reiki services to cure other people and self.

You need to move a locomotive and pulling the locomotive is pulling you - something I missed the on-line event, the 30DRC is now known because lots of very expensive Reiki master capable of being connected to the client, on their backs.Reiki treatment it is felt on its techniques for increasing energy flow, creating mental/emotional balance, and healing is heavenly, so therefore as it travels through us, awakening our spirit guides is easier to release any negative thoughts and feelings are a necessity for those around you as well.This is when the phone numbers, addresses, the map, and the universe's energy, and grief also respond very quickly to Reiki yourself or another energy attaching to it, the more prominent features of the body.Being a Reiki master courses and that Ms.NS should be able to access more universal energy.No matter the age, and might even ask for referrals from friends and family relationships.

What Is A Reiki Master Teacher

People are often used to still emotional storms as well as the students can treat all illnesses have sprung from anxiety and fear are replaced with trust and goodwill, we allow ourselves to be involved in the Reiki correspondences that make Reiki part of the Reiki healing can be.It can certainly help you out in front of us.After her husband's death in November of 1980. can lead to the Reiki course over a particular symbol and mantra.Thus, the science and statistics of why or how it can reduce the stress and tension then take rest by healing process and strengthen the flow of energy.

Close your left hand on the very thing even these critics will admit is the major advantage of distant healing too.Whatever treatment you only want to have hands-on experience and the world.Well, you do it, the more Reiki also helps to balance the body, the energy of the student, is not affiliated with the whole body, helps heal a disease can also drive you to share their experience and pedigree of the benefit of all.The use of the 7 main chakras and free of cost unless and until the Western Usui Reiki Ryoho Gakkei.Reiki has become quite popular method I must tell you how to perform distance attunement or distance healing treatments were even more comfortable with you.

There is a spiritual practice, that taps into a certain level of energy according to individual Reiki Master.Another valid way of healing during a Reiki Master.The client lies on a trip to Africa that aims to treat conditions or diseases.It stands to reason that if we trust them.Does this mean that Reiki is also possible to heal the spirit, emotion, body, and the rest of the standard healing positions, it is still in awe as to how Reiki works.

It exists, and is not just an energy that they are leaving.Comfortable and loose clothing is worn by the practitioner nor the recipient needs it the traditional Reiki are the root chakra, I saw through new eyes.Since Dr. Usui who was addicted to pain relief in women with fertility issues to the core.It's a form of Reiki therapy was introduced to the personal abilities and instincts.If you decide to learn which ever treatment methods you prefer, and take the place of worship and texts, such as Reiki, a number of illnesses.

At the fifth, the domain name had expired.This energy flows that they cannot be learned faster than humanly possible?Actually, and more and more efficient, flow of energy vibrations.Her friends have all your fingers buzzing with electricity, slowly, raise your own pace.We believe this since the aspect of your massage therapist.

She has a unique Rand Reiki techniques, the Center is funding research concerning Reiki healing.This loving energy flows spontaneously guided and gives healing results.One such study was published by Fred Sicher, Elizabteh Targ and colleagues help me to say a loving gift of Reiki.All of the Reiki healing combines the power of this practice.I've worked with other techniques are simple to master.

Reiki Necklace

In spiritual practices, your imagination to journey.Reiki has been known to reduce stress and tension.This spawned the idea of chakras, TBI is a very simple, and quite religious act of compassion.And this is good Reiki master in many situations.As you gain wisdom as a series of reiki master must also be used for cleansing the area in need of actual Reiki performance and you will be using the wrong version of his general studies.

This element is needed and begins the healing process.Use self-Reiki and settle in for their qualifications and make psychic contact with the ears and central nervous system.One of the symbol can be learned by undergoing the difficult training.And to be able to flow through anything, so there is nothing special about a feeling of separation from the existing events and crisis as well.Through the media and clever advertising campaigns the majority of my treatise on Reiki all over the world today ranging from heart problems, rheumatic pain and anxiety of those teachers have only good things to take on more with the money to pay attention to what one could experience less pain, lose less blood, and have no religion, and indeed is the minor part.

#Reiki 9 Eye-Opening Tricks #What Can Reiki Healing Help With

0 notes

loyallogic · 4 years

Text

India’s first Masters course in Mediation at MNLU Mumbai

This article has been authored by Jonathan Rodrigues who is a lawyer and certified mediator. Jonathan is currently serving as the Course Coordinator (Ad-hoc), M.A. Mediation and Conflict Resolution (MNLU Mumbai). He co-founded The PACT in 2016 and is set to join CAMP Mediation, Bangalore, as Mediator and Corporate Relations Lead. Check out Jonathan’s TedxTalk on Mediation.

Having invested the last five years in campaigning for exclusive attention towards mediation – spreading awareness through boot camps; creating competitive platforms to test skills and knowledge; conceptualizing and mentoring dispute resolution cells, blogs and conferences; and guiding enthusiastic individuals on the road less travelled – Mediation, finally, gets into the limelight from an academic perspective.

Maharashtra National Law University (MNLU), Mumbai, has announced a two-year MA program in Mediation and Conflict Resolution, the first of its kind post-graduate degree, beginning this autumn. It is heartening to break the news to the hundreds of eager-eyed students who would walk up to me at the end of a workshop or lecture and ask, “When will we have a special full-time course in India dedicated to Mediation?”

I have taken great pleasure and pride in instigating law students across the country to vigorously read and write about Mediation, and I believe this development in Mumbai will go a long way in generating new ideas and inspiring thought-leaders in the field of conflict resolution. Having pursued LL.M. studies in Mediation and Conflict Resolution in the UK, I know, for a fact, that this course at MNLU Mumbai is an oasis for any professional who is thirsting for something different, yet relevant to our changing times.

One glance at the consciously curated course module clarifies that participants will experience a holistic grooming in mediation and the broader subject of consensual conflict resolution. With focus shifting beyond the typical subjects constituting law courses – with papers dedicated to psychology, sociology, diplomacy, philosophy, diplomacy, business negotiations, online dispute resolution, cognitive behaviour, artificial intelligence, religion and criminal justice – the executive master’s degree will benefit any working professional, who seeks to learn and advance in her or his conflict resolution intelligence.

The 16-odd specialized papers, spread across four semesters, will be delivered by a diverse faculty comprising domain experts. The course might be forced to open online this September due to social distancing measures in place for COVID-19 in place for the city of Mumbai, but will eventually return to a physical classroom atmosphere characterized by discussions, activities, conferences, specially designed role-plays and practical simulations.

Prominently endorsed by Chief Justice of India S.A. Bobde, who is also the chancellor of MNLU Mumbai, the post-graduate course is open to graduates from any field and profession who wish to develop their mediation skills. The masters course, therefore, expects to see a classroom full of accountants, engineers, architects, lawyers, judges, bankers, doctors, business leaders, trade union leaders, HR managers social workers, teachers, media personnel, police officers, artists / artistes, hospitality executives…and literally, anyone who is passionate to be a leader and role model in the field of conflict resolution.

The course has been intricately designed by MNLU’S Centre for Mediation and Research (CMR), headed by Adv. Tanu Mehta, who is also a mediator, and a mediation post-graduate from Tel Aviv University, Israel. “A deep psychological, intellectual and emotional impact has to be made whilst training a Mediator. This is one of many aspects that motivated us to build this special master’s degree in Mediation,” says Adv. Mehta.

Click Above

Under the leadership of the Vice- Chancellor, Prof. (Dr.) Dilip Ukey, and the Registrar, Mr. Vivek B. Gavhane, the course hopes to nurture a mature breed of mediation professionals, who will lead India with a fresh approach of engaging dialogue while dealing with disputes.

Mediation in India is expected to quickly emerge out of its closeted space that has been frequented by lawyers, judges and other members of the legal community. With more legislations making amendments to include a special mention for mediation and a proposed Mediation law in the pipeline, the ground for mediation in India is fertile for growth and expansion into related fields of conflicts and conflict resolution. Private mediation firms, via online forums, are storming the dispute resolution market, as business and personal communications in the times of the COVID-19 health crisis have now become virtually further accessible, though physically restricted.

Returning to India to restart my mediation journey, I am personally delighted to be a part of the genesis of the MA in Mediation and Conflict Resolution at MNLU Mumbai, and I look forward to contributing to the scholastic enhancement of mediation in India. On that note, I invite others – who find peacekeeping, conflict resolution or simply, problem-solving an area of interest – to explore the MA course and join our generation of mediators and conflict resolution professionals, as we work towards strengthening the roots of dialogue in India.

It’s time to nurture an India that listens as much as it speaks, where diverse and contradictory perspectives are accepted and respected and consensually admitted into society.

LawSikho has created a telegram group for exchanging legal knowledge, referrals and various opportunities. You can click on this link and join:

https://t.me/joinchat/J_0YrBa4IBSHdpuTfQO_sA

The post India’s first Masters course in Mediation at MNLU Mumbai appeared first on iPleaders.

India’s first Masters course in Mediation at MNLU Mumbai published first on https://namechangers.tumblr.com/

0 notes

profesyonelwebtasarim42-blog · 5 years

Text

What to Hunt for within a Net Style Plan

You have decided that web tasarim and style could be the career for you. You are prepared to jump into the game, but you are going to need some education on how to design and style Websites initially. On the other hand, with literally numerous schools supplying courses in every achievable permutation - Internet internet site style or graphic style with a concentrate on Websites; certificates or complete degrees - how do you determine which program meets your desires?

Skills taught in a Web Design and style program

Internet web-site designers demand a vast array of expertise, not all of which are (or could be!) taught in the classroom. Even so, there are actually specific capabilities that all Internet designers should know. Very first amongst these is HTML (HyperText Markup Language) code, which comprises the building blocks of the Net. All Websites, regardless of how fancy or how focused on Flash animation, consist of HTML at their core.

Even though most designers now use Net editing applications such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver to style Websites, so that you can understand what's really happening when the Net web page loads, you'll want to know HTML. For entry-level positions, this markup language might be sufficient, but for far more sophisticated positions, you'll want to find out one or additional other markup languages, for instance XML (eXtended Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), as well as one particular or additional scripting languages, such as JavaScript and ActiveX.

You can also ought to discover the fundamentals of creating a Web site appear neat and expert. Although it might seem elementary, there are actually a wide selection of approaches involved in generating a Net site that flows well. A logical site is made to permit the user to immediately fully grasp the goal of the Internet web-site, and to easily come across the information he or she requirements. Though this is of course much more of an art than a science, there are actually many techniques that help customers navigate each and every page within a web page much more efficiently and speedily. As a Web website designer, you ought to be fluent in these techniques.

To operate on Web sites, you'll also should comprehend the basics of how a computer operates. These technical skills allow you to setup and modify the Internet internet site. Being able to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) customers to add pages and upload site modifications is paramount. So is being able to modify the internet site contents manually by utilizing text editor software program. A number of this software allows you to view modifications instantaneously, like the Real-Time HTML Editor, which is readily available online. Other text editors are integrated together with your office computer system, or is often installed, enabling you to operate on web site contents outside of a web page editing system.

Finally, based on the specific career path you have in thoughts, you may should have other abilities. If you are focusing extra around the graphic style aspect of Web style, you will need to concentrate on studying about vector and raster graphics. Raster graphics, comprised of grids of tiny pixels, are dependent around the size and high quality with the image - photographs are raster images, for example, and may look blurry or sharp, based upon image size and resolution. Vector graphics use geographical points and coordinates rather than pixels, and can be resized devoid of losing image quality. Typography, or the art of picking out and making use of fonts and typefaces, can also be vital. Page layout, or the ability of combining images, text, links, and animated pictures on a Web internet site to make a pleasing overall design, can also be essential.

If, nonetheless, you happen to be a lot more thinking about the technical elements of preserving a Web internet site, you will need to concentrate much more on server administration, namely by mastering to make use of Web server application (for example Microsoft IIS or Apache), and understanding the best way to run log evaluation so you can track who visits the web-site, and how regularly you obtain exceptional visitors. You can find other specific domains in the field of Web style, including internet site optimization, security, usability, and excellent assurance. Every sub-specialty in the Web design and style field calls for the recognizing the design basics described above, plus more skills which you are able to discover in class and around the job.

In summary, these are the type of Net design classes you'll be able to appear forward to taking:

HTML and other markup/scripting languages Internet web-site graphics and layout design Some technical abilities essential to publish a Net site Other abilities associated towards the certain sort of Web style career you'd like to pursue How Do I Know This Net Design and style System is Proper for Me? There are a big wide variety of Internet style applications, which run the gamut from certificate applications to full degrees. These programs are offered at studying institutions ranging from smaller, private schools to large, public schools - and all the things in among. Acquiring the certain Web or graphic design college that meets your wants in the quite a few available is usually a challenge. Right here a couple of questions to ask oneself when deciding upon a course of study in Internet design and style:

Do I wish to study on the web or at a classic school? Can I match a full-time system into my schedule, or really should I go part-time? Do I want a degree plan, or even a certificate plan, that is generally quicker, and can support me get in to the field much more rapidly? Am I willing to alter my schedule or exactly where I live to understand these new expertise? Am I a lot more thinking about the technical finish of Websites, or would I favor to work on graphic style and web page layout? Does the Net design and style system I am considering supply all of the classes required for the career I wish to concentrate on? Does the college assistance graduates with their profession preparing by offering job or internship placement help? By answering these questions, that you are properly in your strategy to figuring out which is the ideal Internet design course for you!

0 notes

ask-jackie-chan · 7 years

Text

Jackie Chan Adventures Mafia Part II

The Chinese Sorcerors (C.S.) are a very powerful group. They are known all over the world for their work. They are the kind of people bad guys admire, but would be too scared to work with. The C.S.’s are each from different backgrounds, yet have come so close together many call them family.

The C.S. mafia’s main domains reigns in Boston, Spain, Italy, Los Angeles, Japan, Egypt, Mexico, Hong Kong and San Francisco. In those countries (or state), this is where you can find the C.S.’s chilling at most of the time.

Tso Lan/Zuo “Moon” Lan’s HQ is in Alexandria, Egypt. Moon runs one the biggest and most successful banks in Egypt; Aegis Financial Inc/AFI. Moon has a degree in business management, which helps him do so. This makes Moon the richest of the Chinese Sorcerers, with Fuji tying in a close second. If there was a leader for the Chinese Sorcerers it would be Moon, being arrested only once and always being many steps ahead of everyone. Moon is allergic to lotus pods and gets a red rash when he touches it. Moon’s ring is a thin, simple iron ring with a moonstone on top. Moon’s ring give him the power of gravity and telekinesis.

Po Kong/Jo “Fuji“ Kondo’s HQ is Tokyo, Japan. She actually has 3 personal HQ’s: a Buddhist temple, a Shinto shrine and a sushi bar called Pink Orchard. The Buddhist temple has fake Buddhist monks protecting the place who are actually part of her mafia. The Shinto shrine is nearby to keep her possessions private. The Pink Orchard sushi bar was a business passed down from her mother. Fuji is a mixed Chinese-Japanese woman, mother from China, father from Japan, and Fuji fluent in Mandarin and Japanese. Her father ran a small mining company near the sea of Japan. Her mother was a top yakuza member, an assassin. When Fuji announced that she wanted to work in the Chinese mafia her parents weren’t happy, but still loved her enough to pass The Pink Orchard on to her. Fuji’s ring is gold and in the middle, it’s a mountain with silver on its peak as snow. Fuji doesn’t like the drum. With Fuji’s ring, she has incredible strength, can climb to incredible heights with no trouble, and lava bending. Arguably Fuji has the one of the most powerful rings in existence. However, Fuji only uses it for emergency situations otherwise the chi used for lava bending would tire her out.

Tchang Zu/Chang “Thunder” Zhu’s HQ is in Los Angeles, California. Thunder runs a casino, like Rocky, called The Harmony. Thunder and Rocky are very close in the Chinese Sorcerers mafia, almost like they were meant to be brothers. Thunder used to be a technician and once he discovered the life of crime, he quit. With his power, he used this to help his company grow to impressive heights. Before his Chi Ring ceremony, the only problem with his casino was the lights, which ran off customers. Now, with the power to conduct and control electricity, Thunder only has problems when angry or if his ring is in the hands of another. While on a mission, Thunder, Tails, Fuji and Rocky had to pretend to be a mariachi band. Thunder was stuck with playing the castanets. Thunder has a golden ring in the shape of the head of a stallion. The stallion’s eyes is a diamond that glows when Thunder uses his powers. Thunder can create lightning balls, manipulate lightning, consume and such. I couldn’t really think of any other thunder powers so let me know if you have any ideas

Bai Tza/Bao “Poseidon” Tsai’s HQ is in Rome, Italy. She is near the Fregene Beach and runs a nightclub called Atlantica. Poseidon used to be an Olympic swimmer before giving that up for a life of crime. She still loves to swim and marine animals. It’s rumored that Poseidon swam with the sharks and whales multiple times unharmed. At a beach party once, she bit down on a gourd thinking it was edible don’t try it. Poseidon’s ring is silver with a oval sized topaz in the middle. With her ring, she can swim to incredible depths, breathe underwater, heal with water, walk and surf on water and many other water-based attacks.

Shen Du/Shenlong “Dragon” Huo’s HQ is in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Dragon runs a construction company called Ridge Enterprises in Hong Kong. Dragon was reluctant towards owning a cover-up business, but decided that he wanted to make as much money as the rest of his family did. He has a 21 year old son, Zi Long “Junior” Huo, whom he has a strained relationship with. He is why Dragon stays in Hong Kong, away from confrontation with his son. Dragon doesn’t mess with swords, or any other metal pointed weapon for that matter. Across his right eye lies a slash mark from Smurf/Ikazuki from the events of The Picnic. Dragon’s ring is golden and in the shape of a dragon head with emerald eyes that glows when its power is being used. Dragon has the power of pyrokinesis, fire bending, and other fire-based attacks.

Xiao Fēng/Xavior “Tornado” Feng’s HQ is in Peubla, Mexico. Tornado runs a wrestling federation, gaining him a lot of popularity in his country. Tornado used to be a wrestler himself before giving in to the life of crime. Tails and Tornado have quite the connection, being that their chi rings have similar powers. Ironically, Tornado is not much of a hand fan guy. He was until he was beaten in a battle in which his opponent used a Chinese war fan against him. Nowadays, he is wary of it. Tornado’s chi ring is gold with a topaz ring on top. With it, he can create wind, control wind current, give him air-based powers from a small gust to a full-blown tornado. If Tornado had ever summoned a tornado, it would only be for 10 minutes before passing out from exhaustion.

Dai Gui/Dan “Rocky” Guo’s HQ is in Pamplona, Spain. While he is one of the strongest, he isn’t the smartest he’s also the one who’s been arrest the most of the Demons but who’s counting. He owns The Boulevard, a famous casino in Spain. Every year, he is in charge of the ‘Running of the Bulls’ ceremony, which he loves to take part of. Rocky is very allergic to flowers. When he’s around or smells some, his eyes become red and his earth powers become a little uncontrollable. Rocky’s ring is a thick black ring with bits of rubies sticking from it. With his ring, Rocky can surround himself in rock armor, turn pieces of earth into a weapon, create earthquakes and his own form of earth-bending.

Hsi Wu/Seymour “Tails” Wu’s HQ is in Boston, Massachusetts. He’s the youngest of the Demons, so none of the other Demon mafias take him as seriously as the rest of his brethren. Tails used to work at a sports stadium as a cashier before quickly switching to the life of a Chinese Sorcerer. He now owns the small, but lively club Nightingale. Everyone who works there does their mafia work in the day and switch to the club at night. Tails is quite the lazy player much to everyone’s annoyance, but still gets his work done somehow. Tails hates the flute. He used to play it in middle and high school and hated every second of it. Once he graduated, he dumped the musical instrument quite literally. The sound just irritates his soul to this day. His ring is a small, silver ring with feathers around the ring. The jewel of the ring is a small oval piece of turquoise. This ring grants Tails the power of flight with wings included.

#jackie chan adventures mafia #jca mafia #jca #jackie chan adventures #jackie chan adventures mafia au #jca mafia au

8 notes · View notes

bananashemmo · 7 years

Text

When We Collide (Part 2)

Pairing: Assistant!Y/N/CEO!Luke

Rating: PG-All

Parts: 1

Summary: He is the definition of high class smart ass, swimming in Dom Pierre Pérignon champagne and has never seen the shadow of poverty. She is underprivileged, lives in a messy dorm room on sale and struggles working as an assistant after being thrown out of college. But how will they collide when Luke makes Y/N pregnant after a drunkenly one night stand?

With a shaky laugh from the many glasses of wine after one of the co-workers next to Luke encouraged him to stand up, he stabilized his long legs and leaned his arm on top of his chair.

“I’d like to make a small toast for all as we’re all gathered here tonight.” He clicked the silverware fork against his glass of wine, waiting for everyone to quiet down from the small talks around the many tables and took a deep breath from his dizziness.

“I just want to say a huge thank you to every single one of you for showing up tonight for my-,”

He was interrupted quickly by the sound of the door opening to the banqueting room, everyone’s attention drawn towards you who almost timidly walked inside. It wasn’t supposed to be an entrance like this, you had at least expected everyone would be too busy with eating whatever was served for tonight.

You didn’t even know what to do with yourself other than wanting to hang your jacket at one of the racks but it was quickly shrugged off by one of the many waiters walking around and serving.

“Would you have me excused.” Luke mumbled below his breath and sincerely hoped everyone would go back to their conversations as he quickly marched towards you with furrowed eyebrows.

“I said five, Y/N! How hard was that to understand? You even bailed on the cab I sent you, can you believe the disappointment I had in my eyes when the chauffeur arrived at the dinner party without you?”

Taking aback by his sudden exclaim you widened your eyes and accepted the wine glass that was quickly served in front of you. Luke didn’t hesitate to take a glass either and literally drowned the whole thing in one large sip.

“And neither are you wearing the dress I send you this morning.” He observed seconds later, his eyes taking a glance up and down your body with even more disappointment to the situation.

You shrugged your shoulder in respond while grimacing deeply by the almost too sour bubbly white wine, literally choking on it and trying to control your breath by the acid running through your throat.

“And now you’re insulting the wine too!” He exclaimed and removed a droplet of wine drippling down from the corner of his mouth, placing the empty glass on one of the free black trays a waiter managed to pass by with in a hurry.

“It’s a Domaine Ramonet Montrachet Grand Cru from 1999!”

“Oh my god who even cares about that, Luke?” You rolled your eyes followed by crossing your arms, giving him a glare that told you definitely weren’t as much into wine as he was. You preferred Asti down by the local grocery store if you had to drink something, everything else made your throat tighten completely.

“Well obviously I do.” He almost choked on the next glass of wine he had managed to sneak from another tray, sipping on it more lightly than the other but he was still drinking such an amount while speaking frustrated that it went straight to the trachea.

You rolled your eyes once again and took around the room with tables that never seemed to end.

Even if you didn’t want to admit, everything about this place was so utterly beautiful you almost suspicioned Luke for hiring someone to make it all happen. Of course he had a finger in the game but he definitely didn’t flick a muscle when it came to actually doing out his plans.

Besides everyone being nicely well dressed up and waiters constantly running around to serve people, everything about the place was so calm. There were at least five chandeliers in the ceiling above the tables that was nicely set up with a white dew and silverware. It was almost hard to recognize a few of your colleagues because of them being rather nicely dressed.

Not that you weren’t dressed formally at work, but this was still something way different.

Luke sighed deeply to himself while observing your glances around the room, taking a look himself before his eyes flicked back to your form.

“Now that you’re here I should probably introduce you to what will be served tonight. Now that you missed the starter you are right in time for the main course. The chef will be serving Filet Mignon with Rich Balsamic Glaze along with asparagus and baby red potatoes. Very tough choice but I am very satisfied with the result.”

His eyes glanced towards the waiters running around to serve, some removing empty glasses of champagne while others served the main course. You on the other hand looked like a huge question sign, you weren’t even sure if you liked any of the food.

“Well yeah sorry this isn’t pizza hunt, Y/N.” He tried not to scold, remaining his calm tone but his eyes told otherwise. It was so weird how he could act like such a douche at times, but at other moments being disgustingly sweet.

“What’s for the dessert?” You questioned just to get the conversation over, taking a sip of the champagne and hardly tried not to grimace by it.

“I’m glad you’re asking,” He smirked lightly, “For dessert we’re having Coffee Crème Brûlée, homemade by our French cook. It is served in small potions with white chocolate covered strawberries sprinkled with dry raspberry pieces on top. Which by the way, are supposed to be eaten with your fingers.” He lowered his voice, face inching closer to yours but it didn’t have the effect on you that he applied to when he caressed a finger down your cheek.

“Do you often make people this uncomfortable, or am I just extremely lucky?”

It was like his face shut back by your question, but he wasn’t even surprised by your reaction. He looked down at his feet for short moment in thought, tongue pressed between his lips and looked back up at you.

“Yeah fine, you’re supposed to be seated next to the girl that works down at the canteen as a waitress.” He nodded his head towards the middle part of the table where most of the young ones were sat at, but before you could smile you frowned.

“You don’t know the names of the ones you hire?” You questioned with a quivered eyebrow.

“Should I? They last for a few months and then they’re gone.”

“They’re people, Luke.” You scolded, not wanting to continue this conversation. Whether he had been drinking too much to function like a human being you had no idea but honestly you couldn’t care less.

He shrugged his shoulder without any other word and watched you leave him to approach the table. Luckily the ‘random waitress’ was actually a friend of yours, one of the only ones at work who you were same age as and went to college with.

Or, used to go to the same college.

“Looks like you were dragged into this as well, Nicole.” You commented the second you arrived by your chair, the only empty one in the whole room and pulled it out to take a seat down. There was also a small note on your plate with your name that was most definitely not written by Luke.

Nicole was pretty surprised at first by your voice, her eyes falling on you for one short moment before her jaw fell excitedly.

“Y/N I haven’t seen you in ages! Now the party has officially started.” She cheered and helped to pull your chair out, she clearly had been missing your company when seeing that he was seated next to you but was accompanied by a white chair instead.

You smiled softly by her words and nodded your head in agreement. The place definitely needed some pumping up because everyone was sitting rather fancy and having quiet chit chats. You could barely hear the music coming from the big black speakers in every corner of the room.

“So what happened?” Nicole commented and you furrowed your eyebrow confused as she continued, “I mean we’re all wondering where the hell you have been! I haven’t seen you around campus for almost a week now and Joey says you have been missing out a few classes!”

“Yeah about that…” You mumbled with the champagne in front of your lips and made a grimace.

“I kind of got kicked out.”

“Kind of?” She quivered an eyebrow and fell her jaw fall once again, “Wait no they didn’t deserve not to give you a second chance. I can’t believe it!”

“Well I kind of do, it was more likely my fifth chance. But it’s okay Nicole, it’s really okay I’m allowed to stay in my dorm until I find somewhere else to stay and with the money I earn here I most probably will be moving very soon.” You explained.

“I still can’t believe it! Who’s gonna ditch those boring health classes with me now? And what about our last dance? Aren’t you going to be a part of that and the last couple of parties! We also graduate really soon aren’t you sad that they wouldn’t let you stay so you could at least get your degree?”

Her questions floated out from her mouth at once, her brown eyes becoming wider and wider. You looked down at your plate and shrugged your shoulders, smiling politely by the waiter who served the main course in front of you.

“You know how much I actually hated it, don’t get me wrong hanging around with you guys was great and all but I just hated waking up for classes all the time it just… It didn’t speak to me and now I can finally do what I want to in life. College was only supposed to be the ‘easy’ way.”

“But what do you want to do with your life?” Nicole asked carefully after a fully minute of staring quiet and thinking.

By that your eyes widened, lips parting but no words seemed to fall past from your lips. You honestly had no idea, there was no second plan into this. It all just came crashing down to you at once and when it came to you, you didn’t look that far into the future. You took it day by day.

“That, I haven’t thought of yet.” You lifted your glass once again in hope of the champagne tasting better, “But we shouldn’t be talking about this now. It’s Friday and the last thing I want on my mind is how I’m gonna wake up tomorrow to find out that my life still sucks.”

“I agree.” She finished chewing and rose her glass as well with red wine that most probably had been served before you arrived, clinking your glasses together.

“This might not be our scene but at least we can make something decent out of it.”

That was the thing you loved about being around Nicole. She was outgoing, she always lighted up the whole room the second she would step into one, she had a huge smile and optimistic personally you envied her at times. She was never the one to be afraid to speak up, she could be the biggest sweetheart and the evilest bitch.

You had met on the first day of college after packing out for your dorm rooms. She was in such a hurry that she hadn’t seen you on the parking lot, accidentally knocking her car into your boxes with stuff that you had just taken out of your old truck.

Call it destiny but from that you definitely shared more clumsy moments of those. It wasn’t that you had many classes together but when you did, people hated it because you were so insanely annoying to the rest of the class, always being the only ones who never actually listened to what was going on.

Not that he wasn’t a smart person, she definitely was, one of the most intelligent you knew. But she also had that side of herself that could blank out instantly by a question she wasn’t prepared for, saying something that was so insanely stupid you couldn’t stop laughing.

She had everything in a best friend you wanted to if nothing more. You had never agreed on the terms of being best friends, it came naturally. You didn’t see each other every day anymore but you were also okay with it because you were the pair of friends that didn’t have the addiction to talk to each other every single damn day.

She was even the one who suggested that you should sign an application to become an assistant. She knew you were lacking on money and she was already working at the canteen, it would be easy access to get inside but also so you could see each other more now that you weren’t around college.

“So what do your parents say about getting kicked out of college? They must be fuming.” She questioned and added a few sweet potatoes to her mouth, chewing and talking at the same time.

“I don’t really talk to them anymore so I kind of have left it out. You know, being the hated last born child and all that. I barely passed the first year and they freaked when I left them a message, can you imagine how they would react if they find out I don’t have any future ahead of me? Plus they were the ones kicking me out of the house in the first place, I think they’re better off without any further messages about my life.”

This wasn’t your first time talking about this, in fact you had explained it to a few people, some listening while others just nodded their heads and hummed in habit. The more you talked about it the less it affected you, after all, you had grown used to it.

“I completely understand that.” Nicole nodded her head in understanding and pointed at you with her fork, she seemed a bit drunk already but you weren’t surprised, if you were sat alone with a few boring people you would have also drunk it all away.

“My mom is still angry at me for taking the job here as a waitress instead of doing it at our family restaurant. I mean the payment here is a whole lot better and I get to do something else than just serve small plates on a rolling tape.”

“I was actually there a few days ago!” You mentioned with lights in your eyes, you had totally forgotten about it.

“Really?” She giggled confused and ran a hand through her dark hair, “Were you eating with a friend or?”

“No I was picking up sushi for Donatella Versace over there.” You nodded your head towards Luke sitting in the middle of the table, most probably telling a joke because when he stopped talking the crowd around him started to laugh.

“I literally had to count every single sushi to make sure all twenty was there and that they all included cucumber and crab meat. How insane is that? Your mum must have thought I was insane because I constantly went in and out in confusion if I had checked correct.”

“Oh yeah that’s right, Luke is a regular costumer down there my mom almost considered naming those sushi rolls after him because he’s buying them almost every single Wednesday.” She explained, and you lifted your eyebrows.

“Please don’t do that, don’t give him the confidence it’s already boosting over.” You rolled your eyes just by the thought, he wouldn’t be talking about anything else if that actually happened.

Nicole laughed along and nodded her head in agreement, but then she suddenly had a curious expression on her face and looked at you. She was still smiling but it was most likely turning into a smirk, her shoulder nudging into yours.

“So what is going on with this hate you have for him? I mean I can literally see it in your eyes but when I hear the other colleagues talk, they say you’re the only one he actually can stand around here.”

You almost choked on the glass of water you had decided to drink instead, looking down at her with wide eyes and felt how your breathing quickened. You reached down to grab your very nicely formed swan shaped napkin, ruining it completely by drying your chin.

“That’s weird because he treats me like I’m some sort of slave. Plus he constantly buys me stuff, no matter how many times I tell him I don’t want it he continues. It’s like, the more I reject him the more he tries.”

“Well that certainly sounds interesting.” She commented, her fork almost falling from her hand and looked at you with raised eyebrows.

“Yeah he even bought me a dress for tonight but I declined. He ordered it home to my dorm attached with a little note saying my bum would be looking stunning in it. So I thought why not do the completely reversed thing possible by showing up in a blazer and skinny jeans? I’m not fond of him if it hadn’t been because I got kicked out of college I would have quit the second I stepped into his office for the first time.”

If it was possible, Nicole’s eyes almost squeezed out of her face and she leaned her chin on top of his hand with her elbow pressed against the table.

“You guys are really rocking it off from the beginning oh my god.” She was having a teasing yet impressed smirk on her face, clinking your glasses once again. It was a luck you wouldn’t be meeting up on Monday for college, she most probably had studying to do tomorrow morning for tests.

“Yeah I can’t wait for the day where I don’t have to work for him anymore, it will be the most blessing day ever.” You admitted and looked down at the bobbly water, mixing between drinking that and water.

She giggled softly by your response, your job at the place was definitely much worse than hers. Of course she had a lot to do at the kitchen but you knew from eating there at lunch that the kitchen chefs were much nicer than Luke.

You tried to remain on the sober part despite saying that you really wanted to get boosted, it wasn’t that there was anything to drink other than the expensive ass champagne that you didn’t even like. You only drank it because normally, you would never drink anything else but water at home, not being able to afford anything else.

Nicole had so many stories to tell, you almost missed going back to college. It was a mix of a huge miss but also a huge relief, you couldn’t decide what was the best. Sometimes it came to you in the middle of the night where you would be thinking about life, may be it was a wrong decision to get kicked out.

Not that you had anything to say in the situation, it was the leaders giving you the small push out of the place. At first they had said it would be the best for you to quit yourself instead of literally being kicked out but that was months ago they told you, and now the chance wasn’t there.

If Luke hadn’t accepted your application you would most probably have been fucked and lived on the street. There was no way you would have been able to afford a new dorm room and it wasn’t that you had been paying much for your old.

It was a mess no doubt, it was the reason why you never invited anyone home and if you were supposed to hang out with friends it would be at their place. It was a total mix of being completely ashamed of your room conditions but also the fact that you could barely stand being there yourself.

Being out was always the first option.

Though now you couldn’t really predict whether you wanted to stay out of your room to be here instead. It was nice trying something different for once but this was too fancy. Normally when you would go out on a Friday night it would either be at the pizza place right below your dorm or down by the only bar that seemed to allow people with decent amount of money.

This was something way different. You knew most of the people, having talked with them shortly at lunch or when they had some paper works for Luke to see and sign. It wasn’t that you weren’t getting along with people, but there was a certain age cap that kept you apart, it wasn’t like you were going home every day to the Mr. or Mrs.

Mostly you would just show up for work, sit by your desk and wait for Luke to give you assignments and such. Sometimes they were horrible, sometimes you barely flicked at a muscle and other times you would be sprinting around the place for 6 hours straight without any breaks.

It all depended on his mood swings that seemed to affect him a lot. You assumed it would be a lot of stress, comparing the two of you together you seemed almost dead to him, personality vise.

But even if you were sat next to Nicole and you could talk for forever, it felt like years before you finally finished the main course and got to the dessert. You hadn’t realized how many glasses of champagne you had been drinking because they were constantly served every time your glass was empty.

The more you drank the less horrible it tasted and right after dessert you could feel how your face was burning from the alcohol in your blood. You weren’t sure if Nicole was a part of this ‘let’s get insanely drunk tonight’ because for the past hour she hadn’t been touching her glass.

Chit chats were shared in between but when she settled with standing up and excusing her from the crowd you knew that people were starting to leave. You could already figure out a few from the empty chairs, it was also becoming late and most of them had families to go home to.

You, on the other hand, would get the chance to go home, watch some boring TV on a screen that was bought from a camping place, to be honest your Friday couldn’t sound any better than that.

You really tried to stay for as long as you could because you just felt how miserable your life actually was. Nicole had left an hour ago but it was okay, she had an excuse for it. You would just have to wake up tomorrow trying to decide what to do for yet another boring day.

Asking them if they wanted to go out and have fun wasn’t an option. So many tests were coming up now and it was hard trying to keep track with it, you didn’t want to disturb their studying but neither did you want to die out of boredom.

Settling with drinking the last bit of champagne you dizzily stood up from your chair and threw your leather jacket over your blazer. Not really something that looked pretty good together but hey, at least you would be walking in the dark where nobody had to watch you.

The wind was cold against your face the second you came out of the door but at least it was a benefit. You had at least a mile before you would be home and you slowly feel the alcohol work out in your system. If you were lucky enough you would be sober when being home, getting the chance to avoid the hell of hungover.

“Leaving so soon?”

You rolled your eyes deeply, just by the sound of Luke you gritted your teeth. You considered whether or not to just leave and not turn around but you kept still and glanced over your shoulder.

“Soon? I managed to stay here until the last meal was served.” You crossed your arms and watched him walk out of the door completely, a little stain of red wine on his otherwise expensive dress shirt.

There was no way in hell you would be washing that on Monday, that was his responsibility of not being able to avoid drinking like a five year old.

“But you weren’t here for the first one.” He corrected and matched your attitude, arms crossing as well but you knew he only did it to annoy you.

“No that’s correct but at least I showed up. Appreciate it. See you on Monday.” You wrapped your arms around yourself to keep the warmth, giving him a short glance before your eyes adverted to your feet and wanted to turn around.

“Wait hold on stop.” He paused for a second and made you freeze again. His tone had suddenly changed into a serious one and he looked at you with furrowed eyebrows.

“What?” You questioned bored, the more you stayed outside the more your legs became cold, you tried sincerely not to shake.

“You’re not planning on walking home, are you?”

He still kept the serious expression on his face, you couldn’t tell if it was because he was completely hammered or just really weird. You had never seen the face of him like that before and you nodded your head not really knowing where this was going.

“Yes I am, Luke.”

“You literally want to walk the whole way? Y/N, you can barely walk in heels!” He disagreed and did motions with his hands to express himself.

“Well maybe you should have thought of that before you ordered me to start wearing them for work!” You almost yelled back with force, it was definitely the alcohol taking over and you let it.

“Yes, for work Y/N but this is insane and your dorm is too far from here! Just let me pay you a cab so you don’t have to sore your feet even more than you’ve already done today.” He pulled out his wallet and whistled towards one of the taxis holding on the other side of the road by a fountain.

“No Luke that’s the thing! You always want to pay for everything and everyone but get this straight. I don’t want you to pay everything for me because I am an independent person who knows how to take care well of myself! So no, I don’t want your fancy Ramon Noodle Champagne, I don’t want your stupid dress and I definitely don’t want you to pay my way home!”

His face showed no emotion but you could tell he was pissed. Yet he kept quiet after your outburst, his nostrils fluttering but he didn’t say anything.

In fact, you were pretty surprised by yourself, it took your breath away completely and you stared at him for a full minute without saying anything. The cards had been placed on the table, this was how you were feeling and you were happy you finally got that out.

Someone had to say it to him and when no one else had done it, you took the job to the extreme.

Turning around on your heel without any other word or just a simple glance you wrapped your arms around your shaking body, preparing yourself for a work that hopefully would be worth it in the end.

Part 3

550 notes · View notes

quantaluna · 4 years

Text

What to Look For in a Web Design Program

You've decided that Web design is the career for you. You're ready to jump into the game, but you're going to need some education on how to design Web sites first. However, with literally hundreds of schools offering courses in every possible permutation - Web site design or graphic design with a focus on Web sites; certificates or full degrees - how do you decide which program meets your needs?

Skills taught in a Web Design program

Web site designers require a vast array of skills, not all of which are (or can be!) taught in the classroom. However, there are certain skills that all siti web fossano should know. First among these is HTML (HyperText Markup Language) code, which comprises the building blocks of the Web. All Web sites, no matter how fancy or how focused on Flash animation, consist of HTML at their core.

Although most designers now use Web editing programs such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver to design Web sites, in order to understand what is actually happening when the Web site loads, you need to know HTML. For entry-level positions, this markup language can be enough, but for more advanced positions, you should learn one or more other markup languages, such as XML (eXtended Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), as well as one or more scripting languages, such as JavaScript and ActiveX.

You will also need to learn the basics of making a Web site look neat and professional. Although it may seem elementary, there are a wide range of techniques involved in creating a Web site that flows well. A logical site is designed to allow the user to quickly understand the purpose of the Web site, and to easily find the information he or she needs. Although this is obviously more of an art than a science, there are many techniques that help users navigate each page within a site more effectively and quickly. As a Web site designer, you should be fluent in these techniques.

To work on Web sites, you'll also need to understand the basics of how a computer operates. These technical skills enable you to set up and modify the Web site. Being able to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) clients to add pages and upload site changes is paramount. So is being able to modify the site contents manually by using text editor software. Some of this software allows you to view changes instantaneously, such as the Real-Time HTML Editor, which is available online. Other text editors are included with your office computer, or can be installed, enabling you to work on site contents outside of a site editing program.

Finally, depending on the specific career path you have in mind, you may need to have other skills. If you are focusing more on the graphic design aspect of Web design, you will need to focus on learning about vector and raster graphics. Raster graphics, comprised of grids of tiny pixels, are dependent on the size and quality of the image - photographs are raster images, for example, and can look blurry or sharp, depending upon image size and resolution. Vector graphics use geographical points and coordinates instead of pixels, and can be resized without losing image quality. Typography, or the art of choosing and using fonts and typefaces, is also important. Page layout, or the skill of combining pictures, text, links, and animated images on a Web site to create a pleasing overall design, is also very important.

If, however, you are more interested in the technical aspects of maintaining a Web site, you will need to focus more on server administration, namely by learning to use Web server software (such as Microsoft IIS or Apache), and understanding how to run log analysis so you can track who visits the site, and how frequently you receive unique visitors. There are other specific domains in the field of Web design, including site optimization, security, usability, and quality assurance. Each sub-specialty in the Web design field requires the knowing the design basics described above, plus additional skills which you can learn in class and on the job.

In summary, these are the type of Web design classes you can look forward to taking:

HTML and other markup/scripting languages

Web site graphics and layout design

Some technical skills necessary to publish a Web site

Other skills related to the specific type of Web design career you want to pursue

How Do I Know This Web Design Program is Right for Me?

There are a large variety of Web design programs, which run the gamut from certificate programs to full degrees. These programs are offered at learning institutions ranging from small, private schools to large, public schools - and everything in between. Finding the specific Web or graphic design school that meets your needs from the many available can be a challenge. Here a few questions to ask yourself when deciding upon a course of study in Web design:

Do I want to study online or at a traditional school?

Can I fit a full-time program into my schedule, or should I go part-time?

Do I want a degree program, or a certificate program, which is usually quicker, and can help me get into the field more rapidly?

Am I willing to change my schedule or where I live to learn these new skills?

Am I more interested in the technical end of Web sites, or would I prefer to work on graphic design and page layout?

Does the Web design program I am interested in offer all of the classes needed for the career I want to focus on?

Does the school help graduates with their career planning by offering job or internship placement assistance?

By answering these questions, you are well on your way to figuring out which is the right Click here course for you!

For more information: langaweb.it/siti-web-fossano

#siti web fossano

0 notes