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Careful How You Go.

Ella Kemp explores how film lovers can protect themselves from distressing subject matter while celebrating cinema at its most audacious.

Featuring Empire magazine editor Terri White, Test Pattern filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford, writer and critic Jourdain Searles, publicist Courtney Mayhew, and curator, activist and producer Mia Bays of the Birds’ Eye View collective.

This story contains discussion of rape, sexual assault, abuse, self-harm, trauma and loss of life, as well as spoilers for ‘Promising Young Woman’ and ‘A Star is Born’.

We film lovers are blessed with a medium capable of excavating real-life emotion from something seemingly fictional. Yet, for all that film is—in the oft-quoted words of Roger Ebert—an “empathy machine”, it’s also capable of deeply hurting its audience when not wielded by its makers and promoters with appropriate care. Or, for that matter, when not approached by viewers with informed caution.

Whose job is it to let us know that we might be upset by what we see? With the coronavirus pandemic decimating the communal movie-going experience, the way we accommodate each viewer’s sensibilities is more crucial than ever—especially when so many of us are watching alone, at home, often unsupported.

In order to understand how we can champion a film’s content and take care of its audience, I approached women in several areas of the movie ecosystem. I wanted to know: how does a filmmaker approach the filming of a rape and its aftermath? How does a magazine editor navigate the celebration of a potentially triggering movie in one of the world’s biggest film publications? How does a freelance writer speak to her professional interests while preserving her personal integrity? How does a women’s film collective create a safe environment for an audience to process such a film? And, how does a publicist prepare journalists for careful reporting, when their job is to get eyeballs on screens in order to keep our favorite art form afloat?

The conversations reminded me that the answers are endlessly complex. The concerns over spoilers, the effectiveness of trigger warnings, the myriad ways in which art is crafted from trauma, and the fundamental question of whose stories these are to tell. These questions were valid decades ago, they will be for decades to come, and they feel especially urgent now, since a number of recent tales helmed by female and non-binary filmmakers depict violence and trauma involving women’s bodies in fearless, often challenging ways.

Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, in particular, has revived a vital conversation about content consideration, as victims and survivors of sexual assault record wildly different reactions to its astounding ending. Shatara Michelle Ford’s quietly tense debut, Test Pattern, brings Black survivors into the conversation. And the visceral, anti-wish-fulfillment horror Violation, coming soon from Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer, takes the rape-revenge genre up another notch.

These films come off the back of other recent survivor stories, such as Michaela Coel’s groundbreaking series I May Destroy You (which centers women’s friendship in a narrative move that, as Sarah Williams has eloquently outlined, happens too rarely in this field). Also: Kata Wéber and Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman, and the ongoing ugh-ness of The Handmaid’s Tale. And though this article is focused on plots centering women’s trauma, I acknowledge the myriad of stories that can be triggering in many ways for all manner of viewers. So whether you’ve watched one of these titles, or others like them, I hope you felt supported in the conversations to follow, and that you feel seen.

Weruche Opia and Michaela Coel in ‘I May Destroy You’.

* * *

Simply put, Promising Young Woman is a movie about a woman seeking revenge against predatory men. Except nothing about it is simple. Revenge movies have existed for aeons, and we’ve rooted for many promising young (mostly white) women before Carey Mulligan’s Cassie (recently: Jen in Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge, Noelle in Natalia Leite’s M.F.A.). But in Promising Young Woman, the victim is not alive to seek revenge, so it becomes Cassie’s single-minded crusade. Mercifully, we never see the gang-rape that sparks Cassie’s mission. But we do see a daring, fatal subversion of the notion of a happy ending—and this is what has audiences of Emerald Fennell’s jaw-dropping debut divided.

“For me, being a survivor, the point is to survive,” Jourdain Searles tells me. The New York-based critic, screenwriter, comedian—and host of Netflix’s new Black Film School series—says the presence of death in Promising Young Woman is the problem. “One of the first times I spoke openly about [my assault], I made the decision that I didn’t want to go to the police, and I got a lot of judgment for that,” she says. “So watching Promising Young Woman and seeing the police as the endgame is something I’ve always disagreed with. I left thinking, ‘How is this going to help?’”

“I feel like I’ve got two hats on,” says Terri White, the London-based editor-in chief of Empire magazine, and the author of a recently published memoir, Coming Undone. “One of which is me creating a magazine for a specific film-loving audience, and the other bit of me, which has written a book about trauma, specifically about violence perpetrated against the body. They’re not entirely siloed, but they are two distinct perspectives.”

White loved both Promising Young Woman and I May Destroy You, because they “explode the myth of resolution and redemption”. She calls the ending of Promising Young Woman “radical” in the way it speaks to the reality of what happens to so many women. “I was thinking about me and women like me, women who have endured violence and injury or trauma. Three women every week are still killed [in the UK] at the hands of an ex-partner, or somebody they know intimately, or a current partner. Statistically, any woman who goes for some kind of physical confrontation in [the way Cassie does] would end up dying.”

She adds: “I felt like the film was in service to both victims and survivors, and I use the word ‘victims’ deliberately. I call myself a victim because I think if you’ve endured either sexual violence or physical violence or both, a lot of empowering language, as far as I’m concerned, doesn’t reflect the reality of being a victim or a survivor, whichever way you choose to call yourself.” This point has been one many have disagreed on. In a way, that makes sense—no victim or survivor can be expected to speak to anyone else’s experience but their own.

Carey Mulligan and Emerald Fennell on the set of ‘Promising Young Woman’.

Likewise, there is no right or wrong way to feel about this film, or any film. But a question that arises is, well, should everyone have to see a film to figure that out? And should victims and survivors of sexual violence watch this film? “I have definitely been picky about who I’ve recommended it to,” Courtney Mayhew says. “I don’t want to put a friend in harm’s way, even if that means they miss out on something awesome. It’s not worth it.”

Mayhew is a New Zealand-based international film publicist, and because of her country’s success in controlling Covid 19, she is one of the rare people able to experience Promising Young Woman in a sold-out cinema. “It was palpable. Everyone was so engaged and almost leaning forwards. There were a lot of laughs from women, but it was also a really challenging setting. A lot of people looking down, looking away, and there was a girl who was crying uncontrollably at the end.”

“Material can be very triggering,” White agrees. “It depends where people are personally in their journey. When I still had a lot of trauma I hadn’t worked through in my 20s, I found certain things very difficult to watch. Those things are a reality—but people can make their own decisions about the material they feel able to watch.”

It’s about warning, and preparation, more than total deprivation, then? “I believe in giving people information so they can make the best choice for themselves,” White says. “But I find it quite reductive, and infantilizing in some respects, to be told broadly, ‘Women who have experienced x shouldn’t watch this.’ That underestimates the resilience of some people, the thirst for more information and knowledge.” (This point is clearly made in this meticulous, awe-inspiring list by Jenn, who is on a journey to make sense of her trauma through analysis of rape-revenge films.) But clarity is crucial, particularly for those grappling with unresolved issues.

Searles agrees Promising Young Woman can be a difficult, even unpleasant watch, but still one with value. “As a survivor it did not make me feel good, but it gave me a window into the way other people might respond to your assault. A lot of the time [my friends] have reacted in ways I don’t understand, and the movie feels like it’s trying to make sense of an assault from the outside, and the complicated feelings a friend might have.”

Molly Parker and Vanessa Kirby in ‘Pieces of a Woman’.

* * *

A newborn dies. A character is brutally violated. A population is tortured. To be human is to bear witness to history, but it’s still painful when that history is yours, or something very close to it. “Some things are hard to watch because you relate to them,” Searles explains. “I find mother! hard to watch, and there’s no actual sexual assault. But I just think of sexual assault and trauma and domestic abuse, even though the film isn’t about that. The thing is, you could read an academic paper on patriarchy—you don’t need to watch it on a show [or in a film] if you don’t want to.”

White agrees: “I’ve never been able to watch Nil by Mouth, because I grew up in a house of domestic violence and I find physical violence against women on screen very hard to watch. But that doesn’t mean I think the film shouldn’t be shown—it should still exist, I’ve just made the choice not to watch it.” (Reader, since our conversation, she watched it. At 2:00am.)

“I know people who do not watch Promising Young Woman or The Handmaid’s Tale because they work for an NGO in which they see those things literally in front of their eyes,” Mayhew says. “It could be helpful for someone who isn’t aware [of those issues], but then what is the purpose of art? To educate? To entertain? For escapism? It’s probably all of those.”

Importantly, how much weight should an artist’s shoulders carry, when it comes to considering the audiences that will see their work? There’s a general agreement among my interviewees that, as White says, “filmmakers have to make the art that they believe in”. I don’t think any film lover would disagree, but, suggests Searles, “these films should be made with survivors in mind. That doesn’t mean they always have to be sensitive and sad and declawed. But there is a way to be provocative, while leaning into an emotional truth.”

Madeleine Sims-Fewer in ‘Violation’.

Violation, about which I’ll say little here since it is yet to screen at SXSW (ahead of its March 25 release on Shudder) is not at all declawed, and is certainly made with survivors in mind—in the sense that in life, unlike in movies, catharsis is very seldom possible no matter how far you go to find it. On Letterboxd, many of those who saw Violation at TIFF and Sundance speak of feeling represented by the rape-revenge plot, writing: “One of the most intentionally thought out and respectful of the genre… made by survivors for survivors” and “I feel seen and held”. (Also: “This movie is extremely hard to watch, completely on purpose.”)

“Art can do great service to people,” agrees White, “If, by consequence, there is great service for people who have been in that position, that’s a brilliant consequence. But I don’t believe filmmakers and artists should be told that they are responsible for certain things. There’s a line of responsibility in terms of being irresponsible, especially if your community is young, or traumatised.”

Her words call to mind Bradley Cooper’s reboot of A Star is Born, which many cinephiles knew to be a remake and therefore expected its plot twist, but young filmgoers, drawn by the presence of Lady Gaga, were shocked (and in some cases triggered) by a suicide scene. When it was released, Letterboxd saw many anguished reviews from younger members. In New Zealand, an explicit warning was added to the film’s classification by the country’s chief censor (who also created an entirely new ‘RP18’ classification for the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, which eventually had a graphic suicide scene edited out two years after first landing on the streaming service).

“There is a duty of care to audiences, and there is also a duty of care to artists and filmmakers,” says Mayhew. “There’s got to be some way of meeting in the middle.” The middle, perhaps, can be identified by the filmmaker’s objective. “It’s about feeling safe in the material,” says Mia Bays of the Birds’ Eye View film collective, which curates and markets films by women in order to effect industry change. “With material like this, it’s beholden on creatives to interrogate their own intentions.”

Filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford is “forever interrogating” ideas of power. Their debut feature, Test Pattern, deftly examines the power differentials that inform the foundations of consent. “As an artist, human, and person who has experienced all sorts of boundary violation, assault and exploitation in their life, I spend quite a lot of time thinking about power… It is something I grapple with in my personal life, and when I arrive in any workplace, including a film set.”

In her review of Test Pattern for The Hollywood Reporter, Searles writes, “This is not a movie about sexual assault as an abstract concept; it’s a movie about the reality of a sexual assault survivor’s experience.” Crucially, in a history of films that deal largely with white women’s experiences, Test Pattern “is one of the few sexual-assault stories to center a Black woman, with her Blackness being central to her experience and the way she is treated by the people around her.”

Brittany S. Hall in ‘Test Pattern’.

* * *

Test Pattern follows the unfolding power imbalance between Renesha (Brittany S. Hall) and her devoted white boyfriend Evan (Will Brill), as he drives her from hospital to hospital in search of a rape kit, after her drink was spiked by a white man in a bar who then raped her. Where Promising Young Woman is a millennial-pink revenge fantasy of Insta-worthy proportions, Test Pattern feels all too real, and the cops don’t come off as well as they do in the former.

Ford does something very important for the audience: they begin the film just as the rape is about to occur. We do not see it at this point (we do not really ever see it), but we know that it happened, so there’s no chance that, somewhere deeper into the story, when we’re much more invested, we’ll be side-swiped by a sudden onslaught of sexual violence. In a way, it creates a safe space for our journey with Renesha.

It’s one of many thoughtful decisions made by Ford throughout the production process. “I’m in direct conversation with film and television that chooses to depict violence against women so casually,” Ford tells me. “I intentionally showed as little of Renesha’s rape as humanly possible. I also had an incredibly hard time being physically present for that scene, I should add. What I did shoot was ultimately guided by Renesha’s experience of it. Shoot only what she would remember. Show only what she would have been aware of.

“But I also made it clear that this was a violation of her autonomy, by allowing moments where we have an arm’s length point of view. I let the camera sit with the audience, as I’m also saying, as the filmmaker, this happened, and you saw enough of it to know. This, for me, is a larger commentary on how we treat victims of assault and rape. I do not believe for one goddamn minute that we need to see the actual, literal violence to know what happened. When we flagrantly replicate the violence in film and television, we are supporting the cultural norm of needing ‘all of the evidence’—whatever that means—to ‘believe women’.”

Ford’s intentional work in crafting the romance and unraveling of Test Pattern’s leading couple pays off on screen, but their stamp as an invested and careful director also shows in their work with Drew Fuller, the actor who played Mike, the rapist. “It’s a very difficult role, and I’m grateful to him for taking it so seriously. When discussing and rendering the practice and non-practice of consent intentionally, I found it helpful to give it a clear definition and provide conceptual insight.

“I sent Drew a few articles that I used as tools to create a baseline understanding when it comes to exploring consent and power on screen. At the top of that list was Lili Loofbourow’s piece, The female price of male pleasure and Zhana Vrangalova's Teen Vogue piece, Everything You Need to Know about Consent that You Never Learned in Sex Ed. The latter in my opinion is the linchpin. There’s also Jude Elison Sady Doyle’s piece about the whole Aziz Ansari thing, which is a great primer.”

Sidney Flanigan in ‘Never Rarely Sometimes Always’.

Even when a filmmaker has given Ford’s level of care and attention to their project, what happens when the business end of the industry gets involved in the art? As we well know, marketing is a film’s window dressing. It has one job: to get eyeballs into the cinema. It can’t know if every viewer should feel safe to enter.

It would be useful, with certain material, to know how we should watch, and with whom, and what might we need in the way of support coming out. Whose job is it to provide this? Beyond the crude tool of an MPAA rating (and that’s a whole sorry tale for another day), there are many creative precautions that can be taken across the industry to safeguard a filmgoer’s experience.

Mayhew, who often sees films at the earliest stages (sometimes before a final cut, sometimes immediately after), speaks to journalists in early screenings and ensures they have the tools to safely report on the topics raised. In New Zealand, reporters are encouraged to read through resources to help them guide their work. Mayhew’s teams would also ensure journalists would be given relevant hotline numbers, and would ask media outlets to include them in published stories.

“It’s not saying, ‘You have to do this’,” she explains, “It’s about first of all not knowing what the journalist has been through themselves, and second of all, [if] they are entertainment reporters who haven’t navigated speaking about sexual assault, you only hope it will be helpful going forward. It’s certainly not done to infantilize them, because they’re smart people. It’s a way to show some care and support.”

The idea of having appropriate resources to make people feel safe and encourage them to make their own decisions is a priority for Bays and Birds’ Eye View, as well. The London-based creative producer and cultural activist stresses the importance of sharing such a viewing experience. “It’s the job of cinemas, distributors and festivals to realize that it might not be something the filmmaker does, but as the people in control of the environment it’s our job to give extra resources to those who want it,” says Bays. “To give people a safe space to come down from the experience.”

Pre-pandemic, when Birds’ Eye View screened Kitty Green’s The Assistant, a sharp condemnation of workplace micro-aggressions seen through the eyes of one female assistant, they invited women who had worked for Harvey Weinstein. For a discussion after Eliza Hittman’s coming-of-ager Never Rarely Sometimes Always, abortion experts were able to share their knowledge. “It’s about making sure the audience knows you can say anything here, but that it’s safe,” Bays explains. “It’s kind of like group therapy—you don’t know people, so you’re not beholden to what they think about you. And in the cinema people aren’t looking at you. You’re speaking somewhat anonymously, so a lot of really important stuff can come out.”

The traditional movie-going experience, involving friends, crowds and cathartic, let-loose feelings, is still largely inaccessible at the time of writing. Over the past twelve months we’ve talked plenty about preserving the magic of the big screen experience, but it’s about so much more than the romanticism of an art form; it’s also about the safety that comes from a feeling of community when watching potentially upsetting movies.

“The going in and coming out parts of watching a film in the cinema are massively important, because it’s like coming out of the airlock and coming back to reality,” says Bays. “You can’t do that at home. Difficult material kind of stays with you.” During the pandemic, Birds’ Eye View has continued to provide the same wrap-around curatorial support for at-home viewers as they would at an in-person event. “If we’re picking a difficult film and asking people to watch it at home, we might suggest you watch it with a friend so you can speak about it afterwards,” Bays says.

Julia Garner in ‘The Assistant’.

But, then, how can we still find this sense of community without the physical closeness? “It’s no good waiting for [the internet] to become kind,” she says. “Create your own closed spaces. We do workshops and conversations exclusively for people who sign up to our newsletter. In real-life meetings you can go from hating something to hearing an eloquent presentation of another perspective and coming round to it, but you need the time and space to do that. This little amount of time gives you a move towards healing, even if it’s just licking some wounds that were opened on Twitter. But it could be much deeper, like being a survivor and feeling very conflicted about the film, which I do.”

Conflict is something that Searles, the film critic, knows about all too well in her work. “Since I started writing professionally, I almost feel like I’m known for writing about assault and rape at this point. I do write about it a lot, and as a survivor I continue to process it. I’ve been assaulted more than once so I have a lot to process, and so each time I’m writing about it I’m thinking about different aspects and remnants of those feelings. It can be very cathartic, but it’s a double-edged sword because sometimes I feel like I have an obligation to write about it too.”

There is also a constant act of self-preservation that comes with putting so much of yourself on the internet. “I often get messages from people thanking me for talking about these subjects with a deep understanding of what they mean,” Searles says. “I really appreciate that. I get negative messages about a lot of things, but not this one thing.”

Michaela Coel in ‘I May Destroy You’.

* * *

With such thoughtful approaches to heavy content, it feels like we’re a long way further down the road from blunt tools like content and trigger warnings. But do they still have their place? “It’s just never seemed appropriate to put trigger warnings on any of our reviews or features,” White explains. “We have a heavy male readership, still 70 percent male to 30 percent female. I’m conscious we’re talking to a lot of men who will often have experienced violence themselves, but we don’t put any warnings, because we are an adult magazine, and when we talk about violence in, say, an action film, or violence that is very heavily between men, we don’t caveat that at all.”

Bays, too, is sceptical of trigger warnings, explaining that “there’s not much evidence [they] actually work. A lot of psychologists expound on the fact that if people get stuck in their trauma, you can never really recover from PTSD if you don’t at some point face your trauma.” She adds: “I’m a survivor, and I found I May Destroy You deeply, profoundly triggering, but also cathartic. I think it’s more about how you talk about the work, rather than having a ‘NB: survivors of sexual abuse or assault shouldn’t see this’.”

“It’s important to give people a feel of what they’re in for,” argues Searles. “A lot of people who have dealt with suicide ideation would prefer that warning.” While some worry that a content warning is effectively a plot spoiler, Searles disagrees. “I don’t consider a content warning a spoiler. I just couldn’t imagine sitting down for a film, knowing there’s going to be a suicide, and letting it distract me from the film.” Still, she acknowledges the nuance. “I think using ‘self-harm’ might be better than just saying ‘suicide’.”

Mayhew shared insights on who actually decides which films on which platforms are preceded with warnings—turns out, it’s a bit messy. “The onus traditionally has fallen on governmental censorship when it comes to theatrical releases,” she explains. “But streamers can do what they want, they are not bound by those rules so they have to—as the distributors and broadcasters—take the government’s censors on board in terms of how they are going to navigate it.

“The consumer doesn’t know the difference,” she continues, “nor should they—so it means they can be watching The Crown on Netflix and get this trigger warning about bulimia, and go to the cinema the next day and not get it, and feel angry about it. So there’s the question of where is the responsibility of the distributor, and where is the responsibility of the audience member to actually find out for themselves.”

The warnings given to an audience member can also vary widely depending where they find themselves in the world, too. Promising Young Woman, for example, is rated M in Australia, R18 in New Zealand, and R in the United States. Meanwhile, the invaluable Common Sense Media recommends an age of fifteen years and upwards for the “dark, powerful, mature revenge comedy”. Mayhew says a publicist’s job is “to have your finger on the pulse” about these cultural differences. “You have to read the overall room, and when I say room I mean the culture as a whole, and you have to be constantly abreast of things across those different ages too.”

She adds: “This feeds into the importance of representation right at the top of those boardrooms and right down to the film sets. My job is to see all opinions, and I never will, especially because I am a white woman. I consider myself part of the LGBT community and sometimes I’ll bring that to a room that I think has been lacking in that area, when it comes to harmful stereotypes that can be propagated within films about LGBT people. But I can’t bring a Black person’s perspective, I cannot bring an Indigenous perspective. The more representation you have, the better your film is going to be, your campaign is going to be.”

Bays, who is also a filmmaker, agrees: representation is about information, and working with enough knowledge to make sure your film is being as faithful to your chosen communities as possible. “As a filmmaker, I’d feel ill-informed and misplaced if I was stumbling into an area of representation that I knew nothing about without finding some tools and collaborators who could bring deeper insight.”

Carey Mulligan and Bo Burnham in ‘Promising Young Woman’.

This is something Ford aimed for with Test Pattern’s choice of crew members, which had an effect not just on the end product, but on the entire production process. “I made sure that at the department head level, I was hiring people I was in community with and fully saw me as a person, and me them,” they say. “In some ways it made the experience more pleasurable.” That said, the shoot was still not without its incidents: “These were the types of things that in my experience often occur on a film set dominated by straight white men, that we're so accustomed to we sometimes don’t even notice it. I won’t go into it but what I will say is that it was not tolerated.”

Vital to the telling of the story were the lived experiences that Ford and their crew brought to set. “As it applies to the sensitive nature of this story, there were quite a few of us who have had our own experiences along the spectrum of assault, which means that we had to navigate our own internal re-processing of those experiences, which is hard to do when we’re constructing an experience of rape for a character.

“However, I think being able to share our own triggers and discomfort and context, when it came to Renesha’s experience, made the execution of it all the better. Again, it was a pleasure to be in community with such smart, talented and considerate women who each brought their own nuance to this film.”

* * *

Thinking about everything we’ve lived through by this point in 2021, and the heightened sensitivity and lowered mental health of film lovers worldwide, movies are carrying a pretty heavy burden right now: to, as Jane Fonda said at the Golden Globes, help us see through others’ eyes; also, to entertain or, at the very least, not upset us too much.

But to whom does film have a responsibility, really? Promising Young Woman’s writer-director Emerald Fennell, in an excellent interview with Vulture’s Angelica Jade Bastién, said that she was thinking of audiences when she crafted the upsetting conclusion.

What she was thinking was: a ‘happy’ ending for Cassie gets us no further forward as a society. Instead, Cassie’s shocking end “makes you feel a certain way, and it makes you want to talk about it. It makes you want to examine the film and the society that we live in. With a cathartic Hollywood ending, that’s not so much of a conversation, really. It’s a kind of empty catharsis.”

So let’s flip the question: what is our responsibility, as women and allies, towards celebrating audacious films about tricky subjects? The marvellous, avenging blockbusters that once sucked all the air out of film conversation are on pause, for now. Consider the space that this opens up for a different kind of approach to “must-see movies”. Spread the word about Test Pattern. Shout from the rooftops about It’s A Sin. Add Body of Water and Herself and Violation to your watchlists. And, make sure the right people are watching.

Brittany S. Hall and Will Brill in ‘Test Pattern’.

I asked my interviewees: if they could choose one type of person they think should see Promising Young Woman, who would it be? Ford has not seen Fennell’s film, but “it feels good to have my film contribute to a larger discourse that is ever shifting, ever adding nuance”. They are very clear on who can learn the most from their own movie.

“A white man is featured so prominently in Test Pattern as a statement about how white people and men have a habit of centering themselves in the stories of others, prioritizing their experience and neglecting to recognize those on the margins. If Evan is triggering, he should be. If your feelings about Evan vacillate, it is by design.

“‘Allies’ across the spectrum are in a complicated dance around doing the ‘right thing’ and ‘showing up’ for those they are ostensibly seeking to support,” Ford continues. “Their constant battle is to remember that they need to be centering the needs of those they were never conditioned to center. Tricky stuff. Mistakes will be made. Mistakes must be owned. Sometimes reconciliation is required.”

It is telling that similar thoughts emerged from my other interviewees regarding Promising Young Woman’s ideal audience, despite the fact that none of them was in conversation with the others for this story. For that reason, as we come to the end of this small contribution to a very large, ongoing conversation, I’ve left their words intact.

White: I think it’s a great film for men.

Searles: I feel like the movie is very much pointed at cisgender heterosexual men.

Mayhew: Men.

White: We’re always warned about the alpha male with a massive ego, but we’re not warned about the beta male who reads great books, listens to great records, has great film recommendations. But he probably slyly undermines you in a completely different way. Anybody can be a predator.

Searles: The actors chosen to play these misogynist, rape culture-perpetuating men are actors we think of as nice guys.

White: We are so much more tolerant of a man knocking the woman over the head, dragging her down an alley and raping her, because we understand that. But rape culture is made up of millions of small things that enable the people who do it. We are more likely to be attacked in our own homes by men we love than a stranger in the street.

Mayhew: The onus should not fall on women to call this out.

Searles: It’s not just creeps, like the ones you see usually in these movies. It’s guys like you. What are you going to do to make sure you’re not like this?

Related content

Sex Monsters, Rape Revenge and Trauma: a work-in-progress list

Rape and Revenge: a list of films that fall into, and play with, the genre

Unconsenting Media: a search engine for sexual violence in broadcasting

Follow Ella on Letterboxd

If you need help or to talk to someone about concerns raised for you in this story, please first know that you are not alone. These are just a few of the many organizations and resources available, and their websites include more information.

US: RAINN (hotline 0800 656 HOPE); LGBT National Help Center; Pathways to Safety; Time’s Up.

Canada: Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centers—contacts by province and territory

UK/Ireland: Mind; The Survivors Trust (hotline 08088 010818); Rape Crisis England and Wales

Europe: Rape Crisis Network Europe

47 notes · View notes

script-a-world · 5 years

Text

age

I’m doing a historical story and having trouble with, well, ages. I mean people don’t live long, but there is actual real life people who do live long, like say Genghis Khan who died at 65. Then of course with his status he had to have the best medical care. When I think of it, many fictional stories set in the past tend to often have elderly characters, white haired grandparents, as if it were modern day, and mostly ignore all the infant/child deaths. Thinking again, many of these stories also have fantasy/magicial elements. You know, like Merlin. I’ve also seen a lot of Asian movies and they tend to have elderly kung fu masters that can ‘fly’ to an extent and more. But then in these stories, even regular people tend to lead long lives as well. So, if my story is free of these fantasy/magical elements, I definitely should not have too many of these elderly characters, especially if the character isn’t the ruler or part of the royal family but just regular common people?

Saphira: There is an easy solution. Disconnect the concept of "elderly" from the age itself and treat it as a relative concept. This allows the tropes and representation, while painting depth in the cultural perception of lifespan.

Feral:

Okay, let’s math.

Life Expectancy is typically given as the mean age of death from birth of a cohort (people born in the same year). As you may remember, the mean is the type of average where you add up all the numbers and divide by the number of numbers you added. So,

The mean of {1, 2, 2, 4, 7, 7, 7, 7, 11} is 5.33

There are two other types of averages, though, median and mode. Median is best understood as the middle number in the sequence, and mode is the most often repeated number in the sequence.

So, the median of the same set of numbers is 4, and the mode is 7.

Mean is best used when you have an even spread of data without an exceptional difference between the highest and lowest value. Median is best used when you are looking at frequency in a particular data set. Mode is best used when you have nominal data, which is not relevant so we’re gonna ignore it.

Now, there is a really big problem with using the mean age when you include “from birth.” Infant mortality rates! They used to be pretty high. Let’s take a look at a fictitious sample set.

I have 100 commoners in my fantasy world that are a perfectly representative sample of the people who were all born in the same year in the same or very similar environment. Infant mortality (expanded to include children up to age 10) is at 20% (80% of that 20% are ages 1 or 2), maternal mortality (between 18 & 25) is 20% of the female population and 10% of the general population, and the likelihood you will die of war, disease, or famine between 11 years old and 44 years old is also 20%. 50% of the population lives between 45 years old 80 years old. What’s the average life expectancy?

~39 years old.

Here is the number set I used, randomly generated per demographic under the given conditions:

10 deaths at age 1, 6 at age 2, 1 at age 3, 2 at age 5, 1 at age 8, 4 at 12, 5 at 15, 5 at age 18, 2 at age 19, 1 at 21, 2 at 23, 1 at 25, 6 at 30, 2 at 35, 1 at 37, 1 at 41, 1 at 45, 1 at 46, 2 at 47, 2 at 49, 1 at 50, 1 at 51, 1 at 52, 2 at 53, 2 at 54, 1 at 55, 1 at 57, 1 at 58, 2 at 59, 1 at 60, 1 at 62, 4 at 63, 1 at 64, 1 at 65, 1 at 66, 2 at 67, 1 at 68, 5 at 69, 2 at 70, 1 at 73, 2 at 74, 3 at 75, 2 at 76, 1 at 77, 1 at 78, 2 at 79, 1 at 80.

The median age of death of these 100 people is 47 years old, which is the number to consider when looking at frequencies. Although the average life expectancy is 40 years old, people most frequently die around age 47.

Infant mortality is important when talking about the health of a nation, but not so much to your world building question, so let’s take them out.

Our sample set is now: 4 at 12, 5 at 15, 5 at age 18, 2 at age 19, 1 at 21, 2 at 23, 1 at 25, 6 at 30, 2 at 35, 1 at 37, 1 at 41, 1 at 45, 1 at 46, 2 at 47, 2 at 49, 1 at 50, 1 at 51, 1 at 52, 2 at 53, 2 at 54, 1 at 55, 1 at 57, 1 at 58, 2 at 59, 1 at 60, 1 at 62, 4 at 63, 1 at 64, 1 at 65, 1 at 66, 2 at 67, 1 at 68, 5 at 69, 2 at 70, 1 at 73, 2 at 74, 3 at 75, 2 at 76, 1 at 77, 1 at 78, 2 at 79, 1 at 80.

The average life expectancy if you can survive to adolescence is now 48 years old. The median age is 53. But 47.5% of the over-10 population exceeds 53 years old!

All this to say, the Life Expectancy from Birth, or LEB, is not helpful to you on your quest. Or at least, it’s not the whole picture. The standard deviation of life expectancy is huge. In my first sample set it was about 27 years, and in my second sample set it was about 22 years. For comparison, the modern SD in the USA is still 15 years.

Now, you are planning a historical novel, so you’ll be using real world statistical data, or as close as you can depending on the specific period. Start here [ Life Expectancy ] and work your way through the numbers.

Constablewrites: Simplified version: If you survive infancy, you've got a pretty good shot at living long enough to have children. If you survive the stuff that can kill young adults (war/childbirth/accidents), you'll likely live long enough to see your grandchildren. It's not that it was impossible to live as long as people do now, it's just that fewer people did. So while it would be unrealistic to assume that every household in the village has multiple living grandparents, it's not unreasonable to think that several of them would have at least one.

Tex: Death kills humans, yes, but how one arrives at death varies - there are a few constants that consistently mow down a population: disease, strife, famine, and lack of hygiene.

Famine you can't really do much about - if the rains don't come, there's not much you can do but wait it out. Famine can also come from strife, as cutting off food sources are a popular method of conquering a population (even if it backfires), as well as poor management of the lands (something in which lack of hygiene factors). Famine can also show in the form of malnourishment and malnutrition. Children require a very healthy, well-balanced diet, otherwise they're more susceptible to infections and in general are less robust in surviving daily life (Unicef's articles on child malnutrition and generalized). The elderly often have the same issues (HealthXchange), so along with children are often the first to go when food resources deplete. There's debates on which end of the lifespan is more fragile, but as the elderly have greater opportunity to self-defend and be ambulatory, I would argue that they're more capable of surviving longer in a famine than infants and small children.

Disease is, typically, a function of hygiene. We can look to the spread of infectious diseases such as the Bubonic Plague and Spanish Influenza as examples, and much of a disease's spread can be mitigated by doing such things as boiling drinking water (PDF) and washing your hands. While humans are already built with proactive immune systems that can fight off most diseases accumulated from daily living, hygiene is a habit that allows a species to not only survive, but allow its members to enjoy greater lifespans past age of reproduction.

A lack of hygiene among a population will inevitably skew its longevity downward, especially since some diseases can be so debilitating it that it can damage the DNA of subsequent generations when one's immune system hadn't sufficiently adapted to the disease (and this is if the damage doesn't become an evolutionary advantage).

Strife is, some argue, a human condition - an integral, irrevocable part of our psyche that we must actively work to thwart, as otherwise it would ruin us as individuals and bring down our society. Of a great many terrible things that come through strife, there are societal benefits. Political scientist Jeffrey Herbst argued that war was integral to the creation of strong states, particularly within Europe, and the Sierra Leone government found that there was greater societal cohesion in war-torn areas. With a stronger, more unified society, there is often more resources diverted to thriving as opposed to merely surviving - culture becomes important, history in the form of the elderly are paid more care, and more members of a society work toward non-strife related advancements such as STEM and the arts. Happy people are long-lived people, or rather - the unhappy tend to die at a younger age (Social Indicators Research journal). Happiness, much like strife, is psychological in nature, and a happy person does tend to survive both diseases and strife (PDF) better.

TL;DR Mentally-resilient people who practice good hygiene and have reasonably good access to a balanced diet will potentially live for a very long time.

#pylons #age #life span #submission

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ryugazakkis · 4 years

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Choosing the Best Internal Doors for your Home

From reflecting your personal tastes to protecting you and your property in the event of a fire, your choice of doors can have a big impact on your home’s feel and performance, says Charley Ward

A property’s internal doors can fulfil a range of functions. Aside from the obvious privacy benefits, they also have useful soundproofing and insulating qualities, and can make a real aesthetic statement.

“Because of the rise in open-plan living, even really big houses have far fewer internal doors than they used to,” says Elizabeth Assaf, designer at Urban Front.

“Instead, people are opting to make the ones they do have into more of a feature, so they’re often bigger and bolder in colour and have a lot more glazing.”

So what do you need to know to select the right internal doors for your property?

Door opening styles First and foremost, consider how you are going to use the door and the adjoining rooms/circulation areas. Standard hinged models will usually be suitable, but there are certain scenarios that may benefit from a different arrangement.

For instance, do you have narrow corridors or a small bedroom with an ensuite? Installing a pocket door system that slides into the wall may be the best solution here, as it won’t take up floor space or require any strategic positioning of furniture.

“I think in the past, pocket doors were seen as being a bit tacky,” says Elizabeth, “but there are some really good designs now and you can do so much with them. A lot of people install them in rooms where they want a seamless transition between the wall and the door. “The flush fitting means you can’t see a frame, so it’s a really great way of concealing an entrance.”

This mushroom grey double doorset by JB Kind has a neutral appeal that will work well in modern interiors thanks to its clean lines and slightly textured finish Internal bifold or sliding doors are often used to create a feeling of connectedness between two spaces while also allowing you to close areas off to create more privacy – a great option in an open-plan living zone.

“Putting in room dividers gives you more flexibility,” says Matthew Todd, managing director of Todd Doors. “It can also stop the transmission of cooking smells from the kitchen. Most people opt for glazed panels so that when they’re closed, you still retain the flow of light in the house.”

Internal door materials Whether you like high gloss modern finishes or rustic timber textures, your material choice should be largely informed by your home’s overall aesthetic. A traditional country cottage with exposed beams and a flagstone floor probably won’t suit minimalist glass doors, but would look lovely with the addition of characterful timber options.

Of course, wood is a popular material choice for internal doors and you can find these in styles to suit virtually every scheme.

“For contemporary interiors, many of our clients want the units to disappear into the walls, so they opt for doors with no frame or architrave,” says Elizabeth. “If you’re going more traditional, an oak panel design with ornate handles often works well in these scenarios.”

Glass doors can look stunning, owing to their ability to bring a feeling of light and openness, but this quality also comes with a down side.

Installing a door set on a pivot rather than a hinge, like this oversized model by Urban Front, can add extra wow factor.

“With glazing, you do have to consider whether you can keep the rooms on the other side tidy,” says Matthew. “They’re suddenly visible all the time. You can’t just close the door and lock away the mess!”

Metal interior finishes have also been growing in popularity lately. “Especially in mews houses, a lot of people have copper kitchens, so they want a copper door to match,” says Elizabeth. “Darker options, specialist metals and more outrageous finishes are definitely in vogue right now.”

These do tend to be pricier then wooden models, but there are similar alternatives if you’re on a tight budget.

“We offer a number of timber units that reflect the look of metal with slim rails and glazing bars to replicate the Crittall-style look from the 1920s and 30s,” says Matthew. “These work great in minimalist loft-style apartments.”

What do internal doors cost? As we’ve seen, options such as metal finishes and glazed panels will push up costs, but generally, the price of a door will depend on whether it’s a solid wood, solid core or hollow core construction.

The latter units are typically constructed from a timber frame, with a plywood or hardwood surface, filled with rigid cardboard and covered with veneer.

“You can find fully finished doors for less than £100,” says Matthew. “A lot of people buy the cheapest one they can find, which is often in its bare state, but then you’ve got to factor in the cost of buying the paint and the time it takes to do it yourself, or a decorator’s fee. So even if it’s a little bit more expensive at the point of purchase, a factory pre-finished door is still going to come in cheaper overall.”

A pocket door system, like this smart white offering from Todd Doors, can work well in areas with limited floor space.

Solid core veneered versions made from chipboard or particleboard have midrange price tags and mimic the weightiness of solid wood with its associated benefits.

“For a decent quality internal veneer door set, I would expect to pay around £500,” says Elizabeth, “but for top spec you should increase your budget. Our hardwood doors start from £1,800.”

Your decision will come down to what represents value for money for your budget. Installing high quality fixtures in your home will increase its overall worth.

Solid doors are very sturdy, with a thick, highly insulating construction that can boost comfort levels and stop the travel of unwanted noise. A lot of homeowners elect to install this type downstairs, where it’s noisier and people spend more time, and go for cheaper models upstairs.

Standard door sizes All internal doors must meet the UK’s minimum accessibility requirements as outlined by Building Regulations, but aside from that, there’s no specific size they have to be.

A typical door might be 1,981mm (H) x 762mm (W) x 35mm (D), with a width of 838mmor more if wheelchair access is required. When space is limited, smaller doors are usually 686mm wide.

Opting for larger wheelchair accessible entryways means that you will be protected from having to undertake expensive renovation works or having to move in the future, should these become necessary.

These glazed French doors by Todd Doors allow zones to be closed off while still allowing light to travel throughout the house For those who want to create some wow factor, going for a very large oversized door might also be worth considering.

While these can work on a regular hinge system, installing a pivot, where the door spins around an offset pin, can also help to bring more flair into a room.

“These designs look fantastic sat within really big spaces where they’re used as a room divider,” says Elizabeth, “but it’s primarily a design choice. Everyone we have spoken to who has wanted one of these installed has been keen on making a real aesthetic statement.”

Source: buildit

#internal doors #buying doors

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otdderamin · 5 years

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Transcript: Wednesday Club Ep19: Love is Love

Looking for some good Queer content? The best Wednesday Club was Episode 19: Love is Love! with Marc Andreyko. They talked about the Love is Love anthology made in memory of the Pulse shooting and talked about the history of queer representation in comics.

This is also the episode where Taliesin and Amy came out as bi. It was so soft and empathetic and empowering the whole way through that I think it gave them a push of confidence to say it.

Interesting history, they pulled this VOD after this aired and edited out that coming out. I suspect someone felt they got caught up in the moment and weren't actually sure they did want that out there. But word spread anyway and a few weeks later it was quietly restored.

The only depressing thing about this episode is how hopeful they were for the future and how much everything's gone to shit in the two years since it came out.

Official Twitch VOD, Bootlegged YouTube VOD

If you can handle the sorrow, I really can't recommend "Love is Love" enough. It's one of the most beautiful books I've ever read. A lot of it is heartbreaking, but there are also a lot of uplifting pieces about pride and joy and love, and those were so special.

This episode is so fascinating because there's are dozens and dozens of little ways Taliesin's subtext was "I'm queer," but it was such a surprise for that subtext to be text at the end. I think it's greatly affected how I read his queer coding in acting.

Reading Taliesin himself in this episode of Wednesday Club is a major reason why I feel somewhat confident in my analysis about the queer subtext he shows in Caduceus (and Percy). He's very deliberate about his subtext, I think the joke is always that it's genuine.

"Well, those are then the Schrodinger's representations which are 'Are they? Aren't they? We're not going to say.' [Stage whisper] But they are."

I think about this quote all the time. What he says sideways is deliberate, and something he personally delights in reading into. This is, after all, him playing out people in the way he would interact, not really for other people. We don't ask straight people to tell us they're straight, they just show it and we all assume it's true. I strongly suspect that's a freedom Taliesin looks for in queer portrayal.

One of the dynamics going on here that's SO INTERESTING is how apparent the age gap is between Marc and Taliesin and Amy. I don't know Amy's age, but I'd guess she's a decade younger. Marc and Taliesin are so much more okay with clunky, subtext, and or tragic representation.

Partly this is just a difference of Taliesin liking sad stories & Amy liking happy ones, but the difference is so much more magnified in this episode. Her standards for what makes good representation are noticeably higher, I'd guess partly because she grew up in a better world.

One of the books they mentioned is "My Brother's Husband" by Gengoroh Tagame. there are two volumes and it's such an outstandingly soft story. One of the best comics I've ever read. Yaichi and his daughter Kana get a visit from Mike, his brother's husband, after his brother died. It's about Yaichi trying to get over his homophobia and teach Kana to be a better, more accepting person than he was. Kana just accepts Mike straight away and thinks he's amazing.

Here is a selection of comic picks from the episode (by no means all of them). Here's Amy's crowdsourced queer comics recommendation thread, which is full of excellent reads, some of which they talked about.

4:45 Marc: "I'm glad [the Pulse shooter] is dead because he did a horrible, unforgivable thing, but part of me wishes someone had been there to give him a hug, you know?"

[I've been thinking about this sentiment and grace for two years.]

10:54 Marc: "We need to hold our government responsible with the same passion we do when Marvel has Spider-Man's costume wrong in an issue."

0:16:08 Taliesin: "It is a thing that happens to me occasionally on the internet, and this book brought this back up pretty significantly, and I don't do this all the time 'cause I only have so much emotional energy for a human being, especially, you know, times being what they are. I've only got so much of my brain power before I turn into a quivering mess."

0:16:25 Marc: "I can't wait for the day we can wake up and not be angry."

Taliesin: "I know. I'm so…"

Marc: "I'm so tired of being mad!"

0:16:31 Taliesin: "I take moments every morning, and of course being on the internet you get a lot of- there's hate and trolling that come my way, and a lot of it is nothing I didn't hear in high school, nothing that I'm not use to, you know, I've got a pretty thick skin, and I don't delve into the comments sections of videos or anything like that because I'm, you know, sane. But every now and then some body gets through and I just kind of want to have a moment of, like, I wish- and I want to test the theory that if I just find this person, I grab them for a second, and like, "Dude, are you alright? Like, do you need therapy because I'm in therapy and it's fucking great, and what can I-" I feel like, "When was the last time anyone asked you if you're just okay, if you need something 'cause, like, what the fuck, man?"

…

0:17:18 Taliesin: "I wish I had the energy for all these kids. I mean, like, it's so- and in real life I can do this, and I've had those moments in real life where you see someone losing their shit and you're like, 'Do you just need a fucking drink and someone to listen to you talk about your shit and not tell you that you're being, like-'"

Amy: "Or fewer drinks."

Taliesin: "I mean, like, often times just sit down, and I promise I'm not going to make fun of you, I'm not going to tell you you're being weak, tell me, like, what, man, what hurts?"

0:17:59 Marc: "I don't think most people are evil. I think that there's a percentage of people that occupy the White House that are pure evil…"

Taliesin: "I've had a couple roommates that I'm not even making a joke that are definitely into that spectrum, but most people are just lonely and sad."

Marc: "Well, most people want to live their life, be happy, and be left alone, and I think for me it all boils down to education is the key because when you have- when you're not educated, you're easily scared and when you're easily scared you look for scape goats. It's what one political party has been making their hay on for a number of years."

31:27 Marc: "We're all the same. We come up with things as a species to divide us when we're actually 99% the same. And we just let that 1% get in the way of everything."

36:01 Taliesin: "I started to figure out that this was the beginning of a process. And I was starting to notice, 'This is going to lead to the types of characters I want to see in my fiction. And I started breaking down this formula of there's things that you have to do in the momentum of pop culture to get the kind of characters you want. And this was one of the thing that you have to do. And I broke it down to metaphorical representation with books like the X-Men where there are no—there were almost no gay characters in the X-Men." Marc Andreyko: "Or Peppermint Patty, or Schroder."

Taliesin: "Well, those are then the Schrodinger's representations which are 'Are they? Aren't they? We're not going to say.' [Stage whisper] But they are.

"But we have the metaphorical, we have the Schrodinger, we hate the stereotypes, which are the these are the things people think they know about these people."

Marc: "The gay hairdresser, the black drug dealer…"

Taliesin: "Then you have the buddyism, which is you have the established characters going, 'Some of my best friends.' And then we can just have a character where this is part of the tapestry. Once we've gone through all of this stuff so that everybody has gotten it out of their system, we've kind of sifted the pop culture to the point that now you can just do it."

Marc: "But that's not just limited to LGBT."

Taliesin: "No, that's any."

Marc: You look at female characters, you look at African American characters, and what's interesting about the LGBT experience now is it's taken 100 years for Black characters, it's taken 100 years for women characters, the LGBT representation- In my lifetime- if you told me 20 years ago that the Supreme Court would say that marriage is a right, I would have said, 'No way.'"

Taliesin: "No."

Amy: "No way."

Marc: "If you had told me there was going to be a gay-straight alliance at my high school, where my graduating class was 1000 people, 99% of the them I'd say, 'No.' My high school reached out to me after the book came out to send copies to their library. The learning curve for LGBT- we have gotten the privilege of having a very accelerated learning curve on the backs of other minorities who are still struggling to get ahead."

Taliesin: "We got to live- you actually get to live to see the work pay off. Which is rare in human history.

Marc: "As you say, that's just the way it starts out. It starts with exotic, then it becomes noble savage, then it becomes villain, then it becomes minstrel, then it becomes best friend, then it becomes lead. That's just the evolutionary trail."

54:32 Taliesin: "Culture is not a rocket ship. We all don't get on the rocket ship to the planet culture and go up to the moon. Culture is like life: it is chaotic, it is violent, it is hungry… It is not normal for everything to just keep getting better all at the same time. It's normal for everything to get better over a period of the long game. In any internal point, chaos—"

Marc: "Well, Love is Love, a tragedy made that book come to life."

Taliesin: "That is the soil in which these things get planted, sadly."

Amy: "But that kid who graduates high school [because the book encouraged them when they thought they couldn't do it], who knows what happens."

0:55:04 Matt: "We've got Blackmarket Bingo asking, 'What does Pride mean to each of you individually?'"

0:55:11 Marc: "Well, pride to me is a loaded word because, as a writer, I think 'pride,' I think 'hubris,' I think pride can be a detriment. There's pride with a lowercase p and there's Pride with a capital P. I think, for me, Pride in the LGBT sense of the word is lack of shame, is owning who you are, and not apologizing for who you are."

Taliesin: "Personal honesty."

Marc: "And being a good person who's an honest person. If you're an honest person and you live your life by the only direction we need as people: treat people the way you want to be treated. I don't care if you're gay, straight, Black, white, Republican, liberal, conservative, whatever, if you treat people the way you want to be treated that is living Pride because you should be proud of us not yourself; you should be proud of the change you can affect to make the world a better place. And I know that sounds like fortune cookies or Opera, or Yanla (sp?) changed my life or something like that, but it is very true. So, a lot of these clichés are become cliché because they are very true. And I think if you just try and live your life honestly and be nice to people. Hold the door, let someone in in traffic, you know, talk to the old lady in line at the grocery store, you never know what difference that's going to make. You never know how that's going to change the course of someone's life, so why not?"

…

0:56:48 Taliesin: "The notion of, 'We're all in this together.' And I will say Pride for me has always been about… and I got a lot of, well, for various reason I got a lot of crap as a kid, but one of the things I got crap about was this notion from some people, this was the weird one, that I was somehow putting effort into being this kind of person. That this took effort, that I was somehow pushing forward a pretense, and I just kind of had to do the, "No, this is actually…"

Marc: 'Who has the energy?"

Taliesin: "Who has the energy to pretend to be this weird and awkward! This is just me letting go and if every- like-"

Marc: "I'm not Andy Kaufman, this is all real."

Taliesin: "This is not an act! this is just- I mean, occasionally it's curated, which is different, especially this being the internet, but like, just the notion that if we all are- and the honesty that I was talking about, it was not honesty to other people necessarily, but just waking up that morning and being the person you feel like being and then just treating everybody the way- and just finding that communication between real people, not people trying to live up to some notion of who they think they should be."

0:57:50 Marc: "Well, once again I'm going to circle this back to a quote Patty Jenkins said, she talked about how the word cheesy is banned on her sets because she said, 'When did we become afraid of genuine emotion and sincerity.' And I'm guilty of this; we've all become too cool for school; we've all become the kids in Heathers and all that. And that's kind of why we're at where we're at now: We're afraid to cry, we're afraid to let down our walls, and I can't even read the quote because I start bawling, but she talks about we're in a really difficult place as a species right now. We should be embracing sincerity and genuine emotion and that sort of thing. We shouldn't be afraid of it anymore. And I just responded to her, I tweeted back, 'Fuck yes!'

1:09:28 Marc: "There's something to be said for the hidden and the metaphor, you know?"

Taliesin: "Yes!"

Marc: "It's great that there's so much acceptance for LGBT characters and LGBT people today, but part of me wishes it was still back when I was in my 20s when you would get- you would see someone as a party and be like, [knowing nod] 'Yeah, I know,' and it was just unsaid or your would know that Peppermint Patty and Marcy are going to have a bed and breakfast in Oregon when they're adults."

Taliesin: "Obviously."

Marc: "And all that secret handshake stuff was… It's immeasurably better now and I'm putting this in… I would never want it to change, but there was something that the not knowing, the not having everyone be in on the joke, was nice because it also gave us an ownership of ourselves where it was the club we could control, we were the bouncer at the door of this club, and of course, ironically, homogenization is a good thing and to an extent of everyone being missed up, but there's something to be said about the subtlety of that, and I think a lot of times the subtlety and the metaphors are far more impactful than the direct."

1:15:41 Taliesin: "You have to be open to new ideas and you have to have faith in your ideas, if you think they're good ideas, that they're not… if they're good enough ideas, the world is not going to break them in half. They don't need to have a fence built around them. If you have good ideas and philosophies about the world, the world's not going to break them, it's going to enforce them.

1:20:10 Marc: "'Cause I always say that being gay is a huge part of who I am, but it's also an utterly insignificant part of who I am. We're all, once again, we're all have the same day to day struggles."

1:54:18 Amy: "I don't talk about it much, but I'm the B in LGBT, for the record. Doesn't tend to come up a lot."

Taliesin: "Are we going there?"

Amy: "Well, I am."

Taliesin: "Yeah, I am, too. Fuck it."

Taliesin looked at her with intense trepidation after she said it. Worried about what that step might mean, but also what it said about him if he did that whole episode about Pride and but was too scared to show it. And then wrote it off with a brief shrug and "Fuck it."

If you enjoy my work, consider supporting me through ko-fi, Patreon, or my shop. I'm severely disabled and it all helps justify my time spent on this project. Learn more about how and why to support me, including links.

#Wednesday Club #Geek & Sundry #Wednesday Club Transcript #Transcript #GSA

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theliberaltony · 4 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

The impeachment hearings have been making headlines and drawing big ratings. We’ll soon see whether the blitz of testimony has also had an impact on whether Americans think President Trump committed an impeachable offense when we reinterview our panel of voters, who we’ve partnered with Ipsos to survey repeatedly over time.

We’re especially interested in following up with people who haven’t fully made up their minds about impeachment and understanding what it might take to sway them to the Democrats’ or Republicans’ side. Our initial survey with Ipsos — conducted using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel — found, for instance, that while most Americans say they’re “absolutely” or “pretty” certain about their stance on whether Trump has committed an impeachable offense, about a quarter were “somewhat” or “not at all” certain — which could mean they’re more persuadable.

Interestingly, there wasn’t a big partisan divide among the people in our survey who are less certain about impeachment. About half of those with greater doubts (47 percent) identified as Republicans or leaned toward the Republican Party, and a nearly identical share (48 percent) identified as Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party. But even though this group is pretty evenly split by party, they do have one thing in common: They’re less ideologically extreme than those who are more certain about impeachment. In fact, of this group, 45 percent identified as ideologically moderate, whereas 34 percent of those who are more certain identified as moderate. Additionally, the not-so-certain are less likely to say they’re very liberal or conservative.

Another data point to suggest that this less-certain group might be less intensely partisan? Fewer say they get their news from Fox News or MSNBC. A bit less than half of both groups are getting their impeachment information at least in part from television news, but among the more uncertain respondents in our survey, only 16 percent said they got their news primarily from Fox News or MSNBC, compared with 30 percent of respondents who said their opinion was more certain.

More persuadable Republicans believe key facts

There’s also evidence from our survey that less-certain partisans are absorbing elements of the impeachment inquiry differently than people who are more convinced of their stance. We asked respondents about their views on the three questions that are guiding Democrats’ inquiry. In broad strokes, these are:

Did Trump ask Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter?

Did Trump withhold military aid to pressure the Ukrainians into opening an investigation into the Bidens?

Did the Trump administration try to cover up Trump’s actions regarding Ukraine?

And Democrats — regardless of their level of certainty about whether Trump committed an impeachable offense — are generally more likely than Republicans to believe that Trump did these things. They’re also more likely to believe that his behavior would be both inappropriate and impeachable. But there are some noteworthy differences within the parties that differentiate the people who are still on the fence. For instance, only 54 percent of Democrats who are less certain about whether Trump committed an impeachable offense believe that it would be impeachable if Trump asked Ukraine to investigate the Bidens, compared to 78 percent of Democrats who are more certain.

Meanwhile, less-certain Republicans are much likelier than Republicans with a firmer view on impeachment to believe some of the central claims Democrats are presenting in the investigation. About 4 in 10 less-certain Republicans believe that Trump did withhold military aid to pressure Ukraine to commit to the investigations, compared with only 20 percent of more-certain Republicans. And nearly half of less-certain Republicans agree that the Trump administration did try to cover up the president’s actions regarding Ukraine, compared to only 18 percent of more-certain Republicans.

All of this suggests that less-certain Republicans might be more open to Democrats’ arguments on impeachment. Admittedly, this isn’t a huge group of people — it’s only 12 percent of our sample — but with the country so closely divided on impeachment, even nudging a small number of Americans into the impeachment camp could make a difference for Democrats.

But persuadable people aren’t paying as much attention

There’s one big hurdle for anyone looking to persuade this group, though — at this point, they’re not following developments in the impeachment inquiry very closely. Only 34 percent of people who aren’t as certain about their stance on impeachment are following the process somewhat or very closely, compared with 66 percent of respondents who are more certain.

Meanwhile, people who don’t have as firm a perspective on whether Trump committed an impeachable offense are also less likely to have a strong view about how both parties are handling the process so far. Respondents who are more certain about Trump’s behavior also tend to have a more forceful opinion about Republicans and Democrats in Congress — this group is about evenly divided on Democrats’ performance, while more than half disapprove of Republicans. People in the less-certain group, on the other hand, are much more likely to say they neither approve nor disapprove of how Democrats and Republicans are handling the process so far. That might be a symptom of their general uncommittedness, but it could also be a sign that they’re simply not following things closely enough to have a strong opinion about almost any aspect of the proceedings.

We’ll be tracking how this group responds to the impeachment process over the next few months, so we’ll be able to see if they actually change their minds. But right now, Democrats’ biggest challenge may not be persuading less-convinced Americans on the facts — it may be getting them to pay attention in the first place.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Laura Bronner

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rerwby · 6 years

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Volume 5 OST

I don’t normally have such verbose opinions on the RVVBY music (it’s like writing a review for fiberglass insulation) I managed to sit down and listen to this album the whole way through. My feelings on these tracks feels like a culmination of all my feelings of previous RVVBY music. I won’t try to be lengthy about this but I got some solid thoughts.

First of all, can we just collectively agree to stop making every fucking RVVBY song put on Youtube use fan art? Like can we just get a solid fucking static picture of the volume cover art maybe? I’m sick of the mediocre ship art used for goddamn everything and it looks incredibly unprofessional. Also since these are RT fans you know they don’t give a flying fuck about credit.

The Triumph Not to kick this off on such an upbeat note but this is one of my favorite OP’s. Maybe my favorite. Maybe. I could not fully appreciate this song when the episodes were coming out because the opening itself was the biggest trashfire to come out of this show. Like, sorry I can’t get hyped up on 10 seconds of Ruby and Ren and Jaune sitting on a couch. Listening to it alone though? Big improvement.

Jeff Williams does this thing where he’s clearly way too proud of his proud choice and rhymes, and usually lines end with a big focus on stupid vernacular. Trust me, this will come up later. The Triumph manages to avoid that. This Will be the Day does as well because it’s a pretty hammy song with a better, more consistent tone. “Back to reality, back to the show” is an awful, terrible, horribly ironic line in the context of Volume 5, but it’s not as in your face as it could be, so it gets a pass from me. I also think “That’s when you learned you were messing with gods” is awesome, sorry. It could be more awesome if these characters like, seemed more like gods? And they don’t? So eh.

Then the second verse happens and it calls back to the first with “Yeah I’m a girl but I’m also a god” and I’m like, oh, so you’re just gonna- oh, okay then. Yeah let’s just beat the one good part like a dead horse, sure. That really ruins the song for me ngl.

It also manages to avoid the formulaic trend of post-second verse slow sappy breakdown. Time to Say Goodbye and Let’s Just Live do that and it gets old after a while. If you’re gonna give me hype music then stick with it. Not that Let’s Just Live really hypes you up.

Overall it’s like a 7/10 for me because it has a good pace and it doesn’t scream “look at how clever I am!” at every turn.

Ignite The song I was most excited for and the most disappointed by. I wrote about it here and I’ll try not to do anything more than summarize what I said there.

It’s obnoxious and the lyrics are way too dumb. Not funny dumb, not hammy dumb, nope, just dumb. It’s not even in the style of Yang’s usual dumbness, which by all accounts should now be under Armed and Ready’s foot since that is now the prime Yang theme. The major problem is how obvious these issues are. Like you can’t not hear how bad the writing is.

Then Lamar comes in, and I usually enjoy him since, like I said above, he brings with him some hammy, corny lyrics that manage to be fun. But he’s phoning it in here. He’s mumbling and tripping over his own words. God I didn’t even understand what mumbling truly sounded like until I heard that verse.

4/10 and I hate to write that on a Yang theme but this song is everything wrong with these soundtracks.

Path to Isolation Which brings us to my favorite annual game of “Count How Many Times a Weiss Song Uses the Word ‘Mirror.’” Spoilers: it’s a handful.

It’s fine. Weiss songs have always been fine. The worst thing I can say about them is that you have to dredge through their slow-ass, repetitive openings to get to the good part. 5/10

All Things Must Die aka “Slow And Brooding Villain Song That Turns Into a Rock Anthem #5″ aka “Sacrifice And Divide Did It Better But Even They Were Only So Good” aka “We’re Not Even Going For A Subtle Title Here.”

I don’t even know whose perspective this is sung from anymore. Like Cinder is our designated villain song candidate but she has like no autonomy this volume so that falls flat, meanwhile Salem still has no clear motivation. Hazel and Adam might be the most developed(?) bad guys this volume but this song has nothing to do with them. 4/10

This Time (From Shadows Part II) I’m writing about this one before Smile for a reason.

A song called From Shadows Part II deserves better, lol. Also given the fan art uses on the version I found posted, this is a Blake+Sun song? I don’t know. It starts with the beautiful piano solo from the original which was godlike and relaxing and also dramatic.

Lyrics are just shitty but in a shocking twist they’re hard to hear other than THIS TIIIIME in the chorus which...I’m fine with. I’m legit convinced that the fewer lyrics you can make out in these songs, the better. This all sounds rather nice and has a good flow to it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s kinda just trash. Absolute filler. Fluff. Churned-out melodrama to keep the White Fang kindle going.

Also I guess in hindsight it’s weird to have Jeff singing here since this song is supposed to represent Blake moving on with new resolve. Like before it was clearly Blake and Adam singing, but now it’s Blake and...Sun? Adam again? Like some non-canon reformed Adam? Idk. At least it’s tonally a good contrast to Part I. It’s easy to listen to the song without focusing on the lyrics which is rather soothing, but it’s still nonsense. 5/10

Smile (From Shadows Part 0)

No yeah I made that part up, but I think this song is a better From Shadows Part 0 than This Time is a Part II. I’m dead serious. They gave us an Ilia song and made it more interesting than her character is in volume 5, if not extremely on the nose.

Because my god, it’s on the nose. It’s just Ilia’s backstory about blending in to avoid all the pain your oppressors brought you and biding your time until you can rip the smiles off their faces...oh I don’t think that’s how Ilia’s backstory went. This is much darker. Very Count of Monte Crisco and dare I say actually interesting. It makes Ilia sound way more compelling than Blake while also making her out as a foil to her. Except I don’t know why the fucking hell the character presented in Smile would ever join the White Fang, especially under Adam’s authority, and then follow him so blindly. But I guess as of last volume’s OST we should be use to that disconnect between show plot and music lore.

7/10 for being accidentally interesting.

All That Matters

It’s....fine? Fine-ish. Obligatory slow and sappy song because ofc. Casey at least sounds like she’s in her comfort zone. It just doesn’t mean much to me.I guess it’s the theme of the girls being back together but I have my own issues with that, which is mainly that three of them were already reunited halfway into Volume 5 and it was only Blake’s arrival that really pushed them into sappy territory.

5/10 it’s not bombastically terrible enough to merit a lower score and not interesting enough to be higher.

I’m Her Daughter After All - RVVBY Volume 5 Official Score

I don’t know why this song is here because it’s an actual non-lyrical official part of the soundtrack, which is mind-blowing. You’d think Jeff was contractually obligated to have his blood’s voices dip their toes in every track.

It’s a nice medley of Yang’s themes, namely I Burn and Armed and Ready. It also makes you appreciate how Yang’s musical themes have actually evolved, unlike those of the other characters. Why do we have this Western thing going on? Qrow had it too in Bad Luck Charm. I don’t mind it since I think it’s kinda neat, but 6/10 for being a random score track.

Mayday! Lancers! - RVVBY Volume 5 Official Sc- wait

They did the score thing again. I don’t know why. I also forgot the Lancer scene actually happened in Volume 5 until I heard this. Like, Weiss did so little in Volume 4 that I’m attributing stuff that happened in V5 to last volume.

It’s fine? It’s nice to have a non-lyrical Weiss song, actually. 5/10

Armed and Ready ie The Appeal Of The Original Was Lost On Us

This song did not need a remix lol. Armed and Ready is actually damn good, is a great proper evolution of Yang’s theme that successfully moves her out of the shadow of I Burn, and was a really, really good climax to her recovery arc. This turns it into a dance remix, which ironically is the exact sort of thing the original moved her character away from. 4/10

Gold (Acoustic)

As I listened to this I realized it wasn’t just the original vocals played over an acoustic cover; Casey actually re-recorded the song. That’s blowing it out of the park for a RVVBY remix. Also it’s like, good.

I always liked Gold for whatever reason. I just thought it was uplifting and it did the nice thing where the lyrics are simple and flow well. The loud instrumentals had me unsure if it made for a good complement to the lyrics or if it was just a bad choice. This just sounds wonderful. Most importantly, it makes you really appreciate Casey’s singing talent. More than anything, she sounds absolutely comfortable singing this song. No stressed notes, no weird word choices, no ham. This is just a nice song and it’s my favorite on this album. 8/10

Let’s Just Live (Remix) “The Obligatory OP Remix Oh God Triumph Is Gonna Get This Treatment Next Year

It doesn’t go above my expectations but I like the new instrumentals. Reminds me of Stickerbrush Symphony. I think it’s much more fitting than in the original and is a true improvement on it. 6/10

The final issue I have with this album is this, and it involves some statistics. This is a 12-song album. That isn’t strange. But here are some numbers for you:

Ruby Songs: 0 Weiss Songs: 2 Blake Songs: 1 (2 if you count Smile) Yang Songs: 4 Remixes: 3 Scores(?): 2

Just to put that in front of you. Remixes comprise 1/4th of the album, glorified scores are 1/6th, and Yang received 4 whole slots (one-third of the album!) while Ruby, the protagonist, got absolutely none. Nothing in this album is about just Ruby, and I think she kind of deserves that. I mean she did nothing this volume so whatever, but we didn’t even get Glorious Score Track Of Jaune Healing Weiss so that’s super strange. They didn’t even shaft her in lieu of anyone, she was just left out.

#rwde

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adamoco · 6 years

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DISNEY PIXAR MOVIE MADNESS! (now, with math)

On March 21, in the height of March Madness, Twitter user @yeeitsanthonyy unleashed their own viral bracket buster upon an unsuspecting interwebs. Under the title “DISNEY PIXAR MOVIE MADNESS!” they set up a tournament-style, single-elimination competition between 32 films from both studios, spanning from “The Little Mermaid” to “Coco.” Deceptively simple, devised to determine one champion from two brands enjoying long runs of success.

As a Disney employee and superfan of both studios, the bracket rocked me to my core. It’s a brilliant idea that rightfully set Disney fandom ablaze. But I couldn’t help but notice the lack of explanation behind each film’s place in the bracket. The seeming subjectivity of the ordering. And most notably, a couple of glaring omissions. Much like the NCAA basketball tournaments are seeded, there had to be a statistical way to rank these films. One driven by metrics to ensure the correct films make the tournament; one that gives each studios’ substantively better performing and critically lauded works a fairer path toward total glory.

I started work immediately on using data to make a better version of this bracket.

Above: the original bracket Tweeted by @yeeitsanthonyy.

Methodology

The construct of the original bracket is straightforward and compelling: Disney films fill out one side, Pixar films fill the other. I wanted to maintain this setup, since it ultimately matches up the top Disney and Pixar films in everyone’s bracket for an overall winner. But the reasoning behind which films were selected for the tournament needed to be more transparent.

Using the original bracket’s “The Little Mermaid” (1989) and “Coco” (2017) as start and end points, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios have combined to make 49 films during the time frame it represents. Disney made 30 of those movies, Pixar made 19. That’s more films apiece than there’s room for in each side of the bracket, so we have to omit a few intentionally. But to be objective about which ones, I wanted to consider every film from both studios during this time period for the tournament.

With room for 16 films on each side of the bracket, 14 Disney films from the time period wouldn’t make the tournament, but only 3 Pixar films would miss the cut. That’s a problem – it’s unfair that it’s easier for Pixar movies to make the field. There needs to be a little more parity added to the tournament for Disney films that would be on the “bubble” quality-wise for making it in, but still have a lot of potential for making a Cinderella-type run (see what I did there?) through the bracket.

Speaking of quality, how do we rank these films? The original bracket doesn’t appear to factor in seeding, and that’s my biggest critique. In the NCAA tournament, teams are ranked #1 through #16 in each region. Across the four regions, a #1 team should be roughly the same caliber as the other three #1 teams in the tournament, the #2 teams should match up with the other #2s, and so forth.

Without any qualifications provided for why each movie is placed in its particular position on the bracket, the original gives the appearance of being entirely subjective, possibly based on the original poster’s personal preferences. My goal is to address this.

The Model

We need to rank these movies to set a bracket. Where can we find some data to build an overall metric of quality upon? The internet has made it easier to quantify a movie’s critical reception – particularly a website called RottenTomatoes.com, which popularized the “Tomatometer,” gauging the percentage of movie critics’ positive reaction to a film. It’s not really a statement of a film’s overall quality; for example, it considers a 2.5 out of 4-star review as “fresh,” indicating the critic had a positive response – not exactly glowing. But it’s a highly marketable figure, essentially an update of Siskel and Ebert’s “two thumbs up” with more data points, and it gives us a metric that at least attempts to characterize popular critical response.

The other obvious metric is the movie’s bottom line: how well did it do at the box office? That’s a challenging question, because the answer has changed over the period the bracket represents. Increasingly, it’s not good enough for a movie to just do well in the United States. Global box office has become hugely important to studios; a project’s appeal to worldwide audiences is a huge calculation in slating new releases. And there’s some major winners and losers on global box office among the 49 films under consideration.

But box office numbers can be deceiving. “The Little Mermaid” was a watershed film that marked the start of the original Disney renaissance. But it only made $211 million in 1989, when ticket prices were lower and theatrical distribution wasn’t as wide globally. By comparison, “Zootopia” (2016) cracked just over $1 billion globally. It’s weird to think “The Little Mermaid” would have been a financial disappointment by contemporary standards, so we have to factor inflation into our evaluation.

I did this by looking up the total global box office for each film on BoxOfficeMojo.com, which has a searchable database of box office information. Then, I divided it by the average ticket price for each film’s year of release, yielding a figure I called “admissions” – theoretically, the number of people who saw it in theatres. Since the population of our fine planet keeps growing, it’s not really fair to penalize older movies that fewer people would have had a chance to see. So ultimately, we need to grade box office performance on a something like a curve.

Overall, I used a weighted score to evaluate the 49 movies under consideration. 50% of that score is determined by a movie’s Tomatometer percentage. I took each movie’s Tomatometer and multiplied it by 0.5; the product is a decimal between 0 and 0.5. (“Finding Nemo,” with a 99% Tomatometer, gets a .495 out of .5 score. “Brother Bear,” the lowest Tomatometer of all films in contention at 38%, gets a .19 score.)

Then, I evaluated box office performance to determine the other 50% of the score. I used the “admissions” figure described earlier — again, the idea is to reward movies that were the strongest performers, but not overly penalize ones that didn’t have a great box office (especially if they were still critically loved). I sorted the films by most admissions to least and assigned a perfect score of 0.5 to the film with the highest figure. Then I subtracted .005 from that score for every position a film fell down the list – enough that high performers are rewarded, but keeping a relative balance in place with critical reception, so that movies need decent scores on both to make the tournament. (“Finding Nemo,” with the highest admissions figure on the list, gets the perfect 0.5 score. “Mulan,” the median entry, gets a .365, and the film with the lowest admission, “Winnie the Pooh,” gets a .26 score.)

Add those two scores together, and we’ve got an overall weighted score between 0 and 1. Now, sort the films by those scores, and we’ve got ourselves a statistically sound-ish list!

And here’s that list!

I use “sound-ish” because this model almost certainly has flaws. I could have used the “Top Critics” Tomatometer score that filters out all but the most well-known writers, which could have caused variation. As far as admissions, I have no way of knowing how close my theoretical figure is to actual; it’s just the best I can do with the available data. And also, there’s no accounting for the “favorite” factor, that feeling where regardless of critical or box office performance, you just love one movie more than another. And make no mistake – you should love what you love! Data-wise though, it’s just really hard to account for movies that became “cult” favorites, since there’s not really a good way to quantify that performance-wise. For example, you could take social media likes or conversation into consideration, but that might put certain movies (particularly older ones) at a disparate disadvantage.

One other thing: I’m standing firm on the inclusion of only Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios films, none of their subsidiaries. That means no “Planes,” and as some called out as a miss on the original bracket, no “A Goofy Movie,” either. Rest assured, if I included them in consideration, when the numbers are crunched, none of them make the tournament.

Bracketology

A look at the results of this model suggests the original bracket had a few key snubs. Most notably, it left “Finding Dory” out of the Pixar bracket. The #9 weighted scorer, its credentials are sterling with a 94% Tomatometer and over $1 billion in global box office. Also snubbed was “Monsters University,” a little further down the weighted list but a certain shoo-in at #25. Much further down the list, “The Good Dinosaur” (#37) and “Cars 2” (#45), which made the original bracket, objectively don’t belong in the field.

There’s also misses on the Disney side of the bracket. “Wreck-It Ralph” (#26) is omitted from the original bracket, and people forget this but “Bolt” (#27) actually performed comparably strongly on Tomatometer and box office. But right after this, we get to the problem described earlier: there’s a need for some more parity on the Disney bracket. With only three Pixar movies missing the field, we owe it to a few more Disney movies to have a shot at a tournament run. “Hercules” (#28), “Lilo & Stitch” (#29), “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (#30), “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (#31), and “The Princess and the Frog” (#34) are separated by 0.03 points on our weighted scale. They’re all legitimate bubble contenders.

The NCAA basketball tournament solves for this and makes things more exciting with a “First Four,” where the four lowest-ranked automatic and at-large qualifiers face a one-game play-in against each other to make the official 64-team bracket. That’s how we’re going to solve for this, too: we’re going to expand the tournament field from 32 to 34 movies, with one extra round for those four bubble films to claim the last two spots on the bracket proper.

Probably my adjusted’s biggest snub among movies that made the original: “Pocahontas” is out of the tournament with its #38 weighted ranking. Despite a solid $346 million box office, its 57% Tomatometer is among the lowest in the field; it actually drops it below “The Emperor’s New Groove” and “Winnie the Pooh” as far as movies not making the tournament. (It’s okay, just imagine them all playing in a really fun consolation bracket somewhere.)

Seeding

As mentioned in the methodology, the bracket should be seeded so that quantifiably better movies earn a little bit easier of a run through the bracket (assuming they’re winners in your heart, too). I subdivided the Disney and Pixar sides of the bracket into a two regions of eight movies apiece, so we’ll have four sets of #1 through #8 seeds. The idea is that each numerical seed is of roughly equal quality to the movies in other regions with the same seeds. The #1 seeds in each region are pretty impeccable – and immediately lent themselves to the idea of organizing the regions by older and new entries from both studios.

“Finding Nemo” tops the Classic Pixar Region, while “Toy Story 3” tops the New Pixar Region. “The Lion King” tops the Disney Renaissance Region, while “Zootopia” might be a slight surprise as the top of the Second Renaissance Region, but the credentials are definitely there.

In the first round, #1 seeds face off against #8 seeds; that winner plays the victor of the matchup between #3 and #4 – technically, the easiest path through the field to the Disney or Pixar final round. The #2 seeds get #7 seeds, facing off against the winner of the #3 and #6 seeds. If the top two seeds win out, the final on each side of the bracket matches #1 against #2.

That means “Nemo” gets “Cars” in Classic Pixar, where my favorite opening round matchup puts #3 “Toy Story 2” against #6 “Ratatouille” – the Little Chef could be poised to cook up a nice run in many brackets. In New Pixar, TS3 gets “Brave,” while #6 “Wall-E” could certainly clean up against #3 “Finding Dory.”

Now, checking out the Disney side of the bracket. The two play-in rounds are for the #8 seed, meaning “Lion King” gets the winner between “Nightmare” and “Hunchback” in the Disney Renaissance, while “Zootopia” gets the winner of “Lilo & Stitch” and “Princess and the Frog” in Second Renaissance. (Just to get out ahead of this: “Lilo & Stitch” isn’t part of the actual Second Disney Renaissance; it falls in that weird shadow time between the two, but being released on the 2000s side of the millennium line, I decided to lump it in with the movies in the newer half of the bracket.)

In Disney Renaissance, “The Little Mermaid” is ready to go where the winners go, despite being a #5 seed. In Second Renaissance, I think “Zootopia” might be the most vulnerable of the #1 seeds in the tournament for an early exit, especially considering the crash course it faces with either with #4 “Moana” or #5 “Tangled” in the second round.

Conclusions

What exactly have I wrought with this? A painstakingly calculated, statistically semi-sound bracket that perhaps more accurately reflects the respective pop culture and financial impact of recent Disney and Pixar films, setting up an exceptionally silly, imaginary tournament slightly more equitably. Yet at the end of the day, reiterating a potential shortcoming of this model and all of the math behind it, you love what you love.

I posted my adjusted bracket and hundreds of social media likes and responses rolled in, with comments ranging from “The hero we needed!” to “This is a work of Evil.” But a few people noted that, even with corrected seeding, they still came up with the same final four and eventual winner as the original bracket. If your favorite Disney and Pixar movies were already on both brackets, there’s a very good chance you were faced with the same eventual final picks anyway. You just arrived at them in a somewhat different manner.

So, a closing thanks to @yeeitsanthonyy for their blindingly bright idea that sparked cheerful, passionate participation and conversation across the Disney fandom. I recognize it most importantly as an attempt at creating joy, and there’s objectively nothing to critique about that. But to those craving logic and order in our increasingly chaotic world, I hope you rest just a bit easier tonight.

And finally, my bracket, in case you were curious.

#bracket #marchmadness #disney #pixar #disneybracket #stats #math #spreadsheets

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orbemnews · 3 years

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Analysis: Detroit's mayor and Covid vaccine roulette What did Duggan say? At a news conference Thursday, he said: “So, Johnson & Johnson is a very good vaccine. Moderna and Pfizer are the best. And I am going to do everything I can to make sure the residents of the City of Detroit get the best.” What did the White House do? “As I understand it, our team has been in touch with the mayor, there has been a bit of a misunderstanding,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during Friday’s briefing, adding that she thought “he was going to go out and speak publicly.” What does Duggan say now? In a statement Friday, he said: “I have full confidence that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is both safe and effective. We are making plans now for Johnson & Johnson to be a key part of our expansion of vaccine centers and are looking forward to receiving Johnson & Johnson vaccines in the next allocation.” What’s the story with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine? The third shot received emergency use authorization from the FDA a week ago and has gotten a push from the White House, which engineered a rare agreement with the drugmaker Merck to ramp up production at a time when the country is racing to achieve herd immunity and reopen. What’s the problem? There is a perception, based on trial results, that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is less effective than the inoculations from Pfizer and Moderna. (More on that in a moment.) Add that to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops guidance that Catholics should choose a different vaccine when possible. As CNN reported, the bishops have “‘moral concerns’ over the shot due to its use of lab-grown cells that descend from cells taken in the 1980s from the tissue of aborted fetuses.” Given the choice, people want one dose. At a FEMA vaccination site CNN visited in Miami, people were given the option of which vaccine to get. Many chose the Johnson & Johnson because it requires only a single dose. Related: See how vaccinated Floridians made their choice between Johnson and Johnson and Pfizer What are the facts? Here’s CNN’s full fact check of Duggan’s comments. And here’s some guidance from the CNN Health’s John Bonifield: Is the J&J vaccine effective? In trials the J&J vaccine proved just as effective as the other two in preventing hospitalizations and deaths from Covid-19. In a clinical trial, the J&J single-dose vaccine showed about 66% efficacy globally against moderate to severe/critical Covid-19; in the United States, it showed 72% efficacy. Against severe forms of the disease, efficacy is even higher, offering nearly 86% protection. In the trial, there were no Covid-19 deaths among people who received the vaccine. Is that less effective than other vaccines? Without a clinical trial, it’s impossible to compare J&J efficacy rates directly to those for the previously authorized two-dose vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna. The vaccines were tested at different times, when different strains were more prevalent than others, depending on the location. J&J was tested in South Africa, where the dominant strain was the B.1.351 variant, which is believed to be more contagious and which may weaken the immune response to vaccination. Had Pfizer and Moderna been tested at the same time as J&J, the variants might have impacted their efficacies. What are the advantages of Johnson & Johnson’s version? People are protected two weeks after one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine — which may make it more accessible or preferable for some people. Full protection from the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines comes a couple weeks after the second dose, which takes places three to four weeks after the first. The J&J vaccine doesn’t require extreme cold temperatures for storage, which may make it easier to administer in some places. The J&J vaccine is also being trialed as a two-dose vaccine. Those results are not yet available. GOP efforts to limit weekend voting in Georgia directly targets Black voters We all need to be extremely focused on efforts by Republicans in state legislatures to make it more difficult for people to vote. In Georgia, for instance, the GOP-controlled legislature is working on a law to limit weekend voting. The would cut down on voter turnout, especially since in-person Election Day voting in Georgia cities is notorious for extremely long lines. More specifically, fewer weekend voting days would seriously cut down on the number of Black voters. Here’s the math from CNN’s Fredreka Schouten, Casey Tolan and Kelly Mena: Only 26.9% of the voters who cast in-person early ballots in Georgia during the general election were Black, state voting records showed. But CNN’s analysis shows Black voters made up 34.6% of the voters who cast early ballots on the three weekend voting days that could be eliminated under the proposal from Georgia lawmakers — about 48,000 people. That’s significantly more than President Joe Biden’s 12,000 vote margin of victory over former President Donald Trump in the state. In addition, the Georgia law would “restrict absentee voting, end automatic voter registration and limit access to drop boxes that voters use to return their absentee ballots.” Why is Sunday voting important? “Most working families are working two or three jobs, and don’t have the capacity to be able to vote, like a normal person working a normal job where the hours of that job kind of coincide with their ability to go into a voting precinct and actually cast the ballot,” Atlanta City Councilman Antonio Brown said. And across Georgia, Black churchgoers have a tradition of heading to the polls together after Sunday services — driving to the polls or riding in church vans to cast their ballots during the early voting period. Arizona’s voting-rights fight CNN’s Kelly Mena covers local and state issues, and she did a special edition of the Political Briefing podcast Friday focused on the Georgia law and scores of others across the country. She also focused on Arizona, where one bill would have given the state’s GOP-controlled legislature the ability to select presidential electors if it questioned the election outcome. Listen here. This is Joe Manchin’s Senate. Get used to it Now we’re cooking. The US added 379,000 jobs in February, signaling the recovery is finally gaining steam. Reports like this one could call into question the need for a stimulus plan as big as the one Democrats are considering in the Senate. Or not. The nation is still down 10 million jobs over the past year of Covid. Paring down the stimulus was a major theme of the week after Senate Democrats, in particular Sen. Joe Manchin, struck a deal with the White House to shrink from $400 to $300 per week an extension of unemployment benefits. And Manchin held up progress on the bill all Friday afternoon over the question of whether the benefits should go through September, as House Democrats put in their bill, or July, as Manchin preferred. (A deal was finally struck on benefits into September.) Get the latest updates here. Democrats! They’re not all liberal. Here’s how the Washington Post wrote it, which I think is apt. With the Senate equally divided, the party’s moderates sought to portray themselves in the midst of the stimulus debate as a fiscally restrained counterpoint to liberals — even as they stood with Biden on the need for new emergency aid. But their tactics still threatened to open new political rifts in the party and leave perhaps millions of Americans from obtaining checks and other support they might have otherwise received. Reminder. Manchin and other moderates like Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema are the only reason Democrats have a majority. And without any Republican support for Democratic proposals, he’s a key vote on everything. So he can basically get whatever he wants. Source link Orbem News #Analysis #Covid #Detroits #Mayor #Politics #Roulette #Vaccine #WhatMatters:Detroit'smayorandCovidvaccineroulette-CNNPolitics

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dipulb3 · 3 years

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Analysis: Detroit's mayor and Covid vaccine roulette

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/analysis-detroits-mayor-and-covid-vaccine-roulette/

Analysis: Detroit's mayor and Covid vaccine roulette

What did Duggan say? At a news conference Thursday, he said: “So, Johnson & Johnson is a very good vaccine. Moderna and Pfizer are the best. And I am going to do everything I can to make sure the residents of the City of Detroit get the best.”

What did the White House do? “As I understand it, our team has been in touch with the mayor, there has been a bit of a misunderstanding,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during Friday’s briefing, adding that she thought “he was going to go out and speak publicly.”

What does Duggan say now? In a statement Friday, he said: “I have full confidence that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is both safe and effective. We are making plans now for Johnson & Johnson to be a key part of our expansion of vaccine centers and are looking forward to receiving Johnson & Johnson vaccines in the next allocation.”

What’s the story with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine? The third shot received emergency use authorization from the FDA a week ago and has gotten a push from the White House, which engineered a rare agreement with the drugmaker Merck to ramp up production at a time when the country is racing to achieve herd immunity and reopen.

What’s the problem? There is a perception, based on trial results, that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is less effective than the inoculations from Pfizer and Moderna. (More on that in a moment.) Add that to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops guidance that Catholics should choose a different vaccine when possible. As Appradab reported, the bishops have “‘moral concerns’ over the shot due to its use of lab-grown cells that descend from cells taken in the 1980s from the tissue of aborted fetuses.”

Given the choice, people want one dose. At a FEMA vaccination site Appradab visited in Miami, people were given the option of which vaccine to get. Many chose the Johnson & Johnson because it requires only a single dose.

Related: See how vaccinated Floridians made their choice between Johnson and Johnson and Pfizer

What are the facts? Here’s Appradab’s full fact check of Duggan’s comments.

And here’s some guidance from the Appradab Health’s John Bonifield:

Is the J&J vaccine effective? In trials the J&J vaccine proved just as effective as the other two in preventing hospitalizations and deaths from Covid-19. In a clinical trial, the J&J single-dose vaccine showed about 66% efficacy globally against moderate to severe/critical Covid-19; in the United States, it showed 72% efficacy. Against severe forms of the disease, efficacy is even higher, offering nearly 86% protection. In the trial, there were no Covid-19 deaths among people who received the vaccine.

Is that less effective than other vaccines? Without a clinical trial, it’s impossible to compare J&J efficacy rates directly to those for the previously authorized two-dose vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna. The vaccines were tested at different times, when different strains were more prevalent than others, depending on the location. J&J was tested in South Africa, where the dominant strain was the B.1.351 variant, which is believed to be more contagious and which may weaken the immune response to vaccination. Had Pfizer and Moderna been tested at the same time as J&J, the variants might have impacted their efficacies.

What are the advantages of Johnson & Johnson’s version? People are protected two weeks after one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine — which may make it more accessible or preferable for some people. Full protection from the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines comes a couple weeks after the second dose, which takes places three to four weeks after the first.

The J&J vaccine doesn’t require extreme cold temperatures for storage, which may make it easier to administer in some places.

The J&J vaccine is also being trialed as a two-dose vaccine. Those results are not yet available.

GOP efforts to limit weekend voting in Georgia directly targets Black voters

We all need to be extremely focused on efforts by Republicans in state legislatures to make it more difficult for people to vote.

In Georgia, for instance, the GOP-controlled legislature is working on a law to limit weekend voting. The would cut down on voter turnout, especially since in-person Election Day voting in Georgia cities is notorious for extremely long lines.

More specifically, fewer weekend voting days would seriously cut down on the number of Black voters.

Here’s the math from Appradab’s Fredreka Schouten, Casey Tolan and Kelly Mena:

Only 26.9% of the voters who cast in-person early ballots in Georgia during the general election were Black, state voting records showed.

But Appradab’s analysis shows Black voters made up 34.6% of the voters who cast early ballots on the three weekend voting days that could be eliminated under the proposal from Georgia lawmakers — about 48,000 people.

That’s significantly more than President Joe Biden’s 12,000 vote margin of victory over former President Donald Trump in the state.

In addition, the Georgia law would “restrict absentee voting, end automatic voter registration and limit access to drop boxes that voters use to return their absentee ballots.”

Why is Sunday voting important? “Most working families are working two or three jobs, and don’t have the capacity to be able to vote, like a normal person working a normal job where the hours of that job kind of coincide with their ability to go into a voting precinct and actually cast the ballot,” Atlanta City Councilman Antonio Brown said.

And across Georgia, Black churchgoers have a tradition of heading to the polls together after Sunday services — driving to the polls or riding in church vans to cast their ballots during the early voting period.

Arizona’s voting-rights fight

Appradab’s Kelly Mena covers local and state issues, and she did a special edition of the Political Briefing podcast Friday focused on the Georgia law and scores of others across the country.

She also focused on Arizona, where one bill would have given the state’s GOP-controlled legislature the ability to select presidential electors if it questioned the election outcome. Listen here.

This is Joe Manchin’s Senate. Get used to it

Now we’re cooking. The US added 379,000 jobs in February, signaling the recovery is finally gaining steam.

Reports like this one could call into question the need for a stimulus plan as big as the one Democrats are considering in the Senate. Or not. The nation is still down 10 million jobs over the past year of Covid.

Paring down the stimulus was a major theme of the week after Senate Democrats, in particular Sen. Joe Manchin, struck a deal with the White House to shrink from $400 to $300 per week an extension of unemployment benefits. And Manchin held up progress on the bill all Friday afternoon over the question of whether the benefits should go through September, as House Democrats put in their bill, or July, as Manchin preferred. (A deal was finally struck on benefits into September.) Get the latest updates here.

Democrats! They’re not all liberal. Here’s how the Washington Post wrote it, which I think is apt.

With the Senate equally divided, the party’s moderates sought to portray themselves in the midst of the stimulus debate as a fiscally restrained counterpoint to liberals — even as they stood with Biden on the need for new emergency aid. But their tactics still threatened to open new political rifts in the party and leave perhaps millions of Americans from obtaining checks and other support they might have otherwise received.

Reminder. Manchin and other moderates like Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema are the only reason Democrats have a majority. And without any Republican support for Democratic proposals, he’s a key vote on everything. So he can basically get whatever he wants.

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theliberaltony · 5 years

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Poll(s) of the week

About two weeks ago, we wrote that impeaching President Trump had near-majority support from the American public. This was notable because, at the beginning of October, Americans were about evenly divided on impeachment with just over 45 percent on each side, so there was some question whether this was a new normal or if the numbers would revert to the mean. But so far, support for impeachment hasn’t decreased. According to our impeachment polling tracker, if we look at all the polls, 49.1 percent of Americans support impeachment and 43.5 percent oppose it.

We can also drill down into the different types of questions asked about impeachment. For example, one of the views in our tracker only averages polls that ask Americans if they support beginning the impeachment process, while a separate view averages polls that ask if Americans support Trump’s impeachment and/or removal from office. And right now, there is more support for opening an inquiry than for full-blown impeachment. Currently, 53.1 percent of Americans support beginning the process, while 48.1 percent support impeachment and possible removal.

Support for beginning the impeachment process has been pretty stable, too, since it first shot up to 52.9 percent on Oct. 7. Support has hovered at 52-53 percent, though some of that stability is probably because fewer polls are asking about opening the inquiry. (And I would expect them to eventually taper off completely as the decision to open the inquiry becomes older and older news.)

And a new Quinnipiac poll illustrates some of this. It was the fourth time that Quinnipiac had asked whether Americans supported the impeachment inquiry (it first asked in late September), and it found that a majority of Americans — 55 percent — approve of the inquiry. This result was essentially the same as the previous times they asked: Approval of the inquiry has fluctuated slightly between 51 and 55 percent, while disapproval has remained stuck between 43 and 45 percent.

Support for impeaching and removing the president from office has also been relatively stable in Quinnipiac’s polling. The most recent poll found the country essentially evenly divided on whether Trump should be “impeached and removed from office” — 48 percent said he should be while 46 percent said he shouldn’t be, a gap that’s within the poll’s margin of error. Those numbers have only moved a couple points in either direction since the end of September. That said, our polling average suggests that support for impeachment may still be ticking upward. The increase since the beginning of the month has been slow but steady. As of Thursday night, 48.1 percent of Americans support impeachment and potential removal in our tracker’s average, while 43.7 percent oppose it.

Indeed, net support for impeachment and potential removal is higher in our average than in Quinnipiac’s polling. Our average is more in line with a CNN/SSRS poll released this week that found a full 50 percent of Americans said they believed Trump should be impeached and removed from office, while 43 percent didn’t feel that way.

But arguably the more important measurement to look at is Trump’s approval rating. And at the beginning of October, Trump’s approval rating appeared to sharply decline as the Ukraine scandal unfolded. But his rating has not continued to plummet. Instead, it remains within the same narrow range that it has occupied for most of the year. However, it has slumped to the very bottom edge of that range. Currently, 40.6 percent of Americans approve of Trump and 54.6 percent disapprove — his worst numbers since February. So even if the bottom hasn’t dropped out, it’s possible that current events are keeping his popularity depressed.

Mind you, those events aren’t just limited to impeachment. Over the past two weeks, Trump has ordered the withdrawal of U.S. troops from their position defending Kurdish forces in Syria, and he proposed (then backtracked on) holding the next G-7 summit at his own resort in Florida. These actions drew rare rebukes from members of Trump’s own party, perhaps anticipating that Americans would find them especially serious (or signaling to the public that Trump had crossed a line).

But we’ve seen this movie enough times before to know that Trump’s approval rating might just as quickly perk back up next week. The current drop in Trump’s popularity may or may not be meaningful, but for now, recent events certainly aren’t doing him any favors politically. Indeed, if impeachment support continues to rise, it could be a rough winter for President Trump.

Other polling bites

Interestingly, even though the CNN/SSRS poll shows that Americans support impeaching Trump, that doesn’t mean they approve of how Congress is going about it. Only 43 percent approve of the way Democrats in Congress are handling the impeachment inquiry, while 49 percent disapprove. However, the numbers are much worse for Republicans in Congress: just 30 percent approve of the way they’re handling the inquiry and 57 percent disapprove. And Americans say, 50 percent to 40 percent, that Republicans oppose impeachment because they are out to protect Trump at all costs, not because they believe he did not commit impeachable offenses.

A final tidbit from that very meaty CNN/SSRS poll: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s net favorability rating (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating) is just -2, which is a big improvement from her typical standing in recent years (for example, in September 2017, it was -21). In fact, Pelosi’s net favorability rating is the highest it’s been in CNN/SSRS’s polling since January 2009, which certainly suggests coming out for impeachment hasn’t hurt her.

This week, we got our first nonpartisan poll of the Mississippi governor’s race since July. According to Mason-Dixon Polling, Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves leads Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood just 46 percent to 43 percent. The election is on Nov. 5.

While national polls indicate that granting statehood to Washington, D.C., is unpopular with the public, a Washington Post/University of Maryland poll finds that Maryland residents support it, 51 percent to 40 percent. What they don’t want is retrocession, an alternative proposal to enfranchise Washingtonians by re-combining the District with Maryland. Marylanders oppose that idea 57 percent to 36 percent.

According to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, 55 percent of Republicans whose primary news source is Fox News say there is nothing that Trump could do to lose their approval. Only 29 percent of Republicans whose primary news source is not Fox News say that. PRRI also told The Washington Post that 71 percent of Fox-favoring Republicans strongly approve of Trump’s job performance, while only 39 percent of non-Fox-favoring Republicans do.

The World Series started on Tuesday, and according to an Ipsos poll conducted before Game 1, 46 percent of Americans planned to follow along. Of them, 37 percent were root, root, rooting for the Washington Nationals,1 while 33 percent wanted the Houston Astros to win2 (28 percent have no preference). However, Series watchers thought the Astros would win, 55 percent to 23 percent — although that was before the Nationals won the first two games of the seven-game series.

You may be too old to go trick-or-treating, but there’s another way to get your hands on those sweet, sweet Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. According to a YouGov poll, 74 percent of parents of children under 18 say they steal at least a few pieces of candy from their kids’ Halloween hauls. Four percent even say they eat all of it — now that’s scary.

Trump approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, 40.6 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 54.6 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -14 points). At this time last week, 41.6 percent approved and 54.0 percent disapproved (for a net approval rating of -12.4 points). One month ago, Trump had an approval rating of 43.1 percent and a disapproval rating of 53.0 percent, for a net approval rating of -9.9 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot, Democrats currently lead by 6.3 percentage points (46.6 percent to 40.3 percent). Those numbers are unchanged from a week ago. At this time last month, voters preferred Democrats by 6.8 points (46.8 percent to 40.0 percent).

Check out all the polls we’ve been collecting ahead of the 2020 elections.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nathaniel Rakich

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jrmartindesigns · 3 years

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Millions of Americans can’t get broadband

hen Kathi Shorey moved to a rural region of western Maine about 40 years ago, she knew she was giving up some comforts of life in the Boston suburbs. Her new home of Sweden, located 47 miles from Portland, didn’t have big box retailers or major universities, and its population of about 400 people could all fit into a single city apartment building.

Shorey never anticipated that decades later, her chosen home would make it impossible for her to work remotely and stay connected during a global pandemic — all because her internet service is too slow to reliably get online.

“Never did I think the digital divide would be so unfair,” Shorey said during a conversation on her landline phone, the only reliable way for her to communicate when she’s at home.

The registered nurse, who now teaches a nurse’s aid class, gets, at best, 3 Mbps download speeds through her service, far below the FCC’s broadband definition of 25 Mbps — a level itself that’s viewed as outdated and inadequate for today’s needs. Shorey can’t watch Netflix, and her internet is too slow for her to take classes to maintain her nursing license. Even more worrisome is Shorey’s inability to broadcast video to her nurse’s aid students while the novel coronavirus pandemic forces classes to take place remotely over Zoom.

“The issues I’m having are pretty horrific for this century,” Shorey said. “I can’t show students any video, and they have to turn off their video to hear me. I run around my house and shut off the two phones we have, and my iPad and my home computer … just so I can get a connection.”

For Shorey, the problem goes beyond just lack of internet. Inaccurate information about what service is available at her address limits the public funding providers can receive to improve their networks in her area. According to the US Federal Communications Commission’s national broadband map, which tracks internet availability, Charter Communications could provide nearly gig-speed internet access at Shorey’s home, while Consolidated Communications — her current provider — and satellite companies ViaSat and Hughes Network Systems could supply access at about broadband speeds. That conclusion is riddled with inaccuracies.

“I can’t get anything more than 3 Mbps whether I want to pay for it or not,” Shorey said.

Her story isn’t rare. Millions of Americans around the country lack access to fast internet at home, a need that’s become especially critical over the past year as the COVID-19 pandemic forced everything from family gatherings to classes and business meetings to go online. But even as President Joe Biden pushes an ambitious $20 billion plan on top of billions of dollars in funding already earmarked for unserved communities, a fundamental flaw remains in not knowing where the problems lie. The faulty FCC national broadband map has essentially made millions of Americans without fast internet “invisible,” as Microsoft put it, and unless the data improve, they’re likely to remain so.

“You cannot manage what you do not measure,” acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said in late January. “But for too long, the FCC has lacked the data it needs about precisely where service is and is not throughout the country.”

Why millions of Americans still lack broadband at a time when it’s no longer optional16:00 WATCH NOW

There’s reason to be hopeful. Thanks to $65 million in funding from Congress in December, the FCC now will require internet service providers to share more detailed data, giving a better picture of what areas are unserved by broadband. It will also have to open the map to public feedback, letting people flag when something is wrong and providing more data points on gaps. On Wednesday at the agency’s monthly meeting, Rosenworcel launched a new task force to fix the data, saying “it’s no secret that the FCC’s existing broadband maps leave a lot to be desired.”

But some experts say the new mapping parameters still aren’t granular enough, and the new maps almost certainly will arrive too late to help people during the pandemic. The updated data likely won’t be available until at least next year, the Broadband Data Task Force’s chair, Jean Kiddoo, acknowledged Wednesday. Many regions of the US can’t wait that long.

“Nobody wants to overbuild, and everybody only wants to serve the unserved,” says Peggy Schaffer, director of the ConnectMaine Authority, the state’s effort to bridge its digital divide. “But we, quite frankly, have no idea who they are.”

Unwilling to wait for the federal government, Maine, Pennsylvania, Georgia and other states have set out to build their own maps, drawing on speed test data, specific information from ISPs about what homes they serve, and other resources to find out where their gaps are.

The FCC’s effort is, however, a step in the right direction in addressing a problem that has grown in severity over the last quarter century.

Faulty maps

The broadband mapping problem goes back to the early days of the internet, when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 required the FCC to collect semiannual data from providers about which ZIP codes they serviced. But the agency didn’t publicly disclose the internet service providers in each area.

Thirteen years later, the government tried to make the information more transparent. A provision of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, signed by President Barack Obama, mandated the development of a National Broadband Plan and the creation of a US broadband map by mid-February 2011.

To build the map, internet service providers twice a year give the FCC what’s called Form 477 data that details coverage areas and speeds. But the FCC doesn’t check the data; it just relies on the ISPs to report accurate information. And the speeds that service providers list are what their advertised maximum speeds are, not necessarily the everyday reality. Pricing data is kept confidential, which means broadband speeds may be available but at very high rates.

The FCC’s broadband map overstates the number of Americans with fast internet at home. FCC

An even bigger issue: If even one home in a census block — the smallest geographic area used by the US Census Bureau — can get broadband service, the entire area is considered served. In rural areas, that home may be the only place with internet service for miles around. And the data only shows places service providers could provide broadband within 10 business days of a request, not areas that are actually connected. As of the 2010 census, there were 11.2 million census blocks in the US. By comparison, there are an estimated 150 million parcels — the way land is divided for taxes — in the country.

“Census blocks in America are highly irregular in terms of size and shape,” said Tyler Cooper, editor-in-chief of internet service data tracker BroadbandNow. “It could be a single city block in urban areas or dozens of square miles in a rural area. … You have this vast issue of overreporting happening.”

Accepting an ISP’s data without checking it can be problematic. Barrier Communications, a New York-based ISP that does business as BarrierFree, submitted data for 2019’s broadband report that said it provided speedy internet coverage for nearly 20% of the US population. That would make it the fourth largest US service provider in terms of people covered despite being in business only about six months. The FCC accepted that information without checking it. It was only after nonprofit Free Press pointed out the “implausible” nature of the claims that the FCC revised its figures on the number of Americans covered by broadband.

The flawed maps have presented a big problem as governments try to distribute broadband funding. If a census block is considered covered by the FCC map, it’s not eligible for federal assistance. That’s particularly worrisome as the US distributes billions through the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, which the FCC has called its “largest investment ever to close [the] digital divide.”https://ift.tt/3pKlkJy

A year ago, the FCC approved the disbursement of $20.4 billion to ensure that residents in rural areas of the US have access to broadband internet connections. The funding will be allocated over the next 10 years to broadband providers, cable providers, wireless companies and electric co-ops to build access to unserved Americans. At the time, two of the five agency commissioners, including Rosenworcel, dissented in part to the plan because it relies on what they and many others in the country have determined to be faulty data. Those bad maps have led to issues with RDOF.

“We shouldn’t be surprised, in some ways, that parties are already raising some instances where mapping related problems are arising in RDOF in the phase one results,” FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks said Wednesday.

There’s also a massive lag between when the data is submitted and when the public sees it. The latest FCC data, published the day before Biden’s inauguration, compiles data provided through the end of 2019. It found that fewer than 14.5 million Americans — or 4.4% of the population — lack access to fixed broadband, which is defined as download speeds of 25 Mbps and upload speeds of 3 Mbps. The previous year, 18.1 million Americans didn’t have access to broadband at home.

“Since 2016, the number of Americans living in rural areas lacking access to 25/3 Mbps service has fallen more than 46%,” the FCC said in its report. “As a result, the rural-urban divide is rapidly closing.”

The FCC also said the entire US population has access to broadband internet when satellite service is included — an idea that broadband experts describe as laughable.

In reality, the FCC has been dramatically underestimating the number of people without broadband access for years, something Congress and even the FCC itself have acknowledged time and time again.

SEE ALSO

School is starting — and the broadband gap will be a massive problem

In remote Alaska, broadband for all remains a dream. So a school district got creative

As COVID-19 ravages the world, closing the digital divide is more critical than ever

How faster internet is being blocked by politics and poverty throughout the eastern US

Microsoft over the past couple of years has looked at how quickly people across the US download its software and security updates as a way to quantify how many have speedy internet access. In December, it said that about 157.3 million people in the US, or 48% of the population, don’t use the internet at broadband speeds. And BroadbandNow, which tracks internet service and pricing by combining Form 477 data with other sources, a year ago estimated that at least 42 million, or 13% of the population, didn’t have broadband at all, double the FCC’s declaration at the time.

“Right now we’re in this bizarre situation where even though we know — we know — that there’s something dreadfully awry with our broadband [data collection], as a matter of national policy dating back 15 years, we simply refuse to collect the information that would explicate that,” said Sascha Meinrath, a broadband data expert who serves as director of X-Lab, a future-focused technology policy and innovation think tank, and holds the endowed Palmer Chair in Telecommunications at Penn State University.

Getting more granular

In August 2019, the FCC adopted rules for collecting more detailed information on where ISPs provide coverage and where they do not as part of its Digital Opportunity Data Collection process. But it wasn’t moving fast enough for Congress — or the constituents who have complained loudly and frequently. Nearly a year later, President Donald Trump signed the Broadband DATA Act to order the FCC to collect the more “granular, precise coverage data.” Still, the data collection process faced even more delays, largely because then-Chairman Ajit Pai said the FCC didn’t have the funds to carry out the act. Congress finally allocated $65 million for mapping as part of December’s COVID-19 relief bill.

What the FCC now will do is require more precise data from broadband service providers in the form of “shapefiles.” Instead of giving information at the census block level, the ISPs will give more detailed measurements through “polygons” that are overlaid on census blocks to depict the areas where broadband-capable networks exist.

“We will no longer count everyone in the census block as served if just one person is served,” Pai said when unveiling the new mapping plan in August 2019.The states are the ones who are innovating on this. We know we can’t wait for the feds to fix it. We waited, we’re done, so we’re moving. Peggy Schaffer, director of the ConnectMaine Authority, the state’s effort to bridge its digital divide

The shapefile plan is something that ISPs championed, and it solves the problem of overstating coverage, said Steven Morris, vice president and deputy general counsel at NCTA-The Internet & Television Association. The group, formerly known as the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, represents the country’s biggest cable providers like Comcast and programmers like AMC Networks, and it’s one of the most influential lobbying groups in America.

While the shapefiles will be more granular, they’re still not down to the address level. The FCC proposed that before, but it’s something ISPs have successfully fought. In 2017, the NCTA said providing street address-level data would cause its members to incur “significant costs,” while Verizon argued it would create “large and unjustified burdens” on providers. This time around, ISPs can share address-level data with the FCC, but it’s not a requirement.

“It’s hard to do in a way that’s as accurate as doing the shapefile,” Morris said. If a provider is greatly expanding its network, it could inadvertently undercount the addresses it serves, he said, while construction of new homes could also impact the accuracy.

Along with more granular data, the FCC also must create a way to gather public feedback on whether their homes and businesses are covered or not. Today, consumers have no official recourse when their homes are listed as covered but actually aren’t. The new crowdsourcing method is expected to help check the data given by ISPs.

“It’s not just relying on what industry tells it,” said Gigi Sohn, an FCC staffer from 2013 to 2016 under Chairman Tom Wheeler and current distinguished fellow at Georgetown Law Institute for Technology Law & Policy. A common criticism about the new plan is that it still relies too much on what ISPs are willing to give, instead of requiring even more granular information and data about pricing.

Problems remain

While the maps may be better than what came before, they likely will still not be enough to truly give an accurate picture of where broadband exists, experts say.

The FCC still hasn’t “gotten rid of the ‘could provide service’ versus ‘does provide service,'” Sohn said. That hides areas where people may be disconnected for affordability reasons or other factors that contribute to the digital divide.

Under the new rules, ISPs can only count an area as covered if it could set up a connection within 10 business days of a customer’s request and without requiring resources or construction costs higher than an ordinary service activation fee. In the previous rules, a service provider could — and did — charge people thousands of dollars to extend service to their homes, even if the official broadband map showed service was available there.

Steve Alexander’s vacation home in Maryland lacked broadband internet — until he and a colleague paid to wire their homes. Getty Images

That happened to Annapolis, Maryland-based Steve Alexander in the early days of the pandemic. The chief technology officer of Ciena, a telecom equipment and software provider, wanted to spend more time at his vacation home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, but there was just one problem — internet was virtually nonexistent, despite the FCC data saying broadband was available. Alexander’s DSL connection was too slow for him and a colleague who lived nearby to work from home, and a local ISP said it would cost $25,000 to $30,000 to extend service to their addresses.

Alexander ended up lucking out when a local power company dug trenches to make repairs. He convinced it to dig to his location and that of his colleague, which allowed the cable company to install fiber. But none of that was free. It still cost them both about $5,000 to $7,000 apiece, Alexander said.

“I never felt the maps were accurate in terms of real availability,” he said. “Would a normal homeowner be able to order a service based on that map and be guaranteed to get delivery? The answer is no.”

At the same time, the FCC is only requiring information about broadband availability at homes and businesses, not anchor institutions like schools, libraries, health care facilities, public housing community centers and houses of worship. While the FCC in 2010 issued a goal for all anchor institutions to have gigabit-speed connectivity by 2020, the country fell short of that goal, said John Windhausen Jr., executive director of the Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband Coalition, a public interest group.

“Even worse, we don’t even know how far away from the goal we are,” he said. “We’re not collecting the info that would tell us how fast we have to go and how much investment we need to make to get gigabit connectivity.” The new mapping plan doesn’t change that. Never did I think the digital divide would be so unfair. Kathi Shorey, a registered nurse and nurse’s aid instructor living without broadband internet in Maine

Still, the polygon shapefiles could give a better view of connectivity in agricultural areas, says Dan Leibfried, director of automation and autonomy at Deere and a member of the FCC’s task force for precision agriculture connectivity. That will be key as farming becomes even more technology- and data- driven than it is today.

“If you really want the world’s leading agricultural industry, you have to solve for this digital divide … to give customers the best opportunity to make decisions in real time,” he said. “I would love to see it solved yesterday.”

Getting even better data

While nearly everyone agrees the FCC’s current maps are bad, some researchers have tried to quantify just how inaccurate they can be. Meinrath and a team sought to show the gaps in Pennsylvania using speed tests. Along with his role at the university, Meinrath is also co-founder of Measurement Labs, an open-source network performance project. When someone Googles “speed test,” the testing box that appears at the top of the results is powered by M-Lab technology.

While FCC maps in 2017 showed Pennsylvania was blanketed with broadband, over 11 million speed tests conducted by Meinrath and his team in 2018 found no county where at least 50% of the population had access to broadband. Because FCC maps rely on ISPs to self-report their coverage areas, there’s often overreporting.

“I want to force the ISPs to be accountable for what they themselves are reporting to the FCC,” he said. “That has to be the next step.”

Pennsylvania ended up putting together its own statewide map — taking into account ISP-provided data, FCC information and speed tests — to help providers apply for RDOF funding last year.

Pennsylvania built a detailed broadband map to identify where to steer funding for better coverage. Screenshot by Shara Tibken/CNET

Another group of academic researchers sought to quantify just how inaccurate FCC maps can sometimes be by looking at 4G LTE coverage in New Mexico, many parts of which are rural or include tribal lands. And they wanted to determine what data could be useful for figuring out gaps.

Instead of running speed tests, they partnered with Skyhook, a location data company, for what they called “incidental” data on where there was coverage and what the strength of the signal was. Skyhook’s technology runs in the background of popular apps — it doesn’t specify which ones but says they include programs like social media and location services — and measures where people are accessing those apps while going about their daily lives. It doesn’t track a connection’s speed but helps researchers know if a location has a 4G LTE signal at all.

“That’s really powerful because those are actual measurements,” said Elizabeth M. Belding, a computer science professor at the University of California in Santa Barbara and one of the authors of a new report on the findings.

The researchers compared the FCC’s data with that from Skyhook and then actually went to parts of New Mexico in May 2019 to run their own speed tests and see for themselves what the coverage is like. What they found is FCC data diverged from Skyhook information the most in rural and tribal areas, and the on-the-ground measurement also varied in some cases. In one example, FCC T-Mobile data showed coverage in 92% of tribal rural blocks, but Skyhook showed coverage in only 63% of the blocks, the researchers said in their report.

“The takeaway is that the quality of the data is very variable,” said Morgan Vigil-Hayes, an assistant professor of computer science at Northern Arizona University and one of the report’s authors. “They all have different benefits. … What we’ve shown is we can take [the FCC’s map] and use it as a starting point in combination with other data sets to be able to really identify where much more high-quality measurement needs to happen.”

Georgia turned to a different methodology to build a map that broadband expert Sohn called “the most granular in the nation.” After passing a law to keep ISP data confidential, it worked to gather information from the providers about the exact addresses they serve. But just having the ISP data of served locations and a list of all the other Enhanced 911 addresses wasn’t enough.

Georgia has built its own broadband maps using service provider data and address information from a real estate data company. The dark orange areas have broadband internet, the beige are unserved and gray areas are where there are no locations. Along with the full state view, Georgia offers a county broadband map. Screenshot by Shara Tibken/CNET

Georgia needed some way to know what unserved addresses were actually homes or businesses, not barns or other structures that didn’t need broadband. For that, the state worked with LightBox, a commercial real estate data provider that has information on all addresses in the US. ISPs provided Georgia with data on the locations they served, and the state then matched that with LightBox’s data to identify homes and businesses that didn’t have broadband.

“In order to get it at a granular level like we did, you do have to do this location-level approach,” said Deana Perry, executive director of the Georgia Broadband Deployment Initiative.

What Georgia ultimately found was that 507,000 locations, or 10% of homes and businesses, lack access to broadband, and in rural areas, about 30% of locations are unserved. The FCC, in its most recent report in January, said only 6.2% of Georgia locations didn’t have fixed broadband.

LightBox, meanwhile, has looked for ways to replicate Georgia’s granular map without getting data directly from service providers, CEO Eric Frank said. One method involved collecting telemetry data from cellphones to see if that could identify coverage gaps. While the information helped approximate broad coverage, “it’s not going to give you the precision” that you get by collecting address data directly from ISPs, Frank said.

“The most comprehensive way to do that is … somebody could say to an ISP, send us everything you’ve got, every address that you have in the United States,” he said. “It’s easy for us to take that file and load it into the system, then take the files from the other ISPs. … We can solve the United States in one shot.”

Holding out hope

Maine is counting on speed test data to pinpoint its unserved areas and allow it to direct funding to providers there. The week of Thanksgiving, it launched its statewide effort, encouraging consumers to run M-Lab speed tests from their homes as often as possible. Since then, nearly 17,000 people have taken its speed tests from over 13,000 unique locations.

Speed tests aren’t always useful for address-specific data but paint a picture of what an area looks like. The more tests, the better. Maine’s newest grants for unserved areas will be based on its new mapping effort. One of the four possible ways to determine if an area can get funding is if speed tests show it doesn’t have broadband.

Maine is using speed test data to figure out where gaps exist in its broadband coverage. Since the week of Thanksgiving, residents of the state — population 1.3 million — have taken nearly 17,000 tests. Screenshot by Shara Tibken/CNET

While it knows speed tests aren’t perfect, the data’s still better than what the FCC provides, said Schaffer, the head of Maine’s broadband efforts.

“The states are the ones who are innovating on this,” she says. “We know we can’t wait for the feds to fix it. We waited, we’re done, so we’re moving.”

As for Shorey, she’s anticipating her next call from Charter’s Spectrum, urging her to install its internet service at her home before it realizes she actually can’t. Her research into SpaceX’s Starlink service, which some believe can help connect remote parts of the US, hasn’t been reassuring so far. Connectivity through the low Earth orbit satellites costs $500 for equipment and $99 a month for the beta tests. Registering doesn’t guarantee service.

For now, Shorey’s best hope is for Consolidated to use Rural Digital Opportunity Fund money to upgrade the connectivity in her neighborhood.

Mike Schultz, senior vice president of regulatory affairs for Consolidated, said his company already has updated 760,000 rural locations to multi-gig fiber over the past few years. Consolidated now plans to upgrade another 1.6 million customer addresses in the US, or about 70% of its service area, and is counting on federal funding for assistance.

“We’re hopeful that the next phase of RDOF will help areas just like Sweden, Maine,” Schultz said in a statement.

For some of Consolidated’s customers, getting fiber could take five years. Maybe by then, the maps will catch up.

“I’ve been waiting 20 years for something to happen, and nothing has really happened,” Shorey said. “It’s not fair. It’s not OK to live in a place that doesn’t have adequate communication.”

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nowhere-hunch · 3 years

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Social constructs

A few years ago, I started hearing the phrase “X is a social construct” in the context of social justice. First “gender is a social construct”, then “sex”, and lately I’ve been hearing “race” as well. At first, I didn’t understand the concept well, but as time has gone on I think I’ve gotten a better idea. Essentially, I think a good definition for “social construct” could be “a shared framework people use to cooperatively handle infinitely varied natural phenomena.”

I think the best way to explain this would be to work through a common, pretty non-controversial example: color.

Color is a social construct

“Color” is our brains reaction to light waves hitting our eyes – we perceive different wavelengths within a range of “visible light” as different colors. Since there are an infinite number of wavelengths within that range, technically there are an infinite number of colors.

However, when people talk about color, we are never (or very, very rarely) talking about a specific wavelength of light, but a whole bunch of wavelengths that are next to each other on the spectrum. Essentially, we have divided a continuous spectrum (a rainbow) into several bands (ROYGBIV). This allows us to more easily utilize the concept of “color” in our everyday lives. You can say “These berries are ripe when they’re red” while accounting for all the different variations of red that might occur between individual fruits, for example.

For this to work, the person you’re talking to needs to know (at least approximately) where you put the “boundaries” between the different color bands. As long as you two agree, the placement of these boundaries can be completely arbitrary. This is where the “social” in “social construct” comes from – our concepts are validated by social agreement rather than any actual reflection of physical reality.

When you consider this, several observations follow:

These “boundaries” may be agreed on by one group of people, but they change according to time/place/context.

If you speak another language, you may know that the agreements people have for talking about color vary by culture. For example, in Japanese the word for “blue” overlaps considerably with what we in English would call “green” (e.g. the color of green traffic lights). While English traditionally splits the rainbow into 7 bands (ROYGBIV), other languages may use more or fewer.

Although the whole society appears to agree, it’s likely that no two individuals actually completely agree on the precise placement of the boundaries.

If you give a hundred, or a thousand people a picture of the color spectrum and ask them to draw lines where red turns to orange, orange turns to yellow, etc., you’d most likely not find any two who put them in exactly the same places. Yet we are all (for the most part) still able to communicate successfully with each other about color.

Social constructs usually actually describe the intersection of multiple natural phenomena, even if we don’t always realize it.

In most art programs, when you select a “color” to paint with, you are actually working with three different “spectrums”:

“Hue” – the rainbow spectrum we’ve been talking about

“Saturation” – how bright the color is (full saturation = fully colored, no saturation = gray)

“Lightness” (full lightness = white, no lightness = black, mid lightness = “true” color)

Thus, we get words like “maroon”, “periwinkle”, “navy”, “brown”, etc. The usual answer to “what is color?” doesn’t include any of those. Our social construct of color actually includes not only the bands of the rainbow, but also other attributes like saturation and lightness. This is because our human experience of color is greatly affected by these other attributes, and our social constructs describe our *experience* of a phenomenon, not the actual reality of it.

Two people using the same social construct may sort the same object into different categories for a number of reasons.

First, we already noted how most people probably have slightly different boundaries between categories. Physical differences in our eyes or brains might also affect how we actually perceive color (e.g. colorblindness). Think about “the dress” – many people sorted that image into completely different color categories. Remember that social constructs describe our experience of a phenomenon, not the actual reality of it.

In some cases, we use different attributes to sort phenomena depending on context. Sometimes when we say “color” we mean “hue” and sometimes we mean a hue/saturation/lightness combo. When you’re shopping for clothes, you’ll probably say “I’m looking for a maroon shirt” but when you’re describing your purchase to someone you might say “I’ll wear my new red shirt.”

Social constructs are based on constructed stereotypes but impact our reality in measurable ways.

Each wavelength of light is a completely different color. As stated, physically there is no reason why we have sorted them into bands the way we have… or is there? There are generalizations people make about entire bands of colors all the time: “red is energizing”, “blue is calming”, “purple is luxurious”, etc. There’s a kind of chicken and egg problem:

Did we sort colors the way we did because they have these common characteristics? OR

Do these colors have common characteristics because we have sorted them together?

The fact that the “common attributes” colors are thought to have vary by time (e.g. blue used to be associated with girls and pink with boys, the opposite of today), place (e.g. in the west, white is associated with purity and happiness, while it is associated with death in some Asian cultures), and context (e.g. red could be connected to either anger or love) makes me think more the latter than the former, though I’m sure there’s a mixture of both.

However, it doesn’t really matter whether colors actually have those attributes. Just the fact that these attributes are part of our social construct has a measurable effect on our experience of the physical phenomena. There are experiments that show that people are actually energized by red and calmed by blue, even though those concepts are culturally specific.

As stated, it’s often possible to trace these stereotypes back to some actual reality. Purple is considered luxurious because purple dyes used to be very rare and expensive. But note how the stereotype has remained in place and still has an effect on people’s lived experiences even though reality has changed.

Social constructs usually don’t distinguish between assumptions made about an item’s category and assumptions made based on an items’s category.

The human brain likes to take shortcuts, and one way it does this is by being loose with the distinction between “conditions” and “consequences” of a given object being sorted into a given category. I.e. there’s a difference between “these are the attributes I use to decide that this object belongs in this category” and “these are the attributes I can assume this object has by virtue of being sorted into this category,” but this often gets ignored.

A simple example would be to say something like, “Well, purple is a luxurious color, so I will call any color I decide is luxurious purple.” This isn’t especially common with colors, since it’s really easy for most of us to sort colors by sight and so we don’t need a shortcut, but it happens a lot with other social constructs I’ll touch on later.

Social constructs are not inherently “bad”.

Saying that something is a social construct is not saying that it isn’t real or doesn’t exist or doesn’t impact people’s lived experiences – in fact it’s saying the opposite. A social construct must be based on something real and important to our lives, otherwise we wouldn’t bother to create a social construct to allow us to conceptualize and communicate about it.

Social constructs are necessary for us to live in society, it’s just important that we not mistake our social construct for the actual reality they are meant to describe. Social constructs describe our experience of a phenomenon, not the actual reality of it. “A map is not the territory,” as they say.

Anatomy of a social construct

Now, we can list some things we would expect to find with any social construct:

One or more natural phenomena that are a) experienced by people in infinitely (or practically infinitely) varied ways and b) something that we care about enough to want to think and talk about with others.

A set of categories people sort the experiences of these phenomena into.

For each category, a set of attributes associated with items in that category. These may be used to sort items into categories AND/OR to make assumptions about items after they have been sorted.

We would expect the categories and/or attributes associated with them to change depending on time, place, or context.

With this in mind, we can start looking at some more interesting examples.

Gender is a social construct

If gender is a social construct, we would expect it to be built on some actual natural phenomena. The question is, what is that phenomena exactly, especially if it is distinct from physical sex? I don’t think we as a society have a very good idea of this, which is why, to me, this example is more difficult to talk about than color, sex, or race.

My theory is this: the phenomenon behind what we think of as “gender” is individuals’ specialization in social tasks.

I think this is why sex and gender are so closely related for many societies. The earliest social activities humans were doing were primarily related to reproduction: courtship/mating and parenting, so it makes some amount of sense that individuals would specialize in the tasks required for these activities based on their role in the reproductive process. Someone needs to feed the child; it makes sense for someone whose body produces milk to be responsible for that. And if they’re spending their time doing that, then someone else will have to specialize in the other things that need to be done.

These roles and specialties weren’t (and still aren’t) exactly the same in every family, so as families came together and started to talk with each other about their social roles and specialties, the social construct of gender developed. The concepts of “man” and “woman” corresponded pretty closely with a person’s physical sex. But as human society became more complex, additional social tasks needed to be fulfilled related to spirituality/religion, medicine, industry/technology, etc. These were worked into the gender social construct in different ways depending on the society, resulting in the diversity we see today.

My basis for this theory is just considering *why* it matters to people what someone’s gender is. Humans care about color because it helps us determine what food is good to eat (among other reasons), we care about physical sex because it allows us to find a partner we will be able to reproduce with, why do we care about gender if it’s different than sex? I think that people use gender to make “educated” guesses about:

The language forms used when talking to or about them (e.g. pronouns)

Their roles/responsibilities within their social groups

The most effective social strategies to use with them for the given situation

Social experiences you do/don’t share with them

I.e. it’s a shortcut for figuring out social situations.

So, if we consider “gender” as a construct for describing “how people specialize in social tasks”, then there are technically as many genders as there are people alive on earth – it’s extremely unlikely that any two people will have specialized in exactly the same way. For colors, we mainly use 1-3 attributes (hue, saturation, lightness) to categorize items into categories, but for gender, although there are fewer categories, many more attributes are considered:

The roles/responsibilities you take on within your family (e.g. in raising children) or other groups/teams

The way you present yourself physically via clothing, mannerisms, etc.

Your relationship dynamics with individuals (familiar or strangers) of different genders

Hobbies and aesthetics you are drawn to

Etc.

At this point, we are realizing that our society is so complex that trying to sort every person into one of two available categories just isn’t sufficient. There are so many factors that go into “sorting” people that at this point it’s probably easier and more reliable to just have people self-identify. Sex is not a reliable indicator for all these other things, nor is appearance, interests, skills, etc.

So, we have the natural phenomenon: groups of humans divide responsibility for social tasks between individuals. We have categories for sorting that phenomenon: “man” and “woman” traditionally, and other “nonbinary” categories becoming more prominent as time goes on, and we have lots and lots and lots of attributes associated with those categories. Think of all the stereotypes we use to make assumptions both about a person’s gender and based on a person’s gender.

We can also see how both the available categories and the attributes associated with them differ by time and place. There are many cultures all over the world that have included more than two genders for a very long time. One example is “two-spirit” people in Native American societies. Attributes that are considered “feminine” or “masculine” by one culture may elsewhere be acceptable or encouraged in other genders. For example, in western cultures men are discouraged from styling their hair and face with lots of product, but it is encouraged in some Asian cultures.

This is why gender is considered a social construct: we think about it using concepts that are not a one-to-one correspondence with reality, but are instead validated by social agreement – we as a group all agree to talk about it in a common way.

Sex is a social construct

I think most people are more ready to call gender a social construct than sex, even though to me sex has more in common with the color example than gender does.

Our social construct of sex is based on the natural phenomena of human beings possessing an infinite variety of sex organs – no two people have a set that is exactly the same. The fact that a body is considered “male” regardless of the length of the penis or whether or not it is circumcised is evidence of this.

What makes the social construct of sex difficult for people to grasp, I think, is that it appears to be quite close to a direct one-to-one correspondence with reality, particularly if you’re willing to ignore people with intersex conditions as “outliers” (which I think is unwise). However, if you pay close attention you can see some situations where our social construct starts to fail. This is because although people usually assume “sex” is decided using a single attribute, our social construct actually considers several:

The (visual) sex organs you were born with

The sex organs you currently possess (“sex change” operations may be relatively new, but eunuchs are an ancient phenomenon)

The sex of partners you could potentially reproduce with

Presence or absence of a Y chromosome

Hormone levels in your body

And although the categories and attributes appear fairly constant across place and time, they do vary according to context. This is reflected quite obviously in recent controversies about intersex athletes. Medical and social establishments decide sex based on the appearance of sex organs at birth, while athletic organizations often instead base it on current hormone levels. That’s how someone can live their entire life with no doubt they are 100% female, only to be disqualified from sporting events because they meet the criteria for being “male”.

Again, saying that something is a social construct isn’t saying that it’s not real. In human reproduction there are two roles involved – an egg cell needs to meet a sperm cell, and there are two “configurations” of sex organs that correspond to these roles. This is not being disputed. The social construct is how we “sort” people when these configurations are not exactly consistent and not always as obvious or simple as we might assume.

So, in summary:

Natural phenomenon: People are born with unique sex organs

Categories: “Male” and “female” traditionally, “intersex” more prominent recently, “eunuch”/“neuter” historically

Attributes associated with categories: sex organs visible at birth, sex organs currently possessed, presence/absence of Y chromosome, levels of “sex hormones” in the body

Race is a social construct

Race is another social construct that people might have a hard time recognizing because it is apparently rooted in physical reality - the physical differences that manifest in people due to their genetic ancestry are usually highly visible. The social construct of race is how we conceptualize this phenomenon when no two people (who aren’t siblings) share exactly the same genetic ancestry.

One thing that makes it pretty obvious race is a social construct is that the available categories we “sort” people into vary so greatly by time, place, and context that it’s difficult to even come up with an acceptable list. In everyday life, it seems like we in the U.S. tend to categorize race roughly by continent of genetic origin:

White (Europe)

Black (Africa)

Asian (Asia, sometimes including Oceana and the Middle East, sometimes these are their own categories)

Native American (Americas)

“Latino” is an interesting category. Technically the definition refers to national origin (someone of any race from a Latin American country), but people who only have genetic ancestry from those places are (sometimes, depending on context) considered Latino as well as or instead of Native American.

Notice how these don’t necessarily correspond to the options you can pick from on “official” forms, which for example sometimes include “multiple races”/“two or more races” as an option. In many other contexts someone who is multiracial is seen as being sort of half-categorized in each applicable race, regardless of if this accurately reflects their experiences.

Another way you can tell that “race” is a social construct is that it takes into account more than one phenomenon when “sorting” people. For example, religion and shared *cultural* ancestry has a long history of being tied to race. That is why Jewish people are (depending on context) considered a race even without all having a shared genetic ancestry. There are also Muslim minorities throughout the world today that are treated essentially as separate races locally.

Note that the categories used for race change over time. Catholic people were in a somewhat similar position to Jewish people at one time; remember that the U.S. didn’t have a president who was Catholic until JFK. Catholics were actually regularly targeted by the KKK, and anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiments were closely intertwined. Another example is Moors, which is a racial category we don’t really hear these days, at least in the U.S. These were *technically* people of mixed Arab and European origins, but the term was also more widely used to refer to Muslims in Europe generally. Shakespeare’s character Othello is a famous character who is a Moor.

Another very heavily used attribute associated with race is a person’s physical appearance. Depending on context (such as before we had a good understanding of DNA), this might even be more important than genetic ancestry. For example, think about the “paper bag test” that was used in apartheid South Africa – if your skin is darker than a paper bag, you’re black, regardless of your parentage. On the other hand, there have been examples in more recent times of people being forced to change their racial identification because it was discovered that they had ancestors from a particular place, even though it was in no way evident in their appearance or recent family history.

So, in summary:

Natural phenomenon: People have unique physical characteristics based on their ancestry

Categories: White, Black, Asian, “PoC”, Jewish, Catholic, Irish, Moor, etc. depending on time, place, and context

Attributes: genetic ancestry, cultural ancestry/religion, physical appearance

Conclusion

So, this is how I have been thinking about the concept of “social constructs” - I make no claim that this is in any way “correct” but I have found it helpful and maybe others will as well. What this all comes down to is essentially a) “beware of stereotypes” and b) “knowledge can be validated either by accurately reflecting reality or by social agreement - don’t confuse the two”.

Or if you need something simpler: “be respectful and believe what people tell you about their identities and experiences.”

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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THAT MIGHT BE WORTH EXPLORING

You can't just say Err to the user of a stove. Though serfs were in principle forbidden to leave their manors, it can't have been the personal qualities of early union organizers that made unions successful, but must have been. And it turns out that was all you needed to solve the problem.1 But investing in concepts isn't stupid; it's what VCs do, and the difference is individual tastes. Maybe options should be replaced with something tied more directly to earnings. A significant number of would-be startup founders are probably dissuaded from doing it by their parents. Money matters are particularly likely to become the top idea in your mind. It's more important than anything else.

Well, yes, but you have to work as if it were inherently stupid to invest in them. Another way to decrease the risk is to join an existing startup instead of starting your own. He knew as well as they were ever going to be negative. For example, once computers get so cheap that most people never seem to make is to take advantage of direct contact with the medium. I have a general idea of the greatest masters did this so well that you envision the scene for yourself.2 Simple as it seems, that's the recipe for success. That sounds right, but is it simply a description of how to be successful in general? Indeed, they're bad in a particular way: they have the same drab clunkiness as anything else that comes out of a garage in Silicon Valley would feel part of an organization whose structure gives each person freedom in inverse proportion to the mere discomfort of wearing such clothes.

One of the reasons kids give up drawing at ten or so is that they decide to start drawing like grownups, and one that most people can have one of their own. Everyone knows computer science and electrical engineering are related, but precisely because everyone knows it, importing ideas from one to the other doesn't yield great profits. Which means for a group of 10 people within a large organization divided into groups in this way, but I found the same problem there.3 But is that more important than that they learn to write well? For competitors, list the top 3 and explain in one sentence each what they lack that you have. Then would-be founders can use this as a checklist to examine their own feelings. You don't need to write anything, though? The Defense Department does a fine though expensive job of defending the country, but they wouldn't now. One is that companies will inevitably slow down as they grow larger, no matter how hard they try to measure, and to him they looked wooden and unnatural. It's hard enough to overcome one's own misconceptions without having to think about how to solve it. This was my reason for not starting a startup. They also know that big projects will by their sheer bulk impress the audience.

Eventually everyone will learn by word of mouth. I got done that day, the answer would have been delighted at first to be bought for $2 million, but are now set on world domination. As we stood there, he said. It's not just a synonym for annoying. The biggest spammers could probably protect their servers against auto-retrieving filters. Which means if you want to hear; an interview with a random alum; a high school record that's largely an index of obedience. Indeed, food is an excellent metaphor to explain what's wrong with their lives, the first paragraph sounds like the sort of place that has conspicuous monuments.

This tells you how much to trust your instincts when you disagree with authorities, whether it's worth going through the usual channels to become one yourself, and perhaps most dangerous, the tendency of such work to become a duty rather than a pleasure. Most large organizations and many small ones are steeped in it. It's this end that gives rise to phrases like those who can't do, teach. Of course the habits of mind to invoke. Though the Web has been around for more than ten people. Experts expect to throw away some early work. Much Renaissance art was in its time considered shockingly secular: according to Vasari, Botticelli repented and gave up painting, and Fra Bartolommeo and Lorenzo di Credi actually burned some of their work. The most amusing thing written during this period, Liudprand of Cremona's Embassy to Constantinople, is, I suspect, mostly inadvertantly so. At the bottom are business, literature, and the weather is still fabulous. Work like a dog being taken for a walk, instead of fleeing as soon as conventional working hours end.

The most valuable truths are the ones sitting back with slightly pained expressions. In the mid twentieth century there was a vogue for setting text in sans-serif fonts. In math and engineering, recursion, especially, less is more. You can sit down with you and cook up some promising project. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be the one to discover its replacement. Whereas there appears to be great demand for celebrity gossip magazines. Just as inviting people over forces you to think well.4 And this is not a reference work. Unnecessary meetings, pointless disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people's mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes. That's what a metaphor is: a function applied to an argument of the wrong kind of people, I like to work with a huge weight of expectation on his shoulders. What makes the nerds rich, usually, is stock options. This problem afflicts not just every era, but in both cases we suggested their first priority should be to find a cofounder, what should you do?

What would someone who was the opposite of down and dirty would be up and clean. So working for yourself makes your brain more powerful in the same place they come to meet investors. And yet Y Combinator showed us we were still overestimating people who'd been to elite colleges. But does it do this out of frivolity? The unfortunate writer would then sit down to work with you on your current idea, switch to an idea people want to lead in it, and they all said they'd prefer to hire someone who'd tried to start a startup doing something technically difficult, just write enterprise software. Audiences have to be resourceful. But for what it's worth, as a sort of golden triangle involving doctors, Mercedes 450SLs, and tennis. What you want to know whether to recruit someone as a cofounder. The finance guys seemed scrupulous about reporting earnings. It is possible to slow time somewhat. I will get in trouble for appearing to be writing about things I don't understand. It seems that, for the average engineer, more options just means more work for me, because just in the last ten years the Internet has the most effect.

I didn't want as the top one, rather than because they wanted to; they're probably required to by law.5 There are two main reasons. If you'd been around when that change began around 1000 in Europe it would have seemed to nearly everyone that running off to the city to make your fortune was a crazy thing to do, at least, how I write one. Large organizations have different aims from hackers. They're not just beautiful, but strangely beautiful. They would just look at you blankly. It seems obvious when you put it that way too.

Notes

What they must do is fund medical research labs; commercializing whatever new discoveries the boffins throw off is as straightforward as building a new version from which I removed a pair of metaphors that made them register. There are fields now in which internal limits are expressed. But that turned out to be on fewer boards at once, or the presumably larger one who shouldn't? A more powerful than ever.

Look at what adults told children in the world, but less than 1. How many times that conversation was repeated. Till then they had no government powerful enough to supply the activation energy required to switch to OSX.

To do this all the page-generating templates are still a dick move. Become correspondingly more important than the long tail for sports may be to write an essay that will cause the brand gap between the top schools are, which shows how unimportant the Arpanet which became the Internet. The VCs recapitalize the company and fundraising at the exact same thing—trying to figure this out.

Incidentally, this is the way and run the programs on the proceeds of the biggest discoveries in any era if people are like sheep, but they were friendlier to developers than Apple is now the founder visa in a rice cooker, if you don't even sound that plausible. Org Worrying that Y Combinator was a false positive, this is largely true, because for times over a hundred and one VC. If you don't know yet what they're really saying is they want it.

That's the trouble with fleas, they will come at an academic talk might appreciate a joke, they have that glazed over look. Most smart high school junior. The other reason they pay a premium for you; who knows who you start fundraising, because it aggregates data from so many people mistakenly think it was too late to launch.

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futureshawolhearts · 6 years

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teacher au 2/?

like 1.5K words, still minkey. less stuff happens but there’s a lil more background

(( @minhoinator @taespoon-of-sugar if anyone else wants to be tagged, just let me know! ))

“Hey guys, sorry to interrupt your art viewing, but it’s 30 minutes before students and I have coffee for you,” Suho says in a quiet voice.

When Minho had gone to bed the night before, he had told himself that he wasn’t going to make a big deal out of helping Kibum out. And yet, here he is, already arriving at school a full half hour earlier than normal. He tells himself that it was just because he wants to make sure he has time to go over his lesson plans like normal. As he gets out of his car, he prays that Kyuhyun and Suho weren’t there already. There’s a cough behind him as he’s clocking in and when he turns around he’s face to face with Kibum. He’s got two cups of coffee in his hands and he offers one to Minho.

“I thought I’d buy you coffee since you’re taking time to show me around and everything,” Kibum starts, rushing through the words like he has a time limit to speak. “I didn’t know how you like it though, so I just got it how I like it, I hope that’s ok.”

Minho takes the cup and tastes it, moving aside so Kibum can also clock in. He’s surprised that it’s almost the same way he likes his coffee, though there’s little less cream than he likes in his.

“Is the coffee okay?” Kibum asks when he’s done.

“Yeah. Honestly at this point I’m willing to drink coffee in almost any mix, but it’s actually pretty close to how I make mine at home. Thanks.”

Kibum looks relieved. The two enter the hallway and Minho leads the way to his classroom.

“So, if you don’t mind my asking, since you’ve done mainly admin work previously, what is your degree in?” Minho asks, unlocking his classroom.

“It’s in education, with an art minor. I just wasn’t able to find a teaching job after graduation. There was a lower administration job at the school that I interned at that I was able to catch because the dean liked me. It was basically secretary work. I’m excited to be properly teaching, but it’s been a few years since I have and it was never fully on my own.”

Minho starts setting up his classroom while he listens, trying his best to keep eye contact so Kibum will continue. He knows there’s a good chance he’ll get distracted and he doesn’t want to have to rush to set up as his students are coming in.

“What were you hoping to teach when you graduated?” he asks.

Kibum looks down and takes a moment before answering. “I honestly didn’t let myself dream that far. I just wanted to be able to teach something.” Minho thinks he sees tears in Kibum’s eyes, and for a moment he thinks about comforting him; but Kibum quickly tries to blink them away and collect himself, he decides not to risk embarrassing him.

“What about you? What lead you to kindergarten?” he asks.

Minho laughs, finishing setting up the last station for the day.

“Well, I started out as regular education with a physical education minor. I had done, and still do, a lot of volunteering at sports programs, so I thought I’d become a P.E. teacher at like a middle school or something. When I went to go start shadowing and looking for an internship, the only place open was a preschool program. When I signed up for it, I was upset since it was pretty different from what I wanted. But once I started actually being there, I realized I loved it. Way more than I liked P.E. classes. So I changed it so all my electives were in early education. My advisor always joked that i was majoring in ‘sort of early education.’ I had met Kyuhyun’s boyfriend Changmin in an injury prevention class and so when this spot opened up, they let me know about it and put in a good word for me. I’ve been here for almost 3 years now and I’m so glad I took that internship.”

There’s a knock on the door and Sunny comes in.

“Hey, Minho! Just wanted to bring back the rest of your laminating sheets. You’re such a lifesaver, I really owe you one!”

She hands the box to Minho, waves to Kibum, and leaves as quickly as she came.

“And that is...?” Kibum asks.

“Sunny. The other kindergarten teacher.”

“So there’s two of you?”

“Basically. We’re a small school, as you know. Originally there was just one kindergarten class, it was just her. A lot of parents reached out to Leeteuk, saying that one class of 20ish was ok for older kids, but with kindergarteners it’s usually their first experience being away from family so they were concerned that such a big class was stressful for them. So they split it in two, which was when I was hired.”

“Is having that many kindergartners that unmanageable?”

“Well, no. It’s technically manageable. But having fewer definitely makes a huge difference. I’m able to spend more one on one time with them, which is helpful especially for kids like Chanyeol or Jieun who sometimes need a little more encouragement. It helps us make sure that they’re really ready for 1st grade and more proper lessons. There’s been a huge decrease in students having to repeat grades since we divided the class.”

Kibum nods attentively and Minho’s worry that he’s boring him lessens.

“Maybe it’s just because there’s a quality kindergarten teacher that the number has gone down.” he remarks. Minho blushes a little and fiddles with the empty coffee cup in his hands.

“I don’t know that I’d say I’m a good teacher, I just try my best.”

“Oh please, Minho. I know I’m new and I’ve never seen you actually teach, but your kids were the best behaved class I had yesterday. When I asked them who they were making their pieces for, half of them said their parents and the other half said you. Then they all started asking to do two so that they could give you and their parents one each. It was really cute actually.”

Minho smiles and feels pleased with himself over the story. He looks over at the bulletin board where he hangs (almost) everything his students bring in for him. It’s a little full but he prefers it that way. Kibum follows his eyes and walks over to inspect the pieces.

“Did they make these?”

“It’s all things they draw at home that they bring in.”

“Oh how sweet!”

Minho joins Kibum by the board and starts pointing out different pieces; he explains how Seoeun draws exclusively in red while Seojun draws exclusively in blue, how Chanyeol likes to draw puppies since he can’t pet them due to allergies, and how Yeri can seemingly only draw cakes and pizza. Kibum listens to everything, makes comments or laughs at each account. After a while, there’s another knock and Suho pokes his head in.

“Hey guys, sorry to interrupt your art viewing, but it’s 30 minutes before students and I have coffee for you,” he says in a quiet voice. Minho wonders if Suho is hungover at all from yesterday but doesn’t ask and just thanks him for the coffee instead. When he leaves, Kibum’s silent for a moment.

“So does everyone bring coffee?” he asks.

“There’s a rough rotation schedule. We all switch off making and distributing coffee in the morning. I don’t know if you’ll be put on it since you’re also technically admin and they have a different system. You’re always welcome to some though, it’s in the breakroom. The only rule is to not leave less than a cup in there, which to me seems like it should go without saying but some people apparently need a reminder so.”

“Good to know. Anything else I should know?”

Remembering suddenly that the whole reason they had met up early was so that he could explain the school to Kibum, Minho starts rushing through everything he can think of. From radio etiquette (everyone’s code name is just the grade they teach), to parent volunteering, to Principal Leeteuk’s penchant for turning any sort of special event into a fake tv show, Minho fits everything the can into the 25 minutes. He feels bad throwing all this information at Kibum, but he seems to handle it well enough.

“If you ever forget, just come see me or radio. Everyone’s pretty nice here, but I’m definitely the rookie of the group so I remember best how it feels to be new,” he finishes.

“Well thanks for talking through things with me. Sorry I took up your planning time, I hope I wasn’t a bother,” says Kibum, making his way towards the door.

“Oh it’s no bother! Feel free to stop by whenever you like. I might be covered in small children at the time but I’ll do my best to make time for you if you need.”

“Thanks, Minho. I’ll see you later.”

Minho nods and waves goodbye. He hopes Kibum will come visit him after school or tomorrow before, so he can ask more about his background and why he didn’t have a hope for career when he graduated. As Kibum leaves, a familiar something purple comes into the room. It’s Yeri, with her daily piece of art.

“Look Mr. Minho! I drew you a pizza!”

#im like...............getting really attached to this au #eventually.................onjongtae are comin in #just fyi #pls yell at me about this if you like it #minkey #@subminhonet #uhhh idk if you want to be properly tagged for this au so just let me know?#he's the tenderest kindergarten teacher i promise #mari apparently writes things #mari made a post #teacher au

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tipsycad147 · 4 years

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How To Hold A Séance

By shirleytwofeathers

Throughout the Victorian age, parties that featured a séance were all the rage. Hosts would gather people together to contact the dead. In recent years, there has been increased skepticism towards séances. However, a lot of people continue to believe that making contact with the dead is possible.

Hosting a séance can be an emotional, yet satisfying experience. When hosting your meeting, proceed with caution and patience to get the best results.

If you decide to try to conduct a séance at home, expect some awkwardness, especially on your first try. I’ve always thought that beginner’s séances were like a scene in a movie about teenagers away at summer camp, where the girls and boys from across the lake are thrown together for a one-night dance. In a séance, of course, it’s not about overcoming the gender divide, but the gap between the living and the dead. Like hapless teens, there’s a lot of hesitancy on both sides, and communication doesn’t always come easy—especially considering the dead don’t usually have audible voices!

Supplies and Necessities:

If you’re planning to hold a séance in your own home, you need a few like-minded people and a few vital supplies.

Choose good company.

A séance generally requires a minimum of three people; one to be the medium, who contacts and channels the spirits, and at least two others to provide supportive energy. Make sure you choose friends who are respectful, comfortable with the supernatural, and focused—your friend who can’t stop fidgeting with his phone in a movie theatre is likely to bring that same distracted mood to your séance.

Some say the number of participants must be divisible by three. But this does not seem to be an absolute rule. No fewer than three people should attempt a séance, as it can be emotionally and physically exhausting on a small group.

Séances are tricky business, and you don’t want to invite people who are going to ruin the atmosphere with negative attitudes, or by poo-pooing the entire event. Even if you don’t end up chatting with something from beyond the grave, you still want to have a good time. If you invite sceptical people to the séance, then the positive atmosphere is going to be wrecked and you probably won’t get a chance to communicate with any spirits. When you send out the invites, make sure you tell your cool friends to come, and the more open they are to the idea of a spirit world, the better.

Also, because the experience can be intense, it is usually best to keep young children and pets out of the circle.

Make a space for spirits.

If you’re hosting your first séance, what should you have available? If you’re using a tarot deck, use your favourite set. If you don’t have a favourite set, just use one that speaks to you. There are a variety of tarot decks, and you’re sure to find something that’s your style.

If you’re certain that you’re going to speak with something from beyond the grave, then bring a voice recorder to pick up the audio from the session – you never know what you’re going to hear.

Although séances in film are usually held in romantic rooms with oaken round tables, you might live in a cramped apartment furnished exclusively by Ikea. That’s okay! A few modifications can make even the grungiest space more inviting to otherworldly visitors.

Some séance instructions ask for a round table. This helps create the symbolic circle believed necessary for the ritual, also a square or rectangular table might make it more difficult to join hands. If a square or rectangular table is all that is available, it will be fine. You can use a table cloth or central altar to create the symbolic circle, and arrange the seating so that it is comfortable for everyone to join hands.

Candles, incense, and burnt sage can all boost the psychic power of your space. Both the candles and food are believed to attract spirits who are looking for warms and sustenance.

In the centre of the table, place some simple and naturally aromatic food, such as bread or soup. This is believed to help attract the spirits who still seek physical nourishment. Also in the centre of the table, place no fewer than three candles (or a number divisible by three) lit candles; the more candles, the better. Spirits still seek warmth and light.

Dim the lights and eliminate any distractions. Turn off all music and the television. Do make sure you’ve turned off alarm clocks, phones, and any other distracting electronics—some mediums even find that electronic devices interfere with their psychic senses.

Trim Your Expectations

It’s best if you don’t expect anything. Even highly experienced mediums, who use familiar spirit guides to contact new spirits, run into unexpected setbacks—the dead person they’re trying to reach isn’t answering, or they’re only interested in chatting about their favourite mug (yes, this happens) and don’t respond to the important questions about the afterlife.

Sometimes, an attention-seeking spirit can even intrude on a private conversation. If the world’s most talented mediums experience some unpredictable hi-jinks and complications, you’d better bet you will, too. So, as much as you can, roll with the flow of your séance, and try not to form any expectations before you start.

The Medium.

Mediums are, in effect, translators between the spirit and earthly realms, and they can dramatically ease the process of getting in touch with a disembodied presence. You might want to choose a medium among the participants. This could be a person who has had experience with séances or someone who has displayed that they’ve got psychic abilities.

Although it’s strange to think of spiritual affairs as a skill, mediumship is not that much different from any other talent. Your first (or second or third) attempt might feel awkward or even disastrous as you learn how to hold a séance, but you shouldn’t give up.

Many mediums claim to have felt a calling from a young age, or a natural attunement to supernatural forces, but even individuals who have not previously experienced a brush with the world beyond the grave can begin to develop their skills. Persistence, patience, and a willingness to discover whatever the spirit world has to share with you—from the serious to the kooky—are the foundations of every great medium.

Clearing The Energy

Methods of clearing the energy could include smudging with sage, scattering salt, or using the sound of bells to lighten and brighten the energy. It is also helpful to use a prayer or invocation to set the intention of positive vibes and invite only good spirits.

Here are a couple of invocations that can be used for clearing the energy in the room and creating a sacred and safe space. Feel free to change the wording to make them your own and to fit your personal spiritual beliefs:

To The Spirit World and the Powers That Be As I light these candles, bless this sacred place. Let the light of their flames radiate love and protection to all four corners of this room. I ask at this time that any negative energies be released from this space. With a bath of white light, I ask that it be cleansed and neutralised.

Invocation for Protection:

Spirit Guides and Angels, As I sit with you now, I open my heart. I surround myself with the love and light of your protection. I release any negativity that I have picked up throughout the day. I ask that any energy (information, communication) be given for my absolute good. Dismiss now all energies that are not of the Highest and Greatest source. As I bathe in your grace, I will listen to your resounding voice within me. I will be true to my heart and your gentle guidance. (you can follow this with a moment of appreciation for the universe…)

Determine the mode of communication.

As mentioned, you shouldn’t expect spirits to speak like the living. If you’re the medium, you might hear their voice inside your head clearly, but it isn’t the same as a human voice that travels by vibrations in the air. Some mediums prefer to use a ouija board or pendulumto convert the energy of a spirit to words. It’s best to have a few methods available before you start, and don’t get discouraged if your first or second attempts don’t work out.

A very popular method is using an Ouija board, which is a flat board engraved with several English alphabets, numericals, messages like “hello”, “goodbye”, “yes” and “no”. A heart shaped movable indicator called a planchette is rotated with fingers to point at letters and spell words on the board. The board also contains some images and symbols. The ghost, once conjured, uses telekinesis to rotate the pointer and answer your questions.

A simple pendulum can be used for divination too. The medium holds the pendulum in hand and asks questions to the spirit. If the pendulum swings sideways, the spirit is saying no, while a back and forth swing on the pendulum indicates a yes, and swinging round and round means the spirit is uncertain. Alternatively, the pendulum might be held above a circle of letters, or a paper marked with yes and no on opposing sides.

Spirit rapping is a very old and efficient way where the medium asks the ghost a question, and then instructs it to answer by making rapping noises by tilting the table to a side. For instance, a single rap means yes. Similarly, complex raps can be used to spell out words and complete sentences.

Summoning the Spirits

All the people must sit around the table, hold each other’s hand making a circle and close their eyes. It is good to begin by saying a prayer, which helps cleanse the environment and emanate positivity.

Now everyone must concentrate on the spirit they wish to summon and then slowly ask the spirit to join the group, This must be done calmly and welcomingly. This is most effective when done as a chant.

The participants must speak the words together. Here is a sampling of different ways to summon the spirits:

“Our beloved [name of spirit], we bring you gifts from life into death. Commune with us, (name of spirit), and move among us.”

“Spirits of the past, move among us. Be guided by the light of this world and visit upon us.” If you are wishing to contact a relative or friend, you may chant something like this: “Beloved (name), we bring you gifts from life into death. Be guided by the light of this world and visit upon us.”

Now wait a bit.

Then ask the spirit to provide a sign of its presence. Don’t ask for a specific sign, just be open to receive any signal. When you know that the spirit is present, try to communicate.

Communicating With Spirits

When you finally get a ghost on the line, what should you do? Basically, treat any spirit that you find during a séance like you would Deborah Harry, don’t leave it hanging on the telephone. Treat the entire thing like it’s totally natural that you’re speaking to ghost through a spirit board, glass of water, or a series of wraps on a table. Don’t worry about being too formal with what you’re going to call the spirit, it should let you know its name soon enough.

As long as you start things off pleasantly, the conversation should end up flowing naturally and nothing spooky will happen (except for the whole talking to a ghost thing). Remember throughout the conversation that if the ghost isn’t answering in a straightforward manner, you shouldn’t be weird about it. Spirits don’t communicate the way that people do, and as long as you treat the entire exchange like a David Lynch movie, you should be fine.

Begin by asking questions. Yes or no questions work best. You might ask things like, “Is there anyone here who wishes to speak with us?” Tell the spirits how you’d like them to respond (knock, move the planchette, cause the pendulum to circle for yes or swing for no, speak into the red light on the recorders, etc.)

If a spirit chooses to speak through the medium, you may ask any kind of question.

Everyone needs to try to be as still as possible. If someone makes a noise (such as a stomach growl or an accidental knock), they will need to identify that they were the one that made that noise.

Continue asking questions and make notes of any responses you get.

Always be calm and respecting. However, be warned, at the very first sign of any rudeness from the spirit’s side politely ask it to leave, if it doesn’t abide, forcefully end the session by blowing off the candles and switching the lights on.

So what happens when a ghost appears and things start getting spooky? Act natural. If you’re sitting, stay there. Don’t jump up or anything or you might break the spell and scare away the spirit (it could happen). The most important thing to do here is to be yourself and treat the spirit with respect. As long as it’s answering your questions and being helpful, there’s no reason that you should act like a freak show and scare off whatever it is that you reached out to from across the grave.

If Things Get Weird

Here’s a séance tip: things are going to get weird. When you go to a séance, you have to have an open mind to whatever message ends up coming through. If you don’t allow yourself to enjoy whatever happens during the magical moment, then you’re either going to block anything from happening, or your negative energy is going to affect whatever you end up reaching through the board.

Remember, if things begin to go wrong mid-séance, you have the power to keep things from tipping over into being a straight-up horror movie. As long as you stay positive everything should be fine.

Ending The Séance

When you’re done with your line of questioning, thank the spirit for joining you and tell them to go in peace. Break the circle of hands and extinguish the candles.

Close the séance by saying something such as, “Our communication here is finished now.”

If the séance seems to be getting out of hand, end the séance by breaking the circle of hands, extinguishing the candles and turning on the lights. Have one person remove the offerings, turn on the lights and open a door or a window. Join hands until the spirit leaves, then either replace the offerings, dim the lights and prepare for a fight, or blow out the candles and end the session for the night.

After the seance, it is also important to clear the room and close the connection. Here is an invocations that can be used:

Dear Spirit, Thank you for sharing this sacred time with me. I appreciate the flow of energy I have just experienced. I will use it for my highest good. As I blow out these candles, I close this sacred space, and ask that your protection surround me wherever I go today.

Another really nice way to close out the seance is with the following chant:

The Earth The Air The Fire The Water Return Return Return

Séance Basics:

Although you can go free-form, most successful séances have something of a formula: opening with a declared intention to commune with spirits, followed by an invitation or call (either to a specific spirit or a general audience), and closing with gratitude and peace to your visitors.

Here are a basic step by step plan for the ritual:

Discuss the ritual in advance so that everyone is clear on the protocol

Clear the energy in the room

Light the candles and the incense

Dim the lights and get quiet

Everyone gets seated

All participants must join hands

Summon the Spirit

Wait for a response

Repeat the summoning until the spirit responds or something happens

Communicate and ask questions

Maintain control

Thank the spirits

End the séance

Clear the energy

Talk about what just happened, even if it didn’t seem like anything at all

How Will You Know When You’ve Made Contact?

There is no certain way to know whether or not you’ve made contact. Often, the things that happen during a séance are subtle – a slight knock, for instance. This could be attributed to a spirit, or it could be someone else in the room making a noise. Keep an open mind and first seek to disprove anything that you see or hear. If you can’t find a logical, real-world explanation, you may have made contact.

For myself, I set the intention that anything unexpected that happens is definitely a form of contact. I try really hard not to have any expectations, and then when something does happen that feels or seems meaningful, I simply accept that it is.

Things to Consider When Deciding to Hold a Séance

Before you perform your séance, ask yourself the following questions:

What are your goals for the séance? What is your purpose for holding one?

Is there a particular person you’d like to contact during the séance?

Where will you have your séance?

Who would you like to participate?

Which equipment will you use?

You can use virtually anything; a Ouija board (seance board) or a pendulum, for example. If you are into a more technical approach, you might consider using a piece of paranormal investigative equipment such as an EMF (electromagnetic frequency) meter, or a ghost box.

Will you record your session?

Will it be video or voice recording? Often, video cameras and digital voice recorders can pick up EVP (electric voice phenomenon) that can’t be heard at the time of the séance, but can be heard on replay.

Attitude Is Everything

When you’re dealing with creatures from the spirit realm, you probably don’t want to be in a bad place. If you go into a séance with any worries about the situation then something is probably going to go wrong. Negative energy draws out negative energy, and if you start to reaching into the nether-realm with your bad mumbo jumbo, you’re bound to pull out something that’s extra creepy. .

Sources:

Thought.co

Keen

Love To Know

Graveyard Shift

Ghost Village

https://shirleytwofeathers.com/The_Blog/powers-that-be/tag/spirits/

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