#i have to write about three buildings i have chosen 1.5 of them!!!!! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

katahnisharma · 5 years

Text

when the party’s over [2] |h.o.

Word Count: 1.5 K

Warnings: angsty but there will be a happy ending soon i promise

Summary: You’d always been in love with Harrison, but how long would you have to wait for him to notice you?

A/N: haha I'm back and I'm going to finish what I started! there will be 3 or 4 parts to this :) Read PART ONE HERE

masterlist | series masterlist

The minute Harrison saw you, he knew he had messed up. He didn’t know you had been standing there, and judging from the look on your face you had heard everything.

Why the hell did he say that? What had possessed him?

Harrison tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come out. The look of pure brokenness on your face cut him to the core. When the tears spilled from your eyes, he wanted to die.

He had done that to you. He’d made you cry, and it was all his fault.

“Y/N, no wait!” Harrison yelled, as you turned and ran from the building. He tried to go after you, but Maya held him back.

“What are you doing? I have to go find her!” Harrison hissed, but Maya gave him a stern glare.

“Are you serious?! It’s our anniversary, you can’t just leave! Why do you suddenly care anyway, we all heard what you said?” She asked, and Harrison’s heart sank. Maya was right, he wasn’t supposed to care.

But he did.

“I don’t care, I’m going after her.” He said, leaving Maya standing alone livid. Harrison pushed past the hoards of people, catching the eye of the bartender who had seen the whole thing.

“You’re a dick!” He yelled, shaking his head. On any other day, Harrison would have punched his lights out, but he knew the man was right. Only a dick would hurt someone so perfect.

He just hoped he’d be able to find you.

Eventually, Harrison made his way out of the bar and saw you take off. Though you were wearing heels, this was the fastest he’d ever seen you move.

“Y/N! Please wait!” He shouted, but it seemed to make no difference. You kept running, refusing to look back. Harrison followed, trying to keep up. But you turned a corner, and Harrison lost sight of you.

“Shit, shit, shit. Where did she go?” He panted, staring abysmally into the dark. It was late, and he knew that you didn’t know how to get home on your own. Worst case scenarios began to play in his mind and he frantically searched for his phone.

Harrison couldn’t find it.

“I left it in the bar.” Harrison hissed, slapping himself for his stupidity. He sprinted back, pushing past the swarms coming through the door to find Maya. She was still right where he had left her, with those vapid people they called ‘friends’.

“Maya, where’s my phone?” Harrison shouted, trying to make his voice louder than the music. Maya turned, her eyes cold and angry.

“Why? She doesn’t want you to call anyway.” She sneered, holding the phone away from him. Harrison rolled his eyes, and grabbed it from her reach. The bartender was watching from a distance, and when he saw Harrison reach his phone, he gave a nod of approval.

“I’m going to find her. Don’t wait up.” He turned away, leaving Maya fuming and their friends whispering to each other.

Harrison found himself back outside, alone on the dimly lit sidewalk. He brought out his phone, but to his dismay found that it was dead. Of course, Maya had chosen to omit that bit of information.

Now what?

There wasn’t a charger in sight, and the nearest pharmacy was three miles away. He knew Maya would never let him borrow her phone, and no doubt she had told their friends to do the same.

Harrison looked around and spotted a couple on the steps outside the bar, both on their phones. He walked over and asked if he could borrow one, which the woman kindly obliged him. But when he went to dial your number, he found that he couldn’t remember it.

Just like the phone number, Harrison had always taken you for granted. He’d never imagined his life without you in it.

Now he was starting to feel the withdrawal effects.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The plane ride back to chilly Boston was uneventful to say the least. As you had expected, there was not a single call or text from Harrison. You couldn’t decide whether you were angry or disappointed, so you settled on both.

Screw him, honestly.

Determined to put him out of your mind, you wiped away a stray tear and turned back to your book. It was riveting, but every so often you would be drawn back to the events of a couple hours ago and your eyes would water again.

Even with an ocean between you, Harrison still had some hold over you,

Frustrated, you shut the book and closed your eyes. Maybe with a little sleep, things would look better. Just as you began to doze off, the overhead announcement sounded above.

“Thank you for flying Blue Airlines, we hope you enjoy your stay in Massachusetts.”

You groaned quietly, shifting to peer out the window. Sure enough, there was snowy Boston just as you had left it four years ago to study at Cambridge. With a start, you felt the plane begin to descend, and you clutched the armrest anxiously. You hated landings with a passion, but the one person who was usually here to comfort you had just called you an insignificant placeholder.

Clutching your seat for dear life, the plane came to a bumpy stop. You breathed a sigh of relief, and after waiting for most of the cabin to depart, you grabbed your things and left. The airport was unusually empty, but it was early in the morning. Most flights would leave hours later.

A quick look at your phone confirmed that your mother was waiting for you outside. You smiled for the first time all night, eagerly anticipating going home again. You broke into a slight jog, removing your luggage from baggage claim and walking outside. The rest of your things would arrive later in the week, and you were glad you didn’t have much to worry about.

“Y/N!” A voice cried, and you turned to see your mother standing by the curb. You felt tears of joy paint your cheeks, and you ran to give her a hug. She smelled like cedarwood, her favorite scent, and you were suddenly aware that it had been far too long since you had last seen her.

“Mom, I’m so glad you’re here.” You cried, sniffling into her shoulder. She stroked your hair gently, letting you cry for a few minutes. When you had finished, she took your bags and put them in the trunk of the car. You slid into the passenger’s seat and inhaled sharply. Your mother sat in the driver’s seat and looked at you softly.

“When you want to tell me what happened, you can. But I won’t push you, okay?” She said, and you smiled gratefully. Your mother had always given you your space, never angling for information. She knew you would tell her when you were ready.

“Well, it is a long ride back home. I think we have enough time for the full recount.” You laughed, and your mother rolled her eyes.

So you told her everything. The party invitation, the bar scene, the awful truth. The only part you left out was your feelings for Harrison. They seemed insignificant now, just like your friendship with him.

“That’s everything?” Your mother asked at the end, keeping her eyes on the road. You nodded, picking at your top nervously.

“Yeah, that’s everything.” You looked out the window at the blur of people passing by, when your mother began to chuckle.

“Liar. You love him, don’t you?” You whirled around, utterly speechless.

How did she-

“You forget that I raised you. I know you well enough by now. This boy wouldn’t have affected you so much if he didn’t mean something to you.” Your face flushed pink, stunned by her words.

“I did love him, but that’s in the past now.” You muttered, staring at your hands. Your mother shrugged her shoulders.

“Maybe. Only time will tell, I suppose.” She pulled into the driveway of your three story home, and placed a hand on yours. “But don’t try and kill it so quickly. Weeds grow back unless you take them out carefully by the root.”

“Real poetic, mom.” You laughed, despite the fact that her words hit home. When the car came to a complete stop, you slung your bags over your shoulder and unlocked the front door. Within seconds, a little German Shepherd puppy came bounding towards you.

“Luna! My baby!” You squealed, scooping her up and kissing her head. She yipped happily, licking your face everywhere. With one hand you took her and the bags to your old room.

“Wow, nothing’s changed at all.” You whispered to no one in particular. Your mother had kept everything immaculate, but nothing had been moved or altered. It was exactly as you left it after graduation. The bedding was the same, your books were in the same order. Even your old Marvel posters were still hanging.

“Yell if you need something!” Your mother called from below, and you thanked her before falling on your bed in a heap. You stared at the ceiling, smiling when you realized your old glow in the dark stars were still there.

“It’s good to be home, Luna.” You whispered to the puppy sleeping on your lap, and for the first time all night, you were able to sleep.

add yourself to my taglist here! | writing challenge

TAGLIST (let me know if you want to be taken off!): @tommyparkerr @grandmascottlang @parkerpuff @toms-order @darling-parker @tomhollandandmarvelsworld @buckychrist @cutiehollands @peeterparkr @jupiterparker @inlovewithmob-tom @veronicas-littleworld @da5haexowin @sergeantbxrnxs @hazsterfield @itsholyholland @underoosstark @stormyholland @let-me-luve-you @smexylemony @roses-and-sweaters @musicgirl234 @its-livelovelife @steve-thotgers @tiny-friggin-human @lovelyh0lland @blueberry-butterscotch @keylla-dunspeh @lucille-lovely @yeahbutmarvel @lokiislowkeyhot @spideymood @yoharryyouawizard @tomhollanders2013 @celestialparker @letthembehappymcu @jnej @spiderman-n @positiveparker @treegelbman @winterssoldierrs @heycreehere @galaxy-parker @sdrecsfics @doimakeitthroughthenight @wronglanemendes @brokensimpson @naikia @spnsoap @ninetypoundsofasthma @quitetommy @voltronshepard @marvelismylifffe @iluvmesomemarvelndc @annathesillyfriend @tiredfeels @scarlet-spiderr @hedwigthelegend @renesniajazza @bibliophile-grasshopp @tomhollandswhore @yeeterbenjaminparker @juliabuenooo @h-osterfield @hazsterfield @hazhasmycoffee @paradoxparker @pokeloisfk @machomango13 @parkerstylesperalta@mcuspidey @nobledoritoman @cosmicdaya @hey-its-grey @suncitydanvers @toms-gf @cutesparker @whypeterparker @sunshinehollandd @sunshineandparker @starksparker @hollandroos @mr-delmar @blissfulparker @xxtomxo @sun-flowerparker @nobledoritoman @hey-its-grey @suncitydanvers @nnatasha @parkerpuffwrites @hollandsosterfield @bilkyrie @hillsnholland @peterplanet @hopespym @peterstrainingwheels @upsidedownparker @stuckonspidey @jacobsbatalon @prkerspeter @aw-hawkeye @spideypeach @spxderbarnes @stealth-spiderr @hazownsmyass @uglypastels @galaxy-parker @darlingtholland @spideyflicker @neptuneparker @blissfulparker @maryjparkers @curlytoms @marvelous-maddi @trustfundparker @clockblobber @asmilinghopelessromantic @i-don’t-wanna-go-mr-stark @marvel-language @zaynjawy @sholla4-314 @beautyandflannel @lemondropirwin @angelbabymed @captnsmarvels @in-the-corner-coffee-please @peterbparkcr @william-stanley @greenarrowhead @squishyhyunjin @bibliophile-grasshopp @juliabuenooo @pokeloisfk @machomango13 @parkerstylesperalta @pokeloisfk @starz-23 @spoopy-spooderman @whatevsholland @aestheticstom @tomzfrog @ppunderoos @spiderkat1248

#harrison osterfield #haz osterfield #harrison osterfield x reader #harrison osterfield imagine #harrison osterfield fanfic #harrison osterfield fanfiction #harrison osterfield fic #harrison osterfield x you #harrison osterfield x y/n #harrison osterfield fluff #harrison osterfield angst #tom holland #tom holland x reader #when the party's over

285 notes · View notes

tinabritton-photography · 5 years

Text

Seeing the Light . . . Portrait Research and practice. Not complete!

Today kicked off a brand new project brief called ‘Seeing the Light’. This brief is designed around capturing 4 portraits, family, friends or strangers, in natural light. In this brief we can use either or a combination of a diffuser, scrim, flags or reflectors in certain situations according to how intense the natural ambient light is.

What are the Qualities of Light?

Natural light is any light generated by the sun. The light of day can be harsh or diffused, depending on the weather, cloud-cover, heat and cold, direction, or even time of year.

Without the benefit of light, there can be no image. The frame would be void, black and lifeless. So one could say that each image has a symbiotic relationship light. There is a push and pull between the areas of shadow and the lighter areas of an image, irregardless of whether the light falling on our subject is natural or lit with studio lighting.

Characteristics of Light

The Golden Hour

***************************************************************************************

Portrait Lenses

(note: I have not included the 35mm here because headshots taken with the 35mm exhibit distortion. That being said, with distance, the lens can be good, however, it is just not a portrait lens and will never truly be as good as the ones listed below.)

I think that lenses should be chosen by, not only where the image is going to be taken, say, i.e. a very small studio, or on walk-about around Glasgow, but also available light

The three prime portrait lenses that really shine for me are -

50mm - The 50mm prime lense has a wide aperture and is a great standard portrait lens. It has a fantastic shallow depth of field, and though it has less distortion that a 35mm, there is still some barrel distortion with headshots, so I would stick to half-body or full-body captures.

What is barrel distortion? See below.

Barrel distortion is an aberration and “happens because the field of view of the lens is much wider than the size of the image sensor and hence it needs to be “squeezed” to fit”. (Mansurov, 2019)

“Some barrel distortion is present in most wide angle lenses and zoom lenses with relatively short focal lengths.” (Mansurov, 2019)

(Mansurov, 2019)

Since we have spoken about barel distortion, we have to include pin cushion distortion. Pin cushion distortion in zoom lenses, in particular, consumer grade or even some pro lenses. More expensive lenses contain compensating elements that reduce pincushion distortion to acceptable levels.

(Mansurov, 2019)

The above are examples of optical distortion.

Below is what happens when you capture up-close images with a wide angle lens. This however, has to do with perspective distortion and not lens distortion. Lenses have no perspective. I will be researching this further in a later blog.

(Mansurov, 2019)

See below - focal length does not impact perspective distortion when you are far enough away from your subject.

(Lightroom, 2019)

However - perspective distortion is caused by the distance between the lens and the subjects face, NOT focal length.

(Lightroom, 2019)

85mm - Most photographers would agree that the 85mm is the best lens for portrait photography. It has a wide aperture, shallow depth of field and less of the distortion that we get with the 35mm and 50mm lenses, however there is still some barrel distortion. It is still a go-to lens though because close-up to our sitter we capture a flattering perspective of our subject’s face. Also, 85mm at 1.4mm - 1.8mm will make the background melt into a creamy background, even with waist-high shots, and full length shots. At full length there is still a wonderful 3D feel to the shots with a decent amount of background if you so choose.

135mm - The 135mm prime lens has a wide aperture and longer focal length which gives gorgeous bokeh. I have a manual 135mm lense and the bokeh is swirly and beautiful and it produces sharp images, however, it is manual focus, so would be better in the studio imo. I do note however that, the 85mm is a better choice for closeness to the subject you are shooting. A conversation can continue and a rapport can be built to put her or him at ease. (Abbott, 2019)

Nikkor DX 18-105mm lens - This has been my go to lens when I am out shooting street photography or street portraits. It spans the ranges I need for portrait photography. For example, see the 4 images below . . .

TinaBritton Photography 2014

TinaBritton Photography 2017

105mm (full frame sensors) - This is my next prime lens. Yes, the 18-105mm I already own expands to 105mm, however, I want the constant large aperture the Sigma lens offers.

What about zoom lenses?

What if you only have a 70-200mm (as with the 18-105mm above) in your bag and cannot afford prime lenses right now? The 70-200mm can work for you in many portrait situations. Now, I like to be close to my models. It’s more personal and while I am shooting, I can have a conversation with he or she. This puts the model at ease. With this lens we can still shoot in that range, however, that being said, capturing a portrait, though I have to stand further away, at say, 200mm at 2.8mm creates a beautiful background and unique perspective. Watch out for distortion. (Hull and >, 2019)

*****************************************************************************************************

How do we control the light?

What is a Scrim?

Scrims is a woven fabric on a frame that reduces the light by about 1/2 stop. “The Full scrims will dim the light intensity across the entire beam spread, while 1/2 and graduated scrims are used to even out the beam spread when lighting a subject or background from an angle.”

(Anon, 2019)

What is a Flag?

A flag (black refector) is used to block or control (shape) the light in your scene. It can be used to fill in shadow (negative fill) and to increase contrast. It can stop flares from reaching your camera, almost in the same way a lens hood does.

(Digital-photo-secrets.com, 2019)

What is a diffuser?

A diffuser (or silk) goes between your light source and your subject and produces a finer light, like a softbox. It reduces glare and is flattering to your subject.

(Ghionis, 2019)

What is a reflector?

A reflector helps light reach your subject and also helps to soften the light meeting your subject. It comes in silver and gold and white. Many come in a kit as the one seen below. Be careful using the silver as it can be harsh if bouncing bright sun. Gold gives your subject a golden hour look, however, in some situations, can give your sitter a strange glow. White gives your subject a soft glow.

(Digital-photo-secrets.com, 2019)

Choose 5 Photographers -

1. Henri Cartier-Bresson -

Henri Cartier-Bresson was born to a successful textile manufacturer and his mother (1908-2004) in France. The master of capturing a candid moment, Bresson was the father of street photography and photojournalism. It was his belief that photography was about capturing the spontaneous or the ‘decisive moment’.

Throughout his career, Bresson took hundreds of natural light portraits of famous people, many of them well known and important artists of his era.

It was in 1947 that Henri and some of his peers started a cooperative photography agency called Magnum Photos, dedicated to the premise that photography had become an influential communicative tool. Bresson’s responsibility in the agency was to travel to India and China, but he also travelled to countries such as Greece, Moscow, Egypt and America. His most beloved assignment was his trip to Moscow. “He was the first photographer allowed to enter the USSR after the death of Stalin in 1953”. (Huxley-Parlour Gallery, 2019)

Photograph of Pablo Picasso by Henri Cartier-Bresson. (Ipoxstudios.com, 2019)

Photograph of Pablo Picasso by Henri Cartier-Bresson (Ipoxstudios.com, 2019)

Photograph of Henri Matisse by Henri Cartier-Bresson. (Ipoxstudios.com, 2019)

2. John Loengard -

John Loengard is an American photography born 1934 in New York. Harvard educated, he learned his craft at the International Centre for Photography in New York. His photographic journey began when he was 11 years of age when he began capturing images of his family.

It was in his senior year at Harvard when Loengard was asked by Life magazine to freelance for them by photographing a freighter run aground on Cape Cod in 1956. This began his work with the Magazine.

In 1972 Life magazine suspended its weekly publication and it was then that became the picture editor of Life Special Reports. At the time, he was also the picture editor of People magazine during is formation and for the beginning 3 months of its publication.

Loengard helped in Life magazine’s rebirth and was its picture editor until 1987. While working for Life and other magazines, the photographer authored 10 books and in 2005, He was named “One of the 100 most influential people in Photography” by American Photo. He was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame in 2018.

Below is an image of Georgia O'Keeffe sitting on the roof of her home in 1967.

Georgia O'Keeffe photographed on the roof of her Ghost Ranch home in New Mexico, 1967. John Loengard—The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images. (Time, 2019)

Image of Richard Avedon by John Loengard, 1994. (Photographers, Books and Hours, 2019)

Annie Leibovitz with her Assistant, Robert Bean on the Chrysler Building by John Loengard. (Johnloengard.com, 2019)

Brassai's Eye by John Loengard. (Johnloengard.com, 2019)

3. Alfred Eisenstaedt -

was a German-born American photographer who was well known for taking black and white shots of celebrities and is famous for using the 1.5 Armature. What is the 1.5 Armature?

“1.5 Armature: There are two ways to break down a 1.5 rectangle. The most basic is the 1.5 Armature. It is created by drawing two diagonals from each corner of a negative. Then draw their reciprocals from opposing corners, which intersect the diagonals at 90°. Through the Eyes of the Diagonal and their reciprocals, draw vertical and horizontal lines through their intersections. The 1.5 Armature was a very popular method used by Cartier Bresson early in his career.” (PetaPixel, 2019)

Below we have Marilyn Monroe in a black and white sweater. Her hair has a soft sheen and is worn natural. The background appears to be a barn structure and give the image a mid-tone grey texture.

Marilyn Monroe (Black Sweater Landscape), 1953

Below is an iconic image seen from around the world. A crowd of happy people gathered on the street in celebration, a man tilts his girl back for a long overdue kiss. I have always loved this image and the start black and white contrast.

Alfred Eisenstaedt, VJ Day in Times Square, August 14-1945, Robert Mann Gallery (PetaPixel, 2019)

What can I say? We all know who this man is in the photo below. Albert Einstein sits writing. Love the rich blacks and the striped batter of the chair against the grey of his sweater and white of his hair.

Alfred Eisenstaedt, Albert Einstein, Princeton, New Jersey, 1949, Robert Mann Gallery. (Artsy.net, 2019)

4. Stanislav Puchkovsky (Sean Archer on 500px) is self taught photographer from Yekaterinburg, Russia. He picked up his first camera in 2012 (a Lumix G3) and hasn’t stopped shooting since. And his light source? He uses natural light to capture his classically beautiful images. Amazingly, he shoots all his portraits in his apartment with window light. (Sarkar, Kosa and Sarkar, 2019)(Diamond, 2019)

(Diamond, 2019)

(Sarkar, Kosa and Sarkar, 2019)

(Archer, 2019)

5. Magdalena Berny

Berny is a self-taught photographer born in 1976 and based in Poland. Her natural light child portraits have been recognised and published in “various press dedicated to photographs such as Digital Camera, Click Magazine, Modern Lens Magazine, Magzter, Great Inspire, just to name few.” (Symposion 2019, 2019)

(Dreams Factory Photography, 2019)

(Instagram.com, 2019)

Today we went on a walkabout from class in Glasgow to take images of each other (students). The group I was with only chose a silver/white reflector. The diffuser disappeared with the other students.

Here are but a few of the images I captured on the day . . .

Intensely Adam . . .

We used a refector to get light into the ‘cage-like’ structure. I like framing my subjects. I should have had Adam hide his earphones. I can always take them out in Photoshop. Here we are using a silver reflector. I can only assume that the colour cast on Adam’s face is from the rust covered bars surrounding him.

I’m not perfect. It has been a long time, and the excitement of taking images out with the class was the only reason I can fathom why I would make such a rookie mistake as allowing the top of the stone fence behind Adam to run right through his head. No refector.

I like taking images of my subjects that help tell a story about who they are. Adam is extremely talented and has great instincts in photography. Here we are using no reflector.

This is a woman with her dog. She was walking on the pathway where we were practicing and I asked if we could take her portrait. She was reluctant at first, but said yes. I could tell she was all about her dog. This image is a dog portrait with their human. (Again with the wall. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were through her shoulders.)

The lovely woman put down her dog and allowed me to take her photo. She didn’t take off her sunglasses.

Adam being inquisitive . . .

Adam relaxing on the wall.

Adam rules on the wall . . . a bit over exposed on his face me thinks?

Adam peering into the lens.

My brief, well underway . . .

For my first portrait, I chose my husband. We actually took photos for this portrait the same time and day as I was also working on my #Who project. This worked out well. I love the small Laundry cabin that is situated in the beautiful Finlaystone Country Estate; a large country estate in Renfrewshire near Glasgow, seat of the current Chief of the Clan MacMillan. We have visted here a few times, and I love walking about the trees. The laundry cabin is awesome with its old world objects.

For my second portrait, I chose my friend Andrew. We travelled to Glasgow and visited our favourite place to eat because I knew they had big beautiful windows. The thing about the windows, they are not clean on the outside, so they diffused the light really well. The weather was 13 celsius and it was a cloudy day. Exposure was 1/100 sec at f4.5 using my 50mm lens. I had him sit really close to the window. What I noticed was, there was this white powdery looking dust on the outside of the window and it seemed to make the entire window, even though it was cloudy, glow with light.

For my 3rd portrait, I am going to capture images of strangers, either on Glasgow streets, or perhaps walking in the woods. I have taken my first images of a very talented woman singing on Buchanan Street in Glasgow. I loved her soulful voice. I walked up and stood in front of her until I caught her gaze. I pointed at her, as she was singing, and pointed at my camera then to her. She nodded yes to my silent request. She kept singing while I took a few shots.

I will take further portraits of strangers in the coming week.

For my 4th portrait, I have captured images of my 93-year-old mother-in-law. She is a beautiful woman who lives in Port Glasgow high above the Clyde. There is a gorgeous veiw from her window. I wanted to use that as my backdrop as she has strong ties with her community and has been living in the same house for 65 years. As a matter of fact, my husband was born in the house.

Mum is always talkative, and she never sits still. She is the most inquisitive woman I know to date. Because I knew this setting up for our session, I asked her to stand next to her favourite place, the large picture window in her living room. She continued to ask questions so I took many images in an attempt to get the ones I really wanted.

Mum was getting tired, so I had her sit every once in a while, every second that passed changed the available lighting dramatically.

I decided later to go outside and capture mum in her window, as she can often be seen by the neighbours looking out.

I mixed some more portrait shots of my mum in with the last. OOPS. The last shot was a dramatic silhouette of mum.

Prakel, D. (2007). Lighting. Lausanne, Switzerland: AVA, pp.56-70. (Prakel, 2007)

Lightroom, P. (2019). Choosing the Best Focal Length for Portraits. [online] Pretty Presets for Lightroom. Available at: https://www.lightroompresets.com/blogs/pretty-presets-blog/best-focal-length-portraits [Accessed 4 Oct. 2019]. (Lightroom, 2019)

Mansurov, N. (2019). What is Lens Distortion?. [online] Photographylife.com. Available at: https://photographylife.com/what-is-distortion [Accessed 4 Oct. 2019]. (Mansurov, 2019)

Hull, C. and >, M. (2019). What Is the Best Lens for Portraits? | Photography Equipment. [online] ExpertPhotography. Available at: https://expertphotography.com/best-lens-for-portraits/ [Accessed 30 Sep. 2019]. (Hull and >, 2019)

Abbott, J. (2019). Three prime lenses every portrait photographer needs to consider. [online] digitalcameraworld. Available at: https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/tutorials/the-best-portrait-lens-three-lenses-every-portrait-photographer-needs-to-consider [Accessed 30 Sep. 2019]. (Abbott, 2019)

Cambridgeincolour.com. (2019). Making the Most of Natural Light in Photography. [online] Available at: https://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/natural-light-photography.htm [Accessed 15 Sep. 2019]. (Cambridgeincolour.com, 2019)

Neirynck, F. (2019). Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 – 2004) | Le Couperet. [online] Lecouperet.net. Available at: http://www.lecouperet.net/hcb/en/portraits-by-hcb [Accessed 15 Sep. 2019]. (Neirynck, 2019)

Ipoxstudios.com. (2019). You are being redirected.... [online] Available at: https://ipoxstudios.com/proof-that-henri-cartier-bresson-used-dynamic-symmetry-in-photography-4k-video/ [Accessed 15 Sep. 2019].

Photographers, A., Books, p. and Hours, O. (2019). Age of Silver: Encounters with Great Photographers | powerHouse Books. [online] Powerhousebooks.com. Available at: http://www.powerhousebooks.com/books/age-of-silver-encounters-with-great-photographers/ [Accessed 5 Oct. 2019]. (Photographers, Books and Hours, 2019)

Huxley-Parlour Gallery. (2019). Henri Cartier-Bresson | Photographer's Biography & Art Works | Huxley-Parlour Gallery. [online] Available at: https://huxleyparlour.com/artists/henri-cartier-bresson/ [Accessed 5 Oct. 2019]. (Huxley-Parlour Gallery, 2019)

Johnloengard.com. (2019). John Loengard – Photographs. [online] Available at: https://johnloengard.com/ [Accessed 5 Oct. 2019]. (Johnloengard.com, 2019)

Time. (2019). https://time.com. [online] Available at: https://time.com/3491091/georgia-okeeffe-invincible/ [Accessed 15 Sep. 2019].

Sarkar, G., Kosa, M. and Sarkar, S. (2019). Stanislav Puchkovsky (Sean Archer) - Incredible Portrait Photographer from Russia - 121Clicks.com. [online] 121clicks.com. Available at: https://121clicks.com/showcases/stanislav-puchkovsky-sean-archer-incredible-portrait-photographer-from-russia [Accessed 13 Sep. 2019].

Archer, S. (2019). Sean Archer on Fstoppers. [online] Fstoppers. Available at: https://fstoppers.com/profile/37142 [Accessed 15 Sep. 2019].

Diamond, D. (2019). Stanislav Puchkovsky (aka Sean Archer) is a Master of Natural Light Portraits. [online] Fstoppers. Available at: https://fstoppers.com/bts/stanislav-puchkovsky-aka-sean-archer-master-natural-light-portraits-9584 [Accessed 13 Sep. 2019].

PetaPixel. (2019). The Great Compositions of Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. [online] Available at: https://petapixel.com/2013/04/15/the-great-compositions-of-photographer-alfred-eisenstaedt/ [Accessed 30 Sep. 2019]. (PetaPixel, 2019)

Artsy.net. (2019). Alfred Eisenstaedt: Portraits of the Past | Robert Mann Gallery | Artsy. [online] Available at: https://www.artsy.net/show/robert-mann-gallery-alfred-eisenstaedt-portraits-of-the-past [Accessed 30 Sep. 2019]. (Artsy.net, 2019)

SLR Lounge. (2019). The Flash Modifier You Already Own - SLR Lounge. [online] Available at: https://www.slrlounge.com/workshop/the-flash-modifier-you-already-own/ [Accessed 15 Sep. 2019].

Sekonic.com. (2019). Working with the Sun | Photography How To Articles – What's Your Specialty? Photographer. [online] Available at: https://www.sekonic.com/united-kingdom/whatisyourspecialty/photographer/articles/working-with-the-sun.aspx [Accessed 15 Sep. 2019].

Digital-photo-secrets.com. (2019). What in the heck is that thing for? A photographer's guide to using the black flag :: Digital Photo Secrets. [online] Available at: https://www.digital-photo-secrets.com/tip/6721/guide-using-black-flag/ [Accessed 15 Sep. 2019].

Anon, (2019). [online] Available at: https://www.adorama.com/dodsck.html [Accessed 15 Sep. 2019].

Ghionis, J. (2019). How to Perfect Natural Light with a Collapsible Diffuser feat. Jerry Ghionis. [online] Westcott University. Available at: https://westcottu.com/using-the-omega-reflector-as-a-diffuser [Accessed 15 Sep. 2019].

Instagram.com. (2019). #magdalenabernyphotography hashtag on Instagram • Photos and Videos. [online] Available at: https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/magdalenabernyphotography/?max_id=1254958811895111547 [Accessed 15 Sep. 2019].

Dreams Factory Photography. (2019). MAGDALENA BERNY - STUDIO PORTRAIT. [online] Available at: https://www.dreamsfactory.co.uk/event/magdalena-berny-studio-portrait [Accessed 15 Sep. 2019].

Instagram.com. (2019). PAGE1 (@page1mag) • Instagram photos and videos. [online] Available at: https://www.instagram.com/page1mag/ [Accessed 15 Sep. 2019].

Symposion 2019. (2019). Magdalena Berny | Children Portraits. [online] Available at: https://www.symposion.photo/en/magdalena-berny-en/ [Accessed 15 Sep. 2019].

#seeing

1 note · View note

weekendwarriorblog · 3 years

Text

The Weekend Warrior 8/27/21 - CANDYMAN, LILY TOPPLES THE WORLD, TOGETHER, VACATION FRIENDS, NO MAN OF GOD, and More

There’s only one new wide release this week, and I’m so happy about that, that I’m gonna say the name of that movie FIVE TIMES!

Candyman

CANDYMAN (Universal)

Well, you get the idea. Jordan Peele seems to have done it again with this sequel the 1992 movie from Bernard Rose, although in this case he’s just co-writing and producing along with the film’s actual director, Nia DaCosta, who directed a small indie called Little Woods, which not that many people saw but that played at the Tribeca Film Festival a bunch of years back.

Of course, the movie is really being sold on the basis of Peele’s involvement, because he had such success with two horror movies as a director, the Oscar-winning Get Out in 2017 and Us two years later. Both of those movies grossed over $175 million domestically and another $75 to 82 million overseas. Get Out opened with just $33 million, which is fairly impressive for an R-rated horror comedy, but Us opened with over $70 million based on the popularity and success of Get Out.

Peele and DaCosta have another decent cast with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, possibly best known for playing Black Manta in James Wan’s Aquaman, playing the lead, an artist named Anthony Mccoy, who learns about the myths of the Candyman at the Chicago projects, Cabrini-Green. He also starred in Peele’s Us right after that, and also appeared in The Greatest Showman with Hugh Jackman, another huge domestic hit. Later this year, he’ll appear (presumably as the younger Morpheus) in The Matrix Resurrections. HIs girlfriend and art curator Brianna is played by Teyonah Parris, who might be best known for her role as Monica Rambeau in the Disney+ series, WandaVision, a role she’ll reprise in next year’s The Marvels, which will reunite her with director DaCosta, as she becomes a full-fledged superhero with the film’s star, Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel. The movie also stars Colman Domingo, who had a big breakout by starring in HBO’s Euphoria, the AMC spin-off Fear the Walking Dead, and well-received movies (at least critically) like Zola and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. That’s a pretty amazing trio right there for the movie, and they’ll help the movie get the hoped-for African-American moviegoers but also the young people who enjoy horror.

Horror has generally done okay during the pandemic, although obviously, there’s been a lot of sequels with John Krasinski and Emily Blunt’s A Quiet Place Part II doing the best of all of them. More recent sequels like Escape Room: Tournament of Champions and Don’t Breathe 2 haven’t done as well. And there’s no way around the fact that Candyman is a sequel, but it’s a sequel to a movie that came out nearly 30 years ago, which doesn’t mean that young people will have that close a connection to it.

Maybe it’s no surprise that reviews for the movie have been stellar, similar to Peele’s other two movies, although some definitely have issues with the movie. (My review of Candyman can be found over at Below the Line.)

Candyman seems good for an opening somewhere in the low-to-mid $20 millions, although the anticipation for the movie, and its strong draw within the Black community could give it a nice bump ala the movies Peele has directed. Expect the movie to do especially well on Thursday and Friday, but I think anticipation will make it fairly front-loaded as would be the case with most horror movies released in the summer. (I also expect a massive 55%+ drop next week when Marvel opens Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.)

But in the meantime, this is where I see this week’s top 10.

1. Candyman (Universal) - $22.7 million N/A

2. Free Guy (20th Century/Disney) - $11.5 million -38%

3. Paw Patrol: The Movie (Paramount) - $7.5 million -43%

4. Jungle Cruise (Walt Disney Pictures) - $3.9 million -40%

5. Don’t Breathe 2 (Sony/Screen Gems) - $2.5 million -50%

6. Respect (MGM) - $2 million -47%

7. The Suicide Squad (Warner Bros.) - $1.6 million -52%

8. The Night House (Searchlight) - $1.5 million -48%

9. The Protégé (Lionsgate) - $1.4 million -52%

10. Reminiscence (Warner Bros.) - $900k -54%

A great film I saw at SXSW earlier this year that’s finally coming out and is therefore, this week’s “THE CHOSEN ONE” is the doc LILY TOPPLES THE WORLD (Discovery+) from director Jeremy Workman, which follows the amazing life of 20-year-old domino artist and YouTube sensation Lily Hevesh, who has built up a following due to her amazing domino constructions.

The movie works as a documentary on so many levels, first in terms of relaying Lily’s history as a Chinese orphan adopted at the age of one by non-Asian parents and how that affected her life and her interest in discovery, which ultimately led her to this passion. But building and toppling domino art is much more than a hobby as Ms. Hevesh has been able to monetize her passion with a thriving YouTube channel and also being hired by big corporations to create domino art for commercials and such. I’m not sure how long Workman was following her around but we do get to see Lily in all sorts of environments. We mostly get to see her as entrepreneur as she’s designing and developing her own line of dominoes that would be ideal for the work she does.

Lily Hevesh is just so inspirational and watching this amazing woman go through her life and the wonder she creates in others makes this one of my favorite docs of the year. It will stream on Discovery+ starting Thursday but you can also catch it in NYC at the IFC Center starting Friday.

Over the weekend, I caught a movie that I missed when it got a platform release in New York and L.A. on August 6, as well as when it played at the Tribeca Film Festival back in March. David Gutnik’s Materna (Utopia), an anthology of sorts about four very different women, played by the wonderful Kate Lyn Sheil,Jade Shete, Lindsay Burdge, and Assol Abudllina (the second and fourth of those who co-wrote the script with Gutnik). It’s an interesting anthology that deals with four women who are on the same New York subway when an incident happens, but it never really goes too far into the incident, or even resolves it, since it’s more about the individual women and their lives. I was really only familiar with Sheil and Burdge, although I like the former’s segment more than the latter, though they’re both strange looks at motherhood. I’ll freely admit that there were aspects to all the stories I didn’t get, but I think I ultimately enjoyed the final Assol Abudllina segment the best, even though that’s the only one not in English. I don’t think Materna (which is now available digitally on TVOD) will be for everyone, but it’s certainly an intriguing and somewhat enigmatic film from Gutnik and his collaborators.

Premiering on Hulu Friday is Clay Tarver’s comedy VACATION FRIENDS (Hulu), starring John Cena and Lil Rel Howery as two guys who meet while on vacation with their partners Kyla (Meredith Hagner) and Emily (Yvonne Orji), and they become friends! Okay, there’s a lot more to the movie than that, but I’m embargoed until Friday at midnight so there’s not much more I can say. I do think it’s interesting that this was originally announced in 2005 with Nicholas Cage and Will Smith in the lead roles, and at one point, Chris Pratt and his ex-wife Anna Faris were attached, as well as Ice Cube. It certainly would have been interesting to see any of those pairings, and maybe this would have gotten a theatrical release rather than just streaming.

Mini-Review: A high-concept movie like this could definitely be very funny or absolutely horrible, because it is basically a buddy comedy that relies so much on whether the leads can be funny on screen together. I generally like Lil Rel Howery (even though he’s literally been everywhere this year and is in danger of getting into a James Corden level of annoying) as well as John Cena, who I’ve been a fan of from his wrestling days.

Like I said, the premise is really simple, Howery’s Marcus and his girlfriend Emily are vacationing in Mexico where he plans to propose when they encounter Cena’s Ron and his girlfriend Kyla, who are clearly having the time of their lives, but they’re also the kind of people you don’t want to spend too much time with since they’re VERY LOUD. They end up spending a lot of time together and when they go their separate ways, Marcus thinks that’s it. He and Emily continue to plan their wedding with Marcus trying to prove himself to Emily’s military father Larry (Chuck Cooper). Of course, Ron and Kyla show up and make everyone uncomfortable as they “do their thing” to ruin Marcus’ wedding.

Comedy is a tough thing to critique and gauge how people will receive it, because everyone finds different things funny, and I’m sure that most actual critics will find many reasons to hate this, because it’s incredibly inappropriate and quite low brow. Fortunately, the movie doesn’t rely merely on Ron and Kyla making Marcus uncomfortable as when the movie transitions into a wedding comedy, there’s lots of family dynamics to add to the humor.

Although The Suicide Squad is still Cena’s best and funniest movie of the summer, this is another example of how he’s really trying to mix things up with his acting roles, and even though he’s still way behind Dwayne Johnson in terms of getting to the A-List. Howery is definitely better in this than in some of his other recent movies (koffSPACE JAMkoff), and he continues to be a really strong comic actor that does well with the right material.

Hagner is hilarious and I’m sure I’ve seen her being just as funny elsewhere but some of the best laughs are when she’s faking out Marcus and Emily, but she’s also a great counter to Cena. Unfortunately, that means Orji almost always has to play the straight-person to the other three, but there’s a lot of great set-ups for laughs around her. There are some things that feel played and overdone like the gag of Marcus and Ron getting high and what happens with that, but then there are more original yucks as well.

Ultimately, Vacation Friends does what it’s intended to do. As far as vacation/destination comedies go, this one could have been a hell of a lot worse, but the combination of cast and Tarver’s direction makes this a consistently funny movie that probably would have done okay with audiences in theaters.

Rating: 7/10

I haven’t had a chance to see the Pen15 Animation Special, which also debuts on Hulu this Friday, but I’m looking forward to it for sure, as I love this show.

The pandemic dramedy TOGETHER (Bleecker Street), directed by the great Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, is the definition of a two-hander as it stars James McAvoy and Sharon Morgan (from last year’s Military Wives) as a couple who end up quarantined together during the COVID pandemic even though they clearly loathe each other and probably shouldn’t be together.

This is a movie where I really didn’t know what to expect, but it’s very dark and can’t necessarily be called a comedy and definitely not a romantic comedy, but is something akin to last year’s Malcolm and Marie, although in this case it’s very much meant to be taking place in the here and now. At first, the movie does seem to be fairly funny because of the jabs the two actors take at each other, but then it gets quite dramatic as it deals with her Mum dying in the hospital on her own.

In many ways, Together seems like something that would have worked just as well as a fast-paced play, since writer Dennis Kelly doesn’t make it anything that couldn’t be put on stage, although Daldry and Martin do find ways to keep it interesting as the two actors are moved around their flat. What’s particularly interesting is the pace which starts out quite quickly but then it slows down and gets quite dramatic as each actor goes off to do their own monologue.

It also deals with the seriousness of how badly England was struck by Covid, and it even gets into the mad rush to get the vaccine and the crazy things people would do in order to get it as soon as possible. Much of the question surrounding the duo is how they possibly could have at one time loved each other but now hate each other as their young son is seen in the background during their fiercest arguments. You spend much of the movie wondering whether they can reconcile and get back together, but more importantly, whether they should.

Listen, I’ve long been a fan of McAvoy, and I’ve always known what he could do as an actor but Horgan is a nice surprise, and it’s amazing to see two actors really push each other to get this amazing dual performance that drives the film.

Together covers a lot of ground, and its combination of an amazing script and two actors who can clearly dig in and really get the most out of it makes it a completely riveting film. Everyone involved with this movie has created a really brilliant piece of cinematic drama that can probably withstand multiple viewings to really appreciate what they’ve done, but especially for those two massive performances.

A movie that also debuted at Tribeca is Amber Sealey's NO MAN OF GOD (RLJFilms), another two hander of sorts with Elijah Wood playing Special Agent Bill Hagmaier and Luke Kirby playing notorious serial killer, Ted Bundy. The movie takes place in the mid-80s as Bundy is on death row at the Florida State Prison and Bill is trying out the FBI’s new methods of profiling serial killers in order to find them before they kill more people.

This is another movie that didn’t really click with me when I saw it at Tribeca, but I wanted to watch it again and give it another chance. This is definitely my kind of movie, and you can definitely see how the interviews between Hagmaier and Bundy could have led to things like the novels by Thomas Harris or David Fincher’s Mindhunter series on Netflix.

It’s well-written by Kit Lesser and the performance by Kirby is particularly strong, as he has a method of speaking that lulls you into a false sense of security, but overall, the delivery and pace of the film just isn’t as compelling as it could and should have been. The whole thing feels kind of stiff and staid, and while I like the idea behind the movie.

The movie also has a pretty amazing score, which does add a lot when things just aren’t very interesting, but as much as this is meant to be dark and creepy ala Silence of the Lambs, it just never fully delivers on the promising concept.

Premiering on Apple TV+ this Friday is the second season of the fantasy series, See, starring Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista, but I still haven’t seen the first season, so nothing more to add here.

Other movies out this week include:

BEHEMOTH (Level 33 Entertainment)

DEFINING MOMENTS (VMI Worldwide)

THE COLONY (Lionsgate)

Next week, Marvel Studios is back with a brand new hero in its MCU, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

#The Weekend Warrior #Movies #Reviews #Candyman #Together #No Man of God #Vacation Friends #Lily Topples the World #Box Office

0 notes

fantabulosogamedev · 6 years

Text

Status Update: The Plan

Hey guys! I’ve been writing this post for around a week now, originally as a video script, and it’s ballooned way out of control, so I’ve decided to give y’all the summary of it as best I can here in text. Come by the Discord if you have any questions!

So here we are, t-minus 26 days before the demo releases, with no majorly new information since the last Progress Update. What’s the situation? Am I still on schedule? The answer is...yes!! However...

Part One: The Game Itself

Some major changes have come about in terms of my plan for the game as a whole. Essentially, my original plan (16ish levels total) was just infeasible at this point, and would result in a development time bordering on at least 3 more years at max development speed -- while some people might be cool with waiting that long, I’m not! I gotta eat, and the amount of money I’d need to fund 3 years of development would be really high to ask for a fresh dev like me.

So, here’s the new plan: The Fantabulous Game will now consist of 6 primary levels, along with a tutorial zone (Cragwell Woods) and a hub accessed after The Fightyplace. Based on my estimates, this should reduce the development time to approximately 1-1.5 years if all goes as planned, thereby reducing kickstarter costs and wait times. The levels will consist of a reimagining of the Shamrock path of LFG, featuring the Shamrock City, the prison Ballcatraz, the Shamrock Palace, and more!

To compensate for this drastic reduction in content, some positive changes will be made as well: the game will now cost $15 instead of $20, a Boycap miniboss will be present in each level, brief linear connecting zones between levels will exist to add cohesion and content to the world, and most interestingly the Fantabula sublevels will be expanded!

Previously, the sublevels were going to just be brief platforming challenges, with a gold sausage for a normal clear and a bludsausage for a speedclear. However, the sublevels are now going to be expanded into proper linear levels, featuring collectibles of several kinds scattered throughout...as well as their own full-blown bossfight! Why am I bringing this up now?

With only 6 proper levels in the game, I no longer feel comfortable offering the Fightyplace for free in the demo, as it now takes up a much larger amount of the game’s content proportionally. So instead, I’ll be releasing The Fightyplace’s Fantabula Sublevel, with some tweaks and modifications to give the player as full of an experience as I can! Unfortunately I can’t say for sure how long the demo will be, as much of it will come down to player skill level -- time permitting, however, I’d like to add a NG+ to it, where players can push themselves against much more powerful enemies.

Finally, in regards to the 8 cut levels: if The Fantabulous Game is successful, I plan on working them into two separate expansion packs to be released after TFG is completed, for around $10 each. The first of these expansion packs would focus on the antics of a non-Shamrock race from Le Fantabulous Game, and (assuming expac1 was successful) the second would turn its sights to exploring exactly how the world of LFG turned into the one found in TFG.

Part Two: The Crowdfunding

So with that out of the way, I’d also like to talk about my plan for the game’s crowdfunding campaign! I’ve decided to use a blend of the top options from the poll I posted several months ago: on, or shortly after, the release of the demo, I’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund the game, with a goal of $40k. I’ll be putting the currently planned rewards and stretch goals at the bottom of this post, and would love to hear you guys’ feedback on what should be added/removed/adjusted.

However, those looking for Early Access, I hear you as well -- it was the first option on the poll, after all! Here’s the plan when it comes to EA: the Kickstarter, like many others, will have a backer tier for beta access throughout the game’s development. This backer tier will function the same as Early Access would, but would not be discounted. However!

If the game is successful, and I decide to create the two expansion packs I mentioned above, both of the DLCs will be sold on steam via early access with a sizeable discount pre-release. Considering the expansion packs would make up approximately 50% of the original content of the game, I think this is a great compromise between the crowdfunding options! This will also apply to any future expansion packs I make beyond those two, such as the hypothetical Boycap xpac.

Part Three: The Specifics

As I mentioned above, I have a rough draft of my plans for the Kickstarter, and would love to have feedback on them. Here they are:

Reward Tiers:

Get the game (EARLY EGG) - $10, 750 available

Get the game - $15

Deluxe Edition: Get the game, digital manual, & soundtrack (EARLY EGG) - $15, 750 available

Deluxe Edition: Get the game, digital manual, & soundtrack - $20

Beta access: Pay more to get access to the game throughout development, in the form of episodically released levels! (good for those who wished for Early Access!) - $35

Deluxe Beta Access - Beta Access with the Deluxe additions! - $40

Design a Spherefolk NPC: design a friendly Spherefriend or Shamrock to show up in various levels throughout the game! Design includes clothing, skin patterns, and dialogue (all subject to developer approval). NPCs would randomly appear chosen from a pool of all backer NPCs. Also, appear in the credits as a “Backerfriend” and receive the Deluxe Beta edition of the game! $80

Design a Spheredog Collectible: Design a Spheredog to show up as a collectible in one of the levels of the game! Design can be anything subject to developer approval, but must maintain the basic structure of a Spheredog. Also, appear in the credits as a “Supreme Backerfriend” and receive the Deluxe Beta edition of the game! - $150, 50 Available

Design an NPC: Design a unique NPC that Capboy will encounter several times throughout his adventure! Design is up to you nearly entirely, but should remain reasonable within the boundaries of TFG’s universe and remains subject to developer approval. Also, appear in the credits as a “Legendariful Backerfriend” and "Character Designer,” and receive the Deluxe Beta edition of the game! - $300

Design one of Boycap’s mechs: Design a mechanical boss based on anything! You get to decide how it fights and harasses Capboy throughout the level, but specifics and general design are subject to developer approval. Also, appear in the credits as an “Fantabulous Backerfriend” and “Boss Designer,” and receive the Deluxe Beta edition of the game! - $450, 2 available

Design a Fantabula Boss: Design a boss encountered within The Fantabula! The boss must somewhat match the level theme and is subject to developer approval. Also, appear in the credits as a “Fantabulous Backerfriend” and “Boss Designer,” and receive the Deluxe Beta edition of the game! - $600, 2 available

Ultimate Designer’s Pack: Every reward listed above, including every single “Design an X” reward! Also, get to be brought onto the developer team as a creative contributor, joining private discussion about plans for bosses, enemies, levels and more! Appear in the credits as a “Creative Contributor” and every corresponding Backerfriend section, and receive the Deluxe Beta edition of the game! - $900, 1 available

Stretch/Funding Goals:

40k - Funding Goal

45k - Mutators -- upon finishing the game, the player can use achievement-unlocked mutators to affect future runs of the game! Mutator ideas include having every weapon unlocked right away, randomly shuffled stats on weapons, randomly shuffled enemies, and more! Mutators would be included with the game upon release.

50k - Boss Rush -- The player would be able to rematch any bosses they’ve beaten, including a time trial mode where they’re given a specific build that they must fight each boss with. Good scores would unlock further achievements, unlocking costumes and mutators. Boss Rush would be included with the game upon release.

60k - Second Quest -- The Second Quest would essentially be a hardmode, beyond the simple changes offered by NG+. Unlocked after beating the game, the Second Quest would feature a brand new story set in modified versions of the main game levels, with brand new harder versions of every boss -- which would be included in the Boss Rush! The Second Quest would be released as a free update after the game’s release.

70k - Local Competitive Multiplayer --Local up-to-4 player PvP multiplayer gamemodes. Gamemodes would include 1v1 and 2v2 deathmatch, king of the hill, and a flag-football styled gamemode. Platforming races, “gungame” styled fights, and more would all be further options. The Multiplayer would be released as a free update after the game’s release.

If you’re still with me after reading that massive post, thank you!! I greatly appreciate your devotion to the game if you read all of that, and if you just skipped down here I don’t blame ya at all. Unfortunately though, I can’t really tl;dr this, so you’ve gotta bear with it.

With less than 4 weeks to the demo, it’s exciting to finally see these two and a half years of work start to come to fruition! Thank you to everyone who’s been supporting the game throughout its development -- here’s to a successful campaign, thanks to you guys’ help! If you have feedback and/or questions about this plan, swing by the discord to talk about it there, but if not...I’ll catch you guys on the 26th!

-Fantabuloso

#the fantabulous game #progress update

26 notes · View notes

kida-oftheworld-blog · 6 years

Text

Chapter 5: A Party That Never Ends With a Host That Never Dies

[in which Kida makes a stand and things come to an end]

Get up to date: Chapter 1: News Cycle (Hellscape) Chapter 1.5: A Weird-Form Interlude Chapter 2: The Master of My Own Domain (Dreamscape) Chapter 3: Whats in the booox? (Lifescape) Chapter 4: Help From Another World Chapter 4.5: Interlude: The Other World Reaction

[tw: violent imagery but nothing gory? its a showdown guys, use your judgement here. know your limit, play within it || Word count: 5170]

@thedipster

KIDA

Kida knew better than to jump through a box-portal and not bend her knees to brace herself for impact. After all, she hadn’t been born yesterday, but that didn’t mean the landing still didn’t hurt. She didn’t get how a sphere so close to the ground could still seemingly spit her out from so high-up, but that was beyond the point. Cause she was back in Swynlake. Beautiful, partially-2D, torn-sky Swynlake. It wasn’t exactly the home sweet home she had been hoping for upon her return. But that was fine. She still had a plan. More like the outline of a plan, really.

See, there wasn’t a sphere in the sky that she hadn’t ventured into yet. They were all accounted for. Over the buildings she could make out the two first spheres she had come from amongst the bobbing heads of too-tall-to-be-fair demons. One of those heads happened to be heading in her direction, actually, which meant it was time to go. Where, exactly? Kida wasn’t 100% sure. But if she had learned anything from what had happened so far, her best bet was probably the pyramid in the sky. That, of all things, looked like the climax scenario she had been anticipating.

The little side street she had been spat out onto spilled directly onto the road running towards the pyramid in the sky. She turned the corner, figuring that once she got closer she’d be able to figure out a way to climb onto it but--that didn’t seem to be necessary. Where the main road met the avenue that ran perpendicular to it, a doorway had seemingly opened up out of thin air.

Every ounce of Kida’s rational instincts screamed TRAP! TRAP! TRAP! TRAP! and it was probably right.

But what did she have to lose? Three triangle runes in her possession and she was gonna get scared away by an ominous looking staircase? No. Definitely not. The sound of footsteps drew nearer to her and without a single doubt, Kida barrelled down the street at full speed. She crossed the threshold onto the first step, and immediately her body was her own again. Just as immediately, though, the doorway closed behind her, and the only way left to go--was up. With less of the bravado that she had bared just moments ago, Kida climbed all the way up until the stairs levelled out into a singular playing field. Not blank, but not completely full, either. Just seemingly formed by the great tear some ways off in the distance. And for a moment, Kida was seemingly--alone. Alone-ish.

BILL CIPHER

Someone had been chosen.

Bill was aware of this the moment it happened and he knew that she would be coming. He knew that she would collect the runes, knew that she would do it successfully. Knew that in the Other World, someone would be pulling the strings. Knew that, ultimately, he would be defeated, everyone would clap, and he would be but a memory.

But dammit, if he wasn’t going to make this a helluva time.

And dammit, if he wasn’t gonna try to stick around.

He sat atop a great throne, in the Mindscape he’d formed from the collective consciousness of all those involved in this process--the ones in this world, and the ones controlling them in the Other World.

The throne hovered and below it was Dipper’s still body.

Bill sat, spindly legs crossed, spindly fingers tapping on the arms of his throne.

And towards the edge of the Mindscape, he felt a tug. Someone had entered. It was Her--the Chosen One. Like, literally, they chose her.

He narrowed his eye--well, as well as he could narrow his eye--and with a snap of his fingers, he and Dipper’s body shimmered in their current plane, reappearing in front of the girl.

“Well, well, well,” said Bill, growing larger in size and hovering over the girl. He wriggled his fingers, studying his opponent. He wondered why she’d been chosen, of all of them, but he didn’t question the forces behind the Other World; they had more power than him, ultimately.

“I thought you’d come with a trident or a sword or somethin’” cackled Bill. “That’d be a way to do it--stab me in the eye, eh?” The chuckled turned into a low growl. “But no. Just you, Kiddo. Get it--’cuz that’s almost your name? Hahaha, I crack myself up.”

Now truth be told, Bill didn’t know as much about this one as he knew about Dipper or as much as he knew about some of the other citizens of this world. And as he tried to scan for more information, tried to read the old posts, he found he was drawing a blank.

It was those tasks.

They were serving as a blocker. He couldn’t read all her information. He couldn’t find a weakness. He couldn’t hack her.

But he wasn’t gonna let her know that.

“Soooo,” he said, shrinking down a little smaller and bobbing right in front of her. “What’s it gonna be, Princess? You got a secret blaster or somethin’? Gonna spin some magic on me? I’m excited for this.”

KIDA

The more she looked, the more Kida thought she could make something out in the distance. But before she could figure out what exactly it was: it was gone. Disappeared in a shimmering light--and then reappeared. Right in front of her.

So that’s what she was up against, huh? That was… You know, arguably not as scary as the other demons that had been roaming around Swynlake since the beginning. Off the bat, Kida wasn’t terrified, or anything. But then she got to thinking about it, and well, really the point wasn’t that this thing was particularly scary, it was about what it could do. If this was the source, then it had torn the sky open and set hell upon the town. The triangle in front of her wasn’t scary, but that--all of that--was. Kida got that. But she didn’t move a muscle.

Standing there, for the first time, the runes were heavy in her pocket. She’d need them eventually. But not yet.

Kida’s eyes flicked around, following the triangle as it talked. As it entertained. Cause that’s what it felt like. Like he was some kind of host, as if Kida was just part of the show.

“Yeah-- uh, no.” She replied, cutting it off before it launched into the second act of its speech. If there was gonna be exposition, it was gonna be on her own terms, thanks.

“I’m not really the…” Kida lifted a hand up, let it fall back down against her thigh. “Fighting type, if I can swing it. I’m here to--to talk, actually.”

BILL CIPHER

Bill blinked. (Or was it winked--really, he only had one eye, so was it winking or blinking?)

He bobbed a bit in the air, then rested his hands on the lower part of his form (his hips, one could say, if he did have hips), eyeing this...girl. Character. Person. Thing. Carbon-based lifeform. Sack of meat. Pixels on a screen. Formless creature made up only of words and thoughts. Animator’s sketch. Cells of paint.

She was a lot of things to Bill, but he while he could see all of those, he couldn’t look closer at the one that actually mattered. Which was, really, NOT FAIR, c’mon.

“Alright,” said Bill, lowering himself a little. “Let’s talk.” He let out a low chuckle. “Do you realize my game yet? That’ll be my one regret if you do defeat me--that no one figured it out. No one saw their true potential.” He bounced a bit, circling around her slightly, but keeping his distance.

“But, maybe I’m having too much fate in you--alright, let’s hear it, what do you wanna say that’s gonna make me tremble?”

KIDA

Kida didn’t know what she was getting herself into. Figuring her way out of those orbs, walking up those stairs, she had imagined that it was at this point that things were gonna start making sense. Things like this were supposed to fit together like puzzle pieces, weren’t they? The rip in the sky and the demons and the spheres, they were all supposed to come together with one grand speech, but it felt like this thing was just speaking in riddles. Riddles, for the record, that didn’t make any sense to her. In a way it felt just like… Chatter.

That being said, that was why she was here to talk. There was always sense to be found in something and if nothing else--if she was gonna die here, as unlikely as that was, she wasn’t going to go out without having at least edged her way towards the truth.

As it circled her, she didn’t hurry to keep it in her sights, instead only lazily moving her head to spot it as it passed. She hoped she wouldn’t need much more than that.

Kida laughed a bit, just lightly enough to convey her amusement. Cause she was amused, mainly by the impression this thing seemingly had of her.

“That’s still not my goal,” She corrected, shaking her head. “But since you’re giving me the chance, I guess we’ll start with… What’s the point?”

Kida paused, raised an eyebrow. “Of this. To be clear. Not what’s the point of life--unless you happen to have answers for that, too.”

BILL CIPHER

“There is no point, that’s the point!” cackled Bill. “All of this--pointless. We’re just wasting our time here, all of us, you and me and this bag o’ meat down here.” He swooped down to Dipper, who stirred feebly.

“None of it has meaning, Kida-Kiddo,” he said, rising back up again. “Not my grand scheme, not the words that are writing out your life right now--everything’s just for the fun of it. Might as well have fun, ya know, if your very existence literally is just for plot purposes, amirite?”

<<That’s right. That’s not just from me to Kida--it’s me to all of you suckers there on your laptops and on your phones--your existence means nothing. Might as well have some fun, eh? (that ‘eh’ was for you, Sam, get it, it’s Canadian)>>

“We’re all gonna die--even me. I’ll fade out from imagination, one day, and be a memory of a memory. Y’all will too. Maybe they’ll think of us from time to time, games they played in their younger days. But we will cease to exist.” He turned away from Kida, now, looking up into the Mindscape--the twisting pathways that led to nowhere (though it could very easily be a foggy cloud of consciousness, though it could very easily be black nothingness, it just depeneded on what was written)--then swiveled back to Kida.

“So the point? To have some fun.”

KIDA

Kida narrowed her eyes at this thing as it spoke. Not maliciously, but more like she was doubtful of what it was saying. Cause, plainly, she was.

That kind of thinking irked her. And not just the whole nothing matters part of it--for which she had literally hundreds of years of teaching telling her otherwise--but just all of it. The bleakness of it up unto the driving force and the actions that came of it just didn’t make sense to her. If there wasn’t a point, wasn’t the joy of life arguing with the very fabric that said so? If there wasn’t a point, why did that seemingly justify terrible actions? If there wasn’t a point, did that mean that you shouldn’t have morals? That because nothing mattered, you were excused for your actions?

She didn’t think so.

“I--alright. To have fun. That’s fair.” Kida stepped forwards, not following it per se, but making her own path towards the nothingness beyond them. There wasn’t anything out there, was there? She--could ask that later. Maybe. Didn’t matter right now, since apparently nothing ever mattered anyway, right? Wrong.

She glanced over at the body on the floor--and then up at the triangle.

“But, of all things--why have fun like this? Why not something less…” She waved a hand vaguely through the air. “End of the world-y?”

BILL CIPHER

“Hey, no one’s dead--or even dying, might I add. Everyone’s having some fun! Got cool powers and new forms. Far as I’m concerned, this is the best apocalypse you guys have had in the past three years.”

If he could narrow his eye, he would’ve. Instead, it sorta just crinkled up slightly, and he drifted higher in the air, like a balloon that slipped out of a small child’s hand. He rose about a full Kida’s height above Kida, a full Kida’s length distance away from Kida, and grew to a full Kida’s size larger than Kida.

“Is this your plan, kiddo? Get me talking about my grand master vision? Not that I don’t mind talking--love it, in fact. I could talk about myself all darn day!” He cackled, rubbing his fingers together. “I’m gonna miss this--she’s gonna miss me, ya know? You all are, when this is done and over.” He sighed, dropping his hands down and hanging in the air for a moment.

He blinked, then shimmered a little, for no other reason than he wanted to shimmer for one last time possibly.

“Please tell me you’re gonna whip out that trident now,” said Bill. “I’d rather this was quick and gloriously gory.”

KIDA

Yeah, Kida thought, I sure was having a lot of fun watching my kingdom be destroyed over and over and over again. That--she was still painfully sour in regards to that. It was the kind of vision that required a letter home and whole bunch of extra money in express postage but that was besides the point. The point had to stay in the present. She couldn’t afford to have it go drifting off into the ether where this thing was likely to find a way to scoop it up and use it in its favour.

She didn’t want to be doing it any favours. Didn’t feel like it deserved that much.

Course, neither did she, which was why this whole thing was such a pain.

It rose into the air, and Kida--sat down. Making herself comfortable. As far as anyone watching could tell, she was unperturbed. Unsure, maybe, but not worried about it. She leaned back onto her hands and stretched out her legs in front of herself, crossing them at the ankles. Kida disregarded its last requests and tilted her head up at it.

“Who’s she?”

BILL CIPHER

“I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you,” cackled Bill. He peered at Kida, drifting a little closer. Maybe he’d indulge her.

“There’s forces beyond what you and your tiny one-dimensional brain can understand here,” he said. And if his voice could be kind, it dipped sorta-kinda into it now--not in an actual kind way, but like she was some small child and he was showing her how to do a basic task. “There’s dimensions within your own--then there’s ones that go above and below and all around. You can cross the ones in your own, but not above or below--if you even think about them too much, your tiny little mind will explode.”

He chuckled a little, swerving a bit down for dramatic effect.

“This was my way of pulling those above and below worlds to intermingle with yours, kinda, sorta,” he said, then turned back around. “That answer your question, kiddo?”

KIDA

Kida hummed under her breath. That was better than expected, actually. Two answers for the price of one--and extensive ones at that. This thing spoke of dimensions and higher powers and twisting all of these things to play along with its own sick little game. From where she sat, it seemed like it fancied itself some kind of god.

Was it, though?

Kida doubted an answer that simple.

“Mm, more or less.” She conceded, keeping most of her suspicions veiled inside of herself.

This thing was a--demon, probably. Given the runes and given the, well, the other demons running around Swynlake as she spoke, but it wasn’t anything like those.

(And for a fraction of a second Kida wondered if she had bitten off more than she could chew.)

“What about--” She jerked her head back towards the seemingly lifeless body on the ground. “What’s with the kid?”

BILL CIPHER

Bill had actually forgotten about Dipper. He glanced downwards, his body tilting slightly at an angle, his luminous pupil dipping towards Dipper’s still form.

“Oh, him? Yeah, well I needed a way into this world and Dipper here won’t admit it, but he wanted to know all about the aboves and belows and inside-outs and what not.” Bill straightened back up, eye crinkling, and shrugged his little black arms.

“A deal’s a deal, ya know? He gets infinite knowledge, I get to exist. We might be tricksters, but we hold up our ends.”

This was not entirely the truth of the matter; technically this time around, Milo had summoned Bill. Still, he’d gotten what he wanted -- his dead girlfriend. The first time round, Dipper had gotten what he’d wanted -- infinite knowledge. Never mind that it faded away when Bill had been banished. Dipper still had a sense of it though, a craving for something he could never quite know and never would know (which was enough to have kept the remnant of Bill there in the first palce, which was how the summoning this time had been easier; he just needed someone particularly desperate enough).

But enough exposition--

“He’ll be fine,” said Bill, dropping a little closer to Dipper, who let out a small murmur, and reached a hand to pat him on the head. “Just overwhelmed with infinite knowledge, ya know?”

He bobbed back up.

“Anyway, you a therapist or something? Tryin’ to psychoanalyze my plans for universal domination?”

KIDA

She shook her head.

“No, I’m just trying make sure I have all my bases covered, you know? The whys and the whats and the immediate courses of action and things like that...” The list of things like that ran pretty straight forwards in her head as she compiled information.

Use the runes to do whatever the runes were used for-- because there had to be some point to them. Nothing appeared and disappeared out of nowhere to only ever be used at mantel decorations or coasters.

Take out the triangle (this one was still kind of wishy washy, though Kida wasn’t completely without ideas. It just kind of depended on number 1.)

Probably watch the plane disintegrate around her

Tend to the kid if he needed tending to, which, if he did, Kida hoped that that thing had at least been truthful in that he wasn’t that poorly off. Really though, why did she have any reason to trust it?

“So just to make sure I got this straight, you used the kid to get here, and upon arrival you took the world that was yours for the taking because--why not? That’s a uh--hell of a story. It’ll make for great content, you know?” Kida wasn’t actually considering posting any of the nitty gritty of this on her blog. It didn’t feel--quite right. She’d write it down for herself to remembered, but publishing things like this took tact that she didn’t have, and a open-book policy that she couldn’t quite uphold.

Maybe this one was just hers, for once.

She pushed herself off of her hands and crossed her legs in front of herself. She slipped one hand into her pockets, and came right back out easily with the three runes in the palm of her hand.

“You said infinite knowledge, yeah? Any idea how it all ends?”

BILL CIPHER

Bill did, in fact, know how it was going to end. He’d known from the moment he popped into this universe back in August -- no, even before that, when he was just a passing thought being pulled into creation. There was always going to be an end for him.

That’s how it had been in his first universe, how it had been in the ones after that (there were some weird ones out there, though, where that was not the case, but he sorta preferred the ones where it was), how it would be in this one.

Bill knew that everyone was expecting an epic showdown--lasers and lights and loud noises and the like.

Bill knew that it would end, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

And that he would be added as a footnote when they explained what happened to someone new. That they would talk about him still and they would say they missed him, but ultimately, he would just be words on a screen.

“It ends,” he said, simply. “I end.” He cackled a little, eye drifting up to the space of the Mindscape, the fixed it right on Kida. “Make it a good one, eh? Worth a read, make ‘em talk about us.”

KIDA

In hindsight, she shouldn’t have expected anything less. It took more than a conversation to get to know someone, but when this thing’s M.O seemed to be anything goes--Kida should’ve expected the same, here. She should’ve expected the solemn words, even as she had been hoping for the opposite. It was much easier to take someone out if you couldn’t find any sympathy. Kida had too much of it for her own good, she figured, but not enough to think twice about her plan. There was a pang, for just a moment, and then there were many more for the people still in town--for the rest of the world.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and this thing had no right to take the world for it’s own just because it could.

Kida could feel it’s bulging eye staring down at her as she laid the runes on the ground all the same. There were three triangles on the ground, and one in the sky. How convenient. She clicked them together like a dream, and from the puzzle came a single triangle, with a perfect space in the middle.

“I can’t make any guarantees.” She said.

The runes began to glow with that same dull light as the spheres, and Kida took that as her sign to back up. She scrambled up onto her feet at the runes expanded and expanded and slowly righted themselves until they stood tall in the void, at which point they began to rise.

BILL CIPHER

There were things he could do to delay her.

He could conjure up a swarm of neon-colored squirrels, swirling in tornado formation and chewing up the very fabric of this reality into a million-trillion-gazillion squirrel-chewed pieces. He could call upon a storm of past-selves and current-selves and future-selves and alter-selves and a-whole-lotta other selves and overwhelm them all with the sheer selve-ness of the whole situation. He could blast them into a total other reality where they’d be suspended in time and space and words and not be able to move or think

or act or anything because they didn’t belong there and would not ever belong there, so they’d be in an eternal state of half-existence, existing in one reality but being in another.

But he couldn’t really do any of those things, because right as he decided on the squirrels, the final piece of it all -- the one that Kida didn’t know about, couldn’t know about -- was completed and in another reality, he felt himself violently shaken and tossed and in this one, he froze --

And Kida completed the triangles.

“Aw shit!” Bill cried, as the triangles locked together and rose into the air. His one eye grew wide as the triangles closed in around him, trapping him in the space between them. He let out a scream, low at first, but growing rough and loud, ripping through the air, through time and space, reverberating in the collective consciousness of the Mindscape.

(Feel that chill? The one you get out of nowhere in the middle of the day, when the air is otherwise warm? That’s Bill Cipher’s scream echoing through time.)

As he screamed, his lines bled to his main coloring, the yellow turning black, the black lines of his curves turning red--his eye inverted, the white turning black, the black turning white and expanding and flashing red as he struggled between the bonds.

“You don’t know what this world is,” he sneered and his eye flashed white-red-black-white-red-black-white-red-black. “You’re all just pathetic puppets used by them and they’re gonna leave you one day and you will cease to exist and this was your chance -- all of your chances -- to wake up to your bleak reality--”

His voice was cut off, as the runes closed in tigther and he was shook again in the other world (seriously? twice?)

KIDA

Kida shielded her eyes from the rapidly blinking light above her. Could whole planes shake, or was it just her? Was that the universe trying to burst at the seams or was it her heart breaking free from her chest? Either way, it felt like a lot. Kida was feeling a lot and that made it hard to focus on the task at hand.

The demon--and Kida was sure it was a demon now, she could feel it in the waves of energy rippling through her crystal. It was trying to protect her. She appreciated it--screamed and it’s voice rang out louder than anything she had ever heard before. It was inside her head and all around and in the air and running through the ground and nothing would ever be quiet again, she figured. So long as this thing screamed and struggled and cursed her out, there would not be quiet. The world would not be safe. If she stood there and did nothing, the world would not be safe. Not for herself, not for the kid lying half-dead on the ground, not for anyone.

She had to remember that and--try to do something.

Her crystal rumbled around her neck. There was strong magic in the air, and it could feel it, which meant that Kida could feel it too. It hummed through the Heart all the way back to her and from it there was a lingering sense of peace. One that told her, you know what to do.

Kida stepped forwards, and brought her hand down from where it shielded her eyes to wrap it around her crystal. She tugged and the chain broke loose.

“Why should I care?” She yelled out, holding the crystal tighter and tighter until the ruff edges dug into the palm of her hand. “You said it yourself! There’s no point! Nothing matters! Not even you! So it’s about time you go back to where you came from!”

Kida opened her fist, and just like the day her mother had--gone, the light that spilled out of her crystal was blinding. She turned her head away and closed her eyes, but kept it pointed at the demon.

“Go HOME!”

DIPPER

Bill’s grip on Dipper loosened and the blackness that he’d slipped into for the past week or so started to melt away. He felt the ache in his body first, creeping from his sides, to the very center of being, then up to his face -- have you ever felt your face ache? Like not just your head, but your face --

There was a light. It was so strong that Dipper had to blink to see and then he heard that scream.

He’d heard that scream before--

The last time, when Uncle Ford and Stan and Mabel had blasted into the cave and wrangled Bill out of this plane.

(They hadn’t done it properly, but that had been the plan the whole time)

He scrambled to his feet.

There was a girl there and he didn’t know who she was but the light was coming from her.

y̤͞ ̙͠o̼̹̬̩ ̡͓u̗͈͠ ̜̩c̣͈̮̠̦͜a͙̘͚n̫̹̰̬ ̹͚̳̖͕͙s̨͓̻̞T̡͕̳̤͍ͅo̭͇̼P͓̩̘̭͝ ̮h̻̖̮̟E͏͇̦R̢

The voice echoed through Dipper’s head and he pressed his hands against his ears--he wanted it out, wanted it out.

He had sudden images of horrible memories--of Merida’s face, her eyes wide in fear; of Maui’s eyes wide in confusion; of writhing and spitting and holy water splashed in his face; of Professor Thatch’s desperate voice; of blood--blood from him, blood from Terence, blood from Maui--

s̡̟̻̹t̶̼̹o͖̣͍̠̙̤P̺̥̯̜̝̯̠ ̞H̤͙͎͍͍e̺̟͍͡R ҉̤̣̣͍̪o͕̠̙̬͜R̠ ̴͍̜͓̗Y͏̜͔̰̩̼̜͉O̵͉͉̼̣̟U̵̹̮̮͉̫̱ ̳̰͎̘̱͙W̮̫͕̖̼̺ͅI̞̜̟̫̙̣̗LL̤̙͚͎̝͖̰ ̥̪̖̹͔̝BE̞̺̜͈̥̰ ͢I͏̳̯̹̞N͍̲̖̰̹ ̼̩̯̳̫͙̀T̹͉̫̳̣͞H̰̩̼E̺̕ ̩̪͝D̗̱̖A̲̻͓͎̥̗R҉͇̩k̵̳̥

There were things he also saw--he saw three girls, a bit older than him, they were on a train. He saw laptop screens. He saw himself, too, and Mabel, too, in Gravity Falls, except everything was different, everything was the same, not really. He saw a man drawing. He saw business meetings (why did he see business meetings?)--

He could see all that and--

What was the point? Why did he need that? He had this reality and that was what mattered and he could discover all there was about this one and he had all his life to do that and there was no point in doing that now, not this way, not in this way--

He stood next to the girl and he looked up at Bill--the runes around him closing in smaller and smaller.

“Leave ME ALONE!” he yelled, voice hoarse, but loud and strong and echoing through the Mindscape. “I’VE HAD ENOUGH.”

Bill’s eye flashed back to white, his body flashed to yellow and the eye widened and--

If it could have looked sad, right now, it did.

But it was only a moment, could have been a trick of Dipper’s eye, something that the light altered, something that the hammering of his chest made him feel, something that the ties between him and the demon made him think, something that Bill was doing to make Dipper feel bad.

It was only a moment and Bill let out a wail as he was sucked into the space between the runes, which swirled a deep, bottomless, black.

And then, for a moment, it was quiet. It was still. Dipper took a shaking breath and for the first time in nearly ten years, his head felt silent.

And then, there was a loud sucking noise--the black portal between the runes swirling as all the weirdness, all the disasters and demons and chaos flew to the portal, getting pulled within, vanishing into the nothingness.

The place they were shimmered around them, as if it were fighting between being here and not being here.

And then--as if nothing had happened at all, Dipper and the strange girl were standing in the middle of Professor Thatch’s flat, sunlight streaming through the window, birds chirping outside, a clock ticking from somewhere he couldn’t place. There were noises--noises of life: the radiator in the corner, those birds, that clock, the pipes somewhere, the floorboards.

But his head, it was quiet.

He took a deep breath, his arm reaching for the back of neck, and turned to the girl.

“So, uh, that was weird.”

#c: Bill Cipher #c: Dipper Pines #Saga: Kill Bill #takebackswynlake #au: weird #FIN!

3 notes · View notes

takeastandessaytopics412 · 4 years

Video

youtube

write my paper for me

About me

Write My Paper In Hours

Write My Paper In Hours For some, writing an essay is so simple as sitting down at their laptop and starting to type. But, much more planning goes into writing an essay efficiently. I transferred the money and relaxed, or as relaxed as a person with upwards of £50,000 of debt may be. For assignments that require double spacing, it will take approximately 250 phrases to fill the page. Again, the type of font used can make the word count higher or decrease, nevertheless it’s a great rule of thumb for those who are simply on the lookout for a common estimation. The truth is there isn't any definitive answer to this question. For example, if the assignment says the writing must be in 10-level font, it’s going to take a greater number of words to fill a web page than if the assignment requires a 12-level font. A word count of 750 words will equal about 1.5 pages single spaced or three pages double spaced. This includes writing your matter or idea in the middle of the paper and creating bubbles of related ideas round it. While this sounds like plenty of steps to write a easy essay, if you observe them you will be able to write down more profitable, clear and cohesive essays. The author takes a stand on an issue—both “for” or “against”—and builds the strongest attainable argument to win over the reader. You have already got your thesis statement in the intro. So, write a hook previous it — a quote, a relevant anecdote in a sentence or two, or some statistical information related to the subject. Fortunately, these tips for writing essays may help you along the way in which and get you on the trail to a properly-written essay. Once you've carried out your brainstorming and chosen your topic, you might need to do some research to put in writing an excellent essay. Go to the library or search on-line for details about your subject. Of course it'll depend on the word processor settings, what font and font size you're using and web page margins. However, with a standard 12 point Arial or Times New Roman font and default web page margins your outcomes must be about the same. Examples of 750 word count pages include highschool essays, questions for take house exams, product evaluations and love letters. After a brief chat with a robotic, I discovered that 90 per cent of their writers come from the US and UK, with the remaining 10 per cent being native English speakers. Additionally, most of their writers are educated to a Masters or PhD degree of schooling. Similarly, the credentials of the authors additionally matter an excellent deal in this context. According to an expert, the sources that ought to be used in any paper should be dated the previous five years on the most as it represents the most recent findings on a given subject. Also, make a transition to the body of your essay on the end of the intro. In the conclusion, re-summarize the thesis assertion while linking it to the evidence that you are providing in the body paragraphs. Write a conclusive sentence that might place the information in your paper right into a broader context. Search for the important thing ideas you’re positively going to use in your paper. Remember that you just don’t have much time on the entire essay, so be transient and concise in your analysis. We’ll share with you the secrets of tips on how to write essays sooner below. Interview individuals who may be experts in the subject. Use clustering or thoughts mapping to brainstorm and give you an essay concept. Use our on-line word count software to rapidly count what number of words are in your essay or weblog publish. At Time4Writing, we believe the five-step writing course of is one of the best approach to learning how to write a persuasive essay. Here are persuasive essay tips for every section of the writing process. Writing a persuasive essay is like being a lawyer arguing a case earlier than a jury.

0 notes

maritzaerwin · 4 years

Text

14 Common Interview Questions with Actionable Answers

While you can never guarantee what questions you are going to get at an interview, there is a number that you are most likely to turn up. Preparing yourself to answer these questions will also inspire you for similar questions but be ready for the outside-the-box strange question that many businesses now use!

Don’t feel like reading? Listen to the article instead!

Loading…

The key to nailing the popular interview questions is pretty simple: understand the intention behind them. Every question the interviewer poses is aimed at yanking some key information from you regarding your personality, cultural fit, skills, and career progression. Your goal is to serve them just that, plus use your answer to tout some more curious bits of your professional life.

PRO TIP:

The interviewer will want to get to know all they can about you during the interview, so prepare a summary about yourself and why you have chosen this career and be prepared to back up your answers with solid examples.

Melony Botha HR Consultant London, United Kingdom

Now, keeping that in mind, let’s move on to the list of common interview questions, paired with sharp and on-point tips for answering them!

1. Please, Tell Me About Yourself

This is one of those interview questions you’ll get 99 out 100 times. Considering its popularity, we even wrote an entirely separate post on how to answer the “tell me about yourself” question.

Here’s a quick recap:

Start with a quick, professional summary — a one-liner summarizing your key ‘selling points’ and background.

Highlight your core technical skills and areas of expertise.

Wrap it up by saying why you are interested in this new position/company.

Here’s a sample answer to the “tell me about yourself” question:

“I’m an experienced Regional Sales Manager with 6 years of experience in CRM software sales to Fortune 500 companies. I have deep familiarity with lead scoring and Salesforce software and strong people’s skills that helped me close over $1.5 million in sales last year and win the Top Regional Manager award. Although I love my current position, I feel ready for another challenge and would love to apply my skills in the new market that your company’s pursuing.”

If the interviewer then asks “to tell some more about yourself”, bring up some more details that are relevant, but didn’t make it to the final cut of your resume. Because your resume only contains the basics, add in more information about a skill or some situation that may demonstrate your expertise in the area.

2. What Is Your Experience In This Field?

Talk about the jobs you have held but also elements within it – tools or software used, industry events you’ve attended, as well as some specific projects that you have worked on. Mention some of your key accomplishments, backed by data if possible, to further demonstrate your industry knowledge.

Career changers and recent graduates are the most likely to receive this question. If that’s your case, keep the focus on your education and passion for the field, rather than past work expertise. Mention the courses you’ve taken or brought up some recent commentary on the industry events, demonstrating that you are aware of how things work in the field.

3. Why Do You Want to Work Here?

Focus on the main aspects of the job and why this appeals to you. It might be a chance to learn new technology, work in a new environment, or work on a specific type of project. Or focus on that it is a natural extension of your skills or experience and the best step on your career path.

Read more about how to answer the ‘why do you want to work here’ interview question using our 5-step formula.

4. What are Your Reasons for Leaving a Job?

Be positive and be honest when talking about your reasons for leaving your last job. Focus on the positive reasons for changing jobs such as looking for a new challenge or a lack of career growth in your old job. Perhaps you were a victim of restructuring or the company has relocated, these are also legitimate reasons.

However, at all costs avoid badmouthing your former employer, boss, or colleagues! Even if you still have some hard feelings towards either of these people, don’t show them to the interviewer.

Also, try to turn the negative part of your leaving into a positive one. Reference the good parts of your former job and address any potential shortcomings at your end. For instance, if you were terminated due to the lack of some essential skills, mention that while the company didn’t provide any on-the-job training, you later mastered this skill on your own.

5. Why Were You Fired?

This question may seem scary, but don’t fret too much over it. The intention behind it is to learn where the problem was and if you contributed to it in some way.

So again, be honest and forthcoming. Shortly explain the reason for being fired, address your shortcomings (if there were any), and move on to talking about what you’ve learned from this experience.

6. Why Are You Interested in This Position?

This question is your prime opportunity to showcase your enthusiasm and showcase how your skills and experience can positively contribute to the organization.

The easiest way to answer this question is to use the following three-step framework:

Demonstrate your eagerness for the job

Indicate how your experience and skills match the role

Make a connection with your desired career trajectory.

Here’s a sample answer:

“Your company places a great emphasis on user experience and that can be seen in every aspect of your web app and website. I know that the company’s mission is to create more responsive and inclusive web and that is something I care about too. In your job description, you’ve mentioned that you encourage your team members to contribute wherever the interests take them and I’d be really interested in combing my branding knowledge and UX skills to create a more unified experience for users across all digital channels, and my knack for writing could be further applied towards building a more intentional UX writing process. Starting this practice in my last position has reduced our design timeline by 15%. In fact, I’d be really interested in further growing professionally in UX writing and scaling this practice in your organization — something that works well in SaaS, but unfortunately isn’t a priority for most financial companies.”

Last tip: focus on the career benefits of the job rather than financial aspects or benefits.

7. What Do You Know About This Company?

This question is similar to the previous one, but in this case, you have to place a greater focus on why this industry and employer interests you that much.

Do a little research into the company beforehand so you know its background, its core values, mission, current focus, or general direction. Then incorporate some of the points into your answer. Again, try to ‘connect the dots’ and show how your skills and experiences align with this particular company and role.

8. What Challenges Are You Looking For From This Job?

Remember the job description and the key duties/requirements of the candidates. Then pick one specific point and explain what exactly you’d like to achieve.

For example, the job description says that “you’ll need strong organizational skills to manage multi-million dollar budgets for marketing projects”.

You can take that part and mention that for a long time you’ve been seeking extra leadership opportunities and would love to work more as a team to realize your past successes at a larger scale.

In essence, this question prompts you to discuss your career goals so that the employer could understand your expectations, ambitions, and desired career trajectory.

9. What Kind Of Goals And Objectives Do You Have For Your Career?

This interview question is similar to number 6 on this list and you should approach it in a similar fashion. Your answer should be orientated towards the employer, what benefits them, and how you can be instrumental in achieving those goals.

10. Would You Relocate Or Be Willing To Travel?

The point of asking this interview question is to gauge your flexibility, but also practicality. Some jobs may require extended periods of on-site work at customers’ locations – something that may interfere with your work-life balance or family relationships.

Relocation is a major move that not every person is ready to take. After all, your spouse may be happy with their current position and refuse the move. Anyhow, be honest and mention your availability for travel and feelings toward full relocation.

11. What Salary Are You Seeking?

Ah, the money talks. Money-related interview questions are always tricky. On one hand, you don’t want to lowball your offer. On the other, you don’t want to appear as someone with unrealistic expectations.

When asking this question during the interview (not the job offer part), most HRs just want to make sure that you understand the potential compensation range. Negotiating the salary package happens after the job is offered so simply state a salary range within what is mentioned in the job advert.

If there was none, do some research for similar roles on Glassdoor and PayScale to get a good median range estimate.

12. What’s The Most Difficult Situation You Have Faced And How Did You Handle It?

This is one of the most common behavioral interview questions you can get. The interviewer’s goal here is to assess your personality traits and interpersonal skills. The best way to answer this is to provide a quick example from your job.

Tell a quick story showing how you were in a stressful situation but managed to recover quickly, identify the problem, take the right course of action, and succeed. For example:

“Once, our baggage was delayed when we were traveling to the trade show. Our booth decor, posters, and corporate swag were scheduled to arrive a day after the show began. Since it was a crucial event for our company, I contacted the organizers immediately and negotiated that they provided us with another flat screen. Also, I asked the junior manager to purchase a projector, while the rest of the team, including myself, worked overnight to create a new digital presentation of our products and a set of downloadable promo materials that could be downloaded via a QR code scan. Despite the setback, we still managed to attract good traffic to our booth and sign up 20% more leads than usual”.

13. What Are Your Strengths and Weaknesses?

This tricky question goes as number thirteen deliberately as it’s the one place where a lot of candidates chock. Some downplay their strengths. Others get too hung up on appearing all flawless.

When posting this question the recruiter wants to accomplish several things:

Assess your levels of self-awareness

Check your honesty

Verify for any major red flags

Use this question as an opportunity to highlight what you’ve learned and addressed some of the challenges (your weaknesses) that you had to overcome in the past or things that you are proactively working on right now.

P.S. Read more tips for answering “What Are Your Weaknesses And Strengths?” interview question.

14. Why Should We Hire You?

The inevitable pinnacle to all the interview questions is why should we hire you. Don’t get intimidated by it. Instead, use it as a welcome opportunity to deliver a winning sales pitch to the hiring manager.

To deliver the best answer, focus on the next three things:

Your ability to get the work done thanks to your skills

The great successes you’ve had in the past and can replicate at the new company

Your cultural fit and enthusiasm

Here’s how all of the above can be framed in a quick answer:

“In my last position as a restaurant manager, I managed to reduce the budget waste by 25% while also raising the customer’s rating of the venue thanks to proactive mentorship work with the staff. Thanks to the exceptional levels of service, the venue received a 5-star rating from Culinary Escapades magazine and I still keep close contact with the restaurant critic, so I’d be happy to invite them over to your venue, too. Lastly, I know that organic, fair-trade ingredients are a major selling point of your restaurant, as a vegan myself, I’m always on the lookout for new suppliers and would be happy to share my contacts.”

PRO TIP:

Prepare answers to the Interview questions listed on the site to help you feel prepared and will help the interview conversation flow at a nice pace. If the interviewer asks a question you aren’t prepared for, ask for a couple minutes to gather your thoughts by stating “That’s a great question. Let me give it some thought for a moment.

Brenda S. Meyer Certified Senior HR Consultant Arizona, United States

Every job interview can go one way or another. But no matter which questions you get asked, remember this: be honest, polite and keep your answer on-point. Talk more about what you can do for the employer and how you can be of help, rather than merely reciting all the things you know how to do.

Lastly, remember: you’ve got it!

This article has been originally published on Nov 9, 2016 and has been extensively revised and updated on July 30, 2020.

The post 14 Common Interview Questions with Actionable Answers appeared first on Freesumes.com.

14 Common Interview Questions with Actionable Answers published first on https://skillsireweb.tumblr.com/

0 notes

bigyack-com · 4 years

Text

To Take On the Coronavirus, Go Medieval on It

There are two ways to fight epidemics: the medieval and the modern. The modern way is to surrender to the power of the pathogens: acknowledge that they are unstoppable and to try to soften the blow with 20th century inventions, including new vaccines, antibiotics, hospital ventilators, and thermal cameras searching for people with fevers. The medieval way, inherited from the era of the Black Death, is brutal: Close the borders, quarantine the ships, pen terrified citizens up inside their poisoned cities. For the first time in more than a century, the world has chosen to confront a new and terrifying virus with the iron fist instead of the latex glove. At least for a while, it worked, and it might still serve a purpose. The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, was able to seal off the city of Wuhan, where the Covid-19 outbreak began, because China is a place where a leader can ask himself, “What would Mao do?” and just do it. The bureaucracy will comply, right down to the neighborhood committees who bar anyone returning from Wuhan from entering their own homes, even if it meant sleeping in the streets. The White House, in defiance of recent American history, also opted to go medieval by aggressive measures like barring entry to non-Americans who were recently in China and advising Americans not to go to China or South Korea. Over the years, states and cities have imposed local quarantines, but there have been no national restrictions on entry since 1892, according to Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian and author of “Quarantine!” In that year, President Benjamin Harrison ordered that all ships from Hamburg be kept offshore for 20 days because officials in that city, one of the world’s biggest ports, had lied about its cholera epidemic. It apparently succeeded. The United States had cholera outbreaks in 1832, 1849, 1870 and 1910, but not in 1892. Many public health figures consider shutting a nation’s doors to be an archaic tactic, and nearly impossible in the jet age. But for Mr. Trump, such a move is natural. He was elected on a Build-the-Wall platform and in 2014, when a few heroic American medical workers got infected fighting Ebola in West Africa, he advocated leaving them there to die. (They were flown back, and survived.) Updated Feb. 26, 2020 What is a coronavirus? It is a novel virus named for the crownlike spikes that protrude from its surface. The coronavirus can infect both animals and people and can cause a range of respiratory illnesses from the common cold to more dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS. How do I keep myself and others safe? Washing your hands frequently is the most important thing you can do, along with staying at home when you’re sick. What if I’m traveling? The C.D.C. has warned older and at-risk travelers to avoid Japan, Italy and Iran. The agency also has advised against all nonessential travel to South Korea and China. Where has the virus spread? The virus, which originated in Wuhan, China, has sickened more than 80,000 people in at least 33 countries, including Italy, Iran and South Korea. How contagious is the virus? According to preliminary research, it seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS, and is probably transmitted through sneezes, coughs and contaminated surfaces. Scientists have estimated that each infected person could spread it to somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures. Who is working to contain the virus? World Health Organization officials have been working with officials in China, where growth has slowed. But this week, as confirmed cases spiked on two continents, experts warned that the world was not ready for a major outbreak. Also, this virus’s speed and apparent lethality gave the experienced doctors in the White House Coronavirus Task Force reason to be nervous. It is spreading between nations very quickly. And, while data is still sketchy, some measurements indicate that its fatality rate might be close to that of the 1918 Spanish flu. As a result, they endorsed dropping the portcullis and shutting off air links to China. They even created quarantine stations on military bases, the equivalent of Venice’s island lazarettos, where, in the time of the doges, the infected awaited their fate outside the city. This has led to much consternation among other public health experts, who argue that travel restrictions can cause more panic, misery and death than they prevent. Crowds may besiege hospitals, supercharging the infection rate. Closed borders can cut off vital medications like insulin. Factory and shop closings mean lost wages, hardships and possibly recession. Also, quarantines feed racism and stigma. Officially, the World Health Organization opposes travel and trade restrictions. It reiterated that even as it declared the epidemic a global emergency on Jan. 30. But it now admits that they helped. The head of the W.H.O. team that visited China said this week that China “took one of the most ancient strategies and rolled out one of the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease-containment efforts in history.” The W.H.O.’s epidemic-modeling teams concluded that travel restrictions had slowed the spread of the virus outside China by two to three weeks. For the United States, the delay was probably far greater. Air-traffic data shows that flights from China to the United States dropped much more than they did to Europe. As of this writing, a single case not connected to any known transmission has turned up in California, but there are no indications of large outbreaks like those in Italy and Iran. Harsh measures horrify civil libertarians, but they often save lives, especially when they are imposed in the early days. The best-known modern example is Cuba’s AIDS epidemic. In the 1980s, Cuba and the United States were both hit hard by the AIDS epidemic. In Cuba, the virus first infected thousands of soldiers, doctors and nurses who had served in Africa. The Castro regime’s response — roundly condemned by other countries — was to make H.I.V. tests mandatory, and to force everyone infected into quarantine camps. The camps were not hellholes: they had bungalows, gardens, theater troupes, medical care, more food than people outside often had, and less homophobia than gay men often faced in macho rural Cuba. But no one could leave, except for brief family visits with an escort whose main job was to make sure that no sex took place. Meanwhile, the United States took a pro-legal-rights approach. Even offering an H.I.V. test was made illegal without a separate counseling session, which scared many away from testing. Although gay bathhouses were epicenters of transmission, there were long divisive fights over closing them. After triple therapy was developed in the mid-1990s, most Cuban camps closed. But the difference in lives saved by choosing brutality over freedom was stark: Cuba’s H.I.V. infection rate was for decades about one-sixth that of the American one. New York City and Cuba have roughly the same population. In the epidemic’s first 30 years, fewer than 2,500 Cubans died of AIDS. Over 78,000 New Yorkers — mostly gay men — did. As the virus creeps closer, stark choices will arise. The U.S. cannot shut out the whole world. Even if all air travel were stopped, the virus could reach Latin America or Canada and enter over our land borders. With luck, the extra time that China bought us by falling on its viral grenade will help produce a treatment or a vaccine. The threat will subside and reporters like me will be accused of alarmism. Top American health officials now say “it is not a matter of if but when” the virus begins to spread here. But the American experience will not echo the Chinese one. China has had imperial rule since 221 B.C. The United States, born of rebellion, prizes individual rights. There will be no national lockdown. No threats to have anyone “forever nailed to history’s pillar of shame,” as one of Mr. Xi’s underlings warned those who hid cases of infection. But local control — and the political factionalism that is endemic to democracy — can carry grave risks in the face of a crisis, Dr. Markel noted. In 1918 and 1919, as the Spanish influenza swept across the country in waves, various cities reacted in their own ways. Cities like St. Louis that reacted quickly — canceling parades and ball games, shutting schools, transit systems and government offices, ordering the sick to stay home — ultimately had fewer deaths. In cities like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, which were paralyzed by political feuds or pressure from local businesses to avoid shutdowns, many more ultimately died. To overcome the divisiveness that would imperil a cohesive national response, Dr. Markel said: “You need leadership from the top — and there has to be trust. In an epidemic, the idea that ‘everyone is entitled to their own facts’ is really dangerous.” The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected]. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. Read the full article

#Coronavirus #health #HealthNews #Medieval

0 notes

munciememories · 5 years

Text

Fieldwalk at Beech Grove Cemetery

Introduction - Meredith

On Wednesday, June 19, 2019, we took a trip to Beech Grove Cemetery here in Muncie. During this trip we learned about the history of the cemetery, visited some of the prominent graves, met some folks, and made some audio and video recordings. One of the folks we met was Dave Taylor, one of the cemetery’s board members! He pointed out the grave of Benjamin Cohen to us, tucked away in the Jewish section, telling us that Cohen had been a counselor to FDR on the New Deal! Tina Sulfridge, the Office Manager, was also such a great help as well. She showed us some maps, gave us a tour of the building, and provided us with useful information about the grounds and its history.

Located at 1400 Kilgore Ave, Beech Grove Cemetery claims Delaware County’s largest historic landmark. Though its official history begins in 1841, it has a prehistory. In “A History of Beech Grove Cemetery” by Dolores Black Rench, she writes that the Delaware Native Americans had “chosen a portion of [the site along White River] for a sacred burial ground.” (You can download a pdf of the complete history of purchase the Beech Grove Cemetery Records book in the office.) This area came to be known as Beech Knoll. Later on, when white settlers arrived, the village was known as Munceytown, and picnics, gatherings, and political rallies were held there.

Before Beech Grove Cemetery was established, there were two public designated burial grounds in downtown Muncie:

1. On the northside of East Main St, east of Beacon St

2. On the northside of Adams St, west of Franklin

2.5. Three boxes of unidentified bones were found when excavating ground for a basement for Friends Memorial Church at the northeast corner of Adams and Cherry. They were reinterred at Beech Grove in October 1906 and May 1907

On December 17, 1841, Samuel W. Harlan, John Jack, and James Hodge (trustees for Munceytown) purchased 1.5 acres from Moses and Nancy Eby. This acreage was the first part of Beech Grove Cemetery and is referred to as the Old Ground. Over the years, more and more acreage was leased, deeded, and purchased, expanding the cemetery’s land. One of the most significant additions was that of John Moore’s 51 acre farm (also known as the John Galbraith farm) on April 8, 1902.

Interestingly enough, Goldsmith Gilbert, his wife, and family (arguably the founders of Muncie) are buried in the Old Part, or, rather, had been moved there from their plots at their family home. There are some death date mix ups though for Goldsmith’s wife Mary! Another fun fact, Gilbert and Mary’s daughter Mary Jane was the first white girl born in Muncie and Delaware County. Interesting! Their family home, a log cabin, was located at Walnut and Wysor, not too far from Muncie Memories HQ! Same goes for their original burial grounds too...

How we memorialize - Jenna

Overall, the experience at Beech Grove was educational and I enjoyed the hours we were able to spend exploring. Beech Grove Cemetery is full of hidden beauty, from stained glass windows in mausoleums to Crazy Circle, which should be more aptly named Chaotic Circle. From above, Crazy Circle is a beautiful arrangement of headstones to create a spiral form. On the ground level, it’s many graves piled into a section to help achieve this effect. While walking through it, I wondered why a cemetery would go to such great lengths to achieve this, and did the people buying those lots know they would be part of this “fun fact” for the cemetery?

Aerial image of crazy circle.

Plans of crazy circle.

In crazy circle

Like many places, Beech Grove Cemetery has hidden beauty and plenty of history. I believe my favorite part of this experience was discovering the unique characteristics that belonged here. Many of the gravesites were delicately decorated and many of them helped you learn more about the person who had passed. Leaving flowers is always nice for a loved one who has passed, but leaving memories and items the deceased cared about when they were living seems more personable to me.

One gravesite in particular caught my eye. It was for a young man who was only 20 years old. His friends and family left him a memorial with a skateboard, a half empty bottle of whiskey, and other trinkets that represent him. I find creating a memorial full of personal joys and belongings allows you to better understand the person who has passed and creates a connection between the individuals grieving, missing, or celebrating that person.

Exploring Beech Grove was a great introduction to learning about the history of Muncie, and I hope we go back to discover parts of the cemetery that we did not visit the first time!

Architecture and Communities - Kitty

Beech Grove is laid out in two discrete sections: the newer section is across the tracks, reached by way of the underpass and then the rest of the cemetery. The older section was laid out to be enjoyed more like a local park in today’s time; this was not uncommon for the era in which the cemetery was founded. It wasn’t until more recently that the newer grave plot system was employed, allowing more bodies to be buried instead of focusing on scenery, which the landscape expert O.W. Crabbs had in the past.

Along with the many curious layouts of the cemetery, it is interesting to note that the cemetery itself is around 120 acres. This large area contains an array of different communities of Muncie with differing grave markers. For example while most mausoleums are found along Mausoleum Row, it is not uncommon to see them scattered throughout older parts of the cemetery. Obelisks stand next to wooden crosses or field stones. Walking through the cemetery, it felt as though the Muncie community was holding itself together even in death. The rich standing next to the poor in unity.

As Beech Grove has changed over the years, so have the community locations. While the newer sections of the cemetery integrate all of the communities of Muncie, the older part keeps separate communities apart, making them radically visible. There is the Jewish section, the African American section, which is labeled Colored for historical reasons, the Armed Forces, and Baby grave sections.

Exploring Beech Grove allowed us to immerse ourselves in Muncie’s unique past to understand its present better. We are happy with what we have learned so far, but we want to know more. What do YOU know about Beech Grove and the people that are there? We would love to hear from you!

Send us an email! [email protected] Drop us a line on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter!

#munciememories #beechgrovecemetery #munciearts #plyspace

0 notes

forlawfirmsonlymarketing · 4 years

Text

Analyzing search results reveals a lot about Google’s view of useful content

By Kristopher Jones Creating content is a process that has to get smarter all the time. Google is continually improving how it understands naturally expressed human language, as perfectly evidenced in its BERT update from last October. Google has said – and webmaster trends analyst John Mueller has echoed – that there is really nothing drastically new to optimize for after the update, aside from ensuring that SEOs are writing naturally in their content rather than focusing too much on keywords. The idea of creating content around topics rather than keywords is not particularly new, and so I am presenting an argument for making sure your content is addressing exactly what users want to see. In addition to all the content-research methods you know about already – performing keyword research, examining keyword intent, and using topic research tools – you should be mining the SERPs to see what Google has chosen to present, especially on the first page. If there is anything to take from BERT, it is that, for how well Google understood query intent before, it now does it even better. So, the content Google sees as worthy of positions one and zero – as well as all the surrounding ancillary content on the page – is probably worth a closer look by SEOs who want to compete. With all that said, let’s take a deep dive into analyzing search results for your own content creation, including looking at the various SERP features to see what they mean, discovering the apparent intent of the queries that led you to those particular results, and ultimately understanding and crafting more competitive content.

SERP features and intent

Search for anything on Google and you’ll get about 10 organic results in the form of those famous blue links. Those are the “money” parts of a SERP, of course, but nearly as important are all the images, graphs, boxes and news selections that appear alongside the organic results, depending on the query. Discussing every possible feature that could appear is beyond the scope of this post, and you already know about meta tags, answer boxes and carousel lists. But since our goal is to analyze searcher intent, let’s look at a few SERP features that can be telling, given the right context. Knowledge graphs Knowledge graphs, or panels, present users with basic information about the entity they have searched for, if applicable. Search for “Hyundai,” as you see below, and you get a knowledge panel showing the full name of the company, a blurb describing it, the customer service email and phone number, stock price and so on. That covers quite a bit of information in one concise box. And just to the left, as you would expect, is the top paid result, for the brand’s American division website. So, what can we tell from the box? It is built for the consumer. From this box alone, you can call customer service, start thinking about buying Hyundai stock, or check out the latest Hyundai models. The panel is also a type of portal to a great range of related subjects, including Hyundai’s social media pages and other car manufacturers. And the overall nugget from this particular query? It’s for users interested in learning about and buying Hyundais. While it would be basically futile to try to rank your Hyundai blog on page one of the SERPs for a seed term such as “hyundai,” at least you know the term is more of an informational query than anything else, and with the right kind of long-tail keywords and plenty of regular posts, you might be able to push your blog out there. Images We all know that images frequently appear at the top of the SERPs for certain types of queries. That last part is important. If images don’t always appear, then we have to assume Google knows which types of queries call for image results and which do not. Google does this through its natural language processing, so you know that when you search “nutrition facts,” you get websites about nutrition, but when you search “nutrition chart,” the first results you get are images. Even beginner SEOs know how to optimize images to rank higher. My point is that when you search “nutrition chart” or “pastel shirts men,” you get image results so if you want your company to get more visible on page one for these and similarly worded queries, you had better start getting your images out there using all the known tactics for image optimization. People Also Ask The “People also ask” feature is one of the most valuable on the first SERP. The PAA box usually appears under the featured snippet or video or image results. The box shows you questions that are topically related to the question you actually asked, and you can expand each question to reveal an organic result. The answer to each question acts like a miniature featured snippet, but, of course, users will see it only if they click that question. The PAA boxes appear in results when Google determines that a user’s query is informational in nature. The query does not necessarily have to be a question to get a PAA box. However, to increase the chances of your content getting featured or at least making it as a PAA answer, you should write informational content such as a how-to guide and consider marking it up with how-to structured data. Search an informational query related to your industry. If you are in general contracting and maintain a regularly updated blog, search “how to screw into concrete.” The PAA box shows as follows: If you find that you cannot compete with the featured snippet, try to write content that answers one of those PAA questions. Check out the current answers to see what they are doing well. Then, make your content better.

Writing better content

There are plenty of other features one could analyze, everything from stock market information to sports results to local packs and health features. By now you probably get the idea that by just reviewing the information right in front of your eyes, you can get clues to how to craft your own content, whether it be a blog post, image, local-pack result or “things-to-do-in” listicle. By necessity, I have already covered how to interpret what you find on the SERPs to create ranking content. The three major types of searcher intent are:

Informational (“I want to know more.”)

Navigational (“I am looking for a specific website.”)

Transactional/Commercial (“I want to buy something.”)

Searcher intent has also been broken down into local, visual, branded, news, and video intent, among numerous other types. You can use various tools to dig deeper into specific SERP features, but my opinion is that there is no better instrument for figuring this stuff out than basic logic. Search a query related to your field. Take an hour and really mine that first SERP for what it contains and what each part means. What is Google telling you by presenting this particular piece of content as the answer box? Why is that information in the knowledge panel? How is that People Also Ask question topically or semantically related to what I asked? What are the factors common to the content in positions one and two and six and nine and so on? How can my website compete with all of them? Keep a few things in mind when attempting to answer these questions. If Google has ranked something in position zero, it is likely for good reason, and it may not be the written words of the content alone. Maybe that result is formatted in just the right way, as a how-to or a type of encyclopedia of similar topics. Perhaps the content intersperses written words with optimized infographics and videos. You know those ten results on page one have something useful for searchers. Your job is to do it better. Also, remember that you can capitalize on some of your older content by updating it and optimizing it to be better than what’s on the SERPs now. Make this a habit, and keep up with it, to build your web pages’ EAT score and stay competitive.

Conclusion

You have read all the basics of ranking higher on Google. You know about creating quality content, being authoritative, and writing for topics over keywords. But maybe you were searching for a fairly straightforward way to find out exactly what Google was currently ranking for a certain query, and what its curated content actually meant relative to that query. Your solution to this problem is to go right to the source – analyze the SERPs themselves for answers. Mining that information is only half of it, however. You still need to make your own content better. To do that, go after what Google tells you that people want, but be more detailed about it. Do more research, add more nuances, make it easier to digest, add some jump links, film a video, diversify your formatting, write more naturally, and I could go on and on. Think of the SERPs like treasure maps. They contain all the clues you need to find your buried treasure. Now you have to take the first step.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Kristopher Jones is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and best-selling author of "SEO Visual Blueprint" by Wiley (2008, 2010, 2013). Kris was the founder and former CEO of digital marketing and affiliate agency Pepperjam (sold to eBay) and has since founded multiple successful businesses, including ReferLocal.com, APPEK Mobile Apps, French Girls App, and LSEO.com, where he serves as CEO. Most recently, Kris appeared on Apple's first TV Show, "Planet of the Apps," where he and his business partner, comedian / actor Damon Wayans, Jr., secured $1.5 million for an on-demand LIVE entertainment booking app called Special Guest.

https://www.businesscreatorplus.com/analyzing-search-results-reveals-a-lot-about-googles-view-of-useful-content/

#googlesearchranking #localseo #onlinemarketing #dailydoseofmarketing

0 notes

technicaldr · 5 years

Text

7 Ways to Improve Your Brand Perception with Reputation Management

Reputation management is a lot like the airbag in your vehicle — you hope you’ll never need it, and if you do, you’ll be thankful you have it and pray that it works in time to minimize damage.

This is an often misunderstood facet of digital marketing because the fact that someone needs to change what shows up in the search results for either their personal or business brand doesn’t always mean that they are unethical, dishonest, or trying to hide something.

More often than not, it’s a single upset customer, or in some cases, even a shady competitor causing a problem. Unfortunately, either case can result in tremendous loss of revenue and opportunity.

In other words, it’s an essential part of modern digital marketing.

Act Before a Problem Arises

Because it relies on SEO, reputation management tends not to be a fast process. That’s why it’s critical to be proactive.

If you can take over the first page, or better yet, the first few pages of the search results ahead of time, you’ll be in a much stronger position if and when a crisis does strike.

The importance of controlling how you are perceived online is obvious. The only real question is whether you should handle it yourself or hire a firm.

DIY vs. Hiring a Reputation Management Firm

You can take a DIY approach, especially if you have a fair understanding of SEO and aren’t already in the middle of a crisis.

You’ll just need to be prepared to invest the appropriate amount of time, and in some cases, money, to get the results you’re looking for. Sometimes this can be significant.

On the other hand, if you don’t understand SEO and/or are already facing a crisis, then you may be better off hiring a reputation management firm.

Even if you do choose to hire a firm, it’s still important to have an understanding of the process so you can effectively evaluate potential vendors.

Hiring a firm, however, opens up a different set of challenges.

The industry has earned a bad reputation, both because of the type of clientele they frequently work with and because of how they sometimes behave.

I’ll give you a couple of examples:

Solvera Group was hired by Texas Realtor, Tom Grisak, to remove a negative review posted about him.

Solvera then paid someone to post a second negative comment on that post, and hired a Texas attorney to file a defamation lawsuit against the poster, whom they claimed they had identified — even though it was the wrong person.

The firm then presented the courts with a falsified settlement agreement, and the judge signed a final judgment based on this misinformation, which ordered Google to deindex the post from their search results.

Throughout the process, all of the lawyers, clients, and judges involved were misled. Eventually, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton caught on and helped shut the operation down.

Managers of Status Labs, Darius Fisher and Jesse Boskoff, were sued for the equivalent of embezzlement of more than $1.5 million by one of their partners.

Rather than comply with the court order to stop stealing, Fisher and Boskoff instead set up a shell company, Blue Land Partners, moved the firm’s clients over and used their reputation management prowess to hide this fact from their new potential clients and their partner.

Fisher and Boskoff’s actions in plundering Status Labs were so egregious that the federal judge quoted John Wayne from the iconic movie, “The Sands of Iwo Jima”, saying: “Life is hard, but it’s even harder when you’re stupid.”

Fisher and Boskoff were later held in contempt for violating the judge’s order and were forced to return some of the stolen money to avoid jail time.

My point here is that if you do choose to hire a firm, you need to go into the relationship with your eyes wide open and do plenty of research to make sure you’re hiring a reputable firm.

Whether you’ve chosen the DIY approach or have decided to hire a firm, it’s important to understand exactly what goes into it.

This ensures that you have a solid action plan in the event that you’re doing the work yourself, or, if you’re hiring a firm, it helps you to better evaluate which ones are competent and trustworthy.

1. Optimize Your Own Website

Reputation managements starts with your own website because you have complete control over it.

Obviously, you’ll want to pay close attention to the technical SEO, especially semantic markup and internal links, but don’t stop there.

It’s equally important to publish content and earn links that will make Google view your website as an authoritative result for your name.

The most logical way to do this is to publish articles on your website. Lots of articles.

But it’s important not to put quantity over quality. As you build a library of useful content, your author pages on your website will become significantly more authoritative for your name.

From here, it’s also wise to build quality links to your author page. Unless you share a name with someone famous, it usually won’t take very many.

In most cases, if you have at least a few dozen quality posts on your website, then you can probably get by with less than a dozen quality links. That’s easily achievable by guest posting on other relevant, high-quality websites.

2. Contribute to Industry Publications

Major industry publications tend to be authoritative because they publish a large volume of high-quality content, and that content, relative to similar content on other websites, tends to earn more links.

This makes these publications incredibly powerful assets.

As with publishing content on your own website, the goal here is to rank your author page on industry publications on the first page of the search results.

What you want to do is contact the editors of two or three major publications in your industry to pitch the idea of you submitting an article.

If you have any contacts in common with the editors, it would be a smart move to ask for an introduction, but let’s not put the cart before the horse.

First, make sure you can answer these questions so you can pitch in a way that presents maximum value:

Who Is Their Typical Audience?

Is their audience mainly other people in your industry or to the end consumer? That will usually make a big difference in the type of content will resonate well with them.

You would write a completely different article when writing for an audience of your peers compared to writing for potential customers.

You can look at my writing as an example. When I write for publications like Search Engine Journal, I tend to write at a far deeper technical level because the readers here usually understand it.

On the other hand, when I write about digital marketing for publications in the construction industry, I try to simplify my writing because my audience there doesn’t typically have the same level of knowledge on these topics.

Why Does Your Opinion Matter?

If the internet has taught us anything, it’s that everyone has an opinion about almost everything, and most of these opinions are worthless.

So why should they listen to you?

What knowledge and experience do you have that qualifies you to share your opinion m on a particular topic?

This is an essential part of pitching an editor on your idea for an article.

What Will the Reader Gain From Your Article?

Your article needs to provide tremendous value, in the form of:

Unique and original insight.

Detailed instructions on how to do something.

A comprehensive resource that is unavailable elsewhere.

Skip the shameless self-promotion.

The publisher wants to provide value to their readers in order to ensure that they will return, and they’ll only do that if they gain something from the content on that website.

3. Optimize Your Social Profiles

Social profiles such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are relatively easy to rank, which makes them another valuable asset.

Your profiles on social networks should include all relevant information, including your:

Hours of operation.

Phone number.

Address.

URL.

Etc.

Your social profiles should also be properly branded with your logo, brand colors, and appropriate header images.

The information included makes it more relevant to search engines, helping the profile to rank higher, while the branding increases engagement with real people.

Some of the social networks you should consider might include:

Facebook.

Twitter.

Google My Business.

Instagram.

YouTube.

Pinterest.

LinkedIn.

You don’t have to do everything all at once. In fact, you can’t do everything well all at once unless you have a massive budget and enough employees to perform the work.

See Anyone's Analytics Account, in Real Time. You can literally see real-time sales and conversion data for any website, and which campaigns drove that traffic. Start your free trial today.

Start Free Trial

I recommend starting with between one to three social networks and create a following there before branching out into others.

While I don’t suggest trying to use every social network at once, you should secure your profile on every network so it’s available when you’re ready to use it.

4. Leverage Public Relations

As an experienced expert in your field, I’ll assume you probably have something valuable to say.

If you can leverage your insight into positive media coverage, you can create a valuable asset in your reputation management efforts. And the beauty is that it’s infinitely repeatable.

Large publications like Entrepreneur, Inc., and Fast Company are authoritative and tend to rank more easily. Especially for your own name.

It’s essential to approach PR with the intent to add tremendous value to the editor, contributor, and audience. The mistake most people fall into is trying to make it all about themselves. This is a surefire way to get ignored.

Unless you’ve done something truly monumental, like launching a car into space, no large publication is going to write a feature story about you. It just isn’t going to happen.

Instead, figure out what the audience wants, and find a way to deliver that in a way that includes you, and pitch that to the editor or contributor.

The editor wants more eyeballs on their content. The contributor does too, but they also want to simplify their job of writing the article. Especially when you consider that most contributors aren’t paid for their work.

An effective way to do this is to leverage newsworthy topics. You can see examples of this in articles where I was quoted on the gun control debate in The Business Journal, and on Ja Rule’s failed event in Forbes.

“The key to maximizing reputation in PR is to provide remarks or content that provides high value in terms of being something the readers didn’t know and wouldn’t likely have guessed, such as a surprising insight, backed by data (with the data properly linked and sourced), and perhaps some color and complexion around an example of how that surprising finding plays out in real life,” according to thought leadership and crisis PR expert Cheryl Snapp Conner, of SnappConner PR.

“Include your characterization as an expert and whatever link is best for people to use to find out more about you. That leads people to the right association with you, as opposed to, perhaps being linked for contributing a ‘sky is blue’ quote to an article on something unrelated to your expertise, such as tips for closing a deal on a golf course,” she said.

You won’t have a lot of control over how a contributor writes their article, so it probably won’t be optimized specifically to rank for your name. That’s OK, though.

It may rank on its own without any additional work, but if not, simply earn a few quality links to it and it should easily land on the first page.

5. Earn Positive Reviews

If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you probably already realize that trying to please everyone all the time is about as difficult as trying to make a pile of water.

This sometimes results in negative reviews. One way to combat that, however, is a large volume of legitimate positive reviews.

Earning those reviews is simple, but not easy. Let me explain what I mean by that.

It’s simple because you just need to ask your satisfied customers to post a review on websites where your new potential customers may see them. That’s simple.

But it’s not easy because you must provide an exceptional product or service. Not average, not pretty good — but exceptional. That is difficult. Especially in today’s highly competitive market.

I can’t help you provide an exceptional product or service. That’s all on you.

I can, however, help you to earn those reviews once you have. I’ll do that by sharing the email script that we use, along with our follow-up process.

That process is critical because while these reviews are monumentally important to you, they aren’t to your customers. I’m sorry, but they just aren’t.

Your customer is busy running their business, and they’ll only help you if you can make it easy for them, and even then, you’ll probably still have to remind them a few times.

OK, for the email, it’s simple:

I’d like to ask you to do a favor for me…positive reviews help us to build trust and bring on new clients. Would you mind posting a quick review about your experience working with us? If you want, I’ll even draft something that you can edit as you see fit. Just let me know if you want me to do that to make it easier and faster for you.

The links for Google and Facebook are below

Google: [Link to your Google My Business listing]

Facebook: [Link to the reviews tab of your Facebook business page]

The follow up is simple, too. My agency uses a tool called Boomerang for Gmail because we run on G Suite. We will set a reminder for one week, and if we haven’t received a review by then, we will send a reminder email that simply says:

Just sending a reminder in case this got buried.

We usually give it another week and send another email with the same message. If that still doesn’t produce a review, then it’s time to pick up the phone.

But before asking them for a review this time, first ask something along the lines of this:

Hey, I know you’ve probably been really busy lately, but since you haven’t posted a review yet, I just wanted to make sure do anything wrong or leave anything hanging. Was there anything we should talk about?

Usually, they will apologize and explain that they’ve just been busy. In most cases, they will post it shortly after this call. But in the rare cases where something was wrong, you’ve just bought yourself the perfect opportunity to fix it.

One quick note on this — I highly recommend placing positive reviews on your website as well, and where applicable, including Schema markup.

6. Launch a Podcast

Your podcast page on Apple’s website will generally be viewed as authoritative just based on the domain it resides on. This makes it an effective tool in your reputation management efforts.

Add some quality links into the mix and it can rise to the first page rather quickly.

This tactic isn’t a band-aid though, because maintaining a podcast requires a tremendous amount of effort. I recently learned this when I launched my own podcast.

I point this out because I want to emphasize that if you’re not prepared to invest the ongoing time, effort, and expense of creating a worthwhile podcast, it isn’t something you should start in the first place.

If you’re going to do this, I suggest committing to at least one year of weekly episodes. Anything short of that and you’re wasting your time.

7. Buy Relevant Domains

If you’re facing or anticipating particularly aggressive attacks, buying relevant domains is a wise tactic.

You probably have already registered the .com for your name and/or company name, but what about the almost countless other extensions available today?

At the very least, you should register the .net and .org, but I would also consider other domain extensions that may make sense for your company.

There are more than 1,000 extensions available, so be thorough but try not to go overboard. The idea here is just to prevent others from posing as you and/or your company.

Next, look at domains that could be used against you. For example:

CompanyNameSucks.com

CompanyNameComplaints.com

CompanyNameReviews.com

I would especially make it a point to include a few non-standard extensions, like .online, .club, or .reviews because they tend to outrank comparable websites with traditional extensions.

This can come in handy if there is significant search volume for complaints or reviews for a name, whether it’s a company or a person.

You don’t need a website for each domain. In fact, in most cases, you won’t need a website for any of them unless things get really nasty. This may happen if you run into a particularly vindictive former customer or competitor.

Only once in nearly two decades have I personally run into a situation where creating additional websites to target visitors searching for reviews or complaints was necessary.

Technical Dr. Inc.'s insight:

Contact Details :

[email protected] or 877-910-0004 www.technicaldr.com

0 notes

kkatot · 6 years

Text

Syllabus, Digital Cultures

Sharing is caring, vol 2. This is the syllabus for Digital Cultures (teaching it at Tallinn Uni for MA students starting November 1). I am grateful to everyone, who shared their syllabi with me, and to my guest lecturers for their recommendations. The component-logic of the digital culture experiment is based on an inspired auto-ethnographic exercise and its “building block system” that prof. Annette Markham has developed, and which I’ve had the privilege of implementing in the past couple of years at Aarhus University.

If you’re into PDF’s, this is for you

Digital Culture, BFR7004.FK, Tallinn University

Katrin Tiidenberg, PhD

Course objectives: While an exhaustive overview of what counts as digital culture or how digital culture is researched is impossible to give, this course aims to introduce students to both a cultural studies (digital humanities) and social studies (media and communication research, media ethnography) approach to making sense of digital culture. Active participation in the course should leave the students with an adequate overview of current definitions and relevant concepts of, some excellent recent studies about, relevant scholarly debates regarding and approaches to studying digital culture.

The course consists of lectures, seminars (reading discussion) and workshops (discussion and exercises / experiments). The course is taught by Katrin Tiidenberg and the following guest instructors: Indrek Ibrus, Mikhail Fiadotau, Maarja Ojamaa, Marek Tamm

Learning outcomes: The student, who has passed this course will be able to discuss the following topics in an educated manner, well-situated in extant literature: • What is digital culture, how is it defined, how is it historically situated in the developments of communication technologies, how is it often studied, and what are the central concepts utilized to discuss it in academic debates? • How to make sense of on utilize key concepts in studying digital culture (i.e. intertextuality, remix, bricolage, virality, participation, collaboration, audiences etc)? • What are the implications and relevance of data and datafication on cultural life? • How are meanings made within culture(s) and how can it be studied?

Students will explore how digital culture phenomena (i.e. fandoms, gaming, selfies, influencers) are studied and what is being highlighted about them in relevant academic discussions, and be able to distinguish sensationalist, moral-panic driven interpretations of these phenomena from nuanced, educated ones. The student will analyze how networked communication technologies impact cultural practices, and their own everyday life, interactions and identities, and develop a voice for addressing issues and controversies of digital culture.

Assessment method:

Grades. 30% participation and in-class engagement. 35% digital culture experiment – timely submission of 3 component tasks. 35% final write up of the digital culture experiment

The digital culture experiment is an auto-ethnographic independent experiment with digital culture engaged with for the duration of the class. Timely submission of 3-COMPONNENT TASKS is a pre-requisite to be able to submit the final write-up. The final write up functions as an exam.

COMPONENT TASKS: 1. Create an observation plan. You need to observe your own participation in a particular digital culture phenomenon (i.e. pick a practice, a group, a community, a game, a space that you have pre-existing experience with, or that you are super interested in). Focus on YOUR OWN participation - your own engagement, interactions, reactions, and practices are your research focus. You are your own subject. You will explore and explain this culture from the first-person perspective of a member. a. Create an observation plan – write out a plan of what, where and how you will observe. How often and for how long will you “do observation”? How will you take notes? What is the best field-note taking system for you – do you need to combine notes, screenshots and brief spoken memos you dictate into your phone? Do you need to sometimes film yourself (and your screen) while you are participating? What are the important observations to include? (i.e. location, how you felt, what you were doing, how other people acted, what interactions were had, what you noticed about other people, patterns of use, intentions of participation, unintended consequences of participation etc). If you have never done observation-based, ethnographic research you need to read these pieces. These are in a folder called “Methods texts” on Moodle, within the “Mandatory readings” folder • James Spradley Step 2, Step 3, Step 4 • Nicholas Wolfinger, On writing fieldnotes • Annette Markham, Ethnography in the Digital Internet Era – From fields to flows, descriptions to interventionsb. Observe your chosen digital culture phenomenon for a week. Be honest, be thorough. Try different strategies for gathering data, logging data, taking notes. c. Revise your observation plan based on your weeklong experience – adjust the plan so it serves you better. It is possible you will decide to significantly narrow your focus here. SUBMIT REVISED PLAN via MOODLE ON November 19 (this is component 1). Add brief (~ 200 words) commentary on how you adjusted your plan compared to its first version.

2. Observe your own participation in your chosen digital culture phenomenon for a month (Nov 19 – Dec 19) a. Based on the revised plan observe and track your participation in the digital culture phenomenon during the period of 1 month. If you feel the need to, you can “interview” someone who shares the experience with you, or have them interview you, but your analytical focus should remain on your own experiences. Keep taking detailed field-notes and logging your experience in various ways. b. Write at least three brain dumps during this period. A brain dump is when you set a timer for 15 minutes, turn your ink white in your word processing software and just write whatever comes to mind about your particular experience and observations. When you get stuck hit “enter” twice and keep writing. If you have a hard time starting at the beginning of the 15 minutes, start with “I have to write this braindump, I am not sure what to write, etc until more interesting stuff starts pouring out of your brain. You will use these braindumps as data, you will later code the brain dumps to come up with your arguments. SUBMIT via MOODLE THE THREE BRAIN DUMPS ON DECEMBER 19. This is component # 2.

3. Start analyzing your digital culture experience a. Gather up everything you have so far that can serve as ‘data’. Is it in a format that allows coding (sorting the data to lift out relevant bits)? If it is video or audio, do you need to transcribe it? Organize it so you can code it. If you have never qualitatively coded material/data you need to read Sarah Tracy, Chapter 9 (Data Analysis Basics). It is in the “ Methods texts” subfolder on Moodle. If you need further help with coding, consult Johnny Saldana’s book The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers b. Start coding. Identify any gaps in the early patterns. Do you need to go back to the “fieldsite” to gather stuff to fill those gaps? Do you see any emerging patterns? Does it seem like if you look at these patterns through the lens of the class readings and theoretical or conceptual frameworks you can make an interesting argument? c. Write a short reflection piece (~ 1000 words) – reflect on your process of data collection, coding, thinking, your attempts at making arguments. It is fine if this is messy, you can include snippets of your “thinking” including images if you’ve been mapping, diagramming or coding by hand. SUBMIT via MOODLE ON January 7 2019. This is component # 3 (this is also a dirty draft of the ‘c’ section of your final write up). Final write-up of the experiment (submit via Moodle, due January 17). This should be 8 – 10 pages font 12, 1.5 spaced without Appendixes and Bibliography. Feel free to add illustrator screengrabs, examples of coding, quotes or other snippets of text etc. a. Title, author’s name, b. description of the central topic c. description of the auto-ethnographic process, description of your process of analyzing it d. explanation of your digital culture participation utilizing some concepts and theoretical frameworks covered in class (use at least three assigned or suggested texts here). Describe not only what happened, but also your feelings, shifts in your own perceptions. Include snippets from your braindumps or your field-notes, screengrabs, etc as illustrations e. discussion of your experience, make an argument f. Possible implications of your analysis (what does it contribute to ongoing discussions about digital culture) g. Bibliography h. Appendixes (the more Appendixes the better, add your braindumps, examples of coding, reflections etc).

Course schedule and description, week by week:

WEEK 1, A

Introduction to course and topic (lecture + seminar)

What is culture? What is digital? What is digital culture? How is meaning made in the context of digital culture?

Culture of connectivity, mediatization of culture, visual culture, search culture, algorithmic culture, internet cultures etc

Introduction of the digital culture experiment and the building block system, division into A, B, C, D groups

WEEK 1, B

Digital archival and preservation (lecture + workshop), taught by Mikhail Fiadotau

The class will be structured as a short lecture followed by a workshop. The lecture will outline the key challenges in digital preservation, as exemplified by videogames: technological obsolescence, “bit rot” of storage media, and the logic of instant obscurity in the oversaturated media environment. The lecture will also introduce, and reflect on the work of some archival initiatives, from physical archives such as the National Videogame Arcade in the UK to online resources such as Archive.org’s Wayback Machine. The workshop following the lecture will be a group exercise inviting students to discuss and devise solutions for the archival and preservation of web games for discontinued platforms, with a particular focus on Macromedia/Adobe Flash.

WEEK 2, A

Making sense of digital culture from the perspective of Digital Humanities (seminar + lecture), taught by Indrek Ibrus and Maarja Ojamaa

Introducing concepts: Remix, Bricolage, Intertextuality, Virality, Multimodality, Interactivity, Memory

Introducing cultural studies approaches: media archeology, (new/digital) materialism, software studies

Read: Irvine, M. (2014). REMIX AND THE DIALOGIC ENGINE OF CULTURE, A Model for Generative Combinatoriality.

WEEK 2 B

Historicizing the internet (lecture), taught by Indrek Ibrus

History of the internet and mobile communication. Temporality and materiality of communication technologies and networks. Milestones of computerizing the culture.

WEEK 3 A

Making sense of digital culture from the perspective of communication studies and audience research (lecture)

Introducing concepts: Participation, Collaboration, Audiences, Rules, Community, Belonging, Intimacy

Introducing communication and audience research approaches: ethnography, audience studies, platform and app studies

Introduce situational, relational and concept mapping

WEEK 3 B

Paratextuality and videogames [seminar], taught by Mikhail Fiadotau

The discussion will revolve around paratexts’ propensity for extending digital media, but also subverting their normative significations, both shaping the audience’s experience and offering creative and interpretive agency to fans. Suggested articles also touch upon the issues of materiality, interpretive communities, as well as fan practices and their ethics.

Read: Peters, I.M. (2014) Peril-sensitive sunglasses, superheroes in miniature, and pink polka-dot boxers: Artifact and collectible video game feelies, play, and the paratextual gaming experience. Transformative Works and Cultures, 16. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0509

WEEK 4 A

Form, aesthetics, genre, materiality (lecture), taught by Indrek Ibrus

How can the digital be material? Is the digital culture a material culture? What are the aesthetics, forms and genres of digital cultures? What is remediation? How can archeology help us make sense of the materialities and aesthetics of digital culture.

WEEK 4 B

Collaborative work on your digital culture experiment (discuss what you have, what you are stuck with and what you are confused about with your colleagues in the small A, B, C, D groups. Help each other.

WEEK 5 A

Meaning making, groups, norms and digital objects (lecture + workshop)

How do digital objects gain meaning? What are the socio-cultural functions of digital objects? Online communities, groups, practices and emergent norms. Case: Selfies

WEEK 5 B

What is subculture, what are paralanguages? Identities, identifications and self-presentation (seminar)

Discussion: Antagonistic behavior and ambivalent internet (i.e. the subcultures of trolls and flamers).

Read (in pre-assigned groups, so every person reads one article)

Group A: Coleman, G. (2015). On Trolls, Tricksters, and the Lulz, in Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. London: Verso books.

Group B: Massanari, A. (2015). "# Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures."New Media & Society.

Group C: Seta, G. de. (2018). Trolling, and Other Problematic Social Media Practices. In J. Burgess, A. Marwick, & T. Poell (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Social Media (pp. 390–411).

Group D: Phillips, W. (2015). Dicks everywhere, in This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture. Cambridge: MIT Press.

WEEK 6 A

Attention, reputation, commodification (lecture + seminar)

How does attention work online? Reputation as capital. Commodification of attention and reputation. Celebrity practices.

Discussion: Internet celebrity, influencers and microcelebrity

Read (in pre-assigned groups, so every person reads one article)

Group A: Abidin, C. 2016. “Visibility labour: Engaging with Influencers’ fashion brands and #OOTD advertorial campaigns on Instagram.” Media International Australia 161, 86-100.

Group B: Senft, T. (2014) Microcelebrity and the Branded Self. Companion to New Media Dynamics. Ed John Hartley, Jean Burgess, Axel Bruns. Blackwell.

Group C: Abidin, C. Communicative Intimacies: Influencers and Perceived Interconnectedness https://adanewmedia.org/2015/11/issue8-abidin/

Group D: Susie Khamis, Lawrence Ang & Raymond Welling (2016): Self- branding, ‘micro-celebrity’ and the rise of Social Media Influencers, Celebrity Studies.

WEEK 6 B

Participation, collaboration, production & consumption (lecture + workshop)

Participation and collaboration within digital cultures. “Spreadable media”. Sharing / collaborative economies. Consumption, production, produsage. Case: fandom

WEEK 7 A

Data and culture, datafied culture, cultural analytics (lecture), taught by Marek Tamm

What are cultural data? What does the datafication of culture and society mean? What is cultural analytics? What is culturomics?

WEEK 7 B

Post-digital, post-internet, post-human culture? The non-human turn. (lecture + workshop)

Imagining a better internet.

RECOMMENDED READINGS

What is digital culture?

Peters, B. 2016. “Introduction” in Digital Keywords, a Vocabulary of Information, Society and Culture.

Peters, B. 2016. “Digital” in Digital Keywords, a Vocabulary of Information, Society and Culture.

Striphas, T. 2016. “Culture” in Digital Keywords, a Vocabulary of Information, Society and Culture.

Dourish, P. (2016). Algorithms and their others: Algorithmic culture in context. Big Data & Society, 3(2), 205395171666512.

Payne, Robert (2016) The Promiscuity of Network Culture.

Van Dijck, J. (2013). Culture of Connectivity

Geismar, H. (2013) Defining the Digital, Museum Anthropology Review 7(1-2)

Bucher, T. (2012) Want to be on the top? Algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on Facebook. New Media & Society, 14: 1164–1180.

Niederer, S. and van Dijck, J. (2010) Wisdom of the crowd or technicity of content? Wikipedia as a sociotechnical system. New Media & Society 12: 1368–1387

Seaver, N. (2012) Algorithmic Recommendations and Synaptic Function. Limn, issue 2.

Making sense of digital culture

Langlois, G. 2014. Meaning in the Age of Social Media.

Deuze, M. (2006). Participation, Remediation, Bircolage: Considering Principle Components of Digital Culture. The Information Society, 22(2), 63–75.

Livingstone, S. (2013). The Participation Paradigm in Audience Research. Communication Review, 16(1–2), 21–30.

Silver, D. (2004). Internet/cyberculture/digital culture/new media/fill-in-the-blank studies. New Media and Society, 6(1), 55–64.

Beer, D., & Burrows, R. (2013). Popular Culture, Digital Archives and the New Social Life of Data. Theory, Culture & Society, 30(4), 47–71.

Glen, C., & Royston, M. (2009). Digital Cultures understanding new media.

If you read Estonian: “Kuidas uurida kultuuri, kultuuriteaduste metodoloogia” - https://www.tlu.ee/pood/home/227-kuidas-uurida-kultuuri-kultuuriteaduste-metodoloogia.html

Digital Archival and preservation:

Newman, J. (2009). Save the Videogame! The National Videogame Archive: Preservation, Supersession and Obsolescence. M/C Journal, 12(3). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/167%EF%BF%BD%C3%9C/0

Lowood, H., Monnens, D., Vowell, Z., Ruggill, J.E., McAllister, K.S., & Armstrong, A. (2009). Before it's too late: a digital game preservation white paper. American Journal of Play, 2(2), 139-166. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1069232.pdf

Thomas, D., & Johnson, V. (2012). “New universes or black holes? Does digital change anything?” In Weller, T. (ed.) History in the Digital Age, pp.173-94. Abingdon: Routledge.

Historicizing the Internet:

Abbate, J. (1999). Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Brügger, N. (Ed.). (2010). Web History. New York: Peter Lang.

Gere, C. (2002). Digital Culture. London: Reaktion Books.

Ibrus, Indrek. (2015). Histories of Ubiquitous Web Standardization. In A. Bechmann & S. Lomborg (Eds.), The Ubiquitous Internet: User and Industry Perspectives. London: Routledge.

Ibrus, Indrek. (2016). Web and mobile convergence: Continuities created by re-enactment of selected histories. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 22(2).

Baym, N. (2015) Personal connections in the digital age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chapter 1.

Chapman, C. (2009) The History and Evolution of social media

O’Reilly, T. (2005) ‘What Is Web 2.0’, O’Reilly Network, 30. September

Turner, F. (2005) Where the counterculture met the new economy: The WELL and the origins of virtual community. Technology and Culture 46 (28.s)

Form, aesthetics, genre, materiality

Bolter, Jay David, & Grusin, Richard. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Gottlieb, Baruch. (2018). Digital Materialism: Origins, Philosophies, Prospects. Bingley: Emerald.

Manovich, Lev. (2001). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Parikka, Jussi. (2012). What is Media Archaeology. Cambridge: Polity.

Groups, practices, subcultures, paralanguages, identities

Tiidenberg, K. (2018). Selfies, why we love (and hate) them, Emerald.

Steinberg, Neil. 2016. “The new science of  cute.” theguardian.com. OA: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/19/kumam on-the-new-science-of-cute

Dunbar-Hester, C. 2016. Geek , in Digital Keywords, a Vocabulary of Information, Society and Culture - http://culturedigitally.org/2014/05/geek-draftdigitalkeywords/ plus all my downloads

Allison, Anne. 2013. “Portable monsters and commodity cuteness: Pokemon as Japan’s new global power.” Postcolonial Studies 6(3): 381-395.

Kerr, H. (2016). Kawaii and the Cultural Rise of Cute. The Conversation.

Kelty, C. (2005). Geeks, Social Imaginaries and Recursive Publics, Cultural Anthropology

Timburg, S. (2016). “The Revenge of Monoculture: The Internet gave us more choices, but the mainstream won anyway.” Salon https://www.salon.com/2016/07/30/the_revenge_of_monoculture_the_internet_gave_us_more_choices_but_the_mainstream_won_anyway/

Trolling, flaming, ambivalent internet

Phillips, W., & Milner, R.M. (2017). The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press

Phillips, W. (2016). This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture, MIT Press.

Bishop, J. (2014). Representations of “ trolls ” in mass media communication : a review of media-texts and moral panics relating to “ internet trolling ,” 10(1), 7–24.

Stein, J. (2016).“How Trolls are Ruining the Internet.” http://time.com/4457110/internet-trolls/

Trolls haven’t ruined the internet https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/08/internet-trolls-avoidable/

Paralanguages, visuality and multimodality

Miltner, K. M., & Highfield, T. (2017). Never gonna GIF you up: Analyzing the cultural significance of the animated GIF. Social Media and Society, 3(3).

Tiidenberg, K., & Whelan, A. (2017). Sick bunnies and pocket dumps: “Not-selfies” and the genre of self-representation. Popular Communication, 15(2), 141–153.

Nissenbaum, A., & Shifman, L. (2017). Internet memes as contested cultural capital: The case of 4chan’s /b/ board. New Media and Society, 19(4), 483–501.

Gal, N., & Shifman, L. (2016). “ It Gets Better ”: Internet memes and the construction of collective identity. New Media & Society, 18(8).

Limor Shifman (2014) Memes in Digital Culture. The MIT Press.

Highfield, T. (2016). “Waiving (hash)flags: Some thoughts on Twitter hashtag emoji.”Medium.com. https://medium.com/dmrc-at-large/waiving-hash-flags-some-thoughts-on-twitter-hashtag-emoji-bfdcdc4ab9ad#.vczn6qfgl

Miltner, K M. 2014. “There’s no place for lulz on LOLCats: The role of genre, gender, and group identity in the interpretation and enjoyment of an Internet meme.” First Monday 19(8).

Stark, L, and Crawford, K. (2015). The Conservatism of Emoji: Work, Affect, and Communication. Social Media + Society Journal 1(2).

Willard, Lesley. 2016. “Tumblr’s Gif Economy: The Promotional Function of Industrially Gifted Gifsets.” Flowjournal.org. http://www.flowjournal.org/2016/07/tumblrs-gif-economy/

Paratextuality and Metacommunication in videogames:

Consalvo, M. (2017). When paratexts become texts: de-centering the game-as-text. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34(2), 177–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2017.1304648

Mäyrä, F. (2010). Gaming Culture at the Boundaries of Play. Game Studies, 10(1). http://gamestudies.org/1001/articles/mayra

Fan cultures

Bury, R. (2017). Television Viewing and Fan Practice in an Era of Multiple Screens. Sage Handbook of Social Media, Sage Publications.

 Gn, Joel. 2011. “Queer simulation: The practice, performance and pleasure of cosplay.”Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 25, 583-593.

Gray, J. (2003). New Audiences, New Textualities: Anti-Fans and Non-Fans. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6, 64–81.

Black, R. W. (2009). Online Fan Fiction , Global Identities , and Imagination, 43(4), 397–425.

Wood, M. M., & Baughman, L. (2012). Fandom and Twitter: Something New, or More of the Same Old Thing? Communication Studies, 63, 328–344.

Jenner, M. (2017). Binge-watching: Video-on-demand, quality TV and mainstreaming fandom. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 20, 304–320.

Stanfill, M. (2013). “They’re Losers, but I Know Better”: Intra-Fandom Stereotyping and the Normalization of the Fan Subject. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 30, 117–134.

Harman, S., & Jones, B. (2013). Fifty shades of ghey: Snark fandom and the figure of the anti-fan. Sexualities, 16(8), 951–968.

Hu, Kelly. 2016. “Chinese Subtitle Groups and the Neoliberal Work Ethic.” Pp. 207- 232 in Popular Culture Co-production and Collaborations in East and Southeast Asia, edited by Nissim Otmazgin and Eyal Ben Ari. Singapore: NUS Press Ltd.

Internet celebrity

Abidin, Crystal 2018. Internet Celebrity

Marwick, A. (2015). “You May Know Me From YouTube: (Micro)-Celebrity in Social Media.” Pp. 333-350 in A Companion to Celebrity, edited by P. David Marshall and Sean Redmond. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc

Senft, Theresa M. 2008. Camgirls: Celebrity & community in the age of social networks. New York: Peter Lang.

Production and distribution

Lotz, A. (2018). Portals: A Treatise on Internet-Distributed Television. Michigan Publishing Services.

Sokolowsky, J. (2017). Art in the Instagram age: How social media is shaping art and how you experience it. The Seattle Times.

Evans, Z. (2015). How social media and mobile technology has changed music forever. Social Media Week.

Jenkins, H., Green, J., Ford, S. (2013). Spreadable Media: Creating value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, NYU Press

Datafied culture and cultural analytics

Manovich, L. (2016). The Science of Culture? Social Computing, Digital Humanities and Cultural Analytics. The Datafied Society. Social Research in the Age of Big Data, 1–14.

Manovich, L. Cultural Data, Possibilities and limitations of the digital data universe, Oliver Grau, ed., with Wendy Coones and Viola Rühse, Museum and Archive on the Move. Changing Cultural Institutions in the Digital Era (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2017), 259-276.

Manovich, L. Can we think without categories? Digital Culture & Society (DCS), Vol. 4, no. 1 (2018): 17-28. Special issue "Rethinking AI: Neural Networks, Biometrics and the New Artificial Intelligence." Edited by Ramón Reichert, Mathias Fuchs, Pablo Abend, Annika Richterich, and Karin Wenz. , 2018

Philips, S. (2016). Can Big Data Find the Next 'Harry Potter'? The Atlantic.

Post-digital, post-internet, post-human culture?

Braidotti, R. (2006). Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology. Theory, Culture & Society, 23(7–8), 197–208.

Bishop, R., Gansing, K. Parikka, J. (2016). Across and Beyond: Post-digiral practices concepts and institutions, Transmediale. https://transmediale.de/content/across-and-beyond-post-digital-practices-concepts-and-institutions

Berry, David M (2014) Post-digital humanities: computation and cultural critique in the arts and humanities. Educause, 49 (3). pp. 22-26.

Kember, S. & Zylinska, J. (2012) Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process. Chapter 1 “Mediation and the Vitality of Media.”

Gold, A. (2016). From Digital to Post-Digital: Digital IDEAS in Practice. 2016 Digital Initiatives Symposium, 1–13.

Pinto, A. T., & Franke, A. (2016). THE POST-INTERNET CONDITION. Berlin Biennale for Contemporary At, 26–31.

#syllabus #digital cultures

0 notes

lmhight-eng101-piercecollege · 6 years

Text

ENGLISH 101: COLLEGE READING & COMPOSITION I

LOS ANGELES PIERCE COLLEGE, WOODLAND HILLS, CA

Instructor: Lisa Hight

Section# 15486

8 Week Summer Bridge Session 2018

Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, & Thursdays from 10:00 am to 11:30 am at the BEH Bldg. in Room 1311

Email: [email protected] OR [email protected]

Office Hours: Mondays & Wednesdays from 12:30 to 1:30 pm at the Center for Academic Success (CAS) in Room 5130, which is on the first floor of the Library/Learning Crossroads building

Tumblr Page:

http://lmhight-eng101-piercecollege.tumblr.com/

Course Objective

Analysis: breaking down a whole idea, concept, object, process, etc. into several parts, and examining how those corresponding parts reinforce and make up that whole idea, concept, object, process, etc. in order to understand it better.

Welcome to English 101. As a student, you will learn how to write college-level essays. The foundation of this skill is analysis. You will get a chance to develop your reading and writing skills, and the reading material and writing assignments will offer you a chance to break down and comprehend various types of writing.

You will be required to write four essays, one research paper, and one in-class final exam. Each essay is worth up to 15% points, and the research paper (minimum of 1500 words in MLA format) is worth up to 25% points. In other words, 85% of your overall grade will be from the essay assignments. I will hand out prompts for each essay assignment and for the research paper.

Along with the essays mentioned above, homework & in-class exercises will be assigned and counted towards your final grade. You will also have the opportunity to revise the first essay assigned this summer session.

Required Reading

The Arlington Reader (4th Edition); editors: Lynn Z. Bloom and Louise Z. Smith; publisher: Bedford St. Martin’s

The October Country; author: Ray Bradbury; publisher: Del Rey, a division of Random House

Student Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course students should be able to:

I. Analyze college-level prose of varying lengths.

II. Compose college-level essays of varying lengths (1000-1500 words) in response to college-level reading assignments.

III. Assess and follow accurately MLA research and documentation guidelines.

The rubric for an essay assignment in English 101 that assesses SLOs and the rubric for the Assessing SLOs in English 101 are outlined as follows…

Score: 4 = A

CONTENT: The essay discusses only the assigned or selected topic or question, and is factually correct in terms of the reading(s) assigned as the basis for the essay. Documentation requirements, such as a works cited page, are correctly followed.

ORGANIZATION: The essay (1) has a clear thesis statement that addresses the topic or question, (2) contains only relevant supporting points (a minimum of three) in a logical progression that are adequately developed, and (3) effective uses transitional words and phrases between and within paragraphs for coherence. In other words, the essay is developed, unified, and coherent. Required direct quotations are coherently woven into the discussion.

SENTENCES: The essay contains no fragments, run-ons, and comma splices. The essay also demonstrates effective use of coordination, subordination, and parallelism. Sentences containing direct quotations are grammatically correct and syntactically sound.

GRAMMAR & LANGUAGE: The essay contains no errors in grammar, punctuation, syntax, mechanics, and usage.

LENGTH: The essay meets the stipulated length requirement and fulfills all other requirements given with the assignment.

Score: 3 = B

CONTENT: The discussion is appropriate to the topic or question, but the essay may contain a small number of factual errors concerning the reading(s) assigned for the essay. The response to the documentation requirements may contain up to 2 errors only.

ORGANIZATION: The thesis statement is clear and addresses the topic, but the body of the essay (supporting points) is weak because one or two paragraphs lack development, unity, or coherence. Required direct quotations are coherently woven into the discussion.

SENTENCES: The essay contains minimal (1-2) errors in overall sentence structure (parallelism, fragments, run-ons, or comma splices), including those sentences with direct quotations.

GRAMMAR & LANGAUGE: The essay contains minimal (1-2) errors in grammar or in spelling, usage, punctuation, and mechanics.

LENGTH: The essay meets the stipulated length requirement and fulfills all other requirements given with the assignment.

Score: 2 = C

CONTENT: The discussion is minimally appropriate to the topic or question, or the essay may contain factual errors concerning the reading(s) assigned for the essay, or the response to the documentation requirement is incomplete.

ORGANIZATION: The thesis statement is unclear or vague, and the essay shows poor organization throughout the body because the middle paragraphs (1) lack adequate development or the required direct quotations are inappropriate, (2) digress or contains irrelevant details, or (3) do not contain transitional words or phrases for coherence, especially for the direct quotations.

SENTENCES: The essay contains several sentence writing errors, such that clarity is impacted.

GRAMMAR & LANGUAGE: The essay contains several errors in grammar or in punctuation, spelling, usage, and mechanics.

LENGTH: The essay does not meet the length requirement and fulfills only some of the other requirements given with the assignment.

Score: 1 = D

CONTENT: The discussion is not appropriate to the topic or question, or the documentation requirement is missing.

ORGANIZATION: The thesis statement is unclear or vague, the required direct quotations are missing, and the discussion throughout lacks development, unity, and coherence.

SENTENCES: The essay contains numerous errors in parallelism, or numerous fragments, run-ons, and comma splices. Sentences with direct quotations are grammatically incorrect or syntactically bizarre.

GRAMMAR & LANGAUGE: The essay contains numerous errors in grammar, mechanics, punctuation, usage, or spelling.

LENGTH: The essay does not meet the length requirement, nor does the essay fulfill all other requirements given with the assignment.

Grading Policy

Essay #1 (character analysis) 15%

Essay #2 (in-class thematic analysis) 15%

Essay #3 (rhetorical analysis) 15%

Essay #4 (in-class argumentative essay) 15%

Research Paper (argumentative) 25%

In-class Final 10%

Homework 5%

Total = 100%

Grade Range for Each Essay

15% - 13.5% = A

13.4% - 13.3% = A-

13.2% - 12.9% = B+

12.8% - 12% = B

11.9% - 11.4% = C+

11.3% - 10.5% = C

10.4% - 9% = D

8.9% - 0% = F

Grade Range for Research Paper

25% - 22.5% A

22.4% - 21.5% B+

21.4 % - 20% B

19.9% - 19% C+

18.9% - 17.5% C

17.4% - 15% D

14.9% - 0% F

Final Grade Breakdown

The final grade scale will be calculated as follows:

100% - 89% = A

88% - 79% = B

78% - 69% = C

68% - 59% = D

58% - 0% = F

Please note: your percentage total will be rounded up or down to create a whole final grade percentage. For example, if your percentage total is 88.5% or higher, I will round it up to 89%. If your percentage total is 77.4 or lower, I will round it down to 77%.

Attendance

Please note that I do take attendance daily for my records only (no attendance policy is attached to your grade), and I usually leave the choice of dropping the course to the students enrolled in this course. However, if a student has stopped attending the class and has accrued more than a week of absences, I will drop that student by the deadline of 7/29/18 unless that student has contacted me. Students should be aware that if I drop them from this course between the dates of 6/26/18 and 7/29/18, they will receive a “W” on their records. All students who are still enrolled after 7/29/18 will receive a letter grade (or pass/no pass option if that student has chosen that option).

Please note as well: if a student is enrolled in this class and does not show up on the first two days of the session, he or she may be dropped from the class.

If you miss any classes and assignments, it is your responsibility to get the necessary information from another classmate. In order to make this policy easier on everyone, I will be passing out a sign-up sheet that will list every students' LACCD email address. If you are uncomfortable about giving out such information to the entire class, you must choose one or two classmates and exchange any contact information with them. I want every student to be able to contact someone from the class in case of any absences.

Due Dates for Essays, Research Papers and Homework

Unless otherwise noted, homework assignments are due the next class session. Due dates for essays will be printed in the prompts. Most importantly, only hard copies handed to me in class are considered to be on time. Anything given to me after that class session will be considered late even if you turn in your work the same day.

My late policy is outlined as follows:

Late homework will be either accepted or rejected on a case-by-case basis. You must turn in late assignments by the very next class date. Please note: if you miss any assignments, you first need to contact a fellow student for information on any assignments. This is why I’m asking every student to exchange either phone numbers or email addresses with a classmate.

With Late essays I reserve the right to turn in your essays any time I want, and this includes turning in any late essays on the last day of class. In addition, I date stamp all essays. Lastly, I will apply the following penalties:

Late Homework: please see me about late homework assignments. I usually accept late homework if you speak with me.

Late Rough Drafts: if I accept your late rough draft, I will deduct 1.5% points from whatever grade your late essay earns even if I allow you to revise your rough draft. For example, if you turn in a late rough draft but turn in a revision on time and your revision earns a B+ (8.6), the 1.5% penalty deduction will drop your grade to a C (7.1%).

Late Final Drafts: if you turn in a late final draft, I will deduct 2% from whatever grade your late final draft earns. For example, if your late final draft initially earns an A (9%), the 2% penalty deduction will drop your grade to a C (7%).

If you do not in any draft for an essay assignment, you will receive an F grade (0%).

Late Research Paper: if you turn in a late research paper, I will deduct 4% points from whatever grade your late research paper earns. For example, if your late research paper initially earns a B (21.4%), the 4% deduction will drop your grade to a D (17.4%).

Please note: I will not allow any make-ups for the in-class essay unless you can provide an official written excuse such as a doctor’s note.

Plagiarism Policy

What is plagiarism? Plagiarism occurs when a student takes sentences or phrases from another writer and inserts these sentences or phrases into his or her writing and does not acknowledge or indicate that these are from another writer or outside source whether it is an essay, article, book, blog, etc.

You must be careful in how you present outside sources. If you turn in any work that uses unacknowledged ideas or concepts from other writers, you will receive an F grade (0 points) with no option for a re-write. I will also report any instance of plagiarism to the school; this means that the school will investigate the report and will take appropriate action against the plagiarist.

Special Services

Students with disabilities, whether physical, learning, or psychological, who believe that they may need accommodations in this class, are encouraged to contact Special Services as soon as possible to ensure that such accommodations are implemented in a timely fashion. Authorization, based on verification of disability, is required before any accommodation can be made. The phone number for Special Services is (818) 719-6430, and the office of Special Services is located in the Administration Bldg, Room 1024.

Student Health Services

Medical and mental health services are available to all currently enrolled students at the Student Health Center. There is no cost to students to see any of the medical and mental health providers during extended office hours. Call 818-710-4270 to make an appointment or to ask a question. Located on the 2nd floor of the Student Services Building. www.piercecollege.edu/offices/health_center

Cell Phone Policy

If you receive a call on your cell phone, please take it outside the classroom. Texting is not allowed inside the classroom, and if I find you texting inside the classroom, I reserve the right to confiscate your cell phone till the end of the class session.

CLASS SCHEDULE (SUMMER BRIDGE SESSION 2018)

Please note: this is only a rough schedule. There may be changes to the schedule due to time constraints and other unforeseen circumstances. For example, I may have to switch out one scheduled reading assignment with a new one, so please pay attention to any changes in the schedule.

WEEK 1 (6/18 – 6/21): introduction to class; introduction to character analysis: exploring a character’s psychology; essay structure (intro, body, and conclusion)

Class discussion on the reading assignment, “The Jar,” by Ray Bradbury (in the collection, The October Country)

Class discussion on the reading assignment, “Skeleton,” by Ray Bradbury (in the collection, The October Country)

WEEK 2 (6/25 – 6/28): more on character analysis: exploring a character’s psychology; introduction to thematic analysis: character analysis, symbolism, and subtext; Monday (6/25) is the last day you can drop the course without incurring any penalties; The rough draft of Essay #1 (character analysis of the protagonist in “Skeleton”) is due Monday (6/25).

Further discussion on the reading assignment, “Skeleton,” by Ray Bradbury (in the collection, The October Country)

Class discussion on the reading assignment, “Touched with Fire,” by Ray Bradbury (in the collection, October Country)

WEEK 3 (7/2 – 7/5): review of character analysis: exploring a character’s psychology; more on thematic analysis: character analysis, symbolism, and subtext; Wednesday (7/4) is Independence Day, so there will be no class that day; The revision of Essay #1 (character analysis of the protagonist in “Skeleton”) is due Thursday (7/5); please note: the revision will be graded.

Further discussion on the reading assignment, “Touched with Fire,” by Ray Bradbury (in the collection, The October Country)

Class discussion on the reading assignment, “The Man Upd,” by Ray Bradbury (in the collection, The October Country)

WEEK 4 (7/9 – 7/12): more on thematic analysis: character analysis, symbolism, and subtext; introduction to rhetorical analysis: tone, language, and the three appeals; Essay #2 (in-class assignment on the thematic analysis of “The Man Upstairs”) is scheduled for Wednesday (7/11).

Further discussion on the reading assignment, “The Man Upstairs,” by Ray Bradbury (in the collection, The October Country)

Class discussion on the reading assignment, “Against School…” by John Taylor Gatto (in the textbook, The Arlington Reader)

Class discussion on the reading assignment, “Think Before You Breed” (in the textbook, The Arlington Reader)

WEEK 5 (7/16 – 7/19): more on rhetorical analysis: tone, language, and the three appeals; introduction to evidence used to prove an argument: expert testimony, eyewitness testimony, numerical data, research data; Essay #3 (rhetorical analysis of either “Against School…” by John Taylor Gatto or “Think Before You Breed” by Christine Overall) is due Wednesday (7/18)—please note: you are turning in one draft for a grade.

Class discussion on the reading assignment, “Do You Think Like Sherlock Holmes?” by Maria Konnikova (in the textbook, The Arlington Reader)

Class discussion on the reading assignment, “Divided We Eat,” by Lisa Miller (in the textbook, The Arlington Reader)

WEEK 6 (7/23 – 7/26): more on evidence used to prove an argument: expert testimony, eyewitness testimony, numerical data, research data; introduction to the research paper; introduction to MLA citation and formatting; Essay #4 (in-class essay that argues for the intangible benefits of a college or liberal education) is scheduled for Wednesday (7/25).

Further discussion on the reading Assignment, “Divided We Eat,” by Lisa Miller (in the textbook, The Arlington Reader)

Class discussion on the reading assignment, “Increasing the Value of a Liberal Education,” by William Bowen (hand-out)

WEEK 7 (7/30 – 8/2): more on the research paper; please note: you will begin to build your research paper; A partial draft of your research paper will be due on Thursday (8/2); I plan to make comments on your partial draft and hand it back to you by Monday (8/6).

Class discussion on sample research paper (hand-out)

WEEK 8 (8/6 – 8/9): more on the research paper; I will also prepare you for the in-class final, which will be based on the documentary called Tabloid, and you will be required to answer at least three questions based on the eyewitness testimony in this documentary; the in-class final is scheduled for Thursday (8/9); your research paper will also be due on Thursday (8/9).

0 notes

sustainable-cia · 6 years

Text

Blogger 2019

Blogging: One interesting point to become is that, the more traffic you have at your site, the greater your chances are to slide up on search engine results read how to start a blog Dilemma then, is the places do an individual that initial flow of customers, clients, or readers to make your website vicinity that they regularly have a look at? Know your target readership. In any type of business, researching the target market is extremely important. You need to know what folks are on the lookout for so you'll know exactly in order to offer them. Consider conducting interviews or running reviews. The more you are aware of about these people, the easier it will have for in which get right through to them and that is exactly what you'll need to win their operation. A baby boomer person should to be able to born around the connected with 1940 and 1960, this time of time is also called as the "Post-World War II baby boom era". Conventional they spent your youth during the "Peace and Love" means of behaving. Computers during the moment were still being used mainly via Military. These people big, bulky and only used for scientific how to create a blog wordpress guide for beginner’s facts. The Internet was still at the back of "Al Gore's" mind. Download and open the Kubrick header (kubrickheader.jpg). Note the size the graphic- 760px wide by 200px high. Quite important if the dimensions exactly exact same way when changing the graphics but not messing with the style sheet or perhaps HTML. Add another layer. Save as "kubrickheader2.jpg" (in Photoshop use "Save for Internet.")."Save" after each walk. Start more interested in Wordpress as well as the array of plugins and templates, and you'll start to get dizzy, waste a lot of effort, and yet not have your blog up and running. By using private label resell right articles the insulation is already chosen to be able to. I suggest you find typically the most popular topics around the internet as nowadays March 6, 2010. The perfect resource is to use Google Trends, EBay Pulse, Amazon and Lycos lots of. Then find some article that understand the more widely used topics about the. If an individual reading suggestions then it's likely which you are marketing your online business. If not then make sure you start gone. There are 1.5 billion internet users, a number which expanding by the day, all looking for the solution to a problem or researching their next purchasing. You want be sure that you are there when prospects decide to make their purchase with their credit card in the company. You need Auction Classified Cash. The reason one of the people unique guides that dispatch. You could easily have a classified ad on eBay be providing you with in money within a few minutes. You don't even in order to be having a merchandise to begin to make money. You can show others how become worse money using other people's products.

Tags: how to create a blog, start a blog

Setup Free blog: free blog setup, Recent legal developments have alerted nearly every affiliate how the terms to their relationship with sponsors most likely is not as good as they thought. The campaign is product sales tax circumstance. When states pass law requiring sites like Amazon to pay sales tax because the site has affiliates in the site, end result is predictable - the affiliates are terminated. Just like that. Without cause. In spite of the fact the affiliate sometimes have sent connected with traffic. Pursuant to the terms of the affiliate agreement, there does not recourse for the terminated marketers. The initial few calls brought to mind my early days of contacting the same type of leads. I could relate, but after 15 or so calls it became just annoying. Via the time the 22nd call came in I am turned off of. I really feel unhealthy for and the wonderful who are exceedingly desperate, want to start up a home based business. Most of them I know would be turned off by folks calls. Your marketplace is other network companies. These are individuals who understand your business works and much more likely to learn about your opportunity. For all those who have no idea what fanfiction is or never heard the term fancies before - it's basically the development of fictional content based a good already existing storyline. For example, consider characters within your favorite anime or franchise and write your own story within that same universe and let your creativity just flow.

Tags: free WordPress blog setup, setup free wordpress blog

Add Google Webmaster tools: how to add Google webmaster tools in WordPress, Optimize your website. Your website should be SEO hospitable. You do this by coming into some simple research of keywords which have been highly goal. After you find these targeted and valuable keywords, correctly using them in your internet site is what makes your site search engine optimized. Getting links from relevant websites. Get links from sites which have relevant towards the business, product or service back with the important keyword pages. These industry links are "relevant" links but are highly valued by search engines. Tips: Avoid reciprocal linking unless it's with couple of select partners and as well as for the purposes of link starting out. Another option, three-way link building is often tedious and filled with rejection. I'd personally focus on "value" based link obtaining. Although Google keeps its algorithm secret - good process or formula that they use gain a webpage - some factors identified. You can read what Google has declare on subject matter in the how to add website to Google webmaster help files - just put in those words as pursuit clue as part of your this. Google's main objective is and starts to give users search engine results which are of help to them. The word that they use over and over to describe this is applicable. It's easy to forget just how far we've are search engine quality. I've just been using a primitive search engine on an affiliate site which sells books. Includes instructive discover just how hopeless their search engine is. For that terms Looked on, any huge selection of results were produced yet I wasn't able to find the things i wanted.

Tags: add Google webmasters tools to blog, add Google webmaster in WordPress blog

Install wordpress manually in cpanel: How to install wordpress manually in cpanel, However, in HTML, somebody less fortunate to insert "base" plus your website confront. By specifying "base", the browser can direct to the number one site. This alerts the various search engine of the primacy house page. Also, this action saves you time in editing inner pages. If you are having problems deciding for you to promote, then for tips on product selection, keywords and web-site naming check the actual free video course and also the review site links several a few tips. I specifically require with any hosting service that I exploit can how to install wp manually with a cute single click or numerous simple taps. HostGator offers Fantastico De Luxe and QuickInstall alternatives for easily installing WordPress most other scripts to establish your website (i.e. Joomla and others). Install in Directory - If you must install wordpress manually from the Root Directory then you permit this field blank. People put it in its very directory then you will want to the name among the new submission sites. You can name this anything you wish but be sure the directory doesn't already exist.

Tags: how to install WordPress manually beginners guide, setup wordpress blog manually in cpanel

Install wordpress plugins : How to Install WordPress plugins : I don't think Amazon Associates has a referral program -- however know folks also earn much money thru their a Store which I haven't fully explored yet -- please let me know your experiences this sort of factors! Another one of several best blogging tools is employing trackback. This lets you come up with a link for a behavior which you posted earlier. You can also backlink to other blogs and the blogging software will recognized the link. It's actually quite simple and is a very good way to be able to value to your blog for the readers. You can write a step by step tutorial on how to create a blog or down the road . write concerning how to how to install wordpress plugins blogging. Where to host the websites? If the blog is self hosted, ways to setup your site with the custom hosting account? Enhance profits with templates for blog design and obtaining free templates? How to optimize the blogs for search engine results positioning. If you include all the data about these, it gives a beginners guide to blogging.

Tags: Install Wordpress plugins step by step guide, Install Wordpress plugins tutorial for beginners

Install wordpress themes: How to install Wordpress themes, I personally start building a well rounded backlinks portfolio from can be I launch a site or weblog. This is because it takes a period for build backlinks portfolio and becoming ranked particular keyword on the net. Content Mistakes: I count this as design, simply because it contributes into the general aesthetics of your web site. Grammar and spelling mistakes in web site posts are a killer. I know it happens, through the night . in awhile it just isn't any big topic. However, if you continually get some things wrong and your site content are plagued by them, men and women will be deterred. This includes things like properly titling your post. In general it is a best practice to capitalize each word in weblog post (besides commons words like and, or for example.). The wordpress drafts equate the Quality install wordpress themes. The grade of install wordpress themes imply all for the specific themes are maintain met. In a position for you of finding the good quality of install wordpress themes, you need for considering associated with money things and below are a handful of the tips that you'd like to bear in mind.

Tags: Install wordpress themes step by step, how to install WordPress themes for beginners

Best Website Hosting: Website hosting, Looking in the robustness in regards to a site is likewise extremely important aimed within your site and ultimately your internet business success. Hosts normally have several backup systems if something fails with all of the main web servers. They can also promise less "down time" by backup power brands. I wouldn't utilize a sponsor unless the grade of at the lowest quantity of a 97% uptime makes sure of. These hits don't seem like really efficient gear in analyzing site traffic. Your interpretation is to be extra accurate if view the group guests which were coming inside your website. Relating to the similar critique. Your analysis can be extra precise in a position to accomplish an excellent selection of site traffic. But whenever you aren't getting huge variety of web page guests, a lot your analysis might be misinterpreted. It is a good idea to call up a provider before What is web hosting determine to hire them to ask them a number of questions. You will quickly ability to find out how good top quality of consumer support is, and your kids help anyone to make your decision.

Tags: best wordpress website hosting companies, top website hosting companies

Wordpress: What is WordPress, Reality check: A "blog" is a "website." Indeed, I a great number of other people I know have both traditional "blogs" and "websites" all running on the identical software, but now "blogs" differing only typically the function of allowing site visitors to leave their feed-back. Allow Unregistered Users to write Comments - This is the choice. However, to reduce spam, I'd require users to be registered before posting comments. But the choice is your site. The SEO Score is commonly used to great effect by SEO Pressor. The plugins will forever keep checking the SEO Score from the website in which it is applied and the idea will strive improve the product. It will do a involving tweaks near the website and additionally prompt that is called to apply some changes so that the website's prospects are What is wordpress gotten better. These changes are guaranteed to deliver up the prospects for this website-so much that the web page could figure within methods to use 3 response of Google. Tags: learn wordpress, wordpress tutorials

Setup Wordpress SEO: how to setup wordpress SEO, Numerous people are amazed when they listen about these forms of earnings but it's true. Nearly all sites bought for reduce one hundred dollars so a person they make a five figure earning? Considering pros be aware formula to begin sites quickly and understand how to handle a site at a slightly higher price than most persons. The more they make and deal, modern they help to make. Pick a matter and break it right down to several short installments. As opposed to pouring everything you've got in one long ebook, chunk primary topics to a few sub topics that might convert to shorter many. For instance, if you are writing about WordPress search engine optimization, you may write about these: SEO: Why content remains the king, SEO: Sitemaps are actually they the actual they complete for you, SEO: Do hidden or paid links really your job?, SEO: The best SEO tools over the web today, etc. By doing so, you will have the ability to create a lot of electronic books that may perhaps result in more sales and return.

Tags: WordPress SEO setup, SEO for WordPress blog

Best Wordpress plugins: Wordpress plugins, this plugins really serves no purpose except that making client feel warm and fuzzy without in order to take period to check out the far superior data provided by Google Stats tracking. Stat press Visitors shows the last 1 month of traffic separated by Visitors, Page views, RSS Feeds and Search engine spiders. It will also demonstrate that last 30 or less keywords and check engines that brought site the internet page. I wouldn't rely upon the data to sell advertising, but for an overview it can give a quick snapshot. Fun. but laborious. Because "one and done" in the internet marketing world usually means that they are through with you, your own business, additionally your blog after one visit if you don't need the goods. You can't put a notch with your lipstick case just reality person visits you. The truth is that very same don't buy anything a person until have got had much less 6 marketing touch marks. Choose Wisely, your success depends upon proper choices from healthy. So take all the time you need, haste does definitely make waste when thinking about Internet best wordpress plugins for small business reselling.

Tags; Best wordpress plugins for small business website, most important wordpress plugins for beginners, compare hosting

#create a blog #free blog

0 notes

drunk-math · 6 years

Text

A quickie, only because I haven't written anything since my "alloposium."

So I've been working on a post for a while that has to do with the metamathematical/philosophical concept of finitism, i.e., that the notion expressed by Russel's paradox, which he expressed as the barber's paradox (which can't be solved by saying the barber was a woman, or maybe it can, but more on that later), should be solved, rather than by the axiom of regularity, by an axiom of finitism, where infinite sets are treated as proper classes. I'm rather dragging my feet on that, since maybe it turns out that trying to do math drunk is almost as foolish an endeavor as doing it sober. Consider the Achaemenids, blah blah blah.

Meanwhile, I have to write something, so how about I excerpt the rant on the Banach-Tarski paradox I was going to put in, since it's pretty random anyway?

Now, you probably know the name Tarski from the Banach-Tarski paradox, that you can chop a sphere into a finite number of pieces (nine) and reassemble them into two spheres, which I’m now going to explain in tiresome, prosaic detail for really no reason at all. First accept the axiom of choice, in the form that given a set of disjoint sets, you can infer the existence of a set containing exactly one member of each. Now draw two axes through a ball at a funny angle - pretty sure one radian will do - anything that leaves no finite, alternating string of half-turns around one axis and third-turns (in either direction) around the other that ends up get you back to where you started. (I think one radian will work because its sine and cosine are transcendental - this I’m sure of - and they’d have to be the solutions to a finite polynomial of algebraic coefficients to fail this criterion - this I’m also fairly sure of but can’t be arsed to work out.) This guarantees that every such string corresponds to a unique rotation, and it’s easy to see that you can invert them by just going backwards (thus failing to alternate, I’m sure I don’t need to say). Now, first, let’s split the surface of the sphere into four sets - the fourth will be all the points that don’t move in one of these rotations, and you’ll see why I’m calling it the fourth very shortly. In fact, by the end of this sentence: every point belongs to what’s known as an “orbit” of all the points you can get to by a rotation in the set of rotations described above, which is a set since the relation is reflexive (the trivial rotation - zero degrees - is in the set), symmetric (the inverse of every rotation in the set is in the set), and transitive (the composition of two rotations in the set is in the set), which for every point not in the aforementioned fourth set (i.e., those not fixed in any rotation; note that the orbits of those in the fourth set will be entirely within the fourth set - in fact, I think but can’t prove the fourth set itself - if it were finite, it’d follow from the bijection, so stay tuned - since the operation of bringing it to the fixed point, giving it an appropriate turn, and bringing it back will keep it fixed while being a nontrivial element the set of rotations) has a bijection to the set of rotations, and having CHOSEN (would that I could figure out how to add sparkles to that) one from each orbit you get a set that itself has an orbit that’s the whole sphere bar that fourth set, and that orbit we’ll divide into three unions of elements of the orbit by separating the rotations into three sets. Yes, I will call that a sentence, thank you very much. Anyway, the rotations, the trivial rotation is in the first set, if you turn a rotation around the third-turn axis in one direction it goes from the first to the second to the third and back, the other it goes from the third to the second to the first and back, regardless of whether the instructions alternate or not. Likewise, if you flip a rotation in the second or third set, you get one in the first set, always. However - if you flip one in the first set, it depends. Remembering that each rotation has a unique alternating representation of flips and turns (let’s call ‘em that because why not?), if the last instruction in that representation is a flip, you obviously go back to whichever brought you here. If it’s a turn, you go to the second. So now you take these four sets on the surface and use them to divide the sphere into four sets plus the center. First, take the second and third away. Now, you can flip the first set to get the second and third, break it up, turn both parts to get two copies of the first, and flip one to get the second and third again. Since that’s keeping the fourth and the center, you’ve now got the whole ball plus a nice chunk of it. (If you’re keeping score, only four pieces - the one corresponding to the fourth set and center, one for the preimage of each of the second and third sets under the mapping from the first - have actually been rearranged separately, and one for the points beneath the second and third sets themselves. Only the lattermost will be considered from here on out.) The next part’s tricky, inasmuch as it involves a hypothetical ball and its hypothetical rearrangement into a subset of the other two sets, but that’s not going to be what we’re doing in the end: to wit, hypothetically rearrange the hypothetical ball in the reverse of the way we build the last ball to get just the points under the first and fourth sets (and the center), then turn the first set to become the second, turn the fourth to be entirely in the other three (since the set of rotations we built was countable, the points of the fourth set on the sphere - i.e., the surface - are countable, and since only two rotations can connect a given two and there are uncountably many rotations since there are uncountably many angles, there being are uncountably many reals between zero and tau, there must be such a rotation) and just like the entirety of the three sets before break it in two and rotate it totally into the third set, and shift the center to be somewhere else, anywhere else, in the third set (“chosen,” which didn’t actually make my phrasing, but pretend it did, gets no sparkles because it’s only one arbitrary choice, not infinite - more on that nasty little-big word soon). The next bit to break off is the points under the second and third sets of the sphere that you’ll never get to by doing this to the points outside the second and third, or to the points you get from doing that, or from doing that, ad inf. (Arguably a different sense, but really also sort of the same - Euclid’s sense, to the extent he had one.) These stay put, while the points that you will get you break into five according to where you get them, and send them there. Since each iteration is walked back one, you end up with another entire ball. So now, like the barber, you’ve got two balls.

(The "you probably know the name Tarski..." thing comes from a reference to Tarski-finiteness, which is the property that any chain of subsets, i.e., set of subsets in which of any two one contains the other, has an element that contains all others, which without the axiom of choice doesn't necessarily imply finiteness, unless you assume it for all objects in the domain of discourse.)

Anyway, slightly simpler: Vitali sets. So consider measure: if you have a finite number of disjoint intervals, the amalgamation has a "length" equal to their sum. If you have a sequence of lengths of disjoint intervals that converges (e.g., 1 to 1.5, 2 to 2.25, 3 to 3.125, &c.), that'll converge to the sum, and if you have such a sequence that diverges, we'll say that's infinite, like the real line itself. So let's consider just between zero and one, and divide up the numbers such that in each set, the difference between any two is rational. Now, every such set will be of measure zero, but there are "too many" to put into a sequence, to that's fine. Now let's CHOOSE one from every such set, and since they're disjoint, if you add a rational number, you'll get a different set that'll have the same measure, and if you take the part that's greater than one or less than zero, you'll get two disjoint sets whose sum has the same measure, and moving one will give you a set of the same measure between zero and one. These can be put into a sequence, since the rationals can be, and they take up the whole interval, and since they're disjoint, they add up to the whole interval, but since they have the same measure, that's impossible, so they have no measure, not even zero. The aliens who don't understand Euclidean geometry might have a different notion of "number," and in particular "infinitesimal" from us, but that would take more explanation, which I don't have on me.

So... as Izzard would say... yeah.

#axiom of choice #vitali sets #banach-tarski paradox #eddie izard #infinity

0 notes