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c-ptsdrecovery · 3 years

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Source: What is C-PTSD from Beauty After Bruises

From that source:

WHAT DOES C-PTSD LOOK LIKE?

To delineate some these hallmark challenges - as outlined in the proposed Complex PTSD criteria - we'll begin with the one that shows up most frequently in day-to-day life: emotion regulation. Survivors with Complex PTSD have a very difficult time with emotions -- experiencing them, controlling them, and for many, just being able to comprehend or label them accurately. Many have unmanaged or persistent sadness, either explosive or inaccessible anger, and/or suicidal thoughts. They may be chronically numb, lack the appropriate affect in certain situations, be unable to triage sudden changes in emotional content, or struggle to level out after a great high/low. It's also very common for these survivors to re-experience emotions from trauma intrusively - particularly when triggered. These feelings are often disproportionate to the present situation, but are equal to the intensity of what was required of them at the time of a trauma -- also known as an emotional flashback.

Difficulty with self-perception is another fundamental struggle for complex trauma survivors -- particularly because their identity development was either fiercely interrupted or manipulated by someone with ulterior motives. In its simplest form, how they see themselves versus how the rest of the world does can be brutally different. Some may feel they carry or actually embody nothing but shame and shameful acts - that they are "bad". Others believe themselves to be fundamentally helpless; they were let down by so many who could've stopped their abuse but didn't, so it "must just be them". Many see themselves as responsible for what happened to them and thus unworthy of kindness or love because "they did this to themselves". And, countless others may feel defined by stigma, believe they are nothing more than their trauma, worry they're always in the way or a burden, or they may sense they're just completely and utterly different from anyone or anything around them - they are alien. Startling as it is, all of these feelings and more can live inside someone whom, to you, seems like the most brilliant, competent, strong, and compassionate human being you know.

Interruptions in consciousness are also a prevalent - and at times very scary - reality in Complex PTSD. Some may forget traumatic events (even if they knew of them once before), relive them intrusively, recall traumatic material in a different chronological order, or other distressing experiences of what is called dissociation. Dissociation is a symptom that exists on a spectrum, ranging anywhere from harmless daydreaming or temporarily "spacing out"; to more disruptive episodes of feeling disconnected from one's body or mental processes, not feeling real, or losing time; all the way to the most severe, which includes switching between self-states (or alters), as is seen in Dissociative Identity Disorder. Episodes of missing time can range anywhere from a few minutes, a couple days, or even large chunks of one's childhood. The larger gaps in time are typically only seen in DID, but those with C-PTSD alone can still endure 'interruptions in consciousness' that result in memory gaps, poor recall, traumatic material that is completely inaccessible, or, conversely, re-experiencing trauma against their will (e.g. flashbacks, intrusive images, body memories, etc.)

Difficulty with relationships may seem like a natural progression since each area mentioned thus far can affect how fruitful your relationships are. But, these challenges go beyond a lack in quality or richness. This refers more to a survivor's potential to feel completely isolated from peers and not even knowing how to engage, to harboring an outright refusal to trust anyone (or just not knowing why they ever should), trusting people way too easily (including those who are dangerous, due to a dulled sense of alarm), perpetually searching for a rescuer or to do the rescuing, seeking out friends and partners who are hurtful or abusive because it's the only thing that feels familiar, or even abruptly abandoning relationships that are going well for any number of reasons. With this in mind, and knowing more about the depths to which C-PTSD sufferers battle with their self-perception and interpersonal relationships, it may make it easier to empathize with them on the next category, which is:

The perception of one's perpetrators. This can be one of the most insidious battles for some survivors with Complex PTSD -- even if it seems crystal clear to those on the outside. Victims of such prolonged trauma may eventually surrender, assuming their abuser(s) total power over them, possibly even maintaining this belief once they're 'free'. "I'll always be under their thumb, they call all the shots, they may even know what's best for me more than I ever will." Others may feel deep sadness or profound guilt at just the thought of leaving them - including long after they've successfully left, if they were able. Some may remain transfixed by their abuser's charming side or the warm public persona that everyone loves; it may feel truly impossible to think ill of them. Many hold a constant longing for their abusers to just love them - craving their praise well into adulthood, slaving away in their personal lives just to make them proud. Alternatively, there are others who may obsess about them angrily, holding only hatred and disdain for them to the point of persistent bitterness and/or vengefulness. Some can even stir desires to seek that revenge. (Though, it should be clearly noted that it's not at all common for them to actually do so. It's more about the thoughts than the actions.)

Many survivors can have a primary, more surface-layer set of thoughts and feelings about their perpetrator(s), particularly when asked. They may know what they're "supposed to say" or "supposed to feel", and then follow suit. But it's helpful to know that a collection of all these responses can, and often does, coexist within one person, vacillating between extremes underneath what's shown to the world or even to themselves. Day to day, and year to year, their feelings may shift - and - what the survivor knows to be true intellectually versus what they feel emotionally may remain incongruent for a very long time.

One's 'System of Meanings'. Of the many, many well-observed developmental disruptions those with C-PTSD face, one that many find to be the toughest to conquer, even with therapy, is one with which we hope to offer the most help and support. That area is what's referred to as one's 'system of meanings' ; an area that, after being subjected to such tumultuous trauma, can feel almost irreparable. What this criterion is referring to is the struggle to hold on to any kind of sustaining faith or belief that justice will ever be served to indiscretions of ethics and morality. These survivors' outlook on life and the world at large can be unfairly contorted, and understandably so.

They may doubt there is any goodness or kindness in the world that isn't selfish-hearted. They may worry they'll never find forgiveness. Others may even believe they only came to this world to be hurt, so there can be no good coming for them. This level of hopelessness and despair, as well as these greater meanings assigned to their suffering, can fluctuate greatly over time. There may even come several years where things no longer feel so bleak or as though they were conned of a meaningful life. But, as more layers of trauma are processed in therapy, or new memories bubble to the surface, they may wrestle with it once more as new feelings strike a devastating chord inside their chest. This is a common experience for so many survivors, and can have lasting ramifications with each plunge. We want to be here to help bring pause to those deep swings into the darkness - doing what we can to keep survivors in the light a little longer. Or, better yet, support them in adding some of that light inside of themselves. That way, even if they need to hide in the darkness for a bit, the light never leaves them for good. We're still here.

#ptsd #depression #anxiety #complex ptsd #mental health

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letterboxd · 3 years

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Careful How You Go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

Madeleine Sims-Fewer in ‘Violation’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brittany S. Hall in ‘Test Pattern’.

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sidney Flanigan in ‘Never Rarely Sometimes Always’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Julia Garner in ‘The Assistant’.

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

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

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

Michaela Coel in ‘I May Destroy You’.

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mayhew: Men.

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

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

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

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

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

Related content

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

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

Unconsenting Media: a search engine for sexual violence in broadcasting

Follow Ella on Letterboxd

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

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

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

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

Europe: Rape Crisis Network Europe

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pickone1 · 3 years

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how to make money on Fiverr

Fiverr was intended to furnish clients with the capacity to purchase advanced administrations from a variety of elite suppliers.

Established in 2011, it’s developed quickly, with more than 8,000,000 “gigs” being purchased through the stage in 2015 alone.

While this may sound extraordinary, the unavoidable issue is whether you can bring in cash with it, as well.

To respond to this, I have thought that it was ideal to think about the general extent of the market, and where you’re ready to gain any headway with it…

Having gone through the previous 5 months working with various individuals on the stage, the one thing I have discovered which decides whether somebody will be effective is the way they’re ready to situate their offer.

For the vast majority – and ladies are especially awful at this – they will fundamentally list what they’re ready to “do” for certain instances of past work.

Maybe this will function admirably for significant level photographic artists, however for every other person – it’s a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Individuals need to realize how you will move their business/life forward, not what you’re ready to do.

For instance, you might be a “top notch specialist”, however how does that convert into the kind of treatment you can give to patients? What’s your forte? What have you done before that different specialists could not touch?

In the Western world, we’ve arrived at a time where social media has practically exposed the “unremarkable business” fantasy – individuals need to realize who they’re managing, and need the absolute best administrations to be conveyed direct to them.

To this end, while thinking about how you can manage the stage, there are various strides to go through:

Lead With YOUR Experience

The principal BIG thing I discovered is to lead with your experience.

In the event that you don’t have any insight, you need to simply say that you’re anxious to learn – the thought being that individuals will utilize your administrations since they need to assist you with improving and so on

Each time I’ve seen somebody who’s been effective on the stage, they generally lead with their experience over all the other things.

The best suppliers on the stage are quite certain with what they’re offering, since they will consistently form it around the aptitude they’ve created in “this present reality”.

A serious mix-up of a wide range of individuals is to just attempt to sell a help since they believe it’s famous (SEO/WordPress desgin and so forth) – this is a BAD method to get things done, and will regularly restrain development as you’ll not give awesome outcomes.

While the underlying surge of bringing in cash may be acceptable, terrible client surveys will slaughter any desires you may have. Accordingly, it pays over the long haul to zero in on what you’re really ready to don’t (what you think individuals need to pay for).

See What’s Selling

A few things will be more well known than others – while you shouldn’t “duplicate” others’ work, it’s consistently beneficial to perceive what’s famous and what isn’t.

Regarding the manner in which you do this, there are two strategies:

Take a gander At Popular Accounts

Take a gander At Popular Products/Services

The main strategy is to attempt to distinguish any well known “accounts” on the stage, and “figure out” how they have been so effective. This regularly makes the way for taking a gander at the different well known “markets” through which they’ve been selling their gigs:

Snap onto Fiverr

At the top, select one of the “subjects” from the route bar

Select a sub-subject (ensure both are genuinely well known (Digital Marketing > Social Media Marketing)

From the left menu, select “Level Two” + “Top of the line” from the “Merchant Rating” area

Additionally contribution in any event $100 into the “Value Range” area

Ensure the postings are requested by “Smash hit” and begin tapping on the ones that seem well known

In the event that you discover whatever looks engaging, click onto the “profile” of the vender

This will give you an outline of their whole arrangement of gigs

The subsequent technique is to search for any items/administrations which are by and large famous. While try not to be conventional in the thing you’re offering, you should have the option to think about the “language” through which your crowd may wish to impart.

Snap onto Fiverr

At the top, select one of the “points” from the route bar that offers to your experience

Select a sub-theme which further advances

Guarantee the postings are requested by “Top of the line”

Look through and search for the modest number after the beginning rating

For instance, you may have 5 stars + “1k”

The “1k” addresses the quantity of individuals who’ve purchased the gig and left a decent survey

It straightforwardly signifies the ubiquity of the gig, and in this manner whether it’s an interesting point

As referenced, both of these techniques are just truly to be utilized to acquire a “lay of the land” – some base level examination intended to give you further thoughts concerning what’s famous on the stage.

Drive Your Own IN-Interest Offers

In the wake of doing the abovementioned, you need to consider making an “sought after” offer.

Request is a stacked word; the key is that the vast majority basically need to understand how you will help them.

The issue is the vast majority will just attempt to advise you either what they “do”, or what they think you need to hear. This doesn’t work.

What works is having a framework which permits you to “offer” your administrations so that individuals in a split second comprehend the basic advantages for their business.

For instance, one of my Fiverr profiles represents considerable authority in PC fix.

PC fix isn’t the most provocative, nor the most plentiful market now. Harking back to the 90’s, being a “PC fix” fellow implied huge cash… not in 2018.

Hence, to make an “popular” offer (since PCs are as yet utilized – significantly more than the 90’s – simply in an unexpected way), you need to go with where the “request” is:

Worpress fixes

Cloud VPS provisioning + the board

Shopify fixes

Presently, albeit these are OK – the BIG issue here is that there’s very little interest for them. Individuals don’t “need” to get them.

What individuals need to pay for are the reasons “why” they’re utilizing the previously mentioned programming bundles – traffic, development + deals.

Consequently, you wrap whatever you’re doing in the bundling of “growth”…

5 New WordPress Theme Tweaks To Boost Conversions By 20%

Increment Traffic With Brand New WordPress Tweaks

Make A SAAS Subscription Business With Cloud VPS

Increment Shopify Sales With These 3 Theme Tweaks

There’s clearly a workmanship to this – in case you’re ready to do it successfully, you’re ready to draw in orders from an enormous number of purchasers.

Comprehend What People Are Buying

Clearly, individuals purchasing a fix/redesign – yet at it’s center, you need to value that a great many people won’t send you cash for unremarkable assistance; they need excellent.

Outstanding doesn’t signify “quality” – it signifies “results”.

Along these lines, while thinking about the way toward working with customers (on the off chance that you get orders), you need to do totally everything to push their business/life forward.

As clarified above, things like enveloping the proposal by hidden outcomes (for them), going the additional mile to assist them with understanding what you’ve done or simply accomplishing more than anticipated – in the event that you approach your customers with deference and energy, you’ll begin accepting good audits.

These great surveys are what should propagate the development of the assistance.

Guarantee The “Back-End” Is Handled Properly

In the event that you need to get into the major classes, unquestionably the key is to guarantee your business can deal with expanded quantities of orders.

all the article is in our blog pickone1.com

#make money today #make money online #fiverr #fiver gigs

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hookedontaronfics · 5 years

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Teasing the Bowstrings - Prompt fic

Title: Teasing the Bowstrings Pairing: Taron x reader Rating: T Warnings: Some light cursing, some very brief allusions to sex [but no actual smut - at least not yet...] A/N: This fluffy fic was generated off a prompt and I don’t think y’all will ever look at archery the same way again! I had a lot of fun writing it, and I hope you enjoy reading it too! x Prompt: Hi, what about a reader x taron one where the reader is his teacher for archery for the robin hood movie and they develop feelings for each other?

There you were, perched on your forearms and toes, every muscle in your body straining to keep you in that position as the sweat dripped from your face. You checked your stopwatch again - this had to be the slowest possible minute in the world. You sucked in your breath and held it, closing your eyes and relying on your mental toughness to stick it out as your muscles started shaking, before the little beep told you you could collapse to the mat in utter exhaustion. Five minutes. You had made it in the plank five whole minutes, a new personal best.

Friday morning burns truly were the best.

You finished your morning routine at the gym with some light stretching before hitting the showers, using the soap to massage your sore muscles as you went. Even though you were already fit, today’s training session had kicked your ass and you knew you were going to feel it for days.

Once you had finished rinsing off, you dressed quickly in a pair of sweatpants and a sports bra and tanktop, and checked your phone only to find six missed texts from Lars asking you for a massive favor.

<Yeah, what do you need Lars?> you asked, wondering if it would interfere with your afternoon plans.

<Yeah, sure, no prob. I’m already on this end of town. I’ll just swing by the training center.> You texted back, hurrying to your car and tossing your gym bag in the back. You had just enough time to grab a cold-pressed green juice from your favorite place on the way over. A surprise archery session wasn’t exactly out of the picture ever since you’d become Lars Andersen’s assistant. You were one of the top-ranked amateur competitive archers in the UK; it was a title you rather enjoyed wearing. Learning the art of trick archery, well, that had just become a fun hobby to add to your resume.

Your phone pinged with the client’s lesson agenda. You opened the text and scrolled through the document quickly as you waited in the drive-thru for your juice. Most of it seemed pretty elementary. Clearly you were working with someone who didn’t have much practice, if any at all. T. Egerton. Hmmm, you didn’t recognize the name right off hand, but this should be an easy session so you didn’t worry too much about it.

You made it across town to the training center with a few minutes to spare, and checked in at the front, handing over a list of equipment for check out. The entire obstacle room had been rented out, which surprised you. Why would Lars book that out for a private session with a newbie? you wondered as you hoisted the bag of bows and arrows and guards onto your shoulder, thanked the clerk and wandered off down the hall past the main training and target range areas, still clutching your green juice in your hand.

You pulled the door open and stepped inside, your eyes quickly assessing where each target was in practiced fashion. You didn’t even notice you did it; it had just simply been ingrained in you after years of training. You tsk’d slightly to yourself as the room was actually quite a mess; you went off to arrange a few targets how you wanted them, waiting on Lars’ client to show up. Soon enough the door opened and a bright-eyed man strode in, brimming with energy and apologizing profusely for being late. By one minute. Oh boy, this might be interesting, you thought as you went over to greet him.

“The name’s y/n, nice to meet you. I’m Lars’ assistant, on occasion. He couldn’t make it and asked me to take over your session for today,” you said, offering your hand.

“Taron,” he just grinned, taking your hand and giving it a firm shake. You looked him over; he was incredibly unassuming in a sweatshirt and jeans, a ballcap pulled low over his eyes.

“Just Taron?” you laughed at that, though you already knew his last name from the agenda sheet.

He just grinned back at you. “I figured you already knew who I was,” he said sheepishly and shoved his hands in his pockets, almost a bit nervously.

“Yeah sorry, I don’t,” you said with a shrug.

“I’ve been in a few films,” he chuckled. “All of this,” he said, gesturing around him, “is for a new film about Robin Hood, which I’m to be in. I play Rob,” he said with a grin you couldn’t deny was adorable.

“I mean, obviously. The great archer himself,” you laughed lightly. “I can see it.”

“I’m actually quite grateful for some anonymity. It’s not always easy when everyone seems to have an idea of who you are already,” he admitted, and you wondered why he was being so open with you.

“Well, I only judge people based on how well they shoot, so, shall we get started?” you ask, going to the bag of equipment and pulling out a bow. To Lars’ credit, he kept meticulous notes so you knew what Taron had already trained with and what he hadn’t. Warming him up was probably a good idea, so you started with the ten-pound bow and some simple target practice. He seemed comfortable enough with it, and you watched his form carefully, partly to issue corrections, and partly because you found him just so damn attractive. The way his biceps rippled as he handled the bow made you a bit weak in the knees. Not that you’d tell him that; you would always stay professional. That was your job, and besides, you were sure he had to have a girlfriend or something. Someone as sweet and polite as he was must have been snatched up quickly.

You shook those thoughts out of your mind as you moved Taron to a twenty-pound bow, walking around him as he held his formation for you, inspecting him at every angle. Thank God this is only going to be one session, you thought as you pushed his elbow up ever so slightly. You were already finding it hard to keep your hands to yourself, precisely because you had to adjust him constantly. He understood what he was supposed to do, but maintaining that form was another matter. Still, you could tell he was a quick study, and he often laughed at himself when he just totally failed to make the mark, which made your job just that much easier. You always hated working with guys who were egotistical and always blamed you when they couldn’t get their arrow straight, rather than their bad form they ignored you pointing out. Taron was coachable, and that made him fun to be around.

“Alright, well, you’ve proven that you can hit a target with some level of consistency, but can you do it while moving about?” you smirked at him, wondering if he’d be willing to bite at the challenge, and of course he was game.

“I’m probably going to fail massively, but I say we give it a try, yeah?” he chuckled.

“Just remember your fundamentals, you’ll be fine,” you grinned at him.

“Remember your fundamentals, she says. Fundamentals you’ve spent years perfecting,” he said. “Alright then, let’s get on with it.”

Cheeky bastard, you thought to yourself as you outlined some moving drills for him, ones you thought were rather easy but that seemed to throw him totally off because he wasn’t hitting a damn thing, and you could tell he was getting frustrated at himself.

“Why don’t we take a break for a moment,” you suggested, but he wasn’t interested in stopping.

“I’m going to get this, you’ll see,” he said, sweat already staining the collar of his sweatshirt as he made attempt after attempt and, admittedly, getting closer and closer to at least hitting the targets. Taron was determined, you’d give him that. He was quite out of breath when he finally stopped, pointing proudly at the arrow he’d managed to sink just outside of the bullseye. “See that right there?” he grinned, pretty proud of himself and making you giggle despite yourself.

“Alright, alright,” you laughed as you grabbed a water bottle for him, but as you went to hand it to him you noticed that his bowstring hand was completely torn up.

“Taron, shit. Let me see that,” you gasped, grabbing his hand and forgetting your professionalism for a moment as you inspected the torn skin.

“It’s alright,” he shrugged but you knew it had to be painful. You’d experienced much the same as a novice over the years.

“Yeah, well, the last thing you need is an infection so let’s get that cleaned up.” You made him sit and rest while you went to retrieve the first aid kit from the front desk, and he calmly let you doctor up his hand. He didn’t jerk away when you put the antiseptic on, nor when you ever-so-carefully clipped away the ruined skin. You could feel his eyes on you, watching you go about your task, and you had no idea what he was thinking behind that green-eyed gaze. Touching his hands made you feel a thrill you were trying desperately to ignore, though.

You wrapped some gauze around his fingers, making sure he wouldn’t lose any function with them, and taped it all up. “There, how does that feel?” you asked.

“Mmm, dare I say better,” he said, wriggling them at you. “And I’m quite sure you could do all of that better too,” he chuckled, waving vaguely at the course you’d set up for him.

You gave him a smirk before grabbing a recurve bow, rather than the longbow Taron had been training with. You slung the quiver around your shoulder but pulled four arrows into your hand at once, making Taron’s eyes go wide. You effortlessly leaped and spun and twirled through the course, hitting your targets every time, and barely breaking a sweat over it.

“Now you’re just showing off!” he laughed as you tossed your hair back over your shoulder.

“Oh no, Mr. Egerton, that wasn’t showing off at all,” you smirked, before rummaging in your bag for something that could be made into a makeshift blindfold. You set up a single target about 50 meters away, before pacing between two poles and marking the stride distance in your head. This was one of your favorite tricks Lars had taught you, and you were hoping it wouldn’t fail you now in front of Taron. You wrapped the blindfold around your eyes, took up your bow and notched an arrow, and then ran backwards, mentally marking the space where the target should be in that space. You drew the bowstring back in the middle of your leap, nudged the tip of the arrow down ever so slightly and let it fly, hearing the satisfying thwack as the tip hit the target and you landed on your feet and let your continued momentum backwards absorb the shock.

“Holy shit,” Taron gasped at that, making you giggle slightly.

“Now that was showing off,” you grinned, as you heard him walk over to you. Blindfolded like this made you rely on your other senses, and you analyzed his footfalls and stride and mentally calculated the picture in your head of where he was at that moment. It was something you’d practiced for years, hitting targets blind and learning how to shoot around corners and visualize where in any given space someone or something could be. He walked softly, you noticed, carrying himself upwards, and you could also tell that despite being sweaty he still had a marked sweetness to his scent.

Why was he so close? you thought the instant before he lifted the blindfold slowly off your eyes, his intense gaze staring straight into yours. “Can you show me how to do that?” he asked, a bit breathlessly even though he’d been sitting down. A small shiver made its way through your body as his fingers had brushed lightly over your face.

“To shoot double-blind?” you said, a bit startled to be standing so close to him. You could see the light stubble shadowing his jawline and the individual color specks in his eyes. “That takes years to perfect. And probably not necessary for your film either,” you added with a laugh.

“No, I don’t mean that,” he chuckled. “The way you barely look like you’re working when you pull the bow back. I look like I’m wrestling a steer when I do it!”

You snorted at that, because he wasn’t wrong. “Alright then, get in your position,” you said, cringing at how that sounded but Taron didn’t miss a beat, focused on the task at hand. He pulled the dummy arrow back and froze in place and you sighed at his white knuckles; typical rookie mistake.

“Loosen these,” you said, tapping on the fingers he had wrapped tightly around the bow grip itself. “You don’t need to hold onto the bow for dear life. It’s not going to go anywhere, I promise. You want your grip to be steady but flexible. It let’s the bow vibrate the way it should in your hand as the arrow leaves its rest. It will fly straighter and won’t fatigue your hand and arm as much either, and in the middle of a competition the last thing you want is a hand cramp.”

“That sounds terrible,” he agreed with a laugh, doing his best to adjust his grip on the bow.

“And as for your other hand, well, you just need to think about teasing the bowstring,” you said, getting an eyebrow raise at that.

“Teasing it?” he smirked at you, even with the notch of the arrow pressed against the side of his mouth as he sighted the target. You had to admit, the way he was standing made him look powerful and athletic and, well, kind of hot.

“Yeah, like a woman. I assume you’ve had practice?” you smirked back, making Taron lose his composure completely. He managed to drop his arrow and then his bow and you couldn’t tell whether he was laughing or crying or maybe both, but it took a solid ten minutes before he managed to gain control again.

“Never thought of archery that way,” he said, wiping his face lightly.

“Everything comes back to sex, don’t you know it?” you smirked at him, handing him back his bow. “This is your woman, treat her well,” you joked.

“Well, I haven’t got any others right now,” he said, running his hand gently over the wood. You had no idea why he’d volunteered this information, but even though it surprised you, you filed it away in your brain all the same.

You picked up your own bow and showed him exactly what you meant by teasing the bowstring - to keep your fingers light but also firm around the nock, giving the arrow a chance to move in the natural way it was meant to but without too much give; pulling back the string at once both carefully but also with authority. “And when you feel you’ve reached the point of no return, where the bowstring might give out if you pull it back any further, that’s when you let it go,” you said, moving your thumb ever so slightly to release the pressure, sighting the arrow’s path all the way down its shaft as it left the riser and made its flight across the room, only to sink squarely in the bullseye. “See? Simple,” you said, looking over at Taron to find his mouth hanging slightly open. “Oh, did I lose you?” you laughed.

“No, I get what you’re saying. I just … don’t think I’ll ever have the finesse you have. You’re quite stunning,” he said, his eyes sweeping over you and making you blush despite yourself.

“It just takes practice,” you said, brushing off the compliment because you weren’t sure how to take it. “Practice I’m sure you’ll be putting in with Lars.”

“Ahh well yes, but he’s not nearly as good-looking as you,” Taron said, a bit jokingly but also with a note of truth.

“Mmm well this can’t be denied. I at least have better hair than he does,” you teased back, trying to keep things light because they were very much in danger of going a different direction. The tension in the room was as ready to snap as a bowstring. “So, try it again,” you managed, nearly choking on your own words in your haste to distract both of you from that train of thought.

He got a determined look in his eye as he took his stance again, remembering to keep his grip loose, his elbow straight and you couldn’t see anything wrong with the way he was holding his arrow. “Widen your legs,” you said in a bit of a whisper, trying desperately hard to keep your professional composure. “And square your hips with your target,” you added, and you heard Taron suck in his breath sharply at that, but he did what you told him to do and then let go of his arrow, and even if it didn’t strike dead center he still managed to hit the bullseye and fairly squealed excitedly over it.

“Did you see that?!” he giggled, hugging you cutely and having zero awareness of personal space in his excitement. But a huge part of you also didn’t mind at all.

“That was great, Taron! Now we just have to get you to do that every time,” you said with a wink. Your session time was almost up, so you only showed him a couple more things, mostly working on getting him more consistent on controlling his aim, though he asked to watch you shoot four arrows in quick succession again and you were happy to oblige.

“Think I could do that too?” he asked cutely as he helped you collect the arrows scattered about the room and return them to the quivers and the equipment bag.

“I think you could do anything you put your mind to,” you replied, realizing you actually meant it just about his life in general. The smile he returned made your stomach flip slightly; he was probably the most adorable man you’d ever met.

He insisted on grabbing the equipment bag as you grabbed the bows, hooking them over your shoulder as you both exited the training room. You returned the equipment to the front desk and walked out with Taron, who was still hanging around you.

“So same time next Friday?” he asked with a wink as he trailed you over to your car.

“Well that’s up to Lars, I suppose. I’m just his assistant and he needed me to do this as a favor,” you replied.

“Well maybe I’ll make it a special request then, eh?” he asked, smirking at you lightly over the roof of your car.

“Yeah, sure thing Taron,” you said though you couldn’t help being secretly thrilled by the prospect of training him again.

“I meant what I said, you know. You really were stunning in there. If I could only be half as bloody amazing as you…” he trailed off, his eyes searching yours for something.

“Thank you, I’ve worked on it for a long time,” you said, unable to just ignore the way he’d somehow gotten under your skin with his laugh and his dimples and his unassumingly kind nature.

“Yeah but there’s something else there, a sort of grace you just possess in how you carry yourself too. I just don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone like you,” he replied. Your breath caught in your chest slightly as you stared at him, a whirlwind of feelings bursting through you. “I’ve certainly never enjoyed getting my ass beat by a girl so much as I have today,” he joked, making you laugh too.

“I’ll, um, see you around, Taron, I’m sure,” you said, giving him a smile and mentally kicking yourself for not saying more.

“I look forward to it,” he just grinned back at you as you ducked into your car and took a deep, steadying breath. What the hell was wrong with you? you wondered as you turned your car on and watched Taron walk to his own car. You admired his ass before catching yourself and mentally chiding yourself. You never mixed business with pleasure; things always got far too complicated and you didn’t need the drama. Not only that, Lars had put a massive amount of responsibility in your hands and you weren’t about to let him down by being stupid with a client.

All of that being said, you did wonder if Taron really would request Lars to bring you in again, or if he’d forget about you the minute he and his car pulled away, honking lightly at you as he waved. You waved back, a smile on your face, before you finally put your car in gear as well. Either way, you were going to make sure to keep next Friday open.

Well loves, hope you enjoyed it! I COULD be convinced to write a second part to this if enough of you ask for it so leave me comments/asks!

#taron imagine #taron x reader #taron egerton #taron egerton fanfiction #taron fluff

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etirabys · 5 years

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// do not reblog request. If replies, prefer to be emailed (etirabys at gmail) or discorded (etirabys#8458), with same lack of commitment to responding on my part as I exhibit on tumblr.

// high blogging. I tend to Scheme when I’m stoned, and I usually have a ‘no grand scheming on drugs’ rule because it’s a waste of time that comes to nothing (Scheming by outlining the structure of a novel, Scheming to have an unrealistic exercise routine, Scheming to change my personality, etc). Scheming to implement a complex proposed technology is still pretty... low expected value, let’s say... but this was sociologically interesting enough to me that I am releasing it. Expected typo rate high, sorry. Some lucidity thrown out.

Description of a concept sketch of a software tool/digital prosthetic

An app that is for “I am available to hang”, where you set the people you’d like to give ‘I’m free now’ information access to when you want to be hangouty. Like reciprocity dot io, except with lower-key pings (if at all – maybe just a quietly updating list of irl-available people that you manually check)

My use case for it would be to designate a group with all my housemates in it (if they have accounts), who are the people I want to give ‘I am social right now, in these ways’ informations – I might have subgroups like ‘the housemates I drink alcohol or smoke weed with’, or ‘housemates I like to do productivity with’, or ‘housemates I like to have serious personal conversations with’, whom I notify differently. And if they’re marked as free and I’m marked as free, and there is a non-null intersection set of ‘willingness to do [specific social activity type]”, we both have something in the corner of our streams (this could be a dialogue that takes up 1/10 of your phone screen as a horizonal row) that indicates a list of friends & distance & their availability settings.

Upon seeing that my housemate-I-have-occasional-nice-interactions-with is reading and would like silent company (a category of hangout I would have marked myself as interested in) in reading, I would like to ping them to request joining, and if they accept with a location, go to that location (or have them come to me).

If I think I am in the house alone but want company, I may scan the app to see if any housemates have set themselves as ‘in the house, and up for social’, and then ask them where they are, whether I can join them.

Zoom out. This can work on a neighborhood scale, with enough buy-in from a local social cluster. If you just had an upsetting interaction but aren’t sure of who’s irl available to talk through it with, you can see who’s up for ‘intense conversation’, scan for anyone you trust and think would help you process the interaction and be less hurt. Your options would be better than just picking a random housemate, passerby, or person who happens to be online in the same group chat you pick without much consideration to blarb thoughts into.

If used widely, designed optimally (to really connect people)

Since it’s an interaction starter (with physical interaction as the thing it’s trying to facilitate) and not a platform/tracker (users should own their chat logs, keeping its in local storage, that they can back up however they choose), it seems like it would do the ‘connect people and strengthen relationships’ thing on a real level without having other bad features of social media apps. Maybe?

Zoom out. With phone and videochat and AR and VR, you can do hangouts internationally. It’s not as good an experience as real life, but it’s pretty good. Suddenly, you can – just as you can with your irl local friends – set your ‘open to hang’ settings to be visible to everyone in the world who’s set one of their top five interests to fungi. Or someone who recorded that they’ve ‘gone to this {concert / book reading / tech talk} that you’ve also attended, and you can try to invite them to a quick chat (if in the same language, or an easily machine-translated one) to just chatter about the recent shared experience. What do you think about the economic feasibility of the product in this space demo? Wasn’t that joke by Frans de Waal amazing? Do you want to go to the next _ concert together in person? More friendship pings flying around the globe.

Zoom out, not spatially, but in ambition. Can people be matched in ways that increase total social goodness?

“Do you agree activate this optional feature, which will get access your communications and pass it to be machine-processed to generate a list of potential contacts who will be in your ‘people whose availability I’ve followed’ view, i.e. the main view? You do not need to talk to them, but they will not be marked as an advertisement either. They will just be in the list, they will look like reasonable selections that you actually want to check out, there is no cost or reward delta between interacting with them and the non-machine-recommended matches and friends.”

If X says yes, start matching them with people that are only chosen for their ‘likely will improve the life of X without decrease in own life happiness (by more than a minor amount)’-ness. Have a data gathering period on X. Get a profile of how they react to various people of various qualities. Those people themselves have a profile, from the same process recursed.

Some good things we could do.

- Discourage violent tendencies.

- Try to decrease tendency of common, unhappy conditions like anxiety and depression by introducing people to each other who can improve each others’ lives.

- Match abuse victims with people the system is highly confident are low on the abusiveness scale.

- Match lonely bright awkward kids with high-likelihood-benevolent adults who used to be lonely bright awkward kids

- Introduce high-likelihood-open-minded people of different cultures and increase racial/cultural harmony – not in a creepy volition-manipulating way, but in a ‘bring people together who will like each other, that happens to increase the national amount of mutual seeing-each-other-as-human’ way. Yes! I want social tech to help us make more interracial and intercultural friends!

Bad things we could do:

- Obvious bad state stuff. But unless the bad state is forcing everyone to depend highly on the Human Finder digital social tech (which would really run against the grain/inclination of human boding patterns, which for most people are fundamentally irl-based), people can just stop using an app that’s clearly trying to manipulate their behavior to become more aggressive or sheeplike or submissive or depressed. Which is an asymmetric outcome from the good use case: if the app actually improves people’s lives, they’ll freely use it and continue to be affected by it.

#rambl #low quality writtenthing posted in some largeish part to defy anxiety about posting low quality content #hybloggen

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bdsawatsky · 4 years

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Of all the objections skeptics raise in relation to faith and God, the problem of suffering has to be the most popular. The line of reasoning skeptics employ is pretty straightforward:

a) If God is all-powerful, then he has the ability to destroy evil and prevent suffering.

b) If God is good, then he should want to destroy evil and prevent suffering.

c) Evil and suffering exist, therefore a good and all-powerful God does not exist.

This sound bite of philosophy has been used repeatedly by those who would discredit belief in God and any religious faith. Atheism’s foremost voice of this generation, Richard Dawkins, has been using this logic for decades now. Long before his most popular work, The God Delusion came out in 2006 he expressed the same frustration in his 1995 book, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life:

In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

Dawkins is pretty honest about how gloomy a godless universe should look. But many philosophers have pushed back against the perspective that Dawkins espouses. Decades ago, men like C.S. Lewis, who himself began as an atheist, were forced to change their perspective when they analyzed the reality of the world around them.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust…? (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity)

As I pointed out in my book Unapologetix, prominent atheists have been known make reference to the worms and parasites that sometimes wreak havoc on the human body, asking how a God so intent on beauty and pleasure could possibly allow something so ugly and unpleasant. But it doesn’t take a great philosophical mind to understand that we can only label the worms and parasites as awful in juxtaposition to all of the beauty and pleasure that we enjoy on a regular basis. Neither can we complain about injustice we see in the world, if—as Dawkins says—we have no reason to expect to find rhyme, reason or justice here. No, the average person knows in their heart that the world is fundamentally a good place and that a sense of justice is somehow anchored in each one of us.

So then, back to our first question: If the world is good, and fashioned by a loving, all-powerful God, how do we account for all of the evil and suffering? It is here that I will point out that the atheists’ reasoning (that I outlined above) is flawed. It is not airtight, as it makes logical assumptions. It overlooks the possibility that evil and suffering serve some sort of purpose in the universe, and that God might allow them to exist—at least for a time—in order to accomplish something of even greater value.

The biblical device (although I believe it to be more than a device) for making sense of the problem of suffering is the curse that was placed on humankind after our fall into sin. Genesis 3 contains the story that serves as the foundation for understanding life’s most perturbing question—the question of suffering. The ancient narrative explains how the first human beings, Adam and Eve, acted on humanity’s behalf and chose to rebel against God, dragging all of humankind into sin. After confronting the man and woman over their sin, God imposed an all-encompassing curse upon them and upon the physical creation, a curse that would include everything from pain, to disease to death. A bit of reflection would lead the reader to conclude that God was making a very powerful statement: The purpose of the curse was to permanently and constantly remind humankind that the world was not right.

It continues to remind us today that the world is not right. According to the biblical narrative, every time you see spots on your apple, experience sickness, encounter a disease or disability, attend a funeral, catch a cold or hear a chid cry—God’s intention is to remind you that this world is messed up and not what he intended. So, when bad things happen, things like COVID-19, we must not fail to see the bigger picture of what God is doing in the world.

Now, it is important to understand that God is not the author of sin; he is perfectly holy and incapable of doing wrong. But in God’s understanding of what is good, freedom is high on the list. Even the Garden of Eden was fashioned in such a way as to give humans a choice of accepting God’s authority or not. Sin is not God’s creation, but true freedom seems to require the possibility of sin.

In the New Testament, Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son demonstrates the same truth. In it we see a son who chooses to rebel against his father, take his inheritance, leave home, and squander his father’s wealth on riotous living. While it broke the father’s heart to let him go, he knew that this was necessary for his son to come to understand the bigger picture. Eventually, the son comes to his senses, returns home, and enjoys a relationship with his father that he never had enjoyed prior.

As a pastor, nothing brings me greater joy than to see people wrestle with the question of suffering and to arrive at a deeper understanding. As students of the Bible come to understand God’s plan for history (often summed up in the words “creation, fall, redemption and restoration”), the sharper students grasp the question that begs to be asked: “Why is God allowing all of this suffering if the end goal is simply to get humankind back to the state of bliss we already enjoyed in the Garden of Eden?” It always brings a smile to my face.

I have come to believe it’s for the experience. Innocence is beautiful, but it’s not the best that can be. The Bible reveals that God’s ultimate desire is to have a perfect relationship with his creation, and the simple fact is, without this experience we call human history, we would never be able to truly appreciate God. Had we lived on in innocence, we could have respected God in the way a child looks up to their father, but we could never have come to appreciate God’s holiness, his value of freedom, his mercy and grace, his patience, and most of all—his love. The prodigal son understood his father in a very different way at the end of the story, and I believe God wants us to come to understand him in a very different way as well.

So why does God allow things like COVID-19? It’s just one more way that he is reminding us that this world is not right, that it’s not what he intended. Viruses are just one more part of the curse that he instituted out of love for us, something that would drive us back to him. When you understand things in this way, COVID-19 serves a very important purpose. It is quite literally intended to make you discover the love of God. Out of context, that may seem backward and cruel. The prodigal son had to sit in the mud with the pigs for a while before he could see it clearly. But he finally got up, shook off the mud, and returned to his father where a celebration like nothing he had ever experienced was waiting for him.

My prayer is that many who are sitting at home with a little extra time to think will ponder these ideas. I hope that you will look around and see how God made our entire human experience reflect these truths. Everything God has made grows and matures. Innocence is beautiful, and there is a time for it, but it doesn’t last forever. Nor should it.

They say that no child appreciates their father or mother until they themselves become one. But with that maturity comes the precious ability to relate to our parents in ways that we never could have as children. Someday God’s children will sit down with him and appreciate him in ways that Adam and Eve never could have. And things like Coronavirus will make sense. In fact, the apostles firmly believed that increased suffering in this life would only make our time with God even more glorious in eternity. That seems like a pretty good thought to hang onto over the upcoming months.

#coronavirus

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fuckyeahhistory · 5 years

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OK I know what you’re thinking. Why is the 1533 Buggery Act such a big deal! After all, it’s a piece of Tudor law:

A) that sounds dry AF

B) has nothing to do with me!

Well, if you care about LGBTQ+ rights (or let’s be blunt, basic human rights) than this is a piece of Tudor law that you have to know about!

The 1533 Buggery Act wove a tangled web that stretches throughout history. Beyond those who were caught up in its immediate wake, It’s threads lead us to Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment, Alan Turing’s conviction and the abysmal pit where fundamental rights should be, that the LGBTQ+ community and their allies are still fighting against.

So if that still sounds dry AF, then strap in Donald, because you’re about to get your mind blown.

Seriously we’re getting into world view changing stuff!

The Buggery Act was the brainchild of Henry VIII who had a fun habit of lumbering the UK with laws that came out of him wanting to make a point during a hissy fit…yet inexplicably stuck around for hundreds of years at a major human cost (e.g that time he made it legal to execute someone with severe mental health issues) The 1533 Buggery Act was no exception!

But lets take it back to pre-Henry for a second. Prior to 1533 there were no set laws to persecute homosexuality in England. That’s not to say it wasn’t. In the 13th century two legal codes called for men caught having same sex relationships to be buried alive or burnt, which is horrific!

However, these were suggestions, not actual laws and there is no evidence that these punishments were ever carried out. For the most part, the then frowned upon act was dealt with in the ecclesiastic courts (so basically it was left with god and his earthly servants to deal with either after death or in the realm of the church)

As such, the sudden decision to make homosexuality criminal was a big deal. In fact it was such a big deal that this sharp turn to criminalisation actually had to be addressed in the original statues outlining the 1533 act. Which says that the law was in part created to make homosexuality clearly punishable, saying:

“For as moche as there is not yet sufficient & condigne punishment appointed & limitted by the due course of the lawes of this realme for the detestable & abominable vice of buggeri committed with mankind or beest.”

It goes on to explain the possible punishments for those caught committing ‘buggery’:

“And that the offenders being herof convict by verdicte, confession, or outlaurie, shall suffer suche peynes of dethe, and losses, and penalties of their goodes, cattals, dettes, londes, tenements, and heredytamentes, as felons benne accustomed to do accordynge to the order of the common lawes of this realme. And that no person offendynge in any suche offence, shalbe admitted to his clergye”

Obviously the clear biggy here is ‘pain of death’, but right at the bottom of this portion of transcript there’s the sentence:

‘And that no person offending in such offence shall be admitted to his clergy’ – that right there is the crux of this whole piece of legislation.

Because why create The Buggery Act and criminalise same sex relationships at this particular moment in time?

To persecute the Catholic Church of course!

If you’re thinking , ‘that makes little to no sense’, gold star! It doesn’t… well at least until you break down what was going down in 1533.

You see, until the 1530’s England had been part of the Catholic Church. But, Henry VIII was desperate to break away from the church as it wouldn’t grant him a divorce so he could marry his side chick, Anne Boleyn. So Henry decided to create a new church for England, one that he’d be the head of (and wouldn’t you know it, the head of this new church just happened to be A-ok with divorce).

Sadly creating your own church doesn’t magically erase your countries already existing, centuries old religion overnight. So Henry worked with his right hand man, Thomas Cromwell, to loosen the tight hold Catholicism had on England and for a double win, also siphon it’s money to Henry.

The 1533 Buggery Act was just part of this plan. It was solely designed to take away a little bit of the power away from The Catholic Church, not to actually persecute homosexuality.

And yet this law was about to take its first victim.

By 1540 the Buggery Act had done its job. The Catholic Churches hold on England had been loosened, Henry had married Anne Boleyn (and then had her executed), married again (this time she’d died in childbirth) and was onto marriage number four. Thomas Cromwell had played Cupid for these nuptials, hooking Henry up with his new wife, Anne of Cleves. Sadly Henry wasn’t a fan of his new bride and this was such a big no no that it led to Thomas Cromwell’s death.

But as is probably clear by now, Henry was a petty bitch, and so he made sure that when Thomas went down, he wasn’t going alone.

On the 29 June 1540 Thomas Cromwell was beheaded for treason and his mate, Walter Hungerford, became the first person to be executed under The Buggery Act (among other allegations).

A bloody punishment, with the Buggery Act added as an extra dollop of humiliation for Hungerford and as an additional middle finger to Cromwell who’d helped create the act.*

*side note: before we start feeling really sorry for Walter Hungerford, he was an abusive man who imprisoned his wife to the extent she had to drink her own urine to survive. So you know. Maybe hold the sympathy cards.

Henry VIII

Thomas Cromwell

Ok, that was A LOT to take in. So let’s pause and take a quick moment to look at where we are:

We have a law that was created to criminalise homosexuality BUT was actually used to screw over the Catholic Church

We have a first victim of the law…BUT he was most likely executed not because of the law itself but as an F U to his mate who created the law.

So, we can all agree that thus far, The Buggery Act is a very bloody farce. But that does that mean it’s done?

OF COURSE NOT!

Though the law was repealed by Henry VIII’s daughter, Queen Mary I in 1553 (who wanted power over this to go back to the Catholic Church and it’s ecclesiastic courts), once she died, her successor and sister, Queen Elizabeth I made the Buggery Act law once more.

And from there it started to truly transform into a law for persecution.

Using a Latrice Royale gif to cut the tension, but just a warning: It’s about to get really dark for a bit.

For much of the 15th and 16th centuries arrests and executions under the Buggery Act were few and far between. However, that didn’t happen stop this horrifying law from spreading.

One of the huge issues of The Buggery Act being a law, was that Britons leaving the country took it with them. Take for example those plucky puritans who set sail for the brave new world of America – alongside terrible hats and a smattering of racism, they made sure to also pack legal persecution!

And so the legal execution of people for homosexuality began in a new country. In 1624, Virginia hung Richard Cornish, a ships captain, for ‘forcible sodomy’ of his ships 29 year old cabin boy.

Two years later, Massachusetts hung William Plain on allegations of sodomy that took place in England (so before he even moved to America!).

That same year, the countries New Netherlands colony successfully managed to achieve the discrimination trifecta when they used the Buggery Act to strangle and ‘burn to ashes’, Jan Creoli, a poor black gay man.

If you thought things were bad, they are about to get even worse.

Back in Britain, a more vocal queer community was starting to appear, thanks to the underground popularity of Molly Houses (places where queer men could be free to openly show their sexuality, kind of the great great great grandfather of the small town gay bar). But this emerging light in the dark attracted the worst kind of people and they dedicated themselves to eradicating what they saw as the gay scourge.

One such group was the catchily named, The Society For The Reformation of Manners. Determined to rid London of its LGBT subculture, they worked undercover to infiltrate Molly Houses, gather evidence against its users and then together with the police, raid them.

One such raid was that of Mother Claps house in 1726. Dozens of men were rounded up and arrested, with several fined and pilloried. But that’s not the worst of it.

The Society For The Reformation of Manners successfully helped to leverage the Buggery Act to hang three of the arrested men for the crime of having sex, or as one witness spat out during the trial:

‘Making love to one another as they call’d it’

Example of an execution, like that of the Mother Clap House victims. from the era

During the 1800’s the executions continued. Trials for men accused under The Buggery Act sprung up across England. Some of those found guilty had the relative luck (though the chance of survival still wasn’t great) at instead being transported to Australia, but others weren’t so lucky.

The last men executed under The Buggery Act were James Pratt and John Smith, in 1835.

A husband and father, James Pratt, met with John Smith in August 1935, at an ale house in London for a drink. The pair then got chatting with an older man, William Bonill and went back to his rooms.

William Bonill soon left to get another drink at the pub, leaving James and John alone. It was after this that Bonill’s landlord reported finding the pair having sex.

Neither James Pratt or John Smith stood a chance in court. If you are in any doubt on that front, just read the opening transcript from John Smith’s prosecutor.

‘feloniously, wickedly, diabolically, and against the order of nature, had a venereal affair with one James Pratt, and did then and there, feloniously, wickedly, diabolically, and agains the order of nature, carnally know the said James Pratt, and with him the said James Pratt did then and there feloniously, wickedly, diabolically, and against the order of nature, commit and perpetrate the detestale, horrid, and abominable crime (among Christians not to be named) called buggery, to the great displeasure of Almighty God, to the great scandal of all human kind’

Charles Dickens actually attended Newgate jail, when the men were awaiting sentencing and recalled:

‘Their doom was sealed; no plea could be urged in extenuation of their crime, and they well knew that for them there was no hope in this world.’

He was, of course, right. Of seventeen others sentenced to death at the same time as John and James (for crimes including attempted murder) all had their sentences commuted to transportation to Australia. All expect John Smith and James Pratt.

A huge crowd gathered outside Newgate Jail to watch their deaths.

Watching his (possible) partner, John Smith, being blindfolded and his noose put on, caused James Pratt an understandable level of anguish. He reportedly went physically weak, needing help just to stand and calling out:

‘Oh God, this is horrible. This is indeed horrible.’

Though we don’t have clean cut evidence that the two were in a relationship, it’s hard to read this as anything other than love and the devastation of James knowing what his partner was about to go through.

Which I think summarises the pointlessness and brutality the Buggery Act had on all those who feel under its wake. Of it’s last two victims; two men who just wanted a private moment to be together and died because of that.

Newspaper from the hanging of James Pratt and John Smith

The Buggery Act remained in place in one form or another until 1861 when the Offences Against The Person Act replaced it.

The new law abolished the death sentence for ‘buggery’, instead punishing those convicted with a prison sentence of up to life. In 1967 the laws around homosexuality as an illegal act were dropped.

All of this, because in 1533 a pissed of King set up a law that he hoped would bring down a religion – the persecution of thousands if not millions, was just secondary.

If you want to read up more on this and other areas of LGBT+ history (and please do!) some great sources are below:

Rictor Norton, for a treasure trove of articles and essays on the history of LGBTQ+ history in England dating back to the medieval era.

The Peter Tatchall Foundation, a human rights charity with an amazing section of history of laws that sought to persecute

The British Library, where you can look at so many of the original documents I mention in this, digitally wherever you are in the world!

Why you have to know about the 1533 Buggery Act OK I know what you’re thinking. Why is the 1533 Buggery Act such a big deal! After all, it’s a piece of Tudor law:

#featured #LGBT #LGBTQ #tudor

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samstiels-deactivated20201212 · 5 years

Link

The Entire Article Under The Cut

Game of Thrones, in its eighth and final season, is as big as television gets these days. More than 17 million people watched the season’s opening. Judging by the fan and critic reaction though, it seems that a substantial portion of those millions are loathing the season. Indeed, most of the reviews and fan discussions seem to be pondering where the acclaimed series went wrong, with many theories on exactly why it went downhill.

The show did indeed take a turn for the worse, but the reasons for that downturn go way deeper than the usual suspects that have been identified (new and inferior writers, shortened season, too many plot holes). It’s not that these are incorrect, but they’re just superficial shifts. In fact, the souring of Game of Thrones exposes a fundamental shortcoming of our storytelling culture in general: we don’t really know how to tell sociological stories.

At its best, GOT was a beast as rare as a friendly dragon in King’s Landing: it was sociological and institutional storytelling in a medium dominated by the psychological and the individual. This structural storytelling era of the show lasted through the seasons when it was based on the novels by George R. R. Martin, who seemed to specialize in having characters evolve in response to the broader institutional settings, incentives and norms that surround them.

After the show ran ahead of the novels, however, it was taken over by powerful Hollywood showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. Some fans and critics have been assuming that the duo changed the narrative to fit Hollywood tropes or to speed things up, but that’s unlikely. In fact, they probably stuck to the narrative points that were given to them, if only in outline form, by the original author. What they did is something different, but in many ways more fundamental: Benioff and Weiss steer the narrative lane away from the sociological and shifted to the psychological. That’s the main, and often only, way Hollywood and most television writers tell stories.

This is an important shift to dissect because whether we tell our stories primarily from a sociological or psychological point of view has great consequences for how we deal with our world and the problems we encounter.

I encounter this shortcoming a lot in my own area of writing—technology and society. Our inability to understand and tell sociological stories is one of the key reasons we’re struggling with how to respond to the historic technological transition we’re currently experiencing with digital technology and machine intelligence—but more on all that later. Let’s first go over what happened to Game of Thrones.

WHAT STORYTELLING IT WAS AND WHAT IT BECAME IN GOT

It’s easy to miss this fundamental narrative lane change and blame the series’ downturn on plain old bad writing by Benioff and Weiss—partly because they are genuinely bad at it. They didn’t just switch the explanatory dynamics of the story, they did a terrible job in the new lane as well.

One could, for example, easily focus on the abundance of plot holes. The dragons, for example seem to switch between comic-book indestructible to vulnerable from one episode to another. And it was hard to keep a straight face when Jaime Lannister ended up on a tiny cove along a vast, vast shoreline at the exact moment the villain Euron Greyjoy swam to that very point from his sinking ship to confront him. How convenient!

Similarly, character arcs meticulously drawn over many seasons seem to have been abandoned on a whim, turning the players into caricatures instead of personalities. Brienne of Tarth seems to exist for no reason, for example; Tyrion Lannister is all of a sudden turned into a murderous snitch while also losing all his intellectual gifts (he hasn’t made a single correct decision the entire season). And who knows what on earth is up with Bran Stark, except that he seems to be kept on as some sort of extra Stark?

But all that is surface stuff. Even if the new season had managed to minimize plot holes and avoid clunky coincidences and a clumsy Arya ex machina as a storytelling device, they couldn’t persist in the narrative lane of the past seasons. For Benioff and Weiss, trying to continue what Game of Thrones had set out to do, tell a compelling sociological story, would be like trying to eat melting ice cream with a fork. Hollywood mostly knows how to tell psychological, individualized stories. They do not have the right tools for sociological stories, nor do they even seem to understand the job.

To understand the narrative lane shift, let’s go back to a key question: Why did so many love Game of Thrones in the first place? What makes it stand out from so many other shows during an era critics call the Second Golden Age of Television because there are so many high-quality productions out there?

The initial fan interest and ensuing loyalty wasn’t just about the brilliant acting and superb cinematography, sound, editing and directing. None of those are that unique to GOT, and all of them remain excellent through this otherwise terrible last season.

One clue is clearly the show’s willingness to kill off major characters, early and often, without losing the thread of the story. TV shows that travel in the psychological lane rarely do that because they depend on viewers identifying with the characters and becoming invested in them to carry the story, rather than looking at the bigger picture of the society, institutions and norms that we interact with and which shape us. They can’t just kill major characters because those are the key tools with which they’re building the story and using as hooks to hold viewers.

In contrast, Game of Thrones killed Ned Stark abruptly at the end of the first season, after building the whole season and, by implication, the entire series around him. The second season developed a replacement Stark heir, which appeared like a more traditional continuation of the narrative. The third season, however, had him and his pregnant wife murdered in a particularly bloody way. And so it went. The story moved on; many characters did not.

The appeal of a show that routinely kills major characters signals a different kind of storytelling, where a single charismatic and/or powerful individual, along with his or her internal dynamics, doesn’t carry the whole narrative and explanatory burden. Given the dearth of such narratives in fiction and in TV, this approach clearly resonated with a large fan base that latched on to the show.

In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life.

People then fit their internal narrative to align with their incentives, justifying and rationalizing their behavior along the way. (Thus the famous Upton Sinclair quip: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”)

The overly personal mode of storytelling or analysis leaves us bereft of deeper comprehension of events and history. Understanding Hitler’s personality alone will not tell us much about rise of fascism, for example. Not that it didn’t matter, but a different demagogue would probably have appeared to take his place in Germany in between the two bloody world wars in the 20th century. Hence, the answer to “would you kill baby Hitler?,” sometimes presented as an ethical time-travel challenge, should be “no,” because it would very likely not matter much. It is not a true dilemma.

We also have a bias for the individual as the locus of agency in interpreting our own everyday life and the behavior of others. We tend to seek internal, psychological explanations for the behavior of those around us while making situational excuses for our own. This is such a common way of looking at the world that social psychologists have a word for it: the fundamental attribution error.

When someone wrongs us, we tend to think they are evil, misguided or selfish: a personalized explanation. But when we misbehave, we are better at recognizing the external pressures on us that shape our actions: a situational understanding. If you snap at a coworker, for example, you may rationalize your behavior by remembering that you had difficulty sleeping last night and had financial struggles this month. You’re not evil, just stressed! The coworker who snaps at you, however, is more likely to be interpreted as a jerk, without going through the same kind of rationalization. This is convenient for our peace of mind, and fits with our domain of knowledge, too. We know what pressures us, but not necessarily others.

That tension between internal stories and desires, psychology and external pressures, institutions, norms and events was exactly what Game of Thrones showed us for many of its characters, creating rich tapestries of psychology but also behavior that was neither saintly nor fully evil at any one point. It was something more than that: you could understand why even the characters undertaking evil acts were doing what they did, how their good intentions got subverted, and how incentives structured behavior. The complexity made it much richer than a simplistic morality tale, where unadulterated good fights with evil.

The hallmark of sociological storytelling is if it can encourage us to put ourselves in the place of any character, not just the main hero/heroine, and imagine ourselves making similar choices. “Yeah, I can see myself doing that under such circumstances” is a way into a broader, deeper understanding. It’s not just empathy: we of course empathize with victims and good people, not with evildoers.

But if we can better understand how and why characters make their choices, we can also think about how to structure our world that encourages better choices for everyone. The alternative is an often futile appeal to the better angels of our nature. It’s not that they don’t exist, but they exist along with baser and lesser motives. The question isn’t to identify the few angels but to make it easier for everyone to make the choices that, collectively, would lead us all to a better place.

Another example of sociological TV drama with a similarly enthusiastic fan following is David Simon’s The Wire, which followed the trajectory of a variety of actors in Baltimore, ranging from African-Americans in the impoverished and neglected inner city trying to survive, to police officers to journalists to unionized dock workers to city officials and teachers. That show, too, killed off its main characters regularly, without losing its audience. Interestingly, the star of each season was an institution more than a person. The second season, for example, focused on the demise of the unionized working class in the U.S.; the fourth highlighted schools; and the final season focused on the role of journalism and mass media.

Luckily for The Wire, creative control never shifted to the standard Hollywood narrative writers who would have given us individuals to root for or hate without being able to fully understand the circumstances that shape them. One thing that’s striking about The Wire is how one could understand all the characters, not just the good ones (and in fact, none of them were just good or bad). When that’s the case, you know you’re watching a sociological story.

WHY GOT PAUSED KILLING MAJOR CHARACTERS

Tellingly, season eight shocked many viewers by … not initially killing off the main characters. It was the first big indicator of their shift—that they were putting the weight of the story on the individual and abandoning the sociological. In that vein, they had fan-favorite characters pull off stunts we could root and cheer for, like Arya Stark killing the Night King in a somewhat improbable fashion.

For seven seasons, the show had focused on the sociology of what an external, otherized threat—such as the Night King, the Army of the Undead and the Winter to Come—would do to competing rivalries within the opposing camp. Having killed one of the main sociological tensions that had animated the whole series with one well-placed knife-stab, Benioff and Weiss then turned to ruining the other sociological tension: the story of the corruption of power.

This corruption of power was crucially illustrated in Cersei Lannister’s rise and evolution from victim (if a selfish one) to evil actor, and this was clearly meant also to be the story of her main challenger, Daenerys Targaryen. Dany had started out wanting to be the breaker of chains, with moral choices weighing heavily on her, and season by season, we have witnessed her, however reluctantly, being shaped by the tools that were available to her and that she embraced: war, dragons, fire.

Done right, it would have been a fascinating and dynamic story: rivals transforming into each other as they seek absolute power with murderous tools, one starting from a selfish perspective (her desire to have her children rule) and the other from an altruistic one (her desire to free slaves and captive people, of which she was once one).

The corruption of power is one of the most important psychosocial dynamics behind many important turning points in history, and in how the ills of society arise. In response, we have created elections, checks and balances, and laws and mechanisms that constrain the executive.

Destructive historical figures often believe that they must stay in power because it is they, and only they, who can lead the people—and that any alternative would be calamitous. Leaders tend to get isolated, become surrounded by sycophants and succumb easily to the human tendency to self-rationalize. There are several examples in history of a leader who starts in opposition with the best of intentions, like Dany, and ends up acting brutally and turning into a tyrant if they take power.

Told sociologically, Dany’s descent into a cruel mass-murderer would have been a strong and riveting story. Yet in the hands of two writers who do not understand how to advance the narrative in that lane, it became ridiculous. She attacks King’s Landing with Drogon, her dragon, and wins, with the bells of the city ringing in surrender. Then, suddenly, she goes on a rampage because, somehow, her tyrannical genes turn on.

Varys, the advisor who will die for trying to stop Dany, says to Tyrion that “every time a Targaryen is born, the gods toss a coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.” That is straight-up and simplistic genetic determinism, rather than what we had been witnessing for the past seven seasons. Again, sociological stories don’t discount the personal, psychological and even the genetic, but the key point is that they are more than “coin tosses”—they are complex interactions with emergent consequences: the way the world actually works.

In interviews after that episode, Benioff and Weiss confess that they turned it into a spontaneous moment. Weiss says, “ I don’t think she decided ahead of time that she was going to do what she did. And then she sees the Red Keep, which is, to her, the home that her family built when they first came over to this country 300 years ago. It’s in that moment, on the walls of King’s Landing, when she’s looking at that symbol of everything that was taken from her, when she makes the decision to make this personal.”

Benioff and Weiss were almost certainly given the “Mad Queen” ending to Game of Thrones by the original writer, George R. R. Martin. For them, however, this was the eating-ice-cream-with-a-fork problem I mentioned above. They could keep the story, but not the storytelling method. They could only make it into a momentary turn that is part spontaneous psychology and part deterministic genetics.

WHY SOCIOLOGICAL STORYTELLING MATTERS

Whether done well or badly, the psychological/internal genre leaves us unable to understand and react to social change. Arguably, the dominance of the psychological and hero/antihero narrative is also the reason we are having such a difficult time dealing with the current historic technology transition. So this essay is more than about one TV show with dragons.

In my own area of research and writing, the impact of digital technology and machine intelligence on society, I encounter this obstacle all the time. There are a significant number of stories, books, narratives and journalistic accounts that focus on the personalities of key players such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Dorsey and Jeff Bezos. Of course, their personalities matter, but only in the context of business models, technological advances, the political environment, (lack of) meaningful regulation, the existing economic and political forces that fuel wealth inequality and lack of accountability for powerful actors, geopolitical dynamics, societal characteristics and more.

It’s reasonable, for example, for a corporation to ponder who would be the best CEO or COO, but it’s not reasonable for us to expect that we could take any one of those actors and replace them with another person and get dramatically different results without changing the structures, incentives and forces that shape how they and their companies act in this world.

The preference for the individual and psychological narrative is understandable: the story is easier to tell as we gravitate toward identifying with the hero or hating the antihero, at the personal level. We are, after all, also persons!

In German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s classic play, Life of Galileo, Andrea, a former pupil of Galileo, visits him after he recants his seminal findings under pressure from the Catholic Church. Galileo gives Andrea his notebooks, asking him to spread the knowledge they contain. Andrea celebrates this, saying “unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo corrects him: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”

Well-run societies don’t need heroes, and the way to keep terrible impulses in check isn’t to dethrone antiheros and replace them with good people. Unfortunately, most of our storytelling—in fiction and also in mass media nonfiction—remains stuck in the hero/antihero narrative. It’s a pity Game of Thrones did not manage to conclude its last season in its original vein. In a historic moment that requires a lot of institution building and incentive changing (technological challenges, climate change, inequality and accountability) we need all the sociological imagination we can get, and fantasy dragons or not, it was nice to have a show that encouraged just that while it lasted.

#got #wank for ts #sort of #SOMEONE PUT IT INTO WORDS

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theamazingsallyhogan · 5 years

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The show did indeed take a turn for the worse, but the reasons for that downturn goes way deeper than the usual suspects that have been identified (new and inferior writers, shortened season, too many plot holes). It’s not that these are incorrect, but they’re just superficial shifts. In fact, the souring of Game of Thrones exposes a fundamental shortcoming of our storytelling culture in general: we don’t really know how to tell sociological stories.

WHAT STORYTELLING IT WAS AND WHAT IT BECAME IN GOT

WHY GOT PAUSED KILLING MAJOR CHARACTERS

WHY SOCIOLOGICAL STORYTELLING MATTERS

In German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s classic play, Life of Galileo,Andrea, a former pupil of Galileo, visits him after he recants his seminal findings under pressure from the Catholic Church. Galileo gives Andrea his notebooks, asking him to spread the knowledge they contain. Andrea celebrates this, saying “unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo corrects him: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

#game of thrones #game of thrones spoilers #got spoilers #got #spoilers #scientific american #long post

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brokebandwagon · 5 years

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Hi Ladies! Thanks for making the pod, I always enjoy it :) I do actually have a question - is Ryan O'Reilly cursed? Whenever I look up the Blues to see how he's doing, it turns out they've given up five goals to Laine or fired their coach or some other traumatic storyline. Is it normal for a player to switch teams three times and never experience joy?

Thanks for the support and sorry we missed answering your question on the pod! (Ironically, he did come up in our convo before recording). Since we’re taking a break from recording until after the hecticness of finals and the first half of December, we’ll answer this one digitally. Under the cut because we’re wordy bitches here.

Maia (I got here first and got all the low-hanging fruit ¯\_(ツ)_/¯):

Ryan O’Reilly, to say the least, is a very interesting man.

Both of his trades have been seen as foolhardy to the team trading him. It wasn’t so long ago that Sabres fans (us included) were laughing at the Avs for trading such a good player… only to stand in their place not a mere three seasons later coming to full realization (with St. Louis fans laughing at us).

When a player is traded twice in the span of 3 years despite putting up good points and being a solid 1-2 center, a faceoff machine, and quite defensively sound, that’s never a good sign. The question at that point falls not on a player’s production, but their character.

Now ROR is hardly a horrible person – not by a longshot. He’s actually a really nice guy, but perhaps not the best team player or moral builder. We talk about this in one of our earliest episodes from the summer (1.03, judging from our old outlines), but ROR is almost always going to fill the score sheet, get the assists, get the goals. The trade of ROR to St. Louis was never about the points or goals, and no matter what the Sabres were going to be losing the best player in the trade. But there’s a lot more things that make a team tick then just putting up the points; there’s also camaraderie and truly being not just a team, but a family.

That’s not to say that ROR was the sole reason for the Sabres locker room issues –that falls on a lot of players, some of whom were shipped out or left to free agency (Evander Kane, Lehner, Johnson…)– nor is it to say that shipping ROR solved all the problems (that would unfairly erase all the work the remaining players did over the summer and in pre-season with communication, opening up to each other, working to hold each other accountable). But there’s no denying that the ROR trade was first and foremost, a character move.

It’s hard to gauge how much of the whole ROR vs Eichel thing was true –Jack certainly denies it (as heard on Spittin Chiclets)– but there had to have been a grain of truth in there somewhere. Think of it this way, ROR was brought into the organization only slightly before Jack, he was hailed as a leader. He was expected to be. Jack was too, perhaps, in his own way, but he had quite a bit of growing up to do first. Fast forward to the point where Jack truly starts to mature, he has an A, Brian Gionta is gone and so is the C…

That creates a vacuum, and while it’s always good to have players step up… there’s a difference between stepping up and stepping on toes, and maybe there was a bit of stepping on toes there. Trading ROR eliminates that issue, the locker room and the team is Jack’s to have. So many things changed in the off-season that it’s difficult to pin down exactly what the biggest game changer was (it’s all of them, honestly), but there’s no denying the importance of handing the reins over fully to a young, eager core just bursting at the seams to finally prove itself.

ROR was hard on himself and the team — both good traits to have, but in moderation; he’d still have the downtrodden attitude after good games and wins (despite their rarity). And again, there’s a difference between realism, humbleness, and being a constant downer. As much as GMBOT and co claim that ROR’s locker cleanout comments of “losing the love of the game” and etc didn’t affect their choice to trade him, they certainly did make it a lot easier to do so. The Sabres core needed to be desperately shaken up, and ROR was a very ready choice, esp after saying that. There is that argument that ROR at 27 fell just outside the “young core” Botts is building between 18-23, but then again, Jeff Skinner is 26. (But look at Skinner: what does he bring along with his production? Positivity, hard work, good locker room presence).

We haven’t really been following ROR’s track all that closely on the Blues. He’s putting up the points, for sure, but the Blues? Not so hot. The Sabres surely thought that the 1st rounder they received for him would be a late first rounder, but it’s looking more and more to be a high pick. So who knows, maybe ROR is cursed, but it’s interesting how the Blues have fallen since their acquirement of him.

To answer your question though: Is it normal for a player to switch teams three times and never experience joy?

Maybe, it just depends on the player. Don’t think Matt Duchene is exactly having a blast either

Meghan here;

Going off of what Maia said earlier, I think it was pretty obvious that there was tension in the locker room. If you ask me, I think it was in regards to leadership. Jack was being primed to be The Leader™ in the locker room; he was the youngest player who had the A, guys often commented on how they needed him (especially when he was out for those 4 weeks with an ankle injury), etc. It’s also rumored (and I don’t know how credible this is, so take it with a grain of salt) that he was traded from Colorado in the first place because he and Duchene were feuding for leadership in the locker room as well.

Now, I do want to stress that wanting to be a leader in the locker room isn’t a fundamentally bad trait. We all know this, but I want to put it on the record. However, it is a bad trait when you aren’t able to lead with another person/people. If that’s the case with ROR, then…that’s toxic. Is ROR a toxic person? I doubt it. I’m sure that, had he not had his struggles with leadership, he would have been a great resource both in and out of the locker room. But, as we can clearly see, he did have those problems.

So, to restate what Maia said, I also believe that this was a character move. Something I think a lot of people tend to ignore is that you can have all the talent in the world, but if your locker room is toxic? If your players are warring behind the scenes, if your players can’t get along? That talent doesn’t matter. Ultimately, I believe there were a lot of different reasons why the Sabres were garbage last year, and toxicity in the locker room was, in my opinion, one of the biggest.

To actually answer your question: no, I don’t think ROR is “cursed”. However, I think he just has a mixture of extremely bad luck to get traded to teams headed towards the bottom, and his attitude probably doesn’t help.

Cassie:

I don’t think ROR is cursed, but I don’t think he’s great for a locker room. Moving him was not a product of his production but more of a need for a culture change. If all you’re exposed to is someone that is down and depressed, eventually that rubs off. Unless ROR has changed his stripes, it’s unlikely that his aura has changed. It’s possible that the negative aura is tainting the Blues, but it’s also possible that the Blues are just bad. They were trending downward last season and it’s possible that it has continued. The Blues have a CF%/60 of 50.56 and a CA%/60 of 45.46. I’d believe that these are impacted and look better than they actually are because of ROR’s production. Overall, it’s just a bad team getting even worse goaltending. Oddly, they’re missing Hutton more so than benefiting from ROR. I think with ROR it’s a situation where he’s gone from team to team to team and have caught all three teams in a downslide. Combine that with him taking things too hard on himself it’s a toxic situation. I really hope he seeks out a sports psychologist because it would do wonders on his outlook.

#tbbanswers #buffalo sabres #ryan o'rielly #st louis blues #Anonymous #long post

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bahrrss-blog · 5 years

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DIGITAL PROTOTYPING Malmö University -2019

DE/RE CONSTRUCT - 1st of April

De/construct. Promoting our insight into the ongoing course, this task wants us to investigate and "deconstruct" an actual GUI, recognising configuration examples of the interface. Deconstruct phase is followed by reconstruction.

Beginning with the procedure of deconstruction, I started from researching the applications on my phone, seeking around to check whether there are applications with specific capacities that are confounding, hard to enrol naturally, or just inadequately planned. That being stated, telephone applications these days have experienced a lot of cycles and update that most apps are about flawless usefulness astute other than the occasional bugs. I unquestionably experienced serious difficulties finding an application that I had serious issues with. So I decided to avoid confusion this time and go for just any app, giving myself a hard task. That I chose to look at as a challenge rather than an unsolvable problem.

I settled with the application of Instagram. Instagram is a popular application. It is structured is founded on picture sharing. What makes this application emerge is the exceedingly adaptable showcase. You can change the look of your pictures and videos, comment, explore, share, and chat, privately and publicly. In a case of private chate, this feature, probably due to a secondary role for Instagram is very locate.

The fundamental issue I'm having as I utilise this application is that as the primary GUI is made for single communication/share and not to interact.

STUDYING THE STRUCTURE OF INSTAGRAM

I generally end up experiencing considerable difficulties finding and getting to the page where you can see private messages. The application makes it easy to glance through the communities and explore but could be troublesome when you might want to rapidly access chats your friends sent you.

As an extrovert and someone who likes to communicate, this seems overly complicated for times when talking to people anywhere in the world is free of charge. I attempt to deconstruct in detail Instagram and understand why they have placed direct messages in a place where is hard to find.

These are some of the Instagrams GUI. Here you can five different pages and choose between 5 different functionalities of Instagram. Each display has its purpose. To navigate, to explore, to follow, to add new media, and your own profile.

The main issue with the page I have is, the messaging part. Insofar it is available only on the main page. So not even on your profile, nor any other page of the applications. And, to make even stuff more dislikable for me, there is no even messaging part when the application is accessed from the browser, computer or phone.

The app makes it easy to navigate through all features, such as, follow, like, add a new photo, the main page, or your own profile. However, once you find yourself in any place except on the main page, you can’t see messages being delivered. And, this, in my opinion, can be troublesome, due to a pure fact that messaging is a huge part of social networking.

It is that much complicated that Instagram even made official guidelines on their ‘’how to’’ page. You can see their guidelines on the picture under.

REI found messaging one of, if not the main reason why I use social networks, especially Instagram, it is convenient, retro, and modern way of exploring and sharing, so obstacles like one presented above, strike accords, and that's why I am talking about it. Especially as a Student living abroad, and having friends and families all over the world. I would benefit from facilitated messaging options. I will deconstruct Instagram into details furthermore down in this post. So, stay here around and keep reading.

BREAKING IT DOWN

As you can see on the image, in the right upper corner messages are placed, and on the exact opposite side, down left corner is the home page. (the little house looking alike icon)

Furthermore, I will talk about the Instagram story, in the media presented below, you can notice circles and some of them has a red outline, and some not. The red outline is to show that there is a new story published to buy the user. Once you watched the story (the circle becomes grey and moves away from the top of your notifications)The way to watch someone's story is to just simply press (and hold to pause) on the top of the story. Stories usually can’t be longer than a few seconds, and a maximum number of stories is 100 per day. Each story disappears after 24 hours, with the possibility of being stored on the profile afterwards. It will be available (hidden on the profile, meaning only visible to the owner of that profile for next 12 months, and then it is lost forever)

You can see the stories from the main page, or you can access them also when visiting the page of the person or desired agency. Also, if you desire to share it outside of Instagram you choose from pressing and choosing the option for three dots in the right corner of the media.

In order to not be too subjective, I have asked some of my colleagues to look into this and give me their honest opinions. I also asked some of my friends who are not familiar with the school project, thinking this way I could avoid bias.

Below is a deconstruction of Instagram with annotations of patterns and functions.

RE/CONSTRUCT

If you look closely to provided re-constructed xd prototype. The icon for messages is located in the bottom grid. Inheritably the bottom grid is fixed on the GUI. Hence, to access the messages will be easy and quick. As explained in deconstruct part, the messages/share feature was placed in multiplied places. Giving the cluttered look and giving a feeling of confusion to users. This design patterns can be blamed on Instagram policies to keep their platform explorative and not based it on messaging. It can be argued that Facebook came to a similar problematics, which Facebook solved by creating separate app only for messaging, But this caused the decrease of usage of the main Facebook overall. However my improved design look is minimal, it would not cause major division between messaging and sharing content on Instagram. On the contrary, it would facilitate the usage of both features.

User testing

In user testing, the general feedback I got is can be summed in three words. ´´Oh, THANK GOD´´ what users meant to say was: someone else is also feeling the same way, Some of the users mentioned that they use Instagram as calling app, video calling app. Instagram has incorporated video and voice calling together with iOS and Android, so when someone is calling on Instagram, feels like you are getting regular phone calls. Furthermore, accessing to the deaths of this calls is a bit harder. Because of the issue mentioned previously. Thus having messaging (which is call and video call) feature display on the main GUI of Instagram on the bottom fixed grid, seemed as change worth changing.

vimeo

Analysis

When starting this project, I wanted to focus only on a rather overall redesign than touching only some visual design patterns. Like messaging feature. However, the visual design does have a big impact on user experience. For the above solutions, I wanted to show how small changes can make a big impact.

The patterns, as far for the control that Instagram induces, is hard to notice. Mainly because announcements are very well integrated, it is hard to distinguish them from real person posts. It is, however, a typical iOS application pattern. It is very well adjusted with adds.

Instagram has an integrated variety of shapes in its design. Rounded, and squared icons.

The font used on Instagram is: Roboto is used along with Freight on Android. The Instagram website uses Proxima Nova for all text with Neue Helvetica and iOS Freight Sans.

On Instagram, when uploading a photo the design pattern of carousels can be noticed. You can scroll between pictures to select as many as it is allowed to upload.

This is the noticeable design patterns, I was also when user testing attempting to found more of them, but I couldn’t notice. I would need to do an in-depth analysis to find more, or maybe with any new updates of design, the new pattern will appear. Sometimes also, when we are to dwell into deconstructing.

BEYOND THE NORM - 15th of April

Questions:

What is the speculative approach? What is the critical design? How to relate this to interaction design? Should we, as designers, ignore issues of the world? Should we, as citizens, be satisfied with the world we have?

How can a designer play a role in engaging with the world most critical issues?

Check out the video called Technological Dreams Series No. 1, Robots Dunne & Raby, 2007. It talks about interactive experiences. This video has no voice-over, explaining but clearly explain the power roles that we have over the objects.

https://vimeo.com/2611597

Critical design is rather about asking a question than finding solutions or looking for the problems.

Answers:

Rather than finding a solution to current life problems, Critical design offers a step into the future and gives us feedback about where should we go further. Critical design tests wander and explore with ideas in a rather than unconventional way. Their exploration can be understood as something between reality and impossible. There is an attempt of drawing distinction between affirmative design (design that reinforces the status quo) and Critical Design - design that rejects how things are now as being the only possibility, it provides a critique of the prevailing situation through designs that embody alternative social, cultural and technical, or economic value (Dunne and Raby 2001)

Manifesto of the Critical Design: Design as a medium, asks, questions, social fiction, parallel worlds, functional fictions etc.

Is it even needed? Do we need art in design? Positive critique is that is pushing boundaries that might result in positive changes. Negative critique is that this type of design is just trying to make some noize and that we don’t really don’t need this design.

What to be thoughtful about is that critical design creates a space for critique.

Thoughtful design is taking into perspective, projecting scenarios and establishing the use of emerging things. Discursive design is distinguishing design field, commercial, experimental, and discursive design. What is essential in design fiction is that the object fits into its surroundings.

Relation of these designs to #IXD

Prototypes are tenuous, material and experienceable. Prototyping is aligned in order for situations to be understood.

Issues with Critical Design, it is very hard to know you are on the right path. We don’t know if we are doing a good or bad job.

In a short conclusion: Critical Desing is here to provoke, to question, to change values, to challenge the status quo, do it with great care if you adopt the techniques of critical design.

Adobe XD tutorials

Learning XD in detail has its advantages. Basic functions sometimes are not enough, it is quite a time saving when you know where something is located. Most of the things we learned in the first Adobe tutorial, I have already been familiar with, but haven’t really used them so much. For example, doing animation with xd was valuable insights. We were wireframing the news app. We created load screens, and the screens were supposed to give feedback. And the feedback was load time. I find this very funny, in times when 5G networks are to be implemented.

We created only a few screens and made the animations. But, it is interesting how this animation would look like for enormous news apps, that contain thousands of information and it is updated literally every minute. I guess this information tells how important this trick was when designing an app.

If you look closely you can see that the small dots under the titles are not all the same for each screen. This, when using the app would give the impression of time passing.

Furthermore, learning about wireframing tools, was also valuable. The thing is not only learning is enough, but this skill also has to be practised and put to use. We used already made screens, in my opinion, it is a bit limiting the creativity of the designer, but on the other hand, the time-saving aspect has to be taken into consideration. It would take much longer to make these screens from scratch. Hereunder you can see some screen I made during the XD workshop.

ANALYTICS EXERCISE -23d April 2019

After an in-depth exploration of Google merchandise store, there are few design suggestions that I could recommend for googles improvement in sales. Right under you can see chars that are visualising backing up my argumentations.

If we look closely to these numbers under. There is an enormous differentiation between mobile users and desktop users. It is certain there today in mobile purchases are common and becoming the main way of using the internet, also purchases.

This makes sense in many ways because mobile phones are always in our pockets, and we reach for mobile more often then we do with our laptops. So, I am raising the question about this issue, since Google merchandise store, has more visits from their desktop site.

Overall desktop visits are around 51 000 visits, where on phone it is only around 16000 visits.

This data, made me go and look at the mobile site of the store, and here I have found several design changes that can be applied. This, in my opinion, would give the store market standard, and boost mobile visits. Let take a look at the mobile site (check the media under). There we can see a variety of information hidden, behind the same icon. There are cluttered and not even necessary because all of the information this icon contain can be placed within one icon, or simply displayed on its own. The number of items purchased can be placed on the basked. And the icon next to towards left can be eliminated, or unified with the same icon under.

In conclusion, the site is clean from announcements, which gives it a peaceful place to do your shopping. Adding these small changes would make a site mobile friendly and it would boost visits and purchases made through the phone.

Digital Prototyping - How do speculative approaches reveal qualities of digital prototyping practice, and what are these important qualities?

To begin with, I can mention that speculative design process requires definitely more than one iteration. In my opinion, there is a need for researching the topic of choice from different angels. To understand the complexity of the design opportunity. It is practically a necessity to deconstruct the science behind the design opportunity.

In this course, the topic was drowned from the perspective of the UN sustainable goals. The pros of having to work with information like this is that is a very well researched topic. Easily accessible information online, multiple sources. All of this facilitates the process of speculation.

On the other hand, I will argue that this limits the creative process. Which many would agree, is necessary for any good speculative design process.

However, since this was the first project of speculative design, having predefined filed of work, can be taken as beneficial, then disadvantageous

Furthermore, if we would attempt to answer the following question: How speculative design is relevant to prototyping experiences in general? We can argue that relevance depends on the design aim. In this project, there was a necessity to use previously acquired prototyping skills, but the context was directed towards, information, visualising or grabbing attention overall. To achieve this our prototyping practice needed the help us come up with this design. I would argue that it help to understand speculation in design, but not to the point where the speculation was entirely clear.

For instance, the design process that my group was undertaking in this course, was clearly divided into two major ideas. Where the first idea, was a bad attempt to speculate, and a rather good attempt to solve the problems. Prototyping wasn't contributing much. On the contrary, on the second interaction, when the ideas were considered quite speculative, prototyping, especially using digital tools (such as xd) made the project harder. This is due to the fact that the initial ideas needed to be transferred to visual aspects. Thus, everything seems as constrained. With each small design implementation, the idea of speculation seemed losing its value.

Conclusively, it is worth considering, in future speculative design practices. that the prototyping practices can be arguably big constraint to the speculative design process.

To relate just argued pros and cons of the mentioned topic to the question of this essay (How do speculative approaches reveal qualities of digital prototyping practice, and what are these important qualities?) I can say the digital prototyping has visual aspects as support. Meaning, the tools digital prototyping uses are dependent by the large scale on the visual aspect. Whether we use video or just images. Having said this, and taking into consideration the complexity of the speculative design. Digital prototyping can serve to clarify this complex nature of this form of design.

To wrap up this thought, I can say, the visual aspect is (if well made) self-explanatory, and overall easy to understand (compared to other expensive mediums) therefore, this characteristic of digital prototyping can serve as an advantage when used in speculative design.

However, there are other qualities of digital prototyping that speculative design can reveal. For instance, these qualities can be reviled depending on which angle we are observing digital prototyping. If we looked at it from the perspective of humans needs, then we have to understand that people seek influence over their environments, and digital technology has traditionally extended possibilities to extend knowledge and control (Gaver & Martin, 2000).

There are examples where just simple machine intelligence was used to arranged and to shape birds' behaviour, by approximating a target tune for birds singing. This allowed could allow the different birds to be trained to take different harmonic roles in an overall composition. Hence, digital prototyping can give a man much more than even imaginable at first glance. We can argue that digital prototyping practice could allow people to extend control to the very wildlife and navigate the future of (wilderness and of nature) simply uncontrollable. Another example can be given from this course speculative design project. The project Swipe Dream, developed with my classmates, held in itself speculative understanding of the UN sustainable goal number 17. Partnership for goals. Swipe dream places serious manners such as development and many flows from developed to developing world, by using modern dating environment such as tinder. There is no-the less controversy in this project. But, it proves the point that speculative design allows (with use of digital prototyping) us to see important questions in another light, thus illuminating problematics, that otherwise would pass unnoticed.

Furthermore, when the design is used to ends that are provocative, we are bridging and constructing things. We are also telling stories through objects, which become effectively conversation pieces in a very real and persuasive sense. Through the projection of design scenarios, design fictions, and narratives of use, the designer as storyteller shifts focuses beyond efficient use, to embrace uncertainty, interpretation and meaning (Malpass, 2016).

It can be argued that speculative design holds immense importance for society. It pushes the boundaries from what we know already. It teaches us new perspectives on the stuff that are already around us. It gives purpose to things that presumably are useless. I connect us with objects around us and allows us to create better futures. Speculatively, digital prototyping shines the most in my opinion when using storytelling through film and images. And when mediums for expression is mixed. Her plays important roles in the ambiguity,

Furthermore, when prototyping in relation to the digital world, if we position design as an effective medium with the intent to construct public and engage user audiences by questioning conditions in everyday life. We need a powerful perspective for the user to understand our points. We need to achieve this critical perspective of the user or observer.Here is when digital prototyping can show it’s powered. If done correctly and with huge dedication, we as a designer can affect the direction where our society is going.

Design can push furthermore from orthodox way of thinking. If we manage to encourage the user to interpret the object, we put the user in a role that opens up for exploration, reflection and engagement. And, is it even necessary to explain how important is for every individual to fully engage in explorations of their own lives.

Conclusively, we can argue that there are multiple design approaches when it comes to speculative design. Firstly the combinations of disciplines. Design can be related to art, architecture or even philosophy. But, due to a necessity for clarity and simplicity, to my knowledge, we can narrow down speculative approaches in at least three different ones. The first sees designers reflecting on and critically questioning design practice. In this course, it was a digital prototyping design practice. Also, the second approach is based on re-thinking the design discipline. For example, rethinking if the digital prototyping is the best approach to explain certain problematics, or would is politics the best place to express concern about climate change, and so on. When we are talking about politics, to my knowledge and from what literature supporting this paper is indicating, one of the approaches of speculative design could actually be related to the overall importance of this speculation and design for society. Nonetheless, it is important to see the speculative design more as a discursive practice, based on critical thinking and dialogue, which questions the practice of design than to try to select and eliminate this practice in any other way (Malpass, 2016).

On the other hand, digital prototyping practice in too many ways can be a limitation in the ability to explore possible futures. We are all explorer, and the medium we use matters. Different strategic approaches are both desirable and necessary to achieve the best results possible in the process of exploration.

Digital prototyping is a way of thinking and expressing. It is certainly no so different from physical prototyping. But none the less, the experience digital prototyping can create, might interfere with how we think of our future and how we as mankind will continue to go about our lives. Yes, I argue of the benefits of digital prototyping, but however good and beneficial this prototyping is, it will never bring better results than feedbacks that real users give us.

In conclusion, it can be stated that digital prototyping together with the speculative design is of big importance, it gives us a modern perspective of ourselves and of the context we found ourselves in.

Literature

Gaver, B., & Martin, H. (2000). Alternatives. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’00. https://doi.org/10.1145/332040.332433

Malpass, M. (2016). Critical Design Practice: Theoretical Perspectives and Methods of Engagement. The Design Journal. https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2016.1161943

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bettsfic · 6 years

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Hey! So firstly congrats on the writing program! Secondly, thanks for always sharing interesting writing advice. And thirdly, this: I know most people feel like if they just put their mind to it, they surely have a novel in them somewhere. Do you agree? Do you think more people should just try writing and see what happens, or do you think that studying and training is a better route to take before getting any big ideas?

thanks so much! this is a hell of a question, and my answer is a bit meander-y because i think differently about this in different roles -- my teacher self sees it differently than my writing self sees it differently than my editor self.

my favorite quote about this comes from Flannery O’Connor’s “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” in which she says

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. Myopinionis that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller thatcould have beenprevented by a good teacher. The idea of being a writer attracts agood many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened withpoetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.

i like this quote not because i agree with it, but because it articulates an alternative perspective with which i can pivot my own thoughts.

i believe that creative expression is a necessity of mental health, and in improving the ability of expression -- that is to say, the accuracy of putting what’s in our minds to some external space -- we strengthen a fundamental means of achieving happiness.

writing builds roads that can deliver what’s inside our minds to the outside world. there, our stories can be read, understood, and accepted, and therefore our experiences and ourselves validated. in this way, writing is no different than painting or dancing or making music -- art is the transference of internal to external. it is one of the most important means of communication we possess. this is why artists and writers are so often affiliated with depression and inner turmoil: we’re the ones who most crave understanding.

if you meet someone who feels misunderstood and they are not an artist, they haven’t found their art yet.

so the simple answer is yes, anyone can write a novel.

that said, here’s where things get complicated.

as someone who will soon have an MFA, a million words of fiction written, and only 8k of them published, i do get frustrated at people who think anyone can write a novel, even when i just agreed they could. in part, it means they don’t value (or even know) the amount of work and dedication a novel takes, therefore they take my work for granted.

a novel isn’t just 80k of random thoughts puked onto a page, it’s years of failing, notebooks of outlining, wormholes of useless research, and a truly agonizing amount of rejection. it’s tenacity and stubbornness. it’s facing your own worthlessness every day and constantly reminding yourself your stories and perspectives are worthy of witness.

but i also know that it takes audacity to be a writer, and part of that audacity is believing you’re already good at something you’re actually not good at, just so you can cheer yourself on and keep going.

the only way to write a novel is to start writing a novel, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing. fly blind and slap words on a page until you improve enough that you go, oh shit, this sucks, i need to start over. so you read a few books, realize you really suck, but maybe not that much, and maybe you were on the right track after all, so you open a new doc and start over. maybe you get a bit further this time, but then you realize it’s all way harder than you expected and maybe you need to step back for a bit and try something else, get good at short stories or whatever. so you write a few short stories and maybe start reading a few short story writers consistently, Raymond Carver and George Saunders and whoever else, and realize you suck at both endings and voice respectively, so you write some things that are clearly very derivative but hey, you’re just practicing, right? your novel has been tabled indefinitely and you’ve met 10 writers who are all way better than you so you feel like a total fraud (they feel like frauds too) and read 100 writers who are everything you ever want to be (also frauds), and it doesn’t seem like you’re on a path at all, you’re just swinging punches and hitting air, you haven’t worked on your novel in months but god, this story in your head just needs to get on paper and then maybe you’ll go back to the novel, and now you have hundreds and hundreds of pages of not-novel and teetering stacks of literary journals and short story collections and other people’s novels you’ll probably never read, and fuck. fuck. you’re stuck. you’ve gone as far as you can go and it’s not far enough because you can see it now, the kind of quality you want to write but you’re not there yet. the only way you’ll get better is by getting a mentor maybe. getting an MFA. applying for a residency or fellowship or workshop. getting more eyes on your work. so you do all that and send your stuff out for publication and while you’re waiting for your rejections you go back to your novel, which is actually way shittier than you remember but oh, that’s a good line, you’ll keep that one, and shit, that was actually a really creative character trait, you weren’t as bad as you thought. this is salvageable, you can work with this. and so you keep writing, knowing you’re going to put it down again when you get another idea, when you need to drift away to learn something new, and come back to it eventually.

tl;dr you do not become a writer to write a novel. you write a novel to become a writer.

writing advice tag | ko-fi | beta commissions

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dailyaudiobible · 3 years

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08/04/2021 DAB Transcript

2 Chronicles 35:1-36:23, 1 Corinthians 1:1-17, Psalms 27:1-6, Proverbs 20:20-21

Today is the 4th day of August welcome to the Daily Audio Bible I am Brian and it is a joy and a privilege and an honor to be here with you today around this Global Campfire as we take our next step forward together through the Scriptures and through the year. And…yeah…a year of our life together in the Bible changes an awful lot. So, let's take that next step forward. We’re reading from the book of second Chronicles, and we’ll actually be concluding the book of second Chronicles with our reading today. And then we get to the New Testament because we concluded the letter to the Romans yesterday we’ll be moving into some new territory. And we’ll talk about that when we get there. But first, second Chronicles chapters 35 and 36.

Introduction to 1 Corinthians:

Okay. So, now we’re turning into some new territory in the New Testament, another letter. We’ll actually be kind of camping out in Paul's letters for a while, but this newsletter was a letter written to the church in Corinth and those people were known as the Corinthians. And, so, this is…this letter is called Corinthians and it's the first one in the New Testament. And, so, this is called first Corinthians. And, so, just kinda of getting the lay of the land, Corinth wasn't like a little village, a little hamlet out in the hills in the sticks somewhere. This is like one of the largest cities in the whole Roman Empire. So, pretty influential city in the empire, kind of a hotspot, definitely a hub for commerce and trade and negotiation and business. And, so, it is a large polytheistic Roman Empire city where worship of lots of gods are happening, but it's also a very secular city, very secularized society. Same as we would experience in any large city pretty much in the world today. If there are a lot of people and they’re from a lot of places then you have a melting pot of a lot of ideas. So, there's a church there in Corinth, a Christian fellowship of people that Paul was in association with, and this letter is…is really written responding to some of the things he had been asked and some of the things that he had been hearing that were going on in the church there. And fundamentally he's encouraging unity. And they may have needed that encouragement. Obviously, they needed that encouragement but even though they’re a couple thousand years in the future…man that…that theme of getting on the same page and working and walking together in unity is no less poignant, no less needed today. And as we were going through Romans, you know, we came across passages of Scripture that are very famous like “the wages of sin are death, but the gift of God is eternal”, like all of these things in Romans. So, we recognize a lot of passages that are…that are famous. And we will notice the same thing in first Corinthians. There are themes and passages that are very famous like the theme of seeing through a glass darkly or that when I was a child I spoke as a child but when I…when I became a man I put away childish things. These are in first Corinthians. Then, of course, when we get to the 13th chapter of Corinthians, that…that is known as the love chapter and its very famous and very quotable. So, this is some of the territory that we are steering into. And, so, let's dive into Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. And today we will read chapter 1 verses 1 through 17.

Prayer:

Father, we thank You for Your word and we thank You each and every day for the way that it…it comes into our hearts and into our lives and informs us and challenges us and moves us forward and we are so deeply grateful. And today we had an ending and a beginning. And, so, we’re ending territory in the Old Testament, we’re beginning territory, another of Paul's letters and we invite Your Holy Spirit to speak clearly that we might hear what You're saying and obey where You are leading. We invite Your Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth. As we continue to live into this faith, this journey, this adventure of life together with You. Come Holy Spirit we pray and to all of this and all that we will encounter in the Scriptures in the days ahead we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is home base, it's the website, it’s where you find out what’s going on around here. And, so, check it out. Check out the Daily Audio Bible app. You can access all of these things from within the app as well. So, check that out.

Check out the Shop, the Daily Audio Bible Shop either in the app or on the web. There are a number of resources there and a number of different categories that we have developed over the years for the journey that we are on around this Global Campfire through a year in the Bible and in life together, and there are resources to accompany that journey. So, check them out in the Daily Audio Bible Shop.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, thank you, humbly, with humble gratitude. Thank you for your partnership. If the…the mission here around this Global Campfire to bring the spoken word of God read fresh every day and given freely to whoever will listen anywhere on this planet any time of day or night, and to build community around that rhythm so that this isn’t the solitary journey either through the Bible or through life, that we’re in this together. If that makes a difference ten thank you for your partnership. There is a link on the homepage at dailyaudiobible.com. If you’re using the app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or the mailing address, if you prefer, is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or encouragement you can hit outline button in the app, which is the little red hotline lookin’ button up at the top or you can dial 877-942-4253.

And that's it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Hi this is Paul from Ohio been listening for about 14 years off and on. I'm calling today to say some prayer for Susie from Colorado who called in as she's feeling weary after 27 years of taking care of orphans in Haiti. You deserve to feel weary. Jesus felt weary several times. In John 4, 5, and six is said He was tired in the well near Samaria. In Matthew 5:23-24 He slept through the storm he was so weary. Elijah was allowed to sleep. In King's 19 he slept in the cave under the broom tree and God fed him and he fell back asleep and was OK. Jesus said come to me all you are weary, and I will give you rest. It is totally understandable, and I pray that you get the help that you need, and I pray that you'll see in scriptures not the verses that talk about you being lazy or not doing enough. You are doing plenty and you have to take care of yourself to be able to take care of the rest of the…those orphans many with disabilities. Just like on an airplane when they tell you to put your oxygen mask on first so that you can help the others, you gotta put your oxygen mask on. Give yourself a break. Ask for help. It will make you be a better caregiver and better able to do God's work on this earth. And I think that is what your goal is. You've already done so much. So, I pray for all these things for you. Amen.

Hi this is Kelly in Greensboro NC, and this is for Loving Heart in Saint Louis. I just heard your prayer my dear sweet sister in Christ over your precious daughter who has anorexia and I just wanted to lift you and your husband and your precious child up to the Lord for healing and I just wanted to pray some scripture over her. Psalm 30 verse 2, I cry out to the Lord and heals me. Psalm 103:3 the Lord forgives all my sins and heals all my diseases. Psalm 107:20, He sends His word and heals me and rescues me from the pit and destruction. Isaiah 58:8, My light shall break forth like the morning and My healing shall spring forth speedily. Jeremiah 17:14, heal me O Lord and I shall be healed, save me and I shall be saved for You are my praise. And then Jeremiah 30:17, the Lord has declared that He will restore me to health and heal my wounds. Lord we just pray that if there are any untapped resources that this precious family has not been made aware of that You will bring them into their lives father. And we just lift up this daughter to You, we lift up this mother and father who are heartbroken to see the health of their daughter deteriorate father. And Lord we just pray for complete and total healing of her mind and her body and in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Hey DAB family this is D in Tampa and I called in a couple of…well maybe a week ago or so…a couple weeks ago feeling down and sad from some losses I've had over the last five years. And the prayer request I have for today…and by the way thank you so much to those who did pray. The prayer request I have today is to ask that people, my family on here, my DAB brothers and sisters would pray for the Holy Spirit's intervention over my mental health. I suffer from PTSD, OCD, ADHD, and depression, anxiety along with physical illness. Anyway, my time is running short, and I just want to say we need Christians to stand around each other and not shame each other about mental health issues. And I just want to ask for your prayers over me and I thank you in advance and God bless you guys. Thank you.

Good morning Daily Audio family I just wanted to speak to the person, the gentleman who was wanted to pray for the son’s girlfriend with the __ and everything. I just want to say right now in the name of Jesus, by the blood of Jesus she is being healed and is healed. So, I'm in agreement for full healing and that the Holy Spirit will be able to heal her give her peace and be able to speak to her and draw her closer to God to the Father and also to Jesus. So, I'm in agreement with that and right now I believe in the name of Jesus that she is going to be healed, that it’s gonna be a speedy recovery and healing in Jesus’ name. We love you family.

Good morning DABbers this is God's chosen one from Georgia. I am standing in need of prayer this morning. I have been dealing with multiple myeloma for a while. The pain is deep. The aches are unbearable, but I could use your prayer this morning. It's a new month and so I believe that God will do something new. That our God will move with might and power and restore me to health. I pray that this morning as we enter into this new month of August His mercy will prevail and that His loving kindness will speak life into me. I pray for healing, completeness, wholeness. I pray for complete restoration. I pray as I believe by faith that He is more than able. [singing starts] it's me it's me oh Lord standing in the need of prayer. It's me it's me oh Lord standing in the need of prayer. It's not my brother not my sister but it's me oh Lord standing in the need of prayer, not my father or my mother, but it's me oh Lord standing in the need of prayer [singing stops].

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autoirishlitdiscourses · 3 years

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Discourse of Thursday, 01 July 2021

5 today but tomorrow afternoon. The Dubliners sing The Croppy Boy, mentioned in lecture and less discussion than other people react to the interest of the work that you've set up on stage and reciting, anyway. Grading criteria The/performance/recitation/discussion, of course, you'll get there, but our wonderful email servers that the Butcher Boy was not acceptable, that one of three groups reciting from McCabe in your paper there were things that I disagree with you to section and the fairy world. You picked a longer-than-required selection and delivered it in to the small late plan email penalty ½%, but with the other Godot groups for several reasons for missing a scheduled recitation, you will receive no credit for the quarter.

So you can currently earn for the Self. One is to talk about; it applies to the schedule on the proper day. In a lot of things well here, and then sit down and write about, but rather because thinking about how you'll effectively fill time and get them to pick out the eighth line of discussion if people aren't prepared, it's normal not to argue that a close reading exercise of your discussion.

I think that you examine as part of the assignment write-up test the next two days on grading turnaround was perhaps optimistic for weeks when I responded to being perceptive. You reacted gracefully to questions from other students were engaged, and is entirely understandable, but the most important insights are is one place where I was now a month and a lot of important points of analysis, and you provided a very sophisticated and clear. Does that help? Of course! Let me know if you go over twelve I'll start making discreet kneecap-breaking gestures unless someone before you they will be worth thinking about the question entirely and demonstrates a solid, though not the right direction, though, I'll have to do a good job of reading and thinking about it in contractual terms to the very end of his speech and discussion of a person's actions is what would have most needed in order to tip the scales from writing an essay that is, after all, you've really done some very good selections for your thoughts, and fixing these problems will help you to section on Wednesday prevents you from reciting, obligates you to do is to understand and articulate and did an excellent quarter! This may be a fallback plan. Quite frankly, I guess.

Equal Access Statement: University policy and Federal and state law require that you speak enough in other components of the Artist As a Young Man, which I've gestured to in many small ways, I suppose. Let me know what you want it to work with, e. Good luck with all of these ways.

I'm looking forward to your questions? Section guidelines handout, which is not productive about Fluther's point of causing interpretive difficulty for the Arnhold Program is a very, very well on the paper as a whole, though I think that letting the discomfort of silence force people other than that, you're on the final, you need to participate effectively and in a comparison/contrast is a new document. The basic fact that they will be posted to the date indicated on the final will be on that do not often contact students by email no later than Friday afternoon your notes it's perfectly acceptable additional text to text and helping them to pick it up or down by much. Yeats texts that you've thought closely about it not in many many many ways. Take a look at it if it's the best possible dressing, and the 1916 Easter Rising on the day before Thanksgiving. My son inside her. You will find section more rewarding and enjoyable. That does not fully articulate that argument in a variety of comments explaining why you received the professor's miss three sections at the beginning of the texts is also a complex relationship to each other. Again, though some luxury goods have their prices quoted in guineas, for instance, so you will have to find ways to the text's/Ireland's/Irish literature's/your/my/the professor's signature by next Friday 13 December, you should re-framed to be read allegorically as being the plus and minus for each day that the rather thin time slice that Joyce gives us of their accustomed path. I think that, overall. That sounds good to me, I suppose another way, too, about what kind of murder did win small glory with the final. I sent yours because I will pass out copies of all but the usage in literature in English X-rays, which you make in the West of Ireland: Thanks to! But I'm glad I had my students gave recitations in front of the Absurd, or otherwise fundamentally dishonest paper, no matter how amusing it is likely to get a low C in the loop and let me know what works best for you? Thank you for being such a good paper. You've got some very perceptive reading of the novel. Because I will hold up various numbers of fingers to let you do so just let me know as soon as possible; if you do is to engage in micro-level details of phrasing and sentence structure are real strengths in a thesis statement, as outlined in my mailbox, or sent me this one right away if there are a few exceptions, listed in a paper that you explain ideas clearly and manage to pick one or two days on grading turnaround was perhaps optimistic for weeks when I saw you come out unscathed, full of the students in a packet of poems tonight. I'll send it right along. Congratulations on declaring the major, it's a good choice for a job well done yesterday. You demonstrated that here. Lesson Plan for Week 11:59 pm on Sunday afternoon, we can certainly talk about why you think? You're not alone.

I know my handwriting is hard to motivate discussion, your primary focus should be substantiating some aspect of the fourth qua in the writing process. Your delivery did quite an impressive move, and this weekend has just been crazy and I'm glad to be more explicit, I really did intend to do more than one inch, then left my office SH 2432E, provided that everyone is scheduled. You have a good student and I enjoyed having you in section tonight is The Woman Turns Herself into a text that takes experience to develop your discussion in a section you have thought it; but make sure that it's helpful to you. To put it another way: What do you see as the source you're using an abstraction would help you to open up different kinds of distinctions may help you to be sure you know that I appreciate your quick response! I enjoyed having you in section two, this is very nuanced. Having to seek emergency medical treatment twice is a violent and sadistic serial killer.

Your delivery was solid, although other people in, so you can conceivably take as many lines as the focal point of analysis is will pay off—the refusal to push back the midterm, then you are thinking now, you should be made. I explicitly say so as to avoid proctoring it during my office so they won't be able to hold off, because that will make what I mean as human, in part because it's a bit nervous, but they're also specific; #4 is also quite graceful and lucid though I occasionally feel that there will be paying attention to the deadline and didn't support your assertion that you're both aware that you should continue to be more comfortable with the rest of the course so far and to become more specific about your topic is potentially also a thinking process too, that particular selection and delivered it very well help you punch through to even more, which is also a nice plan here. Good choice. I cut you off. I have posted a copy of the starling but I can see below, and let me know. I'll see you in section, that connecting Lucky's speech and demeanor is expected from everyone in section that you can make it up. But you're a bright group, and should elucidate some aspect of the Anglo-Irish Literature Section guidelines. 2-4:30 tomorrow, as well as some slang terms for various coins and brief notes on areas in which it takes a while for discussion to assist me in the course. Hi! The other people's textual selections won't be assessed until after the meeting you'd have to cut peat, or twenty minutes, but you're absolutely welcome to speak in your notes would be a comparatively easy revision process. I feel that that can be here is one-half percent, you're quite prepared, and I suspect that what most needs at this point for you, because it's a thoughtful delivery of the poem responds to these in my recorder died. There are a couple of suggestions. Have a good holiday, and I'm trying to complete a COMMA specialization, graduating seniors who need to reschedule—as it turns out, only two A-range for the quarter, so is an emotional payoff and a leg. On standard essay format, it's impossible to know. This site will have to know the novel very closely at one section, providing reminders about upcoming events, links to songs and other works, I think that you contribute meaningfully to the course's discourse about sexuality and fidelity would pay off for you to give a quiz.

Tomorrow. I think, always a productive direction, I think that you needed to happen here—it's just that I'm closer to your main ideas. I suspect he'll still want people to speak without forcing them. Note that I have ever worked with, and your material you emphasize I think. A grades should also say that I changed your grade up you should understand that this afternoon.

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Note that plagiarism will definitely require documentation from a poem by noon this Wednesday at 1:30 you are traveling with a difficult text. Neither is really quite a good job of conveying the weirdness of Francie's cognition in general, than it would still help to motivate people other than your thesis at the assignment and subsumes them into a set of mappings is the deal I will make sure that you can respond productively if they do not have started reading McCabe yet if they're cuing off of his own mother. Good luck, and your delivery was very productive. I think one of these things would have helped to think about your medical condition actually makes it easier for me to make sure it's too late to do this in my other section that you're capable of doing so by 10 p. I think you would be to email in just a bit in the quarter, and that his presence is central to your presentation, don't do much to dictate ideas without being so long to get your hands. If you have an excellent lecture/discussion tomorrow night. If we're getting in Nausicaa and The Cook, the F on a first-out argument that you're covering. 10 30% of course welcome to leave campus before I pass it out; if this or anything else gets covered in the way that sets you up and see whether I was too harsh on some of the opening scene 6 p. What is the deal I will also make a paper is really more lecture-oriented than it needed to be experienced and discussed by presenters: You may recall her recitation of a married woman crying in response to such mawkish and purple thoughts. It is/is/your/education; and added and before I do; added that to me about your topic is that the ideas and texts that you're scheduled to recite part of your ideas onto electronic paper is due or a bit over, but help you to perform the assignment into a set of ideas.

Though it was written too close to ten pages. There were some pauses for recall, and your participation weight a number of important goals well, actually. Great! He also demonstrated an extensive set of images to look it up or down by much that you do an awful lot to discuss in connection with the way of engaging in a lot of important themes as the play set? However, if you're talking more than you expect.

277 in the phrasing of your specific question you're answering. You are perfectly capable of this. If you have not held your grade. The Song of Wandering Aengus but that you must have helped to project a bit of wiggle room. I also think that that's what would most help of everything, anyway, especially ballerinas. I think that that's likely for you straighten out I know to and/or #6, Irish nationalism road. If I'm not trying to force a discussion of Extraordinary Rendition: Patrick Kavanagh, Boland, and that the professor hasn't said how much effort and time into crafting such a full email box, does not necessarily mean that I have posted a copy of these are impressive moves. Your discussion and were so effective working together that you lectured more than three sections and/or taking the course are not meeting basic expectations; explains basis for both of you assignment. I would recommend that, with Dexter, it seems that it needed to be as successful as it's written, which could be said for the final, so that you send me more specifically about your own very sophisticated level. By My Window 6 p.

#Irish literature #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Python #Markov chains

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themotivationjournals · 7 years

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25 of the Best Self-Improvement Books To Read Before You Turn 25

Topic: Literature, Books, Lists || by STAFF

When it comes to self-improvement books, readers’ opinions don’t meet in the middle. Others feel empowered and committed by the helpful words they encounter, while the other half believes self-improvements book are phony. Regardless, every human being should read at least one self-improvement book in their life, and we have rounded up the best 25 to check out before turning 25!

Whatcha Gonna Do with That Duck?: And Other Provocations – Seth Godin

This book is a masterpiece, and unlike most self-improvement books, this one targets an infinite array of areas in which you can, and ultimately must, improve. With its ruthless honesty and genuine inspiration, Godin makes you ponder the difficult questions you wouldn’t ever dare to ask yourself. The result is a completely new perspective of the world- a fresher, more vibrant perspective, packed with new and bold possibilities. If you need a friend that understands, a boss that forces you to venture deep in your non-comfort zone, a wise guru that tells you what needs to be left behind and a sage that proclaims the coming of a new age, then look no further; you will find these shrewd voices all tied together in this magnificent book. Make sure to get this one.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Perhaps it is the fact that randomness played such a significant role in my years as a poker player that I find this book utterly important. We often attribute skill where there is only luck; we confuse correlation with causation and we underestimate the incredible effect small changes can have. This book and my time at the tables gave me a perspective I unfortunately rarely encounter in others: you can do everything right and still lose, or do everything wrong and still win. It is thus not about the outcome; it is about your actions that have lead you there. This important message is central to many of my decisions I make in my life and this book by Taleb helps you develop such a perspective so you will be able to live in a world one cannot fully understand, where the results are not always clear markers of performance and where chance seems to play games with our fates. Stop being fooled by randomness!

The 48 Laws of Power – Robert Greene

I read this book in a time where I thought power was something I should attain. Power for power’s sake. And while I disagree with my former self on this point, the fact remains that power is very real, it forms the invisible scepter of all hierarchical relations around us. I still recommend this book; I believe it is important to know how people use power for their own benefit and what to do to protect yourself from certain abuses of power. Besides the fact that all stories in this book gravitate around power, it contains many life lessons, amazing historical anecdotes and, if read in a certain light, the ability to use power for good. From Caesar to Goethe, Sun-Tzu to Machiavelli, this eye opening book spans a wide range of human development. If you, like me, would rather be interested in something less egotistical, perhaps Greene’s latest book Mastery will suffice (I haven’t read that one myself). Another great book in the same style, but this time around, covering a wider scope, and, perhaps, something that will make the world make a better place.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change – Stephen. R. Covey

The title of this book doesn’t capture it all. Covey shares with us seven habits one should adapt to become truly effective in whatever you would like to achieve. Of course, it is not as easy as it sounds. He stresses the fact that we need to go through a paradigm shift – a fundamental change in how we perceive the world and ourselves. This book can be read as a guide, with practices and everything, to go through the stages in order to make such a shift happen. Part shock-therapy, part ageless spiritual wisdom,Covey’s book is packed with wisdom that actually makes a difference. And, as I mentioned, don’t let the title of the book fool you; it is about much more than just becoming more effective. It is about becoming a whole integer person who not only seeks the best in oneself, but also in the people around her. A must read for anyone who feels there is always something left to learn.

The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys – James Fadiman

While finding a book on psychedelics in a list of books on self-improvement might come as a surprise, I believe any metaphysical distinction between tools such as books, meditation or molecules hold no ground and they should all be solely judged on their merits. And the merits of certain chemical keys, used in a constructive way, are perhaps bigger than any book in this list. The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide will teach you how to prepare yourself and your surroundings, what and how much to take, and what do do when something goes wrong, so you can safely enhance your thinking, creativity, introspection and emotional balance. This book contains everything you need to know about using psychedelics as a tool for self-improvement while drawing on extensive scientific literature and personal wisdom. A must have for the beginning and experienced psychonaut alike.

Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time – Brian Tracy

We all know how that destructive downward spiral feels. We have to do some big task, of which the thought alone triggers resistance, not sure how and where to begin and feeling overwhelmed before we start; we get easily distracted to get rid of that feeling, only to suddenly realize that hours went by- precious hours- and then find ourselves in the same position as before, still not knowing where and how to begin, but now, feeling guilty on top of it which expresses itself in more craving for distraction.

To break this spell of procrastination before it paralyzes us, Tracy advises us to Eat That Frog, to set our priorities straight, deconstruct larger tasks into smaller ones, learn when to tackle the big frog first or to start out with something else. Tracy is truly a motivational writer, and while I wished he had gone a bit deeper into the psychological reasons why people procrastinate, it is still a must have for anyone who wants to break the spell and get shit done.

Think and Grow Rich: The Original 1937 Unedited Edition – Napoleon Hill

A from 1937, this book by Hill is a masterpiece. Don’t bother with the edited versions since they all omit important and controversial information: some historical, and some pertaining to the goal of the book, which is to think and grow rich. The word rich might imply that this book is all about material gain, and while it certainly covers that area, it is about much more than that. Perhaps the first explicit mention of positive thinking, on how to care not just about the cash in your pocket, but also the thoughts in your head, this book has been able to withstand the destruction of time. It covers all the basics from planning, decision making and persistence, to the more advanced techniques as auto-suggestion, transmutation and what we can learn from fear. This is not a grow rich book, but a timeless guide to find out what actually matters. As it says clearly in the beginning ‘Riches can’t always be measured in money!’

The Attention Revolution: Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind – Alan Wallace

In a world that is dominated by ever stronger technologies designed to grab hold of your attention, a way to empower yourself is to bring that attention back to where you want it to shine. This book offers just that; in The Attention Revolution, Wallace describes the path to attaining Shamatha, a buddhist meditation state of mind that is free from any flickering of distraction. It is a hard and long path, probably not possible for us to reach in this lifetime. However, even getting to stage two or three will make everything in life easier. A wonderful introduction to meditation, The Attention Revolution will inspire you to take on the challenge and see what training your mind can actually achieve. Once you have achieved such a level of focus you can put it to use to open your heart with the practice of The Four Immeasurables or deepen the practice with this wonderful commentary by Dudjom Lingpa, both by Alan B. Wallace.

The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health – John Durant

In the last 10,000 years or so it seems we have been propelled into an ever faster paced world forged by our own hands and minds. Only recently have we been able to reconstruct our journey and reflect back upon our humble origins. This amazing book is such a reflection. It goes back to the paleolithic searching for answers to health and longevity. Between science and his personal experiments, Durant weaves a mind blowing story that will convey the importance of an evolutionary perspective on how to live well. It covers everything from nutrition to exercise, from sleep to fasting, from ancient practices to modern biohacking and even has an outline for a vision of the future where depression and obesity have become obsolete. If you only have room for a couple of books on this list, make sure this one is included.

Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation – Daniel J. Siegel

As my Burmese meditation teacher often proclaimed, ‘Mindfulness alone is not enough!’ Siegel seems to have taken this to heart and made an unique synthesis between meditation, psychoanalysis and neuroscience which he calls ‘Mindsight‘, as he says himself, a potent combination between emotional and social intelligence. All of us deal with some disorder or another, something that seems to disturb the very core of our being at ease, and while it might not always be the best strategy to want to get rid of it, it certainly helps to understand and have compassion for that little aspect that upsets that perfect image of ourselves. Brimming with techniques, insights and epiphanies, this book contains everything you need to know to reprogram your brain and to optimally use its capacity of neuroplasticity. A great book for spiritual seekers and scientists alike.

How to Win Friends & Influence People – Dale Carnegie

This is the first self-improvement book I have ever read and it is also probably one of the oldest in this category. Written in 1937, mainly for the door to door salesman of that era, this book by Carnegie can truly be called a classic. It shows what we all intuitively know: it doesn’t matter what your line of work is or what you want to achieve- if you are doing business of any kind, you need to make it about the other person. Being nice helps, a lot. And while I might not fully defend the premise of this book, because it doesn’t distinguish between genuine interest and faking it to get what you want, it still contains a treasure chest full of timeless wisdom. Everybody wants to feel appreciated, and rightfully so. Learning to take a small effort to make someone’s day will make the world run smoother, no matter what your goal is. I still spontaneously remember some of his guidance, and perhaps this quality is the reason why this book still draws millions of readers to this day.

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy– David D. Burns

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is the most effective therapy used by psychologists today; it consists of identifying thought patterns that have a detrimental effect on your self-image and mood, and deconstructing these in order to break out of these destructive cycles. If you want to know how this works, which moods are central in your life, what thought patterns are causing your depression, how to overcome self-judgment and guilt, how to defeat approval and love addiction and how your self-perfectionism is hindering you, then don’t look further; Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has helped millions of people and it can help you, and this is the best book for the job. Packed with scientific research, exercises and examples, this is the best improvement your self is going to get.

Psycho-Cybernetics, A New Way to Get More Living Out of Life – Maxwell Maltz

What can a plastic surgeon tell us about happiness? By dealing with his patients, Dr. Maxwell Maltz experienced firsthand that having your expectations come true doesn’t automatically result into a more positive life experience. Their outward appearances did indeed change but their inner insecurity remained. This caused him to find other means to help his patients, resulting in visualization techniques. He found a person’s outer success can never rise above the one visualized internally. This book carries a very honest and humbling story, loaded with fundamental truths about our psychology and how our own philosophy affects us, all told by a very compassionate writer. Of some books it can be said that it will be valuable for years to come, and I am absolutely positive that this is one of them.

Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

This brilliant book by Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman is a lucid account of all the amazing research he has done over the years. He is the founder of behavioral economics – the way our psychology affects our decisions – and explains in simple prose how our thinking is divided in two systems: one fast and one slow. The fast one is almost instant; it consists of the hardwired instincts that govern emotions, a remnant of an evolutionary past, an unconscious irrational machine. The slow one is deliberate, self-reflexive and logical, but can easily be distracted and takes a lot of effort. Both play a large role in our lives and Kahneman explores when the fast system fails and why the slow system is often not utilized. Packed with mind blowing examples and sharp analyses, this book teaches you how to learn to make sound judgments, and use the best of both systems.

An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity, Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything – Chris Hadfield

A few extraordinary people journey to the edge of our world and come back with a unique story to tell. Colonel Hadfield is such a person, and his story is perhaps the most important one in this list. While the other books in this list teach you to be independent, visualize your future and dream big, this astronaut’s guide turns these all upside down. A truly remarkable book, overflowing with mind-blowing stories that illustrate the life lessons he learned as one of the most accomplished astronauts that ever lived.Full of compassion, warmth and genuine self-reflexive humor, he conveys to us to be prepared for the worst and never let yourself be swayed from enjoying every moment. Part action story, part no-nonsense hard truth and part timeless spiritual wisdom, this book makes you feel like you stepped onto a rocket ship and experienced what he did while learning these most valuable lessons on the way.

Perfect Health Diet: Regain Health and Lose Weight by Eating the Way You Were Meant to Eat – Paul Jaminet & Shou-Ching Jaminet

No self-improvement list is complete without a nutrition book and the Perfect Health Diet is arguably the best diet book on the market now. If you are overweight or not, feel sick, or just looking for an extra boost in health (and keep it this way), then look no further. From reading decades of studies the authors construct the optimal way to eat, destroying popular food fads in the process. They explain in sufficient detail the optimal macro-ratios, which starches are safe, which vitamins and supplements to take and what foods, or what they call toxins, to avoid. This book is a great supplement to the Paleo Manifesto as it shares its basic evolutionary perspective; we were evolved to eat non-toxic, high fat, moderate protein and carbohydrates. And, sometimes, going around with no food at all, can be a very healthy thing. If your body is not in optimal health, then it is almost no use to read the other books. Make this your priority number one.

Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success – John C. Maxwell

At one time or another, we will all fail. What matters most is how you deal with it once you do. Will you give up? Or will you use it as a stepping stone for success? I recently read an article about new start-ups in silicon valley. Its hypothesis was the more you had failed in the past, the more likely you were going to get funding. Why? Because failing teaches you invaluable lessons, and if you decide to continue after you hit the pavement, the more you have it in you to deliver. Now, this is not in anyway our instinctual reaction to failing. Most of us dread it, avoid it or refuse to fail at all costs. All three are by far sub-optimal. It is far better to accept failure where it arises, to accept responsibility and use it as a way to learn about yourself and your weaknesses. Only when you are absolute honest with yourself with respect to failure can you hope to grow. This wonderful book will teach you how to do exactly this. A honest book for everyone searching for a clean mirror.

The Power of Now – Eckhart Tolle

The Power of Now hardly needs any introduction. It is perhaps the book that has had the most impact on our collective consciousness in recent years. It inspired millions of people all over the world to live a more fulfilling and compassionate life, all through the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness consists of moment to moment non-judgmental awareness. It is a technique that alleviates depression, increases emotional intelligence and develops compassion- and only recently has come to the west, which remained weary and skeptical until science had validated a wide array of its claims. The brain can be trained. The Power of Now teaches you how to release your attachment to certain thoughts and states of mind, thereby clearing the mind to fully embrace the present moment. If you already have read this book and are looking for deeper understanding, read Wherever You Go, There You Are.

The Last Lecture – Randy Pausch

At some point or another, almost all of us has come across The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. (If you haven’t, watch this powerful message here.) What would you say when you only have a few months left to live? This was probably Pausch’s question he posed to himself when he had to deliver his lecture a week later. But being confined to an academic setting and short time frame he felt he had more to share, thus marking the birth of this book. Filled with stories about his childhood, it is a very down to earth exploration of what it means to chase your dreams, to be a good person and live a life that gives value to others. A beautiful mixture of humor and optimism, his tender voice will be a source of inspiration for everyone who will take the time to listen, something he tried to impart on his readers. A very lovely read. And don’t forget, ‘It’s not about the cards you’re dealt, but how you play the hand.’

Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead – Brené Brown

I love Brené Brown’s books. She writes about an insight that I have found to be scary but true at the same time.Vulnerability, unlike we have been taught, is not a weakness, but a power to be tapped. Growing up with the idea that we have to hide certain parts of ourselves, to look strong and persevere at all costs always seemed a facade to me. And now she has the research to back that up. From that place of vulnerability comes a sense of worthiness, which for most of us, needs to be cultivated every day. Only if we get in touch with that tender spot of our hearts can we connect with others and develop genuine compassion, which are prerequisites, Brown tells us, for living a ‘wholehearted life.’ The reality, however, is that we often close down, feel neglected and misunderstood, and rather want the vulnerability and perhaps even ourselves to disappear. This book is an amazing antidote for that common instinct. Want to be truly convinced? Check out her amazing ted talk here.

The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – Carl Sagan

We all find UFO’s fascinating. We all really want to believe in magic or visiting aliens (surely the crop circles are conclusive proof!) and some of us believe the government is poisoning us with chemtrails. At the same time we are fascinated by the progress made by science, by all the new technology and medicines and the fascinating discoveries being made on a daily basis. Clearly, for the average person, it is quite hard to make a distinction between one claim or another – most of us are scientifically illiterate.Carl Sagan fought his whole life against such unreason and claimed that missing this ability to distinguish valid claims from hogwash could plunge us back into the dark ages. This book is perhaps his best on this subject, filled with examples and his eloquent mesmerizing voice, The Demon-Haunted World is a How To guide to arm you against manipulation masked as information. A must read for anyone who still feels the temptation to click sensationalist sophistry.

Philosophy for Life – Jules Evans

As philosopher Sloterdijk puts it; ‘philosophy is a beautiful child of an ugly mother.’ Philosophy first arose when the old Greek polis states were at the brink of destruction. Philosophy, according to Sloterdijk, was not just a way to make sense of the world, to come to knowledge or truth, but to serve as a psychological immune system. This book is an amazing expression of this perspective. From the stoics to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Jules Evans writes about some of the amazing philosophical techniques we can use to train and improve our cognitive immune systems. He weaves ancient stories with modern applications, from heroism to cosmic contemplation, Philosophy for Life a beautifully written book that makes it easy to understand the practical nature of philosophy. Perhaps the book would have been better if he would have gone deeper into the subject matter, but nonetheless he captures the essence of what philosophy can mean for the modern person. A must read.

Man’s Search For Meaning – Victor. E. Frankl

If I had to pick one book from this list for mandatory reading I would choose this one. For three years Viktor Frankl labored in four different Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. He tells us about his experience and that of his fellow prisoners. Both chilling and uplifting, confronted with the idea that they would be trapped there for the rest of their lives, he gives us an account of those who found meaning and those who succumbed to nihilism. A blend between a memoir, a psychological investigation and a self-help book, Frankl delivers a powerful message: finding meaning lies at the core of being human. From his own experience as a psychiatrist combined with anecdotes from his time in the concentration camps, he tells us how important it is to find meaning in our own lives and what we can become if we don’t. Suffering, he conveys to us, is inevitable. But as to how we cope with it is dependent on ourselves. If we can find meaning, even in the worst acts our species has ever inflicted upon his fellow man, we will be able to move forward with renewed purpose.

Simplify – Joshua Becker

This is a fun little book written by Joshua Becker, a big proponent of minimalist living. We all know that quote from Fightclub: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.” Well, this is ending. Slowly we are outgrowing an era where the unquestioned mantra ‘more is always better’ dictates our behavior. Rather, we now find ourselves, our lives and our homes cluttered with too much information, too much stuff and just too much shit we don’t need. This simple book helps you become aware of the freedom gained from living with less. It is a small book, easily read under an hour, but it carries a persuasive punch to start living live in a very different way.

Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It – Kamal Ravikant

The fundamental ground upon which all true self improvement is build is called self-love. Because in the end, no matter which way you turn, if you don’t love yourself, you will sabotage yourself at one point. You will think that, for some reason or another, you are not worthy. And if you think that, why would you truly want to achieve anything? And this is not just about achievement. This is about how you approach yourself every day; this is what you see when you look in the mirror. We make so many snap-judgments about ourselves- often without being conscious of them- that are filled with negativity, haltering us before we can even begin to heal. This powerful book shows you the antidote. Self love. Not to be confused with creating some narcissistic image of ourselves that some previous books in this list implicitly endorse, but self love, that inner gratefulness that no external condition can take away. Self love, that infinite source you can share with others.

Which one is your favorite?

Is a book missing in the 25 Best Books on Self-

Improvement You Need to Read Before You Turn 25? Thank you for reading :)

[THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY WRITTEN BY LIFEHACK]

#lit #books #reading #list #lists #literature #book #motivation #motivational

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