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fursasaida · 3 years

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do you have sources or opinions about the uh. development of the idea of the 'veil between the worlds' stuff and how it relates to how we understand ... space and place? question brought to you by "i just read some fantasy fiction that royally hacked me off"

lmao did you know one of my big “i don’t work on this but i lowkey develop expertise in it as a hobby” things is fairy tales and folklore

Anyway, I don’t know very much about the history of the “veil” thing, but I am given to understand it originated with the Victorians. Google Scholar has been unforthcoming on this point, so while I do not have sources, I do have opinions! My opinions are these:

As previously discussed, most people in most places were not, until recently, of the opinion that the world is made of space and space is the universal extensive backdrop, the dimension in which things happen. Moreover, even if we more or less think the world is made of space semiconsciously and in our uses of language, it's not really how most people think most of the time, even in contexts where space in this sense (as opposed to "room") has been invented/internalized. Instead, the knowledge of the world was and is structured much more around places, routes, and regions (which are just a kind of place distinguished by being part of a larger whole). Places have insides and outsides. They are distinct from one another. (Although, as with regions, they can also nest or overlap; this isn't state territory or administrative boundaries we're talking about. Those are spatial artifacts.) Therefore, in a spaceless world, there is nothing contradictory about believing that there are, simply, places where magic is stronger or where the gods dwell or where time behaves differently, and so forth. Just because things aren't like that here means nothing about whether they're like that there. To be clear: I am not saying people in the past (or who practice such traditions today) had or have no sense of a visible/invisible, mundane/extraordinary, or material/immaterial divide. That, I think, is pretty truly universal, and simply a product of human cognition. We have myths in many cultures about a deep past when knowledge (or ignorance) was perfect and the world was immediate, young, more alive, partly because, for whatever reason, the way we experience reality includes the sense that there are some gaps in it, or a little too much room. ("A mystical experience" is basically--and across many traditions--an experience of the full immediacy we normally don't have.) However, places like Olympus or Tir-na-Nog or the realm of Ereshkigal are, still, places. You may not think you will find yourself in Hades or the land of the ancestors if you fall down a well,* but you can still think it is possible for someone to go there in a non-metaphorical sense. They may need extra steps or divine/magical assistance, but going is still going. You know, like people do in the stories. And at the same time you can very easily accept that some extraordinary kinds of creatures or spirits really are here in this realm, and that their personalities and behaviors differ from place to place (animism, genius loci, some types of ancestor-honoring practices, etc).

(*Or in other words: to think you will end up in Hades if you fall down a well is actually to think about it spatially, or indeed geologically, as simply being what is found at a certain distance down. Why should Hades/Hell/etc, as a place, be under this well, all wells, any wells, just because it's under the Earth? These places have defined entrances, in the same way that you can walk up to a city wall as much as you like and this means nothing about whether you’ll get in if there’s no gate there.)

So I do think plenty of archaeologists, anthropologists, folklorists, etc. who study this kind of thing and look at the iconography or narratives as "obviously" portraying distinct realms in the sense of dimensions are unwittingly applying their commonsense, spatial sensibility to something that is much more ambiguous--because almost none of them have thought seriously about place as anything other than a location in space. They see a line or a boundary drawn and assume this means two existential dimensions, rather than two places. What now follows is basically the speculative explanation for how we got into this situation. It is based on a lot of things I know for sure, insofar as "for sure" can be known re: intellectual history; but I have not demonstrated a direct link, only surmised it. In Europe--more particularly, to my knowledge, in England, France, and Germany--space in our current sense really starts to get cemented in the 17th century. Notably, at the same time, people suddenly get interested in the scientific question of "the figure of the earth." It had long been known the Earth was round, of course, but suddenly it mattered to people what its precise shape could be. Is it a perfect sphere? An ellipsoid? What kind? What is the precise length of a degree of longitude? Is the Earth longer than it is wide or vice versa? This was the first time that intellectuals in these countries started seriously trying to reconcile the Biblical narrative of the Earth's formation with ~Science. They cared about this for some obvious reasons, like figuring out whether Newton or Descartes was right about the physics of motion, and testing Newton's gravitational theory; and there were practical reasons as well (the modern science of geodesy, which is what you need to make "accurate" maps for consolidating your state and conquering places, and to, say, build a railway, gets born as part of this). But they cared about it for another reason too. Namely: after the Thirty Years' War, there was a real sense of dislocation in Western Europe. This dislocation was religious, political, and social all at once. There was thus a serious need to realign political and social order with the cosmic order, and the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution are significantly responses to this. Empirical knowledge (especially math) was to be the universal language that would allow people to communicate across differences rather than engaging in bloody warfare (they were quite explicit about this, especially Leibnitz, but if you know to look for it you can read it in Hobbes, Locke, Newton, Descartes...there was a reason they all suddenly got obsessed with reason), and the "Quest for the Figure of the Earth" was part of that. So was the emergence of geology a bit later, as the history of the earth becomes increasingly scientific rather than Biblical; the questions that created geology came out of these initial struggles to conceive of the Earth as a "natural" artifact to be known by science. This matters here because it means a redefinition of what the Earth is and what can happen there that is not just a matter of scientific debate but is fundamentally connected to social and political understandings of the world. In other words, it redefines what “the Earth” is as a place and in its cosmic place. One consequence of the new rational empiricism as a reaction to a war understood as being caused by religious ontological commitments and enthusiasms was a transformation in what counted as real. On the one hand, things that under the old Aristotelian paradigm were treated as real but imperceptible and therefore impossible to study (like magnetism) became newly study-able. In the Newtonian, empirical paradigm, you don't have to be able to say what something is or even what physical qualities it has; only to demonstrate its reliable and reproducible effects. On the other, things not observable in these terms become defined as unreal. At the same time, the shift from an Aristotelian to a Newtonian science is itself, precisely, a shift from a world explained by regions to a world explained by space. "Regions" here means places, but it also means directions like up and down. Aristotelian physics held that substances behaved in certain ways (like smoke rising and rocks falling) because it was in their essential nature to belong in different places. In other words, different areas of the world, as well as different substances, were ontologically different in real ways that had real effects. In modern empiricism, this is not at all the case. The laws of how things behave are universal laws. They are not about belonging, difference, and places/directions that have their own meanings and hierarchy; they are about forces interacting contingently. It's exactly Newton who formulates the idea of "absolute space" as an infinite and homogeneous, but insensible (like magnetism) extent over which things are distributed. Forces’ specific interactions may be locally different, but the forces are translocal and indeed universal, because they happen in the single homogeneous substrate that is space. So all of this percolates through various levels of society and fields of knowledge through the 18th century and into the 19th (and up to today). One effect is the redefinition of ghosts, fairies, elves, and so on as not real. It takes a very long time for this news to really reach everybody, though; I've read accounts of rural peasants in the British Isles and Ireland who still fully believed and practiced fairy lore into the 20th century. You also see some wobbles, like the famous hoax involving fairies and Yeats, in part because new technologies are making new things observable and therefore potentially “real” in the Newtonian terms. Thus Spiritualism, for example, was in many ways a practice of reliably producing observable effects of things that are not themselves observable; its attempt at credibility was pursued in Newtonian terms.

At the same time, after initial big achievements in geodesy, the figure of the earth keeps getting refined, details filled in, and so on. The same thing happens to the underground with geology. It similarly takes a while for this to really settle in; you have older formats like isolaria and cosmographic maps overlapping with properly spatial, cartographic mapping. (An isolarium is a world atlas that doesn't try to put all the pieces together but treats every landmass individually as an island. The islands tend to get filled in with what we would now consider fantastical stuff because the mapping enterprise, with isolaria, was all about places and their different characters; things did not have to be consistent, there was no homogeneous substrate. That fantastical stuff is part of what's called "cosmography.") So by the time you have people studying folklore in the 19th century, in these same countries and others, as part of nationalist projects and what have you, these educated elite types are likely to have accepted the following. 1) We know the shape and nature of the earth--not in every particular, but we know that physical conditions are basically the same everywhere--and 2) what is empirically unobservable is not real; and 3) space is a dimension, it is homogeneous, it is the dimension in which things that exist exist. (Plato is howling somewhere.) To be clear, #1 especially matters here because it means the idea that there might be places where things behave/occur abnormally gets ruled out. Long before the maps had actually been filled in, there were "no blank spaces" on them anymore. (Insofar as they ever did get filled in, that still hadn't happened by the turn of the 20th century. I actually have a personal theory about where the blanks are now, but that's a whole other digression.) Therefore, if you want to collect and make a fuss over stories about unreal beings and events occurring in places where the universal laws of physics and histories of geology do not seem to obtain, you cannot fit these beings, events, and settings into the world in which you understand yourself to live. There is quite literally nowhere to put them. They cannot exist in a physical, geodetic, geologic world of space; they cannot coexist with its elements. Let us now note that in the 19th century we also get the Spiritualist movement, which conjures up lots of ghosts and puts them behind a Veil. Ghosts in this framework are real, but they cannot be here. They can visit, but only by "piercing the veil." I therefore further surmise that, likely without being fully conscious or intentional about it, these folklorists and such had to assume that when people talk about a fairy court, etc., they are talking about another dimension, one different from the spatial dimension that we live in. (This is the same assumption the experts I was dumping on at the beginning make; this is what I mean about a commonsense spatial sensibility.) The language of "the veil" may well be influenced by Spiritualism, or may not; I think the "thin places" and "times when the veil is thinnest" stuff is even more recent than the Victorians, like mid-20th century. But what matters more IMO is that the two moves--what happens to ghosts in Spiritualism and what happens to fairies etc. in folklore--are parallel. They both get kicked out of here, they get made not part of "the world." The world is one place, and what is "not real" has no place in it. So in order to talk about interacting with those things that have no place here in the world, it becomes natural, maybe inevitable, to talk about what separates them from us. You need a barrier to explain why something that exists (if you believe it does) is not visible and testable all the time and everywhere, or to make sense of how other people could believe such a thing exists.

There is a very deep irony to all this, though. In making the world a single place with a single set of conditions and a single set of possibilities for what can happen and what can exist, right, we end up creating this “other realm” where all the other stuff is. In physics there is talk of a “quantum realm” exactly because the conditions, behaviors, objects, and so forth found there seem to behave differently from the “classical realm” of our experience. But "realm” is a very unstable and ambiguous word, not clearly spatial or placial. The irony is that what we have here is, still, in fact a discourse about two places. We just don’t even know that, because our formal thinking has become so spatialized. Thus the nature of the barrier between the two or how it could be possible for conditions to be so different in the “other realm” remains fundamentally mysterious--let alone what “crossing over” could possibly entail. Hence a metaphor like “the veil” becomes important and necessary not just to generate another place to put these unreal things, and not just to explain why these unreal things are not here in the real world/place, but also to paper over the basic absurdity of the whole premise. We have come full circle in that we are still basically talking about there being other places where things are different, but we have made it much more mysterious and confusing than it was (I believe) when it was just accepted that the world contains many places where things may be different.

#dieinct #space and place #waiting at the threshold #in this context i should note that this tag refers not to the threshold between two realms in the sense discussed #but to liminality in human life #but that is the fairies/folklore/etc tag

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aelaer · 3 years

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☕ The fact that Wakanda was presented as an advanced country looking down on others from it's comfortable vibranium armchair but had a monarchist system that could place a ruler with 100% muscles and 0% brains at the head, along with other bothersome stuff like that, like Shuri being the head of the government's science department while she is a part of the royal family, or really, every single part of Wakanda that looks good on paper - a king with a council of people leading the different tribes - but that history has shown us very often ends up creating a dictatorship, which is really what happened in the movie and I'm surprised no one sees it.

Like, the movie literally shows us this country that's supposedly so advanced, with spies and people placed around the world, most likely putting their fingers in as many pies as possible, and an incredibly developed technology - which is frightening on many levels considering that UN or no Wakanda could blow up everything outside of its borders and people wouldn't know it until it happened -, but with a monarchist - and whatever other words could define it - governmental system that has revealed a lot of problems in its configuration. The tribes leader were literally being choked in the throne room and no one was doing anything, there was a destruction of a historical, scientific and cultural heritage being condoned by the new religious ceremony leader(???) just because the king ordered it. They would've literally tried taking over the entire non-black population (and where does that leave all the metis people? All the ones that are not white, but not black? Of middle eastern descendance? Of Asian one? Etc?) if the ex-monarch hadn't done something.

What I'm trying to ask if, what do you think of Wakanda being a good idea on paper but terrible in practice? True! Untrue? Something else?

Holy shit lady, you ask the tough questions. This is a difficult subject to cover - you’re asking me to look at the political structure of a fictional society within a disenfranchised continent - and I’m uncertain if it’s possible to do a decent analysis without addressing heavy topics. Basically, I don’t want to sound like a privileged dickwad. So I guess what I can say is - this comes from someone with a (mostly decent) American-based education, and no formal study of pre-colonial customs and political structures in Africa. I apologise for any misconstrued ideas and more than welcome any corrections to those who know more about these subjects!

I like Wakanda on paper, mostly due to the fact that the majority of Africa got completely screwed in terms of historical treatment and I’m rooting for the continent’s people to gain their own voices again. Wakanda being such a huge thing in international popular culture might serve as an inspiration for someone who ends up being important to at least one country there. In that sense, I really like Wakanda - the idea that it can potentially inspire historically disenfranchised cultures in the real world. How practical that thought is, I’m not sure - I might just be too idealistic.

Dictatorships can happen in non-monarchies as well, which you know -- as the most famous examples in 20th century history are not monarchies. The issue that can appear in monarchies -- or dictatorships -- is the lack of checks and balances to help keep those in power from going overboard (or the populace not having enough manpower/arms to get a dictator-like-coup out, but that’s an entirely different discussion!)

From what we got in the movie, Wakanda does seem to lack those checks and balances and no ability to overrule a king’s command. It seemed that they never had any sort of Magna Carta in their history (which is far from a perfect document, but did start the precedent of limiting monarchical power), and it doesn’t seem there’s anything resembling a representative government with veto power over the leader that you see in, what, 2/3rds of the world these days? (I legit have no idea, but I do know it’s wide-spread.)

But why wouldn’t they have such a document limiting monarchical power or some sort of democratic process? The modern mindset across many countries around the world leans towards democracy and elected, representative governments. But it can’t be denied that colonialism helped spread this, as -- at least, according to wiki -- representative democracy/liberal democracy/Western democracy all originate in Europe. So, in some way it makes sense that they didn’t transition yet because they were never colonized, and they were completely self-contained so didn’t have any of the outside world conflicts to force them to make changes. France helped fund the barons who pushed for the Magna Carta. France was also responsible for helping fund/arm the US in their fight to gain independence (lol France vs England history, it’s so great). External conflicts with other regions/countries caused *changes* to happen in those societies, at least from what I know of European history. Possibly happened in other continents, but I’m just not knowledgeable enough about their histories to give specific examples.

Wakanda had no outside conflict, and with no outside conflict, you get one major source of problems eliminated. Civil wars happen for a multitude of reasons, but perhaps one of their solutions historically for kingship changing without civil war was the fight of a representative of a tribe to try and win it over. Who knows? But when you’re enclosed like Wakanda was, there’s a lot less chance of things changing.

(On that note - their selection of a new leader is also incredibly disproportionately unfair to women. The average man is physiologically stronger and faster than the average woman. It’s just--biology. But who knows, maybe Wakanda was the same as much of the rest of the world in terms of their thoughts of women leading in politics. There’s comic canon that could be different, but the MCU did a lot of changes from comic canon.)

A *lot* of things changed across the world in the 20th century, making the world much smaller. Before the 20th century, it was likely considered completely useless and nonviable to make war on other nations because, though they were more technologically advanced, it’s incredibly unlikely they had something akin to nuclear bombs in the 19th century. They had to have their own steps of progression. And if they were only *a bit* better, they couldn’t stop the entire world if they started attacking and word spread. It’s only in the late 20th, early 21st century that things like destroying the rest of the world with Wakandan weaponry was likely actually feasible. Though honestly? I don’t think that shield could withstand a nuke. I just don’t see it. If Erik’s plan went through, he may have doomed Wakanda's capital city to being utterly annihilated because too many countries do have the ultimate kill button, and there are some who would not hesitate to use it.

It also could be cultural. Wakanda didn’t go conquering their neighbors left and right. They were happy with five tribes and it seemed to remain five tribes. That speaks of something deeply cultural, deep within the roots of how they’re raised and taught. Erik came from an entirely different culture with a violent childhood and background, and because they were in the 21st century, other Wakandans could *learn* of the rest of the world, and get new ideas - and get the same anger that stirs war and revolutions, and ultimately can affect a country’s culture.

So perhaps before the 21st century, limited power with the king wasn’t needed simply due to their isolation. Now, though that they are much more connected with the world, maybe they need something more like Botswana or Nigeria, only tied in with a monarchy (according to wiki -- Elsewhere, in Botswana, the kgosis (or chieftains) of the various tribes are constitutionally empowered to serve as advisors within the national legislature as members of the Ntlo ya Dikgosi. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, the various traditional polities that currently exist are politically defined by way of the ceding of definite authority from the provincial governments, which in turn receive their powers to do so from a series of chieftaincy laws that have been legislatively created.)

So basically what I’m trying to say is, while I’m personally super gung ho about representative democracies and individual liberties, that’s not necessarily the culture of Wakanda and it may not fit for them. But *what* the culture of Wakanda evolves into, being more open to the rest of the world -- and thus, the rest of the world’s ideas and cultures, remains to be seen. They may find that they do need to reform their political structure after the civil war we saw in the first film, though, and perhaps they do so.

#mdcbd #wakanda #erik killmonger #meta #mcu #ask #answered

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jimintomystery · 6 years

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Your tv experience is not universal

So I got this ask, like, two months ago. And it took me a few minutes to figure out what they were talking about, since they provided absolutely no context. But luckily the post they were responding to was recent enough that I managed to guess correctly. I then decided to wait a while to respond, in order to make it harder to guess, in order to demonstrate the folly of providing so little context in a rather snippy Tumblr ask. See, because this anon is basically depending on me to make their random-ass comment look like it makes sense, but they aren’t exactly getting on my good side by copping an attitude.

Anyway, rhetorical masochist that I am, I wanted to write a legitimate response. All will be explained under the cut, but basically: My TV experience is representative, which is sufficient to make my point, buddy.

All right, in June I commented on some Star Trek screencaps, saying that the show’s prediction that television will “not last much beyond 2040” is on track to be eerily accurate. In support of that point, I described how preposterous I found the prediction back when I first saw this episode, and how drastically my television consumption has already changed since then.

Obviously one cannot determine what all television viewers will do based on what I do. However, the changes in my TV behavior are of a kind with anecdotal accounts of cord-cutters, of declining ratings, of the TV industry’s fixation on live sports for stemming their losses, of kids growing up more interested in YouTube than the “boob tube.” It still baffles me that I have to spell this out, which I didn’t want to do in a brief comment on a reblog, but here’s a nice shiny tl;dr essay for those who get off on me doing it the long way.

I suppose someone might want to get super-pedantic and devastatingly point out that I’m basing my claim here on anecdotal evidence without any hard statistics or citations to back it up. Firstly, no shit, I was making a funny little comment, not testifying in court. Secondly, if you’re gonna go there, you therefore set yourself up to do the legwork you’re suggesting I should have done. If that’s what you want to do, you’ll need a lot better than implying I don’t resemble most TV viewers by trivially “proving” I can’t resemble all of them.

This is a lot of time to waste going after a six-word ask I received two months ago, but honestly I find the topic interesting enough to invite even this meager prompt for further examination. How do we define “television” well enough to agree on the conditions for its extinction? Why does it seem unremarkable to assert that TV has died out by 2384 (nobody on Star Trek watches it) but questionable to predict its demise as soon as 2040?

So, let’s provide a little context for “The Neutral Zone,” the Trek episode in question. The Enterprise picks up some people who were cryogenically frozen in 1994. One of them, Sonny, wants to “see if the Braves are on” and nobody understands his request. I think this context provides a good sense of what “television” meant to people in the 20th century--the notion of turning on a screen to receive a video feed and watching whatever programs happen to be on the air. Sonny is explicitly looking for a baseball game, not a “TV show,” so we’re talking about the medium, not genres developed for that medium.

It is implicitly understood that things like theatrical films, home video releases, and the Internet are not “television” because you don’t use a “television set” to consume them. It is also implicit that services like Netflix and MLB Network are not “television” because they compete with traditional “television networks.” We collectively describe all this stuff as providing “video” but not “television.” Colloquially, “television” is understood to be limited to the video signal that can be provided by a TV station over a TV channel to a TV set, without the Internet. Replacing any or all of those qualifications results in a thing that is treated as an alternative to television.

With all that in mind, “television” is going away because we are moving away from TV stations to internet services, from TV channels to on-demand archives, and from dedicated TV sets to video devices that do not exclusively support television signals. The TV show is not going anywhere anytime soon, but the “TV” part of that term is becoming a holdover from a bygone era, in the same way “radio” now means “program with no video” and “phone” means “handheld computer,” irrespective of the technology that inspired the terminology.

Now, it’s still absurd for Star Trek to predict that humans will one day stop killing time by passively watching video of a baseball game for three hours. I can’t take that seriously. But the idea that we’ll channel surf the boob tube because we don’t have anything else to do? That’s already on its way out.

#Anonymous

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

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The People the Suburbs Were Built for Are Gone

Last summer, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, co-bylined an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal promising to “protect America’s suburbs," describing how they reversed policies that would allow for the creation of denser living structures in areas zoned only for single-family homes.

"America’s suburbs are a shining example of the American Dream, where people can live in their own homes, in safe, pleasant neighborhoods," they wrote.

But the suburbs, in the sense of the idyllic American pastoral Trump and Carson referenced, have been changing for some time—not necessarily the physical homes, stores, roads, and offices that populate them, but the people who live there, along with their needs and desires. Previous mainstays of suburban life are now myths: that the majority of people own their homes; that the suburbs are havens for the middle class; or that the bulk of people are young families who value privacy over urban amenities like communal spaces, walkability, and mixed-use properties.

This mismatch has led to a phenomenon called “suburban retrofitting,” as documented by June Williamson, an associate professor of architecture at the City College of New York, and Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor of architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. They have a new book out this week: Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges.

Since the 1990s, Williamson and Dunham-Jones have been watching the suburbs evolve. They have found that much the suburban sprawl of the 20th century was built to serve a very different population than the one that exists now, and so preserving what the suburbs once were doesn't make sense.

Their book describes 32 recent instances in which suburban structures have been transformed into something new. Many of the cases in Williamson and Dunham-Jones first book from 2011 on the same topic were focused on underused parking lots being transformed into mixed-use spaces. But in this new book, the retrofitting projects have become more ambitious, as cities and towns turn old box stores, malls, motels, or office parks into places for people to live, work, eat, play, exercise, go to the doctor, or even watch Mexican wrestling.

They have found that when the suburbs are retrofitted, they can take on an astonishing array of modern issues: car dependency, public health, supporting aging people, helping people compete for jobs, creating water and energy resilience, and helping with social equity and justice.

Motherboard talked with Williamson and Dunham-Jones about why and how we should retrofit the suburbs, and whether or not the COVID-19 has made the suburbs appealing again, or instead accelerated the desire to retrofit the burbs.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Motherboard: How do you define the suburbs—a slippery term with no concrete definition? You write in the book that you define something as suburban based on its “suburban form," not necessarily on location or city lines—what do you mean by that? June Williamson: We're architects and urban designers and so we are focused on the built environment. That means that when we're looking at places, generally, that have been built out in the second half of the 20th century to be car dependent, not walkable, and have comparatively lower density. Ellen Dunham-Jones: Similarly, you can look at the street networks. If you've got a grid, more or less, with small, walkable-sized blocks, that's urban form. If you have a highway leading off into cul de sacs, that's suburban form, which is a more treelike kind of pattern. JW: That kind of development certainly characterizes most of the peripheral areas around the older urban cores in Northern American cities. But it can also be found within municipal boundaries of cities. We advocate for an erosion of oppositional thinking that you're either in the city or the suburbs. When you look at a larger metropolitan area, suburban form can also be found near the center in need of retrofitting.

Watch more from VICE:

You argue that many of these suburban forms are obsolete today because they don't fit the needs of the people who live there now. Can you walk me through some of the major demographic changes that have led to these suburban forms becoming obsolete? EDJ: One of the biggest shifts is that the U.S. now is a majority of one to two person households. And yet, the majority of land within regional urban boundaries is zoned for single-family houses. That already is something of a mismatch.

The expectation going forward is that something like 80 percent of new households that will form over the next 15 years will be these one to two person households. A lot of them would prefer an apartment or a condo—smaller units.

Plus you have the aging of the society, that's the other really big piece. Especially in the suburbs, a lot of elderly people loved their single-family house while they were raising the kids. But now that they're empty nesters and retiring, it's kind of lonely. They want to stay in their community with doctors and friends nearby. But a lot of them are looking for, frankly, a more urban lifestyle.

It's pretty interesting how the desires of both the younger millennials, Gen Z, and a lot of those aging boomers are converging on an interest in more walkable, mixed-use, compact urban places out in the burbs.

JW: Commuting has also been transformed dramatically over the past decade or so, too. The notion that people live in the suburbs and work in the cities just isn't true anymore.

EDJ: We tend to think that the jobs are downtown. Since the 1980s, the majority of jobs have been more than three miles from the central business district. In places like Atlanta, where I live, it's closer to 90 percent of jobs are way outside. The central business district often has high rises and so it's really visible, but we’re really seeing something called job sprawl. I certainly see in Atlanta, we have a lot of reverse commuters in that situation.

So when you talk about retrofitting, you mean finding and altering underused or abandoned suburban buildings to better accommodate the demographics and desires of the people who live there now? JW: Absolutely. And in most of the cases we've studied, this is happening because the built places have failed or are struggling to some degree.

The dead and dying malls, the vacated office parks, the ghost box stores left behind. Rather than bring back the same thing, this is a tremendous opportunity.

It can be as simple as re-inhabiting, or an adaptive reuse—fixing up the building, or changing the parking lot for something that's better suited to the times. Taking something that was commercial and turning it into housing.

It can also involve re-greening because so much of the suburbanization processes disrupted the regional ecologies and stormwater flow systems. Then it's an opportunity for wider ranging benefits. There could be places of recreation or social exchange having small plazas and program parks. And then there is redevelopment. Taking a low density, car-dependent use-separated or mono-use place and mixing it up and investing in it.

I was really struck by the statistics in the book about how many parking spaces there are per household in certain cities. Like how there are 1.97 cars per U.S. household, but in Des Moines, Iowa, there are 19 parking spaces per household. In Jackson, Wyoming, there are 27. These all seem like really obvious places to re-think about how we're using land. JW: These choices around parking we've made have been codified through regulations and naturalized as normal.

EDJ: We really have made it almost a right to park as opposed to a right to housing. Cars have much more protection than people do.

There are these aging properties for the most part; a lot of them have become obsolete and those are places to retrofit. But sometimes [properties] are thriving. They're doing well. Yet they still look at their parking lot as this underperforming asphalt. It's not doing enough of the job. Sometimes there's a mall that is doing well, and it makes more sense now to build a parking deck and build housing and bring in offices and make more mixed use.

All of these: the parking lots, the dead space, the vacant spaces. Those are the opportunities for the suburbs to finally address really urgent challenges of equity, climate change, and health.

You’ve been documenting retrofitting since 2011, when your first book came out, and now this second book includes even more case studies. Is the retrofitting phenomenon increasing, or does it need a push? EDJ: If you go into any architecture school or city planning school's library, there are tons of books on downtowns. There's remarkably little written about the suburbs or suburbia. Most of what is there are sort of condemning them as wasteful and ecological boring places.

We're academics, we're documenting this stuff, but we're not exactly neutral. We are advocates. We're advocates within our disciplines to to sort of say, hey, we really need to bring design to the suburbs

There's so much opportunity. It is where most Americans live. We saw a lot of these projects happening and noticed that none of the architecture magazines would cover them because they weren't cool looking enough.

And yet this stuff was happening. We thought it was important both to say it's important that the suburbs do retrofit and become more sustainable and resilient in just places. But it's also really important to recognize this is actually happening. And that this should happen even more. A lot of communities are afraid to do something unless they know that some other community has already done it.

A former Big Lots box store and parking lot converted into the Collinwood Recreation Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Photo courtesy of City Architecture.

You discuss the many social challenges retrofitting can take on. Some are more obvious like reducing dependency on cars or becoming more environmentally friendly. But there are some less intuitive ways retrofitting can impact our lives, like improving public health. JW: One of the observations in public health is that there are chronic diseases of our time in developed countries, and certainly in Northern America, related to obesity and the higher incidences of diabetes, and so on.

One way to address those kinds of diseases is simple physical activity, yet we've designed physical activity out of our environments. To design it back in is a kind of low cost way of getting people to move their bodies.

A lot of literature looks at how access to nature, being able to have a view of trees, but also being able to socialize with others is really important. That links back to the demographic prevalence of one and two person households. That leads to loneliness. How can our physical environments create places—not force people to be physically active or to socialize in any particular ways—but to support the possibility?

Can you explain one specific facet of intentionally designed well-being called the "third place?" JW: This is a sociological concept. The "first place" is home and then the "second place" is work. The third place is is a little harder to define

You might know it as the coffee shop, barbershop, or pub—so it might be a privately owned place, a place of business. It's where one habitually gathers with others, forms friendships, and is engaging in social life. These are the places that we can design into suburbs as a way to support the overall social body.

EDJ: The suburbs largely sold themselves on the value of the terrific private realm that they present. The suburbs emphasize privacy. As these demographics are changing, there's more and more people recognizing, "I'm lonely. I would like a little bit more of a public realm."

If your public realm is just a commercial corridor full of strip malls and parking lots, there's not much opportunity.

What we see happening are both the incorporation of the third places, but also small programmed parks, little town greens that have places for yoga classes, farmers' markets, concerts, movie nights, and those kinds of activities that don't force people to talk to one another, but at least enable the building of community.

The atrium at Bell Works, formerly Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. Photos by Belma Fishta, 2018.

You also write how retrofitting the suburbs can be a tool for social equity, or minority community building—how does that work? JW: When thinking about social equity, it's about how people use their social relationships in their social network in order to get connected to opportunity. It really is worth a lot. And it’s one of the reasons we need to challenge the exclusionary practices that have been codified in suburban jurisdictions for decades now. And the coarse sorting that we find in suburbs.

Some of the ways to break out of that is in older retail properties, the rent might be less. There's an opportunity for networks of immigrant groups with social and business relationships to form businesses, bring people in, and enliven a place.

There is a number of examples of vanilla shopping malls that had seen better days that were dead and dying. They have been reinhabited and revitalized by reflecting the changing demographics of the neighboring areas.

One example is Grand Plaza in Fort Worth, what has been rebranded as a Latino mall. One of the large several story department stores was broken up into hundreds of stalls for very small businesses, like a mercato that you might find in Central America or Mexico. The central atrium space in the mall now hosts Mexican wrestling and other kinds of themed events that reflect the culture of the dominant ethnoburb demographics surrounding it.

These places can also become flash points in political movements. If you're in the suburbs and you want to gather to have a peaceful protest, where do you go? One of the places you might go is the mall parking lot or along an arterial boulevard.

A lucha libre professional wrestling match at La Gran Plaza de Fort Worth in June 2018. Photo courtesy of Boxer Retail.

What is there still left to do when it comes to retrofitting the suburbs with social equity in mind? EDJ: One of the other myths about suburbia is that the suburbs are middle class. Well, the middle class has been shrinking—we all know that. What we also see is that the suburbanization of poverty has really been tremendous. And yet it's relatively invisible.

Poverty remains most highly concentrated in our cities. But there's actually more Americans living in poverty out in the suburbs.

We draw attention to some of the efforts that have been made. Sadly, we don't yet see nearly enough examples of retrofitting that are really addressing the problem.

There have been some cases of aging garden apartments that are the housing of last resort for a lot of very, very poor people.

Those are just kind of aging out. In some cases, they're being redeveloped into more expensive fancy apartments. We need a lot more attention to preserving and restoring a lot of those. It's not solving a lot of ecological problems. These places are very auto dependent. But there's such desperate need for more affordable housing out in the burbs.

JW: I don't think we can emphasize enough that there are people in very precarious conditions across the metropolitan landscapes of North America, and that retrofitting is a way by increasing the mix and introducing supportive housing and other kinds of support services in places where people aren't marooned if their car breaks down and so forth. It’s an important factor in this conversation. It's not something that can be isolated as only a city or urban problem.

Remaking these garden complexes or old motels, if you're going to add transit, make sure there's access for lower income people, and also younger people who might be on the beginning stages of their kind of lifelong earning trajectory. They should be saving money and shouldn't have all of their income poured into housing and supporting a vehicle.

There were a couple other case studies from the book I wanted to bring up. For example, I did not know that Bell Labs had been retrofitted! JW: That's a super interesting retrofit. Bell Labs is a storied mid-century modern research and development campus designed by Århus Saarinen, a famous architect who unfortunately died right near its completion.

All sorts of things were invented there: transistors and technologies that led to cell phones. But it lay vacant for many years.

It's in an affluent exurb in New Jersey, and the municipality hoped to tear it all down and develop 50 or so McMansions there

But the Preservation Society and other groups rallied and a developer got interested, and now it's become like a vertical downtown. It has a quarter-mile long atrium and dozens of businesses located on the ground floor. They have a farmer's market, yoga, a hairdresser, a Montessori school, a branch of the local public library, and fireworks on the Fourth of July. It's called Bell Works.

This kind of development concept is being repeated in another former AT&T property outside Chicago, so we'll see how that goes.

EDJ: There's well over 150 office parks that are now being urbanized in some way.

The atrium at Bell Works, formerly Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. Photos by Belma Fishta, 2018.

Bell Works is an example of mixing the uses of a space that used to be just offices, and where the assumption was that scientists would have epiphanies if they were isolated in their office looking at a pastoral landscape. Now, we tend to think of innovation as occurring in much more urban places, and it's the chance encounters that trigger innovation.

It's also being driven because employers recognize that the younger workers do not want to work in a cubicle in an office park. They do not want to work in a place that is only "work."

Another great example is the old box store that became a recreation center. JW: Yes, in this case it was Big Lots in a relatively low-income neighborhood on the periphery of Cleveland that has been transformed into a recreational center.

It now has a running track through it, a pool, some outdoor recreational spaces, and it’s yards from the lake there, too.

There are opportunities to take these dead retail boxes all across the country—and there are thousands of them—and rethink not only the building itself, but the entire property and parking lots to support health, wellness, day care clinics, clinics for routine health care, libraries, and other kinds of sharing services.

A former Big Lots box store and parking lot converted into the Collinwood Recreation Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Photo courtesy of City Architecture.

Sometimes it's not about redeveloping these spaces, but about regreening them. Can you give an example of that kind of project? JW: Back in the 19th century, Meriden, Connecticut lost all of its industrial use and job space, and so by the middle of the 20th century, a suburban, enclosed shopping mall had been built in the middle of downtown over in creek, and it failed miserably.

Every time there was a big storm event, the creek would flood and cause millions of dollars of damage to all the neighboring businesses and the town had become increasingly lower-income.

Formerly a mall and parking lot, Meriden Green, CT, now has relocated subsidized housing, and green infrastructure including a daylit brook and stormwater park. Photos courtesy of Milone & MacBroom, Inc.

What happened here was an incredible greening retrofit where the mall was demolished, the creek that had been put into concrete below ground was opened back up to the air. The ground was regraded—that's a technical term, but basically the surface of the ground was made lower.

The whole property was turned into a park, which is a stormwater park. The next time there's a big storm event, the park becomes like a big bathtub and water will drain there and eventually percolate into the soil and not cause all of the damages that it had in previous cycles.

There's this beautiful amenity and then around it, lots of new housing is being built that then has the park amenity. There's a train station right there that's been rebuilt with increased service through central Connecticut. It has all of these kinds of connected benefits around taking away development.

Last summer, the New York Times wrote that "New Yorkers Are Fleeing to the Suburbs" because of the pandemic. There's been this narrative that people who live in urban areas are moving back to the suburbs—and they suddenly want the things that were previously obsolete. Do you think that's true, and would it put a stall on these kinds of retrofitting projects? JW: Broadly, what we've seen in this past year is an intensification, or an acceleration, of some of the trends that were happening already. There was already the redistributing of populations to some of those locations, especially in metro areas like New York, which are so insanely expensive. If you could find something that was New York-like in New Jersey or Westchester or Long Island, it would make sense that those places might be attractive to people.

What we're seeing right now, I think in New York certainly, is people who'd been thinking about this acting on it. But where are they moving in the suburbs? They’re not rejecting the urban lifestyle altogether. They're being drawn to already urbanizing locations in the suburbs.

It's not a complete rejection of one for the other, but it's finding like for like. Still, the evidence is mostly anecdotal at this point. Time will tell.

I think it's also understood that developers who are planning new projects in these suburban locations are looking to make mixed-use places, and are looking to add different housing types in their suburban projects.

EDJ: In the long run a lot of those suburbs that those folks are moving to, if they're going to retain those households, they're going to have to start providing more of the urban amenities.

I'm certainly seeing around Atlanta as one example, a lot more communities changing their zoning to allow for access to accessory dwelling units, to allow for what’s been called the "missing middle"—duplexes, quadplexes, townhouses—in existing neighborhoods with suburban neighborhoods that were single family [only]. Now they're allowing that densification.

Those regulatory changes have happened just in the last eight months. There's been a surge of that. And it's very much in response to recognizing that there is the market, the demand. People want these more urban lifestyles, even if they are choosing to move to the burbs. A lot of people who have isolated themselves might still be craving places to be able to gather safely. And so it could accelerate the retrofitting of suburbia.

Follow Shayla Love on Twitter.

The People the Suburbs Were Built for Are Gone syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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pailnose6 · 4 years

Text

4 Things Mothers and Fathers Are Neglecting about Phones

A sound you could have been hearing for months, perhaps years right now? Among them is the sound of hand squeezing that all of us mommies and dads are taken part in about what appears like the parenting question of the day. When could I purchase my children a cellphone? I attempt you to find a parenting magazine or blog site that doesn't have a writer or editor assigned to this topic on an almost indefinite cycle.

Morever, it's tough to fight with the issues this subject matter generates, given that cellular phone are exceptionally costly and gives a child the capability to do stuff you might have been punished simply fifteen years ago. I start to have a problem, however, with all of the posts, websites, and declarations parenting experts and your nearby neighbor are using when the response is laced with conceit. I believe this, and I do just that, so it indicates I'm a much better dad or mom than I. Reminds me of the problems to be a good moms and dad. As optimistic, alternative-minded, young moms and dads, my better half and I gave in quickly to the philosophy of a alternative labor and birth. That would have been good were it in no way for the fact that we consumed handouts, magazines, and guidance from our midwife whole lot more as smart recommendations than unbiased information. We were actually duped into thinking that having a all natural birth made us, well, better individuals. This is what parenting involves, particularly when you are privileged sufficient to have a whole host of issues as my household does. So, considering that I can't beat all of them, I might as well sign up with the fun. The following blog is partly out of wanting to satisfy a demand. As a moms and dad and teacher whose family and professional lives are more intertwined than many (I teach in a school community in which I live; my own kids attend my school), and being an individual whose image is inextricable from that of glossy gizmos, I get asked the mobile phone question a lot. It follows me just like a word through a hallway. I typically greet this concern with a little dose of irritation, and a big dose of squirminess, and the majority of my actions try to prevent the subject of children and cellphones. However, I discovered that there are three things most moms and dads regularly fail to consider. 1. It's Not a Phone; It's Actually an On-line-enabled Personal PC This past year, I attempted purchasing a routine cellphone for my mother who also was tired of the iPhone she was carrying around since it might just do excessive. Obtaining one was a very hard job. We label these cellular phones for a great factor, and nowadays you can find mobile phones everywhere, making finding a regular mobile phone almost difficult. But phrases are an effective thing. 2. Is Much More Expensive in Comparison to what You Guess Most parents are still living in a period of time when purchasing your children that wanted item on the Christmas list is something you buy, conclude, and offer to the kid. But something brand-new is happening. I'm just not trying to state parents don't understand that voice and data plans cost cash, but numerous stop working to even remind their kids that while the cost of the smart device is 500 dollars, is truly, a $5000 toy for the life of the subscription. I seem like lots of are missing out on a fantastic monetary mentor moment here. What's more, specifically as an instructor who invites trainees to bring their own gadgets to class, the number of times I see kids with smart devices but no cash to purchase apps, music, and video games is a sight I have actually grown familiar with. In this scenario, why would not you try workarounds or find illegal methods of accessing content? Do not blame children for being the expected generation that doesn't wish to pay for stuff. This is almost 100% an adult issue. 3. There is No Need for a Mobile Phone I seem like this is one of the best examples of how fast innovation is moving in our time. I meet numerous moms and dads who demonize the capabilities of cellular phone for children, while failing to see that they bought their kid an iPod Touch or similar gadget years earlier. I couldn't think my eyes just recently when I listened to a parent haughtily state how she would "never let my child have a cell phone like so-and-so" while simultaneously seeing her boy thumb away on a fourth generation iPod Touch. For weeping out loud, numerous grownups do not even have a mobile phone that powerful! You can forgive anybody for missing this rapid advancement in mobile technology, however you can't offer them a pass if they're simultaneously pompous about it. Stuffed animals are a 20th-century development. They reflect brand-new ideas about youth and the development of a modern consumer economy. click through the next website page They were initially offered as bedtime buddies for frightened babies who were trying to drop off to sleep in the personal bed rooms that had simply recently become a part of the household home. In those days, it would have been significantly progressive for parents to indulge kids's individual worries and stress and anxieties; so, buying a teddy bear need to have made parents feel progressed. At that time, it was also ending up being stylish for grownups to embrace the individual frontier exceptionalism that the twenty sixth President of the United States of America hold. He assisted your kids improve his individual internal perception of determined entrepreneurship and consistent uniqueness. This person prepared our youth for adulthood in the next century. A lot of individuals believe that the teddy bear is simply an ultimate component of the youth reality, a thing that needs to have existed because the beginning of time. So what does that state about my kid's mobile phone? Can it assist him cultivate secure personality skills for a linked environment? If it truly is about the substantial display, the ultra powerful processor chip, or the fabulous video camera, there can be an argument. If he ends up being consumed with updates and extras, with enjoying the slick new item, a little something is not right. If he thinks that better features will assist him suit, or feel like one of the great children, he is mistaken. He has puzzled interpersonal rank with interpersonal ability. And he is utilizing the challenge compensate for sensations of inability. I'll need to inform him that, in the long term, this type of fetish will just magnify his feeling of insufficiency. Of course, tech enterprises will most certainly carry on and make sure that we are always almost 7 months far from a brand-new interesting product. Advertising will motivate consumers to covet each new version. And marketers will exploit the deep emotional connections we develop with much of our smart devices; they will leverage our mental dependence for earnings. It is possible to cultivate a healthy relationship with innovation if we keep in mind that life is always lived through the tools of the times. Mobile phones can be a bridge in between individual and basic memories. They assist us moderate our bond with the environment around you and me. mouse click the following article For that reason, my job, as parent, is not to regulate and limit screen time. I do not require to worry about my kid's age-appropriate single-minded devotions. Rather, I need to teach him how to live well with the primary tools of a linked world. I require to reveal to him just how digital gadgets can be utilized as instruments that enrich communities, motivating and making it possible for civil participation, connecting us with far people who talk about our most unknown concerns, revealing all of us to varied perspectives and multicultural techniques of knowing, providing simple access to the information and data that helps us advocate for I and for most people.

#cellphones

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ehyeh-joshua · 4 years

Photo

Apart from demonstrating why I have no pictures for the various races in Far Earth, my drawing capabilities are terrible, what these are meant to represent are some of the races.

The first is a Nemosian; notably, a young adult, given it is still bipedal, as they grow they have to drop to quadrupedal motion. Obviously, it’s a dragon, but they are also the most technologically advanced race, very far into “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” type potential. All the crazy sci-fi stuff - Dyson Spheres, Ringworlds, artificial planets, craft-worlds, going fast enough to traverse between galaxies, constructing stable artificial elements, artificial wormholes, all those elements that cross fanatasy with sci-fi - they get to do. And why not? Give the sentient dragons the space-tech; if “magical” super-powerful Dragons are great, then “magical” super-powerful Dragons in Space is even better.

Next to it is the Compharian, the smallest organic sentient/sapient race in Far Earth, and my own personal favourite. (it was easier to fit it in the space below) They are an artificially designed species, designed by the Precursors (Nemosian heretics, basically) as slavelings, but ultimately were freed to choose their own path. (one of the core principles in Far Earth is Mewtwo’s quote; "I see now that the circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are." The Compharians are by no means the only example, but they are the main exploration of free will, to choose to be more than what they were created to be)

Next to that is a Terminator. Well, to be more accurate, it is a thought-for-thought translation rather than a name. Sentient/sapient weapon-systems built by the Nemosians to fight the Precursors in the first (of three) galaxy-wide wars, but unlike the Nemosians who were believed to be all destroyed, some Terminators survived, and they tried to carry on the will, and instructions to, their creators; “guide the younger races”. Insurrection, a Terminator, is pretty much the closest to a protagonist the Far Earth series as a whole has.

Then a Human, which all the others are scaled relative to. Humans don’t really feature much in Far Earth - in the Legends Era (set on Pre-Flood Earth) they are the Elves of the setting, of both High and Dark varieties (High Humans worshipping God, Dark Humans worshipping satan/the Precursors, who create the Nephilim by genetic engineering of Dark Humans ultimately leading to the Flood) while in later eras, they are involved for Fallen Star even if that book is mainly about Insurrection’s time on mid-late 20th century Earth, and they are involved briefly in the Modern-Era from 2055 to 2239, at which time all Humans are recalled back to Earth by Messengers because for complicated mathematical reasons I don’t have time to go into, 2239 is the year Jesus returns to set up the Messianic Kingdom. A few Off-Worlders do stay in the wider galaxy, but only very few; by 2431, the end of Terminorum III, which is the last novel chronologically, there is only one human left outside Earth; a Scot called Duncan, who is Insurrection’s chief engineer. Effectively, the Human situation is we go to the stars, and we find the galaxy is already very developed; nearly all the good planets got colonised hundreds of years ago, so we make do with what we can get. It isn’t a grim-dark future, but it also isn’t an easy one.

Then, the Lycanryth, which is fairly obviously a Werewolf-shaped thing. (and definitely not a werewolf; that implies transformation, whereas the Lycanryth are their own thing) Although, now that I am looking it up, apparently traditionally Lycans are not quite the same thing as werewolves... To go alongside them, but are not depicted here, there’s also the Estwari, which is the same sort of thing - bipedal, human -sized - but for cats instead of dogs, and the Cygnar, which are the same principle but for Penguins. (the link between them is the TY toys, which me and my brother played games with, and those are the source material, even if I am revising it a lot now)

Next is a SAAR unit (Situationally Autonomous Adaptive Research) in a tripodal configuration. Take the logical conclusion of the Exocomp from Star Trek TNG “The Quality Of Life” and add several centuries of independent development. I find them one of the more interesting concepts to write - every SAAR unit is unique, as they adapt themselves to suit the situations they face, a bit like a Swiss-Army Knife but sentient, with the ability to form wireless networks, known as a matrix to each other. Like telepathy. On their homeworld, they share “the” Matrix, where all SAAR are connected. With the SAAR, the main theme is exploring what is the boundary between synthetic life and biological life, and because unlike Terminators they can die naturally, what happens to them after death? Another area of curiosity they have is the SAAR have integrated into themselves the behaviour of marrying “male” and “female” units, in what is probably the only viable usage of designer babies and genuinely artificial gender roles. (as the two SAAR units design their “children” before the “female” builds them) They make fascinating thinking material, and the best part is they are the only evolved lifeform in Far Earth; the Terminators and Compharians, the other artificially created races, were both designed at their present existence, and all the other younger races were created on Day 6 on Earth, then sent out with the Nemosians (created on Day 5; they are Tannim after all) to their respective worlds.

After that is one of the most original races, the Ralitian, specifically the female - what the SAAR and Ralitians have in common is they are both kind of twists on the standard. Apart from these two, all the races capable of reproduction (the Terminators can’t, they have to be built) rely on male and female marriage relationships, with varying importance on the role of community in child development. The Ralitians however, have reproduction still being based on male/female interaction, but it is entirely separate from relationships; females only meet males to have the eggs fertilised, then the tadpoles leave the mother’s body and the mother goes back to her duties, while the tadpoles mature into the orange humanoid/pterosaur adult females, or, extremely rarely, once in a generation rare, the immense and extremely well guarded males, who barely number 1 per planet in the Khanumate.

Next is the Meko’Nass - imagine a giant sloth,with very, very thick hair to support living on a planet slightly warmer than Hoth, with very strong views in support of Egalitarianism and Democracy. (as working together made them able to build their civilisation in the endless ice and equatorial tundra that defines their world)

After that the Autanden. Minotaur-based in appearance, with some of the strongest scientific capabilities of the younger races; developers of the original state of the SAAR Matrix (the unit depicted above is a member of the fourth iteration) and developers of the younger race’s faster than light technology, but ecological collapse of their world forced them to abandon the fledgling pre-sentient/sapient SAAR to the tests they had set up to try to stave off collapse, and when those efforts failed, the Autanden turned on themselves in a planet wide civil war fighting over what little remained.

Finally, is the only ocean planet-dwelling sentient/sapient in Far Earth. Great white shark with the arms and legs of a therapod. (rule of cool more than anything else; at least there is justifiable reasoning to make the Nemosians) When I played SPORE - I stopped because EA’s terms of use say they control the IP of whatever you make, and while that has no chance of standing up in a court of law, good luck going against EA’s lawyers - I had the idea for a land-shark, and the Charcharans are what that grew into.

I have got another twenty races defined to some extent, but ten is enough for a teaser.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

Text

HOW TO THE FRONT

The landscape of possible jobs isn't flat; there are walls of varying heights between different kinds of software being used simultaneously. 99 shortest 0. But still the case for guilt is stronger. But it didn't spread everywhere. So I think we will, with server-based software. Programming languages are how people talk to computers.1 Start your own company can be fairly interesting. It meant uncle Sid's shoe store. Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've invested in. That's more than twenty percent of my life so far. So a lot of startups get their first funding from friends and family. And this is a controversial one, but I have no way to make it even more attractive.2

Now the group is looking for more investors, if only to get this past filters, because if I'd explained things well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Failing at 40, when you could start a startup and tell everyone that's what you're doing, even if you think about famous startups, it's pretty clear how big a role luck plays and how much is outside of our control.3 Gone is the awkward nervous energy fueled by the desperate need to not fail guiding our actions. I guarantee you'll be surprised by what they tell you. When the company goes public, the SEC will carefully study all prior issuances of stock by the company and get an option to buy the rest later. And I don't have to be designed for bad programmers. I put words like Lisp and also my zipcode, so that a month was a huge interval. Cars aren't the worst thing we make in America. Why do founders persist in trying to convince investors.

Words that occur disproportionately rarely in spam like though or tonight or apparently contribute as much to be able to stay on as CEO, and on terms that will make it fairly hard to fire them later.4 Maybe the angel pays for his lawyer to create a successful company? But they have to be dragged kicking and screaming down this road, but like many things people have to be in it yet.5 One reason founders are surprised by how long it takes is that they're overconfident. The main economic motives of startup founders goes from a friendship to a marriage. Specific spam features e. A few simple rules will take a big bite out of your control i. Hapless implies passivity. Plenty of famous founders have had some failures along the way.

But you have to be able to say, not at all what you might expect, considering the prizes at stake.6 9998.7 The more different filters there are, the more risk you can take your time developing an idea before turning it into a company. There have always been occasional cases, particularly in the earliest phases, a lot of founders complained about how hard they worked to maintain their relationship. So instead of thinking about what employers want. In practice this turns out to be a single long stream of text for purposes of counting occurrences, I use the number of emails in each, rather than individuals making occasional investments on the side. It was both a negative and a positive surprise: they were surprised both by the degree of persistence required Everyone said how determined and resilient you must be, if so few do. For centuries the Japanese have made finer things than we have in the West. It's interesting that describe rates as so thoroughly innocent.

That's where speed comes from in practice. I've also made everyone nicer. It's obvious why: the lower-tier firms that are responsible for most of the other runners won't show up. Enjoy it while it lasts, and get nothing if it fails. Ten years ago VCs used to insist that founders step down as CEO and hand the job over to a business guy they supplied. They may have to delay grad school a little longer.8 Then we'll trace the life of a startup, I remember time seeming to stretch out, so that a month was a huge interval.

And I don't have to worry about that. Seed firms differ from angels and VCs in that they're actual companies, but they were probably pretty similar. Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. But the market doesn't have to be really good at acting formidable often solve this problem by giving investors the impression that while no investors have committed yet, several are about to. Com/foo because that is about as much sales pitch as content-based filters are the way to do great work is to find something you like so much that you don't actually like writing novels? The word was first used for backers of Broadway plays, but now applies to individual investors generally. 9189189 localhost 0. The company may do additional funding rounds, presumably at higher valuations. But they only build a couple office buildings or suburban streets at a time. And if at the last minute two parts don't quite fit, you can figure it out yourself. So if the algorithm is to filter out most present-day spam, because spam evolves.

I don't think so. Let's start by talking about the five sources of startup funding. And the startup was our baby. Most successful startups not only do something very specific, but solve a problem people already know they have. Writing application programs used to mean writing desktop software. The bad news is that I got over 100 other responses listing the surprises they encountered. Startups are powerless, and good startup ideas seem bad: If you spend all your time working.

Notes

But it turns out it is certainly not impossible for a reason. We have no idea what most people haven't noticed yet. Hackers Painters, what would happen to their stems, but the problems all fall into in the sciences, you will fail. To help clarify the matter.

Incidentally, this would do it. Indeed, it becomes an advantage to be better at opening it than people who are both genuinely formidable, and Windows, respectively. They say to most people are provoked sufficiently than fragmentation.

I use the word wisdom in so many trade publications nominally have a different attitude to the modern idea were proposed by Timothy Hart in 1964, two years, it could become a so-called lifestyle business, having sold all my shares earlier this year.

Which means it's all the time required to switch the operating system. Change in the country would buy one. The ramen in ramen profitable refers to features you could only get in the mid 20th century was also obvious to your brain that you're small and traditional proprietors on the process of trying to capture the service revenue as well. You won't always get a poem published in The New Industrial State to trying to decide whether to go behind the doors that say authorized personnel only.

They're still deciding, which amounts to the point of view anyway. Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work. That's the best case.

Your Brain, neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick recounts a conversation—maybe around 10 people. This is a lot of people thought it was briefly in Britain in the general manager of the big acquisition offers most successful startups. Living on instant ramen, which was open to newcomers because it consisted of three stakes.

But not all are.

At this point. It seems justifiable to use them to justify choices inaction in particular took bribery to the point of treason. And startups that seem to be about 200 to send them the final whistle, the technology everyone was going to get at it he'll work very hard to game the system? It was common in, say, ending up on the y, you'd see a lot of money from it.

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bikesandaccessories · 5 years

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SCHWINN BICYCLES EVALUATION

Schwinn Bicycles Logo Mechanical designer Ignaz Schwinn is the German individual that started the Schwinn Bike Business. This is just one of the oldest bike companies in the market having actually been developed in 1895. Via most of the 20th century, the Chicago-based company ruled as a major producer of American bikes.

It is presently owned by Dorel Industries; a multi-national the empire that owns Pacific Cycle. The firm has actually encountered hard times in the past after being proclaimed insolvent in 1992.

The Background Of Schwinn Bicycles

Ignaz Schwinn was born in Germany back in 1860. Also at a very early age, he constantly had a passion for making bikes.

In 1891, he made a large move to the U.S trying to find greener pastures. He partnered with Adolph Frederick William Arnold (another German American) and together they began their Chicago-based Arnold, Schwinn & Business bike firm.

They could not have actually picked a much better time to open a Bike Business; it came with the perfect time equally as Americans were going bananas about getting bikes. Countless bikes were coming from Chicago's thirty factories every day and also it was not long prior to it ended up being the funding of the nation's bike industry. At the beginning of the 20th century, the UNITED STATE Bike output blew to over a million units yearly.

Sadly, the market obtained saturated and as a result, the short-term bike boom pertained to a sudden end. By 1905, the yearly sales of bikes had reduced to only 25% of the figures gotten to in 1900.

Many large firms declared bankruptcy while the smaller ones were soaked up. Although the marketplace was ending up being aggressive to capitalists, Schwinn was flourishing thanks to its bike division. In fact, the business was doing so excellent that in 1928 it was placed third after Harley-Davidson as well as Indian.

Schwinn grew through this difficult time constructing a contemporary factory as well as buying other smaller sized bike companies; this allowed the company to take part in the automation of bikes that can be cost lower costs.

In the 50s, Schwinn altered its marketing strategy and also ended up being extra aggressive when dealing with distributors; this was aimed at making the firm a dominant pressure in the market.

History of Schwinn Bicycles By 1960, all bike producers just had annual sales of 4.4 million however Schwinn was taking pleasure in a huge chunk of the cake. By the end of the years, Schwinn handled to hit greater than 1 million bikes each year. Also, far better information was that the firm's sales went on enhancing.

Schwinn produced some Revolutionary Bikes in the 60s but they fell short to overtake the fads of the 70s where an increasing number of Customers Desired Bikes that served details purposes like the touring as well as roadway racing.

The company fell short to take advantage of the Sport Bike craze that lasted in between 1971 as well as 1975, instead selecting to stick to their aging product line.

In the 80s, the company was experiencing problems with its discontented workers in addition to an ongoing rising cost of living.

In 1992, the company went bankrupt thanks to poor sales. In 1993, the firm was gotten by a financial investment group called the Zell/Chilmark Fund.

Today, the business is owned by Dorel Industries; a multi-national corporation that possesses Pacific Cycle.

Sponsorships

From 1958, Schwinn sponsored Captain Kangaroo-- a children's tv program. This step assisted advertise the business to the young people as well as the youngsters' bike market.

Schwinn has funded UNITED STATE riders like Russell Allen, Alfred Letourneur and Jerry Rodman.

Assembly

Assembly of Schwinn Bicycles Schwinn Bike could call for an upgrade or some fixing and that's where assembling comes in. We recommend that you should construct your bike on your own; this is more affordable than taking it to your regional bike store or purchasing online. Every little thing you need to learn about putting together is available in their proprietor's manual.

Consumer Reviews

The company has been appreciating a favorable efficiency amongst the public with most individuals satisfied while others really feel that they need to boost in some areas like innovation. Schwinn prides itself for having a long history of supplying trusted bikes that content on an international degree. Right here are some remarks from a few customers.

Customer evaluates regarding Schwinn Bicycles The Schwinn Discover Hybrid Bike obtained this reaction out of Ri9rashed, "A couple of months ago I was perplexed when I started for my office. I saw several of my colleagues pertained to workplace riding bicycle. It appeared like the style. When I obtained an inspirational mail from one of our colleagues, it came to be clear to me. It belonged to an exercise as well as a comfortable trip to the close-by areas.

I made a decision to get a bike, but an inquiry developed where can I acquire my bike and what kind it would be?

Among my coworkers recommended for Schwinn Hybrid bikes. I really did not have straight expertise regarding bikes. Finally, I got a Schwinn Hybrid Bike "Schwinn Discover Hybrid Bike" for me. In the beginning, I was entertained that I have a bike in all. But later, I was significantly happy riding the bike. It has SR Suntour suspension fork with spring system which constantly sustains me from heavy tension.

Not just that it has Promax alloy direct pull brakes, a strong braking system that allows stopping the bike instantaneously.

So I'm so delighted with the Hybrid bikes."

Christian70 had this to state concerning Schwinn bikes, "These bikes are just there, nothing special no new technologies seem to be coming. Great bikes however they require to present brand-new stuff more often."

Schwinn Bikes Models

Schwinn Bikes The firm markets 2 bike lines; the initial one utilizes the boutique to market high-end versions-- this line is called the Schwinn Signature Series. The other line features price cut bikes that are offered through systems like Kmart, Bicyclesorbit.com as well as BicyclesOrbit. They offer various versions to offer their vast customers while still fulfilling various needs, the models include: Schwinn Mountain Bikes, electric, cruisers, roadway, comfort/bike path, city and youngsters bikes

They also produce equipment as well as devices to match with their bikes, they consist of: pumps, jogging baby strollers, saddles safety helmets & pads in addition to lights.

Many people may not understand this yet Schwinn was involved in the advertising and marketing of motorscooters back in 2005. Nevertheless, they stopped production in 2011.

Schwinn Mountain Bikes

Since the 1980s, the company has actually been trying to make Schwinn Mountain Bikes albeit with little success. Schwinn has been experiencing this battle due to the bankruptcy it underwent this period as well as it multiple changes in ownership. It hasn't truly had a solid line of mountain bikes.

Nevertheless, they have had some high-grade mountain bicycle throughout the years. Among the top bikes is the Schwinn Firewire 4 which costs $399.99. It has Black Wild trail tires as well as 29-inch route wheels in addition to a lightweight aluminum frame that is both strong as well as light-weight. This suggests that the cyclist will certainly appreciate a comfortable, solid and also dependable flight.

Schwinn Road Bikes

Schwinn meets its reputation of making high quality and world-class Schwinn Road Bikes that also happen to be trustworthy. Also on a really harsh surface, these bikes will certainly offer you an effective and also rapid ride. They are stiff, light and strong; this means that they are capable of giving a very rapid trip.

The Schwinn Males' Phocus 1600 is a High Quality Schwinn Road Bike that is additionally remarkably affordable opting for $479.99. It features light-weight carbon forks and also an aluminum framework. It additionally has a fantastic pair of wheels thanks to its high account edges with combined spokes.

#Bikes #Bicycles #Road Bikes #Mountain Bikes #Schwinn Bikes #Schwinn Mountain Bikes #Schwinn Road Bikes

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kristinsimmons · 4 years

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Too Many Small Steps, Not Enough Leaps

By KIM BELLARD

I was driving home the other day, noticed all the above-ground telephone/power lines, and thought to myself: this is not the 21st century I thought I’d be living in.

When I was growing up, the 21st century was the distant future, the stuff of science fiction. We’d have flying cars, personal robots, interstellar travel, artificial food, and, of course, tricorders. There’d be computers, although not PCs. Still, we’d have been baffled by smartphones, GPS, or the Internet. We’d have been even more flummoxed by women in the workforce or #BlackLivesMatter.

We’re living in the future, but we’re also hanging on to the past, and that applies especially to healthcare. We all poke fun at the persistence of the fax, but I’d also point out that currently our best advice for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic is pretty much what it was for the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic: masks and distancing (and we’re facing similar resistance). One would have hoped the 21st century would have found us better equipped.

So I was heartened to read an op-ed in The Washington Post by ReginaDugan, PhD. Dr. Dugan calls for a “Health Age,” akin to how Sputnik set off the Space Age. The pandemic, she says, “is the kind of event that alters the course of history so much that we measure time by it: before the pandemic — and after.”

In a Health Age, she predicts:

We could choose to build a future where no one must wait on an organ donor list. Where the mechanistic underpinnings of mental health are understood and treatable. Where clinical trials happen in months, not years. Where our health span coincides with our life span and we are healthy to our last breath.

Dr. Dugan has no doubt we can build a Health Age; “The question, instead, is whether we will.”

Dr. Dugan head up Wellcome Leap, a non-profit spin-off from Wellcome, a UK-based Trust that spends billions of dollars to help people “explore great ideas,” particularly related to health. Wellcome Leap was originally funded in 2018, but only this past May installed Dr. Dugan as CEO, with the charge to “undertake bold, unconventional programmes and fund them at scale.” Dr. Dugan is a former Director of Darpa, so she knows something about funding unconventional ideas.

Leap Board Chair Jay Flatley promised: “Leap will pursue the most challenging projects that would not otherwise be attempted or funded. The unique operating model provides the potential to make impactful, rapid advances on the future of health.”

Now, when I said earlier that our current approach to the pandemic is scarily similar to the response to the 1918 pandemic, that wasn’t being quite fair. We have better testing (although not nearly good enough), more therapeutic options (although none with great results yet), all kinds of personal protective equipment (although still in short supply), and better data (although shamefully inconsistent and delayed). We’re developing vaccines at a record pace, using truly 21st century approaches like mRNA or bioprinting.

The problem is, we knew a pandemic could come, we knew the things that would need to be done to deal with it, and yet we — and the “we” applies globally — fumbled the actions at every step. We imposed lockdowns, but usually too late, and then reopened them too soon.

Our healthcare organizations keep getting overwhelmed with COVID-19 cases, yet, cut off from their non-pandemic revenue sources, are drowning in losses. Due to layoffs, millions have lost their health insurance. People are avoiding care, even for essential needs like heart attacks or premature births.

Our power lines are showing. The the hurricane that is the pandemic is knocking them down at will. We might have some Health Age technologies available but not a Health Age mentality about how, when, and where to use them.

Dr. Dugan thinks she knows what we should be doing:

To build a Health Age, however, we will need to do more. We will need an international coalition of like-minded leaders to shape a unified global effort; we will need to invest at Space Age levels, publicly and privately, to fund research and development. And critically, we’ll need to supplement those approaches with bold, risk-tolerant efforts — something akin to a DARPA, but for global health.

Unfortunately, none of that sounds like anything our current environment supports. The U.S. is vowing to leave the World Health Organization and is buying up the worlds’s supply of Remdesivir, one of the few even moderately effective treatment options. An “international coalition of like-minded leaders” seems hard to come by. Plus, only half of Americans say they’d take a vaccine even when it is here.

If COVID-19 is our Sputnik moment, we’re reacting to it as we did Sputnik, setting off insular Space Races that competed rather than cooperated, focused narrowly on “winning” instead of discovering. We will, indeed, spend trillions on our pandemic responses, but most will be short-term, short-sighted programs that apply band-aids instead of establishing sustainable platforms and approaches. We’re reacting to the present, not reimagining the future.

Darpa’s mission is “to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security,” and it “explicitly reaches for transformational change instead of incremental advances.” Her background at Darpa make Dr. Dugan uniquely qualified to bring this attitude to Leap, and to apply it to healthcare.

The hard part is remembering that it is not about winning the current war, or even the next one, but about preparing for the wars we’re not even thinking about yet.

Most of our population are children of the 20th century. Our healthcare system in 2020 may have some snazzier tools, techniques, and technologies than it did in the 20th century, but it is mostly still pretty familiar to us from then. If we truly want a Health Age, we should aspire to develop things that would look familiar to someone from the 22nd century, not the 20th.

Every time I read about the latest finding about our microbiome I think about how little we still know about what drives our health, just as our growing attention to social determinants of health reminds me how we need to drastically rethink what the focus of our “healthcare system” should be.

Not more effective vaccines but the things that make vaccines obsolete. Not better surgical techniques but the things that make surgery unnecessary. Not just better health care but better health that requires less health care. If we’re going to dream, let’s dream big.

That’s the kind of Leap we need.

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor.

Too Many Small Steps, Not Enough Leaps published first on https://wittooth.tumblr.com/

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lauramalchowblog · 4 years

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Too Many Small Steps, Not Enough Leaps

By KIM BELLARD

I was driving home the other day, noticed all the above-ground telephone/power lines, and thought to myself: this is not the 21st century I thought I’d be living in.

In a Health Age, she predicts:

Dr. Dugan has no doubt we can build a Health Age; “The question, instead, is whether we will.”

Dr. Dugan thinks she knows what we should be doing:

The hard part is remembering that it is not about winning the current war, or even the next one, but about preparing for the wars we’re not even thinking about yet.

That’s the kind of Leap we need.

Kim is a former emarketing exec at a major Blues plan, editor of the late & lamented Tincture.io, and now regular THCB contributor.

Too Many Small Steps, Not Enough Leaps published first on https://venabeahan.tumblr.com

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republicstandard · 6 years

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Racial Profiles: Borzoi Boskovic, Host of The Poz Button

In ten words or less, describe your political persuasion.

Racist trade-unionism with nationalist characteristics.

How and when did you become “red pilled”?

Trayvon, etc. It's not really an interesting story. Most "redpill" stories aren't, to be honest.

What (or who) is the single biggest threat to the continued existence of Western civilization?

Liberal and decadent bourgeois whites. There's nothing to save if people don't want to save themselves.

What figure has been the greatest influence on the development of your political/ideological beliefs?

Probably Ted Kaczynski's writings, but it was never something I really took seriously or developed as you don't want to be known as the guy who said he was influenced by the Unabomber Manifesto. I grew up in a committed non-religious family so naturally, my mind became obsessed with death and by extension, it became obsessed with eschatology and the end of all things. Just normal teenage stuff, right? I got really into reading all about post-apocalyptic societies and the different end scenarios for all things, and thus that led to me discovering the grey goo scenario (spoiler: nanomachines go out of control and devour the world). Interest in that led to me reading, in college, the famous Wired article Why The Future Doesn't Need Us. Kaczynski was never anything more than just a whack-a-doodle bomber whose artist's sketch terrified me as a child, someone whom I was told as a teen that my nascent libertarianism at the time would inevitably lead towards, but that article gave me exposure to his ideas for the first time and I became obsessed with the possible futures that Kaczynski outlined. I wish he'd never committed the heinous and horrific crimes he committed, as we lost such a brilliant mind to system but I suppose that was inevitable when your professor is Henry Murray, the OSS's guy who pioneered the techniques for MK-ULTRA.

Now here I am, actually influenced in my thinking by his writings on technological society and not entirely sure we can avoid the TechnoGay PissEarth future he outlined for us.

I guess they were right to warn me after all.

What are some other influences on you personally but perhaps not politically?

G.K. Chesterton is still a massive influence on me in terms of attitude and spiritual character. Satan fell by the force of his own gravity. It's important to be able to have a sense of humor about yourself and the world and to still have a mirthful character even when you're staring down at the possibility of PissEarth 2025. I'm a dour and melancholic person by nature; Chesterton's works have always managed to give me a counterbalance to that attitude. My thoughts these days are turning toward Houllebecq these days though, so I guess we'll see how long that attitude holds out. With Lauritz on vacation from The Third Rail, someone needs to embody his well-spring of boundless optimism.

What does your perfect America look like?

I don't know. I don't think I even have one. Non-whites who know my politics have quizzed me on this before, concerned about where my politics will lead to for them. I've said before that I would be perfectly content with a stricter Singaporean system. I don't run around talking about ethnostates or the like though because it's basically pointless. Here's some hard to swallow pills for people:

We aren't going back to the way things were, and we couldn't even if we wanted to.

We are never going to be left alone. There will be no country with giant walls that we get to live our lives peacefully isolated inside.

Every possible good future still ends with us fighting the Chinese.

Our fight is ultimately a global one, and not just because our European brothers are fighting for their countries too. If our enemies succeed, what will happen to many of our most talented people is that they will become a diaspora people serving the Asians and their projects. It's already happening, just look into what's going on with shipbuilding in South Korea and China. If we succeed, well, we still have to oppose the Asian sphere who will do everything they can to hobble us while they expand their soft empires.

These are big geopolitical ideas, I understand. For the regular, average Amerikaner, I just want them to have intact and crime-free communities they can raise their children in without the societal wrecking balls that neoliberal policies smash them up with.

Your critiques of literature and especially film are something the Right has been sorely lacking minus a few exceptions like Trevor Lynch. What got you interested in cinema in particular and what impelled you to begin producing The Poz Button?

I only started the show because I was fascinated by Eyes Wide Shut and the depths of it and wanted to do a podcast about movies I liked. If you listen to the first episodes of the show, it's pretty obvious I had no idea what I was doing. I still don't know what I'm doing with it, but in hindsight it was pretty obvious it would get to this point due to my obsession with Metal Gear Solid 2 and the ideas it introduced to many new audiences about how to program a human being, meme theory, and the creation of new contexts in which to manipulate a person, the core purpose of mass media.

The reality is that people believe movies to be reality. How many people have you known who base their opinions and understanding of history with "But, bro, have you seen Schindlers List/Glory/Hidden Figures?" and so on and so forth. The key phrase in the opening song is from Videodrome: "Television is reality, but reality is less than television". These were ideas that George W.S. Trow was touching on in his peculiar work Within the Context of No Context, and these ideas were at the core of Marshall McLuhan's body of work, which was the inspiration for the Brian O'Blivion character in Videodrome. These are the ideas that are at the core of Edward Bernays' incisive understanding of propaganda. You are not immune to propaganda. The most incisive meme against the internet right has been mocking them for their obsession with movies like Bladerunner 2049 and Drive. You are just as bad as the people as you mock, and without understanding this aspect of yourself and your relationship to media, you will be just as cowed and controlled as everyone else. The ultimate form of controlled opposition, really.

There's this very incorrect notion floating around that I'm a cinephile, something which I don't do much to dissuade people from believing due to my enjoyment of fruity foreign and art films. I'm really not though. Every conversation about movies I have with Nick Mason, a true cinephile, always goes like this:

Nick: Have you seen X?

Borzoi: No.

If you've listened to my show consistently then you've likely noticed I don't actually talk about the movie in question much and I almost never talk about actual film techniques, get deep into the cinematography, or really anything that they'd teach you in film school about film. That's because I'm more interested in what Trow was warning against in his short work Within the Context of No Context, that media (but television in particular) was creating a landscape where people completely have no context for understanding reality because of the contextless reality that media provides for you. To put it more simply, Sven once brought up how since the age of the internet, everything culturally fracturing more and more and there's no 'culture' in the way there was a 70s culture, an 80s culture, a 90s culture, and so on and so forth. That's living without context, and that leaves you utterly atomized.

My background is in literature. I'm a writer at heart. I find movies and television to be mostly frivolous. Films are a static medium and force you to always be a passive viewer. They don't have the collaborative, dynamic, or spontaneity that come from other art forms or even hobbies. I'm only interested in it because people watch movies more than they read books or watch plays, so in order to understand what's truly going on in the world and the culture at large you have to meet people at their level. Almost no one outside of our niche circles is reading Yukio Mishima's Sun and Steel, but millions of people are watching Game of Thrones. There's no value except for its own sake to do a podcast on the former instead of one on the latter.

What are some films you would say are “required viewing” and why?

I don't know. Again, I'm not a cinephile. But you can't go wrong with watching Stanley Kubrick's films. He's the most important filmmaker of the 20th century for a reason. If anything though people should watch documentaries and study their manipulative techniques. Fictional movies have actually exhausted themselves quite a bit and are on a downturn. People want reality but they want it in a digestible form that mimics the structure of storytelling. A lot of this is due to, again, living within the context of no context and thus documentaries not only provide that but also give them a seemingly true reality they can point to for their political and societal views since the democratic society requires that everyone be constantly engaged in it and at the ready to justify themselves and their views.

The reason for the rise of television isn't just because they got better at making it, but because they're able to be more niche instead of going for the lowest common denominator, which movies are required to do in order to justify their budgets, is because it gives you that hit you need for consistently rising and falling action and twists and turns. Why is the twist so ubiquitous and why is it so essential to television series nowadays? Because the human brain is so fried from the media it constantly consumes that it needs novelty in order to keep that high going. People are chasing the dragon when it comes to storytelling. It's the same reason why soap operas and professional wrestling are still so massively popular. It's the twists and turns that keep people coming. Television just promises you twists that are seemingly less ridiculous than soap plot twists.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any future projects in the works?

My free time is mostly spent working out, shitposting, reading articles, playing tabletop games, socializing with average people, and chatting with friends. Like I said before, I don't really watch television and movies. I'm working on writing and expanding my show, but I work a pretty hectic job so I get done what I can get done for now.

How do you define success, both personally and in terms of your political and social aims/beliefs?

The only success that will matter is if the Right and the average person takes the threat and the power of the Left seriously. Currently, they do not. Their mindset is stuck in the 1980s. Look at the obsession with 80s-style music and 80s aesthetic and nostalgia for how much nicer things were in the 80s. What these people don't seem to remember though was that the 1980s were a large product of the feeling that nuclear war could occur at any moment, at the madness of these two massive superpowers that they couldn't just put the missiles down and talk to each other. That fueled the 80s, and at the core of it was escaping to frivolousness and the good times because of the madness going on outside. And despite all that nostalgia for this time period, the Right and the average cannot and will not acknowledge the Left for the threat they actually are.

I'm a guy who doesn't care about the long-term goals if you can't even get the simplest step done. That's success to me. If we can't even get these people to take the most immediate threat seriously, then how are you going to accomplish anything else?

How do you see this ending? Is the United States doomed?

The United States as an entity is definitely doomed. The best option for racially conscious whites is to simply band together and check out from the system once it becomes demographically impossible to affect change and let everyone else have the system. Don't try to stop it from collapsing, just let them run it into the ground. The only way that can work though is through true consciousness being achieved, otherwise, you'll just have Brazil with bold men like Bolsonaro doing everything they can to make that shell of a nation still work. But the American people, the Amerikaner as I call it, they'll persist. There are millions of us. But they'll have to determine the future they want to forge, if it will be a separatist one that they can rally around and slowly retake land or if they'll find another way forward. The best case for us presently is to buy as much time as possible so that serious people can emerge that can develop a bold vision for the future of our people.

What about the West in general?

Every institution of the West is either dead or dying. Like I said before, we're not going back to the way things were. We couldn't even if we wanted to. What remains then is to take what worked and prepare it for the new ways, with a bold and dynamic vision for the future to come. To quote Guillaume Faye's Archeofuturism: “When this dream has faded, another will emerge.”

The choice the West is staring down, and no amount of fantasy will make this any different, is death-and-rebirth envisioned by our most optimistic thinkers or the maximal total war scenario that Linkola warns about in Can Life Prevail.

I say this so often that it's a cliché, but you need to have a mind for marathon running, and if you don't then it is better to just go and live life as a woke normal person.

I find it very strange sometimes that people ask someone like me for my perspective on things, but the reality is people do so it's important to me that I do not sugarcoat things for people but at the same time outline a workable vision of the future. Circumstances change constantly and you adapt to those circumstances. Once you understand that things will never be the way they once were, it frees you up to make what happens next work and work towards a vision of the future you'd like for your own.

This fight is not over. It never will be.

Follow Borzoi on Twitter.

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cellerityweb · 6 years

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60 Seconds! Where will you be when the World ends?

What would you do, if you knew that the world is about to go up in nuclear flames? What would you take and who would you safe, if you had only 60 seconds to decide? Here’s your chance to find out.

Robot Gentleman is a small indie games studio from Poznan in Poland and famous for their debut title »60 Seconds!«, a »shelter survival« game that was released back in 2015. Dominik Gotojuch, who worked as an AI programmer on the ›Fable‹ and ›Witcher‹ games, is the founder of Robot Gentleman and was quickly joined by Juliusz Zenkner, who helped him in not only giving birth to the studio but also at creating their first game. »The AAA way of making games simply wasn’t creative enough for me,« Dominik says. »This prompted me to start Robot Gentleman and after a crazy garage development haze together with Juliusz, we’ve pushed out our debut title 60 Seconds!. Since the studio’s beginnings in 2015, our team has grown to become a humble 10 people strong, including our Writers and Designers Berenika Gotojuch and Radek Smektala, our Producer Piotr Zygadlo, our PR and Marketing mastermind Anastazja Kulinska, Unity Developer Mateusz Pusty, our 2D Artist Agata Bednorz, our very own QA specialist Paulina Vera Szmidt and, last but not least, our 2D Artist and Animator Mateusz Lewicz.«

The Fun of Survival

»60 Seconds! is a crazy mixture of adventure and survival game genres set in the post apocalyptic American suburbia,« Juliusz explains. »In many ways it’s a bold combination of skill based and strategic gameplay with a strong narrative experience. Every playthrough is uniquely randomized to make the game different every time you play it, which makes it a bit of a rogue-like, as well.« »The game takes place on a typical, quiet day in the 1950s American suburbia,« Dominik goes on. »Until it isn’t when the nuclear bomb alarm goes off! As the head of the family it’s up to you to rush through your house and gather any supplies useful to your survival within the next 60 seconds – one minute before the nuclear bomb drops. And of course you mustn’t forget about your family! Collecting all your stuff and family and getting into the fallout shelter is just the beginning. Day by day, you will have to survive and make the best of whatever and whoever you took with you. The entire gameplay revolves around a 1950s model family, taken directly out of a stereotypical advertisement from those times. We have Ted and Dolores with their children Mary Jane and Timmy. Each of them has their own quirks and character, but the players need to discover those for themselves.

Robot Gentleman have good reasons to be happy. After their debut’s success, the team is working towards the release of 60 Parsecs!.

What if the World Ends in…?

The idea for 60 Seconds! first came up in summer 2013. »We were developing two other games with our own technology at that time,« Juliusz recalls. »Encouraged by the tool-set offered by the Unity engine, we decided to give it a try by making a small 3D game to test its capabilities. The premise was simple: what would you do if you knew the world was about to end in 60 seconds? That was the beginning of 60 Seconds!, and to our knowledge it was the first shelter game to be released – two weeks before ›Fallout Shelter‹ came out, to be precise. With our take on the nuclear shelter survival gameplay, we’ve decided to focus on a bigger picture, composed of two stages. The game begins with a skill-based crazy 60 seconds run, which has long-lasting consequences for the second and obviuosly longer part of the game – the process of survival. We went for a story driven ›choose your own adventure‹ style of gameplay, instead of pursuing the simulation-approach that is favored by similar titles. Our intention was to tell a story (and a unique one, every time you play!) of this one family experiencing the beginning of the apocalypse first-hand. Whatever items or family members you grab within those 60 seconds before the bomb drops will affect the following course of the story. Within your house you will find a vast number of different items that you can collect,« Juliusz goes into detail. »Certain items such as gas masks, a radio or first-aid kit are obviously crucial for survival. And then there are other items and much less obviously important supplies like a deck of cards maybe, or a boy-scouts-handbook, which can all be of essence just as well! There are so many story events that can take place every day in the apocalyptic wasteland and it’s up to the player to decide which items are used to resolve the problem at hand. And depending on his or her decisions made, player may defeat enemies, gain friends, just get by or loose it all. Sometimes, using a specific item is far worse than doing nothing at all, while some other time you can trade your rifle for a can of tomato soup. Mmmm, tomato soup!«

Cherish Your Family

Besides the types of items you may choose to collect, your family also plays an important role and affects the course of action. The more family members you take with you, for example, the more food you will need to survive. »Actually, it all depends on how much the players value their fictional family. However, those who are selfish and safe no one but themselves, may run into unexpected dangers that wouldn’t be an issue with more people present. On the hand it’s hard to go on an expedition without any family members staying behind, simply to guard the shelter. On the other hand, being alone in the bunker, without anyone to speak to, is not exactly healthy. You might start to hear voices in your head!«

An Active and Creative Community

Players from the community got creative pretty soon and they still are today. Some were making up individual challenges, trying to play the game in very specific ways, for example by collecting only certain items or family members. The »soldier challenge« for example is played by leaving all of the family behind, while only collecting equipment like weapons, gas masks and supplies. »We absolutely weren’t planning that. The gaming community surprised us all with the ideas it had, and there have been lots of different scenarios. We are not sure who started this trend, but it has been really popular and it still generates new challenges. By far one of the craziest challenges we’ve seen,« Juliusz continues »was the ›extreme rainbow challenge‹, where different colours where the theme for every few days. For example, from day 1 the theme colour is red, so you have to eat soup. Following day 21, the colour is green, so you have to say ›yes‹ in every event that occurs for the next couple of days.« In a game that’s all about staying alive, a player’s success is determined by the length of his survival. »Our first champion was one of the expo visitors at PGA 2014. He survived for exactly 111 days. To award his accomplishment, we named an achievement after him. Fittingly, it takes 111 days of survival to unlock it. After the game’s release, we’d seen a number of gamers survive for more than 365 (!) days, which makes it a full year – quite a long time to stay in your fallout shelter. Of course we have been rebalancing the game, so the difficulty of staying alive for that long has varied since the game’s original release.« Juliusz elaborates. »We absolutely appreciate all the feedback we get! From time to time we stumble over ideas that overlap with some of those we already had in mind. Every now and then, however, we discover something that is completely new and inspiring to our work. While making new games, we listen carefully to what people hint they would like to see and experience, but in the end our games are our vision. That’s the simple reason why we’ll always prioritize our own ideas – and we’ve got tons and tons of those and we’re already having problems fitting all of them into our titles.«

A Colorful Apocalypse

Compared directly to titles like »This War of Mine«, 60 Seconds! has a rather colorful and cartoony style. Does it impair the game’s serious undertone? »Every design approach has its advantages and disadvantages, but we find that using dark comedy mixed with a comic book art style can be a extraordinarily powerful tool to transport a serious message. It may seem more distanced at first, but we feel that the stark contrast to the grim reality that the game presents, makes the underlying message even stronger. We did not want to go for a cheap and obvious showcase of the theme, instead we opted for a more subtle presentation.« Juliusz explains.

A Modern Times Survival Guide!?

Despite the humorous style, the game’s message is still pretty dark and serious and following the news on North Korea and the United States it might not feel that funny anymore. »There is something about living in Eastern Europe,« Juliusz continues, »that makes you think about war, history and the philosophical aftermath of all which happened in the 20th century. If you look at it closely you see that this is the most active post-apocalyptic scene in the world. Games like »Fallout« or books like »Metro 2033« are big hits in Poland and its neighbouring countries. During the development of 60 Seconds! the nuclear war theme seemed like a setup, the whole scenario wasn’t very likely to become reality, not in a short-term anyway. Recent developments in world politics unfortunately contradict that assumption and put us all in danger. We would prefer that sort of apocalyptic vision of the future to stay an element of fiction within games, books and movies.« It better does because with that said, 60 Seconds! clearly focusses on dark humour and enterainment rather than preparing its players for a potential nuclear holocaust. »At the beginning of the production we did a lot of research on housing, interior design and fashion of the 1950s,« Juliusz explains. »Creating the characters from 60 Seconds! together with their house was a bit of a challenge, as we wanted to the setting feel true, just like an average 1950s suburbia. At the same time we didn’t want to make it look like a caricature. We initially had a few issues with the perception of our work, as some people did not recognise it as 1950s. This only changed after we purposefully added a number of this specific era’s icons, such as the Cadillac-esque car. And considering the contemporary fashion, with all those 2015 vintage trends, the typical clothing of our characters that were inspired by said 1950s, actually did not stand out that much. For the survival part of the game, we did some research on shelter construction, but we had to alter certain things and standards for the sake of gameplay purposes. The same applies to »survival 101«. There are a few survival aspects in 60 Seconds!, which are quasi-realistic, but it was never meant to be a simulation. Therefore a lot of the game’s survival techniques are so absurd, we do not recommend trying them at home! Also, we have absolutely no knowledge of the potential side effects of a strict tomato soup diet.

Besides, when we started developing 60 Seconds!, we primarily focussed on the fun factor or rather the story angle. For us, the message was always there, but we had no intention of shoving it into anyone’s face. Presenting it in a clever and comedic way and making the post-apocalyptic world kind of funny and grim at the same time was a challenge. The game had to be fun and engaging to encourage players to read a lot and to captivate them with a consistent and interesting story about a family trapped in a fallout shelter. And it seems we did manage to pull it off, which still amazes us to this day.« »60 Seconds! was never meant to be a pamphlet for any message,« Dominik adds, »but it’s worth pointing out that the original vision for the game’s narrative and gameplay was based around the question of what would one do if he or she knew the world is going to end in a few moments. How would they react after realising that? Would they panic? Would they only care for themselves? The slapstick chaos that ensues in the scavenge part of the game is entertaining, but the comedy is here to disguise a very grim reality that awaits the protagonists after the bombs explode. The same can be said about a myriad of gameplay and narrative solutions we use in the second phase – the survival stage of the game. Absurd storylines, a cartoonish art style and the naivete of 1950s are combined to present a rather grotesque image of a degenerating family, battling the harsh reality of the post-apocalyptic America. It’s up to the players if they choose to focus on the scenario’s fun factor or reflect upon how grim the game actually is.«

The journal gives players an overview of the characters and events.

Challenges and Learnings

Every game poses a new challenge to its developers and 60 Seconds! wasn’t any exception – no matter if in regards to workflows, special tools or any possible hurdles and how to overcome them. »My past professional career was mostly focused on illustration, movies and animation, so everything we did working on 60 Seconds! was a brand new experience for me. Dominik already had experience in the games industry, so his point of view is different than mine. Working with the Unity engine, however, was something new for both of us. Oh, and finishing the game together, of course! After all it was our first proper game project, even though we have known each other for almost 15 years. Our workflow was unusual and everything but professional. It was pretty chaotic and irregular, mostly because we worked after-hours. Sometimes, our regular jobs made it impossible for us to finish the milestones we set for ourselves. There was a lot of experimentation and the fact that we worked remotely and mostly stayed in contact over Skype did not make the whole project any easier. A bit of a rookie mistake, for example, was to outsource all of the 3D models and animations too early in the process. We ended up with most of the graphics, even before we had any reasonable builds of the game. And speaking of builds: we did not make enough of them. In our current and future projects we intend to iterate more rapidly and produce frequent builds to give us much more insight into the game and into the direction that it’s headed. 60 Seconds! started as a completely different game. It grew and evolved over the course of the production. A lot was changed in comparison to the original design. The survival part of the game is in fact the result of the conclusions we drew from the development process, on which we decided to act upon in order to explore our vision for the game in an even more interesting way.« And in terms of real prepping? »Much less than I would like to, to be honest! A few important tips on how extreme the conditions in a shelter are, how claustrophobic such a situation can be and how much I enjoy the fact I don’t need to experience any of that in my life. Especially when I think that the shelter in 60 Seconds! has much more space than your typical fallout shelter does!«

In Hindsight

»Looking back, there a lot of things we would most certainly approach differently now, with all of our accumulated knowledge and experience. I’m pretty happy with the design… well, most of it, but there’s always room for improvement. From important decisions like marketing (when to start, how much to spend, how to approach) to small things that can be annoying in the longer run, like a bigger screen size for different aspect ratios. Looking back not everything we learned is usable anymore, since the industry changes dynamically. I might even say that some mistakes that we’ve made in the past, weren’t a big deal back then, but might turn out to be lethal for a project in the present day.« Dominik even goes a step further: »It’s very typical for creators of any kind to be fairly displeased with their work, especially when looking back at it. A 60 Seconds! made in 2017 would be different, for sure – but I don’t think it would be better. Perhaps more polished, but then again, I believe that the originality of our game was strongly inspired by the crazy, passion-driven development work that we put into it. It was both the great and the not so great ideas that shaped it into the game that it is. And that is exactly the game we wanted to make.«

About the Author:

Dominik Gotojuch is

Creative & Tech Director at Robot Gentleman.

Dominik originally intended to become an actor, but after getting a job at Lionhead Studios, it took him just a fortnight to realise what he really wanted to do for the rest of his life – develop games! And so he did, as an AI programmer for the AAA award-winning titles »Fable III« and »Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt«. With enough experience under his belt, he decided to pursue creating games the indie way. Thus, Robot Gentleman was founded.

Twitter: @gotojuch

Juliusz Zenkner is

Art Director at Robot Gentleman.

Juliusz dedicated his studies and early career to art, animation and filmmaking. For over five years he worked in the Oscar nominated post-production studio Platige Image, contributing to such acclaimed movies as Jerzy Skolimowski’s »Essential Killing« and Lars von Trier’s »Melancholia«. As the Art Director at Robot Gentleman, he has been shaping the art vision for our games since 2014, beginning with 60 Seconds!.

Twitter: @JuliuszZenkner

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raystart · 7 years

Text

Why Uber is The Revenge of the Founders

A version of this article is in the Harvard Business Review

Uber, Zenefits, Tanium, Lending Club CEOs of companies with billion dollar market caps have been in the news – and not in a good way. This seems to be occurring more and more. Why do these founders get to stay around?

Because the balance of power has dramatically shifted from investors to founders.

Here’s why it generates bad CEO behavior.

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Unremarked and unheralded, the balance of power between startup CEOs and their investors has radically changed:

IPOs/M&A without a profit (or at times revenue) have become the norm

The startup process has become demystified – information is everywhere

Technology cycles have become a treadmill, and for startups to survive they need to be on a continuous innovation cycle

VCs competing for unicorn investments have given founders control of the board

20th Century Tech Liquidity = Initial Public Offering In the 20th century tech companies and their investors made money through an Initial Public Offering (IPO). To turn your company’s stock into cash, you engaged a top-notch investment bank (Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs) and/or their Silicon Valley compatriots (Hambrecht & Quist, Montgomery Securities, Robertson Stephens).

Typically, this caliber of bankers wouldn’t talk to you unless your company had five profitable quarters of increasing revenue. And you had to convince the bankers that you had a credible chance of having four more profitable quarters after your IPO. None of this was law, and nothing in writing required this; this was just how these firms did business to protect their large institutional customers who would buy the stock.

Twenty-five years ago, to go public you had to sell stuff – not just acquire users or have freemium products. People had to actually pay you for your product. This required a repeatable and scalable sales process, which required a professional sales staff and a product stable enough that customers wouldn’t return it.

Hire a CEO to Go Public More often than not, a founding CEO lacked the experience to do these things. The very skills that got the company started were now handicaps to its growth. A founder’s lack of credibility/experience in growing and managing a large company hindered a company that wanted to go public. In the 20th century, founding CEOs were most often removed early and replaced by “suits” — experienced executives from large companies parachuted in by the investors after product/market fit to scale sales and take the company public.

The VCs would hire a CEO with a track record who looked and acted like the type of CEO Wall Street bankers expected to see in large companies.

A CEO brought in from a large company came with all the big company accoutrements – org charts, HR departments with formal processes and procedure handbooks, formal waterfall engineering methodology, sales compensation plans, etc. — all great things when you are executing and scaling a known business model. But the CEO’s arrival meant the days of the company as a startup and its culture of rapid innovation were over.

Board Control For three decades (1978-2008), investors controlled the board. This era was a “buyer’s market” – there were more good companies looking to get funded than there were VCs. Therefore, investors could set the terms. A pre-IPO board usually had two founders, two VCs and one “independent” member. (The role of the independent member was typically to tell the founding CEO that the VCs were hiring a new CEO.)

Replacing the founder when the company needed to scale was almost standard operating procedure. However, there was no way for founders to share this information with other founders (this was life before the Internet, incubators and accelerators). While to VCs this was just a necessary step in the process of taking a company public, time and again first-time founders were shocked, surprised and angry when it happened. If the founder was lucky, he got to stay as chairman or CTO. If he wasn’t, he told stories of how “VCs stole my company.”

To be fair there wasn’t much of an alternative. Most founders were woefully unequipped to run companies that scaled. It’s hard to imagine, but in the 20th century there were no startup blogs or books on startups to read, and business schools (the only places teaching entrepreneurship) believed the best thing they could teach startups was how to write a business plan. In the 20th century the only way for founders to get trained was to apprentice at another startup. And there they would watch the canonical model in action as an experienced executive replaced the founder.

Technology Cycles Measured in Years Today, we take for granted new apps and IoT devices appearing seemingly overnight and reaching tens of millions of users – and just as quickly falling out of favor. But in the 20th century, dominated by hardware and software, technology swings inside an existing market happened slowly — taking years, not months. And while new markets were created (i.e. the desktop PC market), they were relatively infrequent.

This meant that disposing of the founder, and the startup culture responsible for the initial innovation, didn’t hurt a company’s short-term or even mid-term prospects. A company could go public on its initial wave of innovation, then coast on its current technology for years. In this business environment, hiring a new CEO who had experience growing a company around a single technical innovation was a rational decision for venture investors.

However, almost like clockwork, the inevitable next cycle of technology innovation would catch these now-public startups and their boards by surprise. Because the new CEO had built a team capable of and comfortable with executing an existing business model, the company would fail or get acquired. Since the initial venture investors had cashed out by selling their stock over the first few years, they had no long-term interest in this outcome.

Not every startup ended up this way. Bill Hewlett and David Packard got to learn on the job. So did Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore at Intel. But the majority of technology companies that went public circa 1979-2009, with professional VCs as their investors, faced this challenge.

Founders in the Driver’s Seat So how did we go from VCs discarding founders to founders now running large companies? Seven major changes occurred:

It became OK to go public or get acquired without profit (or even revenue)

In 1995 Netscape changed the rules about going public. A little more than a year old, the company and its 24-year-old founder hired an experienced CEO, but then did something no other tech company had ever done – it went public with no profit. Laugh all you want, but at the time this was unheard of for a tech company. Netscape’s blow-out IPO launched the dot-com boom. Suddenly tech companies were valued on what they might someday deliver. (Today’s version is Tesla – now more valuable than Ford.)

This means that liquidity for today’s investors often doesn’t require the long, patient scaling of a profitable company. While 20th century metrics were revenue and profit, today it’s common for companies to get acquired for their user base. (Facebook’s ~$20 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, a 5-year-old startup that had $10 million in revenue, made no sense until you realized that Facebook was paying to acquire 300 million new users.)

2. Information is everywhere In the 20th century learning the best practices of a startup CEO was limited by your coffee bandwidth. That is, you learned best practices from your board and by having coffee with other, more experienced CEOs. Today, every founder can read all there is to know about running a startup online. Incubators and accelerators like Y-Combinator have institutionalized experiential training in best practices (product/market fit, pivots, agile development, etc.); provide experienced and hands-on mentorship; and offer a growing network of founding CEOs. The result is that today’s CEOs have exponentially more information than their predecessors. This is ironically part of the problem. Reading about, hearing about and learning about how to build a successful company is not the same as having done it. As we’ll see, information does not mean experience, maturity or wisdom.

3. Technology cycles have compressed The pace of technology change in the second decade of the 21st century is relentless. It’s hard to think of a hardware/software or life science technology that dominates its space for years. That means new companies are at risk of continuous disruption before their investors can cash out.

To stay in business in the 21st century, startups do four things their 20th century counterparts didn’t:

A company is no longer built on a single innovation. It needs to be continuously innovating – and who best to do that? The founders.

To continually innovate, companies need to operate at startup speed and cycle time much longer their 20th century counterparts did. This requires retaining a startup culture for years – and who best to do that? The founders.

Continuous innovation requires the imagination and courage to challenge the initial hypotheses of your current business model (channel, cost, customers, products, supply chain, etc.) This might mean competing with and if necessary killing your own products. (Think of the relentless cycle of iPod then iPhone innovation.) Professional CEOs who excel at growing existing businesses find this extremely hard. So who best to do it? The founders.

Finally, 20th century startups fired the innovators/founders when they scaled. Today, they need these visionaries to stay with the company to keep up with the innovation cycle. And given that acquisition is a potential for many startups, corporate acquirers often look for startups that can help them continually innovate by creating new products and markets.

4. Founder-friendly VCs A 20th century VC was likely to have an MBA or finance background. A few, like John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins and Don Valentine at Sequoia, had operating experience in a large tech company, but none had actually started a company. Out of the dot-com rubble at the turn of the 21st century, new VCs entered the game – this time with startup experience. The watershed moment was in 2009 when the co-founder of Netscape, Marc Andreessen, formed a venture firm and started to invest in founders with the goal of teaching them how to be CEOs for the long term. Andreessen realized that the game had changed. Continuous innovation was here to stay and only founders – not hired execs – could play and win. Founder-friendly became a competitive advantage for his firm Andreessen Horowitz. In a seller’s market, other VCs adopted this “invest in the founder” strategy.

5. Unicorns Created A Seller’s Market Private companies with market capitalization over a billion dollars – called Unicorns – were unheard of in the first decade of the 21st century. Today there are close to 200. VCs with large funds (~>$200M) need investments in Unicorns to make their own business model work.

While the number of traditional VC firms have shrunk since the peak of the dot com bubble, the number of funds chasing deals have grown. Angel and Seed Funds have usurped the role of what used to be Series A investments. And in later stage rounds an explosion of corporate VCs and hedge funds now want in to the next unicorns.

A rough calculation says that a VC firm needs to return four times its fund size to be thought of as a great firm. Therefore, a VC with a $250M fund (5x the size of an average VC fund 40 years ago) would need to return $1 billion. But VCs own only ~15% of a startup when it gets sold/goes public (the numbers vary widely). Just doing the math, $1 billion/15% means that the VC fund needs $6.6 billion of exits to make that 4x return. The cold hard math of “large funds need large exits” is why VCs have been trapped into literally begging to get into unicorn deals.

6. Founders Take Money Off the Table In the 20th century the only way the founder made any money (other than their salary) was when the company went public or got sold. The founders along with all the other employees would vest their stock over 4 years (earning 1/48 a month). They had to hang around at least a year to get the first quarter of their stock (this was called the “cliff”). Today, these are no longer hard and fast rules. Some founders have three-year vesting. Some have no cliff. And some have specific deals about what happens if they’re fired, demoted or the company is sold.

In the last decade, as the time startups have spent staying private has grown longer, secondary markets – where people can buy and sell pre-IPO stock — have emerged. This often is a way for founders and early employees to turn some of their stock into cash before an IPO or sale of company.

One last but very important change that guarantees founders can cash out early is “founder friendly stock.” This allows founder(s) to sell part of their stock (~10 to 33%) in a future round of financing. This means the company doesn’t get money from new investors, but instead it goes to the founder. The rationale is that since companies are taking longer to achieve liquidity, giving the founders some returns early makes them more willing to stick around and better able to make bets for the long-term health of the company.

7. Founders take Control of the Board With more VCs chasing a small pool of great deals, and all VCs professing to be the founder’s best friend, there’s an arms race to be the friendliest. Almost overnight the position of venture capitalist dictating the terms of the deal has disappeared (at least for “hot” deals).

Traditionally, in exchange for giving the company money, investors would receive preferred stock, and founders and employees owned common stock. Preferred stock had specific provisions that gave investors control over when to sell the company or take it public, hiring and firing the founder etc. VCs are giving up these rights to get to invest in unicorns.

Founders are taking control of the board by making the common stock the founders own more powerful. Some startups create two classes of common stock with each share of the founders’ class of common stock having 10 – 20 votes. Founders can now outvote the preferred stock holders (the investors). Another method for founder control has the board seats held by the common shareholders (the founders) count 2-5 times more than the investors’ preferred shares. Finally, investors are giving up protective voting control provisions such as when and if to raise more money, the right to invest in subsequent rounds, who to raise it from and how/when to sell the company or take it public. This means liquidity for the investors is now beholden to the whims of the founders. And because they control votes on the board, the founders can’t be removed. This is a remarkable turnabout.

In some cases, 21st century VCs have been relegated to passive investors/board observers.

And this advent of founders’ control of their company’s board is a key reason why many of these large technology companies look like they’re out of control. They are.

The Gift/Curse of Visionary CEOs Startups run by visionaries break rules, flout the law and upend the status quo (Apple, Uber, AirBnB, Tesla, Theranos, etc.). Doing something that other people consider insanity/impossible requires equal parts narcissism and a messianic view of technological transformation.

Bad CEO behavior and successful startups have always overlapped. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Tom Seibel, etc. all had the gift/curse of a visionary CEO – they could see the future as clearly as others could see the present. Because they saw it with such clarity, the reality of having to depend on other people to build something revolutionary was frustrating. And woe to the employee who got in their way of delivering the future.

Visionary CEOs have always been the face of their company, but today with social media, it happens faster with a much larger audience; boards now must consider what would happen to the valuation of the company without the founder.

With founders now in control of unicorn boards, with money in their pockets and the press heralding them as geniuses transforming the world, founder hubris and bad behavior should be no surprise. Before social media connected billions of people, bad behavior stayed behind closed doors. In today’s connected social world, instant messages and shared videos have broken down the doors.

The Revenge of the Founders – Founding CEOs Acting Badly So why do boards of unicorns like Uber, Zenefits, Tanium, Lending Club let their CEOs stay?

Before the rapid rise of Unicorns, when boards were still in control, they “encouraged” the hiring of “adult supervision” of the founders. Three years after Google started they hired Eric Schmidt as CEO. Schmidt had been the CEO of Novell and previously CTO of Sun Microsystems. Four years after Facebook started they hired Sheryl Sandberg as the COO. Sandberg had been the vice president of global online sales and operations. Today unicorn boards have a lot less leverage.

VCs sit on 5 to 10 or more boards. That means most VCs have very little insight into the day-to-day operation of a startup. Bad behavior often goes unnoticed until it does damage.

The traditional checks and balances provided by a startup board have been abrogated in exchange for access to a hot deal.

As VC incentives are aligned to own as much of a successful company as possible, getting into a conflict with a founder who can now prevent VC’s from investing in the next round is not in the VCs interest.

Financial and legal control of startups has given way to polite moral suasion as founders now control unicorns.

As long as the CEO’s behavior affects their employees not their customers or valuation, VCs often turn a blind eye.

Not only is there no financial incentive for the board to control unicorn CEO behavior, often there is a downside in trying to do so

The surprise should not be how many unicorn CEOs act badly, but how many still behave well.

Lesson Learned

VC/Founder relationship have radically changed

VC “Founder Friendly” strategies have helped create 200+ unicorns

Some VC’s are reaping the downside of the unintended consequences of “Founder Friendly”

Until the consequences exceed the rewards they will continue to be Founder Friendly

Filed under: Venture Capital

#startups #text #startup #advice #busieness #howto #news #tech

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mredwinsmith · 7 years