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blind-rats · 6 years

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SPOILER ALERT!

Veronica Mars fans everywhere exploded with excitement at last week’s news that Hulu had ordered a new season of the former UPN/CW mystery drama — and then, they immediately began speculating what the eight episodes will be about. First and foremost, how would they deal with the follow-up books written by Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas?

Yes, books! After Thomas, star Kristen Bell, and most of the major cast members reunited to make a Kickstarter-funded movie in 2014, Thomas wrote two novels, The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line and Mr. Kiss and Tell. And based on Hulu’s own description of the upcoming season — which will center on a crime that takes place in Neptune during spring break — it sounds quite similar to Tan Line.

While Thomas has clarified that the new season won’t be an adaptation of either book — rather, it takes place five years after the events of the movie and novels — the two books provide tasty clues about what Veronica Mars might bring back. Let’s dig into both novels and investigate what Marshmallows can expect when the show returns next year.

What’s been revealed about the new season?

Rob Thomas will write the first episode and Kristen Bell will return to headline, but no other cast members have been announced yet. But when Hulu made its announcement last week, it also released a plot description that sounded a lot like The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line, the first Veronica Mars spinoff book co-written by Thomas and Jennifer Graham, which finds Veronica solving a crime during spring break.

On Twitter, Thomas described the season as a “hardcore So-Cal noir” that will follow “one big case.” Hulu’s press release about the project offers even more details: “Spring breakers are getting murdered in Neptune, thereby decimating the seaside town’s lifeblood tourist industry. After Mars Investigations is hired by the parents of one of the victims to find their son’s killer, Veronica is drawn into an epic eight-episode mystery that pits the enclave’s wealthy elites, who would rather put an end to the month-long bacchanalia, against a working class that relies on the cash influx that comes with being the West Coast’s answer to Daytona Beach.”

What happens in The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line?

The book is set directly after the events of the movie, which saw Veronica returning to Neptune to help ex-boyfriend Logan Echolls after he’s accused of murder. (By the movie’s end, Veronica and Logan reunited romantically, she lost a job offer at a top law firm in New York, and it looked like she was ready to move back home for good.) In Tan Line, Veronica is in Neptune caring for her father Keith, who is still recovering from a bad car crash he suffered in the movie. She’s in a long-distance relationship with Logan, who shipped out with the Navy on a six-month tour of duty. And she’s taken the lead at Mars Investigations in her dad’s absence. When a spring breaker goes missing, Veronica’s very particular set of skills are called upon to investigate, but as she gets deeper in the case, she’s pulled into a world of crime, money, and drugs that are darker than she’d imagined.

But again, Thomas said the new episodes will not tell the exact story of A Thousand-Dollar Tan Line.

His tweet indicates that the events of both novels will mostly be the backstory for the new season. (In case you’re wondering: Pony is the puppy that Veronica and Logan get in Mr. Kiss and Tell. Also, former Army general Marcia Langdon runs for sheriff against Dan Lamb and wins.) Still, it’s interesting that Hulu’s press release describes a story that’s so similar to Thousand-Dollar Tan Line. Will Veronica ruminate on how this new case bears a remarkable resemblance to the one she investigated five years earlier? Could some of the same players be involved?

Which longtime characters might return?

On Twitter, Rob Thomas has already announced that a handful of cast members will return alongside Kristen Bell, including Jason Dohring, Francis Capra, Percy Daggs III, and David Starzyk — with a promise that more casting news is “on the way.” Given that, plus the plots of the movie and the two books, here are the most likely returning characters and how they’d fit into Veronica Mars now.

Logan Echolls (confirmed to return): Veronica’s past and current boyfriend, played by Jason Dohring. He’s a Navy pilot who’s mostly absent from the first book, except for the occasional Skype session. They get a puppy named Pony in the second book before he’s called away for another tour.

Wallace Fennel (confirmed to return): Veronica’s best friend, played by Percy Daggs III. He’s a teacher at Neptune High and still does occasional investigating favors for her, like posing as a drunk college kid to get into a party.

Weevil (confirmed to return): One-time gang leader turned Veronica’s friend, played by Francis Capra. He and Veronica left things on bad terms at the end of Mr. Kiss and Tell when he dropped a lawsuit against Sheriff Lamb that Keith had championed.

Richard Casablancas (confirmed to return): The father of Veronica’s classmates Dick and Cassidy, played by David Starzyk. In the original series, Veronica discovers he ran a multi-million-dollar scheme and he was sentenced to prison for a year.

Cindy “Mac” Mackenzie: Veronica’s friend and computer whiz. In the first book, she takes a tech job at Mars Investigations and continues to be V’s, right-hand woman.

Keith Mars: Veronica’s dad. In the first book, he’s recovering from a car crash. In the second, he helps old friend Marcia Langdon take down Dan Lamb.

Dick Casablancas: Logan’s best friend and (sort of) charming dirtbag who lives up to his first name. He makes a cameo at a party in the first book but is only referenced in the second.

Leo D’Amato: Veronica’s former boyfriend. He appears in the movie and Mr. Kiss and Tell as a detective in the San Diego Police Department.

Vinnie Van Lowe: The slimy rival investigator that everyone loves to hate. He appeared in the movie, but neither of the books.

Cliff McCormack: The wise-cracking lawyer that both Veronica and her dad rely upon throughout the series, movie, and books.

Lianne Mars: Veronica’s mom, a former alcoholic. She didn’t appear in the movie, though she was on the show and recurs through the books when she returns to her daughter’s life with a new husband and son in tow.

The books also introduce a number of new characters, who could potentially appear in the fourth season. They include Marcia Langdon, the new police chief since Neptune has incorporated; Tanner Scott, Liane’s husband; and Hunter Scott, Veronica’s half-brother.

Where’s the LoVe?

All right, let’s get to the important stuff: What is the state of Veronica and Logan’s — a.k.a. LoVe’s — relationship? In Mr. Kiss and Tell, there was a lot of cute LoVe-y dovey stuff, including Veronica and Logan living together and getting that aforementioned puppy. But then Logan was shipped out with the Navy again and Veronica’s case brought her back into frequent and flirtatious contact with Leo. Still, the second book ended with Veronica video-chatting with Logan and declaring, “I’m here.”

Since Thomas revealed that the new episodes begin five years after the movie, it’s anybody’s guess as to how their relationship has developed during that time. Has the distance worn the couple down? Was Veronica tempted by the very handsome, very present Leo? Or maybe Veronica and Logan got hitched and had a baby? It’s hard to imagine Jason Dohring won’t reprise his role for the new season, but if he doesn’t, perhaps Logan will be stuck on another tour of duty.

Whatever happened between them since Veronica Mars last hit the airwaves, it’s safe to say it will be another dramatic chapter in the show’s long-burning romance. In the words of Logan himself: “You and me. Spanning years and continents. Lives ruined and bloodshed. Epic.”

#Veronica Mars #Rob Thomas #Kristen Bell #Veronica Mars Revival #Logan Echolls #VMars #SPOILERS

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airlock · 7 years

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so, I have a bunch of headcanons about the history of Pokémon training and I've been wanting to have them all in one absurdly immense text post, which is what I'm doing right now but you can come along for the ride if you want

(note: sometimes I take ideas from the anime or other secondary sources but the only actual canon for me is the games, and even then sometimes with a pinch of salt because the games aren't always trying to show you the whole picture -- so yeah, I'm not remotely worried about contradicting anime canon and whatnot)

It's well-established people bonding with Pokémon goes a long way back in the Pokémon world, but the jump from regular husbandry (and/or attempting to control the living doomsday artifact) to Pokémon Training as we know it -- that'd be something a lot more recent.

Where bonding with Pokémon was originally done mostly for utility or simple compassion, a more competitive aspect would come into being over the course of modern urbanization. Folks living in cities sometimes got to have Pokémon as pets, and eventually, training your Pokémon to be stronger than others became something of a refined hobby -- although this wasn't any sort of formalized competition yet; it was more in the sense that having a Growlithe that can beat up the neighbor's Meowth is a point of pride akin to having a greener lawn than your neighbor's (or, perhaps, revenge on your neighbor for having a greener lawn than yours). It was, therefore, a very simple and casual hobby, indulged more as conspicuous consumption than anything. The shift in this paradigm would come from two important milestones in technology: the advancement of telecommunications, and the mass production of Pokéballs.

Before we get too far into it, it's probably a good time to clarify where I am with headcanoning Pokéballs: I don't think of them as the cozy lotus-eater machines that some people like to envision them as, or as a stasis deal either. I think of them as being very convenient, but ultimately temporary transportation. Sure, in the games, it seems as if you don't ever let Pokémon out of their Pokéballs unless they're in battle -- but you also never eat and only sleep on a few rare occasions, so it's obvious that the games just don't distract you from your adventure with all the logistic complications. I imagine that, in practice, a Pokémon trainer will have their team in Pokéballs while on the move, but when night falls and it's time to find lodging in the city or set up camp in the wild, the Pokémon are let out for leisure and rest.

(This, incidentally, would be why you don't take more than 6 Pokémon with you at a time, and even most trainers you find in the wild don't have that many with them -- the more Pokémon you're carrying around, the more travel complications you're taking on. This is also why trainers generally focus on a few select types of Pokémon, even if there's seldom any competitive advantages to doing so -- the less diverse your team, the less specific accomodations you have to worry about. Sure, your player character in each game never seems to have trouble traveling with a wildly diverse, full team of 6; that'd be because your player character in each game is just talented enough to do all that and aim for the championship and make it all look easy. That's why everyone thinks the player characters are so amazing.)

Back to the historical line, though: first, we have the matter of telecommunications. As these improved, everyone's neighborhoods became bigger -- you may have a Growlithe that can beat up your neighbor's Meowth, but your friend who moved to Hoenn now tells you about the Kirlia in his neighborhood that no one can beat. Then came the mass-produced Pokéball. It maybe the case that handmade apricorn balls were already extant for many years before, but they were regarded as more a tool for professional Pokémon breeders or agricultural handlers; mass production and mass marketing made a difference here in that it expanded the number of people who could become trainers. Where having acquiring a Pokémon in the first place was expensive and keeping one out there at all times cost time and money even without ever really taking it out of the house, the day when cheap Pokéballs hit your supermarket shelves was the day when anyone, young or old, rich or poor, could get themselves a Pokémon. It's also from this point onwards that Pokémon trainers have a huge incentive to traveling about: the primary means of acquiring Pokémon is now getting out there and catching them yourself, now that catching and breeding Pokémon are activities that no longer require an entire phd.

This breakthrough is also the birth of the Pokémon Trainer as something much closer to what we know and love today. The household owner trying to one-up their neighbor doesn't really have so much free time as to drop everything and go on a Pokémon journey, but younger people do, and now they will -- both to capture Pokémon in the wild and because, as telecommunications further develop, such cultural figures as the penpal and the fanclub start taking root, and alongside these, the Pokémon training scene starts to develop, such that your opponent is now no longer your pesky neighbor, but rather, another passionate traveler, someone who you might otherwise not have met in your hometown.

Of course, since we're not talking internet levels of telecommunication yet, these developing Pokémon trainer scenes still have a significant local component; it may no longer be confined to each trainer's hometown, but a trainer from Kanto will still generally be traveling in Kanto and meeting with other trainers from Kanto; scenes now form on a regional level. This is, furhtermore, somewhat the ugly period of modern Pokémon training; there are no established rules, whether to protect the safety of the battling Pokémon or of... everyone else nearby; grievous injury and even death aren't unheard of, and Pokémon training has something of a poor reputation, at best being regarded as an extreme sport (like, say, motocross) and at worst being criminalized. Which wasn't entirely unfair, since criminal factions did sometimes branch into the Pokémon training scenes of the world, often in the same way they do for, say, casinos -- after all, it's around this time that money changing hands as a result of Pokémon battles started becoming a tradition (never an ironbound rule, per se, but battling with money on the line got to become necessary if you expected to be taken seriously as a trainer).

Criminals weren't the only ones who saw all the money changing hands; the major success of Pokéballs also spurred many enterpreneurs to invest in the Pokémon training scenes. Major cities started to flourish with lodges specifically for traveling trainers -- which would come to be known as Pokémon Centers. It also became common for these lodges to provide services in caring for trainer's Pokémon, cleaning and feeding them and providing first aid for battle injuries; current Pokémon Centers still do this -- and no, as far as my headcanon is concerned, they're not free Pokémon hospitals; they're more school infirmary than hospital, in that they're equipped to deal with a range of minor and expected ailments, but anything more serious would get transferred to an actual hospital (which may or may not also be free, depends on where you are and when really). This is also where Poké Marts get their start, as shops specifically for Pokémon journeying supplies.

With time and investment, the Pokémon training scenes continued to complexify -- and along the endless march of telecommunications, the ideas birthed within the most influential scenes would spread far and wide, with more or less resistance. A significant example is the figure of the Champion; meeting up and battling was good enough for a while, but then trainers started asking themselves a question that would change everything: who is, in fact, the best trainer of them all? That trainer would be called Champion. The rules for determining a Champion, however -- what made somebody one, or what made the title change hands -- were seldom formalized to any extent, and were thus subject to a lot of regional traditions, some more byzantine than others, as well as rapid changes over time.

In some scenes, all it took to become Champion was defeating the Champion, but the Champion had no obligation to make themself freely available to be challenged; it was, in fact, in their best interest to be challenged as infrequently as possible, if they cared to hang onto the title. Furthermore, if they could freely accept or refuse challenges, then they could choose to only accept challenges in specific times and places, where their Pokémon would have the advantage. Some Champions even started to gather loyal trainers around themselves and stipulate that they'd only accept challenges from someone who can defeat all of their underlings -- and naturally, the challenger was at a disadvantage, their team being exhausted from many battles when the Champion's was fresh and rested. Of course, a Champion taking these stipulations too far would be questioned and, ultimately, disregarded; it was more a matter of finding out just how many restrictions on challenges one could get away with. Additionally, challengers vying for the Championship -- now often known as "elite trainers" -- started joining in the subterfuge; many of them gathered underlings of their own and attempted to impose restrictions of their own on challenges issued to Champions. Prestige and reputation thus made and broke Champions as well as Champion-candidates, and thus, the elite trainers of the world vied to establish these in any way they could figure how to.

With the passage of time, modern Pokémon training started to span multiple generations, and some people found themselves growing too old to keep up with the whole buzz. They instead looked to take in young apprentices, shaping them into trainers capable both in battle and in the intricate cultural play invovled in tackling the scene and reaching for the Championship. Methods for this mentorship were incredibly diverse, ranging from reasonable to bizarre; ultimately, these were codified and solidified in the image of the Gym Leader, who taught at in a specific sedentary location, called a Gym, and usually offered wisdom specifically on the kind of Pokémon that they'd been using in their training days. Note that, at this point, Gyms come into being as a result of individual initiative, so there's no expectations for each region having a certain amount of Gyms, or each city having only one Gym, or even of Gyms giving out Badges -- although it did become common for Gyms to provide some certification for trainers, since Gym Leaders were often trainers of great reputation or even former Champions in their time, so having proof of training under a respected trainer (and, eventually, multiple of them) also became instrumental to the prestige needed for Championship.

Trainerdom may have developed this complex culture, but being the most respected Champion would still net one little respect from society as a whole, since Pokémon training still had a poor reputation. Trainers started wanting to change this -- and when a few influential Champions started catching this attitude, it quickly spread to other scenes, either through their own Champions adopting them to add prestige to their title, or through Champion-hopefuls adopting them to one-up the present Champions. There may also have been a strong sentiment of sticking it to The Man and keeping the scene underground, which many Champions and elite trainers also tried to twist for prestige, but the idea of integration won out in the long run, and as it made its strides, ideas started appearing on what needed to change within the scenes to make them respected. This usually entailed rules. Champions started holding themselves responsible for establishing and upholding specific, formal rules on such subjects as what's required for Championship to change hands, or on what you're not allowed to do in terms of inflicting injury and property damage on all and sundry.

Still, the dispute of "we should have rules and get respect from regular people" vs. "we should keep doing exactly what we're doing now and not care about the Normies" wasn't fought only between Champions and Champion-hopefuls of the world; it spread out until it was a matter where every Trainer had to take a side, and each side turned into a faction, and each faction often resolved into a formal association. The associations of pro-integration trainers came to be known as Pokémon Leagues, and regional Leagues often turned into even brands of some sort. Thus, rules turned even more specific, as they needed not only to effectively make the training scenes more respectable, but also needed to be catchy. A format emerged and became popular: to become a Champion, one had to be approved by eight League-appointed Gyms, then defeat four League-appointed Elite trainers (or, as it were, an Elite Four), and then, finally, defeat the current Champion -- thus, many of the traditions of old were now crystalized in the form of tradition for tradition's sake. Society as a whole responded to this as expected, because they couldn't be made to understand the intricacies of who's pro or against integration, but they could generally expect that eight Gyms, four Elites, one Champion also meant no more unregulated Earthquakes within city limits. Thus, society as a whole approved of the format, causing all of the simpler scenes to resolve into it. The bigger, more complex ones clinged to a few local traditions for longer, but it was inevitable that some sort of Pokémon League would be established everywhere, and with time, even those quirky local traditions would fade.

To make all of this less abstract, a good example would be to look to Kanto, one of the oldest, most traditional and complex regional scenes in the world, and also one where the actual canon provides many quirky details that can be interpreted as holdovers. For example, Kanto also lacked a distinct Elite Four and Champion, instead having a Champion within the Elite Four, until Blue's brief reign. There's also the matter of eight gyms per region, one per city not being a very natural stipulation -- on the one hand, major urban centres like Saffron had issues with the many local Gyms having to compete until one would be appointed as the official League Gym, a conflict that notably climaxed with Sabrina and the Psychic-type trainers whupping their Fighting-type using neighbors; on the other hand, most regions did not have eight major urban centres, so more remote locations saw Gyms hastily being established from the top downwards rather than organically, and Gym Leadership being handed over not to veteran mentors but to whoever's closest by that can train Pokémon decently, which is how, say, 15-year-old Brock became Gym Leader of Pewter City just by being one of the few trainers in the area that took the hobby seriously. This also notoriously caused some Gyms to be much harder to gain the approval of than others -- and this, too, turned into a tradition enforced by regulation, as Pokémon Leagues took to deliberately encouraging their Gym challenges to vary in difficulty in order to instill steady progression for trainers.

The state of Pokémon training as we see in the games is a vastly peaceful one, compared to the rest of the history -- clear rules for becoming Champion make the politics of the process obsolete and enable anyone with the requisite skill to try for the kingdom; further, the spread of Gyms as a stepping stone to Championship also gave trainers without the skill for Championship something to aim for, further turning the scenes diverse and welcoming; Pokémon training is also now legal almost anywhere in the world, with Pokémon Leagues having taken root in most scenes and ever continuing to spread, which usually ensures that battles are safe and fair anywhere they're waged. Still, Pokémon Leagues can't possibly monopolize Pokémon training; there's generally a cultural enforcement of League rules, but unregulated battles simply moved away -- in fact, Battle Frontiers and similar facilities are usually alternatives to Pokémon Leagues, established far away from the urban centres where traditional scenes and thus Leagues formed. With these changes, Pokémon training is viewed in a much more positive light, to the point that it's often expected that young people will dabble in it in their time -- although nonetheless, it remains mostly a hobby that can't really sustain itself, hence it being common for Gym Leaders and even Champions to be people who work regular jobs as well. Regardless, holding an official League position is a source of reputable status; it probably won't help you run for the presidency (and oh, yeah, I have no idea why it's such a common headcanon that Pokémon Leagues are the actual administrative bodies of the Pokémon World), but making it to Championhood often brings pride to your hometown in the same sense as, say, becoming a famous soccer player does.

This isn't to say the Pokémon training scene isn't still in flux as we go through the games, though. From Kanto and Hoenn to Johto and Sinnoh alone we see a lot of changes, such as the aforementioned situation where differences in Gym Leader skill start being enforced rather than accidentally caused (note how Johto and Sinnoh have a lot more young Gym Leaders than Kanto and Hoenn). By the time of Black/White we also see an Elite Four where you can challenge the trainers at whichever order you choose, instead of having a preset order, which also happens in Kalos and the fledgling new League in Alola; this would be a new idea that then spread out to many other leagues, but didn't seem to be around when we were going through Sinnoh and earlier. There's also the PWT in Black 2/White 2 -- prestiged trainers from many different regions being called to a friendly international competition, like some sort of Olympic tradition is starting to surface now that telecommunications reached the insane level they're at by that point. These are small changes overall, but there's nothing to say that the paradigm can't shift even more starkly -- after all, maybe Alola will be the League to prove that a valid League can be run without strictly parroting the 8-badge Gym challenge. Which, itself, is only a sustainable stance in a zeitgeist where Pokémon training is generally accepted without the sheer need to perfomatically signal that it's being done under sane, reasonable regulations.

so yeah, was that a whole lot of overthinking or what

#my stupid text posts #Pokémon is tagged in this post

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john2983miller-blog · 5 years

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Snapfish.

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A Trend-setting Gift.

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These are actually traditional presents. And also in a lot of scenarios, they are actually personalized gifts.

A Beauty Gift.

Whether she is actually 14 or even 55, every gal (or even girl) just likes to spoil herself. A present interfere with of her much-loved appeal brand names is actually a secure alternative. Or even for an extra initial contact, just how regarding a charm procedure token or even a time at the health club?

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The finest component is actually, Personalized gifts are actually liked through folks of all creations. Male would certainly really love to produce their very own design declaration along with tailored garments.

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kevinselders99-blog · 5 years

Text

Exactly How To Discover Lots Of Personalized Gifts Concepts - As Well As They Can easily All Be Actually Individualized Free!

https://www.foxblossom.com/

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Exactly how To Give A Great Personal Gift On Her Birthday/Anniversary.

Many custom-made personalized gifts will certainly perform your door action in a number of full weeks approximately.

What perform you imply through a 'individual' present?

Just how to offer an individual present?

Why a female will like to obtain an individual present?

Acquiring a private present coming from the one she appreciates is actually a significant higher for a female. As well as, it informs her numerous factors.

1. Initially, she really feels really exclusive and also treasured.

3. It presents your delicate as well as considerate edge, as well as rely on our team, lady prepared terrific outlet through that high quality in a male.

Forms of individual presents.

The top secret depend on her character.

Her character must offer you the hint for the style of individual present you need to obtain for her.

Exactly how can key owners be actually tailored to create all of them appropriate for your celebration?

As presently mentioned, they are actually an extremely excellent present suggestion for all celebrations. Exactly how you customize all of them relies on the celebration.

The Very Best Gifts.

Private Creations.

Reddish Envelope.

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- Chilled out-- exactly how around songs, movies, a really good publication, a weekend break at a nation hideaway, bathtub opportunity presents?

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A Mini-break.

Ceramic Barn.

Snapfish.

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A Trend-setting Gift.

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A Beauty Gift.

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The Online World of Personalized Gifts.

Why are actually vital owners amongst the most ideal personalized gifts for any type of event?

Go all out as well as receive her that private present and also she view her eye illuminated up along with enjoyment.

0 notes

smartworkingpackage · 7 years

Text

Timeless Note-Taking Systems for Students

It’s time to head back to school, and to celebrate, eligible college students can now get 50 percent off Evernote Premium. How best to use it? Read this comprehensive guide to different types of note-taking, and decide which styles resonate with the way you think. The best part? They all work in EvernoteIn classrooms and lecture halls around the world, millions of students—from elementary schools to the highest levels of collegiate research—bear the torch as our most consistent note-takers. While we’ve experienced massive shifts in technology over the course of the past four decades, the essence and methodology of note-taking remain largely intact. Same purpose. Different medium.

Whether scribbling shorthand in a notebook or capturing lecture notes on a laptop or mobile device, students still need to find ways to remember what they are taught. Note-taking is essential to the learning process.

Organizing Information

For centuries, we’ve been distracted.

No matter your profession or pursuits, interpreting and capturing information is more challenging than it seems. Students experience this every day. Research shows us that overcoming information overload begins with organization. For students, this starts with having a system for organizing their notes. How students organize notes can have an enormous impact on how well they can recall it later.

Perhaps that’s why professors at Ivy League schools designed their note-taking systems to help students organize information more efficiently. From commonplace (at Harvard and Oxford in the 1800s) to Cornell (1960s New York), best practices for note-taking became a critical component of education. Today, academic institutions such as California Polytechnic Institute to Stanford University still place a premium on educating students about note-taking methodology. But, most of these approaches are designed for paper and pencil. Many universities still point students toward online resources that offer advice designed for the pencil-based note-taker. That’s a testament to the perseverance of tradition, but it’s also indicative of a need to empower students to use technology to capture and study notes.

Image: The Stanford University Academic Center provides writing tips for paper-based note-taking using the Cornell Method.

How we Learn to Remember

As students, we learn through exposure to information. We keep a record of that information, and, following repeated exposures to the information, we can recall it later during exams, pop quizzes, and tests. Nowadays, the use of smartphones and tablets for note-taking can significantly improve the learning process:

Capture and record only the information you don’t know.

Identify the most important material.

Remember the information by setting time to review it later.

Recall the information when it is needed (research, connecting ideas to writing, exams).

Psychologists say that to recall information and build knowledge, it’s essential to understand three distinct stages of memory. Interestingly, they mirror the phases of note-taking:

Encoding (writing down notes, capturing information, capture audio, photographs).

Storage (physical notebook, pen and paper, or a digital system like Evernote).

Retrieval (revisiting and reading your notes and the information you captured).

For students, it’s a time-honored system: Capture the knowledge and then find a system to retain that knowledge so that it will be usefully applied in moments that test your abilities later—exams, quizzes, and tests.

Choosing Your Note Style

Note-taking is deeply personal. How you implement a particular method mirrors not only your productivity habits but also the way you think and your creative workflow. For some people, organizing information into outline formats and lists is the key to success. For others, it’s all about visual systems that help them see information in a new light.

No matter your system, the challenge is universal: how do we parse the noise, sift through information, and decide what’s important?

Though the process sounds complicated, there are two primary classifications of note-taking systems: linear and nonlinear. But the method you use depends on personal choice, the class environment you’re in, and the way your brain works. These are the most common approaches—all of which are easy to implement in Evernote.

The Outline Method

With origins dating back to the 1500s, the outline is a classic paper and pencil style of linear note-taking in which you take capture information alongside Roman or Arabic numerals.

Its durability is part of its legacy—it works on paper, but it’s also easy to adapt and implement digitally.

With a linear outline, you can also use bullet points or other characters and symbols.

This tactic of note-taking works in almost any class setting, and helps you record content quickly. In addition to capturing key points, it also helps you catalog and remember what the subtopics have to do with the bigger concepts. Because this style of note-taking aims to capture the most important parts of a lecture, it’s easy to turn your notes into questions you can use later to study for exams.

The Cornell Method

Originally invented in the 1950s at its namesake university, Cornell is considered by many to be the Cadillac of note-taking systems.

Broken down into three distinct sections, the Cornell system allows you to capture and retrieve information in a single place. Using Cornell, you can hone in on major concepts and ideas in lectures and build learning from there. This system is perfect for high school or college students in lecture situations. It is also a good system for attorneys and knowledge workers. Here’s how it works:

Record: During a lecture, use the note-taking column on the left to record the lecture using sentences.

Questions: Formulate questions in the right-hand column based on your class notes, shortly after class ends (while they’re fresh on your mind). Writing questions helps to clarify meanings, reveal relationships, establish continuity, and strengthen memory. Jotting down questions also sets the stage for exam-studying later.

Recite: Cover the note-taking column with a sheet of paper. Then, looking at the questions or cue-words in the right-hand column only, say aloud, in your own words, the answers to the questions, facts, or ideas indicated by the cue words.

Reflect: Reflect on the material by asking yourself questions, for example: “What’s the significance of these facts? What principle are they based on? How can I apply them? How do they fit in with what I already know? What’s beyond them?

Review: Spend at least ten minutes every week reviewing all your previous notes. If you do, you’ll retain a great deal for the exam.

Additional tips helpful for Cornell:

Add symbols for clarity. Add highlights, underlines, or symbols around information that is important to your studies. If you can, avoid writing out entire sentences. The point of note-taking is to clue yourself into things your professor indicates may be important, and to help create personal study guides.

Shorthand. Create your own shorthand language to help you type faster. If you use abbreviated language to chat with friends on Snapchat, implement it into your note-taking. Use w/ (with) and % (for percentages).

The Sentence Method

This method is a good way to capture content in sentence-sized pieces. Although you lose the ability to organize through numbered or bulleted lists, the sentence method allows you to capture a running list of information that is new to you.

Since what you have written is not organized into paragraphs, you can return and review material later. Sentences have the benefit of making sense because of they are easily readable. If you type quickly, and if the information is presented in an organized manner, this may be the perfect note-taking system for you.

Mind Mapping

If you’re a visual thinker, then mind maps are an opportunity for you to connect ideas and notes together visually. In class, mind maps are an efficient way to sketch out topics. Here’s one Evernote customer’s mind-map for remembering how to use Evernote. In this method, sketching and doodling are encouraged because these types of drawings are relevant to the notes.

More tips for taking great notes

From annotations to highlights, here are some additional ways to take your notes to the next level.

Attend lectures regularly. It goes without saying that consistent class attendance is a huge part of being successful in school. You have to absorb lecture material in class to understand textbook reading and to prepare g for exams and final projects.

Become an active reader. When you’re studying for class or developing ideas for writing projects, push hard to read actively and understand the material.

Ask questions.

Think through the material you’re reading.

Cite sources. Many classes require annotated bibliographies, so you’ll save time if you capture your sources as you study.

Use Amazon Kindle. Capture and save your Kindle notes and highlights into Evernote in three simple steps. Learn more.

Blinkist. Blinkist curates the world’s best business books and distills them into manageable, easily readable 15-minute summaries offered in both text and audio formats in a mobile app for smartphones, tablets, and any web browser. As you save highlights in Blinkist, they automatically sync to Evernote—which are all easily discoverable and searchable any time you need to access it. Learn more.

Instapaper. With a single click, you can save articles you’re reading on the Web. You can save anything you read on iOS, Android, and Kindle. Save your notes, comments, or highlights directly to Evernote with this IFTTT recipe.

It’s amazing how the legacy of note-taking has both evolved and endured. Spanning centuries, the concepts have remained the same. Notes help us separate the important stuff from everything else so we can learn more efficiently.

Eligible college students get 50 percent off Evernote Premium. Check out the details and get organized today.

from Evernote Blog http://ift.tt/2w1RU2Y via IFTTT

#Evernote Blog

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nancygduarteus · 7 years

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The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed With YouTube

Toddlers crave power. Too bad for them, they have none. Hence the tantrums and absurd demands. (No, I want this banana, not that one, which looks identical in every way but which you just started peeling and is therefore worthless to me now.)

They just want to be in charge! This desire for autonomy clarifies so much about the behavior of a very small human. It also begins to explains the popularity YouTube among toddlers and preschoolers, several development psychologists told me.

If you don’t have a 3-year-old in your life, you may not be aware of YouTube Kids, an app that’s essentially a stripped-down version of the original video blogging site, with videos filtered by the target audience’s age. And because the mobile app is designed for use on a phone or tablet, kids can tap their way across a digital ecosystem populated by countless videos—all conceived with them in mind.

The videos that surface on the app are generated by YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, which takes into account a user’s search history, viewing history, demographic region, gender, age, and other individual data. The algorithm is basically a funnel through which every YouTube video is poured—with only a few making it onto a person’s screen.

This recommendation engine poses a difficult task, simply because of the scale of the platform. “YouTube recommendations are responsible for helping more than a billion users discover personalized content from an ever-growing corpus of videos,” researchers at Google, which owns YouTube, wrote in a 2016 paper about the algorithm. That includes many hours of video uploaded to the site every second of every day. Making a recommendation system that’s worthwhile is “extremely challenging,” they wrote, because the algorithm has to continuously sift through a mind-boggling trove of content and instantly identify the freshest and most relevant videos—all while knowing how to ignore the noise.

The architecture of YouTube’s recommendation system, in which “candidate videos” are retrieved and ranked before presenting only a few to the user. (Google / YouTube)

And here’s where the ouroboros factor comes in: Kids watch the same kinds of videos over and over. Videomakers take notice of what’s most popular, then mimic it, hoping that kids will click on their stuff. When they do, YouTube’s algorithm takes notice, and recommends those videos to kids. Kids keep clicking on them, and keep being offered more of the same. Which means video makers keep making those kinds of videos—hoping kids will click.

This is, in essence, how all algorithms work. It’s how filter bubbles are made. A little bit of computer code tracks what you find engaging—what sorts of videos do you watch most often, and for the longest periods of time?—then sends you more of that kind of stuff. Viewed a certain way, YouTube Kids is offering programming that’s very specifically tailored to what children want to see. Kids are actually selecting it themselves, right down to the second they lose interest and choose to tap on something else. The YouTube app, in other words, is a giant reflection of what kids want. In this way, it opens a special kind of window into a child’s psyche.

But what does it reveal?

“Up until very recently, surprisingly few people were looking at this,” says Heather Kirkorian, an assistant professor of human development in the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “In the last year or so, we’re actually seeing some research into apps and touchscreens. It’s just starting to come out.”

Kids videos are among the most watched content in YouTube history. This video, for example, has been viewed more than 2.3 billion times, according to YouTube’s count:

youtube

You can find some high-quality animation on YouTube Kids, plus clips from television shows like Peppa Pig, and sing-along nursery rhymes. “Daddy Finger” is basically the YouTube Kids anthem, and ChuChu TV’s dynamic interpretations of popular kid songs are basically inescapable.

youtube

Many of the most popular videos have an amateur feel. Toy demonstrations like surprise-egg videos are huge. These videos are just what they sound like: adults narrate as they play with various toys, often by pulling them out of plastic eggs or peeling away layers of slime or Play-Doh to reveal a hidden figurine.

Kids go nuts for these things.

Here’s a video from the YouTube Kids vloggers Toys Unlimited that’s logged more than 25 million views, for example:

youtube

The vague weirdness of these videos aside, it’s actually easy to see why kids like them. “Who doesn’t want to get a surprise? That’s sort of how all of us operate,” says Sandra Calvert, the director of the Children’s Digital Media Center at Georgetown University. In addition to surprises being fun, many of the videos are basically toy commercials. (This video of a person pressing sparkly Play-Doh onto chintzy Disney princess figurines has been viewed 550 million times.) And they let kids tap into a whole internet’s worth of plastic eggs and perceived power. They get to choose what they watch. And kids love being in charge, even in superficial ways.

“It’s sort of like rapid-fire channel surfing,” says Michael Rich, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Center on Media and Child Health. “In many ways YouTube Kids is better suited to the attention span of a young child—just by virtue of its length—than something like a half-hour or hour broadcast program can be.”

Rich and others compare the app to predecessors like Sesame Street, which introduced short segments within a longer program, in part to keep the attention of the young children watching. For decades, researchers have looked at how kids respond to television. Now they’re examining the way children use mobile apps—how many hours they’re spending, which apps they’re using, and so on.

It makes sense that researchers have begun to take notice. In the mobile internet age, the same millennials who have ditched cable television en masse are now having babies, which makes apps like YouTube Kids the screentime option du jour. Instead of being treated to a 28-minute episode of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, a toddler or preschooler might be offered 28 minutes of phone time to play with the Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood app. Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood is a television program, too—a spin-off of Mr. Roger’s—aimed at viewers aged 2 years old to 4 years old.

But toddlers and preschoolers are actually pretty separate groups, as far researchers are concerned. A 2-year-old and a 4-year-old might both like watching Daniel Tiger, or the same YouTube Kids video, but their takeaway is apt to be much different, Kirkorian told me. Children under the age of 3 tend to have difficulty taking information relayed to them through a screen and applying it to real-life situations. Many studies have reached similar conclusions, with a few notable exceptions. Researchers recently discovered that when a screentime experience becomes interactive—Facetiming with Grandmère, let’s say—kids under 3 years old actually can make strong connections between what’s happening onscreen and offscreen.

Kirkorian’s lab designed a series of experiments to see how much of a role interactivity plays in helping a young child transfer information this way. She and her colleagues found striking learning differences among what young children learned—even kids under 2 years old—when they could interact with an app versus when they were just watching a screen. Other researchers, too, have found that incorporating some sort of interactivity helps children retain information better. Researchers at different institutions have different definitions of “interactivity,” but in one experiment it was an act as simple as pressing a spacebar.

“So there does seem to be something about the act of choosing, having some kind of agency, that makes a difference for little kids,” Kirkorian says. “The speculative part is why that makes a difference.”

One idea is that kids, especially, like to watch the same things over and over and over again until they really understand it. I watched the Dumbo VHS so many times as a little kid that I would recite the movie on long car rides. Apparently, this is not unusual—at least not since the age of VCRs and, subsequently, on-demand programming and apps. “If they have the opportunity to choose what they’re watching, then they’re likely to interact in a way that meets their learning goals,” Kirkorian says. “We know the act of learning new information is rewarding, so they’re likely to pick the information or videos that are in that sweet spot.”

“Children like to watch the same thing over and over,” says Calvert, of Georgetown. “Some of that is a comprehension issue, so they’ll repeatedly look at it so they can understand the story. Kids often don’t understand people’s motives, and that’s a major driver for a story. They don’t often understand the link between actions and consequences.”

Young kids are also just predisposed to becoming obsessive about relatively narrow interests. (Elephants! Trains! The moon! Ice cream!) Around the 18-month mark, many toddlers develop “extremely intense interests,” says Georgene Troseth, an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University. Which is part of why kids using apps like YouTube Kids often select videos that portray familiar concepts—ones that feature a cartoon character or topic they’re already drawn to. This presents a research challenge, however. If kids are just tapping a thumbnail of a video because they recognize it, it’s hard to say how much they’re learning—or how different the app environment really is from other forms of play.

Even the surprise-egg craze isn’t really novel, says Rachel Barr, a developmental psychologist at Georgetown. “They are relatively fast paced and they include something that young children really like: things being enclosed and unwrapped,” she told me. “I have not tested it, but it seems unlikely that children are learning from these videos since they are not clearly constructed.”

“Interactivity is not always a good thing,” she added.

Researchers differ on the degree to which YouTube Kids is a valuable educational tool. Obviously, it depends on the video and the involvement of a caregiver to help contextualize what’s on screen. But questions about how the algorithm works also play a role. It’s not clear, for instance, how heavily YouTube weighs previous watching behaviors in its recommendation engine. If a kid binge-watches a bunch of videos that are lower quality in terms of learning potential, are they then stuck in a filter bubble where they’ll only see similarly low-quality programming?

There isn’t a human handpicking the best videos for kids to watch. The only human input on YouTube’s side is to monitor the app for inappropriate content, a spokesperson for YouTube told me. Quality control has still been an issue, however. YouTube Kids last year featured a video that showed Mickey Mouse-esque characters shooting one another in the head with guns, Today reported.

“The available content is not curated but rather filtered into the app via the algorithm,” said Nina Knight, a YouTube spokesperson. “So unlike traditional TV, where the content is being selected for you at a specified time, the YouTube Kids app gives each child and family more of the type of content they love and anytime they want it, which is incredibly unique.”

At the same time, the creators of YouTube Kids videos spend countless hours trying to game the algorithm so that their videos are viewed as many times as possible—more views translate into more advertising dollars for them. Here’s a video by Toys AndMe that’s logged more than 125 million views since it was posted in September 2016:

youtube

“You have to do what the algorithm wants for you,” says Nathalie Clark, the co-creator of a similarly popular channel, Toys Unlimited, and a former ICU nurse who quit her job to make videos full-time. “You can’t really jump back and forth between themes.”

What she means is, once YouTube’s algorithm has determined that a certain channel is a source of videos about slime, or colors, or shapes, or whatever else—and especially once a channel has had a hit video on a given topic—videomakers stray from that classification at their peril. “Honestly, YouTube picks for you,” she says. “Trending right now is Paw Patrol, so we do a lot of Paw Patrol.”

There are other key strategies for making a YouTube Kids video go viral. Make enough of these things and you start to get a sense of what children want to see, she says. “I wish I could tell you more,” she added, “But I don’t want to introduce competition. And, honestly, nobody really understands it. ”

The other thing people don’t yet understand is how growing up in the mobile internet age will change the way children think about storytelling. “There’s a rich set of literature showing kids who are reading more books are more imaginative,” says Calvert, of the Children’s Digital Media Center. “But in the age of interactivity, it’s no just longer consuming what somebody else makes. It’s also making you’re own thing.”

In other words, the youngest generation of app users is developing new expectations about narrative structure and informational environments. Beyond the thrill a preschooler gets from tapping a screen, or watching The Bing Bong Song video for the umpteenth time, the long-term implications for cellphone-toting toddlers are tangled up with all the other complexities of living in a highly networked on-demand world.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/07/what-youtube-reveals-about-the-toddler-mind/534765/?utm_source=feed

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ionecoffman · 7 years

Text

The Algorithm That Makes Preschoolers Obsessed With YouTube

The architecture of YouTube’s recommendation system, in which “candidate videos” are retrieved and ranked before presenting only a few to the user. (Google / YouTube)

But what does it reveal?

Kids videos are among the most watched content in YouTube history. This video, for example, has been viewed more than 2.3 billion times, according to YouTube’s count:

youtube

Kids go nuts for these things.

Here’s a video from the YouTube Kids vloggers Toys Unlimited that’s logged more than 25 million views, for example:

youtube

“Interactivity is not always a good thing,” she added.

youtube

Article source here:The Atlantic

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