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#also the future projects within the podcast make me really excited even though they aren’t concrete
amemesiella · 3 years
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there’s only been 2 episodes of asmRT but i already ADORE it jesus
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hartsgold · 4 years
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𝐀𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐨. 𝐕𝐢𝐠𝐢𝐥𝐨. 𝐎𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐫.
𝚖𝚢 𝚗𝚊𝚖𝚎 𝚒𝚜 𝚌𝚕𝚊𝚞𝚍𝚎 𝚟𝚘𝚗 𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚐𝚊𝚗. 𝚒 𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚔 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚎𝚒𝚛𝚘𝚜 𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚝𝚞𝚝𝚎, 𝚏𝚘𝚍𝚕𝚊𝚗, 𝚊𝚗 𝚘𝚛𝚐𝚊𝚗𝚒𝚣𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚍𝚎𝚍𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚊𝚌𝚊𝚍𝚎𝚖𝚒𝚌 𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚌𝚑 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚘 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚎𝚜𝚘𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚒𝚌 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚘𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚕. 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚍 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚝𝚞𝚝𝚎, 𝚛𝚑𝚎𝚊, 𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚎𝚖𝚙𝚕𝚘𝚢𝚎𝚍 𝚖𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚛𝚎𝚙𝚕𝚊𝚌𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚙𝚛𝚎𝚟𝚒𝚘𝚞𝚜 𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚍 𝚊𝚛𝚌𝚑𝚒𝚟𝚒𝚜𝚝, 𝚠𝚑𝚘 𝚑𝚊𝚜 𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚕𝚢 𝚙𝚊𝚜𝚜𝚎𝚍 𝚊𝚠𝚊𝚢.
i’ve been working as a researcher at the institute for four years now, and am familiar with most of our significant contracts and projects. most reach dead ends, predictably enough, as incidents of the supernatural, such as they are - and i always emphasize there are very few genuine cases - tend to resist easy conclusions. when an investigation has gone as far as it can, it is transferred to the archives.
now, the institute was founded in 1818, which means that the archive contains almost 200 years of case files at this point. combine that with the fact that most of the institute prefers the ivory tower of pure academia to the complicated work of dealing with statements or recent experiences and you have the recipe for an impeccably organized library and an absolute mess of an archive. this isn’t necessarily a problem - modern filing and indexing systems are a real wonder, and all it would need is a half-decent archivist to keep it in order. my predecessor was apparently not that archivist.
from where I am sitting, i can see thousands of files. many spread loosely around the place, others crushed into unmarked boxes. a few have dates on them or helpful labels such as 86-91 G/H. not only that, but most of these appear to be handwritten or produced on a typewriter with no accompanying digital or audio versions of any sort. in fact, i believe the first computer to ever enter this room is the laptop that i brought in today. more importantly, it seems as though little of the actual investigations have been stored in the archives, so the only thing in most of the files are the statements themselves.
it is going to take me a long, long time to organize this mess. i’ve managed to secure the services of several researchers to assist me. I plan to digitize the files as much as possible and record audio versions, though some will have to be on tape recorder, as my attempts to get them on my laptop have met with… significant audio distortions.
that’s probably enough time spent making my excuses for the state of this place, and i suppose we have to begin somewhere.
𝚊𝚞𝚍𝚒𝚘 𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚘𝚛𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚋𝚢 𝚌𝚕𝚊𝚞𝚍𝚎 𝚟𝚘𝚗 𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚐𝚊𝚗, 𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚍 𝚊𝚛𝚌𝚑𝚒𝚟𝚒𝚜𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚎𝚒𝚛𝚘𝚜 𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚝𝚞𝚝𝚎, 𝚏𝚘𝚍𝚕𝚊𝚗.
𝙘𝙧𝙚𝙙𝙞𝙩𝙨: photography / texture art / tma s01e01 blurb & transcription. 
Hello! If you’re reading this, welcome to the hell that is The Seiros Archives. I’m hoping to make this as comprehensive a series translation as possible without integrating too many spoilers/telling the stories of characters that aren’t mine (save Sothis and Rhea, who seemed lore-mandatory additions). For example, I don’t have a character to fulfill [Gertrude/the past Archivist’s] position, simply because I can’t think of one and would prefer not to kill anyone off that might want to use this as an AU base. (Feel free to, btw! Just let me know/tag me in your verse thoughts, I’m so excited to read ‘em!) 
Spoilers below. Additionally: please peruse the Wiki pages with caution. There’s a trigger list for TMA episodes/general content warnings located here. 
Essentially: 
The Seiros Archives is an institution that’s existed for two centuries, currently under the jurisdiction of one Rhea, who claims to have come into control of it within the last decade or so. Obviously, this is not true. Rhea’s been alive since the founding of this institute, as she had it built order to resurrect Sothis/The Beginning/The Beholding, [her mother]. 
Sothis is both a God and not. In TMA, Gods are also known as ‘The Entities’, or The Fears. They are described, on the wiki, as such: 
The Entities are various aspects of an amorphous force of fear that exists next to reality. Their influence upon reality manifests as supernatural happenings - all supernatural phenomena in the world are simply extensions of them. These phenomena can take various forms such as people, animals, monsters, books, objects, or places.These entities do not simply feed off of our fear, rather they are our fears made manifest. “These things... these forces, they are our fear. Deep fears. Primordial. Always looking for ways to grow and spread.” Not all their actions inspire fear, they are simply a part of the process, a means to an end. (cont. This link includes a list of the Fears and should be read with caution, as there is some horror imagery, etc.)
In this verse, I’m going to conflate Sothis with The Eye, or The Ceaseless Watcher. She is an Entity of Fear manifested specifically as “being watched, exposed, followed, of having secrets known, but also the drive to know and understand, even if your discoveries might destroy you. Fear that you’re suffering for the sake of something watching.” I think her relationship with being able to control the flow of time and know results of the past and future translate well here. It’s terrifying to consider someone who Knows what might happen in the far future can directly alter it as well. 
Let’s say that Sothis’ “death” in this verse was a failed “Ritual” of The Eye. Centuries ago, Rhea attempted to bring her mother’s Entity to full power above all the others. 
Rituals are ceremonies held in order to empower The Entities. “Most entities have their own ‘ritual’, a symbolic act that, if completed, will allow the entity to merge with reality, changing the fabric of the world as it exert its will and nature upon reality. These rituals have the potential to bring other closely-tied entities along with it. It requires centuries for each Entity to build up the power needed for its ritual, and if it is stopped, it cannot try again until it rebuilds that power base. No ritual has ever succeeded” (x). 
When Rhea’s Ritual for The Eye was thwarted, the Entity lost a great sum of its garnered power. I imagine she was an Avatar of the fear, and her connection with her mother was severed to an extent. As a result, she began to construct the Seiros Institute as a means of rebuilding power for the sake of The Eye. 
Avatars are essentially vessels for spreading the influence of The Entities. “Some humans can become attached to an Entity and become empowered by it, gaining supernatural abilities related to their patron, but losing some or all of their humanity in the process. Most people fall to the powers through love or fear, though it can happen for other reasons such as debt. Avatars and agents of a power retain their agency but can become physically dependent on it, suffering withdrawal effects, including death, if they go too long without feeding the entity that empowers them” (x). 
People influenced by, or who encounter Avatars are often Marked by them, and other Entities alongside their Avatars can sense this fact.
In building The Seiros Institute, Rhea hopes to give Sothis enough power through a ritual to “merge with reality”/live again/to be able to communicate with her once more. 
The former hired Archivist stopped countless Rituals of The Entities, and was eventually killed as a result of attempting to quell Rhea’s efforts.
There are tunnels underneath the institute in canon, which I’m going to say is the equivalent of the Holy Tomb. 
Characters, once employed by The Institute, are unable to quit/be fired. Literally. This is a canon mechanic, where they can’t even say the words. 
TL;DR: This is set in a modern Fódlan. I imagine it as something of a large city interconnected with several other neighboring states, such as Almyra, Brigid, Dagda, etc. 
Are there tense relations between these places? Of course! Is The Empire probably allied with a different Entity and is aggravated that Rhea is doing what she’s doing? Very likely! Are Those Who Slither In The Dark likely allied with one as well, or are experimenting on people in the attempt to complete a Ritual? Why Not! 
The Entities create very viciously real manifestations of their respective fears, so people have supernatural encounters of all kinds. Vampires––weird lore, but yes. People being replaced by doppelgängers––Oh, Yeah. Circus people who steal voice boxes and dance around with mannequin limbs? Uh huh. Worms? Don’t forget the worms. As weird as you can think of it! 
So this modern Fódlan is rife with the eccentric and the supernatural. At the moment, The Seiros Institute is simply an academic place set on recording and understanding those supernatural occurrences! 
I’m setting Khalid as the current archivist because he seems the appropriate “linchpin” figure that Jon is in the main series, having been marked by several Entities. As the most knowledge and balance-hungry of the Three Lords, he fits the part. Obviously there’s something to be said of Byleth’s potential role as an Archivist, but the Archivist does a lot of talking, much like Khalid. He also interacts with everyone giving statements to the Archive, and I think Khalid’s canonical tendency to disarm others in exchange for secrets and stories is par for this course. 
Nonetheless, if you do want to use this AU as a base for your Byleth or any other character, please don’t feel restricted by anything! 
Whether your characters are employed by the Archive, is an Avatar for a Fear, or is simply terrified by whatever the fuck is going on here, please feel free to get in on this! Write it with me! Ask me any questions you might have and I’ll do my best to spoil myself on this wonderful podcast further so I can answer you to the best of my ability! [I’m about 75 episodes in right now, but am content to spoil myself, truly...] So please hit me up anytime. I’m really excited about this and would love to plot things out with you! 
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theadmiringbog · 4 years
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I had a fragile but agreeable life: a job as an assistant at a small literary agency in Manhattan; a smattering of beloved friends on whom I exercised my social anxiety, primarily by avoiding them.
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I wanted to make money, because I wanted to feel affirmed, confident, and valued. I wanted to be taken seriously. Mostly, I didn’t want anyone to worry about me.                
--
Conversation with the cofounders had been so easy, and the interviews so much more like coffee dates than the formal, sweaty-blazer interrogations I had experienced elsewhere, that at a certain point I wondered if maybe the three of them just wanted to hang out.                
--
They wore shirts that were always crisp and modestly buttoned to the clavicle. They were in long-term relationships with high-functioning women, women with great hair with whom they exercised and shared meals at restaurants that required reservations. They lived in one-bedroom apartments in downtown Manhattan and had no apparent need for psychotherapy. They shared a vision and a game plan. They weren’t ashamed to talk about it, weren’t ashamed to be openly ambitious. Fresh off impressive positions and prestigious summer internships at large tech corporations in the Bay Area, they spoke about their work like industry veterans, lifelong company men. They were generous with their unsolicited business advice, as though they hadn’t just worked someplace for a year or two but built storied careers. They were aspirational. I wanted, so much, to be like—and liked by—them.                
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It was thrilling to watch the moving parts of a business come together; to feel that I could contribute.                
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What I also did not understand at the time was that the founders had all hoped I would make my own job, without deliberate instruction. The mark of a hustler, a true entrepreneurial spirit, was creating the job that you wanted and making it look indispensable, even if it was institutionally unnecessary.                
--
I wasn’t used to having the sort of professional license and latitude that the founders were given. I lacked their confidence, their entitlement. I did not know about startup maxims to experiment and “own” things. I had never heard the common tech incantation Ask forgiveness, not permission.                
--
I had also been spoiled by the speed and open-mindedness of the tech industry, the optimism and sense of possibility. In publishing, no one I knew was ever celebrating a promotion. Nobody my age was excited about what might come next. Tech, by comparison, promised what so few industries or institutions could, at the time: a future.                
--
“How would you explain the tool to your grandmother?” “How would you describe the internet to a medieval farmer?” asked the sales engineer, opening and closing the pearl snaps on his shirt,                
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Good interface design was like magic, or religion:                
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The first time I looked at a block of code and understood what was happening, I felt like nothing less than a genius.                
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Anything an app or website’s users did—tap a button, take a photograph, send a payment, swipe right, enter text—could be recorded in real time, stored, aggregated, and analyzed in those beautiful dashboards. Whenever I explained it to friends, I sounded like a podcast ad.                
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four-person companies trying to gamify human resources                
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... how rare the analytics startup was. Ninety-five percent of startups tanked. We weren’t just beating the odds; we were soaring past them.                
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While I usually spent sleepless nights staring at the ceiling and worrying about my loved ones’ mortality, he worked on programming side projects. Sometimes he just passed the time between midnight and noon playing a long-haul trucking simulator. It was calming, he said. There was a digital CB radio through which he could communicate with other players. I pictured him whispering into it in the dark.                
--
At the start of each meeting, the operations manager distributed packets containing metrics and updates from across the company: sales numbers, new signups, deals closed. We were all privy to high-level details and minutiae, from the names and progress of job candidates to projected revenue. This panoramic view of the business meant individual contributions were noticeable; it felt good to identify and measure our impact.                
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Was this what it felt like to hurtle through the world in a state of pure confidence, I wondered, pressing my fingers to my temples—was this what it was like to be a man?                
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I was interested in talking about empathy, a buzzword used to the point of pure abstraction,                
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The hierarchy was pervasive at the analytics startup, ingrained in the CEO’s dismissal of marketing and insistence that a good product would sell itself.                
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He just taught himself to code over the summer, I heard myself say of a job candidate one afternoon. It floated out of my mouth with the awe of someone relaying a miracle.                
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As early employees, we were dangerous. We had experienced an early, more autonomous, unsustainable iteration of the company. We had known it before there were rules. We knew too much about how things worked, and harbored nostalgia and affection for the way things were.                
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The obsession with meritocracy had always been suspect at a prominent international company that was overwhelmingly white, male, and American, and had fewer than fifteen women in Engineering.                
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For years, my coworkers explained, the absence of an official org chart had given rise to a secondary, shadow org chart, determined by social relationships and proximity to the founders. Employees who were technically rank-and-file had executive-level power and leverage. Those with the ear of the CEO could influence hiring decisions, internal policies, and the reputational standing of their colleagues. “Flat structure, except for pay and responsibilities,” said an internal tools developer, rolling her eyes. “It’s probably easier to be a furry at this company than a woman.”                
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“It’s like no one even read ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness,’” said an engineer who had recently read “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.”                
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Can’t get sexually harassed when you work remotely, we joked, though of course we were wrong.                
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I was in a million places at once. My mind pooled with strangers’ ideas, each joke or observation or damning polemic as distracting and ephemeral as the next. It wasn’t just me. Everyone I knew was stuck in a feedback loop with themselves. Technology companies stood by, ready to become everyone’s library, memory, personality. I read whatever the other nodes in my social networks were reading. I listened to whatever music the algorithm told me to. Wherever I traveled on the internet, I saw my own data reflected back at me: if a jade face-roller stalked me from news site to news site, I was reminded of my red skin and passive vanity. If the personalized playlists were full of sad singer-songwriters, I could only blame myself for getting the algorithm depressed.                
--
As we left the theater in pursuit of a hamburger, I felt rising frustration and resentment. I was frustrated because I felt stuck, and I was resentful because I was stuck in an industry that was chipping away at so many things I cared about. I did not want to be an ingrate, but I had trouble seeing why writing support emails for a venture-funded startup should offer more economic stability and reward than creative work or civic contributions. None of this was new information—and it was not as if tech had disrupted a golden age of well-compensated artists—but I felt it fresh.                
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I had never really considered myself someone with a lifestyle, but of course I was, and insofar as I was aware of one now, I liked it. The tech industry was making me a perfect consumer of the world it was creating. It wasn’t just about leisure, the easy access to nice food and private transportation and abundant personal entertainment. It was the work culture, too: what Silicon Valley got right, how it felt to be there. The energy of being surrounded by people who so easily articulated, and satisfied, their desires. The feeling that everything was just within reach.                
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We wanted to be on the side of human rights, free speech and free expression, creativity and equality. At the same time, it was an international platform, and who among us could have articulated a coherent stance on international human rights? We sat in our apartments tapping on laptops purchased from a consumer-hardware company that touted workplace tenets of diversity and liberalism but manufactured its products in exploitative Chinese factories using copper and cobalt mined in Congo by children. We were all from North America. We were all white, and in our twenties and thirties. These were not individual moral failings, but they didn’t help. We were aware we had blind spots. They were still blind spots. We struggled to draw the lines. We tried to distinguish between a political act and a political view; between praise of violent people and praise of violence; between commentary and intention. We tried to decipher trolls’ tactical irony. We made mistakes.                
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I did not want two Silicon Valleys. I was starting to think the one we already had was doing enough damage. Or, maybe I did want two, but only if the second one was completely different, an evil twin: Matriarchal Silicon Valley. Separatist-feminist Silicon Valley. Small-scale, well-researched, slow-motion, regulated Silicon Valley—men could hold leadership roles in that one, but only if they never used the word “blitzscale” or referred to business as war.                
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“Progress is so unusual and so rare, and we’re all out hunting, trying to find El Dorado,” Patrick said. 
“Almost everyone’s going to return empty-handed. Sober, responsible adults aren’t going to quit their jobs and lives to build companies that, in the end, may not even be worth it. It requires, in a visceral way, a sort of self-sacrificing.” 
Only later did I consider that he might have been trying to tell me something.                
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Abuses were considered edge cases, on the margin—flaws that could be corrected by spam filters, or content moderators, or self-regulation by unpaid community members. No one wanted to admit that abuses were structurally inevitable: indicators that the systems—optimized for stickiness and amplification, endless engagement—were not only healthy, but working exactly as designed.                
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The SF Bay Area is like Rome or Athens in antiquity, posted a VC. Send your best scholars, learn from the masters and meet the other most eminent people in your generation, and then return home with the knowledge and networks you need. Did they know people could see them?                
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I couldn’t imagine making millions of dollars every year, then choosing to spend my time stirring shit on social media. There was almost a pathos to their internet addiction. Log off, I thought. Just email each other.                
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All these people, spending their twenties and thirties in open-plan offices on the campuses of the decade’s most valuable public companies, pouring themselves bowls of free cereal from human bird feeders, crushing empty cans of fruit-tinged water, bored out of their minds but unable to walk away from the direct deposits—it was so unimaginative. There was so much potential in Silicon Valley, and so much of it just pooled around ad tech, the spillway of the internet economy.                
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Though I did not want what Patrick and his friends wanted, there was still something appealing to me about the lives they had chosen. I envied their focus, their commitment, their ability to know what they wanted, and to say it out loud—the same things I always envied.                
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I wanted to believe that as generations turned over, those coming into economic and political power would build a different, better, more expansive world, and not just for people like themselves. Later, I would mourn these conceits. Not only because this version of the future was constitutionally impossible—such arbitrary and unaccountable power was, after all, the problem—but also because I was repeating myself. I was looking for stories; I should have seen a system. The young men of Silicon Valley were doing fine. They loved their industry, loved their work, loved solving problems. They had no qualms. They were builders by nature, or so they believed. They saw markets in everything, and only opportunities. They had inexorable faith in their own ideas and their own potential. They were ecstatic about the future. They had power, wealth, and control. The person with the yearning was me.                
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could have stayed in my job forever, which was how I knew it was time to go. The money and the ease of the lifestyle weren’t enough to mitigate the emotional drag of the work: the burnout, the repetition, the intermittent toxicity. The days did not feel distinct. I felt a widening emptiness, rattling around my studio every morning, rotating in my desk chair. I had the luxury, if not the courage, to do something about it.                
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As I stood in the guest entrance, waiting for the stock plan administrator to collect the paperwork, I watched my former coworkers chatting happily with one another in the on-site coffee shop and felt, wrenchingly, that leaving had been a huge mistake. Certain unflattering truths: I had felt unassailable behind the walls of power. Society was shifting, and I felt safer inside the empire, inside the machine. It was preferable to be on the side that did the watching than on the side being watched.                 
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homebrewpodcast · 4 years
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Transcript: Home Brew 08: Skeleton Party
Transcript: Home Brew 08: Skeleton Party
Thank you for your patience! Please explore this transcript of our latest episode at your leisure and look forward to more transcripts to be posted here and on the homebrewpodcast.podbean.com page! 
Order of events:
☕ Hero Cultus!
☕ Main topic: Shadow Work & A Skeleton Party Near You
☕ Mythic feature: El Sombreron (A Guatemalan Tale)
☕ Devotional thought with Danny
DANNY: Hi, and welcome to Home Brew podcast. I'm Danny…
JOHNA: And I’m Johna, two pagan friends exploring spirituality in the Modern Age.
DANNY: We’re queer…
JOHNA: And definitely not so white.
DANNY: So please be aware that we are grown-ups, who may discuss sensitive topics as they relate to our own experiences.
JOHNA: That being said, we welcome and incorporate the experiences of our listeners. You can contribute by messaging homebrewpodcast.tumblr.com—
DANNY: Or by tagging @homebrewpagans on Twitter. And so, let’s get into the episode!
[transition music]
DANNY: This episode we're going to have a new segment that we're gonna introduce in lieu of Make Talk Good, definitely not because we forgot to do—
JOHNA: —we didn't forget, we remembered very good.
DANNY: It's fine. But as we have no Make Talk Good to show you today, we also wanted to introduce the segment anyway called Hero Cultist and we're going to talk more about that in just a second.
JOHNA: And after Hero Cultist we’re going to get into our main topic, shadow work.
DANNY: Whoo!
JOHNA: The Ultimate skeleton party.
DANNY: Yeah, and then after that we're going to wrap our myth and our devotional thought kind of together as one, and you'll see what I mean when we get there.
JOHNA: Dude. 
BOTH: [laugh]
JOHNA: I'm so excited about this segment because I know we've been wanting to do some other stuff, but here it is. We are introducing hero cultist. We just want to take a few minutes to recognize the figures that may not be gods but have nevertheless made a huge impact on our culture or our development as people. I know—well, Danny, you haven't read American Gods, but maybe our reader has read American Gods by Neil Gaiman.
DANNY: I've read American Gods.
JOHNA: Oh, wait you did?
DANNY: Yeah! I haven't seen the TV show, though.
JOHNA: Oh, I haven't seen that either, but I only care about the book
BOTH: [laughs]
JOHNA: Um. There's a character that remarks something like “heroes are the same as gods, except they're allowed to fail.” This stuck with me for a long time, so I want to find ways to respect the influence that some figures had in my real actual life practice. So, for Hero Cultist I have a shout-out to the spirit of Leonard Nimoy. Thank you, dude. Thank you for bringing your legacy of questioning to daytime television. I reblog “The Hobbit Song” in your honor.
DANNY: [chuckle] And I shout out to the spirit of Terry Pratchett. Thank you for bringing your legacy of righteous anger to comical literature. I will have a nice cigar in your honor, once I’m allowed to do so post-surgery, which is happening tomorrow. Or early—early today, it’s very very very late. It’s later than usual here, my listeners.
JOHNA: He would appreciate that cigar, dude.
DANNY: Though like having a cigar right before surgery is like such a Sam Vimes thing to do I kind of want to do it. I’m definitely not going to because I'd get uh beaten up by my spouse. 
JOHNA: Yay!
DANNY: Proverbially. With love.
JOHNA: Yeah. Don’t do that.
DANNY: [laughs]
JOHNA: Leonard Nimoy, Terry Pratchett. We honor you.
DANNY: Yes.
JOHNA: Moving along. 
DANNY: [laughs]
JOHNA: Shadowwork. Have you heard of it?
DANNY: I have heard of shadowwork.
JOHNA: As a cool fun Pagan pastime, perhaps?
DANNY: Yeah.
JOHNA: Oh my god, it pains me sometimes. Thinking about how shadowwork is used, at least in internet pagan land, as sort of a system of, like, dark and edgy personality tests can be bothersome. I mean, I know that like what we put online is not the sum of our practice. Basically, we're just trying to like share the fun bits, share what might generate interest, but new people who are just getting interested only have those superficial attention-grabbing tidbits.
So I’m going to give you a super quick rundown of Jungian psychology. That's Jung, J-U-N-G. So Carl Jung was one of Freud's proteges. When Freud realized that he couldn't be famous and successful and get money from benefactors by calling out family rapists for messing up perfectly good children, he sold out and he wrote all about how kids just latently desire their parents in a sexual way, so it’s actually all okay.
DANNY: Nasty.
JOHNA: Yeah. Ugh. Kay. Jung, who did study under Freud, managed to sidestep some of that and wrote all about how maybe it's horrific parents, maybe it's not, but maybe it might could be, but anyway he knows that for sure that it happens at kids, it happens to them.
My thoughts about Jung and Freud aside, the theory is very useful. In Jungian Theory, the shadow is considered the whole of the hidden and/or undesirable aspects of the personality. The shadow is sort of a potpourri of the id and the subconscious and the emotional all thrown together. It's instinctive and irrational and it tends to project our weaknesses onto others in the form of moral judgments, of jealousy or anger.
People tend to ignore or distract from their shadow personality aspects, but Jungian shadowwork tries to expose and embrace those aspects. So the work is meant to liberate your mind so that you can make deliberate choices that improve your mental health. Many times in therapy you'll find techniques that ask you to confront your shadow, like introspective journaling or guided meditations. But because this work requires a lot of emotional heavy lifting, many people find it useful to use a spiritual lens and approach it with techniques like divination and prayer and spirit journeying.
DANNY: So something to keep in mind as you approach the concept of shadowwork is that there are a billion different ways that shadowwork can be, and we’ll kind of get into those anecdotally in a second, but even deciding what type of shadowwork in the realm of secular versus spiritual is actually something that you're going to be faced with eventually.
For example, shadowwork in the realm of just therapy specifically for work that pertains to mindfulness is really really difficult for me. Mindfulness, just kind of a brief, like, definition, I suppose, is a technique that therapists use a lot, especially lately. It's a really effective, like, meditation technique on the fly that helps train your brain to focus on what is happening to you and about you and within you at the exact moment in time that you are present in. So it teaches you to not dwell on the past or worry about the future, but to be completely in the present.
It is a great tool and it does not work for me. So when I did have to do, when I decided to do shadowwork to benefit some of my, some of struggles that I was going through, it helped me to do that work through the lens of spirituality. And there's really no reason why or why not, it just be like that sometimes.
So when you approach the techniques of shadowwork, know that it might not work out the first time around, and it might be because you are approaching shadowwork in an entirely different realm to what is actually compatible with you. So if you want to do this thing but, say, spirit journeying and journals and tarot aren't working for you—I think everybody should go to therapy anyways just, just as a rule—but try maybe therapy or some kind of mindfulness or cognitive behavioral therapy, something that’s more secular. This can be interchangeable. It can be a little of column A, little of column B. But expect to also have that be some but you have to figure out as well, which I didn't really know what the time.
JOHNA: That's an excellent point. It all just depends on your goal.
DANNY: Yeah.
JOHNA: It depends on you, what works for you and your goal. I remember my first attempts at shadowwork were, I mean I remember them being very very aesthetic. I mean, I approached it from primarily a religious perspective, you know. I wanted to be close to my gods, I wanted to improve my energy work. So I would be like, like meditating after midnight, and only by the light of my Michaels-brand black pillar candles. But allowing, like, the perfumes of totally good and legit incense to allow me to journey into my deeper self.
So, like, I was experimenting a lot. I was trying a bunch of things all at once to see what worked and generally exploring. I didn't know what kinds of skeletons were in my closet. One time I did visualize a house, and I found a literal skeleton in the closet. And I didn't know what to do about it, not at the time. I didn’t know what it was or what I should do, so. That was just when I was first trying it.
Shadowwork’s not something that you do intensely always all the time, at least most people don't. But, you know, you come back to it when you're done or when you've figured out something else that you want to do. So my more recent attempts at shadowwork are obviously, you know, less theatrical and a lot more focused. And while I do pray, I also use techniques that are mostly secular. I might be more aware of the skeleton parties that are happening in the closets
DANNY: [chuckle]
JOHNA: But I'm less afraid of them now. You know, after all that get-to-know-you stuff. So they're more likely to talk and move and make conversation, and sometimes it can be scary and angry, but now I know what to do with them. And the shadowwork helps me decide who I want to invite to my skeleton party.
When you first start out, it’s actually really really fun to get to know yourself, especially because it's sort of like indulging in your vanity. You can talk about yourself all you want, because it feels purposeful now. But everything stays the same if you don't have a goal. I mean, when I first started, I had no goals except getting to know myself. But my new goals are things like, I want less anxiety about medical visits. So, I need to address those shadows. Or I want to spend less energy being annoyed at my co-workers, so maybe I want to look at those shadows. These things are in the shadows for a reason. I mean it takes a lot of energy to move them out to where you can see them, so unless you're going to do something that's where they’re always going to go back to. That's where they stay.
DANNY: Absolutely. And you know we talked about your first attempts at shadowwork. I was really lucky in my like first foray into shadowwork, because I was actually introduced to shadowwork and the concepts of by Johna.
JOHNA: Ooooh.
DANNY: Oooh! So that's like the pattern of, like, half of these anecdotes is like, Johna showed me, and it was neat. [laughs] But it's true. And it’s something that I really needed at the time, because I was going through a really rough patch in my life with regards to having toxic relationships, being kind of a toxic person. I had a lot of old coping mechanisms from earlier points of life that were now periods of trauma for me that I didn't need these coping mechanisms anymore because I wasn't in those places. So I had to learn, like, my goal for shadowwork is to kind of unlearn some bad habits and to reacquaint my brain with the fact that things are a lot safer than they used to be, for example.
So, part of that was figuring out, like I said, what works for me. I've been going to therapy for forever, but my shadowwork I sort of wanted it to be a separate venture and something that was a little more spiritual. And so, what ended up happening is that we had a group of myself, Johna, and another friend. That was like our shadowwork group. And we checked in with each other. Um, I know that our other friend did journaling for a while and would check in with, like, “I did journaling, this is what I learned today.” Daily tarot or, as daily I could possibly be, was really helpful for me. Boy did I get Temperance a lot.
And you know, I was still quite young in terms of practicing. I was like really new to tarot; I was really new to a lot of things. So having a group that helped me kind of like internalize what I needed to internalize and to like, positively reinforce this was really helpful. But, like we said, I had a good time taking, like, my spiritual personality tests, but also I learned how, like, you learn a lot of hard stuff about yourself.
I learned some methods about centering myself emotionally because I took the shadows of, like, my toxicity. regardless of how it happened to me and how I became that person, and I had to like stare that in the face. I confronted a lot of personal foibles. I confronted the fact that I have like a lot of moral absolutism, and that maybe that that doesn't really exist in the real world. 
I learned better ways to communicate with a lot of people. I learned better ways to communicate with my ancestors, because I relied on them a lot during this time to kind of reflect upon the person that I was. I learned how to communicate better with myself in different stages. I had internalized so much, like, unhealthy coping mechanisms as a teenager that part of these meditations where I would you know enter my own mental house, this house was something I had made as a teenager to cope with like stuff. So I would approach this house and find really honestly my teenage self as part of my skeleton party.
JOHNA: Mmmmm!
DANNY: She was still there, that poor bitch! 
JOHNA: Oh my god.
BOTH: [laugh]
DANNY: And so like, confronting that person and learning to cut that kid some slack was really difficult, actually. And it was like the culmination of all of the fun stuff. All the tarot and the journaling and the like, you know, stickers and memes that we shared with each other on Facebook Messenger, um, kind of culminated in this really slow process of learning like, okay, I am allowed to be angry, but I am not allowed to be mean.
JOHNA: Mm-hmm.
DANNY: And like, I am allowed to let go of, like, this, like, piece of trauma. I can tell, like, I don't have to be mad at teenage me anymore. That kid was just a teenager, you know? So that's like the highlight here and the reason why that, like, we kind of dwell on these anecdotes is to illustrate that there are, like, actually a lot of different ways to approach shadowwork.
But go--the underlying truth of it is that you have to be attuned to your own emotional needs, your emotional faults, your foibles. You don't have to, like, have a perfect knowledge of self. That's what you're doing shadowwork for. But you have to be prepared to have your self-perception change, and sometimes that perception is not super flattering. That's why you do what you do. You approach it with the understanding that you're going to be seeing some stuff. That’s why it’s called shadowwork.
BOTH: [laughs]
DANNY: Ugh I personally believe that if you can't confront yourself authentically and honestly, then it is not going to be a super successful venture for you. And it's just kind of a waste of your time. Uh, that's my onion.
JOHNA: Yeah, yes. You know what, the superficial stuff? Like, the personality test feeling stuff, that’s a lot of fun.
DANNY: Yeah, for sure.
JOHNA: But you're absolutely right. It is work. It’s called work for a reason. But it’s so worth it.
DANNY: Yes.
JOHNA: If it's what you choose to do.
DANNY: Yes, I learned a lot.
JOHNA: For sure.
DANNY: And definitely became a less shitty person.
BOTH: [laugh]
JOHNA: If you'd like to dip your toes in a little bit, I did prepare a suggested meditation, just so that you can figure out what skeletons you have, like, who's hanging out in there, and you have a place to start if you're just getting back into it or if you're exploring shadowwork for the first time. We are using a tarot number in this one, that you can use tarot to do a reading on it later. It helps. Helps to review.  
DANNY: Yes.
JOHNA: So, first about the meditation. You're going to create your house. Just want to visualize it. I mean, you can do that by drawing a picture, you can build it in Sims or Minecraft, but only the outside, cause that's all we need for right now. So once you have that visual, sit down someplace, get comfy, focus on your breathing and imagine. See the house in your mind's eye. 
When you start, you are 21 steps from between where you stand and the front door. So with each slow, controlled breath you take, you take another step closer. So starting at 21, smoothing patiently down to 1, till you get to the front door. Then, go into your house.
Easy, right? You go inside. It's your house! Look at your awesome stuff. But you hear music coming somewhere, and you know what? It's the closet. That's right, that’s right it was the skeleton party. You knew about that. So go knock on the door. Let them know you're coming in to check on them. I mean, they may be made of bones, but they’re still a part of you. And they’re a part of this kick-ass house. It’s an awesome house, ‘cause it's yours.
So then you open the closet and see who you meet. And if they want to come to where you are, or if you want to come to where they are, shake hands, say hello, learn new skeletons’ names. 
Then whenever you're ready, you can leave the way you came. From closing the door, step 1 all the way to 21, back to where you stood before. And you can exit your meditation from here.
There's a lot of ways to leave a meditation like that, and if you plan on visiting that house again, maybe you promised the skeletons you were going to come back, I might recommend that you lock up your house before you leave, so you don't like accidentally have any cretins waitin’ for you on your next visit. Another thing is that you might also pray and ask your gods or ancestors to come and visit, so maybe you can give them a key to your house. It's your house, you can do whatever you want.
So Danny and I actually did this meditation before we recorded this podcast. We didn't like do it together, but we did make sure to do the meditation. So personally, because I've been doing this for a while, I didn't actually exit the house, because at this point it's my house. 
DANNY: [laughs]
JOHNA: So I kind of just like sent myself to bed and counted 21 breaths until I woke up here in the real world. But it's my house. I live there, so I don't leave. But you can do whatever you want. The point is, you did your meditation, and maybe you have some skeleton names that you want to think about.
So here’s part dos, and it’s a suggested tarot reading. So you can use tarot cards if you have them, oracle cards, whatever. You can use a free online deck. Just go to Google and ask what a free online tarot deck is. You can use it. You can use a tarot app. You can do whatever you want. The goal is to just decide if you're going to do anything about who you met in your house and how you might do it.
So you start with a small number of cards. We recommend starting with just one so that you can focus on one thing to figure out.
So Danny, you want to demonstrate this part with me? We both have cards.
DANNY: Yeah, let's do it! I've got my cards.
JOHNA: Yes, okay.
DANNY: Let’s talk about my cards, I want to talk about my cards first.
JOHNA: Yeah, well you shuffle, shuffle good.
DANNY: Yes, I'm shuffling. They're called the Darkana Tarot, and I got them because they are—I think that they…quote “combine a modern grunge style with a non-traditional tarot symbolism.” But the frank way to say it is that the art is kind of muddy and ugly. [laugh]
JOHNA: Ooh!
DANNY: But I like it, I like that it’s—they're like kind of like, uh…stained and ugly deck. It seems like a good…it’s a good, um, set for me. And so I wanted to plug them a little bit, because I like them.
JOHNA: Wow. My deck is the opposite. 
DANNY: [laughs]
JOHNA: It is super pretty, gorgeous, dreamy watercolors by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law. It's called the Shadowscapes tarot. It’s like, probably one of the like most popular decks on the market because it really is beautiful, but I remember waiting and waiting and waiting for Ms. Law to like finish the paintings for this deck—
DANNY: Oh my gosh.
JOHNA: —because she was updating as she went. I was like, I was one of the original fans of this tarot deck, dude, I was so excited. I pre-ordered as soon as it was available to get the shadowscapes tarot deck and I was not disappointed. So, that’s how I like it. Anyway.
DANNY: That’s awesome.
JOHNA: So usually, I don’t know. Not everybody has practiced a lot with tarot cards, oracle cards. You traditionally like shuffle the deck like a spiritually significant number of times. Seven is, of course, a common lucky number. I use five when I'm doing shadowwork, because it's traditionally a number for like change, even chaos, and change is usually my goal for shadowwork even if it means some chaos. Some people like nine because it's a number of completion. They want the bigger picture.
DANNY: I like nine.
JOHNA: Oh, that's cool.
DANNY: I don't usually, um, have a number when I shuffle though. I just shuffle. Till it's time to stop, I guess.
JOHNA: Oh man. I actually had to replace this deck. These cards are, like, still stiff and I'm like a little bit sad, because this is obviously a later printing and they are like not as good quality as—
DANNY: Oh no.
JOHNA: —the original printing, I know. This coating on the deck is like, plastic. I, and I'm spoiled when it comes to playing cards, because I like a nice waxed card. [sigh] But that's not a—that's neither here nor there. Let’s go. We draw the cards.
DANNY: We draw. [whip sound] Oh cool!
JOHNA: What does yours say?
DANNY: I got the nine of cups.
JOHNA: [gasp]
DANNY: Yeah, I’m like, oh hey! Um, and I guess for edification, because I don't mind if the internet knows my innermost thoughts, the--
BOTH: [laugh]
DANNY: Um, the thing I'm trying to tackle is my like stress around moving and relocation, just cause there's some stuff there. So that's what I kind of asked the cards about. That was the, the…the big chief skeleton in my skeleton closet party.
Um, and my deck, this deck is also nice because it has two, like, keywords underneath the picture. So under the nine of cups, keywords is fulfillment and pleasure. So like, a really super quick and dirty, like, analysis of the nine of cups is this is like, the cup overfloweth card. They—you are, uh, um, at a place of extreme contentment and satisfaction. Things are falling into place, and you will, like, receive a period of good fulfillment, usually emotionally. Cups are a, an emo--, a feelings card. And especially in this, um, picture, the cups have water flowing out of them. Water is like a feelings thing. So that’s a pretty optimistic one card reading.
If I wanted to, like, I guess for our listeners, if I wanted to ask a question from there, you can take this one card reading and expand upon it. Ask your cards some other stuff. You can also use rocks if you like. But we aren't going to do rocks today because I don't want to go get them. [laugh]
JOHNA: Oh, well you know what, I am glad you brought that up, because I definitely expanded mine. When I did this meditation, I met two skeletons. One of them I am not familiar with, and the other one is, uh, sort of a development because of some other work that I did. So I like went in the closet and, you know, wanted to see who was hanging out in there and the first skeleton to introduce itself to me was dementia.
DANNY: Oh.
JOHNA: Yeah. You know what, I didn't think that I had any, uh, had any stuff about that, but my dad actually had dementia, and maybe I should like, think a little bit about that because I might have like some unconscious anxiety making me act a little foolish sometimes. When it comes to like medical stuff, and maybe taking care of myself. So that's like, you know, that's good.
And the other skeleton I met, this was interesting. Usually I approach like the skeleton of “things I resent my mom for,” “the things I resent my dad for” separately, because I felt like, I always felt like they were two separate things. But this skeleton introduced itself as, “I am the failings of your parents.” And that was different from how I've approached it before because this skeleton was like, very kind and not shy at all and like very very gentle. And I have yet to approach that kind of demon in that way.
So, when I drew my one card I got the ace of cups, which is cool. It can be...I am reading this right now as like, a card of beginnings, particularly emotionally. That means that it's like meeting the tip of the iceberg, and I’ve got some exploration to do, but generally it's a good omen. But I wanted some clarification for that, so I drew two other cards. And one was the queen of cups, which I take to mean as, I'm going to have to be accountable and responsible for myself, but also that means I get to call the shots. Good deal.
DANNY: Nice.
JOHNA: And then the other one was the High Priestess, which comes to me off and on. One of those cards that follows me. So, in this case, I’m going to take this as like, sort of a current in the wheel of fate, you know what I mean? 
DANNY: Mm-hmm.
JOHNA: Like, whatever is coming is coming, and all I can do is just what I judge to be best in that situation. So, cool. All right. That's how you do it. That's how you start. What I definitely got was a place to start.
DANNY: Nice. [chuckle]
[pause]
JOHNA: Come on, where's our tagline dude?
DANNY: Oh.
JOHNA: You got to say it.
DANNY: Fuck. Do you want to hear a story?
JOHNA: I do!
DANNY: Hell yeah. [laugh] So, brief disclaimer on this story. I don't speak Spanish. My accent’s very bad, and I sometimes don't know how to pronounce words. I beg forgiveness. But. [laughs] This myth is a Guatemalan myth and it is the story of “El Sombreron.” It’s found on uexpress.com, the version that I'm using, because I thought it was funny. Uexpress.com has a tell me a story section, which is where I found this, and this is retold by Amy Friedman and Meredith Johnson.
Once upon a time in a Mayan village, twins were born to a hatmaker and his wife. The couple were overjoyed the day their sons were born, but their joy did not last long.
JOHNA: Uh-oh.
DANNY: One of the boys was kind, soft-voiced and even-tempered. But the other lad was born with the devil in him.
JOHNA: [gasp]
DANNY: He was always doing just what his parents told him not to do, and as he grew older, he continued to do whatever he was not supposed to do.
He wasn’t cruel, but he was mischievous. He hid his brother's toys; he stole fruit from the neighbors' gardens. He teased children, he spilled his milk, and laughed when he should have been quiet, and would not speak when teachers asked him questions.
I, as a side-note, have taught many of these children. I have loved all of them.
But he never stopped running and jumping and playing, and his parents fretted and worried and wondered what to do.
At last the boy's mother begged her husband to call upon the brujo for advice. Among the Mayan people, the brujos, wise men, were known to have the power and the magic to cure every imaginable ill.
I imagine in this case, I kind of, another author’s note, that “brujo” is being used in the same way that “curendero” would be used, um, instead of like the broader meaning of like “brujo” just meaning “witch” or “wizard,” I guess.
JOHNA: Mm-hmm.
DANNY: So, these brujos could cure bodies, minds and spirits, so the people said. They knew exactly what to do to fix every problem that arose.
So the hatmaker went to visit the brujo and begged him for help. "My son is a troublemaker," the man said. "Please, tell me how to calm him down and cure him of his mischief making."
The brujo sat and thought, for wise men always listen carefully and think long and hard. And they pray. Finally, the brujo spoke. "I know how to help you," he said. "You must return to your shop, and there you will make a huge sombrero, the biggest sombrero you have ever made. Bring it to me, and I will solve your problem."
The man returned home and worked for several days, fashioning a sombrero so large, it could have fit upon the heads of several of the villagers together. When he was done, the sombrero was so big he couldn’t carry it, and so, with the help of his good son and the neighbors, he carried it to his cart and rode it to the brujo's home.
"Now," said the brujo, "I will put my magic inside." He lit his candles and placed rose petals upon his altar, and closed his eyes and prayed. He began to weave. He was weaving magic into the sombrero, but no one was allowed to watch. People say this took him many hours; the sombrero was big, remember, and the magic was strong. But by sunset he had completed his task.
"Take this home now," said the brujo, "and place it in the middle of the floor of your house. Your son and the magic will take matters from there."
The man did as he was told.
In the middle of the night, the father awoke, startled, when he heard a large crash from the living room where the sombrero sat.
He ran to see what had happened, and there he found the sombrero moving, walking around as if powered by its own spirits.
"Help!" the man heard, and he bent down and listened. "Help me, father," came a voice from beneath the sombrero.
JOHNA: [gasp] Oh my gosh!
DANNY: The man tugged at the hat, and sure enough, there was his son, the head in the center of the sombrero, and his legs thrashing about.
"Take this off my head!" the boy cried. "I climbed under to see what I might see, and now I can't take this thing off!"
JOHNA: Mm-hmm!
DANNY: The father tried to lift the hat, but he could not remove it. It was stuck to the boy's head, and no matter how he struggled and pulled, and no matter how the boy pushed and shoved, and no matter how the neighbors pulled and yanked at the sombrero, it remained stuck to the boy's head.
JOHNA: Wow.
DANNY: The hat never did come off.
JOHNA: Oh!
DANNY: The boy had to wear it all the time, and the villagers began to call him "El Sombreron," the Big Hat.
JOHNA: Oh my god.
DANNY: They laughed when they saw him running through the village, only his legs visible, that enormous sombrero atop those little legs.
JOHNA: Oh my god.
DANNY: "El Sombreron" never grew taller that day.
JOHNA: [gasp]
DANNY: The hat was so big and heavy, it pushed him down, and he stayed short, like a little boy, even though he grew longer in years.
They villagers laughed at him only for a while, though. The trouble was, there was magic in that hat, and "El Sombreron" learned it all--
JOHNA: Mmmm.
DANNY: --and so he never did stop making mischief. He could make himself invisible; he could climb up walls and across ceilings--
JOHNA: Mm!
DANNY: --and he could walk through walls, so sometimes, when he was invisible, he would tear through the streets, stealing fruit and tipping carts. And some nights, still invisible, he would sneak into the neighbors' stables and steal their donkeys.
JOHNA: Wow.
DANNY: For a while people prayed "El Sombreron" would vanish altogether, but he never did. And it seems he never vanished at all, for all over Guatemala people still talk about him. It is he, they say, who turns things inside out and upside down, and is the cause of all the little annoyances in life that no one can quite explain. That's the way things are sometimes.
The end.
JOHNA: Oh my God. That's awesome.
DANNY: Isn't that the funniest way to end a fable ever? It be like that sometimes.
BOTH: [laugh]
JOHNA: Wow.
DANNY: Oh god. I’d never heard of this little creature before, though, so I was delighted to find him. But as you might recall, everybody, the—the devotional thought this episode is going to kind of relate to the myth. And I did that for a couple of reasons, but primarily because the ending of this myth is what I would one day like to actually internalize. 
After all of this effort and magic and like making a big hat the nuisances that this Village encountered never really went away, it just got more ridiculous. And the ending of—
BOTH: [laughs]
DANNY: And the ending of this version of this tale ends with, “that’s the way things are sometimes.” And I, I would like us all kind of while we consider the topic of shadow work and while we enter the winter time where sometimes things are hard, to really internalize that concept. Especially in the case of “El Sombreron,” when things are kind of turning all kinds of different ways, and there's all kinds of annoyances, to really remember that truly sometimes that's just the way things are. But it also means that it isn't going to be like that all the time. Things will be different.
It be like that sometimes. Don't sweat it man.
BOTH: [laugh]
JOHNA: So, our question for you this week is…are you doing shadow work? Did you try the exercise? Did you try a different one? Tell us about it.
DANNY: Did you find a technique that works better for you than even the ones we suggested?
JOHNA: Than even those?
DANNY: [laugh] Let us know!
JOHNA: For sure. Thanks so much for joining us this week you guys. Look for new episodes every other Friday.
DANNY: A big thank you to Vexento for the use of our theme song, “We Are One,” and to The Miracle Forest for the background music, “The Magical Tearoom.
JOHNA: Again, you can send your comments and experiences to us on Tumblr and Twitter with #homebrewpagans.
DANNY: We are at homebrewpodcast.tumblr.com and @homebrewpagans on Twitter. We’ll talk to you real soon.
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theparaminds · 5 years
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Evident with every passing day, much of our daily purpose exists within the pursuit of a purpose itself, seeking answers to universal misunderstandings. While Neil MacLeod is in pursuit of such truths, he realizes it is just as important to seek the beauty which exists between the confusions. In that sense, he attains to brighten our existences through creation and through developing ideologies. He is seeking to fill the gaps with positivity instead of stagnation and fear.
Residing in New Zealand and born in the UK, MacLeod is no stranger to the whimsy an inspiration can have upon an artist. He grasps the hauntingly gorgeous emotions of daily beauty, the ever overwhelming success in daily life’s ability to stun us all. And through that understanding, he creates a mirror of what he experiences. He shares the feeling in forms consumable and resonating, free to share and to grow a life of their own.
In truth, Neil’s pursuit is one of an even balance between selflessness and personal fulfillment. It’s a precarious tightrope of knowing how much to give and how much to take from the artistic world. But as he stands high above, balancing and creating, he’s able to stand sure he won’t fall. He won’t fall as there is balance and beauty. He is able to stand tall because he contributes to the beauty he loves daily, leaving it stronger for the next walker of that precarious tightrope.
Our first question as always, how’s your days going and how are you as of late?
My day has gone really well, my girlfriend’s sisters, and parents were here over the last couple of days so I actually took a little time off from making music for once. It was actually quite nice to spend some time being sociable with people who aren’t concerned with music. Today’s my day of getting back into things. Lately, things have really just been generally positive, a lot of exciting things getting planned.
To really begin by taking it back to start, how did your environment look growing up and how did it put you upon the path of being an artist and did early experiences in that time help with that?
It’s interesting because I’ve tried to analyze that before. I’ve read a lot of biographies and listened to a lot of podcasts about musicians. It seems like a lot of musicians grew up fully immersed in music since day one. And truthfully that wasn’t my experience. Neither of my parents are particularly musical, instrumentally, but they love music endlessly and exposed it to me as a kid. It was never a focus in my early life though. My parents just pushed me to be expressive and creative, allowing me to go down any lane I wanted to. They encouraged my artistic lifestyle. I think the reason I dared to chase a musical career was due to their open-mindedness. A lot of young people are told that being an artist isn’t a job, and I was fortunate enough to grow up believing that it could be. That probably pushed me more than anything. It was just by chance I chose music, I loved painting just as much and right up to leaving home, I thought I’d be a painter. But in the end, I never found a medium that quite connected me to other people or myself more than music, so I pursued that.
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When you first got into the musical space, what were the early influences, not just in music, and how do you compare them to your current inspirations?
They’re really different. My very first love was choral music. I was in a choir as a young boy. I remember how inspiring the sound of a group of voices traveling across a church was. I liked the social aspect of it and the spiritual aspect of it, too. That was how I developed a voice I suppose. And from there it was folk music. I really connected with the idea of storytelling through music. It stimulated me, those stories formed great pictures in my head when I listened to them. As time passed I started getting exposed to electronic music coming from the UK and it took over. Eventually, I found a happy space between the two worlds.
In your eyes, what was the vision of that early artist you used to be and what was the purpose of pursing of the project?
Well, I never really thought anyone was ever gonna give a damn about what I did. I never put out music expecting people to listen to it, so it was really surprising to me when people started responding positively. My early intentions were personal; to tell my stories to those who’d listen and to self-heal in the process. It’s not like that anymore, but that was how it started.
Through that process of growing and coming into your own, what were some of your best memories that stick from it?
I have two I think that really stick. I was born in England and I have family there and in Scotland. My Grandma has this beautiful 100 plus year-old house. I remember visiting this property when I was about 7 and walking around the destroyed outskirts of the place. That was beautiful, I felt as if I’d entered another world. Secondly, I grew up in a place called Christchurch in New Zealand and we experienced some pretty awful earthquakes when I was younger that took a lot of lives. That wasn’t beautiful, but in the aftermath, many buildings became what’s called ‘red zoned’ which meant they were unsafe to enter. Of course, my friends and I went exploring them straight away. There’s a river that runs across Christchurch called the Avon, so we got on a kayak visit these run-down places. It was really spooky but also exciting, it felt kind of like that movie Stand By Me. That thrill of being young and on an adventure. That sensation was beautiful.
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To move into that idea of exploring yourself, with this new project it’s all about unfolding, and you’ve just unfolded childhood, but how have you taken up that process and what does it mean to you to unfold as a whole?
One thing I’d like to make clear is that I’d gone through this ‘unfolding’ process before finishing the record. For me, making the record was a way to solidify my understanding of things that had happened during that time. The ‘unfolding process’ itself allowed me to grow as a person. I was facing internal and external issues at the time, which required serious personal development in order to get through them. I let old parts of myself die, and made room for new, brighter ones. It felt like I unfolding myself, hence the title of the EP, ‘To Unfold’. My music had been very dark prior to this record and I was getting tired of that. I didn’t want to be defined by negativity. To be emotionally vulnerable on the record was still important to me, but I’d learned new ways of doing that, without only indulging in the dark moments. I decided to make an emotional record, but one that left listeners with a feeling of hope, not of sorrow.
And on top of yourself what changes did you make to your process in production and writing the actual songs differently in your approach?
I used to be so private and would never show anyone my music until it was finished. I was very guarded and secretive until I met this amazing guy named Devin Abrams, a prolific New Zealand producer. We just clicked with one another. He sacrificed his time to help me make this project, and working with him was a learning process in itself. Before recording this EP, I’d never really sung in front of somebody, just one on one. After we finished the project, I felt like a better artist and human. I felt this new confidence in myself and as a writer, singer, and collaborator. In New Zealand, there’s a slightly unhealthy romanticism attached to the DIY attitude. I think I’d absorbed some of that because up until making this record, I felt that I was a cheat if I asked for help. Devin really helped me break that down and recognize the beauty in collaboration in order to make something better.
Would you say that this process to you as an artist has been a realization of who you are and has it been a complete shift in your artistic ideals?
I’ve realized a lot of things, and some of my ideas have shifted. Life is complex and I struggle to completely sum up any of my experiences fully. This ‘unfolding process’ has meant growth as a human being and as an artist, both of which I could talk about forever. Catharsis is a good word for what I went through - and I’m still going through it, especially when performing the songs live. It’s one thing for two people to work on some songs in private. It’s another thing entirely, to be in front of a live audience, it requires an intense amount of vulnerability. It’s often quite hard to revisit those darker songs, but there’s power in it, and new things are revealed to me each time I do so.
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In your process of creating music, do you feel a need to make your own wave and shift the norms of today’s sounds or are you happy joining in on ongoing ideas?
I don’t want to make ‘my own wave’ as such. I know that I’m standing on the shoulders of giants at all times. I’ve been informed by so many incredible artists. I hope to make music that’s unique but I’m never upset by comparisons as it’s just an honor that anyone gives my music the time of day. I’m grateful for any categorization. If there’s any ‘wave’ I’m trying to form, it’s concerned with getting everyday people into music that challenges them - both in terms of emotion but also production and songwriting. I want people to see that conventions can break in a good way.
So then, what do you feel is the next building block for you as an artist and what avenues are necessary to go down in the coming future?
I have to think of that all the time because it’s hard to get by as an artist, it’s not the easiest route in terms of making a living so I’m always thinking about how I’m going to build on where I’m at. My current estimation is that I need to go traveling. I want to take this music and present it to other cultures and meet more people and experiment more with my sound through collaboration. On the business side of things I’m still trying things out, It’d be great to capture label attention, but that comes with time. My main priority is to make fresh and beautiful music, so as long as I can do that, I’m on the right track.
In terms of that live experience you mentioned earlier, what does it look like to you and what does it truly mean to share your vulnerability in that space?
I think there are two sides to that coin, there’s the personal and the shared experience. I think live music is one of the most powerful forces we’ve got. Being surrounded by strangers all engaged in one moment is very special and I think right now people need nothing more than connection to one another. Performance has an important social function and I try to consider that. On the personal side of things, I need to live up to my own standards. It’s possible to over-rehearse. I’m cautious of that because I don’t want to be on stage singing about something intimate and not feel intimately connected with it. I work really hard on staying well rehearsed, whilst remaining emotionally connected with the music.
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If one is to go to your show, what feelings and experience do you want them to be able to go home with? Is it simply the ringing in their ears or is there more to it?
I never want to limit anyone's experience by outlining what they should feel. That said, I think there’s a lot of darkness floating around in the world and that it is worthwhile to contrast that with beauty. I want the audience to feel they’ve experienced something beautiful.
Then what is beauty to you in a live setting and how does it feel to an individual?
I use the word beauty loosely. In my eyes, it’s anything that has a positive effect on people. Beautiful experiences, inspire and connect people. I’d like my live show to do the same.
What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever experienced?
I remember being on a plane at some young age, going back to the UK and I was traveling by myself. There was this small child, just old enough that they could walk. They came over to me and began sharing toys, playing, and trying to talk with me. Most people just ignored the child, but I embraced that moment. It left me with this tingling feeling of connection. The beauty of that moment was due to how rare it was. It’s not often you interact with someone who has no ulterior motive and just aims to share a moment in time with you, no strings attached, consumed by the joy of your company.
To you, is part of vulnerability also being youthful or are you trying to be mature and put that aside?
I think that there’s something to be said to that point, I think vulnerability can look like a youthful return. As you’ll see with any really small child they are not insecure like us ‘adults’ and they do not come with an agenda, they’re just themselves. There is something to be learned from that. I think being mature and going through adolescence is important… we all need to ‘grow up’ - but there are moments where we could all embrace that inner child.
Do you feel as of right now you’re happy with how vulnerable you are and how you present yourself even though you’re still looking for the last pieces of yourself?
I don’t think I’ll know who I am until I’m about to leave. I think that the fun of life is to go through the process of figuring it out. I want remain open to constant changes. I’m happy with how open I am. I think the best interviews are when artists are straight up and honest about how they feel. I think it’s a good way to be, for all people.
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And as a final thought, and maybe the most vulnerable of all, what do you want when you leave the mark to be and what do you want the remembrance of you to be?
It’s a hard question. Legacy doesn’t matter much to me. It’s not what I’m working towards. I care more about how people feel about me now. My hope is that I do no harm, make beautiful things and make people’s lives better. I try to be there for my family and friends and the wider community. I would love to be a teacher at some point. I just want to go down as someone who worked really hard and did it for the sake of good.
Is there anyone you want to shoutout or anything you want to know you’ve said?
I have a tour coming up which I am proud of and excited for, (more info on my socials). In terms of people to shout out, there are just too many names to count. So to anyone who has helped me get here, I can’t thank you enough. And to all those who’ve yet to enter my life, I look forward to meeting you.
Follow Neil on Instagram and Facebook
Check out the ‘To Unfold’ Tour 
Listen on Spotify and Soundcloud
Words and Interview by Guy Mizrahi
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jurassicparkpodcast · 4 years
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Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous Delivers A Jurassic Experience You Won’t Want To Miss | NON-SPOILER REVIEW
Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous represents an exciting moment in the Jurassic World franchise, as it provides us with our first adventure within the universe which takes place entirely on our television screens.
The show is set primarily during the 2015 Jurassic World incident, and allows us to explore Jurassic World (both pre and post Indominus Rex breakout) through their eyes. Whilst this is a kid-friendly look at the Jurassic World universe, the show by no means pulls it punches, and provides a fun and exciting experience which I think will resonate with long-time fans of the franchise as much as it will with the young people who it has been created for.
The story of Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous is refreshingly slow. Rather than rushing to the large dinosaur set-pieces which we have all come to know and expect from the franchise, the show takes it’s time to explore the Camp setting, allowing us to experience some of the activities the kids get to experience as a part of their normal camping experience. A big concern of mine coming into the show was that we may not get the time to explore Jurassic World as much as many of us would like, so I was glad to see that I was wrong, and that the show did take the time to build upon the wider-established canon of the world.  I also appreciated that the story found ways to connect to moments from Jurassic World without making them feel shoehorned in. The events, as they unfold, felt logical – and whilst there were some moments where I questioned the concurrence with the events of the film, these moments were few and far between. The advantage of eight episodes in the first season is that they provides the writers with ample time to build a connection with audiences – developing a story which has real depth to it, and which only further helps to enrich the franchise moving forwards. I was surprised to see that the story here is not self-contained, but rather, may have ramifications for the franchise moving forwards – even in a post-Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom world. The story overall does a good job of juggling action and character development with world building, and that is something which I am incredibly glad to see.
Of course no story is complete without a strong and competent cast of characters, and Camp Cretaceous brings us a cohort of six Campers, plus two Camp Counsellors, as recurring characters throughout the eight episode run. I was impressed with how diverse the selection of characters was. Each of the kids has a well-fleshed out personality, with the series gradually unpicking each character and their tropes as it progresses. I like how we get a mixed bag of kids from different backgrounds here as I feel it will make it a lot easier for young people to connect with the show, and resonate with the experiences these young people have. The characters see good growth and development across the eight episodes, with some forming into natural leaders, whilst others concur the emotions which may have prevented them from achieving their full potential earlier in the series. Even the adult characters here feel well written – with a good dynamic between the two counsellors which doesn’t feel like a far stray from the dynamics we see between many of the main characters in the Jurassic World films. I was pleasantly surprised by just how well developed the array of Campers we spend the show with were.
Whilst the humans are big characters within their own regard, I think it would be remiss to also not count the Dinosaurs as characters – and there is a fantastic variety here who really help to breath depth into the show whilst also adding a sense of impending danger to the adventures the characters undertake. The trailers have already shown characters like the Indominus Rex and Bumpy, as these dinosaurs have moments and set pieces which help them to shine. I also appreciate how some additional work has been put into the show to integrate other animals, like the Sinoceratops, helping to create a more coherent universe which connects the dots between both Jurassic World and Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom. This is a small detail, but one which helps to fully immerse viewers in the wider Jurassic universe. I also appreciated how the show felt consistent in terms of the confines of Jurassic World dinosaurs. It is well established, at this point, that there were certain dinosaurs who were present on Isla Nublar, and the show is respectful of that pre-established canon, something which I think long-term fans of the franchise will really appreciate.
We mentioned Isla Nublar and the island itself is arguably one of Jurassic’s biggest characters at this point. The world we get to explore through Camp Cretaceous is both familiar and new, something which I think, again, will really allow viewers to connect with this show. The Camp itself feels like a nice blend between Jurassic Park and Jurassic World – hitting some of those key nostalgia beats whilst still presenting us with something which could have easily functioned as a part of the modern park. I have to admit – I love how some of the locations and vistas which we explore felt as though they may have taken prompts from Jurassic World Evolution and the Evolution of Claire. It helps to ground all of these properties as set within the same universe, and adds some great visual continuity for people who have had the opportunity to experience all of these different projects. It is also fun getting to re-visit some of the iconic locations you will know from both Jurassic World and Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom – allowing us to see some of these locations in new and interesting ways. Whilst we aren’t going to talk spoilers just yet, I do want to add that ahead of the shows debut, I was adamant that I wanted to see more of the functional park – and we do get a taste of what that looks like in this show, which is very satisfying.
An important part of this show is the fact that it is animated – something which I feel had some people worried in terms of the cohesion between this show and other Jurassic World properties. I am happy to share that the animation here feels incredibly high quality overall, and it is able to find a balance between the unique style and flair that Dreamworks bring to all of their projects, whilst also maintaining the overall Jurassic World aesthetic you have come to know and expect. A Carnotaurus will look like a Carnotaurus, and will not stray too far from the pre-established visual identity we have from Fallen Kingdom, which is a great way to really double-down on grounding this as a canonical show set within the same universe. The dinosaur designs also feel as though they have had a lot of texture work put into them – with their assets feeling high quality, letting them pop on screen. There were moments where I was really impressed with the fluidity of the animation too – with some of Bumpy’s movements, in particular, feeling very dynamic and lifelike at times. If you were worried about how Jurassic would translate to the animated realm, it is safe to say that it translates pretty flawlessly.
The last thing I wanted to touch on within this review is the canon of the show – as this is something which I feel will be important to many Jurassic fans. We have heard on several occasions that this show will fit in within the wider Jurassic canon – and I am happy to say that for the most part, it is consistent with the pre-established events from the film. There are nods to moments from the first Jurassic World film at certain points which help to ground it within the canon, and there are a few fun little details which we will talk about later in the month which really help to call back to some older Jurassic Park projects – including one very unexpected nod to Jurassic Park III. The series doubles down on the Jurassic canon in ways which delighted me as a (arguably over-obsessed) fan, and even took the time out to officially add some details to the canon which had only been speculated about up until this point. I am very happy to see that the writers for this show clearly put a lot of time and energy into researching the wider world ahead of this show, as it is clear that they put a lot of work in to ensure that the sequences which we experience on screen can be placed within the pre-existing Jurassic World timeline without causing major inconsistencies.
I think that is enough gushing about the show for one review, but I am genuinely very delighted with the outcome of this show. Going into Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous, I was a little bit cynical about the “kids” focus of the show. I was unsure as to whether there would be much that I would appreciate from a more mature standpoint, but actually, the show has a lot of subtle moments and extra details which have been crafted in specifically for people who are larger fans of the franchise. There is a lot of fun content woven into the very fabric of this show which is incredibly satisfying for long-term Jurassic fans. Whilst there is more that the show could have done in terms of exploring both the world and some of the dinosaurs who inhabit it, Season One is very much about focussing on bringing these characters together as they explore Jurassic World, and it does a fantastic job of grounding both the characters, and us as an audience, within that world. I am excited to hopefully see this show used as a catalyst for much more in the way of extended Jurassic media in the future.
That’s it for our advanced review of the show – and our big thanks to Universal Studios, Netflix and Dreamworks Animation for allowing us to check out the series in advance. Stay tuned to Netflix, where you can catch the full series on September the 18th.
Check out Tom’s mini review above and also find Brad & Tom’s full non-spoiler podcast below.
Written by: Tom Fishenden
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babbleuk · 5 years
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Voices in AI – Episode 79: A Conversation with Naveen Rao
Today's leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese
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About this Episode
Episode 79 of Voices in AI features host Byron Reese and Naveen Rao discussing intelligence, the mind, consciousness, AI, and what the day to day looks like at Intel. Byron and Naveen also delve into the implications of an AI future.
Visit www.VoicesinAI.com to listen to this one-hour podcast or read the full transcript.
Transcript Exerpt
Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm, and I’m Byron Reese. Today I’m excited that our guest is Naveen Rao. He is the Corporate VP and General Manager of Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Duke and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Brown University. Welcome to the show, Naveen.
Naveen Rao: Thank you. Glad to be here.
You’re going to give me a great answer to my standard opening question, which is: What is intelligence?
That is a great question. It really doesn’t have an agreed-upon answer. My version of this is about potential and capability. What I see as an intelligent system is a system that is capable of decomposing structure within data. By my definition, I would call a newborn human baby intelligent, because the potential is there, but the system is not yet trained with real experience. I think that’s different than other definitions, where we talk about the phenomenology of intelligence, where you can categorize things, and all of this. I think that’s where the outcropping of having actually learned the inherent structure of the world.
So, in what sense by that definition is artificial intelligence actually artificial? Is it artificial because we built it, or is it artificial because it’s not real intelligence? It’s like artificial turf; it just looks like intelligence.
No. I think it’s artificial because we built it. That’s all. There’s nothing artificial about it. The term intelligence doesn’t have to be on biological mush, it can be implemented on any kind of substrate. In fact, there’s even research on how slime mold, actually…
Right. It can work mazes…
… can solve computational problems, Yeah.
How does it do that, by the way? That’s really a pretty staggering thing.
There’s a concept that we call gradients. Gradients are just how information gets more crystalized. If I feel like I’m going to learn something by going one direction, that direction is the gradient. It’s sort of a pointer in the way I should go. That can exist in the chemical world as well, and things like slime mold actually use chemical gradients that translate into information processing and actually learn dynamics of a system. Our neurons do that. Deep neural networks do that in a computer system. They’re all based on something similar at one level.
So, let’s talk about the nematode worm for a minute.
Okay.
You’ve got this worm, the most successful creature on the planet. Seventy percent of all animals are nematode worms. He’s got 302 neurons and exhibits certain kinds of complex behavior. There have been a bunch of people in the OpenWorm Project, who spent 20 years trying to model those 302 neurons in a computer, just to get it to duplicate what the nematode does. Even among them, they say: “We’re not even sure if this is possible.” So, why are we having such a hard time with such a simple thing as a nematode worm?
Well, I think this is a bit of a fallacy of reductive thinking here, that, “Hey, if I can understand the 302 neurons, then I can understand the 86 billion neurons in the human brain.” I think that fallacy falls apart because there are different emergent properties that happen when we go from one size system to another. It’s like running a company of 50 people is not the same as running a company of 50,000. It’s very different.
But, to jump in there… my question wasn’t, “Why doesn’t the nematode worm tell us something about human intelligence?” My question was simply, “Why don’t we understand how a nematode worm works?”
Right. I was going to get to that. I think there are a few reasons for that. One is, interaction of any complex system – hundreds of elements – is extremely complicated. There’s a concept in physics called the three-body problem, where if I have two pool balls on a pool table, I can actually 100 percent predict where the balls will end up if I know the initial state and I know how much energy I’m injecting when I hit one of the balls in one direction with a certain force. If you make that three, I cannot do that in a closed form system. I have to simulate steps along the way. That is called a three-body problem, and it’s computationally intractable to compute that. So, you can imagine when it gets to 302, it gets even more difficult.
And what we see in big systems like in mammalian brains, where we have billions of neurons, and 300 neurons, is that you actually have pockets of closely interacting pieces in a big brain that interact at a higher level. That’s what I was getting at when I talked about these emergent properties. So, you still have that 302-body problem, if you will, in a big brain as you do in a small brain. That complexity hasn’t gone away, even though it seemingly is a much simpler system The interaction between 302 different things, even when you know precisely how each one of them is connected, is just a very complex matter. If you try to model all the interactions and you’re off by just a little bit on any one of those things, the entire system may not work. That’s why we don’t understand it, because you can’t characterize every piece of this, like every synapse… you can’t mathematically characterize it. And if you don’t get it perfect, you won’t get a system that functions properly.
So, do you say that suggesting by extension that the Human Brain Project in Europe, which really is… You’re laughing and nodding. What’s your take on that?
I am not a fan of the Human Brain Project for this exact reason. The complexity of the system is just incredibly high, and if you’re off by one tiny parameter, by a tiny little amount, it’s sort of like the butterfly effect. It can have huge consequences on the operation of the system, and you really haven’t learned anything. All you’ve learned how to do is model some microdynamics of a system. You haven’t really gotten any true understanding of how the system really works.
You know, I had a guest on the show, Nova Spivack, who said that a single neuron may turn out to be as complicated as a supercomputer, and it may even operate down at the Planck level. It’s an incredibly complex thing.
Yeah.
Is that possible?
It is a physical system – a physical device. One could argue the same thing about a single transistor as well. We engineer these things to act within certain bounds… and I believe the brain actually takes advantage of that as well. So, a neuron… to completely, accurately describe everything a neuron is doing, you’re absolutely right. It could take a supercomputer to do so, but we don’t necessarily need to abstract a supercomputer’s worth of value from each neuron. I think that’s a fallacy.
There are lots of nonlinear effects and all this kind of crazy stuff that are happening that really aren’t useful to the overall function of the brain. Just like an individual neuron can do very complicated things, when we put a whole bunch of [transistors] together to build a processor, we’re exploiting one piece of the way that transistor behaves to make that processor work. We’re not exploiting everything in the realm of possibility that the transistor can do.
We’re going to get to artificial intelligence in a minute. It’s always great to have a neuroscientist on the show. So, we have these brains, and you said they exhibit emergent properties. Emergence is of course the phenomenon where the whole of something takes on characteristics that none of the components have. And it’s often thought of in two variants. One is weak emergence, where once you see the emergent behavior, with enough study you can kind of reverse engineer… “Ah, I see why that happened.” And one is a much more controversial idea of strong emergence that may not be discernible. The emergent property may not be derivable from the component. Do you think human intelligence is a weak emergent property, or do you believe in strong emergence?
I do in some ways believe in strong emergence. Let me give you the subtlety of that. I don’t necessarily think it can be analytically solved because the system is so complex. What I do believe is that you can characterize the system within certain bounds. It’s much like how a human may solve a problem like playing chess. We don’t actually pre-compute every possibility. We don’t do that sort of a brute force kind of thing. But we do come up with heuristics that are accurate most of the time. And I think the same thing is true with the bounds of a very complex system like the brain. We can come up with bounds of these emergent properties that are accurate 95 percent of time, but we won’t be accurate 100 percent of the time. It’s not going to be as beautiful as some of the physics we have that can describe the world. In fact, even physics might fall into this category as well. So, I guess the short answer to your question is: I do believe in strong emergence that will never actually 100 percent describe…
But, do you think fundamentally intelligence could, given an infinitely large computer, be understood in a reductionist format? Or is there some break in cause and effect along the way, where it would be literally impossible.  Are you saying it’s practically impossible or literally impossible?
…To understand the whole system top to bottom, from the emerging…?
Well, to start with, this is a neuron.
Yeah.
And it does this, and you put 86 billion together and voilà, you have Naveen Rao.
I think it’s literally impossible.
Okay, I’ll go with that. That’s interesting. Why is it literally impossible?
Because the complexity is just too high, and the amount of energy and effort required to get to that level of understanding is many orders of magnitude more complicated than what you’re trying to understand.
So now, let’s talk about the mind for a minute. We talked about the brain, which is physics. To use a definition that most people I think wouldn’t have trouble with, I’m going to call the mind all the capabilities of the brain that seem a little beyond what three pounds of goo should be able to do… like creativity and a sense of humor. Your liver presumably doesn’t have a sense of humor, but your brain does. So where do you think the mind comes from? Or are you going to just say it’s an emergent property?
I do kind of say it’s an emergent property, but it’s not just an emergent property. It’s an emergent property that is actually the coordination of the physics of our brain – the way the brain itself works – and the environment. I don’t believe that a mind exists without the world. You know, a newborn baby, I called intelligent because it has the potential to decompose the world and find meaningful structure within it in which it can act. But if it doesn’t actually do that, it doesn’t have a mind. You can see that… if you had kids yourself. I actually had a newborn while I was studying neuroscience, and it was actually quite interesting to see. I don’t think a newborn baby is really quite sentient yet. That sort of emerges over time as the system interacts with the real world. So, I think the mind is an emergent property of brain plus environments interacting.
Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com
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Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his new book The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity.
from Gigaom https://gigaom.com/2019/02/07/voices-in-ai-episode-79-a-conversation-with-naveen-rao/
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clarenceomoore · 5 years
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Voices in AI – Episode 79: A Conversation with Naveen Rao
Today's leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese
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About this Episode
Episode 79 of Voices in AI features host Byron Reese and Naveen Rao discussing intelligence, the mind, consciousness, AI, and what the day to day looks like at Intel. Byron and Naveen also delve into the implications of an AI future.
Visit www.VoicesinAI.com to listen to this one-hour podcast or read the full transcript.
Transcript Exerpt
Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm, and I’m Byron Reese. Today I’m excited that our guest is Naveen Rao. He is the Corporate VP and General Manager of Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Duke and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Brown University. Welcome to the show, Naveen.
Naveen Rao: Thank you. Glad to be here.
You’re going to give me a great answer to my standard opening question, which is: What is intelligence?
That is a great question. It really doesn’t have an agreed-upon answer. My version of this is about potential and capability. What I see as an intelligent system is a system that is capable of decomposing structure within data. By my definition, I would call a newborn human baby intelligent, because the potential is there, but the system is not yet trained with real experience. I think that’s different than other definitions, where we talk about the phenomenology of intelligence, where you can categorize things, and all of this. I think that’s where the outcropping of having actually learned the inherent structure of the world.
So, in what sense by that definition is artificial intelligence actually artificial? Is it artificial because we built it, or is it artificial because it’s not real intelligence? It’s like artificial turf; it just looks like intelligence.
No. I think it’s artificial because we built it. That’s all. There’s nothing artificial about it. The term intelligence doesn’t have to be on biological mush, it can be implemented on any kind of substrate. In fact, there’s even research on how slime mold, actually…
Right. It can work mazes…
… can solve computational problems, Yeah.
How does it do that, by the way? That’s really a pretty staggering thing.
There’s a concept that we call gradients. Gradients are just how information gets more crystalized. If I feel like I’m going to learn something by going one direction, that direction is the gradient. It’s sort of a pointer in the way I should go. That can exist in the chemical world as well, and things like slime mold actually use chemical gradients that translate into information processing and actually learn dynamics of a system. Our neurons do that. Deep neural networks do that in a computer system. They’re all based on something similar at one level.
So, let’s talk about the nematode worm for a minute.
Okay.
You’ve got this worm, the most successful creature on the planet. Seventy percent of all animals are nematode worms. He’s got 302 neurons and exhibits certain kinds of complex behavior. There have been a bunch of people in the OpenWorm Project, who spent 20 years trying to model those 302 neurons in a computer, just to get it to duplicate what the nematode does. Even among them, they say: “We’re not even sure if this is possible.” So, why are we having such a hard time with such a simple thing as a nematode worm?
Well, I think this is a bit of a fallacy of reductive thinking here, that, “Hey, if I can understand the 302 neurons, then I can understand the 86 billion neurons in the human brain.” I think that fallacy falls apart because there are different emergent properties that happen when we go from one size system to another. It’s like running a company of 50 people is not the same as running a company of 50,000. It’s very different.
But, to jump in there… my question wasn’t, “Why doesn’t the nematode worm tell us something about human intelligence?” My question was simply, “Why don’t we understand how a nematode worm works?”
Right. I was going to get to that. I think there are a few reasons for that. One is, interaction of any complex system – hundreds of elements – is extremely complicated. There’s a concept in physics called the three-body problem, where if I have two pool balls on a pool table, I can actually 100 percent predict where the balls will end up if I know the initial state and I know how much energy I’m injecting when I hit one of the balls in one direction with a certain force. If you make that three, I cannot do that in a closed form system. I have to simulate steps along the way. That is called a three-body problem, and it’s computationally intractable to compute that. So, you can imagine when it gets to 302, it gets even more difficult.
And what we see in big systems like in mammalian brains, where we have billions of neurons, and 300 neurons, is that you actually have pockets of closely interacting pieces in a big brain that interact at a higher level. That’s what I was getting at when I talked about these emergent properties. So, you still have that 302-body problem, if you will, in a big brain as you do in a small brain. That complexity hasn’t gone away, even though it seemingly is a much simpler system The interaction between 302 different things, even when you know precisely how each one of them is connected, is just a very complex matter. If you try to model all the interactions and you’re off by just a little bit on any one of those things, the entire system may not work. That’s why we don’t understand it, because you can’t characterize every piece of this, like every synapse… you can’t mathematically characterize it. And if you don’t get it perfect, you won’t get a system that functions properly.
So, do you say that suggesting by extension that the Human Brain Project in Europe, which really is… You’re laughing and nodding. What’s your take on that?
I am not a fan of the Human Brain Project for this exact reason. The complexity of the system is just incredibly high, and if you’re off by one tiny parameter, by a tiny little amount, it’s sort of like the butterfly effect. It can have huge consequences on the operation of the system, and you really haven’t learned anything. All you’ve learned how to do is model some microdynamics of a system. You haven’t really gotten any true understanding of how the system really works.
You know, I had a guest on the show, Nova Spivack, who said that a single neuron may turn out to be as complicated as a supercomputer, and it may even operate down at the Planck level. It’s an incredibly complex thing.
Yeah.
Is that possible?
It is a physical system – a physical device. One could argue the same thing about a single transistor as well. We engineer these things to act within certain bounds… and I believe the brain actually takes advantage of that as well. So, a neuron… to completely, accurately describe everything a neuron is doing, you’re absolutely right. It could take a supercomputer to do so, but we don’t necessarily need to abstract a supercomputer’s worth of value from each neuron. I think that’s a fallacy.
There are lots of nonlinear effects and all this kind of crazy stuff that are happening that really aren’t useful to the overall function of the brain. Just like an individual neuron can do very complicated things, when we put a whole bunch of [transistors] together to build a processor, we’re exploiting one piece of the way that transistor behaves to make that processor work. We’re not exploiting everything in the realm of possibility that the transistor can do.
We’re going to get to artificial intelligence in a minute. It’s always great to have a neuroscientist on the show. So, we have these brains, and you said they exhibit emergent properties. Emergence is of course the phenomenon where the whole of something takes on characteristics that none of the components have. And it’s often thought of in two variants. One is weak emergence, where once you see the emergent behavior, with enough study you can kind of reverse engineer… “Ah, I see why that happened.” And one is a much more controversial idea of strong emergence that may not be discernible. The emergent property may not be derivable from the component. Do you think human intelligence is a weak emergent property, or do you believe in strong emergence?
I do in some ways believe in strong emergence. Let me give you the subtlety of that. I don’t necessarily think it can be analytically solved because the system is so complex. What I do believe is that you can characterize the system within certain bounds. It’s much like how a human may solve a problem like playing chess. We don’t actually pre-compute every possibility. We don’t do that sort of a brute force kind of thing. But we do come up with heuristics that are accurate most of the time. And I think the same thing is true with the bounds of a very complex system like the brain. We can come up with bounds of these emergent properties that are accurate 95 percent of time, but we won’t be accurate 100 percent of the time. It’s not going to be as beautiful as some of the physics we have that can describe the world. In fact, even physics might fall into this category as well. So, I guess the short answer to your question is: I do believe in strong emergence that will never actually 100 percent describe…
But, do you think fundamentally intelligence could, given an infinitely large computer, be understood in a reductionist format? Or is there some break in cause and effect along the way, where it would be literally impossible.  Are you saying it’s practically impossible or literally impossible?
…To understand the whole system top to bottom, from the emerging…?
Well, to start with, this is a neuron.
Yeah.
And it does this, and you put 86 billion together and voilà, you have Naveen Rao.
I think it’s literally impossible.
Okay, I’ll go with that. That’s interesting. Why is it literally impossible?
Because the complexity is just too high, and the amount of energy and effort required to get to that level of understanding is many orders of magnitude more complicated than what you’re trying to understand.
So now, let’s talk about the mind for a minute. We talked about the brain, which is physics. To use a definition that most people I think wouldn’t have trouble with, I’m going to call the mind all the capabilities of the brain that seem a little beyond what three pounds of goo should be able to do… like creativity and a sense of humor. Your liver presumably doesn’t have a sense of humor, but your brain does. So where do you think the mind comes from? Or are you going to just say it’s an emergent property?
I do kind of say it’s an emergent property, but it’s not just an emergent property. It’s an emergent property that is actually the coordination of the physics of our brain – the way the brain itself works – and the environment. I don’t believe that a mind exists without the world. You know, a newborn baby, I called intelligent because it has the potential to decompose the world and find meaningful structure within it in which it can act. But if it doesn’t actually do that, it doesn’t have a mind. You can see that… if you had kids yourself. I actually had a newborn while I was studying neuroscience, and it was actually quite interesting to see. I don’t think a newborn baby is really quite sentient yet. That sort of emerges over time as the system interacts with the real world. So, I think the mind is an emergent property of brain plus environments interacting.
Listen to this one-hour episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com
Voices in AI
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Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his new book The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity.
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dorothydelgadillo · 5 years
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You Need to Stop Working While Attending Marketing Conferences (a "Because I Care" Intervention)
It was 2014. I was so excited to go to my first INBOUND, but by my second morning in Boston, I was already miserable. 
Before the sessions even started, I knew I was going to be missing at least one of my scheduled talks -- probably two -- and would likely need to work through some of them in the afternoon. 
I spent those three days constantly trolling for open outlets, empty seats, and spots in Club INBOUND, because I still had to work. 
While I try to come across as a confident, professional, Totally Put Together™ adult as much as possible, I was completely stressed out during that week. 
When I finally boarded my train back home to Maryland that Friday, I felt somewhat inspired and marginally excited by the little that I was able to learn.
But this tiny Carrie Bradshaw that lives in my brain couldn't help but wonder:
"Was going to INBOUND really worth that level of pain and anxiety?"
Of course it wasn't.
But it was also my fault. And if you relate to that story, I regret to inform you that it's your fault, too.
You see, working at conferences is probably one of the most insidious issues we marketers are terrible at addressing.
We're downright impressive in our utter refusal to discuss it openly and honestly.
We accept it as a given. Like having to eat vegetables or pay taxes. We put on this big show about how we're not allowed to be happy at conferences; instead, we must always be a slave to our masters. 
So, we pack our bags with a sigh and resign ourselves to yet another conference we'll never totally commit to being present for.
My suitcase for #INBOUND17; not pictured --socks, scattered hopes and dreams.
That couldn't be further from the truth. We're acting like victims about a situation totally within our control. 
So, today, I'm breaking the silence. Together, we're going to rip off the band-aid and have a real talk about how you can take control of your own marketing conference experiences. 
Because if your inbox is anything like mine -- chock-a-block full of conference announcements, early bird ticket specials, and calls for speakers -- you know the time to start planning is now. 
You Need to Set Expectations with Clients Early & Start Planning Right Now
"So, I'm going to be at a conference next week, and I'm going to need to reschedule and/or cancel some of our check-ins."
Please don't ever do that. 
If you know you're going to a conference, let your clients know as soon as possible. "I know it's May, but I wanted us to look ahead to November, as I now know I'll be attending XYZ conference."
Clients don't like being surprised. Clients do like knowing you're always planning, working ahead, and thinking about their needs.
When you have these conversations -- you may decide to wait until closer to the event to hash out the tactical plan, even though you let them know early about your absence --  you need to be very clear about a couple of things:
How much you will (or won't) be working during your time at the conference; and
How reachable you will (or won't) be during your time at the conference.
Obviously, you know your clients and your workload best, but my recommendation is that you set boundaries with clients, instead of letting them tell you how much you will or won't be working during that week.
"But, Liz. I'm special. My industry is different. My company is unique. My clients are needier than anyone else's on the planet."
You know what? You're probably right. 
However, in my experience, there are two guiding principles that work for every single type of organization -- B2B, B2C, B2G, nonprofits, food trucks, higher education, puppeteers -- in these expectation-setting conversations.
First, be upfront and let them know you'll have limited access to phone and email, but provide them with either backup contacts or assurances that you'll be checking your emails and voicemails periodically, in case there are emergencies.
Second, make an action plan everyone agrees to and work ahead, so you don't have to do work during the week of your conference -- and, more importantly, no one expects you to. Don't put big due dates in that timeframe, and don't commit to meetings or strategy sessions.  
"But I Work In-House & Don't Have Clients"
Even though you don't have a portfolio of clients to manage, you need to prepare in advance and set boundaries with the people you work with and for.
Heck, if you're still in the process of getting approval to attend a conference like INBOUND or IMPACT Live, include a plan as part of your pitch goes into detail (with timelines) about how you'll work ahead. 
That way you not only increase your odds of getting that conference opportunity approved because you're such a great planner and team player, you also have set the expectation in advance that you do not intend to work at the same velocity.
👋 Also, howdy, neighbor. I don't have clients either. I work in-house for IMPACT. But guess what?
I only got to have this moment where I danced (aggressively) and sang (loudly) along to "Greased Lightning" with Ann Handley in the balcony during at break at IMPACT Live last year because I planned in advance.
Far in advance. 
Otherwise, I would have been in some corner downstairs, editing, publishing, and hating life. Because our articles, newsletters, and podcasts do not publish themselves. 
Be Honest with Yourself & Stick to Your Guns
No matter how much future-proofing you do with clients or coworkers, you need to make peace with two unimpeachable truths:
I have never gone to a conference where I haven't had to spend some time doing work. Neither will you.
Your clients and your boss aren't your biggest barriers to being present at a conference -- you are.
So, before you board the plane, train, or automobile destined for your conference, you need to have a very serious conversation with yourself about your boundaries.
Here's how I do it. 
At least two months in advance, I take a sheet of paper and divide it into four columns with the following category headings:
LOL, Absolutely Not
The Rulebreakers
Where I Am Weak
The Show Must Go On
"LOL, Absolutely Not"
In this category, list the projects, assignments, and clients you will absolutely not be working on during your conference.
This list is the hill you will die on, your line in the sand, or whatever metaphor you want to apply. Once you have this list in-hand, immediately work through it and make a plan to either get ahead on those projects or talk to those clients.
This is your most important and time sensitive to-do list. So, create it as soon as possible, and then get to work immediately on putting your mind at ease with plans and boundary-setting conversations.
"The Rulebreakers"
No matter how many boundaries you put in place or look-ahead conversations you have, you know there are those people who will not listen. They will still call and email and smoke signal and send carrier pigeons to your hotel.
Like the clients who text my husband at 4 a.m. on a Sunday at least once a month or email him on Christmas Eve about something asinine that could have waited until Monday morning or, you know, a day that isn't a holiday.
(I have elaborate revenge fantasies about these people. I'm also aware I have issues.)
So, make a list of those people. Then... what's next is up to you.
You can either accept that some folks are going to be reaching out to you while you're gone -- and sometimes for good reason, especially if they reside in the C-suite of your organization -- or you can have some heart-to-hearts. 
For those you decide to talk to, to set those extra super-duper boundaries, you may want to put an emergency contact in place. You know, someone they can talk to in your absence. 
And for those you do decide to grant a pass to -- either because of their position or the fact that they don't listen -- one word of warning. 
This list of exceptions should be extremely short. Mine is only five people long -- and two of them are Tony Danza and the Pope, because I'm Italian.
That's the level of exclusivity we should be dealing with here. 
If everyone is a VIP, no one is a VIP. Capiche?
"Where I Am Weak"
Now, list out those projects or tasks you cannot let go of -- you know the ones I'm talking about.
No one is bothering you about them, but you can't stop tinkering, offering advice, or checking in on these tasks. In fact, the only one creating urgency around them is you. In your brain. To yourself.
You monster.
Once you have your list of weaknesses, do two things:
First, find people to take over as many of those tasks as possible. There's a good chance you won't be able to do this for everything, but this is that moment where you need to let go.
"But, but, I'm the only one who can do this."
Lies! That's not true, and you know it! 
Moreover, no organization should run that way.
As terrible as it sounds, you need to work yourself out of a job and not be the only one who can do something.
We all want to feel needed and indispensable to our teams, but you need to be able to step away from what you do for work -- no matter how big or small -- for your own sanity. You can't always be on.
So, stop volunteering or holding on, and start delegating. 
And if you're still saying, "Liz, I am the exception to this rule," and you're not a CEO or startup founder, you have larger issues you need to address.
You need a friend, a priest, a dirty martini that's heavy on the olives and also a good listener... I cannot help you.
Second, find someone who will yell at you when they see you creeping. 
What I mean by that is, someone who will say to you, "You are not supposed to be doing that. You said you wouldn't be doing that. DUDE, stop what you're doing right now."
They can be with you at the conference or back at your home office. It doesn't matter. This level of intervention works well face-to-face and from afar.
In case you're wondering, Jessie-Lee is that person for me. 
"Why are you on Slack?"
"You're supposed to be off."
"I appreciate you, but go away."
"Put that laptop down, or so help me..."
"I see what you're doing -- stop it."
She says these things to me. A lot. 
Here are Jessie-Lee and I hanging at #INBOUND17.
Your person also needs to do this. It's the most necessary kind of tough love, and I would not make it through conferences without her verbal shakedowns. 
So, go get you a Jessie-Lee. Not mine, of course. 
"The Show Must Go On"
Look, some things are still going to need to happen. A phone call here. An email there. Some important items that will require your attention at some point, or at least periodic check-ins. 
So, make your list of people, projects, and priorities that must continue with your input (predicted or unexpected) while you're at your conference. 
Much like the "you get a pass" exceptions on your Rulebreakers list, this should be short. But be aware that it will (usually) scale with your position or tier within an organization. 
For instance, if you're a director, VP, or C-level executive, you know there's no way you can just take a vacation from your business 100% at a work conference. That's not reality. 
But that's also why you made the other three columns on your list. 
You will have room for these interludes if you've done a good job of drawing your lines in the sand and being clear about what can be delegated, planned for in advance, or pushed off until later. 
The shows in this category can only go on without you losing your mind if you've made room for them.
If you don't make the room, you'll go crazy. And you'll have no one to be mad at except yourself.
Don't Waste Your Investment in Yourself
You know what sucks? Spending so much time pitching how valuable a conference or event will be to your career and your company, only to fritter away that investment with poor planning and a lack of self-discipline.
It blows my mind how many times I watch marketers remain a slave to their calendars and their laptops while at a conference, when they could have avoided it entirely.
They'll physically put their body in a room for a session, but spend the whole time writing up an email newsletter or scheduling social posts they put off doing before they left. Sometimes for multiple sessions! 
They'll miss mind-blowing keynotes, because they have to take that one call from a client they failed to set clear expectations with far enough ahead of time -- now they're stuck being available, because otherwise they'll fail that client and cause larger issues down the road.
Then those very same marketers will turn around and say, "Yeah, that conference just wasn't worth it."
No. The conference was worth it, but you did yourself a disservice. You set yourself up to be in a position where you could not be present.
I know this from experience. I've been that marketer.
Don't be like Liz from #INBOUND14.
The only thing standing between you and remarkable, career-shaping, life-changing conference experiences where you get to learn and explore and network and get inspired is you. 
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to start making my plans for IMPACT Live. 
(I know myself. If I don't start planning for Q3 in Q1, I've already lost the battle.)
from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/stop-working-at-marketing-conferences-tips
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iyarpage · 6 years
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Creator of Pixaki and Full-Time Indie iOS Dev: A Top Dev Interview With Luke Rogers
Creator of Pixaki app, Luke Rogers
Welcome to another installment of our Top App Dev Interview series!
Each interview in this series focuses on a successful mobile app or developer and the path they took to get where they are today. Today’s special guest is Luke Rogers.
Luke is the creator of the famous pixel art app Pixaki, which has been very successful over the years. Aside from this, you can spot Luke at many conferences speaking about his indie story.
Indie Developer
Luke, you have been an indie iOS developer for some time now. Can you tell me how it all started?
I was at university studying Computer Science when the iPhone came out — it was a pretty exciting time to be starting out in the tech industry. I also realized while I was studying that I really wanted to do something entrepreneurial with my life.
However when I graduated, I got a job writing CSS and HTML for template websites — it was pretty soul destroying! I only lasted a few months before I quit and decided to go full-time indie. I had no plan and no savings but somehow managed to stumble through for 18 months before I had to get a “real job” again. That was round one of being self-employed.
The big problem for most developers wanting to go indie full time is making the leap. Can you tell me how you managed this?
I created the first version of Pixaki on evenings and weekends while working a full-time job. Initially, I thought it would only take a few months, but it actually took two years to get to version 1!
I was hoping that once the app was released it would generate enough money that I could quit my job and be a full-time indie, but while it was somewhat successful it wasn’t anywhere near enough to live on. I’ve since learned to always run the numbers and do an in-depth analysis before starting a new project, rather than just hoping for the best.
Version 2 was a complete Swift re-write!
So I kept my job, but I kept working on Pixaki — version 2 turned into a complete rewrite and I moved the code from Objective-C to Swift. The real turning point was being made redundant, and I can honestly say it’s one of the best things that’s happened to me!
Rather than look for another full-time job, I decided to go back to freelancing. This time was very different though — I went with a much higher and more sustainable hourly rate, plus I had money saved from Pixaki sales and it was still generating money each month. This softened the blow of suddenly not having a regular monthly income, but it still felt like a big risk.
Being self-employed again has enabled me to spend so much more time on Pixaki, which has really changed everything. After the first few months, I released Pixaki 2, then I began working on Pixaki 3. Version 3 added a huge number of new features, it was the first paid upgrade, and I increased the price from $8.99 to $24.99.
Sales have been going really well, and now Pixaki accounts for about two-thirds of the income I need each month which means that I can be far less dependant on client work. It’s a great position to be in, and it’s all built on the foundations set when I started the project one evening over six years ago.
Sales increasing with version 3 of Pixaki.
What’s your daily schedule like?
I work from home, but every morning I still “walk to work”. I walk the same route every day and I don’t listen to any music or podcasts, but I use the time to think about what I need to be working on today. I also like to think about the bigger picture and consider what my plans are for Pixaki in the months to come and what my next project will be.
After my walk, the day generally looks like this:
9:00-9:30: start working.
12:00-13:00: take an hour for lunch.
17:00-17:30: finish working for the day
I’ve tried working really long hours in the past, but it’s so draining that I think I’m actually more productive by not trying to work too hard. I don’t have much of a set daily routine, but I like to write out a to-do list each day and work my way through that.
In general, I’ll start with the less appealing tasks first, and then when I’m starting to flag I can switch to something more exciting.
Work-Life Balance
Procrastination is a real problem for everyone, how do you fight the battle of distractions?
I work from home, so there’s definitely a constant battle to stay focused. I always have a timer running on my laptop that tells me when I’ve been idle for 5 minutes or more, so I can keep track of how many hours in the day I’m actually working. Closing apps and tabs in Safari helps too — I have Mail closed most of the time, and only open it a couple of times a day to check my emails.
Luke’s workspace at home.
The most dangerous type of distraction I find, though, is the desire to start a new project. Something like Twitter might steal a few minutes from your day, but ditching your current unfinished project to start something new that you also don’t finish can take away months. And because you’re still doing work, it’s much easier to tell yourself that you are being productive.
The first time I was a full-time indie developer, pretty much all I did was start something and then a few months later move onto the next project without finishing anything. I spent a year and a half doing this with very little to show at the end of it all. So now I’m very cautious about starting new projects; I have a process where I weigh up how viable the idea is, which I run through before I start anything.
I’ve decided that Pixaki will be my primary focus for the next couple of years at least, and while I’m considering what will come next, I’m in no hurry to make a start.
Can you list any tools you use that help with your indie development?
One of the best tools I have is a notebook and pencil. I use it for my to-do lists, but also designing and decision making; I think there’s a tremendous value in stepping away from technology when you can. I have a Leuchtturm1917 dotted notebook which is great for writing and designing, and a Pentel mechanical pencil.
In terms of software I use;-
Xcode – For making Pixaki.
Sketch – For doing any design resources.
Tower – This is a git GUI.
Harvest – The timer I mentioned earlier.
What is your ultimate advice for being an indie developer?
Think long-term and keep persevering. It took me a few years to realise that success is not going to happen suddenly, and I think that’s probably true for the vast majority of people. When Pixaki was seeing limited success, I considered giving up on it and moving on to a new project on many occasions, but I’m so glad I stuck with it. And I’m going to keep working on it to grow the product and see where I can take it.
I hope for Pixaki to still be around in ten or twenty years time, so everything I do is with that in mind. Often that means writing my own code that I know I’ll be able to maintain rather than using a third-party library. I also try to keep the app modern without getting too caught up in the latest fashions of app design; there are very little blur and vibrancy effects for example, and I think the app will age more gracefully because of things like that.
Luke’s vision to allow the app to age gracefully.
If you could change anything about being an indie iOS developer what would it be and why?
I think we’re incredibly fortunate to have a platform for iOS to develop for. It’s easy to find fault when it’s what you work with all day every day, but looking at it objectively it’s a fantastic platform.
The thing that makes me the most nervous about building a business around an iOS app, though, is how much control Apple has. Given that they own both the platform and the sole distribution channel for apps, any changes that they make in the future could have a massive impact on many businesses.
So far it’s been good though, and there have been some nice changes to the App Store recently, which is encouraging. I’d like to see them slow down how quickly iOS changes from year to year too, as just keeping up with the platform is a lot of work, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon!
Pixaki
Can you tell me the ultimate success story of Pixaki? How did it all start and how have you managed great success?
Success is an interesting term because it can be measured in so many ways and it’s always relative. There’s obviously a financial success, but also success in terms of influence within the pixel art community, and success in terms of equipping others to create amazing things. I struggle to think of the app as successful because I know where I want to take it and it feels like I’m just getting started, but looking at where I’ve come from I can see that it has achieved success in a lot of ways.
I started Pixaki because I wanted to make pixel art on my iPad but I didn’t really like the look of any of the other apps that were out there — I’m very fussy when it comes to apps! If I started a project like this now, I’d do a lot more market analysis first and take the time to run the numbers. I’ve learnt a lot about running a business in the last few years, and in hindsight, I don’t think I made life very easy for myself. But a combination of learning these business skills and sheer determination has led me to the point that I’m at now.
Pixaki in action!
What’s the thought-process for building new features for Pixaki, is it ultimately user feedback or do you have a personal backlog of features to implement in the future?
User feedback is driving things a lot at the moment. I have a spreadsheet where I collate all of the requests that come in and order the requested features by popularity, which has become my backlog. There are also features that I’d like to add that maybe aren’t the most requested, but are important for the direction I want to take the product in.
This way of working means that I’m not that quick to implement the latest features in iOS because my customers aren’t requesting them, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily. I’ve released 3 major updates to Pixaki 3 so far, and I’ve got another 5 planned which should keep me busy for 2018!
For me, it’s all about the people. I love to attend conferences for making new connections and getting different perspectives on things. It’s nice to have people to talk to about the world of app development too.
What’s the process for releasing new features and how do you keep the quality control high on Pixaki?
I have a great group of beta testers. In the early days I was just recruiting anyone I knew with an iPad to help with testing, but over the years as the product has become more established, I’ve managed to recruit some of my most loyal users to help with testing. I’m very grateful for these people — they volunteer their time to help make the app better because they believe in the product and want to see me succeed. It’s really amazing, and they’ve played a huge part in making the app what it is today.
I really enjoy obsessing over details, which helps when trying to make a high-quality product. I don’t want to release anything that I think is only “good enough”, so I’ll happily iterate five or ten times on a particular aspect of the app until I’m happy with it.
I’ve found having long beta testing periods has been useful — Pixaki 3 was in beta for 9 months before release. There’s definitely more I’d like to do in terms of having a process for maintaining the quality, though.
Lots of folks would like to see Pixaki on the Mac, any signs of this happening in the future?
Yes! It’s currently in active development. There’s still quite a way to go, but I’m really excited about the product it’s turning into. I love the Mac, I do nearly all of my work on a Mac and I know a lot of other people do too, so I think it will be really great for people working on large projects and those who just prefer to work on a desktop. I am hoping to release at some point in 2018. (If anyone would like to help with beta testing, please email me at [email protected]).
Pixaki in action on the Mac, credits to Jason Tammemagi.
Where To Go From Here?
And that concludes our Top App Dev Interview with Luke Rogers. Huge thanks to Luke for sharing his journey with the iOS community :]
I hope you enjoyed reading about Luke’s journey with Pixaki and is a clear example of our very few indie iOS developers in the community.
Remaining clear of any distractions is clearly key to Luke’s determination to make a successful product, Pixaki. I hope you can take away some tips and use in your workflow.
If you are an app developer with a hit app or game in the top 100 in the App store, we’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a line anytime. If you have a request for any particular developer you’d like to hear from, please join the discussion in the forum below!
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giveme5podcast-blog · 6 years
Audio
Today’s Morning Speedrun covers Bethesda’s and 343′s disaster relief campaigns, League of Legends founders stepping down, GeForce NOW beta project, and Nintendo Switch EShop update.
Bethesda and 343 Disaster Relief Campaigns
* So I want to start things off with a really cool story surrounding charity with some pretty big brands out there * If you didn’t already know, Bethesda is pitching in to support the American Red Cross through a fundraising campaign to go alongside the release of their new game, The Evil Within. * Funny enough they are calling it, “The Good Within” where they plan to match the total fundraiser donation amount goal and they vow to match the highest donation as well. * The goal is to raise $15,000 and this event goes throughout October. * If you want to pitch in, the campaign is being hosted through Crowdrise.com and they are currently at $2,722 as of posting this.
* But that’s actually not all.  343 is pitching in with their own disaster relief fund through Halo 5 where they launched the “Relief and Recovery REQ Pack”. * Their campaign started on October 12th and goes through October 23rd in the actual game itself as well as in the Xbox Live Store * All proceeds go to GlobalGiving and not only can you pitch in by buying these REQ packs for $10 apiece, but they stated in their blog post, “the pack itself contains 5 permanent REQs selected from the most popular visual customization REQs of ultra-rare or better rarity, if available, as well as ten rare or better boost cards.” * It’s good to know that these big game companies are using their clout to make the lives of other people a little bit better and doing a little bit of good. * I have other thoughts on this topic too, but I want to leave that one on a really positive note, so we’re going to move on to some interesting news about League of Legends
Founders of League of Legends Stepping Down
* It turns out, that Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill, the two original founders of the biggest MOBA game in the world right now, League of Legends, are stepping down
* Don’t worry though, it seems that they are leaving League of Legends in very capable hands seeing as how they have spent 11 years building Riot into the behemoth that it is in the gaming industry.
* With really only one game under their belts though, they seem to feel that it’s finally time to break away and really focus on making a second title that fuels the growth of the company even more
* When you look at other companies though, like Blizzard, for instance, making a huge impact in so many genres, by creating several addictive titles like Warcraft, Starcraft, Overwatch, Diablo and even delving into the MOBA space themselves, with Heroes of the Storm, you have to wonder whether or not this should have happened sooner.
* Either way, they seem dead set on this new goal to, “finally put the “S” in Riot Games”, as they put it and I for one am really excited to see what they come up with!
GeForce NOW Beta
* Next up is something that has been much needed for a long time to bridge the gap between gamers on PC and Mac.
* NVIDIA announced a Beta of their new GeForce NOW service that you can use for free up until most likely just the end of this year.
* Basically anyone that has a Mac, now has the ability to play games normally only available to Windows by utilizing the computing power of NVIDIA’s own computers and graphics cards via the cloud.  Mysterious, I know.
* Also, it actually doesn’t seem to matter what Mac it is considering one of the ads on it was of a person gaming on a 13-inch MacBook Air, which absolutely is not known for being used for gaming in almost any way, shape or form
* This is an incredible break in the cross-platform space because not only does it bring gamers together from Mac and PC, but it also solves the problem of having to have the biggest, baddest graphics card in your Mac just so that you can bootcamp the machine and attempt to run your Windows games on it
* More and more people all over will be able to play their favorite games without spending an arm and a leg for a computer with amazing specs in the first place.
* I will say so far though, my own personal experiences have been interesting in that the actual input in just the base services seem to add a great deal of lag, which is expected for the time being, but can’t exist when playing competitive multiplayer games
* As of right now, the service is free to Mac gamers, but in the future it will have a pay-as-you-go model and if you have a somewhat sorta crappy PC, well good news is that the PC beta will be here soon too.
* If you’re interested in this Beta, hop on over to the NVIDIA website and they even have hardware specs recommended for machines they have tested so that you know yours can handle the stream decoding necessary for the service to work properly
Switch eShop Update
* Finally, our last topic is on Nintendo and there are a few different things happening
* First off, there was an update recently to the Switch eShop that will be welcomed by all, with zero doubt in my mind.
* They’ve finally introduced a “Games on Sale” tab to the eShop alongside the, “Recent Releases”, “Best Sellers”, and “Coming Soon” tabs
* As you can imagine, the store is empty.  Like, completely empty. With the Switch still being relatively new and really trying to get more developers on board with it as a viable platform to develop on, there just aren’t enough games out there as it is, much less to have actual sales on.
* But clearly they are pushing to make sure everyone understands that the Switch is here to stay, because there has been a lot of word lately around Nintendo welcoming much more mature content. 
* In the past, developers have run into plenty of pushback on Nintendo’s part in regards to content targeting specifically the older crowd, like The Binding of Isaac, for instance.
* But now developers and publishers are hearing positive feedback from Nintendo and of course, even games like DOOM and Wolfenstein II are making their way to the Switch which are already a 180 from what family-friendly games used to be expected on Nintendo’s platform.
* And speaking of new content, as we start to see Nintendo make their way into more and more online multiplayer games, remember that in 2018
Nintendo will be launching their very own paid online subscription service
* It offers similar reasoning AND perks to its customers as what you expect from Xbox Live Gold and Playstation Plus, but at a much cheaper price point.
* In order to play online, you have to pay $3.99 per month, $7.99 for three months, or $19.99 for a year membership
* So that’s all for today’s speed run.  Tell me in the comments what genre of game you would like to see the Founders of League of Legends step into next.  You can also answer by hitting me up on our podcast Instagram or Twitter, @giveme5podcast * You can also share your thoughts on any of these topics or the topics throughout the week, and on Saturdays I will be going through your comments and call-ins to discuss further the biggest stories of the week.
* Last but not least, if you prefer to get your daily gaming updates in audio form, check in on our Anchor channel everyday at 8 AM MST.  You can use any browser or the Anchor app itself!
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