#ok this has been sitting in my drafts since april now time to actually release it

[drawnaghht]

tag guide anyone? + differentiating between usagis (thinkpiece)

I'm really just curious now if something like a "tagging guide" would help? If you would like this, or know if anyone else has posted something like this, sound off in the comments or like/reblog to agree ^^ 

I posted a poll about this on twt and it looks like 13 so far really want one, so I’m putting a lil test post around here too. I also found while researching for this post that apparently on tumblr, the first 20 tags show up in search! so I guess they changed that from 5 to 20 at some point. huh. that’s a bit more helpful than just 5 tags!

I’ve noticed sometimes people have no idea what to tag with a show like Usagi Chronicles that is less than 2 years old and is based on existing IP, but also that ppl use a lot of tags in general, perhaps confused about what is the “main tag” or most used tag for a character in rottmnt for example. So I started writing a little tag guide, which I’ll post the draft of at the bottom this thinkpiece. The main issue around tumblr seems to be excessive mis-tagging or multi-tagging i.e when a character isn’t there. I think I’ve seen this in some other fandoms too (primarily bigger fandmos), but I’m not gonna get too deep into it. You can skip to “tagging guide” via CTRL+F to search it on the page. I’ve also included a little character “separator” part with graphics, cuz it seems some are having trouble seeing the characters differently from fanart alone. I thought it would help to post more of the “source” materials ^^

Also if you have problems differentiating between the two in general…aside from both being white long-eared rabbits they are almost as different as night and day, at least on the surface ^^;; Here is a helpful post by Freakova, about how to tell the difference between Miyamoto Usagi and Yuichi Usagi, ancestor and descendant respectively: 

https://freakova.tumblr.com/post/707461151549702144/i-made-this-for-my-besties-to-help-explain-the

But I kinda get it! Especially if characters are intentionally obfuscated a bit (e.g. there are characters in the show who can’t tell between Miyamoto and Yuichi Usagi, but it is mostly used as plot hook/humor). But they have different names and characteristics and slightly differing fanbases on a site like tumblr, so separating them in tags is helpful. I think part of it also comes from the name confusion, but I already wrote a post about that. Imo, if you have your own design already and it looks like neither of the two characters, you can just use “Rise Usagi” or “rottmnt Usagi” or other variations as tags, those are popular and used enough already that you don’t need to use the main character tags ^^

Personally, I would only like to see Yuichi Usagi in his own tags when it applies (he’s in the pic/fic), but if he’s not, well, what are you doing tagging him there?

I also get that some newer/younger TMNT fans apparently didn’t know the Usagi characters are from their own franchise for a short while last year (but ppl probably learned, right? I’ve literally only seen posts/tweets asking what the series is abt and unrelated posts exasperated that ppl don’t know) but visually they’re quite distinct, even if they are all white rabbits. I’ll post these comparisons just so I can use the tags properly and not piss off anyone else.

We have the original Usagi and his 1000-years later descendant.

Stan Sakai based Miyamoto Usagi largely on his childhood inspiration of samurai films, mainly “Samurai Trilogy” starring Mifune Toshiro playing Miyamoto Musashi, a real-life samurai who inspired many other films and adaptations. You can hear more about how Stan created Usagi here in this Portland Art Museum video where he explains and draws his Usagi. The story usually goes that he drew a rabbit with a chonmage (the edo-period top-knot) and suddenly, Usagi was born.

In the show he has a slightly older-looking design? but in the comics his look varies slightly because the series has been going for 40 years and the character has developed over the pages. so he can look slightly different cover to cover, page to page, but mostly it’s all him, the same character, just different situations, life periods and emotions. So he can look different in official material depending which publication period you start reading from, but mostly the same. 

Then we have both the Miyamoto Usagi’s in different animated mediums,

And Yuichi in different media (show itself in 3D and 2D and merch by Stan)

And then there’s also Jotaro (very important Usagi Yojimbo character introduced early on/vol 1) and Yamamoto Yukichi(introduced in later stories/vol 4), who I think people aren’t mixing up with any of the previous rabbits yet, but who knows, i don’t look through absolutely all the tags myself after all and tumblr seems to have a problem of not showing much older posts in the public tag search anymore, so I can’t find older posts I used to see anymore ^^;

More thoughts on tagging + being a fan under cut. 

This … is not really a vent or analysis post, I can't get that upset about it myself. with real life worries etc - fandom is supposed to be a fun outlet for creativity, at least for me. So I try not to feel anything about it. But tagging has always seemed fairly straight-forward to me and it’s mostly to organize a blog/find other people with similar interests. Writing non-structured non-essays is basically how I interact with a piece of media when I feel like fanart is not enough. And because tumblr posts now apparently Do Not HAve Limits, this is a better alternative to tag rambles.

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So when I saw the post about the Miyamoto Usagi tag I remembered that this was why I didn’t use the “follow tag” feature + the “your tags” tab as much myself (aside from not having it before and not being used to it on tumblr). Because usually with bigger fandoms, people do mis-tag or tag their other shows/fandoms into it without including the main character, this happens on occasion because there are a lot of people using the tag. I also don’t follow the Leosagi tag anymore for the same reason, that people can’t seem to differentiate between the characters and it becomes hard to tell what they want to post or which character they are talking about/drawing ^^;

As pointed out by Tamalinvonpineapple's post about it, people mis-tag Yuichi Usagi and Miyamoto Usagi and that’s a problem for people who would like to see just one of those characters but not mis-tagged as the other. I’m not gonna assume these are made in bad faith e.g. intentionally to piss off other fans, cuz there can be so many different reasons for people doing this. This post is also not gonna get into ship tags much because that is a contentious topic and tbh, left for a separate thinkpiece (I also already wrote smth abt tags for myself).

I tried to find out more possible reasons for mistagging in general or what the general consensus on tumblr is about tagging but it seems (or we can assume) it is a “bad practice” from how social media sites have given a slightly different use for tags tiktok/instagram/twitter - “tag for reach” - so like those social media accounts for companies that spam other tags. I do see this in anime/manga fandoms occasionally. Not just for the different spellings of characters (e.g, when a dub would give the character a new name; japanese vs western way of writing names) but specifically when 1 character is the only one there and the tags then have 30 other characters listed as well so the post/media would show up in search. But I wonder where this habit is from? Aren’t people curious to see what other tags their character/show have? I remember that on sites like blogger, we only tagged so that we could find things later, so people often made their own custom tags, i.e. "my work on the show" or "midnight doodlies". if a show got tagged, for example TMNT or Usagi, it would probably get 1-word/1-phrase tag (i.e. “turtles” “turtlies” “mutant turtles”) or just the series title tag - either the abbreviation or full name of a series/comic/cartoon depending on content. When it comes to tumblr tags, I remember getting annoyed at NOTPs permeating the tags as well. Or just posts about other seriesM multi-crossovers where your blorbo is only there to die, but then is still tagged after that; edits that have no relation to the character but they share a name or tag for whatever reason and you keep seeing these unrelated posts in the tags. I’ve seen more than enough from almost any of the fandom tags I’ve visited on tumblr. So I get how annoying mistagging itself can be.

But basically in regards to tags on tumblr itself, it seems people misuse them mainly because they don't know or don't like the tags for the other shows. Folks also like to see their posts get to as many people as possible, which I understand, I do the same on instagram, cuz that’s what I’ve learned by other artists example. Seems to make sense that more tags = more views. On tumblr, this sort of doesn’t always work this way. I could post a drawing from a popular cartoon and get maybe 5 notes total in 12 years, while a scribble I deemed too ugly to tag properly might get 54 notes on it’s first day. It’s almost like a Murphy’s Law of Tumblr that what you expect to do well, doesn’t. It’s just how it is here and I’m so used to it, it feels weird to complain about it, even on other sites with actual algorhitms and working apps etc.

Well, as a fan of the Usagi Chronicles show, perhaps what makes me more sad is that this has had the adverse effect of older TMNT/Usagi Yojimbo fans being so angry that they can’t stand the show/character itself now, even if they already disliked it before seeing other fans post about it. Which is just plain sad because some people even make up stuff about it just to discredit it as a show that Stan Sakai worked on. I understand that people have different reasons to dislike the show, most probably valid, but they also assume many things about it, to the point of stating them as fact when the opposite is true. I have… a different post about it. In general, we can say that being online seems to be the common thread between fans annoyed at fans.

In some ways, what’s even sadder however is an empty or unactive tag. Imagine that the last post you saw in that tag is still the one from 2013 you made yourself. It’s a bit annoying seeing people mistag or post unrelated fanart in it but hey, maybe this means they also read the tag? A chance to educate or get more views on your own fandom? Just a chance for communication? I know that doesn’t seem very appealing when those same fans are the ones mis-using the tag, but it just seems better than something completely empty. Of course, this is not a problem for TMNT fandoms perhaps, but from my experience in smaller fandoms, or being a fan of smaller/less popular media. And with how much there is mainly ship-related posts in almost all the Usagi Chronicles tags, this seems to be a matching experience I’ve been having so far in the Usagi tags. The comic series tag itself is also often full of other things, or only ship things, or sometimes only TMNT things for a short bit, but overall, I guess at least people use it?? But I would still like it that Samurai Rabbit, SRTUC, etc stuff gets tagged with those tags so I can actually find it instead of combing through multiple tags at a time just to see something new. While the newer “Your tags” feature on tumblr makes this a bit easier, I can see the easy annoyance at when people tag a character but then don’t include the character. and to add insult to injury, they tag a different character, but without acknowleding the first character at all.

But this is now like a joint fandom for a crossover for two franchises which have had crossovers before and now… there’s sort of a joint fandom? Sort of? So because it’s a bit bigger, it feels nice when other fans are considerate of small things like tagging. Now, on the whole, while many do still mistag and the leosagi tag is still mainly yuichi x leo for many, I’ve also seen in my own tagscrambles that not as many do this as much anymore, or going through a tag in time, the newer stuff seems to do this less. So like I’ve written in previous posts, my honest hope is just that fandom will adapt and grow into healthier online habits. Still, there are a few other things in the tags that I just can’t help but notice each time. it’s also why I don’t bother too much with repeat-viewing tags unless I’m looking for something specific.

It often feels like people just make up their own versions of any Usagi and/or write off the show as “too bad to watch”. And. idk, this just makes me feel sad about it because as mentioned above, I’ve seen it before in other smaller fandoms I’m in. In transformative works, it’s fairly normal that people make their own versions of a show or it’s characters, because that’s something fun to do with fanart and fic. But to openly hate a character? idk man, just feels weird to me personally. Like I don’t have the energy for hatedom. I know my little sibling really gets into hating one series that really disappointed her as a viewer, but even she now says that it’s an odd way to spend time, when she could be making fanart of something she likes instead. And I get that. I also spent my earlier non-internet days being more hateful of new media I disliked at the start, and while expressing that isn’t always bad (it’s just an iopinion), it became weirdly detrimental to me actually enjoying stuff in my tweens. Everything me and my friends and their friends ever talked about, was related to somehow being more above others or knowing better than others, being hateful of anything new or popular. And without quite realizing it right away, that was really tiring. Even if I spent time on things I did like, hobbies I enjoyed, that hate and childhood snobbishness sorta simmered there. I remember that for me it mainly came from “oh, I want to be a real animator one day, I should act like a real profesional adult and always be critical of the media I view, because that’s how I see adults treat real serious film.” Fast-forward 15 years, I’ve been through making comics as a tween, making fanart as a teen, I’ve been making a lot of different kinds of “cartoon art” in general as well as some actual art education, thinking, maybe I want to have some more general art schooling too. Later in my mid-twenties, I met someone with this similar mindset to my childhood self, who at first I got along with. We laughed at cartoons we didn’t like and made fun of the bad endings of those we did. At some point, I listened to them talking about getting to visit a big animation festival. And how they completely unironically expressed their hate directly at a leading crew member of a cartoon they didn’t like. And then I realized like. Wait a fucking minute. I don’t wanna act like this to other people! And this is why I don’t really “shoot the shit” about cartoons I don’t like as publicly anymore as I maybe once would have online on tumblr etc. Like I just don’t get it anymore. At most I’ll write down my thoughts somewhere private or to friends and try to understand why I don’t like the thing. And if it’s a very simple dislike, I just don’t spend time on it.

So like, I don’t get the hate the show (SRTUC) and character(Yuichi Usagi) get. Like I can understand sort of where people are coming from. but I don’t get why they gotta publicly tag it, announce it, or put it in the reblogged tags sometimes. the og poster sees that after all? so that’s like a bigger thought for me when it comes to tags.

I believe people can learn to be nice about a show they don’t like, but if they start to feel annoyed at fandom parts of the web they see online, they also start to feel hate toward a specific show, even if the show or thing itself might not be as bad. Example - I have this toward Star Wars for example, it’s a big fandom. I feel indifferent now, but in my youth, I found it annoying that everyone was talking about it as if it was the best thing ever, when it was spoiled for most of my childhood for me, and also felt like a generic movie series after all that. Something growing in popularity, or being really popular in a niche fandom can make ppl dislike it in general and that’s fairly ordinary as fandoms go. Often, people just don’t like a popular thing. Just think of series of like GoT/ASoIaF or HP. But then again those go down the cultural road so easily, I suppose in countries where western-media is really popular/common, it becomes like a cultural osmosis and fans can assume *everyone* likes it, even if not everyone does. I’m thinking about the fresh 30+ dads from 10 years ago I read about who only interacted with their kids through their own nerd interests. Pokemon is such a culturally permeated thing, it’s everywhere and everyone seems to assume everyone has played it or at least knows about it, even if at some point, some of us were big fans of Digimon instead, or some don’t like it at all. At some point, my dad gifted me a Harry Potter book, even though I (non-vocally) disliked it, but it was in the cultural osmosis here so strongly that it was everywhere and he just assumed I was into it (bless his heart, he genuinely didn’t know). HP was something that I initially disliked because it was so popular, but the idea of a “basic magic premise, but extended” seemed interesting, and it was required reading in my middle school, so at 11, I went to see the movie and thought, alright, maybe I’ll give it a chance. But reading the book I found things that didn’t make sense to me, that didn’t match what seemed like the themes of the book (the whole slave freedom plot for example) so I always sort of kept it at arms-length - not quite getting into it, but also not turning it away if I found anything, not saying anything upsetting to people who were fans of it. Everyone at my school read it though to varying degrees, or at least everyone knew things about it even if they weren’t fans or weren’t invested at all. (This was all before we knew JKR is a vocal TERF, so now I feel a bit validated in my dislike, even if I feel sad for the fans who got something positive out of the series).

So point being, fandom can have different types of people in it. A type of media will often accrue a specific type of fan and sometimes it won’t match what the show itself puts out. E.g. fans acting in ways that go squarely against what the media talks about (Steven Universe is a popular show with many fans that comes to mind), or a show having an unexpected viewership next to it’s intended demographic (us 90s kids still being cartoon fans in our late 20s/30s/early 40s). It’s slightly unpredictable in a general way. 

Of course, TMNT fandom is a bit different from those bigger properties because it was an indie comic made in the 80s that was so different and off-the-wall indie for a comicbook, it sold out and gave its creators Eastman and Laird a hefty legacy, lasting careers and actual money. Good for them! Personally I think it’s thanks to how genuinely creative and collaborative their work was then. Like Usagi Yojimbo, it’s an old comicbook/franchise now, so the “fandom” as such differs from generation to generation, from childhood to childhood. I met the turtles for the first time with the 87 series in the early 90s, then the next time w the 2003 series, which i initially hated as that angry, cartoon-critical tween, but was surprised at how much it seemed to take from the comics. I think I was initially angry about it for different reasons, mainly, “why is it so serious? why are the jokes so lame?” and also because I had invested so much emotionally into the idea of seeing something as good as the 80s cartoon again... but then found that it grew on me and now 20 years later I can look at it with nostalgia. As a result, my reaction to the 2012 series was mostly “wow another TMNT cartoon?” and “huh it looks interesting” and “oh I’ve seen this person work on another cartoon before”. My little sibling on the other hand only saw the 2003 cartoon and their reaction the the 2012 adaptation was “Wow, THEY’RE FINALLY TEENS” because as kids, we thought the 2003 TMNT looked and sounded “too much like boring adults”. But from many online fanspaces back then a lot of the more vocal reactions was around “THE 3D IS SO UGLY” and “WHY ARE THEY SO YOUNG”. You’ve probably heard similar sentiments of various degrees if you’ve been a fan or viewer of any TMNT cartoon. 

Usagi Yojimbo is unique in this sense because Stan Sakai has been the only one drawing and writing the comicbook for 40 years. Some of the visual style and writing tone change from book to book, but it’s gradual because Stan has changed as an artist and writer too. If you look at any comic series like this, it’s actually a natural part of many comics i.e. webcomics used to be a prominent example of this, as the creators were often complete novices at the beginning and graduated to a more consistent style. But even from a surface level view, lets say, reading other people’s reviews, you can see that people really enjoy Usagi Yojimbo for how consistent it is with it’s treatment of its characters, story and Edo-period culture. Stan Sakai really does his research and puts respect back into fiction inspired by samurai. Even though guides will often tell you that you can jump into the series from any point in the series, there’s just something really consistent about it as a whole. Sakai gets to do whatver he wants with his books and what he does seems to be thought-out usually. Even if the early animated adaptations were a bit incorrect, comic readers in general have a lot of respect for Stan and his work. My favourite part about this all is how Usagi Yojimbo is actually used to teach about japanese culture in a college course in the US.

Because both TMNT and UY are originally creator-owned comics (still so with UY regardless of publisher or adaptations but not so much TMNT as Viacom bought the rights in 2009), perhaps the general fan experience is more similar to original comics fandoms in Japan. Although whether a series is creator-owned varies from series to series, the manga and magazines culture in Japan seems wholly different from what US comicbooks were in the 80s and even what they still are now in that regard. Because a series will more often be written and illustrated by the same creator/artist/team, there are less variations and book-to-book differences both visually and tonally. In the US, a comicbook series can start with an artist-writer team, but then switch if the editorial decides some change is needed. This is something that often affects consistency and a story or character’s canon eventually and in a convoluted way, it’s the reason why we got “alternate earths” and “multiverse crossovers”. Which, while fun, make american comicbooks hard to read for some newer readers. Even with TMNT, once Eastman and Laird started having less time to make the comics and their other problems, it led into breaking off their creative partnership and never speaking again. But they had to continue the comic. If before the feud, they would just have fun passing the pages between each other, now they actually  so they wrote it he series became different based on who was writing it. One more sci-fi leaning and one more martial-arts and mysticism leaning. You can see this difference in the TMNT animated adaptations as well. The 2003 series namely is more based on Laird’s storylines in the comics and he was also consultant on the series. After the 2009 sale of Mirage to Viacom, we get the 2012 series, where Eastman acts as consultant, so it’s more heavy on his ideas of what the TMNT are. In 2019, the documentary series “Toys that made us” brought them together for the first time in almost 2 decades. And then we fans got to have The Last Ronin, a collaboration between the two again.

(What I’ve paraphrased here is mostly based on this video overview of how the comic became a franchise “How did a violent indie comic become a $15,000,000,000 franchise?” by matttt if you’re interested in seeing and hearing a more picturesque summary of this)

So getting back to fandom, because it’s mostly been one comicbook series, both the more avid and casual UY comics fans might not be used to there being adaptations of Stan’s Usagi. Yes, even with the visual examples I brought up above, perhaps some simply haven’t seen the animated adaptations because these are still marketed “for kids”. This is like the only reason I can think of that people who are 30+ adults, go online to complain about the Chronicles series online, even though it’s obviously for kids, meaning they probably didn’t even watch it. Folks are “surprised” Stan “let Netflix ruin his series” etc - even if it’s explicitly in a new futuristic setting to avoid affecting the comics canon. It will be interesting to know how people react when or if Sakai puts out his “Kagemusha” anthology, where the idea is about different creators telling different Usagi stories.

Even TMNT fans, many of whom don’t know Usagi beyond the animated adaptations, might jump in with this similar mindset of “different = bad”. Maybe there’s a manga/anime adaptation out there with the fans having similar concerns about their adaptations. Sailor Moon comes to mind, but as always, people’s grievances with an adaptation may have good reasons underneath. But also I’ve personally never seen an avid Sailor Moon fans be as annoying as the casual Star Wars fan. It might also depend on the age and lifestyle of the fan. Someone who is a teacher or parent, maybe they’ve met more people, put more thought into it, might feel milder about new or different things vs someone who is used to going online to see people angry and enjoys getting into arguments.

If I start to think about it, I can get a similar reaction out of myself. It was hard to look at mid-00s fanart of Usagi because it always felt a bit “extreme” like fans changed things about Usagi to suit their own understanding or image of samurai, which was always more based on popular movies or anime rather than the comic. I think this is just a general thing about fanart over the times. I still balk at some fanart, either UY or SRTUC, if for example the sides of the clothes are opposite - right over left, for burials vs left over right, like the letter ‘y’ - because it just means the fanartist didn’t bother to look up even references. Most times people just don’t know about this sort of stuff, they might be anime fans or they might even be part of a different asian culture, but it it’s not something that’s taught, of course it won’t reflect in something like fanart. But then, it’ll just be something new to learn. To me it also speaks of a wider annoyance of people liking things only for the surface-level appeal.

Usagi Yojimbo I’ve noticed has much more of a fanbase than fandom. I know fanbase doesn’t get used much as a term these days as more and more media gets an active fandom rather than staying at a fanbasem but it’s a term I’d like to use in this case. “The Wilkes Beacon” in 2014 defines the difference so: “Not everything with a fanbase has a fandom, because a fandom is a group of committed fans who are always vocally interested in their “thing,” usually expressing that on a social website such as Tumblr. Just because you’re a fan doesn’t mean the fandom will accept you.” Indeed sometimes fandom feels almost like being in a separate part of the club, only for people in the know about it. The origin for fanbase is attributed to early 20th century baseball fans. The origin of fandom, most well-known as a portmanteau of fan + kingdom, is often attributed to the original Sherlock Holmes fans who actually gathered to mourn the character when Arthur Conan Doyle decided to kill him off (bless your hearts and souls, sometimes it feels like fandom has never changed) but also from early 20th century sports fans and 60s Trekkies, who saved their show. A lot of different sources give different origins and histories for these words and many will also equate them as synonymous.

My own experiences tell me that a fanbase is more general - any fans of a thing, whether they attend conventions, buy the media or no (i.e. Sherlock Holmes readers, sports fans) and will comprise the “base” of any activity - the larger number of fans that exist for a piece of media/sport/celebrity. A fandom will be the more “active” part, more interested in being connected with each other within that fanbase. Of course, to any other person outside of fans, both of these will be synonymous and a fan will look weird and fanatical regardless of how little they invest themselves into a media. But I’’m making this distinction to describe what I see as more casual and more active “fanbase as a whole”. Fanbase as a word feels more general, while Fandom sounds more specific. So as an example, the One Piece “fanbase” might feel large and more everywhere, like with pokemon or Sherlock Holmes the book, but the OP fandom can feel more active and particitative, like the .It’ll depend entirely on what way each person interacts with the media. Do you have friends who are also fans of the series? it’s like a fandom. You just watch it but don’t participate as much? You’re in the fanbase, but you might partake in fandom activities if you feel like it. You might be a more casual fan, but you might have more avid feelings about the series as well, but you’re not that interested in making fanworks or posts or reacting to other fans at all. A fandom might be big, but more ubiquitous, more silent and conversely, some fandoms may be small, but still very active and vocal. I’ve often theorized that this is because So UY online fandom sorta feels like the latter, but more under-the-radar. Small and active but also more silent and appreciative. With the previous “big fandoms” example, it’s also the juxtaposition between Old and New that comes into play. An old Spidey fan from the 70s might have become an official Spiderman fanartist, but they might not partake in all the fan stuff they used to anymore. Still a fan, but maybe the newer and younger “fandom” as such is just not appealing to them in the same way.

The larger or more advertised a TV series or book is, the larger and more annoying its fanbase in general. If a piece of media has less popularity, it will ergo have a smaller fanbase and sometimes no “active fandom” at all. So now with the Samurai Rabbit: the Usagi Chronicles TV show as an animated spinoff-adaptation, we have a similar problem that TMNT fans have been familiar with over the decades. Thanks to the show, there’s a more active, slightly younger fandom who want to connect over the series and maybe even read the comicbook, know more about the source and origins, they might want to even know how the show was made, make fanart or fic. So fans like any other, but just that the media they’re a fan of now, is still relatively new. Maybe these newer fans act or write differently online from how older fans are used to. Maybe they even treat the original source comic differently or just don’t know anything about it. In any case, new series and new fans will generally seem annoying because culturally that’s what we’ve started to associate some of fandom with. Otaku culture etc. So it and it’s fans might get the “new thing” treatment as mentioned above with the TMNT animated adaptations.

The difference here is that Stan Sakai has been wanting his own animated adaptation for a long time (just look at the Space Usagi pilot for proof) and while many suggested projects to him before, this one actually piqued his interest bc they did something new with the characters. You could say that what people don't like abt this series are some decisions resulting from this being a netflix cartoon for kids. the decision to set it in a near-future with a new younger for example, was made in the beginning by netflix and I haven’t found any articles yet that’s found a legit reason for why it stayed this way. My guess based on interviews with Stan and crew is that Stan found it interesting as a possible new way to get more readers to the comic. Something for the younger generation. Although many readers and even parents will attest that the comic is child-appropriate (and really, it is), the TV-Y7 ratings and so on exist for a reason. And while I would love for more western studios to get funding for more adult animation in general (I’m not from the US myself and animation such a large medium, the way that genres are explored or what gets made for adults vs kids feeks so different elsewhere), I think it’s good that the first full series based on UY is this “non-violent” (your mileage may vary). Because a lot of the more vocal adult fans of UY seem more focused on the violence vs what kids might get out of it. A popular quote from Sakai is “Once, a mother asked me, 'What is Usagi Yojimbo about?' and before I could answer, her son said, 'It’s about honor.'"   (Komai for JANM, 2011). Sometimes it seems like the “older adults” or the “more casual” fans of UY sort of don’t get it.

Even the naming of the series and character has reasons, which I’ve seen some Rise Leosagi shippers make their own reasons for. So the various hate from “older fans” I see about it is strange because all evidence points to the show having Sakai’s approval and his full involvement. Of course, I could also be wrong, but watching the series, it doesn’t feel to me like an “empty cashgrab” as one angry TMNT fan put it. It feels more like something made by other UY fans, those more familiar than I was at the time, with both Usagi Yojimbo lore as well as the culture and lore behind it. In their quest to properly honor the comic series they loved, crew put a lot research hours into making sure both edo and post-edo periods got to be part of their show. Like “trips to japan during a pandemic” type of research. The show is an interesting fusion of old and modern in futuristic setting and feels wholly unique as an experiment.

Another aspect of course is also the shipping parts of fandom. I can never quite get my head behind this “arguing about ships” because it just reminds me of my Grandma and her older sister fighting over their soap operas and who should get together with who. And alright, maybe this was fun for them...? I’ve never been that invested in this myself but it can be fun to have a pairing you root for in a show, when it’s just a bunch of connected ideas over the story, there really seems like a real genuine connection between the characters or if there’s a chance to connect with other fans over it. That’s kind of what fandom is for me in general, but with crossover ships, it’s like a strange and interesting combination of “oooh what interesting similarities and differences” and “lets find out” with fanworks. 

This is the main way I enjoy making crossovers in general work, even if I’ve never finished an actual fic (I’m more of an artist) and even if the works sometimes don’t go together (it’s like a fun challenge). I wonder sometimes if the SRTUC crew also imagined crossovers with TMNT? As in this fanart post on facebook by Samurai Rabbit character designer Andry R, I wonder what that could have been like. After all, if many of the crew are fans too, it just makes sense to think about that? it’s fun to think of crossovers after all! And since it’s fanwork, I personally don’t feel as obligated to make some of the quality as insanely good as I would have in my younger days. I want to enjoy the art making process too, so putting research and sketches into a piece is sometimes my own “enough”. So I don’t really care about views either because I know even now, tastes might still just be not geared toward something sketchier that I make.

Even so, despite the experience with online sites and social media people have in general, or other artists/fans encouraging to feel a bit less worried about socmedia algorhitms, it might be frustrating that posts are not as popular even if your idea feels great.

So connecting all of that fandom talk, I can only assume people mistag between a popular and non-popular series for similar reasons. As said earlier, fans might assume everyone prefers the popular thing and that it’s better to tag that popular/bigger/older thing. Because at least that So in our case, I’ve noticed more that ppl tag Yuichi Usagi with the Miyamoto Usagi tag. From the surface, it seems like people don’t know about the Yuichi tags/show or they just don’t like it for some other reason. Now Tumblr is more a “home of fandoms” than casual fans, as most of the user-generated content is entirely by people who get much more invested in a series than a casual fan. Similarly I’ll see people tag their TMNT 2012 inspired fandesigns as ROTTMNT as well, because that is simply seen as the popular fandom at the time ergo, more attention on your post.

Maybe a solution for the mis-tagging could be smth as simple as fandom outreach, something active to unite the different types of fans into using tags correctly, but of course, something more active and social might feel more unnatural, as most of us are more wall-flower than social butterfly - working off the assumption here that most fans are shy. I used to be pretty shy as a fan and now I’m more active and out-going in general in my adult years, but at the same time, doing something socially more active is still a scary thought in my brain so I can understand that it’s easier to just tag and hope it’s correct. Or easier to make ticked off posts vs something with a different kind of effort. But then again, as brought up in my examples of other fandoms, being a fan can make people very active in taking part in similar fan activities. As we all enjoy the same thing in different ways or different media in similar ways, we are all still fans at the end of the day. Whether casual or more involved, that’s a unique experience that should unite us. So I’ll have my peace with the older cartoon-hating fans who only view Usagi Chronicles as an empty children’s cartoon etc etc. 

So, because I’m an adult, but also an artist and animation fan, this is how I’ve been approaching TV cartoons for the past 5-10 years. Against my first reaction of “oh, this is too slow for me” the way I chose to view the series once I saw more of it was “I’m an adult, and this is a cartoon made my other older adults, for kids - let me see what it’s about”. It’s more about curiosity and seeing what other creatives have done to put connective tissue between one idea to another.

Personally when it comes to tagging I try to keep to a general amount of “minimum amount of tags possible” bc I’m a bit lazy but also, I will never find anything on my own blog later if I used more than 20 tags about a simpler fanart post. So maybe like 1-2 tags for show/series, 1-2 tags for characters and my own art tags. I am lazy but I also like being considerate with other people. But also because of my previous experience with blogging, I like to keep tags I re-use as consistent as possible so I have the same experience. Of course, sometimes I forget what I’ve actually used if there are many tags i.e. many characters. so keeping the tags short is a boon for that end.

Here is the draft version for the UY and Usagi Chronicles tag guide, i'm gonna change this more but this is mostly how I've been tagging stuff (or have tried to so far) and I wrote a small guide back in march before all this, but have been coming back to it now with more general and character tags in mind. 

== Tagging Guide ==

Hello Rise of the TMNT and Usagi Chronicles joint fandom! Here’s a guide on how to tag Usagi Chronicles/Samurai Rabbit stuff! Mostly it’s my own view on how to tag things based on how I interact w the fandom stuff posted here but also from my experience of using tumblr and older blogging platforms - how I see the most common/make-sensical ways to tag characters/shows. But maybe you will find this useful too, fellow fan!

Usagi Yojimbo - the name of the original comicbook series - I decidedly reserve this for posts and reblogs ONLY about the Usagi Yojimbo comic (pages covers,, screenshots, memes), or general fanart of the comic or its characters. This helps me keep it separate so I can find posts about it later.

Usagi Chronicles - personally I use this for all content for the show, but especially the crossover stuff and my own art posts. This seems to be the most commonly used unique tag about this show.

SRTUC - acronym, good for short posts, for quick tagging. but I also use this to tag general reblogged posts about the show

Samurai Rabbit - I only try to use this if it is about the official stuff, like interviews and GIF/screenshots in bulk (more than 2). This tag gets used a lot for both the series but before that it was also used for posting general UY comics content and alternate covers by other artists, as well as for original samurai rabbits unaffiliated by UY. It is too general for me to use it on my own posts outside of text posts maybe.

Samurai Rabbit the Usagi Chronicles - mostly I use this tag for more general posts, but also reblogs if someone else has made something directly related to the series.

SamuraiRabbitNetflix - lol I only use this one on twitter, bc I saw someone from the crew use it and it has stuck for most of my more finished posts I guess ^^ Literally nobody else on tumblr uses it which is fine, but I think it’s a good way to separate the series and the more general posts people make about the comic or guest art of it (or sometimes original art unrelated to UY)

Characters:

Miyamoto Usagi - I try to mainly use it for just comic Usagi and fanart, but occasionally I will use it for fanart depicting

Rise Miyamoto Usagi - Any Rise!versions of comics Usagi. Usually these are fandesigns, but sometimes fans will adapt it wholesale (usually adapting him from his younger years). Sometimes it is unclear which version it is based on or it is a completely original version so I simply tag these as Rise Usagi.

Yuichi Usagi - pretty self-explanatory! I only use this for posts/fanart including Yuichi Usagi (but not when he is only mentioned in passing). Sometimes it is hard to differentiate between these versions however, 

Usagi fandesign/Yuichi Usagi fandesign/Miyamoto Usagi fandesign - I use all these tags to organize the fandesigns ppl make of all these characters, reserving “Usagi fandesign” when it’s really an original design based on various canon Usagi concepts or more of a “general” Usagi than a specific one i.e. meant for the Rise or 2012 TMNT crossover AUs. This counts for me in reblogs also when the OP hasn’t really decided what the character is and has tagged both characters. Lol there is a lot of different fanart of these characters and for my own sake, I tag these separately where possible so I can find the fanart easier later (especially if the posts themselves have text which doesn’t use these names, or if tumblr search is not working on blogs)

UY character - I use “UY” as the common acronym before characters from UY, but I also generally tag their names in reblogs. idk, this just makes it easier for me to find them later in my own blog and that’s all (Kenichi and Mariko for example are quite common Japanese names)

Tomoe Ame - This character just deserves her own tag, but also, I think the 03 version, while quite different, can fit in the same tag because people don’t post about them as much ^^;;

--

And now for the TMNT tags!

Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - the official name! long, but good if you are tagging official stuff i.e. screenshots, gifs, concept art, tweets from crew etc

ROTTMNT - good short catch-all tag, lots of ppl use this to tag their reblogs quickly, but shorter posts can also go under here

Rise of the TMNT - Slightly longer tag than the full acronym, but more descriptive, if you wanna make sure people know it’s a TMNT show

Rise TMNT - I’ve seen a few ppl use this as a tag and it’s a valid way to tag (short and unique) but it’s not as popular as the others

2018 TMNT - again, general tag for the series. Common way to make a tag for a TMNT series - adding the year of airing before the TMNT acronym. Same with TMNT 2018. Same for the comics! I’ll use IDW TMNT as a tag for example, bc it seems widely used and understood.

TMNT18 - same as the previous one, but shorter! There are a lot of TMNT media besides the comics, (movies, animated series, etc) so it’s a general easier practice to tag via year. Ppl also sometimes use the variation 18TMNT. Anything is basically fair game with these general tags as long as the author of a blog finds stuff later.

Characters![I’m not sure about the characters yet bc I use the tags differently than other people apparently. my blog my rules i guess!]

rottmnt [character] - reserved for when i tag this character in crossovers, eg rottmnt April, rottmnt donnie. I generally use nicknames for the rottmnt boys cuz I am lazy.

Rise [character] e.g. Rise Leo, Rise April - I try and use this just for 

April O Neil (full name) - for when I’m tagging them in general and just want to see them in this tag with the other versions

12 April or 12April - for the 2012 TMNT versions of the characters. I often write the tags together bc I am just lazy but in the case of numbers, I can also forget. On tumblr I try to remember to use spaces cuz that is allowed here lol.

----

And that’s it! I have more in the list, but that is the gist of the style of it. Basically hust explaining what I’ve seen and if/how I use it on my own blog. Let me know if you have more thoughts about this. I’m curious to know what other fans of both series think!

#Miyamoto Usagi #Yuichi Usagi #UY Jotaro #rottmnt #srtuc #usagi chronicles #Yamamoto Yukichi #texty #aghhtposts #aghht srtuc posts #fandom tag list #tagging guide #long post #not gonna tag absolutely every character bc some of them don't feature as heavily here #anyway this has been sitting in my drafts for almost a month so i am releasing it from its burden #aghht graphics #haven't used that in a long time #ok this has been sitting in my drafts since april now time to actually release it #might have to review this later for any larger points i forgot to finish or other unfinished sentences. #someone appreciate my graphics

[troutfishinginmusic]

Interview: Tim Kinsella (2012)

In 2012 my life was chaotic. I was working on my degree at Wayne State University and working two jobs. I was also going through some trauma in my personal life, which I’ve only recently sorted out. During all of this, I interviewed one of my favorite artists. Tim Kinsella has been a part of numerous musical projects (most notably Cap N’ Jazz and Joan of Arc). I was lucky enough to interview him when he did a limited run of living room shows at the time. I wrote an article from the interview for my college newspaper. I really don’t like how it turned out. This interview appears on another Tumblr page I made at the time and have since forgotten all the login stuff (including the email). Joan of Arc recently concluded after over 20 years, so I thought it would be fitting to post it again with a bit of light editing. The interview happens at a creative high for JOA and a commercial low. Kinsella currently performs in Good Fuck.

 What made you want to tour living rooms?

It was really a very practical decision.  I’ve been working as an adjunct teacher around Chicago and I have a better job that starts in February.  I didn’t want to go back to my old job yet and get lots of music done.  But by the time I found out I wasn’t working it was too late.  It was too late to book clubs; to do a normal tour.  It was very much just a backwards kind of a panic.  Dave Bazan of Pedro the Lion and Tim Kasher have been doing this. So I got hooked up with the guys who booked those.  And I’m excited this is the first one.

What subject and where did you teach?

I taught two semesters at the Art Institute [of Chicago] teaching a weird first year seminar. I taught classes on Utopia that I made up.  But that’s just while I was in school there.  But then I taught at Harold Washington, which is part of the Chicago City colleges, and I taught popular culture and mass media studies sorts of things.  In February I start teaching experimental fiction writing at the University of Chicago’s night school program.  That’ll be more exciting for me, teaching writing classes.

Are you going to write a follow up the “Karaoke Singers Guide to Self Defense”?

You know I just finished the second one and I can’t find a publisher.  I actually just finished a first draft of the third one in the last two and a half months.  So that means it’s still about two and a half years away from being done.  I sent out the second one to 28 different publishers and have gotten 12 or 13 rejections so far and haven’t heard back from the other 14.

Why not put it out with the last publisher?

That’s part of there deal they don’t do two books by anyone.  Half the people they put books out by have deals with bigger publishers, so this is like their weird side project thing.  So they’re helping me find people to send it to.  And I’ve become really good friends with them.  So they’re on my side but they won’t do the book.

I saw in another interview that you were starting to move away from song-based albums to larger instrumental pieces.  On the new self-titled album there is one side devoted to song-based material.  Do you see yourself continuing to move away from that in the future or is it kind of up in the air in terms of Joan of Arc?

It’s hard to say.  I remember when Joan of Arc Dick Cheney Mark Twain came out in 2004 and, when we finished mixing it, we met this friend of mine who’s in this band called Disappears, who’re really awesome, and telling him how excited I was about the record and gushing about how it does this and it does this and how we balanced it’s so crazy.  He was nodding along patiently and he was like ‘you know it sounds like you just described the first Joan of Arc record to me.’ And I went ‘oh…right. I guess so’ But I don’t know I feel like I’m getting better at the craft of song writing.  They’re very separate disciplines in my mind; song writing and playing music.  I feel like I’m getting better at both, but they’re definitely separate disciplines in my mind.  

Does it feel strange doing very different things under the same banner?

Yeah, from my perspective it’s very unified.  Ideally, it should have contradictions.  I don’t know. Have you ever seen a really depressing movie or read a really fun book and think ‘oh man I want to make something like that.’ That never lets up or never goes one way or the other. Realistically, I’m sad a lot of the time and I’m funny a lot of the time.

You wouldn’t want to box it in or anything?

If it’s going to representative then it needs to be multi- dimensional.  So I’m comfortable with it.  I understand it’s hard to sell.  And at the same time when I feel like I’m getting better at these things, but the business aspect of it has never been worse.  Our audience is shrinking and shrinking as I get better and better at what I mean to do.

Were any of the east coast shows canceled due to hurricane Sandy?

I guess I’m doing them. I’ve talked to all the hosts. There was one show at a friend of mine’s house in New Jersey that we moved to Brooklyn anyways so we could sell more tickets there. His street was destroyed but that show was canceled anyways. The only show that would’ve been canceled was already canceled…so it might be weird getting in and out of places…but I don’t know.  Yeah I’ve been in contact with all of them and they’ve said ‘no you have to do it everything’s fine.’ I guess it’ll go neighborhood to neighborhood.

Are you going to make another film after Orchard Vale?

It’s a thing I think about a lot.  Both novels started as script ideas.  I found I have an easier time realizing the thing when it was just me, a laptop and a notebook.  The movie was very frustrating.  It didn’t turn out like I hoped it would.  The tension of it ended my marriage because me and my ex-wife made it together.  My girlfriend now is an experimental filmmaker and she’s really great, so we collaborate on some little things.  I’ve done some music for a couple of her films and we’re constantly talking through ideas, but I don’t think…I mean I would love to, it would be my dream.

What made you want to soundtrack the Passion of Joan of Arc film?

This festival asked us to do something, it could be whatever we wanted.  But they wouldn’t tell us how much money they had.  They said ‘well how much do you guys want?’  Well for this little bit of money we’ll improvise to a 10-minute experimental film, for a lot of money we’ll do an original score to the Joan of Arc movie.  It just popped out of my mouth.  I didn’t think about it.  They said ‘oh that sounds cool let’s try that.’  The one time we preformed it was in an old church this old church that was really perfect.  There were stained glass windows, some people sitting in pews and a big pipe organ sitting to the side. We tried riding with the pipe organ, but we couldn’t get things in tune with it.  The a-lot-of-money turned out to be very little money considering the amount of time we had to put into it. They called my bluff.

How much did the film influence the band name?  Did it feel like it was coming full circle to do that?

It did feel great to do that.  My relationship with the name Joan of Arc has gone back and forth a few times over the years. At first we thought it was a good idea because we wanted this familiar thing.  Then there were some years where I was like this is a stupid band name, why are we stuck with this?  It felt like claiming it as our own.  I mean obviously it belongs to everyone.  Our original idea was Sony.  But our first label wouldn’t let us be named that.  We just wanted a name that everybody knew that we could change the meaning of the name to certain people.

How’s the Owls reunion going?

It’s going great. It’s really fun.  It took us a really long time to get momentum Sam [Zurick] moved back to Chicago last Valentine’s day. He was living on my couch so he needed to find a job and had to find a place.  Then my brother had a second baby.  I think we wrote the whole record twice and threw it away.  It just wasn’t working.  It had been 12 years since we all played together even though all of us play in Joan of Arc some of the time.  Now we finally have momentum.  We have enough songs where we’re throwing songs away.  I think if we had to record next week we could but we’re waiting until the spring because we’re enjoying playing together and not tweaking things or making it a public thing right now.  It’s fun for us to cultivate.

 Did you plan to release three albums in a year?  Is it hard to do that or is it more of a natural process?

No we’re totally backlogged right now, the labels hate us.  Two years ago we did 113 shows we were all just miserable and exhausted. So we were like OK let’s stay at home and figure things out.  It was a good year we all enjoyed it, but it’s difficult to sustain it.  We’re just staying home but we still like playing music. Most days of the week we play music together.  We throw away a lot of stuff you know.  

The three records are very different: the soundtrack is a very specific thing, Pinecone is a very specific thing and this acoustic record.  There’s three records for next year too.  We aren’t trying to, it’s just how it kind of naturally occurs.  I mean there’s the Owls record and our main focus has been our soundtrack to this performance art piece.  We did it in London in April I guess and that’s a very specific thing.  We’ve been doing this funny greatest hits record of rearranged old songs.  The label’s saying you sound better live than you ever have, you should make a record as a live band.  

They’re very distinct. And that’s a music industry thing really, I mean if you love what you do you’ll want to do it every day.  It doesn’t seem weird to me.  I understand the labels hate it because the records come out in very small pressings now.

Do you still bartend at all?

You know, I just started again and it’s fine.  I was miserable the first couple shifts, but I’m just doing it until I can start teaching again. I’m just not used to being up that late.

Did that inspire the book at all?

I’ve lived above the bar I worked at.  I’m not in there very often when it’s open and crowded unless I’m working.  But the owners and managers there are my best friends. So I guess I’ve just been around the bar.  And my Dad was a governor of a Moose Lodge, so he was like a bar manager too.  So I’ve always been around bars I guess.

#tim kinsella #joan of arc #owls #capnjazz

[geekade]

The Descent Into Madness

Have you ever been in a rocky relationship? Embroiled in a mess break up? Caught in a vicious love triangle and think, “How did we get here?” More often than not, the answer to that question is a sticky one that probably goes back much further than recent memory can offer. I find myself in a very similar predicament when I look at the New York Knicks. While I have no great love for the Knicks, it’s not hard to recognize New York as a great basketball city or identify its fans as some of the most passionate and loyal in the league. For New York, it’s almost unthinkable that their marquee franchise can be mired in a second decade of terrible management and leadership that ultimately led to former Knick great Charles Oakley being ejected from Madison Square Garden in handcuffs last week. (More on that event to come). So how did we get here? It was a strange event for sure, but when you add it to the end of an equally bizarre timeline, sometimes all you can think is “Thank the Lord that’s not my team.”

Let’s start after hall of famer Patrick Ewing was traded to Seattle in 2000 (Why are we now deprived of a pro sports team named the Super Sonics? *sigh*). Shortly thereafter in 2001, we have our first unusual event featuring Knicks coach Jeff Van Gundy. Van Gundy led the Knicks to the NBA Finals in ’99, but in 2001 he unexpectedly resigned indicating that he was “losing focus,” and stepped down. Perhaps Van Gundy had some premonitions about the future of the organization. However, I’d be remiss to not bring up an incident from a game that season versus the Spurs. In this game, Knick Marcus Camby took a cheap shot from Spur Danny Ferry. While pleading his case to the ref, Camby absolutely lost it and went after Ferry with a savage overhead haymaker that completely whiffed. Camby did however, successfully head butt Van Gundy. Enjoy. 

Boom. 2001 season, first year the Knicks missed the playoffs since 1986. When you make the post season for 15 years, and suddenly, you might be bad, organizations respond differently. Some go into rebuild mode, call it Plan A, take their lumps, and come back later with solid team ready to make a run. The other option is Plan B, try and sign injury risk veterans to bad contracts (Antonio McDyess), resign underperforming players to contracts that would hobble an organization for years, ruin your chances at the draft lottery and frustrate your fan base, all for a shot to scrap into the playoffs. Now, what do you suppose the Knicks do?

In 2003 the party really gets started when the Knicks name Isiah Thomas Team President. Thomas brings on the legendary Lenny Wilkens to coach the team, and orchestrates a trade that brings in Stephon Marbury. Plan B works like a charm. The Knicks make the playoffs and are promptly swept in the first round by the Nets.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. After a rocky start in 2004, Coach Lenny Wilkens resigns. Sound familiar? At least it didn’t take a blow to the head to prompt it. Predictably the Knicks miss the playoffs. Thomas, still trying to keep the obviously dying Knicks on life support, brings in universally respected coach Larry Brown, and makes of ton of plan B type moves trading for marginal centers with unprotected, what turn out to be, lottery picks. CBS ranks this as the second worst Knick trade of all time: the Knicks complete a trade for Eddy Curry, sending the Bulls the Knicks 2006 first round draft pick, the 2007 and 2009 second round picks, and the right to swap first round picks in 2007. Curry posted one good year for the Knicks in 2006-07, averaging 19 points and 7 rebounds per, and none of those picks were protected in anyway. This is the type of move that can cripple a team for years. The only reason this is the second worst Knick trade, is because the shipment of Ewing out of town needs to be sentimentally atop that totem pole of awful. The Knicks ended the 2005 season with a league worst 23-59, (you’d love to have that lottery pick right? The Bulls use what turned out to be the 2nd pick in the draft to take 5 time all-star LaMarcus Aldridge) they fired Coach Larry Brown, and were forced to eat $18.5 million of his salary in the process.

Now, with a coaching vacancy facing the 2006 season, who would be one of the wackiest candidates to fill the void? That’s right, team President Isiah Thomas! In 2007, after another abysmal season, we took it up a notch when Thomas was slapped with a sexual harassment lawsuit. Both Thomas and Madison Square Garden were found to be liable and MSG had to cough up $11 million in damages. Are we crazy yet? Knick fans were getting there, and with “Fire Isiah” chants cascading from the rafters, on 11/29/07 the Knicks ate an epic punishment at the hands of the rival Celtics, losing 104-59.

In April of 2008, Thomas was relieved of his role as President, and by the end of May he was relieved of the rest of his responsibilities. It may seem at this point that the ship is righting. Knicks management is about to start getting draft picks back, they are moving bad contracts off of their ledger, they are priming for a big 2010 free agent season, one that features names like LeBron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh (who obviously went another way). Tortured Knick fans weren’t let off that easily though. January 24th 2010 showed ticket holders the worst home loss anyone in New York had ever seen. The Knicks losing 128-78, a fifty point drumming at the hands of the Dallas Mavericks was enough to make any fan start questioning reality.

In 2010 the Knicks finally returned to the playoffs led by new acquisitions Carmello Anthony and Amare Stoudemire, along with their first winning season since 2001 only to be swept by the Celtics, butsometimes going mad isn’t all tragedy. There are highs as well as lows, and you can’t do any damage while the league is on strike. After the 2011 NBA lockout, something magical, weird, and irrational happed: LINSANITY. Jeremy Lin, a third string point guard who was picked up about a month earlier found his way onto the Garden’s floor. What followed was wins in streaks, Sports Illustrated covers, global attention inspired by Lin’s Asian heritage, and must see TV every time the Knicks played. The fact this took place in NYC gave it extra juice and this little known player who was playing under the most auspicious of contracts was headlining SportsCenter nightly. But, yeah, it was predictably unsustainable.

While the Knicks made the playoffs in the 2011-2012 season, every silver lining has a dark cloud. Since they lost the first three games of this series to the Heat, coupled with the previous year’s first round sweep at the hands of the Celtics, 2003’s first round sweep to the Nets, and dropping the last two games of the 2000 first round series against the Raptors, the Knicks were the proud owner of the NBA’s longest postseason losing streak, congratulations.

The following year, the Knicks came out like wildfire, had a great season and actually set a then-NBA record for three pointers in a season. They won the Atlantic Division, and got first round revenge on the Boston Celtics. After falling to the Pacers in round two, we haven’t seen New York in the playoffs since.

In the years that followed, we saw the Knicks hire Zen guru Phil Jackson as team president, experiment with head coaches like Derek Fisher, set a team record losing streak ending at 16 games, and forced to eat large contracts. Suffice it to say, if you are around 30 and Knick fan, you’ve seen your fair share of turbulent times for your team. If you’re any amount younger than 30, that’s all you’ve seen. You’ve experienced a few highs, but mostly you’ve been subject to just awful leadership, sightless “win now” moves, and poor judgement on and off the court. Which brings us to the night of Wednesday February 8th…

Anyone who ever gave a damn about the Knicks has a right to be critical of their moves over the last decade plus. Anyone who ever gave them a dime, bought a ticket, a hot dog or a program has a right to express their frustration with this organization. What about former players, who bled for them, who dripped sweat on the Garden’s hardwood, who Spike Lee high fived after playoff wins? I’m sure they’d have a lot of opinions on the matter. Charles Oakley, a stalwart of Pat Reilly’s 90’s teams, did just that. Sitting just a few rows behind team owner James Dolan, expressing some harsh criticism landed Oakley, before the night was out, with three counts of assault, one count of criminal trespass, a pair of silver bracelets and a police escort out of MSG. Evidently being critical in earshot of Dolan has its price. Dolan may have “won” that battle but what do the optics of this do for the war he’s in with his fan base and their frustration. The Knicks PR team released a statement in a matter of hours following the incident:

“Charles Oakley came to the game tonight and behaved in a highly inappropriate and completely abusive manner. He has been ejected and is currently being arrested by the New York City Police Department.”

“He was a great Knick and we hope he gets some help soon,” 

Um, ok? What’s the insinuation here? Are the Knicks accusing Oakley of having a drinking problem? A drug problem? An anger management problem? A mental problem? To make matters worse, last Friday the Knicks issued Oakley a lifetime ban. Regardless, the Knick faithful are behind Oakley, and Dolan, recognizing what a horrible look this gives him has to course correct. Dolan’s next move is to invite Latrell Sprewell, who he also formerly feuded with, as well as a cavalcade of former Knicks to join him for a game. This pathetic, obvious, cover to show he’s in good with other former players isn’t fooling anyone.

Dolan, left without options, four days after banning Oakley, informs him that he’s now welcome back to a game soon. Oakley, however, isn’t having it, telling the Dan Lebatard show:

“Right now, no. I told him [Monday],” Oakley said. “I want to have a press conference and I want him to apologize to me and the fans. They’ve had my back and they’ve felt the pain. I really appreciate the people all around who’ve had my back.”

So that’s where we are. It’s Valentine’s season and love for your favorite sports team is strong, but just like any relationship there are good times and bad. Love can make you do crazy things. Love can get you into trouble, it makes you passionate, irrational, and emotional. So just like you’d do for your buddy who got dumped, cheated on and done dirty, buy a Knick fan a beer. They’ve earned it.

#Sports #articles

[veiltray63-blog]

The participatory defense program teaches defendants necessary skills to prep for court

It was an early autumn afternoon in 1975 — a moment that Steve Austin wishes he could take back.

Recalling that day recently, Austin took a deep breath, as if he were about to plunge into a deep, dark place.

“I killed a person. I took a person’s life,” he said. “It’s hard for me to talk about.”

Austin, 16 at the time, was selling ice cream at a street stand in his North Philadelphia neighborhood. That afternoon, he and a customer got into a heated exchange over a transaction.

A fight ensued, and that’s when Austin made the worst decision of his life.

He went home and got a gun.

Before sundown, a man named Charles Hudson lay dead in the street, and many lives changed forever.

Hudson left behind a family, and Austin was soon sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Austin didn’t know much about how the legal system worked when he was charged and sentenced. And more knowledge probably would not have changed the outcome of his case. But with a greater awareness, he says, he could have presented himself as someone worthy of redemption.

“Oftentimes when you’re in the courtroom, what happens is the judge doesn’t know you, the attorney really doesn’t know you. It’s the community of people you live in, they know you,” he said.

In April 2017, Austin was released from prison after serving 42 years. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2016 that its 2012 ban on mandatory life-without-parole sentences for “juvenile lifers” must be applied retroactively, he was resentenced to time served.

The decades in prison have left him humbled.

“I have a greater understanding of what has happened … You understand the magnitude of, not just how you have wronged this person, but his family, his friends, his relatives,” said Austin. “They’ll never get to see their loved ones again. As blessed as I feel to get this second opportunity to have a life outside the prison, my victim will never get that chance.”

Now on parole, Austin works as a facilitator at the “participatory defense” program run by the Defender Association of Philadelphia. The community-based justice initiative, launched in March, helps people charged with crimes better advocate for themselves.

Steve Austin spent 42 years in prison for a murder he committed as a teenager. (Bastiaan Slabbers for Keystone Crossroads)

‘Community of people’

The participatory defense program, which meets weekly, teaches people how to present themselves as a whole person, by, among other things, tapping the resources of the community of people who know the defendant as more than a criminal.

That package includes training defendants about the facts of their case; teaching them how to write a biography; obtaining letters of support; and identifying friends and loved ones who will vouch for them in court.

Philadelphia Chief Defender Keir Bradford-Grey says she had to get creative to do battle with the better-resourced district attorney’s office.

“Public defenders need that kind of collaboration,” she said. “That untapped resource of the community to help us understand what’s going on. Otherwise, we’re talking to clients who are so entrenched in the worry and the issues, they can’t give us a full recitation of what happened.”

Keir Bradford-Grey is chief public defender at the Defender Association of Philadelphia. (Emma Lee/Keystone Crossroads)

Defendants, along with their advocates and representatives from the public defender’s office, usually attend the weekly roundtable work session. Austin asks clients about their needs and brainstorms ways to address them. The requests are many and varied. Some want new court dates. Others need help writing a statement for their elocutions. A few hope to learn about the tendencies of certain judges.

“These are things that people don’t know how to articulate to an attorney, and the attorney usually has so many cases and so many people they’re dealing with — they’re just overwhelmed,” Austin said. “So being able to help and assist in your own defense is a good thing.”

Bradford-Grey first introduced the participatory defense program in Montgomery County, where she served as chief defender for more than three years before coming to Philadelphia. Bradford-Grey collaborated with Raj Jayadev, coordinator of the Albert Cobarrubius Justice Project in Silicon Valley to bring the idea to Pennsylvania.

Grief-stricken and worried about her case

Since the initiative launched, it has enjoyed its share of success stories.

Veronica Rex found the program by accident, when she showed up for grief counseling while a participatory defense session was being held in the same building.

It was earlier this year, and she had just lost her the second of her four children to violence.

Her son, Zacki Thomas, 26, had been murdered — shot in the back of the head while sitting in a car in Southwest Philadelphia. His death came nine years after Rex’s 22-year-old daughter, Kamilah El-Amin, was killed by her ex-boyfriend, who ran her over with his car.

“It took a lot out of me,” Rex, 54, said. “It appeared that my whole world had crushed in.”

Rex was also worried about her own court case.

She had just been incarcerated for three months for handling a customer’s weapon at a bar where she worked.

“I was trying to protect myself and the bartender,” she explained.  “I stepped outside to give the gun back to the person after they left my establishment. I, in turn, was charged with having a gun on the streets of Philadelphia.”

She also had a 30-year-old felony conviction hanging over her, stemming from a domestic dispute. As she awaited sentencing, she feared it would hurt her case.

Her lawyer wanted her to take a deal where she would still face jail time. But participatory defense helped Rex draft a letter to the court explaining her perspective. And with that, things began to swing in her favor.

“I was able to get my court date changed to give me more time to prepare and get my bio together because I’m more than what they see on paper,” she said. “I actually had 16 people show up on my behalf.”

Veronica Rex (right) credits the participatory defense program with keeping her out of jail. (Bastiaan Slabbers for Keystone Crossroads)

The judge dropped her felonies to misdemeanors. And instead of jail or house arrest, she got three-and-a-half years probation.

Rex credits the program for giving her her freedom.

“I might be sitting behind bars again — or sitting in the window trying to get the OK to go to the doctor’s, [or] go to the swimming pool with my grandkids,” she said.

Rex now volunteers at participatory defense, helping others just like the program helped her.

Steve Austin says Rex is not alone. He’s seen firsthand how the program, which has been adapted by some other offices across the country, can change the course of people’s lives.

“This participatory defense is revolutionary,” he said. “And I don’t use that word lightly.”

Source: https://whyy.org/articles/in-philadelphia-a-community-based-program-teaches-defendants-how-to-help-themselves/

[raysondetre]

U2′s Songs of Experience

Here are the things in the album and release that U2 have done that tie into this book, summarized without substantiation. I reiterate the list with substantiation below if you actually want to find out if this is going on.

Why this is important: -the book was published January 9th, 2016. Bono received the same book at the halfway mark as a draft in 2011. It was submitted for copyright April 2014 and received its copyright license at the end of that year. So you're dealing with a situation where the book can in no way have been contrived to fit U2's actions with their subsequent album, Songs of Experience. Which implies that Bono contrived his creative output in response to the book, because there are enough of them that it appears it could not have been chance. To find out why that could be of pivotal import, it would pay to read the book, but I'll give you the shorthand, -for the book's entire premise to fly, -Bono was so creatively involved he'd have to agree to its existence on some level. And this is enough to assert that he does. But to understand why that statement can be made that strongly, you'd have to understand what was in the book. Same goes for understanding why that may be so important, but U2 themselves have framed the import themselves quite perfectly by this choice quote they released on the day of the US recent eclipse, "Blackout, it's clear, who you are will appear".

1) Bono appears to have read the halfway draft of this book he got in 2011 -in terms of creating a song that manages to juxtapose finishing the book, along with what might be a reaction to the fact that I have lately published a spate of negative investigative articles about the band with regards to their philanthropy sources, -with the fact that I was on Killiney Bay in the draft right before the first time I met him personally, -a song which actually manages to tie into this circumstance three different ways (relying on the journal entry from the night prior)

2) Bono's preview interview for the album's release (the exclusive Amazon Alexa podcast) had him pulling out and talking about an incident he's practically never discussed, -the theft of his lyrics for U2's album ATYCLB on his laptop - an incident that happened right after I first met him, and was thoroughly documented in the draft he received (as well as the current book), -a theft that happened 18 years ago.

3) U2 have deliberately timed their album's release with both an eclipse (to the day) and a supermoon (which happened two days after the album's release) -both events which happened before and after the first and second time I met and spoke to Bono in person in Dublin in 1999. An eclipse happened at almost at totality over Dublin (over 98%) just days before I met Bono, and the supermoon occurred two days after I met him the second time. U2 timed the release of the album with a supermoon occurring two days after the album's release. All this occurrence was documented in both the draft and the current (pre-published 2016) book.

4) Bono snippets "Walk to the Water" in the BBC promotion of the new album's release, -a song that has never been performed and has only been snippeted four times in all of its existence (including this time). He edited the lyrics so that they emphasize the song's (female) subject, opening by her saying it wasn't cold, and how she walked down the "North Strand" to the sea, -which is exactly where you'd walk to go to U2's secret studio then (in 1999, not when this song was written). This is exactly what transpired when I met Bono the first time. Bono was in a position to know that this was exactly what transpired the first time, because I described the process of finding the secret studio in the draft, including describing which streets, -not to mention the conversation itself.

5) The new album, Songs of Experience has a bonus track, "Book of Your Heart" which actually has Bono describing having reading something given to him exclusively for his reading alone (in which he was a character), that corresponds with several appertaining facts of the book.

6) The most significant of these is that it mentions the name change I made to my legal pen name in order to publish the book. Or at least, this is alluded to as something the writer described in the song has done, and this is something I did to self-publish. This happened after 2011.

7) Prior to this, with Songs of Innocence -Bono titled track 10 after the "sincerely" line of my opening letter that presented the draft, word for word: "This is Where You Can Reach me Now". This is something I cannot document because that letter was saved exclusively to the flash drive that Bono received.

This got started as a reply, which I've kept the link to document because the reply thread is literally when I noticed, in real time, that there could have been a deliberate interplay between the song and my book draft. (As well as the embed code just in case which is not a hyperlink.) Facebook censored me from replying, which is how this analysis took flight.

Anthony: "Pamela Williams this is the stupidest crap I’ve ever read. So Bono stoled lyrics from you? Ok lol"

"No. And not insulting you back Anthony takes some restraint. The lyrics are not a quote -which is apparent to anyone literate. What is he doing by the look of it is tagging the period I was in Ireland and met him personally (and delivered an art theory to him as per lyrics with some pretty serious implications). You might register the fact that every one of these points I'm listing is in the book draft I managed to get to him personally in Chicago, -2011. The draft he got, the chapter I was in Ireland and met him personally was just being begun. I had to summarize it as a series of journal entries." So in the book draft he got:

1) I was crying on Killiney Bay the night after a Full Moon just days before I met Bono for the first time. The night before I was singing my lungs out and dancing on the roof of a Dublin Pub three stories up. -With the song "Love is Bigger Than Anything in its Way". -Bono lyrically suggests to start singing, instead of 'talking' -which would suitably reference the fact that I've done a series of five investigative articles in the last year and a half or so on the band's billionaire sponsorship etc. that were deeply negative. -That's probably the reason for the 'I know the rage in you is strong" reference.

-Now when I went back into writing the Chapter on Ireland in earnest after Bono received the book in 2011, I found I'd made an error and in fact these journal entries were several days apart, -not just one day apart. So the page I put in the book footnotes (that are in the existing published book as hyperlinks) that has these same journal entries (at a higher level of detail) -they're a week or so apart instead of a day apart. The quay I was sitting on (crying) at Dalkey is on Killiney Bay. I said, "I think my heart is completely broken." In the draft Bono got the entry is only two lines and the episode on the roof (June 28th) is listed as the Full Moon the night prior. In reality the second night I listed as June 29th in his draft really took place July 6th. (Yea, I have the original volumes (handwritten journals, -seven of them), the only way this would have even been the result.)

This is not asserting that he is taking lyrics from me. It looks like what happened in the book draft may be something he chose to write a song (actually maybe three plus one deliberate choice of snippet) about. There's a (big) difference between that allegation and alleging "Bono's copping my lyrics".

-Disclaimer, I have run across this interview in The Sun that says the song was written for his sons (heard the same thing about "13 (There is a Light)" -Bono says on record in the liner notes that this is the case, listing three songs by title as dedicated to his children). However, as explained in the book itself, (and further below) -both sons appeared to have been named after the document I handed to Bono the first time I met him, so it may have a dual intention. It may fit both situations and fits this one a little better, as the book puts a host of songs into one giant, narrative uber song. PS: From what I've seen, apart from this one song out of the three I'm referencing, despite the fact that Bono said all the tracks were letters of some sort to people in his life (including fans) the ones I'm mentioning have no such attribution by Bono or the band (fans assume attribution). I'm not sure why Bono would dedicate two songs to his two sons and only one song to his two daughters, and Bono has only attributed one so far to his daughters. So I'm wondering if the song was written with a dual intention, which is not a first in terms of song analysis where Bono is concerned. PPS: I’m not the type to make an assumption about one song because that song "just happens" to fit what he received in a draft. There’s a lot else going on.

2) Bono talks about his laptop getting stolen with all his lyrics on the Alexa interview special that was a retrospective preview to the album, and only broadcast before the album's release (since this individual didn't listen well enough I checked on this interview with second source). This theft happens in the book draft I gave to Bono in 2011, -right after I documented meeting him personally in the draft. "-But [Anthony is] too dim to consider how I might possess a scan of the newsprint article that documents when he recovered it, and exists as its own page because it is an actual book footnote in a book that was already published in iBooks January 9, 2016, -which means I've already written and published this so I cannot have possibly contrived any of these pages, -nor the book's existing context to fit what Bono has since written and U2 have done in releasing this album (same goes for all the links from my book page to follow) - They all exist as hyperlinks in a previously published book." The lyrics/laptop theft is dealt with in considerable detail. Bear in mind Bono's pulling out an event that happened in 1999, -18 years ago, for this interview. -And I know I got the true skivvy on this from a taxi driver because Bono talked in the Alexa interview about negotiating through bad people to get to even badder people. Ergo, The Mirror lied about the recovery.

3) I met Bono for the first time in person less than a week after an eclipse at over 98% totality took place right over Dublin, and this is in the notes Bono received in the book draft, -very shortly after the journal entry where I was crying on Killiney Bay. (Again that's original scanned newsprint that's already footnoted into the book for this very reason.) So, Bono and Co. notify everyone of "The Blackout" (the first single release to Song of Experience) -on the day of an eclipse passing very close to where I live now, it so happens, -in fact where I live it was it was 88% totality. -A blackout is what happens when there's an eclipse, btw. They quoted one song lyric from the song in this mail out to fans in the path of the eclipse: "Blackout, it's clear, who you are will appear". (They don't mention anything about "The Blackout" even being a single release that's in the pipe with this mail-out, what you saw is what people received.) "Eclipse" as both an event and analogy that have very serious occurrences; it is an existent analogy throughout the book. (You can search the term. -In fact the one line of lyric responsible for triggering this whole book, or even traveling to meet Bono in 1999 (let alone bothering to write about it), was "You know the sun is sometimes eclipsed by a moon, y'know I don't see you, when she walks in the room" - "The Fly".)

Interestingly enough, one of the very few (two) religious essays I did for the book centered on a female theologian whose entire religious practice centered on "learning to walk in the dark" - naturally, -because her system of thought was something the book explored doing existentially. (-This was released publicly at the time of writing.)

After signifying the first single with the eclipse, U2 released the album Songs of Experience, two days before a supermoon occurred. -In the book notes Bono received I recorded how I met him personally a second time at the Octagon Bar in The Clarence Hotel in Ireland and the supermoon, which was declared by the Irish Times to be the brightest in 136 years, happened two days after I met him the second time. That is why the book also has a footnote about that as well. -This is also in the notes Bono received that were the book draft at that time. Now what's absolutely mind-blowing about this, is that the supermoon occurs in the book draft two days after I met Bono the second time where we spoke and I gave him a Christmas gift, which is the exact date spacing of how U2 timed the album's release, with the supermoon occurring two days afterward.

4) Bono deliberately snippets "Walk to the Water" in the BBC broadcast promoting this album at the end of the performance of "All I Want Is You": "Walk to the Water" has never been performed. This is the 4th time it's been snippeted in all of its existence (30 years). These are the lyrics. He drops a very sensitive quatrain about the song's subject; she wore a "necklace given to [her] by [her] father".

Rabbit Hole #1

-Bono skips that part of the song in this snippet of "Walk to the Water" to go onto the Dublin streets: she "turned left on the Northstrand, and out towards the sea". -If you know where that is, in Dublin, -you'd know that it changes into Pearse Street when it turns left and later becomes Rings End Road, -and that was exactly how to get to U2's then (1999, certainly not in 1987 when "Walk to the Water" was written) secret studio (which was on Hanover Quay on the Grand Canal, and you can google that location now as they decided to let it go). -If you turned left on the North Strand you'd get to their secret studio, if you just took two more turns at the right place. Turning left on the North Strand is the same as turning towards the mouth of the River Liffey, and the sea. Which I walked before and after meeting Andy a couple of times by chance (Guggi's brother -Guggi is practically Bono's best friend in the world)) -I followed North Strand to Rings End (Rings End was overshooting it, actually the turn off was on Pearse Street) until I came to the secret studio and sat on the bench outside and first met Bono. The book draft Bono got in 2011 goes into these encounters and the walking to get there in a lot of detail because I was in a deadline rush of sorts to sort out to Bono how I actually met him, a deadline determined by a concert ticket. How finding Bono transpired was actually sort of odd and interesting, because it took a series of things happening by chance (Andy included), -and I had to blow Andy's mind by proving that with the song "The First Time" Bono was referencing a feminine Holy Spirit (not by trying to, it was that his mind was blown that prompted him to divulge the location). It took quite a convo to tease the location out of him. So the book mentions "Pearse Street" and "Rings Road". -You can search the book for terms after you've found them on Google Maps. The book has a search option. Incidentally Bono has written a song about Andy all of two times, "Bad" in 1984 (which reappeared and became a regular in their live set after the delivery in 2011 was made), and "Raised by Wolves", which appeared on the first subsequent album "Songs of Innocence" after Bono received this book draft. -Yes, made a note of that observation at the time. (Scroll down, to "let's meet under the cherry tree".)

Now practically the first thing that happens when I relate conversing with Bono the first time in this book (which was the same in the draft) is that Bono goes into a brogue about how cold it is today and waxes apologetic about the state of Ireland's typical weather. And I had to suppress my comment about how it wasn't cold at all, -being from Canada. (For what I avoided saying I interjected the thought "Oh puleez". "oh puleez" will pull up that first conversation with Bono.) -So Bono's literally teased out this verse snippet on the BBC broadcast and modified it (by dropping half of the first verse and going onto the second) -so that it happens to fit the actual context of when I first actually met him -that again (*sigh*) -was transcribed in the book draft I gave to him in 2011 and presently exists in the actual book. -The first line in "Walk to the Water is, "She said it wasn't cold". So the choice of snippet just happens to have fit the real situation.

All of these events happen in just a few pages in the draft that Bono got. They formed the substance of that chapter then, which is certainly not how it stands now.

Rabbit Hole #2

Rabbit Hole #3

5) The album has a bonus track called "Book of Your Heart" - the first verse sure looks like he might be reading a book he received personally that is his sole edition, doesn't it? (No one's ever going to see that draft other than himself.)

The song opens "Right from the start, you put this into words, how you think we should proceed" - I began writing in reference to the matter when I was 21, the "big" concept landed at 25, and then I began writing in earnest. "Love is Bigger Than Anything in Its Way" - has "So young to be the words of your own song". - If you follow the protagonist in this book the full course, you'll find out this linking situation - (-when the protagonist exists as object in an array of songs and you put that all together for the first time as a book, that book is the first elucidation of the whole song-) -this situation of the protagonist as object actually can be traced back to when she was just thirteen years old, with Bono coming into the picture at sixteen, not that any of this was known at those ages. The watershed moment that came on like a neutron bomb happened at age 21. The really freaky part is that in terms of becoming her own song, her own self-conceived myth that ends up playing out through the book, the character she came up with that becomes this myth personae in later years, she came up with at age 12; -first writing the story's beginning at age 14.

"Write a world where we can belong" -in "Love is Bigger Than Anything in its Way" -looks like an endorsement to finish writing (but that the writer is on their own). Bono got a draft that was at the less than halfway mark. And subject to some serious revision in key earlier chapters after he got it (one got added).

"Book of Your Heart" also has the lines "This is the promise that we'll stay, Through the long descriptive passages, Where we don't know what to say" -Also looks like reading a book (and first encounter, the entire intercourse was of what was not said). It's a wordy one that clocks in at 836 pages last I checked (in Word). The song also has "We are not fictitious characters, We don't belong to this world" -which again, indicates characters that exist as writ. It is very fitting for a book that centers on Bono and a protagonist between the two of them, plus an associated ensemble cast, and deals in pre-conception existence (post-death as well).

6) "Book of Your Heart" mentions a name change. When I met Bono and made the deliveries, both in 1999 and 2011, I went by a different name. The book's legal pen name is Pamela Williams. (It's right on the cover.) You'd have to be fairly aware of me, I know, to understand that I changed my name between 2011 and now to release the book, -but I did so on all my social media, it so happens. If you find this dubious, well, I decided on the pen name in 2000. It's on record in the book itself that I'm going to change my name for it -and what the name will be. You can search the name inside the book also to find this out.

[linabrigette]

Web 3.0 Will Evolve as Interoperability and Usability Improve

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Cointelegraph spoke recently with Dr. Jutta Steiner, the co-founder and CEO of Parity Technologies, about what originally drew her into the Ethereum (ETH) crowd and how she plans to bring more interoperability to blockchain.

During the recent TechCrunch Ethereum Meetup in Zug, Switzerland, Steiner detailed how her background in math and science ties into her work with blockchain, as well as how the new Polkadot protocol could help usher in the web 3.0 era.

Molly Jane: Could you begin by telling me a bit about yourself?

Jutta Steiner: My name is Jutta Steiner, I’m the CEO of Parity. I started this company three years ago together with Gavin Wood, who was one of the original co-founders of Ethereum. I myself used to work for the Ethereum Foundation, looking after security before the launch of the Ethereum platform.

Before that I had a background in applied maths, so I spent quite some time at uni, moved a bit in consulting after my PhD, and then got more and more interested, basically at around the time of the Snowden revelations — interested in what’s actually happening online, what’s happening to our data? How does this all work?

And I ended up reading a lot, accidentally came across Maidsafe, which was an early project in that space as well, and then saw people discussing Ethereum in that context about four years ago, how to use it for access management of data. And then I met the Ethereum people, this is how I got involved basically.

MJ: So it all started with Ethereum for you?

JS: I mean, yeah, I had read about Bitcoin and it was interesting to me from a math perspective. But I only realized the potential when I came across these discussions of what can you actually do with Ethereum. I really liked this level of abstraction.

MJ: Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with Ethereum?

JS: Back at the time, I got interested in what can you actually do with it. This whole data perspective was interesting, but then also around the same time I met Jessi Baker, who was just starting a company called Provenance, where she looked at trying to create a Facebook for products, like bringing transparency to supply chains. That was sort of the idea — like, what’s the history, what are the people, processes behind products, etc.

I ended up working for the Ethereum Foundation on security. But then, when working on problems, I was realizing that really the technology isn’t there yet where it needs to be in order to become mainstream, and so out of that frustration Parity came out do as a company.

But we wanted to further work on the fundamental technologies and push that forward, which kind of nicely ties back to my math and science background. So being able to push technology on that end is pretty good fun.

You can watch the interview here:

MJ: So what exactly is Parity? How is it connected to the new Polkadot protocol?

JS: We started Parity by basically taking all the learnings from the early days of Ethereum and coming up with a new implementation.

Initially, the ideas evolved a lot around just pure interoperability. A few years ago, the discussions about private chains and public chains started so it seemed sensible, and it also seemed sensible as a way of optimizing scalability.

But then over time, things like governance became also more of an issue, and we really started thinking about what is the next level of abstraction that we need to bring to this technology in order to make it much more genuine, much more easy to adapt to solve all these issues.

What we’re doing at Parity is coming up with a fundamentally new way of building online services. The way how the web has evolved and applications on the web — everything we do, every service we use, we always have to rely on centralized servers, where all our data is hosted, where there’s like an authority that decides on how does the service work, what happens if there’s contention.

And what we’re trying to build is basically a system where there’s much more agency on the user side, where there’s less of the divide between service provider and the people that use the services. So that it really becomes a much more open, a much more peer-to-peer way of interacting with each other where we don’t have to go through Facebook, through Google buttons that have seamless interacting with our friends or whoever we want to interact with.

That’s what we call web 3.0, the next level of the web.

And that’s where Polkadot, or the technologies around Polkadot, sits right now. Substrate is a technology that we just released in a PoC [Proof of Concept] state in a test net, it’s a very general framework for spinning up your own state machine.

MJ: How long do you think it would take before we actually would enter the web 3.0 era?

JS: So are aiming to release Polkadot at the end of next year. Now that doesn’t mean we’ll already see applications, I think that’s going to be a gradual process. I mean, there are things you can use already to make your applications more decentralized, more peer-to-peer, there are some solutions for having interoperability, like cross-chain transactions.

I hope that over the next few years we’re going to see the first implementations, applications that fundamentally use this. A lot of what we have to solve evolves around usability and user experience, and this will probably still take a bit. Also, there is sometimes an advantage from having systems a little bit centralized, because you can have a massive efficiency gain in certain cases, and we still haven’t found out where we have to make these trade-offs.

MJ: What would you say to someone that says: “I don’t know what you’re talking about with this web 3.0, I like using Facebook, it’s familiar, I don’t care if they take my data”?

JS: It’s hard if people don’t see what the underlying mechanisms are that make systems like Facebook really not the perfect systems to interact with. But I guess the recent revelations around Cambridge Analytica in particular have shown the government how powerful these platforms have become, which the hearings have shown.

There is a spotlight now on all the services to come up with answers, because governments fear the interference that comes through these services. I believe we’re gonna see regulation that will play in favor of decentralization to a certain extent. We’ve seen Europe already with GDPR, so there’s a directive on data protection. Although there are some questions around, like how this would work exactly with blockchain. I believe on the political side a there is a lot of will of making sure we don’t give power to governments that are completely unregulated.

MJ: I know some blockchain companies have experienced problems with the GDPR because of the “right to be forgotten” clause, since the whole point of a blockchain is that nothing is ever forgotten. How do you see that contradiction playing out?

JS: I hope that we see clarification from regulators and from lawmakers over the next couple of years. In principle, I see that the people that believe in blockchain technology and the people that were behind the GDPR have a huge set of common goals, basically giving power back to to the users. And it’s unfortunate that the drafting of the GDPR came just before blockchain became a thing, and so became way too specific in the way it was drafted.

I mean, politics can be slower, but I would hope that people will recognize the potential of the technology, and therefore, I don’t know, create sandboxes, or actually find a way of just leading to more clarification.

MJ: Could you name an example of a country with a regulatory framework where they’re doing everything right? Does that exist yet?

JS:  Where they’re doing everything right?

MJ: Ok, most things right!

JS: Switzerland was interesting because small countries have it easy, right? Or easier because they’ve always struggled with retaining, maintaining relevance and so they had to be more agile and adapt to changes in the environment much more quickly.

I think we’re gonna see a lot of regulatory innovation or regulatory competition between countries, which helps entrepreneurs to a certain extent, but then only so much as this is all global. This is technology that we’re building for the entire web. I’m not sure whether I’ve seen anybody who does everything right, but it’s quite good that people are mobile these days and they just move around wherever they can build their business, it has to add to regulatory competition.

MJ: I saw you retweeted the other day a meme about women in crypto, where the media is shouting “Where are the women in crypto?” and there’s a woman shouting back, “I’m right here!” How many times do you get asked about what’s it like being a woman in crypto?

JS: I get asked frequently my perspective on this and what needs to be done, and then, I guess, my frustration with that topic comes a lot from…often those discussions are very nuanced, but then in the end all that gets printed is like just a complaint, like there aren’t that many, or like the main topic of the article is that there are only Lambos, and I don’t think it’s helpful.

I believe it’s more helpful to just talk about the work that people do.

I don’t find it inspiring if I see people just driving their Lambos either, it wouldn’t have been the reason why I would have come and work in crypto, but instead seeing people that just work in the space and becoming interested in the topics.

That’s what I believe should be talked about.

MJ: Parity experienced a problem with the freezure of wallets containing Ethereum back in November 2017. In April, the frozen wallets became a news topic again due to an Ethereum proposal to reverse the hack that did not end up getting passed.  

Is “unfreezing” the wallets something that Parity are still thinking about?

JS: There are a lot of efforts within Ethereum to come up with answers, like how to fix the issue of governance in general. And the reason why governance is an important thing is because if you have an answer to this, it’s easier to come up with ways where you decide on contentious issues, like whether you want to have a fork or to unfreeze the funds.

And I believe this is a fundamentally needed debate, because we haven’t figured this out yet, how do we actually want to govern decentralized systems, and that’s what we are trying to work out with the community.

I do believe if you want to encourage innovation in space, you need to make sure you don’t discourage experimentation. Like the optimization that led to the freeze was a very sensible optimization back at the time.

And the truth is the tools that we need in order to write smart contracts, safe smart contracts, aren’t there yet. And the wallet freeze wasn’t the only issue that happened where people lost access to their funds. There were other issues, and I still hope that we find a solution where bugs in infrastructure that led to people losing access will be fixed in an adequate way.

MJ: Are you personally involved in the cryptocurrency market? Do you trade, do you hold, do you care?

JS: I wish I was, I don’t have time for that!  Between looking after the company and looking after the family there’s very little time to be personally involved.

MJ: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us!

JS: Thanks.

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