#the art firehose continues

[jeanne-de-valois]

Nib pen experiments continue, early Hobbit edition 

#lotr #the hobbit #tolkien #lord of the rings #bilbo baggins #fili and kili #gandalf the grey #the art firehose continues #feeling extremely inspired at the moment post-project

[longboxd]

2022 comics reading log

In the early days of last year, I was inspired by some twitter mutuals to post my comics reading in the new year and kept it up from Jan 1 2022 till just about the bitter end. Something about it really helped keep me invigorated by the medium even in some pretty bleak times, so I’m going to keep it going this year, but here at Longboxd instead of on twitter, which I'm trying to spend less time at. Before I can do that though, I want to archive the 2022 entries in a spot that’s more permanent/less twitter-iffic, so here we go—pretty much every comic I read in 2022! (As transcribed from here)

Part 2: 22-38 (of 387)

(I can "only" post 30 images at a time here, so that’ll dictate the length of these catch-up posts)

22) Silver Star #1 by Jack Kirby & Mike Royer - Kirby’s Blubber? Very Beto vibes—very Lynchian, held together by spit and nonsense.

23) Shattered Earth #1 - The best story in this anthology has a horny dog that gets cucked by a wandering wasteland hippie.

24) Sun Runners #2

25) Shade, The Changing Man #50

26) True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys: NATIONAL ANTHEM - Narratively, it’s firmly in the "halcyon days of vertigo" mold, and that’s cool, but between Romero and Bellaire this is one of the more stunning art showcases I’ve seen in a while. God-tier coloring, IMO!

27) The Terminator #1 (1990) - Chris Warner tha gawd with nice chunky inks from Paul Guinan, and a script by DH genre MVP John Arcudi that swings between terse and pleasantly purple. This and the Predator series the year before (also drawn by Warner) set the mold for decades of movie tie-in books.

28 & 29) Blood n’ Guts #1 & 2 - These are very bad comics by a weird, probably bad dude who's weird & not always bad comics I grew up with. Not much to them (this is from one of Blair's big firehose-of-comics periods) other than a *great* logo I assume was made by Dave Cooper.

30) Alien Worlds #7 - I loved this series as a kid—it's mostly an art showcase (Corben, Morrow, Anderson & Perez in this issue!) but Bruce Jones' short stories are trashy scifi paperback anthology style fun, routinely see-sawing btwn kind of hokey & total bleak nihilism, often on the same page. one story, theoretically concerned w/recreating The Thing inside an implied sketch of a Wally Wood/EC planet setting, mostly actually focuses on infidelity leading to murder (a common Jones trope). In the end everyone dies after the revelation that their parkas are hungry aliens. 

31) Eclipse Monthly #2 by various

32) Sensation Comics #6 - This is the pure, uncut shit.

33) Head Lopper #15

34) Marvel Team-Up #101 - Robot hippies and Peter Parker favorably compares the trauma of Nighthawk killing his girlfriend in a drunk driving incident to Uncle Ben’s death.

35) The Swamp Thing: Becoming TPB

36) Head Lopper #16

37) Skull, The Slayer #1 - Sorta standard Th’unda etc white adventure guy thrown into a prehistoric setting to fight dinosaurs kinda thing, (the twist being that this guy? He’s a real piece of shit!) but Steve Gan does impressive work, and Marv Wolfman’s colors are surprisingly effective.

38) The Man-Thing #8 - I haven’t read many of these. Pacing is slow if not deliberate, vampy gothic vibes. With Ploog’s squishy art, it kinda reads like a Golden Age Underground. 

_______

To be continued! Read Part 1 here

#inklogging #longboxd #2022 comics reading list #comics reading list #comic books #bincrawling

[jcmarchi]

Drinking from a firehose — on stage

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/drinking-from-a-firehose-on-stage/

Drinking from a firehose — on stage

What happens when a bunch of students used to drinking from a firehose decide to channel their energy into musical theater? If what you’re picturing is a bit chaotic, you’re on the right track.

For more than 50 years, the MIT Music Theater Guild (MTG) has put on epic performances that are equal parts ambitious, impressive, and creative. From “Rocky Horror Picture Show” to original remakes of superhero blockbusters and everything in between, the productions are, above all else, entertaining.

“At its core, it’s just students being passionate about the art they are creating and giving back to their community,” says senior Michaela Purvis, who has served as a president, choreographer, cast member, and more with MTG. “Something about that is really special for me.”

Members of the group are quick to point out that MTG is completely student-run, which makes for a quirky, scrappy culture in which members step up to serve in whatever roles are needed for each show.

That may sound like a difficult way to maintain the group’s four annual performances, but since it was formed in 1971, MTG students have consistently committed themselves to complex shows with an enthusiasm that not even a global pandemic could stop.

“The fact that we’ve existed continually for so long speaks volumes,” Purvis says. “I think it shows the persistence and spirit of students in general. When we’re in pursuit of a project, we’re able to carry it through.”

In many ways, current and former members say MTG’s spirit is an extension of MIT’s ethos.

“MIT students have this attitude that anything that is technically possible can be done,” says Matt Putnam ’09, who has stayed involved with MTG since graduating. “It’s similar to the hacks. … Musical theater is similarly bonkers. If musical theater didn’t exist, and I said, ‘We’re going to put on a show that’s like a movie, but it’s going to be live and everyone’s going to have to memorize two hours-worth of lines, and we’re going to add songs and dances people will need to learn, and we’re going to need sets and lights and choreography and props.’ You’d say that’s crazy. But it is technically possible, so I think students dive into it with this attitude of ‘Let’s make it happen.’”

MTG’s members usually wait until a couple of months before their next performance to pick what show they’ll do, which makes for a hectic preparation but ensures students like what they’re performing.

Some MTG positions, like president and treasurer, are decided on a biannual basis. But many positions are filled after a show is selected. In addition to the actors and musicians, there are carpenters, lighting and sound engineers, costume, hair, and makeup managers, and even a webmaster and documentarian.

“The biggest misconception is you need to be able to sing, act, and dance to be a part of the Music Theater Guild,” junior Eleanor Jaffe says. “You don’t need to be able to do anything. You just need to want to do something. That can be painting, it can be acting, dancing, sewing — literally anything. We have a role for anyone.”

About a week before showtime, everyone comes together to assemble the set. Then the group is in production week. Mondays are spent setting up the technical elements of the stage and conducting a full run-of-show. Tuesday night is orchestra night. There are dress rehearsals Wednesday and Thursday where members try to get through everything without stopping. Friday is showtime.

“Opening night, even in the best of cases, feels sudden and rushed and not quite ready,” Putnam says. “You have to accept it’s never going to be perfect. Some people are quite nervous.”

It shouldn’t be a surprise that things don’t always go according to plan. Fortunately, overcoming adversity is one of MTG’s specialties. One year, a blizzard closed campus during two of MTG’s sold-out shows. Kresge Auditorium was already booked for the make-up dates, so MTG performed in a lecture hall (the set and light teams improvised). Another year, on the first day of “Jesus Christ: Superstar,” the actress playing Mary Magdalene walked in sick and unable to sing. With two hours until showtime, the organizers called another member who hadn’t been involved in the show. That member agreed to sit in the orchestra pit and perform every song into a microphone while the original actress lip-synced. Even during the pandemic, the group published virtual shows.

“There’s a very standard way we do everything, and sometimes things get wobbly and we have to figure them out, but there’s such a large history that we know how to get things done,” Jaffe says.

A show that still holds a prominent role in MTG lore is a 2003 performance that lumped the first three “Star Wars” movies into one epic musical parody. That’s the show that hooked Putnam, who remembers one costume designer using a vacuum form machine to create storm trooper armor. Legend holds that the show featured more than 200 costumes. MTG eventually performed the show at the opening of a “Star Wars” exhibit at the Museum of Science in front of George Lucas himself.

“I thought it was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen,” Putnam recalls. “It pulled in so many different resources from the community.”

Current and former MTG members say it’s fulfilling to be a part of something that requires people from so many different backgrounds. There’s truly something for everyone in MTG, whether students are looking to apply their engineering and design skills, find an outlet for their side hobbies, or they just like to sing.

“Putting together a show is kind of like being on an engineering team or working for a company with a lot of different departments,” says Putnam who currently works as a software engineer. “That’s what’s so exciting about musical theater for me: how many different people and skillsets come together to make the finished product.”

#Alumni/ae #armor #Art #Arts #Best Of #Blizzard #channel #Clubs and activities #Community #dance #dates #Design #drinking #energy #Engineer #engineering #engineers #epic #extension #Featured #form #Full #Giving #Global #History #how #how to #it #Jesus #Learn

[welcometomy20s]

April 23, 2023

Few years ago, I developed an interest in lucid dreaming. I think quite a lot of people get interested in lucid dreaming sometime in their lives, so I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity.

Lucid dreaming is usually achieved by keeping note of the difference between reality and a dream. A few of the signs were things like gibberish writings and warped hands.

AI art is famously known for its gibberish writings and warped hands. In some sense, we are peering through a dream or perhaps an hallucination of a mind. But why?

Why do we dream? There are many competing theories, but we first need to know what is the difference between being awake and being asleep. When you are asleep, your brain senses less stimuli. In some animals, this sensory deprivation can happen for months or be drastic enough that you are turned into goop before reforming as a butterfly. But the mind continues through the deprivation… you do not die during your sleep, there is no break, only rest.

We are constantly bombarded with sensory details, we have to constantly adapt and filter new incoming signals, in order to properly execute our needs. This is our first priority and this is what our brain has been working for millions, if not, billions, of years. It’s this constant updating and shifting of filters that grounds us to reality. Without that bombardment of data, our sense of intuitions will likely go wary, creating seeming things that feel like reality but it is not.

The upselling of ChatGPT and its ability to seemingly understand things hews closely to the dream-like scam fevers of the conmen that surround the tech industry today. I’ll spare the sociological connections and implications for another day, but back to that hunt for AGI.

Best candidate for AGI then will be algorithms which foremost deal with the firehose that is created by reality on a second-by-second basis, in fact a good candidate will be The Algorithm, the colloquial terms for the various processes that determine recommendations on YouTube. Unfortunately, The Algorithm is actually a series of barely-connected algorithms for various different features and the structure of these algorithms are not very complex.

Perhaps if we have a holistic moving-target for things like YouTube and Google Search, I wonder whether that would be the best candidate for creating artificial sentience.

#artificial intelligence #dreams #tech

[calboniferous]

In Theory

Work 1 in The Pen and the Sword aka. my jedi and academics AU

A stressed post-graduate anthropology researcher from Coruscant University enters the Jedi Archives for the first time and is promptly taken under the wing of one Master Archivist Jocasta Nu.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/32355310

—

Master Jocasta Nu felt the visitor before she saw them. Stress and a frenetic energy radiated through the force tangled with the unique threads of emotion and colour that made up their signature.

Closing the book in front of her with a soft thud, mindful of its frayed edges, she appraised the blue nautolan hurrying towards her. Their worn brown coat was unbuttoned and struggling to stay onto their shoulders, saved by the strap of the bag hanging off one side which the nautolan had one arm wrapped around. Apparently, the bag’s tie had lost the battle against the tide of flimsy and datapads making the simple bag bulge obscenely.

Ah.

A scholar.

Like the many before them, they had come to Master Nu’s beloved archives in hope of finding salvation in its hallowed stacks. With her guidance, they always did and more often than not, they would return again. And again.

However, this scholar was not one that Master Nu had seen before and as they glanced wide-eyed at the towering shelves, shying away from passing Jedi, she surmised that the Jedi archives were unfamiliar to them also.

They reached her desk out of breath.

“I need books on Kante martial arts and history. Do you have books on Kante? If it has historical martial arts then that would be incredible but I’m setting the bar low. Really, the bar is non-existent. Should I even be setting a bar I don’t know- do you know what the Kante are? Were? They’re extinct”

“Young one, breathe.” Master Nu said, lifting her hand to interrupt the rush of words. Her brow softened in sympathy, “How about you start from the beginning and tell me what your thesis is and then we’ll go about finding resources.”

She signalled to one of the Padawans stacking holopads nearby for them to take over monitoring the main desk and led Tema to one of the many sunlit alcoves tucked between the buttresses.

Settling on a cushion across the low table from the sleep deprived nautolan, Master Nu pulled out her well-worn datapad, ready to formulate a list of texts to recommend for this student’s project. She had gathered quite the collection of such lists over the years and took great pride in curating them. Often, she would continue to add to them in her spare time so that when the person they had been made for returned, it was waiting and ready. And, if Master Nu happened to enjoy the thrill of a hunt for obscure references through her own archives every now and again, that was her own business.

Stylus in hand, she was ready to begin.

“You mentioned martial arts?”

“Right. Yes. I’m studying the fighting style of the Kante people which they used to reclaim their lands 7000 years ago after it was conquered in the Chandrillan Divide. The politics of the reclamation itself have been documented to death but there’s kriff all discussing how they actually fought,”

Master Nu hummed sympathetically, listening as a classic university post-graduate research tragedy poured out in all its glory. The purple shadows smeared under Tema’s dark eyes suggested that more than one night had been lost to this.

It was a credit to her Jedi training and skill as an archivist that Master Nu could write notes, elegant script flitting smoothly across the datapad without misspelling a single title or name, while offering comforting hums and interjecting words of encouragement where Tema faltered.

“So now I need to piece it together myself in order to build a theory on how the Kante people approached battlefield strategy,” Tema finished, fidgeting with their bag strap.

Setting her stylus down, Master Nu surveyed the drafted list with a critical eye. It was a daunting selection. She weighed the situation in her mind and carefully turned the datapad off, placing it down with a muted click of metal on the polished stone table.

“That’s quite the task you’ve got” Master Nu said, “more than an Honours project scope covers.”

She loathed to discourage any scholar but there were limits to the workload that could be shouldered and she had a strict honesty policy. With all her Jedi compassion and experience ad Head Archivist, Master Nu knew how to recognise when a student needed guidance in whittling down their research focus to a reasonable magnitude.

“I know,” Tema sighed, shoulders sagging, “I know but my project topic has already been approved by my supervisor.”

“Dear, your project as it stands is enough to satisfy a PhD and beyond. I can tell you are passionate about it but it’d be a tragedy for you to fail because you tried to complete years’ worth of work in the 10 months you have.”

The blue nautolan wilted a little, head tails curling.

“I don’t see what choice I have. I can’t form a thesis on the merits of Kante strategy without knowing how it worked at the individual level,” they said, resignation colouring their force signature grey with worry.

Master Nu paused, and after a moment spoke.

“Have you considered centring your project on the martial arts itself? At the individual level, as you say. Leaving the rest aside to focus on that should technically be within your project topic.”

Tema blinked, “That’s…that would work. Yes.”

Master Nu watched as they turned the idea over, considering how to approach it.

“Yes. That would make it more of a research-and-reconstruction project. A literature review with practical application.”

They gave a wry smile, “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.”

Some of the frazzled emotion of their presence eased and a few threads of humour sparked in its wake.

“I could have saved myself from being sick from worry in the University ‘freshers yesterday.”

They flushed a little darker at that admission and Master Nu suppressed what would have been a rather unprofessional snort of amusement as she clicked the datapad back on. Ah, younglings. They never changed.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself, dear. That amount of stress isn’t conducive to clarity of mind, I’d wager,” Master Nu soothed, deleting a few items from the list with a satisfied air, “You’re hardly the first person’s I’ve known to have an adverse reaction to academic stress. Now, I do believe this list is ready.”

Rising with more grace than her age suggested she was capable of, she smoothed the creases in her cream and straw-gold robes and led the way into the maze of columns and shelves. Tema followed a step behind in a manner that to any observers bore remarkable resemblance to a duckling following its mother – if ducklings were six-and-a-half feet tall, that is.

“Somehow I find it hard to imagine a Jedi getting sick from assignments,” they mused absentmindedly, tipping their head to catch some of the book titles they passed, “all this information – it’d be hard to fail.”

Master Nu chuckled at that, passing through an archway into a side corridor.

“I’m afraid it can happen to anyone. One of my agemates routinely emptied his stomach at the prospect of examinations – that one, in fact,” she said, gesturing to one of the bronze busts lining the hall. The metallic features gave the human man depicted a severe expression. In Master Nu’s opinion, it was rather true to life even if the beard was far to neatly sculpted.

“The poor man. Perfection was as much his vice as his virtue.”

She smiled fondly, crows’ feet crinkling with nostalgia at sharing this particular story – at sharing the humanity of someone so proud and distant both in life and artistic rendition.

Tema faltered and the markings on their head tails blanched light blue.

“Oh, uh, my condolences.”

“Hmm?” Master Nu turned to them, “Oh no, he’s not dead. He’s retired.”

“Oh,”

They blinked, nonplussed.

“This way, dear”

The pair continued on their winding path. Master Nu, frequently gesturing to some architectural feature or other with her datapad, began to explain how the Jedi Archival system worked, pausing every now and then to pull a tome from the shelves.

“It is what many have described as ‘archaic’,” she said, stepping deftly onto the fourth rung of a sliding ladder attached to one of the shelves to reach her next target, “but no one—and I mean no one—has said it is an ineffective system.

“At least not in my earshot,” she said with a laugh, pulling the volume from its place and passing it down to Tema. The rumours the initiates (and fully-grown Knights) liked to spread about Master Nu’s draconian defence of the archives may not be entirely accurate but were taken by most as a warning to avoid slandering the archive in her presence. She knew Tholme liked to stir the pot and recount tales of her lightsabre prowess to the initiates, no matter that the stories were thirty years out-of-date.

“That being said, it can take some getting used to. The Padawans and Knight Archivists are always around and willing to retrieve sources for our visitors.”

Master Nu dismounted from the ladder, blew dust from her sleeve, and turned a critical eye on to the stack of books and datapads in Tema’s arms that had been steadily growing in size. The scholar looked strong enough to take a couple more, taking into account that their bulging bag would not fit anything more inside.

“That’s the last one from this aisle.”

She clicked her tongue and marked a check on her list next to the sources they were borrowing. They were all copies, of course, or volumes easily enough to source a replacement that their loss wouldn’t be abhorrent. Nonetheless, clean records made maintaining the collection less stressful on her soul.

On that note, Master Nu was pleased to feel that Tema was no longer pouring stress into the force like an anxious firehose. And—

She stilled, tilting her head as a familiar presence tickled the edges of her senses.

“Master Nu?” Tema asked, noticing her change in manner.

“Nothing to worry about,”

She once again took the lead. Down the aisle, then one aisle to the left and as they rounded the corner Master Nu smiled at the sight before her.

A little blue and beige figure was hunched over a book resting on the floor, absentmindedly gnawing on her Padawan silka beads and completely oblivious to the world around her.

“Padawan Secura! Why am I not surprised?” Master Nu called lightly and the twi’lek girl jerked, breaking from her literature-induced reverie to scramble to her feet.

“I’m not skipping sabre class again. I swear!”

Had it been any other Padawan of Aayla’s age group, Master Nu would think that emphatic declaration of innocence meant the Padawan in question was skipping class. Skywalker came to mind as a repeat offender of that variety.

Only question was that Junior Padawan sabre classes were always on Taungsday afternoons—this afternoon—and had been since before Master Nu was a crecheling. She hummed, unconvinced.

“Knight Kenobi is doing catch-up lessons this week and he said my forms were good enough to skip.”

That explained it. It seemed only yesterday that he’d been roaming the archives as a padawan himself, tearing through histories of the planets he’d visited at Qui-Gon’s side with single-minded focus. Shame that his lineage had picked him up before her own could. He would have made a fantastic archivist despite his record of being convinced to scale the bookshelves whenever Vos got temple fever.

Well, at least Aayla’s fencing education was in good hands.

Master Nu beamed at Aayla, “Then good work padawan and, as you are free, would you like to join us in gathering sources for Scholar Induri here?”

Aayla brightened, “Absolutely!”

And then, remembering her diplomacy training, bowed to Tema, setting her Padawan beads swinging. “Nice you meet you, Scholar.”

She scooped up the book she had been reading and as she put it back in its slot, Master Nu glimpsed the title.

“Reading Bastilla Shan again are we Padawan?”

The padawan blushed, fiddled with her tunic and handily dodged the teasing with a question of her own, “What are we looking for, Master?”

“See for yourself, young one,” Master Nu passed over the datapad, pointing to the highlighted entries.

Aayla squinted at the handwriting for a second before passing the pad back and running away down the aisle, one hand skimming the shelf labels. Padawans were lovely to have around and, watching Aayla slide 4 meters down a ladder and return to them with a grin plastered across her face, Master Nu wondered if she should take another student. Or, better yet, invite her former Padawans around for tea to see if more Grandpadawans would be joining the lineage soon.

“Thank you, dear,” she gave Aayla a pat on the head, “I’ll leave you to your reading. Just don’t forget to remind your Master that he needs to renew the materials he borrowed last month.”

Then, she turned to Tema who hadn’t made so much as a peep the past five minutes, seemingly satisfied to observe the interaction.

“Let’s get these checked out so you can get to reading them.”

Back to the main desk, the archivist and scholar wandered, and a minute later there was a new name entered into the borrowing database.

“Again, thank you for everything, Master Nu” Tema said, gathering the stack back into their arms. They were a little overwhelmed but they were smiling.

“Dear, it’s no trouble. One last thing, are you planning on enlisting someone practised in martial forms in your project? Or were you aiming for a more theoretical illustration of your findings?”

Tema cast their eyes to one side and shifted their weight.

“Ideally, yes, but I have no idea where to find someone like that so…theoretical?”

They trailed off.

“Good. I’m free to ask around here, then,” Master Nu said, tugging Tema’s bag strap so it was in less immediate danger of falling of their shoulder.

“If you need any help at all, don’t hesitate to send me a message or drop by. My archive is always open,”

At that, she tucked a slip of flimsy with her com code underneath the top datapad in the stack and gave Tema a parting pat on the cheek. With hope in their step, the scholar passed back out the archive doors, into the sunlight of the hall beyond.

Content, Master Nu smiled and watched them go.

“Now,” she mused to herself, opening the roster of temple-bound jedi and beginning to peruse the list, “who to ask…”

Her thoughts turned to the bronze bust of a man whose devotion to esoteric research was only outmatched by his skill with a blade.

His legacy…

Her eyes caught on a name. Yes, that would do very nicely indeed.

In the interest of vetting the source she intended to recommend, Master Nu made a mental note to attend next week’s exhibition tournament.

#jedi #jedi culture #fic #my writing #jedi and academics #the pen and the sword #jocasta nu #repost #star wars

[architeuthism]

Dear DCEU Exchange Creator

First off, I apologize for this being so absurdly late. This is certainly not the foot I wanted to get off on with you, and I know I may have put you in a spot. If you've already started working, you should feel free to just go with whatever you're doing, but if you're still looking for ideas, here are a bunch. As far as excuses go, I'm just going to say it's been a tough week and then get on with the stuff you came here to read.

My interest in everything I requested is basically equal, and in shippy content I enjoy everything from fluff to "they touched hands once in the middle of a case and there was such a frisson but then the plot resumed" to kinky porn. I'm pretty familiar with the wider DC universe, so feel free to pilfer characters and plots from it -- fanwork that interprets familiar ideas in a new continuity is one of my favorite things about comic book film universes. I also love the DCEU as a self-contained entity, though, so if you want to just play with what's currently on the board, I'm here for that too. Also, there's no DCEU character I wouldn't be happy to see a cameo from.

This is kind of a firehose of ideas, which you should feel free to winnow down, disassemble and recombine however you please. There’s a section specifically for artists down below, but otherwise I’ve mixed my art and fic likes together pretty freely here, and you should feel free to pull whichever threads interest you, even if e.g. you’re a writer but something is presented in a way that seems art-oriented.

General Likes

First times/get togethers.

For shippy things, I don’t need everyone 100% confirmed TOGETHER FOREVER, but an optimistic ending is nice.

Science fiction and fantasy shenanigans; settings far-removed from present-day Earth, but also SFF things intruding on present-day Earth.

Big, dumb SFF objects, like massive temple ruins, doomsday machines, big mysterious spacecraft.

The intrinsic ridiculousness of superheroes and the lives they lead. I enjoy the tone of the DCEU, but comic book cheese is also very welcome.

SPACE.

Identity porn, and its close relative, undercover work.

Fighting crime! Teamwork! Heroics! Investigation!

Crime-fighting followed by kissing (or what have you).

Kissing (or what have you) with a certain ambiance of crime-fighting about it because it takes place in the Batcave or other Crime-Fighting Location, such as on a rooftop (known staging grounds for crimefighting).

Canon divergence, what-ifs and remixes.

Monsters.

Superhero costumes and equipment. How they’re designed and made (or found), the significance of all the bits and bobs, how hard it is to get new parts, what it’s like to wear or use them.

So many variations on “superhero and civilian existences butting up against and overlapping each other” that it gets to be its own subcategory. Feel free to make up more, I’m probably into them too.

Characters doing superhero things in civilian attire and ordinary person things in superhero attire; superheroes interacting with one party in civvies and the other in costume.

Superheroes applying their superpowers, or knowledge they have because of their superheroic experience, to their normal jobs, or vice versa.

The day-to-day practical and sensory experience of being superpowered – what it’s like to live in a world that isn’t built for your strength, etc.

Going to absolutely ridiculous lengths to protect a secret identity.

The production design for the DCEU: Kryptonian and Themysciran architecture and fashion, the Batcave and the Bat-vehicles, the Wonder Woman closing titles, Victor’s jagged look during JL and the smoother one he adopts at the end of the film, all of the major characters’ civilian and formal costuming, Bruce’s surreal dreams (especially the Knightmare), capes doing dramatic things.

Characters exploring each other’s production design. So-and-so visits Themyscira or gets to experience a Kryptonian liquid metal PowerPoint or stumbles into one of Bruce’s dreams somehow.

Artist’s Corner

I mentioned above that I really dig both the production design of the DCEU and the silly conventions of comic books, and I very much meant that. Other stuff I love:

Portraits.

Schematics, exploded diagrams.

Maps.

Buildings and cityscapes.

Infographics.

Characters touching each other ever so slightly.

Back and shoulder musculature.

Gold foil.

Bruce having a purple cape lining. I know it’s not in the DCEU. Don’t kinkshame me.

Art style pastiche, including comicky stuff but also mainstream art styles, ancient and religious styles. Some ideas, but don’t let me limit you:

More Kirby-driven interpretations of the Fourth World stuff from JL, especially Victor himself.

Diana in art styles contemporary to eras she’s been knocking around the Earth during.

Clark a la Catholic iconography or stained glass. I know there’s a ton of this but I haven’t had my fill yet.

If you’d like visual inspiration, here are some links to tags on my blog.

DC fanart

DC scans

Fanart generally

Non-fanart illustrations

General Likes (Porn Edition)

To expand on something from the intro, I’m more than happy to receive a gift with nothing sexual in it at all, or vanilla sexual stuff. But if you’re interested, here are some other options.

BDSM-wise, I’m into all manner of bondage and most forms of consensual sexual violence and pain, especially when things are pretty informal and the dynamic just arises in the moment. Choking and breathplay in all their forms are great, biting and impact play are great. For Bruce/Clark, Bruce is my preferred recipient for this and most stuff where the idea of “recipient” is relevant; for other ships, I haven’t got a preference.

Superpowers during sex. Gadgets during sex.

Anatomical surprises. Characters whose anatomy is SO surprising that it’s actually challenging to have sex with them. (Ideally, the parties figure something out, even if it’s “just” something like mutual masturbation.)

One party clothed, one party nude. Also, I definitely meant what I said about civvies/costume.

Torn clothing/costumes, partial disrobing.

Even Kryptonian dimensional travel tech is tentacle-based. What do their sex toys look like? (If all you have is tentacles, every problem looks like a….)

Inappropriate sex laughter. Actually, appropriate sex laughter too. Sex that isn’t conventionally good but where the participants are having tons of fun anyway.

I don’t have any strong feelings about specific sex acts/positions! Write whatever seems appropriate.

Relationship: Bruce Wayne/Clark Kent

My pattern with fandom is that I start to ship something, and that makes me more interested in the canon, which gets me interested in more ships and characters, and then I wind up making ten requests in an exchange. This is the ship what brung me here and I haven’t run out of feelings about it yet.

Bruce’s paranoia and existential angst about aliens that could totally (cough) “destroy” him human civilization were what made me ship it, and I am still all about this. “Fearfully turned on” is the most important human emotion, and I’m intrigued by the whole range of Clark’s potential reactions to this, from “you need to calm down” to “… I’m into this too”.

Oh my god, Bruce is SO awkward with Clark in Justice League, and Clark is surprisingly relaxed and jokey. I’d love to see how that plays out in the longer term. Does Clark immediately recognize this as a crush or does it take ages to sort out?

You can fork the timeline just about anywhere and I’ll be excited. They meet during MoS. Their first meeting in BvS goes differently. Clark doesn’t die. Clark comes back a different way.

The Knightmare. There’s, umm, a lot to unpack there. Bruce’s dreams and/or nightmares generally, and especially that line between terror and eroticism that’s perhaps thinnest there. After everything, how does Clark feature in them, react to Bruce waking up next to him after another one, etc?

Relationship: Barry Allen/Victor Stone

Okay, I will admit that I decided I was interested in this ship based on stuff from the New 52 and the press tour. The actors have a lot of chemistry, okay! And then Justice League came along to inform me that I am VERY SMART and I make GOOD DECISIONS.

Has Barry always been OBVIOUSLY HOT FOR CYBORGS or is this a new thing for him?

Victor can’t exactly go out on a conventional date, so what does taking him out for a nice evening look like?

They have an interesting combination of power/skill sets that are very different from the ones that usually get matched up in DCEU fic – I would love to see them work a case or fight a villain together.

I already mentioned anatomical surprises and characters who are difficult to have sex with, but seriously. Seriously.

Relationship: Apollo/Midnighter Relationship: Diana Prince/Kate Kane Character: J'onn J'onzz

All of these tags involve at least one character who isn’t in the DCEU at all yet. I’ve got one big prompt for all of them:

What are they doing in the DCEU?

I love origin stories, timelines, concept art, character turnarounds – anything that re-constructs a character from the ground up in a new universe. Show me how the forces in the DCEU combined to turn a character into a superhero, or how they responded to the events of the films, or what their costume looks like in this continuity, and I’ll be a happy camper. 

I think Zack Snyder recently tweeted something about Calvin Swanwick (from MoS and BvS) being J'onn, which has been a popular headcanon in some circles for a while. Swanwick is fun and I adore Harry Lennix, so I'm completely open to this, but I'm interested in other possibilities too -- and I don't consider tweets canon, so he goes in the "not in the DCEU yet" bin with these other characters.

Character: Clark Kent

There’s this big chunk of Clark’s background, the wandering period that ends in Man of Steel, that we don’t know a ton about. I am dying to hear more.

In the course of looking for leads about his origins, does he run into any false ones?

Speaking of running into things, what about encounters with other DC characters? This would be a completely excellent time to loop back to Bruce Wayne/Clark Kent, but I’d love to see him crossing paths with, say, other members of the League. Do they recognize something unusual about him?

OH MY GOD IS THIS HOW LEX SR. GOES BALD

There’s a whole chain of rescues and other Weird Events that Lois followed for her article about him, and we’ve only seen a couple of them!

DOES HE FIGHT ANY CRIME? :D?

How many shitty, soul-crushing jobs does he work?

If you aren't interested in that part of his history, I'd be delighted to hear about Metropolis-era Clark: 

His relationships with his coworkers at the Planet (Perry and Jenny are particular favorites).

Experiencing the city from on high as Superman.

Getting back into the swing of things after Justice League. Petting the corn. Reconnecting with Martha. The struggle of completely rebuilding your wardrobe when you have that much junk in the trunk.

Flying around in business casual. I don't know, man, it's just hot for some reason. Give me that unruly flapping tie action.

Non-backstory crimefighting, of course; I'm really interested in Clark Kent the crusading journalist as well as in superheroics of every scope.

Character: Victor Stone

All right, look. I know I keep pushing the “characters who are difficult to have sex with” button. I don’t mean to give the impression that’s the thing I want the most, it’s just relevant generally (you could definitely do something in that vein with e.g. Clark) and also relevant to Victor specifically, who, from what we’ve seen, does not have most of his original torso. So. Figuring out how to masturbate again must’ve been a real challenge, right? What does he think about, and is it different from what he used to think about?

In general I am very keen to read/see things about Victor’s body and powers, and his relationship with them. Weird new parts he didn’t know he had, how different/similar things feel when you’re mostly metal, what it’s like to have the ENTIRE INTERNET at your fingertips (and all attendant hacking shenanigans), the process of repairing after a major injury to his robot parts (perhaps sustained during crimefighting? :D?), how other superhumans read to his new senses, etc.

I LOVE JOE MORTON. I am keenly interested in everything having to do with Victor’s relationship with his father. It seems like they ended JL on a pretty good note, but there were some VERY rough times there and I’d be happy for some fanwork about those, too. (Terminator references welcome.)

What was Victor getting up to on the internet while he was mostly housebound? Or, hell, was he actually housebound? What happens in the gap between becoming a cyborg and becoming a superhero?

Character: Dinah Lance Character: Renee Montoya

These two get to share a section because they're TEAMMATES. :'D  I would have requested Helena too if I hadn't been running out of slots. Solo fanwork about any of them and fanwork about any two or all three of them together would be equally delightful. How their skills and backgrounds dovetail and bounce off each other is really interesting to me. Also, I don't have strong shippy feelings about these characters yet, but if you wanted to advance an argument about Dinah/Renee or either of them/Helena, I would be willing to listen.

We see the team come together as people, but we don't (I think, having seen the film once in the Before Times) see them become Officially A Team, name themselves, etc. And we definitely don't see them select or design their costumes! I'm keenly interested in all of that.

Renee isn't the Question yet! I'd love art of her as the Question, or a story about how that happens in the DCEU (or that hints toward how it might).

I find the "I shaved my balls for this?" T-shirt incredibly funny and am here for all sorts of puerile humor about it. I'm not proud.

Dinah only uses her power a couple of times in the film, but she seems to know her way around it. I'd love to hear about how she got it and/or how it developed (if you go with the metahuman version of its origin). Where it comes from keeps changing in the comics, so consider yourself to have a free hand. I also really dig visual depictions of sonic powers -- I thought it looked great in the film, and a lot of the ways comics have depicted it have been super cool as well.

DNWs

Major character death (excepting in-continuity deaths), breakups – basically, don’t kill the thing I requested.

Incest, incest-adjacent things, mentor/student.

Reproduction (such as mpreg).

Bodily fluid/byproduct kinks: watersports, scat, lactation, bloodletting in quantity and for bloodletting’s sake. Fluids you expect to encounter during sex are fine, as is incidental blood from a heroic flesh wound. Alien and machine fluids are also fine in moderation.

Body modification, guro. Major injury and gore are fine in the context of, say, a fight, just not in porn, please.

Stories that are heavily focused on characters experiencing or discussing real-world oppressions, major illnesses, or addiction.

Fandom AU templates (A/B/O, soulmates, coffee shop, etc).

Depowering, no-capes AUs.

Noncon, dubcon.

Chinspike.

#. #.. #... #.... #..... #dceu exchange

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: 29 Feb 2020 (EFF dream-job, Medicare For All Bond Villain, Bloomberg's Sackler connection, Tory housing crisis and more!)

Today's links

EFF is hiring a new tech projects director: It's a once-in-a-lifetime dream job.

Bond villain monologue, Medicare for All edition: "No, Mr Bond, I expect you to sign a binding arbitration waiver."

FUCK TRUMP AND HIS STUPID FUCKING WALL: A 26% alcohol habanero spirit from Empirical Spirits.

Mike Bloomberg helped the Sacklers launder their reputations: Just helping out the "Friends of Mike."

Bernie Sanders is the only candidate with a climate plan as big as the climate crisis: No one ever asked how we'd pay for WWII.

Cutting the UK housing subsidy led to massive homelessness payouts: Tories are always swallowing spiders to catch their flies.

This day in history: 2012, 2016 (leap years!)

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

EFF is hiring a new tech projects director (permalink)

There are lots of ways techies can help EFF – contributing code to our projects like Certbot, Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere and/or joining up and writing a check. But right now, there's a rare chance to work directly to make profound change with us.

That's because EFF is hiring a Tech Projects Director.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/eff-seeks-tech-projects-director-lead-awesome-technical-team-and-help-us-save

It's a huge gig, the kind of thing that only comes up once in a very long while. You don't just get to oversee the impressive roster of EFF projects, you also get to set future priorities.

"Some people join EFF having been burned by unfeeling tech companies or corporate law jobs, and coming to EFF can feel like coming home – a place where everyone genuinely wants you to be successful, where we do our best to leave drama at the door even as passion is welcomed."

I've been with the org for EIGHTEEN YEARS and this is so, so true.

Even if you're not right for this gig, keep checking in with our help wanted page.

https://www.eff.org/about/opportunities/jobs

We're growing fast, first because the world is severely messed up, and second because our member-donors recognize how well situated we are to make a difference and they're funding us to expand.

Bond villain monologue, Medicare for All edition (permalink)

We're all familiar with the Bond villain setup: "Mr. Bond, I see you've ingested my poison."

But what follows in Matt Haughey's "Monologuing" is a fabulous satirical take on the Medicare For All moment.

https://a.wholelottanothing.org/2020/02/28/monologuing/

"No, Mr Bond, I expect you to…"

Locate in-network doctors on our website

Cross-reference with the benefits PDF you were sent last month

Create a login

Verify your last three home addresses

(before the poison hits)

Call your doctor and agree to see a physician's assistant so you can get treatment in less than 3 week

Agree to a $100 urgent-care co-pay

Pay $1200 for the ambulance to the ER

"Do you expect me to talk?"

"No, I expect you to continue to wait on hold because your call is very important to us and may be monitored for quality assurance purposes."

FUCK TRUMP AND HIS STUPID FUCKING WALL (permalink)

"FUCK TRUMP AND HIS STUPID FUCKING WALL" is "a habanero spirit made from a base of pearled barley, Belgian saison yeast, and koji. The clear product is rectified with a habanero vinegar that gives it a 27% ABV. This imparts an intensely fruity habanero profile without any of the heat."

It actually sounds delicious.

https://us.empiricalspirits.co/products/fuck-trump-and-his-stupid-fucking-wall

It's $85 plus $35 S+H in the USA for 750ml.

Serving suggestion: "With red grapefruit juice, topped with sparkling water and cornichon as garnish"

I'm a little bummed that they take out the capsaicin, as I love spicy booze.

My current favorite is a spicy, sugar-free Old Fashioned:

2 shakes Hellfire bitters 2 shakes Angostura bitters 1 jigger decent bourbon Orange zest (wipe over rim, squeeze into glass, then drop in the drink) Serve over a whiskey rock in a lowball glass

Mike Bloomberg helped the Sacklers launder their reputations (permalink)

The Sackler family became some of the world's richest billionaires through the actions of the family business, Purdue Pharma, which committed a string of felonies as it conspired to addict the world to its killer opioid, Oxycontin. The company's bribery of doctors, scientific frauds, and corruption of its regulators allowed it to kickstart the opioid epidemic, which has so far claimed 200,000 US lives, more than were lost in Vietnam.

And yet, until very recently, the Sackler family was primarily known for its art philanthropy, firehosing its money and name over some of the world's most prominent art institutions. As the family's role in corporate mass murder came to light, artists demanded that institutions remove the Sackler name. It worked! Nan Goldin's stunt of showering the Guggenheim with Sackler opioid prescriptions was just one of many amazing actions.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/nan-goldin-leads-a-protest-at-the-guggenheim-against-the-sackler-family

The Louvre also removed every mention of the Sacklers from its spaces.

https://www.france24.com/en/20190721-sackler-name-removed-louvre-opioid-crisis-france?ref=tw_i

But you know who DIDN'T ditch the Sacklers as they were becoming social pariahs? Guess who expressed rock solid billionaire class solidarity with the poor, beleaguered plutes when their reputation laundry failed them?

Mike Bloomberg, of course!

As @propublica reports, when the Sacklers worried about their collapsing reputations, they knew who to turn to: the ex-mayor whose return to his news organization meant that reporters who chased billionaires were sidelined.

https://www.propublica.org/article/bloomberg-sacklers-opioid-crisis-public-relations

While Bloomberg had been mayor, his newsroom created a "billionaires team" that investigated the doings of the super-rich, including the "Friends of Mike" (FOMs) whom everyone understood to be untouchable under Bloomberg's management.

Upon his return, he heaped scorn upon these investigative reporters: "Why is that news? Why do we have to probe into that stuff?" Mike's return to the newsroom created "a culture of not wanting to upset billionaires."

So naturally the Sacklers turned to him! And Bloomberg obliged. After meeting with Mortimer Sackler, Bloomberg gave the Sacklers crisis communications advice and helped them his old mayoral press secretary, Stu Loeser. According to Bloomberg, Loeser was perfect because of his new communications company's "political instincts and deep connections."

Loeser went on to work with the Sacklers as they pushed out the story that opioid addiction was the fault of weak-willed criminal addicts, not corporate drug-pushers.

Loeser now works as a Bloomberg presidential campaign spokesman.

With Bloomberg's help, the Sacklers were able to continue to leverage their philanthropic donations to shore up their reputations, particularly by embarking on joint projects with Bloomberg Philanthropies. Bloomberg posed with Sackler heiresses at the opening of the Sackler Wing of London's Serpentine Gallery (which eventually took the Sackler name off the building), and then served as chair of the Serpentine Sackler Galleries.

His news organization ran multiple, glowing stories about the Sacklers' generosity, and continued to work closely with the Sackler families, even as they were committing a string of crimes.

For example, money laundry to the tune of billions.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-purduepharma-bankruptcy/sacklers-reaped-up-to-13-billion-from-oxycontin-maker-u-s-states-say-idUSKBN1WJ19V

Fraudulent misrepresentations of the company's role in the opioid epidemic.

https://www.propublica.org/article/data-touted-by-oxycontin-maker-to-fight-lawsuits-doesnt-tell-the-whole-story#167506

And giving some of the weirdest, most risible, most terrible testimony in the history of corporate criminal depositions.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/sackler-behind-oxycontin-fraud-offered-twisted-mind-boggling-defense/

Just more Friends of Mike!

Bernie Sanders is the only candidate with a climate plan as big as the climate crisis (permalink)

The climate crisis is an existential threat to our species (and many other species besides). It turns out that Keynes was more prescient that we knew. He proposed that you could start an economy by paying half the unemployed to dig holes and the other half to fill them in. Instead, we spent more than a century subsidizing our ancestors to dig up fossil fuels and now we'll have to pay our descendants to spend 200-300 years getting all that carbon back into the ground.

If we don't, our civilization will collapse and our species may go extinct. There's no time for half-measures. That's why Bernie Sanders's version of the Green New Deal is such a big deal.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615292/bernie-sanders-has-an-audaciousand-hugely-expensiveclimate-plan/

He's the only leadership candidate whose plan actually confronts the scale of the crisis.

The $16T (yes, TRILLION) plan includes $2.5T to convert all US energy to renewables, "ending subsidies, mountaintop-removal coal mining, and the import and export of fossil fuels."

He'll also ask the DoJ to investigate criminal frauds committed by energy sector companies that spent millions to delay action on climate by pumping out disinformation along with their CO2.

The budget also includes $2T for a retrofit of our homes and workplaces, $1T to retrofit roads and other infrastructure.

There's $3.6T to convert the US's vehicles to electric, $85B for charging stations and $100B to improve electric car manufacture.

There's $900B for mass transit and high-speed rail, and $150B to improve emissions from aviation and marine transport.

In all, the plan creates "20 million jobs, while offering wage guarantees, job training, and other assistance to displaced energy workers."

As James Temple writes in MIT Tech Review, there are some odd quirks, like a rejection of carbon capture, but these are issues in the margin that administrative agencies staffed by independent experts (not corporate shills) might tweak.

But this is the plan we need. Remember, no one ever asked how we'd pay for WWII, and a Nazi victory would have merely put half the human race in mortal peril, while the climate crisis threatens us all, and without the hope of regime change down the road.

The purpose of the economy, the justification for markets, is that they promote human prosperity and progress. Scratching in flooded rubble for canned goods and drinking your own urine is not "progress." If our spreadsheets can't figure out how to allocate capital to heading off an extinction-level event, we need new spreadsheets. As our friends at Prager "University" like to remind us, "facts don't care about your feelings."

Cutting the UK housing subsidy led to massive homelessness payouts (permalink)

Margaret Thatcher sold off council houses to create more Tories, on the theory that home ownership made you a Conservative. But the end of council estates just meant that private landlords were able to gouge local governments for substandard housing for poor people. Predictably, this only worsened, with rents spiraling for poorly maintained, dangerous housing. Eventually, David Cameron got a genius idea: he'd cut how much money families could spend on private rent.

After all, this was much more politically feasible than ordering landlords to provide decent housing at a fair price. Landlords make campaign contributions and vote Tory, and a majority of Tory MPs are landlords themselves.

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/corbyn-tried-pass-law-make-homes-safe-last-year-conservatives-rejected/14/06/

By contrast, council tenants vote Labour and are (by definition) too poor to bribe politicians. Just as with Thatcher's selloff, the outcome of Cameron's policy was totally predictable to anyone whose wealth didn't depend on their denying it.

People couldn't pay their rent, so they became homeless.

You know what's more expensive than paying rent for poor people? Helping homeless people. The savings from Cameron's cruel policy of limiting rent subsidies were totally wiped out by the millions more that local governments had to pay to find temporary shelter for the wave of homelessness Cameron had created.

That's not all, of course. Voter turnout among affected households plummeted, and when they did vote, it was in the Brexit referendum, where the housing benefit cuts strongly correlated with a Leave vote: "We also observe that a one standard deviation increase in the level of exposure to the cut in a district is associated with up to a 2.2 percentage point greater level of support for 'Leave'."

https://voxeu.org/article/housing-insecurity-homelessness-and-populism

The inability of the British private sector to build affordable housing and the unwillingness of the public sector to fill in the gap has produced a ghastly quality of life. In Camden, £1500/month gets you a 27sqm "flat" whose bed is literally a mattress wedged next to the toilet.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/29/uk/london-renting-compared-berlin-gbr-grm-intl/index.html

And yet, Greater London has never had a better ratio of bedrooms to people. It's just that HALF the beds in the region are empty on any given night. But with 60% of the UK national wealth represented by property in the southeast, the last thing the Tories want to do is fix this misallocation, which has been such a boon to the ownership class.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/14/great-housing-disaster-danny-dorling-review

This day in history (permalink)

#8yrsago In Minecraft, a fountain of cats at the top of the world https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iNw2YcAK9Wc#!

#8yrsago Smithsonian building archive of printable 3D scans https://www.cnet.com/news/smithsonian-turns-to-3d-to-bring-collection-to-the-world/

#8yrsago Finance industry bemoans hard times in an era of reduced bonuses https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-02-29/wall-street-bonus-withdrawal-means-trading-aspen-for-cheap-chex

#4yrsago Crapgadget apocalypse: the IoT devices that punch through your firewall and expose your network https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/02/this-is-why-people-fear-the-internet-of-things/

#4yrsago Press looks the other way as thousands march for Sanders in 45+ cities https://web.archive.org/web/20160314104804/http://usuncut.com/politics/media-blackout-as-thousands-of-bernie-supporters-march-in-45-cities/

#4yrsago FBI claims it has no records of its decision to delete its recommendation to encrypt your phone https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160226/14181133727/fbi-claims-it-has-no-record-why-it-deleted-recommendation-to-encrypt-phones.shtml

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Alice Taylor (https://twitter.com/wonderlandblog), Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/) and Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/.

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

Canada Reads Kelowna: March 5, 6PM, Kelowna Library, 1380 Ellis Street, with CBC's Sarah Penton https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445

Currently writing: I just finished a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel now, though the timing is going to depend on another pending commission (I've been solicited by an NGO) to write a short story set in the world's prehistory.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last month, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs"; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers' Fortresses: https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/02/24/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-the-gatekeepers-fortresses/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

[johannadc]

Are We Drowning in Content?

From an interview in Doctor Who Magazine (I think #493 from November 2015) with Mark Gatiss and Reece Shearsmith about the episode Sleep No More. 

I often think about this, as I stop watching comic book TV shows (or never start) that I would have loved to have had years ago, when everything was camp. Now, there’s just too much of it to really love, and it’s hard to stop and appreciate. There is too much of a firehose coming at us, and we’re encouraged to race to the next new thing. 

I’m reminded of Spider Robinson’s Melancholy Elephants (can be read online at that link), a story that had a great influence on me with its concept of the need to forget to allow creativity to flourish, as artists are inspired by other works. 

Don't you see what perpetual copyright implies? It is perpetual racial memory!   That bill will give the human race an elephant's memory.   Have you ever seen a cheerful elephant?"  ...

A copyright must not be allowed to last more than fifty years--after which it should be flushed from the memory banks of the Copyright Office.   We need selective voluntary amnesia if Discoverers of Art are to continue to work without psychic damage.   Facts should be remembered--but dreams?"   She shivered.    ". . . Dreams should be forgotten when we wake.   Or one day we will find ourselves unable to sleep.   Given eight billion artists with effective working lifetimes in excess of a century, we can no longer allow individuals to own their discoveries in perpetuity.   We must do it the way the human race did it for a million years--by forgetting, and rediscovering.     Because one day the infinite number of monkeys will have nothing else to write except the complete works of Shakespeare.     And they would probably rather not know that when it happens."  ...

"If you live long enough," the senator said slowly at last, "there is nothing new under the sun."

Love this picture from the interview, though. 

#mark gatiss #reece shearsmith #doctor who #stop and enjoy #too much content

[good-omens-fanart]

GOOD OMENS FANART

BLOG STATUS REPORT 

Since the TV series has been released, things have changed around here [1].  

At the moment I’m just trying to keep up with the flood of new content.  I will try to include AT LEAST one older piece of art every day [2].  At this point I intend to make NO MORE THAN 75 posts per day (and likely less) [3].  I provide this information so that you may make a more informed decision about whether you want to follow this blog or not. 

Aside:  Your curator is feeling under the weather at the moment.  Until I’m up to it, I won’t be tagging as many things in the images.  I WILL CONTINUE TO ATTEMPT TO TAG ALL SPOILERS.  Blacklist “go spoilers” to avoid spoilers for the TV series.  (The book has been out for nearly 30 years; I’m NOT tagging spoilers for the book.) 

[1]  There’s a lot more fanart, for a start.  It’s like going from a faucet to a firehose.   [2]  By “older” I mean “originally posted before the TV series was released.”   [3]  There’s a LOT more than 75 pieces being posted to tumblr daily now. 

#good omens #good omens fanart #good omens art #ineffable husbands #aziraphale

[owlhillproductions-blog]

Let the art shine through

Fair to say, I have never considered myself an artist. Growing up my mom clearly prioritized art and my exposure to it. In grade school, we had limited resources, and paying admission to the art museum was not in our budget. The Seattle Art Museum had one free day per month, the first Thursday of the month, during the school day, it was free to go to the museum. I always wondered why the free days were in the middle of the week, when kids were supposed to be in school, instead of on a Saturday or a Sunday when more people could go. So every month, my mother would pull me out of school to go to the art museum. In Hawaii, we would go to the beach instead. She understood the relationship between nature and art. Over the years many teachers complained that I was missing school, but my mom was quite clear, she said I was learning more from going to the museum and other unique experiences than I would learn sitting at school. She was right. In the time before the internet and cell phones, I saw a whole new world inside museums and on a variety of outdoor adventures. It instilled in me a strong desire to travel to see art in its original environment.

When I finally got my dream to travel to Europe at 21, the summer before I started medical school, I was on a strict budget. Alas, there were no free days when I got there so all of my “spare cash” went entirely to museum admissions! 30 years later I still remember the art I was exposed to on that first trip. Certain pieces/places are burned in my memory: Monet’s waterlilies -full panels, displayed in on oval room at the Musée de l'Orangerie or an entire museum just for Rodin. Everywhere I went I met people from all over the world who had come together to witness a certain piece or place of art. The desire to make art, see art, and interact with art crosses cultural boundary’s and can bring us all together.

Then I entered medical school. In the 90’s medical school did not teach you how to be healthy or how to live a balanced life. Instead, there was a firehose of information to be memorized so when you got out you could “first do no harm” and then do your best. This does not leave a lot of time for eating well, exercising or supporting your spirit by exploring a world of art. Despite this, I found every opportunity to check in on my local museums and traveling exhibits, in those years it was often when my mom or family came to visit. I started collecting art from the places I visited and from friends and family that were artists. My mom always encouraged me to do art when we were visiting together. I was often reluctant as she was clearly good at whatever we were trying to make and I was perpetually learning and never really liked the results. But she could get me to try and it was always fun.

In 1999, I moved to Boston and by happenstance joined Dr. Arthur Wills, III in his downtown medical practice. Dr. Wills was a true supporter of the arts and the entire office was floor to ceiling original art from 5 artists he helped. This was the most visible link between art and the practice of medicine outside of anatomy drawings that I had seen. Working among original works of art had a positive effect on my practice of medicine. I feel the unique surroundings supported my individual style of medicine. I started to have some free time and hosted art nights for my friends. I loved collage, lacking the confidence to paint, but cut and paste felt adventurous in its own way. I was still feeling confined by traditional boundaries, art still felt like something primarily to be admired or pondered.

Then my brother, niece and nephew stepped in. In 2005, each for their own reason, they wanted me to go to Burning Man. After 6 months, they finally convinced me to brave the desert environment, in those years you could get a ticket at the gate and drive right in. My understanding of art cosmically shifted. Burning man allowed me to see the magic of interaction. I had grown up on with museums steeped with seriousness and reverence and sign after sign of “do not touch.” Finally I had found a culture of artists making creations that could be used or played with. Function and form merged around me and I could see art everywhere. Space was art. Some pieces only worked with your participation and some were planned to be enjoyed only in the moment. At Burning Man nothing would be left to sit in a museum. Fire and ash make art. Ultimately, experience itself is art. I was finally home.

Many years have past and I am now surrounded by a family of artists. I am a muse for my love Finn and have co-created many pieces of public art. My daughters continue to talk me into “trying” and I am a little less hard on myself in looking at my own creations. We have created an oasis here on Owl Hill. We have space to create and the rest is filled with works of art, some you can use and play with, a few are just to look at. I surround myself with creations at in my office as well. One of my exam rooms has two of my mom’s paintings of her backyard in Indianola. Everyday I sit in that room as I see people and am reminded of my mom, I can even smell the cedars if I stare at the paintings and pause long enough. My second room has local art that inspires me. I often speak to my patients about public art and creative use of public spaces. I feel I am a better physician because of my exposure to a wide variety of art and of self expression. Art helps me see creative solutions for promoting healthy life choices.

There is art in my medicine, but medicine is not my art. My art comes through in the creative ways I continually find to communicate medical knowledge to everyone individually. There is the artistic dance between multiple pressures of cost, insurance, and quality leading to a struggle to provide the best care to everyone equally. That I still do this with a smile is a testament to my ability for the art of acting. To see this you would have to come to my office. Instead, I will use these pages to share the alternative ways I have found for self-expression, through stories, videos and photos. I hope to share some of my roots, my current work and my future dreams. I think life feels fuller, more connected and more meaningful when I can let the art shine through.

Love and light,

Parra

[pgoeltz]

THE STINKFOOT ORCHESTRA

In the early months of 2019, South Bay musician Nick Chargin (keyboards and vocals) got a wild hair up his ass. Best known for his work with the successful Bay Area cover band, the Houserockers, Nick had the idea of assembling an ensemble to give a tip of the hat to one of his greatest musical influences – Frank Zappa. The goal he set was to perform a handful of shows in the Winter of 2020 in celebration of what would have been Frank’s 80th birthday.

But it couldn’t be just any band… There had to be horns. There had to be a mallet player. There had to be backup singers. This had to be more than a band that was capable of playing “all the right notes” – it had to be a band that was capable of performing Frank’s music with accuracy and integrity.

The first two people he contacted were Victor Manning (a guitarist with whom Nick had played music with for well over 20 years) and Jon Hassan (a Baritone/Tenor Sax player and fellow member of the Houserockers) – who were both rabid fans of Frank’s music. With their buy-in, Nick quickly filled out the rhythm section with friends and fellow Zappaphiles Michael Palladino (drums) and Josh Baker (bass). It took some time to fill the mallet player slot, but after scaring away multiple Bay Area orchestral percussionists, they found a musician willing to take on the enormous challenge of covering Ruth Underwood’s impossible lines in Dillon Vado (tuned percussion). The 6-piece horn section came together by enlisting Mark “Dbone” DeSimone (Trombone), Kevin Kono (Trumpet, Flugel Horn), Jo Major (Tenor/Soprano Sax and Flute), Mike McWilliams (Trumpet), and Paul Degen (Tenor/Alto/Bari Sax and Flute). The ensemble was eventually rounded out with 3 dedicated vocalists – Suzi Baker , Amy Barnes , and Mike Boston .

A couple months into rhythm section rehearsals, the group was hit with an enormous loss when their guitarist, Victor Manning, passed away unexpectedly. After a month of grieving and waffling on whether to scrap the project altogether, Nick came to the conclusion that Victor “would have kicked my ass” if he did not see this project to fruition. After a significant search, the band found the perfect replacement in Tomek Sikora (guitar) and they began the daunting task of learning some very difficult music. But it could still come up a notch…

Nick and other members of the band had worked with Zappa alumni Ike Willis 15 years previously, and Nick thought the one thing that would give this band a real sense of authenticity would be to front it with one of Frank’s dynamic male vocalists. So, with the help of his friend André Cholmondeley (leader of the legendary East Coast Zappa tribute band, Project Object), Nick was able to enlist the legendary Napoleon Murphy Brock – a San Jose native who served as the iconic voice of Frank’s music throughout the early 1970‘s.

When asked what songs people can expect the band to cover, Nick responds “Well, given the fact that we have Napoleon on board, we are naturally incorporating a large amount of material from his era with Frank. Roxy and Elsewhere (Zappa’s 1974 live double album) is one of my favorite albums of all time, so there are a number of songs we pulled from that. Apostrophe, One Size Fits All, Bongo Fury…folks can expect a sizable amount of material from those albums. At the same time, Frank’s catalog is so immense and diverse that we can’t properly present a snapshot of his work without delving into everything from his earliest days with the Mothers through the 1980‘s. We have an amazing 6-piece horn section, so we are able to do justice to stuff from albums such as The Grand Wazoo and Waka Jawaka. We have 5 great singers, so we are also tackling some more vocal-intensive stuff from You Are What You Is and Joe’s Garage…really, there is something for fans of all periods of Frank’s music. I don’t want to give away too much more – we want to keep a certain element of surprise to the performances, ya know?”

Given the amount of work required to perform much of Zappa’s material, one might question what motivates this group of musicians to dedicate themselves to such a huge undertaking. Nick’s response is simple… “Frank’s music has had such a huge influence over my musical development. It actually makes me a little nuts when I think of the fact that his virtuosity never really received proper accolades here in the States. This music is historically important – and I feel it is the responsibility of those who ‘get it’ to help keep it alive and, hopefully, introduce more people to it. On any given night, I realize that we may serve as someone’s first exposure to Frank Zappa – and I don’t take that responsibility lightly.”

“It has been a tremendous amount of work, but I cannot even begin to list the ways in which it has been fulfilling for me as a musician”, Nick continues. “Yes, getting the lines under our fingers has been a challenge, but that merely scratches the surface of what it has taken to bring this project to the stage. Most of the horn charts were transcribed by ear from various (Zappa) ensembles by Dbone, Hassan and me – but I had never created a horn chart in my life – quite a way to cut one’s teeth…” he says. “Never mind the logistics involved with getting such a large group of working musicians together and dealing with all managerial aspects of the band. Yeah – it’s been a full-time job for me for the past year, but well worth the effort. I can’t wait for people to hear what we have put together. Perhaps I’m a bit biased, but I think people are going to be blown away by this project.”

                                   NICK CHARGIN

KEYBOARDS & VOCALS & VISIONS & POODLE GROOMING

Nick began studying piano at age 5, later picking up guitar at age 15. A California native, Nick moved to San Jose in 1984 to study music production, keyboard synthesis and performance at SJSU under Dan Wyman and Alan Strange. He has been playing professionally since age 17 with the majority of his time spent writing, playing and recording original music with such Bay Area bands as Swing Party, BlissNinnies, Elephino and Corduroy Jim. Over the years, Nick has shared the stage with such acts as the String Cheese Incident, Leftover Salmon, Zero, the Kantner Balin Cassidy Band, Steve Kimmock, KVHW, JGB, the Radiators, Merle Saunders, Eddie Money, Starship, Firehose, Wang Chung and Jonathan Richman. For the past 15 years, Nick has been a vital part of the critically acclaimed South Bay band, the Houserockers, has backed the legendary Zigaboo Modeliste and at one point assembled a short-lived band playing Zappa music backing Ike Willis.

                   NAPOLEON MURPHY BROCK

VOCALS & TENOR SAX & FLUTE & STYLE ICON

Napoleon Murphy Brock, front man for Frank Zappa in the early seventies, was first discovered by Frank on a day off in Hawaii. Frank and his band stopped into a club where Brock was leading his band through a set of originals and contemporary funk, rock and blues hits. Zappa was immediately struck by Brock’s voice and sax playing, but was particularly taken by his commanding stage presence.

Brock soon hit the stage and studio with Zappa, first appearing on the breakthrough album, Apostrophe (‘). By 1974, Napoleon had learned and memorized the Zappa Song Book (including new material written specifically for Napoleon) and recordings from the 1973 concerts were soon released on what many consider to be Frank’s penultimate live album – Roxy and Elsewhere. To this day, the all-star “Roxy Band” is commonly considered one of the greatest bands that Frank ever assembled.

The release of One Size Fits All followed which, like Roxy, became hugely influential on not only Zappa fans, but fans of progressive rock, fusion, and bluesy jazz-rock in general. In 1975 Zappa released the iconic Bongo Fury, a live album which documented the collaborative tour that year with the last Mothers lineup (including old friend and co-conspirator, Captain Beefheart).

After the 1975 and 1976 Zappa tours, Brock went on to tour and record with fellow Zappa alum George Duke in his

hugely popular George Duke Band. He went on to make several albums with Duke including Master Of The Game,

Follow The Rainbow, Dukey Treats, and Don’t Let Go (which spawned Duke’s huge hit “Dukey Stick��).

At the end of the 1970’s, Frank again called on Napoleon to provide vocals on the recording of Sheik Yerbouti – which went on to become Zappa’s biggest selling album worldwide. The fact that Frank called on Napoleon to lay down vocal tracks (including the lead vocal on “Wild Love”) speaks volumes about Frank’s continued respect and trust in Napoleon’s vocal prowess.

Since 2001, Brock has worked with several Zappa tribute bands around the world including Project/Object, the longest continually touring alumni-based Zappa tribute band in the world. In 2007, Napoleon received a Grammy Award for his work with Dweezil Zappa on the live album release from the inaugural tour of Zappa Plays Zappa. He continues to perform, record and lecture around the world.

                   ,

DILLON VADO

TUNED PERCUSSION & IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBILITIES

Dillon Vado is a professional drummer and vibraphonist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a graduate of the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley. He grew up in San Jose, where he played many small club gigs on drums and marched snare drum for the Santa Clara Vanguard. He has recorded at Fantasy Studios,  and played with many musicians at The Freight and Salvage, Yoshi’s, and the SF Jazz Center. He has also performed overseas at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland and the Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy. Dillon has performed with Art Lande, Hafez Modirzadeh, Royal Hartigan,  Marcus Shelby, Erik Jekabson, Jeff Denson, Alan Hall, Jovino Santos Neto, Marcos Silva and Kate McGarry. In 2014, Dillon won 1st place in the Jazz Search West competition on vibraphone. Dillon was also acknowledged as the Most Promising Young Jazz Artist of 2017 from the  Buddy Montgomery Jazz Legacy Awards. He regularly performs on vibraphone with Alan Hall’s Ratatet, on drums with The Jeff Denson Quartet, and Erik Jekabson’s Electric Squeezebox Orchestra and leads several of his own projects, including Never Weather, The Table Trio, and Beyond Words: Jazz and Poetry.

                   JOSH BAKER

BASS & RANDOM SCREAMS

Josh started his love of music with the Piano at age 8 and was hooked. The bass came into focus at age 12. Josh’s early years on bass was  in the Abraham Lincoln High School Jazz band for 4 years where he had the privilege of playing many in High School Jazz band competitions and even playing in Hawaii for the Aloha Bowl. Josh also received the Louis Armstrong High School Jazz Award for recognition in his Senior year. After High School, Josh spent his summer at the Berklee College summer music program in Santa Fe New Mexico. Josh studied 2 years with bass player Keith Jones( Santana, Flora Purim,and Andy Narrell)

Josh has played with local bands Sporadic Greetings, George Heagerty & Never the Same, Soup, Grampa’s Chili, the Sliders, Black Sunday RoadShow and Levi Jack

                   MICHAEL PALLADINO

DRUMS & SPANKINGS

Michael has been drumming professionally in the greater Bay Area for over 25 years. He studied various rhythmic styles ranging from jazz to West African and afro-Cuban under the tutelage of San Jose State professors Dan Sabanovich and Royal Hartigan. His band credits include Soup, Sporadic Greetings, Mescalito, Corduroy Jim, Grampa’s Chili and Tricycle Side Project, for which he had the opportunity to perform with Ike Willis from Frank Zappa’s esteemed list of previous band members. He has performed at hundreds of venues up and down the entire West Coast bringing his unique style and energy to every performance he gives.

                   JON HASSAN

SAXOPHONES & MEGAPHONES & STANK

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                   JO MAJOR

SAXOPHONES & FLUTE & PUNCTUALITY

Jo Major began playing professionally in his teens and has played with a variety of groups, including the Jimmy Dorsey band and the University of Illinois Jazz Ensemble. In the local area,  he has been featured with A Touch of Brass, the KA Wonton Little Latin Jazz Big Band, Bug Horn Rex and the Chabot Jazz Ensemble.In settings ranging from salsa to swing, he has been featured with Ernie Watts, Bobby Shew, Eric Marienthal, Wayne Bergeron, Francisco Torres, and Geoffrey Keezer.Jo has studied with Ben Torres, Kristen Strom, Charlie McCarthy, Bob Reynolds, Chad Lefkowitz-Brown and Chris Cheek. He is a member of Bob Reynolds Studio.

                   MIKE MCWILLIAMS

TRUMPETS & CRUMPETS

Mike McWilliams started playing the trumpet back in 1974. In 1986, he began performing with cover bands and performing all over the SF Bay Area. He currently is a member of the Houserockers horn section, and teaches private lessons as well as public middle schools with the School Spirit band program.

Mike believes that there is no substitute for real horns, and his influences include Tower of Power, Earth Wind and Fire, Maynard Ferguson, and Doc Severnsen. Mike heard his first Zappa cassette tape in 1977 while on tour with the Santa Clara Vanguard and, many years later is enjoying playing this amazing music.

                   KEVIN KONO

TRUMPET & FLUGLEHORN & MASTIC ADHESIVES

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                   PAUL DEGEN

SAXOPHONES & FLUTE & HYDROHYPNOTHERAPY

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                   TOMEK SIKORA

GUITARS & ALL THINGS POLISH

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                   MIKE BOSTON

VOCALS & GUTTURAL UTTERANCES

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                   MARK ‘D-BONE’ DE SIMONE

TROMBONISMS & EVER-CHANGING FACIAL HAIRS

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                   AMY BARNES

VOCALS & ASTRAL PROJECTION

Amy Barnes began studying piano and flute at the age of 8. After a fateful move to Santa Cruz at the age of 16, she joined forces with the Musical Group World Entertainment War for 5 very entertaining years. Increasingly fascinated with the human voice, she embarked on an obsessive vocal discovery mission; earning a B.A in Voice Performance from UOP Conservatory followed by an M.A. In Voice Performance from UC Santa Cruz. She has prepared works in more than a dozen languages, and has enjoyed teaching singing as much as the singing itself. Amy has travelled thru many different musical galaxies over the years, and is currently very much enjoying her visit to the Zappa Constellation…

                   SUZI BAKER

VOCALS & KALE DISTRIBUTION

Suzanne Baker began her singing career touring with Plum Tuckered, a children’s musical performing group under the direction of Lynn Shurtleff, musical director and composer from Santa Clara University. While growing up, she enjoyed singing in many school and church choirs, but she honed her skills at Abraham Lincoln High School for the Performing Arts in the sixteen member Swing Choir, under the voice instruction of Connie Lukien, musical director of the San Jose Civic Light Opera.  She went on to be lead singer of the innovative band, Sporadic greetings from 1990-1992 and sang back-up vocals in various other bands over the years.  She is very fond of her time directing her own elementary school choirs and currently assisting with her classroom musicals.

                           Victor Manning

Guitars

[hydrus]

Version 330

windows

zip

exe

os x

app

tar.gz

linux

tar.gz

source

tar.gz

I had a great week. There are some more login scripts and a bit of cleanup and speed-up.

The poll for what big thing I will work on next is up! Here are the poll + discussion thread:

https://www.poll-maker.com/poll2148452x73e94E02-60

https://8ch.net/hydrus/res/10654.html

login stuff

The new 'manage logins' dialog is easier to work with. It now shows when it thinks a login will expire, permits you to enter 'empty' credentials if you want to reset/clear a domain, and has a 'scrub invalid' button to reset a login that fails due to server error or similar.

After tweaking for the problem I discovered last week, I was able to write a login script for hentai foundry that uses username and pass. It should inherit the filter settings in your user profile, so you can now easily exclude the things you don't like! (the click-through login, which hydrus has been doing for ages, sets the filters to allow everything every time it works) Just go into manage logins, change the login script for www.hentai-foundry.com to the new login script, and put in some (throwaway) credentials, and you should be good to go.

I am also rolling out login scripts for shimmie, sankaku, and e-hentai, thanks to Cuddlebear (and possibly other users) on the github (which, reminder, is here: https://github.com/CuddleBear92/Hydrus-Presets-and-Scripts/tree/master/Download%20System ).

Pixiv seem to be changing some of their login rules, as many NSFW images now work for a logged-out hydrus client. The pixiv parser handles 'you need to be logged in' failures more gracefully, but I am not sure if that even happens any more! In any case, if you discover some class of pixiv URLs are giving you 'ignored' results because you are not logged in, please let me know the details.

Also, the Deviant Art parser can now fetch a sometimes-there larger version of images and only pulls from the download button (which is the 'true' best, when it is available) if it looks like an image. It should no longer download 140MB zips of brushes!

other stuff

Some kinds of tag searches (usually those on clients with large inboxes) should now be much faster!

Repository processing should also be faster, although I am interested in how it goes for different users. If you are on an HDD or have otherwise seen slow tag rows/s, please let me know if you notice a difference this week, for better or worse. The new system essentially opens the 'new tags m8' firehose pretty wide, but if that pressure is a problem for some people, I'll give it a more adaptable nozzle.

Many of the various 'select from a list of texts' dialogs across the program will now size themselves bigger if they can. This means, for example, that the gallery selector should now show everything in one go! The manage import/export folder dialogs are also moved to the new panel system, so if you have had trouble with these and a small screen, let me know how it looks for you now.

The duplicate filter page now has a button to edit your various duplicate merge options. The small button on the viewer was too-easily missed, so this should make it a bit easier!

full list

login:

added a proper username/password login script for hentai foundry--double-check your hf filters are set how you want in your profile, and your hydrus should inherit the same rules

fixed the gelbooru login script from last week, which typoed safebooru.com instead of .org

fixed the pixiv login 'link' to correctly say nsfw rather than everything, which wasn't going through last week right

improved the pixiv file page api parser to veto on 'could not access nsfw due to not logged in' status, although in further testing, this state seems to be rarer than previously/completely gone

added login scripts from the github for shimmie, sankaku, and e-hentai--thanks to Cuddlebear and any other users who helped put these together

added safebooru.donmai.us to danbooru login

improved the deviant art file page parser to get the 'full' embedded image link at higher preference than the standard embed, and only get the 'download' button if it looks like an image (hence, deviant art should stop getting 140MB brush zips!)

the manage logins panel now says when a login is expected to expire

the manage logins dialog now has a 'scrub invalidity' button to 'try again' a login that broke due to server error or similar

entering blank/invalid credentials is now permitted in the manage logins panel, and if entered on an 'active' domain, it will additionally deactivate it automatically

the manage logins panel is better at figuring out and updating validity after changes

the 'required cookies' in login scripts and steps now use string match names! hence, dynamically named cookies can now be checked! all existing checks are updated to fixed-string string matches

improved some cookie lookup code

improved some login manager script-updating code

deleted all the old legacy login code

misc login ui cleanup and fixes

.

other:

sped up tag searches in certain situations (usually huge inbox) by using a different optimisation

increased the repository mappings processing chunk size from 1k to 50k, which greatly increases processing in certain situations. let's see how it goes for different users--I may revisit the pipeline here to make it more flexible for faster and slower hard drives

many of the 'select from a list of texts' dialogs--such as when you select a gallery to download from--are now on the new panel system. the list will grow and shrink depending on its length and available screen real estate

.

misc:

extended my new dialog panel code so it can ask a question before an OK happens

fixed an issue with scanning through videos that have non-integer frame-counts due to previous misparsing

fixed a issue where file import objects that have been removed from the list but were still lingering on the list ui were not rendering their (invalid) index correctly

when export folders fail to do their work, the error is now presented in a better way and all export folders are paused

fixed an issue where the export files dialog could not boot if the most previous export phrase was invalid

the duplicate filter page now has a button to more easily edit the default merge options

increased the sibling/parent refresh delay for 1s to 8s

hydrus repository sync fails due to network login issues or manual network user cancel will now be caught properly and a reasonable delay added

additional errors on repository sync will cause a reasonable delay on future work but still elevate the error

converted import folder management ui to the new panel system

refactored import folder ui code to ClientGUIImport.py

converted export folder management ui to the new panel system

refactored export folder ui code to the new ClientGUIExport.py

refactored manual file export ui code to ClientGUIExport.py

deleted some very old imageboard dumping management code

deleted some very old contact management code

did a little prep work for some 'show background image behind thumbs', including the start of a bitmap manager. I'll give it another go later

next week

I have about eight jobs left on the login manager, which is mostly a manual 'do login now' button on manage logins and some help on how to use and make in the system. I feel good about it overall and am thankful it didn't explode completely. Beyond finishing this off, I plan to continue doing small work like ui improvement and cleanup until the 12th December, when I will take about four weeks off over the holiday to update to python 3. In the new year, I will begin work on what gets voted on in the poll.

#release

[spacelyjake]

Learning Learning Strategies

Our firehose continues to flow :) I need to find more time to work during the week, because the weekends only have 48 hours and those are the two days of the week when I sleep :P

I found Ch. 5 of our Dirksen textbook to be really interesting and valuable. I had the highlighter flying through my notes, marking points for me to remember in my own classes. I’m particularly interested in motivation and attention, both personally and professionally.

What I’d like to do right now is focus on online and remote learning, synchronous learning via Zoom. I’m a social person, and I really struggle with the lack of direct interaction with students in my synchronous courses. It helps when I can see their faces, but that in itself does not provide the feedback that I would get from an in-person class.

Our TLT403 flipbook also provided a lot of valuable information for me. I took away some concrete information, such as trying to jump into active learning every 15-20 minutes - I already made a concerted effort to do this even more this year, but it give me a metric to at least have a point of comparison, instead of feeling like I’m wingin’ it :)

I enjoyed researching simulation based learning, and I see a huge value in it. I don’t think I can do much of that in my web development courses - that’s mostly project based learning, both in terms of homework and a group project. But even smaller simulations within a course can be helpful: I send students out to w3schools.com to use the “Try me” button to experiment with different HTML attribute and CSS properties, without damaging their web pages. lt’s a minimal ‘simulator’, but still.

I personally prefer formal learning to informal learning. And as I read, I can see different personality types to excel or struggle with each. I’m not one for watching YouTube videos and treat that as foundational, curriculum-based, structured learning (as I’m supposed to be learning Drupal, of all things, for my day job). However, I have many students in my classes who are bubbling over with creativity. So I don’t necessarily ask them to update their homepages for our class with a particular style or even content. But I encourage their creativity, and share comments to challenge them with ideas for better communication on the web, additional creativity, or better coding structure.

My courses generally have two dichotomies - art/design majors and computer/programming majors, plus experienced developers and first-time programmers. In order to provide the best experience for all, I would like to incorporate more personalized learning into the class.

But I hope the following isn’t a rude comment, but I think it’s honest - I’m an adjunct instructor. I would love to double the amount of time I spend on classwork, and I feel that I should do exactly that. I have the interest, both as an educator, but also a desire to see my students succeed and even excel. But my adjunct work is after I already spent 8 hours working, or after class which is after 14 hours of work, if not more.

I would like schools to have fewer adjunct instructors and instead hire more full time instructors. I think it’s what is best for students, instructors, schools, and the educational system alike. But to be fair, I only see this from a small corner of the room, so others would have a better assessment of this view. I understand that community colleges are generally struggling, even pre-pandemic. But it seems like more full time instructors is the right thing to do.

What am I happy for this week? A stunning blue sky and multi-colored sunset tonight, before the clouds from the next snowstorm rolled in. That included beautiful golden sunshine coming through my windows all afternoon. I’m happy that at 50+ years old, I’m still healthy enough to function on 6 hours of sleep per night, so I can fill my days with so many things - learning, teaching, working (yes, I enjoy the idea of working), cooking, playing a little Animal Crossing when I can. And I’m happy to spend time with my girlfriend when she’s available, even if I’m not available (meaning we’re together but I’m working). She is incredibly understanding, supportive, and caring.

[superspunarticle]

Customers Seek Experiences That Enhance Their Current State, Design Accordingly

https://superspunarticle.com/?p=6078 Customers Seek Experiences That Enhance Their Current State, Design Accordingly https://superspunarticle.com/?p=6078 Tutorials & tips on Content and Video Marketing. In a world of distraction, listeners make the best experience and engagement architects. In a mobile-first world, experiences must be reimagined for the small screen. The best experiences will break the fourth wall of digital to deliver real human-to-human engagement. Like software, mobile has eaten the world. But mobile is more than a next-generation platform. Mobile is a powerful unifier. It has evolved into a digital hub for humanity, business and society. It brings us together while connecting us to other people, information and services on demand. It puts users in control of their experiences. It creates new worlds that transcend everyday norms. These evolved norms influence new behaviors and preferences in all we do. We’ve changed, and we continue to change. As we do, we seek experiences in everything to enhance our current situation, state of mind and expectations. As technology evolves so does behavior. None of it goes backward nor does the status quo ever stay in favor. Any business hoping to plug into this evolving society requires a human-centered model in which engagement and technology align to deliver personalized, intuitive, and value-added experiences. We are all distracted Mobile hasn’t just eaten the world, it’s also eaten our traditional grasp of space, presence and time. We blur the line between real and virtual worlds, making them one. We reach for our phones hundreds of times per day and thousands per week. Most mobile users receive upwards of 200 notifications per day. We light up our screens to capture important moments living in a mode of digital and analog duality. We reach for our screens when the experience around us is seemingly less interesting. To say we get lost in these moments is an understatement. You’ve heard of (and most likely felt) FOMO. I’m sure you’ve experienced anxiety and confusion as you’ve strained to process the firehose of information and possibilities (and cat memes!) as you relentlessly scroll. Sometimes, you most likely struggled to feel like your best self when compared to everyone else’s best life. We can’t overlook the currency of views, likes and followers and how we give and expect them in return. We can’t ignore how we feel about ourselves when those activities don’t add up to what we feel we deserve or when they don’t emulate those of our peers. There are real cognitive and emotional costs that come from pervasive connectivity. Each time we reach for our device, we pull ourselves from whatever had our attention before. We’re learning to task switch in everything we do; how we work, how we browse, how we think and talk, how we simultaneously engage in the physical and digital worlds. Doing so accelerates how our brains fire, retraining us to think and act faster in moments to keep up. Our short- and long-term memories are affected and so is our ability to activate depth and creativity on demand. We’re constantly chasing the next shiny object or captivating sensation. Being in the moment is now becoming a lost art. The art of engagement is defined through technology, empathy, and artistry Earning someone’s attention is an art and science. It’s always been. The difference in today’s world is that engagement dynamics are much more distracted, personal, and complex. As a result of technology’s influence on behavior, people are unwittingly more self-centered, impatient, and demanding. They’re also more connected and hyper-informed. I refer to today’s customer, lovingly of course, as accidental narcissists. What’s more, people report that they increasingly carry stress and anxiety in their customer journey. Businesses aren’t doing much to help. Choices are everywhere. Decisions are daunting. Customer journeys are needlessly complicated and often irrelevant or impersonal. Traditional communication strategies, legacy mindsets, processes and funnels, regardless of the shiny objects we employ, are in need of a critical upgrade. Customers need “light” to guide them in productive, enlivening and personal ways toward desired outcomes. They need light to brighten the darkness and chaos of pervasive distractions and overwhelming choices. This is an invitation, and an incredible opportunity, to compete differently. The good news is that we have the technology and the tools to do so. The key is to remember that change is never one-sided. As customers change, so must those hoping to reach them without becoming distractions like everything else in their life. Differentiation comes in how we use the tools and why. To engage someone now, means that we understand them. We understand their moments, their feelings and intent, their preferences and expectations, their means of communication and what entices their attention to move them, deliver value and build meaningful relationships. We must also understand their feelings, frustrations and annoyances. Distraction is something more than interference. It doesn’t have to be a negative. There can be positive interruptions to steer someone toward a brighter light. Communication and technology can build bridges to better places, more meaningful moments and better outcomes. The other good news is we have the ability to understand how people communicate, their intentions, times when they’re open to engagement, and what they value. We also have the ability to predict their needs over time. What changes, is us. Our words, intentions and the next steps we present to someone in moments of truth now count for everything. Listen. Observe. Discover. “We have two ears and one mouth for a reason,” the old saying about the importance of listening goes. But in everyday business applications, models aren’t really designed to listen, they’re designed to convert. For the most part, we profile customers, we don’t really know them. More often than not, especially when it comes to business communications, we talk at them rather than personally talk to them. Even though we have a direct line to customers through an incredible array of personal channels, we must take pause. Doing so will yield a competitive advantage. While everyone else is scrambling to keep up with and reach customers, grab their attention and pull them through the funnel, this is a time to listen and to learn. Technology gives us, not ironically, the ability to finally be more human, to put back the “relationship” in CRM and the “message” back in messaging. We can finally, not only deliver personalization; we can use communications technology to do so as a means of humanization. We must use technology to listen to data with the intent of doing more than converting. Conversions are merely an outcome of a meaningful experience—so are relationships. We must translate data into stories that inspire more relevant, personalized and value-added engagement. Those stories are equally important to incite change and innovation within your organization. We must also reimagine next best actions as a series of thoughtful steps in the customer journey, as they envision or expect it. Attention spans, patience, and emotion are all powerful catalysts and inhibitors. Think of next steps as thoughtful task switching, bit by bit, to walk something through to a mutually beneficial outcome. We must deliver value and meaningful experiences that customers appreciate and remember. Those memories serve as the foundation of any brand and are powerful, emotional drivers toward loyalty and customer lifetime value. Communications platforms serve as a bridge. In an era of pervasive distractions and unlimited choices, cast an empathetic and positive light across that bridge. It lights the way for people to take steps closer to you again and again. Originally published at Twilio Hub. Photo by Ben Kolde on Unsplash !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function()n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments);if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n; n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)(window, document,'script','https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '192647454418119'); fbq('track', "PageView"); (function(d, s, id) var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.3"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); (document, "script", "facebook-jssdk")); The above post “Customers Seek Experiences That Enhance Their Current State, Design Accordingly” was first published here. We hope that you found the article above useful and/or interesting. You can find similar content on our blog here: superspunarticle.com/blog Please let me have your feedback in the comments section below. Let us know which topics we should cover for you in future. #SEO

[architeuthism]

Dear DCEU Exchange Creator (Round Three)

Hey! I'm Squid.

I’m equally interested in fic and art, and equally interested in everything from gen through fluffy ship interaction to kinky porn. I'm pretty familiar with the wider DC universe, so feel free to pilfer characters and plots from it -- I get really excited about fanwork that interprets familiar things in a fresh new continuity. But I'm also very interested in the DCEU as a self-contained entity, so if you want to just play with the elements we already have, I'm here for that too. Do what works for you and have fun. If you have a question, I’ve got anon asks on.

This is kind of a firehose of ideas, which you should feel free to winnow down, disassemble and recombine however you please. I have both general likes and some character- and pairing-specific prompts; if something in the likes section grabs you, it's fine to ignore the prompts. Don't feel like you need to do everything in one piece, either. If an idea needs some breathing room, that's fine by me.

There's a section specifically for artists down below, but otherwise I've mixed my art and fic likes together pretty freely here, and you should feel free to pull whichever threads interest you, even if e.g. you're a writer but something is presented in a way that seems art-oriented.

General Likes

First times/get togethers.

For shippy things, I don't need everyone 100% confirmed TOGETHER FOREVER, even in fic -- but I like to know that they're interested, that there's something real there and that it has a future.

Optimistic endings in general.

Science fiction and fantasy shenanigans; settings far-removed from present-day Earth, but also SFF things intruding on present-day Earth.

Big, dumb SFF objects, like massive temple ruins, doomsday machines, big mysterious spacecraft.

The intrinsic ridiculousness of superheroes and the lives they lead. I enjoy the tone of the DCEU, but comic book cheese is also very welcome.

SPACE.

Identity porn, and its close relative, undercover work.

Fighting crime! Teamwork! Heroics! Investigation!

Crime-fighting followed by kissing (or what have you).

Kissing (or what have you) with a certain ambiance of crime-fighting about it because it takes place in the Batcave or other Crime-Fighting Location, such as on a rooftop (known staging grounds for crimefighting).

Canon divergence, what-ifs and remixes.

Monsters.

Superhero costumes and equipment. How they're designed and made (or found), the significance of all the bits and bobs, how hard it is to get new parts, what it's like to wear or use them.

So many variations on "superhero and civilian existences butting up against and overlapping each other" that it gets to be its own subcategory. Feel free to make up more, I'm probably into them too.

Characters doing superhero things in civilian attire and ordinary person things in superhero attire; superheroes interacting with one party in civvies and the other in costume.

Superheroes applying their superpowers, or knowledge they have because of their superheroic experience, to their normal jobs.

The day-to-day practical and sensory experience of being superpowered -- what it's like to move through a world that isn't built for your strength, etc.

Doing absolutely ridiculous things to protect a secret identity.

The production design for the DCEU: Kryptonian and Themysciran architecture and fashion, the Batcave and the Bat-vehicles, the Wonder Woman closing titles, Victor's jagged look during JL and the smoother one he adopts at the end of the film, all of the major characters’ civilian and formal costuming, Bruce’s surreal dreams (especially the Knightmare), capes doing dramatic things.

Characters exploring each other's production design. So-and-so visits Themyscira or gets to experience a Kryptonian liquid metal PowerPoint or stumbles into one of Bruce's dreams somehow.

Artist's Corner

I mentioned above that I really dig both the production design of the DCEU and the silly conventions of comic books, and I very much meant that. Other stuff I love:

Portraits.

Schematics, exploded diagrams.

Maps.

Buildings and cityscapes.

Infographics.

Characters touching each other ever so slightly.

Back and shoulder musculature.

Gold foil.

Bruce having a purple cape lining. I know it's not in the DCEU. Don't kinkshame me.

I was going to have an entry here about color schemes, but it's, like, all of them. B&W, monochrome, B&W with an accent color, limited palettes, high contrast, GO NUTS.

Art style pastiche, including comicky stuff but also mainstream art styles, ancient and religious styles. Some ideas, but don't let me limit you:

More Kirby-driven interpretations of the Fourth World stuff from JL, especially Victor himself.

Diana in art styles contemporary to eras she's been knocking around the Earth during.

Clark a la Catholic iconography or stained glass. I know there's a ton of this but I haven't had my fill yet.

If you'd like visual inspiration, here are some links to tags on my blog.

DC fanart

DC scans

Fanart generally

Non-fanart illustrations

General Likes (Porn Edition)

To expand on something from the intro, I’m more than happy to receive a gift with nothing sexual in it at all, or vanilla sexual stuff. But if you’re interested, here are some other options.

BDSM-wise, I’m into all manner of bondage and most forms of consensual sexual violence and pain, especially when things are pretty informal and the dynamic just arises in the moment. Choking and breathplay in all their forms are great, biting and impact play are great. For Bruce/Clark, Bruce is my preferred recipient for this and most stuff where the idea of "recipient" is relevant; for other ships, I haven't got a preference.

Superpowers during sex. Gadgets during sex.

Anatomical surprises. Characters whose anatomy is SO surprising that it's actually challenging to have sex with them. (Ideally, the parties figure something out, even if it's "just" something like mutual masturbation.)

One party clothed, one party nude. Also, I definitely meant what I said about civvies/costume.

Torn clothing/costumes, partial disrobing.

Even Kryptonian dimensional travel tech is tentacle-based. What do their sex toys look like? (If all you have is tentacles, every problem looks like a….)

Inappropriate sex laughter. Actually, appropriate sex laughter too. Sex that isn't conventionally good but where the participants are having tons of fun anyway.

I don't have any strong feelings about specific sex acts/positions! Write whatever seems appropriate.

Relationship: Apollo/Midnighter Relationship: Cassandra Cain/Harper Row Relationship: Diana Prince/Kate Kane

All of these ships involve at least one character who isn't in the DCEU at all yet. I've got one big prompt for all three of them:

What are they doing in the DCEU?

I love origin stories, timelines, concept art, character turnarounds -- anything that re-constructs a character from the ground up in a new universe. Show me how the forces in the DCEU combined to turn a character into a superhero, or how they responded to the earth-shattering events of the films, or what their costume looks like in this continuity, and I'll be a happy camper. That can be a lot of work for two characters in something something that's also shippy, so if you need to dial down the shippiness or focus on one character's origin over the other, that's all right!

Relationship: Barry Allen/Victor Stone

Okay, I will admit that I decided I was interested in this ship based on stuff from the New 52 and the press tour. The actors have a lot of chemistry, okay! And then Justice League came along to inform me that I am VERY SMART and I make GOOD DECISIONS.

Has Barry always been OBVIOUSLY HOT FOR CYBORGS or is this a new thing for him?

Victor can't exactly go out on a conventional date, so what does taking him out for a nice evening look like?

They have an interesting combination of power/skill sets that are very different from the ones that usually get matched up in DCEU fic -- I would love to see them work a case or fight a villain together.

I already mentioned anatomical surprises and characters who are difficult to have sex with, but seriously. Seriously.

Relationship: Bruce Wayne/Clark Kent

My pattern with fandom is that I start to ship something, and that makes me more interested in the canon, which gets me interested in more ships and characters, and then I wind up making ten requests in an exchange. This is the ship what brung me here and I haven't run out of feelings about it yet.

Bruce's paranoia and existential angst about aliens that could totally (cough) "destroy" him human civilization were what made me ship it, and I am still all about this. "Fearfully turned on" is the most important human emotion, and I'm intrigued by the whole range of Clark's potential reactions to this, from "you need to calm down" to "... I'm into this too".

Oh my god, Bruce is SO awkward with Clark in Justice League, and Clark is surprisingly relaxed and jokey. I'd love to see how that plays out in the longer term. Does Clark immediately recognize this as a crush or does it take ages to sort out?

You can fork the timeline just about anywhere and I'll be excited. They meet during MoS. Their first meeting in BvS goes differently. Clark doesn't die. Clark comes back a different way.

The Knightmare. There's, umm, a lot to unpack there. Bruce's dreams and/or nightmares generally, and especially that line between terror and eroticism that's perhaps thinnest there. After everything, how does Clark feature in them, react to Bruce waking up next to him after another one, etc?

Relationship: Bruce Wayne & Kryptonian Scout Ship

I feel like Bruce, as a gadgeteer, must have a pretty intense relationship with objects and machinery, and what more fraught object than the Kryptonian ship? Don't hesitate to include other members of the League here -- especially Clark (whether dead or alive), but anyone else is welcome to come along.

Stealing it from Heroes Park and putting it somewhere safe seems like a pretty good idea. This could happen at any point after its crash in Man of Steel.

Or, what if Bruce got to it before Clark did in MoS?

That thing is a trove of reverse-engineerable technology that nobody else on Earth has. This could mean a real leg up for the Bat. That might be straightforwardly useful or it might be TIME FOR FEELINGS.

With Jor-El gone, the ship seems to have reverted to an out-of-the-box personality that is surprisingly suggestible. This isn't where this prompt was originally intended to go, but I bet Bruce is such a bad influence.

Is there a copy of Jor-El still in there somewhere? Is he glitchy? How does Bruce react to Clark's holographic dad ghost?

How 'bout them silver bas relief PowerPoint presentations? Is that what all Kryptonian movies look like?

Relationship: Diana Prince & Victor Stone

This was such a surprise and a pleasure in Justice League. The comics didn't really prime me to think about these two connecting, but I love what we got, and I'm excited for more.

They've both been so isolated for so long -- Diana primarily from other metahumans/heroes (she seems to have been leading a pretty okay civilian life), and Victor apparently from most forms of at least in-person contact, but they warm up to each other pretty quickly -- I'm eager to see how that plays out, both as a friendship unto itself and as a friendship between people who respectively have really tiny social circles.

Diana's been around for probably thousands of years and is very educated; Victor potentially knows almost everything. Nerrrrrrds.

I keep coming back to prompts of basically this form, but the two of them just doing some superhero stuff together and growing closer as friends would make me really happy.

Character: Alfred Pennyworth

So what's Alfred's deal?

He's got who knows how many comics backstories. In this universe, was he SAS? An actor? What was that like and/or how does it inform his buttling and/or how does it inform him being Bruce's superhero assistant now?

Does he wear a three-piece suit to do EVERYTHING? We see him fixing the Batmobile and chopping wood in one. So, like ... everything?

An artbook or something indicates that he's Wayne Enterprises' head of security. What's that look like, day to day?

I'm absolutely fascinated by fanwork about him relating to the rest of the League, their civilian families, etc.

Character: Clark Kent

There's this big chunk of Clark's background, the wandering period that ends in Man of Steel, that we don't know a ton about. I am dying to hear more.

In the course of looking for leads about his origins, does he run into any false ones?

Speaking of running into things, what about encounters with other DC characters? This would be a completely excellent time to loop back to Bruce Wayne/Clark Kent, but I'd love to see him crossing paths with, say, other members of the League. Do they recognize something unusual about him?

OH MY GOD IS THIS HOW LEX SR. GOES BALD

There's a whole chain of rescues and other Weird Events that Lois followed for her article about him, and we've only seen a couple of them!

DOES HE FIGHT ANY CRIME? :D?

How many shitty, soul-crushing jobs does he work?

Character: Victor Stone

All right, look. I know I keep pushing the "characters who are difficult to have sex with" button. I don't mean to give the impression that's the thing I want the most, it's just relevant generally (you could definitely do something in that vein with e.g. Clark) and also relevant to Victor specifically, who, from what we've seen, does not have most of his original torso. So. Figuring out how to masturbate again must've been a real challenge, right? What does he think about, and is Barry involved?

In general I am very keen to read/see things about Victor's body and powers, and his relationship with them. Weird new parts he didn't know he had, how different/similar things feel when you're mostly metal, what it's like to have the ENTIRE INTERNET at your fingertips (and all attendant hacking shenanigans), the process of repairing after a major injury to his robot parts (perhaps sustained during crimefighting? :D?), how other superhumans read to his new senses, etc.

I LOVE JOE MORTON. I am keenly interested in everything having to do with Victor's relationship with his father. It seems like they ended JL on a pretty good note, but there were some VERY rough times there and I'd be happy for some fanwork about those, too.

What was Victor getting up to on the internet while he was mostly housebound?

DNWs

Major character death (excepting in-continuity deaths), breakups, hopeless endings -- basically, don't kill the thing I requested.

Stories where all the major characters pair up -- I prefer only one ship per story.

Incest, incest-adjacent things, mentor/student.

Reproduction (such as mpreg).

Bodily fluid/byproduct kinks: watersports, scat, lactation, bloodletting in quantity and for bloodletting’s sake. Fluids you expect to encounter during sex are fine, as is incidental blood from a heroic flesh wound. Alien and machine fluids are also fine in moderation.

Body modification, guro. Major injury and gore are fine in the context of, say, a fight, just not in porn, please.

Stories that are heavily focused on characters experiencing or discussing real-world oppressions, major illnesses, or addiction.

Fandom AU templates (A/B/O, soulmates, coffee shop, etc).

Depowering, no-capes AUs.

Noncon, dubcon.

Chinspike.

#. #.. #... #.... #..... #fests #DCEU Exchange

[andreacaskey]

Customers Seek Experiences That Enhance Their Current State, Design Accordingly

In a world of distraction, listeners make the best experience and engagement architects.

In a mobile-first world, experiences must be reimagined for the small screen. The best experiences will break the fourth wall of digital to deliver real human-to-human engagement.

Like software, mobile has eaten the world.

But mobile is more than a next-generation platform. Mobile is a powerful unifier. It has evolved into a digital hub for humanity, business and society. It brings us together while connecting us to other people, information and services on demand. It puts users in control of their experiences. It creates new worlds that transcend everyday norms.

These evolved norms influence new behaviors and preferences in all we do. We’ve changed, and we continue to change. As we do, we seek experiences in everything to enhance our current situation, state of mind and expectations.

As technology evolves so does behavior. None of it goes backward nor does the status quo ever stay in favor. Any business hoping to plug into this evolving society requires a human-centered model in which engagement and technology align to deliver personalized, intuitive, and value-added experiences.

We are all distracted

Mobile hasn’t just eaten the world, it’s also eaten our traditional grasp of space, presence and time. We blur the line between real and virtual worlds, making them one. We reach for our phones hundreds of times per day and thousands per week. Most mobile users receive upwards of 200 notifications per day. We light up our screens to capture important moments living in a mode of digital and analog duality.

We reach for our screens when the experience around us is seemingly less interesting. To say we get lost in these moments is an understatement. You’ve heard of (and most likely felt) FOMO. I’m sure you’ve experienced anxiety and confusion as you’ve strained to process the firehose of information and possibilities (and cat memes!) as you relentlessly scroll. Sometimes, you most likely struggled to feel like your best self when compared to everyone else’s best life.

We can’t overlook the currency of views, likes and followers and how we give and expect them in return. We can’t ignore how we feel about ourselves when those activities don’t add up to what we feel we deserve or when they don’t emulate those of our peers.

There are real cognitive and emotional costs that come from pervasive connectivity. Each time we reach for our device, we pull ourselves from whatever had our attention before. We’re learning to task switch in everything we do; how we work, how we browse, how we think and talk, how we simultaneously engage in the physical and digital worlds.

Doing so accelerates how our brains fire, retraining us to think and act faster in moments to keep up. Our short- and long-term memories are affected and so is our ability to activate depth and creativity on demand. We’re constantly chasing the next shiny object or captivating sensation. Being in the moment is now becoming a lost art.

The art of engagement is defined through technology, empathy, and artistry

Earning someone’s attention is an art and science. It’s always been. The difference in today’s world is that engagement dynamics are much more distracted, personal, and complex.

As a result of technology’s influence on behavior, people are unwittingly more self-centered, impatient, and demanding. They’re also more connected and hyper-informed. I refer to today’s customer, lovingly of course, as accidental narcissists. What’s more, people report that they increasingly carry stress and anxiety in their customer journey.

Businesses aren’t doing much to help.

Choices are everywhere. Decisions are daunting. Customer journeys are needlessly complicated and often irrelevant or impersonal.

Traditional communication strategies, legacy mindsets, processes and funnels, regardless of the shiny objects we employ, are in need of a critical upgrade.

Customers need “light” to guide them in productive, enlivening and personal ways toward desired outcomes. They need light to brighten the darkness and chaos of pervasive distractions and overwhelming choices. This is an invitation, and an incredible opportunity, to compete differently.

The good news is that we have the technology and the tools to do so. The key is to remember that change is never one-sided. As customers change, so must those hoping to reach them without becoming distractions like everything else in their life. Differentiation comes in how we use the tools and why.

To engage someone now, means that we understand them. We understand their moments, their feelings and intent, their preferences and expectations, their means of communication and what entices their attention to move them, deliver value and build meaningful relationships. We must also understand their feelings, frustrations and annoyances.

Distraction is something more than interference. It doesn’t have to be a negative. There can be positive interruptions to steer someone toward a brighter light. Communication and technology can build bridges to better places, more meaningful moments and better outcomes.

The other good news is we have the ability to understand how people communicate, their intentions, times when they’re open to engagement, and what they value. We also have the ability to predict their needs over time.

What changes, is us.

Our words, intentions and the next steps we present to someone in moments of truth now count for everything.

Listen. Observe. Discover.

“We have two ears and one mouth for a reason,” the old saying about the importance of listening goes.

But in everyday business applications, models aren’t really designed to listen, they’re designed to convert. For the most part, we profile customers, we don’t really know them. More often than not, especially when it comes to business communications, we talk at them rather than personally talk to them.

Even though we have a direct line to customers through an incredible array of personal channels, we must take pause. Doing so will yield a competitive advantage.

While everyone else is scrambling to keep up with and reach customers, grab their attention and pull them through the funnel, this is a time to listen and to learn.

Technology gives us, not ironically, the ability to finally be more human, to put back the “relationship” in CRM and the “message” back in messaging. We can finally, not only deliver personalization; we can use communications technology to do so as a means of humanization.

We must use technology to listen to data with the intent of doing more than converting. Conversions are merely an outcome of a meaningful experience—so are relationships.

We must translate data into stories that inspire more relevant, personalized and value-added engagement. Those stories are equally important to incite change and innovation within your organization.

We must also reimagine next best actions as a series of thoughtful steps in the customer journey, as they envision or expect it. Attention spans, patience, and emotion are all powerful catalysts and inhibitors. Think of next steps as thoughtful task switching, bit by bit, to walk something through to a mutually beneficial outcome.

We must deliver value and meaningful experiences that customers appreciate and remember. Those memories serve as the foundation of any brand and are powerful, emotional drivers toward loyalty and customer lifetime value. Communications platforms serve as a bridge. In an era of pervasive distractions and unlimited choices, cast an empathetic and positive light across that bridge. It lights the way for people to take steps closer to you again and again.

Originally published at Twilio Hub.

Photo by Ben Kolde on Unsplash

The post Customers Seek Experiences That Enhance Their Current State, Design Accordingly appeared first on Brian Solis.

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