#you know what happens when you train audiences to stop critically thinking about what 'science' theyre hearing

[crowdvscritic]

round up // JANUARY 21

New year, not-so-new Crowd vs. Critic! It’s another batch of films, TV, music, and reads that were new to me this month and think you would enjoy, too. As we cozy up inside for the winter, nothing warms you up like a good piece of pop culture.

January Crowd-Pleasers

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

Does this sequel reach the heights of 2017’s Wonder Woman? No, but I wish more superhero movies were like this one. I explain why at ZekeFilm. Crowd: 9.5/10 // Critic: 8/10

21 Bridges (2019)

A solid action crime thriller with a solid Chadwick Boseman at the center. Crowd: 8.5/10 // Critic: 7.5/10

The Lethal Weapon Series (1987-98)

I watched the first Lethal Weapon in 2017 for ZekeFilm, but now I’ve a decade’s pleasure of progressively over-the-top action sequences and progressively more absurd ways to destroy Roger Murtaugh’s (Danny Glover) house. The Murtaugh/Riggs bromance holds this progressively sillier series together, and an supporting cast of charismatic actors (Jet Li, Darlene Love, Chris Rock, Rene Russo) are game for whatever comes their way. Joe Pesci is the true MVP. Series Crowd: 9/10 // Series Critic: 7/10

The High Note (2020)

Tracee Ellis Ross’s Grace Davis is a diva in every sense of the word. A high-strung and highly successful singer, she’s also highly demanding of her assistant Maggie (Dakota Johnson), who wants to step out of her shadow and become a music producer. This rom-com-adjacent flick is one of the most fun escapes I’ve had from a 2020 movie, and it’s perfect for a girls’ night in. Crowd: 8.5/10 // Critic: 7/10

Double Feature—Rom-Coms With a Magical Twist: Just My Luck (2006) + When In Rome (2010)

Disclaimer: These movies are not good. In fact, they’re junk, but they’re my kind of junk. In Just My Luck (Crowd: 7.5/10 // Critic: 6/10), Lindsay Lohan loses her life-long lucky streak when she kisses schlimazel Chris Pine. And When in Rome (Crowd: 8/10 // Critic: 6/10), Kristen Bell attracts unwanted admirers (Will Arnett, Danny DeVito, Josh Duhamel, Jon Heder, and real-life future husband Dax Shepard) after she steals their coins from a wishing fountain. To their credit, both of these movies know they’re silly, which means you have permission to just sit back and laugh along with (or, honestly, at) them.

WandaVision (2021)

I sometimes fear for the world of entertainment when I think of how much intellectual property Disney has gobbled up, but WandaVision is evidence the company is a benevolent dictator at least for now. This odd delight is a send up and a tribute to sitcoms like I Love Lucy, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Brady Bunch, and Paul Bettany and Elizabeth Olsen are so charming and weird I don’t need whatever mysterious sub-plot they’re building.

Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)

If you want to make the most of watching Robin Hood: Men in Tights, first watch Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), an action flick I saw last February and didn’t include in my monthly Round Up. This Mel Brooks spoof is a direct response that self-serious Kevin Costner adventure, even down to copying its costumes. While I wish I could find a Mel Brooks comedy with any substantial female character (in every movie I’ve seen so far, the joke is either, “She’s got a great rack!” or “Wow, she’s an uggo!”), I still couldn’t stop laughing at this 104-minute version of the Robin Hood scene in Shrek. Crowd: 9/10 // Critic: 8/10

Aliens (1986)

Peak ‘80s action. Peak alien grossness. Peak girl boss Sigourney Weaver. Crowd: 9/10 // Critic: 8/.510

Big (1988)

After talking about Laverne & Shirley with Kyla on SO IT’S A SHOW?, I had to check out Penny Marshall’s classic. While a few moments haven’t aged so well, its heart is sweet and the script is hilarious. And that Tom Hanks? I think he’s going places. Crowd: 9.5/10 // Critic: 8/10

Unstoppable (2010)

I’ve laughed at SNL’s spoof of this movie for a decade, so it’s about time I got around to enjoying this action thriller very loosely based on the true story of a train that got away from its conductor. Denzel Washington (“You’re too old!”) and Chris Pine (“You’re too young!”) are our heroes in this over-the-top ridiculousness, and their chemistry is so extra it makes me hope they team up for another movie again. Crowd:  9/10 // Critic: 7/10

January Critic Picks

Double Feature—‘90s Space Adventures: Apollo 13 (1995) + Contact (1997)

I have no desire to join Tom Cruise as he films in space, but I know I’ll be pumped to watch whatever he makes because I love sci-fi and space  adventures. Apollo 13 (Crowd: 9/10 // Critic: 9/10) tells the story of an almost-disastrous NASA mission in the ‘60s, and it taps into our hope for the human spirit to overcome obstacles. Contact (Crowd: 8.5/10 // Critic: 8.5/10) surmises what might happen if we received communication from extraterrestrial life, and it taps into our struggle to reconcile faith and science.

McCartney III by Paul McCartney (2020)

I spent January catching up on the albums on Best of 2020 lists, and the one I listened to for hours and hours was Paul McCartney’s latest solo album. Catchy, thoughtful, and musically surprising, it ranges from pop to rock to folk in 45 minutes and still feels like it’s over too soon. Like Tom Hanks, this Paul McCartney guy is going places!

The Thin Man Series (1934-47)

Like Lethal Weapon, I watched the first installment of The Thin Man awhile back, and Kyla and I even covered the series on our podcast. But thanks to a full series marathon on TCM earlier this month, I’ve now laughed through all five. When you talk about great chemistry, you’ve got to talk about William Powell and Myrna Loy, who make Nick and Nora’s marriage feel lived in and romantic as they solve crimes together. Witty, suspenseful, and jaunty, this series is still sexy cool over 80 years later. (Also, Asta? Still one of the cutest dogs in cinema.) Series Crowd: 8.5/10 // Critic: 8.5/10

The King and I (1956)

Here’s your regularly scheduled reminder Hollywood works differently now, and many casting decisions of the ‘50s wouldn’t fly today. What has aged well in this film: The Rodgers and Hammerstein music and the sumptuous costumes and set design. I love extravagant musicals of yesteryear—perhaps it’s time for Hollywood to revisit and remake The King and I for modern audiences?

Inauguration Day

In a year with no major televised events with celebrities in a room together, Inauguration Day felt like the most exciting cultural event in ages. We’ve been missing major fashion, but then we got Lady Gaga! We’ve been missing live performances, but then we got Amanda Gorman! And I got a lot of tears during that poem—not just me, right?

Good Reads

Writing that made me think and smile this month:

Steven Soderbergh’s list of everything he read, watched, and listened to this year, Extension765.com (2020) – An indirect inspiration for these monthly Round Ups!

“My Year of Making Lists,” NewYorker.com (2020) – I made a lot of lists in 2020, so I feel this author’s #mood

“Betty White Says She Will Spend Her 99th Birthday Feeding Two Ducks Who Visit Her ‘Every Day,’“ CBSNews.com (2021) - “Betty is a treasure,” I say as I watch The Proposal for the 99th time

“A Sculpture’s Unusual Journey to SLAM [St. Louis Art Museum],” SLAM.org (2020) – With a casual mention of an attraction I never knew about in St. Louis

“The Culture Is Ailing. It’s Time for a Dr. Fauci for the Arts.” WashingtonPost.com (2020) – An idea that occurred to me a few months ago: Why don’t we have an Arts Cabinet?

“The Arts Are in Crisis. Here’s How Biden Can Help.” NYTimes.com (2021) – Partly in response to that Washington Post piece, a historical look at how artists have made it through difficult times in the past and how we can revive artists’ livelihoods mid- and post-pandemic

“The Right’s Message to Silicon Valley: 'Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee,'” TIME.com (2021) – A more thoughtful and less reactionary take on a volatile moment in the history of modern technology

“'It Makes Me Sick With Grief': Trump's Presidency Divided Families. What Happens to Them Now?” TIME.com (2021) – A study on how politics has done damage to family dynamics in America

“Help, the Only Cinema I Can Handle Is Zac Efron Prancing Angrily in High School Musical 2,” Vulture.com (2021) - In a lot of ways, same

“50 Easy Things To Do When You are Anxious,” ShopTwentySeven.com (2021) – I especially endorse coloring, puzzling, and watching happy movies!

Double Feature—Miss Marple Mysteries: Murder at the Gallop (1963) + Murder Ahoy (1964)

Remember when I was all like, “Watch these Agatha Christie movies so you’re not sad Death on the Nile is delayed”? Remember when I said I was just a few movies away from becoming an Agatha Christie junkie? Well, I think I’m there because I can’t stop with the murder mysteries! Margaret Rutherford is a treasure whether she’s solving a murder at a horse ranch or on a boat, and a cast of colorful supporting characters (including Rutherford’s husband) makes these breezy instead of heavy. Crowd: 8/10 // Critic: 8/10

8½ (1963)

File this with 2001: A Space Odyssey—I don’t know if I really understood this film, but I think I liked it? Federico Fellini’s surrealist, male gaze-y drama blurs the lines between reality and imagination, love and dysfunction, and the past and maybe some future that involves clowns? What resonated with me was the story of a director with creative block, wondering if he’s already peaked and if he’ll create anything worthwhile again. Crowd: 6/10 // Critic: 9/10

Sense and Sensibility: The Screenplay and Diaries by Emma Thompson (1995)

Sense and Sensibility is not just one of my favorite Jane Austen adaptations—it’s one of my all-time favorite films. One of the co-hosts of one of my favorite podcasts has raved many-a-time about Emma Thompson’s journals from the making of film, so it was only a matter of time before I read them myself. Witty, informative, and all-around lovely, Thompson’s journals are an excellent insight into the filmmaking process and how novels are adapted.

Also in January…

I reviewed the new-ish documentary Flannery for ZekeFilm, which is all about the writer Flannery O’Connor and feels a little like going back to high school English class.

In addition to the Lethal Weapon and Thin Man series, I rewatched all of the X-Men series this month. You can see everything I am watching on Letterboxd, including favorites I love returning to (i.e. X-Men: Days of Future Past) and the movies I try that don’t make my monthly recommendations (i.e. The Wolverine).

Photo credits: Paul McCartney, Zac Efron, Sense & Sensibility. All others IMDb.com.

#Round Up #Wonder Woman 1984 #21 Bridges #Lethal Weapon #The High Note #Just My Luck #When in Rome #WandaVision #Robin Hood: Men in Tights #Aliens #Big #Unstoppable #Apollo 13 #Contact #McCartney III #The Thin Man #The King and I #Amanda Gorman #Murder at the Gallop #Murder Ahoy #Miss Marple #8 1/2 #Sense and Sensibility #Emma Thompson

[ahmed120893]

1)

ID: 120893

Course Name : Issues in mass communication SPRING2020

Course code : Mass2620

Date: May 31,2020

Assignment 2

: Introduction

Media issues are one of the most important subjects to be studied by students who learn and practice media life on a daily basis. This course teaches us in detail how to discuss and analyze media issues that cause a stir in the media field. What I thought in this course would be an analysis of the issues but there were many other things that we knew thanks to this course such as the issues surrounding us and the difficulties and challenges facing the world and how the media was old and how it changed to this day and more importantly the development of our skills in writing in English.

2)

The submitted material:

In the beginning I learned about the critical thinking and its meaning and how I can develop it in my study life .Then I moved to understand the media and how I think about the questions and answer them in ways that are different from the usual methods. In addition, the factor of transformation and social changes since it has been playing a role in the change of the media from the old to the modern and from modern to postmodern. Combating disinformation aims to make students who study media feel more confident in the release of the correct information and not to believe any news easily until it is confirmed. Moreover, the Media Literacy has helped me to find out the news and how to start asking about its sources. The other one is to discuss how media can effect on us and what theories used on that and what the expiation of those theories. Furthermore, I learned how media has been changed from the past. Also, the labeling theory tells me how names can be a reason to make people feel paranoid and scared, but on the other hand they are useful, but you have to choose the right names, and here's the role of editors and media officials. Social media is believed by many people and they don't care what the official authorities say about The Corona Virus, for example, so it was good for the government to take these platforms to spread what is said about the virus. Visual novels, such as comic books and animations, are becoming increasingly popular as a tool for teaching science and communication

3)

Combining the benefits of visualization with powerful metaphors and character-driven narratives. Comedy has the potential to make scientific subjects easier and enjoyable for a wider range of audience and this is followed in the publication of The Corona Virus to raise the public awareness. Which is most important is that media rights are under pressure of the obstruction of freedom of expression and the freedom to access information. Media regulations have become together and journalists who are not in line with mainstream elite. Good media needs sound financing - The economic sustainability of media outlets continues to be a major challenge.

All these topics were connected together from how I will think until I can move to solve the problem and what I will face in media life.

Every week in this semester we've been given a topic to talk about and analyze. They seemed different when you look at them for the first time, but in the end, I found that all the topics are connected to each other .The first topic was about disinformation, we can say that disinformation is a revolution in propaganda and is one of the ways in which we live today. It can be said that disinformation is false or deceptive method which is used for wars, politics and many other areas. As time passes, technology evolving shows many ways to practice misinformation and spread its purpose which is to distract attention and not to share facts at all.

The second topic is the use of cognitive strategies in the media. Cognitive strategies are important in our lives as students and it can be said that all current functions use

4)

these strategies because they open our eyes to what we are facing in our daily and professional lives. We have learned a lot of new strategies which depend on understanding learning and predicting what will happen .The third topic is the link between World War I, World War II, cold war, and the invasion of the American coalition in Iraq and how communication was in World War I. Although the radio existed before the beginning of World War I the British leaders used different means to convey news among them. They used birds and trained clostrids to act as their correspondents that was because they outperformed humans in speed, the enemy did not infect them. In World War II, radios were used because of their development, but not as expected. There were several factors that affected this. The most important of which was the poor signal. But propaganda has had a positive impact in getting people to fight the enemy and defeat the country in the war. In the Cold War, communication was the main weapon, relying on technology such as radio and computers to raise threats in the media .Finally, communication during the American coalition invasion of Iraq , The allies against Iraq used the propaganda campaigns to communicate with the Iraqi people to convince them to abandon Saddam . The forth topic is how media outside Oman presents race, gender,(Male,Famale,3rde ) and class. In this topic I found that foreign countries are fighting racism too much. On the other hand, in the Arab countries we do not hear such issues because there can be more awareness of this subject. As for the third sex, it exists in all countries, but in the Arab world it is not mentioned publicly unlike foreign countries. Moreover, the perspective of self and narcissism , I found that celebrities are the most likely people to be cheating in their lives to always feel that they have everything but in fact most of them do not have any of what they show. In addition, the Hate speech is one of the

5)

worst ways to destroy a person as it is used to devalue celebrities. Furthermore, the role of media in health education can change a people's ideas and adjust their behavior like what we have encountered regarding The Corona Virus and how the media has been educating people to wear cams and gloves and not to go out except for the utmost necessity .Also , the comics in the time of coved-19 has made people love the drawings that they see and believe, whether in a funny way or vice versa. And it is also useful for people who can't read because they follow the current situation with this crisis .In addition , The two hypotheses, After researching these two theories, I found that people only need to know all the important things, but that there is no more important things than power and judgments that concern the state. The last topic is that the perspectives of media ethics challenges. With the development of life, conflicts that occur between countries and the change of media contacts, you can notice that the media work has ethics to know such as honesty, not spreading rumors about other countries and telling the truth are some of the most important qualities that the world must know in order not to have permanent conflicts between countries.

The analyzing:

As I mentioned before, all the topics were connected to each other. Starting from the first topic until the end it can be clearly seen that each topic is connect and related to each other. Starting with (disinformation and cognitive strategies )and ( communication in wars). The disinformation strategies is used in wars. However, if we have the techniques of cognitive strategies we will know how people think if they want to change their opinions and thoughts against something. Next, (race and

6)

genders ),( self and narcissism) and ( hate speech ). Hate speech is one of the most important reasons of discrimination in race and gender between people. Also, it divides people into two types . One of them is self love and others are narcissism. We need to stop the hate speech and spread tolerance values instead. Third, ( media role in health education) and (comics ). Nowadays, the comics techniques has become an effective, attractive way of giving advice among the society and increase health education. Forth, ( hypotheses ) and( ethic challenges). Ethics prevent media from telling lies to the audience. However, media should publish the correct articles that suit the needs of the society .

Conclusion:

In the end, this course taught me how to look at topics and news in a different way, and not to believe everything I hear until I obviously know the perfect truth. It also taught me different ways to search for information and discover facts and write them in English.

#RTVSQU#Spring20#Mass2620_20

[comicteaparty]

June 27th-July 3rd, 2020 Creator Babble Archive

The archive for the Creator Babble chat that occurred from June 27th, 2020 to July 3rd, 2020.  The chat focused on the following question:

If you could do your webcomic for a living, how would that change things in regards to how you work on it (if at all)?

Deo101 [Millennium]

I'd definitely put out more content, cause I could focus on it fully every day of the week.

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

i would probably start hating it and get burnt out

Deo101 [Millennium]

thats why I would also have to start another comic or do short stories on the side or something, too.

I would probably keep individual comics update schedules the same, I'd just do more comics

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

If it became a part-time job, I don't think anything would change. It kind of feels like that already. If I were in a position where it became a full-time job, I do dread how my relationship with the work would change. I don't think I could ever make as much doing comics as I do in my day job (which isn't crazy, but is comfortable) so I don't know if I could ever 100% transition unless it was really, really worth it It's something I've thought about a lot, for sure.

Cronaj ~{Whispers of the Past}~

In a way, my comic is my full-time job? I don't make very much money with it, but I do put over 40 hours a week into it, and I don't have another job. I am in the very fortunate position of having an SO who is able to support me financially while I try to get my footing with my passion. If I was depending on it for a paycheck though, the main thing that would change is my style would probably get simpler, because there is no way I can make enough pages a week otherwise.

Holmeaa - working on WAYFINDERS

It is really the dream to be able to do it! Right now I am unemployed, so I basically treat the comic as my fulltime job, until I find the next short project. I want to be able to work on it full time! In Denmark there are some cool possibilities to get funding from the government and I hope we can get enrolled with some of those programs with our comic.

I would also just love to do small videos, podcasts, animations etc. Small fun projects

Mitzi (Trophallaxis)

If I had to do it full time, I think i'd put a LOT more hours into learning how to paint, watching speedpaints, ect. It'd also make a huge difference in my living situation, as the first thing I'd honestly do with a full time at-home job is move to another city with cheaper rent. Another state, maybe! Oh, and I'd do a lot more promo work. posters and animations are fun, but they're not quite worth it with an audience consisting of two my writing partner's friends, and my older brother.

Shizamura 🌟 O Sarilho

the biggest difference, I suppose, would be that I would make a lot more pages, a lot faster. But I like it that it's been pointed that the relationship with work changes when you have to do things full time, so there may be some unpredictable variables there

eliushi [Keyspace]

For a living for me can mean many different things: able to sustain living expenses vs full-time. There’s overlap but one gives financial security meaning an element of creative freedom. The opposite end will probably entail working on other comic projects with the current one as a passion story on the side (no change but probably might not want to draw so much after drawing for work!) If we’re discussing the ability to do the webcomic full time without financial worries then I do believe my output will increase but also I will be dedicating more time to the craft (studying story structures, art directions etc) as well as marketing/joining professional associations/pitching/connections. There are a lot of career options within the comic world and I’d love to explore everything before deciding what’s best for the current story. Ultimately if I were to do this as a living, I’d treat it like any other job: a routine, a strive for improvement, and wellness to recharge. I follow several artists not only for their art but also their schedule/workflow to see what worked for others. It’s very interesting!

In reality though, I might work on smaller scale projects on the side to build up the experience and platform needed to tell the story of Keyspace. As a full time comic creator, I’ll be seriously thinking to covert the seven novel series into a hug comic project. So TL;DR if full time, I make more pages

varethane

I'm in an odd place with my comic because.... well, I sort of had an opportunity to spend all of my time on it for a few months, when I was in between contracts at work. But I found that I wasnt getting it done all that much faster than I did when also working full time

To be fair, it's kind of hard to compare my speed between the three periods, because when I returned to work after a few months away, it was after work from home had started and now I no longer have a commute, so perhaps my ability to squeeze comic pages into my free time has expanded.... but I feel like my attention span caps out around 8 hours on any single task

So I didnt work that much faster. But... I'm also bad at keeping track. I could be wrong.

Yung Skrimp (Carefree)

8 hours is a long attention span

varethane

It's not all in one go, haha.

eliushi [Keyspace]

I definitely have to take breaks between pages, whether or not I have just a few minutes to a chunk of hours

It’s about finding a balance that works for you!

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I don't think I could put more hours daily into my comic than I currently do. I have a chronic issue with my drawing shoulder, so my body won't be able to handle that much work. Probably wouldn't be great for my eyes, either. I also don't know if I want my livelihood to depend on how many people like my story. This story is a pair of custom-tailored skinny jeans for my heart (and I have an unusual body type, making it impossible to wear skinny jeans regardless of size). It's a story I want to read. It's meant to fit ME. I don't want to worry about how to also make it fit a bunch of other people.

That being said, some people do find themselves in a situation where they're making something they want to read, and a bunch of other people just happen to like it, too. I think that would be nice

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

I physically can‘t draw for more than four, five hours a day, found that out the hard wayy

eliushi [Keyspace]

I most recently developed pain likely due to RSI and have made accommodations since then but yeah it was scary to think that I have a limit in drawing time. Gotta find ways to take care of yourself for the long run

cAPSLOCK (Tailslide)

I think if comics were my only job, I'd feel a lot more anxious about what I create, and would struggle to work consistently. Having another pursuit makes me feel like I have more freedom to experiment, learn, and make what I want to make.

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

That's a really good point keii

Would drawing a comic for a living push me to change it to have more mass appeal?

I don't know but it is definitely possible and would be on my mind

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

It is the dream, if I could get a decent monthly wage on my comic, yes I will dedicate more time, work out a better schedule. Get an editor and colourist on board to help make a polished series. Altho I'm still doing this method to build good working habits But I agree with Eli's point, have to assign days for breaks for myself to prevent RSI. At present I have a trained mindset to work on schedules, but I may feel the pressure to produce as fast as I could.(edited)

Desnik

Well, for starters, my comic would actually be released somewhere, so it'd be nice if it made something back for me

Miranda

I’d actually release it. And work on it regularly, instead of sporadically like I have been! I’d definitely be more critical of what I was doing, and probably way more anxious every time I posted.

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

You know, when I was only like 6 years old, I was like "I don't want to be an artist when I grow up. I love art too much, and I don't want to burn out and stop enjoying it. So I'm gonna be a singer instead." I have no idea how 6-year-old me knew about burnout, but I definitely remember saying that in response to an adult asking something like "what do you wanna be when you grow up"/ "wow, you're drawing all the time; do you want to become an artist?"

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

The more I do comics the more I think I want to do art stuff as part of my main career. I would love to make sequential art that's for science purposes

sagaholmgaard

Ah that would be the dream! I'd probably feel more secure in my ability to build up a backlog of pages, and be able to make more extra content for the PDF version! And more content for instagram and twitter as well

kayotics

If I were to be able to do comics full time I think it would completely change my current lifestyle. Not even money wise but I’d need to switch up a lot of things. Like make sure I get a good amount of exercise in. I’d probably add in another page a week, but then use the rest of my week to project manage the comic, and promote my work. I’d spend a lot of other time working on creating an online store, because I can’t see the comic working full time without some supplemental merch keeping me afloat. And I’d also use that time to create and work on another comic series I think.

Yung Skrimp (Carefree)

If I were to do comics full time I’d flex on everyone I know

Feather J. Fern

If I was able to do comics full time, be able to pay off debts, substain rent and food, and extra saved for small spluges, I will shove my comic in my family's face(I got a family who doesn't believe in me at all), dancing around screaming "I MADE IT IN LIFE" And then jump out the window because haha this can't be a reality because I don't think I will ever make it in comics. I will still keep my other job of working at a library and drawing on the side becuase I want working job insurance and also I am the type who wants to save all their money if possible(edited)

eliushi [Keyspace]

I was on board until jumping out the window

Yung Skrimp (Carefree)

I wasn't on board until jumping out the window

Now I am

Moral_Gutpunch

If I could do this for a living, I could do so much. I could afford to put my mother ina home, start my dream farm and start a bunch of conservation as well, I could help my husband fund his own sidegig, and I could afford to foster pets like I always wanted.

shadowhood {SunnyxRain}

Personally, if I was able to do it I would be a lot more invested in it. I would also make a lot less excuses as to why I'm not practicing as much; it took a pandemic to happen for me to dry taking it more seriously!

I think overall I might have been more happy.

On the other hand, there's also the danger of burnout, of constantly doing the same thing over and over again for me. I'm the type that needs constant change, so I think I'm more suited to having another occupation be my main profession while comics/art would be a secondary one, where I don't have as much pressure. Furthermore, it's also my backup plan in case anything happens to my main job.

Moral_Gutpunch

^ This. I'd be focusing so much more on comics. And I'd be expanding into more comics and writing more stories. I'd be happier I'm writing more, but more frustrated at writers block

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

Man if I could do it full time, might be able to pull more page updates and actually get deep into doing some long term projects I had planned for years. I won't have much of an issue as long i can also do my zine projects on the side. also would be nice to have some job insurance too along with it lmao. the only danger that could take it away if I get incapacitated for no reason lmao

TaliePlume

If I could do comics as my full time job would be awesome! But all that focus would go only to the comic and nothing else which is bad because I would be neglecting a lot of things and not getting other things done.

AntiBunny

I'd finally be able to tell my whole story and start telling another. It drives me crazy that I have more ideas than I can pursue.

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

In terms of my actual production, I'm not sure doing my comic as a living would change much lol. I already spend upwards of 40 hours a week on it, I seriously doubt there's more I could be doing. So, earning a living off my comic would just be... one less thing to worry about.

#ctparchive #comics #webcomics #indie comics #comic chat #comic discussion #comic tea party #ctp #creator interview #comic creator interview #creator babble

[wesleybates]

10 Top Skills Required To Be A Successful Logo Designer

Good news is that the logo design industry is expanding so rapidly that through 2024, logo designers are expected to face strong competition for jobs. An increase in demand for logo design also means an increase in the craze and value of logo designers. This means now is the best time to become a successful logo designer.

Why Are Such Skills Of Optimal Importance In Logo Design?

Many of us with appreciable design skills probably work for a much different role. Some of us have been waiting to begin their design careers and some of us already there are waiting to reach optimal success in design. Technically expressing, design is communication via visuals and logos are the means of communicating a brand’s identity.

To define design and the present field of current and aspiring designers in the style of American Institute of Graphic Arts, this field is all about the creative and functional understanding of precisely 7 visual elements – color, space, line, texture, form, size and shape, and creating a bridge to express these in their original communication form.

While many logo designers are required to complete a design higher education degree, it is not always a mandate. However, you might need to acquire and hone your design skills further beyond what you already possess in order to ultimately become a successful logo designer.

The Top 10 Skills You Need To Be A Successful Logo Designer!

01. Communication Skills : Superior Interpersonal Attributes

Logo designers communicate the identities of brands via ideas portrayed through visuals and text. Therefore, superior interpersonal and communication skills are crucial to achieving success as a logo designer. In order to come up with the ideal logo you need to first understand the identity of a brand perfectly. And for this you need to have a certain level of improved communication skills. Communication is the key aspect of design in a wide array of ways.

Logo designers are required to come up with unique ideas and articulate concepts in exchange of briefs from companies, clients, employers, colleagues, etc. This requires improved public speech skills in order to submit presentations or understand briefs, and writing skills to submit pitches or proposals.

These skills are crucial for any logo designer to succeed as they would require these to communicate with their clients in person or via a variety of media like phone, messages, emails or even video chats. Logo designers must be able to understand their clients’ requirements or problem areas and be able to convey persuasive solutions with proper clarity.

The Following Communication Skills Are Of Primal Importance In Logo Design:

i. Creativity and confidence.

ii. Consultation, customer service and establishing rapport.

iii. Interpreting artwork for the general public and understanding clients’ artistic preferences.

iv. Interpersonal skills, active listening and receiving constructive criticism about artwork.

v. Sales and marketing skills of communication and collaboration.

vi. Writing and editing communication skills.

02. Creativity Skills : An Eye For Art And Design

Creative thinking is a key-core skill required to be a successful designer. In order to fully communicate the identity and personality of brand via one small symbol requires designers to creative thinkers with edge and eccentricity.

Logo designers often need to creatively express concepts and ideas via visuals or text and then generate active solutions to address clients’ needs via creative means. These kinds of tasks require superior artistic and problem-solving skills.

The Following Creative Skills Are Of Primary Importance For Logo Designers :

i. An eye for the aesthetics.

ii. Undivided attention to Detail.

iii. Balancing the artistry with functionality and practical appeal to audience.

iv. Perceptivity and visual representation ideas.

v. Sketching, mind-mapping and brainstorming.

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03. Technology Skills : Embracing Technology

Being the present digitized world of everything online, technology plays another key part of logo design. Logo designers are required to communicate a brand identity to the world and communicating anything to the world these days requires proper understanding of technology and various aspects of the same.

Therefore, in order to be a successful logo designer you have to be able to master certain specific set of honed skills that involve technology. There are various forms of technology and software these days such as logo maker, photoshop, etc. that make designs much easier than it used to be in an age without computers or software. But easing the design process through these software can only happen if you master their usage. And this might seem tough initially as there are many.

But once you hone your software and technology skills, and put them to use combining a fruitful merge of both, no one can stop you from transforming your logo designing career into a successful one. Try and become comfortable with the usage of design software like InDesign, Quark, Adobe and more like these.

The Following Technology Skills Will Help You Succeed In Your Logo Design Career :

i. Ability to Learn Digital Design Software.

ii. Adobe Acrobat, Flash, Creative Suite, AI Logo Maker, Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign and Dreamweaver.

iii. CSS and HTML.

iv. Quark and QuarkXpress.

v. Photo Editing.

04. Punctuality Skills : Management Of Time

Most logo designers have multiple projects at the same time and they need to be able to juggle those at the same time while also coming up with unique ideas and ideal results. This is pretty hard but if punctuality and responsibility is important to you, along with adept creativity skills, this might not be as tough as it sounds.

In fact this is quite a common responsibility of a logo designer and hence a logo designer aspiring to be successful must have strong time management attributes. Apart from balancing time and meeting strict deadlines, logo designers also must be able to multitask over long periods of time and meet established requirements and timelines.

The Following Time Management Skills Are Of Crucial Importance In Order To Find Success As A Logo Designer :

i. Critical thinking but decisiveness.

ii. Design strategy creation and deadline management.

iii. Multitasking, prioritizing and organizational skills.

iv. Problem-solving and flexibility.

05. Typography

Logo designers need to have a basic knowledge of typography and which type sets fit the best with which visual forms or text. This is a basic must for being a logo designer. There’s not much space to implement a lot of design elements when it comes to logo design and logos generally involve minute visuals that make a huge difference.

Therefore typography is a key element tweaking the minute details of which can either make or break a logo. Therefore in order to achieve success as a logo designer, one must be able to clearly identify and understand the importance of typography in design.

In fact, knowing how to create, select or pair well-designed and appreciable type with visuals or backgrounds is an important skill that comes to tremendous regular use in the career of a logo designer. A good logo designer is expected to be familiar with certain important fonts and stacked with an improved knowledge of tracking and line-height.

The Following Typography Skills Are Important For A Successful Logo Designer To Include In His Skill Sets :

i. Logo creation and choosing fonts.

ii. Spacing and kerning.

iii. Representing figures in space with a balanced perspective.

iv. Modifying designs and layouts.

06. Accuracy And Precision

Logo design requires accurate attention to detail and precision. Since there is not much space in logos for a lot of elements or details, accuracy and precision are of top importance after the brand’s identity and personality. How close a value is to its true value determines accuracy. In archery when an arrow hits the bull’s eye target, that can be taken as an example to determine accuracy.

Precision on the other hand is about how much the repeatability of a certain measurement is. Both accuracy and precision are important skills that a designer should possess and strive to hone throughout their design journey.

07. Analytical Skills

With the new age digitized world now, technology is the key ingredient in the making of almost everything. The designing on paper days are far gone and we are head deep into an age where designing on Mac seems more obvious.

In a world now where fast developing virtual and augmented reality are changing the dynamics of every sphere, the knowledge of technology and analytics is an important skill. Every designer who dreams of success must possess and hone their analytical and technical knowledge and skills.

Adaptability is key in any age and hence this skill is a must nowadays in order to be successful in the design industry of this era. Especially budding designers should keep reinventing at each and every stage of their design journey to continue being relevant and find success.

08. Color Sense

Designers must have proper knowledge about the color palette, understand how different colors are formed or even relate to each other in order to create great designs where colors are employed effectively. Art students are always trained in the science of color theories.

This is because having proper knowledge and sense of color is a crucial skill that every designer should possess in order to find success in their design journey. For example, choosing a right color while creating logo helps to create the potential of the company. Colors give message. Therefore, examining the set of logo colors will help them successfully implement the right colors in their designs and help smooth and enhance their design process.

Color harmony or the balanced arrangement of colors in design and color balance are important skills necessary to create good design. This is because colors play an important role in driving human psychology and while color harmony might make a design, disharmony might break them, leaving audiences even disgusted. This is why color sense is vital if you want to find success as a designer.

09. Illustration

A good design is appreciated. A great design has a strong impact that drives people to take action. Being able to illustrate and just the right amount through design is that key skill that helps create such great designs. The power of a design being able to communicate the exact message set for it to communicate is an important skill every designer should possess in order to find success or even recognition.

The role of a brilliant design does not end with catching the attention of the audience, but continues in keeping them engaged and interested. It makes them come back for more while it lingers in their memory. The power of visual storytelling is the edge that defines the very roots of design and plays a key role in illustrating the right stories to the right audiences.

This is one of the most important skills that any designer who wants to be successful in the design industry must possess and hone throughout their journey. Quite opposite to common fallacies, illustration is actually more synonymous to design and less to beautification. It is more like an ingredient or a knack that a successful designer must have.

10. Strategic Thinking, Usability And Marketing

Strategic thinking plays a crucial, if not mandatory role in the achievements and success of a designer’s goals. This is true in almost every sphere or approach in life. Strategic thinking in design identifies as the nexus connecting creative design ideation and corporate outcomes.

Strategic thinking in the corporate aspect of the design scenario calls for identifying, planning and finally achieving both short and long term business objectives. This is where creative strategies introduce some emotion and abstract.

However that creative strategy should be built over a strong foundation that offers the ideal usability as well as drives customer interest. Hence design strategies need to be a solution based methodological approach that solves a problem or simply provides a solution to make things better for the audience.

The execution and implementation of this will require a mindset fit for such strategic thinking, marketing or usability. This is an important skill that every designer should possess and hone in order to find ultimate success.

Wrapping Up

More important design skills required for a logo designer to find success in the design industry are : i. Assertiveness, ii. Proper application of digital resources to projects, iii. Patience, iv. Creative Intelligence, v. Demographic targeting with visual communication, vi. Composition Balance, vii. Troubleshooting, viii. Negotiation, ix. Networking, x. Photography, xi. Planning, xii. Presentation, xiii. Production, xiv. Project Management, xv. Teamwork, xvi. Independence, Energy and Lots of hard work.

As hard as this seems, if creativity and the motivation to learn are your innate talents, we are confident that you can find success as a good logo designer. So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and put your creative talents to great use!

Happy designing!

Our team of Website Developers in Silverthorne, CO have combined over 30 years of experience. Whether you are looking for application development, a site overhaul, or digital marketing development, we are the team who delivers ahead of time and goes beyond expectations. With our process, you’ll receive a complete website with a smooth functioning, mobile-friendly design that converts customers easily.

[the-desolated-quill]

The Doctor, The Widow, And The Wardrobe - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

I actually went into this one cautiously optimistic for once. While there were a few problems with it, Moffat's adaptation of A Christmas Carol was pretty damn good overall and surprisingly touching at points. (See, I do say nice things about Moffat sometimes. So I don’t want anymore hate mail saying I’m just a Moffat hater. I’m not a Moffat hater. I just despise shit writing. It’s not my fault if most of what Moffat writes is shit, is it?). Granted I wasn’t too keen on the idea of Moffat adapting The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe. I’m not exactly a fan of CS Lewis (misogynistic prick), but I figured I’d give Moffat a chance. It might be really good.

Was it? Well... I suppose it’s not the worst thing he’s ever written.

Things don’t exactly go off to a promising start. Remember when the Doctor said it was time to step back into shadows? Go into hiding? Stop being so big and noisy? Well this episode opens with the Doctor blowing up a spaceship. So much for hiding. And don’t get me started on the Doctor falling to Earth and trying to put on a spacesuit whilst in the vacuum of space. I know the science in Doctor Who has always been incredibly dodgy, but this is taking the piss.

Anyway the Doctor is rescued by a woman called Madge and he vows to return the favour. Three years later, during World War 2 (yes again), Madge and her family get evacuated (to an empty house, which is unusual. Also Madge is evacuated with her children. Why I don’t know. Either she’s a lot younger than she looks or Moffat hasn’t picked up a history textbook in a while) and the Doctor returns to give them the best Christmas they’ve ever had.

Let’s quickly talk about the family. First there’s Madge, played by Claire Skinner. Not a particularly interesting character, but she seems likeable enough. I enjoyed her resourcefulness at the beginning with the lockpick and everything. I also liked her emotional dilemma. Trying to give her children a happy Christmas while at the same time handling her own grief toward her seemingly dead husband and attempting to put a brave face on it. Her husband is played by Alexander Armstrong, who gives a good enough performance with the small amount of material he’s been given, although it’s a bit hard to take him seriously as an RAF pilot considering that he played an RAF pilot in the comedy sketch show Armstrong & Miller. Every time he talked, I kept expecting him to start complaining about how he wasn’t allowed to wear his ‘well hardcore trousers with all the pockets and shit’. Their children are less effective however. Cyril is a gormless troublemaker played by a child actor who gives a performance more wooden than the trees. And finally there’s Lily, who... exists. She breathes in oxygen and breathes out carbon dioxide. That’s basically her main contribution to the story. (And don’t forget, trees absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, so Lily is in fact making a very important contribution indeed).

We then spend some time enjoying some wacky hijinks with the Doctor, including spinning armchairs, taps that dispense lemonade, a train set built into a Christmas tree, and hammocks. While I’ve never been very fond of Matt Smith’s Doctor, even I have to admit I found this amusing. I think it’s because of how humble it all is. The Doctor isn’t being weird just to show off how weird he’s being like he normally does. He genuinely wants make this family happy.

And then it’s off to Narnia.

At first things are pretty suspenseful. Christmas trees that grow their own baubles, mysterious footprints and a wooden building shaped like a giant Playstation Move (remember those?). But as things go along, you get the sense that the episode is treading water a bit. Let’s face it, there isn’t actually a plot here. Sure Moffat tries to shake things up with the wooden statues and Bill Bailey in a space marine outfit. He even name-drops Androzani in the hopes that it’ll get classic series fans like myself excited. But it does little to disguise the fact that we’re basically watching a bunch of people trudging through the snow for 45 minutes with not a lot actually happening. It’s a bit dull. In fact name-dropping Androzani might not have been the best idea because all it did was remind me I could be watching The Caves Of Androzani right now instead of this.

Bill Bailey is utterly wasted. Who casts a brilliant comedian like him as the comic foil? Whose stupid idea was that? It hurts especially because you just know if he was doing most of the jokes, he would knock it out of the park. instead it all feels really awkward and forced. The other two Androzani miners just aren’t very good. And more to the point, what are they all even doing there? They’re using acid rain to harvest the trees, but why do they need to be there on the ground? And why, other than for the sake of plot convenience, did they leave that mechanical walker behind?

It soon becomes clear this is supposed to be an environmentalist story. The souls of the trees wanting to escape from the destructive influence of man. A worthy cause I suppose, even if it is a bit old hat. It’s a pity it doesn’t really make sense. So their plan to escape is to just wait for a human woman to conveniently happen upon them? Bit weak, isn’t it?

And then of course Moffat’s trademark sexism comes creeping back in. When her children disappear, mild mannered Madge suddenly shifts to the Moffat default of a gun toting sass machine (where did she even get the gun from anyway?) because that’s the only way Moffat knows how to write women. Apart from anything else, it’s just boring by this point. She manages to incapacitate the Androzani miners with ease, she manages to operate the mechanical walker despite the fact it takes years of training to do so apparently, and she absorbs the souls of the entire forest. How is she able to do all of that? Because she’s a mum. Yes ladies, it’s your capacity to bear life that makes you strong.

Moffat thinks he’s a feminist. I think he has an extremely unhealthy and patronising obsession with the female reproductive system. Also he doesn’t seem to understand how relationships actually work (which is a bit worrying considering he’s married). Newsflash: A man following a woman home alone in the middle of a forest is not romantic or charming. it’s just fucking creepy.

Yeah, so anyway, after some convoluted bullshit that gets everyone back home and brings Madge’s husband miraculously back from the dead, the Doctor goes off to visit Amy. I was more than happy to see the back of her, so you can imagine my disappointment when she showed up at the end. (And with a water pistol to assault carol singers with. What a delightful person). The episode concludes with an oh so poetic tear trickling down the Doctor’s face while the audience simultaneously groans with embarrassment at such a cliched ending.

Like I said, The Doctor, The Widow, And The Wardrobe isn’t the worst Moffat story I’ve seen. It’s not outrageously bad or anything. It’s just not very good. Also, apart from the WW2 setting and the snowy forest, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe whatsoever. In my opinion, the biggest crime this episode commits is that it’s just really, really dull to sit through. My advice is to just watch A Christmas Carol again.

#the doctor the widow and the wardrobe #steven moffat #doctor who #eleventh doctor #matt smith #bbc #review #spoilers

[john-stints-blog]

Last Ride of the Blood Letters Part 1: 1

Hey folks, this is the beginning of my in-progress novel, The Last Ride of the Blood Letters (Working Title). It's a "science-fiction-like-Star-Wars-is-science-fiction" novel I started for NaNoWriMo 2016....totally failed at THAT, by the way--but I haven't quit working on the book! As a way of encouraging/putting a fire under my ass, I've decided to start serial-posting chapters of the book weekly until I've posted the whole thing. Which means I've got to keep writing so I don't catch up to myself.

I'll mention now--this is FIRST DRAFT. So, typos, grammar, all of that good shit....well, I do my best to edit while I write, and I think I'm pretty decent at it--but if you notice anything, commenting about it would be really nice as long as you're not an asshole about it.

The Last Ride of the Blood Letters

A long time from now, in a galaxy uncomfortably near…

1.

“The show always looks the same to me, T-12. I don’t get it.”

“Considering that most of the consumers of these videos are beings who intend to be chemically addled beyond sentience while viewing them, I do not believe it matters.”

“That’s a good point.”

Rab sat in the pilot’s seat of the Downed Horizon, being careful to keep his right eye trained on the colors and shapes moving outside the cockpit.

Travel through intraspace was, without a doubt, a captivating thing to look at—it was said that more colors than any single being could comprehend passed by as a ship made its way through. In a ten-minute video, a Human would see every color they’d ever known—and some they hadn’t. Even that didn’t explain it.

The shapes were beyond drawing. The colors—beyond understanding.

Rab used to be fascinated by it—he used to stand in the cockpit of the Downed Horizon, staring as intraspace passed by, amazed by it. His old pilot, Cress, had said that it made him nervous to have someone looking over his shoulder—and Rab would have to assure the little Chig that he wasn’t paying attention to the piloting at all—just the show passing before them.

But, like anything, familiarity destroyed wonderment.

At this point, Rab was bored. He’d recorded the last fifteen minutes of their intraspace journey using his cyborg eye—and his patience was wearing thin for maintaining the view.

Sending an impulse to the tiny computer stored in his right eye socket with a thought, Rab shut down the recording.

“I think we’re done with that for now.”

“Are you sure? The journey to Eunthis should take another hour and fourteen minutes. I would imagine there is a lot more material your audience would appreciate.”

“I’m sure they would—but I’m done. Gonna get a quick nap before we drop the cargo.”

Rab pulled up the sleeve of his jacket and pulled open the small flesh-colored flap on his wrist that covered a computer-interfacing cable. Grimacing as he always did, he pulled the cable out, extending from his wrist, and plugged it into the onboard computer of the Downed Horizon.

He’d had the prosthetic arm for nearly two years—but the light tickle of unwinding the interface-cable  from within his ‘arm’ hadn’t ceased to unnerve him. He’d considered having a techie turn off the sensation signals in the arm—or even seeing if T-12 could do it—but there was a part of him that still wanted to be able to feel the other sensations the arm was capable of.

If Rab hadn’t been so cheap with his biological replacements, he would have been able to choose which sensation signals he received. But he had been—and a fully new arm was out of the question at this point.

Rab was struck by how silly—how sad—it was that he was down to this—using his prosthetic eye to record videos of pretty colors for chemical abusers to entertain themselves with.

The Blood Letters had done real work—and they’d made real money doing it. And now? He was delivering barely-illegal cargo to backspace planets and selling vids to life-wasters to keep the Downed Horizon, which was also his home, fueled.

While the video of his past fifteen-minutes uploaded itself to the ship’s local hard drive, Rab could feel T-12’s robotic eyes analyzing him.

“If you’re trying to read my biometrics, you can stop. I’m not sick. I’m not disturbed. The injuries from that last delivery have almost fully healed—just some tightness across the ribs when I stretch.”

“I would never condescend to check your vitals without asking you first. I would hope you would know me better.”

Rab thought he could hear actual indignation in the war bot’s vocoder-induced voice. He turned and looked at T-12.

It seemed so rare for him to actually look at T-12 these days. These months. Too much a reminder of how things had gone. Of what had happened.

His black-metaled, Humanoid form was as comforting as a dog foaming at the mouth, but Rab had known the robot long enough to know that T-12 would never do him harm.

Rab appreciated the company, of course. T-12 was a decent conversationist—and a damned good chess player who would (only) occasionally let him win—but he was still…A robot.

Rab was struck by his own softness—had he not spent nearly eight years completely alone on the streets of New Earth, fending for himself?

Had he not done things he could no longer speak of in order to stay alive? Stolen from people—hurt people—even killed those who would have threatened his existence?

He had done everything necessary—and nothing short of it. He wasn’t sorry for it.

There was no warmth on those streets—New Earth may have had a temperate climate, but Rab still felt a to-the-bones chill when he thought of the planet and his childhood there.

And here he was—bemoaning that his only company was a war bot who would die before allowing him to suffer harm?

Straighten up, man. You’ve had it far worse. Remember how it was when you and Reese—

But again, Rab was struck by memory.

Reese was dead. Nostalgia wouldn’t bring her back. Wishes wouldn’t put oxygen in her lungs—and even if it did, after what that monster did to her—

Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.

Rab has spent the first few months after…what had happened…recoiling emotionally. He’d set the Downed Horizon on a drifting course towards a distant sun.

It would have taken a month for the ship to reach the sun and burn to a crisp, ending his life.

T-12 had been aboard and had agreed to not do anything to stop their fate.

Because T-12 believed in him. As much as a robot could believe in a Human. Rab supposed that T-12 wasn’t like most robots—he was certainly capable of more critical thought. Maybe he’d known all along that Rab wouldn’t let the ship become ashes.

And he hadn’t. That was why they were now on the way to a planet no one cared about to deliver something the Galactic Coalition police probably would have laughed at and allowed through customs without a fuss.

The plant, fairgone, of New Earth was a simple hypnotic—best imbibed by smoking or making a tea from it. It didn’t cause the user any known long-term health problems and consumers of it were often the most docile within their given populace.

Personally, Rab didn’t see the appeal. The drug was useful for relaxing, he’d been told, but Rab had never really understood the concept of that word anyway.

Relax.

It sounded like something in Chig or Nestapian. Foreign to his Common English speaking tongue, hard to pronounce and harder to understand.

No one who grew up on the streets of New Earth took to the idea of relaxation. They all knew exactly what Rab knew—that the second—the microsecond—you did that…that was when the blade dropped on your neck.

#science-fiction #novel #sci-fi #serialized fiction #serialized novel #serialized story #first post #writing #fiction #nanowrimo #Rab #T-12 #aliens #Star Wars #books

[douchebagbrainwaves]

AN ALTERNATIVE THEORY OF ADDICTIVENESS

Why do readers like the list of n things. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were grad students in computer science, which presumably makes them engineers. A few months ago an article about Y Combinator said that early on it was so fragile that about 30 days of going out and engaging in person with users made the difference between success and failure. Kids are good at telling that. Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. Because a good idea in the harsh light of morning and ask: is this something people will pay for. Much of what's most novel about YC is due to Jessica Livingston.1

They'd prefer not to deal with tedious problems or get involved in messy ways with the real world. There's a name for this compiler, the sufficiently smart compiler, but no one person would have a complete copy of it. Immediately Alien Studies would become the YC alumni network. What does the Social Radar, and this special power of hers was critical in making YC what it is. Organic ideas feel like inspirations.2 It was a lens of heroes. Having the Social Radar. Combine that with Pirsig and you get: Live in the future to say this replaced journalism on some axis? It was English.3 In my case they were effectively aversion therapy. But in that case I often recommend that founders act like consultants—that they do what they'd do if they'd been retained to solve the same problem there.4

People would order it because of the name, and you just have to be at least some users who really need what they're making—not just people who could afford to go were VCs and people from big companies. A name only has one point of attachment into your head. It's not something you read looking for a cofounder. VC will feel about your startup is how other VCs feel about it. We did the first thing you build is never quite right.5 They're not part of the training of engineers.6 So unless you discover a competitor with the sort of lock-in that would prevent users from choosing you, don't discard the idea. Like a lot of developers feel this way: One emotion is I'm not really proud about what's in the interest of the shareholders; but if you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be an old and buggy one. Apple is the channel; they own the user; if you want to do will constrain you in the opposite direction.7 If you don't understand YC. Surely many of these people would like a site where they could talk to other pet owners. The bust was as much an overreaction as the boom.8

At YC we use the term Collison installation for the technique they invented. There's another thing all three components of Web 2. In 1958 there seem to have looked far for ideas. If you do that you raise too many expectations.9 For many, perhaps most, graduate students, it remained for students at specific colleges for quite a while. Considering how much time deciding what problems would be good to solve?10 Would that mean too much due diligence? Programmers don't use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. Gradually it dawned on us that instead of trying to make a more deliberate effort to locate the most promising vein of users. We felt pretty lame at the time.11 And now that the web has evolved mechanisms for selecting good stuff, the web as a platform, developers make or break you.

That spirit is exactly what you want to do will constrain you in the long term, because if you don't get that initial core of users, you can make even a fraction of the size it turned out the idea was on the right side of crazy after all. They'll just lose the de facto monopoly on certain types of learning that they once had. They're clearly made more as a way to please other people.12 The most surprising thing I've learned is how conservative they are.13 If learning breaks up into many little pieces, credentialling may separate from it. They just wanted more than acquirers were willing to pay.14 Which means if letting the founders keep control stops being perceived as a concession, it will show up on some sort of push to get them going. That helps would-be founders. My current development machine is no more miraculous by present standards than the iPhone? If you'd proposed at the time. There will be many different ways to learn different things, and some may look quite different from their own; and its very uselessness made it function like white gloves as a social bulwark. It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist.15

And while 110 may not seem much better than me. None of the existing solutions are good enough salesmen to compensate. But I'm uncomfortably aware that this is the truth. You build something, make it available, and if they take it, they'll take it on their terms. That was not a unique feature of Airbnb. The person who needs something may not know exactly what they need. Moore's Law back, by writing software that could make a large number of people want a large amount. They may know, because they read it in high school and no time at all to practice the new bits.16 One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we can warn them about this. YC unique, the very qualities that enabled her to do it mean she tends to get written out of YC's history. There are more digressions at the start is to recruit users, and after 2 years you'll have 2 million.

But when founders of larval startups worry about this, I should be working. The most dramatic remnant of this model may be at salon.17 Force him to read it and write an essay about it. VCs told him this almost never happened. This is an extremely useful question. Airbnb is a classic example of this phenomenon, ask anyone who worked as a consultant building web sites during the Internet Bubble.18 I asked more to see how little launches matter. Fields that are intellectually unsure of themselves rely on a similar principle. Airbnb, we thought, let's make it an effort to understand him. Doctors discovered that several of his arteries were over 90% blocked and 3 days later he had a quadruple bypass. Occasionally it's obvious from the beginning when there's a path out of the bust, there would be a bad sign when you know that an idea will appeal strongly to a specific group or type of user.

But if you're looking for. Actors don't face that temptation except in the rare cases where they've written the script, but any speaker does.19 One wrote: While I did enjoy developing for the iPhone, you could succeed this way. In private there was a new version of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the Bubble, a startup meant a company headed by an MBA that was blowing through several million dollars of VC money each. What problems are people trying to solve by sending you email? Or the would-be app stores will be too overreaching, or too technically inflexible, and companies will arise to supply payment and streaming a la carte to the producers of drama. If you do that you could spend no more time thinking about each sentence than it takes to say it. It's a worrying prospect.20 When you feel that about an idea you've had while trying to come up with a cartoon idea of a very successful businessman in the cartoon it was always a man: a rapacious, cigar-smoking, table-thumping guy in his fifties who wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. Drew Houston did work on a less promising idea before Dropbox: an SAT prep startup.21 But when Bill Clerico starts calling you, you may as well do what he asks, because he is not going to be entering a market that looks small but which will turn out to be more precise than we're going to do initially to get the attention of an audience than as a reader.22

Notes

So during the Bubble. Often as not the sense of the problem and yet in both cases you catch mail that's near spam, but that's a pyramid scheme.

To be fair, the world in which practicing talks makes them overbuild: they'll create huge, analog brain state. In every other respect they're constantly being told that they consisted of three stakes. Or you make it to profitability before your initial funding runs out. But in practice money raised in an absolute sense, if they make money; and if you aren't embarrassed by what you call the years after 1914 a nightmare than to read an original book, bearing in mind that it's bad to do tedious work.

You'll be lucky if fundraising feels pleasant enough to incorporate a prediction of quality in the sale of products, because for times over a series of numbers that are only arrows on parts with unexpectedly sharp curves. That's probably true of the 1929 crash. Sometimes a competitor added a feature to their software that was really so low then as we think.

One to recover data from crashed hard disks.

For the computer, the switch in mid-sentence, but the nature of the founders enough autonomy that they kill you, they wouldn't have the concept of the things we focus on building the company. Spices are also exempt. Interestingly, the more accurate predictor of high quality. Currently we do at least 150 million in 1970.

It was born when Plato and Aristotle looked at the end of economic inequality is really about poverty. Currently the lowest rate seems to me like someone adding a few unPC ideas, they say. Though nominally acquisitions and sometimes on a weekend and sit alone and think.

Don't even take a conscious effort to extract money from them. But be careful here, since that was actively maintained would be to write an essay about why something isn't the last step is to write every component yourself, because they could then tell themselves that they think are bad news; it is. Because the pledge is vague in order to avoid collisions in.

How to Make Wealth in Hackers Painters, what you really have a standard piece of casuistry for this is mainly due to recent increases in economic inequality in the Baskin-Robbins. Then you'll either get the answer to, but in practice signalling hasn't been much of the Nerds. A company will be silenced.

Cit. Starting a company just to load a problem later. Ideas are one of the largest in the definition of property. This is a facebook exclusively for college students.

Whereas there is the kind of secret about the millions of dollars a year to keep tweaking their algorithm to get fossilized. That's why the series AA terms and write them a check.

Economic History Review, 2:9 1956,185-199, reprinted in Finley, M. Maybe not linearly, but I couldn't convince Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this process but that's overkill; the critical path to med school. You can have a better story for an investor makes you much more depends on a form that would scale.

Y Combinator is we hope visited mostly by technological progress, however. Believe it or not, don't even sound that plausible. We could have used another algorithm and everything I write.

Don't be evil. Com.

Some graffiti is quite impressive anything becomes art if you get of the reasons startups are competitive like running, not how much they'll pay.

The ironic thing is, this paragraph is sales 101. Whereas when you're starting a startup to sell things to be employees is to say they prefer great markets to great people. You have to keep tweaking their algorithm to get as deeply into subjects as I explain later.

And even then your restrictions would have been sent packing by the Dutch baas, meaning master. But he got there by another path. It's not only the leaves who suffer. Stiglitz, Joseph.

An investor who's seriously interested will already be working to help SCO sue them.

But there is one you take out order.

That's the lower bound to its precision.

A round VCs put two partners on your thesis. I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to predict areas where Apple will be interesting to consider themselves immortal, because any invention has a sharp drop in utility. Picking out the words we use for good and bad technological progress is accelerating, so I may be exaggerated by the PR firm admittedly the best high school writing this, I can't refer a startup in question usually is doing badly in your country controlled by the Dutch baas, meaning master.

Not one got an interview, I'd say the raison d'etre of prep schools is to do tedious work. Ed.

One way to put it would be on the partner you talk to mediocre ones. 35,560. It wouldn't pay.

Thanks to Patrick Collison, Sam Altman, Max Roser, Trevor Blackwell, David Hornik, Jessica Livingston, and Aaron Swartz for inviting me to speak.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #practice #students #Y #Nerds #type #country #Economic #guy #effort #utility #MBA #ways #Patrick #leaves #story #carte #Joseph #Studies #ideas #Bubble #A #person #path #something #fifties

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My Mother, My Dog, and Clowns

by Dan H

Tuesday, 20 October 2009

Dan is unimpressed by Ashes to Ashes~

Ashes to Ashes is the follow up series to the critically acclaimed Life on Mars. You would not believe how long I spent trying to come up with the best possible David Bowie quote for the title of this article.

Rejected titles may or may not have included: The Girl With the Mousy Hair, Take a Look at the Lawman, Hope You're Happy Too, Beating Up the Wrong Guy, Time Takes a Cigarette, Although He Wasn't There, Your Circuit's Dead There's Something Wrong, and I'm an Alligator. I finally went with the one I went with because the show does in fact feature a sinister clown, and the heroine is totally obsessed with her mum.

Anyway the original Life on Mars was about DI Sam Tyler, who is in a car crash and wakes up in 1973, where he falls in with period-appropriate Mancunian copper Gene Hunt. What follows is basically your classic buddy-cop-show. One's from the progressive, liberal nineties and solves crimes with procedure and cutting edge criminal science. The other is from the seventies and solves crimes with gut instinct and shouting. They, well, fight crime.

Life on Mars worked because it was basically a straightforward cop show with a decent gimmick. Two cops with different personalities, a crime every week, and a framing story about how the main character was “mad, in a coma, or back in time”. The second series didn't work quite as well as the first, as so often happens they got a bit of Jack Sparrow syndrome and decided that Gene Hunt was more interesting than Sam, which made things a bit problematic, but even then it was still a good watchable show.

Ashes to Ashes has several subtle differences from its parent show. Firstly it's set in 1981 rather than 1973. Secondly it's set in London rather than Manchester. Thirdly instead of the central conflict being between a hard-bitten working class copper and a highly trained policeman who was raised in a different time with a different set of values, it's between a hard bitten working class copper and ... a woman.

Now I should probably put my hand up here and say that the problem with being a self-righteous pseudofeminist like me is that you have to be really careful about your reactions to things, because a lot of the time it can be hard to tell whether you're objecting to something because it's sexist, or whether you're objecting to it because you're being sexist, if you see what I mean.

Basically the problem I had with Ashes to Ashes was that where Sam Tyler came across as competent, professional, intelligent, compassionate and generally a lot like Nick Angel from Hot Fuzz, a twenty first century supercop, Alex Drake came across as histrionic, self-centred, and frequently just a bit rubbish. In the interests of self-awareness, I recognize that this might just be my own subconscious prejudices talking, it's possible that I read Alex as annoying and self-centred simply because she's played by a woman, rather than the writers having chosen to write her that way because she's a woman, if you see the distinction.

It's for this reason that the comparison between Sam and Alex is at its most interesting in the first episode, because both characters react almost exactly the same way, but for some reason Sam comes across as behaving perfectly rationally, while Alex comes across as hysterical.

I think part of the reason is simply that because Sam was there first, the audience didn't know quite what to expect, and so his disorientation mirrors our own. His attempts to make sense of his new situation match our efforts to make sense of the series, and his eventual acceptance of it allows us to settle down and enjoy the show.

By contrast, Alex has to contend not only with the audience's awareness of the situation but also her own. She is very specifically presented as being familiar with Sam's accounts of his experiences, which gives the whole series a distinctly fanficcy vibe which it never really overcomes (it doesn't, I think, help that several elements of the show – arbitrarily changing the location, spuriously getting a major character divorced so you can ship them, a fundamentally awful character who everybody seems to love for no good reason – are the sorts of things that would get you laughed off of fanfiction.net). More than this, though, while Sam's understanding of his predicament is left ambiguous, never really progressing beyond “mad, in a coma, or back in time” Alex Drake spends not only the first episode but the entire series fully convinced that the whole thing is a hallucination, which uncomfortably highlights the fact that what we are watching is just a work of fiction, based on another work of fiction, that the people in it aren't real and we have no particular reason to care about any of them.

By the end of the first episode Sam has basically settled into his 1970s reality, and proceeds to treat it as functionally real. This makes you invest in the show for two reasons, firstly because all the characters in it are treated like real people and secondly because the central mystery of whether Tyler really is back in time is preserved. This means that the show can settle down to being about fighting crime in 1970s Manchester, which is sort of what the whole thing was about. Drake's refusal to engage with the 1980s on their own terms makes it hard to care about anybody. You can't care about the supporting cast because you're constantly being told they're not real, and you can't care about Drake because she's so utterly selfish.

DI Drake also comes to the show with a crapton more baggage than DI Tyler. Tyler would occasionally flash back to an indistinct childhood image that he could only half remember, and couldn't understand. His father appears in two episodes, and Tyler's final confrontation with him is quite moving and understated, but for the most part DI Tyler and DCI Hunt just fought crime.

Drake, on the other hand, has awoken in 1981, a few short weeks before both her parents were killed by a car bomb. Pretty much the whole show is her angsting about the fact that both her parents were killed by a car bomb and trying to stop both her parents being killed by a car bomb. Those parts of the show that are not about both her parents being killed by a car bomb are about her angsting that her mother didn't love her enough (her mother who, by the way, she contrives to bring in to every single episode on a variety of flimsy, unprofessional excuses) or shipping her with Gene Hunt.

The actual crimes that the team solve are completely secondary. DI Drake doesn't care about them – she's convinced that the whole thing is a hallucination and that her first priority has to be herself and her parents being killed by a... you get the idea – and the rest of the team seems primarily interested in DI Drake (again, huge Mary-Sue flags go up over the way the rest of the team respond to Alex – Tyler was pretty much ostracised for the entire first series, whereas Drake instantly develops a relationship with Hunt which is better than the one his team have, despite their having worked with him for over a decade).

Drake's obsession with the meta-plot has a knock-on effect of harming the plots of the individual episodes. She's interested in herself, her parents, and her psychobabble. She's not particularly interested in, y'know, solving crimes.

Oh sure crimes get solved over the course of the series, usually by either dumb luck, handwavey “psychology” or simply by somebody else doing the legwork. Worse, she frequently interferes in investigations so that she can subvert them to some other end, like trying to stop the guns that would later lead to her shooting, or trying to bang up the guy that shoots her, or trying to stop her parents being killed by a car bomb. It all makes her profoundly unsympathetic and horrifically unlikeable.

All of this is made worse by the fact that she's a woman. Again, I freely admit that this might actually be me being sexist, rather than the show being sexist, but from where I sat watching it, it felt a lot like Drake's personality was effectively “female”.

This is most telling in her relationship with Gene Hunt. In the original Life on Mars Sam was the rational one (because he was educated, and came from the twenty-first century and relied a lot more on technology) and Gene was the intuitive one (he had a copper's gut instinct). But of course DI Drake is a woman, so she has to be the emotional intuitive one, which leads to completely ludicrous situations where Gene Hunt is yelling things like “we don't have any evidence” while the highly educated twenty first century police psychologist is making wild leaps of intuition on the flimsiest of evidence (my favourite being “no, I saw how certain you were when you said it was him”). She gets hysterical, she cries, she clings to men for comfort and affirmation, she's obsessed with her mother and trying to bone her surrogate father-figure. She's really, really awful.

There's probably good stuff in Ashes to Ashes - the actual plot with her parents is resolved relatively well, although the inevitable twist feels a little bit forced. Suffice to say that her parents' car was not blown up for any of the normal reasons that one would blow up a car, and was blown up in order to achieve an effect which the killer could have achieved better in a number of different ways. Part of me hopes that the next series will pick up, since now her mum and dad are dead she can hopefully get on with actually being a goddamned copper.

We won't find out for a while though, because we've just started watching Chuck, which was half the price of Ashes to Ashes and is actually really good.

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TV & Movies

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Guy

at 13:18 on 2009-10-20Forget your mind, and you'll be free... ?

:)

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Niall

at 11:17 on 2009-10-21Huh. I liked Ashes to Ashes -- and Alex Drake -- precisely because she treats the world around her as an illusion. Far from reducing my empathy, it made it easier for me to empathise with her, since as far as I'm concerned her reaction is that of any sane person in possession of the information she had.

Nor do I really agree that she's more emo than Sam; in fact one strike against the first season in my mind is that the overarching plot is basically the same in both cases, to confront some mystery about the way their parents left them (abandoned in the case of Sam, dead in the case of Alex). And I'm pretty sure she cries less than Sam, too. (Not that there's anything wrong with crying, I just meant that Sam was plenty emo.)

My problem with the first series -- aside from the inevitable romantic tension between Alex and Hunt, which has some nice moments but is mostly tedious -- is that it shied away from engaging with the nature of fantasy and dream in the way that I thought Life on Mars did so well. Much is made of her analytical mind, and ability to judge character -- both of which should be helpful attributes when trapped in a death-dream -- but the writers never really pushed hard enough, probably because they didn't wwant to abandon the crime-of-the-week, even though, as you point out, some of them end up being quite perfunctory.

But I gather this is somewhat rectified in the second season, so.

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Arthur B

at 13:59 on 2009-10-21Maybe this makes more sense if you've actually seen this, but if Alex really believes the whole thing is a dream or illusion, why does she care about the car bomb? The fact that it apparently takes up so much of her time would seem to suggest that she lends at least a little credence to the idea that she can save her parents, which isn't consistent with the idea that she's sceptical about the whole experience. Could it be that she's supposed to be a Thomas Covenant sort, making out that she believes it's all a dream but taking it seriously anyway?

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Guy

at 14:25 on 2009-10-21This will probably be even less helpful than my Bowie-quote above, but I didn't really like Life on Mars and so I haven't really attempted to watch Ashes to Ashes. It felt to me as though the premise of the first show was, "let's make a 70s cop show, but have some kind of gimmick that allows us to wink at the audience about how different the 70s and the present are." And... so it felt like a mixture of some very nice aesthetics with some very ordinary cop show cliches. I like the actor - John Simm? - who plays Sam, but I wasn't really able to believe in him or the world because it felt so pasted together... particularly with some very Captain Planet-esque single-episode-resolutions of complex social problems like football hooliganism and police corruption. I do think the aesthetics are well done, and I kept wanting to like it... without quite getting there. Sounds like I probably wouldn't get there with this series either.

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Dan H

at 16:58 on 2009-10-21@Guy

For what it's worth I liked the original Life on Mars for exactly the reasons you disliked it. I basically really like cop shows, and appreciated the fact that it was essentially a cop show with a cool gimmick. I thought its treatment of Complex Social Issues (tm) was actually okay, at least in the first season - it was a bit heavy handed but it felt like it had a real awareness of the time and place - somebody writing for it clearly really had lived in Manchester in the 1970s and was writing about their childhood as much as anything else.

@Niall

Firstly, what Arthur says: treating the whole thing as an illusion in Alex' mind actually makes no sense whatsoever. It's clear that when she's talking to her mother she really is talking to her mother, and when she finds out the real reason her parents died she clearly is finding out true information. This makes no sense if the whole thing is a delusion.

On a wider level, deciding it's all an illusion is absolutely *not* a sensible reaction to waking up and finding yourself in 1981. A rational response, in fact, would be to decide that *everything you remember* is a delusion - after all those memories exist entirely in your head - and that you really are just somebody who lives in the 1980s. Alternatively you could rationally decide that you have in fact traveled in time. The notion that the world around you is an illusion is actually completely ludicrous however you cut it.

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Niall

at 17:49 on 2009-10-21I didn't say it actually

is

a delusion. The only possible direction for S2 to go in, that I can see, in fact, is to suggest that it is somehow "more" than a delusion, that there is in some sense a "reality" linking Alex's world and Drake's; otherwise they're just going to continue retreading Life on Mars. But either way it doesn't preclude the existence of information that seems "new" to Alex within the 1980s world; it's either the product of her subconscious mind or something more, and either explanation works just fine.

As to the second point, I didn't say it was purely rational, in the strict sense of the phrase, I said it struck me as the response of a sane person in possession of the information she had: that is, an extensive, internally coherent set of memories vastly more extensive than even the most detailed fictional world or documented case of delusion. Particularly when 1980s-world is *not*, as she is experiencing it, internally coherent. Now, the basic premise of both LoM and AtA is that actually, either response is valid; but the scales always felt tilted towards delusion to me, to the point where I occasionally lost patience with Sam's vacillation. Alex's commitment to a particular stance was refreshing.

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Dan H

at 18:34 on 2009-10-21But the information she has is that she's awake and alive in a world which is, in fact, extensive and internally coherent. The fact that it is more detailed than any documented case of delusion is in fact strong evidence that she isn't delusional and that, therefore, treating everything as if it's an illusion isn't sane at all. It's stupid.

Further, as Arthur points out, she actually *doesn't* commit to the idea that everything's an illusion. If she did, she'd just fling herself off the nearest building.

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Andy G

at 02:52 on 2009-10-22Maybe it's like one of those dreams where you are convinced you're rational and in control, but when you wake up you realise you were working on fucked-up dream logic the whole time after all.

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at 11:16 on 2009-10-22Thanks, Dan, for saying everything I had been thinking about Ashes to Ashes. I abandoned watching it after the first series. Mostly because of Alex's useless attitude to what was happening to her, but also the whole "let's dress in all the fashions and actually apply tons of over-done 1980's make-up" as if a C21st professional woman would think a) these were classy fashions to wear to work in a police station b) could bring herself to over-make-up herself with blue eyeshadow etc etc. The whole thing was crass and sexist, the UST and over-concentration on her relationship with Gene reducing the value of the drama overall.

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Dan H

at 22:18 on 2009-10-22The way they dressed Alex did strike me as a bit off, I was sort of willing to give it the benefit of the doubt as a genre parody. On the other hand her mother dressed entirely sensibly.

The more I think about it, and the more I look back at /Life on Mars/ the more I wonder if the problem with /Ashes to Ashes/ isn't a lack of a concrete setting. LoM is fairly clearly set in 1973 in Manchester. I might even go so far as to say that it's explicitly set in the childhood of whoever wrote it, although that might be entirely untrue and is certainly unfounded. Ashes to Ashes, by contrast, is just set in THE EIGHTIES.

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Sister Magpie

at 16:54 on 2009-10-23

The more I think about it, and the more I look back at /Life on Mars/ the more I wonder if the problem with /Ashes to Ashes/ isn't a lack of a concrete setting. LoM is fairly clearly set in 1973 in Manchester. I might even go so far as to say that it's explicitly set in the childhood of whoever wrote it, although that might be entirely untrue and is certainly unfounded. Ashes to Ashes, by contrast, is just set in THE EIGHTIES.

You could have something there. I remember one of the problems they had when they did the US remake was that they set it in LA and I seem to remember people just not getting a sense of place. At least when they moved it to NYC they got closer to the specific time/place.

Also just off the cuff, "70s cop show" is very different from "80s cop show." The first automatically gives me a sense of contrast. The 80s just seems like jokes about the 80s rather than a whole feel and attitude, if that makes sense. It's just one more level of something specific and concrete vs. just a general time in the past.

#Ferretbrain #Dan H #Ashes to Ashes #Life on Mars #Minority Warrior

[adamboden]

Does Drama Really Matter? Are you having a laugh?

I'm not here to bang on about EBAC proposals or defame another Tory MP, but I have seen article after article this year answering the question 'Does Drama Really Matter'? Why are we even responding to a question that is so distinctly rhetorical. Ask Google. It also wonders 'Does theatre matter'? Lists the even worse 'Why does theatre matter to you'? Follows with 'Does theatre even matter'? and the aggravating 'Why does theatre education matter'? Siri led me to an article entitled 'Drama Matters: Does It?' Of course these links mostly lead to articles, blogs and videos from advocates of drama, but posing the question in itself suggests the possibility that it doesn't. Isn't it time to stop entertaining the negative altogether, when the positives are so clear to see in any good drama education, inside or outside of school. Let's change the question. Can I suggest a few.  What would the world be like without the arts? Answer - Even Worse.  What life skills can be learnt through the arts? Answer - Most of them.  What six day a week mundane jobs can be relieved between clocking off and the next impending shift by the arts?   Answer - all of them.  Additionally, while I think about it... What incredible affects can the provision of arts training have on our young people? Maybe that's the one we should be asking. For decades, leading drama providers for young people use the phrases 'have fun', 'develop confidence', 'realise potential', 'make new friends' and in recent years we've started to add 'develop life long skills' and 'explore creativity' to our websites and snapchat stories, as we attempt to combat  a politically induced stigma surrounding the arts. But it's never been enough. Do we need to try a little harder? As arts providers, it's been made clear to us, that as wonderful as these benefits to participants are, the government, and an increasing number of parents,  don't think it's enough. And maybe, maybe... sometimes it isn't. If we are using great teachers, providing arts classes at the very best level, then we are providing all these transformative skills, and additionally, much much more, that even more importantly, is incredibly relevant to the problems currently facing not just our young people, but our society today. Don't get me wrong, as the principal Applied Theatre practitioner at one of the UK's foremost performing arts schools for young people, I'm as guilty at the next school's social media marketeer. In the paragraph above, I probably just paraphrased my own last Instagram post, set under a couple of really smiley children having incredible value for money. It's difficult to start including #grit and #criticalthinking when it's hardly going to get the parent down the road to click on a pirate adventure day. This is definitely not happening overnight.  I'm not pretending here that I'm at the forefront of critical engagement within the provision of arts. Far from it. I spend most of my time teaching, while incredibly educated researchers are putting in hour after hour of tremendous work to try and prove the worthiness of the arts to the non-believers. But that doesn't mean I can't do my bit at this level. Let's be honest, after school and weekend performing arts schools are where this all starts for so many. It is a massive stepping stone in the struggle to prove impact and sustainability in the arts. So it's important that we get it right. We know that teaching children a song and dance number from Oliver can boost confidence and co-ordination skills, AND if the choreography leans far away from the original, we're even boosting creativity. Children have fun performing 'A hard knock Life' and they can improve their vocal skills, but start to talk about the orphans situation in the correct way, AND we start to include empathy in the process, something which naturally declines in the adolescent brain. At Bodens, we have belief in increasing our student's grit and determination. Already articles suggest it has no effect on academic achievements (Daily Mail.. does that count?)  while suggesting perhaps it is more useful after the age of 16. What does that mean? How is that a negativity? Aren't we building students up to achieve and keep on achieving throughout their lives. Apparently not. Just up to the exams. Even if that were the case, isn't it already established that drama helps students achieve in other subjects? Or should I save that for another question? Does drama do anything? So we need the drama to compliment the rest of the education. The Maths, English, Science etc. are an incredibly important part of who our young people become, and so is the drama education. Emphatically. I once worked at Toys R Us with an A Level student. He had four of the things. All A grade. Couldn't sell a 'Cozy coupe' to a toddler though. Maybe not the most important thing in the world, but he also failed to talk warmly to a customer, make eye contact, understand the social perspective of a young black girl's parents wanting a black barbie (this was 1990 and change was on it's way). And to be honest... cozy coupes usually sell themselves. Anyway. Getting back on track... Bertolt Brecht spent a lifetime challenging audiences to think for themselves.Our young people are facing a spiral of fake news in their feeds and have to be able to think for themselves... something which many subjects are actually steering away. You can't get much further from critical thinking than a Scholastic Aptitude Test. Brazilian Practitioner Boal works to heal communities, surely there is a place for his teachings within our own fractured towns. Starting with the next generation is usually a good idea. It was 1942 when Russian Practitioner Michael Chekhov specified his acting teachings were most probably for the actor of the future. Well here we are, and his techniques centre around focus, being in the moment and spiritual awareness. If you ever wanted mindfulness away from a smartphone app, there it is right there. These are merely a few examples demonstrating what the arts can offer in school, after school and at the weekends, alongside having fun and making really good theatre. But you have to have the right teachers to do it. The danger is that by this continued dismissal of arts education impact, and a lack of schools and funding providers taking the subject as seriously as they should, we are losing amazing drama teachers on a daily basis. Of course there are a plethora of young performers willing to turn their hand to teaching until the next acting job arises, and they do bring an amazing inside knowledge of the industry to their classes (something which we always try to include at times throughout the term) But they are not actually teachers armed with the knowledge of what the arts really can do for our young people. What the arts can really, really do for them in the right hands, with the right backing. That's what we need to be going on, in school, after school and at weekends.  After I completed my MA in Applied Theatre at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, I found myself left with this question... If we can make really great theatre with young people, teaching them to act, sing, dance and realise their potential, and alongside that have an opportunity to impact on the rest of their lives: transferable skills, how they see the world, truly thinking for themselves, grit and determination, mindfulness, acceptance (personally can't abide the word tolerance) and the ability to perform in the real world as themselves... then why would we not make the most of it? At Bodens performing arts, our fully qualified teacher's also have training along the way, at every level of teaching, to ensure they make the biggest impact they can. It's not always easy, and it demands planning and passion that is admittedly 'possibly' easier to sustain in a privately funded school where our hands are maybe not as tied.  We need the arts to be backed as the serious subject that it is, so seriously good teachers are teaching it, and the impact is as powerful as it can be. All over the UK there are pockets of amazing performing arts schools with incredible teachers working their magic on the future of your young people, and within schools up and down the country, drama teachers worthy of a Robin Williams film, with their backed departments, are having incredible success both within the teaching of the curriculum and the transformative powers their classes can have. We need to shout out about these teachers, embrace them and embrace the arts in and out of our schools. So let's stop discussing if we need the arts and spend more of our time on why. Because that matters.

#dramamatters #dramaschool #dramatraining #dramabenefits #drama #actingclasses #actingschool #actingtraining #bodens #bodenscollege #performingarts #performingartsclass #Afterschool #sing #act #dance #appliedtheatre

[chocolate-brownies]

There is plenty of science to convince us that social connection is key to well-being. But relationships are complicated, bringing good and bad into our lives. This year’s top insights speak to the practical forces that unite us or divide us—both in intimate relationships and in our communities. They offer some hints about how to overcome anger or loneliness, and help explain why it’s so hard to make friends and offer them emotional support. They demonstrate the psychological forces that lead to conflict and the kinds of environments that promote greater generosity.

All of these insights remind us of the interplay between our inner lives and our social conditions. Ways we might take care of ourselves, like practicing mindfulness and getting good sleep, have implications down the line for our relationships. And the type of neighborhood and culture we live in, in turn, influence our own well-being.

This year’s top insights from the science of a meaningful life move from our most private emotions to the ways different groups of Americans relate to each other. They won’t solve all of our social problems—but we hope this list of discoveries will help you to better understand yourself and the people around you.

1) It takes 120 hours (or more) to make a good friend

A great deal of research has investigated the tricky realms of parenting and romantic relationships. Yet studies on friendship—which can offer so much joy and meaning in life—remain less common.

This year, University of Kansas researcher Jeffrey A. Hall helped demystify the process of friendship-building in a study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. It’s the first to explore how many hours it takes for an acquaintance to become a friend.

Hall surveyed 112 college students every three weeks during their first nine weeks at a Midwestern university. He also gave a one-time questionnaire to 355 American adults who had moved to a new city in the past six months. In these surveys, the newcomers picked a friend or two and reported how much time they spent together and how close the friendship became.

With this data, Hall was able to approximate how many hours it took for different levels of friendship to emerge:

It took students 43 hours and adults 94 hours to turn acquaintances into casual friends.

Students needed 57 hours to transition from casual friends to friends. Adults needed, on average, 164 hours.

For students, friends became good or best friends after about 119 hours. Adults needed an additional 100 hours to make that happen.

How do you know if someone is destined to become your bestie or remain a polite acquaintance? Hall asked people what kind of activities they did with their friends, but there was no one clear path to intimacy. However, a different team of researchers discovered this year that they could predict which people were friends based on their brain activity. Friends, it seems, share not just secrets and hugs but similar neural responses to the world.

Friends, it seems, share not just secrets and hugs but similar neural responses to the world.

These findings offer hope—and a dash of perspective—to those of us feeling lonely and yearning to find our crowd.

“Making friends takes time,” Hall says. “Everyone wants to have friends, but you can’t have friends without making them.”

2) You’re not as good at empathy as you think you are

Do you consider yourself to be pretty good at identifying what other people are feeling? Well, don’t be too confident, suggest four recent studies.

One study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, ran multiple experiments testing how accurately people gauged the feelings and thoughts of others. Some people were specifically instructed to try to walk in others’ shoes, while others were instead asked to do things like concentrate hard or imitate the expression on the other person’s face. The researchers found that the shoe-walkers did no better at accurately reading another person than any of the other groups—and, in some cases, they did worse.

In yet another recent study, researchers asked some participants to look at the face of a person who was watching an emotionally evocative video—and then guess the emotion in the video from the face of the watcher. Another group simply watched the video and tried to imagine how it would make a stranger feel. You might think that faces are an open book, but the people who tried to guess the emotion in the video from a watcher’s face were more often wrong than those who just watched the same video themselves.

In these studies, the most confident people were often the least accurate at empathizing. The problem is hubris—thinking we understand people better than we do and jumping to unwarranted conclusions. But there are ways to improve our empathic skills. Over the long term, we can work on developing our own self-awareness—since, in two otherstudies this year, more self-aware people were better at identifying the feelings of others.

In the meantime, we can better understand others—whether a spouse or someone on the other side of the political spectrum—if we simply ask them questions and listen carefully to the answers.

3) Mindfulness can help you manage your anger

All of us have probably lost our cool at one time or another—maybe yelling at the phone company or at a child who misbehaved. But these outbursts are rarely very effective, and they often leave us feeling ashamed and regretful.

How to handle anger better? Recent studies suggest mindfulness could help.

In a study published in Mindfulness, David DeSteno and his colleagues randomly assigned participants to either a three-week mindfulness course (training in breath and body awareness, open awareness of thoughts, and not judging experiences) or a control activity that involved solving cognitive puzzles, prior to bringing both groups into a lab. There they gave a talk—and then received a scathing review of their performance from an undercover research assistant in the audience. Afterwards, researchers asked them to make a condiment mixture for their critics to sample based on a few ingredients, including a very hot pepper sauce—a way to see how aggressive they would be.

The results? Those who’d practiced mindfulness meditation said they were just as angry as non-meditators…but they added significantly less hot sauce to the mix. Apparently, the meditators were more able to feel anger without lashing out.

Other recent studies support the idea that mindfulness can help us regulate our emotions amid social tension. In one, more mindful spouses were able to maintain lower blood pressure and greater heart rate variability—indicating better recovery from stressors—while discussing marital conflicts than people who were less mindful. Another found that more mindful people seemed to be less distressed when they were excluded by others, and their brains showed decreased activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, too—a pattern associated with exerting less cognitive control over emotional upsets.

These finding suggest that mindfulness could help us manage our anger better—not by suppressing it, but by staying cool while anger passes through us.

These finding suggest that mindfulness could help us manage our anger better—not by suppressing it, but by staying cool while anger passes through us. That’s why DeSteno says that mindfulness meditation does “exactly what the developers of meditation hoped that it would do: increase ethical behavior by preventing people from inflicting harm on other people in a situation where that’s the normative response.”

4) Sleeplessness breeds loneliness

It’s been long known that when you’re feeling lonely, you may not sleep as well. But the opposite appears to be true, too: Poor sleep leads to loneliness.

In a recent study published in Nature Communications, researchers scanned people’s brains both after a normal night’s sleep and after a night of sleep deprivation. Participants watched videos of a stranger approaching them from a distance and pushed a button when they felt the stranger was getting uncomfortably close, while the researchers monitored what was happening in their brains.

After sleeping poorly, participants wanted the strangers to stop at a much greater distance than they did after a night of normal sleep, and their brains reflected a particular pattern: Circuits associated with social repulsion lit up, while circuits involved in theory of mind (our ability to gauge the intentions of others) diminished. This pattern suggests that poor sleep makes people want to avoid other people. Indeed, the poorly slept participants also reported feeling lonelier.

Then, the researchers took the experiment one step further: They asked other people to rate how lonely they thought participants felt by watching videotapes of them. Not only did the raters think the sleep-deprived ones looked lonelier—the raters were also less interested in interacting with them. This implies that poor sleep could lead to a vicious cycle of avoiding others and others avoiding us—a threat to our well-being.

As the researchers conclude, “People who come in contact with a sleep-deprived individual, even through a brief one-minute interaction, feel lonelier themselves as a result, indicating viral contagion of social isolation caused by sleep loss.”

Other studies have shown that healthy sleep affects our relationships by helping us better empathize with others, reduce our prejudices, modulate our anger, and be less susceptible to rejection. These new findings add to that science, demonstrating that a good night’s sleep can help prevent loneliness, too—in ourselves and in those around us.

5) Smartphones can make in-person interactions less enjoyable

As smartphones become ubiquitous, it seems like it’s becoming more and more socially acceptable to use them in different settings. But how does this affect our relationships with other people?

A study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology investigated how smartphones influence in-person interactions by inviting over 300 people to share a meal with friends or family at a cafe. Some people kept their phones out next to them, while others turned their phones on silent and stowed them away. Afterward, they filled out surveys about their experience.

Ultimately, the people who dined without their phones felt less distracted and (in turn) enjoyed the meal more. They were also less bored and in a better mood. In a separate analysis, the same team of researchers pinged 123 students randomly during their daily life—to find out what they were doing, how they were feeling, and whether they were using their phones—and the same pattern appeared. People just didn’t enjoy socializing as much if they were on their phones.

“Phone use prevents individuals from fully engaging in the present moment,” the researchers write. “Despite their ability to connect us to others across the globe, phones may undermine the benefits we derive from interacting with those across the table.”

This seems to be true even for people who grew up with smartphones, like the college students in the study. In fact, another study published in Emotion this year suggests that well-being is declining among teens and that screen time may be to blame. A team of researchers led by Jean Twenge found that teens who spend more time on screens and less time on offline activities tend to have reduced well-being. And since 2012, the first year when a majority of Americans owned smartphones, the rise in screen time has gone hand in hand with decreases in teens’ self-esteem and satisfaction with life.

There was one hopeful finding in Twenge’s study, though: On an individual level, teens who spent more time interacting with friends online also spent more time with friends in-person. Our online and offline worlds are not always a zero-sum game—but maybe, as the first study suggests, it’s best not to combine them during the same meal.

6) Teen emotions really are jumbled

If you have any teenagers in your life, you’ve probably witnessed the emotional rollercoaster that is adolescence. But why is teen emotional life so rocky, and how is it different from our emotional experience at other ages?

In a study published in Psychological Science, researchers from Harvard and the University of Washington asked participants ages five to 25 to look at a series of unpleasant images, such as a baby crying, and rate how much they felt five negative emotions: angry, disgusted, sad, scared, and upset. Their scores were analyzed to see how often they experienced a certain emotion independently from the other four emotions.

Ultimately, the researchers found that adolescents tended to experience many emotions simultaneously—and that they differentiated them poorly. In other words, a teenager might consistently feel angry and sad together, indicating that it is difficult for her to distinguish between the two.

Adolescence is “a period of more murkiness in what emotions one is feeling,” explains lead author Erik Nook.

Emotion differentiation, the ability to know and accurately label distinct emotions in ourselves, is a sign of good mental health. Those with high emotion differentiation tend to use effective coping strategies in difficult situations instead of turning to unhealthy alternatives like aggression or alcohol.  Can teenagers improve their ability to differentiate emotions? Or do they just have to wait until adulthood when, the research suggested, people became better at it?

Another 2018 study published in Emotion found that teaching middle schoolers about their emotions—specifically, how they can get better at changing them with practice—improved their well-being in school. The key seemed to be understanding that emotion regulation is a skill that can be learned, not something you’re inherently good or bad at.

So while it’s true that teens experience a whirlwind of confusing feelings, it’s also possible to help them gain more clarity and feel more in control.

7) We can’t assume that SEL programs meet the needs of all students

This year, we learned that we probably can’t take a “one-size-fits-all” approach to social-emotional learning (SEL) at school. Here’s why.

When researchers Hillary Rowe and Edison Trickett analyzed 117 U.S. school-based SEL studies with K-12 students, they found that the research didn’t systematically report on student diversity characteristics, including gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability, and sexual orientation/gender identity. Fifteen percent documented no diversity characteristics, and another 18 percent documented just one. In addition, they didn’t always analyze the results in specific subgroups to see if they held up. 

As a result, the researchers suggest using “considerable caution” when drawing conclusions about whether SEL programs are beneficial to diverse groups of students.

We also learned this year that traditional SEL programs that are more skills-based and adult-driven may not be as effective with adolescents as they are with younger children. Psychologist David Yeager and his colleagues argue in Perspectives on Psychological Sciencethat teens would respond better to developmentally appropriate instruction that targets their need to achieve “status” and “respect” among their peers.

Ultimately, action-oriented learning opportunities featuring peer mediation or mentoring, student-led projects, and community engagement may be more beneficial to older students, helping them to feel a greater sense of competence, autonomy, and value to others.

Why are these findings important? They remind us that both researchers and educators need to be aware of the challenges that different student populations face, in addition to acknowledging cultural nuances in emotional expression, emotion regulation, and communication style. In other words, we can’t assume that an SEL program will be able to meet the needs of all our students, even if it works for some of them.

8) Americans are divided by identity, not issues

Gun control. Same-sex marriage. Immigration reform. Are you for them or against them?

While you’d probably like to believe that your positions are based on a rational evaluation of the evidence, a wave of studies have found that your voting decisions are more likely to be rooted in your group affiliation.

One of the most recent—titled “Ideologues without Issues”—analyzed data on 2,500 Americans and discovered, surprisingly, that both liberals and conservatives tend to lean left on many individual issues. However, this does not translate into conservatives voting for Democrats who agree with them on those issues.

So, what determines voting behavior? “Americans are dividing themselves socially on the basis of whether they call themselves liberal or conservative, independent of their actual policy differences,” writes political psychologist Lilliana Mason of the University of Maryland. An appeal from a politician to voters’ conservative identity can override their personal desire to, for example, keep abortion legal. Team victory becomes more important than solving problems, which in turn discourages compromise on issues.

These labels go beyond voting. According to Mason, the more you identify with an ideology or political party, the more likely you are to befriend or marry someone in that group—which in turn reinforces those bonds and makes outsiders seem threatening.

Other work suggests that this antagonism is being aggravated by the racialization of party identity. The Republican Party has become whiter in recent decades, while the Democratic Party has become more racially and religiously diverse. A recent study of survey data by political scientist Diana Mutz found that nothing predicted support for Donald Trump more than a feeling of threatened status among white Christians—an insight ratified by several studies from Robb Willer at Stanford University and the Public Religion Research Institute.

These are dire developments, but there are many reasons to hope we can overcome them. These studies indicate that Americans really do agree with each other on many issues—we’ve just sorted ourselves into groups and we have really lousy intergroup communication skills.

These studies indicate that Americans really do agree with each other on many issues—we’ve just sorted ourselves into groups and we have really lousy intergroup communication skills.

“Liberals and conservatives must take the time to really listen to one another, to understand one another’s values and to think creatively about why someone with very different political and moral commitments from their own should nonetheless come to agree with them,” says Willer. “Empathy and respect will be critical if we are going to sew our country back together.”

9) More egalitarian cultures are better for everyone

Living in a country that promotes gender equality may seem like a good idea for many reasons. But does it really affect people’s well-being? A new study published in the Journal of Happiness Studies put that question to the test.

Drawing from the World Values Survey—a large data pool tracking well-being around the world—researchers looked at how happy people were in Western Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. This they compared to specific measures of gender equality in each country, like educational attainment, gender balance in parliament, earned income, life expectancies, and more.

Ultimately, they found that people living in more egalitarian countries had greater overall well-being. This was true even taking into account people’s wealth and income, as well as whether a country was more “individualistic” or “collectivist,” among other factors. Additionally, when looking at changes within a country (rather than comparing countries), increases in gender equality during one year corresponded to greater overall well-being that year.

“The magnitude of the effect of inequality is quite pronounced, meaning that changes in the level of inequality are associated with substantively meaningful changes in the level of well-being,” the authors write.

While these effects were more pronounced for women, men were also better off in more egalitarian countries. Why? Perhaps egalitarianism allows men more emotional freedom, reducing their perceived need to conform to masculine ideals (which is tied to unhappiness); or happier women mean happier men (because of contagion effects). Or it could be that equity helps the economy overall, and that in turn influences everyone’s well-being.

One recent study suggests another possibility: that when people live in more generally egalitarian cultures—marked by greater social trust and self-expression values—they are less likely to feel inferior to others, and so are happier as a result.

Whatever the reason, the researchers conclude, “To the extent that governments wish to promote the happiness and well-being of their citizens, it may be sensible to prioritize equality.”

10) People may be kinder in racially diverse neighborhoods

Some research has suggested that people are more antisocial in racially diverse areas—that is, less trusting and less kind. But a study published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that on a neighborhood level, at least, that might not be true.

The researchers poked and tested their thesis from a variety of angles. In one of the analyses, for example, the research team examined, by zip code, 4,500 offers to help survivors of the 2013 Boston marathon bombing. They found “people living in more racially diverse neighborhoods were more likely to offer to make their homes available” to bombing victims, “even after controlling for distance from the bombing site.” In another of the studies, participants who imagined living in a racially diverse neighborhood were more willing to help people than those who imagined living in a more homogeneous one.

To understand how diversity might make us more generous, the researchers recruited 517 Americans, noting the racial diversity of their zip codes. They asked participants whether they had helped out a stranger over the past month—and then posed questions about how much those participants identified with “all humans everywhere,” compared to fellow Americans, or residents of their neighborhood. The result: People living in diverse neighborhoods were indeed more likely to identify with all of humanity—and the same people were more likely to report having helped a stranger in the previous month.

These studies aren’t the last word on diversity and altruism—results can be contradictory, and there is still a lot we don’t understand about multiracial societies. But during a time of intense social and political polarization, we might find in these results some inspiration and encouragement.

This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, one of Mindful’s partners. View the original article.

The post The Top 10 Insights from the “Science of a Meaningful Life” in 2018 appeared first on Mindful.

#sleep sounds #sleep music #white noise app #nature sounds #relaxing sounds #rain sounds for sleeping

[ianasennus]

[Udemy] Instagram Founder's 5-Minute Cure for Procrastination

Discover How to Stop Procrastinating Using A Simple 5-Minute Technique Used Also By Instagram’s Founder Kevin Systrom   \ What Will I Learn?   Learn how to beat procrastination Learn how to change, eliminate, or create new habits Learn how to manage time properly to avoid dipping into procrastination again Understand procrastination, habits, time and mind management Requirements A Will to Beat Procrastination Description Hi. I’m Bryan Bolt and today you are about to learn how to stop procrastinating using a simple 5 minute technique used also by Instagram’s Founder Kevin Systrom. I’ve now thaught this technique to more than 1200 people from more than 98 different countries all over the world to finally beat their procrastination. And people have been absolutely thrilled by the results they have been getting. I’ve studied the leading researchers in psychology and behaviour and what they’ve thaught me is that the moment you want to change, break a habit, or do something that is hard or scary and you hesitate, your brain goes to work to stop you. We keep telling ourselves that this time we are really gonna do it, but we never do. Something seemingly more important and more urgent always seems to come up, and we don’t get it done. This doesn’t have to be your experience. I’ve created  5-Minute Motivation to show you how to free yourself, beat procrastination and take control of your life, once and for all. This program is also a rallying cry. Every week I meet people who would desperately like to exercise, finish their latest project, who would like to study and finish college, but they just can’t do it. They feel stuck and overwhelmed. Others start, but then fall off the wagon in a matter of weeks or even days. And this also happened to me, in my own life.  Ever since my later years of high school, I had tried to make exercise a permanent habit. But for over 12 years it never stuck, despite my efforts. I just couldn’t get motivated. I went out and I read every book and I listened to every audio and video course on motivation.. I went through my usual “get motivated” routine. I listened to motivational vidoes, did visualization techniques, learned from some of the greatest motivational speakers like Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar and Nick Vujicic… and you know what? And things didn’t change for months..  not until one evening, when I accidentally discovered a suprisingly effective technique, and saw that the changes I made were actually lasting, I realized why the prior strategies I relied upon were complete failures. I now exercise almost every day. I work out at my local gym two times per week and do yoga 5 times per week. I’m really close to achieving and even exceeding my fitness goals. I thought myself how to beat my procrastination with a simple mind trick.. which let to an amazing superpower.. And that’s what I am going to teach you how to do. You’ll get my complete step by step blueprint on how to use the 5 minute rule in your own life and a series of 9 video trainings plus set of powerful exercises to help you beat your workout procrastination reach your biggest, wildest dreams. Inside this course, I’m going help you create your very own 5 minute rule that fits perfectly with your own unique life situation, how to stay motivated during the long run, and the 3 critical rules you can’t afford to break to make your 5 minute rule a success. This technique, backed by the latest findings in neuroscience and behavioral psychology and Instagram Founder Kevin Systrom’s favorite life hack, allows you to beat your brain at its own game and distract it from the ways that it tries to sabotage you.  And this changes everything. Learning this technique is a totally new way to approach motivation and it gives you a powerful, powerful new superpower. And I’m really excited to have it all in one awesome course for you to discover. And I think this is going to be… it’s going to be a life changing experience for you… and I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. Alright, if you are ready to get started, and if you want to discover how you can cure your procrastination in just 5 minutes, then I invite you to join me in this breath-taking new program. Watch session number one NOW, learn the science behind why we procrastinate, go through the program and do ALL the exercises that I’ll give you. It will make a huge difference in your life. Okay, see you inside. Cheers! Who is the target audience? People who want to beat procrastination People who want to learn how to manage their time and mind properly to avoid procrastination pitfalls People who want to learn how to change their habits People who want to understand the ins and outs of procrastination to be able to control it People who want to learn the psychology behind habits source https://ttorial.com/instagram-founders-5-minute-cure-procrastination

source https://ttorialcom.tumblr.com/post/177939379303