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fantroll-purgatory · 6 years

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Xyrida Poales

(She’s baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack. Well, to an extent. I wanted to try my hand at an Alternian troll given all the new information we have after Hiveswap, and who better to test than Kamala’s possible post-scratch descendant? Time for a study in contrasts.)

Let me say right from the get-go that I LOVE her and also that I really don’t have too much in the way of things to suggest, because I love her.

Universe: Alternia!

Name (preferably include how you came up with it and why): Xyrida Poales! As far as I’m aware (correct me if I’m wrong) all of the Alternian trolls have the same surname as their Beforean Ancestors, which would mean that Poales would stay. Xyrida comes from Xyridaceae, a family of flowering plants within Poales, for that double reference synergy! Also it just sounds alien, which I like. I debated “Millet” because I find it charming but it seemed too on the nose.

You’re right, they do share it. And Xyrida works well!

Age: Roughly 6-7 Sweeps

Strife Specibus: Bookkind!

Had she been smart, she might have tried to come up with something like “Grimoirekind” to try and cast magic (spoilers: she can’t, but she wants to) but the comfort of having a book in hand to smack a fool upside the head with is something too natural for her to pass up.

If she’s lucky she still could end up using magic with it. We know that Rose couldn’t really use magic until she started combining items to result in wands, like the Wizard Statue + the Knitting Needles. If she combined the book with something symbolically magical like that, she could end up having some good magic book fun later on in the story!

Fetch Modus: I’m horrible with these. My current idea (to tie into her interest in myth and history) is Interpretatio, from the Latin Interpretatio graeca, trying to relate Greek myth to Roman sensibility. So in order for her to put something in (or take something out) she has to think up some kind of justification as to why these things should be stored together. The more outlandish and silly the answer, the better.

That is a really funny idea. Considering her interest in stories and stuff like that, I can see her doing this… Writing a complicated narrative to justify keeping a collection of entirely unrelated items together.

Blood color: Jade

Another thing she inherited from Kamala, though they don’t take the same stereotypes from the Caste. Xyrida falls more into “ intelligent and steady, they are excellent organizers and planners” than “Naturally loyal and loving” but she she can get to that kind of emotional foundation if you give her enough time.

Symbol and meaning: So! Here we have… something of a dilemma. Kamala was designed years ago around the symbol Hi'iaka:

Which logically her descendant would have the right to lay claim to. However, this was before Extended Zodiac gave all trolls Canon symbols, which given their positions as the group’s Heart Prospit players, means they would lay claim to this symbol instead:

Virlo, The Foundation.

HMM…. I think I’ll just try to figure out how to reform Hi’iaka to fit the jade sign language instead of changing it entirely, because it fits thematically so well that it’d be a shame to muck that up.

Trolltag: acroamaticCamarilla [AC] and viciousVagabond [VV]

Okay, so here we go. Xyrida uses AC as her main, which is in her Jade Blood Color. The name is a reference to her love of dramatic secret societies. Acroamatic means roughly “esoteric” as in “hidden or hard to understand”, but specifically to the teachings of Aristotle, mirroring her obsession with the teachings of a certain other male philosopher. Camarilla means “a small group of people, especially a group of advisers to a ruler or politician, with a shared, typically nefarious, purpose” but this is really just a fun reference to Vampire: The Masquerade, since Jadebloods all seem to be some kind of vampire reference. Xyrida herself is very much a “Dracula never leaves the castle grounds” kind of vampire reference though.

Xyrida uses VV when she’s trying to dig up dirt on the Sufferer cult, and she puts it on hemoanon. She’s about the aesthetic, and she figures it’d be dumb to do that on main. However, she’s absolutely horrendous at remembering to log out of it, so most of her friends have received really strange messages from VV and have by now put it together that that’s her side account.

I love the AC one. VV is a great setup too, though I don’t necessarily see the reason for vicious? Maybe vicariousVagabond instead. Living out excitement through researching The Cult without indicating that she’s a tendency towards violence? Unless that’s the impression she Wants to make, then that’s fine.

Quirk:

[AC]: On her main, Xyrida differentiates herself primarily through her typing all of her dialogue like stage directions, which is obnoxious! She sometimes struggles with finding the right emotion to put down, so her friends have gotten used to not getting replies from her when she’s stressed. She has a big love of CAPITALIZING when she’s TRYING TO SHOW EMOTION which reflects the way she stresses words when she talks. “[AC]: Xyrida [Thoughtful]: the quick brown fox JUMPED over the lazy dog”

[VV]: When she’s hemoanon, Xyrida uses the Sufferer Follower quirk, which according to the wiki is “referring to him [the Sufferer] by the numbers 6 and 9 replacing the b and o respectively in sym69ls, as they resembled the cuffs confining him at his execution” though she’s a bit clumsy with it, so she replaces practically every “b” and “o” with it. “[VV]: the quick 6r9wn f9x”

Special Abilities (if any): While having the vague Jade possibility of “becoming a rainbow drinker (maybe)” Xyrida possesses no supernatural abilities, nor does she possess any physical abnormalities that might give her an edge. She’s really just a girl with a book.

Lusus: I’m currently going to have the girls share a Lusus of a Kamehameha caterpillar, but their circumstances are different. Xyrida’s lusus brought her to a hot and humid cave systems somewhere far away from average troll civilization (though, that’s something standard for jadebloods) which is absolutely littered with carvings and long dried paintings in what should be a dead Alternian dialect. It turns out that Xyrida happened to settle in what used to be a base for the Sufferer’s followers, which is what lead to her lifelong obsession with learning about the cult and her Ancestor.

V e r y neat concept, and very good for building a character foundation for her.

Interests: History, Mythology, Storytelling, Dance, Acting/RPing/Theatre in general

You should add the additional more Specific layer of her really liking romantic drama. A highly specific interest in historical drama, maybe? You know those tv shows that are all about reenacting the romantic drama of various royal reigns? Make her love those. Make her love troll romeo and juliet. Maybe make her fawn over fictional characters who are Her Type.

Appearance: Xyrida wears her hair long, but she ties it back in a long fishtail looking braid that she hates to keep anywhere but behind her. Otherwise it’s everywhere and gets in her eyes and drives her batty. Lately she’s been very taken with the idea of looking ominous and ethereal, so she wears a absolutely impractical black cape that’s lined on the inside with jade, so then when she runs around her hive at night it billows behind her and gives her the aesthetic she’s been looking for. Since procuring her cape (she snatched the materials for it from her Lusus’ chrysalis beginnings) she tries to hide her average wardrobe of greys and blacks behind it, so as to add to her mystique.

Adore This I will keep it in mind while working on the redesign.

Personality: Xyrida is a hermit at heart, and she knows it. And hates it. She knows she doesn’t like leaving the hive, she knows she doesn’t like large groups of people, she knows she doesn’t actually like adventure, or strife, or any of the uncomfortable situations that come with it. But by god, does she want to be that person. Xyrida is hopeless with people, and her close circle of friends have just kind of gotten used to her oscillating moods between expressive joy and crushing dourness. In any mood, she’s always dramatic. She feels strongly and expresses with even more strength, partially because she has no idea how not to. This causes her to latch on to people and then push them away with force once she gets too close. This penchant for theatrics certainly leads to her natural skills on the stage -not that she’d ever perform, of course, but the thought is always in her head- and she loves to put on elaborate one-troll shows for her lusus, complete with singing and dancing and of course a tragic love triangle that ends in pathos and disaster for our wayward heroine. In her dreams, Xyrida sees herself as some kind of character in a really strange and elaborate production. It’s the closest thing she gets to thrill in her life.

I love this so much. What a poor hopeless romantic who likes to be alone. In my heart I really hope she likes writing scripts, too. Ones that she could accidentally post online after hours of panicking about whether or not she should post them online.

Ancestor: The Wayfarer [Kamala Poales, The Mage of Heart]

Xyrida is a big believer in the “you must be fated to follow your Ancestor” philosophy that Alternian trolls seem to be split on. I envisioned Kamala’s Alternian counterpart as a minor member of the Signless/Sufferer cult-rebellion. Her skills at pathfinding surely lead her on the road to what she felt was something moral and greater, desperate to convince her two closest companions to join her. However, much like Hi’iaka and Pele, the Wayfarer found herself in the heart of emotional turmoil, and her closest companion betrayed her, slaying her lover and culminating in a duel that left both parties dead, as the rest of the Signless’ retinue fell by the wayside.

Xyrida is absolutely obsessed with this. To her, it is the height of romantic tragedy, and she’s spent many wistful nights dreaming about how amazing it would be to be involved in something to extraordinary, so climatic, so… storybook.

Very fitting for Kamala’s situation, unfortunately. Poor girl. It’s great for her personality and tendencies, though… I adore her. And it’s a great thing for Xyrida to discover and read about. I hope she writes tragic stories about this, and rps as her ancestor All The Time.

Title: Knight/Witch of Heart

Given what happened in Canon, it seems to be a fact that all trolls share the same Aspect as their Ancestors, but different Classes. As Kamala is a Mage, that’s right out, and doesn’t really work for Xyrida’s whole schtick anyways. I’m torn between two very active classes for her, though: Knight and Witch.

With Heart’s inverse being Mind, Xyrida would find more success retreating inward and moving Witch to Seer of Mind, which stifles her growth as a person (becoming the confident go-getter she dreams of) but plays to her strengths (sitting around reading, considering all possibilities and letting her friends do all the heavy lifting). Much like Jade, Xyrida has something of a learned helplessness complex, where she simply believes that she just can’t do things because of who she is. As a Witch, she’d have to learn that she change herself just as much as she can change everyone else.

Knight is a fun option I’ve considered because Knights have something of a “hidden self” complex. Dave’s sunglasses coolkid facade and Karkat’s shouty, bossy leader self are both akin to Xyrida’s “dramatic heroine caught in a Shakespearean tragedy” persona that she’s created for herself (and partially become out of habit). Knight stretches Xyrida to her absolute breaking point, because not only does she have to go out and do things, she has to save people?! The idea of watching someone get hurt because she did not act would shatter her, but her own tendencies would make that an inevitability. Hence, Knight of Heart- the Heroine gets on her own damn horse, dons a set of armor, and saves her friends herself. (Even if she’s terrified the whole time).

God I’m so conflicted here TOO. I think… Knight might be the way to go. She has such a limited self perception that she needs to develop that potential and learn to utilize her passion and confidence and true identity instead of being so afraid. It definitely flips the sort of dramatic heroine/damsel in distress common narrative on its head and turns her into her own hero, the resolver of her own conflicts. The inverse is Rogue of Mind, which also means she’d have to learn to passively reallocate action and would likely be Required to take a lot of decisions and thought and Active Movement on herself for the benefit of the team.

Land: The Land of Rope and Screams

Xyrida walks out of her hive reluctantly, and finds herself in something straight out of a horror movie. Her hive’s been placed somewhere at the top of a mountain, the sky is an endless black-brown haze, and the wind whips by her so fast she fears she will fall. It’s only then that she realizes that this is no ordinary wind, but the screams of… something far down below. The only way around her planet are very rickety wood-and-rope bridges stretched between vast spaces between mountains, sometimes a sharp inclines. The only way she survive is to take a leap of faith and head downward, with little hope of making it back up. Hopefully she figures out who or what is in such distress, and get them to stop screaming.

Oh this is really good and terrifying and plays right into the idea of her needing to learn to be a hero for herself and others instead of just sitting up in her home passively.

Dream Planet: Prospit

Given that the trolls share the same symbol, and symbol alignment is linked to Dream Selves, then both Poales girls would be Prospit Dreamers. Despite her obsession with a heretical cult of dissidents, Xyrida doesn’t share any of their moral strife or conviction- she is exactly as who she says she is, a lover of history and tragedy.

I think prospit definitely fits, too. She’s Very interested in destiny and following the flow of it, which does seem important to prospit dreamers.

Design time!:

Horns: I gave her the same pronged horn as Kamala, but I had to add a hook for jade themed.

Hair: I am ashamed to admit I based her bangs loosely off of Yuki Cross, because she’s such a dramatic vampire protagonist caught in romantic turmoil of the worst kind. The top part of her hair is meant to look a bit like Kamala’s. I did keep the braid, though I kind of want it to be shaped more like a heart in the back than a simple fishtail braid.

Eyes: I did something I don’t usually do and gave her downward facing eyelashes. It gives her a sort of sleepy and demure look I can imagine in a romantic tragedy heroine. They’re still shaped somewhat like a lotus petal, though.

Mouth: For similar reasons, I gave her lips that are somewhat heart-shaped. With nice tiny fangs.

Cape: I based the bottom fringe loosely off of one of fan-troll’s dresses. I wanted to make sure it looked flowy and loose, like it was made of silk and could be easily flapped around. Complete with nice jade inlining.

Shirt & Pants: I decided to keep them relatively plain and dark, for the mystique.

Symbol: I kept the base of Hi’iaka, but edited the outer curves into the looping fish shapes we see in a lot of Jade signs. I also turned the circles into smaller loops that hook on the straight line. The added bonus is that the reflected symbols are reminiscent of the Sufferer’s rotational motif.

Shoes: They’re really super simple, too, but I based them off of the Disciple’s really simple shoes, so that’s fun.

Thank you so much for sharing her!

-CD

#persephoneanmystery #xyrida poales #xyrida #poales #jadeblood #review #redesign #cd review #submission

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jillmckenzie1 · 5 years

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Wannabe

Do you know what drives me absolutely batty? When a movie doesn’t know what it wants to be. You’d think that would be reasonably easy to work out, right? Perhaps not, but let’s perform a thought experiment from a couple of angles.

Imagine you’re a screenwriter. A major studio hires you to pen the latest installment of their box-office dominating franchise. To do that, you need to figure out genre and tone. With genre, are you making a superhero movie? An action flick? A comedy? Science fiction? If you want to blend the genres, great. The Cabin in the Woods is ultimately a horror movie that has a great deal of humor blended in.

Now that you know what kind of story you’re telling, you need to work out how you’re going to tell it. Tim Burton’s Batman is firmly in the superhero genre, but the film feels gothic and brooding. Goldfinger and The Bourne Identity are both espionage movies, yet one has a lighter and jokier feel, while the other has a tone that’s self-serious and situationally aware. Tone is the color palette or lack thereof.

Sometimes, you’ll have filmmakers whose reach exceeds their grasp. When they know precisely the kind of thing they’re making, they create magic. That’s the problem with Rupert Wyatt. He’s a smart and talented director who made the excellent Rise of the Planet of the Apes and the criminally underseen prison drama The Escapist. His latest film is Captive State, and it pains me to tell you that it’s a mess.

We’re unceremoniously dropped a few years into the future. Aliens have invaded. They are not a wave of rampaging xenomorphs killing indiscriminately; instead, with intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic,* these aliens have arrived to take our resources. What resources do they want, you might ask? We never find out. We do know that they kick our collective asses. How do they do that? With the exception of one scene early on, we never get a strong sense of their technical superiority. Regardless, humanity quickly surrenders, which is highly disappointing.

Ten years have passed, and onscreen text helpfully informs us that the aliens, now known as Legislators, have made changes. Specific parts of cities have been walled off and within these “closed zones” people dig tunnels under the watchful eyes of their alien overlords. Before we go any further, there are two points I need to make.

We never get a good, clear look at the aliens

We never get a good, clear look at their motivations**

We’re introduced to Chicago resident Gabriel (Ashton Sanders), a young man working a job in a data-collection facility. His job is to upload data cards to an alien server. Why? Research, I suppose, but it also serves as an exposition device later on. He’s not a happy camper because his parents were turned into pink mist by the aliens years earlier, and his older brother Rafe (Jonathan Majors) was presumably killed in an uprising. You’ll notice I said “presumably.”

Gabriel’s dad was a cop. His partner was William Mulligan (John Goodman), and Mulligan has taken it upon himself to watch over Gabriel. That gets tricky, since Mulligan is also a member of the secret police, and he’s investigating a terrorist cell. For highly, highly convoluted reasons, Gabriel is reunited with Rafe. From there, we have three plots competing with each other for time. They are:

Gabriel desperately wanting to become a freedom fighter like his brother

Rafe and the personality-free members of the cell attempting to kick off an uprising

Mulligan attempting to stop the uprising from taking place

Captive State is incredibly frustrating, and one of the most frustrating things about it is you can see its potential. We have a film that’s an original idea, that wants to take the idea of alien occupation seriously, and that’s not a dopey Independence Day knock-off. We might have had a low-key classic on our hands that’s not an overblown pain in the ass.

Part of the problem is Wyatt’s direction, but it’s not all problematic. I liked the production design, and rather than everything feeling post-apocalyptic, there’s a sense that technology has slid backward by about 15 years. A scene where a phone call is transformed into a classified newspaper ad hiding a secret message is clever. Wyatt’s film doesn’t want to be a special effects extravaganza. He’s going for a focus on character and ideas.

That’s great and all, but he’s made a film with an obnoxiously dour tone. I’m not saying we need a Marvel quip fest here by any means. What I am saying is that humor is a natural human emotion, one that pops up in even the darkest moments. Here, I think I might have seen one person smile briefly once. The tone is relentlessly grim. You would expect a movie about a band of freedom fighters to at least be kind of exciting occasionally, but the oppressive tone squeezed out all the energy. Speaking of darkness, you can tell that we have a lower-budgeted film on our hands. On the rare occasions when we kind of see the aliens, they are shrouded in shadow, which is an old trick used to hide dodgy FX.

The larger problem is the screenplay, written by Wyatt and Erica Beeney. Again, I’m trying to be positive, and I liked seeing the moving pieces of the resistance cell as they carried out their plan. The things that are missing from all of it are characterization and emotion. Other than Gabriel and Mulligan, none of the characters are interesting or distinguishable from one another. I learned nothing about a tweedy gentleman played by Alan Ruck, and the same can be said about a prostitute played by Vera Farmiga and a cop played by Kevin J. O’Connor. How do you take distinctive actors like that and place them in roles that are so gray?

How do the characters feel about everything, though? What this script sorely needed was moments where the characters are pushing the story based on what they want. We see plenty of processes with Mulligan conducting his investigation; does Mulligan feel guilty acting as Gestapo for the aliens? Resigned to it? Conflicted? Does Gabriel want to be a warrior like his brother? Does he want to rebuild? We don’t need grand speeches where the characters explain their motivations, but we do need to feel what the characters are feeling.

The cast has so little to work with that the majority of them feel like blank slates. I’m a sucker for John Goodman, and in the last few years, he’s done strong work in good genre films.*** As Mulligan, he’s downplaying everything so hard that I could only feel flickers of his conscience when I should have a strong sense of who he is.

Captive State wants to be a heist film, a procedural about people fighting back against an oppressive regime, a coming-of-age tale, a character study about who collaborates, who fights back, and how each justifies their actions. It wants to be all of that with aliens. The film never commits to what it wants to be, and instead of confidently moving in a single direction, it tries to move in five directions at the same time. I applaud Rupert Wyatt and his cast and crew for trying to make an original film with something to say. I just wish they hadn’t made a film with such a profound identity crisis.

*I would have preferred to give The War of the Worlds another read rather than seeing this film. I thought about that a lot.

**This annoyed me. Yes, I’m aware that this film is pushing hard for a tone of verisimilitude, and yes, I’m aware that if we were really invaded, we’d likely have no idea regarding any of the details of the aliens.

***For a fairly recent and outstanding Goodman performance, check out 10 Cloverfield Lane.

from Blog https://ondenver.com/wannabe/

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jeroldlockettus · 7 years

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Time to Take Back the Toilet (Rebroadcast)

Muzak masks awkward silence in an elevator; shouldn’t public bathrooms provide a sonic cover for awkward noise? (Photo: Kevin Zamani / flickr)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is a rebroadcast of “Time to Take Back the Toilet.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

Public bathrooms are noisy, poorly designed, and often nonexistent. What to do?

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

* * *

Stephen J. DUBNER: Levitt, here’s a question for you today. Would you agree that you and I are fundamentally pretty different people?

Steve LEVITT: Yes.

DUBNER: OK, I would too. But of all the ways in which we’re different, what would you say is maybe the biggest difference?

LEVITT: Probably that you like people and I don’t.

DUBNER: Yeah, that’s not what I was thinking of.

LEVITT: OK …

DUBNER: Here’s the one I’m thinking [of]: you seem to be almost entirely unaffected by your physical surroundings.

LEVITT: That’s completely true.

DUBNER: Whereas you ridicule me for being too sensitive. Like, if the lights go out or something, you’re like, “Dubner, just keep working. What’s the problem?” But when you’re working or even filling out your horse-betting stuff, you could be in the desert, you could be in a room with 150 decibels. You’re a machine. It doesn’t matter to you. Would you agree that’s a pretty fundamental difference between us?

LEVITT: I think so. But there’s a downside to it, too, which is that I when I get dragged to nice places, I never appreciate them.

DUBNER: You don’t know how to behave.

LEVITT: Well, if I don’t care if I’m in a dingy pit or standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, then I get the feeling that other people appreciate things that I don’t appreciate.

DUBNER: Maybe so. You make up for it in other ways. Here’s a scenario that really bothers me that I want to talk to you about today — but you may be the wrong guy to talk about it to because I have a feeling it doesn’t bother you at all. You and I both travel a lot, fly a lot, and here’s my thing: airport restrooms particularly — but public restrooms of all types — are usually totally devoid of any music or other masking sounds. You walk in, and it’s like a library, punctuated by the sound of traveling men using toilets.

It drives me batty. Does that bother you? Do you even know what I’m talking about?

LEVITT: No. It doesn’t upset me the way that I’m sure it upsets you.

DUBNER: Have you noticed it? We don’t need to get too graphic here, although with radio, it’s probably easier to get graphic. You walk into a men’s room and, let’s say, there’re three zones, right? There’s the sink zone, the urinal zone and the stall zone. It’s the stall zone that I’m talking about.

LEVITT: I try to stay away from the stall zone. I’m pretty good at staying away from the stall zone.

DUBNER: Believe me, I do too. But audio waves travel into the sink zone and the urinal zone and the in-and-out zone. When I hear what’s going on in that stall zone, I think, “How can I invest more heavily in gastroenterology because the needs of American men are plainly huge?” It just sounds like a MASH unit of people in gastric distress and I hate it. You’ve never been bothered by this?

LEVITT: It’s disgusting, but honestly, I really try to avoid restrooms where there are lots of men doing fireworks. Maybe we’re not so different in that particular regard. It’s just that maybe my abilities to avoid these places are stronger than yours.

* * *

Here’s what confuses me: just about every public place you go to these days, you’ll hear music being played, or some kind of a soundscape. Stores, restaurants, the doctor’s office, the gym. The airport, the rental-car counter at the airport, the gas pump outside the rental-car counter at the airport. So that’s a lot of sound to deal with. And the one place you want to hear music — at least the one place I want to hear music — the public restroom: it for some reason features only the sounds of nature, which are, to some ears, unsettling.

Why is that? And how does all that music in other public places affect us? Does it really make us buy more in stores and eat more in restaurants? If you want to know the answer to questions like that, you have start with Ronald Milliman. He spoke to us from his cabin on Lake Barkley, Kentucky.

MILLIMAN: I’m in the western part of Kentucky.

Milliman’s retired; he spends a lot of time here, fishing.

MILLIMAN: Mostly bluegill and redear and bass and catfish. I like to fish for and catch catfish. Pretty much, I just like to fish. I just like being out on the lake. You go out in the early morning. It’s just so flat and peaceful. You hear the birds and hear the waves splash against the side of the boat. It’s just really nice.

Milliman was a professor of marketing at Western Kentucky University. Before that, when he was getting his Ph.D., in Arizona, he worked at a radio station.

MILLIMAN: One of the assets that we had at the radio station was a FM subcarrier, where we could transmit background music into stores, doctors and dentists office[s], and that sort of thing.

This got Milliman to wondering …

MILLIMAN: I wanted some idea of what music affected…what kind of music to provide…and there wasn’t much of any research out there at all on it.

Muzak, the company that got famous for making background music, or elevator music, did make some research claims. But Milliman found it completely unscientific. He says they claimed their music did amazing things…

MILLIMAN: Reducing turnover, increasing productivity, helping in terms of job contentment — a number of things like that. As I recall, they even had some research that showed that it could increase the milk productivity of cows and the egg productivity of chickens — when I got into it, [it turns out it] wasn’t very scientific. But at any rate, because there was no research particularly done in that area, it’s something that I made note of and thought, “Gee, this is something that I could pursue.”

Now, there’s one more reason why Ronald Milliman might have been a little more interested than the average person in measuring the effects of sound:

MILLIMAN: I had perfect vision until I was 8. Through a very rare illness that I contracted when I was 8, I lost most of my vision. I had partial vision from about 8 to 17. Then, I lost my eyesight at 17 — the rest of what I had — through a very freak wrestling accident. I was a varsity wrestler on the high school wrestling team. I was totally blind through undergraduate and graduate school. Then there was a doctor in Houston that felt he could restore my vision.

By now Milliman was in his first academic job, at the University of Texas-Arlington. He went in for surgery:

MILLIMAN: … and sure enough, that did restore my vision. As a matter of fact, I had incredible vision. I had 20/15 vision, or 20/10 vision, or something. 20/20 is normal vision and I had much better than that for a while. But it was a real challenge to keep it because there were lots and lots of complications that I wasn’t hardly prepared for.

With these complications came many more surgeries — more than 50.

MILLIMAN: I had vision for about four years or thereabouts. I was actually driving a car and everything. Then, again, through complications, I lost it totally and permanently. So I’ve actually lost my eyesight twice.

Blind again, he turned back to sound for his research. There was a grocery story in the Dallas/Fort Worth area …

MILLIMAN: It just happened that I knew the manager of the store some…

This manager agreed to let Milliman set up an experiment.

MILLIMAN: We wanted to know whether the background music affected behavior in any way.

Here’s how they set it up. They’d play fast music, slow music, and no music, and see if it changed how people shopped.

MILLIMAN: Then comes the question, “How do you define slow and how do you define fast?”

Milliman and the other researchers played music for a group of people who shopped at the grocery store. They asked them: do you think this is slow music? Is this fast?

MILLIMAN: As I recall, the slow music was something like 72 or 74 beats per minute or slower.

So that would be something like this.

youtube

Or this:

youtube

MILLIMAN: And the fast music was something like 94, 96 beats per minute and faster.

Like … this:

youtube

Or this…

youtube

Now, the actual music they used in the experiment, slow or fast, would have no lyrics.

MILLIMAN: Then we positioned graduate students, [who] appeared to be ordinary customers, like they were looking at a can of peas or whatever.

The grad students were equipped with stopwatches and notepads. They watched people and timed them as they shopped. One day they’d play fast music; another day, slow music; another day, no music at all. This went on for roughly two months, so they’d have plenty of observations. They also stopped shoppers as they came out of the store and asked them: “Do you remember if there was music playing in the store when you were shopping?” Here’s what Milliman wanted to know:

MILLIMAN: … how fast people traverse through the store, if it made any difference with how much they purchase or what they purchased. But the other part of the study was, “How aware of the music were they when they were in the store?” Were they real aware of the music playing or were they unaware of the music playing?

So what did they learn?

MILLIMAN: What we found was that with the fast music, they did traverse through the store more quickly.

What do you think happens when people move through a store more quickly? Yep: they don’t buy as much stuff. But what happens when you play the slow music?

MILLIMAN: Now, that’s a really interesting one because sales were significantly greater. I say significant. I mean literally — in the scientific, statistical sense — significantly greater sales with the slower music playing than with the fast, background music playing.

With fast music playing, the Dallas grocery store did about $12,000 in sales each day. With slow music: $16,000. Interestingly, most of the shoppers, when asked upon leaving the store about hearing music, didn’t recall whether or not they heard music. Furthermore, there wasn’t much of a statistically significant difference between no music and slow music, or no music and fast music, but between slow music and fast music, a difference. How did Milliman explain this?

MILLIMAN: The theory was — and we have reason to believe this is pretty accurate — is that people simply, as you slowed them down, saw more that they remembered that they needed. They saw more that they wanted. Sometimes, like you’ve probably done when you’ve shopped, you’re into the aisle and you glance down the aisle to see if there’s anything down there that you want or need.

For Milliman, the takeaway from this one study was pretty obvious:

MILLIMAN: It’s clear that music does affect people’s behavior in a lot of different ways.

This study was one of the first in the field that would come to be known as “atmospherics” — how sound and smell and other factors influence our behavior. Milliman did a ton of work in this area. One study was similar to grocery-store study but this time he did it in a restaurant. There, too, he found that slow music makes people linger — which is great news if you’re trying to sell more alcohol, or maybe dessert. And if you need to turn over tables faster? Yeah — bring on the fast music.

By now there’s been enough research that we know a good bit about how we’re affected by different types of music and other sound. The right music can reduce stress for a patient waiting for surgery; it can help a kid do better on a math test; classical music leads people to buy more wine than top 40 music. But the wrong music — or the wrong sounds — can be bad for you too. If you work in an “open office,” for instance, also known as a cubicle farm — you’re more likely to be stressed out, less productive, less satisfied.

That’s in large part because you’re getting a lot of stimuli that you didn’t ask for — like other people’s conversations and phone calls. And you can’t simply shut these out, no matter how good you think you are at concentrating. We all have a limited amount of auditory bandwidth and, as the sound expert Julian Treasure likes to say, “We don’t have any earlids.”

This becomes more of a problem when you’re hearing someone else’s noise, someone else’s music, everywhere you go. Everywhere except the one place where you want some music — the louder, faster the better, please. The bathroom. It’s time to take back the toilet.

WOMAN: Anything. Literally, anything would be better than nothing.

Harvey MOLOTCH: There used to be an Italian restaurant in California that I would go to and they piped in Italian lessons. While you’re in the bathroom, you’re hearing, “Can you tell me where’s the train station?”

WOMAN [Italian]: Mi sa dire dov’è la stazione ferroviaria?

* * *

So there’s a lot of music in public places — in part because researchers have found that music has a strong influence on how people behave in public places. So you can see why they play music in stores and restaurants and airports and even surgical suites. But why don’t they play music in public restrooms? That’s the question we’re asking today. I know it may strike you as juvenile, the kind of thing no one in his right mind would ask — but we’re not the only people who’ve thought about this …

MOLOTCH: The toilet is, in a way, my landing spot because it’s where issues of city, artifact, and design all come together; particularly, in the public restroom.

That’s Harvey Molotch. He’s a professor of sociology and metropolitan studies at New York University. Molotch’s broad mandate is urban design but he is, more narrowly, a toilet scholar. One of his books is called: Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing.

MOLOTCH: Our knowledge of the history of public restrooms is very scattered. But one of the things that we do learn is the extraordinary variation that there has been in the history of the world. In the Roman Empire, they had quite marvelous plumbing for their time —the aqueducts and so forth. One of the things they applied that to was to public restrooms. The baths. The baths were, in general, a very social place. People went together. They met up together. Some of the rooms held as many as 60 people…

The setting, Moloch says, was quite beautiful, with mosaics on the floor and walls …

MOLOTCH: The toilets are arranged in a semicircle. They’re built of a single slab of stone with a series of holes. The people are sitting certainly as close together as we sit when we sit on toilets in public restrooms.

So there were no stalls — at least not what we think of as stalls today.

MOLOTCH: One of the interesting things is that they wore togas. The toga was their stall. By wearing the toga, you have a way of keeping your private parts private even as you’re sitting on the toilet.

But Molotch agrees that modern public restrooms can be pretty unpleasant. And we shouldn’t really expect them to get better any time soon.

MOLOTCH: One reason it doesn’t change is that toilets, in general, in public restrooms — there’s a taboo around them. Where there’s a taboo and you can’t speak freely about something, it becomes a place where there’s not accountability. Whereas the iPhone — we can question, “How come it’s like this? How come it’s like that? Wouldn’t it be better like this or that?” Or a sofa for the living room. You can’t really talk through a toilet.

Now, it’s one thing for someone like me, the resident of the richest country in the history of the world, to complain about the setup of public restrooms. But let’s be real: this bathroom taboo that Molotch is talking about has much, much, much bigger implications.

MOLOTCH: The distribution of toilets of any kind is very skewed. In some countries, India being a prime example — Pakistan — there is an absence of facilities. What that means is that people go in the open. They use whatever trench they can find, whatever hole there might be. This is a problem with sanitation and it means that the mixing of human feces with water supplies happens and babies die. Almost 50% of the population of India is defecating under those circumstances.

One of the other aspects: it means that women are put at a huge disadvantage and subjected to security worries because they’ve got to make their way in the night, very often in darkness, to go to the common place where this is done because of other cultural problems, which is that the very idea that women are going to the toilet itself is a taboo and can’t be faced front-on.

This taboo, Molotch argues, extends to high places, very high places. And that’s a problem.

MOLOTCH: For the President of the United States to go to bat for public restrooms in, say, India would be humiliation for him. We’ve got to get the topic on the agenda locally, nationally and globally.

There are also practical issues — issues of priority, and cost. Harvey Molotch has served on many building committees…

MOLOTCH: Even working with the most prominent architects of the world, never is there discussion about the substance of the toilet stalls. As a result, the lowest person typically on the totem pole of the architectural firm is given that job. Then they call up the mass supplier, and they just order the same stuff.

Joel BECKERMAN: One of the things that is interesting is thinking about public restrooms.

That’s Joel Beckerman, a composer and sound designer.

BECKERMAN: Think about all the architects and energy that gets put into designing the physical locations that we go to, whether its bus stations, restaurants, or hotels. The vast majority of these instances, they are not putting nearly the same amount of thought into the sound of those spaces; which includes what materials are being used because that determines the reverberation of sound.

Beckerman’s company, Man Made Music, creates soundscapes for all kinds of spaces, from small to very large, like the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium. He’s written a book about this, called Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy. He has a lot of examples of how sound functions in ways we wouldn’t necessarily think about.

BECKERMAN: In Moscow, their subway is a circle. It’s basically a big loop. One of the ways they give you information in an instant is that one direction, I’m not sure whether it’s clockwise or counterclockwise, all the announcements are made by a male voice. Then, in the opposite direction in the loop, it’s made by a female voice. Even if you can’t understand exactly what’s being said, you know which direction that train is going.

Beckerman agrees with Harvey Molotch that the sound of the average American public restroom is sub-optimal. They start with one obvious problem: the walls of the stalls aren’t really walls. They don’t go all the way up to the ceiling or down to the floor.

MOLOTCH: I’ve lived in Britain. I’ve lived in Germany. They have walls. Italy has walls. Stall walls. That’s step one. Then, if you want to get really groovy, like the Japanese…

It may not surprise you to learn that bathroom design in Japan is rather advanced. For instance: the “sound princess.” As the story goes, Japanese women were so put off by the silence in public bathrooms that they’d flush the toilet over and over again to mask the noise. Which worked but also used a lot of water. The solution: a device that mimics the sound of the toilet flushing. The Japanese use sound in all sorts of interesting ways. Many towns in Japan have intercoms mounted on public buildings through the city. This one plays a daily message, around sunset.

INTERCOM [Japanese]: This is Matsudo City Hall…

That’s in Matsudo, about an hour outside of Tokyo. The woman’s voice is basically telling kids “it’s time to go home.” The intercoms are networked around cities to serve as an emergency broadcast system, in case of earthquakes, for instance. Here in the U.S., we too have a history of sound design in public places. Joel Beckerman again:

BECKERMAN: The story is that elevator music began when elevator manufacturers realized that people were very uncomfortable being in close quarters in a closed room, essentially.

So you have to ask yourself: if we felt the need to mask uncomfortable silence in an elevator, wouldn’t you think we’d feel the need to mask uncomfortable noise in a public restroom? We stopped in to a ladies’ room — well, outside of a ladies’ room — to ask people what they’d like to hear inside:

Madelyn MAHON: What do you think would be the best kind of music in a bathroom? Like, what would you like to listen to?

WOMAN: Anything. Literally, anything would be better than nothing.

WOMAN: Maybe classical music.

WOMAN: The Beatles.

MAHON: Always or different kinds?

WOMAN: Early Beatles in a public bathroom, I think, would always be appropriate.

WOMAN: I would probably choose to hear Hall & Oates.

WOMAN: Beyonce 24/7.

WOMAN: I feel bad relegating them to the bathroom because I love them so much, but I love them so much that I would want to hear them that frequently.

WOMAN: Depends on the type of music. Like elevator music… everyone complains about that so bathroom music would turn into elevator music. Everyone would be like, “This sounds like bathroom music!”

The sociologist Harvey Molotch, in his tireless pursuit of toilet improvement, once came across something he loved …

MOLOTCH: There used to be an Italian restaurant in California that I would go to and they piped in Italian lessons. While you’re in the bathroom, you’re hearing, “Can you tell me where’s the train station?”

WOMAN: Can you tell me where the train station is?

MOLOTCH: …and then you hear it in Italian.

WOMAN [Italian]: Mi sa dire dov’è la stazione ferroviaria?

MOLOTCH: There are many ways to do it that are amusing, charming and you can have new groups audition and create new acts.

And Joel Beckerman would like to improve the sonic design of airport restrooms:

BECKERMAN: In a plane terminal, you’d want to be relaxed a little bit. People generally are a little bit nervous when they go flying. What could we do in terms of putting quiet ambiences in that would mask out the unwanted sound and actually relax people before they got on a plane?

I went back to Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author, to see where he landed on this …

DUBNER: OK. Even you agree that it’s not a great thing to listen to, especially if you’re an innocent bystander. Here’s the paradox: it’s not great to listen to and yet, there’s very rarely music or other masking noise in public restrooms. Whereas in every other public area — hotel lobbies, airports, stores, restaurants, etc. — there’s a lot of music in public these days; which can be great or horrible depending on your preference.

Don’t you think it’s a little bit strange that the one place that I, at least, want a lot of music, [it] doesn’t exist and other places where we might not want it, it does?

LEVITT: Given your description, how loud would the music have to be in order to protect you from the sounds you’re afraid of? Pretty loud, right?

DUBNER: It would sound like the loudest rave you’ve ever been to.

LEVITT: I think that’s part of the problem. If there was subtle music that was interfered with by the sounds that disturb you so much, that would only enhance your rage, wouldn’t it?

DUBNER: If it were subtle music? You’re saying it would somehow highlight or punctuate the bad sounds?

LEVITT: Exactly.

DUBNER: Really?

LEVITT: I don’t know. It would be hard. From what you’re describing, the sounds are so loud that they’re louder than conversation, right?

DUBNER: Yeah. But there’s something about them as pieces of punctuation in the midst of this pronounced silence that, to me, draws that much more attention to them. The restroom at WNYC, the radio station in New York where I do this show — you walk in there and it really is like a funeral home. You just hear little pitter patter and then there’s a couple stalls back there and even if you’re just going to wash your hands, you get, “BLAM! BLAM!”

Then, the sounds of human distress and I’m thinking, “This doesn’t need to happen. This could be taken care of.” We’ve put men on the moon. We’ve done a lot of amazing things. Maybe this is a problem that no one cares about but me and it’s not worth thinking about, but if we were to put your brain on it, any thoughts? Do you think it’s worth thinking about? Do you think the public restroom is a place that deserves a little bit of our curatorial attention?

LEVITT: No. I think this is like the penny: it’s something only you care about. No one else cares about it — getting rid of the penny. But I don’t know. No. I don’t lose any sleep over it. Maybe I will now. Maybe every time I go in a bathroom I’ll be primed to be upset by it. But I just thought the answer.

DUBNER: Tell me.

LEVITT: Do you own a set of headphones?

DUBNER: Yeah. Believe me I wear the noise-cancellers. I do!

LEVITT: Why don’t you just wear your headphones and turn up your music really loud. Done. You don’t mind the smell though?

DUBNER: I don’t want to even get into the smell.

LEVITT: For me, the smell would be at the top of the list and the sound would be quite secondary. I would trade smell or sight for sound, myself.

DUBNER: Sight? Who’s bringing in sight? Now you’re polluting this already bad idea. You’re taking this already bad idea to a much darker place.

Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio: we all know about the huge decline in manufacturing jobs.

David AUTOR: We would conservatively estimate that more than a million manufacturing jobs in the U.S. were directly eliminated as a result of China’s accelerating trade penetration in the United States.

Donald TRUMP: We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing.

It’s the same story throughout most of the big, wealthy Western economies. But not this one:

Jens SUEDEKUM: We don’t hear that anti-globalization, anti-China rhetoric.

How did Germany come out on top?

Daniel STURM: Germany has a very unusual economic geography.

Uwe REINHARDT: In Germany, the unions have representatives on the board of the company.

Dalia MARIN: Germany is not a shareholder economy. It’s a stakeholder economy.

How did “the sick man of Europe” become its superstar? That’s next time, on Freakonomics Radio.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Suzie Lechtenberg. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Greg Rosalsky, Stephanie Tam, Eliza Lambert, Emma Morgenstern, Harry Huggins and Brian Gutierrez; the music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook, or via email at [email protected].

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Joel Beckerman, composer and sound designer.

Steve Levitt, professor of economics at the University of Chicago.

Ronald Milliman, retired professor of marketing at Western Kentucky University.

Harvey Molotch, professor of social and cultural analysis and sociology at New York University.

RESOURCES

“The Effects of Background Music on Primary School Pupils’ Task Performance,”Susan Hallam, John Price and Georgia Katsarou (2010)

“The Influence of Background Music on the Behavior of Restaurant Patrons,” Ronald Milliman (1986).

“The Influence of Background Music on Shopping Behavior: Classical Versus Top-Forty Music in a Wine Store,” Charles Areni and David Kim (1993).

“Music reduces stress and anxiety of patients in the surgical holding area,” M.J. Winter, S. Paskin and Taejanae Baker (1994).

Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy by Joel Beckerman and Tyler Gray (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing by Harvey Molotch and Laura Noren (NYU Press, 2010)

“Using Background Music to Affect the Behavior of Supermarket Shoppers,” Robert Milliman (1982).

EXTRA

Slavoj Žižeck on toilet design.

The post Time to Take Back the Toilet (Rebroadcast) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/time-toilet-rebroadcast/

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