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theradioghost · 4 years

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Do you have any podcast recs that are super easy for those of us with audio processing problems? For me specifically that means one voice (or maybe two if they’re very distinct) and minimal complexity in the soundscaping, though if you have recs that don’t fit those that you think might apply to other people w/ different audio processing issues you can talk about those too! :)

I can certainly try! I feel as though I should put it out there that I often have a difficult time gauging where a podcast sits re: audio processing/HOH listeners; the literal entirety of my day job is being good at telling what people are saying in audio, and my own audio processing problems mostly just result in my near-inability to keep up with actual plays, so if any of these are misjudgements on those terms I apologize in advance.

* means that I know there are also transcripts available for the podcast in question!

SAYER: scifi dark comedy/horror. In a morally questionable tech corporation’s moonbase facilities, advanced artificial intelligence SAYER directs employees about their daily routines; this then turns over time into possibly the best story about AI I’ve ever heard. Especially in the first three seasons, virtually all speaking is done by one voice. (Caveat that a few other characters come in later, and they’re actually all voiced by one guy with different filters, but the filters are pretty distinct and characters tend to identify themselves by default at the beginning of every conversation.)

*The Cryptonaturalist: comforting supernatural folksiness. The titular expert on all things strange and wonderful reads poetry, admires nature, and talks about wonderful creatures like foxes that live within library shelves, stick insects that camouflage themselves as whole trees, salamanders that swim in parking lot asphalt, and Owls.

*The Hidden Almanac: comforting supernatural weirdness. Hagiographer, avid gardener, and Mysterious Dude In Plague Doctor Getup known as Reverend Mord gives tidbits of the history of his strange and fantastical world, along with gardening advice. Sometimes his tequila-swigging accidental necromancer best friend coworker Pastor Drom shows up. Written by fantasy author Ursula Vernon and mostly voiced by her husband Kevin. Extremely relaxing to listen to; the show ended last year but they put out five-minute episodes three times a week for eight years so there’s plenty of it. The first year or so actually doesn’t appear on most podcatchers so maybe check out the website.

Everything Is Alive: poignant, heartfelt interviews with inanimate objects. While there’s a different object featured each episode, it’s mostly just them and the interviewer, plus occasional phone calls with an expert on some subject brought up during the interview. Hits so much harder than you could possibly imagine given the summary. You WILL be upset about a can of off-brand cola.

*Quid Pro Euro: bizarre comedy mockumentary. A satire of the European Union in the style of a set of instructional tapes for EU employees made in the ‘90s, predicting what the EU would look like in the 21st century. Their predictions are somewhat off. Only one voice and delightfully it is Felix Trench. I don’t know anything about the EU but I still think it’s hilarious.

*Glasgow Ghost Stories: spooky supernatural. A resident of Glasgow is unexpectedly able to see the many ghosts that reside in the city -- but the ghosts have started to notice her too, and not all of them are friendly. A beautiful and atmospheric single-voice show; plus the feed also contains the very good miniseries Tracks.

*Palimpsest: poetic and haunting. An anthology series about young women experiencing supernatural happenings, each 10-episode season tells a different story in monologue (I think there are literally two episodes with other voices in them). Poignant, gorgeous, and sometimes heartbreakingly sad in the best way. In season one Anneliese wonders about the strange neighbors at her new apartment. In season two, Ellen takes a new job as companion to a supposed fairy princess imprisoned in a strange showroom in turn of the century America. In season three, former codebreaker Josie begins to see the spirits of the dead on the streets of London during the Blitz.

*Within the Wires: alternate history scifi found footage. From a world where a calamitous global war resulted in the installation of a new Society where nations and family ties are banned, an anthology of voices telling their stories. Each season is a single voice. Season one, a set of relaxation tapes deliver unexpected instructions to a government prisoner in a strange medical facility. In sSeason two, a series of museum exhibit guides spin out the mystery of two artists and their work. In season three, a government employee dictates notes to his secretary and begins to suspect a plot. In season four, the traveling leader of a secretive cultlike commune leaves sermons for her followers, and instructions for her daughter.

*Alice Isn’t Dead: lesbian americana roadtrip weird horror. Keisha’s wife Alice was missing, presumed dead. Now Keisha is a trucker, traveling the vast American emptiness to seek her out; but she’s about to become embroiled in the same vast secret war that may have drawn away her wife, and she’s not alone on the roads. Starts with one voice, adds a new one each season for a total of three. Also is finished.

*Station Blue: psychological horror. Matthew takes a job as the lone caretaker of an Antarctic research station for several months. This goes about as well as you’d predict. Very much a slow burn, strange, brooding horror of isolation. Heavy themes of mental illness based on the creator’s experiences of bipolar disorder.

*Mabel: dark, poetic faerietale horror. Live-in caretaker Anna attempts to contact the absent granddaughter of her elderly employer, the lone resident of a strange and ancient house in Ireland. A love story, a haunted house story, a fairy tale with teeth. This one might be hit or miss; it sometimes tends to the abstract a bit, and there’s more soundscaping and some other occasional voices besides the main two protagonists. Definitely worth trying out, though, this is absolutely an underappreciated gem.

*Janus Descending: tragic scifi horror. Two researchers, Peter and Chell, travel alone to a distant planet to survey the ruins of its extinct civilization. Unfortunately, they discover exactly how that civilization died out. Excellent if you like movies like Alien, and also being extremely sad. Only two voices. Really unique story structure: it’s told via the two protagonists’ logs of the events, but you hear Chell’s logs in order, and Peter’s logs in reverse, with their perspectives alternating. The result is a tragedy where technically you know the ending from the start, but it’s told so cleverly that just what happened and how remains a tantalizing, tense, heartbreaking mystery right until the end.

*I Am In Eskew: poetic, surreal horror. Only two voices and few sound effects. David is a man trapped in the twisting, malevolent city of Eskew, where the rain always falls, streets seem to lead the same way twice, and nothing can be trusted. Riyo is an investigator, making her way through rumors and questions in search of a man long missing and a place that seems not to exist. Maybe my favorite horror media ever? Deeply disturbing and yet even the most awful things are somehow beautiful. Like if Lynch, Escher and Mieville had a terrible, wonderful baby.

*Tides: contemplative hard scifi. When biologist Dr. Eurus is wrecked alone on a distant alien world shaped by deadly tidal forces, her struggle to survive also becomes a meditative exploration of the ecosystem around her, and a recognition that here, she is the alien. Mostly it��s Dr. Eurus; sometimes you hear from her coworkers. It’s got Julia Schifini, what’s not to love?

*Midnight Radio: ghost story/romance. A 1950s radio host who broadcasts a late-night show to her small hometown begins to receive letters from a listener and respond to them on air. I wrote this! It has a total of three voice actors and virtually no soundscaping. I promise it’s good.

#podcast recs #bobbie recommends things #I hope this is useful!!#Anonymous #asks #my posts

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hillblah · 3 years

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Podcast Recommendations:

I just spent nearly 2 hours writing these for a work Teams thread #justpandemicthings. So uh, here you go. If you’re following this blog (why tho?) you might like my vibe, so you might like some of these! Finding categories is hard, so I've mostly lumped podcasts together in small groups by loose connections, or vibes. This is also how I sort my bookshelf after admitting defeat on having a perfectly coherent system. Past me would have been horrified, but I think that's what growth looks like. Some descriptions are all mine, some are copied from the creators. Feel free to read into which ones I copied and which I wrote myself as much as you want.

Fiction:

36 Questions A 3 part musical podcast about a couple on the brink of divorce. The title references the "36 Questions to Fall in Love" (/build intimacy) that can be found here: https://bigthink.com/ideafeed/how-to-fall-in-love-36-questions-and-deep-eye-contact

Alice Isn't Dead Audio diaries of a long road trucker searching for her wife who she thought had died, but Alice Isn't Dead. Really cool sound design and writing from the team behind Welcome to Nightvale. Slight absurdist/ more than slight horror vibes. There's 3 seasons in total that tell a meandering overall story roadtrip. Best listened to while parked in an empty carpark on the edge of town with rain running down the windshield and creating flickering shadows from the streetlights. It took me a few attempts to listen right through the first episode, but I eventually fell in love with the sound/feel/vibe of the podcast. Teaser is here: http://www.nightvalepresents.com/aliceisntdead

The Magnus Archives A horror fiction podcast examining what lurks in the archives of the Magnus Institute, an organisation dedicated to researching the esoteric and the weird. Each episode is presented in the form of a witness statement being read by the newly appointed Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute - London. Over time the stand-alone statements start to form connections, and then an overarching plot. I don't normally enjoy horror, The Magnus Archives is absolutely the exception. Really well told stories with incredible soundscaping. Maybe don't listen right before bed...

Kiwi Podcasts about Sexuality and Gender:

Micro Wave Feminism Micro Wave Feminism is a place for open, inclusive, loving and vulnerable feminist chats. It's all about talking to real people about real sh*t and experiences of femininity and masculinity in this crazy (beautiful) world we live in. Really interesting discussions on feminism through the personal experiences of kiwis. Sporadic episodes as a non-professional labour of love, but boy does it have cozy vibes.

BANG! RNZ's BANG! explores sex, sexuality and relationships over a lifetime, from parents attempting "the talk" with their children, through the fraught teen years, modern dating, long-term relationships, contraception and conception, right up to intimacy in retirement homes. So many people talking about their experiences with all aspects of sex, sexuality, relationships and gender. My personal favourite is the Takātapuia episode from season 2: https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/bang/story/2018651794/bang-season-2-episode-6-takatapui

Let's Get Sexual Let’s Get Sexual is a podcast dedicated to exploring sexuality. It is part of the growing global movement to normalize conversations around sexuality, to embrace its complexity, and highlight how we all have our own sexual journeys. Similar vibes to BANG! But with a more personal approach and more time with each guest. Really interesting conversations with people from all walks of life.

Kiwi Current and Not So Current Events:

Gone by Lunchtime The Spinoff's politics podcast. A good balance of views from the 3 hosts, and the only politics podcast that has made me laugh out loud multiple times.

The Citizen's Handbook Robbie Niccol (White Man Behind a Desk/that guy that I went to school with) partners with RNZ for a video series all about the history of Aotearoa, and the things all citizens need to know about where we are now. There's also a podcast that goes with it, that's a game show? Really the video series is the more important part... But the podcast is a great listen.

Isolation:

The Habitat The true story of six volunteers picked to live on a fake planet. You know those stories that occasionally pop up about people living in isolation with each other to see what happens so we know about the problems and can prepare for space travel? Well this 7 episode podcast follows a group of 6 imitation NASA astronauts stuck with only each other for a year. Something I'm sure the rest of us will never have to experience right?

Our Plague Year Essays and listener messages about Our Plague 'Year'. Some really talented writers pouring emotions out. This was one of my favourite podcasts last year, though some of the episodes hit a little hard. My personal favourite episode (so far) is Trust Ends at the Windshield, featuring Hank Green, Meg Bashwiner, and Erin McKeown. Which talks about the the-show-must-go-on mentality, includes this gem: "We are killing people because we are bored. We are killing people because we are entrenched in a toxic, capitalist society that values money over life.", and was one of the triggers for me writing a 12 minute, spoken word, poetry adjacent, thing, last year.

Doing Stuff:

Cortex CGP Grey (educational youtuber) and Myke Hurley (host of about 50 podcasts) talk about productivity, and how they run their businesses, and education, and the Apple ecosystem, and a whole bunch of other things. Long episodes, and occasionally dated by reference to current events. Definitely not a super condensed productivity podcast, more of a personality / sitting in on a conversation vibe.

Start With This Art is hard, starting is hard, if you want to start somewhere you should start with this. The co-creators of Welcome to Nightvale talk about making things/the artistic process. Every episode ends with 2 assignments, one thing to consume, and one to create.

Building Positive Culture:

Dare To Lead Brené Brown talking with other people about Leadership. Really interesting and inspiring conversations. Top recommendation is the episode with Simon Sinek.

A Bit of Optimism Simon Sinek talking with other people about working together to make a better world. Really interesting and inspiring conversations. Top recommendation is the episode with Brené Brown.

TED Worklife Organizational psychologist Adam Grant takes you inside the minds of some of the world’s most unusual professionals to explore the science of making work not suck. From learning how to love criticism to harnessing the power of frustration, one thing’s for sure: You’ll never see your job the same way again. Pretty new on my feed, but every episode I've listened to so far has been an absolute hit!

Interesting Stories/People:

TED Radio Hour TED talks, collated into similar subjects with extra stuff pulled out interview style. Good to search through the archives to find areas you're interested in, or just pick a random episode and dive in!

99% Invisible - 10,000 Years [person from work who I’m too lazy to edit out a reference to] has already recommended the podcast, but I want to throw in my favourite episode. It's about the challenge of trying to mark nuclear waste sites in a way that will last 10,000 years (for reference 10,000 years ago stone tools were a pretty neat invention) and is absolutely fascinating. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/

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the-woman-in-the-writing · 4 years

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“When the Moon Walked Among Us” a short fiction

Rating: PG Word Count: 3,164

Author’s note: I’ve always been good at remembering my dreams, and that seemed like a useless talent until I dreamed the world ended. I wrote this story as a way of preserving how vivid and realistic (yet a bit weird) my dream was, though please take note that I am not the narrator (in my stories, the narrator is never me). I didn’t revise, add, or deleted any scene or part in this dream-story. Everything you’re about to read was purely dreamed by yours truly.

Maybe it was the end of the world. Maybe it wasn’t. They never knew for sure what it was and why it happened. Only one thing was clear: nothing was ever the same again. Not after everything…

No.

People came together all over the world to watch the Super Moon. They packed their tents and barbecues, set up camp in wherever there was a clear field and open sky, turned off their lights, and waited. Families, friends, lovers, and strangers. We all came to watch the Super Moon that was said to last for a whole day. People chatted with one another, talking about their families or whoever they came with, over burgers and beer. The children made new friends and played by the sunset with their flashlights and food wrapper paper planes.

Everyone waited for the Super Moon.

They said it will be the most beautiful thing you’ll ever see. And it was. Despite everything that happened after, it really was.

When the evening came and everyone had piled up beside their tents and prepared their telescopes or binoculars, the Super Moon came into view: beautiful, big, round, and luminous, tinged and glowing with a creamy orange light that everyone marveled at. We were wolves staring at the moon, waiting to be transformed into something greater and stronger. It was so close that you could almost see every spot and crater in great detail even without a telescope or binoculars.

Then we went home, talked about it on the drive, posted pictures of it on the internet with stupid captions and hashtags, and showed it on the news. But as the world spun around this captivating piece of heaven, we all took turns, the people of the world. Of viewing. Of taking photos. Of making art. Of writing poetry. At one point you could say everyone was looking at the same thing as you could never miss it, this beautiful thing.

Later, people will believe that the Super Moon brought the world together for one tiny yet impactful moment in history. Not everyone will think so, but most will.

But we would all agree that this was the beginning.

“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” - Romans 8:18

II.

No one could sleep.

When it started, no one knew why. Everyone in the world shifted in their beds and wondered why it was 2am and they couldn’t sleep. Though we all woke up on time, in sync with our 7am alarm, the atmosphere felt like noon: hot and awake. At work or at school we all exchanged, I couldn’t sleep last night’s and me too’s, and two hours after we all ate our lunches the sun was already setting. We were all confused. That night, no one got a good night’s sleep.

We asked the scientists, but some of them kept silent. Some of them said it was normal. We didn’t know what to think; we just wanted to sleep.

After a while, people started getting sick or getting into accidents. Most of us developed insomnia and loss of appetite. Those who started falling asleep again began while they were driving on their way to work. By the end of the month, most of the headlines yelled CRASH, DEAD, and INJURED. Children cried out of fear, wondering why they couldn’t avoid the darkness of the night by sleeping. Their parents grumbled, tired and sleepless as well.

Our days shortened. Life felt fast with our 16-hour days, but we’re humans. Of course, we found a way to adjust to it eventually. We stayed up all night partying, reading, drinking, texting, praying, and wandering; we opened and closed our stores much later; we extended our Late, Late Shows; and we made clocks that had shorter hours.

That didn’t mean we slept well and regularly again. Sometimes we would still shift in our beds and turn our pillows over and under our heads. The digits of 8 midnight would seem to blink endlessly by our bedside table. And if sleep was hopeless, we all stared at the moon, which was closer than it was three months ago.

“Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed…” - 1 Corinthians 15:51

III.

It was all over the news: a lion with a school of dead fish washed up ashore on a beach in India. No one knew where the lion came from or how it made it all the way there, but people were speculating it had something to do with the moon and how it traveled a hundred thousand kilometers closer to us in just five months.

Again, we asked the scientists. And again, they either kept silent or said it was normal.

It’s part of the earth’s natural process.

It was bound to happen sooner or later.

It’s nothing to worry about.

From 384, 400 kilometers to 274, 575, we knew that was something to worry about, but we didn’t know everything. The how’s and the why’s. So, we relied on the scientists, because in science we trust and in God we doubt.

No one lived by the beaches anymore, even fishermen. By day, beaches would get so dry that you could walk for three hours and see nothing but land still. You’d step on a dead baby crab once in a while and by the time you’re looking back to where you came from, your legs would be gift-wrapped with seaweed and glittered with sand. At first, we couldn’t figure out the best way to fish and go on cruises because by night the water would get so high that it would swallow up any structure within fifty kilometers. In Ireland they say you’d be able to climb half of a sea cliff during the night.

After a while, the ecosystem went crazy and we went hungry. Partly because we’d just been adjusting to the 16-hour days, but mainly because the animals had a harder time getting used to it. Most of the fishes we caught were dead, and no one dared to fish in the middle of the night as weather became more unpredictable. Crops were no exception. Half of them died along with the marine life.

But then again, we were humans. We found a way to survive.

Almost everything we ate were manufactured in a shape of a cylinder or cube. We wrote recipe books that said, “101 Ways to Cook Canned Food” or “Canned You Cook This?” And we hid almost every vegetable we had left in fear of someone stealing it. Then by moonlight, if we felt having something that reminded us of how the world used to be, we would eat our roasted genetically modified chickens and our children would say, “Daddy, daddy, the moon is the size of my fist!”

“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.” - 2 Timothy 3:1

IV.

Our days shortened to 14 hours and depending on which part of the world you lived in, you either bathed in the sun or crept in the dark for more than half a day. The lands were cracked eggshells in Southern Asia and Africa, just like their skin. News reporters, missionaries, and tourists who travelled from the cold, dark North cried at swimming pools and parks because they missed the heat, and sometimes children would mistake them for ghosts or banshees.

Earth’s tilt was at 45-degrees and up in the North, where it almost snowed all year-round with only a month to melt almost half of the ice. People who didn’t die to lack of sleep or hunger died in the cold; in the South, they dried up like beef jerky. And before even Christmas arrived there were already no feeding programs or charity cases anymore, because all the beggars were dead and buried under our snow.

One time, a friend said, “My daughter came home from school and gave me her drawing. Their teacher had asked them to draw and color different kinds of people from all over the world and you know what? Even the Asian is black now!” We laughed for a second or so, but we stopped for a lot of reasons.

“You know, you could draw the moon and the sky and still use the same crayons.”

He replied, “The moon will take half of the paper though”

“And if those days had not been cut short, no human being would be saved. But for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short.” - Mark 13:20

Big, bold letters sprawled across every outlet store, every shopping center, and every thrift shop, and they all spelled the same thing: WINTER CLOTHES FOR SALE. We scavenged the last of our animals that could provide us warmth and security because nothing says, “We will survive this deadly winter” like wool jackets made from our frozen sheep and a pair of leather gloves, freshly skinned from our endangered cows.

Then the world figured out how to get what it wants. The North began to ask the South for animals: chickens, pigs, cows – every farm animal you can find in a children’s story book. Because no animal we could eat could survive the winter that long and we don’t know where the fishes went. On the other hand, the South asked for vegetables and lots of ice. And finally, we were able to travel conveniently again when we’ve figured out where to put all the ice, and the people of the South were happy as long as they got fresh vegetables on their plates and ice to keep them hydrated and cool. It didn’t matter that their forests and crops burned up and that their rivers were nothing but empty veins, because it was enough that they ate and drank.

It wasn’t easy, of course. We all complained. We all asked the scientists.

“How do we survive?”

We no longer asked if we were going to be okay or if they were lying about half of the world being frozen and the other half burning as something normal, and that we will be finishing the year earlier than expected. The scientists said there was nothing to worry about. We had to take their word for it, because what could we do if even they can’t do something about it?

So, no one just talked about the moon that watched over us, except maybe for the Internet that made jokes and funny pictures about it.

What’s important was that we made it out of this alive.

So, our scientists – all kinds – genetically modified our animals and manipulated our crops; they reproduced fishes in their laboratories; they made special facilities for storing water; they invented brand new foods with whatever was left to help get us all the nutrients we need; and they gave us technology and guides to help us do all of this at home.

If the sky was clear, we would find ourselves looking at the moon and its craters and spots, with our faces painted with moonlight. We were still wolves waiting to be transformed into something greater and stronger. Something that could survive all this.

We prayed.

Even though in science we trust and in God we doubt.

“Pray that it may not happen in winter. For in those days there will be such tribulations as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now, and never will be.” - Mark 13:19

VI.

What follows is a series of tragedies: tragedies we know of; tragedies we named; tragedies that weren’t 14-hour days, mass animal endangerment, world famine, or a half-frozen, half melting world – tragedies that we were used to.

Earthquakes and the tsunamis that followed sunk islands as we welcomed a new year. All the small countries that lived on islands no longer resurfaced; their people would’ve been declared extinct if it weren’t for migration. If somebody were to make a world map at that time, you’ll no longer find Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Fiji, Cuba, or any of the islands as small as them on the map. Half of Japan and Indonesia sunk, and only a quarter of the Philippines resurfaced.

We lost seven percent of the world population. That’s half a billion people crushed by debris and drowned with the resources they traded all over the world. All their memories of their childhoods, first loves, and heartbreaks were reduced to nothing but rocks in the ocean to be covered by algae or barnacles. They were Atlantis, and a story come true have never felt so tragic.

People were devastated, of course. But we were all very hungry too. Those who weren’t affected by the earthquakes refused to help. There were incoming hurricanes and we all thought,

The dead will remain dead.

Half a billion people don’t need food, shelter, or medicine anymore.

There was no use in sharing resources with the few hundreds of survivors when more than a billion need it to stay alive.

Some people thought it was cruel and selfish, but by then we weren’t humans anymore. We were savages scraping what was left of the world we destroyed. And as much as we hate to eat and drink what should’ve been shared to the survivors of the Great Sink, we still did. We were all so hungry. God, we were hungry.

Then the hurricanes came along with their floods, landslides, and tornadoes, and they killed us and our animals. Homes were destroyed. Families were separated. Children were orphaned. There were about five billion people left in the world.

This must be a bad dream, we thought.

A sick joke.

That’s what this is.

“There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.” - Luke 21:11

VII.

People found evidence of advanced technology being developed and used by scientists, the same ones who told us that the world was not ending. (Or so we believed.)

There was a mass production of high-tech projectors and weather instruments that were launched into space to control what we saw on the horizon and what we didn’t. (Or so they say.)

The media was accused and persecuted for false news and being paid of hush-money to keep the so-called truth a secret. (Or so we wanted.)

Hundreds of data was discovered to contain information about a world-wide human experiment determining the effects of a global catastrophe and series of disasters on human behavior. (Or so they say.)

We imprisoned CEOs, scientists, and news reporters. We raided their homes, stole their food and clothes, and hurt their loved ones. We killed them in our dreams every night and ripped them limb by limb in the sleepless ones as we lay on the floors of our wrecked home, covered in snow or in sweat, and still staring at the moon that isn’t back to its rightful, safe distance. (And so we did.)

Everything will be back to normal once we shut down all those projectors and controllers. We will learn to live again and be humans.

And the world was not ending after all.

(And that’s what we wanted to believe.)

“And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.” - Matthew 24:10-12

VIII.

People came together all over the world to watch the world end. They held their children or whoever they had left, gathered food and shared them with others as a last act of kindness, set up camp in wherever there was a field with no debris or remnant of a human being, and waited. Families, friends, lovers, and strangers. We all came to witness The Day that was said to last a lifetime. People chatted with one another, talking about their families or whoever they lost, over empty stomachs and chapped lips. The children stayed with the adults and clung onto them with unending fear and the memory of a lost childhood.

Everyone waited for The Day.

They said it will be the most dreadful thing you’ll ever see. And it was. Despite everything that happened before, it really was.

When the hour came and everyone had piled up beside the broken homes or fallen trees, the moon stared right us as always: terrifying, big, round, luminous, and waiting to collide with our fallen earth. We were wolves staring at the moon, waiting to be transformed into something greater and stronger. It was so close that you could almost see every calamity and loss you’ve endured the past year in great detail even without a telescope, binoculars, or a washed-up family album or baby shoes.

We stayed and faced our inevitable fate. Some still managed to post pictures of it on the internet with stupid captions and hashtags. There were even people who showed it on the news. But as the world spun around this frightening piece of heaven, we all took turns, the people of the world. Of viewing. Of taking photos. Of crying. Of hugging and kissing one last time. Everyone was living the Day as you could never miss it, even if you wanted to.

And we all believed that the moon will crash into us and wipe us out for old times’ sake, but it wasn’t much later that we heard the most chilling, bone shattering sound we ever got to hear: the sound of the moon cracking, like a breaking iceberg, echoing into our souls, and resonating as weeping and almost hushed screams.

Some people swore they saw Christ come out of the moon, accompanied by angels. Not everyone believes so.

But we all agreed that when we saw pieces of the moon falling down on us in slow motion, helpless and blazing, that it was disturbingly beautiful.

It was then that I kissed my wife for the last time.

“But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven; and the powers of heaven will be shaken.” - Mark 13:24-25

E P I L O G U E

There were survivors and they were less than a hundred. They spent the last days on earth, freezing, weeping, and gnashing their teeth in the dark. The sun died. The moon is gone. There is only but loneliness living and walking among the few humans who had gathered up the will to keep on breathing.

They couldn’t accept that that was the end of the world. If it was, there shouldn’t have been anyone left. But there was, and it was them.

Soon, they realized there was nothing left to do but wait.

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ren-c-leyn · 4 years

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QnA tag game

I was tagged by @hyba to play this. Thank you very much.

rules: post your answers, and tag some pals.

1. When did you first learn you enjoyed writing?

Honestly, I used to hate writing. It wasn’t fun, it was boring school essays and annoying prompts on exams. That being said, I had always enjoyed storytelling, and had been telling stories since before I could remember.

How I reconciled that gap between the written and the spoken was I went through a really shitty period of time in my life and I took up poetry to help vent. And it was so freeing and fun that I kept with it.

I had been doing that for a while when I decided to try writing some fantasy story that popped into my head, though I can’t quite recall why I bothered to try. It wasn’t a very good story, but I filled up like an entire notebook with it and started writing it on another, and I discovered ‘hey, writing can be fun... if it isn’t about something boring.’

And over the years, fantasy has over taken poetry. I still write poems from time to time, but not like I used to.

2. Tell us about the first project you ever wrote.

It was one that tried cramming way too much into one story, but there’s elements of it that I still use a lot of. I can’t remember the exact plot I had in mind for it, because it was all over the place, but I remember there being some sci-fi, a lot of fantasy weirdness, and a chosen one who was both angry and horrified that her world ended when she had the power to save it, because no one knew what she was or that their world was in danger. It never got finished, but I had fun with it while I was working on it.

3. How does your favorite media shape who you are as a writer?

In ways I don’t even realize it did, I’m sure. Particularly since I binge read without really analyzing the writing techniques of people. My writer brain turns off and reader brain takes over. Which many people say is bad, but it works for me. That being said, I can draw some obvious parallels between things I’ve read and my own works.

I know that Tolkien was a big influence for my ‘this string pulls on this person’s string, which does that, which leads to a poor hobbit having to lose his finger to throw a cursed ring into a volcano and save the world’ kinda plots. I also enjoyed his world building, but, and this is just my opinion, it slowed the Lord of the Rings triology down a lot and made it a little clunky to read. So it taught me both what I kinda wanted to see in my world building, but also how I didn’t want it to come out in the story. Plus, The Hobbit is the book for me. It is one of the first ones I got when I finally learned ‘oh, reading can be fun’ (because child me hated reading like she also hated writing boring essays), and it’s the one that got me stuck on fantasy.

Douglas Adams, there are many who will probably consider it a crime I have not read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and yet still list his name in this, but my favorite book of all time is probably The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, and it was the way the characters existed and the hidden easter eggs that I’m still finding like 7 read throughs later and the pacing and red herrings. I learned from and loved a lot about that book alone.

There was also J.A. Jance, the author of many of the murder mysteries my grandmother loaned me, and it was from her and other mystery authors that I finally, finally figured out how to set up suspense and tension. They were also really good studies in character motivations and how a character’s mindset can change the way they perceive the world and the things they notice and miss.

Video games is another thing I know has influenced me. I like story and lore rich games. Dungeons and Dragons is another thing I play a lot of and has followed me through my writings. The stories that get told can be every bit as awesome as a book, and the mechanics are also part of what helped me learn to structure my magic systems. Because if the wizards didn’t have rules, who would play a fighter who does? The same idea got translated into my writing very early on, ‘if I don’t give my wizards rules, why would warriors exist?’

And I can keep rambling, but I think I’ll leave it at this for now ^^

4. What’s something you’ve wanted to write, but aren’t sure you could? (A tv show, a genre, a style, a time period, a video game, etc)

I had an idea for a fantasy world inspired by various Asian myths, and even had a basic map drawn out in my head and some ideas for a magic system, but I’ve been too terrified to actually do anything with it, and it’s been so long since then that I don’t remember anything about it. Plus, I had no plot to use for it at the time.

I also wanted to write a mystery, but when I tried I found that while I has suspects and everything, I couldn’t think of the crime or how the heck anyone would just kinda figure it out from a bunch of random things normal people could just play off or not notice XD

5. What is the thing that keeps you from writing the most?

Procrastination is sometimes a problem, and I do occasionally need to kick myself in the shin. But there’s also life and plot snags and just days when a story isn’t working for me.

6. How do you deal with an inner editor?

That depends. Sometimes the inner editor saves me a lot of headaches later, and sometimes a tiny mistake can break the flow of writing. I normally don’t have an issue with fixing things on the spot, but on nights I need to focus on writing I just keep myself from reading back.

7. How long have you been writing?

I mean, they make kids write really young for school, so begrudgingly that long. Creatively and for fun? I’m not sure. I can’t quite recall how old I was when I started with the poetry. But considering the notebook I have the earliest pieces in is falling apart, I think it’s been a long time. lol

8. What is your general writing process? Do you write chronologically? Do you do a lot of planning?

I normally get this idea that shows up out of the blue as a daydream or a random thought. Then, there’s at least a month. If it’s still there, it gets considered. If it’s grown and expanded into something resembling either a world or a plot by then, it’s probably getting written.

After the idea finally bugs me enough, I’ll start world building and building a bare-bones plot, complete with bare-boned characters. I never flesh anything out completely, since I do most of that while I write and having strict outlines suffocates my story.

If the world building, characters, and whatever I have of a plot are interesting, I’ll start chronologically and keep moving from there.

9. Assign a scent to your writing style.

A scent for my style? Um... that’s kind of a weird question and I have no idea how I would even begin to think of an answer for that. Like, how do you translate comma usage and word choice into a smell? I mean, I use roses a lot in my stories, so maybe that would work?

10. One book you hope everyone reads?

I have to agree with hyba that I hope everyone just finds their version of the book. The one that gets them through a hard time, the one they really need, and that that book won’t be the same for everyone.

11. What is it about your least favorite genre that makes it your least favorite–and how might you change that to better appeal to you?

Oh that’s simple, it’s because horror does it’s job. That’s it. It’s nothing particularly about the style or anything besides that the genre is what it is.

12. Design a “collector’s edition” for your first novel. Include items that might be of interest to your audience.

Never thought about it, but I guess I could throw in the world map I drew for The Plight of a Sparrow into it.

13. If one thing was real from your project, what would you want it to be?

Nothing in particular? I can’t think of anything that would make sense to transfer from my projects to the real world, because I don’t want magic to be real, because my magic systems tend to be brutal, but also, we have stuff like or better than a lot of what doesn’t run off magic. Maybe some of the creatures would be cool, but I don’t know how that would affect ecosystems.... probably not for the better.

14. What’s something you always include in your work? Do you have any other Easter eggs?

As far as easter eggs, I can’t think of anything off the top of my head. If I do, it probably wasn’t intentional.

15. What is your favorite passage from your own work?

I still am not really comfortable with sharing things out of my WIPs on here. As far as things I’ve written for the blog itself go, there are quite a few pieces and passages that turned out really good. I think one of my favorites is from a really old piece I did back before I was doing fusion stories. It’s from this one specifically, if anyone would like to read the full tale, it is a grim one, though.

The very edge of the forest was about as welcoming as a gallows. Crows watched us hungrily, like we were dead men about to sway. None of them made so much as a peep as their dead eyes followed our trek through the knotted mess of brambles, ivy, knotted shrubs, and gnarled trees. We hacked at the plants, and they hacked right back at us. We traded blows like it was a war. hatchet and sword blows countered with sharp thorns and parried with thick branches.

I’m going to leave this an open tag, jump in if you’d like to. =D

#tag game

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v-v-void · 4 years

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List 5 things that make you happy and then pass this on to the last 10 people who reblogged stuff from you

1) Nature: The forest, the ocean, the moutains, fields that seem to have no end, every plant, animal, and even insects (at a distance). EVERY LIVING ORGANISM on this planet. The way ecosystems change during the day and night. Both equally beautiful in their own way. When everything falls asleep at night, there are things just waking up and that itself is magical. The seasons, and the way life can die and be reborn again. Over and over again. Ps; I've spent most of my life with my head in the clouds. As I've been told by my family, elders, teachers, friends and lovers, I'm usually in my own little world. Which makes sense because I'm drawn to the sky. From sunrise, to cloudy days, thunder and lightning, rain, snow, to sunsets. Which leads me to number 2.

2) Space: I'm drawn to the stars in the sky at night. Each constellation. Every planet. The thought that there is so much out there that we can't even begin to fathom. The possibilities are endless and so are we. I could spend all night in a hammock looking up in the sky, waiting for shooting stars or the northern lights.. even just watching as the sky slowly shifts.. no amount of time will ever be long enough. Which is where astrology comes in. Astrology is an obsession of mine because I believe we are energetic beings and the moment we enter this existence, the stars literally tell us what it is that makes us tick. It's like a tiny road map into our souls.

3) Connections: They are the most beautiful part of life. In a way, that's really what we are here to experience. We as beings connect to animals, people, places, things, feelings, and really anything that sparks our soul. It's extraordinary really. The way our heart recognizes something or reacts to something and all of a sudden your body, mind and soul all join together in this weird dance of energy. Setting off alarms inside of us, in hopes that we pay attention. It's yet another chance to feel something. Connections aren't always easy and I won't pretend to romanticize the pain of certain experiences, but it is and always will be the way of life. We are meant to feel all of it. Let it consume us and try to remember that the sun may have set but it will always rise again. Which sounds really stupid and cheesy but it makes me happy. All I can hope for in life is that I can experiences many connections as possible. I will go through life in search of myself and one day, the right people will gravitate to me and maybe if I'm lucky, I will connect with one person and it'll be so good that neither of us will have to search any longer. The knowledge or hope of that is what drives me. I'm a firm believer that people come in and out of our lives for a reason. My person is out there somewhere hoping for a person just like me, and I them, if we exist at the same time, that is enough.

4) Art: It's beautiful the way people can capture a thought, feeling, moment, or memory in a way that sticks with us. Paintings, drawings, pastels, doodles, music, poetry, spoken word, photography, modeling clay, abstract sttuctures, dance, baking,interior design, fashion, etc. Its a way for each person to show the world what they find beautiful. It's a way to express oneself without the use of words. Or maybe they can't vocalize it so written words are all they have. Either way, it's saying something that's not so easily expressed. The human body (women especially) is the most beautiful creation. Hands down. We are all breathtaking in our own ways.

5) Home: No, I don't mean the house I grew up in, I mean the feeling of home. Safety. Security. Comfort. Warmth. Acceptance. Forgiveness. Laughter. Love. Home is a feeling. Above all else, my son is home. That sweet boy is the light of my entire existence. Nothing made sense until I had him and I wouldn't change a single thing for the world. He makes me happier than anyone or anything, by far. ✨

#personal #anon

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mostlysignssomeportents · 5 years

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The lost audiobooks of Roger Zelazny reading the Chronicles of Amber

When I was a kid, my whole circle of D&D-playing, science-fiction reading pals was really into Roger Zelazny's ten-volume Chronicles of Amber, but somehow I never read it; for years, I'd intended to correct this oversight, but I never seemed to find the time -- after all, there's more amazing new stuff than I can possibly read, how could I justify looking backwards, especially over the course of ten books?

But I do have some time in my day to read older books: I swim every day for my chronic pain, and when I do, I use an underwater MP3 player to listen to audiobooks that I generally get from Libro.fm, Downpour, or Google's DRM-free audiobook store (the market-leading Audible, a division of Amazon, mandatorily wraps audiobooks in its proprietary DRM without allowing publishers to opt out, which has the dual deal-breaking effect of locking me into Amazon's ecosystem and not working on my underwater MP3 player).

A couple of months ago, I decided to go looking for DRM-free versions of the Amber books, which is how I found Speaking Volumes' editions of Roger Zelazny's own readings of the books, long believed to have been accidentally erased and lost forever, but which were recovered and remastered in the mid-2000s. Speaking Volumes sells these as MP3 downloads and MP3 CDs, and I bought the complete set of the former and listened to them over a couple of months' worth of laps in the pool.

Zelazny's reading is pretty much fantastic. The books are justly loved for their deadpan, ironic, noirish prose style, and Zelazny's voice -- smoke-cured by the same cigarettes that were blamed for the cancer that killed him in 1995 at the age of 58 -- and delivery are absolutely delightful. The audio quality is patchy at best -- whatever medium these recordings were recovered from was evidently in less-than-perfect shape -- and in some places there's bleed-through of other people having arguments. One book was only partially recovered and is read in places by another reader, who is competent enough, though he's no Zelazny. Despite these imperfections (or, perversely, because of them), it's pretty fabulous to hear these rediscovered lost treasures.

What about the books themselves, then?

They're...a mixed bag. The story is a set of courtly intrigues based loosely on Hindu and Buddhist scripture, infused with heavy doses of psychedelic industry as the forces of Order and Chaos fight one another for dominance over the universe, even as the royal houses of godlings who represent each force squabble among one another in succession struggles for the thrones of their respective realms. The hero of the first five books is Prince Corwin of Amber, fighting for the crown of the lands of Order, while the second five books tell the story of his son, Merlin, whose mother is demon of Chaos and who might find himself running either one or both of the great houses.

The books start strong, as Corwin awakens in a hospital in our world with amnesia and slowly recovers his memories, thus easing us into Zelazny's universe. These books sport psychedelic interludes in which Corwin walks through "shadow" (the branching, unimportant worlds, including ours, in which everything that can happen does, which the godlings of Chaos and Order can traverse to find any possible outcome) that Zelazny brings to life with deliveries that turn them into free verse poetry, heavy on delightfully weird symbolism.

But -- even with the book six reboot and the switch to a new PoV character -- Zelazny struggles to keep the story together. His multiple mystical systems of magic allow him to squeak out of narrative problems by inventing some new twist on the rules he's set up that conveniently allows characters to escape from the dead ends he writes them into. This has the unfortunate side effect of setting up characters with overpowered artifacts, unfollowably complicated powers, and an sense of anything-can-happen whose corollary is nothing matters.

The psychedelic interludes that are so much fun in the early volumes turn into self-indulgent cheap tricks for getting characters in and out of trouble the action flags.

All in all, it has the ring of a D&D game whose inventive Dungeon Master has set down all the twists and turns that were so much fun to play through in a book that's significantly less fun to read -- like dreams, D&D adventures are generally more fun to live through than to hear about (and it doesn't help that much of the action in the Amber books takes place in characters' dreams).

I nearly met Zelazny. He was scheduled to be the Guest of Honor at Toronto's Ad Astra science fiction convention, but died shortly before the event. Ad Astra was my first con, where I volunteered as a gofer, then attended as a neopro, and I remember being disappointed that I wouldn't get to meet him in person -- even if I hadn't read the Amber books, I'd enjoyed his story Auto-da-Fe in Harlan Ellison's first Dangerous Visions anthology and, more importantly, Zelazny was the mentor of one of my favorite writers, Steven Brust (previously) whom I met for the first time two years later when he was a guest of honor at Ad Astra, in 1997.

Brust's work is an instructive counterpoint to Zelazny. His longrunning, nearly complete, must-must-must read Taltos series is filled with homages to Zelazny and Amber, from the hard-boiled tone to the beautifully choreographed sword- and knife-fighting scenes, to the mystical, semi-sentient cord his hero wears around his wrist (Brust even named his kid Corwin!).

What's more, Brust's Taltos books are literally based on an RPG, with the same gods-and-mortals dynamic that Zelazny propels the action in Amber with.

But Brust's books are infinitely better than Zelazny's. It's not just that he doesn't have the same problematic characterizations of (and interactions with) female characters that plague the Amber books -- Brust's story is much more consequential because it moves very swiftly from the kind of courtly intrigue that fuel the Amber books, and onto the lives of myriad, everyday people struggling to survive the terrible fallout generated by the power struggles of the unthinking, unregarding great and noble personages who are Zelanzy's heroes and Brust's ultimate villains. Brust's "little people" are heroes; Zelazny's are literal figments of the aristocracy's imagination.

While Brust's magic and mysticism are nearly as expansive as Zelazny's, his tales don't suffer from Zelanzy's ultimately boring, consequence-free meandering, because Brust focuses on consequences for people who have no choice but to live through the aftermath of these mythic struggles in their (decidedly non-mythic) everyday lives.

Brust is nearly finished with the Vlad books, after nearly four decades in progress (!), and here, too, Brust shows that the student outshines the master. As the Amber books approach their ending, they get more chaotic, less controlled, more improvised and, frankly, sillier. Brust, by contrast, keeps getting more salient, trenchant and consequential with every volume, building to a climax that makes me shiver in delight whenever I remember that it's on our foreseeable horizon.

Ultimately, Zelazny ended the Amber books on a note so disappointingly nonsensical and lazy that I could hardly believe it -- it was a disappointment to rival the end of Stephen King's Dark Tower books; having made us slog through a Silmarillion's worth of family trees and ancient history, he just...fizzled (Zelazny didn't read the final volume for audio -- for that, I suggest ripping the CD version of Wil Wheaton's reading, which does an admirable job with some pretty weak material).

They say "the Golden Age of science fiction is 12," and perhaps if I'd read Amber when my friends were all fizzing with it, I'd have found it more interesting. Decades later, I'm glad I read them, but I'm also not planning on re-reading ever again -- unlike the Taltos books, which I sneak into my queue all the time, inevitably finding new delights with each fresh reading.

In the meantime, I still recommend the Speaking Volumes editions: for all the failings of the series in hindsight, Zelazny brings in a brilliant performance, one that might have been lost forever. And these books, flawed as they are, are important parts of the genre's history -- for one thing, without them, we might never have had Brust's Taltos books.

The Chronicles of Amber [Roger Zelazny/Speaking Volumes]

https://boingboing.net/2019/09/22/golden-age-of-sf-is-12.html

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abangtech · 4 years

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Opinion: Artificial intelligence is the hope 2020 needs – Crain's Cleveland Business

This year is likely to be remembered for the COVID-19 pandemic and for a significant presidential election, but there is a new contender for the most spectacularly newsworthy happening of 2020: the unveiling of GPT-3. As a very rough description, think of GPT-3 as giving computers a facility with words that they have had with numbers for a long time, and with images since about 2012.

The core of GPT-3, which is a creation of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco, is a general language model designed to perform autofill. It is trained on uncategorized internet writings, and basically guesses what text ought to come next from any starting point. That may sound unglamorous, but a language model built for guessing with 175 billion parameters — 10 times more than previous competitors — is surprisingly powerful.

The eventual uses of GPT-3 are hard to predict, but it is easy to see the potential. GPT-3 can converse at a conceptual level, translate language, answer email, perform (some) programming tasks, help with medical diagnoses and, perhaps someday, serve as a therapist. It can write poetry, dialogue and stories with a surprising degree of sophistication, and it is generally good at common sense — a typical failing for many automated response systems. You can even ask it questions about God.

Imagine a Siri-like, voice-activated assistant that actually did your intended bidding. It also has the potential to outperform Google for many search queries, which could give rise to a highly profitable company.

GPT-3 does not try to pass the Turing Test by being indistinguishable from a human in its responses. Rather, it is built for generality and depth, even though that means it will serve up bad answers to many queries, at least in its current state. As a general philosophical principle, it accepts that being weird sometimes is a necessary part of being smart. In any case, like so many other technologies, GPT-3 has the potential to rapidly improve.

It is not difficult to imagine a wide variety of GPT-3 spinoffs, or companies built around auxiliary services, or industry task forces to improve the less accurate aspects of GPT-3. Unlike some innovations, it could conceivably generate an entire ecosystem.

There is a notable buzz about GPT-3 in the tech community. One user in the U.K. tweeted: “I just got access to gpt-3 and I can’t stop smiling, i am so excited.” Venture capitalist Paul Graham noted coyly: “Hackers are fascinated by GPT-3. To everyone else it seems a toy. Pattern seem familiar to anyone?” Venture capitalist and AI expert Daniel Gross referred to GPT-3 as “a landmark moment in the field of AI.”

I am not a tech person, so there is plenty about GPT-3 I do not understand. Still, reading even a bit about it fills me with thoughts of the many possible uses.

It is noteworthy that GPT-3 came from OpenAI rather than from one of the more dominant tech companies, such as Alphabet/Google, Facebook or Amazon. It is sometimes suggested that the very largest companies have too much market power — but in this case, a relatively young and less capitalized upstart is leading the way. (OpenAI was founded only in late 2015 and is run by Sam Altman).

GPT-3 is also a sign of the underlying health and dynamism of the Bay Area tech world, and thus of the U.S. economy. The innovation came to the U.S. before China and reflects the power of decentralized institutions.

Like all innovations, GPT-3 involves some dangers. For instance, if prompted by descriptive ethnic or racial words, it can come up with unappetizing responses. One can also imagine that a more advanced version of GPT-3 would be a powerful surveillance engine for written text and transcribed conversations. Furthermore, it is not an obvious plus if you can train your software to impersonate you over email. Imagine a world where you never know who you are really talking to — “Is this a verified email conversation?” Still, the hope is that protective mechanisms can at least limit some of these problems.

We have not quite entered the era where “Skynet goes live,” to cite the famous movie phrase about an AI taking over (and destroying) the world. But artificial intelligence does seem to have taken a major leap forward. In an otherwise grim year, this is a welcome and hopeful development. Oh, and if you would like to read more, here is an article about GPT-3 written by … GPT-3.

Source

The post Opinion: Artificial intelligence is the hope 2020 needs – Crain's Cleveland Business appeared first on abangtech.

from abangtech https://abangtech.com/opinion-artificial-intelligence-is-the-hope-2020-needs-crains-cleveland-business/

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kdinthecity · 7 years

Text

Confessions of a Teenage Sugar Queen: In Other News

This is for @zutaraweek Day Five: Modern Times

Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four

Zuko and I fall into a comfortable pattern of casual conversation in the car, a productive partnership at work, and the occasional night “out” at Mushi’s. He puts on an unconvincing act like his uncle annoys him, but I can tell they are close. Whatever Zuko doesn’t say out loud, I can easily read on his face. Details behind those expressions are lacking, of course.

Certain topics are off limits—like what happened with his father or that night in Iroh’s apartment. I let down my guard in sharing about my mom, but I’m putting it back up until it’s clear what direction we’re headed with all this. It's easy to talk to Zuko, but trusting him is a different matter entirely.

The first warning comes from Yue. She reassigns Hahn to the education position, and I assume it's because she is tired of his constant flirting. But then she starts spending more time in her office, making hushed phone calls behind closed doors. I imagine some intriguing behind-the-scenes action—like they’ve discovered the elusive tiger-seal (a creature from my stories) and finally receive the national attention they deserve for their hard work.

I often use fiction to escape my reality. Why do I feel this sudden urge to write?

I panic when Yue calls me into her office. She’s caught me daydreaming again. Or she’s seen me staring at Zuko’s ass. She’ll reprimand me for being so distracted all the time and probably reassign me, too. I prepare a report about some unusual findings Zuko and I discovered in one of the plankton samples as proof we work well together. I’m ready with my notes and everything.

“Katara, how are things going with Zuko?” she asks.

“F-f-fine, I guess. Er—great.” I didn’t expect that question, exactly.

She eyes the papers in my hands, the ones I'm flipping through nervously. “You… guess?“

“We’re good partners.” Ugh, I hate that I’m blushing right now. “In the lab, I mean. We get a lot done.”

Yue nods slowly in the way that grownups usually do when they have something they don’t want to say. “That’s good. So… you don’t feel… threatened… in any way?”

Blindsided again. What the hell does she mean by that?

I try to pick up my jaw and answer quickly. I don’t want my silence to raise any suspicions. “Threatened by Zuko? No, not at all.”

“Have you received threats from anyone else?”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.”

“I don’t mean to scare you, Katara, but some threats have been made around here recently. If you ever feel unsafe or uncomfortable, will you please let me know as soon as possible?”

“Of course.”

“And… be careful. Zuko’s situation is… complicated.”

When I piece this conversation together with what I overheard between Zuko and Yue that one day, my best guess is that Mr. Kasai gives a lot of money to the Marine Center. And when things don’t go his way, he may use his power to pressure them. If Zuko’s face is any indicator, then I have no doubt his father would make threats… and follow through with them.

But what does this have to do with me?

My second clue arrives through a series of messages from Azula. She says I should stop seeing her brother, that their father disapproves, that if Zuko stays with me, then he will pay…

First of all, we are not together!

Wait. Am I the reason he…

I was with him that night.

Oh shit.

I have to know for sure.

Except Zuko is acting… weird. He’s more relaxed and happier than I’ve ever seen him. There may even be a hint at a sense of humor trying to break through his surly outer shell. Iroh has noticed the change, too, and calls it a “metamorphosis.” Zuko says he resents being compared to a butterfly and tells his uncle to “bug off.”

Did I say sense of humor? More like lame attempts at making jokes.

I laugh anyway. He lights up when I do. Like a... firefly?

Damn, he’s gorgeous.

There is no way in hell I’m bringing up that stuff about his father now.

Iroh invites Gran Gran and me to a July Fourth barbecue on the beach. Normally Dad and Sokka would come home for the holiday, but those storms swept northward and disrupted their travel plans. As consolation, I’ve been promised a HUGE party to celebrate my 16th birthday in August. To be honest, I’d be OK with a small family gathering. And Zuko. Maybe Mushi, too.

Speaking of, that man loves parties.

While Ozai practically owns half of the bayside resort property on Ember Island, his brother opted for a vacation home and a strip of private beach along the Pacific coast instead. This area is much better for surfing, but no one brought any gear today. Gran Gran enjoys chatting with Iroh’s friends, Jeong Jeong, Bumi, and Piandao. There are a few people I recognize from the restaurant—an employee or two, and a repeat customer I often see there. A young girl, maybe four or five years old, flits about the adults vying for attention. Coincidentally, she's wearing a pair of costume butterfly wings.

I survey the perfect waves and lament not having a surfboard.

“You just want an excuse to get me in a wet suit,” Zuko says.

“Was that… another joke?”

“You know me, Katara. I don’t joke.”

His face is passive, but golden eyes flash with bridled laughter. There is only one thing I can do to unleash it.

Tickle him.

“Nephew, why don’t you show Katara the tide pools?”

At first I think Iroh makes the suggestion because he disapproves of our touchy-feely ticklefest which involves tackling each other and rolling around in the sand. But after the short hike to the tide pools, I wonder if he was actually encouraging us. We are now enclosed in a small private cove.

Zuko laughs. “Uncle knows that low tide was hours ago.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, you can’t really see anything right now. If he intended for me to show you the marine life and all, then…”

We both know it was a setup, but I’m the first to make a move. I lace my fingers with his and wait to release the breath I’m holding. He does that shuddery sigh thing, like he’s relieved. And then he squeezes my hand.

“Could you tell me about it at least?” I lean into his shoulder and decide to breathe again.

“Uhh—“ He swallows. “Organisms that survive here must be able to withstand harsh conditions. The environment is constantly changing with the tides, but a unique biodiverse ecosystem has adapted to thrive.”

He gets a poke in the ribs for that. “Thank you, Wikipedia.”

He grabs my other hand to ward off the attack—or maybe to pull me closer. “I had the education position at the Marine Center, remember?”

I’m facing him now, and a heat rises between us. I’m feeling bold enough to close the gap and trap it. I’m already enslaved by the intensity of his gaze.

“Yes sir, Professor Kasai.”

He freezes.

He only steps a few feet away, but he’s as distant as the offshore waves. He’s watching them, too, but without really seeing them. There is something with him and the water—while I feel connected to it, he’s haunted by it.

“My mom loved the ocean,” he says suddenly.

The space he left behind is now cold—empty. It takes me a while to recover, to respond. “That’s something we have in common."

At this, Zuko smiles. “She would like you.”

Some warmth returns, but I'm still uncertain. “Oh. I meant… my mom loved the ocean, too.”

“Ocean secret, vast and blue

Ebbs and flows, beneath the moon,

Rise and fall, crashing blue spirit

Whispers on waves, can you hear it?”

“That’s… beautiful,” I say.

“She wrote poetry… about a lot of things, but her favorite was the sea.”

My heart is racing again, but for a different reason this time. “That’s something else we have in common.”

“What’s that?”

“My mom was a writer, too. She was an investigative reporter for The Modern Times. She wrote mostly stuff about the environment, so our work at the Marine Center reminds me a lot of her.”

“That’s so cool, Katara. She would be very proud of you.”

“She got her first big break on the oil spill in Alaska. That was before she met Dad. She dug so deep into the corporate scandal that even years later, they had to move because of safety. Of course, that didn't keep her from doing the same thing here."

"What happened to her?"

"We don't really know. She was on assignment in Death Valley. Her editor suspected foul play... but there was never any proof."

Zuko goes pale. Paler than pale. Paler than I thought possible. "D-d-death Valley?"

If Zuko’s ghosts are whispers in the waves, then mine are mirages in the desert. "Yeah. I know. Sorry, I didn’t mean to—"

"It's getting late. We should start heading back."

It's not late, but I've obviously said too much… again. I never talk about this with anyone, and I promised myself I wouldn’t be so vulnerable with Zuko. But he’d opened up about his mom... a little. Maybe something bad happened to her, too.

Zuko avoids me for the rest of the day. He uses the excuse that he needs to help his uncle with the food... and then the cleaning… and setting up for fireworks...

At dusk, they disappear. I watch Gran Gran play a complicated board game called Pai Sho with Piandao. When we settle on the beach for the show, Iroh’s youngest visitor unexpectedly plops down in my lap. I catch a whiff of something familiar, something comforting...

Moon peaches.

"Hi, I'm Kiyi," she announces, leaning against my chest and looking up at me with curious golden eyes.

“Hi, I’m Katara,” I answer slowly. “Where is your—“

“I love the fire in the sky!” she squeals as the first bottle rocket takes flight. “Uncle does the best fireworks ever!”

I’m not sure which adult the girl came with since I haven’t been introduced to everyone at the party. I can guess by her looks that she’s related to the Kasai family somehow, but it’s the way she says Uncle that sounds…

Just like Zuko.

Per the norm, the next time I’m in Zuko’s car, we act like nothing ever happened—the almost-kiss, the cold shoulder followed by moments of deep connection complete with a poetry performance.

Nevermind all that. I have more pressing questions. "Who is Kiyi?"

"I don't know. Uncle adopts practically everyone and calls them family. He already thinks of you as his niece.” Zuko immediately turns bright red and coughs. “Kiyi is sweet, but hella stubborn."

Just like Zuko. "Are you sure you're not related?"

"Maybe? Like distant cousins or something?"

"Does Iroh have any kids?"

"His son died in the war."

I apparently have a talent for finding the most sombre subjects. Either that, or there is no end to Zuko's family drama. "Oh. Sorry."

"What's this all about anyway?"

"She told me about the blue spirit."

Aaaaaaaand cue the switch from deep red to paler than pale as the color drains from Zuko’s face. "That's... well, anyone could say that. It wouldn't be the first time something supernatural was attributed to the sea. Take... Poseidon for example."

"Or Tui and La." I wait for the furrowed brow to follow.

And... check. “Who, what now?” he asks.

“Your mom’s poem reminded me of the moon and ocean spirits, Tui and La. It’s a belief my ancestors in Alaska held, a harmonious push-and-pull relationship to keep the world in balance.”

“Sounds like the tides.”

“Exactly.”

Here comes the part where he sighs dramatically, but I have no idea what he'll say next.

“It’s just another way to explain what we don’t understand. What we cannot control.”

Hmm, interesting. “Isn’t that what spirituality does?" I muse aloud. "Help us make peace with those things? Like death, for example.”

I am NOT speaking from experience because if I’m honest with myself, I am far from making peace with my mother’s death. If he has any insight, I'm all ears.

“I… don’t know.”

I don’t know, either, but I wish I did... for the both of us.

I spend another day at the Marine Center in a complete state of distraction. After this, Yue will undoubtedly reassign me to the dreaded job of cleaning up seal shit. She alternates between giving me looks of warning and pity, so I’m still not sure what to make of our conversation or anything else that's transpired since then.

I'm going to ask Zuko about it. Point blank. He'll probably turn a ghastly shade I haven't seen, yet. But it's better than black and blue, if his father really is making threats.

But when we head back to his uncle's restaurant after work, we don't slip into our usual booth near the back. I follow Zuko past the kitchen to the stairs that lead up to Iroh’s apartment. We haven't been here alone together since that night, and all of those sensations return to me as if that moment is suspended in time. I’m looking at the face of someone who’s been beaten, and all I want to do is kiss the pain away. I won’t reopen those wounds—not now, not ever.

Zuko is not one for dwelling in the past, though. He doesn’t skip a beat as he leads me down the hallway, and I think maybe we're going to his room. My brain and pulse race with curiosity—of the possibilities—but he stops short of the doorway and points at something on the wall.

My breath catches. It’s a framed newspaper article from The Modern Times, dated May 2009, the same year my mom died.

The headline reads, "No matter how things may seem to change, never forget who you are." I skim down to the byline at the bottom. "Professor Kasai teaches English composition at Atlas University."

Zuko's mom taught at AU? And she wrote for The Modern Times, too?

"When I worked for my dad last summer, I found some of Mom’s files," Zuko explains. "I knew she wrote a few articles, but I didn't know Uncle had this until I started staying here recently.”

"Do you think our moms knew each other? It's a big newspaper, but maybe—"

"Was your mom The Painted Lady?"

I stop breathing altogether. "What?"

He runs a hand through his hair like he does when he's nervous. "Was that her...pen name... or whatever?"

It was a reference to war paint and a tribute to our tribal heritage. "Yes. Why?"

"Then I need to show you something."

#zutara week #zutara week 2017 #zkweek #zkweek2017

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theinvinciblenoob · 5 years

Link

First some notes on SoftBank’s rumored expansion into China and its weird fund math, then Foxconn and then quick notes on tech depression, Huawei and more.

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new — provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at [email protected]) if you like or hate something here.

SoftBank has fund visions (and a Vision Fund) for China? That, and more money

Kane Wu at Reuters reported overnight that SoftBank is looking to open an office and hire an investment team in China, which Wu says will be based in Shanghai. That’s following the fund’s recent global expansion with new targeted offices in Saudi Arabia and India.

When I saw this, I sort of did a double-take: SoftBank doesn’t have a presence in China? The fund has reportedly been seeking investments in some of China’s leading unicorn stars, including controversial face recognition startup SenseTime, and leading edtech startup Zuoyebang (作业帮, which literally translates as “school assignment help”). (Hat-tips to Selina Wang at Bloomberg, who seems to just be sitting in Vision Fund partner meetings). And of course, it dumped a pretty penny into WeWork China, where it was part of a $500 million syndicate, and is a huge investor in Didi.

It’s sort of obvious that SoftBank would expand to China. What will be interesting though is to see how the fund structures itself long-term. As far as I know, the Vision Fund is a singular “fund” that invests worldwide (send me an email if I am wrong on this count). China has a thicket of regulations on funds and companies, which is one of several reasons we see specifically China-focused vehicles (such as Lightspeed and Lightspeed China or Sequoia and Sequoia China). If the Vision Fund continues to be a unified fund, that would be a notable strategy shift that might be cloned by other trans-Pacific funds.

Aside: SoftBank Vision Fund math is complicated

Rajeev Misra, board director of SoftBank Group and CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisors. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.

When it first closed the Vision Fund, SoftBank explained they had raised just over $93 billion in committed capital or, more precisely, around $93.15-$93.2 billion, according to the initial investor presentations and its annual Form D filings. In those docs, SoftBank said that the fund was financed with $28 billion from SoftBank and $65 billion from third-party investors.

On top of the $93 billion raised for the Vision Fund, SoftBank detailed that it had committed $4.5 billion of its own capital to a separate “Delta Fund,” which was used to alleviate conflicts around SoftBank’s Didi investment. Thus, SoftBank’s total VC funding aggregates to around $97.7 billion.

To add a complication, SoftBank later shifted $1.6 billion of the Vision Fund’s previously disclosed $65 billion in third-party capital over to the Delta Fund. In current disclosures, SoftBank shows $91.7 billion of committed capital for the Vision Fund ($28.1 billion from SoftBank and $63.6 billion from third-party investors). For the Delta Fund, SoftBank shows $6 billion in committed capital ($4.5 billion SoftBank contribution and $1.6 billion from third-party investors).

Here is where it gets even more complicated. In its latest filings, SoftBank also notes that it completed the interim closing of an additional $5 billion for the Vision Fund in mid-October, “intended for the installment of an incentive scheme for operations of SoftBank Vision Fund.” That additional cash would bring Vision Fund’s total committed capital to $96.7 billion, and $102.7 billion together with the Delta Fund.

While it wouldn’t be included in the committed equity capital total, SoftBank is also rumored to be raising a $4 billion credit facility to help finance additional acquisitions.

So, it’s probably best to say that the Vision Fund — as constituted right now — is $97 billion or $96.7 billion with precision, assuming this $5 billion reaches a final close.

SoftBank IPO

We have, of course, covered SoftBank quite obsessively, particularly its debt situation (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5). What we haven’t covered more recently are the latest developments in SoftBank’s IPO, which is slated for December 19th and expected to bring in a haul of $21 billion. More to come on that front in the coming days.

Foxconn or Foxgone?

U.S. President Donald Trump and Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images

The South China Morning Post reported yesterday that Foxconn is investigating expanding its factories to Vietnam in order to avoid tariffs. Makes sense, and I have some calls this week and next trying to suss out how much hardware supply chains have really changed in response to the trade conflict.

That decision though isn’t just about the trade conflict, but also about the quickly increasing wages of Chinese laborers, as well as political interference from Beijing. The Trump administration’s trade policies are just the excuse Foxconn needs to (at least partially) extricate itself from China, while saving face in the process.

What’s interesting is that Foxconn is also dealing with a massive brush fire in Wisconsin, where it received one of the largest economic development incentives ever offered by an American government, a whopping $3 billion package that was expected to drive manufacturing employment in the state.

Overnight, Republicans in the state legislature passed a bill that would place large restrictions on incoming Democratic governor Tony Evers. Jessie Opoien for the (Madison) Cap Times:

Under the bill, legislators would have increased influence over the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, and the WEDC board, not the governor, would appoint the job creation agency’s CEO. However, the governor’s power to appoint a CEO would be restored in September 2019.

That is the agency that provided the Foxconn funding, which has become a political football in Wisconsin politics. Republicans are trying to protect one of the major economic legacies of outgoing governor Scott Walker, as well as what they believe is the future direction of manufacturing work in the state. Democrats smell a boondoggle in the making.

If that wasn’t all, rumored skimpy sales for iPhones is putting enormous pressure on Foxconn’s bottom line. Debby Wu at Bloomberg reported two weeks ago that:

The contract manufacturer aims to cut 20 billion yuan ($2.9 billion) from expenses in 2019 as it faces “a very difficult and competitive year,” according to an internal document obtained by Bloomberg. The company’s spending in the past 12 months is about NT$206 billion ($6.7 billion).

Foxconn is a very dynamic organization that has weathered repeated crises over the years. It is pretty much unique in what it does today: very few other companies can scale up and down hundreds of thousands of workers to meet iPhone and other device demands with such alacrity.

But, the fundamentals of the mobile device market have apparently changed dramatically this year, and Foxconn is likely to be the company most harmed as the assembler of those devices. That could destroy not just the Chinese dream of leading in manufacturing, but also the Vietnam and Wisconsin dreams as well.

Also: If you haven’t read it, this poetry by a Foxconn worker who committed suicide really resonated with me. Foxconn’s suicide problem is well-documented, but we often don’t hear from the individuals themselves.

Quick bites

Which big tech companies are most depressed?

Blind, the anonymous enterprise chatting app that has taken the tech world by storm, published survey results asking tech employees “I believe I am depressed.” Roughly 40 percent of employees responded yes. Interestingly, there wasn’t too much variation between companies. Amazon had the highest rate at 43 percent and Apple had the lowest rate at 30 percent. It’s an informal survey, probably without high scientific validation, but it is a reminder for all of us in the community that mental health and burnout is very real in the startup and tech ecosystems and we should be vigilant in helping each other when times are rough.

More bad news for Huawei as British Telecom bans its equipment

This is one of those stories that we are just going to keep hearing about. After bans in Australia and New Zealand, British Telecom has announced they will not just ban Huawei’s 5G equipment, but also its 3G and 4G equipment. Britain, like Aus/NZ, Canada and the U.S., is part of the Five Eyes intelligence network, and national security officials have been leading the crusade against Huawei infrastructure. What’s interesting is not just the rapidity of the bans, but also that the bans haven’t (from what I have seen) migrated outside the Five Eyes community yet.

Pendo commits to hometown of Raleigh

Raleigh skyline. Photo by James Willamor used under Creative Commons via Flickr.

Pendo is a digital product management platform that has had quite a bit of success with customers and has raised more than $100 million in VC funding, most recently a Series D from Sapphire. The company announced that they have received a grant from home state North Carolina’s economic development department to grow in the Raleigh region. Pendo is committing $34.5 million to its headquarters (with the potential of creating 590 jobs), while the state will offer around $8.8 million in potential reimbursements over the next 12 years.

Given what I wrote yesterday about Wes McKinney leaving NYC and heading to Nashville and the work Chattanooga is doing to aid startups, it’s great to see other hotspots like Raleigh, NC invest to build out their ecosystems in a compelling way.

Todd Olson, CEO of Pendo, explained to me by email that, “Office rents in our downtown are a fraction of the cost of operating in other cities, and the cost of living is appealing to our employees. They can afford to buy a house here. In some markets around the country, that is becoming more difficult. It’s also just a nice place to live and work.”

Creative work is increasingly going to have to find a lower-cost home.

What’s next

I am still obsessing about next-gen semiconductors. If you have thoughts there, give me a ring: [email protected].

Thoughts on articles

The LP Anti-Portfolio – Great short read. Lindel Eakman, former managing director at UTIMCO, the University of Texas/Texas A&M endowment, gives a list of funds that he passed on that he now regrets. Unfortunately, this is pretty rare coming from an LP, albeit a former one. It would be great to get more public discussion on which funds were missed and why by LP investors.

Hopefully more reading time tomorrow.

Reading docket

What I’m reading (or at least, trying to read)

Huge long list of articles on next-gen semiconductors. More to come shortly.

via TechCrunch

#IFTTT #TechCrunch

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spacemagazine · 6 years

Text

Small Press Traffic’s Executive Director on Place-Keeping in San Francisco

For decades, San Francisco has illuminated the United States and served as a beacon for artists and radical thinkers. It’s where Joan Didion traveled to document 1960s counterculture, it’s the home of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, activist artist Ruth Asawa’s hometown, and the city where California’s first openly gay public official, Harvey Milk, served on the board of supervisors.

San Francisco’s new economy and shifting demographics, as a result of the ballooning tech industry, have elevated real estate costs to the stars – spiraling arts and cultural organizations that once served as the city’s backbone into a state of crisis.

I spoke with Samantha Giles, Executive Director of Small Press Traffic, about the ways that the historic literary arts organization has created and kept space for radical thinkers in an otherwise untenable climate for the arts.

Sara: What is Small Press Traffic?

Samantha: Small Press Traffic is what I normally describe as a literary presentation organization which means that we provide a continuum of support for writers, particularly those who publish with small presses and who consider themselves experimental which generally results in some kind of presentation of that work. That continuum of support includes things like workshops, lectures, and readings and other events to celebrate and promote experimental writing. I’ve been the director of SPT since January 2009.

Sara: Tell me a little bit about Small Press Traffic’s origins.

Samantha: Small Press Traffic started in the mid-seventies, 1974, in the back of a bookstore called Paperback Traffic. The idea was basically to make small press books available for purchase inside the larger bookstore. The main urgency around generating this collection of small press books was that it was the mid-70s and there were lots of people making cool artist books and experimental presses and there wasn’t really a cohesive venue for that, but the economy was such that people had tons of space and tons of time. There was a curated space within this bookstore that was about promoting these small press books. As that community started to coalesce around that curation, there were events in that bookstore around that started to be more of a community. What was then SPT later moved to its own space for a number of years and then did all sorts of things like intergenerational writing workshops and events and also the selling of books. When that bookstore financially became unsustainable, the organization moved entirely to a presentation organization in the early-90s and has been housed at different academic institutions ever since. We were at New College for a while and we’ve been at CCA for a while. That affiliation has moved into primarily about providing an address and a virtual location, although we do still have occasional events. There’s no financial reciprocity in the institution at all, but we have a home there.

Sara: How have changes in the Bay Area effected Small Press Traffic?

Samantha: When the organization first started it was a completely reasonable goal, from what I understand, to work half-time in a bookstore and halftime on your art practice and your art practice might include things like insurrectionary politics and new forms of identity and new forms of community. It’s not an entirely unknown argument that the demography and the economics of the Bay Area have changed drastically since that 40 years ago moment. The tech industry has changed the economy in extraordinary ways and the access to space has been really affected and the time and energy available for insurrectionary politics. What might be considered experimental literature and art has drastically changed as well, and so, I think that the impact that SPT has felt in terms of its access to space has been felt by lots of arts organizations in the Bay Area. Particularly those who are keen to promote arts practices that are not traditional, populist ones. There are lots of organizations who no longer exist, largely because of the access to space and the access to an interested audience, but also the economies around that art, the energy and capacity to fuel the fires of that kind of often anti-capitalist art and that kind of community that generates around those aesthetics and politics, are largely gone.

Sara: Is that change good or bad?

Samantha: Oh it’s horrible. I think it’s really sad. I think art is a necessary survival skill for human beings and for cultures. That’s the point of culture. I think that it’s really sad that the Bay Area has been known for decades and decades as a space for weird, exciting, enriching culture and that culture is really deeply homogenized now in a way that is sad and depressing. The inflated tech industry has descended on the Bay Area and the people can pay a ton of money for their entertainments, but their entertainments are restaurants and fancy apartments not supporting grassroots arts. There just hasn’t been the level of philanthropy and attention to the reason why San Francisco is an interesting place to live and it’s really devastating that so many artists are forced to move out of the Bay Area and/or give up their practices or arts organizations, forced to move or die because there isn’t a healthy ecosystem of economy and culture brewing in its scobi. It’s just economy right now. I mean, all sorts of people are being forced out in ways that are equally or more brutal, but of course, we’re talking about the arts right now.

Sara: How do you think that we can get philanthropists to start putting money there?

Samantha: I think that’s a larger question. I mean, people don’t go to college to become erudite, knowledgeable citizens. They go to college to find a practical skill to finance their lives. And assume an extraordinary amount of debt in the process. The whole system is broken. There’s definitely a push-back in the ways that people craft their DIY spaces and their Pinterest pages or whatever, but, I think that it’s a much larger cultural issue. I don’t know that I have much faith in the individual conversion of one person or one organization to support art. Art is so personal! To say, “Oh Oracle should give a bunch of money to the LAB and SPT and Yerba Buena.” I mean, who’s to say that that’s the right organization to promote or the right ethos to promote? There’s a general deterioration in the understanding and appreciation of arts and culture for arts and culture’s sake. I’m not necessarily sure that I have the right answer for that. Is it… break capitalism? We should break capitalism. Let’s do that.

Sara: Over the last nine years that you’ve been working for SPT, what are the ways that you’ve leveraged the organization’s identity as a space without a space to its advantage?

Samantha: Well, I definitely think that SPT would have died if we’d had to pay rent. And yet, there’s a huge disadvantage in not having a physical space. The sense of building a community and building a cohesive feeling around the organization is deeply compromised by the fact that we don’t have a space where people can just pop in and take communion. We can’t build the sense of hominess like the Poetry Project in New York, where it’s like “Oh! I always know that on Mondays and Wednesdays, there’s a thing.” We’ve been deeply impacted by our inability to negotiate an audience and build an audience because of that lack of consistency. But we are a deeply elastic organization because we don’t have to pay rent. There’s an organization called Artist Television Access, where we’ve been presenting for the last...I want to say five years… It’s astounding that organization still exists in the Mission District of San Francisco because they are a grassroots, almost 99% volunteer-led organization that is dedicated to experimental film and other, mostly experimental visual and performing arts forms. The Lab is another organization devoted to experimental art, also located in the Mission. And both of those organizations have deeply struggled to stay afloat because of gentrification. The Lab’s building was just bought and they don’t even know if they are going to let the Lab and the other organizations who rent that space stay because the real estate is so high. There’s just no way, with the size and the scope of SPT, that we would be able to have events if we had to pay rent. That said, it’s hard to be a place without a place and it’s also really exciting to be a place without a place. We’ve been able to do stuff online that I don’t think we would have done were it not for the lack of a physical location and there’s a way in which we’re able to collaborate with physical spaces, organizations, and entities that we probably wouldn’t seek out if we weren’t forced to do it. There’s an exciting electricity in that.

Sara: What are some of the projects that you’ve done that are examples of Small Press Traffic’s position as an organization that doesn’t have a space?

Samantha: We have a few things that I think are at some level born from the fact that we don’t have a physical space. We do these sporadic online workshops. They allow a teacher, who may be academically affiliated, and may not, to teach a class. I encourage people to bring a syllabus that they wouldn’t be able to teach in their institution. They’re allowed to do these experimental classes and to cull students from all over the world. As a result, we’ve had teachers and students participate from places like Australia and Ohio. We also do an in-person fundraiser, similar to the Poetry Project Marathon, called Endless Summer, and we’ve had people participate virtually in that. We do try as much as we can to have an online presence. We are re-launching an online magazine called Traffic Report and that is an online space. Also collaborating with different organizations but also venue support, for example collaborating with the San Francisco Museum of Art, which was all about poets talking about poetry and poets talking about contemporary art and I’m not sure that we would have done that collaboration if we’d had a physical space. We are able to think outside of that curatorial reliability is what I’m trying to say, and I think that in that mode we’ve done some of our most interesting projects.

For example, this past year, some students from UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley collaborated to create a suite of programs acknowledging and celebrating the New Narrative genre of writing. New Narrative was a school of writing that was actually kind born and bred at Small Press Traffic. It was really exciting for that to have that tribute to this school of writing manifest and for SPT to stay involved. Since the programming was somewhat traditional conference fare: it was a conference, there was a symposium and talks, it was born in a physical space of people doing this academic performance of academia around New Narrative writing. Of course, there were performances and readings as well. Because we didn’t have a physical space, but also, because it didn’t feel that energized to replicate that model or at least I guess it felt more energizing to think outside of that model (and the conference coordinators were generous to let us do this experimenting) - we did a walking tour. It lives online but it’s a physical thing that one can do where one walks around San Francisco and at particular points in the map of San Francisco one can stop and press an audio clip and listen to a New Narrative writer talk about something about that space. That sound clip could be writing that they’ve done already about that particular corner of San Francisco or them talking extemporaneously about their writing practice and their New Narrative work in San Francisco. That’s located on our website at smallpresstraffic.org. You don’t have to be in San Francisco in order to enjoy the experience. You can be in the San Francisco of your mind.

Samantha Giles is the author of deadfalls and snares (Futurepoem Books, 2014). She is the director of Small Press Traffic and lives in Oakland, California.

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