i’m so fucking pissed rn

Log 2: Living Under a Rock

It's been a week since my drop-off at the hospital....no surprise I've been having trouble sleeping, I got some work leave from my boss at the nature reserve.....god damn I'm fucking tired.

Local folks both new to the town and old friends have been pandering for questions.

Some of the local middle schoolers kept fallowing me to my work place asking me about the metal guy. I simply told them I shot him in the eye, than he exploded.....I wasn't expecting those annoying brats to tell other kids about it. Obviously the local pastor (Mark) has been sending his goons to come to my cabin to convince me to come to church for the sake of saving my soul and all that "lovely" jazz. I told them I literally may have met the devil, shot him in the eye, exploded , and now he's dead and thus to leave me alone.

Some folks are a little more respectful and just ask me about more personal things. Got recommended a therapist who just moved to town named Miss Jenny Oakley, nice lady, smiles all the time and has an impressive 3 PhDs in psychology and mental health medication. She's been helping me get through the whole thing and believes I'll be able to make a speedy recovery. She trusts my resolve and that's good in my book.

....now "Newly appointed Deputy" Jeff (my ex-boyfriend) apparently thinks he can just give me the presidential treatment. He keeps following my car EVERYWHERE. I feel like nuisance now this has happened, people keep staring at me when Jeff just follows me at this point. You'd think after our falling out he'd have the self respect to be a little less...creepy about it. He's stopped by my cabin to keep checking up on me....I wonder if he thinks it's going to be like in the movies where estranged lovers get back together if something happens....jokes on him... I do not need a guy who has tried to convince me to move to Ohio and insult my family's cultural background to boot. Asshole.

Anyways, I've been hanging out at this new coffee shop that's just opened up...it's cozy, sells actual homemade pastries and the coffee is pretty good. Finally, a nice third place. I've noticed more people around my age go there too .... however I've noticed one group constantly eyeing me from across the shop every time I go...they call themselves the "Marine Spotters"...I have no fucking idea what that intels, one of them came up to my table, had the audacity to sit down in front of me like he knew me.....

"So..........you saw one?", the unshaven neck beard asked.

".......you know you could have asked to sit down and I would have said yes but fine go off Gabe Newell.", I'm not usually this hostile but things have gotten tense for while....I wouldn't blame anyone for being upset at me for it either.

"heheh very funny, anyway, my name is Benedict Grabowski. I'm the local expert in these "big metal men "....I see based on your description you've seen a "Black Legion" marine. A level 3 on the danger scale and are quite rare in these parts.", he adjusts his glasses. "The fact you even survived a harrowing encounter with one is without a doubt a life achievement and a free ticket admission to our organization!", handing me a business card with some edgy cartoon spaceman, it had his phone number, email address and an actual address...it was the abandoned mineral mine not too far from the animal reserve I work at....

"I hope your membership will prove to be of great use to us.", concluding with a smug look on his jolly face.

I sat there ready to throw this guy from window I was seated next to....but I'm certain the shop owners wouldn't be too pleased.

".....why the .org?"

He acted confused, "I beg your pardon?".

"...the .org....on your email address....you don't work for the Tillamook station do you? I told them I don't know shit.", took a frustrated sip of my coffee.

He laid back, "well...I...what one would call....a "white hat hacker"....my services in online server hacking, government surveillance and hehe...not to brag...a national code cracking champion of the Tokyo Code Breaker competition. I actually am...not a huge fan of our corporate federal overlords and I only desire for their inevitable downfall through me tanking their stocks."...

I literally was sitting across to a felon....

"so ..with your epic survival skills, my tech mastery and my collaborators", he points to his original table of collected individuals; a heavyset goth girl, the kid of one of the local beef farmers and one creepy guy I remember being the weird kid in highschool.

"Hi Steven.", I wave to him.

"Hi Lorey!", he waves and gives his creepy grin that in through literally means nothing to me. He does it for a cheap bit that I'm certain Jeff already knows and is dieing to catch him for something.

By this point Benedict was actually shocked I knew Steven. "What?! I thought you just moved here!"

I chuckled a little, "I use to live here, I know the area rather well but it's changed a bit since I was last here back in 2003. Also....what the shit is this all about?". I point to the business card.

His shocked expression transforms back into that stupid 'big shot cool guy' look. "Well, we spot those big metal men. Turns out....these anomalous entities are actually appearing throughout the whole planet. All of them of variety and....motives....". He looks around, takes out a folder of the ever lovable 'blurry photographic evidence' one would expect looking for cryptids. "Behold. Humanoids who walk amongst us!".

Im staring at the photos, one struck me to my core ....the big black and bronze one I saw being blown to chunks...the one that killed Grandpa.

"ah...I see...so it was that one.", leaning towards me closer....I can smell the fucking butter from his croissant he ate at his table. "If you need us...call us....", he decided to leave a second card....ok....."anyway, surprised?"

I was a lot more than surprised....I must have been living under a rock...."yeah....I am."

After that I decided to go home. On the ride back, I couldn't help but wonder if Benedict was telling the truth... about them being everywhere...that's a scary thought in all honesty.

I get out my car and took one long glance at my Grandpa's cabin. His only inheritance to my mom. When I said the funeral was a mess, it was an absolute garbage fire because on the same day we had his will reading. His most valuable possession in his will was this cabin, and boy was my aunt pissed she didn't get the property. At least Mom had the last laugh, anyway....as I was remembering that day....I noticed something that sent shivers up and down my spine.

A blood trail....it looked like it came from the forest behind the property, up the steps and on to my doormat. I get out of the car, cautiously, for I all know whom ever left this bloody mess is close by.

It was a huge leather sack, sealed tight with...a red wax in the opening. It was leaking a lot, I was hesitant to open it, but the blood smelt familiar. "....it can't be....", I tore off the hard wax, the gamey stink of deer was permeating throughout the porch. Opening the sack, I saw what could be weeks worth of meat. I was stunned! All nicely cut and cleaned ...I tried lifting the sack without getting some blood on me...failed...and brought it to the cellar freezer. As I placed the meat in the freezer, I saw there was a note on the bag I hadn't noticed....it was a handwritten note for certain....but I had no idea what was written on it. Again, Nordic ruins were present...but it was mixed with another language...I took medieval history a short while back and had the privilege of almost learning how to read medieval texts....it was close to it...and yet... completely unreadable for me.

I set the note on a table and save it for later.

Everything has been so strange lately.

The hours pass, and I finally decided to do some digging....this has to be some...real life ARG or something....it's either a dedicated group of cosplayers....or... something is really out there...it's so uncanny....

End of log 2

@kit-williams

under the cut, a long update on Today When A Dude From Work Yelled At Me

tl;dr my boss is being even more spineless than usual, has explicitly told his two disabled female direct reports that if we experience more ableist nonsense from some guy who has already yelled at us he will not intervene or back us up because “conflict is healthy”

however, the director of another team was also there and at least she is not spineless!

also I fully hate my job and have resigned from interviewing applicants for staff positions here, because I’m worried that the next time someone asks what it’s like to work here I will tell them.

(I do know that “previously never having been yelled at in your workplace” is a big privilege few people have and I know I sound here a bit like my boss does every time he goes “wow I didn’t realize there was so much ableism,”)

(also yeah, he has repeatedly this week been like “I’m so surprised that ableism is so entrenched and people are so unwilling to talk about it,” and it’s like, buddy, you are surprised all by yourself here)

anyway, this meeting’s key players:

-my boss

-me

-my favorite coworker, who does a similar job to mine

-the woman who does my boss’s job, but in Canada

-the woman who does my job, but in Canada

-the jackass who yelled at us

-two women from his team, neither of whom said much, although one of them did decide, at a point well after her team member literally yelled at us, that the conversation was “over time, we’ve gotta go” and ended the call abruptly.

(I would pay money to see any backchannel conversations those team members were having during this call, like, do they totally agree that we’re being Extreme and Adversarial or are they like “uh, buddy, maybe we could back this up a step?” do the two women have a chat thread the asshole’s not in and what does it say?

but also I don’t need them to see the backchannel my team had that started out with “this is a lot of jargon, what does this mean?” and finished with, like, it’s a work software and if they wanted to IT could see it so there’s a line to be mindful of, but there was mild snark all around, and a few instances of me using the word “buddy” in the way where I would use “asshole” on a non-work chat software.

(Cool Colleague and I did at one point start a text message thread on our personal phones that’s just completely impolitic and 50% full-on swearing)

I would not be delighted if other people saw our Teams backchannel, but I would be willing to defend all of it, if I had to.

we haven’t fired one lady for “bullying other team members so bad that two of them quit explicitly because of her bullying and said so on the record,” so I feel like “being sarcastic on the work chat” is not a firing offense here.

also, like, they’d have to fire at least 2/3 of my department, which would be… kind of hilarious, actually? no one of us is individually irreplaceable, but if our whole department collapsed it would be a Bad Time For Everyone.

Cool Coworker is for SURE quitting as soon as she can line something up, so probably she’ll be replaced before I quit, but also, do you know how funny it would be if we quit simultaneously and the whole office was like “oh fuck, we needed those two people pretty bad, actually, maybe we should have done something the fifth or sixth time they said they were feeling undervalued and demoralized? whoops!”

anyway, as I said earlier, this meeting consisted of our three person team, the two-person team who does our job in Canada, and the team of which Yelling Man is the director

(today I learned that Yelling Man actively wants to quit working here, but can’t because “the CEO won’t let him,” is that a thing? how does that work? I’m sorry you hate it here, buddy, but you still can’t yell at me)

anyway, Canada’s department head had to leave the meeting early (by which I mean like 30 minutes after it was supposed to end, it continued after that) so I think she missed the yelling (now I wish she hadn’t, I feel like she was the person most likely to say “guy, you’re yelling at us, what if you didn’t?)

so the meeting ended, we debriefed.

I asked my boss to interrupt this guy if he raises his voice in future meetings. my boss said no, because conflict is healthy

I asked my boss if he would back me up/cover for me if I need to leave a meeting for 90 seconds to calm down because a dude is yelling at me. no, he will not do that either, because conflict is healthy.

there will be at least one additional meeting on this subject with a dude who yelled at us for calling out ableism and my boss has informed his two junior female disabled staff members that if this guy yells ableist nonsense at us a second time, he will do literally nothing to intervene or help us and he won’t try to call out this guy on how he behaved today, either.

I do genuinely appreciate the vast amount of off-the-record paid sick time I’ve gotten, but also, I am maybe ready to stop saying “my boss is so great, but sometimes…”

like, my boss is a spineless asshole, but sometimes he does nice things.

anyway! you know who is <not> a spineless asshole? the head of the department from Canada! she missed the yelling, but noticed how needlessly hostile and also incredibly ableist this dude was being, so she got the other Canadian to fill her in on the part she missed.

she is horrified and using words like “harassment”

she wants the folks on my team to meet with her individually to discuss and document how inappropriate this guy was, so she can do something about it.

I don’t know what our options are. despite being an org with somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 staff, I’m not sure we have an HR department?

we have the Talent people, who oversee our definitely garbage probably illegal hiring process (with interview questions like “what is your relationship with your mother like?” and “oh, but aren’t most disabled advocates just so mean all the time?”) so my hope is we can get Almost Anyone Else, but I don’t think there’s anyone else, it’s probably them.

-the Integrity team might be good, but as far as I know the three members of that team either just quit, are secretly quitting very soon, or are on sabbatical, and also I think they deal more with legal issues than just “some asshole yelling at work”

-and there’s Yelling Man’s boss, our CEO, who is not… famous for being a reasonable guy with a good understanding of workplace norms, acceptable behavior, nuance, etc. he’s also the guy who refuses to let Yelling Man quit, so I don’t know if he would be at all helpful here

but at least somebody is trying!

also, for a while I was interviewing candidates for jobs here, and I thought I could do a little bit of harm reduction. I would skip the wildly inappropriate interview questions, and I would be as honest as possible with people who asked what it was like to work here.

a woman I interviewed in January is quitting as soon as she can because it sucks so much here. her job is to tell people when we’re breaking the law, usually in ways related to privacy laws, but also I think some equity stuff.

I knew when I interviewed her that her job in particular would suck, I watched how people treated the other people who did it, ignoring them at best, belittling them sometimes. fuck rules, we’re innovators!

I definitely told her we had some strong personalities and it wouldn’t be an easy job.

in the meeting where everyone who interviewed her met to make a decision a dude tried to stop us hiring her because, essentially, fuck rules, we’re innovators, why do we need someone who cares about complying?

-the boss of her team, who has since quit, was like “we probably should try not to break the law, though”

so she got hired and now both of them are quitting because it sucks here and I feel complicit in getting her here.

- so I’m resigning from doing interviews with job candidates, theoretically because of “limited capacity” but actually because if someone asks me what it’s like to work here, I will not be able to hedge, I will absolutely be like “it sucks so much to work here. we do occasionally manage to do good work, but the process of making that happen in this incredibly dysfunctional environment grinds down staff. it is bad to work here, I am quitting the second I can, go somewhere else”

and, like, if I got lucky I could get away with that once, and also it would be a fun way to get fired, but instead of that I’m just not helping bring on staff anymore, because it makes me feel complicit when this place grinds them down”

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga - Icelandic review

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga is a Netflix-produced affectionate parody film about Eurovision starring Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams. This wouldn't qualify it for coverage on this blog by itself - but as it happens, the main characters are Icelandic, Icelandic is spoken in it, and a significant portion of the film takes place in Iceland. So I think it's close enough to being of interest to readers of this blog!

As a film, my feelings on it were mixed - the Eurovision parodies were incredibly spot-on, I liked Dan Stevens' character and the amount of Eurovision cameos, and it definitely had some pretty funny moments - but it was far longer than it needed to be and wildly inconsistent in tone, flitting between utter ridiculousness and emotional melodrama played completely straight. However, this won't be a review of the film - instead, I'll be going over the portrayal of Iceland and its culture and language and sprinkling in some related trivia.

The Icelandic Opening

The film opens with a montage and a song that the subtitles identify as an "Icelandic folk song". The song is Sá ég spóa, which is indeed a genuine Icelandic folk song. The lyrics of the song go:

Sá ég spóa suður í flóa, syngur lóa úti í móa, bí bí bí bí, vorið er komið víst á ný

which translates to:

I saw a whimbrel in the bay to the south, a plover sings in the dry grassland, cheep cheep cheep cheep, spring is surely here again

The song references the common folk belief that the migratory European golden plover brings spring with it; we still have newspaper headlines when the first plover is spotted (or heard) every spring. The song is largely notable for being suitable for canon singing, which unfortunately can't be heard well in the movie, since the most audible part is the beginning, and the song kind of fades out before the other voices come in. I think this YouTube video is the same recording the movie uses, only you can hear all of it properly!

From there, the first chunk of the movie takes place in Iceland, in both the capital Reykjavík and Húsavík, a town in northern Iceland (the Húsavík scenes were genuinely filmed there). These scenes feature Icelandic extras and some actual spoken Icelandic, with English subtitles. Their lines are grammatically accurate and natural, clearly translated by a native speaker; however, when you're actually Icelandic, it's incredibly obvious that Pierce Brosnan (playing the main character's father) does not actually know the language. He tries, but it's only kind of intelligible, and when he's surrounded by actually Icelandic extras and the film wholly acts like he's just another one of them, it's pretty glaring.

The Names

The first really major issue to tackle about this movie is the character names.

The main characters are named Lars Erickssong and Sigrit Ericksdóttir. First of all, I understand that "Erickssong" is meant to be a pun because he's a musician - but it simply makes no sense to make a pun like this, any more than it would make any sense as a joke in English to consistently refer to somebody as someone's song instead of their son. You can absolutely make up punny Icelandic patronyms - but the part you make the pun out of has to be the name part, not the son/dóttir part, or it just doesn't register as a name at all.

But let's put that aside. Lars is an accepted first name in Iceland - but Sigrit is not, nor is Erick, and Lars is not a common name - it's pretty distinctly foreign-sounding. In general, nearly all of the Icelandic characters' names are not actual Icelandic names, and don't sound like they might be Icelandic names, either.

You might say, well, this is a comedy film, it's not supposed to be accurate. And there is some truth to that, sure. But the thing is that most of the names used in the movie aren't really humourous or systematically inaccurate in a deliberate-seeming way. Instead, they largely just sound like they're playing to your average American's idea of what generic Scandinavian names sound like, but with patronymic suffixes slapped on, and I expect the primary American audience would assume these are realistic Icelandic names.

This is unfortunate, because Icelandic names broadly really don't sound like generic Scandinavian names! We have a different alphabet from our Nordic neighbors: in particular, we don't have the letter c. And the overall sound of Icelandic is pretty different, such that the names in this movie sound distinctly foreign to us. The actual Icelandic equivalent to Sigrit Ericksdóttir would be something like Sigríður Eiríksdóttir, and in fact some of the Icelandic extras just went ahead and pronounced her last name "Eiríksdóttir". Naming her Sigrit Ericksdóttir instead isn't a joke; it's just inaccurate, and I don't think the film being a comedy really excuses stubbornly insisting on not doing the research here, especially when you involve a bunch of Icelanders who would definitely have pointed this out.

Húsavík and On-Screen Text

While Húsavík is a real place, the way it's pronounced and spelled is all over the place. I think the subtitles sometimes included the accents and sometimes not; on-screen text usually didn't include accents. It's important to note that u and ú are two different letters in Icelandic, pronounced differently; not using the accent is wrong, so although not including accents is acceptable for regular people typing in a medium where it'd be difficult or tedious to use them, on-screen text does not really have any excuse, especially in a movie that significantly takes place in Iceland rather than simply being a throwaway scene; they have plenty of time to spell the words correctly.

It's also a little frustrating that Húsavík is actually pretty easy to pronounce for English-speakers! It's just HOO-sah-veek - no sounds that don't exist in English at all. Despite this, the last syllable gets pronounced 'vick' sometimes, and in the song during the climax, Rachel McAdams' Swedish singing double Molly Sandén makes it sound Swedish and like it actually has a u instead of an ú.

Elves and Folklore

Elves are a plot point in the movie, with Sigrit being a true believer in elves but Lars not. She leaves food at a little 'dollhouse' built into a hill while asking the elves for favors. Needless to say, this is a comedic element, and the way it's used is pretty fun - nonetheless, however, I feel obliged to say that no, Icelanders do not do this. Even the true believers (who are few and far between) don't leave them offerings or pray to them for favors - and in Icelandic folklore, elves are not tiny! They're thought to live in actual rocks - no little houses necessary - and they're pretty intimidating and vengeful as described in folklore; if you were to give them offerings or ask them anything, it'd be more along the lines of pleading with them to please tolerate something you're about to do without taking bloody vengeance on you, not asking them to do something nice for you.

(The movie's use of elves was actually ultimately more accurate than it seemed; I won't spoil the details, but it's pretty good.)

Another plot point involves Sigrit's inability to sing a "speorg note", which is stated to be from Icelandic folklore. There is no such folklore, "speorg" would actually be pronounced spee-org with a hard g if it were an Icelandic word, and the way they're pronouncing it is once again something that sounds more vaguely Swedish than like Icelandic of any kind. Obviously this is a pure joke concept not to be taken very seriously.

The Problem With Winning

A major plot point in the movie is a businessman, "Victor Karlosson", who points out early in the film that if Iceland won Eurovision, it'd practically bankrupt the country. This is a genuine concern that Icelanders talk about any time we seem to have a chance of doing well. However, that scene also features someone suggesting hosting the contest in Keflavík, a town about 45 minutes outside of Reykjavík, which causes him to respond that a town of 15,000 wouldn't be able to do that. The joke here is obviously meant to be that hosting it in such a small town (actually pretty big on an Icelandic scale) is especially obviously absurd. However, I'm pretty sure I remember it being actually seriously suggested that if we won Eurovision we might have to host it in one of the aircraft hangars at the US army base that used to be in (near) Keflavík! We don't actually have any Eurovision-sized stadiums in the country, so that was legitimately one of the more realistic possibilities.

Perceptions of the Contest in Iceland

In the movie, while Lars is absolutely obsessed with Eurovision, this is implied to be pretty weird. There's a recurring joke of nobody wanting to hear Eurovision songs, and a lengthy scene in a Húsavík bar where the TV is showing a football game and one of the inhabitants makes an impassioned speech about how they should switch to Eurovision to see Iceland's entry because the contestants are from Húsavík! This is pretty hilarious, because man, Icelanders who don't like Eurovision have a hard time getting away from it when it's on! Potentially you might have a bar making a point of showing something else on Eurovision night and advertising itself specifically to Eurovision-haters, but the idea of no one in a full bar of random Icelanders wanting to watch Eurovision, especially when Iceland is competing, is pretty absurd. We're obsessed with this contest!

The bit where the teenage boy who plays drums in their band doesn't accompany them abroad because "my friends think the song contest is for losers" is valid, though; I can absolutely believe in a friend group of musically-inclined teenagers who think it's trash and they're too cool for it.

A Song in Icelandic Would Never Win

Sigrit says before the Icelandic semifinal that she wishes she could sing in Icelandic, and Lars counters by saying a song in Icelandic would never win. It's true that after Eurovision dropped the rule about all contestants singing in one of their country's official languages, most of Iceland's Eurovision entries have been in English, largely because of the perception that nobody will understand Icelandic lyrics ("Hatrið mun sigra" was only the second entry to be in Icelandic since the change).

However, a lot of songs are still sung in Icelandic in the Icelandic contest - in fact, the last couple years have required it! So technically this should not have stopped the characters from singing in Icelandic there and just translating it to English for the main event. This is a minor nitpick, though, and can be considered merely one of the many pieces of artistic license taken with the contest rules in the movie.

"Semen and Garfunkel"

There is a scene where Lars tells Sigrit that romance ruins bands, and he lists off a few supposed examples, including "Semen and Garfunkel". This probably seems like a really weird, random joke to everyone else, but it's actually kind of enjoyable when you do know Icelandic, because the Icelandic equivalent of the name Simon, Símon, is actually pronounced very similarly to "semen". It's a joke about them being Icelandic and therefore pronouncing his name that way, only probably nobody outside of Iceland would actually get it. I enjoy this.

Some Transcripts/Translations

There are a couple of pieces of unsubtitled Icelandic in the film. At the end of Ólafur Darri Ólafsson presenting the points from the Icelandic jury in the semifinal (yes, they have public jury points in the semifinal; another one of those bits of artistic license), after he says thanks, he adds in Icelandic: "Takk fyrir. Fyrirgefið þið aftur." This just means "Thanks. Sorry again [about the technical mishaps during Iceland's entry]."

During the climax of the film, Sigrit sings a song about her hometown, which has a couple of lines of Icelandic in the chorus. Our initial reaction to the [sings in Icelandic] subtitle was actually "Thaaaaat's not Icelandic," but when the chorus came on again I just about managed to make out that yes, it was in fact supposed to be Icelandic, which Molly Sandén was just pronouncing in a pretty Swedish way. The main line goes "Eina sem ég þrái er að vera með þér í Húsavík," or "only thing I long for is to be with you in Húsavík." There is another line after that, but I can't make out what she's trying to sing there at all, even after going back and rewinding it a few times.

License Plate Trivia

This is only barely relevant, but the license plate on Fire Saga's Eurovision tour bus is R 373. This is one of the old-fashioned black license plates that were in use before 1987; the R stands for Reykjavík, as license plate numbers were allocated by county. In 1987, we switched to white license plates independent of county with two letters followed by three numbers; later, when they ran out of numbers, it was tweaked so that the first number slot could also be a letter. However, some cars that had the old license plates are still on the roads today. I can't imagine why they'd put an old license plate on the bus unless it's genuinely just an old Icelandic bus with pre-1987 license plates.

The Reaction

The most realistic portrayal of Iceland in this movie is when Lars and Sigrit return from Eurovision to a crowd of extremely enthusiastic people waving Icelandic flags. Icelanders who accomplish anything cool abroad tend to be treated as heroes on their return; when our handball team won a silver at the Olympics, there was a whole sea of people and a ceremony to welcome them back, and they were all awarded with the Order of the Falcon. This is absolutely what Icelanders would do, accurate Iceland, A+.

Belonging: An Inclusive Approach to Inclusion

By Neha Sampat, Esq.

(This article builds on a training the author provided to the ACCTLA Board in May 2019 and was originally printed in ACCTLA's The Verdict magazine.)

In 2001, right around the time I was starting my career as an attorney, African-Americans made up 1.28% of partners in law firms. This clearly was a problem. Even way back then, we as a profession decried awful statistics like these and promised to do better. In 2017, sixteen years and many, many millions of dollars later, the percentage of African-American partners in law firms was 1.83%. Math may not be my forté, but I know that is a 0.55% increase over 16 years.

That’s not a typo. And that certainly is not progress.

The legal profession’s stagnation with regard to diversity and inclusion is such old news that the stagnation itself has become stagnant.

There are a number of reasons why things haven’t changed. As a belonging strategist, consultant, speaker, and trainer, I work a lot in the legal industry, but also in other industries, so I get to see what sets us apart from other industries for both better and worse. On the worse side of the coin, we are very risk-averse: We aren’t comfortable with experimenting with bold initiatives, because we fear failure and worry it will define us. We are trained (for many good reasons) to mitigate risk, but it works against us when it keeps us stuck to the status quo. 

We as a profession also are very competitive. That means that we want to do whatever it is our competitors are doing. “Does Firm A have a diversity committee? Oh, then we better create one, too.” We measure our success relative to others in our profession. “We beat the average by having 1.84% African-American partners. Yes! Success!”

Ok, I’m being a bit hyperbolic and more than a bit glass-half-empty, which is not my usual view of the world. So here’s the glass-half-full part: We don’t have to keep doing what we are doing that is not getting to where we really want to be. We are capable of learning, growing, and adjusting. In fact, as lawyers, we are really good at learning, gathering evidence, and reframing.

The big reframe I urge you to consider to earnestly start to move the needle on inclusion in our profession is to shift from a diversity and inclusion framework to a belonging framework. This is going to help you get unstuck from what hasn’t been working for decades and start addressing what the real issues are in an inherently inclusive way. 

The Problem with Diversity

What is diversity? Diversity is most often about demographics and is measured by sheer numbers of people from specific categories of background, experiences, and/or traits. I see diversity as useful in that, by creating a critical mass of previously underrepresented folks, (1) Legal employers have a better chance of attracting even more folks of that particular background since people want to work where there are others to whom they can relate; and (2) Conceptually, legal employers have a better chance of decreasing implicit bias within the work environment since more folks will have increased exposure to and opportunities to connect and empathize with those who previously were from their out-groups. 

But the problem with diversity is that its positive impacts are limited and precarious. If people from marginalized and unique backgrounds do not feel engaged and sincerely welcomed in their workplaces, it doesn’t matter how many of them there are; they will leave. And they will leave without having felt comfortable enough to share their authentic lived experiences and unique qualifications, so the bias-busting outcome doesn’t really pan out. Also, this approach breeds tokenism, a valuation of people for optics: “Oh you hired me because I’m brown and a woman. Not because of my merits and because of what makes me uniquely qualified.” This feeds into all sorts of problems that actually decay true equality, such as by nurturing internalized bias and Imposter Syndrome. It doesn’t explore how to engage with folks from diverse backgrounds and capitalize on their unique perspectives, which is a tremendous opportunity lost.

Diversity tends to focus more on recruitment and hiring than on retention, engagement, and development, so it is very short-sighted. And that’s where inclusion comes into play.

The Illusion of Inclusion

What is inclusion? Inclusion is most often initiated and evaluated from the perspective of the organization and/or organizational leaders and implies efforts made to engage folks from diverse categories of background, experience, and/or traits. It focuses more on retention, engagement, and development, which signals an evolution from the diversity framework. However, inclusion commonly is implemented based on assumptions and on sweeping generalizations. It ignores the goldmine of data that is found in the lived experiences and perspectives of every person in the organization. So it is a very top-down approach to inclusion, one that is not very inclusive in how it is implemented, and one that often exacerbates a disconnect between the people in an organization and its leadership. 

How do you get to a truer form of inclusion? One that identifies the true strengths of an organization and the true pain points of an organization. How do you address the right challenges in the right way? By shifting to a “belonging” framework.

The Benefits of Belonging

What is belonging? Whereas “diversity” is “you get me into your org,” and “inclusion” is “you make an effort to include me,” “belonging” is “you make the right efforts such that I feel seen, understood, and valued.” Belonging is for everyone; just ask Maslow.

That said, belonging can feel uncomfortable as a concept in that it may appear to be too touchy-feely and subjective. As lawyers, we are trained to discredit the subjective. We always look for objective data and aggregations. But we lose so much in this process. We tell ourselves and our colleagues that our lived experiences and perspectives don’t matter, and we don’t feel comfortable sharing our authentic selves, which leads to job dissatisfaction, disengagement, disconnection, and stress. To adapt to a belonging framework, we need to expand our definition of data to include the lived experiences and perspectives of each individual in our organizations. We need to remember from our work as attorneys the unrivaled power of a story and make room for our own stories and stories of those in our organizations.

Belonging is subjective. It can mean different things to different people. What it takes for me to feel that I belong in a particular organization may be different than what it takes for you to feel that you belong in that same organization. So a cornerstone in building belonging is to ask and help each individual define for you what belonging means to them and what you can do as an organization for them to belong. Have each member of your organization tell stories of specific times when they experienced belonging and when they did not experience belonging. You then will start to identify the real pain points in your organization instead of assuming what the pain points might be. That will allow to you address your organization’s true challenges by leveraging your organization’s true strengths. You’ll be solving the right problems in the right ways. And you will have sent a message to everyone in your organization that their voice and experience matter from the get-go. This is what makes belonging a truly inclusive approach to inclusion.

How to Implement a Belonging Framework

A belonging framework requires a particular process that engages each of the individuals in an organization and moves forward from there. I have been working with a number of bold and dedicated law firms and teams on taking a belonging approach by first conducting belonging and engagement assessments for them via anonymous surveys as well as confidential interviews and focus groups. I then analyze the data and share back with them themes and insights. The org/team then has a sense of what is required to create a sense of belonging for all and where they may be falling short. I then help them harness this data into a strategy for true inclusion, and we then implement this strategy.

Along the way, we tend to unearth and address many common hidden barriers to belonging, ones that tend to go under-recognized and under-addressed in the diversity framework, including:

Unconscious bias with organizational activation (many of us have attended unconscious bias workshops with limited to no follow-through, and that has been found to sometimes backfire.)

Internalized bias and Imposter Syndrome – Along with reducing the bias bouncing around in our organizations, we also must acknowledge the damage already done by the bias our marginalized populations have faced in our workplaces and in their lives. We must empower them to recognize and uproot this internalized bias. One very common hidden barrier to belonging is the feeling of not belonging cognitively that, for some, is tied to internalized bias. This can manifest as a particularly destructive form of self-doubt called Imposter Syndrome that is very prevalent among high-achieving lawyers and is also very addressable.

Generational friction – Many younger attorneys experience a sense of not belonging in the profession due to the profession’s traditional hierarchy, and with the leadership retiring out soon, many firms are finding themselves facing a succession crisis, so creating belonging for members of all generations becomes a priority.

These approaches are not ones that get a lot of attention in our profession because they are not part of what our profession has been doing over the past few decades. But the time has long ago come for change, and if we can let the voices of everyone in our organizations guide us, we can feel confident that we are catalyzing the right kind of change. This type of change keeps attorneys with diverse backgrounds in our organizations and our profession, honors and takes their lead, and eventually leads to even more individuals with unique backgrounds and perspectives wanting to join us, because they know we have created a place where they know they are seen, understood, valued, and championed. Where they belong. 

I always feel so pressured to participate in Suicide Prevention Month when I don't particularly want to and don't, at this point, see much value in it. 

The reality is that all the same messaging goes out over and over and over, from every possible suicide or mental health adjacent org. A lot of our messaging is regurgitated; puts the onus of finding support on people in crisis (as if the crisis itself doesn't already take up 100% of a person's bandwidth); and it's often in direct conflict with itself. 

As an example: we tell people over 48k Americans die by suicide annually. It's the 10th leading cause of death overall, and 2nd for youth aged 15-24. These stats imply that it's deeply important and that it happens often. In the very next breath, we will tell you that it's a "rare event" and not to normalize it. We might follow that up by telling you that every other person in the room you're in has been affected in some way. It's incredibly frustrating. If we follow the public health trajectory of cancer, we know that normalizing it as A Thing That Happens to People & A Word That Is Okay to Say was helpful: for coping, support, policy, funding. 

But here we are. Regurgitating and contradicting ourselves over and over, and wondering why it's difficult to get people onboard. 

And everyone who does this work? We're all so burnt out by the end of September that we need a month off (which we obviously can't have). And we're all sad and frustrated, because after 9/30, it's business as usual for the rest of the year. And we're sad and frustrated anyway! Because the funding isn't there; because the resources aren't there; because people are forced into treatment that traumatizes them when they need safety; because true, life-saving support is fucking hard to come by. 

There are so many faults with this work and this field and the politics around it, but I'd bet lots of goldfish crackers that most of us come to it with great love and passion. I know I do, which makes it hard for me to watch this cycle over and over and not say anything. I try to change messaging and perspectives about suicide every day of my life, so I don't feel compelled to run on this particular hamster wheel. But I sure do feel pressured, given that some folks view me as a leader in the field. 

So: talk about suicide this month (and all months), but find some new way to add your voice to the same ol' mess. 

Tell your story if you can (esp if you're a mental health professional/academic/researcher—let's clear out all the gross prejudice in the field). Tell it to a stranger, to your boss, to your journal, to your friends, to Twitter, to Facebook, to your pillow. Get it out of you however best suits you. There's power in the telling.

Donate to people with lived experience: do they do work you love (hi, a plug: livethroughthis.org)? Are they struggling with bills? Maybe thank them for being in your life with dinner or a nice gift. Mentor them. Do their dishes. 

LISTEN to people with lived experience when we talk. Put yourselves in our shoes. What would it take to make you want to end your life? Work on your empathy. Make yourself safe to come to in crisis. Learn about what happens when someone pushes the panic button and the cops get called or someone goes to the ER. 

Learn about mental health and involuntary commitment laws. Learn about how all of the above affect civil liberties. Learn about how you can advocate for someone who has been involuntarily committed and who has few supports. Understand that all of this affects Black, Brown, Indigenous, people of color, and LGBTQ+ folks differently than it would a person who presents as straight and white. 

Consider how YOU might support Black, Brown, Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQ+ folks, and disabled folks, and how that might look different from how you might support someone who presents as straight and white. 

Do you know any trans* folks? Use their preferred names and pronouns. Donate to their legal name change/gender marker change funds. Donate to surgery funds. Throw them parties for these big life events. Celebrate them. Love them. 

I'm just spitballing here, which is what I'm hoping to inspire y'all to do. Like I said, Suicide Prevention Month leaves me like 🤬🤬🤬. 

Do you know someone looking for a therapist? Trying to navigate an insurance system, TANF/SNAP, or trying to establish disability? Are you good at navigating these systems? Offer your time and expertise. 

Do you know someone in the middle of a breakup? Support them. Listen, even if you're over it. Grab them dinner and drop it off. Validate that pain, no matter how old they are (yes, I'm talking about how we invalidate these teenage experience). And oh god! Be a safe adult for these kids. I had so few safe adults in my life when I was a teenager. Kids deserve our love and care and guidance, even if they're not our own. 

Look, suicide prevention is ALL of these things. It's both subtle and explicit. Suicide and mental health diagnoses often intersect, but they are not one and the same. 

Suicide prevention is so much more. It's supporting people who need help—with food, money, therapy, legal fees, bail. It's validating their feelings, letting it be about them, using their pronouns, ACCEPTING THEM. Suicide prevention is having food, housing, a living wage (and hey, maybe even some extra cash for fun things), healthcare. Suicide prevention is acknowledging structural oppression and white supremacy, and it's DOING SOMETHING ABOUT CHANGING THAT. Suicide prevention is fighting for disability rights, for civil rights, for reproductive rights, for voting rights. 

Suicide prevention is literally taking care of one another. It's community, it's collective care, it's mutual support. I believe that, if we all had the support we needed, suicide wouldn't be a problem.

Hello! I need some advice ASAP. I've started to realize that I may be NB, I really despise being considered a "girl" and my parents really like mentioning how feminine and beautiful i'm becoming. Another thing that bothers me is that my father is very, VERY, transphobic and my mom would probably be distraught with the thought of losing her "baby girl". Plus I'm latinx, living in south america, and in spanish there are no neutral pronouns. I'm AFAB and 16 What should I do? (Ily ur content btw ❤️)

Personally, I would protect myself in the now and plan for a better future.

Protecting yourself now means doing whatever it takes to survive your situation. This might mean being completely closeted for the next few years or it could mean allowing yourself to privately explore and wear different clothes and try different things while staying closeted to your parents. You know your situation best. Trust your gut here. Check out our coping suggestions for coping with being misgendered and having to live closeted to help protect your mental health.

For protecting yourself and for your future, start by thinking about what it is you want. Do you want to eventually be able to come out? Do you want to be fully out? Do you want to live a life where you’re mostly out but not out to your parents in order to keep at least limited contact with them? Do you want to try and educate your parents on trans identities - once you are in a safer space to do so? Maybe you even want to disregard all this and just spend more time sorting out who you are first?

For the future, you can spend time thinking about what it is you want and where you would feel safe. Moving out seems like a likely a plan for the future - but how so and how far? Do you want to try and leave your country? The continent? Is this most achievable through college or a job? Will you need a passport and/or visa and what do the application processes look like? Will you need to learn a new language to give yourself options/for wherever you want to move? When can you work on getting a job and is it possible to keep at least some of those wages for yourself for your future fund? How supportive are your friends? Do you think when the time comes they could help support you in moving out? Will you need to stay closeted to get their help?

How about any local-ish queer orgs or communities/groups? Can you reach out to them for support? They may be able to help provide housing options, volunteer experience for jobs, scholarships, etc. (They may also have other useful information for you, such as pronouns folks are creating for a more inclusive language or how to go about not using pronouns.)

This is a lot to consider and start planning out. Do it in small steps that feel approachable to you. Maybe come up with a big picture general plan (ex. ”I want to go to college and live in dorms in this country and then use that as a jumping off point to get a job elsewhere”) and then start knocking out small parts of it at a time (such as researching colleges, starting to look at what you need to do to meet application qualifications - maybe you need to join a school club or just improve your grades, etc., and make a plan for saving up money for tuition or coming to terms with staying at least partially closeted so your parents will lend financial assistance, etc.). Use whoever you can as a resource to help you work out these steps. Teachers, counselors, family members - you don’t have to reveal why you’re starting to think about this so seriously, just ask for job advice, studying advice, etc. - whatever it is you need.

At some point, you’ll also likely consider if you want to come out to your parents and how much you want to keep them in your life as a result, but this is something that can be a consideration for far down the road when you’re in a better place to actually do this.

What I’m getting at here is encouraging you to think for yourself what it is you want. Until you know something of what you want, you’ll always feel lost and confused about where to go. This is your life, and you’re the one in control of it. I can’t tell you what path you should take because there is no one path that is indeterminately right to take. You’ll make decisions for yourself based on what’s best for you and what’s available to you. There are a lot of options that will be possible for you to pursue. There is no objectively right or wrong decisions to make regarding where you take your own life. The choice is largely up to you - and that is scary! But it can also be freeing and hopeful and exciting.

So what should you do? Well, what do you want to do?

Sending you good vibes and thinking of you. Check back in with us as often as you like, okay?

~Pluto

you ever feel like a space that used to be a respite for you is now just...not? I don’t necessarily mean it’s not safe, just that going to a place which was once really productive and comfortable and energizing for you now feels stressful and uneasy? I (likely temporarily) stepped out of an organizing space that I’ve built up over the last year in order to deal with the intense workload around thesis/defense which is happening this upcoming Monday. Anyway, we started at three people and now we have a pretty robust core of about 20. What we’re trying to do is organize grad students into a union at the university where we all work, which is pretty fucking horrendous about how it treats us. This basically meant spending ~20hrs / week finding new students who wanted to organize, meeting with them, agitating, meeting with other unionizing grad students at other schools, managing personality conflicts in the group, etc as well as working on whatever campaigns/ social media stuff we were doing. All while doing grad school full time. It was energizing. We accomplished shit with only very few of us. While it’s explicitly in our bylaws that there is no “group leader,” a lot of things that would usually be directed to a president end up coming to me just because I’m the common person that everyone knows. Most folks in the group have zero other organizing experience; one has quite a lot, and two or three have basically been in the periphery of this one far left org (let’s call it WTF, for Women’s Task Force) in our very conservative small city. Most of us are quite left, though there are a decent number of centrists.   About WTF: basically there’s this one really...problematic? person who is employed by our university who leads WTF (which isn’t affiliated with the university). She, a white cis woman, collects people she can use as symbolic tokens (usually women of color, visibly disabled women, lesbians, and fat women) to use them in promo material, and get them to do errands for, and doesn’t help them gain more power or skills within the group. She consciously excludes transwomen and only allows AFAB nonbinary folxs, and not even those who have a more masc presentation much of the time. WTF is also massively outspoken about Palestine, which is usually a signal that a group may be pretty antiSemitic as well.  She uses her identity markers to shut down others who (legitimately) question her tactics.  WTF, in the 10ish years they’ve existed, has never made any actual policy or political changes in this town. They’ve never actually run a campaign. They basically just show up “in solidarity” with actions other people organize, and host fundraisers for themselves. So having to deal with them is pretty ick, because the people in that organization. WTF is basically bad news. The people from WTF--three women of color and two queer white women--are consistently bad about things which seem to be just fine for literally everyone else in the group. We understand that shit’s stressful as a grad student and that there are a lot of other things we could/ should all be doing in addition to organizing. But the few rules we have are freaking common sense/common courtesy, and not that hard to follow.  When people need to drop off the map for a while, they let others know that they’ll be out for a bit, and then get back in contact when their schedules free up again, so they can be caught up to speed at the next meeting. There’s also meeting notes which you can read to get back in the loop if you thought you’ve missed something: If you think you’re not going to be able to do something, you’re not supposed to commit to it.  If you can’t do something you committed to doing, give others a heads up so they can cover it. Last, since we’re trying to be a space that works for people across the political spectrum (not just like the total of 30 dedicated leftists here), we’re explicitly against callout culture. Meaning that if you have an issue with something someone says in meeting, you’re either supposed to hold it until the group evaluation (where there’s dedicated space for that), OR you’re supposed to have a conversation with the person about the situation, OR you’re supposed to talk to another neutral-party group member so they can have the conversation for you.  The WTF people have committed to following all of these rules and have been consistently bad at actually doing that, as per rules. They’ve consistently just not done the things they committed to, without actually telling anyone, leaving folks in the lurch. They consistently call people out in meetings in a way that alienates newcomers. They’ve consistently misgendered me, despite my asking them to not to, and speaking to them about it after meetings.   About five weeks ago, this started to become a really big problem as we planned a big public recruitment event. I had a few conversations with the people who’d primarily been affected by one of the WTF folks’ failure to follow through on commitments. They asked me to speak to her. So I took several days to plan and rehearse a conversation. She was extremely defensive (ok, that’s fine, whatever), and committed to a whole lot of other shit. My follow up with her was to meet on a regular basis, so we could check in and readjust. We met the week after that, shit seemed fine. The week after that, the day of the big event. she came to the 1:1 meeting we’d set up and basically yelled at me for an hour for promoting white supremacy in the group. I tried to ask her some questions but really it just was her telling me how I’m a white supremacist and by holding women of color accountable to rules which they too had voted for, in a UNANIMOUS VOTE, I’m promoting white supremacy. She suggested I go to WTF subgroup meetings called SURJ (showing up for racial justice), which is basically a reading circle for white people only to “deconstruct their complicitness in white supremacy.” One of my partners went once to learn more about antiblack racism, but was turned away because he’s South Asian, not white. So, nope. Not fucking happening--it’s a completely performative thing IMO. Also the WTF leader person consistently is there and I’m not comfortable around her. They are also definitely under the opinion that “Jews are white and benefit more from oppressing PoCs than other white people.” So not a good/safe place for me.  Maybe I wasn’t supposed to take it as a personal attack, but about halfway through the conversation she said it was specifically about me. So, yeah, a personal attack. She quit the organization and left, leaving us in the lurch for that night. The other thing that really bothered me about this conversation was that she was using her identity as a way to evade any and all accountability for repeatedly committing to things and disappearing. I would have been really happy to talk with her about how to make the space more accessible to her. In fact, we’d had multiple conversations about this. We’d implemented multiple things to help with the issues she’d mentioned...and she’d engaged with literally zero of them. Around that time, before the big event at a group meeting, another WTF member (also a WoC) was on the agenda to talk about “accountability.” Vague agendas are generally fine, so it was like, Of course! We should talk about that. That piece wasn’t really about accountability, it was literally just accusing the group of being a space for white supremacy, telling white people in the group to go to SURJ. Then she also left the group (though she waited until after the big event), though without the “Fuck y’all, I quit” meeting.  I’ve spoken to most other group members outside of WTF about this (both PoC and white folks), they agree that I’m not a white supremacist. Still, it’s probably a good idea to address the issue in more depth in the group. As a white person I really can’t say anything about how WTF members, unlike literally all other people in the group, were using callout culture and accusations of white supremacy to derail conversations, and to block any attempt at getting them to follow the same rules they not only expect others to follow but also that they themselves committed to following. We’ve had like 3 followup conversations in general meetings since then. So far, we’ve scared off 5 people that I’d recruited, as well as 3-4 others had recruited. Multiple opportunities to choose, plan, and launch campaigns have passed while we have these conversations. I can’t point any of this out because when I do, I’m just the white person who doesn’t want to talk about white supremacy.  Basically even though there are supportive people in the group that I absolutely love, I feel like the space has been emotionally polluted for me. I can’t deal with this fucking shit anymore, as much as I think unionizing is important to deal with the fucking bullshit from the university. This has become more of a stress for me than the shitty paychecks that come at unpredictable times; the shitty issues with my old PI/advisor; the really terrible benefits and leave policies; the expensive term fees.  I almost don’t want to go back. Is that terrible of me?

Is TAXATION THEFT

(SHOTS OF ME OPENING A LETTER)

Mmm Money. Oh hello there, Badmouse, I was just enjoying the sweet sweet smell of the British Payslip, nah its pretty bland, this one here’s from a job I had about 2 years ago, ah memories, memories, memories…. (Sees Tax) I’ve been stolen from.

£50 taken from me! Money that I don’t even get to decide how it gets spent, 1 vote every 5 years out of 2 preselected jerks every 5 years I wouldn’t call a great turnaround. We don’t tolerate thieves coming into our houses and stealing our prized possessions, why do we allow the Federal government to do the same?

(British Mouse appears) We don’t have a Federal Government in Britain, you poser twat.

Rational Mouse: Maybe I can be of assistance.

Its not really ‘THEFT’ though is it? Its a lot less of this “Gimmie your money, of you’ll die!” And a lot more of this “Gimme your money, and I’ll give you, Mrs Piggy Winkle.

IrM: Still Theft Buddy! If one man steals from you, is that Theft? What about 5? What if they buy the man a hamburger and give him a vote? Is that not still the…

MYOPIA ———————————————

RM: This is Myopic and Archaic guff dude

(Irrational Mouse Gasps)

This isn’t how the form of governance we now inhabit came to be anyway, its like that Who will Pick the Cotton without slaves analogy when you compare it to Roads.

Its conflating a systemic transport basis, to a generalised commodity thats sold many times over. They’re not the same thing, theres a very obvious reason why business prefers state run roads the same way industrialised economies prefer state run schools. You’re sort of neglecting why these things came to emerge in the first place. Is it it any coincidence that most of the toll roads started being gutted when Feudalism came to a close?

IrM: Who even are you?

RM: Oh, I’m RATIONAL MOUSE

IrM: So that means I’m…

(RM does the Jack Nicolson eyebrows)

IRRATIONAL MOUSE… Well thats not fair is it?

RM: Look just read the script bud, y’know how it ends

IrM: Fucking writers, you don’t do anything…

RM: Excuse me

IrM: The state has been showcased to be an incredibly inefficient, bureaucratic nightmare, that can never innovate like the market can, it wastes too much of its money, I mean have you seen the state’s attempts to be cool, they couldn’t even make a Millennium Dome profitable.

EFFICIENCY ———————————————

RM: Well you’re right on profits but apart from that its pretty much all Chicago School taft

(IrM gasps)

So many of us have a distrust for the public sector these days, its really no wonder seeing as for the past 40 years men in suits have done an active push of erasing the private sector defects by blaming the state. Quite interestingly, and surprisingly for a lot of leftists, the state sector is actually very efficient, especially when it comes to R&D.

IrM: Blow me

RM: No, I’m serious, wide spread free at the point of use services benefit amazingly from economics of scale. https://newint.org/features/2015/12/01/private-public-sector http://www.psiru.org/sites/default/files/2014-07-EWGHT-efficiency.pdf

Let me put it this way, what seems more efficient to you. Have 10 businesses all competing to not to make the best product, but to win them over to you, you can’t just ask them. In order to do that you’ve gotta come up with some snazzy designs, aesthetically pleasing logos, a funky marketing gimmick, before long you’re spending so much dough in marketing you’re not even interested in helping people, just getting yourself seen. Or You could just have one org that does all of that stuff, it doesn’t need to compete. Sounds to me like a lot of hands that could be spend doing R&D.

IrM: Thats investment not waste, besides R&D is the definition of the private sector … Yea?

RM: No. The private sector utilises R&D a lot, but effectively every piece of GPT was created in the public sector. Yes Samsung made this phone, but who made the battery that goes in it? Why is the state sector significant? TIME. Companies flock new models of these out every year to keep the money train rolling, and most importantly keep faith with their shareholders. Makes them flimsy, crappy, liable to break. But GPT takes decades not years to bring it up to commercial satisfaction. Do you really think that  shareholders are gonna give you investment with the tagline of “Coming this summer. 2047”

Fact remains, we’ve had plenty of time to analyse the effects of the free-market and what we find is theres hardly any greater efficiency.

IrM: You’re really getting off topic here, okay fine businesses want roads, the market isn’t as efficient as I thought, it doesn’t mean that taxes are moral.

WHY BASE AN IDEOLOGY AROUND IT? —————————————————————

Fair enough, the government sure as hell does take my money through a warm gun doesn’t it?

But for the vast majority of us… its really small, like in my pay check I only lost 1/20th of my monthly income, and sure its annoying not being able to spend that on the latest gamer game or a lush soap but I am getting free healthcare, an education, a polli… I’m getting firemen, ROADS, libraries, Society. If thats worth £50 a month then fuck me daddy I’m ready.

(BRITISH MOUSE gasps)

Point here is, you’ve got no semblance basing your entire ideology around something so insignificant, especially when the majority of us will not be owners we’ll be workers and buyers. Now I’m no normie, I know that a lot of this just goes on corporate warfare, IMF loans, and bailouts. But I recognise that thats part of the system we live in and sadly we have to hang on to what we’ve got whilst the very government I am under is selling it all off to the highest bidder. Don’t want things getting worse do I?

IrM: Yeahh its not a significant thing to base your ideology around, but you’re not getting the point, Taxation is still THEFT!

RM: Ok.

IrM: (Puzzled) eh… No, Taxation is Theft.

RM: Well at this point does anyone care about the views of an An-cap. Come back to reality dude.

(Blinding light)

IrM: The right of a man to own his own own property is a right ordained by common natural law prerequisite to our beings here on earth, through the self-ownership of a person’s own oneself, by natural exclusivity to the creation of ethics and rule of law, as prescribed in first principles, to disagree is literal rape and medieval iceland an…

RM: Alright I get it, you want a wibbly wobbly philosophical answer. Look I could the Positive/Negative rights shit if you want, Kant and Moral hierarchies if we want, I really don’t think folks give a damn about that right now, besides theres probably better people who could do that job than me (Olly)

I think when the dust has settled it all comes down to taxes being negligible compared to what you defend.

IrM: Huh?

RM: Exploited Labour

IrM: Huh, there is no exploitation, if I want someone to pick my potatoes…

EXPLOITATION IN 45 SECONDS

A man has £10 worth of Capital, he uses this to buy raw materials. He pays a wood turner to turn this wood into a chair worth £50. For this he pays the labourer £10. The turner therefore has to make 5 chairs in this arrangement in order to buy 1 of them for himself. You don’t gotta be a genius to see theres a disconnect going on here…

Remember my old pay check? I made about £1000 a month, Now as you…

IrM: Why do you keep leaving? I’m in here?

RM: I got £1000 a month, in an average day we made £1500 worth of goods, generally there were 3 people there each day. Divided by all of us thats £500 each. Now I’m gonna be super generous and say that only half of that is profit, that brings us up to a daily average of £250, but I only saw £60. Whats going on here?

IrM: You decided to take that job…

RM: No I didn’t it beats eating ass omelettes for a living.

I’m not denying its very liberal estimate it is, but £190 is a lot of money that I literally get no say in how its spent, I’m sure a lot of it would of have to have gone back into my employment or taken out as more taxes, but its not the specific amount I’m interested in, the point is I get no say my labour power, I don’t even get a vote, best I can do is fuck my boss. If we drag this out to a month, thats £3000, I’m getting screwed. And this, this small little number, is what we consider… THEFTTTTTTTTTTTT. Those Chicago boys were good.

IrM: You can… You can start your own business…

RM: Majority will always be workers not owners.

IrM: Not if everyone decided to save up their money and open one

RM: Nobody’s going to buy your cigars if they’ve quit smoking to sell you cigars.

PAUSE

And don’t think I’d stop there, I’d consider RENT theft too, think of all the money we spend so just existing in buildings, somehow I don’t think it costs half our pay checks to have personal washing machine fixers.

IrM: But its their property

RM: O RLY?

IrM: Yes, if they weren’t allowed to do that then they wouldn’t bother, nobody would be able to find anywhere to rent

RM: And maybe if jesus had been hanged we’d all be kneeling over a fucking gibbet.

IrM: Wa.httt??

RM: Theres a reason I think why we call them American Libertarians. See if you pick up a copy of Adam Smiths stuff you’ll notice that he’s not the pastiche we think of him as. Check this out… “The landlords like any other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even from its nature produce” Now I’m not saying BOOM Smith’s a lefty, the point is he didn’t view Capitalism as great just because, he was looking at it based in his experience of the system as it existed in Britain.

But America has a very different history to us Anglos, the entire nation was founded upon a certain hatred of taxes, and tea.

BM: Actually it never really was about the taxes, they just wanted to own the slaves whole sale, didn’t want old money controlling the colonies so they could …

And when you take the views of this man, and throw it into the melting pot of Exceptionalism and Capital, you get all sorts of zany concepts, like the Self-Made man, The U-turned addict, the Noble Christian, and above all the cult of the founders. They’re dead, they’re not going to sleep with you, I’m sorry.

So what of it? Is Taxation theft? Sure, but its not worth basing your life around it. We all think the Capitalist process is just the general flow of life but its very recent, Medieval Ireland and Iceland don’t compare guys, and at the heart of that system is Exploitation, something that we all as a class deal with on a daily basis, and gain nothing from. One might argue, Taxes on business are a trade off for what they get from us.

I know when you first get into politics its juicy to claim theft over a little bite out of your salary, but we only see it that way because its… literally right in front of us, there isn’t a spare column that counts your total labour value. We shouldn’t get so pissed off over the pennies scraped off instead of the huge overhead.

IrM: Well, guess you got me there.

RM: The circle is complete

BM: I must say it really is a very American thing this whole Taxation, not good business isn’t it rather? RM: Well at least we don’t live in a socialist country… like FRANCE!

Yeah thats like 2, 3, 4 personas in 1 video, I could start an extended universe.

BOOM RAWRRRRRRRR

Oh what now?

I’M THE LATE FOR TRENDS GUY, FEMINISM IS CANCER!

nope nope.

WAIT, STOP, SOMEONE GIVE ME AN OPINION!

I am horrified and disgusted to have to share this, but EVERY avenue has been attempted by the most experienced people in the community since mid last year, to no effect. In a last-ditch effort, this situation has now been made public in hopes of preventing people from supporting this breeder by purchasing puppies (of which she has 3 litters planned for this year). PLEASE do not message/harass this person, as I said the best of the WDC have been trying to no success. I am sharing George Stapleton & Sara Movahedi’s experiences here.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

George: “This post is about a dire situation for Wolfdogs in Cherokee County Texas, and may be one of the hardest things I have ever had to do…

Let me tell you what we experienced….nothing could have prepared me for what I saw and felt at Lynn Savage’s place. For years I had heard the stories, going back to the mid 90’s about how bad it was out there. I never took much stock in it and assumed others would deal with whatever was going on out there if there were a need. I mean how bad could it be? Little did I know. 

I was approached by some folks in July of last year and they wanted my help placing Lynn’s animals. It was never going to be that simple and it still is by no means, that simple. They sent me pics and told me their experiences and I said I would help and even tried to get out there but could not at the time. Fast forward to the end of August and I was getting ready to go to the Pawty at FMF and I get a call. Jimmy Mantel has become a very good friend of mine and this is what has happened to us, others were involved initially, and they can say who they are if they want. Jimmy calls me and says, Lynn has had a stroke and now the need to place her animals is urgent. The reason the animals needed placement goes way beyond Lynn having a stroke, the neglect and abuse I saw was systemic and comes from years of those behaviors. Enclosures knee deep with bones and feces as well as some puppy skeletons, containments that are hardly standing, water green with weeks of algae, canines with so many fleas and ticks on them that one died. Dead canines in trash cans, and canines that died years ago in no longer working freezers. (Note from me: in addition, a dead canine’s decomposing body was used to block a breach in containment to prevent his mate from escaping) Pretty much the worst situation that an animal could have to endure. 

(pictured below, the remains of 3 dogs who were put into a freezer when they died)

Some of this may have to do with Lynn’s choice of how to live, she is a hoarder, and, in my opinion, that is her choice. I saw everything that first trip and spent the better part of the 1st day feeding and cleaning water buckets and securing canines enclosures. I also did a physical assessment of each animal for rescue. At the time I had no idea where Jimmy and I were going to place them. Lynn had given Jimmy verbal permission to place the animals, she just had a stroke and knew it needed to happen. 

From the moment that Lynn went into the hospital, Jimmy drove 4 to 5 hours 3 times a week to feed and water Lynn’s animals. Those animals never ate so good and certainly by the end of 8 weeks of care he gave they did not look emaciated anymore. Before then we had the 2nd trip planned, and we were bringing out the folks from Wolf Connection in California and St. Francis Wolf Sanctuary in Texas to do their own assessments and help plan the rescue. The folks from those orgs spent a lot of time with us there and in the end agreed to take all the Wolfdogs. Jimmy and I had done it!! We found a place for all of them, USDA licensed facilities to boot, and they agreed to not make a shitshow in the press about it. Do you have any idea how hard that is? 

And then, Lynn said we could not save them, something happened to her at the hospital and only Lynn can tell you what, then she was released back into living in her dog kennel. So that stopped us in our tracks….for the next couple of months we tried offering Lynn money, we begged and pleaded, we went to the USDA and the County Attorney and Deputy Sheriffs and no one could make Lynn give her animals up or take them. It is now puppy season and she has 3 breeding pairs and intends to sell them. 

Here is the deal; that is not going to happen. I may not be able to save Lynn’s animals from the horrid place they are in, but I can damn well make sure everyone knows and does not buy from her. You want the proof, here are some pics. What do Jimmy and I want; we want you all to help Lynn understand the danger she is putting Wolfdogs, herself and her local community in; and to let us place her animals before something bad happens to her or the animals. Or you can find places for them, or you all can chip in and fix her enclosures and provide her an animal caretaker because even before the stroke she could not take care of her animals properly. 

For you old timers, it is time for this to end. For the new breed, please learn from our mistakes. We need to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again. You may ask who am I to pass judgement on Lynn Savage like this, all I can say is I am not the only one person that knows the truth. And I would never act on my own, not like this, not for something so serious. I have also been there and seen all of it, and I mean all of it as well as some others. I am worried about the Wolfdogs, how is she feeding them, does she change the water or just throw bleach in, what about the fact she cannot even get in the enclosures, what happens when puppies are born will they drown in the rain, how many Wolfdogs must die, what is it going to take for Lynn Savage to do the right thing?

Let these names burn into your brain as they have mine….Nootka and Sheeba, Ripley and Smokey, Ranger and Walks, and a very old girl with a broken leg or shoulder since at least August; Enya. I am haunted day and night by what I saw there, and it hurts my soul that Lynn will not see the truth and let me help. No animal should have to live like that and I am tired of knowing about it and being unable to save them….please help us, please help Jimmy and I save these animals.”

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sara Movahedi: “When this situation first came to my attention, Lynn agreed to let me find homes for some of the animals, and said she would let me take two pups she had left from an unplanned Smokey/Ripley litter to bring to our sanctuary here in Florida. I contacted some folks in Texas with knowledge of the situation to assist with the lows and dogs she had on property and had agreed to give up, since it made no sense for me to head up a rescue of that magnitude from several states away. None of these animals had ever seen a vet, none had been vaccinated, none had been altered. At some point in the first few days of discussion, Lynn changed her mind about letting us take the two babies, and said she would only allow one to leave... the little female. She wanted to keep the male (for breeding when he would be of age I’m assuming) and despite my pleas to keep them together and let us take them both, she refused. In the end, we were only able to save the little girl, but that one little life was still one less that had to endure those conditions. About Maya... Lynn didn’t pull them, and she wasn’t touched or handled until she was 4 weeks of age. After suffering some kind of accident involving the fence, Lynn took her and her brother out and placed them in a round pen (similar to a puppy play pen) with a GP pup she had acquired at some point. Maya and her brother were never bottle fed, instead, they went right from their mother to canned Pedigree at 4 weeks of age. As a result..... Maya was a tiny little ball of paralyzed fur. She literally wouldn’t move from the back of the crate during transport, and remained shut down during the days she was fostered by someone in Tx for us. I will let the transporter and the foster come forward if they wish, I won’t name them without their blessing. Maya was completely broken, and it was unlike anything I had ever seen in a 6-7 week old baby. For weeks, she remained isolated and distant from the other pups at the sanctuary. Her fear and insecurity about the world around her prevented her from playing, from interacting with our staff, or really doing anything a normal, healthy puppy that age would do. We were fortunate to find a social hc pup almost the same exact age as her, and brought him to the sanctuary in hopes of bringing her out of her shell a bit... but to illustrate how damaged and broken this baby was, her insecurities and fears instead made her social buddy become shy and slightly skittish just from being around her all the time... But with time, she has slowly started to play, and interact with other pups her age, but the damage is unmistakable when you see her and watch her with other animals. Her first few weeks at Lynn’s undeniably scarred her for life and that is something that she will always live with... my only regret is not being able to keep her and her brother together, and not being able to get the other animals out when we got her.”

WIP “The Princess, and the Pegasi”

My first new story in my 'Mountain Tales' storyline. A series of childrens 'fairytails' all set in Appalachia. This was from a dream that woke me about two days ago and I had to write out the skeleton. This is now offically the 1st re-write. A couple more is coming before I post it around Wensday on my FA acount. Still I thought you'd all like to read it. Yeah, I went overboard on this one, but I was having too much fun with it to give a damn. :) Comments are always appreciated, especially ones that will help improve it. (I use EMACS/Org-mode so ignore the **, and : formatting. Those won't be on the final version.) -- :info: The princess, and the Pegasus DOC: Thursday, June 28, 2018 version: 1140-063018-b1 :end: ** 1 - new A young girl peered out of the window at the gray landscape, deeply sighed. Before a storm rattled the dishes, and lashed the side of the small home with a waterfall. Now the pattering of the rain on the metal roof just made a soundscape of noise along with the gray haze that faded the mountains just a mile way. A deep fog adding to it, darkened the sky and noon-day. ** 2 new The red barn was barely visible though the haze, fog and mist. Nothing of remark, that old red barn. Happy memories of playing in it, a forrowed brow when she had to work in it. Jules Huffman, the WSAZ weatherman from Huntington, West Virgina said in his uplifting, smiling voice. "The rain's coming to an end, folks." But even Mr. Cartoon could barely register though the haze of her boredom. Wishing it was 3, so at least he could alliveate the bordem with Bugs Bunny, and Daffy Duck. Then on that non-descript barn, the door smacked the side with a loud CRASH!, and she yelled out "Pa!" But no answer, he was too busy working on the books of their business to hear their only child, "Ma?" Again no answer, since she was with Prince Valium now; snoring peacefully after a horrible night of sinisitus that kept her awake. Jessica was glad, at least she didn't get that from her. The door would be ripped off the hinges if someone didn't go and fasinit it. The water-soaked ground squished like a damp sponge under her bare feet, headed for the barn. At least the rain was so light it was more like walking though a cloud of mist. Her blond hair was straightening up down her shoulders, even if her sun-dress was barely damnpened. The barn's bone-dry floor coated her bare feet with a layer of dust. Holes made by the ant-lions dotted the floorscape, hand-hewn beams thrusted up toward the metal roof. Lined with the remaining dry and brown leaves of tobacco infusing the air with a strong sweet smell. A soft basey nickr came from a horse that peeked out from a cut window on a tan colored stall-door. "Old Rosie" the sign said. As Jessica opened, then walked into the belgim's stall she fluffed up the straw with a pitchfork, after pouring some new oats into her bucket. "Lousy day, hmm Rosie?" she asked the belgin as she stroked the broad roman nose. Rosie nickered, and nuzzled at Jennifer as if she was answener her. ** 3 new Suddenly there was a rapping, a rapping at the barn door. Who could it be now? As she opened it slowly, silver light flooded into the barn, and a black head thrusted into the door. The head pushed open the doors more, and followed quickly by a maginifiant black stallion! Not as tall as Rosie, but his sleek black body shown in blue-black from the light. Jessica was struck mute by her friend returning, for this black stallion had equally ebony wings tucked against his sides, the wings adorned with jet black feathers and she knew his wingspan was huge "Shadowfax, my old friend" she said as she wrapped her arms around his broad neck, He nickered at Rosie, nuzzling at her side, then nuzzled Jessica before he spoke, "Princess, the kingdom is being invaded, and we need you. I was asked to fetch you." he tossed his head to the side, as he said "They knew you are the only one I will allow to carry in lew of our friendship." ** 4 new The land was gold and jewels and people waved and cheered seeing Princess Jessica flying over them on her friend, Shadowfax, the good. Coming into the town was a huge, fat bloated ogre. How he could run with the blubber, like jello flapping with each heavy footstep, she couldn't tell. Clothed only with a set of bib-overalls that strained to hold the ogre in. But he too looked up and laughed. Seeing the pretty princess aside her broad winged pony. "Oh yes, a mosqueto comes to bite me?" it yelled in a gutteral voice. "Do your worse!" Suddenly Princess Jessica guided Shadowfax down into a dive right at the ogre. Not trying to guide the good pegasi, since the ogre would be hard to miss. But as the green giant picked up a side of a building as a club, Shadowfax suddenly flicked to the left. The princess as if she was mentally connected, leaned to the right her sword glowing blue "I shall!" she finally yelled at the ogre then a swip of Sting, her sword. The straps on his shoulders was cut, and the mighty ogre was show as the emperior he was! "NO!!!" he roared, dropping down to cover his...jewels. Then the pegasus turned, dove in for another and she swatted him on his ample behind! The ogre, now red, screamed out cuses and obsenities that would make a salior blush with shame then exploded in a puff of dandilion seeds that was scattered across the nine winds. ** 5 new Shadowfax looked over his shoulder at his princess, "That was too easy" She patted his side, and gave him a hand-full of sugar, "HOw so, faithful steed?" "An ogre is mearly muscule." he said, between munches, "They don't have the brains to chew gum and scratch their behinds at the same time. No, there is someone else. Someone far more cunning at work here" he then flapped his broad wings and flew higher, and higher to see the kingdom. The princess looked around at the layout of her lands. It was peaceful now in the main section since she dispached the ogre. But her excellent eyesight caught sight of movement on the east side, "There!" she pointed. "I see it" replied Shadowfax, and with a powerful sweep of his wings, the princess was hard pressed to hold on as he flew so forcefully toward the people running. ** 6 new "Oh no!" the princess explaimed, "The lion hord!" Sure enough, in a blitzkreg of huge white bodies, segmented into many sections with jaws like scyicles and two huge black eyes on a black head, the lion hord was a force to be reconed with. six huge steel legs clanked and squeeked along as they ran as fast as they could for one thing. The peaceful Ant village! A people her father had sworn to protect long ago, and she wasn't about to fail them! The ant people's screams was growing louder in Shadowfax and the Princess' ears as they swooped further down. The people was carrying squirming bundles of white babies in their own jaws, while warriors stood at ready with their own antenee, and jaws open and waving. At nearly ground level, the princess swung Sting but it was ineffective against the lion's body, Pegasus reared and kicked but he too wasn't able to make much progress. Finally she told him "Take to the clouds, my fine steed!" and without question he did with hard flaps of his wings. Higher, and higher he flew, while the ant people thought their defender had foresaken them. The warriors clashed, the others continued their exidist out of the town. But instead of foresaking them, mighty Shadowfax climbed higher until the very clouds was a ceiling to them. He hovered, and the princess rose her sword and yelled a spell out in Quentien. In a moment the sword once again glowed blue, but this time St. Elmo's fire gathered around her, then the pegasus. He laughed saying it was tickling him. She then pointed down "Dive, Shadowfax! Dive down into the town once again!" Again, without question he did. He even folded his wings to gain more speed and the princess held on tight, "How close?" he yelled, as the wind whipped though mane and hair. Her response; "Point blank range!" As soon as they came within roof top level, she pointed Sting down at the town, spoke a spell again in Quentin, and the blue fire surrounding them flowed from the sword down into the town, evenloping the lion hord. They twitched and convolsed as millions of volts cooked them, with a nice brown crust. Everytime a small bump popped out, the fire jumped from them into another, dodging and jumping over any ant and leaving none even touched but the lions, they fried like a good hog. Soon the air was filled with the scent of cooked ant-lions, and the princess quipped "We just need some garlic and basl, right Shadowfax?" she giggled. "Id add a bit of alfala as well" he added to that, as well as a throaty laugh. They circled the Ant town, as their cheers came up with their antenee, and front legs waving at them in thanks. ** 7 new All though this, neither was happy with this. The ogre could have been dispached by a child, the ant hord a little harder, "When do you think we'll see the mind behind this?" she asked. He flapped his wings, pulled higher into the air, "No idea. There is someone very powerful behind all this. ** 8 new Shadowfax pulled up, wings flapping hard as he squeeled, and snorted. The princess pulled her sword, "Oh no! It's the Witch Queen of Agrabar!" Without even trying the 50' tall queen reached out and grabbed the pegasi. The queen's silk robes slowly waved in the breeze, as the princess tried to get away. But she was powerless in the grip. What's worse is when the broad face came to the princesses she tried to cover her ears for it was said never let the Witch speak, less she hyponotize her. "I've called you three times for dinner. Put up Rosie, and come on in." Jessica blinked, and she was back in the barn again, "Ok Ma, feelin' better?" "Yeah, now comon" As they was walking to the house, the clouds had broken and some blue was starting to peek though the gray. Her mother looked down at her "Witch Queen of Agrabar hm?" Jennifer just nodded, "Uh huh..." She got her head fuzzled, much to her giggles. "Guess we'll have to get you some better reading materal. What say tomarrow we go to the drug store and you can blow your allance on comics?" "Yeah!!!" she jumped and laughed, as she closed the house door to dinner. end

Ep. 8: “This isn't really my drama” - Anastasia

Elle

Me getting votes in the first post-merge tribal? We absolutely hate to see it folks!! I feel like I'm being so pessimistic about my chances in this game but also like... shouldn't I be 😂😂 God I hope those two votes were Julia and Pietro (but still like, r00d. lol) I have a 10% DA in this next challenge... I'll be Frank [-but then who will be Elle?] Things aren't looking amazing for me but I don't think I'll go home next round (unless Julia has another idol 😭😭😭). I don't even know what to say I'm just bad at thisss 😅 I mean the game not confessionals I've been leaving my heart and soul in these lol. Anyway I'm gone for now I'll just leave with this: Liability is the best song off of Melodrama not Ribs mmk bye ✌🏽✨

DeNara

Oh my gosh, that tribal!!! When Raffy pulled the idol I was like.... what the heck is happening?!?! I can understand Raffy playing it because he wasn't solid with the other warriors and newbies voting with him, but it was a waste of an idol. TBH I am glad he played it though since I didn't know he had it. I felt bad that Pietro went home just because he was aligned with Julia, but it happens. I had to try and do some damage control with Moth and Elle, as well as Rachel after tribal. They were shook when Julia pulled an idol and Pietro got votes. Anastasia just out right told me the magic beans she got at the auction allowed her to see if people have idols and said she would use it for me (I think she said this to everyone). I don't think Elle, Moth or Rachel suspect me playing both sides hard, but who knows. I really don't know who I should work with. I was thinking about making a big move and flipping to my new "Lucky Charms" alliance with Moth, Elle, Ginnifer, Rachel and potentially Julia, but it could be too early for that. The sad thing is I want to work with Rachel and Elle for sure but they aren't in my core alliance. I am suspicious of Gian because he seems to be playing pretty hard and he isn't aligned to me much. Madi and I don't talk much so that gets me worried as well. Raffy is super fun, but he is a big threat in this game. I honestly think it is just Steven keeping me with that group because he is my #1 in this game. I honestly am finding it hard to figure out who I want to work with because I like everyone in this game!!!!! I just can't get caught in the middle or I am hecked.

Raffy

The plan went off without a hitch. I did waste an idol, but now no one can say that I have one. I am considering telling my alliance that I have the "Safety Without Power" so that they don't have any reason to distrust me. It might have hit a sour note with them to find out I had an idol that I didn't tell them about. Gian didn't seem to mind, but most people put on an act in this game. It would be a hard decision, however, since they can easily use that against me at the next tribal. I hope that neither Julia nor Ginnifer win immunity. Julia speaks for itself. I am targeting her, and I want her gone. However, Ginnifer has now alarm bells ringing in my ear. DeNara told Steven and I that Ginnifer wants us GONE. Like, Ginnifer is on some sort of vendetta mission to take us out. While we don't have the exact reasoning, we can assume that she is targeting us for simply being winners. She seems to think that we think we're master manipulators and puppet masters who need to be brought down a peg. Here's the thing with that kind of logic though. It isn't going to work with people who don't care about us being winners. My allies don't care, and they are even ratting on you to me. I love DeNara. She's a great ally. I told Steven that maybe we should reconsider our target and make it Ginnifer. He seems down, but he doubts there would be numbers (as do I). Speaking of numbers, I need to be way more social than I already am. I don't have as much social capital as Steven or Madi or DeNara. So, I am going to start with the people who are probably near the bottom of people's ally list or are considered non-factors: Elle, Moth, and Anastasia. If I get in good with them, I can gain some solid numbers. Moth and Elle had no idea about the split, so I had to do some damage control. Whether that worked... I have no idea. However, I need to be more transparent with them so that I can gain their trust for future tribals. Plus, I am pretty sure that Elle has an idol.

Julia

BITCHES THOUGHT I WAS DOWN AND OUT FOR THE COUNT. Found another idol baby. I’m basically Rick devens. Anastasia is going to use her stupid magic beans on me again though but I simple don’t care. Let them know I have an idol great. Then they’re going to have to figure out who they want to vote for instead, which will create massive cracks for me to work around. I love this

Ginny

Since I went to exile I was safe from a tribal council on the first round of merge then when I got back I saw pietro was voted off in a chaotic tribal council but I’m in many different alliances but I’m choosing the original warriors alliance because warriors strong duh

Raffy

I did not win this immunity challenge which sucks. I think I might want to use my SWP because if I don't then I'm just going to be a target everyone wants for now. And I want to at least make single digits. I told my alliance of Gian, Madi, DeNara, and Steven about my SWP to gain their trust after not telling them about my idol. And if I do plan to use it this round, it doesn't hurt to tell them about to plan around this. I've been focusing a lot more on socializing, so we'll see if it garners me any favor to not be voted out. Julia has tried reaching out. I think I want to get her to target Ginnifer since the latter is coming after me.

DeNara

Heck ya, I may win individual immunity today! I find out soon if I will be competing in a tie breaker challenge to see if I win. I sure hope I do, I would feel great!

DeNara

I am playing the middle so hard right now I may end up getting voted out because of it... oof

Raffy

The vote should be unanimously Julia. I threw Ginnifer under the bus to Julia so that... she doesn't vote for me. Though, I doubt she has an idol. Plus, if she does, we are going to ask Anastasia to play a bean on her to see if she does. DeNara told me about an alliance with Ginnifer, Elle, Moth, Rachel, and herself. Apparently, Rachel is getting suspicious of Gian and Madi because they didn't tell her about the split vote. This works in my favor as it splits the newbie tribe a little bit because Gian and Madi seemed very pressed about it. This will sow the seeds of implosion for the newbies. The planned boot order would be Julia then Ginnifer. Apparently, Ginnifer, Elle, and Moth are a trio (but Ginnifer is the only person who cares about it). I'm not too concerned, but I am going to keep an eye on Rachel too now.

Ginny

Since I went to exile I was safe from a tribal council on the first round of merge then when I got back I saw pietro was voted off in a chaotic tribal council but I’m in many different alliances but I’m choosing the original warriors alliance because warriors strong duh

Julia

I miss Pietro so much, it’s so fun deciding which person to send to jury with him tonight

Julia

GOD THIS IS FUN. Bitches being saying straight up in the tribe chat, oh I’m voting for Julia. Hwuxixkejwor this is actually so funny. I’m idoling elles ass out tonight and feeling absolutely no remorse

Elle

Not Julia coming for me within an inch of my life and then denying it 💀💀💀.

Moth

Holy fuck

I literally leave for 20 minutes and suddenly people are arguing and demanding tribal happens now Like noooooooo I hate this so much I need to do an exam in 20 minutes

DeNara

What in the actual F is happening. All I was doing was trying to get ready for work and Julia just full on started calling everyone out. Apparently Rachel tried to make an alliance with Julia and included me in on it, then Julia sent that to Raffy. So I had to try and do damage control and try and get Rachel to stop talking to Julia. THEN apparently Julia tried to frame Elle as trying to plot against Ginny which isnt true and now EVERYBODY is fighting in the tribe chat. Like this is so crazy rn. I just hope me playing the middle doesn't heck me over. I may need to ditch one side to save my game.... rip me

Anastasia

This isn't really my drama. I am a spectator and my name is out of peoples mouths which is perfect. I really don't understand what just happened. Like I saw Julias and Ginnys texts but I don't understand what it means lol. I will probably quietly ask around what people thought of it and vote with them as to lay low and stuff. Don't worry, I am going to plan to get someone threatening out soon. I'm still new at this and I'm learning everyday what to say and what not to say. But hopefully I can try to convince people to get out my target (raffy) next round. He really needs to go because he dominated the last org. He is too good at this game and if people ignore that he literally won half of the challenges and the entire game last org they are dumb. Luckily we have Rachel that keeps winning immunity so none of the actual targets get it. But of course, this is a concern. Rachel might have to go at some point sadly.

Julia

https://youtu.be/8EPTKjTqKFQ

Elle

Okay... so today I decided to pop off a bit (may be related to me being a little Done with irl stuff but that's not what this is about lol). Ginny came into our alliance with Moth DeNara and Rachel (we have another one without Rachel bc she's kinda on Julia's side/helped kick James off/p sure she knew what Anastasia's beans did and lied to us so she's very sus but we're keeping her close for now) and guns blazing was like "so I heard all of you were gonna vote me off" to which i was like ?? and then she said Julia told her I was a ringleader convincing everyone to vote Ginny out which. Incorrect. My now one and only goal in these games is to get Julia out and avenge James that's IT 😂 . And I have told so many people today but 👏🏽I👏🏽Am👏🏽Too👏🏽Dumb👏🏽To👏🏽Be👏🏽Conniving👏🏽. The idea that I could be a ringleader is hilarious honestly, and the idea that I would vote for anyone except Julia until she's out even more so. Anyway, I went into the tribe chat and said "So I've heard that there's a question as to who I'm voting, or who I'm endorsing, so I just want to clarify: *I'm voting for Julia* that is all ^_^" bc all I have is my word and the fact that I'm voting for Julia isn't a secret or anything lol. This got things very spicy at 11am and I'm sorry for everyone that had a class or job 😂 including me lol. me? missing an entire half of my class because survivor drama is way more interesting than typography? it's more likely than you think! We didn't end up having tribal right then and there even though I think about half of us were yelling for it 😂 (sorry again for the people at work or school idk why i woke up today and chose violence ajkjakhlalsjsj) We got on call with Julia to give us receipts but eh I don't trust it At all. Mostly because the receipts she gave weren't on the same stuff we were talking about??? Like she was calling out Raffy and Steven in them but that's not even where the convo started 😒. And nothing about how I'm this all-powerful ringleader trying to shoot someone down from my original tribe. I have to laugh. Anyway, I hope she goes tonight, if not it better be me bc this is getting 🎶frustrating🎶 and l am a complete angel until you talk shit about me or one of my closest allies and then you better be prepared for war it's that simple 😇

Moth

Julia claims that I refuse to talk to her when she legit hasn’t even reach out at all since the swap- like o k my dude- Jesus this is nuts

Julia

Why are people so obsessed with me 🤩

They really started a whole fight with me in the tribe chat today. It’s honestly super frustrating. But I think this could be good for me maybe? I think Elle is getting idoled out tonight, and then Ginny is still here. And Ginny has proved she’s a liar and a snake and is really chaotic so maybe she’ll be seen as a liability going forward

Gian

Rachel is trying to flip. Julia & Ginny are dangerous blabber mouths. The warriors won't take out one of their own and we still barely have majority. This is getting messssssssssy.

Madi

hey hey so heres the tea rachel is being a mf snake because she feels “betrayed” bc we “lied” to her for the pietro vote but like sis..... we didn’t LIE we just left out some details also have now tried to pin onto her that she has the other idol also so much tea went down while I was at work??????? it was pretty spicy but im just happy my name was nowhere near that I hope rachel does not start working with juli bc that would truly suck but having elle and moth and anastasia as numbers for us is very very good also anastasia has kinda gone AWOL and idk how much longer we are going to be able to keep her in too much longer but thats another story for another time I am scared people are starting to murmur my name, I might just be paranoid but Idk I hope this julia vote goes well

Raffy

This morning, Elle took to the tribe chat to confirm that she is voting Julia. This is because, according to Ginnifer, Julia has been telling Ginnifer that Elle was trying to ring leader Ginnifer's vote out. Ginnifer also got in on the action by saying that Julia is a liar and trying to snake other people. As it turns out, Ginnifer might just be paranoid, but, at the end of the day, whatever makes the target on Julia bigger.

Steven

https://youtu.be/2NGxkNjrGdk

Rachel

this game is so mentally draining. even if i've won immunity, i certainly don't feel safe. julia blew up the game by telling secrets, and it hurts cause i felt like i could trust her. i hate that i'm seeing viewing this game so personally, but i feel that i have lost such an epic battle and it is so frustrating.

Elle

Still the same tribal in a little less than an hour... I feel like I went a lot wild today, sure hope it isnt enough for everyone to switch and vote me out 🤷🏽‍♀️ I very well might be next after Julia though, or that's the paranoia. Idk, I miss pre-merge when I was just playing games with friends and not going to tribal 😂. Now it feels like a Lord of the Flies or Danganropa RPG and I feel like I let the craziness get to me a little. I don't know what's gonna happen, but I don't really ever know really. I'm tired 😅 and want to maybe read some fanfic before whatever happens next (maybe I'll have a lot more time to read fanfic after this lol).

DeNara

Seems like this morning's craziness is calmed down a lot to the point of making people nervous because it is so quiet. I am hoping the plan is still to vote out Julia, but I am sad she is going. I do like her a lot as a person. Hopefully she doesn't take any of this personally!

transitions & transformations

i. the rest of my batch at RC

I spent the first six weeks of my batch at Recurse Center in an out-and-out sprint. I learned Python, built and released projects, and wrote blog posts every week. I wasn’t sure where my limits were, but I was determined to find out - preferably by overshooting them, then adjusting after the fact.

A curious thing happened. I kept finding that I was more than capable of starting and finishing projects, especially when I had a firm mental image of the end goal. There were at least as many unexpected good-turns as there were setbacks, and I certainly didn’t come up against any inscrutable barriers. Mostly the challenge was in overcoming the distance between a thing that doesn’t exist and a thing that does, which I was able to sort out pretty handily through a consistent application of effort across time.

Who’d have thought?

A selfie taken on my birthday, which also happened in the last few months and was really great!

The second half of my batch was not so visibly productive - with the exception of The Question Game. The Question Game is a simple game designed to help groups of people get to know each other better IRL. I designed it with my friend Brittany a few years ago as an icebreaker when we found ourselves in a group of folks who knew us but didn’t really know each other. The game only really needs a method of generating random numbers for a small but arbitrary group size, but building it out as a toy webapp was a good excuse to get practice working with a JS-only stack. I learned React, got a lil more familiar with node, and even went as far as to attach an otherwise completely unnecessary PG database and Sequelize ORM. You can see the code for it here. Outside of this project, however, I didn’t publish any code. I didn’t publish any writing, either.

So I’d like to take a moment and shine a bit of light on the work that I did during the rest of my batch.

🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘

First, I made the decision to leave community.lawyer, the social impact startup I co-founded in 2016 following the Blue Ridge Labs Fellowship.

I’m happy to report that I left on the come up, which seems a rare and privileged thing for a founder to be able to say. Gaining traction in a hyper-specialized industry like legal tech takes a gargantuan amount of sustained forward momentum, and I departed just as we began to reap the fruits of our labor. In the last few months community.lawyer has reached final approval on partnerships a year in the making, won federal grants we’d submitted to in 2016, and every day our software is being used to help connect people who have legal needs with credible lawyers. Our first two partners were exactly the types of legal organizations at the heart of our mission: the Justice Entrepreneurs Project and the DC Reduced Fee Lawyer & Mediator Referral Service.1 Based in Chicago and Washington DC respectively, these orgs are specifically chartered to deliver quality services at rates that more Americans can afford. I am so proud. ⚖️

Second, I started my first ever job hunt as a software engineer. Wowee, this was scary! I knew that I had to prepare for interviewing, which meant a) getting my career change narrative straight, b) studying Data Structures & Algorithms 101, and c) learning how to perform my handle on both of these in a live, semi-adversarial environment.

At one point during my batch my laptop broke. I read through this wonderful illustrated book during the two days it was being fixed.

In order to direct my search I also had to craft a set of selection criteria of my own. Foremost: “What good will my work do for the world?”2 Additionally, “What degree of access will I have to supportive mentors?”

Getting started with interview prep was a challenge, at least partly because I had so many options for where to start. But I did get started! I read Cracking the Coding Interview, I did the free trial and weekly free problems on Interview Cake. I attended a few group mock interviews at Recurse Center and signed up for a 1-1 mock interview with an RC alum. Her name is Leah, and she’s amazing - the superbly friendly and encouraging Comp Sci TA I wish I’d had years ago. 💚Brittany also set up mock technical screens for me with her pals, Leaf and Ian. They were the vanguard against my outsized anxiety about programming for an audience and they each took the time to give me solid feedback.

Third, I extended my batch at Recurse Center by another 6 weeks. I had decided early on I wouldn’t extend (for no real reason) and stuck with this decision up until two days before my batch ending. A small group of folks - Lily, Connor, Alicja and I - went to NYX in Union Square to try out lipsticks. We played with different colors and finishes (satin! matte! shimmer!) for half an hour or so. There came a point when I looked up, glanced across the narrow makeup store at my beautiful friends’ beautiful faces and thought, “You know, you don’t have to leave yet, right? What’s the rush?” I’d already accomplished my primary goal, to forcibly rework my identity as an engineer, but it sure seemed that I could stand to reach for a second one. That night I decided to extend my batch, with the intention of sampling a more open method of self-directed learning, i.e. with a little more chill and a lot less panic. Specifically, I wanted to practice connecting meaningfully with my limited supply of social energy.

In my bonus six weeks, I: gave three talks (2 planned, 1 impromptu) under encouragement from Ayla and Lily, learned to juggle thanks to instruction from a fellow RCer, Edward, who also loaned me a book about learning, made it into weekly Feelings Check-in (read as: opt-in support group) fairly regularly, picked my first ever lock, saw a live-coding show and then later attended two live-coding workshops (one on TidalCycles, another on Super Collider), sat in a dark room and played howling wolf clips while Microsoft Sam read grimoires aloud, got my hair braided for the first time in a decade, made dumplings and DJ’d for a dinner party, connected with folks about queer-poly relationships, gave fiery advice, and received compliments so earnest and rational and persistent that it was difficult to refute them.

Zine fair plus Lightning Bolt concert inside a movie theater in Times Square??

I also put my interview prep to use and interviewed with a handful of Recurse Center partner companies. Job searching meant squaring off against impostor syndrome and a ton of related anxieties in rapid succession. I successfully choked most of that down when it mattered, though, and it was only a couple short weeks before I received my first offer.

To that end, I’m super happy to say that I’ll be joining Blink Health as a Fullstack Product Engineer! Blink Health is a healthcare startup in SoHo. They make it easier for people to afford prescription drugs, especially for those with limited insurance plans or none at all. These savings aren’t trivial either: an extra $50 can spare someone from choosing between groceries or medicine that week, and for some folks Blink saves many times that. I’ll be starting at the end of this month. ✌️🤓

The last two years have been a wild ride: participating in a social impact fellowship and accelerator, busting my product chops and learning web dev to get a public benefit company off the ground, then diving into four months of self-directed learning at Recurse Center. I’m really looking forward to having some externally imposed structure again. Real health insurance, too.

ii. some hard truths

I made a few radical life changes in 2016, like getting involved in activist spaces, dating more, biking everywhere, building strong friendships, going capital-B Boogying, programming full-time. As I carried those changes forward through 2017, I began to notice a lot of mental and emotional reconfiguration happening to me.

Did you know that along its way to becoming a butterfly, a caterpillar nearly completely liquifies inside its cocoon?

Psychological growth is confusing, full of false starts, and generally painful. You’ve got the static pain of stretching beyond your limits, the pleasure-pain of feeling an old knot finally release, the frustrating pain of stubbing your toe because some helpful asshole has been rearranging your psychic furniture when you weren’t looking. There’s the more dramatic knife-in-the-gut pain of realizing that just because you’re growing doesn’t mean the people closest to you are, and that now in certain cases what you previoulsy regarded as friendship actually looks a whole lot like run-of-the-mill exploitation or even emotional abuse, if you're being honest, and it's a realization that only hurts more because it’s so irredeemably cliche and boring. And despite all that pain you gotta go ahead and grow anyway, claw your way out of the relative comfort of ignorance. Transcendence may not be the only show in town but afaik it’s the one most worth watching.

Prior to attending Recurse Center I’d spent lots of time exploring my surroundings and cataloguing people and places worth coming back to. My view of myself did change (and positively!) as a consequence. But sooner or later, ya get tired of the taste of low-hanging fruit.

So, armed with the bookshelf of a philosophy grad and a burgeoning psychoanalytic vocabulary begging to be let off leash, I decided to use my time at RC to try confronting a few of my Hard To See truths in addition to becoming a better programmer.

Here’s what I’ve found so far.

Truth #1: People like me a lot. This causes me problems.

I’ve been metabolizing this one for some time. I remember having a conversation with Brittany in January of 2016. I don’t remember what social anxiety I’d been vocalizing, but I must have been worrying that someone “hated me.” Brittany cut me off, exasperated in the way that only a friend can be in the face of utter delusion: “No one hates you Nicole! You’re always worried that people don’t like you and it’s never true!”

I carried that admonishment with me through two years of voracious friendship-building. On the whole, seeing that people do in fact enjoy and seek out my company has curbed the most egregious overreaches of my social anxiety. But reckoning with my anxiety honestly has also meant acknowledging that my compulsive instinct to withdraw from social situations is also a protective (if suboptimal) response to a few very real dangers.

Most acutely: being friendly, generous, and intensely empathetic makes me a ready target for users. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt for as long as I can, which makes me proportionally susceptible to being taken advantage of and then gaslighted about it. A lifetime of socialization as a petite woman don’t help, neither. This leads to a pattern where, semi-regularly, I look up and take stock of how someone has been treating me and realize that the answer is Very Badly, For Quite A While. This in turn leads to rough periods of cutting ties and moving on. Ideally I’d like to be be able to filter bad actors out sooner, but I also want to stay open, giving, and hopeful beyond reason. Those desires are fundamentally at odds with each other - raising vs. lowering one’s defenses - but it’s clear that I need to come up with a strategy that balances both.

More broadly, though, I operate under an ever-present dread of inevitably disappointing everyone who knows me. Whether people project onto me because they already like me or like me more because they project positively onto me, I am extremely sensitive to the fact that when people meet me the conception they form has waaay more to do with what they want to find than what’s actually there. My body is a surface readily projected upon: young, female-shaped, ethnically ambiguous, small, smiling. These well-intended projections cause me the most trouble when people see me interacting socially; they’ll witness fifteen minutes of seemingly effortless extroversion on my part and extrapolate out massively. As far as they’re concerned I’ve got plenty of social energy to spare, and if I don’t spend it hanging out with them, it must be because either my friendliness is fake or I don’t like them.

Pretty much none of this is conducted consciously, of course, but it still creates a lot of unnecessary pressure that I can’t pretend not to feel and resent. I know there are people who dream about attaining this kind of “popularity” - to be assumed Cooler than one truly is - but getting buffeted around by folks’ totally unexamined, unarticulated psychological desires mostly sucks.

Truth #2: I’m non-binary.

I’ve also spent a very long time resisting this one. Two decades on the rack, easy. As such, the story of getting here is long. Perhaps one day I’ll tell it. 😛

The short of it, though, is this: I’m probably at least as much of a boy3 as I am a girl. Outside of where my life has been mutated by the chronic background radiation of sexism, “benevolent” and otherwise, I don’t strongly identify as a woman. Furthermore, I find the two-gender system to be infinitely more alienating than comforting. Gender is a social construction designed to impose order on the natural messiness of sexual experience, and as far as I’m cool with that, I am decidedly Not Cool with the “normal” state of affairs, i.e. aggressively shoving whole human beings into an absurdly reductive false dichotomy.

Between its either-or-ism and its forced assignment, the traditional approach to gender reveals itself to be obviously bullshit to anyone who spends more than a few minutes thinking about it. Its boundaries are arbitrary, inconsistent, and generally ill-fitting at the level of individual experience, which why they require such an outrageous amount of coercion and bodily violence to enforce. As much as other folks want to participate in a system of ritualized violence I guess they are free to? Personally, I’d prefer to see it actively dismantled.

If gender is to be saved it’ll be by subverting it, taking it apart, remaking it into something life-affirming. Not the dehumanizing garbage we’ve got now.

As of yet I don’t have any plans to change my presentation because I don’t fuckin’ gotta!

I do have a preference towards They / Them pronouns, but She / Her is still fine. For most of my friends this isn’t going to be at all surprising nor will it in any way negatively impact our relationship. Anyone who needs me to just-be-a-girl, however, can expect turbulence.

Truth #3: My righteous anger is justified and I am good at using it to help others.

I have felt conflicted about my anger for a long time. Since a very vocal childhood I have been regularly frustrated by prejudices and injustices, and I was frequently the first voice of dissent against them, whether that meant challenging adults or my peers. Unsurprisingly, I became well acquainted with the standard strokes of the backlash.

When you are confronting bigotry in a mixed environment, the voice of the status quo will generally manifest in one of two ways:

Gaslighting, e.g. “you are wrong to have said this at all, obviously I am a Good Person, you are just imagining that what I said sounded like XYZ, honestly how could you even think this, as a matter of fact it is I who is offended!”

Tone policing, e.g. “you’re too upset about this! after all, I, the person who did Fucked Up Thing, am perfectly calm about Fucked Up Thing, so any amount of anger makes you irrational by contrast, and I get a raincheck on whatever this is about!”

I know these responses are repulsive. I know they are merely the signs of a weak and imperiled ego acting out of fear. And yet I still spend an inordinate amount of time second-guessing my own anger. Gaslighting and tone policing are a favored weapon of the status quo because they work, and they work in direct proportion to how agreeable their target wants to be.

content warning: the following segment talks about sexual harassment and assault

About couple weeks ago I had the misfortune of being sexually harassed at a club in Bushwick. After numerous rejections and explicitly telling a creep bothering me, my friends, and other women in the club to get lost, I finally went to get a bouncer to eject him. The bouncer got the creep to leave. When I went to thank him, the bouncer told me a whole story about how the creep was “a harmless guy.” Then he reached down and grabbed my ass. Presumably he felt entitled to do this after helping me get rid of a person I asked him to remove... for unwanted touching.

It Really Sucked.

At every turn during the whole ordeal (and its aftermath) I had to hold onto my anger, convince myself that I wasn’t overreacting, remind myself that anyone who thought this was acceptable to do to me is almost certainly doing worse to more vulnerable people. I kept picturing myself the way this guy, this man in a position of power, must have seen me in order to feel okay doing what he did. That I was young, small, female, too friendly to say No, already indebted anyway; that he was one of the Good Guys, that his behavior was also “harmless” because he had decided it was. I conjured up as much anger as I could, pushed down the nausea of envisioning my own degradation from an attacker’s POV, and got to work. I reached out to the club and was quickly put in contact with the owner. The venue now has a publicly posted zero tolerance sexual harassment policy. The entire staff is going through training with a local org dedicated to creating safer nightlife spaces. And that motherfucker has been fired.

I demonstrably made the world better. I wasn’t alone, but all that happened because of my actions. Me and my anger, we did that.

I wish more people were this fucking angry. 💢

~ end of content warning ~

iii. an opinion

My Saturn return is upon me, y’all. As Frank Ocean serenades, we’ll never be those kids again. I have lived a few of these here nine lives and it seems only prudent to be moving forward with some sort of opinion on the matter.

My opinion is this: us folks with financial and physical security should be spending more time fixing shit around here. Figuring out what needs fixing and how you might help are the first steps.

If you’re operating on a similar scale of privilege as I am, maybe that means changing jobs to do more mission-oriented work. If you can’t swing a change of that magnitude, maybe it means showing up to community events and engaging with, caring for, supporting people you otherwise wouldn’t talk to. Churches, libraries, volunteering, supporting local artists, participating in local politics - this all counts. If you’re already doing this sorta thing, that is awesome! Maybe you also have a friend worth inviting who you sense is just itching for a chance to exercise compassion?

I’m using “fixing” pretty loosely here, too. Fixing, to my mind, means making the world brighter, safer, and sweeter for your fellows, human and otherwise. We’ve all got different ideas about what that looks like, and there are definitely folks - myopic or malevolent or both - who will swear up and down that their fear- and hate-driven behaviors will bring about better world. Ultimately, though, I believe that many hands reaching towards their personal vision of Better will in fact make things Better, especially when that vision is informed by meaningful interaction with the real world and its real sorrows and its real triumphs.

But ya gotta reach. Ya gotta try.

I am so tired of hearing my well-fed, well-homed friends piss and moan about late capitalism4 without lifting a damn finger in service of the communities bearing the brunt of material hardship. Unfettered capitalism sure does have a marked tendency to wreak havoc on organic life! But capitalism is not a monolith, and lamenting the abuses perpetuated by its principle benefactors as unchanging or inevitable only normalizes them. Any investigation into the history of capitalism (or the broader phenomena of how a Few come to subjugate the Many) will very quickly disabuse you of the notion that this shit is going to stop without a great deal of active resistance.5

So unless you are personally doing work to put our current strand of democracy-withering corporatism six-feet-under, seriously, just STFU instead. Your nihilism is boring! You don’t sound woke! Save it for your local DSA working group!

Which isn’t to say that I’m not convinced of the wickedness6 of the problems we’re facing: skyrocketing wealth disparity with no relief in sight; the destruction of most of Earth’s biodiversity via mass extinction; a pernicious climate of racism and xenophobia that scapegoats black and brown folks and then visits misery upon them; the weight of an aging population bearing down on the shittiest healthcare system of any nation in its class; a widely disenfranchised electorate further fragmented and fatigued by hyper-polarization; the gendered terrorism that is inflicted daily on women, trans and non-binary folks, and queer people at large; a rising wave of depressive anxiety as people become more aware of these problems and how thoroughly they’ve been disempowered from changing things for the better.

So yeah, I get it. These are hard problems. I just don’t see any better option than trying anyway. I want to spend my time fixing things around here and encouraging others to try their hand too. You already know the bad news: real change is hard and it can take a very long time. You might work your whole life sowing seeds whose fruit you never get to taste.

The good news, however, is that you can get started whenever and wherever you are. The good news is that a sense of purpose is its own reward.

iv. how to get started

When you’ve got hard work ahead of you, your best bet is to use your beautiful human brain and create some leverage. Ask Archimedes about it.7

Lever systems got two parts:

The lever, which is the tool you use to amplify your effort. The longer your lever is, the easier your job will be.

The fulcrum, which is the wedge the lever rests on. The nearer your fulcrum is to the thing you want to move, the easier your job will be.

If you’re starting from zero - “I want to do more for the world but I don’t know how!” - my advice is to forget about the lever arm for now. A lever ain’t shit without a fulcrum, anyway. Your time is better spent exploring the world, keeping an eye out for problems you’d like to solve, and identifying nearby points of leverage. If you want to get into activism, a fulcrum might be volunteering to fold pamphlets for an organization with a mission you believe in. If want to see more self-expression in the world, it might be might be inviting your friends to a zine-making class or hosting your own arts and craft night.

The best fulcrum is one that makes you Feel Good when you apply any amount of effort against it. Too many people get caught up in a self-defeating belief that if they can’t give 110% of their creative energy to something they might as well not try. I can confidently say that trying is itself a virtue. Every time you try even a little bit you make it easier for yourself to try again later, and more importantly, you make trying easier for others. A bunch of people altering their behavior a smidge in the same direction doesn’t add up to nothing; on the contrary, it’s a sea change.

If you’ve got a decent idea of the types of problems you want to solve, though, and you’ve tested your fulcrums, and you are thinking, “Okay, but is this all I’m capable of giving?” then it’s probably time to work on your lever. Given your own interests and inclinations, what skills can you develop that will increase the good you’re doing 10x, 100x over? This is the long game, but it scales a whole lot better than “keep doing what I’m already doing, but more.”

For me right now this means deepening my technical knowledge, building a resilient support network, and sharing what I’m learning. Helping others has been a powerful motivator for self-improvement, not the least of which because it’s a convenient shortcut through the snarl of self-confidence issues.

I am so grateful that Recurse Center was a stop on lengthening my lever! What a concentrated cluster of helpful, considerate beings.

I’ve spent the last two years wandering around New York City in wide-eyed wonder, asking myself the most ambitious question I could think of: how do you save the world?

Getting older comes with a lot of downsides, but asking yourself big questions and living your life as the answer is the primary pleasure of adulthood. It took a ton of courage to get started and I am still frequently awed to find myself moving in the right direction. I’m humbled by the grace and fortitude of the folks who’ve been at this for way longer.

I’m also a hell of a lot happier. This summer’s gonna be rad. ☀️

There are lots of extraordinarily sexy company names like this in the legal world. ↩︎

Having the choice to direct my energies in this way is a privilege. Working in tech gives me this freedom of motion and I have been drawn to software engineering in part because it is the freest of the free (if you still gotta labor for your living). ↩︎

😱😫😖😬😬😬... 😏 ↩︎

Substitute with whatever modifier is en vogue. As a point of fact, “late capitalism” is a term that’s been floating around for literally over a hundred years. ↩︎

Thankfully, history also clearly demonstrates that the tide can be turned. ↩︎

“The use of the term ‘wicked’ here has come to denote resistance to resolution.” Wikipedia page. ↩︎

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” etc etc. ↩︎

 We need to have some real talk around what we are calling Developer Experience (DX) at developer-focused companies.

It's not well defined, although Chris Coyier has done a good survey of what people think of when they hear the term.

Here are some things that companies traditionally think of when they "work on DX":

Replacing many with few: Replacing many lines of code with few lines of code. Replacing many logos with one logo. Replacing many steps with one click (signup, deploy). Generating code so you don't have to handwrite it. Providing great value and plenty of functionality as a first-party, out of the box, or with zero config.

Extensive Documentation: Getting Started. Example Demos. Interactive Examples. Full API Docs. Guides and Recipes. Good Search. Versioning. (appropriate to project maturity)

More tooling: CLIs, Editor Extensions, Code Snippets, Playgrounds, Language Servers.

I'm not at all saying these things aren't important. They're even hard to do well, and fully deserve specialists in their own right. These foundational pieces of developer experience should also be fast and intuitive to the point of guessable.

But I'm also saying that developers, when they use our products, experience manyother things which aren't traditionally the domain of "DX people":

Downtime: When your service goes down, does your status page lie? Do you post prompt, no-bullshit post-mortems? Do you provide good fallback options for when your service is down? Do you practice disaster recovery?

Response times: Are you not just meeting your SLAs, but actually clearly answering customer questions? What are you doing for users not yet covered by SLAs? For your open source footprint, do users have confidence that their issues will be addressed and appropriate PRs reviewed, or are you asking people to do free work for you that you then ignore?

Missing/Incomplete Features: No product launches feature complete. Nobody expects you to. The true test is whether you address it up front or hide it like a dirty secret. As developers explore your offering, they will find things they want, that you don't have, and will tell you about it. How long do you make developers dig to find known holes in your product? Do developers have confidence you will ship or reject these features promptly, or are they for a "v2" that will never come?

Uncertainty over roadmap: Do your most avid users know what's coming so they can plan around your plan? If that's too high a bar, do your own employees know what's coming so they can coordinate nicely? Do you have "perma-beta" products? How do you communicate when users ask if they should use "orphan" products? (don't be ashamed, everyone has them)

Uncertainty over costs: Is your pricing predictable or do your users need a spreadsheet to figure out what you are going to charge them? If charges are unexpectedly high, can developers use your software to figure out why or do they have to beg for help? Are good defaults in place to get advance warning? Have your employees ever paid for your own product (or had to justify doing so to their own employers)?

Deprecation/Lock-in/Portability: Do you constantly deprecate APIs and products, causing additional work for no gain? Some amount of lock-in is unavoidable, but are you conscious of how much proprietary API you are foisting on your user? Should your user want to leave someday for whatever reason, have you documented that and made that easy, or are they on their own?

Debugging: Are your errors informative or scary? Have you designed them to be searchable or do they only make sense to maintainers? When things go wrong, how quickly does your service surface common issues and offer resolution steps? What about enabling users to answer questions they don't yet know they have? If developers are constantly making mistakes and "holding the phone wrong", is it their fault or yours?

Audit Logs & Access Control: Many products start life in single-player mode, and then execute a very clumsy transition to multi-player when they start serving teams and enterprise. When something that shouldn't have been done has been done, do you offer trustworthy sources of truth, and ways to prevent repeats (or, of course, make them impossible in the first place)?

Of course, none of these are new problems, and well known to product management. The problem is mostly organizational - as "developer advocacy" as a discipline evolved from "developer evangelism" (going from a "1 way street" to a "2 way street"), it is now evolving to "developer experience". I see a troubling organizational limitation of DX folks, defining DX to the stuff that focuses on increasing "top of funnel" growth (reducing friction, growing awareness, an endless parade of copycat short term growth hacks) - and having comparatively a lot less impact on the "bottom of funnel" stuff (logo churn, satisfaction scores, account expansion/customer success). There's little sense making more rain when faced with a leaky bucket.

Conway's Law is an eponymous law that states that "organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure". Steven Sinofsky's snappier definition is "don't ship your org chart". We need to be careful about the consequences of letting Conway's Law apply to Developer Experience.

To be clear, I don't really know how to do this yet. I am just thinking out loud. But my intuition is that in order to design exceptional developer experiences, we should pay more attention to developer exceptions. As DX people, we've focused a lot on try, perhaps we should take a good look at catch.

The first thing to fix is organizational incentives. DX work must not just feel welcome, it must be demanded and good results rewarded. Nobody wants to feel like they are adding weight onto an already overloaded backlog. Most orgs are set up in a way that lack of feedback isn't noticed when it isn't given, and feedback when given feels like additional burden. This is, unsurprisingly, not conducive to feedback.

The second thing is to establish invariants around your core developer experience and automate monitoring and reporting of these to the fullest extent possible. Tools that hold the line are incredibly powerful. To progress, you need to first stop regressing.

My last thought is around helping PMs and EMs create DX, rather than taking primary responsibility. If you're sending in PRs and design docs yourself, you are probably doing too much of someone else's job and will be ineffective and/or resented. Better to provide them the information they need to make decisions and be available for opinions and instant feedback since you represent the end user. It is common for there to be an infinite list of small things to do - and that is very hard to sell internally - so how can you bundle these up into thematic projects, motivate engineers, and carefully communicate progress to the wider world?

It's time we look beyond the easy questions in developer experience, and start addressing the uncomfortable ones.

EPISODE TWO

“I'm starting to feel more comfortable with my position in the game.” - dem

HOH: Josh C UPSIDE DOWN: Nick & Joshua NOMINEES: Emma & Nash POV: N/A FINAL NOMINEES: N/A EVICTED: Dem (Expelled)

EMMA

I been struggling in this game which is sad i want to have fun but yesterday made me feel like maybe having a meltdown and leaving 90 percent of servers was a good idea for me i really hope not i just really want to have fun and win for some reasons i always have trouble prejury in games trying to find my footing but at jury and late prejury i always know how to rise ASDFGH the people i really like rn are Jakey loml jev loml aria queen saira queen and also joshua is easy to talk too!!! nathan is also great

DEM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSgjyUhGTng

NASH

i simply think men should stop winning hoh and trying to nom me. its week 2 go target someone else j*sh. jev and i are cool now though <3 love him

DEM

I'm starting to feel more comfortable with my position in the game. I think I'm not in anyone's bad graces so far, which is good. But I really need to win one of these next HoH's so secure my social relationships. My plan moving forward is to see win HoH's. I want to win the next to HoH's I'm eligible in back to back. I also want to try to secure my relationships with Gina, Jev, and Jake. Those are three people I want to be close with in this game. Also maybe Joshua? He's pretty cool and chill.

SAIRA

I'm still getting a sense of how the game works but I feel pretty good, there are some people that are much easier to talk to than others but everyone is still so nice! i feel good about josh c as hoh! we get along pretty well and I don't THINK im in any danger but you never know! imma be honest, I don't have an actual plan, i'm mostly playing this by ear, just talking to people, bullying beck when the chance arises, and being myself! 

JOSH C

HELLO GIRLIES!

well, we won HOH and that's really EXCITING. i probably didn't need to win this week but i figured that i'd get a win under my belt while nominating people would still be EASY. i can establish trust with some people and get a "i didn't nom you, please don't nom me" situation going on. i also feel like the two people i'm going to nominate would have NOMMED me anyways because we just haven't talked..

who those people are? nash & emma. (vl don't hate me for only nominating women i didn't want it to come to this either)

but i just.. both of them have really only put in any effort to talk to me now that i'm HOH and i don't really LOVE that tbh. i've already told a few people that's who i'm thinking so i kind of accidentally locked myself in on these noms because there isn't any sense in throwing out more names than i have to!!

i have an alliance with kiki, brianna, jacob, jake, and aria. (i think that's the people in it? i wanna say that's right. LKFMSDG love this game for me) and i feel pretty good in that because i like all of them enough and they're people that will watch out for ME and each other. but i know my social connections go beyond that so i'm feeling pretty good with my spot in the game? i have a solid relationship with almost everyone in the game and i think i should be able to play a cute lil utr game for a few weeks. i don't think that i'll get targeted first if my alliance gets outed and if so.. i have ENOUGH faith in my comp strength and relationships to save me against MOST of the cast.

people kind of want me to nominate DEM because apparently he starts drama with people and has been a bit inactive. he's talked with me more than other people so im not super keen on throwing him on the block RIGHT AWAY but i'm thinking he's a good replacement nom because if people think he's MIA then no one other than him will be upset with me. maybe a backdoor? could be spicy..

i don't really know what else to say here so.. i hope this is enough! love u guys <3

BRIANNA

https://youtu.be/mJw3qxsZ-Bg

JEV

Okay so I feel like pretty comfortable this week because me and Josh have gotten pretty close and bonded over our mutual love of Lucas HOWEVER he's just let me know he's gonna be nominating Nash and Emma which isn't GREAT since I'm in alliances with both of them and they're the only 2 alliances I have so I really wouldn't want to see either of them go home this week, this SUCKS ASS

JAKE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt2xRQqqax8

ARIA

how is it ONLY week 2 i feel so hecking exhausted fhsabfd, but that might also be the fact that is 2 am so,,,oop. Um okay recap time!!!! Recaps are so hard because theres minor details that i still want to note without seeming super annoying so heres a minor list of things im noticing 

-Dem wants to "start playing the game" I told this to Jake (wish i could bold names ugh)

-Gina & dem told me they were gunning hard for hoh- i told nathan/monty/nick/,,,,and someone else this

-emma feels unconnected from cast

-Jake doesnt like Gina

-Josh likes Me Jev Kiki (told joshua)

-emma knows alliances are starting to form

-joey can get pwr hungry and chaotic + good comp ability

-told gnia my thoughts on the sides being "connected v unconnected" and other tidbits of info

-GIna (potentially joshua) doesnt like nash

-Nathan/Nash ARE CLOSE!!!!! WEE FUCKING WOO!!!!

-Told Jake that Jacob has the power (and the bs excuse he told gina pretending he doesnt have it,,,sure jan)

-jake is GREAT at lowering his threat lvl im sick

-Jev-Josh-Nathan-Nash all bonded p well on vc potentially an alliance

-jake tried to get gina nominated

-Emma Nash noms

-Jake doesnt want emma to leave

So,,,thats what you missed on GLEE! Honestly glee sucks but yeah thats all my info i would weave everything together with cute transitions but im TIRED and lots of this information doesnt really connect well so,,,have a bullet list! 

okok nvm heres some general thoughts bc JUST a bullet point list is so boringgg im honestly not too sure what i want to do this week bc i think emma doesnt have a lot of people (although she has jake apparently,,,she might just be putting up a front of being unconnected ffs) so i would rather keep her around based on our relationship alone esp compared to nash whose been busy w/ irl things to reply i think (nash would prob do gr8 in old school bb,,,but new school is a whole other beast) HOWEVER!!! I need to protect gina who isn't the best conversationalist (sorry bb ily but its true <3) and keeping nash around ensures people have another "inact" target besides her but also nash is such a god connection for people like nathan and jacob and i would rather get her out sooner than later before we have another renee on our hands ...

Also i havent talked to the pasio peeps (omg if we ever make an alliance,,,that should be the name hehe) in a while and idk if theyre distancing themselves or if theyre just busy fndsjafd god im too paranoid for this game its awful. Also i think i mentioned the alliance with josh kiki bri jake jacob last time and it still isnt made and im PRAYINGGG it never gets made bc i have SUCH an awful feeling like SIX FUCKING PEOPLE??? S I X?? THAT IS GOING TO FAIL AND BLOW UP!!!! but i cant say no to an alliance so here i fucking am :/ also im trying to think of my longevity in this game and like,,, idk im nervous. I mean ive mentioned going to the end with multiple people but i have such a bad feeling im gonna go out 9/10 as a big move and i REFUSE to let that shit happen, not on my fucking watch no sir!! Not sure what to do about it yet but i feel like monty in particular doesnt trust me and i need his ass OUT! or maybe not if he comes around but like??? sir pls talk to me- i mean this phase of the game is early im setting up the pawns for later, but before later theres gonna be a couple explosions of my game which i'll have to deal with,,, or maybe not actually i mean in my first org i did a really well mastermind game with it- nvm it did explode on me once FDBSHFDS yeah so theres gonna be an explosion period but i think im getting good at dealing w/ the backlash from it and reintegrating myself..

oh also yeah im safe this week lol

anyway sorry for rambling so much LMAO have a trust ranking!

1.Gina (MY QUEEN!!!!!!!! i LOVE her!)

-BIG BIG FUCKING GAP-

2.Jake (listen,,,my thoughts go back and forth but he did tell me the noms so,,,have some rights)

3.Saira (we never talk game but i dont think she talks with anyone about game beyond maybe nick and also shes nice and im a sucker for nice girls)

4.Emma (if this isnt all just a front shes gonna make a great number for me,, might need to fact check some of her statements tho)

5.Joshua (honestly? i love him hes so funny and i think he has my back although he could be more act)

6.Nathan (literally havent talked in 3 days but also i have a soft spot for him <3)

-GAP-

sorry the Js are just kinda scary lmao JFNSDKF

7.Nick (!! we gotta an actual connection folks!! heck yeah!)

8.Josh c (im safe! but he D E F trusts others more than me such as Joshua and Jacob)

9.Jev (honestly a king but hes a little quiet although his reccs are the BOMB)

10.Jacob (i know youre being sneaky,,,idk what youre being sneaky with but im getting the vibes)

11.Dem (might be weird but i think he trusts me? at least a little bc he ranted about losing to me so O.0)

12.Brianna (youre adorable and deserve the world but everyone likes you,,,is this how people view me omg fhsabfhds)

13.Kiki (youre SO hecking sweet and actually u probs have a connections to nash but we havent talked ANY game yet)

14.Nash (p,,p-please talk to me uwu)

15.Joey (i dont trust you at ALL! Why? good question-)

was that mean? sorry in advance ilyall but also its 3 am brain empty no filter

NASH

i think jev and nathan might end up being good allies of mine (inb4 betrayal)! despite the mistake he made nomming me, talking to jev has been lovely so far he's getting me into loona LMFAO. and i just love nathan's energy & i feel like as the season goes on i can see him winning comps. i'm excited :3 hope josh c does not end my existence this week

JOEY

I feel FANTASTIC about Josh being HoH. I’m making sure that others are coming to me about gameplans, and I’m making sure I don’t come off as too pushy or aggressive in PMs. With most of the players, I’m trying to give them all the same energy and hype. It seems kinda weird to say this, but I’m not concerned about being nominated at this point. What I need to ensure is building my social relationships with people outside the “Crackhouse”, and yes that big ol friend group moved to Discord in 20 minutes like 6 months ago. 

This is the first major game I’ve ever played with Skinny Nick(yes, I’m absolutely confused as to what to call them, I’m so used to calling Nick “Eve” that its going to take time to adjust.) Speaking of Nick, my social relationship with him is actually surprisingly similar. In the past, I felt as though it would be as “on-sight” as Tom & Jerry, and it actually isn’t turning out that way, which is surprisingly refreshing. Every day, I’m making sure I send Nick something different to diversify my social game with them. Yesterday, I asked Nick about his preferred streaming services for music and TV, and I discovered we have the same music service(Apple Music).

I’ve played one game with Monty before, but it was a disaster. We were in pairs, and it felt like we were on different planets. I did tell him to not worry about personal feelings when it comes to this game, because I compared the relationship of BB Netflix and the Crackhouse to the separation of church and state. I made that comparison because the two entities of church and state should never cross, but when they do it becomes disastrous, and I feel as though that same principle applies to this game.

Overall, I feel good, Emma may be going up on the block, but it shouldn’t affect me that much. We’re in the early stage, I want to make sure I’m good with everyone.

ARIA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFeox7LM1-E

JAKE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLkZ-BIIjTU

HOUSE MEETING

https://youtu.be/BZMorvWvyKY

HOST WEEKLY CAST ASSESSMENT WEEK 1 & 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc-iMpkfrdw&list=PLFEwPPy8j010XXwntq80VSU0qLNTNpSIN&index=3&t=0s

008

Long time listener. First time curator.

Popping in the latest Play It By Ear selection is like walking through a day in the life with laz, a quick trip into what's happening around him and what he sees as inspiration. As a guest curator, I thought about the quarantine experience, how our paths will diverge as we transition out of it, what we decide to bring back into our lives, and what we decide to do without. My music tastes here illustrate that current frame of mind, sounds that pique my inspiration these days, and the thoughts of what are to come.

                                         PLAY IT BY EAR 008  

                                        curated by Predakon

                                     Link to all platforms HERE.

Sault - Don't Waste My Time

WHERE: Last year on the internet somewhere (maybe KCRW), I heard this new song by the band Sault and was instantly hooked. There was zero information on the band online, and the Sault IG account had one post with barely a caption. Two albums in, many rumors later, there still is zero info on who these folks are.

WHY: The song is a meld of boogie, funk, psychedelic moods with vocals that lean into punk tendencies. The chorus is catchy, fun, and shows up in my head anytime I'm on the move, rushing through the grocery store these days with an invisible 6 foot radius bubble.

2000black - Plastic Jam

WHERE: NTS Radio, while working at my desk at Stones Throw. One of those tracks that I was lucky enough to Shazam, as a lot of times the exclusives the DJs play give me that "No Result".

WHY: One of those groovy synth and drum machine songs that are no more than 4 tracks laid on top of each other. As we simplify what we do in real life, it's dope to hear how simple a track can be to groove you.

Roland P. Young - Ballo-Balla

WHERE: DJing at Gold Line Bar in LA with Peanut Butter Wolf's record collection

WHY: Another simple 4 track song that gets more weird with it. That squeaky sound throughout and rattled snare drew me into this cut from a 1984 synth boogie album, a diversion for this jazz protege of Alice Coltrane. It's wild to think about an artist making futuristic weirdo sounds in the 80's for me to discover in 2020. Mission accomplished, Mr. Young.

Teebs - Shells

WHERE: A few people mentioned the latest Teebs album to me, including my coworker matthewdavid of Leaving Records. Beautiful sounds throughout this one.

WHY: Another instrumental song, but with more natural/live samples, giving it that (hate to say it) "songs to study to" vibe. When I was at UCSD, I had a pre-med neighbor that would study to movie scores like Lord of The Rings, Jurassic Park, etc. but at full volume on his Winamp. Walking into his dorm was walking into a battle. I thought it was a super intense way to study. Apparently at some point, soothing lo-fi hip-hop instrumentals became the study music of choice.

Knxwledge feat. Anderson .Paak - itkanbe[sonice]

WHERE: As my last project at Stones Throw, I had the privilege of project managing the latest Knxwledge album, 1988. This is one of the tracks that feature Anderson .Paak, the other half of Knxwledge's duo project, NxWorries.

WHY: I am probably biased, but I believe Anderson .Paak's best tracks have been the ones with NxWorries and Knxwledge. The vocals on this one get that distorted radio feel, giving the song that flashback treatment. The delivery and flow gets your head moving, and the lyrics "I don't even know how it feels anymore" remind you of the pre-quarantine days.

Cool Calm Pete - The List

WHERE: A throwback with this one from Cool Calm Pete, the Korean American rapper that was on Def Jux in the early 2000s.

WHY: because I'm a washed backpack rap nerd. I had to include at least one hip-hop track here, and might as well throw it back to when I ran a student org at UCSD called L.I.F.E. (Living In Four Elements). Always enjoyed this guy's flow and voice that was a hybrid of being laid back and tough.

Bakar - Small Town Girl

WHERE: Spotify

WHY: Another in the "it can be simple" category. Electric guitar. British singer Bakar's laid back half singing/half rapping delivery. That's it. One of those songs that seem effortless enough for you to try to serenade your partner with, only to realize you missed the mark on all the nuances that make it special. Will keep singing along though.

MIKE DEAN - THE EIGHTH DAY PART 1

WHERE: An article in Rolling Stone on Mike Dean's 4:20 release. Mike Dean produced every Kanye album and a slew of other hip-hop classics.

WHY: Released recently on 4/20, this album is Mike Dean playing synthesizers only for an hour and a half or so. This is my kind of study music! This is also what I imagine it sounds like whenever I buy a new synthesizer and tell myself what I'm doing will be featured on the next season of Stranger Things. Not surprised if Mike Dean's new album does show up on a bunch of films and shows in the next year. Listening to this track, you can imagine drums being added to push the track into infinite directions (hip-hop, techno, etc.), or you can just leave it alone and let it be.