ASOI&Data: Life Expectancies of Targaryen Monarchs, Sums Only.

The average, "natural" lifespan for a Targaryen monarch is 47 years.

The average life expectancy of a Targaryen monarch is 43.6 years or 43 years & ~7 months.

The average "reign" (years survived post-coronation) of a Targaryen monarch is 14.39 years or 14 years & ~3 months.

(This average is skewed by Jaehaerys I, who reigned for 55 years, and misrepresents how "consistent" Targaryen rule was: 4 of the 18 monarchs included reigned no longer than 2 years at most.)

The average age of a Targaryen monarch at their (first) wedding is 15.54 years or ~16 years old.

The average age a Targaryen monarch first became a parent is 19.61 years.

With Aegon the Conquering Outlier removed, the average becomes 18.5 years instead.

(this calculation does not account for any illegitimate children conceived prior or during marriage)

18 Monarchs were used for these calculations, Rhaenyra I & Aegon II both included and with Aerys II as the last recognised monarch of the dynasty.

Day 6 - The Drive Home

Today was the last day of tour. I wake up in the morning feeling guilty because I have a groggy memory of waking up around 8 to go to the bathroom, Paul was waiting to go, but when the person came out I just fronted him (a word I just now remember from elementary school, cut in line, but southern), used the bathroom and went back to bed. Rude. I am wiping the cold from my eye, taking in the undecorated walls of the apartment, and Jeremy comes from down the hall and says ‘Did you get the memo? Louisville cancelled. Tour’s over.” I said ‘fuck’ and processed it. I feel sad for Jeremy and John and Kabir because I know they wanted to play this last show in Kentucky. It’s not that I didn’t, but also for the last three months and for especially the last month I have been feeling a tremendous amount of anxiety about this tour, about feeling out-of-control, about being away from loved ones at home, about being available to show up for people in my life, about completing regular routines of hygiene and spirituality and task completion that make me feel boring and comfortable, both. Touring stirs up dredges of the tea leaves that I had let settle into a fine filmy sediment at the bottom of me. I manufactured a jello mold two years ago and poured myself into it: regular 9-5 in the legal field as a means and precursor to law school, then diligent study for 3 years, then a professional career, abandoning the party life, abandoning trespassing in abandoned buildings, abondoning the luxury of resentment and unproductive time, trying to cool and firm into something reliable, serviceable, dependable, available, a resource people could draw from for once, rather than a leech or slug. And when I go on tour I take that jello mold out of the fridge and it holds its shape but also it warms and the longer I’m out the more liquidy it gets and sloshes over the sides and so forth. So I’m ambivalent because I like what I have to offer to this band, I like the physical process of drumming and expressing myself in the context of music and being a member of a band, but also I feel like I’ve kind of chilled enough and it’s time to settle down. And I’m at a way different point in my life than the other guys in the band it seems like, for the most part. So anyways all this to contextualize the fact that the news of tour ending even earlier than early honestly makes me feel relieved, if not happy, and so then I work to temper that boosted mood for the sake of grim decorum befitting a tour taken before its time. 

All our stuff is locked in the venue from last night and we learn we won’t be able to pick it up until 1pm and so we have about 4 hours to kill in the apartment. Phillip puts on a pot of coffee that will turn out to be some of the wateriest on record, but still, a super kind gesture, and then he also puts on The Wire on HBO Go and we just settle in on the couch and watch for awhile. Some of the scenes are familiar, there’s something seductive about this show, and it brings me back to the precise moment of Summer of 2013 right before I moved to Philadelphia right after I got evicted from the squat/music venue I had been living in that winter and spring, I watched all episodes of The Wire on DVD on Matt Martin’s couch at 3 Pomroy and felt deeply depressed. It ranks up there with when I watched all released episodes of The Office in bed in the winter of 2009 after my girlfriend broke up with me, in terms of memorably devestating life phases offset by the amniotic fluid of full-series of TV. So we watch The Wire and I find myself not too inclined to sit and watch and I want to write so I sit at my laptop on the table nearby and write an email to a female (sorry) but I actually do and its purpose is to make her smile and bring some levity and play and purple prose to a moment in her life that, from how she tells it to me, is just so heavy, nightmares and waking horror and a future that feels like it hangs by a thread. so I’m glad to spend time showing up for her in this small way rather than watching The Wire, and also I write yesterday’s blog post, another activity that feels sort of like a pittance but also like: doing-writing is something I have been putting off, in phases and seasons, for my entire adult life, because to me nothing ever matters enough to write about, or if it does my perspective is deficient, or my research inadequate, or my skill incommensurate with the subject matter, or it won’t properly reflect my feelings, or any number of self-sabotaging excuses to not do this thing I so love doing, and love sharing. So for me, writing this blog is a very meaningful and special act of reclamation of a personal mode of expression that constitutes a break in my winter’s depression and what feels like a new phase of happiness, of believing-i-have-a-future, of feeling more authoratative and qualified to know and describe my own experience in a lifetime marred and dampened by dissociation, oblivion, amnesia, and fugue. So it feels like nourishment to get some paragraphs done and to move slow through my days, get them onto the page.

The Wire grows tiresome at some point and Jeremy fires up the PS4 and then the PS3 looking for games but none are multiplayer and so eventually he settles on Skyrim and starts from a new file. Me personally I love watching let’s plays and this is as good as TV. There was a moment last tour when we were in this strange small town in Connecticut called Torrington (the town all touring bands are required to go to, we also joked), in this town Jeremy was describing the sort of surrealness he experienced there and he said he felt like the townspeople in Torrington were like NPCs in a FPS RPG like Skyrim wherein you would go up to people and press A to talk, say ‘What news?” and that I thought was really funny then, I like his sense of humor. Really Kabir and Jeremy and Royal represent this sort of humor that is to me equal parts razor wit, cleverness, timing, accents, absurdity, and broad conceptual placticity, all for the most part very clean too, never or at least rarely blue (you’re gonna inevitably make a D’s nuts joke and that’s just that). And during happy times I am so grateful to be nearby this humor and during less happy times I get self conscious about how great their humor is and how I sometimes feel like I don’t measure up. But that feeling doesn’t weigh for long. Skyrim is fun to watch, it kills some time, we all take turns trying to kill wolves with swords before Jeremy finally does it, there’s a dragon, we loot corpses, discuss Bloodborne and Dark Souls and comparable games. A lot of the main media activity in this group is discussing how a given media relates to another media, Kabir and Jeremy and John know it seems like everything between the three of them when it comes to record labels, band narratives, artist’s hometowns, etc. So we play Skyrim for awhile, and then eventually it’s time to go to the venue and we drive back to The Salty Nut, load in all our gear, do a final sweep, and say our goodbyes and thankyous to Phillip. We return to the Bandido place one last time for one last round of free local Taco Bell which we absolutely scarf and are very vocally grateful to the people for giving it to us for free again, it’s clear they really put effort into being hospitable to touring bands here, at least through Phillip. His band, Thomas Function, was signed on Fat Possum Records, which also had bigger indie acts like Jay Reatard (who Phillip tells a story about him demanding $50,000 in cash for a show fee to feed his coke and heroin habit, Reatard died at age 29 from cocaine toxicity with alcohol also), The Black Keys, Andrew Bird, Wavves and Soccer Mommy, but which Kabir postulates has most of its success due to having signed octogenarian southern blues legends like R.L. Burnside and King Ernest and raking in royalties from what Kabir speculates is due to poor management of the estates of these dead leagends who each had more than a dozen children. It’s truly fascinating for me to hear how deep and complex the analysis of music these guys have is. When I feel insecure, which is often, I tend to veneer these sorts of expertises and shibboleths among music-heads as snobby, elitist, exclusionary, petty and asinine. But I think most of that comes from a fear that I lack the insight, cognitive absorbency, and passionate research skills to collate and catalog data about artists in the way these people do, the way my bandmates do. I feel inspired to take time to dig deeper into the musicans I love, to make them real to me, to get a sense of their story, their lived experience, for the sake of corroding the mediation between us somewhat, or at least polishing the media membrane. 

I volunteer to drive for the first half of what will end up being about a 10-hour drive back from Huntsville to Chapel Hill. We go to a Whole Foods in Huntsville upon Kabir’s insistence where I purchase a nootropic snakeoil energy affair in beverage form, Kabir gets hot coffee and a La Colombe Draft can of latte, Jeremy gets a kombucha made from yerba mate (“best of both worlds” he says), John black coffee as per, and Kabir also buys a slice of Tres Leches cake in a clear plastic to-go clamshell: “they can take away my tour, but they can’t take away my tres leches.” Later he’s eating it in the van and he accidentally spills some on himself and he says “shit…spilled some on myself. oh good, it was only one leche” which to me is so funny and perfect humor and just like kind of a paragon of the kind of joke I so treasure from this friend group. Another is when Jeremy and Kabir are recalling a favorite running joke from two tours ago, wherein they were in Philly, home to the famous Schuykill River (pronounced skoo-kill, at least when i lived there, at least around the non-indigenous people i knew), and while there they would affect this blaring Brooklyn accent, deployed heavily on this trip as well for basically any purpose, but back then they would say “UGH MY SKOYKL IS KILLING ME” like Schuykill was lombago or sciatica and also would say “YEAH LET ME GET A KWATA POUND OF SKOYKL ON RYE” like it was a deli meat, and they laughed and laughed. Also they liked doing rhyming jokes like last night there was a chair nearby the combo amp Tired Frontier was going to use for their set and Kabir goes ‘amp on the chair, tone everywhere’ and then I say ‘amp on the ground, makes a bad sound’ and then I tell Jeremy later how Kabir would put me in good spirits whenever I was describing to someone how my LSAT score is very competitive but my checkered past makes the acceptance process a little less than straightforward, and Kabir would see I was getting kinda down and anxious, and he would say ‘You gotta break the law before you make the law,’ and we all laugh and I love that, the function of humor as balm, salve. I want to wield my humor like that.

The drive back is fine, some sprinkles, nothing major, clear traffic for the most part, I feel like I have a good command of the van, keep it around 75 for most of the trip, feel smoth and confident switching lanes, passing, etc. We do another two NYT Wednesday classic crosswords together, Kabir is getting probably 40% of the clues, me maybe 30% Jeremy and John the other 30%, Kabir will just to YEAHHHHHHHH after getting a clue and I start doing that too after Jeremy says “X down, ‘on the table’ 15 letters,” and I say UPFORDISCUSSION after only a couple seconds and it fits and is correct and I feel like a damn genius and we’re all laughing and kind of praising each other half-jokingly for being strong beautiful geniuses who also we know songs. This is a great passtime and the drive flies by and before I know it we’re in Western NC just outside of Asheville and we make a stop to refuel the tank and get dinner. We decide on a Waffle House across the street, not wanting to venture too deep into Asheville for something healthier and better because of the time and money it would likely eat up, Kabir says that FEMA uses the closing of Waffle Houses as a bellweather to indicate the severity of a given natural disaster. We go inside, the waitress says ‘ya’ll aren’t from around here are you?’ in a way that I take to be hostile and I suggest that to the guys and they seem like maybe slightly offput but not very much and we decide not to abort and I later feel foolish because I think I am doing this thing where I become excessively vigilant or sensitive to a perceived slight to a friend who is brown for the putative purpose of interceding on their behalf against racism but what’s actually happening is if someone was racist to them they could just stand up for themselves and make their own call regarding their own comfort or lack thereof and I would do better to act less motivated by white guilt when avoidable. That passes, it’s fine, we eat hash browns and waffles and eggs and grits and toast and cover everything in tobasco and tip well and get back on the road, John takes over for the final stretch. 

I return a call from Marty and catch him up about tour being cancelled and we discuss our fears and hysteria and cancellations and reaction and so forth. Marty remarks that he is a gravedigger during the plague, which is the best possible job to have. It’s not a joke because he actually drives a backhoe working for a cemetary and digs actual graves, super weird and eminently punk/goth and kind of a curiosity but really perfect for the lead singer of one of the South’s premiere punk bands, especially after his being fired from the swish cafe he worked at in Richmond before that. I love Marty and catching up and it feels good to hear his voice. After I get off the phone it sort of becomes campfire spooky story time in the van with everyone proffering their take on the panic, market failure, the likelihood of Capitalism as a superstructure to require perpetual growth even at the peril or death of its working class, the superior response to covid that South Korea and Norway seem to have mounted, a lot of fear of financial insecurity. Eventually this digresses to talk of touring, and the guys discuss all manner of various routes throught the South, Midwest, Northeast, plains states, PNW, Mexico City, Jeremy says ‘I can get us a show in Colombia’ which he can, Argentina or Venezuela through a mutual friend, then Europe so long as the label foots the bill for the plane ticket, then Japan, setting up camp on Honshu would make it easy to hit TOkyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Nagoya no problem, except where exactly are people playing shows? there’s gotta be somewhere all these Japanese Noise and Hardcore bands are getting gigs, and then from there of course it’s not hard to get to Australia, John knows a band there, and they go all around the world and this is stressing me out a little bit, only because I wonder about how much they think I would be involved or want to go on such a theoretical tour, and the answer is I don’t 100% know. Part of me wants to say this is my last tour, lean all the way in to law school and leave behind this chapter. Part of me feels like it’s better not to make a hard and fast statement like that because what if the economy collapses and for some reason school is a no-go but being in the band becomes the most plausible source of income or something. I get anxious and psych myself out and quiet down and feel foolish and wish to be home. I fantasize about my future life of stability, but I second guess myself because I just don’t know for sure how my life will be, and want to be careful to work toward the goals I think will be the most fulfilling, self-actualizing, spiritually nourishing, healthy for me; I also want to not forsake the friendships and bonds I’ve forged in these weird intimate moments in the van with the guys. I have the wherewithal to know that nobody is requiring me to make a decision right this second, and that as time passes it’s likely that the best course of action will be revealed one way or another if I can keep from panicking. So I watch videos of the 2019 Classic Tetris World Championships on my phone, eat two candy bars, watch videos of a streamer named Wumbotize play the latest Tetris game, Tetris Effect (2018, PS4, PC), and am pleasantly awed by how crazily far the skill curve of that game has shot up. I have some time ahead of me that is completely free, which is so nice. Before I know it I’m back home in my clean apartment which is tidy like a tetris field at the beginning of a new game and I get into my bed and lay down flat and if my bed is the well than the line of me clears and the well is clean, smooth, primed, for whatever falls tomorrow. 

Survey

I structured my survey from the same questions I took in to the focus group. I think they have a good range of both emotional and analytically framed questions which will hopefully collate all of the data I need to refine this video further. As I said previously I used Survey Monkey as it is a streamlined process creating and distributing questionnaires from their website. Whereas in the focus group I had been more interested in the emotional reaction of people, the questionnaire lends itself to being a lot more broad and assessing purely the functionality of the video. I have not gotten all the responses I hope for just yet but I will continue to refer back to the results of my questionnaire as I make changes to my video over the next few days. 

Before anything else I wanted to make sure I knew what device each individual person was watching the demo on as some of these problems may only be device or platform specific so it is important I’m aware of what issues are happening in which areas specifically. In this survey everybody was watching on an iPhone so far which is good as this is likely how most people will engage with the video so this is a really important area for me. In the focus group I played the video on a television and the text was far more legible than it had been on my Mac screen, knowing this I expected there would be problems with legibility when it came to mobile devices specifically iPhones.

Although I have no defined audience for this video I still wanted to look at the ages of the people engaging to give me more of an idea of where and who this feedback is coming from. All of the responses so far lie between the ages of 18-24 but again, I expect this to be the primary audience for this video due to its distribution taking place on social media platforms. 

Although this question may not cause any changes to be made to my project I wanted to make the survey participants first feel valued by asking them about their feelings before critique as this is a little more personal and I want people to feel like more than data to get the best responses out of them. This question does allow me to see though if I have included good, precise data which is easily digestible and relatable. I found it really interesting the amount of interest people showed in emissions surrounding the storage of emails specifically. I think there is even a possible project for the future in that alone, as there are so many elements of our daily online lives that use massive amounts of energy consumption external to our own homes and computers that most of us are totally unaware to, including myself until researching for this project. 

Similar to the last question before using people for their critical analysis I wanted to hear a little more about their digestion of the piece and how its affected them. It was really encouraging to see that people are looking to make changes in their own lives off of the back of some simple advice. I think this is what made the section looking at CO2E so effective was the advice that followed, it wasnt anything too drastic it was just some easy that anybody can do and feel like theyre making a difference whilst doing it - because they are.

Similarly to in the focus group I was really interested to hear what specific emotions people experienced whilst engaging with the video as this is the most important thing. Some people said they felt sad or guilt which I understand as it is a sad thing to hear about the way we harm our own home, but my hope was that people would feel hopeful and inspired. So I was glad that these more sad emotions were balanced out with some positive ones. I really liked how one person said ‘The background music helped to evoke calm feelings which is unusual for a video about climate change. I think it made a nice difference to the videos that scare you with the dooming facts and may even have more of a positive effect.’ I spent some time looking for soundtracks and tried multiple in the project but I settled on this one for this reason, I wanted it to feel positive and inspiring. This was a point that was made in the focus group too that my approach of trying to inspire people rather than scare them makes it a more effective campaign. This was my goal from the start so I couldn't really have asked for better feedback than this so hopefully this shows I am doing something right. 

Towards the end of the questionnaire I begin to ask for more critical analysis of the production itself. As expected people found parts hard to read but in the questionnaire people complained less about the speed and more about the actual legibility. The blue text fill on the green background are quite complimentary colours which makes them hard to distinguish at times, this wasnt a problem on the television but as the data shows this is definitely problem on mobile devices, one person said it was the scale which was the problem. I think that it is likely to be a blend of all of these factors. I can fix this hopefully by increasing the scale and the drop shadow which I have applied to the text. If this doesn't fix the problem fully as I expect the blue text may still be hard to read, I may need to reassess my colour palette slightly or maybe look at using some sort of stroke or border for the text. This feedback is invaluable though, as someone who has seen the data countless times it was becoming hard for me to really assess the legibility of text both visually and in its duration but now I have feedback I know where I need to make changes. 

As well as wanting to know what people thought of the production I also wanted to know what they thought of the content itself. I felt that I was trying to get a lot of different subjects into one video but I wanted it to feel more like friendly advice than an instruction manual, this was a hard balance for me to try and find so I was really interested in the responses to this question. All but one of the responses so far indicate that people were happy with the depth of information and how it touched on a number of points briefly. One person suggested that there could be more information surrounding each point and to a degree I agree, but this would take the video to a length where I feel it would be better suited being produced as a series of videos each looking specifically at one area. As I have just stated this was not where I wanted my video to go as I think too much seriousness limits audiences in a lot of ways, especially in this case as my goal should be to inform as many people as possible, not just those already eco-conscious as they are likely aware of all of this. I am trying to inform those who are more unaware. 

Although a rating isn't ideal for making adjustments to my project I wanted to see at what level people thought it was currently at using a 1-10 rating. 

I felt that my questions covered a good number of areas but with this being quite a personally subjective topic I wanted to give the opportunity for people to express any other thoughts they may have had about the project. The suggestion of a ‘longer into to set up what the video is about to say’ really interests me especially following the point about possibly including more information surrounding each point. I think that outlining from the start that the video exists to be informally informative would help people to engage with it more easily. I can see that the point where the nature of the video becomes clear is closer to the end, which may stop people interpreting the earlier information as effectively as they are too busy trying to think of what the video is trying to communicate.  Across my testing and feedback of this infographic I have collated a lot of useful information which I can use to make amendments to my video. Specifically my first goal is to make the text more readable where necessary and from there I will fix the issues with the timing and duration of text. At this point I hope to text another demo to see if this has fixed those problems and if so, I can add some finishing touches to the visual styling. Overall though I have found both the survey and the focus group really interesting in highlighting areas where I can improve the video and also giving me more confidence to keep going with it as the data suggests people are affected by and learning as a result of it which to me is a huge success.