hey!! im gonna humor you (but also im just really interested), how’s your capstone? it sounds compelling:>

i think its SO cool and interesting but I may be biased i've spent the last like,, six months on this researching and planning and im starting statistical analysis next week (planning to do a t test several times over, if I have to do ANOVA i'll cry. I could settle for pearson correlation coefficient theyre not terrible)

(can you tell im a STEM guy through and through)

short version: i'm studying how often a pair of jeans should be washed based on accumulation of bacteria over a period of time, the project itself was conducted through seven consecutive days, being worn for a minimum of three hours a day, however I do believe this information could transfer over to "wears" instead, so instead of three consecutive days you could wear them three times over maybe two weeks and get similar results (in theory, this is inference made based on my decent amount of research)

longer version:

the whole reason clothes need to be washed beyond removing stains is because of odor. how does that odor get there? bacteria, baby! there is a large amount of bacteria residing on your skin (which is wonderful for your immune system, first line of defense!). The amount, types, and variety/biodiversity of bacteria is determined by many factors, including but not limited to pH, temperature, and moisture. how do these bacteria survive on your skin? sweat! sweat is inherently neutral and has no odor, it gains an odor as a byproduct of bacteria metabolizing it.

this odor is transferred over to clothes through the sweat, it wics into the textile and attaches to the fibers, bringing the bacteria along with it, they will just exist together for the most part, creating a malodor but nothing intense for now, the real fun part happens when the sweat dries. as the sweat dries, the solutes and compounds that the bacteria metabolize are severely concentrated, so the bacteria can access more of it quicker, giving it much more energy than it previously had access to, allowing irreversible adhesion to take place, which when built up can cause a lingering malodor, discoloration, loss of textile strength (thinning) not related to natural wear and tear,

the material a textile is made of will impact how sweat, sebum, and bacteria interact. most clothes are made with any combination of these three things: cotton, polyester, and spandex/elastane, each with different properties and attributes causing. ive read some journals/studies suggesting spandex to have a degree of antimicrobial properties, and for denim/100% cotton to have a degree of antifungal properties

cotton and polyester differ in many ways due to being natural vs synthetic, with one being hydrophilic and the other hydrophobic, different hygroscopicity, and general structure, as well as preparation for textile making. this results in different sebum distributions as it dries, polyester causing a uniform distribution with no respect for being face up/face down, while with cotton it dries into spherical droplets, face down, which could lead to implications and suggestions with and about bacterial behavior and odor formation (different bacteria cause different odors!)

the dyes used for clothes can also impact bacteria, it can accelerate or decrease bacterial growth/quantity/malodor, for example black jeans will gain a unique malodor that blue jeans may have. different dyes and dying processes can impact the integrity of the textile to begin with, such as stonewashing or acid wash which compromise the health of it, and traditional/classic indigo dye will strengthen/better it, with its natural antimicrobial properties. ultimately, different dyes will also have chemical properties that will affect how bacteria, sweat, and sebum interact and absorb (adsorb?)

jeans can have a different washing rate than say, t shirts, for a few reasons

one, denim is in reference to how the fibers are weaved to form the textile itself, a different structure means sweat and sebum (oil from your skin) will interact differently two, where and how you sweat! sure you sweat everywhere for the most part, but it accumulates and acts differently in some places compared to others, the most prominent sweating is at the armpits so it has all these processes happening quickly creating a greater need, compared to your legs where it may not be happening as quickly, if at all

so with all that background knowledge, what did I actually test?

I had a person wear the same pair of jeans for seven days, minimum of three hours a day, medium wash, indigo dye, 100% cotton. i took samples on day 0, 1, 2, 6, and 7. I could not get data for days 3-5 due to reasons out of my control, but it ultimately may not matter because there was no seemingly visible difference in amount of bacteria compared to day zero and one until day seven! at day seven it was intense, easily reaching fifty colonies per plate (two sections per day, each section gets played five times), compared to the one to ten colonies, <= 2mm on the first few days,

i predict that my statistical analysis will not show a significant difference (probably p value <0.05) until day seven, but i may be entirely wrong either way, i think its going to be very interesting!

in theory it would have applications in determining optimal washing frequency, based on a variety of factors (significant physical activity or sweating would decrease amount of time between washes) to create the longest possible lifespan of the jeans, especially with the effects of fast fashion and planned obsolescence

washing too frequently can also negatively impact the lifespan of a textile and make it degrade much quicker, and not washing it frequently enough will cause bio deterioration

I would love to do this project again another time, perhaps with more people, or exploring other %make ups, brands, and dyes/colors

Assessment #2: Reflective journaling

The Creative Technologies experience I chose to apply the “Kolb cycle” to is the very first Introduction to Creative Technologies (ICT) project I was given, a vlog. The vlog was an individual activity where I had to describe my reasons behind my decision to become a Creative Technologist.

I was encouraged to creatively explain why I chose to study at University, why Auckland University of Technology in particular, what Creative Technologies is historically and what I envision this career path to be. Emphasis was also placed on my ideas in the vlog being original, critical, informed and broad.

 This activity is experientially significant as a teaching tool as it teaches students to analyse their own thinking and reasoning towards their choices, helping them define their goals and causes them to research what it takes to achieve them.

The activity helps students understand the ramifications of the choices they’ve taken. It helps them understand their predecessors in that field; and what existing expectations and paradigms are waiting in the industry.

 For myself, the vlog assignment was a steep learning curve. I had never edited before and had to learn how to use new editing software. I had never filmed before, yet alone on a smart phone and I had to learn how to record my voice as its own entity for the narration. The script had to be rewritten many times to express complicated reasoning behind the vlog’s purpose and compressing the various paths in my life to my current decision to study was also difficult.

The vocal recording and editing were particularly difficult as I soon found that pacing for filming and for my narrative reading was of great importance to the flow of the overall vlog. Projection and pronunciation were also unexpected difficulties in the editing and recording process.

Arguably, my difficulties arose due to my self-imposed limit of not wanting to be shown on camera. I had to face my own issues with self esteem and my own short comings as a creator and a person in order to complete the project. In a way, it was like a strange form of therapy – I had to face my own demons around low confidence to create a competent result.

It was a good creative exercise to work around this limit, however, the earlier discussed difficulties around narration and editing were birthed completely from this limit.

In the end, I did not film enough footage to fit with my narration and thus, had to be filmed anyway. The experience taught me to allow myself to be flexible with my limits and allow myself to be vulnerable on camera. It also taught me to approach my projects with a more unbiased view, to see my creations and myself as materials to achieve the desired outcome. It was more important for the points expressed in the narration to have a physical representation of my injury, it had more impact upon the viewer seeing the repercussions than just a disembodied voice speaking about the topic.

 While completing the project I learned about the technical aspects, but I struggled with the academic purpose of why this project was useful to students – why a vlog was our assignment instead of an essay, for instance. To enlighten myself, I researched vlogging and the benefits thoroughly.

In a study of veterans’ vlogging, it was postulated that a therapeutic narrative could be achieved from collective commentary given from any of the community online who have an interest in the subject matter, not just an expert’s opinion as a person would receive from professional therapy (Schuman, Lawrence and Pope, 2019).

The study reported that vloggers were more open to sharing personal information, their faces and even stigmatising conditions in contrast to text-blogs or real life interactions as further reasoning for the deep therapeutic nature of the bond between vlogger and audience. They further postulate that vloggers turned to social media (in this case, Youtube) to process feelings of alienation, grief and loss of self and relationships.

A survey stipulated that vlogs can be used in more ways than text or audioblogs, e.g. in online education, online gaming, product marketing and news reporting (Gao, Tian, Huang and Yang, 2010).

Molyneux, Gibson, Singer and O’Donnell argue that “Vloggers also view vlogs; therefore vloggers engage with videos on several levels – they are both the encoders and the decoders, both producers and members of the audience and the Youtube community”. They emphasise how vlogging is a social activity, encouraging people to view and participate in vlog creation (Molyneux, Gibson, Singer and O’Donnell, 2008).

Vloggers attempting to connect with strangers after a loss of a loved one has been found to happen quickly; months, weeks, even days after the death, and shows that vlogging in a 24/7 online world where someone is ‘always there’ is a comfort (Gibson, 2016).

Gibson emphasises the interactive nature of vlogging, shown by the empathy expressed in comments of the vlogs. These commenters act as a substitute support system despite co-presence to the vlogger’s grief being impossible. Gibson further purports that a support network can be garnered from online communities where real world support is lacking.

An exploration of vlogging explains how vlogging can be a useful tool for identity experimentation for people transitioning genders (Raun, 2015). Raun postulates that vlogging is a continually reforming and changing form of storytelling, with feedback coming from the creator as well as the viewers. He argues that this makes the narrative of the vlogs more non-linear and democratic than written autobiographies.

 After this research, I discovered various benefits to vlogging; it can be empathy from strangers to help with a healing, structured therapeutic narrative, that people are more open with themselves in a vlog than in a blog or in real life interactions, or that vlogging helped them process feelings that they could not in real life.

Vlogging can be more useful than text or audioblogs and connects people socially, through creativity and comforting support. It can help people figure out their identities, it’s as ever-changing as people themselves and can act as a way to monitor their progress, like a visual diary.

 References:

Gibson, M. (2016). Youtube and bereavement vlogging: Emotional exchange between strangers. Journal of Sociology 52(4), 631-645. https://journals-sagepub-com.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/doi/pdf/10.1177/1440783315573613

Molyneux, H. Gibson, K. Singer, J. O’Donnell, S. (2008). New Visual Media and Gender: A Content, Visual and Audience Analysis of Youtube Vlogs. Conference Papers – International Communication Association Annual Meeting, 1-12. http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=5&sid=258c6212-018e-44a9-aa72-65aa55798a79%40sessionmgr4009

Raun, T. (2015). Video blogging as a vehicle of transformation: Exploring the intersection between trans identity and information technology. International Journal of Cultural Studies 18(3), 365-378. https://journals-sagepub-com.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/doi/pdf/10.1177/1367877913513696

Schuman, D. L. Lawrence, K. A. Pope, N. (2019). Broadcasting War Trauma: An Exploratory Netnography of Veterans’ Youtube Vlogs. Qualitative Health Research 29(3), 357-370. http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/10.1177/1049732318797623

Wen, G. Yonghong, T. Tiejun, H. Qiang, Y. (2010). Vlogging: A Survey of Videoblogging Technology on the Web. ACM Computing Surveys 42(4), 15:1 – 15:57. http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.aut.ac.nz/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=4&sid=edca290d-1305-4408-bc98-241a4bd5fbc0%40pdc-v-sessmgr05

Sleuthing Writer’s Block

Orson Scott Card said to me in a workshop that writer’s block is a gift because it tells you there is a problem. The trick is simply solving that problem. But that’s quite a trick, isn’t it. Because writer’s block only tells you that there IS a problem, not what the problem is. 

This is like a murder mystery. You come in on the body, no explanation, and you as the writer/detective must solve who has left the corpus of your writing on the floor, what they did it with, why they did it, and then how to right the scales of justice. It’s a big task. And all you’ve got to work with is that body.

Now, luckily, like with a murder mystery, there are basic facts and logical steps we can use. In a cozy, the detective is locked up with the body and all the possible suspects. The same is true for you and your story. There are only a few suspects or classes of suspect. Your eight suspects are: 

Milieu/Setting/Worldbuilding 

Ideas/Concept/Genre

Character/Characterization 

Event/Plot/Structure

Theme/Metaphor

Voice/Style

Scene Execution

Boredom / Disbelief / Poor Development

Chances are that scene execution, voice/style, and Theme/Metaphor are most likely innocent. But we’ll still cover them just in case. You’ll also note that the first four suspects match up with Orson Scott Card’s MICE Quotient, there really is a reason I’m so into it ;) 

So let’s interrogate. 

1) Suspect number 1 defines a lot of your choices. Yes, Milieu declares if there are spaceships or dragons but it is just as important if you are writing a slice of life set in the here and now. There are rules to it. Things that say one thing must occur while another cannot possibly occur. Is the scene you are trying to write attempting to violate one of the rules of your world? Or has a scene you recently wrote violated them? Is one of the rules of the world that you need in order to move on missing from earlier in the work? What about just a detail? Details are almost always something that needs to be fixed earlier in the work, rather than right where you are, in order for you to hang later developments on that detail. Are there vampires but you’re balking right as you are about to have them fly in? Then it might be that you need a hint of vampiric possibility earlier in the text to make yourself ok with it. 

2) The Ideas / Concept / Genre suspect is a lot like Milieu. It sets a lot of rules. Most importantly, this class sets the rule of consistency. Everything that occurs inside a text must match the idea that dictates the text. What if a vampire fell in love with a UFO? If that’s the idea you’re running with, then everything that happens inside your text must either support, contrast, or complicate the vampire falling in love with a UFO. Which means if a werewolf shows up to fight the vampire over their deforestation investments... that scene probably needs to be cut. That may be an extreme example but suppose you are just writing a normal woman coming of age and discovering she’s a lesbian story. That is also a confining idea. The werewolf would be just as out of place. So, most likely, would be her struggles with her POS first car because that’s harder to feed in to the idea of “What if Shelly was a lesbian?” Is what you are trying to write consistent with your what if statement? If you are having trouble early on, do you have a working what if statement? Do you feel like you need to contrast the statement in order to give it a starker definition? Do you feel like your what if statement has given you enough conflict? We’ll come back to conflict because it is a major issue over and over. But in this case, your idea needs to give you several moments of tension over whether the goal of the character can be accomplished or not. If the vampire falls in love with the UFO then how, literally on Earth, is the Vampire going to meet up with it? That’s a problem that grows out of the idea. If Shelly is a lesbian, then how is she going to come to suspect it? Etc. Do you need that sort of problem work to go on? 

3) I’m going to be honest, Character is one of your likelier suspects. Especially if you have filled out twenty character questionnaires of 300 questions each and know every little thing about them including which hand they hold their toothbrush with. Much more important than knowing every little thing about your character is being able to predict your character. Because if you just don’t know what your character is going to do, that is likely to give you block because your brain can’t use the instructions you have given it. Do you know what your character wants in the situation you are blocked about? Do you know what your character is afraid of at this time? Do you know how your character is going to approach getting what they want and avoiding what they are afraid of? Are they brainy? Are they aggressive? Are they avoidant? Etc. How will your character know they have succeeded/failed with their current goal? How have they been defined by their backstory in relation to your idea? Contrariwise, suppose you do know the answer to those questions. Then the question might be, has the character deviated from what should be their predictable behavior? Have they gone someplace or done some thing that doesn’t fit with what you need to say about them? Finally, does your character have a good reason to participate in their conflict? Or does your character have a good reason to feel incapable of avoiding it? If your character doesn’t, then they may simply be refusing until you tailor your conflict more closely to their heart. 

4) Even more likely than Character, your plot / structure has the scent of manuscript murder all over it. Plot is usually the vaguest thing a writer goes into a manuscript with. You often have a point A and a point Z and maybe, maybe some notion of an M. The rest of the alphabet we are determined to wing. Which means all too often we’re left with ok, what next? In which case the question to ask is: what has to happen? What dramatic event needs to occur? In some ways you can rely on your genre for this. In horror, the characters split up. The heroine is abducted by the monster. These are tropes that have often turned into clichés but see Cabin in the Woods, it plays with it but the event still happens, right where it is supposed to. You can ask yourself, what trope should go here, and then play with it to see what new you can create. You can also rely on structural dictates such as the monomyth. Certain things, such as refusing to participate in the story that is about to occur, are expected and can be just the right thing to do, even if only as a place holder. The other question to ask is if your plot meshes with all of your other choices. Do the events of your plot, especially where you are blocked, illustrate and play out your What If? Does the plot fit the genre expectations? Would this part of your plot happen in the world you have so far described? Or is your plot to linear? Is it all too easy for your character? Can you see the ending from the starting line? In which case the question might be how to move to a parallel course, how can you change the path so it still gets you approximately where you want to go but does so in a different way?

5) Theme / Metaphor is an unlikely suspect because it’s polished into a story far more often than it is built into a story from the get go. There is a reason every lousy writer who is really a failure alcoholic depicted on the silver screen talks about what their story is ‘really about.’ All the screenwriters know that is mostly bs. Mostly. But our minds are playing with such things and they are deeply powerful. And when it goes awry, that power can derail everything. The real question to ask yourself here is what deeper meaning are you trying to put into your story? And this does need to be somewhat nebulous, you are playing with metaphor. If it requires an essay to talk about it, it isn’t going to work. And you’re going to need to get comfortable with imprecision. Because it doesn’t communicate very well in words. My book is about family... but it clearly isn’t. Mad Max: Fury Road is about something like women deserving to be free. But the actual literal words for it are lost, you just... feel it in the middle of all the action which is all connected by that nebulous feeling or rebellion and righteousness. The Da Vinci code is about organized belief as a deceitful authority. It’s more obvious in the Da Vinci code but the depth of it also runs into where that deceitful authority isn’t the obvious villain of Christianity existing for the power of a few men. What is your theme? Have you been playing it out, or have you diverged from it and so need to go back and change direction? Is what you think you want to write in conflict with it? Does it just feel like things aren’t connecting correctly? And finally are any of the metaphors you are using conflicting with your theme?

6) Voice / Style isn’t guilty. Ok, maybe. But it is unlikely. Does it feel like the flow of your writing has changed? Is the way you are saying things feeling forced instead of natural to you? That actually is the most likely reason that style will block you, if you don’t really like the way you are writing and want to write a different way instead. You’re much better off writing in a way you are comfortable. The block here comes from writing being just too difficult and not resonating with your writer’s soul. Some people love flowing beautiful prose. Some of us do not. And whether we enjoy writing it can be an entirely different spectrum than our enjoyment. Write the way you want to write. This does mean, sometimes, that you can’t write the exact plot you want to write. My writing style does mean I can’t write high literature, my choices and comforts don’t mesh with the genre expectations for it. And this may be true of you as well. If this is actually your block it is about taking a long hard look in the mirror and going with the flow of your personality instead of against it. Because you are going to have substantial problems as long as you are working against yourself. 

7) Scene execution is about the actual how of how you deliver your story. Have you delivered the story expositions you need up to this point to move on? Are you delivering the information you need to deliver to the reader at this point? What action on the part of the character will deliver that information? Do you need to just state the information and move on, maybe restate it more eloquently later? Every scene has a job. It is to show a particular set of actions that move a character toward or away from their goals. Do you know the goal?  While the scene does its job, it must also do the job well, which means it must also convey information necessary to the greater story as a whole. Do you know what overarching goal this particular scene goal relates to? Do you know what you want the reader to know in the context of the greater story by having this scene play out? Has the scene that this scene relies on provided the information it needs to move forward? Do you know what forward means in this particular case? If this is your block, then you are looking for something relatively small and concrete. The problem will be where you are or in a scene related to where you are. It’s not an overarching story problem. It’s just getting this scene to do its job and making sure it has all the tools it needs to do it.

8) And here, unfortunately, is where we get to the real problems. Ones where there aren’t simple answers no matter how many questions you ask. These are actually derived from questions, which I also got from Orson Scott Card: Huh? I don’t get it. Oh yeah? I don’t believe it. So What? I don’t care. In all these cases it is about truly going back to the drawing board.

Huh, I don’t get it = poor development. There is a point at which you may just not have any idea about your story. You don’t know where to go. You don’t know what to do. You’re not even sure what you were doing. What this is not understanding your own story to the point that your brain balks and refuses to go any farther until you do the underlying work. This is writer’s block because you don’t have the materials to work with. Which means you need to develop a story. All of that stuff above can help. Just use it as a means to develop your story instead of question it. Work out your MICE Quotient and figure out your what ifs. Who is your character for story purposes? How do you want to challenge them? Where would that conflict be most powerful for you?

Oh yeah, I don’t believe it = disbelief. I know, really complex. But belief actually is a fairly complex system and suspension of disbelief doubly so. If you’ve stopped believing in your story all together then the problem most likely orbits around the various elements of your story not supporting each other well enough. Or you may have too many gimmes. My example of a vampire falling in love with a UFO is a lot of gimmes right on the face of it. Attempting to put anything else nonstandard in is going to throw most readers. I might not be able to make myself believe it. So, sometimes you need to step back and ask if your elements are working against each other? Might it be better just to have a human fall in love with a UFO or a vampire fall in love with a more mundane vehicle? And does it all just seem too ridiculous. The thing is, for each element you are going to have to give it the smell test. Can you believe what you have put together? And if not, what can you change to make it more believable?

So what, I don’t care = boredom. Sometimes you are just bored with a story. Sometimes you don’t like it anymore. Sometimes it is just time to put it down and go on to try something else. It is a hard truth but it happens. I’m not saying you have to give up just because you’re bored but it is something to consider. If you want to keep at it then it is time to treat the story almost as if it is new. Large changes are probably in order. Ask yourself honestly which elements bore you. And scrap them in favor of something new. Shelly may need to be relegated to a minor character in the story about the actually interesting girl she has a crush on. Instead of a coming of age realizing it is a Lesbian story, it may need to be a drag racing story that happens to star a teenage lesbian and her fearlessness behind the wheel is echoed by her fearlessness in her identity. Maybe you hate that story. It might also be worth asking what elements you like and simply taking those and reworking the rest around it. If none of that sounds good, put your story in a drawer and work on something else for a while and come back to it in six months or so. In six months the story will look very different and problems will be more obvious. 

9) Wait a minute, nine? There were only eight suspects. Well every so often someone gets the brilliant idea that the detective did it. It generally doesn’t work but it is a possibility. You may be “the problem” and not your story. In which case it is definitely time to put the manuscript away. I once heard Stephen King say in a speech that he saw himself as a father first, a husband second, and a writer as a distant distant third. He may have even put it lower on the list. Life comes first. The truth that many writers and writing advice givers don’t want to acknowledge is that you can’t write every day. As someone who did write close enough to every day for government work for five years before I started harming myself because of it, I am telling you that it isn’t a good idea. And your brain is going to let you know. If you are giving too much energy to writing, your brain is going to go all out to try and stop you. Writer’s block can be an early-ish symptom of this. I cannot tell you the number of times I said I don’t have any ideas. I should have stopped then. The way that writer’s block felt to me was like a well gone dry. Like it was eating my life. Like I would rather cut off my hands than put them on the keyboard. Let it go. Life comes first. Take care of yourself first. You will get infinitely more writing done if you get yourself healthy and in a good space than you will trying to kill yourself doing it. 

The Elemental Sects: Xynne

Common Term: Time Complementary Sects: Prestlae, Alindye Counter: Jetraal Indirect Counters: Leshranel, Uthyn Domain: time, speed, memory, dispersion (physical) 

Like Prestlae magick, much of Xynne magick is highly regulated, if not outright forbidden, which is part of why I chose to present these at the end of the elemental list.

 Xynne weavers are able to comprehend time on a level that most drians and other creatures cannot. In one essay, an Archweaver of the Xynne sect explained that time was not chronological, but more like little squiggly lines that a child had drawn. They crisscross and overlap and loop back over one another. However, most creatures’ progression through time is a linear march, and so that is how we perceive it. Xynne weavers, however, can follow the flow of time as it actually occurs, stepping into the past and future as they wish. However, even if they do such a thing, stepping out of this line anywhere aside from where they entered creates a magickal pulse. This Archweaver, Lord Vrasser Khaoce, told us to think of it as such: here in Order we’ve a set amount of magick. If someone steps through time, then they are taking their part of their element away from their current time and adding it to another, which causes a swell in the leylines, as the world’s natural order attempts to compensate.  This creates what is known as a ripple effect. While wildfires, floods, and expedited growth of plants can easily be dispersed or controlled, Xynne ripples are much more difficult, for if they aren’t canceled correctly, they just create more ripples.

 It should also be noted that all spells have some sort of backlash. Typically, it is assumed that they simply draw energy from their caster. The stronger the spell, the weaker it leaves their caster after it’s been used. In truth, every spell has some sort of physical backlash beyond its caster. Most Wry spells will leave the room a bit warmer—normally not even a noticeable amount. However, there have been instances of Wry weavers’ clothes catching fire after using a powerful spell or Tyssil weavers leaving gaping cracks in the ground around them after channeling a particularly powerful ward or attack. These are just a few of the examples. Most spells’ aftereffects are such that they do not actually harm the physical world. Unfortunately, Xynne’s aftereffect almost always creates a ripple. It can be as simple as feeling a moment where one is sure that they have done something before, or as drastic as the case of Bethrenal, a small village in what is now northern Achieven, where all of its people are perpetually stuck going through the same day, unaware that the rest of the world has left them far, far behind.

 That said, the first sub sect is, as usual, where this element gets its common name: time. In theory, Xynne weavers can travel through time as they please, and can manipulate it as they wish, speeding up a horrible day, slowing down a pleasant one. However, because of the ripple effect, this sect of magick is reduced almost entirely to theory.

 The next sub sect is speed. Rather than trying to control an area’s time, this sub sect focuses on an individual. Through very careful spell preparation, Xynne weavers can offer a sacrifice of some of their own magick to negate the ripple from such spells, allowing for increased running speeds or reduced casting times for others. This sort of spell is highly taxing on a Xynne weaver, but as it is one of the few instances where they are actually permitted to use magick, many of them flocked to such studies.

 Memory is the third sub sect. Xynne weavers can manipulate what a person remembers or forgets by applying filters to the mind, enabling one to peer back into certain events for key information, or forget traumatic incidents all together.

 Lasly, Xynne weavers can physically disperse something. Supposedly they do so by accelerating its time to the point that the item decays or withers away to nothing, though to the naked eye, all one would see is the item slumping into a pile of dust.

 As cannot be stressed enough, it requires an incredible understanding of Xynne magick to be able to use any of these sub sects without damaging the world on a drastic scale, and most Xynne magick is simple theory.

 Xynne weavers generally have photographic memories. When they get a grudge, they hold it until they day they die. Likewise, they are likely to remain passionately in love, as they will always remember the reasons they fell. They can be hurt when others forget what they perceive as important. They are loyal and reliable.

 Xynne weavers make good event planners, managers, secretaries, and archivists.

Question 4: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Tumblr 

The blogging site Tumblr was useful during the planning stage as it allowed me to accumulate all my research in one place. This included theories and theorists, audience research, a production log and analyses of music videos and digipaks. The chronological structure of the site allowed for sections to form naturally, showing the progression of our music video from basic research through to evaluation.

The ability to embed videos and images is invaluable as it allowed me to visually punctuate any point I made, whether on my music video or during an analysis. This can be seen in my analysis of Dead End Street by the Kinks or Another Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd. However, when it came to posting my digipak on my blog, the quality of the image decreased. This was frustrating as I couldn’t work out how to fix it and the image seems to be decent quality before posting. 

I have also had issues with Tumblr because of poor wifi connection. If there isn’t a strong connection, Tumblr has at times taken hours to submit a post or even embed a video. This was especially tricky in the research phase when it came to analysing music videos. At one point the video took so long to load I tried to cancel it to start again and ended up losing the essay I had just written. 

Overall, Tumblr’s layout and accessibility to my whole group is beneficial in organising research and keeping track of progress because of its linear structure, but its technical flaws have been a detriment at times. 

Prezi 

Prezi has enabled me to create an in-depth critique of my own work, in which I was able to break down individual points and section off answers into appropriate and easy-to-navigate sections. It includes many sleek designs for free that presented my work in a succinct and flowing manner and allowed me to provide evidence or visual aid to my points through embedding videos and images into sections.

This program came into most use during my evaluation in which I was able to analyse each of my original media texts in appropriate groups (e.g., discussing the ‘minimalistic style’ in my music video, digipak and magazine cover). My biggest problem with it was that it ran very slow, with each action taking twice the time that it would if running smoothly. This is again most likely because of poor internet connection. The only real drawback was that it was tedious and took longer. 

Mobile Phones

These were beneficial in the traditional sense; I was able to keep in contact with my group whenever I needed them, mostly for help organising filming days during production. We were able to set up a group chat through Facebook and having that easy, reliable communication between everyone meant that we were all ‘in the loop’, receiving the same information and discussing the video as it was being made. 

Mobile phones also came in handy when we needed to take photos of filming days for the production log. This, coupled with the social media access it brings, allowed for easy sharing of pictures and thus, improved blogs.

PCs

The computers at school were what the music video itself was edited on and it caused a lot of trouble. While the extensive storage space on the iDrive is useful, the speed at which post-production had to go because of the poor processing speeds was tragic. 

This was mainly an issue with rendering, which can take up to 3 hours to complete with lots of footage. This forced us to be selective from the get-go with what shots we actually wanted to import and render, which ultimately meant that Premiere Pro didn’t become cluttered and only the best shots made it into the final cut. 

Similarly, the slowness of the PC meant that cutting in time with the beat of the song was more difficult. There were lots of lagging issues that meant we couldn’t tell with any accuracy whether our edits lined up with the beat of the song. It was partially because of the trouble we had with these PCs that resulted in me editing the Directors’ Commentary, Final Focus Group and Animatic on iMovie on my laptop from home.

DSLR Camera

Using a DSLR Camera is a significant technical step-up for me from year 12, where I used a camcorder to film our film opening. Getting used to the digital camera was relatively easy as I never found the need to white-balance or anything like that, something that I would have to do several times every time I used a camcorder.

The primary reason digital cameras are superior is the video quality which far exceeds that of a camcorder. Similarly, using the DSLR meant I was able to use a 35-millimetre lens to create a small field of focus and giving a sense of intimacy and insight into Lola’s life through the slider shots and still shots of alcohol bottles. 

The one problem I ran into with this camera was that creating effective zooms is very difficult as it requires a perfectly smooth manual extension of the lens, something that I couldn’t manage to perfect, resulting in some zooms in the video looking uneven and unprofessional. 

Adobe Premiere Pro

This software was ideal during the post-production process as it was logical and accurate with cuts, transitions and video corrections software, such as colour, lighting and rotation. It was easy to cut to the beat of the song when things were running smoothly as the audio track allowed me to view the frequency of the song and judge confidently where the edits should be. 

The main issue we ran into during post-production was that the tool Warp Stabiliser, used to stabilise shaky footage, was missing from the program, resulting in us having to resort to importing the clips into Adobe After Effects and stabilising it there. This led to complications during our re-edit as some of the clips that had been put through After Effects vanished or stopped working, meaning that we were unable to tighten up a few minor sections of the video.

Adobe Photoshop

This was my first time using photoshop and at first, I found it tricky to get the hang of. I used it for my digipak and magazine cover. My design for the digipak required me to use an Intuos Wacom tablet in order to effectively draw in the black and white block design of the final product. Once I started using photoshop in conjunction with the tablet it became easier and I enjoyed being able to work in layers. 

The lasso tool, magic wand tool and paint bucket tool made the blotting out much quicker and smoother, meaning that I was able to finish the panels for my digipak in two days. The style was to mimic somewhat the style of the original album cover while incorporating a Banksy-inspired graffiti style to appeal to my youth audience. I also utilised the blur tool and added a yellow and red tint to some of my panels to convey a 70s style to the photography. 

Youtube and Facebook

After all the editing and exporting was complete, our final music video for Lola was uploaded to YouTube, where it currently stands at 666 views. YouTube is the most convenient and effective way of publishing video content as it is the leader in the online video market and has almost zero competitive alternatives. It was the best way to get our video online in an easy-to-share format, such as through Facebook. Meg shared Lola through her Facebook account and received lots of positive feedback, encouraging us that the purpose of our video (to show the struggle a person goes through in discovering their gender identity) was conveyed. 

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My favorite books of 2016

(~3500 words, 10-15min read)

As I was thinking back on 2016 over the holidays, I decided to go re-read my notes from all of the books I read this year (a total of 48 books—4 audio books, 5 “tree books”, with the balance on Kindle, and 3 of them were repeat reads) and see what I had learned (or simply enjoyed) … then it seemed easy enough to write it up. Rather than a generic top-ten, I picked my favorite twelve just because, and all by themselves they came out with an interesting blend of topics. My favorite quotes are in block quotes below the book.

Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow - originally recommended to me by Ryan Barrett, this classic engineering tome holds up well in theory (if not in the examples he chose), and is a fantastic reminder to anyone building (or operating) complex systems … which these days, is basically all of us. TL;DR the more linear you can make a system (interactions flow one direction in a well-defined path, instead of complex where everything interacts with everything else), and the more loosely-coupled you can make a system (with buffers and room for slack to ensure errors are isolated to one part of the system, rather than tightly-coupled where an error in system 1 immediately spills over to system 2), the safer and more reliable the system will be. 

the characteristics of high-risk technologies that suggest that no matter how effective conventional safety devices are, there is a form of accident that is inevitable.

If interactive complexity and tight coupling—system characteristics—inevitably will produce an accident, I believe we are justified in calling it a normal accident, or a system accident. The odd term normal accident is meant to signal that, given the system characteristics, multiple and unexpected interactions of failures are inevitable.

computers are more reliable than pneumatic controls.

A note on the terms “complex” and “linear” is in order. It is difficult to find precise terms that are also brief; I have opted for brevity. “Complex” should read “interactions in an unexpected sequence”; “linear” should read “interactions in an expected sequence.”

tight coupling is a mechanical term meaning there is no slack or buffer or give between two items.

Tightly coupled systems have more time-dependent processes: they cannot wait or stand by until attended to

Straight to Hell by John Le Fevre of @GSElevator fame - this one can best be described as a guilty pleasure, but it’s funny (and inappropriate) as hell. It’s one banker’s memories, likely exaggerated for good measure, of his time in New York, London, and Hong Kong. Definitely not appropriate for kids.

Who by Geoff Smart - originally recommended by my friend Jordan Burton, and then a number of other people, this is probably the book I’ve gifted most widely this year. Like many “practical” “business” books, it could probably be half the length and just as good, but it lays out a fundamentally useful (and from first principles) approach to evaluating people for the purposes of hiring. TL;DR it emphasizes the importance of functional scorecards (rather than vague, useless, traditional “job descriptions”), well-defined interview objectives, and behavioral interview techniques to increase your chances of hiring well. 

Part of successful hiring means having the discipline to pass on talented people who are not a fit

Jonathan Livingstone Seagull by Richard Bach - recommended by my coach Chris Holmberg, this is the closest I got to philosophy this year (that I actually enjoyed), but it was fantastic. Basically, a fable about a seagull learning to fly, and while all the rest of the seagulls just want to “fly to live”, Jonathan wants to “live to fly” and learn everything he can about flying, just for flying’s sake. I certainly haven’t absorbed all of the learnings, but it’s a very rewarding read on multiple dimensions. 

He spoke of very simple things—that it is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form. “Set aside,” came a voice from the multitude, “even if it be the Law of the Flock?” “The only true law is that which leads to freedom,” Jonathan said. “There is no other.”

“Why is it,” Jonathan puzzled, “that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he’d just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?”

Manna by Marshall Brain - I don’t remember who recommended this to me (maybe Ryan?), but it was a fun pair of short stories on the best- and worst-cases of our future robot overlords. TL;DR don’t kick the robot dog on Youtube (LINK), because its descendants will probably retaliate. But seriously, very quick read and thought-provoking, even if it does diverge into utopian ... "hopefulness." 

The Other Side of History by Professor Robert Garland - recommended by Cornell professor David Collum (whose end-of-year essay my dad passed on last year and I quite enjoyed...warning it's not for the faint of heart or easily offended), this was the first Audible audiobook I listened to … and it was fantastic. An engaging series of lectures based on the premise that most of history studies the heroes, the royalty, the “influential figures”, this would instead cover all of the nameless, faceless people that history generally glossed over. What was it like to be an Egyptian peasant during the reign of the Pharaohs? Or an Italian shopkeeper during the time of the Medicis. 

Living with a SEAL by Jesse Itzler - recommended by my colleague Steve D’Angelo, this book is another easy/quick/fun read. Based on the premise that the author hired a former Navy SEAL to come live with him for a month and train him (for fitness), it’s an amusing tale of “you can do a lot more than you think you can,” peppered with quotes of “SEAL says …”. Some highlights:

“I don’t stop when I’m tired. I stop when I’m done.”

“It doesn’t have to be fun. It has to be effective.”

I found out SEAL once entered a race where you could either run for twenty-four or forty-eight hours. Shocker: SEAL signed up for the forty-eight-hour one. At around the twenty-three-hour mark, he’d run approximately 130 miles, but he’d also torn his quad. He asked the race officials if they could just clock him out at twenty-four hours. When he was told they couldn’t do that, he said, “ROGER THAT,” asked for a roll of tape, and wrapped his quad. He walked (limped) on a torn quad for the last twenty-four hours to finish the race and complete the entire forty-eight hours. “When you think you’re done, you’re only at forty percent of what your body is capable of doing. That’s just the limit that we put on ourselves.”

Open by Andre Agassi - recommended by my old roommate Tricia Lee prior to my first-ever trip to Wimbledon, this was a great autobiographical account of one of the great legends (and characters) of tennis, including all of his ups and downs. 

The scoreboard said I lost today, but what the scoreboard doesn’t say is what it is I have found. Over the last twenty-one years I have found loyalty: You have pulled for me on the court, and also in life. I have found inspiration: You have willed me to succeed, sometimes even in my lowest moments. And I have found generosity: You have given me your shoulders to stand on, to reach for my dreams—dreams I could have never reached without you. Over the last twenty-one years I have found you, and I will take you and the memory of you with me for the rest of my life.

Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet - recommended by Robert MacCloy, this was the other contender for my most-gifted book of 2016. From the email I sent to our executive team: 

It’s the story of a USN captain assigned to command the USS Santa Fe, one of the latest of the 688-class nuclear attack submarines, and how he guides it from one of the worst-performing submarines in the fleet to one of the best. Let’s start with the metrics he chose — not only performance evaluations during exercises, but also the promotion rates for the crew, and how many of them went on to bigger and better things in the Navy (captaining their own ships, etc). And what’s even cooler, he focuses on what happens to those numbers *ten years* after he has left command; it’s about building a system that runs itself, not simply about him being awesome. 

He, and the crew, affect this change largely through adopting his philosophy on leadership (which he calls “leader-leader”, in contrast to “leader-follower”) … this matches very well with my own personal philosophy, only he has thought about it a lot more, written it down, and is probably way better at it to boot. :) 

First, a few observations he makes about leader-follower. It’s great when you wanted physical labor from people, and didn’t need to harness everyone’s intelligence. But it tends to suppress people thinking for themselves the farther down the chain they get. Even when it works, it leads to personality-driven leaders (and organizations) that fall apart when leaders leave. There are no checks and balances (he tells a great story about an order he gave, by mistake, which is a physical impossibility and yet was relayed all the way down the chain of command “because he said so”). And finally, he points out that to scale this type of organization demands incredible stamina from the leader(s), who must be everywhere all the time to make sure things don’t fail. 

In contrast, leader-leader is the idea that each individual in the organization has both the responsibility and the authority to do his or her job. This doesn’t mean there’s no org chart / structure (it’s the Navy, after all!), but that the default assumption is that each person does his/her job and his/her manager will only step in when things go totally wrong. Put differently, “don’t move information to authority — move the authority to the information.” The person closest to the work is probably the right one to make the decision. I could write a few more paragraphs on specific learnings and stories but I’ll leave it for you to discover, and/or maybe discuss in the future. Instead I’ll leave you with one major change he made in his organization which, while we’re way less formal, I think makes sense for us as well. Instead of the classic “sir, I request permission to…”, everyone on the Santa Fe says “I intend to…”, and one of the captain’s goals is to go as long as possible saying only “very well.” This means that the crew plays “a game” of providing just the right level of information upwards in any decision to allow the approver to decide it’s the right action (without needing to ask a lot of questions back). 

And the Weak Suffer What They Must by Yanis Varoufakis - I think I first heard about this book from dad; it’s a fun, opinionated (even if I don’t agree with a lot of them) account of the Euro crisis by Greece’s short-term finance minister, starting from before Bretton Woods and going to the present day, and closing with a chilling personal warning about the rise of the Golden Dawn party in Greece and what he believes is a return of Nazi-ism across Europe. As with many political economic texts, I found it hard to separate fact from opinion (there’s an immense amount of “X caused Y”), but the perspective is interesting and certainly credible. 

“Gentlemen, for years you have been disparaging our stewardship of the postwar global financial system—the one we created to help you rise up from ashes of your own making. You felt at liberty to violate its spirit and its rules. You assumed we would continue, Atlas-like, to prop it up whatever the cost and despite your insults and acts of sabotage. But you were wrong! On Sunday, President Nixon severed the lifeline between our dollar and your currencies.4 Let’s see how this will work for you! My hunch is that your currencies will resemble lifeboats jettisoned from the good ship USS Dollar, buffeted by high seas they were never designed for, crashing into each other and, generally, failing to chart their own course.”

looking through Keynes’s papers and books at King’s College, Cambridge, I noticed a copy of Thucydides’s Peloponnesian War in the original ancient Greek. I took it out and quickly browsed through its pages. There it was, underlined in pencil, the famous passage in which powerful Athenian generals explained to the helpless Melians why “rights” are only pertinent “between equals in power” and, for this reason, they were about “to do as they pleased with them.” It was because “the strong actually do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” ... “those who find themselves in the clutches of misfortune should . . . be allowed to thrive beyond the limits set by the precise calculation of their power. And this is a principle which does not affect you less, since your own fall would be visited by the most terrible vengeance, watched by the whole world”

So what did these Bundesbank men do? In a move more reminiscent of a banana republic than a European democracy, Germany’s central bank engineered a sharp recession to oust the government.

Volcker symbolizes the self-confident American policy maker whose greatest fault is an unquestioning conviction that what is good for the United States is good for the world; a weakness compensated for with an astonishing capacity to look into the future and distinguish between that which is desirable from that which is feasible.

If the budget goes into a deficit exceeding the Maastricht Treaty maximum of 3 percent, the commission begins to issue warnings that can eventually lead to sanctions. Usually this triggers a long negotiation between the member-state and the commission that becomes the subject of lengthy Eurogroup meetings, leading to some additional austerity for the country in question plus a great deal of creative fiddling with its macroeconomic accounting.

The Seven-Day Weekend by Ricardo Semmler - another recommendation from Chris Holmberg, this could be quite simply described as the hippie version of Turn The Ship Around. :) A discussion of Semco, a reasonably large and successful company in Brazil which eschews all traditional management structures in favor of complete “use your best judgement”. Both are somewhat light on tactical explanations of how this actually works, and strong on the reasoning behind “why”, but clearly there’s something here (and clearly it resonates with me!) 

“Sometimes I sits and thinks, sometimes I just sits.” —Satchel Paige

To put it another way, people who have learned to answer e-mails on Sunday evenings also need to learn how to go to the movies on Monday afternoons.

We brainstorm up to ten years into the future, but we only write down the next six months, a process that guarantees freedom. Besides, every one-year plan that I see has all the good things happening in the second half.

It’s hard for a leader, especially a charismatic one, to avoid becoming synonymous with the company in the eyes of employees and the public. Equally harmful is that leader who believes all the hype and equates himself with the company. To avoid this trap, I believe a dedicated leader must physically distance himself from day-to-day company workings and continually decrease his influence.

I also want my customers to depend on the company, not on me. I learned this maxim from a client who owned a large chain of diners and bought his dishwashers from us at a heavy discount. He was a ferocious bargainer and often tried to go up the corporate ladder for even more rebates. When the unit general manager passed him on to me, I listened at length to his tale of loyalty and commitment. When he finished, I asked him the size of his current discount. I expressed utter shock at the size of his discount (shock akin to that felt by Claude Raines that there was gambling at Rick’s place in the movie Casablanca), but immediately promised to honor it and also have a stern talk with the manager who’d authorized it. The customer hung up, relieved that he could keep the same deal, but knowing that deeper rebates were unlikely. After I’d done the same to a half dozen customers, they stopped calling me.

How did he keep his job when his official forecasts were so off the mark? “Ah,” said the man with silver hair and thick eyeglasses, “I have the right to be wrong, but only so long as I am precisely wrong!” Talk about Alice in Wonderland–style logic!

As an IBM CEO once put it, “We only restructure for a good reason, and if we haven’t restructured in a while, that’s a good reason.”

Algorithms to Live By by Brian Christian - this was a book that kept popping up enough I finally had to read it (first Lizzie, then Scott Cannon, and so on from there)…and it was totally worth it. The basic premise is “what do computer science algorithms look like when applied to life?”, and it a) largely jibes with the way I think about my life, b) is a great reminder and exploration of new stuff, and c) is quite entertaining. Think the optimal-stopping problem applied to apartment searches or dating; explore/exploit applied to trying new restaurants; etc.

I find that the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty. —Clark Kerr, President of UC Berkeley, 1958–1967

A similar insight might help us resist the quick-moving fads of human society. When it comes to culture, tradition plays the role of the evolutionary constraints. A bit of conservatism, a certain bias in favor of history, can buffer us against the boom-and-bust cycle of fads. That doesn’t mean we ought to ignore the latest data either, of course. Jump toward the bandwagon, by all means—but not necessarily on it.

When we start designing something, we sketch out ideas with a big, thick Sharpie marker, instead of a ball-point pen. Why? Pen points are too fine. They’re too high-resolution. They encourage you to worry about things that you shouldn’t worry about yet, like perfecting the shading or whether to use a dotted or dashed line. You end up focusing on things that should still be out of focus. A Sharpie makes it impossible to drill down that deep. You can only draw shapes, lines, and boxes. That’s good. The big picture is all you should be worrying about in the beginning.

The world’s most difficult word to translate has been identified as “ilunga,” from the Tshiluba language spoken in south-eastern DR Congo.… Ilunga means “a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time.”

Now is better than never. Although never is often better than right now.

I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart.… I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. —Steve Jobs

the value of a stock isn’t what people think it’s worth but what people think people think it’s worth. In fact, even that’s not going far enough...We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe who practice the fourth, fifth, and higher degrees.

James Branch Cabell: “The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”

NB: once again, all links are Amazon Affiliate links ... any affiliate fees go to the charity of my choosing, right now Wounded Warriors.