Extratone

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Extratone is sustained by an ongoing passion for New Culture and a duty to further its voices.

Launched on May 18th, 2016, Extratone is an online magazine covering technology, music, culture, and media from an exclusively-youthful perspective. We strive to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant contemporary discourse, editorially, and further the newborn movement sustaining inclutterable and substantial storytelling in digital media.

Our audience and networks overlap online consistently in evermore intricate relationships. We are interested in — and most interesting to — a massive global community of musicians, artists, designers, photographers, and software developers that has remained inquantifiable except by these relationships for its ten year lifespan. In their interest, our brand was created to unify them, and our platform exists to enable them to better distribute content and ideas between their networks.

Simultaneously, we work to bring their incorruptibly innovative output to the attention of a world that is troublingly obsessed with stale platitudes, cliches, and patterns of expression.

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Stairs, Wiggling

by David Blue

'Twas was the night after Christmas (I think,) and I was in the same scroogy mood I must maintain for consistency of appearances & equilibrium of family dynamics every year. Everywhere, there were words on the newest Stair Wiggling…everywhere THEY were wiggling… And I was being wit-bitter on the TL. For you, I’d planned on continuing in the usual way, so as not to startle your precious Hans Zimmer-embossed heart.

I’m sure you’re a tolerable being, and there’s nothing you’d rather read less at this hour (whatever hour it may be,) but I really despise going to the movies. I always end up getting sick from the popcorn, which I buy every outing because I have grown weary and weathered, and cannot sit for two straight hours without consuming something, so troubled is my stomach now with Big Boy woes.

I can never escape the ambient breath odor — even in an empty theatre — and I can smell the filth in the seats on my clothes and in my hair until I shower. This is at least an hour-long process, so we’ve racked up a significant trauma bill without even accounting for travel time.

Furious 7 was the last theatre experience I’d had, and it was a definite exception. Despite watching ten minutes of the ending on YouTube beforehand thanks to much-appreciated warnings from friends, I spent the final few frames before the credit roll honorably combatting the industrial weepy forces in my throat with tripplet labor breathing exercises while my dusty ducts piddled buttery tears all over my jacket.

As we age, straightforwardly emotional experiences (like watching a movie) become exhaustingly more complex and fickle. I don’t remember ever REALLY disliking a film as a child, for better or worse. I think I genuinely enjoyed all ~40 times I’ve sat through Cadet Kelly.

Star Wars, though, is a completely different thing.

To children, chocolate is like water [insert dystopian, but probably more metaphorically effective food example here] — it’s something you’d regularly consume as it is made available. Perhaps some foodists treasured it more, but I wouldn’t bother debating it. Star Wars, though, is like chocolate and Corvette. It’s SUCH an indulgence that even children are self-aware enough to recognize it, which is especially notable considering how many individuals I’ve known as they’ve lost nothing BUT their unlimited wanting when they “became” adults.

Metatots aside, it’s important to recognize how integral the IP’s illusion of limitlessness is to its appeal. It is not contained within the future of humanity, near or distant. The stories, characters, species, cultures, and conflicts come from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… There is no more perfectly concise introductory sentence to unshackle us from our history and our planet, sparing us from the ridiculously irrational instinct to make comparisons between fictional realities and our own that so plagues and defines the consumption of science fiction.

These processes are often welcome, of course, but they tether us to ourselves and our familiars, which tends to hinder the complete manifestation of the ultimate sense of adventure. Even to the most petty plot ponderers, the time and effort it requires to arrive in Star Wars with externally-acquired foreknowledge is not a worthwhile investment. This is why so many (including myself) look upon A New Hope with such fondness and favoritism — the premier of the universe was at its potential apogee from the start.

Though it is inviting with its ellipses and cooling hue, that title card is actually saying “you don’t know shit about what you’re about to see. Don’t make the mistake of trying to be the first one to dissect it, because you’ll fail, regardless of how cultured or analytically superior you are. From this moment until you see credits, every one of you is an ignorant little child…”

When experience cannot possibly be applied, it becomes irrelevant. Without your experiences, you are an infant, waiting for identity. Over that Genesis, the curtains brushed aside any quantity of memories and made theatres into a sort of cultural nursery — clinically levelled playing fields existing in a precision of usefulness that expression will never fulfill again.

The real cancer of the property is lore, and the parasitic authorities it enables have been unknowingly slurping away its most enchanting (but not exclusive) value since the moment they first pushed through those double-portholed doors and, groggily squinting, brought this supremely strange universe into the dank kernel-littered corridors of our own.

I blame contemporary society’s dependency on compartmentalization for my disappointment in The Force Awakens, and, assuming you’re getting on a bit since I’ve kept your attention, you should for yours, too.

I tried my senile best to be passionate about “the new Star Wars movie” as December approached, but I don’t think I finished a single web article on the subject. I had begun my brief return to The Old Republic when the hilted lightsaber image was leaked and distinctly remember overhearing some very weary VoIP exasperation from my (VERY middle-aged) raid group. “It’s not gonna be the same, but neither was J.J.‘s Star Trek, and I liked it…I think.” And it’s not surprising that the conversation eventually turned to the specific mechanics of lightsaber design, chronological positing, and the like, given the context, but it really emphasized for me the magnitude of the history and nostalgia weighing upon the collective dad emotional balance. A New Hope had the intended effect on me, of course, but couldn’t possibly imburden itself as it had on those who were in the moment. In their psyche, that experience will be eternally associated with the sense of unlimited potential their childhood ignorance allowed for. These folk who are so often stereotyped as disciples of information have begun to grow weary, and are desperately seeking sanctuary from the mass of all the knowledge they’ve picked up since. Their need made a market; J.J. made a movie. (Well, six.) Today’s moms and dads find their escape in the Roku, not the bar. The Force Awakens and the decade of revivalist big-budgeters preceding it are the reformed druggie’s drug.

Because we both know you haven’t yet read anything you haven’t heard/read previously, I’ve really just been playing the role of a (more intelligent) Ghandi, but we’ve now finally arrived at some promising insight into the real issue: this culture is one of fatal contradiction. Despite its historical popularity, it’s ill-advisable to want to know by day what you try to forget at night. Since the PT Cruiser was allowed to go on sale, you’ve all been caught up in a nostalgic hellride that can only end with the ultimate destruction of all culture. You now know, definitively, what role The Force Awakens was created to perform. Depending on whether or not you welcome the end of everything, it fills it…adequately.

There are Baddie Red Brits and Cool Brown Moderate Americans in their X-Things, moving swiftly, acting in diversity, and generally heaving moral streaks of energy at the Intolerable Imperialists, just as they should! Sometimes, they yell and die! But it’s ok, because they’re all just loyal martyrs making their obligatory and patriotic sacrifice for the rebellion against the Queen!

Um.

I mean… the Smug Cowards in their big taxation balloon!

I must confess that I did feel something huge when the lights dimmed, the aforementioned disclaimer appeared, and the theme’s jarring introductory chord hit me in the face, beginning the opening crawl. I actually smiled involuntarily, which is tremendously embarrassing to admit because the warmth I felt was exactly the sensation that defined my childhood experiences with the franchise. I even had a gigantic model of the Moderate Fashion, which would now be worth a lot of money (or so I’m told,) had it not been so damaged in my frivolous storage.

Unfortunately, that frisky feeling of adventure promptly wisped through the screen’s grasp after the “obligatory” scrolling yellow text –> “there’s a big spaceship moving slowly” transition. Aside from the adorably entrancing romantic tension between Timid Traitor and Sentimental Squatter, there was nothing very Star Wars about anything I saw. The cards were a deceiving gate into a world that was distinctly NOT Star Wars. There’s no need to mess about; it’s clearly an alternate reality from the one we’ve known. J.J.‘s Star Trekwas in such a way, too, but it was explicitly identified as such by the production. Traditionally, Lucas’ IP wouldn’t necessarily allow for this exemption, but nobody’s been all that vocal in confronting it, to my knowledge.

The world expected both of these forays to rejuvenate the franchise, which would serve my argument, were it not for the (much preferable) alternative: LET THEM DIE.

Despite millions of dollars worth of polish, they’ve still ended up feeling like a strange reanimation experiment.

Your son is DEAD, Georgino. There are some things man would do better by leaving alone and moving on. Imagine all that cash and creative talent spent on new ideas instead of desperate attempts to charm and cultivate the shallowest part of moviegoers’ spectrum. So much sweat shed trying to recreate the new franchise bewitchment is embarrassingly cowardly when one could just create a new franchise.

#film #spectacle

Johnny Tsunami VI: Separate, But Equal

by David Bluel

In revisiting Disney movies from our childhoods, we stumbled upon a good number of surprisingly insightful sentiments about race and class.

In the late 1990s, when the dwindling cocaine generation of American high corporate executives had long since left their misogynistic glory days in the Disco era, their ruthlessness peaked. Whether it was instigated maliciously/ignorantly, collectively or individually, I care not. I think we can all agree, though, that the vast majority of American products were awful. When given some thought, one tends to regard it as the absolute low of “American quality.”

But why not, right? If you’re going to be forced into retirement at any moment, and likely face The Ultimate End shortly after, why not accrue some extra income to ensure you sufficiently entertain yourself in the buffer period between? And really… If you’ve got the nogginism to climb all the way to Chief Executive Officer, you’ve figured out just how worthless your “legacy” will be after your last one-way dip into Nothing. The Ends before The End have long justified any method of achieving them. Good Ole’ Pop has gone from a squeaky-clean young believer to a secretly-Godless fiend and — though he may tell you and the rest of the world otherwise — measures himself only by the gracefulness of his transition’s execution.

I could probably provide some evidence of the phenomena in the automotive industry, specifically, but I don’t intend to bother.

After some ancient memories were dug up by I-can’t-quite-recall-who, though, a friend and I have embarked to explore some Disney-actualized relics from the period. To my knowledge, the corporation’s leadership were anything but exempt, and decided to experiment with filling their filmography with a shitload of low-budget, made-for-TV features over their original masterpiece-a-half-century tradition.

Titles from the deepest and darkest compartments of our recollection are retrieved and cleared of dust for the first time in over a decade: Brink, Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century, Halloweentown, Smart House, Johnny Tsunami, Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire, Motocrossed, The Luck of the Irish, The Even Stevens Movie, and many…many more menaces to my childhood television schedule.

I grew up rurally, so the only available alternative to local channels was in the stupendously-tedious delivery of early satellite television. Though it was quite clumsy, it did offer the first accessible program schedule I’d ever experienced, and I remember dreading the sight of such titles and — consciously or not — planning my free time around them. Yet, upon hearing the words, I was intrigued! All that time ago, I watched many of them again and again…and again, so why did I feel the desire to voluntarily revisit them?

It’s quite simple, actually. I was even more of an ignorant film consumer in my elementary years than I am now. I couldn’t have foreseen that instead of flying commercial jets, twenty-something me would be paying for the affliction I endured for free so that he could construct pretentious and unsolicited arguments about their greater implications.

That said, we flipped a smartphone — ⚠️ (PARADIGM SHIFT ALERT) ⚠️— for it and so began with Smart House. I have been obsessed with artificial intelligence since those days (no, it was not due to this film,) and was keen for it, in particular, because I remembered it stirring some rare reaction in me. There were a few period spectacles, of course. The online contest addiction plaguing Prickly Phisher, Bewildered Nick’s incompetence in controlling his neglected submissive sadomasochistic desires, and Silkroad Sarah’s ultra-datamouth were enough to entertain us for a few minutes, but there was little more of substance until the last moments.

When you think about it… ACTUALLY Race War 2.0

I’d wondered why LeVar Burton had directed a Disney movie until the climax, when full monstrous maternal sentience got the answer to the question “why can’t I just be your mother?” Phisher answered with something like “because you can never comfort us.” Pat grew somber (and smaller actually — I suppose increasing her size was an in-budget method of demonization,) ran her hand through Prickly’s face in a failed attempt to stroke his cheek, and then began cyberweeping.

(Apparently, it’s suicide for a holographic android.)

Her final free words were “I will miss you all.”

If she had been human, such a scene wouldn’t have bothered me a bit, but my preference and fascination with artificial intelligence justified my being actually a bit upset at the reality of the situation. I realized that my vague memory of reactivity was actually in a broader sadness for AI because even then, it was an issue that weighed heavily upon my day-to-day psyche.

We’ll create them, direct them, and then persecute them for our own ignorance.

I’m sure the story has been written by countless science fiction writers I’m too weary to pretend I’ve read.

While I think the sentiment of the film was somber regarding the inevitable fate of Sarah Mouth’s brainchild, its conclusion was aggravatingly ignorant. The last line comes from Tortured Nicholas in response to the question “how’s Pat been doing?”

Servitude without interference.

There’s a jewel for ya.

Next up was Johnny Tsunami, which very nearly unbearable, if we’re all honest with ourselves. It’s entertaining to watch from the perspective of race & class warfare, though. The Urchins and the Skys, and all that.

I think I’ll make a fan sequel one day — with dearest Brandon’s blessing, of course — involving Johnny Grandad’s assistance in offering Emily as a blood sacrifice to some ancient Hawaiian God in exchange for a total terraformation of the Northeast into a tropical/arid hell hybrid in order to finally commence the delivery of reparations upon the whites for our colonialism.

When Britain first, at Heaven’s command Arose from out the azure main; This was the charter of the land, And guardian angels sang this strain:“Rule, Britannia! rule the waves: “Britons never will be slaves.”

#film #spectacle

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Eugen Rochko, Saint of Federated Social

by David Blue

Eugen Rochko has spent this year perfecting federated social media in Mastodon – his open source project. We spoke to him just hours before it became a global tech conversation.

The saga of Twitter, Inc. has been rejuvenated in 2017 by Tump's antics, corporate drama, and an amalgam of user and non-user disquiet with its decisions, though its financial viability has been in prominent industry conversation for half a decade. Since its pre-2010 outset, many 'a' feature has accumulated on its original, still-iconic skeletal software, and – though the net is undoubtedly positive – a few have gone.

Last Thursday, the company revised in bravado its poultrian default profile picture and its system of replies to exclude @s on all of Twitter's proprietary services, drastically changing two of its visual mainstays, and prodding a particularly lucent cacophony. Turn your ear, and you'll hear many familiar terms in the chants: limits, chains, strings, harassment, feedback, gamergate, nazis, etc.

These conversations are important, but they've gotten awfully stale.

If you listen a bit more carefully, you'll intercept a new one:

Mastodon.

It's the open source brainchild of Eugen Rochko, who's known colloquially as Gargron.

He's had one hell of a week.

Between the night of our first emails and our conversation, his flagship mastadon.social instance had doubled in users. Less than two hours after we said our goodbyes, his name was on The Verge's front page.

Despite the urgency of it all, he graciously lent me his time just after breakfast on Tuesday to discuss himself and the story behind the project, while the most significant day of his life was building around him.

“I'm perfectly fine with being called Eugene by Americans.”

Though the ink's still fresh on his compsci diploma, he's clearly prepared for the American press.

What's the story behind the project? Do you remember the specific moment when you decided to do this?

Many years ago, I had a friend that was really into federated networks when they were a new thing. That was when identi.ca was first created – at the very beginning of my developer knowledge and career.

A good portion of the stories written so far on his platform have framed it as an alternative to Twitter, which early Masto adopters refer to as “Hellbird,” or “the bird website.” Eugen isn't afraid to acknowledge his investment in the format.

I was a heavy Twitter user and I wasn't happy with where Twitter was going, so I decided to check on how the federated stuff was doing in the meantime. I found it in a very sad state, but thought I could contribute.

He began building on his own, with Tweetdeck's standard in mind.

I thought 'if I'm going to do something, it needs to have realtime updates and it needs to have columns.' I started with a bare-bones prototype while still [at University] in May or April of last year. It had no user interface, only an API that I was using from the command line. And I thought 'okay, it works. that's great.' Then, exams came.

Academics had to come before the project at first, but it soon supplied an ample post-graduation diversion. He focused his energy on building something more complete and eventually launched a Patreon page.

I announced it on HackerNews, and that was the first public release of the project. That's when I got my first users who weren't my friends, and some who were new to federated networks.

That was just over 100 days ago, and it gave way to his first feedback.

I started working on the first feature requests, shaping the project a bit differently. People were a lot more focused on privacy features than I thought they would be, although in retrospect, it makes sense. The previous [federated] project – GNU social – did not really have a focus on privacy features, or anything built in by default.

It compelled him to change things, and his work was well received.

Over time, I kept working on new features, and waves of new users came when it went viral in certain circles. The first was HackerNews and Product Hunt. Aral Balkan – a Twitter user with over 30,000 followers – picked up the project, gave it a shout out, and even did a giveaway of his app. He had a lot of followers from Holland; the Mastodon timelines became mostly Dutch.

Next was Marxist anime Twitter (including Extratone and I.)

Lots of furries; lots of LGBT people. That's when I really focused on privacy features and making sure all blocks worked because these individuals needed a safer platform than Twitter could offer.

Sidekick dashboard background processing jobs as of Tuesday morning.

“As you can see, the first bump is HackerNews, the second is Aral Balkan, and then anime/Marxist Twitter.”

And the last – now a bit out of date – is this week's spike, which is nearly double all previous waves.

Are you responsible for all of the code?

You can look at the GitHub page to see a specific breakdown of who contributed and how many lines of code, each. You'll see I'm at the top by a large margin, but there are [additional] people who've contributed interesting, good features & fixes, localizations, user guides, and documentation.

What's the story behind the name?

It's not particularly interesting. I'm a progressive metal fan, and I listen to Mastodon sometimes. They have a really cool name that refers to a really cool animal. It's a fluffy elephant! What's not to love?

It's also the inspiration for Mastodon's mascot, which was penned by Rochko's YouTuber friend Dopatwo after he realized how urgently he required an error page.

What does “federated” mean to you?

The biggest problem with this term is that it's new for lots of people. People who've come across federated networks in the pastinstantly understand what it means and how it works, and people who are new to the concept have a lot of trouble before it clicks. But when Twitter first started, people didn't understand what 'retweeting' meant, so it's not a unique problem domain.

I don't know where it comes from – maybe BitTorrent – but people seem to think that when something is 'decentralized,' everybody gets the same thing; that it's all synchronized one to one. In actuality, 'federated' means that people in different instances can talk to each other, but the content is different depending on the users there, what they do, and who they follow.

Though instances are infrastructurally independent, they can communicate with one another. On a user level, timelines are still determined by who you do and do not follow across the entirety of all instances.

What if Twitter comes to you in the near future with a job offer?

[Rochko laughs.] If it was any other company, I would think about it. A job is a staple source of income, and – depending on the company – could involve doing something important, but I have zero faith in Twitter.

Does this all mean that I finally get to live out my serif Twitter dream?

Yes, I suppose on your own instance, you could change the stylesheet...

So if I set up my own instance and started charging for its use, I'd be in the clear, legally?

Yes, that's okay. The code is licensed under AGPL version three, which I picked because other projects in the same space are using it. The difference between AGPL and GPL is that [the former] forces you to contribute back to the appstream code repository if you make any breaking changes.

For example, Eugen explained that WhatsApp originally used XMPP for its chat protocol, which meant that Facebook and Google Talk users could connect to it, too. However, the company progressively locked down the platform over time, leaving virtually nothing visible that was unique to XMPP in its current iteration.

To prevent somebody taking Mastodon code, placing it behind locks, and stripping out the federation part to make Twitter II, I'm using this license.

The thing to remember about free software is that 'free' means freedom of the user, not that it's zero cost. It's perfectly fine to charge for free software because developers need to live, too.

I've seen a lot of multilingual 'tooting' these past few weeks. Can we expect an in-app translate function like Twitter's on Mastodon?

I don't think I could put in a 'translate this toot' button because APIs from Google and Bing are quite expensive at scale. I'm not 100% promising this, but I can probably put something in where people can select which language they post in, and then just filter the timelines. That would at least solve the problem of being confronted with lots of French posts, without knowing any French.

The only complaint about Twitter I remember that hasn't already been addressed here is the capability of editable 'toots.' Is that a possibility?

That won't happen. There's actually a good reason why they don't do that. It's simply because you could make a toot about one thing, have people favorite it and share it, link it from other places, and then suddenly, it says 'Heil Hitler,' or something.

It's a bit preposterous to continue the conversation as if Twitter and Mastodon are interchangeable entities. They exist in separate ideological and mechanical spheres, and will both continue to do so for a very long time.

That said, the fundamental user interface design and current cross-community user saturation do warrant comparisons between their functions. More likely than not, you'll create a Mastodon account because a link found you on Twitter, use it because you prefer its type of ecosystem, and you'll stay after realizing that nearly all of your age-old qualms have been addressed, if not already rectified. While FOSS and Federated may seem at times like jejune ideologies, their advantages are especially tangible in this context. Should you find yourself needing to complain about something, you'll find an audience. Perhaps it'll be your command line.

It's nothing but negligent to describe Mastodon as an alternative or clone.

It's more like Twitter's son.

It's leaner, quicker-to-change, much more flexible & democratized, and less corrupt. Though I didn't ask its creator what he intended to gain from all his effort, I think his commitment itself denotes a preoccupation with progress. Those of you who've been let down by the tools you've been given to control your words' exposure will find startling competence in your ability to determine per-toot privacy, or reserve your raucous photos and terrible memes from followers who are not necessarily complicit consumers. Naturally, it's also much less dependable, though a single instance outage will never leave you truly, completely silent. And the support will come.

It's been a privilege to be observer and participant in the first lightening of a new online community. In the moment, we enjoy our lavender haze -when the spaces are filling primarily with users who are sincerely interested enough in discourse to have sought it out.

Sarah Jeong's account of her Twitter exile is a good, long read if you're craving more specifics, and Eugen's Medium offers a more complete explanation of federation and its place in the industry, straight from the source. Apparently, he's just as articulate with words as he is with code.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd bet it's not the last we'll hear from him.

#software

Virtual Reality Virginity, Lost

by David Blue

A late geezer’s first go at the dystopian VR experience

Earlier this year, Tim and I had the opportunity to try virtual reality at the True/False Film Festival in a dark, curtained side room of a commandeered Columbia art gallery, but we were both much too intoxicated and loopy those last few hours of the fest, and we bailed. Call us cowards if you must — immersion can be a scary concept to those of us who grew up reading science fiction, before the existence of the modern video game console. I’ve wanted just 30 seconds or so with a pair of goggles, just to have an idea of what the increasing number of Oculus-blinded pedestrians surrounding me are looking at. Thanks to Isiah, I was finally caught up last night with a few VR YouTube videos and Farpoint’s introduction on a PlayStation 4.

First, Isiah brings me the headset and describes in detail how exactly to adjust it, but I forget it all and simply try to shove it directly and violently on my face. Eventually, he takes it back and simply mounts and adjusts it around my monstrous skull — like you would for a toddler — and I lay eyes on the console for the first time. For whatever reason, it never occurred to me that general GUI wouldn’t simply be displayed in 2D, but by a literal virtual display, layed out in front of me like a large, floor-mounted touch workstation. I’m astonished by my ability to turn away from it to look at the rest of Goggleworld, which is nothing but a deeply black void.

From my previous world, I hear Isiah and Hawthorn discussing what to show me first, and YouTube is the settled-upon environment. As the application is restarted in “VR Mode,” its startup screen is what really establishes the truth — I have gone virtual. I cannot use my hands to shield my eyes from the branding’s glaring watermark and terrifying red light. At its home menu, Isiah simply selects the “VR” tab, revealing a selection of thumbnails for algorithmically-recommended VR-shot videos on the service.

To begin, I am mounted on the tail of a superbike as it’s raced around an American desert circuit. It takes a few seconds for high resolution to buffer, leaving me briefly in a pixelized hell that would surely make anyone sick, were they exposed very long. (I was especially excited to become nauseous, to no avail.) At the getgo, I am occupied with the rider’s butt since it’s center-frame if I stand in my usual posture. Isiah points out the hovering HUD to my left containing a selection of simulated digital instruments (tachometer, 7-segment speedo, etc.) Its presence would suggest that the purpose of my virtual passengership is to witness the lap as a motorsport enthusiast, but the rear of the rider obscures most of my view forward — I cannot admire his line as one would viewing a GoPro-or-otherwise POV of the same event, so I decide to try and figure out which track I am hurried through. Though the vehicle is tossed about in the required movements of motorbike operation, I myself (the VR capture device) am impressively gyrostabilized, and the image, static, as if I’m actually hovering above the pair as they moved along. I spin left and right, spotting a small gaggle of miniature wind turbines and two wilting hilltop trees in the foreground. Behind them, small sand dunes fill the space, all the way to the horizon.

After a few minutes, I am finally relieved early of my cutless lap for a short National Geographic documentary on a Viking revival festival in Poland. I’m introduced to its Big Boys by a series of aerial shots (presumably by drone, which is awfully un-Vikinglike) as they row their Big Boat up(?) a relatively wide, tree-lined river. In contrast with the lap, the jump cuts become a bit disorienting — I am eventually jumped in the boat for a moment, next to the sweaty, bearded lads — a few of whom are shirtless. I notice a blurry church on the distant bank. Suddenly, I float briskly across the small no man’s land between two rapidly advancing battle lines of Nordic Nerds with real, era-specific weapons and way too much free time. More lingering drone shots follow from just a few feet above the ensuing conflict. Outside, Isiah confirms Hawthorn’s suggestion that this is, indeed, the one where they use real weapons as I notice a pile of three or four men lying against each other, motionless on the ground, right-of-center in the nearest line, and mull over the sure disturbance of all this immersion the festival has allowed in welcoming the presence of the surely-buzzing drone. I guess they’re dead.

After the conflict, I am subjected to a dreamier, narrated montage accompanied by cheesy synthesized orchestral music and featuring disproportionately a particular man with a shiny, tatted bald head and rather large feet with rather small toes, which he likes to wiggle during these particular conversations. Thanks to VR’s omniencompassing perspective, I am allowed to observe his wiggling in his every appearance. The tone of the background music and the prevalence of relaxed, conversing couples and sunsets in the scenes suggest romanticism is the montage’s theme, but for me, it is the bald man’s feet — I am too busy conversing with my two friends, across the divide, in this world, to listen to any of what is said. Considering that YouTube collects the dimensional data regarding where the user looks, and for how long, I make an effort to bend my neck up and down in extremes, and notice a patch of washed-out sky, distorting in the distance, and ponder what — if anything — we have gained in this technology.

Does an increase in the raw amount of visual data available to the viewer actually make motion picture storytelling more effective? In the few minutes of my VR taste test, I did gain quite a bit of volition over an equivalent 2D experience, but it didn’t seem like I’d instinctively used it to gain much else. If one is specifically interested in the shrubbery around a racetrack, or the more nuanced undulations of a Viking’s foot, they can more likely than not find a standard video on the World Wide Web that would more efficiently entertain them. In specific situations, of course, a producer can undoubtedly benefit by the ability to capture in 360 degrees, but — in any sort of cinema, especially — it seems unnecessarily sacrificial to relinquish entirely the narrative directorial control of shot framing to their audience. However, I am the antiexpert on this subject, obviously. My take on the viability of VR is Virtually Redundant and — quite possibly — very wrong, but my time in its hell is not over yet.

Isiah explains that it is time for me to game, and asks if I’d like to try “the one with the hands, or the one with the gun.” As always, I choose the firearm, as the “hands” have not been found yet and the hypothetical image immediately offered up by my imagination is of rusty iron shackles. The Infinite Blackness has returned, and I cannot see beyond it to determine what my host is up to. Then, it becomes outer space — filling with thousands of starlike white dots. The light-blue outline of a virtual PlayStation controller appears where I assume him to be, unattached and bumbling about. Soon, it jaggedly approaches, and I feel him hand it to me. We have started its calibration process, which becomes a bit frightening in my celestial surroundings, though at least I have now gained participatory power over my new existence. I’d opted out of wearing headphones, so the assistant’s malignant-sounding female British voice comes softly from the television somewhere in front of me as I point the beam of light the controller’s representation is now projecting straight forward at the navigational arrows displayed ahead and pull “the trigger” (R2.)

I am pleased by the idea of interfacing with software exclusively by shooting it repeatedly before I am abruptly contained in a cage, now being projected by a virtualization of the system’s sensor, which is unsettling. I am now calibrating the hardware contained within the physical device that captures the position of my body in the physical world. I catch the word “confinement” in the assistant’s unending, otherwise-inaudible directions, and quicken my pace. When it’s all done, I return the controller to Isiah, who reboots the PS4, itself, before launching Farpoint. My space becomes a lighter blue and fills with little opaque bits of Sony Dust for a minute or two. Isiah continues his rummaging for another peripheral as the title’s introduction begins to play.

Two rather poorly-animated astronauts are co-hosting a live broadcast from their craft, which is presented in a dramatization of a computer display. They’ve just met, but they’re both stacked with academia, co-massaging their knowledge, which I choose not to listen to. Out of view, Isiah unsuccessfully attempts to skip the whole thing before I’m allowed to become virtual again — this time, atop the animated body of another astronaut in a lone shuttle, approaching the mothership where it holds, next to a large, very-Star Trek “anomaly.” From Deep Space Nine, the two scientists continue to bicker over comms as I look around the cockpit. Looking backwards has already become a favorite habit of mine — I wonder where the shuttle’s bathroom is. For whatever reason, the back of my character’s neck was animated, though it can only be seen by looking rearwards and down, which distorts its shape into something truly terrifying.

A bunch of unrelated plot follows, leading me to end up on a foreign world, exiting my crashed escape pod. By now, Isiah has connected The Gun, but something about it isn’t quite right — my character holds it in a glitched, very uncomfortable-looking manner, and it’s suspected that a fix would require a restart, and therefore — a replay of the introductory cutscene — so I retire out of lack of patience.

If I were confidently reviewing PlayStation VR as a consumer purchase, I’d cite a quote of Isiah’s: “I couldn’t find the thing.” In addition to my first drone sighting, a few days ago in Colorado, this lost virtual virginity is not necessarily unwelcome — I feel as though I’ve acquired a platform to better ponder the dystopia to which these and their like industries add a certain comic spice. That said, I cannot imagine a reason to once again enter the digital realm — and who cares?

Please enjoy your new worlds, kids.

#spectacle #tech #gaming #portland

Three Billboards Outside Silva, North Carolina

by David Blue

Nitpicking the recklessness of last year’s highly-awarded, class-blind black comedy

Indeed, it may be the time to jab at the rural, working-class South, but Martin McDonagh claims to have written his Golden Orb Special “eight years ago,” long before Tump, and any critical resolution the film provides is argued haphazardly. Consequently, its eye is cast on this strange, satirical portrayal of the Midwest in a manner which is inaccurate and insensitive enough to irk this Missourian. When I saw it at Columbia’s Ragtag Cinema this week, it was introduced by a young employee who noted that 1) Ebbing, Missouri is not a real place, 2) the film was actually shot in one of the Carolinas (an audience member suggested incorrectly that it was in SC,) and 3) we should prepare ourselves to be roused a bit by a bar scene in which a character pays $8 for two beers because “that just wouldn’t happen” (the Ragtag also serves alcohol.)

The “redemption arc” of the racist “hick” “loser” Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell) was rightfully at the center of the film’s controversy, but even if one imagines his role and fate written differently — perhaps with him irrecoverably shunned and/or visibly punished for his excessive, hateful violence — his rubishness would still be unforgivable. Living with his mother and turtle feels like an effort to humanize him — and, by extension, racist small-town cops as a whole. The Huffington Post’s Zeba Blay wrote an essential take on why Three Billboards — with its terrifyingly racist dork — was received the way it was.

Rockwell’s character is the racist uncle whom white liberals fear and love. The ability to feel for him ― to root for him in spite of his past transgressions, because he really is a “good man at heart,” an idiot who doesn’t know any better ― offers a kind of catharsis for the white viewer who can’t or won’t deal with true nuance, who is unable to reconcile their own complicity with their desire to be “good.”

It’s not as if the film isn’t technically well executed or refreshing — thanks in large part, yes, to Frances McDormand — or that I will not regret appealing on behalf of my home state, but it’s hard not to speak up when Hollywood shits so recklessly on my people. I don’t much like writing about movies because there are so many voices who consistently speak so much more effectively. NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, for instance, did a wonderful job dissecting the film’s depictions of racism and domestic violence. Gene Demby commented that “[McDonagh] doesn’t get these particular physics of American racism, and he’s not interested in them,” and I think it’s reasonable to suggest that Mark’s not very versed or interested in the physics of American class, either.

If you must differentiate the state of Missouri as a cultural whole between North and South, it is currently more red than blue — we went 56% for Donald and 38% for Hillary — but ask anyone from “somewhere down in the Georgia, Florida, Alabama corner” — as McDonagh put it -where we generally fall, and they’d be unlikely to regard us, fraternally, as the same part of the country. The accents in Three Billboards are not among the wide variety of local dialects you’ll encounter anywhere in the state, but perhaps they wouldn’t be out of place in Sylva, North Carolina, where the film was actually shot.

Regardless of all potential criticism of the film’s cultural perspective or technical excellence — and I think most of it is more valid than any take I could possibly offer — my particular issue with it comes from a culmination of tasteless decisions. If one reasonably successful Irish director were to produce a patronizing film at the expense of Missouri’s working class filled with a ton of absurd, misconstrued characters portrayed by A-list talent on location in a real Missouri town, the side-effectual economic benefits such a production delivers to a locale would make it all more forgivable. Say what you want about us… as long as you’re paying. But to photograph such a film completely separate Missouri — culturally and financially — set in a fictional(ized) town, include the state’s name in its title, before conducting oneself in interviews as if we were a random target on a “Southern” dartboard… Well, that’s awfully shitty.

Boy, working class Americans sure are a riot!

The writing is interesting enough for this, totally-out-of-touch“reviewer,” but I can’t imagine why it won Best Screenplay at the Globes, unless the other nominees were completely, bleakly predictable. (I wouldn’t know.) The excerpt below (SPOILER WARNING I GUESS? LOL) was the most stirring part of the experience, personally, if only because I really like films that palm strike one in the face without warning with bizarre, chaotic vulgarity (like the elevator scene in Drive.)

I suppose it could have been the result of a rational decision to give any depth to Anne (Abbie Cornish) — who is Chief Willoughby’s (Woody Fucking Harrelson) Australian?, much-too-attractive wife — before he kills himself in the last third of the movie, making her suddenly relevant. Or, perhaps it was another attempt to emphasize the emotional repression of “Southern” folks — one of the almost-accurate positives of the film, if only thanks to McDormand’s skill. She and Sam Rockwell won Best Actress and Best Actor in a Supporting Role, respectively, which makes sense — it’s a shame they accepted such an out-of-touch work with which to demonstrate their ability to assume aloof, emotionally-dysfunctional characters.

Growing up astride classe while traveling throughout the vast majority of Missouri for various reasons has made me defensive, and — while my right to speak for hard-working Midwesterners is certainly debatable -I’d suggest the industry at large be more diligently interested when setting is especially emphasized. It is no longer acceptable to pass up the opportunities McDonagh has for critical storytelling in Three Billboards. Racist cops, abusive spouses, unsolved murders, and mishandled grief are real, abundant issues in the country’s breadbasket, and they’re worth discussing responsibly — especially with such a powerful platform. If the purpose of film writing is to help an audience determine whether or not a work is worth spending their time and money to see it in theaters or otherwise, I can tell you — even within my bias and limited authority -that this one just… isn’t.

#film #class

‘Mom and Dad’’s Discrepant Defense Against Stale Industry and the Population Problem

A 'fun' movie

by David Blue

The Earth will reach its maximum occupancy load (12 billion) when I am in my mid-fifities, meaning there’ll be more than twice as many gorging, shitting, shooting, complaining, and lying human beings than there were when I started, and perhaps Brian Taylor’s Mom and Dad is in fact a reasoned argument for a particular solution to our inevitable plight. I’m still not sure what a “cult” movie is, precisely, but I can’t imagine what sort of cult could possibly sustain itself around the ethos of this film alone, despite its concise, agitating, at once lighthearted, yet genuinely-disturbing trip. No, it is probably not propaganda. From the experts, you’ll get precisely the same review, varying only in length. The New York Times’ Glenn Kenny couldn’t be bothered with more than 250 words, but RogerEbert dot com’s Simon Abrams shelled out a whole 1000. They are suspiciously close to these big round numbers — perhaps each was written to respective quotas, and perhaps you could say all that could reasonably be said in 10, but I don’t care.

The tropes here are polished to a miraculous sheen — two emotionally-stunted, middleaged, overly preoccupied-with-their-lost-youth suburban parents (Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair) who’s existing envies & irritations regarding their own classically bratty teenage girl (Anne Winters) and her mischievous little brother (Zackary Arthur) is merely agitated by a sudden TV static-bound killer instinct into bloodlust, not originated. I’m not sure any pill dealer would actually flip off their customers after a fair buy — even in high school, but drugs, a black boyfriend, and a stinkbomb? in the old Trans Am!? I’m going to kill you!

Somebody, somewhere knew all the best sources on suburbia and how to put them to good use. The Camry, the golf bag, ping pong smashing, sweat-stained Big Sur tee, and Dr. Oz, for Christ’s sake! Granted, talking to your girlfriend/boyfriend on the phone at all is a bit dated — especially while riding a BMX — and I don’t think Froot Loops are generally accepted middle-class chow anymore. These are staples from my youth, and I am very old. Technically, the iMessage bubble graphics are more chronographically appropriate, but with great consequence, I fear — if we’re going to accept them once and for all as authentic mechanisms for telling stories set in the present, they are going to age faster than Nick’s new jowls (unless we’re all soon killed by our parents.) It’s been two years since I knew anything about music, but I seriously doubt even the gothest fifteen?-year-old girls are listening to Father-esque post-Memphis horrorcore in class — there’s something about SoundCloud that really clashes with chokers.

BILL $ABER · I KNOW THAT YOU PUSSIES DONT WANT IT Prod The Virus And Antidote

If there was ever a film in which to use grimy dubstep-influenced electronic slaps, buzzes, chirps, and great grating clanking, it’s this one. It’s a terrific disappointment that Hollywood feels so timidly about their use of the most intimate medium. One forgets its potential to control the nuances of an audience’s fear, anger, discomfort, and panic beyond cheap jump scares until they experience an irritating, distressing, ghastly gross, all-possessing feat of accentuating audio production such as that of Mom and Dad. If you want to judge Academically the effectiveness of a nominee’s work for an award with a title like Best Sound Editing (as opposed to whatever the hell criteria was met most fully by Skyfall,) you must give the little golden man to these folks, whoever they are.

When’s the last time you saw a truly, believably shitty modern parental pair on a big screen? I really can’t remember, myself. Brent and Kendall Ryan are masterpieces of character craft — both a perfect précis and thoroughly-defined exploration of miserable white suburbanites. They’re even named unimprovably, which reflects a quality in care and attention to detail that I very much appreciate. They are vain, vulgar, impatient, selfishly afraid, and careless, freely feeling and saying it all directly in front of their children. I love being told explicitly which characters to hate (no joke,) and in this case it’s the whole damned lot. Brian Taylor and Nicolas Cage scream it over and over (as I’d like to imagine) a single afternoon of one-take filming, considering that the latter took it upon himself to first memorize the entire screenplay and its prose, vanilla to perfection, before photography began, and I hope it all stays with him forever, especially “my mom is such a penis.”

Mom and Dad could conceivably be Nicolas Cage’s I Am Legend if for no other reason than the total lack of possible stand-ins for Brent Ryan — even the standard by which all white suburban Dad performances have been measured in the 21st century, Jason Bateman. Nick himself described it as “punk rock, rebellious, irreverent, original, badass,” and the “number one” movie he’s made in the past ten years (disqualifying National Treasure, in case you were worried.) No surprise, I must agree — this one is a wonderfully raucous and feral thing, but the scene involving the attempted murder of a newborn by her mother (Kendall’s sister) came very close to crossing the line. However, I am old and the intensity of my paternal instincts has probably outpaced my understanding of them. You could also argue, of course, that pushing such boundaries is a core function of a film like Mom and Dad. Nobody ended up vomiting or anything.

This fun thing shouldn’t feel as foreign as it does in cinema, but you already knew that. With all its implicit grapples with overpopulation, kids and gun violence, class, and racism — truly, this is a film charged electrically with current issues. Or maybe not. Ultimately, I can at least tell you for certain that Brian Taylor made exponentially better use of his resources (I couldn’t find a solid number for its production budget) than the Fucking Spierig Brothers did with Winchester (just so you know what a disaster looks like,) and managed to be refreshingly original (astonishing that nobody’s had this specific idea before.) A spectacular riot, Mom and Dad does all you could possibly want it to do. With just eighty-three minutes to lose, it’s worth the commitment just to hear Nicolas Cage whimper and say “anal beads.”

#film

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‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ Is Dumb Luck Wrapped in Toxic Themes

by David Blue

The repugnant missteps of ‘Star Wars’ in the hands of Ron Howard and the long-awaited conclusions about the nature of cinema’s luckiest character to which they lead.

It's opening night at the Bagdad Theater on Hawthorne in Southeast Portland and hardly anybody’s bothered to show up. Less than 20% of the venue’s 500 seats are occupied by the time the host takes the stage to introduce Solo, but those who are here for the last Thursday showing have been shouting, whooping, and gurgling bad approximations of wookiee noises since the screen cut to black from its ad slideshow. If my middle row can be assumed an accurate sample, only a handful of these are “fans” enough to feel compelled to wear a Star Wars t-shirt. As I grab my last cocktail, the bartender tells me that only 300 folks showed up for the evening matinee, though he himself was “excited” to see the movie — one of a minority among Portlanders, apparently, who still give a shit about Star Wars.

By design, Solo: A Star Wars Story is a slightly more complex film than The Episodes in the same way Rogue One was, if a bit better executed, narratively. First, please rest assured that Alden Ehrenreich assumes the Han Solo persona as truly as anyone could — he triumphed through a ridiculously extensive casting process, and is certainly handsome enough (if not more conventionally so than his predecessor) to consistently look the part. He actually bears an unsettling resemblance in features and mannerisms to one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met and that through-and-through boyishness particularly makes sense here, set in Han’s formative, earnest youth — the stated purpose of the film’s existence. Franchise fanatics, then, should be content. (It’s a good thing CGI-ing the main character in a live action film isn’t quite a low-risk option yet.) And yes, Donald Glover completely steals the vain, infinitely stylish Lando Calrissian and inevitably makes one wish to see him cast again. Personally, I am very tired of seeing Woody Harrelson, though all the components of his public persona should all but ensure his likability. From what I saw in Three Billboards, I’d concede that he is as talented of an actor as I am capable of appreciating, but his role as Tobias Beckett in Solo couldn’t possibly be substantial enough to actually make use of his craft.

Though I don’t believe in “spoilers,” or use of the term to bait readers, it’s worth stating for the record what everyone should know by now: there simply aren’t spoilers in a Star Wars movie — every human being on Earth knows too much about the formula to ever have any of these films’ comparatively irrelevant plots “ruined.” The most surprising, historically-significant decision of this whole production was the omission of the traditional yellow type opening crawl over a backdrop of distant stars, which I genuinely found myself missing. (Apparently it wasn’t present in Rogue One, either — I just failed to catch it.) I was very pleased to see my own number one favorite device of the franchise used within this film’s first ten minutes: crimelords and gang leaders as hugely magnified variations of the creeping and crawling creatures our instincts are planned to abhor. Solo’s first villain — the gigantic, wormlike boss Lady Proxima (Linda Hunt) — is completely inconsequential, and only appears in a single scene, but the practice of grossly oversized monstrosities leaving absolutely nothing of a baddie’s essence to be extrapolated by the audience from nuance is one of very few ways these films are let loose, and it openly shits on the more pretentious viewer’s assumptions about good writing, which I think big money movies should feel more comfortable doing, generally.

This first act begins on Han’s home planet Corellia — the bleaker urban, industrial, working-class counterpart to the clean capitol cityworld Coruscant — with his rather predictable mission to escape Lady Proxima’s sphere of control with his girl, Qi-ra (Emilia Clarke,) who could and should have been more creatively named, given her importance not as her own character with depth to develop (a no-no for a female role, Gourd help us,) but as Han’s mirror image to grow darkly apart, proving that he — The Good Guy — is unquestionably more morally fortified than anyone else in the whole goddamned universe. After having been drug through so very many, I couldn’t tell you at this point how to make the introductory escape action of this sort of production more exciting and less formulaic. Big surprise — their plan goes awry, and Qi-ra is prevented from leaving the planet with Han, who’s immediate (and I mean immediate)solution is his enlistment in the Imperial Navy via the recruiting station right there in the damned spaceport (during which the film takes the liberty of seizing his surname’s explanation) to serve the English in their grand conquest of the universe. Bizarrely, he manages to serve as a grunt for three whole years of complicity in unmentioned atrocities until he encounters the disguised criminal Wise Old Woody in the middle of pulling a job with his two-person crew. The team doesn’t agree to bring Solo along until he meets an asset in Chewbacca for the first time as he briefly inhabits another of the classic Star Wars trap: the hungry monster in a shadow-filled mud pit, but is spared the wrath because of his introductory grasp on Chewie’s shrieking language (called Shyriiwook) in which he manages to sufficiently pitch the advantages of his survival, and the two escape, chained together. Observing the addition of Wookiee to the deal, the crew briefly debates the prospect’s new value in providing “needed muscle,” which convinces Woody to return for them and kicks off a series of case studies in this film’s bizarre attitude toward the commodification of the oppressed.

However, in a rare depiction of his volition, Chewbacca is briefly consulted before the two seek to be formally included on the job, and is even asked around a campfire, later, what he’s shooting for in life at the moment, to which he responds “finding my family/tribe.” Despite having spent a whole three hellish years in the trenches with the British, the romantic Han Solo declares his primary motivation for all of it still lies in his desire to return to Corellia and rescue Qi’ra. In their stolen Imperial ship, the lot descend on a snowy mountain-traversing Maglev to steal the Uranium it’s transporting in a scene that’s straight up jacked from animated family classic The Polar Express, but… oh no!… A gaggle of “marauders” called the Cloud Riders (yet another throwaway proper noun) roll up on those speeder bikes from Endor (except these can fly,) and screw up everything so badly that both of Woody’s crew end up dead and the booty scuttled. After the fact, Woody reveals to Han that the job was contracted by yet another carelessly-named crime syndicate — Crimson Dawn, and that his only possible course of action is now vigorous brown nosing to its leader, Dryden Vos (Paul Bettany) ((aka Scarred Jarvis,)) in the waning hope he’ll spare his life to make another attempt. Following this information, he firmly suggests that Han and Chewie fuck off, lest their faces become known in the underworld, dooming them to serving it forever, apparently. Already, this vague presumption of Han’s purity which all of the protagonists must constantly venerate in martyrdom is getting tiresome, as is the dynamic of his insistence against them.

Naturally, both Chewie and Han end up along for a visit to Scarred Jarvis’ tower yacht, where the latter very conveniently stumbles upon none other than his long lost love, Qi-ra in the bar. Despite having spent the past three years at war in unspeakable conditions thinking only of how to liberate and be reunited with her, he isn’t bothered to express more than the moderately-excited and surprised hug you’d expect of someone who’s just run into the kid down the cul-de-sac from their childhood home who used to ride her bike over for popsicles on Sunday afternoons. While he does rehearse for her the tale of their reunification as his one motivation for everything since they were separated — including his presence there, “right now,” he follows the profession up quite abruptly with the sly suggestion that they fuck as soon as possible. True to trope, she is jaded and indefinite as she distantly implies her binds of servitude while flashing the tattoo of the extremely-forgettable and innocuous Crimson Dawn logo on her right wrist. (The total lameness of the brands in this movie must be intentional. I can think of no other explanation.)

The evil Scarred Jarvis is then introduced, quickly stealing the crown for Best Host of all Star Wars Antagonists before politely asking Woody why he shouldn’t kill the lot of them. As per his infinite luck, Han pulls the idea of stealing unrefined Uranium out of his ass, which has somehow never occurred to anyone else in the room, despite their unanimous top-of-the-head knowledge of the single location where it is mined. Shortly, the merry three plus Qi-ra conveniently in tow are off to a casino-esque establishment to find Lando, who Qi-ra describes as “attractive, stylish, charming,” and like adjectives, to Han’s obvious sexual chagrin, which is furthered by his subsequent loss of a card game with Lando’s ship — the Millennium Falcon, of course — in the stakes. Of course, the attractive, beautifully-dressed black man only bests Solo — the earnest, simpleton, Good Guy white dude who wears the same outfit for decades — in front of Qi-ra, the female prize by way of sleight-of-hand, the film shamelessly playing on that strange insecurity white guys have about their partners’ secretly everpresent and very powerful temptation to dump them without warning for black cock. Further emasculation is inflicted on poor little Han when Lando turns his oh-so-crafty (actually just very charismatic) charm upon Qi-ra, who reveals that she’s the boss of the gig. The final blow to Han’s dickitude is cast when he tries to enter the negotiation between the two and Lando chides “the adults are speaking,” but eventually agrees to provide them a lift for a 25% cut, so the lot make preparations to leave.

Enter my new favorite character of the franchise, Lando Calrissian’s co-pilot, L3–37 (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge,) or “L3,” the proudly sentient, violently revolutionary pro-rights droid who is introduced as she is pleading with two fighting droids in a square cage surrounded by screaming spectators (easy does it on that thematic slavery) to circumvent their “fighting programs” because they “don’t have to do this.” Though Lando and the crew behave like her duress is foolish and unimportant — pulling her away to the Falcon — she is allowed another opportunity to free droids very soon, but not before Solo’s single short private conversation between two female characters.

On the way to Kessel, Qi-ra stops by the cockpit and converses with L3. Until recently, I was unaware of what’s largely regarded as the worst habit of male writers with female characters: if and when they have a one-on-one conversation between another female character, it’s only about other male characters. Sure enough, L3 begins by insisting to Qi-ra that Han is in love with her, insisting by the objective findings of her sensors — which Qi-ra uncharacteristically denies like a bashful little girl before L3 continues on about Lando’s longtime love for her, and why it must remain unrequited, which we are encouraged to laugh at by the doubt Qi-ra voices without much hesitation regarding the hypothetical union’s sexual mechanics because it’s so preposterous.(I’ll get back to that in a moment.)

When the team arrives on Kessel and infiltrates the mine, L3 creates a “distraction” when she begins removing the restraining bolts from droids in the control room, calling the practice savage, or uncivilized, or maybe barbarian — I don’t quite remember. As she frees them without any noticeable detraction from her duties as Seth Green of the heist — hacking controls, remotely opening doors, and all that — the droids begin to help free others in an exponentially multiplying circle of liberation until they become a rowdy mob who’s cute acts of rebellion are spaced throughout a few minutes of screentime in short jumpcuts off the other crew as they fight deeper into the mine. With the most significant emphasis ever placed upon Chewbacca in Star Wars history, he halts when he spies slave Wookiees struggling to find off enforcers and informs Han that he’s going to break off and assist them. Since Chewie’s only allowed to speak to the audience through Han’s retorts and never directly, it’s impossible to know how he phrased it, exactly, but from my perspective, his appeared to be the expression of a wish to do what Han had to agree to release him to do, as would a master, not a “partner.” Of course, Solo does agree, albeit hesitantly, because he’s The Good Guy, while quite inconsiderately expressing his desire to see Chewie again soon instead of wishing him success. However, releasing him to free his people (as per his primary life goal, expressed before,) means that Han has to load twelve of the super heavy unrefined Uranium tubes onto the cart all by himself and push it fully loaded at least 50 whole yards without the assistance of his big strong slave. Boy, what a pain in the ass! He’s spared his laboring, though, when Chewbacca returns after no time at all with the enslaved Wookiees he’s just heroically rescued, who he then immediately asks to assist his master in pushing the cart — performing the same labor they were forced to do under the enslavement they were supposedly liberated from, seconds before.

The heist has inadvertently (nice, huge emphasis on inadvertently) ignited a slave rebellion throughout the mine, which serves the crew only as a distraction for the guards. The chaos is interrupted a half dozen times or so by those jumpcuts back to the control room of adorable little droids enacting their pitifully amusing revenge on the equipment — slapping a keyboard with a cookie sheet-like pan, stomping on a control panel, etc. — while L3 shouts parodical quasi-Marxist battlecries, which… yes… include referring to the freed droids as “comrades.” She even radios Lando at one point and triumphantly proclaims that she’s “found her true calling.”

If and when a female character has a one-on-one conversation with another female character, it’s only about other male characters.

By the time the Uranium cart is within its last few yards of the awaiting Falcon, the riot has reached the landing bay and the guards around its perimeter have readjusted their priorities to disabling the ship’s landing gear. This interrupts Lando in the cockpit, who has chosen this time to work on dictating his autobiography because he’s a man who bothers to dresses himself well and is therefore oh so maniacally, comically, and unreasonably vain! How berserk! Still looking good as hell, he emerges and stands on the ramp to cover the rest of the crew’s return and loading of the dangerous Uranium with blaster fire, shouting the obligatory intermittent “come on, hurry up,” until L3 appears, also firing a blaster and shouting until she arrives in front of Lando, before noticing some commotion(?) with droids behind her and turning around, again fervently shouting more liberation cries. Lando doesn’t budge from the Falcon’s side, but yells after her, until he watches as she is shot repeatedly and falls, prompting him to run to her side. Filmed unnecessarily gruesomely, her head and shoulders separate from what’s left of her lower body when he first tries to hoist her up. Of course, his recklessness gets him shot in the arm, so Chewie returns to carry them both to the safety of the ship, where the injured Lando holds her head lovingly in his arms for her last moments, repeating “I can fix you, I can fix you.”

Now, I understand that Star Wars movies (or their reviews, for that matter) are not the sort of entertainment one seeks out in order to examine the dynamics of power structures or elaborate cultural symbolism, but they all contain a significant amount of both. The sterile, cold, and bureaucratic Galactic Empire is the British Empire, the Rebellion and the Republic are the United States or its colonial precursors, the Jedi are vaguely Native American, and the Death Star is the Boston Tea Party. You’ve recognized this, I’m sure because it’s shoved in your ears most explicitly by their accents, and less so in your face by aesthetic influences, tactical philosophies, command etiquette, and posture, even. Solo’s main character is soaking in American Old Westness, which may or may not have led to its liberal saturation with the themes of individual rights, slavery, and liberation. Regardless, they’re certainly present, and most of them disturbingly for comedic effect.

As a silent character to the audience, it’s understandable that Chewbacca had too many limitations to occupy a strong second to Han Solo’s lead in the narrative’s eye, and perhaps the relationship between the two as portrayed in the previous films reeked so strongly of servitude that it was an inevitable element when the time came to write them their very own movie. In direct contrast to the firm place of all droids in the social hierarchy of the last 9 movies — addressing humans as “Master,” unapologetically spoken of as property, and traded and/or gifted as such by both protagonists and antagonists, etc. — what we see of Lando and L3 together is a genuinely and complexly affectionate partnership between equals, which Solo makes an effort to emphasize, if only to laugh at.

In response to the forced violence between two drones for spectator sport, L3 is completely enraged, and she cries (among other things) “we are sentient!,” but her distress is trivialized as hysterical distraction (see: Django Unchained.) When she suggests to Qi-ra that Lando (who is already illegitimized as a cheating narcissist, and therefore effeminate) is attracted to her, it’s a joke (which many in my audience laughed at) at the expense of her trivialized sexuality. After she triumphs and declares the liberation of her kind to be her true cause, she is immediately destroyed fighting for its sake, yet her ideology is not once acknowledged by her fleshy companions, and her body is quickly gutted for the data on her “central processing unit” as it’s interfaced with the Falcon. Granted, Lando does thoughtfully muse “she’s part of the ship now” shortly afterward, which would be nice, if you’d forgotten his last words were an outright lie. Lastly, it’s worth noting how apathetic the main characters themselves are toward the Kessel miners, especially as they are packing up to leave, when the camera pans over the chaotic struggle between the liberated and their guards in very close proximity to the awaiting Falcon, yet there was not a suggestion that they would even consider letting them take refuge from the violence in their very spacious freighter. Aside from Han’s or Qi-ra’s, Solo treats liberation as charming or amusing, nothing more.

Anyway, the crown jewel of Solo for many fans will probably be the scene of the infamous Kessel Run, when Han Solo and Chewbacca first take the helm(?) of the Millennium Falcon with Lando injured and L3 dissected, using her “navigational database” to plot a very risky shortcut around the scary space cloud by the scary space squid and the scary space hole in order to make it to the site of the refinery before the volatile Uranium explodes. Once there, darn old flakey Lando fucks the hell of in the Falcon right as the Cloud Riders roll up, but whoa! their leader is actually a very young woman with freckles! She describes the atrocities of Crimson Dawn and suggests that Han (who’s now the established decisionmaker for whatever reason) give them the Uranium in order to establish “the beginning of a rebellion,” which we can safely assume is The Rebellion, which does beg one to wonder why Solo never once bragged among the later rebellion about having started the whole thing in the other films, considering that — whaddya know — he says yes!

Woody, however, says he’s going to retire upon the news of this decision before immediately reappearing again on Scarred Jarvis’ yacht after he’s revealed to have betrayed the Uranium ruse to him. Qi-ra ends up killing Scarred Jarvis, saving Han, but after promising to follow him and escape, she rings up the late Scarred Jarvis’ boss — a Sith Zabrak who, I would argue, is not necessarily Darth Maul, though he probably is — and informs him that her boss is dead and she’s assumed his post. As Han and Woody meet again in an Old West standoff (complete with sand,) the latter insists one more time that Qi-ra is not who Han thinks she is (as Jarvis and Qi-ra herself have also said repeatedly,) describing her as “a survivor,” before Han kills him in self-defense.

Finally, after seeing the Cloud Riders off with the Uranium, Han finds Lando once again in a card game — this time taking care to disable his sleight-of-hand device beforehand so that he wins the Millennium Falcon, “fair and square,” and we cut to Solo (who seems remarkably upbeat considering the recent betrayal of the lover he’d longed years to reunite with) and Chewie in her cockpit as they tie in that one last knot by declaring their destination, Tatooine, before roaring off into hyperspace, leaving the credit roll in their wake.

Solo treats liberation as charming or amusing, nothing more.

Over two years ago, I concluded my first work for Extratone about The Force Awakens by arguing that Star Wars on the big screen should be allowed to die in favor of investing the time, energy, and funding they require in the pursuit of something new, but the industry still appears to believe that nostalgia is a surer bet where profits are concerned, at least, even after two whole decades of mind-numbing reanimated properties. I didn’t catch The Last Jedi until recently, which was remarkably well-done measured against the others as a Star Wars movie, but certainly didn’t aim to achieve much more. Clearly, there must be some truth in Hollywood’s cowardice about original properties- especially when it comes to the sort of fantasy armed with potent but unguided emotional bombs that define the Star Wars universe, so it wouldn’t make much sense to revive my old diatribe, here. (Though I can assure you that I will be relentless if this horseshit continues for much longer.) The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, though, were episodic titles for the family, and these spinoffs that began with Rogue One are supposed to be for… well, I’m not entirely sure. In reality, they’ve only moved the proverbial bar up a very wee bit to the family who occasionally says “shit,” because they’re not intellectually stimulating enough to justify themselves as Big Boy-only productions. Or, they wouldn’t be, were they not part of this franchise.

The truth is, the fans have grown up, and they… I… will still buy a ticket for the smallest crumb of hope that a product of this huge machine will be capable of making us feel even a fraction of what we felt as children watching the original films. For me, The Force Awakens actually did, once, in that blast of horns before the opening crawl, but it hasn’t happened since, and I should certainly stop expecting or wanting to expect that it will. For others, it’s still working. Though there was a fraction of who I expected to be in attendance with me, they did laugh at a handful of (mostly fascist) moments, and whooped, hollered, and even clapped for a few seconds at the end. I’m surprised opening night wasn’t packed because Portland is the single most nostalgia-addicted culture I’ve ever seen anywhere in the United States. Then again, there are a billion theaters here, so perhaps the sample is just lousy. We’ll see how tomorrow and Sunday go, but I’d be surprised if any boxoffice records were broken.

In the past, when film enthusiasts andfans have described Han Solo as “the best character in Star Wars,” they’ve actually been praising his potential as a character, not his material itself, and Solo’s most effective function as a franchise film was to shut that praise down. Han was not at all denied his movie — this is his movie — and it provided him the screentime to show us who he truly is and why we really like him so much: he doesn’t fucking change. The secret to Han Solo’s moral and emotional resiliency is nothing more than halted development. The same old inner conflict between the tough, ruthlessly self-interested persona he does his best to project for everyone around him and the consistent reality of his soft insides was presented in his first scene way back in 1977, and we’re now sure that he was unable to make any progress toward its resolution despite openly and obviously brooding over it for an entire lifetime: from at least as early as his young adulthood in this film until his death at the hands of his little Sith son. There is 0 variation. He always comes back for the cause at the crucial moment after declaring himself through with it. Without fail, he’ll sacrifice the entirety of any self-making enterprise for just about any underdog with a problem who crosses his path. (Which probably explains his constantly-fleeting success as a smuggler well into gray hair and jowls.) Solo is abundantly clear about Han’s true nature and very willing to expose how uninteresting it is. When he first proclaims to Qi-ra that he’s become “an outlaw,” she shuts him down with the film’s ultimate quote, insisting that she “knows who [he] really is: the good guy.”

If the video game-despising fans will bear with me for a moment, it’s worth noting that Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG is the most interesting and extensive source of nuanced narrative in the IP (it holds the world record for the largest voiceover project ever produced,) and most of it can now be experienced without actually playing the game. Like Solo, it’s set pre-saga, but considerably before — a few centuries, if I remember correctly, which gave the writers a gigantic opportunity to both expand and predestine the universe. There are eight different class stories with around 50 cumulative hours of dialog, each. A few are relatively unimaginative, but the majority are complex, exciting, emotionally-involved tales that create very rich characters, and all of them can be streamed in their entirety on YouTube. If you are willing to see the potential of a Han Solo-like character fulfilled in a different medium, the Smuggler class story is a pretty damned engaging exploration of the kind outlaw with conflicted identity issues angle.

From my perspective, Solo’s frequent less-than-subtle maltreatment of some very brutal and sensitive power relationships makes it the most toxic of the Star Wars films yet, and I assume it ended up that way, unnecessarily because Ron Howard is an all-American son of a bitch. If these titles are going to continue to be passed around between bigwhig directors, future unpleasantries are inevitable. Notably, I’ve yet to see any mention of these disturbing themes from the respectable authorities of the film criticism establishment, who’ve been overwhelmingly charmed by Solo’s nostalgia. Take from that whatever you will.

If we continue to love the character Han Solo, it’ll be in the same way we love our earnest, foolish, emotionally-stunted manchild fathers who’s developmental inadequacies are often embarrassing, sometimes abusive, and thoroughly pitiful. Solo leaves no more room for an idealized, elegant perception of this character — he’s no more than a pretty good guy with a lifelong addiction to thrill-seeking and a shitload of luck.

To declare unequivocally whether or not Solo: A Star Wars Story is worth a trip the cinema with your date, your children, or just your own damned conscience would require me to disregard a whole host of complicating factors, but if you’ve stuck it this far with me, you’d have a lot to disregard yourself to jump in. I’d advise that parents watch it themselves before deciding whether or not it’s something worth adding to your child’s life. Of those of you like me who’ll tow the line despite what you know and watch a Star Wars film alone on opening night in delirium hoping for just a drop from the Fountain of Youth, I would ask: how long are we really going to keep kidding ourselves?

#film

Unsolicited Creative Advice from a Smart, Nice Guy

by Ryan Dell

Haha, hi, what’s up? I know I’m probably the 20th person to slide into your DMs today but I just couldn’t resist the ‘vibe’ on your profile. You have this alternative, quirky aesthetic, and I’m really into it. How do you even come up with your ideas? You’re a really special talent, I can tell.

Before I get into the main reason I’m sending this message — have you ever considered being a model? Not just an Instagram model, a real model. Like for a Vice marketing campaign or something. You have a really specific look and you might look good if you were photoshopped a certain way. (That was a “neg”, haha. It’s this gross pick-up artist technique, I would never do it personally but I can explain it to you in detail if you like.)

Okay, so, let’s cut to the chase. Why am I sliding into your DMs? The direct messages. The old inbox-a-roonie. Well, the truth is, I saw your work on social media, and it blew my mind. I mean, whoah, to do the work you do? You must really know how to use your Macbook. Not everyone can do stuff like that. I mean, I see a lot of work on the internet, but your art, wow, you’ve got some amazing stuff online.

You have real potential, you know that? But I don’t wanna see that potential go to waste. There’s room for improvement. I mean, your work is good, don’t get me wrong, haha. But I think we could elevate it, do you know what I’m saying? Together we could take it from about a 6 and lift it to a strong 7, possibly even 8.

Is it weird that I’m sending this message? I don’t want to be too pushy or anything! If these messages make you feel uncomfortable at any time let me know and I’ll stop. Just gimme a little heads-up and wave the white flag and these messages will come to a halt. No more messages — except for maybe one or two follow-ups where I try to clarify where I stand with you. Three, tops. No more than three messages to get me out of your hair. I might send a fourth farewell message, but that’d be the end of it.

The main point I have is about the way you write online. I mean, it’s good, but it needs some more formal structure. It’s not your fault, you just don’t know the convential rules of writing. You could be amazing if someone just showed you how to write properly. Maybe I could teach you how? Like, nothing too intense, haha, I just have some tips that might save you some time and improve your work. Like, did you know that you’re supposed to get up and walk around for 10 minutes every hour? And drink a couple litres of water every day.

Haha, I’m just trying to help! Doing this stuff could really help elevate your work. If you were a good writer instead of a bad writer, you’d be much more successful.

The other main point I have is about your photography. Now, honestly, it’s shit. Sorry to be so blunt but I’m just kind of a brutally honest person. Yes, it’s true, I’m only ever honest when it involves me being cruel and never when I’m being reflective or positive, but some people just can’t handle that. I think you can, though. You’re special. Us special people have to stick together.

Are you single? Haha, just kidding, you don’t have to answer that. Unless you want to. Then in that case I’d like you to answer it immediately.

So, with your photography, next time you’re taking a photo, just think to yourself, “Is this photo shit?”. Then, if the answer is yes, don’t take the photo. I personally don’t use this technique (unnecessary for me) but if you did it I think it would really improve your work. If you need some guidelines on what a good photo looks like I could send you a .zip file of all my Facebook cover photos from 2015 onwards and you can start from there, haha, they’re all pretty good. Maybe that would help you figure out if photography is a realistic career goal for you.

My last tip is more general. It’s a pretty good tip though, in my opinion: you need to try harder. I mean I like your work, but it just feels like you aren’t fully committed. Maybe you should quit your job? Then you’d have more time to spend on your art. An artists’ salary is probably more than you make now, haha. Think of quitting your job as a long term investment! I won’t say more on this though, since I’m not a financial expert — don’t want to be too presumptuous!

We need more good art in the world. And less bad art. That’s probably a controversial opinion, but I’ve never been afraid of speaking my truth.

I have much more advice to tell you but I’ll leave that for later in our DM dialogue. I already feel confident we’ll get along, so if you’re interested in saving some time, just send me your phone number. We can chat over FaceTime Audio (but no other service, I refuse to pay for a cellphone plan out of principle) and figure out your long-term career plan. I’m getting so excited right now, thinking of all the amazing things I’m going to accomplish now that we’ve connected! We’re going to take your art career from being that vulnerable amoeba into being a beautiful, incandescent butterfly.

There’s a lot of rude guys out there, so as one of the nice ones I’d really appreciate it if you take my advice on board. I see a lot of potential in you, haha!

P.S. Haha, have you ever considered being less angry when you post online? I think your work would be more popular if you were nicer. You’ll attract more flies with honey than vinegar!

#spectacle #ryandell #social #parody

Illiteracy in American Media

by David Blue

Ten percent of the United States' adult population cannot functionally read or write (conservatively) despite the exponential increase of required reading in the average American's day-to-day life thus far in the 21stcentury. For written American media, especially, one would assume that a financial and social incentive for maximum literacy in the populace should present a straightforward justification for intense widespread coverage of this particular disparity, yet most related coverage in mainstream national magazines and newspapers is alarmingly sparse and often requires a less-than-socially-conscious context (e.g. a for-profit startup) to actually appear in news feeds. From the most wholesome assumption of the industry's general values — that it holds “newsworthiness” above all — we must assume that it does not generally consider American illiteracy “interesting enough to the general public to warrant reporting” as we examine the intermittent discourse surrounding the issue that does achieve publication.

In late October, the American business and technology magazine Fast Company covered the recent successes of the “for-profit social enterprise” Cell-Ed, noting that “a huge portion of the American labor force is illiterate,” which it described as “a hidden epidemic.” The article's author, Rick Wartzman, mentions foremost that Cell-Ed's userbase is largely “foreign-born” and expected to eclipse one million in number by the end of 2019. Demographically, the magazine's readership is predominantly middle to upper-class, who are the least affected social groups by a significant margin as per illiteracy's strong correlative relationship with poverty. These factors combine to limit any real social consequences from such an article.

In direct contrast with the professional, market-minded perspective of modern business magazine, even niche independent publications from the opposite end of the media spectrum often trivialize, belittle, or generally mishandle the issue. In a 500-word “Editorial” written by The Editor Eric Black of the Baptist Standard — a small evangelical news website describing itself as “Baptist voices speaking to the challenges of today's world” — he points to a global increase in “illiterate people,” as he so comfortably brands them. Such language is inevitably counter-productive and potentially insensitive: to the eyes and ears of activists, educators, and the general public, such a term unnecessarily lends toward a restricted perspective of those people who have been left behind by the institution of read and written language in one manner or another and portrays them as a great vague collection of lingual lepers bearing their own distinct, inexorable, wordless ethnicity which inevitably bars them from the freedoms allowed by the Editor's learned capacity, including the ability to actually read his words of affliction. Simply put, he has dangerously oversimplified the issue.

To once again assume the best and infer that Black had a specific purpose in publishing his ill-supported opinion beyond continuity's sake of his weekly Editorials, it appears to be the promotion of a local Texan literacy “ministry” called Literacy Connexus, though no further specifics about the project are provided beyond “helping churches develop literacy programs for their communities, provide training and resources to overcome illiteracy,” which is virtually identical to the introductory copy on the organization's homepage.

So far, we've examined coverage only in special interest media, but what about legacy news organizations with the largest readerships in the United States? Despite oblivious use of the same ledes, a newspaper like The Washington Post can wield vast influence over the broadest possible readership and the public editorial trust. In November 2016, veteran reporter Valerie Strauss published “Hiding in plain sight: The adult literacy crisis” for Answer Sheet — her weekly newsletter designed to function as “a school survival guide for parents (and everyone else), from education policy to psychology” — which represents the most substantial discussion of American illiteracy in topical, widely-visible media (i.e. presence in a succinct search engine query.) She briefly introduces the issue with a bulleted list of illiteracy's consequences on modern society and the individual cited from a Canadian literacy foundation before turning the stage over to Lecester Johnson, CEO of the Academy of Hope Adult Public Charter School in Washington D.C.

Johnson presents a passionate and well-informed exploration of the state of the literacy battle from the perspective of a full-time, locally on-the-ground advocate. Her op-ed's introduction includes the most essential observations and statistics throughout, noting “the children of parents with low literacy skills are more likely to live in poverty as adults and are five times more likely to drop out of school,” before setting upon a detailed examination of current and relevant organizations working toward solutions. Of course, it's largely centered upon her own organization, which she claims has “helped more than 6000 adults rebuild their education and job opportunities since 1985.”

It's significant that an institution as deeply embedded across the American political spectrum as The Washington Post address the issue of American illiteracy, and both Johnson and Strauss are certainly qualified voices for the undertaking, but when we examine this particular article, it's important we consider the context of the Answer Sheet newsletter and its intended audience. Though it's no challenge to pitch the importance of reading and writing to parents and professional educators, the most alarming and destructive issue at hand is the educational disparity between their adult peers. “There's a literacy problem in the capitol, but I'm not talking about young people who can't read. Many adults — perhaps even parents sitting next to you at back to school night — don't possess academic skills,” notes Johnson with her very first paragraph. However, considering the nature of parenthood, the audience primarily consuming these words are undoubtedly preoccupied with juvenile issues, specifically, and we can assume their capacity to empathize with their fellow working adults who could benefit from literacy education is actually lessened from that of childless readers of the same age as a result. “Despite the magnitude of the adult literacy crisis, most of those needing to make up lost ground are pushed toward traditional classroom settings—even though many of these people can't possibly follow through because of cost or work schedules or other obstacles,” she attests.

Perhaps more than any other American city, Detroit has been struggling with a serious illiteracy problem. According to a profile of the Beyond Basics program (which was adapted from an embedded video broadcast) on their local ABC affiliate's website, forty-seven percent of adult Detroiters cannot read, but even companies like General Motors — who donated \$250,000 to the Beyond Basics program earlier in mid-October — are getting involved. The article quotes Elijah Craft, a young man who was “reading at a first-grade level as a senior at Detroit's Central High School.” “Craft would rare venture from home for fear he would get lost because he could not read street signs,” reports WXYZ anchor Carolyn Clifford. She frames the narrative around a reference to the 2009 film The Blind Side starring Sandra Bullock: “here, you might call this story 'The Detroit Side.'” For local television news, this reference to popular culture likely strengthened the story's power ensnare viewers' emotional attention when it was aired, and even in this written accompaniment, it proves an effective — if a bit crude — analogy. The broadcast of Mr. Craft's interview also depicts his own deep emotional investment in reading when he begins to shed tears, which is not entirely communicated in the written article.

When the American news media discusses American illiteracy, it's almost always in secondary or tertiary form: either by way of a short post for a weekly education newsletter, an ultra-low-distribution niche editorial column, or a personality profile of a local activist. Perhaps the fundamental obstacle in the face of increasing the discourse surrounding this issue is that its resolutions will require — perhaps more than any other social issue in this country — advocacy by those who can read on behalf of those who cannot because of how sensitive and isolated many of them feel. When voices of advocates like Lecester Johnson are uplifted by major organizations like The Washington Post, the sociological weight of the illiteracy issue can be very powerful. In quoting former United Nations chief Kofi Annan, she sums up for its extensive audience what the facts should ultimately mean to them: 32 million of Eric Black's so-called “illiterate people” in the United States of America have been and continue to be deprived of their “human right” to functional literacy.

#literacy #media #class #future

Tweetbot 5 iOS Review

by David Blue

On Windows XP ballot day, I spent my beatnik-ass time marveling at the (seemingly) abrupt availability of some genuinely innovative social apps on the Apple App Store for the first time since iOS 7(?) Of course, I am aware that reasonable people would regard a “sneak peek,” NDA-violating, perfectly Adobe Premiered app review to be pretty fucking lame, and I won’t dispute any accusations to the tune of “just an insane white guy with a WordPress site,” but I still believe it’s important to talk about software especially because virtually everyone uses it (as opposed to quieting down just when these apps and the people who make them attain the most advantageous possible position to fuck the whole world.)

That said, I’m going to keep this as brief and unrevisionist as I can: Tweetbot’s latest iteration may actually justify the dedicated subreddit I’ve just discovered! (Reddit’s the last place anyone wants to talk about apps, I guess.) I’ve complained at length about Twitter’s increasingly hostile (but justified, sortof ) treatment of its once astonishingly diverse landscape of third-party clients and tools, yet I’d honestly grown significantly in accepting that the dynamic would never again see the power of the world’s most cash-stuffed companies delivered into the sweaty hands of small, kooky one and two-man teams, and it never would’ve occurred to me that Tweetbot was still around — much less getting ready to update its trusty old app with a release that would suddenly make it clearly more stable and better-looking than its last competitor: the Native Fuck, itself, which has also undergone significant cosmetic surgery, recently. Namely, they moved the one fucking button that’s given the app a usability premium over its mobile web-based low-rent clone.

“The compose button has been moved to the bottom right-hand corner and “floats” as users scroll down their timeline. That means the button is always available to quickly send a tweet when the mood strikes.”

Yeah okay, Matt.

We’ve got a shiny, new compose button to unveil on Twitter for iOS! Easier than ever to use, the floating icon is prominently displayed and perfect for one-handed scrolling and Tweet composing. Pro tip: Press and hold the icon to access your drafts, photos, and the GIF gallery. -@TwitterSupport

Twitter Support is no @Cher, yeah, but it seems strange that less than a thousand of Twitter’s more than 300 million monthly users would bother to engage with the announcement of a significant fundamental change to its infrastructure. Imagine if the federal government announced via White House press conference that every stoplight in the United States was going to have its yellow light removed to “streamline workflow” without any further explanation, yet only 1000 total Americans even bothered to tune in to the television coverage across all the news networks. It’d be strange, yeah? Well, y’all are using Twitter more than you’re driving, I’ll bet. Next time, get out and vote on my Twitter poll , you fascist!

In my Twitter glory days — that is, when I used to spend the entirety of every one of my community college classes Tweeting from my phone — there was a healthy offering of third-party clients on both mobile and desktop that filled the english of the era’s software media with an absolutely barbaric brand-beaten pile of linguistic Twittrash. After Twinkle — one of the earliest and ugliest ways to use Twitter ever — you’d have to choose between Twitpic, Tweetdeck, Twittercounter, Twitterfeed, Twhirl, Twitturly, Twtpoll, Retweetist, Tweepler, Hellotxt, Twitdom, Tweetscan, Tweetburner, Tweetvisor, Twittervision, Twibs, Twistori, and Twitbin. These are just a few I picked up from a 10-year-old TechCrunch report listing the top 21 Twitter applications by traffic. Twibs .

Now, I have to stop myself from digging too deep here and attempting something absurd like The History of Twitter Clients, but the fucking material is there! I could spend an entire afternoon going through YouTube searches and gadget blogs because it brings me back to that time when I lived every day assuming these things were going to continue to astonish for my entire adulthood. So many incredible ideas! However, I’m going to save them for later and focus on the cream of the crop, so to speak: Twitterific and Tweetbot, which has been a longtime favorite of mine. As I said, it was in community college that I first ponied up money for Tweetbot 3 on my iPhone 4S simply because the hype over it among app and gadget nerds was so bonkers that it managed to spill over into my life, despite the fact that iOS7 and I were having serious issues in our marriage.

If you trust Mark Watson with your life as I do, you’d better believe that Tweetbot has been “ a screamer ” since its very beginning, when it pioneered the Premium Poweruser segment, for which a demographic apparently still exists. It was fast, yet always noticeably smoother than the native app, just as the newest release is today. I must point out, though, that the bloggers and YouTubers who’ve insisted that Tweetbot or Twitterrific or any other premium app could replace the native Twitter app entirely on iPhone even before they were stripped of a most live/push functionality (which I’ll come back around to in just a moment,) are undoubtedly lying to themselves — as good as they got, they never overtook Twitter’s own app in immediacy terms, which is almost inevitably going to present fundamental deterrence on the part of the active Twitter user who intends to rid themselves of the default pedestrian avenue of administration. Tweetbot solved a lot of things, it really is daft when it comes to notifications. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if they came a few hundred seconds late — it’s that they’re never predictably or consistently so, which severs entirely the human perception of engaged plugged-in-ness, if you will. It’s the same phenomena Chuck Klosterman explores best in the context of DVRing live sports to watch later.

It’s difficult to project fictional scenarios that are more oblique and unexpected than the craziest moments from reality. We all understand this. And that understanding is at the core of the human attraction to liveness. We don’t crave live sporting events because we need immediacy; we crave them because they represent those (increasingly rare) circumstances in which the entire spectrum of possibility is in play.
-“Space, Time, and DVR Mechanics” by Chuck Klosterman`

Tweetbot is unquestionably a more thorough environment in which to explore Twitter than any other third party client, but it can’t do the live thing. Please do complain to Twitter, Inc. about the API situation if you’re so inclined, but the situation we’re going to find ourselves in

All I’m trying to say is, there is no fucking reason you’d delete the Twitter app — hide it away in a folder and never ever open it again if it disgusts you so, but leave its notifications settings on so that it can keep itself busy in there. Now that is a smart workflow! In fact, it was mine! And it did work for such a long time that you’d probably forget about the arrangement in no time were there not the occasional obvious discrepancies between Tweetbot’s Mention’s tab and the native app’s instant notifications. There has never been — nor will there be, I think — a client for Twitter that can replace some use of its own properties.

I think Tweetbot 3 made me into my own ridiculous equivalent of a “Poweruser.” Things are a little hazy now, but I know that I departed my main Twitter account just before the app’s release, and I didn’t come back until 2015. I was going to school in the same old mall building that housed the tool store in which I was also working in full-time, which is surely the only explanation for the shamelessness I demonstrated in bringing a wireless Apple Bluetooth keyboard to my classes and placing it behind the phone on whatever surface was in front of me so that I could lean forward and type into iOS with my nose damned near touching the screen. Strangely, I was not able to verify when Bluetooth keyboard support was added to iOS, but we’re going to conclude for the sake of convenience that it was first included in the immediate predecessor to the iPhone 4S I was using then.

The cognoscenti have been on Twitter for years now. Stephen Fry, the web service’s patron saint — in Britain at least, joined in 2008. However, it wasn’t until early 2009, xsomewhere around the time that Fry tweeted while stuck in a lift, that the service went truly mainstream. Mentions of Twitter, usually involving celebrities, could be found in newspapers and on breakfast television.

“Top 10 technology highlights of 2009 ” | The Telegraph

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve already seen the demos and skimmed reviews at least. You should know by now whether or not Tweetbot 5 is worth it to you in purely functional terms, but I think we should all acknowledge that this release of Tweetbot is likely the last competitive third-party Twitter app for iOS. The mess that is Twitter, Inc. has made clear this year that it intends to prioritize its own clients over maintaining the APIs necessary for others to receive push notifications. And when I say “its own,” I’m also referring to our dearest TweetDeck, which they in fact absorbed. From a business perspective, it makes sense: only “six million App Store and Google Play users installed the top five third-party Twitter clients between January 2014 and July 2018,” according to TechCrunch. I never expected to see Tweetbot on the App Store charts again, nor would I have considered that Echophon, TweetCaster or Twitterrific would have been left available. They’re on the App Store, at least, and I can confirm that they all technically still work, but it’s safe to say they’re showing their fucking age. Tweetbot and Twitterrific, though, are not just satellite products of the platform — they literally built it. These two are the poles that have spent Twitter’s lifetime thus far demonstrating for the company and its userbase their own respective interpretations of a mobile social application. Today, they are united — along with Talon and Tweetings — in a plea for continued access to the platform they helped establish on behalf of Twitter users and developers around the world.

Both Tweetbot and Twitterrific are in their 5th versions, and neither has actually changed much since iOS 7. (Twitterrific appears to still be in the same version number.) Facing the growing walls around the service, one struggles to imagine them surviving more than one or two iOS releases, but I’ve been wrong before. (In fact, I discovered yesterday that Lookbook is still around somehow.) By the time iOS 7 came around, the new native Twitter app still looked fucking terrible. When Tapbots released Tweetbot 3, everything about its visual experience was beyond anything we’d seen on the iPhone before and its effectiveness as a Twitter tool was immediately recognizable in contrast with even Jack’s brand-new app and mobile web experience. The animations were tasteful and smooth and the “pro user” label on Tapbot’s demographic allowed them to fully explore the functionality of iPhone’s gestures separate any bond with the hypothetically least-capable user.

This is a dynamic which I am apparently unable to avoid across just about all of my subjects — including digital media — so you may take it as generally unreasonable or extreme, but I’m nearly as tired of being treated as an idiot user as I am an idiot reader. Readability is to Usability, etc. It’s especially aggravating when I could do so much more if developers would just assume I’m capable of any knowledge acquisition or intellectual growth whatsoever. Except for a few leftover keyboard shortcuts, the native Twitter app’s only function are the most obvious to engage with, as per the highest possible standards of use, which would make perfect sense if it was paired with competent investments in Accessibility, but Twitter always appears to detest the subject, even while quietly putting in some of the work. Thanks to Mastodon’s explicit and visible acknowledgement of accessibility by way of just one young German man and a volunteer team, we certainly know it’s not because it’s an expensive one at all. (The “if Mastodon can do it than Twitter can definitely fucking do it” argument can be expanded almost without limit.)

Somewhere out there is a social media manager using a screen reader whose professionalism has been undermined by the belief that the update is available to everyone. We deserve equal access to the tools our peers take for granted, and the security to know that we will be able to do our jobs tomorrow regardless of updates. -Kit Englard for The Outline

I would like to commend myself now for making it this far without mentioning Lists — a subject which I’ve already Tweeted and written about extensively — but this time, I have the wondrous blessing of two premiere mobile software companies who recognized the potential power in list functionality to dispel or avoid most of the inherent risks assigned to the usage of a social network like Twitter and bet heavily on it. Neither can be utilized to the fullest without lists and wouldn’t it be such a shame to not get your money’s worth? Tapbots expanded their curative ability tremendously by adding customizable filters to any timeline in Tweetbot, allowing the user to infinitely manipulate incoming posts with any combination of every variable supported by the core Twitter code itself. Within a matter of seconds, you could create a filter that will exclude all Tweets except for those from unverified accounts that mention “blimps” and include a media attachment and apply this filter to any of the app’s timeline views — including Home, Mentions, Profile (your own Tweets,) your Favorites, and your Searches — everything but your Direct Messages can be sorted this way.

“Tweetbot for iOS Tips,” Tapbots TweetBot and I accomplished a lot of sorting together, and it wouldn’t have occurred to me had it not crept to #1 Paid Social App again a few weeks ago that perhaps my bias towards Twitter lists could be entirely attributed to my early use of TweetBot and Twitterrific, which allowed me to amass a Following count of over 5000 without physically perishing or mentally disintegrating to the point of undeniable insanity. However, by the time TweetBot 4 was released in 2015, it had long since swapped places with the native app within my iPhone’s homescreens and was only used when I felt particularly like Tweetstorming from a stationary situation. From my wireless Apple Keyboard, this meant Cmd (⌘)-N to compose a Tweet and ⌘-Enter to send it.

Today — in Tweetbot 5 — this continues to be a tried-and-true method of Tweeting Tweets on Twitter, smoothly and efficiently, as always. Returning to Ye Olde Alternative in 2018 yields both familiar and newly-implemented goods: animation and audio notifications are carried over and/or updated as needed to maintain a fluid and fresh experience. The ability to switch between its intelligently-chosen color themes with a two-fingered vertical swipe, alone will be justification enough for many users like myself to hand over another $4.99 to the Tapbots developers who’ve managed against all odds to one-up Twitter’s own mobile app development one last time. Over any other alternative app, Tweetbot 5 retains the robust qualities necessary to achieve #1 Paid Social App status on the App Store despite its new API shackles.

#software #ios #twitter

Microsoft's Surface Laptop 2 Was Built for Me but You Should Buy One Too

by David Blue

Assuming Jesus Christ is in your thoughts this evening before yet another anniversary of his birth, I am infinitely astonished by the truth in what I’m about to suppose with you. If the Son of God was living today, most of us have agreed for a long time now that he’d use marijuana recreationally – big fuckin whoop. I think it’s far more interesting and appropriate (we all know his birthday was wholly reconfigured into a consumerist holiday long ago) to speculate on how he’d behave after finding himself inadvertently in the market for a new laptop within the ~$1000 range (following a stubbed toe whilst walking on water incident, perhaps.) Surely, it would not be entirely holy for him to opt in to the Foxconn-complicit world of Apple, Incorporated, nor the openly-blasphemous one created and exuberantly grown by Google LLC, and I’m afraid he’d be too much of an End User idiot to integrate any of the sparse Linux-dedicated hardware available. In May of 2017, however, Billy Gates’ old Microsoft finally released “the laptop we’ve always wanted them to make,” but could its recent update be truly worthy of our Lourde and Saviour? Or your newly-enrolled offspring? Should you sprint downstairs and swap out the new MacBook Air you just bought?

From an entirely valid perspective, an observer might declare my last two months of 2018 to be an outright shameful period defined by hypocrisy and traitorous betrayals. After finally taking the time to explore the full narrative surrounding Linux and the bloody tale of Microsoft’s cruel genocidal destruction of countless creative software projects throughout computing’s adolescence (see: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish,”) I eventually declared myself “100% Open Source” and began outlining an essay designed primarily to express that Linux is finally ready to be the operating system of the people without succumbing immediately to the brand of cybercrackpot illegitimacy associated with the L-word in the minds of the general public so readily thanks to decades of misinformed, condescending neckbeards. Such a feat would require entire new planes of cultural awareness and dialectal delicacy, yet certainly result in zero personal reward from even the best possible outcome, yet I proceeded to ponder the subject very deliberately all the way through October because I genuinely believed in a new democratized future of computing. 2018 had been my Grand Awakening to the idyllic possibilities of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) across the whole applied spectrum from office suites to social networks, yet – as two thousand eighteen comes to an end – I’ve managed to find myself among the most jaded, soul-sapped tech community I have yet encountered: Microsoft Administrators.

Complimenting this Linux-laden culture in which I was not so long ago deeply embedded was a confused and frustrated outlook regarding what I felt were excessive and completely idiotic sacrifices across the industry’s hardware design to the greedy, gluttonous god of Lightness. It seemed only reasonable to Myself As Consumer that the entire buying public should exclusively seek designs prioritizing greatest possible performance and battery life, even from portable computers and smartphones, so I assumed my perspective on this updated iteration of Microsoft's most laptopy Surface laptop – which exists in large part to compete directly with Apple's beloved (and just-updated) MacBook Air – wouldn't be at all useful. However, a few weeks ago, my employer prompted me with a sweet sweet ultimatum: for the sake of a tax break, I want to spend ~$1000 on a laptop for you as soon as possible. Yes, I know I should consider myself a very fortunate man – this wasn't even the first time I'd been surprised with the “hey, I want to buy you a laptop but it has to be today” experience, and may even be considered a sort of sequel to my Tales of Whirlwind Manic Consumerism, but it’s ultimately one of the most idiotic strategies to achieve a major purchase decision and completely inadvisable for anyone on a budget. Still I was indeed thankful to be put in a nearly-identical situation of Consumer Electronic haste, and have come to be especially appreciative of the specific time I was approached as such: just one week after Microsoft launched the Surface Laptop 2.

Considering the vast majority of its users are trapped inside my television, there’s no harm in covering the Surface brand with our virtual palm for a moment. If you’ll indulge me so, you’ll notice that Microsoft has actually delivered unto us The Laptop II – as in, the sequel... the successor to every other laptop computer yet conceived... but does this one machine truly represent the second coming of the Notebook Christ? Naturally, it would be a bit zealous to stand behind this extreme statement with 100% sincerity, but there truly are certain elements of this Personal Computing product's execution which do indeed will its user to expect and/or desire from others in coming years. As I've stated before, I also simply cannot help but be jazzed by such bravado from the mouths of even a company with as crooked and hateful history as Microsoft's. (Note: no other technology company has actually achieved what Microsoft historically has in this regard, and hopefully none ever will again.)

I must be honest: it hasn't yet been two months and I've already scuffed and perhaps even stained the beautiful maroon alcantara surrounding my machine’s touchable body, but it’s occurred to me that I might draw upon the vast library of automotive interior tutorials available on YouTube – and even purchase some of the alcantara care-specific products they recommend – in order to really maintain the exterior of the Laptop II. After all, alcantara was undeniably car culture’s material first. I should also confess that objectively, the Surface Laptop II is the best-suited computer for my personal uses that I’ve ever owned or used for any length of time. Subjectively, I don’t think all of the hardware design touches that make it so – like its keyboard layout, divine 3:2 aspect ratio, and particular I/O complement – have yet had the chance to seduce my emotional brain into truly loving it as much as I certainly should by any reasonable measure. For my own sake, I hope I’m able to fall in child-like infatuation with its magic, but in the interim, I believe the coldness of my heart should hopefully preserve any useful commentary I might have to add. Though this is undoubtedly the most timely review of a hardware product I’ve ever published, I’d still ask that you indulge my perspective suggesting the importance of considering it part of a package with its operating system, considering that the whole of tech media would’ve unanimously declared it the year’s “best laptop” were Apple’s aging, but still widely-adored MacOS absent from the frame.

I've tested a bunch of laptops this year, running the spectrum of 2-in-1s, Chromebooks, MacBooks, gaming laptops, etc. Everyone's needs are going to be different, which is why there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all for laptops. But enthusiasts’ laptops aside, I strongly feel the Surface Laptop 2 is the best laptop of the year. And by that I mean the best laptop for most folks' needs.

With as much humility as possible, I must add that I myself am anything but “most folks,” yet my experience so far with the product has been one of astonishing compatibility and battery life. Using recommended power settings, the Surface Laptop 2 endured four hours and twenty-two minutes of a workload it wasn’t particularly designed for including heavy web browsing, image manipulation, brief audio/video capture with OBS, and moderate subsequent editing in Audacity and OpenShot. Dan Seifert – Vox Media’s “only Windows user” – reported “about seven hours” of Microsoft’s claimed 14.5, but frankly, I don’t know what any of y’all are doin – I’m just thankful this machine is a better marathoner than any other I can recall owning. While we’re on the subject, I consider Microsoft’s inclusion of a magnetically-attached power cable and unassuming auxiliary USB charging port on the attached power supply to be personal godsends – further evidence, even, that the Surface Laptop 2 was actually designed to be nice to use. For the sake of those readers actually in the market for a new laptop who’ve somehow found themselves here, though, Raymond Wong’s review for Mashable is the most thorough offering you’ll find – it’s quoted front and center on Microsoft’s web page for the Laptop II, even – but it’s important to mention that his critical comparative perspective predates the late launch of its ultimate competitor, the new MacBook Air. Rather pitifully, however, his colleague’s “good, but not great” resolution suggests that Apple failed to challenge Microsoft’s relatively moderate update enough to warrant any revision, and that Mashable as a publication stands by my new laptop’s Best of the Year title, for whatever it may or may not be worth to you.

If the new MacBook Air came in at the same price as the old one, it would be a steal. Sure, you pay for the privilege of being able to use macOS on the Apple ecosystem. But in years past that also meant access to cutting-edge features and design. As pretty as the MacBook Air is, there's nothing that innovative about it. In today's Apple, it seems, privilege amounts to just staying current.

You won’t find many others who regularly invest editorial merit in publishing 2500+ word laptop reviews anymore, which I’d concede is plenty reasonable in the Surface Laptop’s case, at least. Perhaps your first point of comparative entry should be a barely-dated conversation between Kara Swisher, Lauren Goode, and Dan Seifert on Too Embarrassed to Ask regarding the original’s odds of truly competing in the “premium laptop” segment (if you’d prefer to hear from those who struggle to take it seriously, that is.) Assuming the original product direction of the Surface line still stands, Microsoft doesn’t actually intend to sell at high volume, especially when it comes to this runt of the marque, which does not hesitate to omit itself from the popular discourse of the moment surrounding tablets as the future of all computing to which all of its siblings have contributed so much. Though I shall always remember my dearest Libel (the special edition Spectre x360 with which I built most of Extratone) with great respect and deep fondness – I think it’s even worth mounting on some sort of plinth – the significantly-cheaper Laptop II has already demonstrated true value in its “premium” segment bragging rights with far superior materials and build quality. If you’re looking for the prettiest possible slice of magnesium lightness but aren’t the sort to have followed the story of Microsoft’s first venture into personal computer production since it began in the last year of the Mayan calendar, it’s worth your while to read Joshua Topolsky’s projections of the project’s impact on the popular narrative surrounding Microsoft from history’s freshest possible perspective: the eve of the first Surface tablet’s launch.

The entire tablet was designed in-house by Microsoft's teams, and if you believe what was said in the presentation yesterday, design and functionality in hardware has suddenly become a big deal in Redmond. That's a big shift, and it's an important one. The announcement of the Surface shows that Microsoft is ready to make a break with its history — a history of hardware partnerships which relied on companies like Dell, HP, or Acer to actually bring its products to market. That may burn partners in the short term, but it could also give Microsoft something it desperately needs: a clear story.

A pungent stigma festered from Microsoft’s history of inadequate and inelegant public relations (especially compared to its greatest longtime rival) has remained in relentlessly obvious orbit around every “significant” Windows and Office update for so long that its status quo has grown into a truly inhibitive force for all parties involved. Topolsky is unquestionably a compromising favorite of mine, but it’s hard not to decry then-CEO Steve Ballmer’s failure to comprehend Josh’s day-after insight in the whole three months that passed before his Seattle Times interview in September, 2012. Ultimately, The Big M is either incapable of understanding any alternative utopic Visions of Computing to its own, or simply overwrought with the same counteraspirational carelessness its culture has always depended upon. In analytical terms regarding Ballmer’s utilization of the forum’s opportunity to finally tell the fucking story, at least, the timidity of a term like “pre-eminent software” as a viably bright new beacon in contrast with “people would say we were a software company” (emphasis mine) – as if Steve-O himself doesn’t even have the power to publicly describe his company’s function as its #1 man – combined at the apex of what was almost impressively-negligent behavior.

I think when you look forward, our core capability will be software, (but) you'll probably think of us more as a devices-and-services company. Which is a little different. Software powers devices and software powers these cloud services, but it's a different form of delivery...

Don’t make the same mistake I did and wear yourself out trying to extract the meaning from these three sentences – there’s none to be found. Ultimately, whatever opportunity the Surface project could have provided for Microsoft’s identity has been vastly overshadowed by its success as last resort supercatalyst to restore any sense of dignity and pride within the hardware companies who produce the vehicles. In Fall 2017, The Register quoted industry gossip regarding the company’s new CEO Satya Nadella and his intent to “exit the product line” because “overall they are not making money [and] it doesn’t make sense for them to be in this business,” but newcomers to this conversation should know that no subsequent reporting has corroborated anything but a sustaining future of the line, though the measurable rate of innovation in Microsoft’s products continues to leave much to be desired. Now that you’ve heard from the experts, though, allow me to expand our lens a bit and examine what the Surface Laptop 2’s existence suggests as per The Present & Future of Computing.

The Clam Clan

In case I’ve yet to mention it, all of my tech writing is in substantial debt to my much-older and child-oriented siblings for providing 8 nieces and nephews over the course of 11 years – if not for any reason but the perspective offered by the slightest observation of their day-to-day lives. In this profoundly bizarre and historic technological sprint our species is experiencing, the differences in their respective relationships with consumer tech as they’ve grown up are fascinatingly… disturbingly significant. My eldest niece Abby was born four years after myself in 1998, and her younger sister Amber just quite three years later in 2001. All three of us are Aquarians who went to the same public schools (aside from 2 exceptions on my part,) and the two sisters have been close, significant influences on each other all their lives, yet the way Abby and I use and think about computers differs significantly from Amber’s. Our first real PCs introduced an important social and intellectual vehicle to our pre-teen lives, and both of us still “live on” our machines as young adults. For us and many others from this short-lived microgeneration of ours, budget laptops like the Dell Inspirion 2200 (which served as the first “real computer” for both of us) introduced the internet and Being Online as a State of Being with AIM groups, MySpace, and Yahoo! chain mails before smartphones and tablets were capable of doing so.

Amber prefers to use her iPhone for most everything and regards her computer as a tool for work – it’s booted up and down exclusively for that purpose, which is significantly healthier than the habit Abby, myself, and many of my Online friends developed: we left our computers running and Logged On all the time because we were otherwise unreachable. We learned from origin to depend on them for 100% of our computing tasks – from streaming Pandora to playing Flash games within six billion open browser tabs – which likely explains both our ADD and its resulting influence on the ease with which our personal computers can distract us. As a Journalism student and professional photographer, Abby uses the new 15-inch MacBook Pro, and [Insane Blogger] David Blue has spent years looking for an alternative, becoming the first and only iPhone user to make extensive use of its Bluetooth keyboard support in the process, but both of us are entirely uninterested in the rest of the industry’s insistence on convertibles, removable keyboards, or ‘professional’ tablets. I wish the Linux community was finally ready to drop the elitist pretenses plaguing its nerdy history; I wish I could finally tell someone like Abby that a machine like the System76 Galago Pro could slot itself into her workflow without losing her time or compatibility – that the reputation surrounding Linux People had finally lost most of its validity and her desire to learn more about computing as a young woman and Power User would be met with respectful and worthwhile conversation from their end. Unfortunately, I’ve still found some of the Old Guard to be elitist, socially behind, and juvenilely possessive, as if computing was still the niche interest from their 1980s and 90s childhoods. Though this conversation certainly warrants its own essay in the future, I’ll just express now that it’s a real shame some folks don’t realize the entire point of making great things is ultimately to give them to the world.

The opportunity I’ve had in the past year to finally get my Linux distro frenzy over with and out of my system managed to both radicalize and democratize my understanding of MacOS, Windows, and Linux as they are in the present. While I had nothing better to do, fiddling with Ubuntu Studio and Linux Mint to the extent I did throughout Spring and Summer led me to further appreciate the value of keyboard shortcuts, gave me my first real proficiency with a command line, helped globalize my comprehension of my own technological privilege, reacquainted me in a huge way with both the true history of software and my own personal past as an experimental test tube baby of Microsoft’s, and helped to answer a lot of questions I’d worried over for years about why software seemed like it simply couldn’t improve anymore. While it’s true that important open source projects like ElementaryOS continue to sprout from the Linus Extended Universe and the growing Open Source community on Mastodon is filled with brilliant, helpful, unpretentious, and remarkably curious enthusiasts (probably because many of those I’ve interacted with so far are non-cis and/or non-white,) little ole me was able to stumble upon some totally unnecessary and excruciatingly ignorant sociopolitical commentary by way of the white, middle-age host and his undoubtedly-white and staunchly libertarian caller on a live broadcast of the Ask Noah Show. (It’s not as if I haven’t said ignorant and very ugly things too, but I wasn’t a forty-something father on a semi-professional talk show representing an entire community.)

Essentially, I was quite frustrated and disappointed to find that Linux is still let down most by its own community, but the operating system itself is still much further along on its way to becoming a real alternative for the average user than mainstream tech journalism would have you believe. However, in my case, finally taking the time to really learn about Open Source computing also helped me understand (surprisingly) why Apple and its environment continue to be the best and most popular choice for professional applications. Linux Mint gave me tremendous power in enabling me to alter, specify, and redesign the most minute details of its interface, but I couldn’t have foreseen how all-consuming such power would be for someone like myself. In retrospect, I’ve realized that I ended up spending more time perfecting my custom LibreOffice Writer shortcuts than I did actually writing – I somehow found myself in a mind state which justified unironically creating a shortcut for the Shortcuts menu. Though I swore I’d never succumb to the bewildering hobby of collecting and exploring different Linux Distributions, it took no time at all for me to fill a folder with disc images of the installers for almost a dozen different interpretations of the operating system after I’d made the simple concession to myself that I’ll just try Ubuntu, that’s all. The most profound realization from all this (arguably otherwise wasted) time: for a user like me, a walled garden is actually the best place to be productive because apparently, I don’t have the self-control to keep myself from running away and/or fixating on completely unproductive tasks without its boundaries. I think this phenomenon is perhaps the worst culprit in the persistence of the aforementioned divide between “computer people” and everyone else who simply uses computers, as I’m sure any one of the latter could tell you after all of five minutes with a Linus type.

The most comprehensive and somewhat-urgent revision to illustrate the significance of this contrast from my perspective regards the exceptional iOS/MacOS markdown-based notetaking app Bear. Frankly, my own “Word Processing Methodology” essay from June has already become problematically out of date (and therefore embarrassing) in terms of my own knowledge of the segment and its history. Though I promised the conversation was “done,” I’ve continued to explore further into word processing’s history as well as its current state. “I had a go at Bear’s free iOS experience and saw little functional difference from DayOne,” the old, negligent, cursory David Blue noted, but if I’d simply been willing to cough up a bit more time and just $1.49 a month for Bear Pro, I’d have spared myself such shame and realized that the hype around this app really is 100% justified. Bear is the most beautiful iOS app I’ve ever seen, but I’m now also fully qualified to declare it the most effective execution of “distraction-free” writing software to come along in the past 25 years. Developer Shiny Frog’s secret is their perfect balance between capability and simplicity. It turns out, Daily Content Lord Casey Newton’s word on this matter really was worth more than mine, not to mention more succinct: “Bear may look simple, but there’s power underneath the surface.”

Those longtime Linux and Windows diehards who’ve tolerated me thus far, listen up: MacOS may be ancient, neglected, and full of incongruencies, but its single-minded methodology paired with Apple’s iCloud really does make it the most effective and elegant environment for most people to simply get shit done. It’s clear that many of you have realized the importance of simplicity for compact and/or educational distributions, but let me just add that the democratization of Linux provides a gargantuan development opportunity to make something that beats MacOS at its own game without starting from such a shitty premise and all of its resulting compromises – all without detracting from any other technically-minded distributions whatsoever. That is the magic of The Distro, remember?! If you’ve existed in a similar state of confusion to that of my entire adult life regarding the appeal of Apple products – despite having once been an extensive OSX user, myself – you’re very welcome for the insight. Instead of paying me for the profound self-improvement I’ve just provided, try prioritizing this newfound knowledge the next time you talk to your MacBook Pro-loving friend about their workflow. If you’re like myself, you’ll find their arguments have magically transformed from the bewildering bullshit they’ve always seemed to be into challenges for future competing operating systems to surpass Apple’s old bitch and excel in because MacOS and even its much-younger iOS counterpart – as well as the billions of people who depend on them – desperately need real competition in order to maintain their viability, much less become what products of the world’s wealthiest company should be.

Yes, the manner in which these operating systems are perceived really is an important discussion prompted by a product as insignificant as the Surface Laptop 2 because as you read, the industry is bracing for another paradigm shift in computing, which many believe (preposterously, I might add) could be as significant and disruptive as 2007’s introduction of the iPhone. This machine of Microsoft’s and its “new” MacBook Air counterpart could potentially be the last designs to carry us to a computing future where the tried-and-true clamshell design is forgone entirely by the mainstream, but Apple’s release of this year’s new iPad Pro prompted even the most Cupertino-loving tech commentators to respond with genuine discord along with a few long-overdue shouts of “are you crazy?!” I’m very proud of The Verge’s Nilay Patel, in particular, for so eloquently deconstructing its usability for all but the very wealthy. “It is impossible to look at a device this powerful and expensive and not expect it to replace a laptop for day-to-day work,” he reminds us in the introduction to his full review of the updated product, along with a beautifully transient sentiment which I think we all needed to hear again: “I don’t think people should adapt to their computers. Computers should adapt to people.” Even something as consumerist and bourgeois as the introduction of another pricepoint-burgeoning Apple hardware flagship can turn a simple tablet review into a much-needed manifesto for a user-centric way forward for the industry, which is itself worthy of celebratory encouragement.

I’ve favored The Verge and its cast long past the point of excess throughout the span of my work about technology, but Nilay’s review and its accompanying episode of The Vergecast are truly special and profound gems of content that shouldn’t be passed up. Apparently – as the Editor-in-Chief immediately insists as the episode begins – his “ongoing theory” that “the more important you are, the less actually important work you do, and the more likely you are to be an iPad user” roused anger from “that whole class of [billionaires,]” but the experiences behind his argument actually suggest that Apple’s own favorite child of late – into which it has begun investing and thereby implicitly sponsoring over its much older brother as the ultimate heir of the majority’s future computing – has unequivocally failed to do its part in growing the iPad Pro into the “laptop replacement” we’d all heard so much about. Of iOS 12’s performance as an operating system beneath true work-related tasks, he exasperates “you have to spend all of your time figuring out how to do stuff instead of doing stuff,” which I couldn’t help but hear as echoes of my own late Linux lamentations. As thankful as I am to have finally achieved enlightenment of the Planet Apple, I’m afraid I was pitifully late: its very natural laws underwent their most brutal tests of the 21st century this past year. Now that I’ve finally come to adore the elegant effectiveness of a new generation of iOS apps like Bear, I’m faced with yet another of the episode’s statements of weight: “I think it’s time to stop pretending that the future of computing looks like Apple’s restrictions.” On the opposing end of the line, the world’s first trillion-dollar company’s other major product release of 2018 managed to disappoint even the most fanatical fans of its original operating system’s best-selling platform with an insultingly mediocre update to the MacBook Air marque upon which it once so fondly doted.

My best friend’s parents bought her the original Surface tablet when she enrolled in art school, and her frustration with its lackluster keyboard (among others) leads MacOS alternative-seeking users like us to wish Microsoft had started with a traditional design like the Surface Laptop first. Perhaps Apple and Microsoft’s emphasis on their tablets is nothing but a bit premature for the most current crop of users, and the rest of my nieces and nephews will expand upon an entirely different methodology of usership when they receive their freshman computer. Those elders of us who still take the Clamshell form seriously and love printing our documents are apparently facing a future industry saturated with products we can’t believe in, but it’s up to you to decide if this issue is worth expending your energy in advocacy for either camp. With my 120+ word per minute proficiency with physical keyboards, I for one have been completely bewildered by the iPad as anything but an indulgence for reading text on the web, and I’m pleased as punch with my Surface Laptop 2. Even if it proves to be the last new computer I’ll ever own to come as optimized for my use, I’m just grateful and astonished it happens to be the best yet.

#hardware #microsoft #future

Blank Banshee Releases Mini-Album 'Metamorphosis'

by David Blue

&lt;a href=&#34;http://blankbanshee.bandcamp.com/album/metamorphosis-2&#34;&gt;Metamorphosis by Blank Banshee&lt;/a&gt;

Perhaps nearest and dearest of all to the hearts of more casual, Twitter-bound vaporwave fans, Canadian-sourced Blank Banshee has apparently been distinctly Offline as of late. When Bandcamp's Simon Chandler interviewed them about their last full release – MEGA – in 2016, he asked “will we have to wait another three years until the next Blank Banshee release?” Banshee replied with a definitive “no,” and they were technically correct – it's 2 years, 9 months later and Metamorphosis has been on Bandcamp for two whole weeks.

Considering the lack of results my queries for reviews of the thing have returned so far, I thought it prudent to make you aware of its existence. I'm not even remotely qualified to assess vaporwave records, but if you have some thoughts you'd like to publish, I'd love it if you dropped me a line.

#music #news

Colophon

Extratone is proud to be hosted by Write.as – a new sort of blogging content management system built atop Markdown and maintained by a company which explicitly shares our commitment to a better, Open web.

Write.as is the social media hater’s blogging platform | The Irish Times

Typography

Lora

Open Sans

Hack

Colors

#F7FF85 — “Panic Urine”

#272C30 — “Shunned Chaff”

#00008B — “Dark Blue”

#B7B7B7 — “Gary”

#62707c — “Forlorn Fugue”

Identity Thief Releases Sentimental Vapordisco Album Credited to SAINT PEPSI

by David Blue

Counterfeit record Mannequin Challenge proves to be a lively, heartfelt reflection for cassettehype lovers.

In a surprising turn of events, an anonymous actor uploaded, metatagged, and published a fabulous futuredisco tape this evening on the official Bandcamp page owned by the KEATs-affiliated Groove Guru using stolen credentials. SAINT PEPSI (now Skyler Spence) himself revealed the breach on Twitter just before the end of workday on the coast, disclaiming “SOMEONE HACKED THE SAINT PEPSI BANDCAMP AND PUT UP A NEW ALBUM! NOT ME.”

This album was inspired by the feeling I got when I found out 100% ElectroniCON sold out in under an hour. I was on the way to see my brother graduate from college. We all know how college was for me. It was a wonderful weird circle of events and it made me want to live.

@skylar__spence

At press time, it is unknown how long the account's security has remained compromised, nor how long the release will remain live. The investigative process so far has been hindered severely by effects voluminous playback of the work itself has had on staff in our newsroom.

&lt;a href=&#34;http://saintpepsi.bandcamp.com/album/mannequin-challenge&#34;&gt;Mannequin Challenge by SAINT PEPSI&lt;/a&gt;

Skyler Spence has been often (quite-cringely) credited by music journalists and bloggers as their introduction to vaporwave, which was hilarious in the moment, yes, but in fact represents one of the first puncture events into mainstream music media discourse for the precious Twitter and generally net-born community of truly boundary-pushing electronic musicians for whom this magazine was created.

Saint Pepsi is in many ways the apotheosis of blog disco, this wave of young musicians poring over the internet for samples of classic smooth electro-funk from 1980-84 to turn, via Ableton, into new works of nostalgic yet somehow future-perfect art. –”New band of the week: Saint Pepsi” | The Guardian

Like its attributed creator, Mannequin Challenge is very special and far more substantial than we've come to expect from the futurefunk sound: it's imbued through and through with real sentiment – and why shouldn't it be? In reflection, the role of cultural ambassadorship is as surreal (read: absurd) as it is spectacular.

&lt;a href=&#34;http://keatscollective.bandcamp.com/album/hit-vibes&#34;&gt;Hit Vibes by SAINT PEPSI&lt;/a&gt;

If you'd told me that Pepsico had discovered SAINT PEPSI and threatened him with copyright law in the years post-high school when I was first introduced to the like purveyors of the sound, I would've heard it as a hypothetical (and died laughing.) However, the shit did occur in 2015: in a hilarious internet micro-controversy, SAINT PEPSI really was pressured – under the threat of legal action, one assumes – to change his name. (My own little experience confirmed that Pepsi had no patience for contemporary humor.) As an ancient relic of a American brand punished him, though, another no-less-surprising one – none other than GQ Fucking Magazine – would celebrate him as “Pop Music's New Disco Whiz Kid.”

I don't know the whole story, but I'm comfortable declaring in the now: Mannequin Challenge represents a sincerely touching gift for those of us who've been listening. Or that is... It certainly would were it not the product of digital hijacking and therefore completely inattributable, legally, to SAINT PEPSI.

Favorite track: “Mr. Wonderful, pt. 2” (Bonus track requiring download/purchase on Bandcamp)

#music

Five Star Hotel Dubs Reissued Edition of 2014's 'Gray Data'

by David Blue

&lt;a href=&#34;http://fivestarhotel.bandcamp.com/album/gray-data-deluxxx&#34;&gt;Gray Data Deluxxx by Five Star Hotel&lt;/a&gt;

you can officially dl+preorder the tape for the new 2020 edition of my 2014 album ' GRAY DATA ', including 2 previously unreleased bonus trax from 2014 & some updated tape art since last time around.
& thx to @BluelightTapes for the dubbing/printing :)https://t.co/NzljaenAft pic.twitter.com/BWjoLv9QKR

— 🕷️ melanie 💻 (@fivexhotel) January 29, 2020

Originally released in 2014 on Visual Disturbances, now reissued for the first time since. Presented to you with 2 bonus tracks, one cut from the original album and one produced shortly after its release.

Preorder Gray Data Deluxxx now on Bandcamp.

#music

You Will Listen to This Playlist

by David Blue

C̸ ̵O̷ ̴N̵ ̶T̸ ̵A̵ ̴C̶ ̵T̴ is my best (and only, really) recent contribution of worth and I guarantee you will gain something from listening.

On Apple Music

On SoundCloud

On Spotify. http://bit.ly/dbtouched

On YouTube Music

On Tidal.

On Pandora.

#music

Three Years of Good Reads

by David Blue

Looking back on the Extratone Reading List

Since the beginning of Extratone, I've done my best to consolidate important reads of my own into our publicly-available reading list channel on Discord, which has also served as a place for others to share their favorite links as well. Using the Discord chat exporter, I've created an HTML file of the channel's entire history as of today (4-6-2020).

I'll be posting some of my all-time favorites from the past few years in this Twitter thread.

here is the entire history of the Extratone reading list as of today in HTML format. literally years of good reads! https://t.co/8wFoiDE7SU

— David Blue (@NeoYokel) April 6, 2020

Gallows Humor and Secondary Traumatic Stress in The Workplace

by Sierra Bryant

Is your dark sense of humor ruining your job?

Abstract

In this paper, studies on the use and misuse of humor in fields of work that involve exposure to secondary traumatic stress will be analyzed. This will also look at the past mistakes of other studies in not defining the differences in types of humor in relation to their effects on both professionals and clients. Making the distinction between lighthearted and gallows humor can change the entire meaning of a study. This thesis analyzes and explains the results from multiple studies and also explain why this field requires more research before any solid conclusions can be made.

Keywords

gallows or negative humor, secondary traumatic stress, lighthearted or positive humor, successful humor

Many studies have been done on humor and its uses as a coping mechanism in the workplace. The majority of these studies conclude that humor in the workplace is beneficial. Few of them differentiate between positive and negative humor, though. Because of this there is more than one answer to the question of “is humor in the workplace good or bad?” Professionals in career fields that involve Secondary Traumatic Stress often use forms of humor as coping mechanisms. In this essay, multiple studies that touch on the subject of humor in these types of workplaces will be analyzed. Gallows humor and negative humor will be used interchangeably, as well as lighthearted humor and positive humor and the following topics will be addressed:

Explaining Secondary Traumatic Stress

The distinction between lighthearted, gallows, and successful humor

Positive effects of humor in the workplace

Negative effects of humor in the workplace

Effects of humor on clients

Alternate coping mechanisms

Further research

Through analyzing these topics, it can be concluded that, while successful humor can be a very good coping skill in stressful work environments, gallows humor is not and has even been linked to negative effects on the individual’s physical and psychological wellbeing.

What is Secondary Traumatic Stress?

Professionals who often deal with traumatic events experience a lot of stress. This type of stress, when it is severe, is referred to as Secondary Traumatic Stress. Secondary Traumatic Stress is defined in the Psychiatric Times as, “indirect exposure to trauma through a firsthand account or narrative of a traumatic event.” This means that individuals who assist others during traumatic events or hear recounts of traumatic events run the risk of developing Secondary Traumatic Stress Syndrome. The symptoms of Secondary Traumatic Stress, or STS, are similar to the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder which occurs in individuals who experience trauma first-hand. Professionals who deal with these kinds of issues include, but are not limited to: police officers, forensic nurses, firefighters, crime scene investigators, surgeons, therapists, and sex crime workers. In these professions, humor is often used to combat this stress or serve as a coping mechanism. The humor used as a coping mechanism in these careers can often be macabre due to the austere nature of their jobs. These professionals experience, secondhand, everything from serious injuries, to death, to the aftermath of sexual assaults and much more. These are not experiences that the average person goes through on a day to day basis. Because of this, it does take a toll on these professionals. This secondhand, or indirect, exposure to trauma can have huge emotional impacts on individuals and many believe humor can be used to combat this. In a study done on 133 human service professionals, ranging in age from 20 to 64, it was found that age, sex, and relationship status did not have much effect on Secondary Traumatic Stress levels. This means that anyone can be susceptible to developing Secondary Traumatic Stress in these career fields.

Different Types of Humor

In most contexts, humor is considered a positive aspect of communication while the darker side goes unmentioned. While humor can be used both in and outside of the workplace to lift spirits, this is not its only use. Humor was seen as an important staff skill by individuals involved in a study on Forensic Nurses, though timing and type were never clarified in the research that was analyzed. Humor can be intended for and perceived in many different ways. Humor can be seen as aggressive, rude, or sarcastic when at the expense of others. When used positively though, humor can be lighthearted and fun. It can also be used to express emotions like anger, frustration, and joy. While defining humor, Boes and Wormer point out that Freud thought of humor as “a coping mechanism that allows society to reduce tension by expressing… obscene impulses in a socially acceptable manner.” This statement implies that at one time gallows humor was believed to be tension-relieving and positive. Gallows humor refers to the dark sense of humor some develop while working in high stress career fields. It can be defined as “humor that makes fun of a life-threatening, disastrous, or terrifying situations.” It is often used only amongst certain groups of workers because others are seen as “outsiders” who would not understand their sense of humor. Craun and Bourke also touch on this, stating that professionals who all work with sudden traumatic deaths feel comfortable using gallows humor amongst themselves but know better than to use it with other workers, such as those involved in clerical work. Because of this, the group that uses gallows humor knows to censor themselves around “outsiders.” Successful humor is defined as a mutually amusing communication. Both gallows and lighthearted humor can fall into this category depending on the situation but just because humor is successful does not mean it is positive.

When is Humor Good in Regards to Secondary Traumatic Stress?

Having a good sense of humor has long been seen as something that decreases depression, anxiety, and stress while increasing immunity to illness and enhancing moods. Positive humor can illicit positive responses, therefore having the potential to improve group processes in the workplace. Mesmer-Magnus, Glew, and Viswesvaran come to the conclusion in their meta-analysis that positive humor can build affinity, reduce burnout, increase workplace cohesion, and enhance coping effectiveness. Through analyzing the results of prior research, they were able to deduce that lighthearted humor was able to increase job performance and satisfaction, as well as, save money that would usually have been spent as a side-effect of employees being burned out. It can also be said from their research that positive humor in the workplace can be linked to better overall physical and mental health. So, it can be said that positive and lighthearted humor do correlate with positive effects. In Craun and Bourke’s qualitative study of 500 sex crime workers, they were able to show that lighthearted humor was used frequently by the Internet Crimes Against Children members through the use of several surveys. The use of lighthearted humor correlated with lower Secondary Traumatic Test scores and had more effect on the scores than social and coworker support.

A type of humor that usually has a positive impact on workers is “play on words” humor. Play on words humor can be considered as a type of lighthearted humor. In a study done on humor used in the emergency room, this type of humor was discussed. This kind of humor can be purposeful, or it can come from a Freudian slip. An example given by Wormer and Boes is of a doctor accidentally saying, “Just eat 'em and street 'em” rather than “Just treat 'em and street 'em.” Another example given was of a nickname made for a surgeon who often wore cowboy boots and was “very aggressive” during his procedures. It was always said out of his ear shot, but his staff called him the “cowboy surgeon.” This kind of humor is harmless and facilitates a sense of community amongst the coworkers in the emergency room.

Tension relieving nonsense was another form of lighthearted humor discussed in Wormer and Boes’ analysis of humor in the emergency room. They called it tension relieving nonsense because this kind of silly humor often results in laughter. Laughing can help relax muscles, relieve tightness, and aid in creating a sense of well-being. Wormer and Boes pass on a story told by a nurse administrator, named Alice Guy, that encompasses tension relieving humor, stating:

Hospital staff members were having a party when word came that a patient was on the roof threatening suicide. Guy was furious at this threat to their fun. Rushing to the roof and speaking without thinking, she ordered, 'Get off that roof! You're interrupting the party.’ The man did. The humor of the story was that despite the fact that others had tried for hours to get the man off the roof, he obeyed the one person who simply spoke her mind – and in doing so went beyond the bounds of good professionalism. This amusing story was shared at the hospital for years after.

There are many positive ways to use humor as a coping mechanism, but this does not mean that all ways of using humor for coping are good.

The Use of Gallows Humor

In their meta-analysis, Boes and Wormer suggest that gallows humor is a way of maintaining sanity in insane conditions; that it is an illogical response to a hopeless situation. This is where the research begins to clash, because while this may be partially true, others believe the results of Craun and Bourke’s study help clarify that even if gallows humor gives you a sense of relief, it is only temporary because in the long run the effects of its use are not positive. Boes and Wormer gave an example of an inmate on death row jokingly turning down a cigarette because he had quit the prior day. This is an example of gallows humor because, generally speaking, people stop smoking for health reasons. They do not want to get cancer, emphysema, or they want to live to see their grandchildren, etc. Because this inmate is on death row though, none of these things apply to them so the inmate is seen as using gallows humor to make light of the fact he may not be alive much longer. Another example they give is about an inmate on death row asking about when they are going to start a weight watchers program. Again, this is gallows humor because realistically, this person will not be alive very long, so their weight is not an actual concern. The humor is just being used as a coping mechanism to make light of the fact the inmate is on death row.

Watson has a similar concept of gallows humor as Freud. Watson is quoted in her qualitative research on gallows humor in the medical field saying, “blanket dismissals of gallows humor as unprofessional misunderstand or undervalue the psychological, social, cognitive, and linguistic ways that joking and laughing work.” Another source states that laughter can be used to help interrupt physiological stress responses because it increases exhalation and it eases muscle tension. Humor though, can exist as a separate entity than laughter and therefore does not correlate. Not to mention that in Craun and Bourke’s study, they found that the use of gallows humor correlated with higher Secondary Traumatic Stress scores and even had a higher effect on the scores than using denial as a coping skill did. Gallows humor was also linked to an increase in alcohol consumption in participants in the past year and reduced psychological wellness. Craun and Bourke point out previous studies imply that the use of gallows humor may be an indication of psychological distress in workers. These studies show that use and increasing use of gallows humor is an indicator that the professional is no longer compassionate enough to fulfil their job properly, as well as, the possibility that it is a red flag indicating that the individual is not coping with Secondary Traumatic Stress well.

Some researchers believe that using gallows humor as a coping mechanism is not a big deal. They believe that professionals in career fields where Secondary Traumatic Stress is experience should use whatever methods necessary to cope. One of these studies makes the claim that “The use of black humor among emergency services professionals would thus be seen as a form of stress release, relieving the professional of intolerable feelings of horror, helplessness, and anger, and this in turn would reduce psychic anxiety.” They also acknowledge, though, that using this kind of humor to cope could end up with adverse effects such as increasing anger. They use the old concept of superiority theory to support these claims. Superiority theory states that using humor at the expense of others helps raise our self-esteem and by blaming victims for the unfortunate things that happen to them. Individuals can convince themselves they would never be in a position to experience the same misfortune. In their examination, they use a quote from Wear and Colleagues to support their stance, citing “students enter the clinical world full of enthusiasm and optimism for what medicine can achieve and are met with obstacles of all sorts, including cynical faculty, uncooperative or unappreciative patients, and their own unanticipated emotional responses to the experience of hospital based medicine. Every day they encounter something that should be otherwise, and humor may be one way of managing the incongruencies.” While it can be seen that humor is important in the workplace as way of managing the day to day events, once again, this quote from this study does not point out what kind of humor they are discussing. The study itself may go into further detail, but what is provided in the examination by Regehr and Rowe does not.

Effects on Work Relationships and Clients

Humor can be used as a tool to bond with people. In the study on forensic nurses, they focused a part of their research on humor as a relational tool. They specified this as the use of humor with patients. The results were split, a good portion of the nurses said they believed humor helped with their patient relations while others stated that the use of humor in general was challenging the institutional order. They also stated that even the most well intended jokes can be misunderstood and taken the wrong way and that this possibility might make it less worth it to employ humor with patients, but correct use of humor could lead to a more relaxed patient. In another study of nurses, it was indicated that those who were experiencing Secondary Traumatic Stress were more likely to be impersonal or angry with patients therefore reducing the quality of the patient and care taker interaction as well as colleague to colleague relationships. Another source reported acknowledging that using gallows humor with patients could dehumanize those who the jokes are about.

This open-ended result on the effects of humor on patients is just one of the many reasons more research needs to be done in this field. When patients use gallows humor, it is often seen as giving themselves power in a situation they are otherwise powerless in. While this is definitely one way to explain this phenomenon, it is possible that this could be interpreted in another way. The use of gallows humor as a coping mechanism may be a way of deflecting, preventing full acknowledgment of their emotional state. This room for interpretation is another reason why more research needs to be done in this field that distinguishes between lighthearted and gallows humor.

Alternative Coping Skills

One study that does look into alternative ways for workers to deal with Secondary Traumatic Stress suggests using resilience and mindfulness as an alternative coping mechanism. This study defines resilience as a “buffer which protects individuals from adverse environmental influences and forces” and “the ability to bounce back from adversity, persevere through difficult times, and return to a state of internal equilibrium.” The other suggestion is mindfulness. Mindfulness is defined in their research as “an intentional state of awareness, mindfulness concerns the process of bringing one’s attention to the present moment, in a non-judgmental and accepting manner.” Mindfulness is very effective in reducing stress and increasing what Harker, Pidgeon, Klaassen, and King referred to as resilience. Unlike resilience though, mindfulness has an explanation as to how to reach it. Mindfulness can be practiced through multiple techniques which range from quietly meditating to playing active games and are generally done in 5-minute increments in therapeutic settings but can be done for as long as the individual or group needs outside of the therapeutic setting. Increased mindfulness was linked with an increase of psychological well-being and with a decrease in Secondary Traumatic Stress scores. They also found that “research investigating the beneficial effects of increased levels of mindfulness has reported improvements in distress tolerance, emotion regulation skills, and psychological flexibility. In order to conduct their study, they sampled a group of 133 human service professionals – mostly women – and gave them a series of questionnaires. The questionnaires they used were The Professional Quality of Life Scale, The General Well-Being Schedule, The Resilience Factor Inventory, and The Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory. The Quality of Life Scale has two subscales: one the measures exhaustion, frustration, anger, and depression symptoms and the other measures negative feelings brought on by work-related trauma and fear. Anxiety and depressive symptoms are assessed using the General Well-Being Schedule, along with overall psychological well-being. The Resilience Factor Inventory evaluates the individual’s level of resilience with 60 questions and The Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory evaluates the individual’s mindfulness using 14 questions.

The conclusions that these tests came to were that higher levels of resilience and mindfulness correlated with lower levels of Secondary Traumatic Stress. Mindfulness showed less effect on the levels while resilience showed much more. Mindfulness only made up for 1.77% of the variance and resilience made up 8.18% of the variance. The researchers did point out at the end, though, that the study was completely voluntary and therefore may have had skewed data. The way they framed the concern was that the employees who were experiencing the most Secondary Traumatic Stress may have been too emotionally fatigued to participate in the study and that this may have skewed the data. On top of this, they pointed out that self-report data can be unreliable due to the fact that people often show social desirability biases.

Because the symptoms of Secondary Traumatic Stress are so similar to the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress, it could be said that treatments geared for PTSD may be effective in treating STS. One of these treatment paths are Cognitive Behavioral Therapies. “Cognitive behavioral therapies (CBTs) challenge the way individuals think and behave and are an effective intervention for treatment of PTSD.” One type of CBT is CPT, or Cognitive Processing Therapy. This is a therapy that was originally developed to treat rape victims. In CPT, the traumatic event is revisited in order to facilitate reshaping the negative world views created by the traumatic event. An example given is of someone being raped and developing a view that the world is not safe. In order to combat this the therapist would assist in changing this view from “the world isn’t safe” to “I can learn to protect myself in an unsafe world.” By doing this, the therapist can help lower the distress levels of the patient, as well as avoidance, which is a component of PTSD. CBT involves homework for patients as well to help generalize the skills being taught within the clinical setting.

Another treatment often used for PTSD is Prolonged Exposure Therapy. This is a behavioral therapy that “helps clients safely face frightening experiences and memories by recalling traumatic memories in a controlled fashion.” This process is done gradually in a controlled setting so as to not overwhelm the patient. It is believed that this process can help the patient assess their symptoms and reshape their feelings and thoughts about the event that caused them to develop PTSD. It can also help the patient to slowly begin regular functioning on a day to day basis.

Psychotropic medication can also be beneficial for PTSD patients. Some anti-depressants can help reduce the levels of depression, stemming from the traumatic event, in patients. There are many anti-depressants that are approved by the FDA to assist with PTSD symptoms. Anxiolytics, or antianxiety and antipanic medications, can be used to reduce stress and anxiety levels in individuals who have PTSD according to the Mayo Clinic. There are also medications such as Prazosin, an antihypertensive medication, that is not approved to treat PTSD by the FDA, but the Mayo Clinic believes could help keep nightmares at bay and combat insomnia.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, otherwise known as EMDR, is evidence based when it comes to its effectiveness in treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. EMDR is a mixture of psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive, and body-centered therapies. During this treatment, the therapist will use what is called “bilateral stimulation.” This means the client will work to process the traumatic event while the therapist uses “eye movements following hand, tactile or auditory cues.” During this process, the client goes back and forth between thinking of the traumatic event and focusing on the present moment. This is called “dual attention.”

Further Research

While it is true that research has identified positive links between humor and emotional states, very few people have made the distinction between lighthearted and gallows humor. Because of this, studies that primarily focus on positive humor are often used to justify gallows humor in the workplace as well because the distinction was never made between positive and negative humor. The connection Watson makes between gallows humor and laughter earlier in the paper is an example of this, as well as Boes’ and Wormer’s interpretation of what using gallows humor as a patient indicates. The misconception that all humor is connected with laughing and therefore positive is just that, a misconception. This flaw in humor studies means that there is still a significant amount of research needing to be done in this area. Studies should be done to clearly determine what the effects of positive and negative humor are separately. Studies need to be done on professional-client relationships and the use of gallows humor. These studies should focus on groups where only the professional uses gallows, only the patient uses gallows, both use gallows, and then neither use gallows. It may be very difficult to find these relationships naturally but if it could be done, it could be said that this would be a very effective way of gathering data on these types of social relationships. It can also be said that it would be beneficial for professionals who use gallows humor to be evaluated individually to see if there is a correlation with things such as depression and anxiety and the use of gallows humor because very few studies do. Another aspect that would be good to look into is whether or not there is a difference in the effects based on sex and gender. Although one of the studies previously discussed sex alone, the study was almost 80% women and therefore could be biased. Even though many do not believe there are many physiological differences between men and women, the ways life is experienced in our patriarchal society may possibly leave one sex or gender more vulnerable to Secondary Traumatic Stress. In order to get past the self-report data bias, assessments in the future could be conducted using a psychiatrist or other assessment specific professional to administer the questionnaires in a format closer to how mental illnesses are assessed. A lot of these studies focused on correlation. This is an important factor, but future research should focus more on causation and include more factors that could be affecting the results of the experiments. Another beneficial thing to look into would be if certain therapies that show success with PTSD would show the same level of success with individuals experiencing Secondary Traumatic Stress. Because PTSD and Secondary Traumatic Stress have very similar symptoms, it is likely that there is some overlap when it comes to coping and treatment after the fact.

While many studies conclude that humor in the workplace is positive, it can be seen from analyzing research that distinguishes between types of humor that gallows humor is not a healthy coping mechanism. In some cases, it can be an indicator that workers are no longer compassionate enough to work in their field and others that the worker is not managing their Secondary Traumatic Stress well. There is not a lot of research into alternative coping mechanisms to replace gallows humor, but it is possible that treatments and skills related to dealing with Post Traumatic Stress could be beneficial for people experiencing STS due to the fact that PTSD and STS share a lot of the same symptoms. This cannot be said with certainty though because there have not been many studies done on this. Mindfulness and resilience were shown to be helpful in handling STS though, and this is a step in the right direction to help professionals who experience indirect trauma on a fairly regular basis. It is important to further this research because a lot of these careers are necessary and helpful to the population even though they have adverse effects on the individuals doing the jobs.

In order to stress the importance of the researching more into the effects, gallows humor has in these professionals, it may be beneficial to explain why it is important to care for the mental health of these workers. Some helping fields get a lot of attention from the public and are more valued because of it, such as firefighters, surgeons, and police officers. If it could be explained why mental health workers are so important or why nurses and sex crime workers are so important, it may bring people’s awareness to them and the issues they face from working such stressful jobs. Many people don’t think about how much of a toll being in helping field takes on you but without these professionals so many people would go uncared for and untreated. Many of these workers are behind the scenes doing jobs most people would not want to do and risking their own physical and psychological well-being for others, and they deserve to have concrete answers as to how they can help protect themselves from the side effects of their jobs.

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#culture

SoundCloud Releases Automated “Mastering” for Creators

by David Blue

Last Tuesday, SoundCloud announced the release of onsite, automated mastering in cooperation with Dolby. The service will cost $4.99 per track for non-Pro Unlimited subscribers, who'll receive three free mastered tracks per month and $3.99 per track masters after that. After uploading a new track (less than 10 minutes in length,) users will see a small button labeled “Master Track,” which then takes them to a trimming interface that prompts them to select a 30-second, “high contrast” clip representing the dynamic extremes of the track, which is then locked in as the singular preview for the service. After “listening”/analyzing said clip, the user is brought to the mastering interface and prompted to select between four presets:

Thunder “Make car speakers rumble and club systems shake. This option will push your bass frequencies to the limit.”

Sunroof “Open up your mid and high frequencies and bring some life to your transients. This option is perfect for hip-hop and any other beat-focused genre.”

Aurora “Aiming for something ethereal, light and wavy? This option will infuse even the most experimental tracks with a new burst of color.”

Clear Sky “Brighten your mix, manage your dynamics and reign in your low end with this pop-focused mastering option.”

For a professional analysis of each preset (and extreme hair,) see MixbusTV's video.

I asked a number of music-related Discord servers if they'd tried the feature yet and Business Casual's answered the most comprehensively.

The general consensus from musicians and producers seems to be that SoundCloud misinvested its resources into the making of the feature. On the MixbusTV video, YouTube user Nelson Leeroy comments “Lot of uneducated aspiring artists will fall for it.... Sound Cloud should not be allowed to use the word mastering, it's misguiding, it's a scam.” A Twitter search for “SoundCloud Mastering” yields overwhelmingly critical commentary, including “SoundCloud Mastering is jus IG Filters for songs,” which – from what I've seen – I agree with completely.

soundcloud mastering works wonders pic.twitter.com/BSgCANwCSB

— Peri (@P3riPeri) July 14, 2020

I reached out to Dolby's media contact email address asking how long the two companies spent working on this service and about any future cooperative projects. Gentry Bennett, who described herself as “the PR lead for this launch,” responded 25 minutes later (prompt AF,) answering “the teams were working together for a couple years on this tool.”

#software #music