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Calendar of Clivia Shows Australia 2018

Saturday 16 June
Clivia Society of NSW
10:30am – 4pm
Thornleigh Community Centre
Cnr Phyllis St and Central Ave
(off Pennant Hills Rd )  next to Bunnings
Thornleigh, NSW

Saturday 15 – Sunday 16 September
Clivia Society of NSW
10:30am – 4pm
Thornleigh Community Centre
Cnr Phyllis St and Central Ave
(off Pennant Hills Rd )  next to Bunnings
Thornleigh, NSW

Friday 21 – Wednesday 26 September
Toowoomba Clivia Society Inc.
9am – 5pm daily
TAFE Horticulture Pavillion
Entrance Campbell St. Behind Cobb  & Co.

Saturday 22 September
Melbourne Clivia Group
10am – 4pm
St Scholasticas Community Centre,
348 Burwood Highway, Burwood (Bennettswood)
(between Station Street and Middleborough Road)
Parking off Starling St

Clivia Society Membership

I am the Australian Representative of the Clivia Society based in South Africa.

Members of the Clivia Society receive an annual Yearbook which is a beautiful publication with photos and articles. They also receive quarterly newsletters and have access to other publications.

Anyone interested in becoming a member, please download the membership application form and send back the completed form with fees.

Fees (AUD $) for 2018 are:

  • One year $33
  • Three years $85
  • Student discount one year $16.50
  • Student discount three years $42.50

Payment methods are as follows:

  • Cheque, money order or bank cheque made out to Lisa Fox. Sent to 88 Mangans Road, Lilydale, VIC 3140
  • Bank transfer to Account name: Lisa Fox BSB: 063853 Account #: 10090099. Please use your surname as the transaction description.
  • Via Paypal directly to the Clivia Society. Use the email – PAYMENTS VIA PAYPAL MUST BE IN US DOLLARS (US$25 or US$65)

Contact me with any questions – Lisa Fox
PH: 0417 087 667

Changes to seed importation

Please note that the Australian Biosecurity Import Conditions have changed and this does affect Clivia seeds that are imported to Australia from other countries. Review the changes below carefully and understand that seed imports that do not meet these requirements could potentially be seized or destroyed.

Seed arriving through the mail and as passenger baggage will need to be appropriately identified. This can be done by any of the following:

  • Commercial packaging and label with the full botanical name (genus and species).
  • Commercial invoice listing the full botanical name (genus and species) accompanying the seed.1
  • A laboratory report listing the full botanical name (genus and species) accompanying the seed.1
  • Commercial supplier’s declaration2listing the full botanical name (genus and species) accompanying the seed.
  • Phytosanitary certificate listing the full botanical name (genus and species) accompanying the seed.
  • International Seed Testing Association (ISTA) certificate listing the full botanical name (genus and species) accompanying the seed.
  • Naktuinbouw Authorised Laboratories (NAL) certificate listing the full botanical name (genus and species) accompanying the seed.

This change is now in affect and will make it difficult for seed exchanges between Clivia enthusiasts in the future. Seed will either need to be from a commercial entity (commercial invoice, commercial supplier declaration or commercial packaging and label) or the seed must be inspected and certified (Phytosanitary Certificate, laboratory report, NAL certificate or ISTA certificate).

If you currently have seed in transit then it will be subject to these conditions.

For more information please contact Plant Import Operations on 1800 900 090 or

For more information on the alert, please refer to the BICON website:

Feel free to phone Lisa Fox on 0417087667 if you wish to discuss any of the above.

UPDATE – Clarification of seed identification requirements for seed arriving by mail or accompanied baggage

This alert is to provide clarification of the import conditions for seed arriving through the mail or as passenger baggage.

  • If seed is not commercially packaged and labelled then one of the following documents listing the full botanical name must be provided:
    • Commercial invoice
    • Supplier’s declaration
    • Laboratory report
    • Phytosanitary certificate
    • Seed analysis certificate
    • ISTA Orange International Seed Lot Certificate
    • NAL quality certificate
  • Supplier’s declarations will be accepted from organisations or commercial entities. Supplier’s declarations must be presented on the organisation or business letterhead.

Do you sell blue Clivia?

Do you sell blue Clivia?

I am getting this question a lot lately, as well as purple and white. I have to explain to the person that there is NO SUCH THING as blue or purple Clivia. I could make a fortune if I could breed such a thing. Pure white Clivia are also just a dream at this stage.

This furphy has come about on US ebay where Chinese sellers have  photoshopped photos of Clivia and made them look blue or purple. They have then listed seed for sale on US ebay from blue Clivia. Sad to say that many people have been duped and bought these seeds. They will not know for approximately 5 years that they have been duped until their plant flowers common orange. Due to Clivia being such slow growers, these dodgy sellers are able to get away with selling seed from plant colours that do not exist.

Many Clivia enthusiasts and growers world-wide have reported this to US ebay but unfortunately they will not do anything about it. It is merely our word against the seller that blue Clivia do not exist. These sellers even get good feedback from buyers because seed does arrive in the mail so the buyer provides good feedback. What sort of feedback would the seller get in 5 years time when the plant flowers?

Searching on Google images for ‘blue Clivia’ results in the following:

Searching on Google for ‘purple Clivia’ results in the following:*

It is best to do your homework and buy from reputable sellers.

(Photo credit is US ebay, ernwat-0)

Basic Genetics for Clivia Breeders

Professor Johan Spies, retired head of genetics at the University of the Free State in 2015 – Bloemfontein, has completed his book, Basic Genetics for Clivia Breeders.

To order: phone Lisa Fox on 0417 087 667 or email to

The cost is $20 including postage and is for Australia only.  Members of the Clivia Society in South Africa receive a $2 discount.

Payment can be made by sending a cheque to Lisa Fox, 88 Mangans Road, Lilydale VIC 3140 or a bank transfer to BSB: 063853 Acc: 10090099. Please ensure you provide your address details for postage.

Clivia in China

I was fortunate enough in late March 2016 to visit China and view the greenhouses of several growers. It was interesting to note the growing differences between China and Australia. Unfortunately we had missed the Clivia show at Changchun by one week.

More notably, due to the extreme cold in winter, the plants are kept indoors and heaters keep the atmosphere at 25° Celsius. The air is very humid and it remains this way all year round. I asked how they get flowers as we know Clivia need a certain amount of cold weather to produce flowers. I was told that for several weeks in late winter, they turn the heater off at night so the plants get a certain amount of cold.

The first group of photos is from the growing area of Mr Wang, famous for his Wang Dian Chun yellow.

Mr Wang has two areas similar to a factory structure here in Australia. He grows Group 2 yellows and oranges. The plants are compact, painted face with broad leaves. A mature Wang Dian Chun Yellow sells for the equivalent of US$2,000.

Unlike other Chinese growers, Mr Wang does put some thought and effort into growing nice flowers, though the leaf structure and shape remains very important.

Over the next two days we visited several growers who specialise in Engineer Clivia. These plants are known for their veined leaves and fan shape. Seeing a huge line up of these plants is certainly an impressive sight.

The next photo clearly displays the veins on the leaves and the fan structure.

All the growers we visited use oak leaf litter for the potting medium. The oak leaves are sifted then covered and left for 6 months to decompost. All plants are repotted twice per year.

We showed the Chinese growers photos of Hirao and other popular flowers. Their comment was that it was not commercially viable for them to grow anything other than yellow or orange and that the leaves were the most important attribute.

I do love nice fan shape leaves with painted face or veined, but the flower will always be number one for me.

Photographing Clivia

I am not going to pretend for a moment here that I am a great photographer or even a remotely good one.  I am very pleased with many of the Clivia photographs I take and perhaps that is because I take so many, a few would have to turn out satisfactory. Or, perhaps I have a good eye for what makes a plant look attractive and at its best. I think that is the answer. The most professional photographer in the world may not necessarily photograph your plant to look how you would like it to look.

This article aims to be simple and not get into fancy cameras or settings. I have taken many photos with a simple Nikon camera that has automatic settings, and I have taken some fabulous photos with my iphone6.

When a flower is first opening, it is so tempting to want to photograph it immediately, however the plant will not likely look its best until all the flowers are open. I tend to take a few photos as it is opening and then take more when the flowers are fully open. That way I am covered should something happen and I am not able to photograph the plant when it is fully open. An example is a pink flower that opened this season. I photographed the plant as the one flower opened, and had planned to photograph the entire flower head in a few days. That night it was extremely windy and the pot was blown over, damaging all the flowers. I was pleased I had at least that one photograph.

Before I photograph a plant, I gently wipe all leaves to remove dust or marks. Nothing looks worse than a beautiful flower in a photograph with dusty or dirty leaves. If I will be photographing the pot then I clean that too. Generally I do not photograph pots.

If there is a spike in the pot to hold a previous flower up, or to hold this particular peduncle up, then I will remove it for the photographs.

I turn the pot around to determine the best angle for the flower arrangement. Sometimes what you consider the front of the plant does not photograph as well as the back of the plant where there may be more flowers. It is important for balance so it is a good idea to gently swivel the pot in a full 360 degree turn to work out where the best balance is.

The background for me is always a nightmare. I have bought numerous black cloth from stores and have never been happy with it. Somehow it tends to attract light and shine in places rather than be a matt black. I will keep experimenting and hopefully find the right material. I try to have a neutral type of background, whether that be a black material background, a pale coloured wall, or some other surface which is flat and matt. Photographing a flower with a busy background should be reserved for excellent photographers who are able to blur out the background and focus on just the flowers. I am not one of those.

The lighting is very important. I try very hard to capture the exact colour of the flowers. If I photograph indoors, sometimes the colour tends to look a bit pastel compared to if I photograph outside. Often I will try a few different locations and backgrounds before deciding what works for this particular flower. The time of the day makes a difference with the lighting.

Trying to judge what angle works best with photographing a particular flower takes practice and also just a flair for it. Sometimes positioning the camera low and shooting upward towards the flowers works best, other times shooting at an even level is best and other times, shooting slightly sidewards works best. I think beauty is in the eye of the beholder and everyone sees the flower at its best in a different light.

Photographs that frustrate me and are so often seen on Facebook, websites and forums are the ones where the flower is slightly blurry (or highly blurry) and out of focus, the colour is not correct making the leaves look slightly blue, over exposed photographs and over-done photographs where you can’t believe they are real as they look too sculptured and manicured.

Good photographs are very important for people who wish to sell plants, or sell seeds from those plants, and also to have a good record of your own flowering. It is worth taking some extra time to get the best possible photographs that you possibly can.

An example of good and ordinary photographs taken with a Nikon automatic camera and an iphone6 can be seen on the Clivia Market 2015 flowers Flickr album –

Preparing Clivia for Exhibition

This is a timely topic for me considering the Melbourne Clivia Group Expo is only 9 days away as I write this. This is not just for people who wish to exhibit their plants, but even for people who would just like the plants looking their best when visitors come to see them flower. Often we see photographs that people have posted on a forum or Facebook and although the flower may be beautiful, the leaves look dirty, yellowing or generally very untidy. Being a bit of a neat freak, I like my flowering plants to look their optimum whether exhibiting them or not.

It is always preferable for a plant to progress their flower spike and flower outside the house where it is cold and has good lighting. The reason for this is that the colour of the flower will be truer and if there is a green throat to the flower then it will be more prominent. Most years at this particular time of the year, I have to bring many of my plants into the house where it is warm to speed up the flower spike and flowers open, so I can exhibit them at the expo. A warm house is the fastest way of bringing up a spike or getting a flower to open. However, it is important to place the plant near a window or in a location that has good lighting. A common problem with beginners is to place the plant in a slightly dark room or location and the flowers end up looking more of a pastel or lighter colour than they usually would. I made this mistake many years ago and wondered why my pastel was orange the next year when flowering outside.

It is amazing how quickly flowers can open when in a warm house, though with 9 days until the expo and still many green buds, perhaps I left this a bit late. In the right circumstances you can speed the flower spike up by bringing into the house, but then put the plant outside just before the flowers open. If you are not in a hurry to have the flowers then you may have the luxury of leaving the plant outside until the flowers open naturally.

It is important to place something under the pot such as a saucer or even a piece of cardboard as moisture from the pot can find its way out and onto the floor surface ruining your carpet or floor boards.

Around the time that I need to bring the plants in the house, I have a good look at the plant and remove any outer leaves that may be looking a bit worn or unbalance the plant. I wipe the leaves with a damp cloth to remove dust or spray residue. I also look for leaves that are broken, yellowed on the ends or have any fungal spots. Using scissors, I trim off the damaged part of the leaf but I shape the end of the leaf to match the rest of the leaf ends. This looks so much better than a straight cut across the leaves.

I also give the plant a good water with a weakened liquid fertiliser or similar to give the flowering a bit of a boost. If the plant is a little crooked in the pot, I may use a small stake to try to straighten the base. Make sure you water the plant once per week if it is in a warm house and heating will dry the pot out faster. Also check for little creepies and crawlies such as Mealy bug, spiders, ear wigs or other nasties.

The day before show day, I clean the outside of the pot with water and a touch of vinegar in the water. This will remove any staining around the drain holes of the pot. If the pot is in really poor condition and won’t come up clean, I place the plant and pot inside a new pot. It needs to be a good tight fit and you would barely realise that it is a pot within a pot.

With cleaning a plant, some people use water with a touch of milk to shine up the leaves. I have tried this but these days I tend to lean towards water with a tad of White Oil in the water. You need to ensure that you do not add too much White Oil or the leaves will look greasy. Just a drop or two into the water will give the leaves a lovely shine without looking oily.

I use a small paintbrush to get at dirt or any other litter that falls down between the leaves. If the top of the potting mix in the pot looks a little old or messy, I lightly top the pot with a new layer. If the flower has a long peduncle and will be travelling by vehicle to a venue, it may be necessary to place a long stake in the pot and gently tie the peduncle to the stake so there is not a lot of movement. It is amazing in a car how much the flower spike shakes around with the normal movement of the vehicle. You can always remove the stake and tie when you arrive at the venue. If you feel the peduncle needs the support then leave the stake and tie. I understand in official shows that this is frowned upon, however for display purposes this is fine.

Plant ready for exhibition.

Clivia in Spring

For the Clivia enthusiast, is there ever a more exciting time than spring?

It is interesting that the seasons are so different each year. I remember last year that I had dozens of plants in the house to try to encourage the flower spikes to rise faster than they normally would so I could display the plant at the Clivia Expo. However this year, I worry that many flowers will be past their prime by the time the Expo rolls around and only have 3 plants in my house. The only reason I have these 3 plants in my house where it is warm is because either the flower bud has not developed at all in the past few weeks and appears to be stuck down low, or in one case, it looks like the buds will open while still down between the leaves.

Of course being in pots makes it easy for me to bring them into the house. If they are garden plants then there is not much you can do except keep an eye on any buds that appear stuck down in the leaves or are opening down in the leaves, as rot can set in and damage/kill the plant. I have at times, use clothes pegs to force the leaves open so more air will circulate around the stuck flower. Sprinkling Sulphur Powder down around the stuck buds may assist with eliminating rot, or worst case, you may have to cut the stuck buds or stuck flowers out with a knife, and then sprinkle Sulphur Powder on the open wounds.

Hopefully none of that will happen and you will have tons of stems elongating full of flower buds. I tend to bring all my flowering plants up to the house so I can look at them all the time. I can keep a check on how the stems are elongating, clean the leaves so they will look good for photography after the flowers open, fertilise them, and generally just stare at them and daydream of what the first flowering plants may turn out like.

At this time of the year (early September), I am starting my spraying regime for the year. Although mealy bug is not a huge problem over winter due to the colder environment, small pockets of the little blighters may have survived and will thrive once the warmer weather arrives. I spray all the plants again to hopefully knock them off at this early stage.

My plants have not been watered very often over winter so I have just recently gone through and given them all a good drink. Already I can see that the great majority of plants have new leaves so have started their growing cycle for the year. It is the perfect time to water and fertilise them. My plants have a 12 month slow-release fertiliser in their pot already, but I have gone through and given them a slightly diluted liquid fertiliser, in this case, I used Aquasol.

This is also a good time to look for potential problems. Any plant that does not have new leaves, I have to wonder why. I squeeze the base of the plant to test it is solid. A plant that has rotted through the middle will be spongey when squeezed. A plant that I am sure has rotted through the middle, I will pull off all the leaves, or cut through them with a knife, so the base is left with the roots. If the roots are healthy and there is enough good material left in the base, then eventually this stump may grow offsets. Plants try very hard to survive and will produce offsets when they know they are sick or dying. If I do not think there is rot in the middle and I am sure the roots are ok, and yet the plant has not produced new leaves, I sprinkle Sulphur Powder down between the leaves (just in case), give the plant a good fertilisation and then keep an eye on it to try to diagnose what is wrong.

A few downfalls with bringing a plant into a warm house are that the darker house will result in a more washed out colour on the flower. Even if it is situated in front of a sunny window, I find the flower colour is not completely accurate if the plant has been in a warm house. Also if the flower generally has a green throat or green tips to the petals, this may be reduced by being housed in a warm environment. Green likes the cold.

Enjoy your budding plants as it is a long time until next spring.

Winter care of Clivia

Different seasons require different care of your plants, particularly plants in pots. For most Clivia, winter is a time of a degree of dormancy. There is very little root growth or leaf growth during this time.

Clivia need about 6 weeks of cold weather in order to flower. Often species plants such as Gardenii and interspecifics may be flowering during this time.

I have heard of growers with plants in pots under cover who do not water at all over winter. I do still water my plants but not as often as I do during the growing season. With plants in pots under cover, I water around every 10 days though I always feel the potting mix to determine how dry it is first. With my plants in pots that do get rained on, I may only water every 2 – 3 weeks depending on how much rain we have had and how dry the mix is.

Clivia planted in the garden probably will not need watering over winter. There will be enough moisture in the ground to keep them happy. If you are in an area of low rain fall, you may need to give them the odd watering.

Repotting and Dividing

You can repot or divide a Clivia any time of the year though winter is not the best time as the plant will take longer to establish due to the low root growth during the cold season.

I don’t fertilise my plants over winter as I want them to go through their dormant period and not be induced to grow.

Pests and diseases

Mealy bug tends to disappear of lessen during winter as they prefer a warm humid environment. Having said that, it is still important to keep an eye out for Mealy bug as well as snails, slugs, earwigs and other creepies.

Other care

As berries are ripening and colouring up, often mice or possums think they look like something that may be good to eat, and try to eat them. Usually you find berries missing and seed scattered around where they have been dropped when deemed inedible. If the berries are important to you as you wish to harvest seed, it may be worth covering the berries with netting to protect them.

Watch for water dripping from trees or bushes in the garden. Normal dripping is fine but sometimes the plant may be in a position where it gets extensive water pouring down on it. This can damage leaves and cause rot.

Also watch for leaves and debris building up in the leaves of your plant. After autumn with all the trees losing their leaves, these can easily catch around the base of the plant as well as in the leaves. These leaves then get soggy with the rain and can cause rot.

Winter is a great time as it means we are closer to flowering season.


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Dear Father’s Day Gift Giver,

We come to you in a time where you may be wondering, “what on earth does my dad not already have?” Hold it right there! We know what Dad doesn’t have, so you can relax and breathe easy. Always leave it to us.

We did all of the leg work searching high and low for things that would make Dad say, “I haven’t seen this before!” and things that will make you say, “This is not a boring gift at all!” We even made it a bit easier so that you don’t have to do a ton of clicking around and we placed all our favorites in the “New Arrivals” category in our online shoppe! Click right here to be brought directly to everything your dad’s heart desires.

Care for a cocktail? Here’s a carry-on cocktail for all occasions! No flight required. This novelty will be appreciated and utilized without a doubt. Whether Dad prefers an early morning Bloody Mary, or an Old Fashioned night cap… there are 5 Carry On Cocktails to choose from!

BloodyMary ChampagneCocktail

If Dad is a dapper man, you may find that these brass dipped combs are a special (necessary) edition to his every day accoutrement. One for the side part, and one for the beard, respectively.

Brass Comb

Keep him footloose and fancy free with these practical accessories. Especially if Dad is a traveler, a shoe bag is simple but makes a difference in a tight piece of luggage (we know he travels light). A shoe horn may not seem like the best gift ever, but when you read the sentiment it’ll be a symbolic keepsake that just happens to be practical.

Finally, we have to talk about these decanters one more time. Make Dad the highlight of the party and the most coveted bar tender in town while he can brandish his own emblem on a custom decanter new to the shoppe. Available in 4 different styles, whatever he picks as his poison will be beautifully displayed in a way that won’t clash with your home.

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Deadline to order the custom decanters and get them by Father’s Day is June 1st! Click right here to see all 4 in the online shoppe.

Need more ideas? We’ll keep them coming! Remember, click here to see everything we mentioned above… and more!

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Monday, January 30, 2017

U is for Ursula Brewery

Well ... you may remember that in November and December, I made a lot of progress on the the A to Z Denver Breweries series.

Since mid-November until late December, I moved from N is for New Terrain Brewing Company to T is for TRVE Brewing Company.

I even covered Q with Q is for Queen Bee Brews. When I started this project, I thought I'd never find anything for Q.

Wondering what the hell I'm talking about ... check out Sheppy's Blog: A to Z ... I think you'll be able to figure out the concept.

It is as simple as A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T.

And now ... What comes after "T"?

You guessed it ... "U".

U is for Ursula Brewery

When I first made "the list" (see Denver Breweries II), Ursula Brewery was named Coda Brewing Company. I'm not quite clear why there was a name change. All the website says is ...
We opened in 2014 under the name Coda Brewing Company, but decided in early 2016 to make some changes. While change is always a trying and difficult experience, we believe what we are doing now is better than ever… and we’re sticking with Ursula this time.
Well, I am not going to complain. Until they changed their name, there were not any "U" breweries for me to visit. Now there is ... Ursula Brewery.

Ursula Brewery is located on the Anschutz Medical Campus at 2101 N Ursula St. Unit 10, Aurora CO, 80045.

It has a nice neighborhood bar feel. It wasn't very busy at all on the early Saturday afternoon we went. We stopped by for lunch after a short little outdoor walk in the area.

Technically, this place does not make food, but they have a "sister restaurant" right across the street, Cedar Creek Pub delivers their entire menu right to your table. The bartender in the tasting room gave us a menu, we gave the Pub a call, and 15 or 20 minutes later, we had our food. Nice.

To kill time for the kids, we played Harry Potter Trivial Pursuit. I got killed at this game. My wife and kids remember a lot more about the Harry Potter books and movies than I do.

I thought the beers were fantastic. For the most part, they were pretty imaginative as well. Not really your typical brewery line up.

I had a flight of most of what they had on tap:

  • Curse Quencher ... A dry-hopped tart saison with a bit of bret. This is a tribute to the 2016 World Champions ... #GoCubsGo.
  • Via Chicago... Nice hoppy pale ale. Tropical. Citrus. Stone fruit. I think this was my favorite of the beers.
  • Colorado Buckeye ... Really good imperial stout with peanut butter. Usually, I'm really a fan of peanut butter in beers, but this one was good. Just enough peanut butter to compliment the stout.
  • Ursula IPA  ... Really tasty. "Tropical hop juice". Orange. Pineapple. Lemon lime. Nice and dry. Exactly what an American IPA should be.
  • Man of the Earth ... Robust porter with sweet potato, toasted marshmallow and pecans. Orange zest, vanilla, brown suger. It was tasty. A bit sweet for me. But well made.
  • RedHeaded Revenge ...  Nice American Amber/Red. Malt forward, but enough hops to balance out.
  • The Sacred Fire ... A 12% ABV Scotch Ale. Really good. A bit high in alcohol for me. But really really tasty.
  • Nopal Mosaico ... "Prickly Pear Golden Ale with Brett and Mosaic Hops". Nice beer. My wife's favorite of the flight. I really liked this one too. I think Via Chicago was still my favorite, but this was a close 2nd.

Really great beers. As I mentioned, most of them were very unique. I really liked them all.

So, we hung out, had lunch, answered Harry Potter questions (I got most of them wrong to the delight of my children).

I totally suggest you make the effort to visit Ursula Brewery. It is worth the trip.

Their hours are:
Monday – 3PM - 9PM
Tuesday – 3PM - 9PM
Wednesday – 3PM - 9PM
Thursday – 12PM - 9PM
Friday – 12PM - 9PM
Saturday – 12PM - 9PM
Sunday – Closed

And now... as you can probably figure out ... my next letter of the alphabet is "V".

I think I know what brewery it is going to be ... but you'll have to come back to find out.

Go Blackhawks!

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What if I’d grown up Unitarian?

I sometimes wonder what might have been different if I had grown up Unitarian.

For one thing, I think I would’ve been more likely to stick with church. I stopped going to my parents’ church (Methodist) when I was in junior high or high school, partly because I never found it to be all that meaningful to me. Maybe it was just my anarchic streak; Christianity tells you what to believe, and it claims to have the final answers, and it claims to be The One True Way And Everyone Else Is Wrong So We Must Bring The Nonbelievers To The Light, and none of those things ever appealed to me. What happened to “love thy neighbor”?

Unitarians are… a bit different.

If you’re Christian, then you believe certain things. That’s what “being Christian” means, by definition. So by definition, it goes both ways: if you believe those certain things, then, well, you’re a Christian. That’s what the Apostle’s Creed is all about: you’re a Christian if, and only if, you believe the things stated in that creed.

Then there’s us. Unitarians are non-creedal — whether you’re Unitarian has nothing to do with your spiritual beliefs. This takes some getting used to! There are atheists who go to my church, along with agnostics, secular humanists, Christians, Jews, Wiccans, Buddhists, and probably at least thirty-one other flavors. Writing sermons for this lot has got to be a challenge!

Q: Why are Unitarians such lousy hymn-singers?
A: Because they’re always busy reading ahead, to see if they agree with the words.

Going back to my reasons for leaving church: Unitarians don’t tell you what you have to believe — we help you figure out what your own beliefs are. We don’t claim to have the final answers; most of us would agree with Andre Gide, “Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.” And we don’t claim that we’re right and everyone else is wrong. (Well, we try not to, anyway. Fundamentalists and their agendas do make it hard sometimes!)

I really think it would’ve been cool to grow up Unitarian, and go to Unitarian Sunday school and youth group. Learning how to question instead of follow (not that I ever learned much about following anyway). Talking about gay rights at church. Going through a year-long Coming of Age program in ninth grade, writing my own personal statement of beliefs, and reading it in front of the congregation. And the sex-education classes.

Yes. Unitarians have a sex-ed program, called “Our Whole Lives” (OWL). It covers not just the biological side of things, but also the emotional and spiritual. I’m told that some of the discussions can get extremely interesting.

Unitarians aren’t the only ones to do this; the OWL program was actually developed jointly with the United Church of Christ. UCC is cool — they’re the ones who got turned down by some of the TV networks recently, when they tried to air a commercial saying that gay people can be religious too.

The idea of church sex ed is a little jarring at first, isn’t it? U.S. culture has some very screwed-up ideas about sex, and most of them seem to stem from religions with some very unhealthy ideas about “sin”. (“Sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.” — Butch Hancock) But at the same time, church is where people gather to talk about their moral values, and get in touch with the spiritual — it’s about the only place most people do either. So what better place to talk about something that’s so deeply intertwined with both morality and spirituality?

(Okay, I’m getting a little too philosophical here.)

I think back to some of the hang-ups and the teenage neuroses I had back in high school and college, and I wonder if it would’ve been different if I’d had the chance to take those OWL classes. It might be wishful thinking, of course; being a teenager is never easy. But I think that OWL is the number-one reason that I wish I’d known about Unitarians back then.

But all is not lost. I certainly could’ve used this stuff back then, but they call it Our Whole Lives for a reason. The main curriculum is aimed at grade 7-9, but there are also units available for kindergarten/first grade (age-appropriate, but tying into the whole), grade 4-6, and grade 10-12.

And there’s also an adult OWL curriculum. My church is offering the adult class (I think for the first time), and Jennie and I both signed up. It’ll be a twelve-week class, starting later this month.

I really don’t have any idea what to expect, but I’m really looking forward to this. It should be… well, interesting, at any rate. (It remains to be seen how much of it I’ll actually blog about, mind you.)

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‘Hacksaw Ridge’ Garners Six Oscar Nominations, Including for Mel Gibson

andrew-garfield-hacksaw-ridge-ffbMel Gibson appears to have found his feet again in Hollywood, and it took his very Catholic movie about a Seventh-Day Adventist World War II hero to do it.

In the Academy Awards nominations, released in the early hours of Tuesday, Jan. 24, Gibson’s “Hacksaw Ridge” took nods for best picture, lead actor (Andrew Garfield), best director (Gibson), film editing (John Gilbert), sound editing (Robert Mackenzie, Andy Wright) and sound mixing (Kevin O’Connell, Andy Wright, Robert Mackenzie, Peter Grace).

This makes it the third highest-nominated film (tied with “Lion” and “Manchester by the Sea”), behind “La La Land,” which got 14, and “Moonlight and “Arrival,” which both earned eight (click here for the full list of nominations).

But before you get too excited, “Hacksaw Ridge” also received three Golden Globe nominations — for the film, Gibson and Garfield — but walked away empty-handed.

HacksawRidgeTeaserPoster_2016June39The film also earned one SAG Awards nod, for outstanding performance by a male actor in a leading role (Garfield).

The Oscar nod for Gibson marks his first nomination since 1996’s “Braveheart,” which earned him best director and best picture. He did receive acting nominations, for “Ransom” in 1997, and “What Women Want,” in 2001.

In the 21st century, Gibson was embroiled in several scandals, including a drunken rant after a DUI bust, the breakup of his marriage and his tempestuous relationship with girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, with whom he has a daughter.

And recently, on Jan. 20, the 60-year-old Gibson welcomed child number nine, a son, Lars Gerard, with girlfriend Rosalind Ross.

On the scale of Hollywood misdeeds, this is relatively minor stuff, but it does point up Gibson’s issues with alcohol and his troubled relationship with the Faith.

At a press conference for “Hacksaw Ridge” a few months ago, Gibson (wearing a large Miraculous Medal) described himself as “a poor practitioner.” He also said he was attracted to stories like “Hacksaw” — a portrait of unarmed medic Desmond Doss, recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor for singlehandedly saving 75 soldiers on Okinawa — as inspiration, saying, “maybe I could take a leaf out of his book on some level.”

From Variety:

Gibson thanked his cast and crew in a statement and said the Academy’s recognition of the film is “a testament to every single person who worked on Hacksaw Ridge, and to every soldier who made the sacrifices they made to fight for their country, including Desmond Doss.”

“What could be more exciting than listening to the nominations being announced while holding my newborn son!” added Gibson. “This is a truly wonderful honor. I’m especially happy for Andrew Garfield, our producers Bill Mechanic and David Permut, our editor John Gilbert and our incredible sound teams.”

Producer Bill Mechanic tells THR he spent 15 years trying to convince Gibson to direct Hacksaw Ridge. “The first two times he passed.” “The third time, he read the script overnight and committed in the morning.” He says Hacksaw is a tribute to Gibson’s incredible talent. “I think it also shows there is forgiveness in Hollywood even if it might not seem that way.”

Notable, too, is that “Hacksaw” was an independent film, not a big blockbuster. But its quality was so evident that Hollywood somehow swallowed its animus against Gibson and took notice.

In box-office terms, “Hacksaw” ranked 51st for the year in worldwide grosses, with with $157.9M, not that far behind top nomination-getter “La La Land,” at 45, with 174.3M, and above some other nominated films, including “Hidden Figures,” at 80, “Manchester by the Sea,” at 105 and “Lion,” at 146.

Actually, none of the nominated films is anything like a box-office blockbuster.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Not to rain on the parade of this year’s many highly worthy Oscar nominees, but the fact is, most of the best picture nominees have not been all that widely seen, at least by the standards of mainstream Hollywood blockbusters.

As of Tuesday morning, none of the nine films nominated for best picture have crossed the $100 million mark so far at the domestic box office.

While that’s not unprecedented, it’s only the fifth time that’s been the case in the past 20 years. (In 2009, the motion picture academy expanded the best picture race from five nominees to as many as 10, in large part to try to open the Oscars up to more broadly appealing films.)

Three of this year’s best picture nominees —  “La La Land,” “Hidden Figures” and “Arrival” — are within striking distance of the $100 million mark domestically. “Arrival” is the top earner at this point with more than $95 million, but it is in a dwindling number of theaters at this point after two months in release, while “La La Land” and “Hidden Figures,” which have fresher legs, should easily chug past $100 million.

Despite a lot of buzz and early interest, Martin Scorsese’s “Silence,” about Jesuit missionaries in 17th-century Japan — which also starred Garfield — got only one Academy Award nomination, for cinematography. It’s also performed poorly at the box office.

The Oscars will be handed out on Sunday, Feb. 26. Prior to that, the Feb. 8 edition of Family Theater Productions’ monthly Prayer & Pasta event will feature a panel — Head of Production Father David Guffey, C.S.C.; Catholic movie reviewer Carl Kozlowski; and Sister Nancy Usselman of the Pauline Center for Media Studies — to discuss and analyze the nominees.

Image: Courtesy Lionsgate

Visit the Family Theater Productions homepage and Facebook page to learn more about how FTP is reaching out to Hollywood and producing its own projects.


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Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Hans Wegner: The Master of the Chair

Hans Wegner, Danish Architect and Furniture Designer

What defines Danish modernism? Hans Wegner once told reporters that Danish modernism was “a continuous process of purification, and for me, of simplification, to cut down to the simplest possible elements.

The Wishbone chair has defined a school of furniture design, and has been in production for more almost seventy years.

Hans Wegner was a child of a shoe maker, born at the end of the Great War. He apprenticed first as a cabinet maker -- his feel for the wood and his joining techniques impressed, and his own designs soon saw light. After three years of working with wood, he headed to Copenhagen and studied to be an architect, eventually joining another Danish design deity: Arne Jacobsen. Together, with Erik Møller, they begin designing the Aarhus City Hall -- both inside and out. Working with Jacobsen, Hans Wegner began to simplify the chair to its most basic and functional pieces, never losing sight of balance and grace in the design.

Over the next 60 years (!!) Hans Wegner designed over a thousand pieces of furniture, and of those, more than 500 chairs. "A chair is to have no backside. It should be beautiful from all sides and angles.” he once said. Some of the most iconic chairs of the twentieth century, including the Wishbone Chair, the Wing Chair, and the Shell Chair are Wegner designs. The Wishbone chair has been in continuous production since it was introduced in 1949, and some of his former designs have been put into production after his death, such as the Oculus Chair.

The classic Wing Chair

His clean lines and attention to both function and beauty have left a catalogue off work that defines Danish modernism -- but according to Hans, that work is never done. "The chair does not exist. The good chair is a task one is never completely done with."

Come and see Hans Wegner’s good chairs in our beautiful showroom in sunny Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, or online at! And now, take advantage of a discount on two special Hans Wegner designs as produced by Carl Hansen and Søns of Denmark: the Oculus Chair and the Wing Chair. Purchase before September 15 to receive the matching foot rest free!


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Tuesday, 20 July 2010

Blog Awards

The very super Gracie Motley has been kind enough to give me these two awards, and it's now my duty to follow the rules and pass them on to others! Unfortunately I can't give them back to her, which is a shame as she's lovely, but I shall endeavour to do my best.

The Versatile Blogger Award rules:

1. Thank and link back to the person who gave you the award.
2. Share seven things about yourself.
3. Pass the award to fifteen bloggers you think deserve it.
4. Contact each of the bloggers you chose.

Seven Things About Icy
1. Other girls like fairies or unicorns, but I have wanted a pet griffin since I was little.
2. One of the first things I remember writing was a mock newspaper article about the great flood that swept away the original Tyne Bridge. This is notable because I typed it up on a BBC computer, using the font 'Jupiter' for the headline.
3. I studied art when I was in my late teens, and one of my final projects was a giant 8ft painting of Homer posing as Michelangelo's David, albeit holding a 'Censored' sign over his family jewels.
4. I have a penchant for steel-boned corsets, and feel nostalgic for the days when people still considered good posture to be important.
5. Starting my web serial was a complete accident, kickstarted by my posting a flash fiction that prompted people to ask what happened next. Up until nineteen episodes in, I still had no idea how it would end.
6. When I get stressed or angry, I calm myself down by doing mental arithmetic. Something about numbers is very soothing to me.
7. I assign moods and colours to strange things - to me, Tuesday afternoon is an autumnal orangey-brown and feels very melancholy.

Now for the One Lovely Blog Award rules:

1. Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person who has granted the award and his or her blog link.
2. Pass the award to 15 other blogs that you’ve newly discovered.
3. Remember to contact the bloggers to let them know they have been chosen for this award.

There are a lot of bloggers I'd like to give them to but it seems Gracie beat me to it... So if your name isn't here but you've recently received an award from someone else, that's why I haven't named you - you don't want the same award twice, surely? To avoid claims of favouritism, they're also listed in alphabetical order.

1. Adam Byatt of A Fullness in Brevity
2. Benjamin Solah, Marxist Horror Writer
3. Brian at The New Author
4. Carrie Clevenger of Mindspeak
5. Cathy Olliffe
6. Chloe Kovac at Randomitronica
7. Eisley Jacobs
8. Emma Newman
9. Jo Finlay of Zombie Cupcake
10. Jodi Cleghorn
11. Leslie R. Lee
12. Pamila Payne at The Bella Vista Motel
13. Sam Adamson of Future; Nostalgic
14. Sophie Bowley-Aicken
15. Writer's Block NZ

Laura Eno said...

Congrats on your awards and also to your picks!
#3 cracked me up. ;)

Jen Brubacher said...

#7 is very cool. To me, Tuesday is light green.

Icy Sedgwick said...

@Laura - I used to have photos of it somewhere - I need to find them so I can put them online! There were actually two paintings - one was Homer posing on David's plinth, and the other was David standing in the doorway to the Simpsons house. I always wanted to bring them home from school but there was nowhere to put two 8ft x 4ft boards...

@Jen - I always thought it meant I was a freak until I discovered synaesthesia, and found that a lot of people have similar experiences! A friend of mine even has it with numbers.

Sam said...

Thanks for the award, bonny lass! ;D

Presumably #1 comes with a goodly supply of ferrets to feed it? As for #5, me too! I'm up to episode 14 and am only now getting a sense of where it all might end.

I had never heard of synaesthesia until you mentioned it, I'm off to Google it now...

Icy Sedgwick said...

Not a problem, Sam!

I think I discovered synaesthesia through QI, of all things...

Mono S. said...

Yeah well, I didn't want your stupid award anyway.. and to think of all those thousands of ££££££'s I let you borrow!

Wait.... I have that bit confused don't I?

Icy Sedgwick said...

@Mono - I did have you in my list but a) I didn't think you read my blog and b) I didn't think you'd want a blog award! Anyway, you're in my 'Places You Should Visit' list so shush.

Mono S. said...

Yuh, you know I probably wouldn't have ever got around to passing it on to anyone else!

Pamila Payne said...

Sweet of you to think of me, Icy. Appreciate the compliment. I'm in fine company.

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Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Spring is in the air

I saw this bossoming tree on the way in to work this morning and thought I would share it with you. Isn't it beautiful? My camera phone made it look like an impressionist painting. Interesting. Have a good day!

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Saturday, February 02, 2013

A Long Overdue Update

I won this medal for completing runDisney's
Coast to Coast Challenge by finishing a
half marathon at Walt Disney World and
Disneyland in the same calendar year.
It's been nearly two and a half years since my last update and lots of things have changed.  I figured it was finally time to do something new here.  When I sat down to write a new post, I could barely even remember how to log in.  Once I did, Blogger had completely changed the interface, and it even forced me to update my template because the one I had customized was apparently completely out of date it didn't even work with the system anymore.

So now that I'm finally in and typing... what's new?  Well, probably the most dramatic change in the intervening years is I have become a runner.  If you had told me three years ago I'd be a runner, I would have laughed squarely in your face.  I've lost about 45 pounds, so I can breathe easily after walking up a flight of stairs.  I've run distances on my own two feet that are even still hard for me to comprehend.  I've simply taken it in stages.

In the summer of 2010, I began climbing at my favorite mountain, Stone Mountain, on a regular basis (two or three times a week, and I even stuck to it through the winter months) and that's how I shed the early bulk.  In March of 2011, I kicked it up a notch to running in my own neighborhood.  My first time out of the gate, I ran 1.4 miles.  The next time I ran, I doubled it.  From then on, it was a head game.  Once I increased my distance I had no excuse to do it again because I knew I could do it.

I ran my first official 5K on May 14, 2011.  It was the Brookhaven Bolt.  I immediately wanted a bigger challenge.  After buying a race bib for Atlanta's famed Peachtree Road Race (they had already sold out by the time I wanted in), I ran my first 10K just two months later on July 4.  I just recently ran my first official half marathon in January of this year at Walt Disney World, and the next weekend I ran my second one at Disneyland, completing runDisney's Coast to Coast Challenge within just eight days.

Running has changed my life.  It's improved my mood and allowed me to handle stress more easily.  I dare say I wouldn't be in the job I'm in now if I wasn't running regularly.  I've met great people that helped to inspire me to higher and higher levels.  Running has challenged me to think about other aspects of my life.  If I am capable of running 13.1 miles, what else can I do?  It's been an amazing two years and I will continue to go onward and upward (Excelsior!).

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Marketing and Research Consulting for a Brave New World
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Often this question is a snicker by marketers, supported by the trade press who seems to love reporting on CMO surveys that find big data falling short.

Yet, without big data, there would be no Facebook, no Google, no Amazon recommendation engines, no behavioral targeting of digital advertising, no Billy Beane revolutionizing baseball player selection via Moneyball.

So given the impressive impact on media businesses enabled by big data, I prefer to interpret this question as a call to action…what can big data tell us that we do not already now?  How can we not know the answer to this question…we must find out.

Just like someone in most marketing research departments owns effective management of syndicated data because it is so different from survey data, research should create a team who owns big data…mastering high volume, unstructured and semi-structured data to enable high yield marketing actions.

How might a newly created big data team begin its work?

Create roadmaps for the 4 ways that big data makes its contribution to marketing:

  1. Improve the productivity of marketing spending
  2. Create stronger offerings and experiences
  3. Provide insights and measurements about the brand and consumer that are unique
  4. Allow us to sense early signals about the future

Identify data streams where you feel the organization is not currently taking full advantage.

This will probably include:

A. Customer transactional data
B. Digital data from your website  and apps and location/movement from geo-sensing via your app that customers have downloaded into their smartphones
C. Social media data conversations and profile information
D. Third party data: from weather and mapping APIs; profiling from Experian/Acxiom; data from media companies and aggregators that match customer data to media and shopping behaviors
E. Your own media impression delivery data related to conversions, tagged and organized for reanalysis

Develop a big data databasing and analytics engine

The real magic will come from connecting these data streams:

  1. A+B+D gives us path to purchase, conversion rates, and targeting based on predictive analytics
  2. A+B+C tells us what key customer segments say and share about our brand and their lives.  The big breakthrough here will come from matching public social media profiles with customer data to create listening by customer segment (now available in what I call listening 2.0)
  3. A+B+C+E and survey data give us a powerful way of tracking the multi-dimensionality of brand health
  4. A+B+E tells us what worked

Changing the way marketing works

When big data infrastructures are put in place, it will change the way marketing works.  First party data is the number one priority to fuel a big data effort.  Your brand must generate consumer use of its website, newsletter and promotion mailing lists, apps, etc. You will realize that this is one of the most important creative assignments you will work on with a digital agency.

Secondly, you will turn every ad campaign and piece of first party content into a naturally occurring experiment that will enable real time tools to adjust your media efforts in-flight.

Third, your organization will house results for reanalysis about what works using deep data mining and predictive analytics.

Fourth, you will start thinking about markets as the compilation of micro-segments and individual users so you are always oriented to optimizing each touch between brand and consumer.

Finally, a commitment to big data will change the marketing research mindset.  We will move away from thinking of projects as disjointed, with beginnings and ends. There will be more surveys to clickstream panels to match behavior and attitudes, more matching in of third party data, and more analysis of consumers across lots of profiling data accumulated over time via questioning, customer behaviors, and social media profiles.

What can big data tell us that we don’t already know? Let’s commit the talent and money to find out.

Acknowledgement: I would like to thank Frank Cotignola for a valuable discussion that led to a number of points made in this blog

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    If we can Moneyball baseball, why not marketing and marketing research? | Joel Rubinson on Marketing Research


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Is 25 the new 18?

not old enough to drinkThe recent raise of minimum drinking age from 21 to 25 in Maharashtra is pure hypocrisy! The majority of Indian citizens seem to be ungratified about this anserine convention. Especially the Bollywood is shocked to its guts as we get a line from the recent updates like: “Big B finding it STRANGE”  and “Imran filing the PIL”.
It is more like a decree recounting that we are not responsible enough at 18. When we can get a driving license and a voter card then how can we be not able to decide about drinking? India is a developing country and the level of advancement achieved by youngsters in all walks of life is not a jest at all. When at 23, Sid Mallya can own the  3rd largest liquor company in the world how can he be not allowed to drink?

What makes it more perplexing is that they have set different rules in different states. While Kerala, Goa, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh allow 18 year olds to handle booze; Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu keeps it 21. And it’s not astounding anymore that  it is completely prohibited in Gujarat and Mizoram. What do the state governments want to prove here? Isn’t it a dubiousness on our ‘integrity in diversity’?
Moreover, are these rules being implemented aright? If it were so, there had been no case files piled up in the courts. The beauty of our plotters is that they are more occupied in making new rules and not descrying that the old ones are not even hunky-dory. This is one of the reasons that corruption is building up so well. It appears that the rules are meant to be broken.

If such stupendous rules are imposed on the nestling citizens, of course they will be aroused to go against it. What is required is to use the power of youth and not to suppress it. It is not that we should support drinking as a habit or anything alike, but it is just that the basic rights being provided should be well delineated based on the needs and acquisitions.

P.S.: Under-age tipplers can still be found buying liquor in every state, so I guess it doesn’t really matter.!/speedoholic/status/81390085093851138


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Mobile and Tech, Small Business

Apple Watch Etiquette In (Four) Key Situations

What is proper Apple Watch etiquette?

With the Watch having been out on the market for well over a couple of weeks now (with Line2 for Apple Watch available as well with a simple app upgrade), many owners have finally gotten used to their smartwatch and how to find their way around one. Learning the ropes socially is a different story though.

Certain golden rules should apply when it comes to any smart-device. This includes behavior like having it on silence at work and the movies, abstaining use of your device while driving, and being careful about flaunting your shiny smartwatch like a new engagement ring—nobody likes a showy bride-to-be or a pompous Apple Watch owner.

That being said, what is proper Apple Watch etiquette? While there are no hard and fast rules for each, here are some things to keep in mind in four general life situations:

At work

  • Don’t glance at your Watch during a meeting. A general rule of thumb: If it applies to the smartphone, it probably applies to the watch. If you do glance at your watch for some reason (ex: you notice you’re getting an incoming call), make it brief and adopt the proper protocol (in this case, directing that call to voicemail).
  • Don’t show off anything on a Watch. Even if it’s work-related—your smartphone screen is far more sensible for the purposes of presenting things, while your computer is ideal.
  • Limit the use of voice dictation in front of others. Especially during meetings where it should be avoided altogether. Voice dictation is one of the coolest features of Line2 for Apple Watch but it has its place and during work meetings is not one of them. Doing so in front of others only draws unnecessary attention to your wrist and device and may come off as pompous, especially because the action likely be done on a phone or even computer.

At home

  • You have more leeway with your Watch at home. There’s no need to silence it like you would need to in the office. Also voice dictation, especially if you’re in the middle of cleaning or playing with your pet or something, is far more socially acceptable at home.
  • Try to limit the use of the Watch at home. Home means family or you-time. The smartwatch is designed for the modern person who’s on-the-go and in need of a more efficient means of performing certain activities. This doesn’t apply as much at home. Is it really necessary that you use your Watch to voice dictate a text response via your wrist if you’re just relaxing on the couch during a TV commercial with Ben and Jerry? (The ice cream, that is.)

At a social gathering.

  • Stay present. Make sure that, above all, you’re being present in whatever social situation that you’re in. If it’s a dinner, engage in the conversation and meal in front of you (especially if it’s a date). If you’re on a hike, take in the scenery around you. If you’re at the movies . . . do we really need to even say what you should be focusing on?
  • Be intentional about using your watch. Your Apple Watch should be rendered a basic watch if you’re socializing, however if you need to utilize any smartwatch functions, make sure that 1. If you can’t take your watch off, your Watch is always on silent 2. If you need to take a call or perform any obvious Watch-action, pardon yourself to those around you.

In transit or just out and about.

  • Pay attention to your surroundings while using voice dictation. If you’re literally in transit, whether that be on the bus or walking to the office, voice dictation is a great Watch-specific feature that lets you efficiently conduct business from your wrist without needing to stop and look down at the smartphone screen in your hands. Make sure of course that, above all, you’re paying attention to your surroundings and not bumping into folks or being too loud and obvious.
  • Utilize functions that are easier to access from your wrist. If you’re at the grocery store or the gym, your Watch can come in handy. We recommend utilizing accessible functions from your Watch like reading a quick email or shooting a quick “I’ll be there in 10 minutes” or “Where do you want to go for lunch?” text instead of retrieving your phone from your pocket or bag to do so while you’re in the middle of something while out.

Above all, let’s not forget what Line2 is all about. Always: be connected and be present.

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LIVing it up in the Capital for Canada Day!

To celebrate Canada 150, LIV Apartments hosted a variety of events for residents and their guests. To start Canada Day off right, we hosted an all-Canadian breakfast in the Blended CafÃ©. Blended catered the morning event, serving up delicious breakfast food including eggs, bacon, home fries, French toast and of course, mimosas. Residents and guests gathered in the cafÃ© decked out in Canada Day attire and ready to celebrate! We also handed out flags for residents to take with them as they explored downtown and a face painter was set up in the lobby to add an even more festive feel to the day. Residents lined up to have artwork added onto their face or arm, and even a few pet residents got some artwork done! A 150 balloon was placed in the lobby which was the perfect place for residents to snap some photos.

Our LIV It Up! Canada Day Contest winner and guest joined us at LIV Apartments and Extended Stay for the weekend and we were so thrilled to have them partake in all the festivities of the day.

Meet our Contest Winner

LIV It Up! Canada Day Contest Winner

Contest winner Valerie and boyfriend Paul enjoying Canada Day in Ottawa!

Following breakfast, our Brand Ambassadors set out around the downtown area to hand out flags and spread the Canada Day cheer.

In the evening, part two of the Canada Day festivities took place. Residents and guests joined us on the rooftop for an evening of barbequed food, live music, DJ, dancing and more. Blended was serving up their always enjoyed barbequed fare while The Hornettes were providing incredible live music. The residents had a blast enjoying the evening on the rooftop and dancing along to the jazzy, funky tunes. Later in the evening, a DJ set up inside to keep the party going and it sure was a hit! The photo booth was also set up for residents and their guests to snap some memorable photos and takeaways. We also recently installed an interactive wall in the Mingle Room for residents to sign and make their mark in celebrating Canada 150 which was a huge hit with all.

As the night fell upon us, we all headed outside on the roof to catch the fireworks. A spectacular view and the perfect way to complete an incredible day!

Thank you so much to all the residents who joined us, we couldnâ€™t have imagined a better way to spend our Canada Day!

See more photos from the event and the photo booth, here.

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New Crop Style Muse: Cher

When it comes to a style muse, Cher is firs to come to mind with her nostalgic 70s style and a constant evolution and expression of music and style through the eras. Fearless and fierce- and not afraid to make you do a double take, truly timeless expanding past a particular time and space. Cher herself is her own era, her own movement, and effortlessly stunning.

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I’m sitting in my room back in my hometown of Arlington, Virginia as I write this. I’ve almost completed my third year at UMW, it being officially over as soon as I can get myself to press the submit button on a final assignment. Time really does fly here, but in that time I’ve learned new things, them being not just class material, but things about myself. If I had elected not to take this digital studies class, I would have missed out on an interest I had no idea I had. In the beginning, I was a bit unnerved about having to get in coding for a website. My freshman year was rough due to the computer science classes I was taking, yet could never seem to grasp, so anything involving angle brackets and parentheses triggers a few flashbacks. Yet, instead of shying away from the task, I used a lot of personal recreation hours to get the hang of things. I really appreciate how responsive coding an HTML page is, how instant feedback can be provided on what does and doesn’t work as soon as you save and implement it. I think it would be incredibly beneficial for me to continue pursuing material of this kind, so my next project is figuring out how to make my class schedule work towards not only my major of English (Creative Writing), but also towards the Digital Studies minor. A lot of the websites I want to work and write for in the future desire their employees to understand how web content works, or how to properly check and cite web sources, and I’ve begun my own personal journey into that through this class. Over the summer, I’m going to continue to code web pages on my own time and enhance my understanding of the HTML and CSS languages and architectures. There are plenty of helpful communities and knowledge repositories out there, like Codecademy and W3 Schools, not to mention other message boards like Reddit or StackOverflow, so I’m sure I’ll be able to find help in spades.

Before I finish up, I’d also like to take a moment to thank my professor, Zach Whalen, for being a wonderful professor. DGST 101 has been one of my most positive academic experiences at Mary Washington, not due to low difficulty or small workload, but through a comfortable progression and gain of the knowledge necessary to finish these tasks. If I tried to get ahead at any time in my work and encountered a hiccup, the help received usually in the next class or two answered most of my questions. If you’re a student, and you’re wary on taking a digital studies class, I highly recommend that you do. You’ll learn so much about how new technology works and how to make use of it effectively that you’ll have a leg up on the competition when trying to sell yourself as an employee to a company, or when you start building the infrastructure for your own personal projects or organization.

To any readers I have, thanks for sticking around for these updates. I’m still planning what I want to use this WordPress site for over the summer, but I’ll make sure to drop an update on my life regularly, to keep any of you who care informed. Have a great summer, Eagles.

Fidget Withdrawal

Something that’s trending right now is the art and habit of meditation, this idea of mindfulness in one’s life. At the beginning of the semester, I think in January, I started using an app that guides you through this app called Headspace. The app features ten or eleven minute audio clips you can listen to each day of an Australian man named Andy Puddicombe walking you through these exercises to make you more aware, more present in what you’re doing throughout the day, giving more meaning to each action performed. Now incredibly recently, as in yesterday, my phone became nothing but a very expensive brick. The device just doesn’t respond to any sort of stimuli, and I surmise that something has knocked the connections to the display loose, but I didn’t think it was going to be a major problem. I can live without a phone for a week or so, and I still think I can, but not as comfortably as I thought I would. With a dead phone, I have remembered how aware I actually am, and it’s not because I’m no longer meditating in the morning.

Do you even meditate?

I have had anxiety for most of my life, being officially diagnosed with OCD when I was 9 or 10, and then with depression when I was 16. Over the years, it’s been very difficult to get both chemical imbalances under some form of control, and I still have days where one or both will flare up, but I forgot that the nature of my illness pervades my physical body, too. I feel it in my hands, feet, and legs, particularly, as my anxiousness and unrest will manifest itself in the form of fidgeting. I’ll tap my fingers on a table, or sometimes I’ll rub my thumbs like one would if beckoning for some sort of payment. I tap and stomp my feet, or I’ll bob my entire leg up and down, side to side. Yet I just never notice it unless a friend brings it up (usually to stop me). Now that my phone is gone, my morning consisted of eating breakfast and just existing without a retina display right in front of me. To put it lightly, it was odd.

I guess I first noticed it when I was walking to Blackstone, the coffee place on campus, and I took stock in just how many thoughts I was having. With OCD, I have a lot of obsessive thoughts, and they usually revolve around negative things I’ve come up with in the back of my subconscious mind. I’ll worry that something’s going to happen to my loved ones, or that something bad will befall me, all if I don’t do some sort of ritual or action that my psyche has deemed as a guarantee that the thing that I truly know won’t happen not happen. I sound like I’m talking in a circle, but that’s just the way it works; It’s an awful circle to be stuck in. No phone for me means no music and no podcasts, so I just had the music of my mind to occupy my morning jaunt down campus walk. Dear Christ, is it uncomfortable. I think about how I’m walking, my posture, how I look, that I’m walking again, about everything I’m going to do during the day, but at an unbelievably rapid pace. Usually I’m preoccupied thinking about the lyrics of a song, or seeing what my friends post on Instagram, but without that social background noise, all I can do is think. If there’s one thing I’ve learned with mental illness, I don’t like to think.

I appreciate when things slow down. I see a task before me, an obstacle, and I’ll put together a path slowly to cross over, get to, and finish it. With my mind unoccupied and at ludicrous speed, I’ll start building ten or so paths all at once, and I can feel myself thinking. It’s so…uncomfortable. That’s great that I’m using my brain, but I’m not using it in a way that is beneficial to my situation. This hyper-awareness is taxing, and it’s not helping me in any way that Mr. Puddicombe says the less extreme version will. So with all this extra brainpower and space, how do I cool things down? How do I open up the heat vents or exhaust pipes of my mind?

I’m going to try just keeping myself busy as much as I can. They say an idle mind’s the devil’s workshop, so perhaps focusing on the development of a few web pages or editing some of my essays will keep me grounded in reality. I’ve also been thinking about investing in a few fidget toys to keep my hands busy, like a spinner or those fidget cubes that seem so popular.

This withdrawal that my body seems to be going through without my phone or to occupy my hands is nowhere near as bad as actual withdrawals I’ve gone through from trying to find the right medication for myself, but I would still really appreciate if it could just stop. Maybe it’ll go away in a day or so, and there are many better things I could focus on, so we’ll see. This, too, shall pass.

Methodology Module Reflection

This is a direct link to the webpage I’ve crafted for this module.

From this project, I’ve learned that developing web architecture is much harder than I thought it would be. There are a lot of things to keep in mind when writing an HTML based web page with CSS elements, and from the looks of my current page for this methodology module, I still have a lot to learn and technique to define. I have found, however, that this is something that I really want to do well just because of how interesting it is. I have a lot of fun seeing a page develop right before my eyes, and the instantaneous feedback you can get after saving the changes you’ve made in your text files is very welcome.

For the module, I chose to work with visualization, and I utilized the ImageJ program and the IMJ tool developed by professor Whalen. I was able to create some interesting composite scans of the comic book 30 Days of Night written by Steve Niles and illustrated by Ben Templesmith. On my page you will also find each of the 80 pages condensed into a single barcode image, which allows you to see how the color palette changes over the course of the story. You can also see the exact page my trade paperback began to fall apart from the multiple folds into a scanner.

I think the thing that’s going to stick with me the most is this idea presented at the beginning about not always trying to find the most scholarly thing in a dataset, but to use programs to also have fun with what you can manipulate. Often times, that goofing around will cause you to stumble upon an observation that is groundbreaking, or at least very intriguing.

Methodology Module Plans

For the next module, I’ve decided to work with the visualization of a set of data, or “seeing all the things.” My plan is to take scans of the pages of three horror graphic novels that I own and compare the color palettes to one another. I’ll create a composite image using the IMJ program developed by my professor, and see what observations I can make. I’ll be doing this for 30 Days of Night, the first volume of Revival, and the first volume of Nailbiter. I expect the first one listed to feature a lot of black, blue, and white towards the beginning, eventually including a LOT of red when the vampires finally show up to the setting of Barrow, Alaska. Other than that, there’s a fair amount of blood in each collection, and it should be interesting to see if that change in the palette occurs at roughly the same time over the lengths of the books. They all feature a fair amount of gratuitous violence, but the overall spread is another thing I’ll be analyzing.

The only thing that worries me is the designing of an attractive web page. Coding has never been my strong suit, but HTML doesn’t look too intimidating, nothing like Python or Ruby or some other esoteric grouping of letters, numbers, and various brackets. I think if I put some time into going through the codecademy lessons introduced to us at the beginning of the semester, I should be fine. The great thing is that I have the Digital Knowledge Center here on campus should I get super stuck anywhere. Should be interesting, and I hope I can deliver.

Digital Polarization Thoughts and Reflection

Digital Polarization Initiative Banner

I’m not gonna lie to you, I thought I was immune to being swayed by the clickbait that plagues the Internet. I thought my college boy brain could easily pick apart all types of fake news and sensationalist headlines that dominate my Facebook feed, and I was damn wrong. I’ve fallen for the same things that everyone around me has, but this project has opened my eyes to how easy it is to check the facts surrounding an issue. The probability of the issue is I’ll fall for something again, but at least now I know proper procedure to correct myself.
My group worked on the reporting of an issue originally known as, “Black Activists Launch Monthly Fee System For Guilty Whites,” that told how direct members of the Black Lives Matter movement started a reparations system that preyed on the racial guilt plaguing white Americans. The original article was published by the Daily Caller on December 5th, 2016, and the subsequent reporting on the topic featured articles with more and more volatile titles to direct outrage at the members of the movement who started this fee system. In truth, the fee system is a subscription service that one can sign up for, with price points ranging from $25-$100, that will provide you with tasks to “be an ally.” The website for Safety Pin Box states that the two women who founded this service, Marissa Jenae Johnson and Leslie Mac, have worked with BLM, but are not direct affiliates of the organization, and that all the money received will go to benefit black women. Two of those black women are the founders of the service, and they do not state how they will use the money.

At first, I thought people were just trying to paint BLM in a bad light. The rhetoric of the titles suggests that these online news outlets were trying to play off of the outrage that some people would feel for African-Americans to demand reparations for slavery today, and I thought the article would be grossly over exaggerated. To my surprise, the Daily Caller was partly true. While the women are not claiming reparations for slavery or systemic racism, there is a preying on this idea of “white guilt” that the two women are hoping will financially benefit their program and, in result, themselves. There exists a level of ridiculousness with this issue. I know that racism is real, that it is alive and well, and I also know that I’ve only ever experienced one side of the issue. At the same time, just asking for money isn’t going to make the issue go away. Two black women telling you that you are a good, not-racist person because you give them money neither makes you good nor not racist. I wanted to highlight this point in my editing of the Digipo wiki, and I hope my group and I were able to get that idea and the facts across to other fact checkers.

No matter how well read or how educated you are, people will always be able to play to your biases. That’s why it’s so important to know how to research news reporting well, and to see if a site is all about telling you the facts or just about getting you to click on those ads for that sweet, sweet revenue. Childish Gambino said it best on the track “Redbone” off of his album, Awaken My Love: “Stay woke.”

Digital Polarization Intro and Weekend Plans

Today in class, we’ve begun the unit on digital polarization and fact checking news articles on the web. From the twenty minutes of work I did in class today, I’m quite surprised to see how stories can be proven false so easily, or rather, how little energy it takes to find the real story, provided you take time and care to check official reports. Like the awful series of events that were the shooting of Philando Castile. Some friends that I discussed this with back when it happened told me that Castile was an armed robbery suspect. With just a bit of fact checking, that is proven completely false. Those claims came from an officer on the scene, remarking that the shape of Castile’s nose is what made him think he looked like a suspect. Looking at all the details, it seems like this officer is just trying to cover his ass now, and this is a different officer than the one who shot the man.

I’m with a new group of people for this project, and I’m excited to put names to new faces. More and more I’m becoming a morning person, which makes me more of a people person in this Digital Studies class.

As for the weekend, I don’t have much to do except experimenting in the Melchers dark room. I learned how to develop photos yesterday, but I think this weekend should be spent taking photos, getting better acquainted with my film camera and new lens. I’m gonna take some time to play a new game that just came out, Nier: Automata, for I caved and spent the $60. I haven’t paid full price for a new game, but I want to start creating written content responding to games as they come on the market. It’s what I want to do for a job, so I figure padding my own website with some pieces will help me out in the future when I’m applying for jobs. Austin Walker and Patrick Klepek’s discourse over the game on the Waypoint podcast also did a great job of pushing me to pick up the title. I love pieces of work that get into what it means to be human, and Patrick’s on his 32nd hour of play, so I’m thinking it’ll end up being good bang for my buck. I’ll let you all know once the 46gb monster stops downloading.

Digital Archaeology Reflection

Prior to this module, the only thing I knew about the development of the smartphone I use, an iPhone 6S, was that it was produced in a giant factory-city owned by a company called Foxconn. I heard from my dad that Steve Jobs and the other Apple bigwigs worked very hard to get the necessary land, materials, and contracts to open this massive center of production, but even then I could not comprehend the amount of injustice that happens on the premises. The hours are so demanding that suicide at the facility is not uncommon and, since the workers also live at the location, their lives become eating, breathing, sleeping, and speaking the manufacture of the technology that has become so intertwined with our, the average American’s, idea of daily life. I love having my stupid little device as much as anyone else around me, but learning that people all around the world live and literally slave away for its production hit me hard, and the experience was quite jarring to put it lightly.

Phone story screenshots

Opening up with Phone Story and an excerpt from Kevin Bales’ Blood and Earththe mining and distribution of columbite-tantalite quickly piqued my interest, and once my group and I had finished busting open our Philips iPod Dock/Speaker/Alarm, I identified the company that made one of the chips as Holtek Semiconductor, Inc. I made their supply chain my target, and I wanted to see if their company conflict minerals policy has held true since their founding in 1998. The first two hours of digging didn’t come up with a lot of leads.

A soldier stands guard over the prisoners of war being forced to work in the harsh coltan mines in the Congo

There were a few threads on Newegg and TigerDirect that discussed what parts and what companies were doing business that most likely used slave labor to get the necessary raw materials, but those were more general computer parts than basic Radioshack tech. Many of the sites I browsed through looked like they hadn’t been touched since the late 90s and, based off how many times my virus and malware detection software popped off, I think it’s safe to say their architecture probably hasn’t had any attention since then. After another couple hours of sifting, the forums began to get more and more modern, and eventually I found a Mega.co.nz link that was a repository of public transaction records for Holtek. Now, if you think computer code is lifeless to go through, try going through a bunch of business legal jargon and alphanumeric codes for who knows what. There wasn’t a key or anything, but I kept my eyes open for key phrases like “shipping,” “Democratic Republic of the Congo,” “Australia,” and “columbite-tantalite/coltan.”

Something about me is that once or twice a month, I’ll have a night where sleeping is just impossible until the wee hours of the morning. Having nothing to do, I decided to get back to deciphering those documents. I had made my way through about forty pages the previous night, and I felt I could knock out at least another twenty or so. Then, a chat box opened up in the lower corner of my window. Many alarms went off in my head, for I’ve heard horror stories on how people will go to parts of the web they shouldn’t only to have a chat box appear with some random posting how they have all of their geographic information and have sent an armored van full of nasty dudes to their house to make them the latest addition to their illegal torture live-streaming website. Very quickly, thankfully, my OCD brain turned off and I realized that since I had made a Mega account to get the most out of the service’s interface, I remembered that users can chat with each other. So the box read, “Hello.”

So I typed back, “Hi there,” and this is how the conversation went, slightly paraphrased for grammar’s sake:

What’re you doing here?

What do you mean?”

Why’re you looking at these files?

I’m a college student working on a digital archaeology project, I wanted to see where Holtek Semiconductor gets their coltan from. I thought these had already been published in the public sector, should I not be looking at them?

Oh. No that’s fine, just nobody ever bothers to look for that kind of stuff. You’re access is the first activity we’ve seen on those transactions for five or so years.”

We? Do you work for Holtek?

CryptoCat chat client logo

Upon asking that question, I got a link to the homepage of an encrypted chat client by the name of CryptoCat, along with some information that I assumed was to be used to connect to the person I was talking to on Mega. I had used CryptoCat a few times in high school, when I was heavy into an anti-government, anti-surveillance, punk music mindset, so setup was more or less like riding a bike. After successfully connecting, this mysterious man behind the curtain told me that he was an accountant for Holtek in Taiwan named John. At least, that’s what he said I could call him, since he said I probably didn’t have keys on my keyboard capable of writing out his actual name. I asked him if he worked at the HsinChu City location, but he wasn’t comfortable giving out that specific of information. I asked why the secrecy and encrypted communication, and he informed me that some of the programs that monitor Internet usage in nearby China collect information from some servers in Taiwan. His actions up to this point were just routine protocol on identifying if it was another bot program from China, or an anomaly like I turned out to be.

After talking about the political climate in China, and how much censorship affects web usage in all of Asia, I got back on topic to coltan. I wanted to know if all the materials that Holtek used came without slave labor, and that they actually came from Australia like most of the trade reported on Wikipedia. John informed me that, for that product and the year it came out, the coltain most likely came from Australia. Nowadays most companies get their coltan from mines in Africa, but they avoid business with countries like the Congo. However, the product from the Congo will be housed in the same warehouses as coltan from Australia or other parts of the world. In these storage facilities, it’s all just coltan, and with occasionally inaccurate weigh-in machines, Holtek might end up with a half a ton of the material from the Congo. Internal investigation shows that this happens for about lesser than or equal to .01% of their supply, and that’s low enough and out of their hands enough for them to keep their policy and how they’ve stuck to it on their homepage. I thanked John for the time and info he gave me, telling him that finding his document backup was like finding the next big ore vein for my project.

I never thought that my seemingly microscopic investigation would send me down such a deep rabbit hole, but it was a real eye-opening experience. All of my work hammered into my head the idea that there are real people behind every step of getting the tech we here in the first world can’t live without, and some of those steps aren’t pretty or nice or happy. I can’t get rid of all the illegal coltan mines that violate human rights with one blog post, but I can spread awareness to those around me, and I hope that helps plants the seeds of change for a more responsible tomorrow.

Reflection on Trolling

Taking a chance to look back on the trolling module, I’m kind of upset that I didn’t take the time to create something humorous like one of those videos I’ve linked to here on my website or in the trolling channel for our class’s Slack. Putting myself into the position of trolling for views could have been a lot of fun, and I would have loved to flex my video editing muscles to make a knockout end to the presentation I had.

With that in mind, I’m particularly pleased about the last slide I got to handle, “Tips on Avoiding Trolling,” because it was something I knew a lot about. To be up front, if you go on the web, there is no chance of avoiding trolling in some form. Commenting on a video or post, or even having any sort of political view sets one up to be offended or targeted in some way. The way of the web is delegated by clicks, views, and keystrokes, and controversy drives all of those things en masse. Describing someone as, “fake and gay,” in a comment on a video made by someone with a dedicated fanbase assures that someone will respond to it to rebut these egregious claims, but that’s just what the offending troll wants. The resulting flame war will drive traffic to the video and the offender’s profile, bringing more fans who will want to white knight their chosen web personality, but also conjuring up more trolls from the bowels of the Internet. This happens all the time, and with the bigger personas involved in trolling, no matter the type, major news outlets are even choosing to cover these instances as breaking news stories. There’s a lot of debate out there concerning real versus fake news, and there is no doubt in my mind that Internet trolls are going to have a hayday influencing bigger websites to rake through their muck concerning words you can’t use, symbols you can’t use, and views that make you a trash person, whilst somehow incorporating cats and inside jokes/memes from the depths of the web while doing it all, “For teh lulz!”

You can’t fight trolling as long as anonymity exists, and even if that were to be taken away, the extreme distances that we are all connected over can prevent real world consequences from happening.  There are people out there who wouldn’t hesitate to go to some guy’s house after he’s bragged about the size of his anatomy and remarked about how much someone’s mother has enjoyed it in a Call of Duty game, but even they lose traction after finding out that the foul-mouthed trog has an entire ocean between them. Trolls like these like to swing for the fences, targeting whoever they land a blow on first. People like these should just be ignored, for attention only feeds them and makes them stronger. At the same time, you can do your part to be considerate and put a decent amount of thought into what you post. With anonymity, you never know who you may be conversing with, and such that you might not know who you’re pissing off. You do something slightly pejorative on one message board, you call one League of Legends player’s build completely idiotic and nonsensical, and the next thing you know you’ve got someone tracking your IP and DDoSing your router so hard that it makes a 56k modem look like a deep space transmitter.footage hacker

When it comes down to it, going online and being trolled is complete RNG (random number generator), and you just have to hope that your number doesn’t come up for someone with unparalleled technological skill.

My Time with Interactive Fiction

I’ve been fiddling around with Twine for about five days now, spending the little free time I have reading tutorials and watching how-to videos on YouTube. Twine is one of those interactive fiction creators that requires almost no coding, but to create a more immersive experience, I’d suggest having some knowledge about CSS and HTML. I played around creating a scene from one of my favorite literary works, H.P. Lovecraft’s A Shadow Out of Time, where the character finds a lost city in the middle of the Western Australian desert, deep beneath the sands.

I decided to set my interpretation many, many years afterward, with my main character being Arthur Peaslee’s grandson, who receives his grandfather’s journal at his funeral. He then decides to set out and discover what his grandfather found all those years ago, and in the lost library city of Pnakotus is where my work begins. At the beginning of the work, I wanted to put some kind of sanity mechanic in place once the character begins to read the works of the library, these tomes containing hundreds of stone pages of recorded history from all points in the universe at all moments in time. As the player begins to explore the manuscript more and more, which I could continue to add entries to as my knowledge of actual history and capacity to invent something Lovecraftian both improve, there would be subtle things at first to suggest that maybe they’re reading something they shouldn’t be. Maybe the knowledge they are accessing has been hidden away for a reason, which would be reinforced by the appearance of flavor text such as, “You swear you hear a whisper in the distance,” or perhaps clips of eldritch symbols flashing across the screen. Eventually it would reach a point where the player character would be eaten by a shoggoth, another creation of Lovecraft’s, and the player would have to start over, hopefully navigating the manuscript more carefully. Ideally, I also would have like to add some kind of special ending that would be unlocked by reading specific entries from the interactive manuscript and using that knowledge to go down a different path. But, Twine has its limitations, and the low barrier to entry of coding knowledge has proven to be too much for me. Computer science has never been my thing, and it showed when I tried to add more complex paths to my story. Another important thing to mention is that Twine saves all records of your story to your web browser, so when you have a weekly dumping of that info, you might find yourself having to start from square one.

From the work I’ve done, I’ve discovered that the designers that make more intricate pieces of interactive fiction, such as Telltale’s The Walking Dead video games, there are so many deeply webbed and interconnected points in those stories that I can’t even begin to comprehend. I became confused just from Twine’s interface that eventually becomes a massive sprawl of passages and possible outcomes. I can’t imagine how commercially successful pieces must have several whiteboards of connections at their respective companies. This idea I have is something I’d like to revisit in the future, but I’d like to have a more tech savvy partner working with me, to help implement the system ideas I have when I have a bit more free time on my hands.

For those future wannabe-interactive storytellers, I have a few pointers:

  1. Don’t think too big for your first story
  2. Keep the cookies in your browser
  3. Develop your knowledge of CSS and HTML before diving in

Maximum Disrespect

At the moment, I don’t know what game I want to dive into utilizing the capture card I just installed. I want to get into making interesting/stupid videos about games, but nothing’s quite grabbed me, at least until I saw these two videos below. For Honor is coming out on Valentine’s Day, and features vikings, knights, and samurai in a massive continent-spanning war for honor (duh), resources, and supremacy. The combat system in the game has been hailed as fresh by the reviewers and forums I read say it’s very intuitive, easy to get started with but quite difficult, although satisfying, to master. But now I know that there seems to be a fair amount of cheese, and this footage from the beta shows a bunch of things I hope will still be fully released game. Finally I can get a sense of all of those crusades jokes I keep seeing passed around by spamming flip-kicks as a Peacekeeper and knocking people off walls in 1v1s. Well, I know that’s what my brother’s going to be doing.

These two videos showcase a bunch of funny tricks and some absolutely fantastic editing that is major inspiration for myself.  If you like what you see, consider looking at Iron Pineapple and yung maestro‘s other stuff and maybe subscribing. I bet they’ll appreciate it.