An emergency such as a fire, a bomb threat, a flood or a tornado can occur at any time. If an emergency happened in or near your tower facility, would you know what to do? Would your coworkers know? Do you have a plan for handling emergencies? In this program, we'll talk about the written plans and procedures that you should have in place at your facility. These plans, required by OSHA, tell you what to do to get out of a tower in the event of an emergency, when to do it, and who is responsible for what. This is your workplace, but you must treat it similar to the conditions of your home. We're going to focus on what to do to develop an occupant emergency plan or how to bring your present plan up to date. You'll need to identify who to call and to specify how to get out of your tower and where to go once you're outside. Your plan should also cover actions during an emergency, what to do, when to call appropriate personnel, and how to check and report on the safety of your people after they have evacuated the tower. After an emergency, you'll need to evaluate the effectiveness of your plan. It's important to determine how well the plan worked and whether you need to make any changes to it. If smoking is permitted anywhere in your tower facility, your emergency plan should include procedures for regular inspection and cleanup of these areas. Be sure to designate someone to be responsible for these procedures. Work out a maintenance schedule. Your plan must cover electrical hazards and what to do about such things as faulty or poorly maintained electrical wiring and equipment, exposed wires, dangerous quick fixes or installations, and crowded or unprotected wiring. Electrical hazards also include improperly wired or installed systems and appliances. Your plan should also address general housekeeping practices. Carelessness in this area may make an emergency more dangerous if people can't get through exit passageways. Include procedures for proper storage of any flammable products and for keeping traffic and fire equipment areas clear of obstructions at all times. You'll have no control over some other disaster situations that may require evacuation of your tower, things like storms and severe weather, explosions, bomb threats or suspicious mail packages, or actions of terrorist or political groups. But your Occupant Emergency Plan must also cover what to do in these kinds of emergencies. So a plan is an idea of what to do, how to do it and when to do it, thought out ahead of time. These ideas are then written down as procedures or guidelines for action. An Occupant Emergency Plan or OEP is designed to protect two things, people and property. It covers how to evacuate a facility in a fire or other emergency and how to safeguard the equipment and the building. OEPs include bomb and incendiary device threat plans, which tell you how to handle telephone threats or delivered packages that may be suspicious. And disaster plans, which cover what to do in a natural disaster or hazardous materials emergency. Now let's see what's really involved in developing an Occupant Emergency Plan. The first step is to analyze two critical elements, the structure, which is your tower and its occupants, your personnel. Let's begin with the tower. You should be very familiar with your particular facility, both inside and outside. Know the floor plan and the locations of all doors, stairways and exits. Know where all installed fire protection equipment is, the type of extinguishers available and who has been trained in their use. You should also know what kind of furnishings and equipment are inside your tower. Note potential problem areas. Blocked exits can cause dangerous delays in an emergency. An exit blocked from the inside prevents people from getting out of the tower safely. An exit blocked from the outside prevents people from getting clear of the tower building and dispersing safely once outside. Remember that air traffic control towers are unique in their design. They typically have only one way in and out at ground level. Additional exits may discharge to a room for balcony. So it's very important to keep these areas always accessible and clear of obstructions at all times. Make sure that all exits are clearly marked. The second critical element in emergency procedures planning concerns the personnel who work in a tower. A major objective of your Occupant Emergency Plan is to provide instructions to your people on how to exit the tower in an emergency and where to assemble safely for check-in and reporting. You should know who works in your tower, the kind of work they do and what they're capable of doing in an emergency. Now you're ready to develop your Occupant Emergency Plan. There are five required components. Specify a procedure for reporting any emergency. This may involve sounding an automatic alarm or activating an emergency organization and command center team. Either way, the goal is the same. Notify the appropriate personnel to set response actions in motion as quickly as possible. Specify the escape procedures your people are to follow to exit the tower. These should be written in the plan as step-by-step actions to take when the alarm sounds. This part of the plan should also identify the safe area outside the tower where people are to assemble when they exit. Refer to the sample procedures in your handbook for developing procedures for your particular tower. Develop appropriate procedures for critical operations shutdown. Because air traffic control is a critical operation, you'll need to specify how to notify and transfer control to another tower in an emergency situation. Next, develop a procedure to account for all personnel who may be in the tower on any given day. In an emergency, you must know who was working and who was visiting the tower that day. Everyone must be accounted for. Finally, identify all responsible persons. Designate an official with overall responsibility who will take charge in an emergency. This person will also supervise the development of the emergency procedures plan. Other designated positions may include an occupant emergency coordinator, a floor team coordinator, exit monitors, and a damage control team. If your occupant emergency plan contains all of these elements and you train your people to follow it, you'll meet the requirements for emergency preparedness. Be sure to use the information in your handbook to develop your plan. It contains helpful checklists and sample procedures you can use as guides. Although fire is the most common, your OEP can be applied in any emergency situation. Keep the plan posted in your tower so it will be available to everyone at all times. Be sure that people can quickly find the telephone numbers of the designated responsible persons and the local fire and rescue department. It's important to evaluate your emergency plan regularly and to update it as needed. Review it after every fire drill to assess how well your evacuation procedures worked. If you find any deficiencies, make changes promptly. Remember, a good plan answers the questions, who do I call? When do I call? How do I get out? What do I do? Where do I go? If you've got all those bases covered, you're in good shape. Once you've collected your information and developed procedures, keeping your plan current is easy. You may never have an emergency in your tower, but with this plan in place, you know you'll be well prepared.


Live from the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Splunk.com 2016, brought to you by Splunk. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and John Wall. And welcome back here on theCUBE, the flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV as we like to do as John Furrier so to extract the signal from the noise that a lot of noise here on the show floor at dot-com 2016, that's a good sign. Along with John, I'm John Walls. We're joined by two gentlemen from Defense Point Security, a big cyber security provider. Mike Flority, who is the vice president of security engineering, Mike, glad to have you with us. And Dwayne Watto is a security engineer at Defense Point. Dwayne, good to see you, sir. First off, the Fez, somebody at home might say, why, you know, why is he wearing the Fez? That really is, I'll let you tell more about it, but part of the Splunk Trust MVP program, you have earned that by acclimation of a pretty big user group with whom you work. So tell me a little bit more about that. Yeah, so the Splunk Trust, it's Splunk's community kind of ambassador thing. So the folks who are doing user groups or Splunk answers or participating in the chat stuff we do on Slack or maybe they publish a lot of code. Folks who are helpful in the community, Splunk gives the trust membership out every year to a select group of those to kind of let them represent the best of the community and what we're trying to do in terms of helping people. Well, congratulations. Thank you. On the honor, and Mike, I'm sure you're glad to have a guy like that on your piece, right? It's well worth it, man. This guy is one of our hardest workers, so definitely. I said about the community, we were talking about last night on our wrap up in this morning with the security announcements that Splunk is kind of, has a nice trajectory and it's kind of a trajectory you wouldn't have thought Splunk would be at if a few years ago when they started, but the growth in the aspect of security has made Splunk a perfect enabler to come at this new dynamic of security. And they talked about it last year, so it's not new to the strategy, but what is new is the role of the community's playing and what's interesting and what we're observing and reporting is that Splunk not only has a product for security, but the communities are coming together organically across company, okay? Oh, absolutely. Can you guys add some color to that? Because this is a brand new industry dynamic that actually is changing the game on how people are configuring their assets and the data assets in particular. Yeah, so I guess I'll take that one. So, I mean, in general, the idea is, and you know, our company in general is a security company, right? And that's what we do and that's what we excel at. But the idea is that if you have a tool that can go do a business context and a business use case, that business use case is what you can drive security through. So we wholeheartedly believe in the Splunk as a tool for everyone and the ability to aggregate all of this data and make intelligent decisions off of that. That's the reason why we are so invested in the tool set itself as well as have put a lot of time and a lot of people like Dwayne who are going out there and kind of being these large-scale ambassadors. So to your point or to your question, the reason that you're seeing that trend is because security tools can't just be security tools anymore. There's no time for just a SIM. There has to be a SIM and a way to go build business intelligence out of things. And you guys are in the middle of all the action. Can you take a minute and just explain what you guys do and then how you guys are interacting with Splunk? Yeah, absolutely. So we are DefensePoint Security. We're a security services company based out of Alexandria, Virginia. We're about 200 individuals. Security capital of the world. Yeah, security has security capital of the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we actually have both, you know, federal and commercial side contracts. We do a lot of different things with Splunk. Specifically, we have large-scale DHS contracts in a couple other places where we build these things out and actually build this operational intelligence kind of like what I'm talking about. Overall, our focus is, again, wholly- But you're directly with the customer. Your customer is the Splunk's end customer. Yeah, correct, correct. So we are only a services company. All we do is services. We've been around for about six years. Like I said, we're 200 people, right? So we're growing very rapidly in what we're doing. But again, it's only on security services side and that allows us to kind of be like a trusted advisor to the government. So therefore we can make these decisions and help the government with these technology decisions in a way that's unbiased. We're not reselling a product so therefore we can make the best decision for the government. You must have a great pipeline with customers, obviously, but the federal side, no, end commercials. Perfect storm, massive growth. I'm sure you guys have got a lot of hiring needs. Watching, great opportunities. We're at 1.4 million jobs open right now in cyber. It's incredible. A lot of machine learning, a lot of cool tech stuff. How are you guys deploying Splunk? And how does it, I mean, you can't really reveal some of the secrets, but what are some of the use cases where Splunk's winning for you guys? And how does that impact the customer and how are they operationalizing it, if you will? Yeah. Well, some of our, we've got customers who do Splunk in the very large where, you know, multi terabyte today and it's kind of driving their whole security operations.  You know, and it can be a challenge just because, you know, any tool you invest in, you've got to have a certain amount of people to also support that tool. And even though there's several thousand customers here this week, it's really hard to find good Splunk people right now. And I know for us, we're looking for people all the time. We've got customers that are looking for people all the time and it's difficult. So what are the traffic flows on security? Obviously, you know, that's a big issue. How do you guys look at that? How does, how do you guys talk to customers around how to manage the attack vectors? Is it a flow game? I mean, so attack vectors is an interesting thing, right? It's, again, it's your contextualizing to the landscape of a specific entity, whether it be federal, commercial or whatever it is. So, you know, from a flow perspective, you have to take into account a couple different things. Number one is the business value. I mean, we're always going to harp on that because we understand that that's, you know, how we're funded. That's how we have our jobs is the business relevance is because security in and of itself is something that costs money. It's not a money maker. However, it is something that prevents the money since they're high. Exactly, right? Problems important. Yeah, and we've seen things in recent memory, right? Where you have Target, you have all these large reaches to OPM, all these different things that have occurred. And the idea is to build a tool set that, again, has business relevance and that we can actually take and go make into something that has, you know, security expertise individuals to go get that in there. So, yeah. Yeah, we've heard a lot about disruptive thinking and new approaches to security. You guys haven't been around long enough to have an old way of doing things, right? You know, in the six years. But in terms of that, generally speaking, when you talk about the community, when you talk about what's going on, future trends and all that. Does that paradigm shift work for you? Does that make sense that it's about, you know, looking at the problem maybe through a different prism because the old way of doing things is this is not cutting it right now. Yeah, absolutely. So, I think that the big thing, and you can correct me if I'm wrong too, I think that the big thing here is that you will always see paradigm shifts because of the fact that that's how technology works. Technology is innately a thing where every five years you need to rethink on how you're doing things. Big data analytics may or may not be the end of that paradigm, right? The idea of being able to take data, again, data's the king. If you have data, then you have the ability to make rational decisions and objective decisions as opposed to subjective side. That data and being able to basically munch that into things that are necessary for different operational units is really where, you know, the industry's going. As opposed to pure SIM or everything else that used to be there, it's not that way anymore. It's the ability to take a lot of data and build, you know, we have a phrase that we've coined, it's called high confidence content. We build high confidence content for our individuals based upon the amount of data that we can get in. And to your original point last time, that's how we actually do things. The flow of data, the ability to make decisions, the decision making tree is all based upon the data that we have and from a big data analytic perspective, making a security use case out of that, so. The data's critical obviously, you need the data. And you have so much data and I'm really excited about the machine learning stuff. You know, I know that Splunk's put a huge investment in machine learning and I'm really excited to see the features in 6.5 that enable that more and see how that works out from a security use case just because there's, you sit as an analyst and you look at this, even though you have a great big data tool, you're still inundated with things to go look at, research, review. We need something to help make that better and it seems like machine learning is right now our very best bet at that. We had Rahman who was the startup that they invested in, they made that announcement on Monday. We were having a great chat and one of the things we talked about was, and he mentioned, and this was back to the machine learning, things that's exciting is the unsupervised nature of these IT operations wants the threats in. They have their way, right? So, you know, it's a cat and mouse game and so like John said about this new way is, you got to beat the cat and mouse game with a better cat and mouse game so one of the things that Splunk has is data. So this integration of data and syncing data becomes a huge challenge for customers. So machine learning is a nice new tool. The unsupervised ones, I'm not sure I haven't looked at the kit yet but if they have that unsupervised machine learning. And at the core of that too, right? Is the people that are doing that, right? It's the people that are building that intelligence behind it. So not only is the tool set awesome but you have the individuals who are making that smart decision behind it. Yeah, and there's no panacea. So I mean, you're at a great point. I want to get your thoughts on this so you guys can share your some insight. There's no machines can't do it all by themselves. You got to have a human machine relationship. And this is where training the machines if you will kind of an AI fantasy way becomes the future path and the machine learning is a step there. What is the role of the configuration of the human involved? Because the IT ops guys want to automate everything. They want to use scale as their friend, right? So that's cool. How do you guys advise clients? How do you guys deploy? How does IT ops leverage the IT personnel to maximize their execution? Well, to me, when we talk about good security, good security is really doing the little things right. If you talk about automated things.  If you don't have your patching stuff down right then you should focus on that. That's core to being able to keep things secure. You've got to know what's on your network. You know, all the things that the Controls tell you, they're very fundamental, but you have to be able to execute on those fundamentals. And the problems that customers have is they don't have enough bodies to run the tools to keep all of those fundamentals executed with basically 100% actors. Are there too many tools out there?  I've kind of, we hear that as like, damn, another tool. Another training class or another tool that promises, I mean, it's a tsunami of platforms and tools. I think that, yes and no. Too many tools means that people are trying to innovate. Innovation is good. The problem is is that when everyone is selling and everyone is trying to make their profit and that's what the job is, that's where you start running into that there's too many tools conversation. Oh, well, this is the next best thing because of this and here's the amount of money. It really comes down to, it really is a 80% role for me, right? It's, I want to have, if I've done 80% of the security for my organization, that means that I'm running, I'm doing stuff and I'm more than zero. That's kind of a phrase that a good friend of mine, our VP of R&D, Jason Ashbaugh of Coin, it's more than zero security. A lot of times we always look at, we need to be perfect in everything. It's not realistic. It's not how things work. It's not how businesses work. We try to do the best that we can based upon that and basically the tool inundation there, yes, there's a lot of them. And yes, some will come and go, but that is how we innovate at the same time. So it's not too many tools, but it is a lot of tools and you need the people, again, going back to the people conversation to help make that decision and to have that unbiased decision for the political landscape. I love the fundamentals conversations. We like to use sports analogies. It's like a baseball team.  Fundamentals are really critical. So that's cool and that's kind of like how you evaluate your team and have reps. Hey, we're having a practice. Security practice, hackathon or whatever. No, this is going on. People are doing this, it's really cool. The question though is now what's next for you guys? So as you guys walk out of the dot-com this year, the business is moving, probably Mach 100 for you guys, I can imagine how fast it's moving. What's next? What do you guys take back to the ranch? What do you guys operationalize? What are the things that you're doing now that you're focused on? Yeah, so in general, so we have one of the largest, in my opinion, and based on what we've done.  And we're doing a huge investment in people for Splunk. And again, nothing about our business is going to change. Our business is people. Our business, that is our product. We will never be a product reseller. We are the people who go recommend the correct product for the right job. Splunk is most oftentimes that product. And to take it back, what we're doing is we're also building in the, again to the business context side, the ITSIs, the UBA, the user behavior analytics side. Those things that are kind of the next step of this.  We've done, customers will have us do some really awesome, but sometimes crazy customizations. And it's really fun work, but it's very challenging to figure out, okay, how do I take this very malleable tool that is Splunk that is the, kind of the tool over all the tools and force it in a direction that, maybe the product team has not, they didn't think of exactly that use case. There's always a new use case. It blows me away about Splunk and what covering them for so many years is that, this is a zillion use cases. The creativity is interesting, right? And you bring up the point about personnel and fundamentals earlier. Also a mismatch in sports, having the wrong player in the wrong position. So deploying the right resource from the wrong problem is a lot of people make that mistake. Splunk can solve that problem because if you can. You wouldn't put a defensive tackle by receiver, right? I mean, like that. Unless you're the Patriots in the quarterback. That's true, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Why receiver? Personnel utilization is really critical. You want the right people on the right problems, right? I mean, that's at the end of the day, one big thing, but if you automate with Splunk, and that's something that I'm really proud of the way that we do that stuff. I'm not originally a security person. I came into this from the IT ops world. I was a sysad man for a really long time, focused on the engineering and the servers and so forth. And it took these guys a long time to convince me that, no, that's really relevant to what we did. You must have natural talent to go, because that's all my security friends. He's the right player in the right position. And we've got other folks on our team who started out doing security for a living, and we work really well side by side together. My co-worker George and I, we've got a talk tomorrow where this is the third Conf in a row that we've spoken together. And we've put together some really good examples of how to use Splunk in occasionally obscure ways. And there's always a good- Cultural blending, right? I mean, you're bringing together two worlds, right, almost. And he is much better at the security side of things than I am. And I am much better at the operation side than he is, but we work really well together. And frankly, both of our customers benefit from that. Well, it's a good team. It's a working, obviously, defense point.  Yeah, yeah. Thanks for joining us and Dwayne again. Congratulations on the honor. Thank you. It's been such an important part of that community. I know that Splunk community can't exist without people like you collaborating and helping. So good job on that. Thank you. And that's one of the things that I really like about the community. We don't, you know, it's not, well, I work for Defense Point and these guys over here work for another company that does Splunk services. We help each other all the time. It's a new social network. Yeah. And it's not like we look at him and go, I can't help Dave because he works for them. We don't, you know, the community goes beyond that level of... It's not Red Sox Yankees, but it's... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Gentlemen, thank you again for joining us. You guys are really unique in this Splunk world. You bet. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you much. Thank you, guys. You can attend us here at .com. 2016 is from Orlando.


It's okay that you love Babel. Inspiration from, and that is inherently ridiculous to me. You can't expect me not to pick it apart when it makes no sense. Babel by RF Kwong was the one of the biggest, most hyped releases of the year. Something told me that I, for some reason, I didn't think that I would love it that much, but I was still feeling the hype. I was excited. I ordered the Waterstones edition. It's a very pretty book, I think we can all agree. The one thing that I think we can all agree about is that every edition of Babel is gorgeous, which it makes me sad that I did not like this book because I would love to prominently display this beautiful book on my shelf. But alas, I don't normally script book reviews. I don't normally put a bunch of disclaimers on my book reviews, but this book being the book that it is, I feel that that's necessary. So, disclaimers.  And it's okay that you love Babel. And if you don't wanna hear somebody criticizing it, then just don't watch this video, okay? Next disclaimer, I love the idea and ideas in this book or that this book was attempting to handle. I think the idea of exploring colonialism and bringing that into dark academia, in general, that I think is a fantastic idea. And I think that those ideas are pretty compatible. The positions espoused by this book, the arguments made by this book, these are positions that I largely agree with. The historical time period and everything to do with it, this book is drawing inspiration from, it will become clear later why I put quotes around that. I do think it's a fascinating period of history. It has a lot of darkness, tragedy, it's layered, it's complex, generally speaking, great fodder for a compelling novel. Disclaimers about me going into this book, I previously did have some issues with Kuang's writing style in the Paviwark trilogy. I liked the first book the best. And thereafter, I felt that the characters were extremely one note, particularly the main character who seemed to do all of her growing and changing in the first book reached her final form by the end of it and then just kind of stayed like that. And for me, as a character-driven reader, I found that incredibly boring. I'm here to see how these characters are affected by this story, how the characters react to the events that happen around them. I had hoped that the character work would be stronger in Babel because this is a later book. Authors are always hopefully growing and improving. Dark academia, by its very nature, is, in my opinion, or should be, much, much more character-driven than a big war epic, which is more what the Paviwark is. So while I had trepidation about this, I had reason to believe that it could be a lot better in Babel, and it should be. And lastly, the biggest issue with me going into this book, setting it up for failure ultimately, I think, is the fact that the blurb for the book states that it is a thematic response to the secret history and a tonal response to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Now, if I'm gonna speak entirely candidly, that 100% rubbed me the wrong way. I think it's incredibly egotistical to say something like that, to draw comparisons to books like that, to other well-loved, well-regarded, and much revered, some would say masterpieces. To say that you drew inspiration from that, or that you were inspired by that, okay, I guess, you're inviting the comparison then, but okay. But to say that you are responding to it, insinuating there is something wrong with it that you're gonna set right, and to basically put your book, setting it at a level with those two other books, the egotism of that really, really irritated me. And for people now drawing comparisons to these books, I have heard people say, oh, it's not fair to compare it to the secret history. It's not fair to compare it to Jonathan Strange or Mr. Norrell. Well, normally I would say, okay, I guess that's, I guess, but in this case, she invited the comparison herself by pitching the book this way. And if you're gonna compare your book and say it's a response to these well-revered, modern classics, you better walk the walk. So picking up Babel, more so than I would have, if she had not said that, I was basically thinking, okay, prove yourself to me now. You've said all this about yourself. You've said all this about this book. I have pretty high expectations now, which you have, you've set that bar for yourself. So I feel like that's not really my fault if I had much, much higher expectations of this book because you didn't say, hey, I wrote a book and I think it's pretty good, here you go. You said, I'm responding to these great classics. I'm gonna show them how it's done. So, okay, you better, you better have something great here. The next thing I wanna talk about is something that is, I think important for you to know about me as a reader. And it is to do with magic words as a magic system. So Babel does use magic words more or less as its magic system. And this is a type of magic system that I, at all times, have a great deal of problems with. Not just in Babel, although Babel, I think, is particularly bad. But this being your magic system is already going to be a hard sell for me. So I wanna explain why that is and what I mean, I guess, by magic words because I discovered that people didn't automatically know what I meant by that when I said that elsewhere. So magic words meaning in a fantasy story where the saying of a set of words, a word out loud is what results in a magic thing happening. Obviously there's a lot of different versions of this, a lot of different authors handle it in different ways and the reason for why this is working the way that it is varies a great deal. But in essence, magic words is exactly what it sounds like. It's, I said Alakazam and because I said Alakazam, a magic thing happened. So why do I have a big, big, big problem with magic words? So magic of any kind in any book and any speculative project requires a pretty substantial amount of suspension of disbelief. And that being the case, my reading of it and the way it is often handled in books is where it comes across almost as a otherworldly science that is not completely or fully understood by its users be it physics, chemistry or biology. So physics think like elemental magic. Chemistry would be like magical elixirs and potions. Biology is magical bodies. So when the character, they themselves, are innately magical. We can understand this as there is something about this body in this environment that we can't really say that that's impossible because we humans in this plane do not have whatever it is in this body that makes them able to influence the world around them. So that's in essence how I understand it. And if they say it's magic in their world, okay, I mean, historically speaking, magic was used as a justification for why a lot of things we didn't understand how they worked. So that's essentially how I think of magic and other stories where something is making this work. And if you don't know how it works fully but you're able to get the result that you want because you do these steps although you don't exactly know why that works the way that it does just that it does. That doesn't mean to me that there is no explanation for it in this universe. This is possible somehow. So just because they don't know exactly why it functions this way doesn't mean that there isn't an explanation for it at a atomic chemical, whatever level. And that's why I'm able to suspend disbelief because even if that's kind of far-fetched to think that, you know, like a magical body has the ability to levitate. I mean, like that does seem far-fetched, but okay, like I don't know that there's not something in this body that makes them levitate. So I guess they can levitate. There's something in their body that makes them able to do that. It seems far-fetched that a body would have the capability to affect wind and water but I don't know, I don't have that in my body but you're telling me this body can, okay? So there's something in their body that enables them to do that.  You're telling me something in the natural world is sentient, understands language and is nitpicky and requires language to be used in a specific order under precise circumstances such as, you know, a spoken during a full moon or while holding a wand after giving blood or whatever. But it's the saying of words that then something in the natural world is like, aha, I hear you saying the right words in the right order. It is time to do the thing that you require. That is inherently ridiculous to me. Again, like this differs from the other kinds of magic I described because a magical object, a magical elixir, a magical body, there is the possibility that you could interpret this as being scientifically discoverable as scientifically explainable if it was studied long enough at a, you know, a molecular level, perhaps, that there is some property to this object that doesn't exist in our world that influences things. There's some property of this magical body that doesn't exist in our world that influences things. But to say that words spoken out loud are understood by wind or water or whatever it is that you're controlling with your words is ridiculous to me. Now if magic words are used as a way for a magic user to kind of focus the mind, then it becomes more like a mantra, so to speak. I can buy that because then it's, again, it's more the magical body, but then they require deep focus and concentration and the saying of these magic words helps to put them in the right mind to tap into this thing that's in them that makes them able to do magic. But a spell cast via spoken or written word, that's just dumb to me. So do I hate every single book that involves or uses or relies on magic words as a magic system? No, no I don't. There's a lot of books that I like that do have magic words in them. Most of the time, either I like the book despite that, there's not enough other things going for it that I forgive that about it, and or it has in it some mitigating factor, either acknowledging in the text in some way the kind of inherent absurdity of this as a magic system, or if it's told in a way that it's clearly relying on traditional understandings of magic, it is meant to be read as kind of folkloric and the magic system itself is not being described or explained or invented by the author. For example, like, you know, which is reading from a grimoire, this is a very traditional understanding of magic, so if you're just kind of relying on this general traditional understanding of that, well, not my favorite, I'll understand that what you're doing is playing on this traditional idea of a witch, not inventing a magic system in which we read words off of these a favor and magic happens. Examples of books that I love that kind of acknowledge the inherent absurdity of that as a magic system are Harry Potter and the Simon Snow books. Jinky Rowling's awful, but I did enjoy Harry Potter, so, and it does use magic words, but early on in the books, magic is often kind of tongue in cheek. The names of spells is kind of plain for a laugh. It's kind of a joke a lot of the time. Later on in the series, actually the books get quite serious and I feel like that's when they kind of lose it because you've set up a lot of things to be kind of nonsense, and now we're supposed to take it super seriously, which is kind of, there's a lot of reasons the later Harry Potter books don't work for me that well, but that's one of them. You know, having a spell that's Oculus Reparo to fix someone's glasses, I mean, that's kind of inherently kind of silly. It's meant to be read that way. And it's doing also the thing of playing on tradition. So it's not that she's invented an entire magic system. She's playing for a laugh. Again, the idea that witches and wizards have hats and they do potions and like just lots and lots of traditional understandings of magic are just kind of playing off of that. That's what it's doing. And it's not really taking that seriously. The mechanics of it aren't really described because that's not really what it's trying to do. And then Simon Snow is basing itself on Harry Potter, which is basing itself on these things. So, and Simon Snow is itself kind of playing Harry Potter for a laugh and Harry Potter plays magic for a laugh. And so, so there you go. But that being said, the magic system in the Simon Snow books genuinely makes more sense than that in Harry Potter or that in Babel. I'm not joking about that. It does make more sense. I'm not saying it's a super amazing, brilliant hard magic system that is up there with anything Sanderson could invent, although I also didn't have problems with Sanderson magic systems. But anyway, no, I'm not saying that, but I'm saying like that's how bad the Babel magic system is because the one in the joke book carry on makes more sense. Another example is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the book that she's supposedly responding to. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell acknowledges the inherent absurdity in magic words, how they magic system, and in a lot of the magic that it's doing, it kind of plays it sardonicly kind of tongue where the characters themselves of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell themselves, they are kind of ridiculous figures. And it's a lot of sarcasm and a lot of sort of witty ribbing throughout the book, making fun of British etiquette and things like that. And again, it's doing the thing of playing off of traditional understandings of magic, English historical ideas of magic, of lore and myth surrounding magic users such as Merlin and things like that. And playing on those ideas, magic is never explained in this book because the practice of magic is itself acknowledged to be kind of ridiculous. The magic users themselves are kind of ridiculous. And what the book is really about is different kind of approaches to thinking, different approaches to pursuit and scholarly study. The idea that Mr. Norrell is like, you have to do it by the rules, you have to read the book, you have to do it by the manual. And that Jonathan Strange is the wild whimsical one that invents out of whole cloth. And it's like, who cares what the rule book says? I do whatever I want. It's about that dichotomy, not about the actual mechanics of how they are actually doing magic. Lord of the Rings is again presented where magic is not the focal point. It exists in the world. It is presented more as myth and folklore. It is presented as an unknowable mystery. Sometimes there is a speaking of a magical word, but this is not what is predominantly happening in the narrative. This is not what our most of our main characters are doing. And the mechanics of that are not got into because again, it feels more like ancient lore about magical beings and that kind of thing. Not about a magic system that is understood and has rules. So let's talk about Babel. So for anyone that wants to hear my thoughts about Babel, but without spoilers because they just don't want to read the book, I'm gonna talk about it non-spoiler now. And then after that, I will go into some spoilers because I feel that I need to to fully explain why problems with this. In my opinion, Babel is an essay in novel form. And if you're fine with that, you'll probably love it. If this were an essay, making these same points and arguments, I'd probably love it because these are points and arguments that I agree with and they are generally speaking well-made. But I require novels to be good at the novel side of things. And in my opinion, Babel almost entirely fails at that side of things. So broadly speaking, without getting into spoilery specifics, how does it fail at being a novel? First and foremost, the thing that's the biggest pain point for me as a character-driven reader is the characterization or the lack thereof. The characters in this book, if they can be called that, are predominantly vehicles through which the author then delivers arguments and observations. And she wants the reader to hear, regardless of whether it makes sense for that character to have thought that or noticed that or said that. I think the pacing of this book, it feels slow, mainly I think because I just don't feel any investment in the characters, but ultimately I would say the pacing is rushed. It just feels slow because I find it boring. But it's actually quite rushed. It feels like it is rushing to get to the conclusion of the argument of this essay. The world building is pretty much non-existent. This reads like historical fiction with the silver magic and an institute called Babel just shoved in there, but then everything else around that remains exactly the same as historical fiction would be. This is another huge pain point for me specifically, being the reader that I am. I have huge problems with this in many books. Again, Babel's not alone. Babel's not the only book that I'm mad at for doing this. There are lots of books that I have vocally criticized. Even one set in entirely separate, speculative, invented world. So it's not even set in our real world. I've often criticized books for not actually thinking through the ramifications and consequences of elements that they've introduced into their world, into their story, particularly magical elements. How they would change everything. There's a butterfly effect to introducing a world-altering element, especially like magic. If you introduce this to your world, then in my opinion, you need to think through how this would affect everything. This would affect the economy, the culture, the religion. This would affect day-to-day habits. This would affect manners and customs and social structure. And in the case of historical fantasy or alternate history fantasy, the introduction of something as huge as this silver magic would or should alter the course of history. But in Babel, it doesn't. Basically, anything that actually happened in history still happens the same way, but we swap in a silver magic explanation for the exact same thing happening. So according to Babel, the existence of silver magic and the Babel Institute has almost no effect on the course of history, which just impedes my suspension of disbelief. And it's also irritating to me because it's lazy that you haven't thought through how this would change the world because it absolutely would. And if you're telling me that it doesn't change and that the course of history went exactly the same way, then why should I care about silver magic at all? Because apparently it doesn't affect the world at all because the course of history would remain the same with or without it. Which leads me then to the magic system, which I will get into more specifics about in the spoilery section, in case you think it's spoilery to hear explained the actual workings of that magic system. So I'll save it for the spoiler section. But generally speaking, the magic system, I've already explained that magic words are not a thing that I buy into. You can get away with it under certain circumstances in my opinion. I've been told that I should regard this magic system as a metaphor and not focus so much on the mechanics of it. But it is Kuang who is focused on the mechanics of it. If you want your magic system to be regarded as a metaphor to be read that way, then that's how it should be written. With just enough information for people to understand the gist of what you're suggesting is happening, how this is affecting people, what people think about this, what they're doing about it. Or if Kuang spends a ton of time explaining the mechanics of this magic system, it is a huge part of the book, going into detail about how this supposedly works. She explains it and re-explains it and re-re-re-explains it. So if she's focusing so much of the word count and page count on the mechanics of this magic system, you can't expect me not to pick it apart when it makes no sense. I already used Lord of the Rings as an example, but Lord of the Rings now specifically as concerns the ring, the main kind of focal point of the story. The magic of the ring more or less is a metaphor and Tolkien doesn't spend any time explaining the mechanics of the one ring because that's not the point of the story. The ring is evil, the ring represents power, the ring represents temptation, it represents corruption. And so that's just what it is. Like the ring just is those things. We don't go into, oh well, because it's made out of this and under the right light, and if you wear it like this, and if you touch it like that, and if you inscribe it like this, and if you made another one, then it would react to it like, we don't go into all that because that's not the point of the story. The ring is a symbol and we don't go into detail about the science behind how the magic of the ring works. Whereas the silver magic of Babel, the mechanics of it are gone into in great detail and the details of it are really ridiculous in my opinion. So either you think this is a brilliant magic system and then we can argue about that, or it should not have been described in such detail if it should be read as a metaphor. But in my spoilery section, I'll go into why I believe she refused to write it vaguely because it wouldn't allow her to do very specific things that she was determined to do with this narrative. Lastly, for my non-spoiler section, is I don't think this is Dark Academia. Now there's a, I don't think there is one definition of what Dark Academia is, but I have arrived at my definition largely through my Dark Academia project. If you didn't see that and you are interested in it, I'll link down below. Basically, I picked up a bunch of books that I saw listed as Dark Academia and I love the secret history. So I've been on the hunt for a book that would do something equivalent to be just as good as, could keep company with the secret history. So I was trying to find another book that could. And for the most part, they all failed, but in doing this, I realized what I think my definition of Dark Academia is. One of the biggest things to me is that Dark Academia is not a dark book that has academia in it. It is not a book about academia that also has some darkness in it. No, to me, Dark Academia means that dark is the adjective describing the academia. And this does not mean, again, to me, that it just means that you murdered your school chum, but it had nothing to do with your academic studies.  So it's academia. No, the darkness may lead to murder, but the darkness should come from and be the result of the academia. So in Donna Tart's Secret History, her students in that book were obsessed to the point of murder about Greek classics and the study of Greek classics and the living out of the principles of Greek classics. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, she wrote about a man who's obsessed with animating dead flesh. So it's sort of the science counterpoint to the classic students in the Secret History. This is Dark Academia. It is an obsession with the thing you are studying and that obsession by its very nature is dark because it's not good to be obsessed with something. It leads to extreme behavior. Babel, by contrast, whether it's good or not aside, it's about socioeconomic revolution, which happens to be told from the perspective of students at an academic institution. That school is, in many ways, at the center of colonialism and that's what the book is focused on. Colonialism, not on the darkness of pursuing academia. Dark academia, Timmy, also should mean that it is intensely character-driven. How could it not be? It is about a character or a group of characters so deep in their studies, so obsessed with their studies that this has dark consequences. So that is, by necessity, an introspective and character-driven story. But Babel is not character-driven. In my opinion, the character-working Babel is pretty abysmal. So to conclude the non-spoilers section, if you don't care about world-building, if you don't define dark academia the way that I do, if you don't care about a magic system making sense, if you don't care about good characterization, you might very well love Babel. And if you do care about those things, you might also love Babel and we can disagree about whether or not it fails in any of these categories. So moving on then to spoilers. Since I've spent so much time alluding to it, let's talk about the magic system first. For anyone that has not read it or that did read it and was understandably confused, as far as I can gather from my reading of Babel and from discussing Babel with other people who also read it, the magic system works something like this. Magic is accomplished through silver, not magical silver, just regular old silver. It is accomplished through translation. So a word in one language is inscribed on one side of a silver bar and the translation of that word into a different language is inscribed on the other side of that bar. It is accomplished through things being lost in translation. So when this word pair is inscribed on either side of this bar, something is missing in that translation. Some element of this word, some secondary or implicit meaning or implication of the one word that is absent in the translated form of that word into different language. Magic is only possible through the common understanding of words by which I mean you cannot just invent a language, you cannot use a dead language. It has to be words that are commonly used by people in these ways to mean these things but it can only be accomplished by a scholar who deeply understands the history and etymology of the words that they are native speakers of and do commonly use. So when a bar is activated, the scholar that is doing the activating, they have to have both a native understanding of these words, i.e. they dream in these languages. They also have to have an etymological historical understanding of all of the nuances and layers of meaning in those words so that when they speak this word paralleled, the thing that is lost in translation will become activated by the silver. And lastly, a belief it is accomplished through proximity, although that is unclear. It does not appear in the book that silver needs to be touching the thing that it is affecting and later on it seems that silver does not necessarily even need to be near the thing that it is affecting. How do you direct the power of the silver at or towards the thing that you intend to affect? I couldn't tell you. So my problems with this magic system are many fold, some of which are to do with the mechanics of it and some of which are to do with the thematic implications of it. For the silver magic system to work, the way that I understand that it does, silver itself, the metal, it has to understand human languages, understand the nuances of human languages. It has to understand what is the current common usage of those words by people right now. It not only understands the spoken word but also the written word because it functions only when both are combined. The writing has to be etched onto it so it has to understand the written word that is etched onto it but it has to be spoken aloud so it has to hear the word that it is etched upon it. So I don't know why silver needs this or how silver could need this or how silver could possibly scientifically understand all of this but it does, which I think is ridiculous. But not only does it understand all of these languages and understand both written and spoken word, it also has the power to influence the natural world in basically infinite ways because whatever it is that is lost in translation will materially become manifest by the silver. So it has the power to affect mood, it has the power to affect nature, it has the power to affect physics, it has the power to affect the weight and mass of something, the speed of it, it can cause explosions, it can do an infinite number of things simply because it understands human speech and written word. Silver does all of that. So how is the silver magic applied in the context of the novel? Well, people have to study in-depth histories and etymologies of the words so that they can come up with these match pairs that have a key thing missing that is lost in translation, something that would be useful and actionable, but the magic only works if these languages are in common usage in the present day. So why wouldn't anybody who speaks these languages be able to just do the magic? Why would etymology be important if this is how it works? Well, because Kuang wants to tell you about the history of words. So that's how it works. But so then why include the rule about it needing to be in common usage with these meanings? Well, because if she didn't have that rule, then someone could say, why didn't they just make up a language? Why didn't they use Vulcan? Why didn't they use Dothraki? Why don't they just make something up and then you could have infinite match pairs? No, no, we have to use real languages. Why do we have to use real languages? Because they have to be in common current usage in these forms. So then why do we study etymology? Well, because I want to tell you all about these neat little nuggets of fun information about etymological history of words. But these rules are incompatible here magic system. So why have a magic system that has incompatible rules? RFKwan couldn't think of a magic system that was based on etymology that wasn't easily then broken by the why don't you just make up a language? Okay, but so then why do the words need to be inscribed in silver of all things? Like, what is up with that? Well, my understanding of this because it does not make any sense otherwise. So this explanation is the only reason I can think of that actually sounds legit as to why this is the case. Well, it's because historically speaking, silver was important. There was historical significance to the trade of silver during the colonial British empire. So silver was chosen not because it would make for a great foundation for a magic system, but because RFKwan wanted to make a point about the history of colonialism, about greed and exploitation. Now, there was a way to make this work, I think. You couldn't make a magic system that is based on silver being a requirement and thereby play off of the already existing and history importance of silver in trade. But then that's not really compatible with this other thing you're doing of translation. And she was determined to make it do both. And she's unwilling to give up either part of the magic system. You could have a magic system about translation, but I don't know why you need silver for it. You could have a magic system that's based on silver, but then I don't know how translation would factor into that. And she could have come up with two different things going on simultaneously in this world that might in some way be connected to each other, but are ultimately different things. Whereas silver is somehow important to magic and colonialism and translation is also important to magic and colonialism. But while connected, they are separate things. You could do something like that, probably pretty effectively. But she was determined to have silver by itself be the linchpin of all of it, whether that makes sense or doesn't. Those are my problems with the mechanics of how the silver magic works, which is nonsense. I'm sorry, but it's nonsense. But I have an even bigger problem with this magic system on a thematic level. This book is ostensibly about the power of the language, about the nuance of a language, about how translation in itself is more art than science, how you could never perfectly translate something from one language into another, that what a translator does is interpret and whatever they translate is ultimately a product of their interpretation of the meaning of the thing they have translated. Frankly, I found that quite vindicating, that element of the themes of this book because I've been in hot water because I dared to suggest that I don't feel like I've truly read the works of authors if I have not read the original words they wrote, that I'm reading the translation's interpretation of them. And so if I say that I love or hate that book, I ultimately don't feel like I truly know if I love or hate that book because I might just love or hate the translator's interpretation of it. And I will never really know unless I learn the actual language and read it for myself. This book driving home the point that, yeah, there is no one-to-one translation. You can do your best guess or your best attempt at kind of trying to get the same meaning over or the same type of thing over so that it would be understandable, but it will never be a one-to-one. I completely agree with that. Like I said, I agree with a lot of points of this book. But this is where the magic system completely bucks against the very theme of this book because for a book, it's about the infinite nuance and changing nature of language, about the way that language changes depending on who speaks it, where they speak at the context of it, how it gets shaped and changed by culture, by meeting with other languages, about how languages then fracture off into being different languages when they encounter neighboring languages and a whole new language is formed from that, how all of this nuance and gray area and mess, essentially, that is language, which I do think is fascinating and that is absolutely true about language and that is one of the most fascinating things about studying language. But in this book, the magic system foils language down to a hard science with this nonsense of silver. Silver in this universe is the arbiter of the precise and exact meanings of words, whether they be in one language or a different language, and with that precision narrows down the exact thing that is lost in translation and then physically manifests that thing. There is no debate to be had about what is the actual meaning of these words, what other nuances there are to these words, how different people interpret these words in different ways. No silver decides.  It knows all of the ways people have ever mean it and how they currently mean it and silver decides the thing that is missing is this and therefore I explode. This silver magic is the antithesis of linguistic nuance. Moving on then to characterization or again the lack thereof as well as the plot. I kind of combine those two because I feel like they do go hand in hand because better characterization would have necessitated the plot to go slightly differently. As I said, the characters function as author inserts, just vehicles to deliver arguments and observations that it makes no sense for them to be espousing, makes no sense for them to be thinking or speaking or observing these things, but Kwong wants to make these points so they're gonna say it. Our main character, Robin, is plucked from a very, very young age from his home and his life in Canton by a British professor.  You learn later that this is actually Robin's biological father, but regardless he shows up, Robin's mom is dead and he takes him away back to England where he raises them thereafter. He gives him food and clothing, a good education. He gives them every privilege that in material things that this professor would be able to give Robin. And in so doing Robin is immersed from a very young age in British culture, in British society, he's surrounded by British ideas, by Englishman espousing, pro-British, pro-colonial ideas all around him all the time in how they talk to each other and how they talk to him. But because RF Kwong fears that you're not gonna recognize racism when it's happening unless she tells you that that's what's happening, Robin at all times is fully aware of when racism has happened around him or to him. Not only is he fully aware of this going on around him, but he articulates it in fully formed notions about the structures and reasons for why people are behaving the way around him that they are. Now, is it possible that a young man who's fully immersed in colonial ways of thinking fully surrounded by white British people who fully believe in the rightness of what the Brits are doing, that a young man who has given every material advantage by this world, is it possible that this young man would retain a complete and independent understanding of the sociopolitical powers at play and how those influence his interactions with the people around him?  Is it likely? I don't think so. Robin remains proud and indignant about the way that he is regarded and the way that he is treated. And then he finds like-minded friends at Babel who are also people of color who have been othered by British society. And they all also fully recognize what has been happening and continues to happen to them. They also fully articulate all the ways they've been affected by colonial racism and speak of it in extremely modern, on-the-nose, soap-boxing terms. Even nowadays, when we do more openly discuss these things and talk about these things and books have been published about these things, people nowadays often do not recognize the ways in which various power structures built on racism, sexism, classicism, how these have affected people and how they have overlapped and how people have experienced life. Even nowadays, people internalize the kind of racism and sexism and classicism that they are surrounded by their entire lives having been immersed in it. People nowadays have to work very hard to deconstruct all of the internalized biases that they've developed over a lifetime. And plenty of people don't bother deconstructing it. They accept these biases as simply the way the world is because that is how the world has always been to them and that is how they understand it. It is accepted as given. Ideas of superiority founded on racism, classicism, and unsexism are accepted as the way the world is. I find it extremely unlikely that a young boy who is raised by a British scholar from a very young age, given every material privilege, does not know any other way, does not have anyone else around him to guide his thinking, that this young boy would not drink the Kool-Aid more. And I think this novel would be a lot better if he had. When Robin reaches Oxford, he's not confronted by worldviews that conflict with his own, that force him to question and interrogate his own assumptions and biases, that force him to question his abiding allegiance to a country and culture that he's lived in since he was a child. No, he meets with people that already pretty much think the way that he does. And he's like, oh, awesome. I'm not the only one that's conscious of being othered my whole life. Cool. Wouldn't it be far more interesting if Robin, upon meeting Rami and the other Babel students was met with a variety of sentiments about Britain, some that love the empire that they've been living in and benefiting from their entire lives, some who came into it later and harbor a great deal of resentment like Rami? Wouldn't it make for more dynamic debates and more introspection if Robin initially defended, staunchly defended Britain and the empire that he benefited from? After all, the professor and the empire rescued him from poverty, educated him, gave him clothing and food and a great deal of material comfort. If he then gradually, when confronted with these troubling ideas, he gradually came to realize that maybe, just maybe the system that he so greatly benefited from might actually be quite insidious. What if Robin retained his faith in Britain and the empire right up until he actually returned to Canton and was confronted fully with the horrors that have been inflicted on his homeland by the empire? What if Robin's ardent faith in the empire was turned to ardent hatred once he realized what he had been turning a blind eye to? Now that's someone that would be ripe for radicalization. What if Robin had been determined to love the cold man that had raised him but seeing the state of Canton and fully realizing what he's been party to, being around the Babel students who have begun the process of changing his mind? If that's what opened his eyes to the actual cruelty of the man that raised him and that made him snap. But no, Robin is fully aware of racism and colonialism the whole time, confirms his friends largely agree with that and his female cohorts add in some soap boxing about extremely modern day understandings of feminism and patriarchy, all of which is shoehorned in on the nose and sounds completely out of place, especially because again, even today, women often internalize patriarchal ideas that they've been surrounded by their entire lives and you're telling me that these girls who got into Oxford in a time when that is not at all common for women to do, that they would not have internalized some of that patriarchal thinking, at least some of them. You're telling me that they would have fully formed ideas about how patriarchy functions, how it affects them and would they be going around lambasting patriarchy to young men that they have just met at Oxford? Robin is radicalized practically the instant that he arrives at Oxford. It doesn't take a gradual shifting of understanding and perception and questioning what he has believed his whole life. Nope, he shows up and is pretty much instantly on board with joining a terrorist group. Going to Canton later doesn't open his eyes so much as it just confirms what he already knew and shows him how actually really bad things are. Cause I mean he knew they were bad but he didn't know how bad. Robin is aware from day one and thinking about how cold his father is. There is no internal or external revelation about this. So when he kills his father in a moment of anger this is not a big turning point for his character or a moment of growth or shift in Robin as a character. No, it's just an escalation of their situation because now, oh no, what are we gonna do with the dead body? Not what does this mean for Robin and his understanding of who he is in his place in the world, what his life has been up to that point. And if you thought Robin was radicalized quickly wait until he gives one speech to the students of Babel and they are instant radicalized all completely on board now with this occupation of the Babel Tower. One speech from Robin and it's down with Babel, down with Oxford, down with the empire, down with Britain.  Who knew Robin was such a great orator. Silver magic then makes even less sense during the siege of Babel where apparently there are these support bars in Babel that support the network of silver that is supporting all of Oxford. How this silver knows to affect something that is not near it or directly touching it, I couldn't tell you. Robin starts willy-nilly pulling out these silver bars to damage the structural integrity of the rest of Oxford. Again, I don't know how that silver from a distance is supporting the structural integrity of Oxford. But moreover, if that is the case who's to say Robin's not going to accidentally pull out a silver bar. I don't know what it's touching that he's pulling it out of but it is making it function or whatever. Who's to say he's not pulling out a bar that's supporting the structural integrity of Babel itself and sabotaging himself.  But that's not suggested anywhere in the book like, hey, what are you doing? You could hurt Babel. It's just like, oh yeah, chaos, let's do it. Yeah. And lastly, of course, the one white friend they have turns on them and is evil. So is that a surprising twist that she's evil? No. Is it a big shocking revelation that she's turned on them? No. Is it an unforeseen betrayal that results in a gasp? No, because, well, she's white, therefore she's evil. So, you know, we expected it. And then we come to the footnotes. Despite sacrificing everything in this novel for the sake of the arguments and points that she wants to make, she still couldn't manage to cram in every bit of research and every bit of discussion of colonialism and imperialism and British being evilness into the main narrative. So we added footnotes. And I mean, Susanna Clark did it. Therefore, it's brilliant, right? But ultimately the footnotes mostly serve as a crutch because Robin is a pretty limited perspective even though he's been made to think and observe things that it doesn't really make sense for him to have observed or thought. Even with all that, he's still not able to provide you all of the information that R.F. Kwong wants you to have. So the footnotes serve to tell us whatever it is that Robin just absolutely could not possibly know or be able to tell you and things that Kwong feels that we absolutely must know. The most egregious example of this is later on in the book when Robin's brother Griffin is having this violent altercation with somebody that Griffin knew from his past. This is not something that Robin is intensely aware of the history and nuance of the relationship between these two individuals. He couldn't know that, he wasn't there for it, no one told him about this. So we have a footnote telling us exactly what Griffin's relationship with this person was and why this moment is so significant for his character and what it really means to him. Footnotes are not for character development and significant character revelations. So the fact that this is a footnote, just, you know what? It's something that we're just not gonna know as readers, okay? My camera went out of battery. But yeah, basically find a way for Robin to know it or don't include it in your narrative because that's a footnote is not where that goes. So in conclusion, Babel is just so much wasted potential. The themes of colonialism I do think suit dark academia very well. Discussion of translation suits dark academia very well. Students of color trying to excel at a British institution at the height of colonialism would suit dark academia very well. Introducing magic into dark academia, into colonialism, into translation. It's a great idea. So why didn't this work? Well, I think it's because Kwong is not interested in writing a novel. She's interested in making points, proposing arguments and discussing and debating these issues and in showing off everything that she personally knows about etymology. The character's thoughts and observations, they only ever serve to make the points that she wants to make. The magic system only ever serves to make the points that she is trying to make. The events of the novel only ever serve to make the points that she is trying to make. And this hurts so much. Why does it hurt so much? Because the points that she is making are points that I agree with. I would love to see a good novel explore these themes in a compelling way. In my opinion, what makes a strong novel is very different from what makes a strong essay. Well, an essay should very clearly make its arguments to you, very clearly define its thesis and then provide points in support of that thesis and then tell you its conclusion. That is not what a novel should do. A novel should be a story that grips you. It should be about characters that you find compelling, a plot that you're invested in, a world that feels cohesive and believably real. And in reading that novel, you alongside these ideally compelling characters may be confronted with troubling ideas, may be forced to grapple with the dark truths. And those themes and ideas will land and hit home with your reader so much more if they are invested in the characters and in the world and in the story. They will internalize these ideas without realizing they're doing it. Before when I was talking with my patrons, I used the analogy of vitamins where a good novel should be like a nutritionally complete meal where you've gotten all the vitamins and minerals you need from a very enjoyable, delicious dish. A less good novel will insert vitamin supplements into what it is feeding you, but will do a decent job of masking the flavor. You might notice it here and there, something tastes a little bit off about it, but mostly just tastes like good food where you can kind of tell there's some vitamins in there. A bad book will be like vitamin tablets that you are trying to swallow by eating or drinking something tasty alongside it. In my opinion, soap boxing in a novel is never a good idea. It does not matter if I agree with those points. In fact, it will bother me more probably if I do agree with those points because I'll think, ugh, you're doing these points such a disservice by handling them in such a way that's bound to just upset and anger and irritate people rather than making them in a compelling way where people might actually absorb these ideas and actually internalize them. If the author wants to address the reader directly, well, then they should write nonfiction or write an afterword, but a novel is not the place for that. The fact that she dared to put herself at a level with Susanna Clark and Donna Tart to masters of their craft who each spent about 10 years on their respective novels. Babel felt like a rushed, rough draft of something that could turn into a compelling idea one day. With a lot of time and effort, it could be shaped into something truly special. Instead, we got an essay about the evils of colonialism masquerading as a novel with a completely nonsensical magic system, zero creativity in the world building and cardboard cutout characters. Donna Tart is a master of character work.  Babel fails at all of these things. So reading this book, I'm left feeling like how dare you call this book a response implying the works of Donna Tart and Susanna Clark were in some way inferior and will now be shown how it's done by Babel.  So if you love Babel, I am sincerely 100% delighted for you because loving a book is great. I love loving books. That's why I get so mad when I don't because I go into every book hoping slash expecting to love it. And when it fails me, I find it upsetting. Seeing the squandered potential of Babel in particular really, really upset me because these ideas, these themes, this type of book, it should be my favorite book of the year. And it really hurts that I think it's so badly written. But again, if you love it, nothing I say can change that. If you enjoyed your experience with Babel, nothing I say can change that. If you think it is brilliant that it was great character work, the magic system is sublime that these themes were handled with all the new ones that you desire. Again, nothing I say can change that. This is my review. This is my opinion. This is my experience reading Babel and that is all I'm here to share with you. Let me know in the comments down below your thoughts and feelings about Babel. If you've read it, if you haven't read it, if you plan to read it, if you never plan to read it, whatever you wanna let me know. I post videos on Saturdays, other random times about only Saturdays, well, I can subscribe, join my Patreon if you feel so inclined and I'll see you when I see you.


What is going on guys? It's your boy dpj here today with another destiny video and in today's destiny video We're gonna take a look at the new vanguard auto rifle the pest controlled Matrix now you guys know I went and played the house of walls about three weeks ago while I was there I actually brought this myself from the vanguard quartermaster because I believed it to be like a new shadow price in a way it Performed so I went to the tower. I brought this bad boy, and I tried out not too long I tried out in PvP for so I think I've got it stats I know exactly what it does damage-wise etc etc, and I also tried out in PvE as well now straight away I know I am gonna be the only person on YouTube to have this weapon and have its in-depth steps at this current moment in time And that's got to be worth a like it really has if we can reach 4,000 likes that'll be insane Really would now I've got another weapon as well I'm gonna be reviewing which so stay tuned for that which is exclusive with the house of wolves just like this one Right here, but getting straight into the weapon. Let's take a look at his muds now like every primary weapon across the tower vendors It is a kinetic damage weapon You can reforges at any time with the gunsmith So if you're not happy with its muds when you brought it from the vanguard You can basically go to the gunsmith and reforge it and hopefully get a better roll of muds You can also send it to a three six five. Okay. It's three sites. We have the range lens RS3 we have the short shot is and we have the red dot or s1 We then have as a standard mud under one you buy from the vanguard quarter master We have hip fire. This weapon has bonus accuracy when firing from the hip We also have lightweight when how this weapon grants plus two character agility We have speed reload reload this weapon quickly and we have small ball increased range and stability slow reload reduced magazine size and then we have army of one unassisted kills with this weapon Reduced grenade and melee cool down. So as you can see standard mugs ain't that great So if you do buy these be sure to reforge it So yeah, I've definitely forged this weapon as you can see it's sort of like a high fire rate But it's also got quite a high impact as well I mean it hasn't got a massive fire rate, but it has got a high impact range ain't too great Stability is actually better than what you would think really. That's pretty good. Also, it's got 27 bullets in its magazine as Standard now we're going to move on to its PVP stats Because like I said, I did record a little bit of PVP footage with this So I can give you the guys basically the low down on its stats, especially damage-wise anyway, okay So this weapon will shoot April it's per second minute shoots 480 rounds per minute It will empty its entire click in roughly about 3.2 seconds a PVP damage is 19 to the body and 23 to the head its damage per second to the body is 152 and to the head is 184 maximum click damage with a standard clip is 621 and it's standard reload time is 2.0 for seconds Now a lot of people are comparing this to the shadow price and shadow price being an old school Amazing Vanguard also rifle now keeping mind also rifles in PVP have been nerfed So that ain't as good as what they used to be and on screen now I am showing you guys is sort of great It's sort of spreadsheet I made last night took me hours to do and find out all the stats for these weapons Because actually basically had to equip them all go into fucking PVP We call this little snippet of each weapon and calculate all its damage output etc etc And as you can see here, you can see the pest control matrix highlighted in pink Because I like pink and above it is the vanquisher and the shadow price of two Weapons that are more similar to this in my opinion But as you can see all three of them do the same damage output But the pest control matrix has a faster fire rate meaning it does more damage per second to both the body and The head it's got a slow reload, but still it's still got a higher damage per second Output hasn't got quite the accuracy the vanquisher and the shadow price have but the accuracy on it Isn't that bad whatsoever and I rate these 7.7 out of 10 now these rains on these weapons here are my personal choice Nothing to do with anybody else they've my personal choice of my personal opinion and I rate this just that one better than the vanquisher Which is a weapon I absolutely love and a couple better than the shadow price Which is a weapon that's also a beast as well, but yep guys that is it That is my pest control matrix mini review when the house of rules drops I can do a proper in-depth review of it with PvE stats also Now in the back down now you've got a little bit of PvE for each when I went to the customers You want to just decide to promote some falling with this pest control matrix you guys can watch it You can get the gist and the feel of the way this weapon handles etc etc But I hope you guys enjoyed the video if you did do drop a like I do appreciate the support like I said I've got one more weapon to come Exclusively that comes with the house of all so stay tuned for that thanks again for stopping by and peace out until next time Peace


And speaking of next time, yes, there will be a next time, or two, coming up later in the year, coming up next is a Dev Day slash Sprint alongside the Gov CMS mega meetup in Canberra. We're looking at dates in November, between the three later this year, so it'll be a day butted up right alongside that, so you can do both if you want with a focus on Drupal Gov, details to be confirmed for that, so keep your eyes peeled. Planning for the next Drupal South is underway. It's going to be big, and if you don't know where already, I will tell you. Yeah, going to make a return to Oz, probably not at the Opera House, but we will be in... Yeah? Right? Yeah. We feel it though, I don't know, maybe we could, but we will be in Sydney for the first time in a long while. We're checking out venues, we've got our short list now, we're looking at dates around March or so, so a little bit earlier in the year, if you want to help with that, organizing that, get in touch via the Drupal South Committee, we're on Slack, Twitter, email, social, whatever, yeah, get in touch and help out. It'll be a big one. We're looking to make it an extravaganza.


Main time public opinion is tense on the kidnap of students and staff of the Zamfara State College of Agriculture of Animal Sciences. The stakeholders are reacting to these with a call for a state of emergency on Nigeria's security and education sectors. And Netafilx has details. Students of the Zamfara State College of Agriculture and Animal Sciences bound by their hands, blind folded, surrounded by tourists and pleading to be saved. Fifteen students and four teachers of the school were kidnapped on Sunday while four others died in the attack. On Plus TV Africa's breakfast show, public affairs analyst Nick Agulay calls out the president of Nigeria, Mohammed Abu Hari, for failing to fulfil his promise to protect school children. He also suggests ways to track the location of the bandits. According to Agulay, it's high time the government declared a state of emergency on Nigeria's education sector. They need to declare emergency in the security sector, in the education sector. But the government of Nigeria has not taken able simple steps like that where they can put a communication system in place with every school giving a dedicated phone line if their school is under attack. The abductors are demanding a ransom of 350 million Naira before they would release them. But the government is yet to respond. And Neta, Felix, Plus TV Africa.