Welcome back to the Agora Cafe. I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey, namely a little video tour of my old childhood neighborhood, San Diego. I'm going to do it via the Street View function in Google Maps. Now the images in Google Maps are all copyrighted, but I look through their terms of service and as I read them, they are. I'm allowed to use them so long as A, the use is non-commercial, which this is, and B, so long as I give appropriate credit for each image, and they say in the terms of use that that text at the bottom right of the image that you hopefully can see there is sufficient credit. I don't need anything further than that. So assuming that I have interpreted these requirements correctly, then YouTube should not take this down. So I was going to start with my elementary school from the early 70s, Silvergate Elementary, I don't remember this sign, though that doesn't mean it wasn't there. The sign I remember is this one. The name Silvergate comes from the days when, a long time ago, San Diego was contemplating adopting the nickname Silvergate as a rival to San Francisco's Golden Gate, since they have two of the major harbors on the California coast. In fact, maybe one point that you were going to call Balboa Park, Silvergate Park, which I guess makes at least as much sense as Balboa Park, since Balboa never had any connection with it, but Balboa because he was the one who discovered the Pacific as supposed to be sort of a symbol for the Pacific in general. Anyway, I also thought it was odd to pick Silvergate to rival with San Francisco's Golden Gate. It's like deliberately picking the number two metal. This fence right here used to have, when I was a kid, it had a street sign, an intersection of a Venice street as a voice circle, even though the actual intersection is not there, it's a little bit farther back, and I see they no longer have that street sign there. We used to be there right next to the fence, and I used to wait by that fence from my mother to come in the car and pick me up, and I would fantasize that the fence was a horse, and that the pole with the street sign was the horse's neck, and that the street sign, saying Venice and Savoy, crossed where they was the horse's head, and that Venice Savoy was the name of the horse. I must have been pretty desperate. Anyway, next I'm going to take you to my old address. I can't show you my old house because it's been torn down. They put a much larger and fancier house in it instead. There we're getting some nice blue skies. Sweet home San Diego, where the skies are so blue. Sweet home San Diego, Lord I'm coming home to you. What happened to the arrow? Why can't I move this further? I'll just cheat and jump. There we go. So you can see this is a very pretty neighborhood with a nice view of the ocean, and I wonder, well, this is most of a pretty expensive area. How could we afford it? Well, we couldn't, but my grandmother could, since she's still one of my mother's inheritance. I think I've talked about that in another video. And then she would dull it out to us to basically to control my mother. And my mother initially didn't want to take any money from her. But once she had me as a child and my father had died, then she felt she couldn't afford to turn down financial help. And grandma wanted to keep her near where she lived in San Diego. And so she helped out financially with this house, which was, the house she stayed in was, and I didn't realize it at the time, but years later, before they turned it torn down, I came back and saw it and thought it was the smallest house on the street. It was really tiny compared to every other house on the street. And it's since been replaced by, as you'll see, a much larger house. Anyway, this was a beloved neighborhood for me. Everything was so pretty. And that view, every time you, every time you pass the view, there are actually some houses in this area up on that hill that have view of both the ocean and the bay, looking one direction or the other. I imagine those cost a pretty penny. Okay. We're coming up on Miles Street pretty soon. There is Granger. And then that building on the right that large squares building is where my house used to be. We had, ours was only one story not two, and it had a big front lawn, which has been replaced by this car park. But there it is. I imagine they get pretty good views from up there. This house next door looks new to me, too. I don't recall the house next door looking quite like that. Used to take care of their cats when they were away. And they were trick-or-treating with my friends, Brian and Jamie, on this street. It's a little hard to tell from the, on the street view here, though from the fact that you could see the ocean before and you can't now, you can sort of tell that this is a hill, but it doesn't look, hill doesn't look as steep as it actually was. It wasn't super steep, but it was, you know, is more of a hill than this. So come here, and then we want to get coast right here, and there's this little alley going up there. And I actually want to show you the alley. So I'm going to backtrack back up here. This is the alley that runs behind all the houses on Granger. So let's see, did I miss it? I'm going to show right there. That's the place where our old house was. And there was, I don't know, you can't really tell what the yard is like now, but when I was there, it was this massive jungle, all these cactus plants that our dogs couldn't go near without getting stuck full of needles, but our cats could easily go around them and under them and so forth and never, never got any needles. So I used to practice riding my bike down this alley, and here the alley gets a little bit less finished. Now you really, you know, look at this, you don't really think that you're in, you think you're out, you think you're farther away from the center of things than you really are when you see this, this area here, this, it looks like you're doing some tropical isle. Anyway, this is on Point Loma, which is the big peninsula that separates the San Diego Bay from the Pacific Ocean, which makes it possible to have a silver gate, so to speak. The very tip of Point Loma is the Cabrillo National Monument, which has some of the best views, but we're not going there today. It's hanging around the old neighborhood. All right, so this is now where you've come out of the place that I showed you before. Now, when I get to where the action is, namely you want to get to the coast, so if you go right, it'll take you to Orange Beach, sorry, Wrong State, to Ocean Beach. If you go left, it'll take you to Sunset Cliffs. I'm going to go left just a little bit to give you an idea, and then we'll head over to Ocean Beach, which is quite a bit of my neighborhood. The farther you go in this direction, the more expensive the houses get. There's a nice little park here. You can see this sort of thing, and this sort of thing, and this sort of thing. It's jumping around a bit randomly, but it's all very familiar. All right, so you get an idea of what this area looks like. It's called Sunset Cliffs because there are cliffs, and it's a great place to watch the sunset. All right, now I'm going to take us to Sunset Cliffs Boulevard, and heading toward Ocean Beach, which is the commercial district. Yeah, and this is sort of my favorite places to be back then. It was near my home. That was the only commercial district near my home. The only place you could really walk or bike to. I don't think I ever biked there. I would have thought it was too exciting for me to bike all the way out here, because I never got that expert at biking and traffic. I usually went to a park somewhere to practice my bike. I realized this is not quite as engaging as an actual video tour, but you know, we make do with what we can, and it will give you an idea of why this is a kind of a cool neighborhood coming up. You can't tell from here, but Narragansett has good views at the end. But we're not going to Narragansett now. We're headed toward Newport Avenue. This is Newport Avenue. This is the main drag in Ocean Beach. It's kind of a funky little beach town. It's the Breakfast Republic, where I had breakfast with my friends Gary and Alicia the last time that I was here. Down in this area is where I, as a kid in the 70s, first discovered comic books. I think it's a Harrington font over there, isn't it? No, not quite, but almost. If I remember correctly, which there's no guarantee of. Anyway, the particular stores where I used to get comics are not here anymore, but this is where I first got into superhero comics and horror comics and all that good stuff. The other main street, although we're not going there now, because they take too much time. The other main street in Ocean Beach is a number of blocks to the right. We'll be going in that direction in a bit, but we won't really go to that street. It's Voltaire Street, which has a vegan co-op that, remember, was, when we took Jeff Tucker there, he was horrified, traumatized. I don't think he's ever quite recovered from it. He kept saying, isn't there a McDonald's? All right, this Wings Swingware place, as you can guess from the marquee there, used to be a movie theater. We used to have these kids matinees where parents would drop their kids off. I don't think they were supposed to drop them off. They were supposed to stay with them, but they would drop them off. My mother would stay with me, but most of the parents would drop the kids off to get rid of them in the kids matinees. It was like Lord of the Flies in there. Well, not quite, but it was pretty chaotic. They were yelling and running around and throwing food. Not really there for the cinematic experience. This is a famous hostel, galactic comics that wasn't there when I was there. There are a lot of excellent murals in Ocean Beach, and then there's that one. It's an odd mural for this location.  I'm sure not everyone is happy with that super patriotic mural. This place is famous for absolutely gigantic hamburgers. It's a real challenge to try and deal with. A hodad is someone who hangs out with surfers and is on the surf for lifestyle, but doesn't actually do that much surfing. I've never been up there, but that would be on that rooftop bar there, but that would be a cool thing to do sometime. I've eaten that. I think that Japanese restaurant was pretty good. There's Ocean Beach Hotel. I've stayed there. It's a very nice view. Although the air conditioner in my room was so loud, I felt like I was in the middle of some kind of industrial factory. Okay, I want to take you to the right, but first I want to take you to the left. I want to show you the pier. This is the way to the pier. You can see an arrow here, but you actually can. I guess there's a little leap. You have to leap past and then there you are. Famous gate. It's not really cooperating. If you look over here to the right, oh, we're already a long way past the beach now, but the nearest part of the beach is for surfers. The middle part of the beach is for swimmers. And then the farthest part of the beach is for dogs or humans with dogs. I've eaten to this place too. It's nothing special, but it's a cool location. That's the end of the pier. According to this little map, I'm in the middle of the water. Trust everything you see. Okay, heading back to the mainland. Right there you get a bitter view of the beach, of the near part for surfers, the farthest part for swimmers. You'll see a short jetty, a rock jetty that I think is what the divide is between the swimmer's beach and the dog beach. I believe that's right. Remember my mother and I and our dogs used to walk out on that jetty. One of our dogs did it easily. Everyone had lots of trouble. The first dog would show off and go back and forth to show the second one. Then farther away, you can see a much longer jetty and that marks the entrance to the San Diego River and beyond that is Mission Bay. Okay, so back down to Newport Avenue. Oops, I ended up in the parking lot at the Ocean Beach Hotel. Back in the 19th and maybe the early 20th century, there was a big amusement park here, but it's long since been torn down. Though there's another one up in Mission Beach that is still going strong. So this is Abbott Street, which runs along the coast here. Now we're back in a more residential area, as you can see. If we went farther, we'd eventually come up to Voltaire Street, which is the more, well, actually, maybe I'll take you up there. Why not? I'm going to come back. Voltaire Street is one of the number of streets that come off of Rose Crans over at the other side of Point Loma. There's a whole bunch of streets that are named after famous authors running A through Z and then they run out and they start over again, though they don't get all the way through the alphabet the second time. And a few of the streets have changed their names. They actually have a Xenophon Street, which is cool. I'm a fan of Xenophon, I think he is underrated. Anyway, so this is Voltaire Street, which is the other major commercial street. So it's that way, but misdirected. It's still fairly residential right along here, but now the commercial part starts. Of course, these photos are all pre-pandemic. Probably some of these places are going out of business and roads that aren't at least hunkered down a bit. Where is that Regan Place that we dragged? Really, as Angela Keaton dragged, Jeff Tucker too. I was just along for the ride. To large building on the right side. Not there yet, I don't think. I might have passed it, missed it here. I suspect this is it. People's organic food market. Yeah, I think that's it. I'm not absolutely sure. I saw it. When we went there, it was nighttime. I think that's what it is. All right, so we've seen a little bit of Voltaire Street. It's not quite as cool and funky as Newport Avenue, but it's all right. It has a cool name. Cooler than Newport, really. And I want to find a way back to get back, get back, get back to where I once belonged. I don't want to say those are the only two commercial streets in here. Here we are. This is the intersection of Brighton and Abbott and the head toward the beach. Abbott ran along the beach, but then, since it wasn't exactly parallel to the beach, it got farther and farther away from it. I'm going to go in where it says no exit. I mean, no entrance, because wrong way, because I can. You can see the the pier there in the distance. So this is a place to park if you can't find any place to park closer in. This is a place to park. I'm like those realtors saying this is the bathroom. Like you can't recognize a bathroom when you see one. Not doing what I want. Oh, I know. You did. You did. All right. This is the bike path. This bike path runs along the San Diego River, which is a slimy God forsaken river in some ways, but that's not so bad here where we see the ocean, but farther in, like when you get to Fashion Valley, it's sort of a slimy thing. Anyway, this bike path goes a good long way, very long way. It's a great place to ride a bike. The bike path is up there is the sky. Down there is the ground. That's called a person. This is a very informative and educational video. Okay, the part of the bike path that's been recorded for Street View doesn't seem to want to let me go here, but this implies I can go. Boom. There we go. Every once in a while, reach a point on Street View where it won't let you go any further. You just, you cheat and hop past it and then you can go again. I don't know if I'm cheating. It's not really cheating. This takes the fun out of it. I say it's not really cheating, so let's say it's cheating. It's not that scenic on the right side. It's scenic on the left side. Yeah, this is the part of the San Diego River that isn't all creepy. You could follow this bike path a very long way, although as you'll see, Street View doesn't. But I think this bike path goes quite a long way inland. See, now it becomes more scenic on both sides. This is probably the best part of the bike path. I think that is, is that the skate park? There's a skateboard park. I think that's it. I can't see from here, but I believe that's it. Yeah, that's a skateboard park. This is the bridge that goes over to Mission Bay and all that stuff. And now we're actually back in Sensor Cliffs Boulevard, and somewhere near here is a way, please, you can catch the freeway. And if you're taking the freeway in, it'll shoot you right into Sensor Cliffs. Anyway, so I think that's all I'm going to burden you with. So that's my childhood neighborhood in San Diego between Sensor Cliffs and Ocean Beach out on Point Loma. And I thought you might enjoy it. And if you didn't enjoy it, we have to watch it anyway, because that's the rule. And if you break the rule, then you're cheating. And we know how much fun that is. All right, so see you next time.


Erin, what stood out to you about Montgomery? Ooh, cut her again, a factor. Thought he had a really good one at times. And I thought he had a little bit of everything going again. I feel like it's been that the last few times for him. His mix has been good. Good change-up, breaking ball. I thought he was on the attack really well. I thought he started to waver there a little bit in the sixth and seventh. I think he had to kind of find his legs a little bit, but was able to finish it. And seven huge innings by him. It was going to be a struggle if we didn't get a lot of link out of him today. And that was just what the doctor ordered. And then obviously, the offense was terrific. But Manny was huge tonight. Erin, do you think he knows that going in, that you're going to lean on him pretty heavily? Once I took him out, he knew. But not something you want to lay on him early or tell him about. You just go pitch. But yeah, I think he had a good idea. He said all the right things this season, but we've spoken many times how he doesn't seem to get a ton of run support. Do you notice any difference in the way he attacks when he starts getting some runs on the board? I mean, I think he went through a year last year and started this year where it was kind of just a little fluky and amazing just how little. And it never seemed to bother him. He gets pretty locked in in the game. He's a really good competitor. And so I don't know. You'd have to ask him now that he's got a couple outings where he's got a lot of run support to work with if he likes that or gets on the attack. I remember the first time he got the runs, the other was it last time or the time before. And he came out and walked about her right after he got to. We threw a crooked number up there, and I got on him a little bit. But I'm sure the runs tonight helped him to just really go out there and even be a little more aggressive. Tyler. Tyler, could you just? Rangel, as pitching is and as important as it is, what does do for a manager when you can go into every game with pretty near certainty that your starter is going to give you a realistic chance to win at a high level? Yeah, I mean, every starter we run out there, there is a confidence that they're going to go give us a really good chance to win. So there's some comfort in that. And for us, it's been huge. As much as in that first month, as guys were getting built to lean on our bullpen like we did to really have in the rotation, they were throwing well. And now over the last month or a month and a half, they've been not only throwing well, but routinely getting deep in the game. So whoever it is taking their turn of those five guys right now, I think myself, the staff, and certainly the players feel really confident that we have a good chance to win that day. And that's a good space to be in when you're coming to the park every day. Justin, to the right. Aaron, what's the energy like in the dugout as that many home runs are flying out? Yeah, pretty cool. And when Judges gets going right away with the lead-off Homer again, that was big. Again, just almost a perfect night out. It's starting to be that summer, cubs in town, weekend, night, just a great environment to play in here in Yankee Stadium. You start hitting the ball out of the ballpark and everyone's chipping into it. Definitely makes for an energetic and fun night in the dugout.


Japanese actor and martial arts master Sonny Chiba has died from COVID related illness. The talented Chiba died late on Thursday in a hospital near Tokyo, where he had been treated for the illness since August 8. The 82-year-old acting career began in the 1960s with a string of roles in Japanese martial arts films and TV shows. He will go on to feature in more than 100 films. Chiba was also a title-winning gymnast in his teams before turning to karate, earning a black belt in 1965.


Hi, my name is Alexandra Cunningham Cameron and I'm a Curator of Contemporary Design and HIN Secretary of Scholar at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Welcome to Confusing the Algorithm, Fashion Surveillance and Racial Bias, featuring the work of Chinook Felix de Miranda, Pascal Sablon, and Madh Achempong, also known as Dainty Funk. The idea for convening this panel emerged from a reflection on Willie Smith's constant reference to the street as a source of influence and as a metaphorical space where people could walk together in their difference with tremendous optimism. And in the late 1970s and early 80s, he talked about surveilling the street from his studio to evaluate his success as a designer, whether or not his designs were reaching people and how to examine how people wore their clothes, how they moved, how they navigated their daily lives. And the way that Willie Smith talks about the streets as analog spaces of inspiration, improvisation, happenstance, feels distinct to a growing understanding of our own experience of the streets today, both built and digital. There exists now a different kind of eyes on the street, those of cameras tracking and storing our movements, predictive policing devices, geotags, personal security systems collecting data around our behaviors, and the traffic of our digital worlds through which an increasing amount of our social exchanges and retail transactions occur has created the opportunity to enforce, predict, and shape our interests and our habits, somehow narrowing while also expanding our spheres of influence. There are various ways that the fashion system has participated in a mass surveilled society from corporate marketing that exploits social media algorithms to dazzle wear that blurs identity during protests, in some cases, co-opting and other cases, resisting. The magnitude with which technological advances have increased access while also threatening civil liberties, often perpetuating cycles of discrimination, is really the focus of our speakers today. We'll discuss how their own practices work to undermine racism and oppression within the built and digital realms of fashion and beyond. I'll introduce them now. Design researcher and critical fashion practitioner, Chinook Filik Demiranda, explores the crossover between the fashion system and digital culture by focusing on introducing digital literacy in fashion. In her practice, she approaches fashion as a subliminal communication vehicle, which she aims to demystify in order to inform consumers on complex matters regarding individual agency within our current digital culture. Her ongoing research project, The Algorithmic Gaze, explores and explains the digitization of fashion and the new ways the fashion system and its consumers connect and communicate through newly acquired technological rhythms. Ma Da Chempong, also known as a deity funk, is an interdisciplinary spoken word artist and filmmaker who uses drag and the art of transformation to explore personal ideas about gender and blackness, as well as reclaiming American clowning and performance. Dainty Funk is an all-encompassing aesthetic movement that describes the intersection between vanity and vulnerability, the soft and the grotesque, frill and fright. The most recent project, Soné de la négritude, is a poetry visual project that explores these dichotomies. And finally, Pascal Sablan is an associate at Ajay Associates. She is more than 14 years of experience working on a diversity of projects around the world. Pascal is a 315th living African-American woman registered as an architect in the United States. She's an activist architect who works to advance the field for the betterment of society and bring visibility to issues concerning women and BIPOC designers. She founded the Beyond the Built Environment Organization to uniquely address the inequitable disparities in architecture. Pascal is president-elect of the National Organization of Minority Architects, the fifth woman to hold this position. She was awarded the 2020 AIA New York State President's Award and the 2021 AIA Whitney M. Young Jr. Award for her advocacy efforts. She lectures at universities and cultural institutions and is the youngest African-American to join the AIA College of Fellows. Chinook, modern Pascal, thank you all for being here. They will each present their work and then be available for a Q&A period, which I will moderate. So thank you so much. And over to you, Chinook. Thank you so much for having me. Let me check. Share screen. Okay. So, on a day-to-day basis, I see so many ads online that I'm now up to the point that I don't even notice them anymore. They linger in the corners of my screen or they pop up in my email and they've suddenly melted into my Instagram feed. And basically they follow my every move. Usually I don't really mind because they often showcase products that I'm interested in and I will click and click and click to the point where I'm like, how did I end up here? And that's how my five-minute break usually turns into a 30-minute scroll. Applications like Instagram do that to me a lot and it mostly feels like I'm at fault because I mean I could stop if I wanted to. But in most applications, I'm able to curate my fee, which gives me a sense of agency and commercial brands capture our attention by tapping into an aesthetic appearance of our online environment.  So in actuality, what we're consuming is the image and the image is concurrently forming our interest in our taste. So it happens when the current site guys is strongly related to cultural tropes. Brands are turning marginalized aesthetics into consumable products. By taking the aesthetics from people that they social economically do not serve. So my practice focuses on the crossover between fashion and digital culture and the way we engage with fashion and our online environment from the consumer's point of view. And during our time online, we often unknowingly come across various modes of engagement. So in terms of dynamic marketing and the cultivation of an algorithmic gaze, understanding these helps us comprehend how cultural tropes are communicated and often very misleading. So the experience and process of engaging with digital marketing is built upon the following components. You have rhythm analysis, visual, visual culture, new media, consumer psychology and propaganda. And I want to focus on the idea of rhythm analysis really quick because it lies at the base of the way we experience our everyday life and also our extended digital life. And it helps us understand what cultivates an algorithmic gaze. So we live our lives in rhythms and we encountered biological rhythms such as sleep, hunger and thirst on a day to day basis, but also more mechanical and social rhythms such as traffic lights or weekend versus workdays. In the fashion industry, these rhythms are found in form of visual influence and they condition our consumer behavior. So they control consumption habits in form of seasonal collections and the constant change towards the new. So what the algorithmic gaze does is create a personalized rhythm based upon your preferences. And a visual feed like Instagram or Pinterest is filled with obvious and not so obvious advertising and algorithms capture what you click on or when you linger and try to find a common denominator, such as a color or a specific item or an aesthetic and it learns from your scrolling behavior and it tends to curate a new feed. So while you're using these apps, you're unknowingly designing your own digital bubble. So visually, everything starts to overlap and everything starts to look the same. So this sameness refers to a so-called digital collective conscious or is sometimes referred to as collective consumption of aesthetics. And this tunnel vision can be regarded as the algorithmic gaze. So a personal bias and a comfortable bubble in which you're simply being approached as a full time consumer. The fashion industry tends to employ this bias for commercial gain and is very dedicated in catering to their marketing strategies to the comfort of your bubble. And it can be regarded as a form of mindset marketing in which advertising follows you around across a multitude of platforms reinforcing this rhythm of influence. So as fashions algorithms surveil and adapt to the current zeitgeist, your digital footprint helps them navigate towards a collective mindset because a group of like-minded people is always easier to target than one person. So these bias narratives and stylized bubbles seem to work in favor of these marketing strategies. So in order to explore these personalized narratives, I've hosted digital footprint workshops in which participants screen record their scrolling behavior while using these new media platforms in search of either visual triggers or insulated structures. And the goal is to demystify online fashion media and propel conversation amongst consumers. So our environment is so personally tailored and dictated by our behavior and an example is where a participant focused on the ethnicity of the people she was seeing via Instagram Explorer feed, which consisted for 96% of individuals of Asian descent, which also translated into the type of advertising she was seeing. So by acknowledging that these bubbles exist and cultivate a bias narrative, we can create an understanding in terms of how our digital environment is morphed and how digital marketing plays into that. In order to connect with the collective conscience, brands are in need to define the contemporary momentum. So it propels campaigns like H&M's Comeback Stronger, which is meant to signify a revert of acceptance in which the physical and cultural norm experience are reset. So specifically concerns of body, this specifically concerns body types, skin color, hairstyles, which are in high demand of radical acceptance. And it's an approach that's very obviously edged toward cultural relevancy and a step towards embracing diversity, because we now get sea braids, full figures, darker skin color. But we're seeing this because we've demanded this and because it spikes our interest. And in reality, while cultural tropes are being capitalized upon to a highly aspirational point of view, diversity doesn't always translate beyond the visual. So it wasn't until consumers demanded a more inclusive narrative that diversity was deemed important in order to even connect with an audience. So Calvin Klein is an example of a brand that has always been more forward in connecting to a contemporary audience through highlighting their audience as others, the other being the outlier of the social norm, which is a, which the brand has actually successfully turned into a desirable but commercialized group. And the notion of the other is often related to ethnicity, which Calvin Klein emphasizes to creative collaboration, collaboration such as the current here impressing collaboration and the typecasting of people of color as alternative, alternative icons such as Zivert and Nas. So when I click on my sponsored ad in my Instagram feed, my social currency seems to focus towards girls of mixed race descent intertwined with the occasional plus size or curvy body. And overall it strokes with the rest of my feet. But there's a problem with these algorithm algorithms as form of surveillance mechanisms in the context of fashion communication and marketing because they serve, they serve as a form of inclusive exclusivity. So diversity gets commercialized by showing different people to different, different, different images to different people. So when it comes to seeing what we like and liking what we see. We as users do not have sole agency over the narrative. So targeting a certain demographic with specific images polarizes the target target groups even more. So our interest is surveilled it's used as base as design base and then presented to us in a form of service and our personal taste and can then gets conditioned and capitalized upon and thrives by us. So, sort of speak this by staying in our lane, sort of speak. It's a self sufficient cycle that keeps audiences contained and inadvertently also feeds of itself. So you're being sold what you're curated yourself you're not getting credit or even worse you're not even getting acknowledged as a source of inspiration. While industry is making money off of it. So, an example of an unobtainable but relatable aesthetic is the collaboration between Burberry and color studio which is a musical platform in which new emerging artists perform. It is following holds a urban demographic in which it opens a new doorway for Burberry to connect with the younger audience. In the campaign centers around artists of colors that are portrayed and we're able to connect with through either their music or styling their skin their skin color and their hair texture or other stylistic throats that you're able to shop directly from the image. And this easy access generated through online shopping formats is very misleading because these campaigns are often geared towards audience that towards an audience that does not have the financial means to actually buy the products. So this back that is so luxuriously draped across these bodies holds a price tag of $2,000 and it's marketed to a certain demographic while using other demographic demographics cultural tropes. So the digitization of fashion enables brands to reveal the likings of an audience for financial gain at the cost of culture. So in conclusion, algorithms accelerate a collaborative consumption of aesthetics and inherently denies those who inspire the fashion industry any type of ownership. And by capitalizing and appropriating cultural tropes fashion brands and their digital marketing strategies allude to an obtainable image that seems to celebrate diversity. While the social economics standard does not comply with the inclusive atmosphere is set out to portray. So it adds up to an inclusive exclusion. Thank you. That was my presentation. Hi everyone, I'm Pascal Sablan. And I want to share with you my presentation and talk to you a little bit about architecture in its role. So for me, I want to just introduce slightly, and thank you so much for the update or the bio it really kind of captured most of it. But what I really want to talk to is just how rare we are as an architect, as a person of color and as a woman in the in the field in the profession. And we make up point zero two percent of the profession and therefore I identify myself as not just an architect but a Jedi architect. I want to talk about the justice equity diversity inclusion, where I advocate for our culture identities within the built environment and dismantle the injustices that embedded there. So to make that point I want to talk to you a little bit about how architecture was used specifically to facilitate those oppressions. So we have an example of Robert Moses, who had a large impact into the way New York was designed a lot of the public spaces including Central Park, as well as Jones Beach and other public spaces. And although in my education, he was glorified as this amazing person who's done great work. What wasn't translated or kind of communicated was that he was an advocate racist against not just black people but undesirables which is immigrants. And he understood that it we took buses as mass transit to get to places. And so to ensure that us as undesirables were not able to reach Jones Beach. He actually mandated that all the overpass bridges 20 plus bridges over the Southern State Parkway be designed and constructed nine feet or shorter to make sure that our bus couldn't fit. So this is an example of how the built environment was constructed to facilitate that racism. Then you have developments that have financial tax incentives to utilize and incur and have affordable housing components but yet at the same time have different entrances support doors and market doors which is in in most terms the modern day example of whites and colors only. Then you have gentrification and redlining there's many ways in which architecture is utilized to perpetuate those systems. And we talk about I'm talking about this to say we need to understand that there's tangible moments that the built environment has been telling the story about who we are where we're allowed to be. And I identify large locations or high pinnacles of very significant moments in cities that have statues of those who were who fought vehemently to maintain slavery who fought vehemently to make sure that a certain demographic of the community or the country felt less than. And so really starting to dismantle and these claim those spaces is really important. So as we talk about surveillance. This is also a remembrance of.  So just understanding that and also following the suit of places like New Orleans who have replaced statues with components of culture and identity where they're starting to create places for the Mardi Gras costumes that clothing that fashion to be at the center and at the highest point of the city and to put the power of the people on display. Then there's also this idea and this is really related to retail and the way we shop and the way we engage spaces but also the way we live. And it's called septet and it's basically stands for crime prevention through architectural intervention environmental design and it focuses on supervision on public and private spaces on access control and surveillance. And the problem with that is that it really centers the way people interact on crime rather than on giving communities power. It criminalizes blackness under the guise of safety and it promotes an unwarranted interaction with the police. People people of color really weren't pushed against or away from spaces until it became something that the police was able to enforce. And so if there was a dispute between you and your neighbor. That was for you to figure out but now that the police are in then it starts to mindset of is this person supposed to be here. Do they have the right to claim this space can they be walking on my block. This is somebody that I should be a family afraid of and therefore that starts to police the way we inhabit in the type of welcomeings we feel when we're in terms of spaces. So the work that I've been doing and passionate of doing is engaging the community through architecture to advocate for equity, equitable, reflectively diverse environments and what that means is a space where we all feel welcomed, but also a place that reflects the culture that is bespoke to that town in the community that's the present. And so the three projects that I'm going to quickly present to you to kind of share that experience starts with format which was located in Queens. My client was Nigel Sylvester. He is a G star he he is a pro BMX bike rider very successful and he wanted to create a store where he could share some of the tools and the components in the clothing that is the person of who he was right. And so we found a spot in Queens because that location was remnants of where he came from. The next is that he his style of writing of what the way he writes his bike is instead of bike parks or skate parks he actually arrives through the streets of Manhattan through New York. And so leveraging that that became the concept and the way we thought about designing the spaces. So for instance the clothing rack is actually the same proportion and slope of handrails that he usually uses to slide up and down. And also kind of thinking about the New York City skyline and the way that he uses steps in his tricks as well starts to create the language in the way we create the spaces for the way the components are displayed. And then really just thinking about how that space could be enhanced through again in bedding his culture into the space his identity into the space. And so in the plan and this kind of speaks to when we talk about how you plan a space for retail.  Instead we took the approach that we're going to allow for more flexibility or more communal space in the center of the build of the program space to allow for one to feel welcomed and to feel that they can go through to space even to be adjacent to the room that has a lot of the merchandise and storage because we trust you right we are inviting you into the space that is part of Nigel's identity and this is a space that you're welcome to be. Another project is the Cleveland Foundation headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio. And with this one, the reason why I want to bring it up although it isn't specifically retail. It is really echoing the idea of community engagement and really pulling communities in. So first with the design process, we actually have many meetings with the community to hear what they needed and what they felt like. And it's connecting to the main road here Euclid Avenue and E66 Street connecting to a predominant black community called the Huff community. And right now as a pedestrian from that community, this is what your block looks like. And so really understanding what that built environment perpetuates and also offers to the contextual language of their environment. And then what we were actually offering them as another means of another method of creating that. And also the development is not just our building but also expanding the green spaces and creating pedestrian friendly locations for people to really enjoy and to have it. And so there's large programs more than 90% of the ground floor is for public open use. You do not need to have any business in this headquarters to come here use a living room, this lounge, use the Wi Fi and participate in this space. This space itself is communicating the need for you to know that you are welcomed, and that's embraced through transparency that's embraced the materiality and that's embraced through the programming of the project. So really quickly just kind of showcasing that is as a Huff community walking down the block, you have access to this community space for gathering, you have access to this multi purpose space for performances and needs. And then this is that community lounge and lobby that we talked about community gallery that we talked about as well. So the idea and the intention is to really create architecture that invites people into this building, not just as a symbol, but actually creating programming and providing value for their use in their identity into the space and create more of a collaborative relationship between those who are working in the in the in that zone to those who live and operate in it and have the architecture stand up for them in that capacity. Lastly is Bronx Point. Bronx Point is in Bronx, New York. This project is a 542 affordable housing project with the first ever brick and mortar hip hop museum, and when I say brick and mortar that means physically built. So we're saying that this is the first time an actual museum is actually physically built as dedicated to the identities and the contributions of hip hop to not just to our culture but to society globally at large. The concept of the entire development irregardless of all the different programs that's within is still hip hop, meaning our value our identity who we are as a people is of value and should be manifested into the built environment. Therefore we use bricks that are darker tones black bricks if you will, we have the windows and fenestrations dancing movement to remits the movement of architecture of hip hop and dance then how it perpetuates into the spaces. And really when you look at this project, do you see public housing and do you see a place that one could see as home and be pride, and have pride in seeing. And here is a view of what that retail experience feels like right we are adjacent to Milpawn Park, and then we made sure that we always had a facade of retail that's perpendicular to the main road to ensure that it's visible and seen. We are not hiding who we are in terms of the graphics and really identifying and exploring who we are as people through the culture and through the spaces, and then really providing adjacent spaces that allow for community engagement and what I mean by that and showing you in plan in terms of the retail areas on the ground floor and the museum area that we talked about is that we created a public plaza here to the north of the page. That is really for people to be able to enjoy seating chairs so that you are able to participate and be there and enjoy that space. We also have a upland connection that connects people that to the water, but also provides an opportunity for kind of Hollywood stars if you will But there where we had records of those who've impacted hip hop and embedding their names and their contributions into the soil into the ground into the surface that we can recognize and celebrate. And then also we provided fully public accessible waterfront. It's important to understand that waterfront is not just a privilege of some who have financial deep pockets, but actually a community asset that everyone should have access to. And really, again, creating another access point through vehicular access to get to this. And we beautified the parks to ensure that there has up to date and healthy and accessible equipment for all to share and enjoy. So I just wanted to share these ways and these components of how retail specifically can be positioned, not just the way the space functions like what we talked about with format, but also the way the space is in relationship to public zones and public areas where we as a people, the black bodies who have been imprisoned the black bodies who have been told they're not allowed or accessible, are able to see that there are spaces that's designed for them that reflects them and welcomes them at the same time. Thank you. Hello. Let me just get my screen share together. Okay. Hello, everyone. My name is Mog Cheris, then I got a son taught a champion are you. You can just call me mod. I'm a fan of the funk a poet drag clown on all relevant social media platforms. And before I begin, I would just like to thank the keeper Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian and most importantly my fellow panelists, a Chinook and Pascal for participating and adding such wonderful and points to this conversation. I am hoping to add to this conversation with my experience as an online content creator, and the ways that I'm attempting to subvert surveillance through my own practice. I want to begin with a poem, my own poem the watching eye. The bullet tear through again.  It knew my name. It knew my street, and in no time know my rhythm, know my rhyme. I promise that this will be the first and last time I quote myself during this presentation. But I wanted to open with this poem because I believe that it contextualizes the relationship between policing imitation and surveillance, specifically within black communities. If we're thinking of surveillance as a vehicle for violence when used by the state, as well as a vehicle for erasure when imitated by the hegemonic or majority community. We see the parallels between the bullet both patrolling the streets and collecting information so that it can know the rhythm and rhyme of its inhabitants. My experience online is largely influenced by me being a dark skinned black non binary cultural worker with a hyper visible social media following. So I will be speaking mostly from that perspective, but the surveillance occupation serves absolutely no one. The first phase of complete digitized erasure is digitized isolation black content creators myself included often find ourselves in the position of the educator, whether that is through a makeup tutorial, people inquiring where we get our clothing from giving historical context about racism, or more intentional political commentary, even without our consent, we often find ourselves teaching some one something. This is very reminiscent of the Mammy trope and more traditional media like movies and television, where darker skinned women were relegated to positions of coddler teacher child viewer. This mothering expectation encourages you were users to see us as a resource from learning for a place for character development, not as people. And because that is what users engage with the algorithm only pushes that kind of content from black creators. This encourages tone policing when black creators do not want to opt into content like that, or when they are not kind understanding and patient with the interfaces users and the cycle continues black content creators are also often the target of incessant hate speech because of the faceless nature of online interactions. Instead of supporting those creators, the response from the interfaces are often to take down those pages, the content creators page because that is something that they can have access to. And in some cases when black content creators choose to respond to that rhetoric in their comment sections, users can use that same tool meant to protect content creators from harassment to report those content creators pages. I actually posted a video this morning where I talked about how people being able to opt in to alternative fashion choices dilutes the political nature of alternative clothing. It used to be a signal for political affiliation for morals and values. Now because of cultural exchange, you cannot tell who is punk for the aesthetic or who is punk for the politics, and it was taken down for hate speech. The second phase of this phenomenon of digitized erasure is imitation. That phase predates the digitized surveillance we see today, but I do believe it serves as an important pillar of the American imagination, given it is the only theatrical art form indigenous to the United States. The act of white men imitating black people, imitating black music is the only indigenous form of American entertainment. That is very, very important. The first picture is still a Bo Derek in the critically acclaimed 1977 film or killer whale, where she dons what I know and what many of my black companions would know to be cornrows, but what many white women at the time dubbed Bo Brates. Shortly afterwards in 1981, a federal court held that an airline that bans the all braided hairstyle was not liable for race discrimination. The judge noted instead that the hairstyle was popularized by the white actress Bo Derek, instead of being a culturally significant I'm sure this person needs no introduction. Rachel doze was president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane Washington from 2014 to 2015, where she resigned in the midst of controversy over her racial identity, when her white parents revealed that she was biologically their child. And so we have an actual white person being able to infiltrate these spaces, being able to dawn the aesthetics of black people and black culture, not experience the violence from those aesthetics, while simultaneously enjoying the benefits from being a part of that community. And we also see kids going to school wearing ethnically and culturally significant hairstyles being sent home, because it is a distraction to education supposedly, while it is simultaneously lauded on a fashion stage on white models. We see that there is religious based violence based on the clothing and headwear that you wear. And yet we see those clothing garments on the runways. And this is that second phase. After those two phases, we move on to the final phase of complete digitized erasure. These are searches that I did on my own time a couple of weeks ago of accessories aesthetics fashion movements that I know to be specific to the black community. Here you have who earrings in the first search. There is hardly no black people in that first couple of searches.  In the second picture I looked up acrylic nails, mostly white hands, or non black hands in that picture. In the third, I searched up braids. In the third picture that comes up in the search, Kim Kardashian comes up and hardly any dark skinned people. And the last photo, street wear, which is aesthetic movement and fashion movement started by black people, you can see on Tik Tok, it will show the original creator. You can see that the original creator is a black man. And yet, all of the videos under that are of lighter skinned, non black people. I'm using Tina Bell as a case study. A lot of people might not know. In 1993, the Seattle band Bam Bam was fronted by the amazingly talented black woman front woman Tina Bell. They were the first to create the sound and lyrical foundation for grunge. But if you look up the word grunge, all you see is Nirvana, other bands with white men in it. And there is no accreditation to Tina Bell's legacy. So what do we do about it? Well, in my personal experience as a drag clown, I often am obscuring my face in some way. The project was actually inspired by this presentation, the idea of being able to obscure my visage and facade and prevent people from knowing who I am and also having the agency and ability to obscure my image and present what I want to present to certain communities being able to have the ability to obscure my black skin from surveillance in that way in a physical and direct way is the way that I am choosing to combat surveillance on my Instagram, on my Tiktok, on pages that have a history of collecting information from communities that look like me. These are some of my resources for this presentation. Please I consider or please consider looking at some of these and reading more about this information. Thank you. Thank you, Mod Pascal and and Chinook if you all wouldn't mind turning on your videos. Hi. I'm starting to get some questions coming in from the audience so thank you to everyone who is submitting. I wanted to start with a particular question. Because the expression of your work is all quite different. You're working as social justice advocates. You're navigating digital performance, digital art, academia, architecture, and I wondered how you got started and whether there is an experience or a personal influence that led you towards working for social change in your field and this is a question for everyone but maybe would you want to kick it off? Sure. Thank you so much for the question. I've always known that I wanted to be an architect even when I was little because I was an artist and was constantly drawing. And so when I went to my undergraduate program, second week, a professor asked me and another student to stand in a class of 60 students and said, Okay, these two will never become architects because they're black and because they're women. But a professor who didn't know my name would make such a strong proclamation. It also wasn't lost on me that my peers were just silent on this and then also in a room full of 60 people, it was only two of us that complied with this pre-represent. And so in that moment I realized as a person who grew up in Queens, predominantly Haitian community, and went to an all girls Catholic preparatory school, it was crazy to me to be in a space to be told that I'm less than for two things that I was celebrated about in my education and my community upbringing. And so that moment I call is the moment that I realized that I would never walk into the room and just represent myself, that I would always be representing women and people of color and therefore I had a responsibility to show up and show out to be amazing to be better. And I talk about being 315th, but that means I'm 0.02% of the profession are black women. So it is also a responsibility of me of one of the rarities in the space of the profession to speak about us and to show volume and conviction about justice when I speak about black and brown communities as well as women. And there's other ways and the built environment specifically was not designed for us the heights of the doorknobs that the heights of the cabinets, the temperatures because you know we're always wearing sweaters. It's all set to the man's body type. And so just understanding that role and that perception and that education allows me to push us forward through this these conversations and welcome us to really be part of the conversation, how we transform our built environment and have that built environment support us know things that we're trying to do. Yeah, in my experience, the practice kind of came before the justification. Like similarly, I'm sure Pascal, like as a kid was super interested in all struck by like the idea of architecture, and then afterwards was encouraged, like, because of life experiences to pursue it in the ways that she has.  I, I started this online social media thing during quarantine, and at the height of the George Floyd protests, and I was receiving a lot of vitriol, because of me doing a lot of poems about my black experience and my black identity and the harm that I was feeling happening in real time on these digital spaces.  And that's when I started working on like being more intentional about the art pieces that I was putting out who had access to those pieces who I was interacting with on my social media pages, who I was uplifting. But yeah, I started out just, you know, being an artistic person and wanting to do that publicly and then as a result of my life experiences and wanting other people that look like me to also feel comfortable being on these spaces. I decided to be a bit more intentional about saying who it's for, you know, I think for me, it was very gradual and through selecting up on my experience, I started to realize like, okay, this is actually what I'm doing. Right. It was more of an embodied experience. I'm, I'm mixed race, and I grew up in a small town in the Netherlands in predominantly white space. So I had, or I instinctively adapted. And it's, it's also small things like, like my hair, I used to straighten my hair and every just like then I moved to a bigger city where it was way more multicultural. I started to get into like the curly girl method, appreciate myself or my text, my hair texture and stuff like that. So then I joined a master's program, which focuses on fashion strategy. I learned a lot about the social political sphere of fashion. And I was always interested in the digital aspect of our day to day life. And this master's, although it was very fulfilling to me academically, it's also kind of although women were encouraging all the men were saying I wasn't really fit to explore a digital a digital work field, because I would never make it I would be run over so that made me kind of like push back more and just be like, okay, why are you seeing this me why am I not able to do this so I mean, maybe gradual and then it turned into resistance that that's my personal experience or why I'm here now because or why my practice revolves around the consumers point of view and not the systems point of view. Thank you. We have a question for Pascal from an audience member. Is there any way that we can protect ourselves as black and brown people from being surveilled in public spaces. Well there's two parts right there's a engaging in the process and creating architecture that dismantles that level of thinking. It's also as a profession stepping away from creating spaces that perpetuate those oppressive natures. But then it's also for you to be knowledgeable about those those strategies and components that are being leveraged to surveillance you. And so really it's about supporting the spaces that are designed for you and in advancing and reflecting who you are, rather than forcing yourself into spaces that is not for you right and so meaning to say you have access to all spaces you move throughout those spaces but really some of those locations are designed in a way to make you feel unwelcome. Right and then so therefore we need to be mindful and thoughtful about how we want to engage does the space deserve my presence does this does this retail store deserve my my money right as my support should I be wearing their brand does this brand suit me or in line with my values. There's a lot of questions that we need to be really more strategic about who we support and how we support and in the spaces as well as claim and demand from your local officials and zones areas about the kind of programs in the spaces you want. It's a conversation and a narrative that we rarely participate in and it's important that we engage in it. And I'll give you an example in downtown Manhattan they were building a federal federal building and in the construction they started to come across African remains. And they were throwing them out of supposedly until a whistle was blown, and then they stopped Howard University came investigated the site and found 419 remains African remains. And we inscribed on the monument that we put on that site, the full map of the African background extent, and it shows that all of downtown Manhattan was literally built on the backs and bones of us. And that means the federal building to the north, the courthouse that we all get married into the south, literally was digging their foundations saw their remains and continue to build anyway. And so that monument reclaim that space and told tells our story. And so it's important that we frequent those spaces we learn those spaces and we also require our government and our built environment to be representative of the history of the important moments that happened in these spaces and identities that we claim. But in terms of how you protect yourself from surveillance is being really knowledgeable about who and why people are surveilling you and the kind of relationship they're trying to have with you as a consumer and be strategic about who you choose to engage with with the gloriousness of who you are and what you bring to the table. Thank you so much for your question. That leads to another question around the complexity of surveillance and digital marketing and how we are often benefiting from the convenience of how the algorithm is tracking our interest and feeding back information to us. That seems to be what we like. And so the question is, are retailers wrong for surveilling my, my, my, my online buying habits. I'm guessing it's for me. Thank you for your question. I don't know if you can call it wrong. It's, it's, it's about consent, and it's about the option of choice. We don't have it. And they make us feel like we have. And that's the problem. So, in that sense, I think, being aware of basically what Pascal just said, is brand stroke with my beliefs. Does it, does it deserve my personal data? Do I want to give it to them? Are they gonna, and am I going to be able to see what they're doing with it? Most of the times the answer is no. So, in that sense, I think yes, they're wrong and they're making it an unable for us to choose if we do want it or if we don't want it. And that's why the problem lies. And of course, it has a bigger framework in terms of what are you being sold? How are you being sold the image, the product? Who's, who's the brand's owner? It's a complex, it's a complex question or answer, actually, but I think it's not about being wrong. About the information that's extruded from the fact that it's happening. So thank you. Yeah. To add to that, like just a testament of the facade of opting in or the facade of consent. All of these social media apps have community guidelines. What communities are they talking to? You know, this, this idea that they are involving us in the creation of this incessant cycle of like, you know, them pandering to us essentially as if we opted into that with language like community guidelines. That's like one example. Another question about spaces that black and brown people can create either digitally or physically outside of the social norm that excludes us. Yeah, um, I, I mean, again, I'm speaking from my perspective as an online creator and someone who creates content. I found that being able to curate your following. And also the people that you follow is really important. Like, we know that we don't have as much opting in power as we would like to, but we do, there are some measures that we can take to curate our experience to prevent digital harm. I only follow black people on my page because that is a community that I have experienced the least harm from.  There are like encryption apps that you can use that have like a backend that prevent any type of data stealing, essentially, but for me as someone who makes money online, it's really hard for me to consider exiling from those spaces because like on the one hand I do experience harm but is paying the bills. So I think that there are ways for you to support black creators on these platforms and create communities that are safe. But you would have to the onus would be on you I don't really know how much has been done really on the social media aspect like the people in the room making Instagram I don't know how many people are concerned really about about that inclusion. And then with my advocacy work. Part of it is I talk about Googling the word great architects and how Google comes up with 40 names and faces and one is a woman and zero are black. And so I went to Google headquarters and asked them why is that the results. And they said Pascal frankly there's none of content that list you all is great. It became one of the kind of powerful parts of my advocacy work was actually to cultivate and find and curate information on women and BIPOC designers and elevate their identities and their contributions to the built environment. And so every time I do a new exhibition and we've done 21 so far, every new location I'm elevating women and BIPOC designers of that location, which provides another kind of realm of kind of curating right this idea that I am pulling information that we all wouldn't have had access to otherwise and saying that sometimes it's not also just about blocking or kind of eliminating or engage with some communities but it's also cultivating another community of information sharing and giving a light to other people who have been kept in the darkness and suffer from that erasure that we've been talking about on the panel discussions. So, I think it's also powerful about creating those communities and so by having this beyond the built IG page of all these people featured I've been been creating a coalition of people who frankly care, right who wants to hear our stories who benefit and learn and are seeing themselves reflected in our narratives and what we share so I think it's also powerful to consider ways of how you can actually cultivate information that we need to know and also share that with everyone. Thank you Pascal, that's a really important call to action for public scholarship. And I encourage everyone to get to know Shinook Pascal and mods work even better. Thank you so much for spending the time with us today all three of you. And I hope we have a chance one day to convene in person to take care, take care everyone. Thank you. Thank you.


A wooden ship of 224 feet may be small compared to a carrier more than a thousand feet long, but that doesn't stop minesweepers in Saasibo from doing big things. Mine countermeasureships USS Warrior and USS Patriot plan to meet the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, or JMSDF, in northern Japan to start the bilateral mine warfare exercise, 2JA. The whole reason we're here is to be interoperable with the regional allies to include our host nation Japan. So we're very excited about that. First off, let me tell you how proud I am of the crews of both Patriot and Warrior as they get underway today for extended operations. It's definitely a testament to their hard work in both maintenance and training to get to this point. Warrior and Patriot will continue patrolling the 7th Fleet area of responsibility after the exercise, working in Japanese and Korean waters. I'm Christina Coffey, Fleet Activities Saasibo, Japan.


So this is Halloween nights the Saturday night before Halloween and If you can see this costume, I have a Hat an old-time hat. This is actually my grandfather's hat and my grandfather's tie and I'm holding a little magnifying glass which together Will tell you that I am a detective So this is my go-to Halloween costume. It's pretty basic stuff and I also in looking through at the last minute to find my Trench coat which would have completed the look I realized that I must have thrown it out During my summertime zeal for minimalism when I went through The sort and I must have thought. Oh, here's something that I am going to use once a year. Why don't I just? Get a better one next year. Well, but here it is and At the time when it would have been useful. I don't have it. So there's always gonna be something When when you do a decluttering when you pursue minimalism, there's always gonna be a Regret there's gonna be something there because we cannot make perfect decisions and in order to Get the overall benefit of the clearance we have to be willing to throw away things that are in the maybe column As when when you do this kind of decluttering kind of kind of a sore to have the things that you know For sure you're gonna keep and you have the things that yeah, you're quite comfortable with throwing away but then there's so many so many items that get stuck in this middle pile and If you kept all of them, then you might barely make a dent So this is part of the price that I'm paying and I imagine if I really wanted to avoid decluttering and I Wanted to really I really wanted to hold on to my stuff. I could use this as a Warning that oh look what happens when you don't keep Everything that you might possibly need at some point in the future You may run into a time when you are missing that thing that you would like to use And So that's that's true So this is a counter example But I show it because It's the first Time that I really regret Having thrown something away during the summertime tour of all my Accumulations that saw me removing about a third to a half of all my stuff This is the first time that I really felt well, you know, I I really Could have been happy to have kept it And you know, we're we can be influenced by the size of containers at the time I had a bin that was used for like old for old clothing and Various things I rarely wear and the old sheets and towels and things like that and at the time it was Stuffed full So then it was an easier decision to Well, I'll say okay this trench coat that has no use except in this once of your costume Okay, this can go But now that bin is no longer full because a whole set of sheets had been passed on So now it seems like oh that would have been Completely fine to have kept that item So But that's the decision we make and when when you're going through a Sort it is just so many decisions going rapid fire and you just can't make perfect decisions When it comes to this stuff and it's okay to air a bit on the side of throwing away too much because almost nothing is missed and Then I compare this to in the month since the summer when I did this is it was really in June and July and it's now October All the benefits I've had from the greater cleared space and the cleared mental space I benefited from Getting closer to simplicity removing distractions that Take me further away from a good life by just sort of wrapping me up in unnecessary Filler But for everything that we do We always have to pay the price some kind of price So for tonight, I will be a detective without a trench coat post script back from the Halloween party and Yeah, I really didn't miss that trench coat would have taken it off any way to just dancing in this shirt so I really didn't need that trench coat and It's okay that it was donated on to someone else to be of use So it's all okay


It is already January 6 2016 I actually recorded this over New Year's weekend, but I did a lousy job decided I needed to do it again so here we are going to be doing my wrap up for the month of December 2015, but before I Get into these books. I want to do a little update about the the YouTube channel and about 30 second sci-fi In general on YouTube. I have more than 380 subscribers now more than 90% of my views however come from non-subscribers Almost 100% of my views my hits come from that video. I did last year about how to fix a problem with the OBS Streaming software those three videos. I did about unboxing and critiquing the cano computer I'm gonna keep the OBS video in fact I think I'll do an updated version of it so people will stop leaving comments asking me what to do the cano videos though I think I'll get rid of those. They're not bringing in useful traffic Speaking of traffic all of the Star Wars videos. I did during December were entirely intended to be clickbait They're not really getting any more views than my regular videos do but they're generating a lot more chatter from my regular viewers and Guys, I have to tell you I really don't care Like that's a video I posted about the Star Wars toys that I saw at the library yesterday That was entirely intended to be clickbait. I do not want help identifying Those various spaceships. I don't care It's just clickbait And it's not even working really so Just relax. Okay. I have two patrons for most of the time that I've had the patronage thing going I had one patron then for a while. I had two and then for a while. I had none but right now I have two and they are pledging a grand total of four dollars a month I Really did way too much work last month To be justified by that amount of patronage. I'll keep this up for a while I'm not going to do as much work as I did last month Seriously, the tumbler has grown to I think 70 followers But there's no activity on the tumbler at all if the posts get any likes at all they may get one and They don't generate any comments at all the Twitter account is not growing either and Neither is the Facebook page although there is one fan on Facebook that likes About half of everything I post there But really the tumbler is the headquarters and if you're not going to the tumbler and I know you're not because The traffic here on YouTube is a thousand times greater than the traffic on tumbler There's so much more stuff on the tumbler in addition to my videos and my book reviews. I post Pictures of the stuff that comes in I post links to other stuff.  That's what it's for if you're interested in science fiction If you're interested in what you're seeing here on the YouTube channel, you will be interested in what's on the tumbler I know it's impossible on the internet to get people to go outside of their regular deer runs But anyway, the good stuff is at the tumbler. Go visit the tumbler All right, so Here's the stuff that I brought in and read during December December was a long month. It just dragged on it seemed like it would never end. I don't know why 2015 seemed like a very long year 2013 and 14 went by so fast. I don't know what happened to them. They were gone before I knew it 2015 Seemed like it would never end. It was a very difficult year financially personally. I Don't expect 2016 to be any better honestly. I expect it to stink. I Really do all of these books came in in December again as I always say it looks like I'm spending a lot of money on books I am not I am spending Pocket change on books usually no more than a dollar a book This was unusual. I paid ten dollars for this Lumberjanes graphic novel if you have daughters if you have nieces if you have friends who have daughters and nieces get them this They will enjoy it is a day. It is aimed particularly at little girls It is great fun the art is very loose and enjoyable The the dialogue is the same Just a lot of fun lumberjanes these three issues of fantasy and science fiction from The 1950s all of them from 1954 got these on eBay. I Saw them on a good deal snapped them up. I Showed you this book a while back when it came in. I finally got around to reading the The title story here the Two-handed engine by Henry Kutner and Seal Moore. It was okay I really should read more of their work their husband and wife science fiction writing team very unusual I should read more of their work so I can talk about them This book right here analog science fact and fiction December 1961 issue, this is a UK edition the reason I bring this up is because I listen to an Audio book on YouTube and I'll post a link to it in the description that audio book had the picture of this cover on it and the story this illustration fits that story and It solved kind of a mystery for me in that I've had this book for a couple of years and I for the life of me could not find a story in this book that matched this picture or this This phrase heavy planet design the story that I heard on YouTube that had this picture with it Perfectly matches this This cover painting went on this issue Without the story in it That belongs with this illustration. Maybe it's because it's the UK edition. I don't know anyway. I'll post a link It's a neat little story not a great story, but a neat little story some stuff that came in the mail Stephen King night shift collection of short stories After reading under the dome last year, I decided I wanted to read some more Stephen King But I don't want to read any more of his giant novels I'll start with some short stories the Martian child by David Gerald Apparently, this is his defining work for those of you who don't know David Gerald is the guy who Created tribbles on the original Star Trek and he was the guy who created the original land of the Lost television series in 1974 Edge Chronicles book one beyond the deep woods My Paul Stewart and illustrated by Chris Riddell I've been following Chris. Oh, it was a bookmark in here. I've been following Chris Riddell on tumbler for a couple of years seeing his illustration work and I had no idea he was involved in this book series I Suspect there are plenty of artists I follow on tumbler on Twitter Whose actual work I'm not actually familiar with Anyway, once I learned about this I ordered this first book The same shipment I got this across the wall short story collection by Garth Nix. I've seen this guy's name I'm not familiar with his work, but I guess I'm gonna find out This was sent to me by the author J. R. Hammond Teshin. It's his latest book. This one's self-published The full title is There it is With a voice that is often still confused but is becoming ever louder and clearer He has a habit of doing that making these Story titles that are full sentences. I reviewed his previous book Which he informed me was not self-published I said it was when I reviewed it and in during my horror month last October He contacted me and asked if he could send me a copy of this and I said sure of course I may save this until next October When I review some more horror books Speaking of authors sending me books I'm getting more and more Unsolicited messages from unpublished authors who ask me if I would like to review their first Science fiction novel or even I had one guy ask me if I wanted to beta read his unpublished science fiction novel The answer is no. I'm not going to do that ever so People please don't send me messages like that. The answer is always gonna be no I've never responded to those requests by the way. I'm not even saying no. I'm just not responding The rest of these books here came from The thrift store at the local library volume 2 of cowboy bebop manga. I've seen the anime Series of this not not a big deal. It's about bounty hunters in space in the distant future. I Read a few pages of this. It's no big deal. There's a Yu-Gi-Oh card stuck in it though This is probably worth more than the book and I I paid a dollar for this The Andalite Chronicles It says before the Animorphs there was El Fango or I Don't know anything about the Animorphs series. It's a Young readers science fiction series about teenagers who can turn into animals and stuff And according to the description on this book this alien here is Where their powers came from? Why did I pay even a dollar for this? I don't know and there was this this shiny Silvery-covered book Tracker's book one by Patrick Carmen. The reason I looked at this was because of the shiny cover But the reason I went ahead and paid a dollar for it is because it looks like the entirety of the text is written in a question-and-answer form Someone interviewing somebody It looks like the entire book is that way either that will be interesting or it'll be too painful to read This I bought This is kind of a lark Naked came the manatee a novel written by all of these authors And I recognized a good bit of them Carl Hyason Elmore Leonard Dave Barry and the Buchanan 10 and a Reeve do It's one of these things where one author writes the first chapter and then they all take turns writing a chapter Dave Barry wrote the first chapter here and And It's entitled booger That sounds exactly like something Dave Barry would do for those of you don't know Dave Barry is a humorist who is known for his Comedy editorials and newspapers back in the 80s and 90s He was extremely funny. This was my big find at the library bookstore this month a dollar for this giant Oxford book of fantasy stories apparently It is a companion piece to An Oxford book of science fiction stories, which they did not have But the list of authors is a who's who of science fiction authors I took a look at this and said I need to get this Lord Dunsaney a Merit HP Lovecraft Robert E Howard Clark Ashton Smith Fritz Liber Ray Bradbury Harry Cutter Jack Vance Manly Wade Wellman theater sturgeon Paul Anderson Avram Davidson it goes on and on Larry Niven John Brunner Peter S. Beagle James Siftry, Jr Tanneth Lee Lucius Shepherd Terry Pratchett It's an amazing selection of authors I'll get into that And let you know what it's like. I bought this book. You may be able to see what the problem is already I bought this as an example Of what not to do with a book cover. I looked at it on the shelf I looked at it and looked at it and had to ask myself What's the title of the book Gina show alter Maggie Shane? Susan Crenard is Gina show alter the title of the book or are those names of authors? I looked and looked and couldn't figure out and just as I was setting it back down I noticed down at the bottom in Dark letters that you that are hidden down in the background painting that you can't even see It says heart of darkness. That's the title of the book. It's a collection of three novellas each by these authors and It's an example of a really bad cover. I can see putting the author's name above the title When you're talking about an author whose name is a household word like Stephen King, but for people like this I mean, who are they and Then to hide the actual title of the book down at the bottom making it so dark.  I can hardly see it Bad cover speaking of bad covers. I posted this on the tumbler in the science fiction section of the library I found what has got to be the worst book cover. I've ever seen here. It is I don't know what the Publisher or the editor was going for maybe they were going for a video gaming crowd or the anime crowd But it's a fail. It doesn't capture any of that kind of atmosphere or attitude to it I made a video before where I talked about how you shouldn't blame the artist for bad covers like this And I'm still I'm still going to defend the artist here. This is a situation where the editor and The publisher should have looked at this art and said this is not usable This is not right for this cover It's not right for this project and perhaps the artist is not ready for a job like this the editor and the publisher should have nixed this Anyway, moving on The only other things I have to show here are audio books that I checked out from the library Seven eaves by Neil Stevenson. I've been reading an awful lot about this book a lot of my fellow Booktubers have talked about this I'll I'll give this a listen. There was something called The library at Mount Char Some kind of fantasy murder mystery or something and then some Science fiction for young readers space station rat Something I've never heard of I'll give it a listen and let you know Alright, that's it for this month's wrap up. I will do the first book review of 2016 And post that shortly. Bye You can support 30 seconds sci-fi and my other projects by becoming a patron There is a link in the description below and visit the 30 seconds sci-fi tumblr That's my headquarters in addition to my videos. I publish links and updates there every day