Welcome, everybody. I'm Lori Bell, and on behalf of my partner, Dr. Bill Fisher, we'd like to welcome you to this fall colloquium. On November 2nd and 3rd, we're pleased to announce we'll be having a Library 2.0 conference, and it's free, and we have a great website set up for it. So check that out. We have presenters from all over the world that will be presenting at this event. So today, we're really pleased to have Jeff Frank, who is an alumni of San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science. He graduated last spring with the Master in Library and Information Science. He's currently a software support specialist with the CMS project team at San Jose State. Before he came to San Jose State, he completed a certificate program at Idaho State in Geotechnologies. He's a native of Pennsylvania, and he holds a BA in History and Geography from Penn State. And today, Jeff is going to talk about his thesis and the research he conducted while working on the thesis. With all the major weather patterns we've been having, the tsunami in Japan and Hurricane Irene, his study of the impact of Hurricane Katrina is more relevant than ever. So, Jeff, welcome. We're really glad to have you, and I'll turn it over to you. Hi, everyone. Thank you very much for coming in today. It's wonderful to see all of you. I see some folks here that I've seen here at various points. This is good. So thanks for coming in. As Lori mentioned, yes, I'm here to talk a little bit to give some perspective about my thesis today. I have to say it was a long process, but it was very rewarding, and I think this will be of benefit to people who are just curious to know about the process and the inner workings of compiling a thesis versus, say, the ePortfolio, the other culminating experience here to graduate from this list program. Also, I think this will be of use to students who are maybe on the fence about whether to do the thesis or the ePortfolio is the culminating experience. Obviously, I'm here to advocate that the thesis is the way to go. I think for who I am, for my research interests and how I approached the research material in my program, this is the best avenue for me. So I guess we could move along here. So let me go to the next slide. Hi. Okay. So there we are. So about me, just a couple of minor points. I live here in California. I live in Morgan Hill, which is a little south, about 10 miles south of San Jose, California here. And I do work at SJSU as Lori said. I work one floor up, so very convenient for me. And I did attend the SLIS program from fall 2007 until spring 2011. And I did graduate this past May with the thesis option. Also, before I go on, I think if anybody has any questions, if we can hold them to the end, that would be wonderful. I just want to kind of keep the flow going here and then anybody has any questions and comments. They can certainly ask them at the end. So let's get going here a little more. Okay. So here we go. This is my thesis topic. I took a little tweaking here with my committee and I. But they basically ended up being the impact of Hurricane Katrina on Gulf Coast libraries and their disaster planning. My goal here was to examine, as you can see here, the impact that Hurricane Katrina did have on the Gulf Coast library community in the most affected parts of southeastern Louisiana and southern Mississippi. And I was also looking at the role that existing disaster plans played in preserving select libraries, collections before, during, and after the disaster. Okay. So let's go to the next slide here. Oh, there we go.  Or as I said here, I would not be giving this presentation without their guidance. Dr. Debbie Hansen, she was my thesis committee chair and my thesis committee members, Dr. Susie Abert and Dr. Pat Franks. No relation. But it was just a wonderful experience working with Debbie, Susie, and Pat. I'll be forever in their debt and it was just wonderful working with them. I really learned a lot. So if we can just move on to the next slide, that would be great. Okay. So why did I choose this as a thesis topic? I've always been interested in disasters ever since I was a kid. I've always just been fascinated by them. Not that I look forward to them, nothing like that, but I've just been fascinated by them, as well as their impact on human society and throughout history. I've spent most of my life in northeastern Pennsylvania in the Wilkesbury area, Wilkesbury-Scranton area. And that part of the country tends to see some pretty extreme weather. I've encountered many blizzards. Severe thunderstorms, accompanying tornado scares, hurricanes, floods. You name it, really. Even drought. I remember in 1988, big drought that summer. It was pretty bad. And as a result, I did pick up an appreciation and a respect for this natural phenomenon. And another reason is that I was really appalled after watching the coverage of the media coverage of the recovery of the Gulf Coast as a result of Hurricane Katrina, how it overwhelmed the Gulf Coast and how the recovery just went just sluggish. And it was really inexcusable. And I think a lot of people, rightly so, were outraged at that. And I think I wanted to kind of be a voice for them in any way, in the small way that I could here. And honestly, I just knew that before starting as a SLIS student, as a result of that, since that was really the most talked about disaster in recent years at that point, I knew that that was what I wanted to focus on and its impact on the Gulf Coast libraries because I knew that part of the country is very vulnerable to flooding and natural disaster and hurricanes. So if we can move on to the next slide. Thank you. Okay, so I guess it comes down to why did I choose doing this over ePortfolio? It really was not a decision for me at all. I knew that these were the two options that I had to choose from and I did read through what would be required with ePortfolio and obviously what would be required with a thesis. And the ePortfolio just didn't really appeal to me. I kind of take a traditionalist view of graduate work and I just wanted to do a thesis, really, on what it comes down to. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do this that was so really research intensive. And I can guarantee you my wife can definitely verify that this is all that I would be doing whenever I would be home, either that or discussing about it at any event. And I also wanted to contribute in the original body of research to the library and information scientist, excuse me, field. And finally, really, I just thought of such a lofty goal. I wanted to throw my hat in the ring and see if I could do it. And very fortunate for me, I did it. And I'm still kind of pinching myself every now and again thinking, did I actually do this? So, very happy with the result. Okay, we can go on to the next slide. All right, well, the research strategy, it wasn't something that, okay, I came up with a research strategy and by gum we're going to do it. It was something that certainly took some evolution. Most of it was there. And I really started writing about this topic even vaguely starting in my first semester in the fall of 2007 for Dr. Bill Fisher for Library 204. And it was just something as simple as, I'm just curious to see the impact of Hurricane Katrina on Gulf Coast Libraries. It wasn't particularly for the term paper for that class. And it wasn't particularly focused, I'm the first to admit that as Debbie, Susie, and Pat will certainly admit as well as time went on. But we certainly got it down to that point, but that's a little later. So my initial research strategy, it began in fall 2008 as a result of taking Library 285 with Dr. Debbie Hansen. And that was to incorporate several items. I was to look at the existing literature on Hurricane Katrina's impact on libraries as well as library disasters throughout history. Another component I wanted to include was the utilization of geographic information systems or GIS so that I could produce maps to visually demonstrate or actually visually illustrate, I should say, the impact of Hurricane Katrina on southeastern Louisiana and southern Mississippi libraries. And third, this is the thing that did have to end up changing, was I initially wanted to obtain firsthand oral histories from library professionals in the Gulf Coast region as a result of a research trip that was going to be planned for the fall of 2009. Sounds simple, right? Well, not so much. We can go to the next slide. So as time did go on over the course of the next several months, I realized that the part of the strategy dealing with me taking the physical trip down to New Orleans and the plan was to go to visit Hattiesburg and along the Gulf Coast there in Mississippi. That was just going to become increasingly impractical. And it was to be amended to the next step was to be performing interviews of library professionals remotely via phone and online surveys. And that sounded easy enough. But however, due to time constraints, this had to be further defined to eliminate the phone interviews and getting the local perspectives via the survey questions. And I thought that would be a pretty logical way to go. And after some massively a lot of consultation with Debbie, Susie, and Pat, and rightly so, there's a lot of factors that go into it. Oh, let's go back to that previous slide. I was still in the middle of it. Please, thank you. I had to go through what's called the SJSU Human Subjects Institutional Review Board IRB. It had to be a sanctioned questionnaire from the university so that I can be approved to send this questionnaire to several library professionals who've been visible in the literature in order to get their feedback for inclusion into my thesis. Okay, if we can go to the next slide. Thank you. Okay, so finally, by September 2009, the major sections of my thesis were finalized into the following. And again, the first two didn't change. We're still looking at the existing literature on Hurricane Katrina's impact on the Gulf Coast libraries as well as library disasters throughout history. And the second piece, again, utilizing GIS to create maps to show some destruction, not necessarily destruction, but just to show some kind of visualization of the disaster's impact on the libraries in the region. And then, again, the IRB questionnaire that was going to be sent to the library professionals electronically. We can go. Okay, so just a little word on the IRB. I wouldn't go so far as to call it a thorn in my side, but there was a lot of back and forth with my thesis committee and myself and the Office of Graduate Studies and Research. I had first obtained approval to get this questionnaire out to the professionals. And we had to just really, really nail down all the why are we doing this, what's going to be sent to them, what can the respondents expect, that kind of thing. And then we did have to wait four to six weeks for IRB approval. And from what I remember, it took closer to four weeks, which was just wonderful because that certainly expedited everything. And then once I got that approval, I was free to send it out to the anonymous Gulf Coast library professionals. And then here on this slide, I just wanted to show you what the questions of the questionnaire. There were only eight, but these questions, as you could see, they were pretty, they're certainly getting a lot of information here that for my purposes, for my research was certainly something that I could use. So anyway, so as you could see, I was talking about what kind of damages, basically kind of broke it down into several parts. Just seeing what the damage was that the library has experienced. Also, disaster plan preparedness. What was their status at the time of Hurricane Katrina? Was it adequate? Were there gaps in coverage, that kind of thing? And finally, what were the lessons learned for future disasters? And I'll just give you a moment just to look at that. Okay, so with something like this, sorry, there are some folks out in the hallway. We just had to get that door closed, so sorry about that. So there were a few bumps in the road here on the way to getting my thesis to fruition here. And there were several options, not several options, but several issues. One of them was, as I kind of mentioned earlier, I really had a general research interest in, okay, Hurricane Katrina's impact on Gulf Coast libraries. Okay, well, what about it? And I really did have to refine this with my thesis committee just to make sure it was a workable topic. We eventually got there. And I think I'm very happy with it. Not I think, but I am very happy with the results. And once I was able to nail that down, it was very easy to move forward. Another problem was obviously, as I definitely mentioned earlier, was trying to get this. I was really married to this idea of going to the Gulf Coast to do this research trip. I really wanted to do it. But obviously, for reasons, it just didn't happen. And what are you going to do? It happened this life. So as you can see, it evolved from a physical research trip to phone interviews to get the oral histories from the library professionals to the questionnaire that was sent electronically. And another issue, and I found this out once I discovered, once we not discovered anything, but once I got to the part of writing this chapter about the questionnaire respondents, how to preserve their confidentiality and to protect their identity. The whole point was that, and when we explained it to them, that they would not be identified by name and by other factors. But what we did decide, just so that, of course, we had to refer to them somehow in the thesis in that particular chapter, that was Chapter 5, basically we decided to just refer to them by what library they represented, academic, public, or government depository library. And what's geographic location? Louisiana or Mississippi? And that seemed to work just fine. And some of the GIS data that I wanted to show in the maps, and I'll be showing them to you here momentarily, was I was really, really eager. I was really kind of going above and beyond what I was expecting to find. But you know, you got to shoot for the stars, right? So I was hoping to find some rainfall intensity and some flood depth data sets. So I could just really visualize to the reader what the, what New Orleans, what a southeastern Louisiana and what Southern Mississippi was looking at in terms of water depth, that would really, really put a fine point on it. But they weren't available at the time of the map creation. So, okay, so, okay. So this is far and away my most, this was the next point here. Was far and away the biggest issue that I dealt with here. Basically, I had to find the library damage statistics in Southern Mississippi and Southeastern Louisiana, right? Obviously, it's kind of important for my thesis to come to fruition. Guess what? It wasn't in one place. I can tell you that right now. It was, I didn't panic. It was nothing like that, but it was just a realization thing. You're in the middle of this and you have to research it and you have to find some way to, you know, make it work like Tim Gunn on Project Runway says. But basically, at the time, most of the information up until that point came from library journals. You know, like Southeast, I think Southern Mississippi libraries is one and others, for example, that regularly was running articles on status reports for their libraries. But it was more of a general kind of format rather than a detailed accounting of the damage these libraries received. And as a result of that, I had to do some kind of hunt and pecking internet searching. And which was, it actually did yield some results. Not too many, as I'll get here momentarily. Actually, I can probably just jump ahead here just a bit that the bulk of the data did come from my contacting Louisiana and Mississippi State library associations and individual libraries representatives via email correspondence, excuse me. And they were sent in a very eager, very quick turnaround. They were very eager to tell the story, help me tell the story. And it was just a fantastic amount of data. That was far and away the bulk of the library's data that I received. And it was just wonderful. I was honestly expecting to go to, you know, American Library Association or the Special Libraries Association website, go right to the page that has all the library damage statistics, and move on my merry way to the next part of my thesis didn't happen that way, as you can kind of tell. And one of the things that I found out that Debbie and I were kind of going back and forth on, excuse me, was that some of the web pages that I did find these library statistics on before contacting the Louisiana and Mississippi Library Association and the Mississippi Library Commission and the State Library of Louisiana are the ones that I'm referring to here. They were there, they were online at the time of my research, which is the fall of 2009. That was really the bulk of my research in the beginning of it anyway when I was doing this part of my thesis. And then when I came time for doing editing and so forth, you know, so I could submit to my People's Committee for review, I kept getting 404 errors and that this page is no longer available. Yeah, so that was quite a feeling, but we got it, we worked around it by indicating in the body of the thesis that that information was no longer available. What are you going to do? It's not there, it's not there, but the data did come from, for example, the State Library of Louisiana. So what are the findings? So basically the data that I got from these library associations in Louisiana and Mississippi, the professional library journals and what was available on the Internet, it did yield a total of 66 academic public and government depository libraries that suffered damage. It was from Hurricane Katrina obviously and it was a pretty healthy set, I thought. I broke it down to, there are 16 libraries for which I had data in New Orleans, 29 in South Eastern Louisiana excluding New Orleans and 21 in Southern Mississippi. And it's pretty obvious, the libraries that did sustain the heaviest damage in Mississippi, they were located in low-lying areas along the Gulf Coast and within close proximity to the Gulf Coast, south of Interstate 10. If you look on the map, Interstate 10 is only several miles away from the Gulf Coast itself, from the water of the Gulf of Mexico. And the reason why this was so big, you have to realize that when Hurricane Katrina did make a landfall on August 29, 2005, it was a category three storm. You see a lot of them, they tend to be, you see a lot of these storms come up the Atlantic Coast and the Gulf Coast. The thing is, though it's very important, is that this storm was a category five, a very strong category five about a day before. So you still had this residual water being pushed out that caused the storm surge that was around 30 feet in place along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. And for several miles inland on places, there was substantial flooding. And with all of these communities along the Gulf Coast in Mississippi, Gulfport, Biloxi, Ocean Springs, et cetera, they were just annihilated. And so in Louisiana, outside of New Orleans, it makes sense that Southeastern Louisiana is close to the Mississippi River Delta. You have low-lying areas that are at or even in some places under the mean sea level. And they are in flood-prone areas. And in New Orleans, New Orleans is located in a very flood-prone city that is below the Mississippi River in Lake Pontchartrain base levels. The ones that are not, basically, if it's located in a bowl. And the ones that are not located on higher ground within the city suffer the most damage. And it's pretty obvious that those libraries that did store their collections in the basement or on the first floors of their buildings, as in Mississippi, they were the ones that sustained the most damage, especially once the levees failed. Okay, so the next several slides here. These are the maps. You'll have the following maps for inclusion in my thesis that just showed you a little more information about what I'm talking about. This first slide here, this is just to kind of give you a little bit of information about where I got the data. I got these GIS data sets from the Mississippi Spatial Data Repository. It's called MARIS, excuse me, M-A-R-I-S. And for Louisiana, it was called ATLAS. I also received these spatial data sets from FEMA and the Louisiana State University GIS. All fantastic sources for this kind of spatial data. And at the time that I used, they still had pages of just pages and pages of these data sets related to it. And it was very helpful. And as you can see, and I initially thought when I created this one, I don't know many hurricanes that move in right angles like that, almost right angles. But apparently I did double check and that was the trajectory on August 29th when Hurricane Katrina did make a landfall. It moved straight north and then just did a little jog to the northeast there. And you can see the wind speed at landfall. It was still pretty substantial. And if you look just to the lower right of that larger blue body of water, that's Lake Pontchartrain. That yellowish, creamish color border on this lower right side, that's New Orleans. So you see how close that storm came to just really, really pounding New Orleans. And it already got destroyed basically the way it was. So if you can go for the next slide, that'd be great. Thank you. Okay, these next three slides I just wanted to show, excuse me. I'm sorry, my computer went in a power save mode. I was like, hey, everything's going black. This is a map that I created to show the damage caused to Louisiana libraries that does not include New Orleans Parish where New Orleans is. That's the next slide. And I have represented as the libraries these multi-colored icons. The green icon represents minor damage, yellow for moderate damage, and the red for severe damage. I can certainly go into detail, a little bit of detail about what compose, why I chose these classifications for this kind of damage classification. Sorry for repeating myself, but I can if you'd like. I can certainly kind of tell you that a little later on here. And as you can see, there's really kind of spaced out in terms of what kind of damage certain places received. And that lightish blue color, that is showing you the storage extent. Basically it's the areas that are flooding. So you can see a lot of these places are in flooded areas. And like I said earlier, this part of Louisiana is very close and in some places under sea level that are protected by levees and banks. A point of interest I wanted to make note here is toward the top of my map here you see those four blue icons. Those are libraries that did not receive extensive damage, but they were closed, nonetheless, after the storm because of all the financial difficulties as a result of just that area being completely devastated. It's unfortunate, but it happens, I guess. So if we can go to the next slide, that would be great. Okay. And this is another slide showing you the damage caused to New Orleans libraries by Hurricane Katrina. And I will admit, as time has gone on, I'm not the biggest fan of my choice for selection of the flood level shading. But in any event, it is what it is. Gotta make it work. So you can see there that I'm still using the same classification category of minor, moderate, and severe damage to these libraries. And a lot of these places, most of them, as you can see, they're in these flooded areas as represented by that light blue color selection that shows to indicate those flood levels. And this is two days after landfall, which was August 29, 2005. So if we can go fourth one more, if we can go to the next slide. There we go. Now this slide is arguably my favorite because I think this really does just give you a really good sense for the extent of the flooding here. Same idea, minor, moderate, severe damage library locations here. And just look at all of those library locations. They are located well within, in some places, well within the surge extent of how far I came inland. If you look a little to the north of where Pascagoula is, towards the right there, that's not, I thought that first, that was an exaggeration. There is a bay there. And that went in, I don't know how many miles, the number escapes me, but it was several miles. And that flooding is accurate.  That is astounding. And then you just have some other, a little farther north here in Hattiesburg, which is the location of, let's see, a University of Southern Mississippi. They received some minor damage. And the one in the right there. I believe that was caused by a weakened tree that fell plumb through the middle of library branch. And that was the end of that library. I would have to research that just to double check, but I remember that stood out quite a bit. So we can go to the next page. Okay, so what were my thesis findings on disaster plan effectiveness? As I've already went over, in order to get to the point of where I can get these findings out and convey them, I had to process this library literature related to Hurricane Katrina. How the small and large scale disasters throughout history impacted libraries and the input from these Gulf Coast Library professionals. There were four of them. As a result, it was revealed, and this is pretty obvious, that most of Gulf Coast Library's disaster plans, they were very ineffective at mitigating damage to their collections during the storm because simply of the magnitude of the storm, the flooding during and afterwards as a result of, in some places, the levee collapses and the ensuing disaster responses. So, and let's see here. Okay, so this one here, one of the questionnaire respondents said it perfectly, he just said it perfectly, that no disaster plan can anticipate a disaster, the magnitude of a hurricane Katrina. I mean, that was absolutely true. I couldn't get any more right than that. So their respondents, as a result of those eight questions that I posed earlier, their answers to the questionnaire illuminated several factors that impacted their library's effectiveness at preserving their collections. And there were three that I was able to determine there. Their library location, the scope of the disaster and what disaster's most plans address. So for the first one, these libraries were located in a pretty vulnerable area. But these places, these libraries that were located further from areas of flooding, however few, really few there may have been, or on higher ground, they did see less damage, they may be reduced to a broken window here, a little bit of a leaking roof there, a little bit of mold damage. In vice versa, the places that were located in southern Mississippi, for example, on the Gulf Coast, they were annihilated. Many of the places were annihilated. Some were rebuilt further inland very wisely if you ask me. And regarding the scope of the disaster, these typical disaster library plans, library disaster plans I should say, they are intended to mitigate small localized disasters, a small fire, leaking pipe, or even a power outage that might affect climate control of the library's collections. But not those that affect both large areas, like a hurricane or an earthquake. And it affects many of the libraries a response to support systems. And finally, what scope, what disasters most of these plans address. I mean, they're designed to address events happening singly, one at a time. It is, say, in a localized disaster.  But they're not really meant to assist with the succession of events that are a disaster besides if a hurricane Katrina would incur. So we can go to the next slide. So I do have some suggestions as a result of going through my thesis and my findings. I came up with three items. To anticipate, library administrators should certainly keep personnel up to date as possible regarding risks for future disasters that that particular library location may be susceptible to. Here in the Bay Area of California, what is it? The big issue are earthquakes. So, you know, it's just dependent on the part of the country that these places are located. Another suggestion here is to communicate, to have communication among library personnel, emergency management officials, local state and federal authorities. That's always good. You can never go wrong. You know, knowledge is power. And the implementation of a current communication tree so library personnel can be contacted after a disaster is advisable. One of the, on a quick aside here, one of the respondents on my library respondents indicated they had it. They had a communication tree. Not a problem. Problem was with hurricane Katrina that came through and it knocked over all of the cell towers. You couldn't, and if you're trying to use a cell phone, good luck, it wasn't going to work. So, for updating, people, the library administrators should periodically review and update library's disaster plans. That's just common sense, just as with anything. Make sure it's a well-oiled machine. Make sure that it's effective. And finally, to pre-meditate, this is more for future considerations of where libraries should be planned to be and to live, basically. But a lot of thoughts should certainly be given to where these future library locations are going to be in areas of vulnerability, such as the most susceptible areas of the Gulf Coast. And that just goes without saying. Let's go to the, okay. Final thoughts, everyone. Okay, is this, my efforts to compose this thesis to go through everything that went through the preparation effort, the rewrites, research, yes, frustration, absolutely. Again, excuse me, this is something that I really enjoyed doing. This is something that I wanted to do. And I don't think, no, I don't think, but nothing was going to deter me from getting this done. I really wanted to do it. And for you Swiss students who might be listening, or may be listening in the future, to this presentation. And if you're on the fence about doing this thesis option, should I do the e-portfolio, from my perspective, I can't recommend it enough. If any of what I've said throughout my presentation here has kind of struck a chord with you, I suspect that you'd probably enjoy doing the thesis. I found it very rewarding, and I still feel an enormous sense of accomplishment. Again, I still pinch myself every now and again. And it's a great research experience. It absolutely was. You know, I was very fortunate in that a lot of what came out in the end with my thesis, the real nebulous core of it was there since the beginning. Again, like I said, I've always wanted to do this, and it really seemed to work out just fine. And as I was going along, yeah, there's going to be changes, and it's not the kind of thing that you go, oh, no, there's going to be changes. What am I going to do?  It's something that you just roll with the punches. And I felt that it was just a natural progression in the final stage. There are going to be changes needed to be made. But since you're already in that mindset, it's not that difficult. It really isn't. Okay, and I think I have one more slide here. If you do have any questions, this is kind of going forward here. I wanted to give you my email address. If anybody had any questions that you felt like contacting me, anything I could further flesh out after the question and answer period here momentarily, that's my email address, glengarry72atyahoo.com. And this is for anybody who might be interested in accessing this recording at a future date. You would simply come to this website, HTTPS, remember that, s-colon-double-back-slash-nexus.sjsu.edu. And then you'll just click on the recordings tab and select today's date and time. And that's October 4th, about 12 o'clock. And I believe that's it. I think that's what I got. I think my next slide is just indicating questions and comments. So there we go. So let's see here. All right, if anybody has any questions, I'm more than happy to. Okay, Angel, I'm seeing your typed-in thing here. Could you describe disaster recovery efforts of document recovery? Some of them seemed, from what I read, they were using a lot of... See, I'm kind of warming here. They were using a lot of disaster document control specialists. They would utilize freeze-drying methods. They did, from what I gleaned, they were able to recover a lot of those materials. I mean, obviously, there were some materials that were not able to be saved. But from what I read, they appeared to be pretty successful at, even to save a lot of these documents, these music recordings, for example, that may have been even underwater for days and weeks. They were pretty successful at getting them dried up and ready for use again. But that's about as much information as I probably have about that. Okay, Melissa, okay, yeah, apparently I guess this is going to be the way to go. Let's see. Oh, that's a good question. If any libraries completely lost their books, there were... they were primarily located in Mississippi. And for obvious reasons, as my one map showed, that how there were well... a lot of these libraries were just well within the storm surge. There were a lot of these Mississippi libraries that did lose just absolutely everything. Building, I mean, water completely covering the buildings. I mean, there were definitely instances of that. For sure, yes, there were. Stormy, hello. No, no. Yeah, it breaks my heart. Yeah, I really wish that I could have visited the Gulf area. I haven't yet. It is on my radar. I do want to get down there. And when I do go there, I certainly, more than just eat my weight in Cajun food, I definitely do plan on making some kind of post-research trip here, just to see for myself, you know, kind of how things are, and maybe even interview some folks, just, you know, just for my own personal edification. Yeah, for sure. It's definitely on the radar, but up to this point, no, I haven't just yet. Marissa, hello again. Anything... you know, isn't that funny? No, I haven't read anything where historical... anything really historical or important that was completely lost. I didn't read anything where there was any one thing or these handful of collections that just, that was so culturally significant, that lost, that was completely lost. I was very fortunate not to read that. My overall impression, again, was that most of the items that were damaged by the flooding, they were saved, which is great, but any of the things that were completely not saved, they didn't appear to be not insignificant, but not really historically significant, like copies of, like Louisiana's copies of the Declaration of Independence or anything like that. So, Loretta, hi, Loretta. Nice to see you again. Let's see here. Yeah, Loretta. You know, I've gotten a lot of positive feedback. I've gotten a lot of positive feedback about the restaffing of the libraries and the rebuilding of the libraries. Even with a lot of these libraries that were completely destroyed, what I got was I got a lot of positive feedback indicating that they had, if not rebuilt right on the same spot or they would rebuild it at a place further inland. They had a lot of community assistance with people just donating books, all sorts of drives similar to that to just restock any collections that were lost in the flooding. It was, and the restaffing, there were some issues, of course, with some people, you know, not only as a storm as something like Hurricane Katrina, a real physical issue, but it also plays a big psychological role in how some people, do they want to return into such a vulnerable area where they can reuse everything again that they've built up over the course of a lifetime just like that. There were certainly some issues that I did come across where folks left their positions because of that, but my impression, again, from what I've read and from what I've researched, most of the folks did come back, it was like they just completely mobilized and they really dig their heels to just get those libraries back up and running. That was a very positive side effect of Hurricane Katrina. Okay, hi, Martina. Okay, let's see. Did the libraries lose vital records? Isn't that interesting? I would have to assume that they did. I can almost say for certain, I did not come across any of the literature that specifically mentioned losing the vital records. I didn't really come across anything specifically mentioned that. What did they do? Oh, Martina, I can tell you that in order for them to recover from such losses, I should almost just send you an email with some of the information because there were certainly, for example, some of the folks who did respond to me for the questionnaire, part of my questionnaire just did indicate, you know, what have you done to recoup from this? How are you going to prepare for further disasters? And some of them, boy, they really went into some great detail about how they did recover from these losses. Let's see here. Some of the libraries did, from what I understand, some of them just were, what's a good word for it, were just kind of, they were accepting of their situation of where they are in such a vulnerable area. There was a particular respondent that honestly did not instill a lot of faith. It was almost like he was, that was the word I'm looking for. He was really resigned to what the, basically what the chips fall where they may. The rationale that was given to me being that because they're in such a vulnerable area, that it was almost expected to happen. But the other respondents, for example, they did indicate that they have changed their plans radically. For example, taking their collections out of the basement, which were on the first floor, especially if you're very close to levees and the Gulf Coast, that makes perfect sense. That's certainly what they did. And let's see. Let me get to your last question here. Did you come across the impact of larger state and private archives? Let me see here. There were certainly some archives that were lost. Of course, along with regular library collections, I think you'll see a lot of those that were not. I didn't read a lot. I didn't read anything that indicated how crippled the archives community is in the Gulf Coast area based on how much they lost as it had to stand still for those states. That's about as far as my research took me. I didn't recall reading or coming across much, indicating how impacted the status of the archives and the special collections were in those southern Mississippi and southeastern Louisiana. Okay. Let's see. Two microphones available. Hi, Angel. Okay, there you go. Did I come across any films or videos of destruction in libraries? No. Unfortunately, I didn't. I've certainly come across a lot of literature. I did purchase myself a few DVDs of just information about the Hurricane Katrina's damage. National Geographic had one called, I think it was called Inside Hurricane Katrina, just jaw-dropping. And of course, Spike Lee's When the Levies Broke. You want to cry, that's something to watch, but it's something that I think a lot of people need to see. That was just something to watch. Unfortunately, no, I really was looking for videos that dealt with how libraries responded to Hurricane Katrina and the flooding. Unfortunately, I couldn't find it. Okay, Martina. Oh, you're welcome, Martina. I actually wanted to know if his thesis was available for reading or purchase or something, because I was in Houston, Texas at the time, I was around for Allison Ike, Katrina, Rita, and I have family in Louisiana as well, and I wouldn't mind reading what he wrote. And I was just wondering how I might be able to read what he wrote. Okay, hi, Stormy. Yes, it is available. And I was actually quite surprised at how fast my thesis did go to publication, and it is currently available. And the good news is that you could certainly, downloadable copy that is available through the MLK Library. And it's pretty straightforward. I can't remember specifically what the navigation is, but you could certainly look for just theses that have been published since, say, 2010. Mine will show up there, and then you could just follow the links there to get to where you could just click the PDF copy of it, and there you are, and it will all be there for you. Well, thank you very much for attending, everybody. I really appreciate it. Again, if you're on the fence as a SLIS student, wanting to do this, wanting to do a thesis as your culminating experience with the SLIS program can't recommend it enough. Absolutely can't recommend it enough. It was just wonderful. And I know that the resources SLIS has here in terms of their faculty, you will not be disappointed. I can guarantee you that. Thank you very much, and have a great day, everyone. Jeff, thank you very much. That was a wonderful presentation. Thank you for sharing your experience of doing the thesis, but also sharing some of the facts from your topic. You just did an excellent job, and we sure appreciate your sharing that today. So thank you very much. Be sure to look at the SLIS webpage. We have Career Colloquia coming up and Mara Colloquia, and more general. And we have most of these scheduled and publicized through the fall, so I hope you can join us.


Attention East Colfax residents. This is a community notification of a new sexually violent predator in your area. Please stay tuned to the following short program for more information. Hi I'm technician Ron Hackett with the Denver Police Department. The sex offender registration and compliance unit at DPD is responsible for the registration monitoring and tracking of all registered sex offenders and sexually violent predators who live in the city and county of Denver. Here's a brief history of sex offender legislation in Colorado. Our state laws trickle down from federal government mandates. In 1994 we had the Jacob Wetterling Act which mandated that states would establish a sex offender list. Magans law of 1996 said that the public would have access to those sex offender registration lists. The Pam Litchner Act of 1996 stated that some offenders might have to have lifetime registrations and the Adam Walsh Act of 2006 unified sex offender laws across the country. In Colorado the legislature has determined that sexually violent predators by definition pose a higher risk to the community at large and therefore mandated that upon their release from the Department of Corrections the community must be notified. Sex offender notification in Colorado happens in two ways. The first is passive and ongoing through the sex offender registration process which is a list maintained by local police department. The second way is active via community notification for those offenders determined to be sexually violent predators by the courts or by the parole board. Most sex offenders in Colorado are supervised by the criminal justice system in our communities. Most sex offenders engage in crossover behavior which means they may have been arrested for one type of crime but be apt to commit another.  There is no typical sex offender but all tend to be deceptive, manipulative and secretive. 80 to 93 percent of sex offenses are committed by someone known to the victim. Sexual deviancy begins in mid to late adolescence. Sex offenses are not impulsive.  The community has a vested interest in helping offenders to be successfully managed in the community. Sex offenders have the same need for housing and employment as any other citizen.  There are approximately 16,500 registered sex offenders in the state of Colorado. About 65 percent of convicted sex offenders are placed in the community on probation. The remainder are in the department of corrections or community corrections. Offenders may be caught for one type of offense but be at a high risk to commit another type. Crime of conviction is only one indicator of risk.  The offender's residence must be verified quarterly by the Denver Police Department. The full sex offender registration list is available by calling the Denver Police Department Identification Bureau at<PHONE_NUMBER>. Convicted felons and those with multiple convictions are posted online at denvergov.org slash police.   Now here's a look at the newest sexually violent predator living in Denver. Here's an overview of the registered sex offenders currently living in Denver. There are 2,225 total living within city limits. In Denver Police District 2 there are 406. Precinct 223 has 136 registered sex offenders. Of those 96 have felony convictions and 40 have misdemeanor convictions. Christopher James Magaux is a sexually violent predator currently living in Denver. He's 25 years old and was born on August 16, 1989. He's a white male 5 foot 6 inches tall 135 pounds with blonde hair and blue eyes. He's currently living at the 7-star Motel unit 4 at 8400 East Colfax Avenue in the East Colfax neighborhood of Denver. Schools located within one mile of this offender include Denver School of the Arts at 7111 East Montview Boulevard, St. James School at 1250 Newport Street and Montclair School at 1151 Newport Street. Parks located within one mile of this offender include Crescent Park, Denison Park, Fred M. Thomas Memorial Park, Greenway Park, Montclair Park, Verbena Park, and William H. McNichols Park. Recreation centers located within one mile of this offender include Montclair Recreation Center at 729 Ulster Way. Bus routes located within one mile of this offender include Route 10 East 12th Avenue, Route 105 Havana Crosstown, Route 15 East Colfax, Route 15L East Colfax Limited.  He's currently on parole and registered with the Denver Police Department on March 16, 2015 to the 7-star Motel Unit 4 at 8400 East Colfax Avenue. Past charges against this offender include attempted sex assault on a child, felony vehicle theft, felony criminal mischief, possession of dangerous drugs, assault. Christopher James McGough has been determined as sexually violent predator after meeting the following criteria. Criteria one, age 18 or older on the date of the offense or under 18 and tried as an adult. The offender was 20 years old at the time of the offense. Criteria two, the crime must have been committed honor after July 1, 1997 and convicted honor after July 1, 1999.  The offender was convicted on December 17, 2009 for attempted sex assault on a child. Criteria three, the relationship to the victim was one of the following. Victim was a stranger to the offender or the offender established or promoted a relationship with the victim primarily for the purpose of sexual victimization. The victims were two 14-year-old females. The offender was known to the victims. Criteria four, positive results are the passing of a risk assessment instrument administered by probation parole staff and a qualified treatment evaluator. Positive results include an assessment for the presence of a mental abnormality, a level of denial regarding the offense, treatment appropriateness and motivation, presence of sexual deviant interests. The offender was evaluated by the Jefferson County courts with positive results determining him to be a sexually violent predator.


Hello and welcome to the channel. I'm Dr. Sumerian, not a real doctor, and today we're going to go over the dank memes from the dank memes from site 19 subreddit. Let's get started. This one is by Zeal. The ethics committee shouldn't complain about the new humanoid's containment procedures. It is fine with them. I hate it in here.  I do. There are a lot of interpretations of the ethics committee, but honest to God, this may sound weird, but I guess it's a little bit like children, because you're not keeping someone in containment for their own good most of the time. I'd say 90% of the time you're doing it for society's good one way or the other. So what they like or don't like doesn't enter into it, but there still is a way to do it that's not cruel, and the doctors in the foundation for some reason just want to be as mean about it. I know what the problem is. The writers want to show that the foundation is this cold and cruel, or we're cold, but not cruel. They want to show that it's cold and cruel to make a point. That's it. That's the whole point. And not my favorite portrayal of the foundation, if I'm being honest with you, because it's not super realistic. I'm not saying that an organization can't exist that does some pretty terrible stuff. That's absolutely possible, but there would be objections. The idea that they're beyond just the ethics committee that everybody ignores. There'd be objections amongst the rank and file.  There's no way that doctors would act this way. Not all of them.  I do like the idea of, and I don't know that this is explored enough in every canon. I know there are probably certainly canons that do, but I think it's explored enough how little privacy a foundation employee actually has. I feel like they could really, and this is a shoulder beam, by the way, I think they could really dive into that. And it would be quite an interesting, it'd be quite an interesting story in almost any setting or almost any other story, like it's a little side thing about, we don't have privacy, learn to live with it. This one's by Dimon Bright. What's the sad fellow story? An unknown entity repeatedly harvests his organs, SCP-415. And this guy? He has no joints, so he breaks his bones every time he moves, SCP-116. Damn. What about him? He gets harassed by seals. Oof. Yeah, SCP-3213, one of my most inspired ideas, is just a guy that the seals, all seals in the world, hate.    Sometimes the simplest ideas work the best. Me almost done reading and ranking every 001 proposal, the Dash Jays. This one's by FanboyX27. I don't understand, and this is coming from somebody, by the way, who is doing a YouTube short series that's going to take until the end of time, where I'm going to rank every, not rank, I'm going to do every SCP starting with 001 and move all the way to the end of the list, which will never happen. I'm at three now. It's taken me three weeks to get through three, but yeah. I don't understand the impetus to read and rank every, so I think this comes from an approach to content and media that is outside of how the SCP Wiki works. And this is the reason why I feel comfortable not even exposing myself to certain types of content. I'm not a big fan of Broken God stuff or Sarkic stuff. I'm more a fan of Broken God than Ammo of Sarkic. I don't think I've read any Sarkic articles that I've really enjoyed for the Sarkic content. The SCP Wiki has no single canon, right? It's not like a television show where you have to watch every episode to understand what's going on in the story, and the next episode could reference literally anything that happened in the past. In the SCP Wiki, if something's going to reference something that you need to read, trust me, they will link it and it'll probably be by the author of the thing that you're reading. So you don't need to read all of it in order to understand any of it. And the whole, I'm going to read everything. I'm going to read all of the SCPs. No, you're probably not. And even if you did, it wouldn't help you better understand the SCP universe over somebody else who's read more of a niche section and understands their section in more detail. Anyway, take me from site 19 saying enjoy boys first article being saved from deletion. So I, this is one of my fervosh one. I clicked through to the article in question, which has been delete since deleted. This is actually slightly older. I don't know what happened with this, but I understand there was an article, it started to fail. And then somebody posted, I'm not sure exactly what this may be a two separate incidents, but there's somebody posted some memes to help try and save it. But then another article is doing the same thing. And I feel like people were mad that somebody was trying to quote unquote beg for votes to save it. Someone in the comments can explain to me what exactly happened here because I'm quite interested to know. I'm a scientist. I cannot let my emotions attach me to a potentially dangerous anomaly. I must only refer to this scared four year old who we separated from his family forever as SCP 3737489 SCP 2524. Oh my God, Walter Hi. Yeah, this is again, this one's by spiritual fan 2436. The reason why this exists is because different authors interpret the SCP foundation in different ways. That's it. That's the whole problem. Everybody's going to be like, Oh, you know, how come in some articles, they they use the names of the characters and in some articles, they say that they can't because they've got to be cold and unfeeling about no. It's because the neither in every article is a canon to itself. And unless it directly references another article, it doesn't even include that. It doesn't include any other articles backstory. Let's say I wrote an article on the SCP wiki and I referenced SCP 173 in it. Well, okay, great. In my article, SCP 173 exists. But in SCP ones, that doesn't change what's going on with SCP 173. In SCP 173, my article doesn't exist. It can be one way. Again, this is alien to how people understand and consume fiction. So it can be a bit hard to comprehend. But this is not, I mean, this is it's funny because there is a little bit of a the juxtaposition here is indeed funny, but it's more understandable than people make it out to be. Unexistent entity, SCP fans creating new hypothetical fields of study to argue with online strangers about. I had an art. I'm going to click through here to find it real quick. I'm not going to name names, but I had a conversation with somebody recently. Oh, right, right, right. I wrote an article that included the word esokinetic, which is a made up word that the wiki is used before, but we'll get into a little bit of a talk about this in a second. It's a made up word that means reality warper. And the person in the article goes, what's esokinetic? And I said, well, that's a reality warper. And they said, do you mean ontokinetic? And I'm like, no, I meant esokinetic. Ontokinetic is also correct if you'd like to use that instead, because they're both made up words.  Sorry. It made me it made me angry. It really did it legitimately genuinely because they didn't go, oh, that's a I didn't know that that meant that they go, oh, did you mean ontokinetic? No, I didn't.  Anyway, I think it's the last one. So it's good that I got angry at the end. Thank you very much for watching. If you enjoyed the video, hit the subscribe button, hit the notification bell. Next, that's your notified when I upload new videos and then head on over to patreon.com forward slash decimarian pledge at any level like everybody here on the screen already has, including Synderiki was pledged at $100. I would very, very much appreciate it if you guys could pledge. I've seen my Patreon numbers start to slowly slide down and I haven't been uploading as frequently recently. I did I did a shorts. I was trying to do get to the point where I can schedule regular videos on Tuesday and Wednesday and then shorts on Monday. No, yeah, Tuesday and Thursday and then shorts on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Yeah. And then I'll take the weekends off. That would be my preference, but getting into a groove where I can actually get all that editing done and get all that recording done is a little more difficult than it used to be. I miss when I could just flick on my camera. I really do miss when I could just flick on my camera. Now I have to get everything set up. I gotta figure out a way to get everything set up so I don't have to figure it out. I'll figure it out eventually. Anyway, but yeah, join me on Patreon. It will really help me. If I had more funding coming in, I could maybe get some sort of read by a new setup that actually allows me to have everything just a flick of a switch and I can start going again. I'd really like that. But yeah, thank you very much for watching. And thank you for letting me know that I'm not alone out here. I will see you all again on Tuesday or Monday. One of those two.


James Sunderland killed his wife, but now the memory is repressed. Of course, this is only a revelation that dawns on both him and us at the end of the game, and so for the duration of our dalliance, we share in his confusion. He is drawn to the town of Silent Hill by a letter from his deceased wife. His curiosity only tempered by the haunting inkling that what he finds will only lead to his ruin. United in our disorientation, the player in James wander the fog-cloaked streets of Silent Hill, a town that manifests every person's worst nightmares. To get him to the realization that it was he, not tragic circumstance, that murdered his beloved, Silent Hill has a plan. Pyramid Head, an invulnerable monster, stalks our protagonist, an imposing phallic presence introduced to us violating some mannequins. Its jarringly animalistic indulgence in its baser instincts is not arbitrary shock-surely. This is a Japanese horror game. There is symbolism to go along with the sadism, right? Regardless, Silent Hill 2 expertly walks us through the many circles of hell-only guilt that could manifest. He wanders the streets aimlessly looking for direction, confront creatures whose presence is telegraphed by the shrieking of a radio. Conditioning is real even though the hell-scape of Silent Hill is not. We meet many others walking through their own personal renditions of purgatory. But it is only when we meet Maria, an eerily similar facsimile of our dead wife Mary, that our sins become clear. James killed his wife because she had a terminal illness. Pyramid Head is a walking metaphor for his repressed desire, an invalid wife could never satisfy. Dignified death and euthanasia are euphemisms that are only temporary remedies to the truth that is murder and guilt, a burden only solved by amnesia. Silent Hill 2 is not a heroic quest of mythological proportions, its monsters are not lovecraftian freaks of cosmic horror. This is a character study. After coming to the accommodating realization, both James and us have some options. We can kill ourselves, surely an admission of defeat. We can leave accepting what we have done, something even armchair psychiatrists would recommend. Or we can leave with the new and improved version of our dead wife, an act that simply repeats the events of the past. Silent Hill 2 is fascinating in that it bridges the divide between eastern and western forms of fear. In his GDC talk on the game, producer Akira Yamaoka talks about how the game was meant to be a Hollywood style horror experience, but the development team's Japanese roots inevitably seeped into the design. He claims that the difference between eastern and western horror is that the former has stories of sadness, loneliness and contemplation, whereas the latter has monsters and gore and more overt types of terror. Design wise, eastern horror is usually about lonely surgeons through wide open space, eliciting fear through more subtle means, whereas western horror has more jump scares. Silent Hill 2 does both though, it has horrific creatures of the night, but there are symbolic expressions of the protagonist's mind. Silent Hill is a space for existential contemplation, but there are still dynamic jump scares littered about. It has western protagonists, but its themes and story have an undeniable Japanese charm. He also suggests that ambiguous storytelling and confusion is an integral part of eliciting fear in the player, and music that does not prompt resolution but is intentionally discordant is how we prime paralysis. Silent Hill 2 wheels these tools with expertise, blending cinema and music and the design of space itself to perpetually keep players on the precipice of madness. Horror games have become entrenched as one of gaming's most prominent genres, starting with Alone in the Dark, but then driven into the mainstream by games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. These developers have also established themselves as the most prominent purveyors of fear, but this seems an anomaly of our medium. In his essay, Screams on Screens, the author shows how horror literature's most prominent voices are all from the western canon, whether Bram Stoker or H.B. Lovecraft. In cinema, early movies like Frankenstein set a clear template, but German expressionists and the film noir tradition consolidated a distinct aesthetic. However, the essay also highlights how the horror of every era is always somewhat an expression of the anxieties of the culture it arises from. Horror after World War II and the Vietnam War were not the same as before, with more biological and nuclear and psychological themes becoming manifest. Think of the anxieties exemplified by the hills have eyes, versus night of the living dead or a psycho. Japanese horror shows its own trajectory though, and is also rooted in its own cultural anxieties. In his essay The Anthropology of Fear, the author explains the origin of the many themes we see in Japanese horror. After World War II and the dissolution of state Shinto, many small groups splintered off creating what we now refer to as cults. Shinto has as a part of its ethos the idea of kami, of ghosts and spirits, and if we look at seminal works of Japanese horror like The Ring, we see these themes play out overtly. In Fatal Frame II, an unapologetically Japanese-Japanese horror game, you play as disempowered girls fighting ghosts in the midst of fanatical cults, synthesizing all these strands of Japanese horror. Japan had many other anxieties as well, most prominently the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the Kobe earthquake of 95, which is where the tropes of being apprehensive about the excesses of science in Resident Evil come from, and the theme of separation, of a realm broken apart, came from in Silent Hill. Horror has now gone universal though, the strands of East and West being intertwined in ways they never could be before, Soundal 2 is a perfect example of this, but there are others. Bloodborne, a game developed in Japan, has its lore rooted in the works of Bram Stoker and H.P. Lovecraft, authors of the Western canon, and a game like Outlast, although very Western in its jump scares, has elements of cults and disempowerment more reminiscent of the East. How do we conceive of the elements of design in different horror games as existing under a unified rhetoric though? In his essay on Forbidden Siren, the author calls the elements of interactive fear horror affordances, and this perfectly illustrates how interactivity adds an additional layer of agency to the design of fear. In Forbidden Siren, the resource scarcity, the difficulty of the game and the disjointed narrative structure, both in space and time, only serve to enhance its ability to terrify us. In Fatal Frame 2, you have to fight off ghosts, specters of the night that haunt you at every turn. But to do this, you have to use a camera whose effectiveness only increases the closer they get, inviting players into the choreography of terror. In Amnesia the Dark Descent, we are wandering dark hallways, being driven to the edge of madness, and so we have a mechanic called a sanity meter. If we spend too much time in the dark, more macabre manifestations of the mind are conjured. However, we also need the dark to avoid monsters. The affordances of risk and reward in games is used to craft an aesthetic. In PT, all the developers needed was a single corridor, and a suite of embedded symbolic motifs and storytelling devices to amplify the encroaching dread. We enact a quasi-ritualistic process through every turn. The simple movement through space can be instrumental in the construction of abject terror. As a spatial medium, video games seem perfectly situated to exploit this. Horror is sometimes referred to as a body art, because our physiological responses to it are a part of what makes it so compelling. This prompts an uneasy question that underlies all this, though. Why do we love to be terrified? The evolutionary utility of fear is that it gets us to avert things that might kill us, but yet audiences across cultures seek to activate this impulse. We could invoke the famous tragic paradox Aristotle clued into, where we voluntarily confront anxieties in the safety of play and storytelling to gain control over chaos, to enact catharsis. In his book, The Philosophy of Horror, Noel Carroll proposed an answer to this paradox. If we are actually afraid, why don't we run? His solution is the cognitive theory of fear. We are both afraid and not afraid, afraid psychologically, but unafraid in that our body knows that it is not really real. The way to solve the paradox, apparently, is paradoxically. And so, by reveling in this paradox, horror affordances from the conventions of different mediums, as well as the conventions of different cultures, can be leveraged by the authors of terror. When horror becomes cognitive, though, it is no longer an impulse grounded in our evolutionary heritage. Fears of fear that permeate culture and individual experience start to arise. There is now room for anxieties, both personal and universal, to manifest. For a space where something like Silent Hill 2 can exist. Fears from around the world are now starting to cross-pollinate. No one is safe anymore. In his talk, Yamaoka pontificated about the future of horror games, and he suggests that technology is less important than the emerging new technology might afford. The original Silent Hill had to work around the constraints of the PlayStation console, and so limited draw distances were obscured with fog. However, this actually served to enhance the atmosphere. The same can be said for games like Resident Evil, where strange camera angles, weird controls and unclear directions actually work to the genre's benefit. Technology and horror have an interesting relationship, then. Agency actually enhances the fear we can leverage, but too much agency can actually minimize it once more. It needs to be an aesthetic of deliberately minimized agency. Resident Evil 5 and 6 veered more towards action, towards empowerment and control, and this alienated many fans. So what do they do with 7? Technology lowered the scale, brought it into the first person, reintroduced disempowerment resource scarcity, and the tension of intimate and wide-open space, uniting the Texas chainsaw massacre with the cultish elements of Japanese horror to bridge the divide between East and West once more. However, it is also wise to remember that technology is not just a hindrance, it can be used intelligently as well, to realize more immersive worlds, more fully realized characters, but also to facilitate the formation of fear. Alien Isolation Xenomorph uses complex AI systems to respond to the tension felt by the player, creating new forms of dynamic fear that only technology can afford. At the end of his talk, Yamaoka talks about how we need to find ways to use the medium to communicate metaphors. In writing, we can use illusion for shadowing symbolism, but with games, we have yet to understand our medium's language well enough to craft the subtlety that horror requires. And yet, Silent Hill 2 does do this. It plays with the medium's layers of identity to unite both us and James on a quest of revelation. It uses the medium's encoding of space to explore the psychology of confusion, disorientation and existential reverie. Its monsters are beasts in the conventional sense, but they are also symbolic, metaphoric, expressions of the psyche of our protagonist, whose quest unifies horror in all its disparate strands. In play, we are actively confronting horror. It is the voluntary confrontation of our anxieties, personal, cultural, and now universal. Silent Hill 2's horror is not just arbitrary, or crass, or mired in its own self-indulgence, it is ultimately therapeutic, not just for James but ourselves. In games, horror may have found its true calling, its new home.


Just like Reese's peanut butter cups there is no right way to fantasy football and so while most leagues use the same standard settings there's plenty of fun ways to mix things up as well. Some of these leagues are required just as much if not more prep than traditional standard fantasy leagues but others are just a bit of fun on the side and one caveat on all of these I do have suggested scoring for most of these leagues but obviously take them and change them how you think is necessary. In an elimination league the team with the lowest score at the end of each week is just completely kicked out of the league boom gone and that eliminated teams players will then become free agents. I played in this kind of league a few times and it's pretty awesome well unless you get knocked out early then it's kind of lame and because of that I would not make this the only league that I play in. One key note on strategy weekly waiver pickups become a huge part of this league so keeping with a standard serpentine non-resetting order is intriguing because it's a big risk to pick someone up and then lose your top spot on the waiver wire. On the other hand you can spice things up a little bit by making the waiver wire pickup order reset each week in reverse order of the number of points scored that week. This would make the ideal spot to finish in each week actually to have the second lowest number of points if you really like to live on the edge. For simplicity's sake you can set this league up to have normal head-to-head matchups even though you know the outcomes don't matter even after they're eliminated even teams will kind of remain in the league but just with a blank roster in order to keep an even number of teams. You don't usually see many roto leagues in football a rotisserie league just means that there are no head-to-head matchups and points are added up for the whole season to determine the standings but it can come in handy sometimes. If you've ever had the second most points in your league in any given week and still lost because you just happened to be playing the team that was on top that week you know what I mean. This league standings are determined by awarding a team for winning their head-to-head matchup but also for finishing with a higher number of points relative to the whole league. So each head-to-head matchup earns one point for the winning team ties are worth a half I guess if that ever happens and then in addition each team finishing in the top half by overall points that week is also awarded one point so the top five teams for our 10 team league. Another way to accomplish this would be to have every team play every other team every week although it might be a little less confusing to just do a straight roto league at that point. In a poacher league each week the winner of each head-to-head matchup can select a player on the team he has just beaten to join his team. In return he must trade a player of the same position to his opponent and this player that he trades must have been on his roster during the matchup. He can't just pick up a bad player off the free agent list in that trade immediately. This weekly trade would be mandatory for all the matchups and it must obviously be accepted by the losing team. If this league is left unchecked it could quickly allow the rich teams to get richer and just destroy those that happen to lose in the first few weeks which is why I like to refer to this league as the American Economy League. There's a few ways to combat this you can either eliminate or severely limit bench spots this will keep the free agent list stocked of stronger players and will also mean that while the winning team will have to trade one of their players he'll still be of a reasonable talent level. You can also allow each losing team to protect a certain number of players on their roster. If the balance is still out of whack though you could go with what I think is more intriguing. This is the reverse poacher league or sometimes called the Bernie Sanders league. This is similar to the poacher league only now it's the losing team in each matchup that gets to choose the player for the trade. So even if you lose you know that your team is going to get better for the next week. If you're going to have playoffs in this league though then you can flip it around for that one or two matchups and let the winner choose the trade in that scenario. A predictions only league would take very little amount of your time relatively speaking and put your prediction skills to the test. The rosters are standards there is no bench once everyone drafts rosters are locked for the whole season and may the best man win. If you can only find a few friends interested in another league why not use a lots of starters league there's no reason to allow a bunch of players to sit unused. So each team in this league would have four each of quarterbacks running backs wide receivers flexes and defenses scoring totals will be extremely high week to week relative to regular leagues so you can't have too many weak spots. If you don't want to get too extreme here's a few quick ways to alter any traditional league and maybe shake things up just a little bit. Have two flex players after my league tried this the first time everyone loved it will never go back. Having two quarterbacks on your roster has become a fairly popular tweak because quarterbacks tend to score the most points in traditional formats and they can really boost team even if a few other players are having a poor day. Not having any bench is a personal favorite of mine I don't want to draft guys and then just watch their points get wasted on the bench or if you're not quite ready to go so hardcore maybe just have two bench spots so you can keep your top guys on their by weeks risk-free either way you're really going to have to weigh free agent pickups. At first a lot of people are afraid of getting rid of kickers and then when they try it then they love it. Another kicker variation is to switch kick point values up because obviously not all kicks are created equally. As for my recommendation if you can use 0.1 points for each yard made of a field goal so a 31 yard field goal would earn you 3.1 points. If your site can't support that though for kicks 30 yards or under three points for a make minus three for a miss between 40 and 50 yards four points for a make and negative one for a miss and 50 yards are over five points for a make and no points for a miss. Kickers can now become pretty valuable. Everyone knows that the most exciting part of a game is touchdowns so why not dedicate a league to them. A scoring only league would only factor in scoring plays. In this case larger than usual rosters are probably a good thing to have. The opposite of a scoring only league is a yards only league and anyone who's ever had their running back rush the ball down the field all the way only to have a full back fall over into the end zone for a one yard touchdown run and steal all your points you get it. This league would allow you to eliminate defaultures. A punters only league is a league that I have done and not to brag but I did win. This league was born out of an idea that would make fourth downs relevant to fantasy owners and at best make someone in a crowded bar yell at a punter on a tv while the other people give them funny looks. Each team consists only of two punters.  It admittedly is a pretty silly league. There are no bench spots so a major decision is do I drop a good punter on their bi-week and risk losing him. As strange as it may sound I do believe there's a legitimate strategy to win this league but I'm not going to tell you what that is. These next two are a bit more in-depth. The alternate points league is one that I found on reddit a few years ago so I'm just going to link it in the description. The main feature here is that it actually has different values for certain actions depending on which position a player is. So the guy who came up with it includes his reasons for everything in the description. The only drawback is most fantasy sites cannot handle this degree of customization so to my knowledge the only two sites that can are Fligflicker and Phantrax. The expected points added or EPA points league is another one I'm just going to link to from Deadspin. It's actually based on the amount of expected points added by each particular action in a football game. Think football saver metrics. They describe reasons for everything in their article as well so I'm not going to re-bore you with them here. Finally some leagues do include individual defensive players in their leagues. These are called IDP leagues but why not just make defensive players the only focus. So this would eliminate all offensive players from your league and point totals would look something like this. Hopefully one of these will peak your interest. Remember you don't always have to play fantasy football for money so why not give one of these a try with a group of your friends just for the fun of it. If you don't think that you can trash talk in a league based solely on punters you are mistaken.