​          If you would like to contribute to Shark Preservation in a non-monetary way, check out this year's Top Priority endeavor: Shark ENVOY, dedicated to removing drum lines from Australian coasts (particularly in Queensland). There's a couple of petitions and email campaigns being run right now to help push the government into acknowledging that public opinion has shifted.
         I may write up a few more Shark-themed posts this week, but I will definitely be pushing myself to get more Fanfic chapters out to literally bribe what audience I have to address into thinking differently about sharks. I sincerely hope that all of you take these animals to be the beautiful, critical creatures that they truly are.

            Strap in, folks, because this one's a ride. I nearly hurled a few times, definitely gagged.
          I wanted to like this one, I really did. It's just been a few years of SJM not writing up to her potential, but still showing that potential... I walked into this with low expectations, high hopes, and a careful detachment that would let me read this without my dislike of Nesta getting in the way of my enjoyment.
       Don't get me wrong, I don't hate Nesta. I've just always found her rather irksome; she was annoying but interesting enough that her purpose as a foil to her sisters worked rather well. She was never main character material because she was never meant to be. SJM actually did alright with fleshing her out enough to hold up a main character role, but Nesta just isn't a piece on the board. She's not significant enough to the world to NEED to be anything more, which means she's just there far too much of the time to be interesting as a central figure. 
           This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Any story needs its side characters. To promote a side character to MC status is difficult, but can be done, so long as you reframe the rest of the narrative along with them. SJM didn't.
Which means that all the elegant character building and world crafting she put into the first three (*cough* Frost and Starlight was a travesty that I will forever ignore *cough*) just evaporates. Because to make Nesta seem fleshed out and solid, the rest of the characters became pitifully flimsy cardboard cutouts of themselves.
         Like even Mor and Azriel were barely there and only the slightest bit participatory. It was tragic. Az had a few good quips, but it was an SNL skit of Clinton with Bengazi compared to the world-shaking political impact of the Shadowsinger's true glory.
           That was the main thing for me. This was a character-driven story without any truly great characters... And zero plot. 700-something pages of hints and preamble, but with zero follow through. 
​
Again, here there be spoilers. Very direct, spoilery spoilers:

          Slavery, in most nations, came to a natural end as the societal system it supported evolved. In the Americas, that societal system was artificially and intentionally maintained by a sort of aggressive racism unique to the West. In most slave-nations prior to the West's development, slaves were not racially inferior or species-separate or anything like that. People of all races owned people of all races. It was just a money thing.
          This is not to say racism, wasn't a Huge Thing (Imperialism is a very terrible thing itself, and the subjugation of others based on country of origin is a long-standing terror of our humanity), but that's a separate statement. Racism and Slavery were not intrinsically bound together outside of direct and immediate conquest. Once a new place was conquered by the Empire, the old lowest-people rose up in the ranks, and if you had enough money you could buy a slave of any race even ones theoretically high up the ladder than you.
         That does, admittedly, vastly over simplify things. But I'm not trying to make a nuanced argument (at least no more nuanced than to make it clear I find both racism and slavery abhorrent).
         What I'm saying here is that this story should have had a few characters, both black and white, who believed in the institutions they were raised within without that believe automatically forcing them into villain roles. Fear of change, belief in the status quo, confusion about why it mattered so much to some people... All of that should've been more prevalent in this novel.
         The fact that there wasn't a single character in 1812 Barbados that fully believed in the current Natural Order who was not ultimately painted as an utterly depraved and immoral individual was just plain creepy.
        The concept of slavery didn't survive for SIX THOUSAND YEARS because everyone always knew, deep down, that it was wrong. We aren't a species of creatures so heinous that we can look at something we know is wrong for SIX THOUSAND YEARS without doing anything about it.
      We didn't do anything because we didn't see it as wrong.
      Honestly, at the heart of it, we sorta still don't.
   The concept of free labor hasn't gone away. Unpaid Internships are the modern indentured servitude. The requirement of X years of experience to allow you access to a job force you need to be involved with in order to survive is heinous.
     Yes, Interns have things like rights and safety recourse guarantees and legal backstops, but they're pretty basic rights. Your employer isn't even required to feed you, they're just required to give you a bit of time not-working to feed yourself, buying food to do so with money you aren't allowed to make (only 10 minutes minimum if you're working less than 5 hours and none at all if you're working less than 4). 
      Slavery, through most of its history, included ASPCA levels of animal-abuse-type protections. Food, provided freely and regularly; body security and autonomy (ie, no direct injury or sexual abuses); recognition for good service and the ability to be a person with a name and a backstory and HEALTHCARE (instead of just an employee number with the last-line protection of company liability pay if you get grievously injured on the job you don't get paid for).
      Were there abuses? Yes.
      Was most of human history a string of abuse after abuse? No.
    People voluntarily sold themselves into slavery, or at the very least, term-indentured themselves, pretty dang regularly throughout history.
      Because sometimes, the promise of regular meals and decent healthcare was legitimately preferable to starving to death. Like right now.
     Not kidding. There are legitimately countless studies out there of how MODERN PRISON is a preferable state of being for human than getting shunted into an unpaid internship. (Some of them are even legitimately academic and peer reviewed, but those take longer to find for free-viewing than I want to spend right now, so: here, here, here, and here, will have to do, though most of these are just about the poor ethics of the Unpaid Internship concept).
      And yet, thousands of people in America alone don't see the problem with it.
     So, likewise, thousands of people in 1812 Barbados should've not been able to see the problem with it. And as a pretty well-researched author, Willig should have known that and accommodated for including it.
       It is NOT COMFORTABLE to be lead through a story where slavery is just okay, I wholly admit that (and am frankly, glad for it).
      But literature is not supposed to be comfortable.      It's supposed to make you FEEL what the author thinks you should be able to SEE, because its right in front of your face and wrong but not acknowledged.
      I am not saying, in any way, that a slave-believer should have been the hero. But someone should've been, at least sympathetic, to the Status Quo.
      Also, there was just such a fixation on the 'Slavery as an evil institution thing', that the little love stories didn't get much attention which made them feel cute but rather hollow. I loved the moments we got to see the two couples being cute, but they were so few and far between that I got lost.
       I LOVED the comments on being so unsure of your own feelings that you make the mistake of wanting your partner to be sure enough for the both of you, but that was the only message in the story besides 'slavery is bad'.
         It was good, and a great beach read. Really goo. I deeply enjoyed it. 
        To be perfectly frank, while reading, I couldn't put my finger on why I didn't love it. And I couldn't figure out why I didn't want to review it until I sat down and started reviewing it, (I actually read this over my little vacation in the second week in August, and put off reviewing it until a few days before you guys see this post).
       But it wasn't literature, and I'm pretty disappointed in the lack of legitimate social commentary.
​

         ​While ADD is dramatically different for everyone, there are some consistencies that are used as diagnosis tools. The obvious one is a lack of ability to pay attention, even when the desire to pay attention is present.
         ​The best way I can put it is that ADD is like the last 3 days of being out sick with a really bad cold. You're better enough to be pissed off at how exhausting it is to simply exist, and while your brain is functional enough to recognize that it's not stuck in the sick-fog sleepiness, you also have to spend five minutes staring at your TV remote to figure out what button turns the dang thing on. ADD is a wall of that feeling that doesn't ever really go away. With meds it gets better, like staring at a room through a window instead of through an opaque closed-door, but it never goes away.
         ​And yet, there is a converse to that: Hyperfixation. Not everyone with ADD has this, but a lot of Type 1's do, we hyper-fixate instead of exhibit hyper-activity.
         ​Let me tell you, it is a goddamn SUPER POWER. Sorta. A lot of people with ADD hate to have this piece valorized because it's actually far more dangerous to our direct health than any other aspect of our condition. That's a very fair assessment. I have hyper-fixated to the point of forgetting to eat for 48 hours. I have forgotten to drink water for almost 24 hours. I have forgotten to breathe for about 5 minutes and only managed to avoid passing out because I was already laying on the floor. I chew through my fingernails and rip out my hair and dig furrows into my skin that bleed for ten minutes before I notice them--because the motion is somehow helpful to my focus-clarity and my fixation means the part of my brain that feels pain is just turned off for the moment..
         ​Hyper-fixation is legitimately dangerous.
         ​But it's also really really cool.
         ​I have a partially eidetic memory, which means if I have heard a song I know it. If I've read a book, I remember almost all of it. If I have handled an object in my entire life and no one else has touched it since I last did, I can navigate to the geographic coordinates of it, blindfolded. I can research like BAMF, and I can instant-recall all of it on the spot and synthesize it into a legitimate argument at the drop of a hat. I can give college-level dissertation oral defenses on topics I've only skimmed the readings for, in after-hours presentations that I only remembered to attend because I left my water bottle behind after lecture... My brain is frickin' MAGIC.
         ​At least on good days.
         ​Honestly, on good days, the fact that this will probably kill me very young is a trade I could as entirely worth it. If this is my deal with a devil, man, I'm a-okay with the payoff.
         ​On bad days, it's extremely difficult to remember why walking backward in the rain across a 6 lane highway is a rather poor life decision... Seriously, most of what keeps me grounded on bad days is remember that I have written records showing that on good days I think it's totally worth the bad days.
         ​ADD, like everything else in the Universe, is cyclical. ADD is unique in that it has 3 separate layers of things operating on an influential cycle. There are some Psych Journal research articles on the topic, but I don't like how most of them describe the issue, so I'm gonna break it down for you myself:

- Engagement vs Disengagement
Am I able to legitimately engage with whatever I'm working on? Or am I looking at it through a plexiglass wall? This is the piece that is most easily influenced by medication. On bad days, the meds mean I'm still trying to play Operation while wearing wool mittens, but on good days, the meds let me manipulate my mental puzzle pieces on an atomic level to make them fit together perfectly. This is both the shortest cycle and the longest cycle. This because there's the daily circuit (pre-caffeine, pre-meds fog of nothing, then the productive bliss of extended release capsules, and then the nightly 'oooooh, yeah everything helpful has worn off') and a longer cycle where I'll just hit a mental block that keeps me from engaging with anything for a random month or two.

- Positive Feedback vs Negative Feedback
Is what I'm looking at interesting enough to make me ask another question, and is the answer to that question enough to spawn yet more? 'Positive' here doesn't necessarily mean 'good', it's used in the scientific way of 'increasing acceleration'. Anything that doesn't increase the interest / fixation level contributes to it slowing down. This cycle is the most obvious to me while I'm moving through these cycle-processes, and it's one I can effect. The moment I feel the acceleration of interest slowing down, I can stop, pull back, and take a break. Pushing against negative feedback does nothing but hasten burnout, which is AWFUL. Avoiding burnout is why I have queues set up and why working 8.5 hours in a boring office job would probably kill me.

- Present vs Dissociative vs Concurrent Mindset
A Present mindset has me fully aware of myself, my environment, and the intricacies of my current task. A Dissociative one has me exclusively aware of my current project and all it's permutating aspects, my body is not a real object and the outside world could burn for all I care. Both of those are productive, though only one is at all close to being 'healthy'. A Concurrent mindset has both awareness of what I should be doing (eating, homework, etc), and what I want to be doing (current project), occurring within my brain at the same time, without either of them really clicking into place properly. This is the mindset that has me staring at walls and into water bottle and just off into the middle distance. It's horrible because I can't focus on the thing I want to focus on, and I feel guilty for wanting to focus on a thing that is not the thing I should be focusing on, and we spiral into angst from there.

         ​And then all of that is further complicated by Focus Fatigue. Also known as Hyper-Exhaustion or Burnout, this state of being happens when all the lowest points of the other three cycles line up with each other. It comes at random, though I can usually feel it creeping in a few weeks before it really hits, and it stays for a random duration. The only effect I can have on it is to not prolong it by trying to just push through. Accepting that I'm in a down-beat and just riding it out without attempting to DO anything is usually the best bet I have to hasten the recovery process.
         ​This is what I've been dealing with from the end of October and all through November.
         ​I've just got nothin' left to call on. I've been playing lots of Solitaire and a hidden-object game called SeekersNotes. I've just been letting my queue run itself out while hoping that I get my mojo back before it hits the end of its schedule.
         ​It's possible that things will get back on track soon, but it's hard to tell. ​The best way I can characterize recovery is to compare it to alcohol consumption. When you're just sitting at the bar, you don't feel much different between your first shot and your fourth, a little buzz turns into to a little buzzier, but nothing major. But then you try to get up for some reason and you realize that the room is spinning and gravity is gone...
         ​By the time you realize your drunk, your very drunk.
         ​Likewise, by the time I realize I've got my focus back, I've been doing focus-related things for a while already and doing them successfully.
         ​I'm hopeful that this Burnout will be over soon (being able to succeed in writing this is a very good sign), but I can't guess how long it'll take me to go from tipsy with a drip of focus to full on smashed with Hyper-Focus... 
It could be a matter of days, or it could take a few more weeks. We'll just have to see.
         ​Wish me luck!


(Fortunately, while I'm waiting, I've got plenty of little objects left to find in Seekers).

       Firstly, I just disliked it. Secondly, it was cheap-ass story telling.
       Thirdly, it was an example of a grown ass man foisting his own damn trauma onto a barely-hanging-on teenage girl (whom his dead brother loved like a daughter) and explicitly asking her to do something he knows will be traumatizing because he is too physically disabled to do it himself.
       And finally, that ending was a display of grossly misogynistic violence that the player is forced to carry out actively and personally, not watch as a cut scene.
      Which all combined to absolute, visceral hatred of the ending for me.

      Reminder, from here on out, there will be explicit spoilers.

           Kpop has done things were 'cute' and 'gangsta' overlap, there's been other examples of aegyo mixing with straight-up awesome, but nothing else I've ever seen does it quite like this; nor nearly this well. Most other versions of an attitude that resemble this one use aegyo to straightforwardly mix in a dose of adorable, but this release takes that a leap forward by avoiding straight-aegyo, for the most part, and using a more sophisticated weave of more traditional imagery to convey the idea that the object of the narrator's affection is a singular point of exception in his world. Every single detail in the visuals plays off the notions in the lyrics, leading to an achingly cute final product that takes its message more seriously than I would have ever guessed just by glancing at the colorful screencaps.
           It also has something very important in common with Beyonce (but we'll get to that later).

          From the set aesthetics and the basic styling, it looks like Just Tell Me can't possibly be anything to terribly spectacular. MYNAME isn't really a band with a track record of deeply meaningful or profoundly impacting releases, so when combined with a concept that looks to be more of the same old, hiphop-grunge-but-still-clubbing-chic that's been flooding the market lately there was really no reason to suspect that this release would be incredible. Honestly, there were a dozen pressing reasons to think this release would be anything but awesome, including the fact that MYNAME has already had a comeback this year, and they've had activities in Japan, so theoretically they haven't had much time to spend on this; not to mention the fact that the concept seems blandly unoriginal and the the Choreo from the teasers has some moves that stand out as painfully frequent instances of recycling moves.
          HOWEVER, to anyone who believed the teasers or who concluded on a cursory examination that it really is just another sex-focused grungy hiphop club thing: YOU GOT PLAYED. The whole thing is one big joke on us and the best part of it is that our expectations were used against us by preparing us for something mediocre, but what they gave us was something FABULOUS. Unfortunately, there are still a ton of people who are taking the release at face-value and as it's easily the best thing MYNAME has ever released, I will not suffer it to be maligned by people who won't give it more than a cursory look to allow the true elegance, sweetness, and complexity to unfold.

THE PRODUCTION COST OF "FLOWER" IS THROUGH THE ROOF, BUT DID JUNSU GET ENOUGH BANG FOR HIS BUCK? THE MESSAGE IN IT IS A HAZY, SILENT SCREAM TO THE VOID, MADE WITH FLASHY SYMBOLS AND GLITZY VISUALS BUT WHAT IS IT REALLY SAYING?

          The last time I posted in this section was for the 2013 rookie assessment. Even though I haven't been here analyzing the year's events (distracted by things like graduating from college and whatnot), I've still been playing close attention and this year's crop of rookies was actually quite presentable. I've been pretty impressed by what I've see this year, so here's the groups that really caught my eye this year (in more or less order of debut):

         To be honest, I almost forgot about Got7, but in a good way. I hardly thought they'd only debuted this year, I've gotten so used to hearing about them and seeing them around when I was in Korea that I totally forgot they weren't old hands at the industry. Honestly, I haven't liked any of the songs they've released with their MV promos, but at the same time I've loved a ton of the music they've had on their releases, but haven't promoed.

          Now BigFlo's debut with Delilah wasn't overwhelmingly wonderful, but it was a fairly solid debut and I found myself getting it stuck in my head. Their follow-up in Bad Mama Jama was similarly unimpressive, yet catchy and cool enough to linger around in my memory. All in all I didn't peg them as the future of Kpop, but I think they've got a good chance of being a part of it, even if they're not leading the wave. LipService served up almost exactly the same story with Too Fancy, but I found theirs a bit more impressive due to the fact that a girl group was rapping in a way that didn't make them sound like little kids. They almost undid their work in their YumYumYum follow-up, but the cutesy there was more satirical than anything else.

        Domino Game was a fairly impressive way for Kiss & Cry to hit the Kpop scene. Great vocals and some epic styling, and of course a killer beat. The Choreo was fabulous and the MV was glam as hell, so these girls seem to be a complete package. 1PS is quite lovely as well, though I wasn't quite as enamored with their debut as I could have been. Sonamoo was fantastic, but considering their rep as the female BAP, I was honestly expecting more. I mean the wardrobe was fantastic, it's nice to see girl groups in real cargo pants for once, but the girls were still more like underworld accessories than actually fearsome gangbangers.

         Next on my agenda is the girl group that I've decided to hand the crown to. Wings is a duo that easily makes this year's top rookies in the girl group category. They have some incredible vocals and some absolutely heart-wrenching concepts that are carried out with a beautiful flair for the poignant understatement of true drama. Both Hair Short and Blossom have fantastic visuals that tell wonderfully empowering stories while not losing out on things like choreography and glamour shots. Their vocals are strong and dynamic, and beautifully flushed out with a full-bodied ring of lightness. I have no qualms at all about handing them the title of my favorite rookie girls of 2014.

         The only other girl group that caught my eye this year was Mamaoo, which I thought for sure had the honor of being my favorite in the bag. I mean, Mr Ambiguous is a fantastic track and the girls are some of the best female performers I've seen in Kpop for years. The only thing Wings won them out on, truthfully speaking, was the MV. The message and the way it was delivered in both videos by Wings was outstanding. Mamamoo's tracks were great but their MVs were... classy and colorful and lovely, but they didn't really make me think about my life or the universe. Piano Man, like their first MV, was gorgeous, but it wasn't revolutionary, so Wings is the one that wins it.