But with the move and the monthlong period of being a nomad, and all the newness coming at me (I’m not good at “new” even when I ask for it), something was bound give.
It also turns out that hard water + unwashed hair equals a sticky mess. (Seriously. It was gross.)
So what gave was the “no washing with shampoo” routine.
Even with a crunchy seaweed-based shampoo, I don’t love how my hair feels. It’s so dry and sad.
Eventually, as I settle in, I’ll figure out what I want to do next. I can get a filtered showerhead, or rinse my hair with vinegar to counteract the minerals, or stick with shampoo but add a pH-balancing scalp treatment.
In the meantime, I’m a normal-haired person again.
One of the things I admire most about SM Entertainment is that they are constantly iterating and A/B testing the groups, songs, and concepts that they produce.
If you pay attention to how they operate as an entity, rather than focusing exclusively on one of their groups, you can see a real-time example of why they’re one of the biggest entertainment groups in k-pop.
They’ve created entire “entertainment properties” to showcase this A/B testing.
SM Rookies
Before NCT debuted as its various subgroups, SM conducted rigorous testing through the online series SM Rookies. They tried out various different configurations of trainee groups. Sometimes this is really rough, as with the “SR15B dance practice” video, or music-video quality in the case of “Bassbot” and “Super Moon.”
“Super Moon” is interesting because of the three members–Taeyong, Johnny, and Hansol–featured in it, Hansol did not debut with any NCT units. In fact, he’s no longer under contract with SM Entertainment.
I suspect this is because Hansol has an almost identical “look” as Yuta, who did debut with NCT 127.
[Warning: unknown quantities of confirmation bias ahead.]
With male groups, SM tends to assemble a variety of different types. For example, if you compare a photo of EXO with a photo of BTS, you can see what I mean. EXO members each have their own charm, while–with the exception of Rap Monster–BTS members have a similar vibe. NCT is no exception to this, as you can label each member as “The ______ One” even if you know nothing about their personalities.
If you compare Hansol and Yuta in other footage from SM Rookies, Yuta is hungrier. Despite being Japanese, Yuta has been described as “more Korean than the Koreans.” You can literally watch Yuta work solidify his status as “the sexy one” as NCT 127 has practiced, promoted, and performed “Cherry Bomb” this year. (I have the YouTube receipts for this–let me know in the comments if you want me to post them.)
From my completely outsider perspective, it makes sense that if you have two trainees who look almost identical but have different work ethics, you’ll pick the one who is going to work harder.
SM Station
One of SM’s staples on YouTube is SM Station, which features single songs that are collaborations, off-brand concepts for an existing group, or other “random” things. There are a lot of fun songs under this umbrella. (Don’t mind me plugging my boy Chen again.)
Right now, I suspect that they’re testing a subgroup or solo venture featuring Wendy from Red Velvet. In the past months, she’s been featured in two different SM Station releases.
One is a jazz version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which prominently features the fact that she’s an English speaker and a strong vocalist.
The other is a collaboration with singers Baek a Yeon and Jaehyun (from NCT). Another seasonal song, called “The Little Match Girl,” but it’s in Korean and puts Wendy’s voice in a different context than Red Velvet.
SM is also simultaneously running a test between Jaehyun and Doyoung as soloists from NCT 127. Jaehyun has gotten two SM Station songs so far versus Doyoung’s one (although Doyoung has been featured in some live stages), so we’ll have to wait and see what comes of this.
The one downside that I can see is that all of the tests attract at least some fans, so you still have a small contingent of NCT stans who wonder about Hansol. I could see this building up into ill will if SM made the wrong decision, but clearly NCT is succeeding reasonably well without Hansol so I doubt it will become a huge problem. I could see this negative feedback being another metric to check your decisions against.
I don’t really know what SM’s intentions are with SM Station, or what the outcome will be.If I can figure out a way to reverse-engineer YouTube views I’ll see if I can put together a predictive post.
In the meantime, I’m determined to learn from SM how to A/B test in real time while also producing quality product that people enjoy. The sheer volume of content that they produce is staggering, and I don’t doubt that it has a direct correlation with why they are so successful.
I’ve fallen asleep listening to it more times than I can remember since it was released last January. It’s soothing, but dynamically interesting, and refreshing.
I love a good over-the-top k-pop music video as much as the next person (probably more than the next person, judging from my college-dude coffee shop neighbor right now), but the simplicity of this video makes it a drink for the soul, not just an entertaining spectacle.
And in this case, knowing the lyrics doesn’t cheapen the experience. This song is like a deep breath at the end of a long, difficult day.
For a long time, I wanna be with those Who don’t give me a score Among all the countless ratings So I can go through the door of a lonely day So I can live completely as myself
I think we can all identify with that experience, and I would bet that after you watch this video, you’ll want to identify with this old man.
I’m quite gratified that Dynamic Duo x Chen won the MAMA award for best collaboration this year. It gives this song more recognition and I hope that it can help seed a trend for more introspective k-pop.
(Certainly there’s introspective Korean music, but I have not yet started exploring it.)
The performance arrangement is interesting. The beginning of the coda has been changed to an intro, which builds anticipation from those of us who are familiar with the song–when will Chen’s falsetto come in?
The answer is: never.
I’m not sure if this is a brilliant workaround for a note that is probably only achievable in the studio, or if I feel cheated.
As I’ve been meeting and gauging my new coworkers, it’s always useful to have a couple of metrics handy to evaluate their work ethic, creativity, level of social needs, etc.
IQ isn’t everything, but it does provide a starting point.
I like this version because it has real-world features built in that help with on the fly assessments.
I’m not even going to try to write this post like a sales letter. I’m not trying to sell anything, just trying to start every sentence with “I’m” and hash out my thoughts on things.
I’ve had more “random” thoughts lately, which means that I’m finally settling into my new environment (even though I don’t get keys to my new apartment until tomorrow). It helps that I’ve set up a new configuration for my bullet journal-style planner which is much more conducive to my way of operating. In practical terms, it means that I have a “notes” section where I can jot down random thoughts instead of putting them on random pieces of paper or forgetting them or letting them fester until they’re just weird vapors spun from the rationalization hamster.
Anyhow. One of the things that I’ve recently been able to see and identify is this ability for people (who are not strategic thinkers) to skip directly from a high-level/strategy/overview way of thinking down into this middle domain that is characterized by rumor, innuendo, words meaning things, what other people think, and lots of other stuff that is ultimately irrelevant to strategically accomplishing a goal.
In other words, something like this:
Level
Characterized by
High
Strategy, long-term, vision, ideas in their bare form
Middle
Social, “what will other people think,” sophistry, rhetoric
Low
On-the-ground details, data, facts, reality
I suspect this is heavily influenced by (and maybe inadvertently copied from) Nassim Taleb’s ideas about asymmetry and “barbell theory.” I’d check, but my copy of Antifragile is packed right now.
I believe that the best way of thinking is with the vision of the high-level strategy, and the practicality of the low-level data. Anything else just gets in the way of clear thinking (unless you have to take account of it to successfully navigate your projects–politics are a real thing).
Lots of people who can’t or won’t stay with the high-level thinking (not totally sure why, if it’s just laziness or if they legitimately aren’t intellectually capable of it) will skip down to the middle and wallow around in it.
Ideally, good writing would combine “directional truth” (as Scott Adams would say) of the detail-free salesy version (which I sometimes think of as the “metaphorical understanding”), or you get the super duper uber detailed version, with the charts and graphs and raw data and alllllll the analyses.
The stuff in the middle fails to communicate either the endgame, or the reality. It writes phrases like “substantially all” and favors the insufferable passive voice. This is where the fifty-cent words come into play.
Hence why you should never use the word “literally.” It’s a dead tell for middle-level (OMG DID I JUST PRETEND THAT I INVENTED THE TERM “MIDDLEBROW”?!?) writing.
Dirty adverbs:
Virtually
Substantially
Literally
I used to wonder why some websites that check your writing’s grade level issue a warning for adverbs.
If you’re in the higher education racket, you deal with faculty. Period.
Maybe, if you play your cards right, you can get out of dealing with students, but you can never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever escape the faculty.
If you can work successfully with faculty, I’m pretty sure you can work with anybody. (Although I’ve heard that surgeons are pretty bad too.)
The thing is, most individual faculty members are perfectly lovely people. If you talk with any one of them one-on-one, even the old crotchety ones, they come across as decent people with good motives.
As a group? Entirely different story. They are so difficult to work with. Recalcitrant, paranoid, constantly complaining without being willing to take action to change things.
For a long time, I thought about why they always seemed to be this way. Was it the low risk tolerance? The innate leftism that was bred into most of them, leading to a hugely r-selected population? The self-selecting for introverted personalities who prefer “facts” to action?
All of those are true, I think, to some extent.
But I didn’t realize until Stefan Molyneux’s most recent call-in show that there might be more nuance to my observations of faculty than I previously thought.
You see, one of Stefan’s guests was a Baby Boomer (trigger warning for the background image), out to disprove all of his negatively-biased conclusions about her generation.
Naturally, she failed at her own aims and succeeded only at reinforcing the Boomer stereotype. (Of COURSE it’s all about me!)
This was when I realized–what if it’s not just faculty, but Boomer Faculty who present such a difficulty to work with. Many of the same hallmarks are there–the entitlement, the inability to see themselves as part of a larger group or trend or demographic, th
Perhaps this is why there is such a divide between senior faculty and junior faculty. Between the Boomers and Gen X.
Most of my favorite faculty were and are Gen X.
Anyway, I don’t have any grand conclusions to this line of thinking at this point, so I’ll let this post drop with a very unsatisfying THUD, but I’ll be exploring it more as I slowly wade into the waters of a new project.
One of the delightful bonuses of moving from a medium city to a small town is that it takes much less time to get anywhere.
Part of that, certainly, is having access to a car and roads without too much traffic on them. (Tonight I got caught in rush hour, which was a whole two blocks long.)
Or not having to get to and wait for and travel on public transportation. (There are public transportation options, but they take much less time.)
I’m a happy girl–I feel like I have hours and hours of my life back.
(Of course that’s less time spent listening to podcasts, but I’m sure I can make that up somehow.)
But while these distances and travel times have me absolutely happy, the locals have an entirely different view of things.
“I could go to Wal*Mart, but you have to drive forever to get there.”
It’s a 15 minute drive, max.
“That grocery store is in the next town over.”
The travel time happens to be the same amount of time it would take to drive from my parents’ house to their grocery store…in the same town.
If travel relativism is related at all to temperature relativism (in that the actual distance is objective but the perceived change in time or temperature is HUGE), that means I’ll adapt to this new way of transportation soon.
I wonder how long it’ll take before a 5 minute drive feels like a long time to me.
I want to escape into a misty forest at dawn and run toward the light that spills through the trees. I want to cloak myself in velvet and swim into a glittering nebula. I want to discover the truth of God and the universe.
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