wen u have a $100 gift card 2 da ethiopian supermarket
Tags:
#food #paired post #(I’m never sure what order to do paired posts in) #(I’m doing them chronologically here because I personally read my dash in chronological order) #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
Well, it’s not scientific, but I can think of maybe 2-3 people (including me) who started out fairly far to the right and are now pretty far to the left, and one person (you) who started out left a ways and has stayed there. The rest of the people I follow whose… political trajectories I’m aware of, which is maybe a dozen or so, seem to have started out sort of… mildly leftish-centrist and have moved further left with time. Like, there’s – I know there’s a norm of teenage rebellion and finding your own path, but my impression is that wide swings across the ideological center are fairly rare and may involve some kind of conversion/aversion experience.
(Bear in mind here that I’m very depressed, so this next part, I’m probably being more of a catty little bitch than is called for. But – like, I think we’ve discussed, you tend to run into a thing where people are like “Well, nobody is born feminist/whatever, we have to learn, go easy on us?” I genuinely don’t recall if that’s ever been me saying that, and like I say I could be totally wrong, but… like, my completely unsupported impression is, that kind of remark comes more from people who were born centrist, have liked to consider themselves quite left-wing progressive, and are just finding out that they’ve got a long fucking way to go and are feeling defensive about it? Like, pulling an example out of the air, somebody says “you know g*psy is a slur, right?”, and instead of “oh shit! no i didn’t know, sorry!”, they reach more for “don’t judge me! i couldn’t have known!” it’s… like i say, i could be full of shit, but for me myself, that identity-thing of “don’t judge me, i didn’t know any better” got lost somewhere around the same time as “gayness is a SIN”. i mean, i still don’t like being seen as a fuckup, i imagine nobody does, but my mental image of people who say “nobody is born knowing whatever” is of kids who… still have that belief in their own Moral Rectitude, you know? who have never yet had to integrate into their identity the fact that they are A Person Who Can And Does Fuck Up. who feel like they need to defend the idea that they couldn’t have done any better, defend their… their honor, and that’s their go-to excuse because idk it fits their world paradigm or whatever.)
(sorry. i say “kids”. given that this conversation involves a discussion of authors younger than me having their shit together, and that you also are quite a lot younger than me, that’s probably a bad choice of words. but i’m failing to come up with a better one. :P)
again. large grain of salt. possibly a barrel of salt. or a very large crystal. a hunk of salt. i’m tired and depressed and pretty sure i’m not being terribly articulate. but that’s my impression: most people our age have started out pretty centrist, and i’d bet the ones who overgeneralize about “nobody grows up far-leftist” are included in that centrist-moving-leftward group.
Hmm. The thing is–and I know I often elide this–I don’t think I was exactly raised far-left per se. Like, there were groups (the ones that come to mind are black people and gay people) where people talked positively about them, but you never seemed to actually meet any. Trans people were mostly not on our radar, and when they were they were mostly viewed with vaguely benevolent confusion.
But I was raised left enough that when I did meet full-on social-justice folk, they didn’t feel foreign. I wasn’t exactly raised in SJ culture, but the place I was raised was…adjacent, somewhere close enough that SJ proper felt of-a-piece with it.
>>they reach more for “don’t judge me! i couldn’t have known!”<<
For me, personally, while that reaction is correlated with childhood because I hang out on the Internet more as an adult, I think the main distinction is actually speech vs text. Offline!me’s* primary reaction to conflict is fight; Brin’s primary reaction is flight. My first emotion when called wrong is anger, but given a short time (usually short enough that textual communication will inherently give it to you) the anger is overwhelmed by fear. “If I crush the opposition they’ll stop hurting me!” becomes “As far as I can tell, I have never managed to successfully crush anyone, and I have no reason to think this will be the exception. Trying and failing to crush them will only prolong the fight and its associated pain. The only way of ending a fight that reliably works for me is complete and unconditional surrender, so that’s what I should do.” (Now that I’ve spent a lot of time in that frame of mind where my cowardice can shine through, I can even manage flight reactions in offline conflicts sometimes.)
(Apparently a lot of people are more the opposite? I mean, I guess they must be, or we wouldn’t have stuff along the lines of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. In a twisted sort of way, I suppose the existence of opposite people helped me; while I haven’t managed a 100% perfect record, I learned very fast that I could avoid a lot of fuckups by staying very quiet, observing, and letting other people make beginners’ mistakes for me.)
*My legal name would be less clunky, and I wouldn’t mind you knowing it, but I’m writing this publicly.
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#it’s not really Learning to Accept That I Can Be Wrong #as much as #Learning It Is In My Self-Interest to Pretend to Accept That I Can Be Wrong #(people who are not motivated primarily by self-interest confuse me and I am often tripped up by them) #(what do you mean you’re professing [insert political stance here] because you think it’s correct) #(and not because you fear social repercussions for not supporting it or because it would benefit you personally?) #(how does *that* work?) #reply via reblog #our roads may be golden or broken or lost
#like I know it’s not ~a lot~ of money #but it was more profitable than how I would otherwise have spent that time #while not being significantly more unpleasant or inconvenient #(well I mean having a transcript deemed unfit for use last night was unpleasant) #(but that’s technically *next* week’s paycheck) #(and in terms of emotional pain level probably comparable or better than fucking something up on Flight Rising) #((*also* something that affects other people)) #(so as long as I’m more careful not to bite off more than I can chew I should still come out ahead) #anyway unequivocal steps up are worth celebrating regardless of Objective Size #tag rambles #in which Brin has a job #oh look an original post
TOASTYSTATS: Did the US election influence fanfic production?
I’ve heard some folks talking about using fanfic to cope with/distract themselves from the recent US election (I’m in this camp, though I’m not ignoring the real world), and others, like the hosts of @fansplaining, discuss not being able to focus on fandom right now. I wondered which of these impulses was currently stronger overall in fandom.
TL;DR: as of two weeks following the 2016 election, there’s been a big post-election spike in fanfic production on AO3 (~30% increase) – which is unusual for this time of year. Though, of course, correlation is not causation – there could be some other cause(s) at play. And while some people may be turning to fandom for distraction, there’s a bigger increase in ‘Angst’ than ‘Fluff.’
I gathered daily data from AO3 for the pat 5 years in order to compare this year to past ones. I figured even if we did see a spike or a drop in fanworks, that might be normal following an election – or just normal for November. The past 5 years have the benefit of containing another presidential election, as well as a midterm election and two off-years. I looked at the total amount of fanworks produced in each of the two weeks leading up to the US election, and in each of the two weeks following it. (If you look at the above graph, 0 on the x axis is Election Day – Nov 8, 2016.)
Based on the above graph, we can see that most years have a fairly flat production rate surrounding the election. 2016, however, departs strongly from this pattern with a 32% increase from the two weeks leading up to the election.
As a matter of fact I mathed a while back and my transcribing speed on KUEC is well up to professional standards (I get through one minute of audio in about 6-7 minutes of work on average, last time I googled it said professionals vary from 4-10 minutes of work per minute of audio). I’m not sure how those figures would hold up when trying to transcribe people I haven’t already listened to literally hundreds of hours of, though, and if it had to have every “um, uh” and “I, I, I think” literal I’d definitely be slower. On KUEC transcriptions I cut out a lot of the verbal static that normal audio conversation has.
It’s worth looking into, though. What’s the pay like, what kind of material does one work on, what are the minimum/maximum productivity expectations, other questions like that? :-)
Background:
The company in question is called Rev. This is the job listing that brought it to Mom’s attention, which gives a short ad and a link to a bunch of generally positive reviews. (Mom, it turns out, is too hard of hearing: when they gave her a test recording to transcribe, she couldn’t even hear it well enough to finish the test, let alone pass. When she told me about this, after consoling her I said “Hey, I’m not hard of hearing, maybe I can do it.”)
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Note that despite that being a Canadian job-hunting site, the listed pay is in U.S. dollars. (The company is based in San Francisco.) Money-wise, what you see is what you get, and what *I* see is a smaller number than what I get. (My currency-conversion app has been getting a little more use lately.)
“Average monthly earnings: $241, top monthly earning: $1,440″: in other words, theoretically possible to make a living off it*, but most people don’t. (Of course, I expect a lot of people are just supplementing and aren’t aiming for a living wage, and that would drag the average down.)
So far, I have completed two transcriptions, for a total transcription time of 13 minutes, a total real time of slightly over two hours, and a total money of USD$5.76. (That is, as the old joke goes, $7.72 in real money.) However, I am a newbie and speed comes with practice. Also, people who have logged less than an hour of transcription time don’t get paid as much: 20% of what would otherwise be their pay goes to an experienced transcriber who double-checks everything to catch any beginner’s mistakes, for a pay boost of 25% (because fractions) once you finish the probationary period.
So yeah, the bad news is that it’s not minimum wage until and unless you get pretty good at it, and no benefits. Good news things:
There are no minimum productivity requirements. I mean, it’s one thing if you’re claiming jobs from the pool and then not doing them, but if you don’t claim any jobs for a while there’s no penalty (unless you count the natural consequence of not earning anything). There’s no official maximum, although I’d guess there’s some number at which they go “this is suspiciously ridiculous”, because it’d be strange if there weren’t.
As long as you have an Internet-connected computer, a set of headphones, and a reasonably quiet environment, you can work. No commute, sit in whatever chair you want.
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By default, “umms” and “ahhs” and such are skipped. Customers can request verbatim transcripts (my first transcript was verbatim), but they cost(/you get paid) extra (an extra dime per minute, I think).
Payment for each calendar week is sent to your Paypal the following Monday. So I’m told, anyway: I haven’t gotten there yet. (I don’t think it will feel quite real until I see the money in my account. Then, I will be Employed.)
Material varies. Interviews, medical records, instructional videos, sermons, I’m told podcasts but I haven’t seen any yet… Audio quality varies a lot, and there’s been some I haven’t understood, but you can hear a recording without claiming it, and there’s a one-hour grace period after claiming where you can bail on it without penalty. (Also they have audio filter options that apparently help somewhat with recorded background noise.)
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All in all, may or may not be enough on its own, but at the very least a potentially helpful supplement. If you have a spare hour and a half or so at some point, you might want to try applying; fair warning, they brag to their customers about rejecting 90% of job applicants (”only the best 10% work on your recording!”). I mean, who knows how many of that 90% were blatantly incompetent, but if it seems like something you might be interested in, it might be best to find out whether or not they’ll take you before you get desperate.
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I feel like I might be missing something, but it’s past my bedtime. Let me know if you have any other questions.
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*According to the cost-of-living figures in my head, which are based on averaged per-person cost for a family of four in southern Ontario circa 2014. YMMV by quite a bit.
How long does it take to hear back about whether you’ve been hired? And what’s the application like – I mean, do you need an up-to-date resume, or a list of seven years’ addresses for a background check, or is it more just “prove you have these current skills”, or what?
(I haven’t the time to apply at this very moment, cos I’m tryna catch up on a bit more sleep before work, but I’m trying to figure out how much time to block out and what to prepare before I do.)
More just “Prove you have these current skills.”
The application asked for my name, my email address, my typing speed (linking to an online test to take if I wasn’t sure), and my level of previous experience with transcription (options: “none”, “some”, “professional”; I picked none). Then they gave me a short quiz on grammar and choosing the correct homophone for the context of a sentence. Then they asked me to write a thing of one to three paragraphs on a provided topic. (600 word maximum, I think mine was about 250 – 300; since they expect the entire application to take an hour*, they’re clearly not expecting a highly polished essay, just something that shows competence with English.) Then they gave me their Style Guide to read, and a clip about 2.5 minutes long to transcribe in their text editor and according to their style standards. I saw in the background on one of their instructional videos–which was filmed on an older version of the interface–that there used to be an optional resume upload at the end, but now they don’t even give you the option.
Oh, and a Terms and a Privacy Policy to agree to. I did actually read them; it was pretty much what I expected, the usual “to the greatest extent possible, nothing is ever legally our fault” that most companies do with most things, and a warning that I was a freelancer and not technically an employee, and therefore not eligible for things like employee benefits. (I did hear on their forum that if you’re a freelancer and you need an official paper proving you work somewhere, Rev will give you one. I haven’t looked into it yet as I haven’t needed such a paper, so I can’t promise that.) (Also, you know, make sure to read it yourself and not rely on my summary, just in case that needs to be said.)
Email, November 21st, 10:46 PM Eastern: “Most likely you will hear back from us within one to two days. In particularly high volume times, it can take as long as three days to get through all of the applications.“
Email, November 21st, 11:21 PM Eastern: “Good news, your Rev account is now activated and you are ready to start working and earning money!
To get started, click here to complete your account registration.“
So they reserve the right to take a couple days, but mine was less than an hour. I can only guess that the application queue was deserted and somebody had nothing better to do than review my application immediately. (I was particular surprised given that I didn’t even submit within Pacific business hours.)
“Completing my account registration“ involved my home address, phone number, and the name and email of the Paypal I wanted them to send my payments to. (Which were the same as the name and email I’d given them previously, but the fact that they’re separate fields implies the option of having them be different.) They gave me a tutorial where they showed me around the employee freelancer-only sections of the site, gave me a few short sample audios (optional but recommended) that I could try to transcribe and/or watch a video of an experienced person explaining how to deal with the clip’s particular issues.
After that, I could start right away, and that evening I took a short (6-minute) clip that I could manage before bedtime (and I could, but only just). (I woke up to find that just after I’d turned off my computer for the night, a grader had checked my work. They said I’d done very well; the only flaw was one word that they had managed to hear but I had marked inaudible. The other word I had marked inaudible didn’t count as a flaw because the grader couldn’t hear it either.)
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Things I thought of after finishing the last message:
I can’t be sure, and it’s probably still best to look into it sooner rather than later, but I suspect the 90% rejection rate isn’t as big a deal as it sounds. It’s in their interest to hire as many competent people as they can get their hands on: the larger the pool of freelancers, the more and/or faster transcripts they can complete, the more attractive their service will be to customers. (I saw quite a few positive customer reviews along the lines of “They told me to expect my transcript within 24 hours, but it came back in only 3!”.) Like I said in the footnote, quantity is good as long as it doesn’t compromise quality.
It’s not 100% true that there’s never a penalty for not working. They don’t fire you or dock pay for work you completed or anything, but people who are prolific enough while maintaining good grades are rewarded with first pick of new audios and the option to apply to become a grader, and if you don’t maintain your prolific-ness you drop down to regular transcriber.
Working in transcription would probably directly help with the feeling of your work requiring you to be mean to disabled people. In my last job, I made an instructional video more accessible. (Speaking of, Rev also has freelance captioning, but I haven’t applied to that and don’t know much about it. Rumour on the forum has it that it is more difficult than transcribing but higher pay.)
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*Mine was more like an hour and a half, and so was Mom’s from when she started to when she gave up. I do tend to be slow and cautious and triple-check everything on tests, though, especially tests without strict time limits. (Or, in other words, I’ve demonstrated a willingness to take a significant cut to my own hourly wage to ensure a higher quality for their product. I don’t know if they’ve noticed, but they might think it’s a good sign if they did. Quantity is good all else equal, but only if it doesn’t compromise quality.)
Tags:
#I’ve been aiming for a transcript every school evening #(probably aim for more on non-schooldays) #but I ended up skipping yesterday because Thanksgiving was too tiring and I couldn’t focus enough #reply via reblog #in which Brin has a job #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #adventures in human capitalism
Brinens and Things 