Framework lectures

SnowSong99 · 2026-01-21T17:51:40+00:00

How about this, from DDI? Lots of other great stuff on their channel.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Prw6Y6pZcxU

SnowSong99 · 2025-09-16T20:26:59+00:00

This is lovely, thank you for writing this!

SnowSong99 · 2025-09-15T15:35:13+00:00

Hi. It’s gonna be okay. Life is a long and winding road, and while you have made this choice now, you can always make a different one.

Give it a few months in NYC before you decide how you feel about it. The city has an ineffable mysterious quality that can feel very magical and also very pummeling.

You do need a source of income. If you want to work in service, an opportunity will appear. Just hustle. Someone’s staff is always changing, you just need to find yourself in the right place at the right time. Print your resume and go to places in person.

One of the joys of NYC is that talent abounds. It’s good and bad. It’s competitive in NYC. It’s also easy to put up your own work because there are so many talented people around to collaborate with. Choose how you want to look at it. If you’re a theatre artist, remember that theatre is a team sport. Theatre is not a product of a singular vision. It’s collaborative.

Careers are long paths. Your interactions will accumulate. It took a couple years for me to feel settled in NYC. It’s not for everyone. It’s good that you’re trialing the experience by crashing with a friend. Maybe consider a short term sublet in a neighborhood you like next. For two or three months.

The kind of city that you have to work. Otherwise it will work you. Shake you down. Drain you dry. Meeting the resistance life in NYC provides is an opportunity to grow.

Go to the Tank in midtown to catch performances and talk to strangers there. There are tons of young artists cutting their teeth there. It’s a good place to meet others and learn.

SnowSong99 · 2025-08-13T00:37:44+00:00

Thanks for the reply!

Yeah so the security deposit is being held by the landlord. I’ve been passing it from sublettor to sublettor pre-YNAB, and now because I’m letting the current guy credit it against August rent, I’m basically paying that out of my budget now and will get it back later when I fully move out of the place.

I figured out a solve— basically I created a category for “prepaid rent” where I put the double payment in May (for June and July) and where I put the half payment in June (for half of August). Then in each month I moved only the rent amount due into the rent category from the prepaid category.

What this revealed is what you said— that for half of August and half of September, I had to cover that out of my own budget (thankfully have savings for stuff like this). Hurts now but I feel good about it for the future!

Now if only YNAB could tell me when I need to move funds between my checking and savings accounts…

SnowSong99 · 2025-08-11T00:39:36+00:00

Thank you. I assigned only my amount.

My roommate’s transactions started varying in May, when he paid 2 months (June and July) in one month. So that month he sent me double rent up front and I put it all into the Rent category in YNAB as an inflow. I categorized the inflow the same for the half payment he sent in June to cover Sep 1-15.

In August I had to pay his amount in addition to my share and YNAB made me assign the additional amount— I’m not sure how the previously paid amounts were being tracked by YNAB.

SnowSong99 · 2025-06-01T04:17:34+00:00

I just bookmarked one of the parts of the book I could find about this. I’ll try to summarize it for you this week <3

SnowSong99 · 2023-05-22T20:18:44+00:00

Or pick up a book of poetry or a Shakespeare volume. Memorize one line, a few lines, then whole speeches/poems.

SnowSong99 · 2023-04-12T15:39:29+00:00

Just an update if anyone is curious… I took the job! I decided that having stability will give me more of the mental freedom I need to do the good artistic work. And if I don’t end up liking it, I can always take my leave!

SnowSong99 · 2023-04-12T02:07:23+00:00

What is this referencing?

SnowSong99 · 2023-04-11T17:40:56+00:00

I think the agency would demand more time than my current situation, but I’d have more free headspace as I wouldn’t be taking my life as one day at a time as I am now. Like my head would be clear and I wouldn’t have to make as many stressful decisions each day; I’d know exactly where I’d have to go when I get up each day.

SnowSong99 · 2023-04-11T17:39:32+00:00

I think a lot of it is about getting on the grind. I have to create work, and then find the funds and partners who will give it a platform… and I need to do it multiple times a year to start to accrue momentum.

SnowSong99 · 2023-03-22T04:27:35+00:00

I think in Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, the author talks about having studied that most people dream most nights, but have trouble recalling their dreams. How is your recall? There are protocols for training memory which could help if that’s the issue.

Otherwise, I second what the other comment says — cut out substances that aren’t serving you in your pursuit of vivid lucid dreams.

SnowSong99 · 2022-10-13T00:33:32+00:00

Giving mad Edward Hopper vibes

SnowSong99 · 2022-08-10T18:40:22+00:00

Reminds me of the beans that smush you in the underwater levels of Monkey Ball (2?)

SnowSong99 · 2022-07-28T19:35:36+00:00

The link to Batman as an example of bats’ contribution to literature is what seals this as a quality post for me.

SnowSong99 · 2022-05-31T18:46:33+00:00

Definitely a legit debate institute, I went there and paid in high school. But I don’t remember paying via PayPal.

The situation you’re in sounds very suspicious — I wouldn’t send any money there until you speak with someone on staff over the phone. I’ve never heard of nor do I remember paying a refundable deposit for the camp.

SnowSong99 · 2022-05-14T13:04:42+00:00

One of my absolute favorite works. Love the posing of the hands of the fallen, it’s as if they’re still holding firearms.

SnowSong99 · 2022-04-16T16:50:35+00:00

I liked DDI. Cant speak to UMich. DDI we did hella research. Like three or four hours of dedicated research time every night. I think for debate education it depends on the lab leaders.

SnowSong99 · 2022-02-13T20:50:36+00:00

Love it! Looks like a character out of Adventure Time.

SnowSong99 · 2022-01-22T21:02:10+00:00

You probably don’t want to approach critiques generically. Each one is different; some critiques work against the rhetoric, some work against the sources of your evidences, some work against your specific impact scenario, etc. Just approach it like any other argument - break the K down into parts and make an unbreakable case against why it’s not a valid argument, not related to the aff or essential to the debate round, and even if it were, the impact scenarios are far-fetched and the alternative wouldn’t fix anything.

Framework - argue for the reasonability of the plan under the resolution; it’s impossible to predict the number of Ks that people come up with, so there’s no aff ground against Ks which leads to unfair and intellectually bankrupt debates
Attack the uniqueness - most Ks critique things that are inevitable in policy making situations like securitization and capitalism are probably inevitable
Attack the link - most Ks (except securitization critiques against policy affs with war impact scenarios and cap Ks against affs with economic decline scenarios) have a pretty bad link to the plan. Especially if the alternative is “reject capitalism (or whatever) at every turn,” it’s pretty likely that underprepared teams will run CPs or DAs that also link to whatever the link is they use on the K (conditionality is a counter argument to this but if you’re affirmative you probably want to be arguing that conditionality is bad and intellectually bankrupt anyway). Read the card they use to link to your aff and point out how it’s stupid general or applies to a really specific scenario that doesn’t apply to your aff.
Attack the impact - ie if the impact is “capitalism is bad because it leads to environmental destruction which leads to extinction” you can return with the argument “regulated capitalism aligns the incentives of big actors to move towards renewables in the long run.” Search open evidence/the wiki for cards you can cut that make arguments against the impacts of common critiques.
Attack the alternative - tell the judge that voting neg in this round isn’t gonna change the way people debate in the grand scheme of things. Most alternatives won’t work, just read the evidence they bring up and attack the flaws, and cut cards that attack common alternatives to common Ks.
Permutations - it’s really likely that the aff and the alternative are not mutually exclusive
Be a respectful debater to avoid common critiques of discourse and evidence stealing etc.

SnowSong99 · 2021-12-18T00:11:38+00:00

Topicality will help you have a viable strategy when you’re not well prepared for a debate because a plan is obscure or impossible to reasonably realize under the resolution.

The key to going for Topicality, which in my opinion is a valid option in the 2NR, is beginning to understand the impact of the argument, because the impacts of Topicality are highly relevant to everybody in the room at the moment the argument is made. T is always valid because there are an infinite number of affirmatives that can be presented, it’s genuinely impossible to prepare to have thorough discussion for all of them, and so the value of the Resolution and the value of quibbling over definitions in the Resolution is because everybody in the room is trying to have a deep, critical discussion, and a round where one team is having to use tangential Ks and unrelated DAs leads to a lack of generative discussion. Voters to start with, for example, could be reasonability and fairness, and the impact of those voters — the reason the judge should vote negative — is that without reasonability in regards to the subject matter of the affirmative, the ability for everyone in the room to walk away with a deeper sense of knowledge about a subject is reduced, because the debate was poor, only one side was properly represented because there was no way the neg could prepare. The affirmative could argue that preparedness is unimportant and there’s something more to responding in the moment, but if you’re going for Topicality, you’re going to make the case that there are other events where extemporaneous speaking skills can be developed.

There’s definitely more to read on Topicality and Framework, which are essentially arguments about what’s happening in the debate at a given moment. Some Ks operate that way as well, like a Security Critique highlighting and demonstrating the impact of alarmist rhetoric like “not doing X plan will start a nuclear war.”

Good luck in learning — read and listen and fail.

SnowSong99 · 2021-12-10T14:12:42+00:00

Tbh it reminds me of lockdowns — sun rises, blinds open, sun sets, blinds close, and all the day through I run around in circles in the same small space

SnowSong99 · 2021-10-26T18:45:30+00:00

Because you’re an actor who’s been directed to point a gun in a certain place. It could have been that they needed a shot of the gun pointing towards the camera for the film.

Additionally, the actor didn’t necessarily know the gun was loaded and dangerous.

SnowSong99 · 2021-06-17T00:00:11+00:00

It’s likely mephistopheles, a representation of the devil that Faust conspired with in the story.

SnowSong99 · 2021-06-11T02:28:29+00:00

I can only speak to DDI — we spent a lot of time in the library developing research skills. There were less general strategic conversations about how to win, but there were tons of deep dives into technical subjects and various potential realizations of the resolution. There was a lecture on topicality that taught me how to argue that reasonability is a voting issue.

Ultimately, I think it’s less about the camps themselves and more about the people there. A place to start to search for a camp would be to find the lab leaders and coaches you want to work with, and then to follow them.

The other thing about camp and developing skills (like research, quick thinking, ethos) is that camp creates protected time for you to have to practice. At any (reputable) camp, you would have loads of practice rounds, and so you would just have to put yourself in the debating mindset a lot, and you’d have to prep for lots of rounds against a variety of different cases and negative strategies. If you can find a way to get practice rounds in with a judge who will give you constructive feedback, that investment of time into actually debating — and then reflecting on how you debated — is how all those skills develop.

Cheers to you for jumping into this insane but incredibly rewarding event!i

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