#✮ no matter where the place the members are gathered is; its instantly our stage | closed starter; tsurumaki kokoro

[multi-mused-menagerie]

     SHE’S HERE AND SHE’S READY TO TAKE ON YOKOHAMA! Now if only she could find her girlfriend...

[undertalethingems]

Bark at the Moon Chapter 11: Mob Mentality

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Rating, Setting: Gen, Pre-canon

Chapter Warnings: None

Chapter Summary: Everything goes absolutely right: everything goes wrong.

Flowey cackled as he raced towards Snowdin as fast as his roots would take him. It was time, it was finally time! He popped up in the town square, in view of the most people. "Hey! Everyone! You have to be ready, the beast is coming! It's--it's in Waterfall right now, I saw Undyne fighting it--but! Oh god, it was so powerful! I think it's coming here next, we have to be ready to fight it together!"

A worried murmur rose from the gathering crowd, and it parted for members of the Royal Guard--the Dogi.

"How long do we have?" Dogaressa questioned, fixing him with a firm gaze.

"I--I don't know, however long Undyne can hold it off. From what I saw... it might only about fifteen minutes before it gets here--but maybe even less!"

"That's still plenty of time. Not to worry, everyone," Dogamy called out, "we'll arrange our forces accordingly. Please take your children inside until it is safe."

"Anyone else who is ready and willing to fight, prepare yourself. We will not let this individual escape justice," Dogaressa added firmly. "We'll regroup at the clearing past Papyrus and Sans' house in ten minutes."

The crowd broke into an urgent bustle as everyone hurried to their families or the meeting place. Flowey slipped away to watch it from a distance, his work done. Excellent. The stage was set, and all he had to do now was put the other piece in place. A bit of scouring, and--oh good, Sans was still napping under his old sentry station. It was kind of funny how he still frequented places he had no reason to anymore. He tapped his snout to wake him up, and ignored the growl he got as Sans set eyes on him.

"Hey, no need for that. I wanna help you out!"

Sans eyed him suspiciously.

"Look, I even brought you a peace offering--here, your favorite!" Flowey said, offering up one of the burgers he still had. It was snatched from his vine almost instantly, and Flowey shook his head. He knew Sans hadn't been able to find much food lately, but he hadn't expected him to be so quick to accept his gift. Well, all the better. It was just a matter of stalling for time now.

"So hey, I know you've been looking for your brother--I've been looking too. And I'm pretty good at finding stuff, so it was weird when it seemed like he wasn't anywhere."

Sans still watched him warily, but sighed.

"Yeah, I know. So color me surprised when I heard where he's been this whole time!"

Sans perked up, tilting his head at him.

"He's been with Undyne! It turns out she knows of some secret caverns and stuff too, and he's been hanging out there. But I also heard... that he's thinking of coming back soon--maybe even today!"

Sans narrowed his eyes and uttered a short, questioning grunt.

"Yeah! I don't know when, but you might wanna head back soon so you can meet him when he arrives. You'd like that, right?"

Sans rumbled, and looked toward town. Flowey wasn't sure if he still--oh, there was the flicker, and Sans was gone. Alright, that would have to do--he grinned. He burrowed back toward town as quickly as his roots could take him, and popped up in the trees to the side of the road to wait. A decent crowd had already lined up, headed by the Guard. Shouts urged stragglers to join the ranks, and he wondered if Sans could hear them from his house.

And then--a far louder cry as Papyrus appeared, plowing through the snow toward the gathered townsfolk. He looked happy to see them at first, expecting them to be a welcoming party. But as he got closer and realized their expressions were all dour, he slowed--and the first attack smacked into him, a heavy icicle bullet. He staggered with a yelp, and the crowd cheered. And then the rest attacked too.

Papyrus tried to shield himself, but there were too many projectiles coming from too many angles. He went down with a shriek, and Flowey cackled. Unless something happened, it'd be only moments until Papyrus was--

A line of bones stabbed up through the crowd's feet, knocking them back. Flowey knew that attack. That was his cue.

"Oh god, there's TWO of them!" he screamed above the confusion, using someone else's voice to avoid suspicion.

A beam of light cut through the crowd, leaving screams and scorch marks in its wake, and then another seared from another angle, sowing even more confusion. Several people fled--this was far more than they'd signed up for, and Flowey cackled gleefully--fools and cowards and idiots, all of them! He delighted in watching them squirm and mill and scramble while they tried to defend their worthless lives as something tore through their ranks. Then, finally something visible--a white blur tackled one of the bears and snapped its heavy jaws around the unfortunate monster's arm, and he screamed as he fell back.

But then something blue flashed within the white blur's ribcage, and it was yanked off and slammed into the clearing with a dull thud. It went still.

Flowey frowned, and looked up. Papyrus was sitting, one hand extended and trembling, tears trailing from his sockets. Realizing everyone was looking at him, he started--then lunged forward, grasping his brother's spine in his jaws and turning tail to flee into the trees. Dogamy called orders for anyone able to fight to go after them, and a small party took off. Flowey watched them go knowing they'd never catch them, but stayed put himself. Undyne had finally arrived. She was jogging up looking thoroughly concerned, and he wanted to see what her reaction would be. Dogaressa approached her, and explained what had transpired.

Her fury was spectacular.

The anguished howl that tore from her throat echoed from the cavern walls, and a tree splintered on contact with a spear thrown in her outburst. Another cracked when she punched it, and it was several minutes before anyone felt they could approach her. She whirled on them, her voice clear even from where Flowey hid.

"This is EXACTLY what I was afraid of--BUT!" she bellowed, "who told you these things?! Who was it? I'm going to make them SUFFER!"

"I-it w-was a flower," one of the townsfolk offered timidly. "A little yellow flower that could talk."

There was a moment's silence.

"HE. IS. DEAD!" Undyne roared. "I want everyone looking for him. He is NOT to be trusted, the lying, manipulating little--I WANT HIM DEAD!"

"B-but Undyne," Dogaressa piped up, "we have to follow due process. What has this flower even done?"

Undyne could barely bring herself to speak. "Those monsters... were Sans and Papyrus. I know it was Papyrus, and the other--I don't know, I don't know! It had to be Sans, somehow--but! That's NOT THE POINT! The POINT is, that flower told us Sans was back, looking for Papyrus, and then he apparently told you Papyrus was the beast and to attack him. For some reason... he wanted this mess to happen!"

There were murmurs through what remained of the crowd.

"I don't have time to deal with you all, so go home, patch yourselves up, and think about what you've done. Guard, we'll talk later. Dismissed."

Flowey giggled. What a fun bit of chaos that had been. He was tempted to just reset now, but he kind of wanted to see this all play out to the very end. Would the brothers ever come back? Who knew. What would happen if they did? What would happen if they didn't? It was all so interesting. He'd call today a success.

[bellakitse]

The Marriage Tamales

Answering a call, TK and 126 meet Carlota Reyes, Carlos' mother, and his three sisters. While there, TK learns some very important information about his and Carlos' relationship.

* “You made this pretty little gringo, our mother’s marriage tamales?” Lola looks at him amazed.

Valentina smirks at him, the only way the oldest can. “When’s the wedding?”

“Wedding?” Sofiá repeats, scoffing. “Where’s their kid? Obviously, he already married this white boy if he made him mama's marriage tamales."

Carlos gets the text from his older sister just as he’s leaving the station for the day; he lets out a groan before he reads it, remembering as he sees her name that he’s supposed to go to their mother’s house for dinner. His workday has been a long one, and it’s completely slipped his mind. Valentina was probably texting to know when he would be getting there, since his mother doesn’t like to serve unless all her four children are at the table on family night.

He opens his messages, ready to shoot a quick text that he’s on his way when he reads what exactly she’s sent him.

‘The fire department is here, Mami almost burned the house down, get here now.’

Carlos feels the blood in his body go to his toes as he rereads the text before letting out a curse. He rushes to get into his squad car, turning on the light bar and the sirens as he goes. He tries not to speed, the last thing he needs is another lecture from his mom about it, between the squad car and his Camero, his mother is always giving him the stink-eye, and lecturing him about being a speed demon who is giving her grey hairs with his driving.

Carlota Reyes knows how to turn on the mom guilt like a pro when she needs to.

He gets to the simple ranch house his mother moved them into when he was a teenager to find a fire truck, EMS, and his sisters’ vehicles all in front of it. He’s barely turned his car off before he’s already out the door. Seeing the badge on the truck, he spots the engine number and instantly realizes that it’s the recently rebuilt fire engine 126 that has been called to his mother’s house. He’s worked a few calls with the new crew in the last few months since the firehouse opened their doors again, he likes them, and Michelle who works with them as EMS Captain seems to have good things to say about them too.

He relaxes slightly now that he knows it’s them who answered the call, it also helps that the house seems to be fine except for the emergency vehicles gathered around, and a few EMTs by their rig. No one makes a move to stop him as he makes his way up the stone pathway to the front door. Be it because he’s still in uniform, or because his face says ‘get the fuck out of my way,’ he’s not sure.

“Mami?” he calls out as he walks into the house, the smell of smoke hitting him the second he’s through the door. “Valentina?” he shouts next as he enters the living room, stopping short at what he finds inside the family room.

His oldest sister Valentina is there alright, as are his other two sisters Sofía and Lola, and they aren’t alone. Members of the 126, Mateo, and Marjan are sitting on the couch with them, while Judd and Paul stand behind it, all drinking what looks to be horchata like it’s a party.

“What the hell?” he gets out, drawing the attention of everyone in the room.

“Hey, bro!” Lola speaks up first, flashing him a shit-eating grin as she raises a glass to him as a toast. Lola is the one he’s closest to age-wise, with her being only two years older than him, as opposed to Sofía, who is five years older or Valentina, who at 34 is eight years older. “Finally, you’re late.”

“Seriously, what the fuck,” he repeats himself, looking away from his troublemaking sister to the more responsible ones. “I get a text saying Mami almost burned the house down, and I come to find you guys drinking horchata with the 126?”

“And chicken empanadas,” Captain Strand adds in from where he’s sitting next to Valentina, a smile on his face as he bites into the empanada, letting out a joyful sound. He’s not surprised, his mom’s empanadas are delicious, but that’s beside the point.

“I’m going to ask one more time, and I expect an answer,” Carlos tells them all sternly, placing his hands on his gun belt. “What the fuck is happening here, and is everyone okay?”

“Everyone is fine, Carlitos, which is more than I can say for you if you curse in my house one more time, Nene.”

Carlos spins on his heel to find his mother over by the archway mimicking his pose by having her hands on her hips.

“Mami,” he exhales, he crosses the distance between them and pulls her small frame against his, holding her tight. He feels her chuckle softly as she rests her head on his chest, hugging him back. The top of her head barely grazes his chin, and he leans down to accommodate her. “Are you okay? Valentina said there was a fire.”

Carlota Reyes pulls back from the hug, throwing a glare over his shoulder, no doubt at his older sister. “Your sister is melodramatic, Tu sabes como es.”

“I’m sorry, did you or did you not start a fire in the kitchen?” Valentina asks the room at large, getting an echo of agreement from his other two sisters, though the 126 seem to be smarter by keeping their mouths shut when Carlota shoots them all another look.

“Mami?” he questions her, giving her his cop face in hopes that she’ll cave and tell him the truth. Rolling her eyes at him, she turns to the man beside her, and for the first time, Carlos notices who it is. He can feel his face go hot as he looks at him.

TK Strand.

He shouldn’t be surprised he’s here; he should have realized that TK would probably be responding to the call the moment he saw the 126 truck, he definitely should have anticipated it after seeing TK’s dad.

“Hey, TK,” he gets out, his face goes redder still at the way his voice cracks, but he can’t help it. He and TK have been messing around, keeping it strictly friends with benefits since his failed dinner attempt and then their darts date. They hang out; they’re friends, they have sex – really good, out of this world, mind-melting sex – and now TK is standing next to his mother, while he has to get through this without her figuring out all the dirty things he’s been doing with the guy she’s smiling up at so sweetly.

“Hey, Carlos,” TK smiles at him as he tries not to react too much. There is a way that TK sometimes looks at him, that makes Carlos forget that the guy is not his boyfriend, it always makes him want to press him into the nears wall and lick his way into that smile.

“TK, tell my Carlitos, that everything is fine,” Carlota nudges at TK with her elbow like they’re already best friends, Lord help him. “He’s always worrying so much. You’re going to get wrinkles, Bebé.”

TK grins at him with a twinkle of amusement in his eyes that Carlos is sure is from the way his mom talks to him. It doesn’t matter that he’s 26 and a Police Officer. As the youngest of four, his mother and to an extent, his sisters have always babied the crap out of him. He’s learned to ignore it until people outside the family get a front-row seat to his embarrassment.

“The stove caught fire,” TK starts telling him, raising his hands to calm him down when Carlos makes a panicked sound. “It’s all good, we put it out and checked-out your mom and sisters,” he looks over at the couches where everyone is seated. “Everyone is fine, and there’s not much damage, though the stove will have to be replaced.”

“See, the handsome firefighter says everything is fine. You can stop worrying now, mijo,” Carlota says to him, turning back towards TK with a smile. “You’ve met my son before, TK?”

Carlos feels his skin heat up as TK looks over at him, a slow-building smile working its way to his face. “Yes, ma’am, Carlos and I know each other from work, he’s an excellent officer.”

“And handsome?” his mom questions hopefully, a sly grin on her face as she looks over at him like she knows she’s killing him with embarrassment and is okay with it.

TK lets out a chuckle, his eyes crinkling at the corners from his grin, he leans down closer to his mother to speak in a stage-whisper. “He certainly makes some of the calls we’ve been on, way prettier.”

Carlota lights up like she has won the lotto, and Carlos instantly understands what his mother is playing at.

Carlos groans loudly, earning himself a snort from more than one of his sisters. “Oh my god, this isn’t happening,” he says, turning away from TK and his mom to find his sisters, Captain Strand and the rest of the crew watching them with entertained looks on their faces, empanadas in hand.

“What?” his mom asks innocently like she doesn’t know what she’s doing.

Carlos ignores her as he takes a step back towards the couches and the food, if he’s going to be embarrassed in front of his siblings, the people he works with, and the guy he has a massive crush on; at the very least, he’s eating.

“She zeroed in on him the second she saw his eyes, kid,” Valentina tells him.

Carlos shakes his head, holding out a hand to Sofía, grateful when she passes him an empanada. “Of course she did, Mami likes green eyes.”

Valentina, Sofía, and Lola all nod in agreement, while everyone else in the room looks on curiously.

“Mom’s scoping him out for Carlos,” Lola explains because she’s a horrible, horrible sister who he is going to smother with a couch cushion. “Valentina and Sofía are married, and I’m a lost cause, so Mami is checking out if TK is available for Carlos.”

“I am not!” Carlota protests, which sets her and his sisters off, in between the snippets of conversation he learns that his mother latched on to TK since the second he walked through her door.

Turning his gaze towards the man in question, he finds TK has taken a few steps closer to him, looking at him with humor and a little shyness as his family really gets into it. The rest of the 126 looks on, riveted by the show, the Reyes women are entertaining if nothing else. Taking the plate of leftover empanadas, he passes it to TK, letting him take one.

Biting into it, TK lets out a moan that stops all conversations and makes Carlos’ pulse spike.

Jesus Christ, this man lives to wreak havoc on him.

“Oh my god, that’s delicious,” TK says happily, closing his eyes as he chews, missing the grin Carlota is sporting, pleased as punch by TK’s reaction. “No wonder you’re such a good cook, you got it from your mom.”

Carlos stares at TK and nowhere else, as the rest of the ones gathered stare holes into the both of them. TK looks back at him, and the little shit dares to smile at him like he hasn’t just unleashed mayhem with his words.

“Carlos has cooked for you?” Sofía asks, the glee in her voice proof that while she might be the quietest of them all, she still has an evil streak a mile long.

“Mmhmm,” TK says around another bite, raising his fingers to count off. “He’s made me fish, didn’t eat that time though, my fault, not his. He’s made me carbonara; that was pretty simple, but he was coming off a 16-hour shift, and it was still delicious. He also made me some tamales to die for,” TK continues, not realizing what he's done by mentioning them. Carlos cringes as his sisters look at him with unholy excitement. He turns to look over at his mom, shaking his head as he takes in the way she looks ready to cry, she’s so happy. 

“He said it was your recipe, ma’am,” TK tells his mom, flashing her a bright smile. “You taught him well. It’s the best food I have ever had, besides these empanadas, of course.”

His mom makes a squeak like noise, before slapping her hands over her mouth in what Carlos thinks is an attempt not to start squealing. As is, she looks to be vibrating with unbridled happiness.

“You made this pretty little gringo, our mother’s marriage tamales?” Lola looks at him amazed.

Valentina smirks at him, the only way the oldest can. “When’s the wedding?”

“Wedding?” Sofía repeats, scoffing. “Where’s their kid? Obviously, he already married this white boy if he made him mama's marriage tamales. You guys adopting or going with surrogacy?”

"Marriage tamales?" TK asks with a small confused smile on his face, while his sisters nod in his direction. 

"Mami taught all of us with the condition that we can only make them for someone truly special to us," Valentina tells him, as TK looks at him with wide eyes, his mouth parted in surprise. "I made them for my husband when I realized I loved him, Sofía, did the same with her husband."

"I have never made the tamales for anyone," Lola adds. "Cause like I said, a lost cause."

TK continues to look at him, shocked, and suddenly Carlos doesn't care that his family or TK’s crew is watching; all he cares about is that TK doesn't freak out, and as a result, Carlos loses him. "Tyler, I –" he starts only to stop when he hears choking happening next to Valentina.

Looking over, he finds Captain Strand staring at them. "He called you by your name."

TK snaps out of his daze and looks back at his dad, his face turning red. "Dad," TK hisses in warning, but Owen doesn't listen.

"He knows your first name, TK," Owen continues, making significant eyes at his son. "He knows it and just used it. Does he know what the K stands for too?"

TK doesn't answer, his face is a pretty shade of pink, and Owen turns his eyes to him, waiting for an answer. 

"Yes," Carlos starts, making TK’s gaze go back to him. "It's –"

TK takes two steps towards him, placing his hand over his mouth. "Don't you dare, Carlos Reyes," TK warns him gravely, but Carlos can't help but smile at how flustered TK looks. 

He tugs the hand off his face, grinning at him. "I didn't realize using your name was such a big deal," he teases him, smirking as TK gives him a scowl. "I feel special."

TK narrows his eyes at him in response. "Marriage tamales, Reyes."

Carlos loses his smirk, giving him a nod when TK raises an eyebrow at him. Fair enough. 

"So, you're dating?" Mateo asks, reminding them that the crew is still very much in the room watching this all go down like a telenovela. Marjan, Judd, and Paul all look on in interest with small smirks on all their faces.

"We're –" TK starts, looking around the room, then back at him. There is a vulnerable look in TK's pretty green eyes, and Carlos feels like an idiot. He has spent the last few weeks that they have been doing this, trying to keep it all light and easy, as not to spook TK. And while doing so, he hasn't been looking for a sign that maybe things have changed, that possibly TK might finally be ready for more.

"We're not, not dating," Carlos says for him, the words feeling really inadequate, but it's the best he can do with everyone around them right now.

They need to talk alone and give this a new definition, but for the first time, Carlos is hopeful that it will include the words relationship and together.

TK looks at him with a small smile, giving him a slight nod of his head, silently agreeing with him.

His mother, though, of course, isn't satisfied with the answer. "I'm sorry, but that is young people speak for what exactly?"

Carlos opens his mouth only for Lola to cut in.

"It means Carlitos has been hitting it with the gringo, but not putting a label on it, Mami," Lola informs her while smirking in his direction. "He's been doing a whole lot of sinning, but it also seems like he wants to bring this cutie into the family."

TK blushes again at his sister's words, while Carlos narrows his eyes at Lola who keeps looking at him completely pleased with herself.

"Lola, how's Leticia from the good market Mami likes?" Carlos questions, a victorious grin on his face as she loses her smile and glares at him. Valentina and Sofía let out amused 'oohs,' respectively.

"Lola?" Carlota questions, groaning when Lola gives her a hesitant smile. "If you break that girl's heart, her dad isn't going to sell me the good peppers anymore, and I’ll make you go across town to get me some from that fancy organic place that pisses you off,” she warns her.

The comment gets his sister, and his mother started again, his other two sisters joining the fray.

Captain Strand proving to be a good Captain who knows when to get his people out of the fire, begins signaling for them to leave. One by one, the firefighters each head for the front door, each thanking his mother for the food.

TK is the last to go, still looking at him and no one else. "We'll talk later?" he asks, his expression tentative, and Carlos can't let him leave like that. Ignoring his family, he leans down to give TK a quick kiss. He lets out a surprised sound when TK touches the back of his neck, holding him there for a moment to make the kiss last.

When they break apart, the room is completely silent, but Carlos can't hear anything but their breathing and his heart beating.

"I finish my shift in three hours," TK tells him quietly, and Carlos nods, understanding him.

"Come by after; I'll be home."

TK smiles at him before turning around; he lets out a nervous chuckle as he finds his sisters and his mother watching them. "It was nice meeting you all," TK starts, walking back towards them to get to the door. He stops in front of his mother, holding out his hand. "Ma'am it was a pleasure, thank you for the food."

Carlota smiles up at TK, taking his hand before pulling him in for a hug. TK lets out a surprised noise, whether it's from the unexpected strength his mother has, or the hug itself, Carlos isn't sure.

Letting him go, Carlota points a finger in TK's face. "I better see you again, guapo, soon."

TK looks at him, smiles, and then looks back at his mom. "I'll make sure it happens, ma'am."

 ֎֍֎

 Carlos is a mess of nervous energy as he paces back and forth in his apartment. TK texted him twenty minutes ago, asking if it was still okay for him to stop by, and now Carlos was waiting for him, every second that past putting him more on edge.

He has a feeling that the conversation they need to have is going to go his way. TK put down all the signals before he left his mom’s house, but that doesn’t stop him from being nervous. He wants this, wants TK so bad. More than he’s ever wanted anything, and knowing that there might actually be a chance he gets to have him completely sends his pulse racing.

The rest of his time at the house had been interesting. His sisters and his mother grilled him about TK to the point that he had to ask who was the cop, him, or them? They’re amazing interrogators and cracked him like an egg. In the end, he told them how he met TK, keeping some of the more salacious aspects of their relationship to himself for his mother’s sake, though given the leers his sisters gave him, they weren’t fooled at all.

Finally, though, all it boiled down to for his mom and his sisters is how he feels. His mom softly asking him, ‘Lo quieres, Carlitos?’ her warm hands holding his. Valentina playing with his hair, Lola with her head on his knee as she sat on the floor, while Sofía stood behind him with her hands on his shoulders, he couldn’t deny the truth.

The hug that came from all sides as he let out a quiet, ‘Si, mucho’ soothed him the only way his family’s love could.

He couldn’t hide it anymore. He cared about TK, given half the chance he could love him forever, and he really wants that chance.

The knock on the door pulls him away from his thoughts, taking a breath he crosses his living room to open it, finding a soft-looking TK, who gives him a nervous half-smile as he takes him in.

“Hey,” he says quietly, stepping to the side to let TK in, only TK doesn’t do that; instead, he steps into Carlos’ space, his face inches away from his.

He looks at him for a moment, his green eyes searching for something before he closes the distance between their lips. Carlos sighs into the kiss, bringing his arms around TK’s back as TK wraps his arms around Carlos’ neck. TK’s tongue runs over the stem of Carlos’ lips, and with a soft moan, Carlos opens his mouth. TK kisses him the way he does everything else, one hundred percent in, his tongue dances against his as he deepens the kiss, and all Carlos can do is hold him closer as he gets lost in the taste and feel of TK. He feels perfect in his arms, and it’s all he wants, to keep TK close to him. Jesus, he’s in love, without meaning to, he's fallen in love with this beautiful man, and he just wants to keep him.

Carlos has them pressed against his door when they break the kiss, both breathing heavy. TK keeps a firm grip on him like Carlos has any interest in stepping away from him. He looks at Carlos; his bright, colorful eyes have a soft hazy look to them.

“The marriage tamales, Carlos,” TK whispers, there’s almost a pleading quality to his tone. “What do they mean?”

Carlos inhales sharply, his heart pounding in his ears as TK looks at him earnestly. Licking his lips, he closes his eyes for a moment, and he feels the way TK runs his fingers at the top of his spine, almost petting him to calm him down. Opening his eyes, he looks back into TK’s, time to lay it all out on the table, and hope he’s not wrong in his optimism.

“It means,” he starts, his voice not much more than a whisper. “It means I want to be yours, and you be mine. It means that I want what I have wanted from the moment I met you.”

“What’s that?” TK whispers back, his eyes are large, and he looks at Carlos like he’s genuinely seeing him for the first time.

“A chance to love you the way you deserve,” he tells him, smiling at TK when he lets out a sharp breath. “If you let me, I’ll love you the way you should always be loved, Tyler. Entirely and with my whole heart.”

“What if I don’t deserve that?” TK asks, swallowing hard, his eyes glassy from unshed tears.

“I’ve never heard a bigger untruth in my life, you deserve everything good this world has to offer,” Carlos brings his hands to TK’s face, cradling his cheeks, his thumb under his eyes, ready to wipe away the tears. He hates that someone made TK feel like this. “I’m not saying I’m the best thing that will ever happen to you. All I can say is that I’ll treat you like you’re the best thing that’s happened to me, because you are, we aren’t even together, and you already are.”

TK closes his eyes, and more tears spill, but there is also a blinding smile on his face as he pulls Carlos even closer, resting his forehead against his. “When your sisters said that the tamales are only for people you guys think are special and love,” TK opens his eyes, and Carlos has never seen anything more beautiful than the man standing in front of him. “I wanted that. I want to be special to you, loved by you. I want it so bad, Carlos. I think I have wanted it from the start and it scared the fuck out of me, it still scares me.”

TK pauses, taking a breath. He lets his hand slide down from Carlos’ neck to his chest, letting it rest over Carlos’ heart, he smiles up at him when Carlos covers his hand with his, holding it to his chest. “But I want it more than it scares me, Carlos.”

“Yeah?” Carlos asks, his cheeks hurting from smiling so hard.

TK grins back at him, a soft laugh falling off his smile as he nods. “Yeah.”

 ֎֍֎

 Carlos pulls his car up in front of the house; the driveway is already full of vehicles. Turning his head to look at the house, he makes a vague note that the house could use a paint job. It’s not bad, but a touch-up is needed. Looking next to him, he takes in his passenger. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asks for the third time since he started his car. TK flashes him a smile, it’s a little nervous but mostly amused at his expense. He shifts the package he has in his hands, drawing Carlos’ attention to it, it makes him smile.

“Yes, I’m sure,” TK answers firmly, the same way he has since Valentina called this morning to ask if he was with his white boy, and if he had finally declared his love for him, then their mom insisted he bring TK to a late lunch at the house since dinner didn’t happen the night before.

He’d had the phone on speaker when speaking with his sister, and before Carlos could weasel out of it, TK answered they would be there, asking if he should bring anything.

Valentina had gone silent for a second, before letting out a loud laugh, telling him that bringing his pretty self was more than enough.

“Okay,” Carlos takes a deep breath as TK flashes him another smile, his hand going for the door handle, but Carlos can’t help but stop him.

TK gives him a curious look; his brow pinched softly in the middle. “Carlos?”

“Just don’t break up with me now that we’re finally together because my family is crazy, please?” Carlos rushes out to say, only half-joking. He adores his family; he’d give his life for them. But they’re nuts, and last night was only a taste of it, now that they know he and TK are together, he can only imagine how extra crazy they’re going to be.

TK’s expression softens, he lets go of the handle, turning his body back towards Carlos. “Come here,” he commands softly, his hand reaching for Carlos’ cheek to pull him close. Carlos goes as he’s asked, sighing as TK presses his forehead against his.

“I’m not going to change my mind about this,” TK tells him quietly, his thumb drawing circles on his cheekbone. “I know I have been hot and cold with you.”

Carlos opens his mouth to argue only for TK to cover it with his hand.

“But,” TK emphasizes. “I know what I want now, okay?”

“And it’s me, right?” Carlos askes, needing to be sure, the smile TK gives him is bright and sweet.

Carlos’ eyes shut a second before TK’s lips touch his. The kiss TK gives him is gentle, a soft press of his lips, it’s after Carlos lets out an impatient sound that TK deepens it. Still, Carlos can feel TK’s smile against his lips as he licks into his mouth, the temperature in his car rising with every swipe. Carlos grabs at the back of TK’s head, pulling him closer, moaning as the action makes TK suck on his bottom lip.

“Tyler –,” he groans out as TK pulls his mouth off his, starting to kiss his way down his neck. “Baby, please.”

He’s not even sure what he’s begging for, and neither have time to find out when there is a sharp knock at the hood of his car, startling them enough to jump away from each other.

Looking over towards the passenger side window, Carlos lets out a deep mortifying groan as he takes in the smirking faces of his three sisters watching them.

“Heeey, bro,” Lola starts, her eyes flickering from him to TK and back again, her grin growing, while Sofía places a hand over her mouth, and Valentina shakes her head, rolling her eyes. Carlos looks at TK to find him blushing, his eyes a little hazy, and though he’s embarrassed himself, he’s also more than a little proud by the expression he’s put on his boyfriend’s face.

“So we can see you’re having a real good time out here,” Lola continues, and Carlos hears one of his other sisters snort. “But we’re kind of hungry, and you know Mami doesn’t serve unless we’re all sitting down, so if you could stop eating your gringo’s face, we’d appreciate it. Mami made carne asada and raja con papas.”

Sofía leans down to speak to them. “She said he’s too skinny, so she went dish heavy and made a lot,” she looks at TK, giving him a shrug. “You better be ready to roll out of here, she’s going to stuff you.”

TK laughs, giving his sisters a nod he opens the door to the car and steps out. Carlos follows, going around the car quickly to take his hand.

They start towards the house only for Valentina to hold up a hand to them. “What’s that?” she points at what TK is carrying in his other hand even though it’s obvious what it is.

TK looks down at his hand and grins when he looks back up at his sister. “You said I didn’t need to bring anything, but I was taught not to come into a house empty-handed,” he smirks when Lola and Sofía start laughing as he shows them the gift he got their mother.

“No mames!” Lola gets out through her chuckles, setting Sofía off again.

Valentina shakes her head again, also smiling. “He’s a smartass little shit,” she looks over at him with approval. “Good job with this one, Nene. Mom might box his ears, though.”

Carlos shrugs, he’s not worried, he saw the way his mother looked at TK the night before, and he knows he’s already won her over.

Walking into the house, they find Carlota Reyes standing in the foyer, a smile on her face, and the house smelling amazing. Leave it to his mom to have a kitchen fire the night before and now a little over twelve hours later have lunch ready.

“Mami,” he greets her, letting go of TK’s hand to hug her, leaning down so she can kiss his cheek.

“Carlitos,” she greets him back before looking over at TK with an even wider smile. “Welcome back, guapo.”

“I did say I would make it happen, ma’am,” TK grins at her. He holds up the small home extinguisher he’s been holding, presenting it to her, his lips twitching as Carlota narrows her eyes at him and his present. “Valentina said no flowers.”

Carlota stares at it for another few seconds; everything is quiet as she purses her lips. “Que suerte la mia,” she starts, rolling her eyes when the girls start laughing. “Another smart ass, not like I already have four.”

“That means she’s adopting you,” Lola tells TK as she throws an arm around his shoulder for a moment. Valentina and Sofía nod in agreement, grinning at TK as he smiles back at them. Carlota shakes her head at all of them, the corners of her mouth curling upward.

“Enough standing around, let's eat,” she orders them, waving towards the dining room. They all listen and start to make their way into the room.

Carlota stops TK with a touch of her hand on his arm, Carlos stops too, watching TK with his mother. “Thanks for the gift, mijo, I appreciate it.”

TK looks over at him and then back at his mother, a soft smile on his face as he covers her hand with his. “Gotta keep you safe, ma’am, you’re my boyfriend’s mother after all.”

Carlos watches as his mother lights up, and he feels something warm spread through him as he watches two people he loves get along. Behind him, he knows his sisters are also listening; he can feel their approval too.

“Call me Carlota, ojos bonitos, Carlota.”

[nananaptime]

Necklace of fate

I’m on a roll today! xD

Masterlist Rules

Genre: Fluff

Word count: 1 951

Summary: A world where you’re handed a necklace at birth which will help you find your soulmate.

~

The slight coldness of the incomplete locket was something I barely registered by now. Having felt it against my skin for as long as I could remember caused it to turn into a part of me. However, the fact that it had never changed in temperature was somewhat sad as that was the one sign your soulmate was near. Once it started growing warmer, all you had to do was analyse the temperature and move towards its hottest spot. That is if you want to meet your soulmate of course. As not everyone was too fond of the idea, the thought of finding my soulmate often caused a nervous knot to form in my stomach. What if they didn’t care to get to know me at all? My fate was lying in their hands, as they decided whether or not I was to be forever alone.

I touched my fingers to the locket as I made my way towards the practice room. I know I should’ve been more excited about the fact that my group was finally going to debut but having spent yesterday’s evening entertaining that feeling, the only one left was the excitement for a whole new world of people to open up in front of me. What if my soulmate was active in the music industry? That might explain why it had taken so many years before my necklace decided to increase its warmth.

Mia hooked her arm through mine once I entered the room, ready to start the dance practice, wanting it to be perfect for future variety shows as well as music performances. The energy was through the roof and I was happy to see my members so happy about the schedules for the day. Knowing that we had no more than a couple of hours before we had to be at the arena to prepare for our debut performance and then yesterday the entire day was to be spent in preparation for the MAMAs to which we were invited.

I managed to gather the girls to tell them my plan of just going through the performance and work on the parts we struggled with. They were all satisfied with the initiative and we were at it within five minutes. The excited feeling in my belly not disappearing for a second.

That evening, the girls were more excited than ever. The stylists even had to scold them a couple of times due to not being still when getting their makeup done. I just silently laughed at them, finding their giggly behaviour endearing. It took some time, but finally, we were ready to meet our fans for the first time. Mia, being extremely energetic, walked up to me, a big smile covering her features.

“Y/N! Can you believe this? Right this moment, people are filling the seats, the tickets were sold out! I am in awe!” I’ve never seen her this giggly before, it was almost like people would’ve mistaken her for the maknae of the group. I was about to answer when I felt my skin heat up. More specifically, the skin being covered by my locket. I gasped, instantly taking hold of it and lifting it from my skin, slightly startled by the sudden increase in temperature. Looking at Mia, she registered the alarm in my eyes in a moment, glancing down at my necklace and then looking at me again with a big grin on her face.

“Out of all places. I guess you have an even bigger reason to be excited now. We’re debuting and you’re about to meet your soulmate!” She grabbed my arms, forcing me to look at her and hence let go of the locket, causing the warm object to hit my skin once again. “Hey! Your soulmate is a fan of ours, that’s amazing!” I slowly pried her hands off of me.

“Yeah, which is why it will be near impossible to find them in the big group of people.” Her face fell when she realised the difficulty of the situation.

“Well…” She quickly managed to put a smile on her face once again. “Since it’s meant to be, you’ll meet them soon enough, this is just the first step.” I couldn’t help but giggle at her enthusiasm, even though I doubted it would be that easy.

I had no more time to think about that however, as our manager approached us as got us moving towards the stage.

It went perfect! Not one mistake, the high notes were on point, the rapping was as hot as fire and the dancing was as sharp as knives. Although the unusual heat of my locket acted as an uncomfortable reminder of a certain someone’s presence in the building caused some focus to slip from my mind. I was satisfied and relieved that no mistakes had been made during the most important performance of our lives. By the time we left the building, the locket was back to the familiar coldness against my skin.

The next day everyone was experiencing slight fatigue due to the lack of sleep everyone had as the excitement had been too evident. I had to force breakfast into most of my members in the morning and get them into our van on time in order not to be late to the rehearsals for the MAMAs. It came as no surprise when all of them ended up taking a nap on the way there, too tired to feel even an ounce of the excitement which had been present the day before. I took the chance myself and closed my eyes for ten minutes before ushering my members out of the car and into the building, trying to find our dressing room.

I tried paying no mind to the way my locket heated up as I entered the building, knowing that as the leader, I had to make sure my members were at the right place at the right time, no matter how much my heart protested.

Once at the dressing room, our stylist made us sit down and then act as mannequins as she dressed us for the occasion. I was very thankful to our stylist as she managed to keep it appropriate and at the same time extremely fashionable. She also understood when some of us would rather perform in flats than heels.

She was finished quickly and while the rest of my team decided to get some of the dance steps down, I opted to walk the building and look around, making sure that I knew what direction we were to go in when rehearsal began and when the time came for the award show to take place.

I rounded a corner and walked straight into someone’s chest. Looking up, I was met by a pair of shocked eyes as the person in question did not expect to be halted in his steps in such a manner. As I stepped back and took a better look I realised I had walked into the one and only NCT’s Renjun. I spluttered out an apology while bowing before trying to walk past him and find the entrance to the stage. However, a grip on my arm stopped me from walking any further.

“Wait, wait. You don’t need to apologize, it could happen to anyone.” I nodded, slightly awkward at his attempt at conversation. “I’m Renjun.” He extended his hand which I grabbed and shook.

“I know, I’m Y/N and I’m kind of a fan.” He chuckled at that.

“Well, so am I, but of your group, of course.” I gave him a shocked look, not expecting an idol to be a fan of us this early on in our career. He chuckled again. “We were at your debut showcase yesterday, Chenle, Jisung and I. You were awesome!” I couldn’t help but smile at the praise. Thanking him for his kind words, I explained my pursue for the way to the stage which he managed to be more than helpful as he offered to take me there and show me. We met up with Chenle on the way there who couldn’t stop going on about yesterday’s showcase, causing a very evident blush to appear on my face.

I touched my locket again, feeling it heat up more and more with every step and, along with it, the feeling in my stomach grew. Renjun noticed where my attention was at and commented on the obvious state of my necklace.

“Yeah, it started doing that yesterday as well, wish it would’ve started sooner and not interrupt such an important event as this. I need to concentrate.” He nodded understandingly, mentioning how he would never have the focus to perform with the knowledge of his soulmate being close by and hence, giving me props for pulling it off yesterday. All of a sudden, Chenle emitted a sound of surprise, causing both me and Renjun to jump out of our skin.

“Jisung’s necklace was also heating up yesterday at the showcase, he could barely concentrate, just looking around for someone who might be experiencing the same thing.” His shocked expression was exchanged for a happy one and he expressed certain knowledge of Jisung being my soulmate. I waved him off, not believing it to be true until it was obvious. Chenle rolled his eyes before fishing his phone out of his pocket, suddenly immersed in the contents of it.

A couple of minutes later he turned his attention back to me and announced with a smug smile that Jisung was checking out the stage as well. Then he grabbed my arm and started pulling me in the direction which we were headed.

The spotlight was already on the stage as the crew was making sure everything was working correctly. Jisung was standing with his back towards us, his outline illuminated by the light in front of him, making him look like some kind of angel. He and the other two were already clad in their outfits for Boom and hence, all ready for the award show to begin.

Jisung seemed to be frozen in shock and soon he turned towards us, his fingers on his locket and a confused look on his face. My locket went ballistic, heating up to such a temperature that it almost burned my skin, causing me to remove it with a shriek of surprise. Jisung’s eyes snapped towards mine and at the same time, Chenle decided that it was a good idea to give me a strong push in Jisung’s direction. With a small “oof” I stumbled forward, only coming to a stop when a startled Jisung caught me before I fell to the floor. Our eyes locked and before I could register what happened, my locket had lifted from my skin on its own accord and interlocked with Jisung’s in between us, connecting in a clash of heat.

Neither I nor Jisung knew what to say, all we could do was stare at each other like the love-struck fools we were. Then, acting as the perfect factor needed to ruin the moment, Chenle whispered loudly from behind us.

“Kiss, kiss!” Jisung gave him an exasperated look and shooed him off, causing Renjun to laugh and drag Chenle away, leaving me and Jisung alone on centre stage. He then glanced down towards out lockets, reached up and carefully separated them again. Now, however, as it settled back against my skin, it didn’t give away the usual cold feeling which I was so used to, but rather a comfortable warm presence. It made my heartbeat increase immensely. Jisung then looked at me again and a small, awkward chuckle left his lips, causing me to giggle.

“So?” He inquired. “Date?”

[vannahfanfics]

Now and Forever

Category: Romantic Fluff

Fandom: Fairy Tail

Characters: Erza Scarlet, Jellal Fernandes

Requested By: Anonymous User

“Is everyone in position?”

Erza raised a hand to the small, barely detectable communication device hooked into her ear as Gray’s voice buzzed in. There came a chorus of affirmative quips from Lucy, Natsu, and Wendy followed by Happy’s characteristic, optimistic “Aye!” before Erza pressed the button on her own earpiece to validate her own position. The team’s latest assignment involved staking out a very popular pub where a certain dark wizard was known to frequent. They had been told that he would likely appear tonight to deal in the smuggling of illegal magical artifacts, and so they had assembled to stop the operation short. Her guild members were stationed in various locations throughout the small building, covering all entrances and exits, but Erza’s location was the most important... on stage, right in the center of the bar, posing as a singer.

Currently she was eclipsed by the stage curtains, but it was only a minute or so before they would be drawn up and she would be revealed to the small crowd. Erza had managed to get over her stage fright after years of forcing her way into jobs such as this, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still unnerving for her to perform in front of a crowd. She inhaled, then exhaled deeply. All you have to do is sing and look out for the man in the wanted ad. Eyes closed as she steeled herself, she did not notice that she had been approached until they coughed politely.

“Yes?” she responded automatically as her eyes opened to settle on an intimidated-looking stage hand.

“We’re about to go live, Miss Scarlet, and the um, owner was wondering if you intend to, ah, perform like that?” he stammered quietly. Erza’s eyebrows shot up as she realized she was still dressed in her usual armor.

“No. Of course not.” Ribbons of light flashed around her before enveloping her form, hugging her tightly as her armor phased out of existence. The shimmering light protected her modesty as she pulled her new garments from her magical storage universe. By the time that the shocked stage hand lowered his hand at the dimming of the light, Erza’s voluptuous body was now clothed in a skin-tight leotard, mesh stockings and black stilettos, and a pair of bunny ears sticking out of her scarlet hair. A blush painted his cheeks and he murmured his approval before he scampered out, likely to nurse his bleeding nose. Erza chuckled and walked over to the piano, hips swaying with each step, to take her place by the gawking pianist. She leaned over the large instrument and flashed him a wink, making him shut his mouth and find new interest in his music sheets. Suddenly, she heard the whooshing of the red curtains being pulled away from the stage, and she tossed a glance over her shoulder.

The bar was dim, only lit by a ring of circular white lights lining the rim of Erza’s performance area. Her trained eyes spotted her cohorts instantly, mingled among the crowd and constantly shifting their gazes to watch the patrons. There was no sign of their target yet, at least not that Erza could see. The chatter faded as soon as the gorgeous wizard appeared, the bar falling into silence as it awaited her singing voice. The quiet was soon replaced by the heavy, dramatic tune spilling from the piano man’s expert fingers. Erza inhaled deeply, closed her eyes, and then began to sing.

At one point in her life, her voice would shake and hitch, and she would’ve been chased of stage in a matter of seconds. However, after careful practice (and a fair bit of encouragement from the ever-supportive Lucy), Erza had conquered her fears and come into her own, performance-wise. Her voice flowed like honey, dripping with emotion as she sang in time with the piano notes of longing and lost love. The bar owner had told her that her intense, dominating looks and personality was perfect for such a performance. After the first verse, Erza opened her eyes and began strutting across the edge of the stage, pausing to lean over in such a way to accentuate her pleasing features and stroke the face of the man nearest the stage. He swooned and nearly passed out into his friends. Erza gave the rest of the crowd a cocky smirk before standing back up and finishing her circuit of the stage, hips swaying and voice thundering in passion.

She came back to the piano and laid herself across the back of it, kicking up her legs with her scarlet hair spilling over her back. In that moment, the lyrics abruptly made her think of Jellal. It took all she could to focus on the task at hand and not lose herself in the thoughts of him. Why did I think of him singing some stupid love song? She knew why. She had loved him a long time, but had never worked up the courage to tell him. Erza had a lot of courage for battle and protecting her friends, but it always failed when it came to being honest with him. Her voice took on a more somber tone as her subconscious delved further into the depressing thoughts. As her eyes flickered up to meet the crowd, she could almost see him standing there, watching her with a knowing smile ghosting his lips.

Wait a minute.

She blinked, and the phantasm did not vanish. She managed to keep herself singing, but only just barely, while she frantically looked around the rest of the bar. Sure enough, the other members of Crime Sorcieré were strategically positioned throughout the establishment. No way! Is Jellal here to catch the smuggler as well? She thought as her heart nearly jumped into her throat and choked out her melodious tune. Trying not to panic and act natural lest she scare off their target, Erza pushed herself upward on the piano, but her arms were shaking slightly. She could feel the nervousness bubbling up inside her; something about Jellal watching her perform was lapsing her back into her stage-fright. Thankfully, the song abruptly ended and the curtain drew shut with Erza’s echoing voice singing the last word. As soon as it shut completely, she ceased and collapsed back onto the piano, wheezing and holding her chest in an attempt to still her pounding heart. She could still feel Jellal’s dark eyes on her, watching with rapture.

What the hell is going on here?!

~~~~~~~~~~

“Dammit!” There was a thunderous crash as Natsu took out his anger on a nearby trash bin, kicking over the metal container to spill its contents out into the street. He then squatted down while muttering under his breath to retrieve the trash because Lucy scolded him something fierce. He had a right to be annoyed; apparently the culprit had caught wind that his operation had been compromised, and had been a no-show. Erza, now in her trusty armor, crossed her arms as she sighed deeply.

“This is rather unfortunate. Now we are back to square one in hunting him down,” she tutted with a click of her tongue. Jellal laughed lightly and rubbed the back of his neck with an apologetic look.

“I’m sorry, Erza. I hope our appearance here didn’t ruin your mission.” Gray and Natsu both slung their heads around at identical moments, mouths open to likely blame it all on Jellal, but a sharp glare from the red-haired warrior immediately made them swallow whatever ill remarks they were about to spew from him. Erza returned to Jellal with a soft smile.

“No, there’s no way to tell how he learned this bar was being watched, and by whom. We will just have to gather information on his next movements.” Jellal frowned and rubbed his chin, tilting his head to the side and looking up through the corners of his eyes as he pondered something. He then smirked and looked back at Erza.

“We’re also interested in bringing this guy down, so why don’t we team up?”

~~~~~~~~~~

When Erza had accepted Jellal’s proposal to form a joint effort to take down the smuggler, she had never imagined that things would end up the way they were. She was in the fanciest restaurant in the entire city, dressed in an elegant black dress with her scarlet hair fashioned in an elaborate up-do, sitting across from Jellal who was wearing just a simple tuxedo and that coy, smug smirk of his. By their joint information-gathering, they had learned that the smuggler would be conducting his failed business venture in a more lucrative environment; to avoid the same unfortunate outcome as last time, they had decided that only the two of them should be on scene with the others waiting outside for back-up.

But still… To pose as a couple on a date? Surely this is too much! Erza thought wildly. She felt like the room was spinning, and she had the sudden extreme urge to vomit. Her fingers dug into the silky fabric of her dress as she concentrated her gaze on her lap. She was utterly unable to look at him. It was just Jellal, but it was Jellal, and under this premise with all the implications… it was liable to drive her insane!

“Erza.” His voice somehow sounded like the touch of the smooth silk caressing her nervous fingers. As if called, she glanced up, and was immediately met with his smoldering gaze. “Relax. It’s just me, you know.” A haze of pink dusted her cheeks. He saw right through me… “Your performance was lovely, by the way. Because we were so busy gathering intel, I was never able to tell you.” The blush on her cheeks heightened to a shade of carnation. She nervously fidgeted in the chair, unsure how to handle the praise, and dropped her gaze, unable to handle the way he was looking at her... Like a precious object who had captured his attention.

“Y-yes, I’ve… Been practicing…” She mumbled. She was beginning to grow frustrated with herself. How could she be so confident on the battlefield of war, but such a stumbling fool on in the warzone of love? Though his unyielding stare unnerved her, she could not but help wish to be locked in it, and so her eyes slowly circled back to meet his. His expression had not changed despite Erza’s worming about; he just continued to sit there, chin resting on his interlocked hands, those dark eyes absorbing everything about her.

“I would love it if you would sing for me sometime… A private performance, if you will.” Erza choked on air at his very blatant and insinuating remark. Her cheeks were surely the shade of her hair now. Her mouth opened and closed, attempting to form words but dismally failing, only managed to produce sputtering gasps. Jellal’s smirk widened, and then he began to laugh heartily. “Relax, Erza, I’m only playing the part of the flirtatious date. There’s no need to take everything so seriously! I’m only teasing,” he grinned widely. Erza’s shoulders hunched up as she glowered at him.

“That teasing was in very bad taste!” she scolded him. Jellal continued to laugh. By the time he had finished, Erza was steaming enough to fry an egg on her head. “I hope you’re happy.”

“I am, because you feel more at ease, don’t you?” Erza’s mouth fell open. What a devious ploy! It had sure worked, too; Erza had more or less forgotten about their environment and operation, and was more relaxed, because now it just felt like she was just spending time with Jellal. That in itself was nerve-wracking in its own right, but she had managed to recover some sense of the defensive decorum that she maintained with him during their normal interactions. As he flashed her a devilish wink, she shook her head and decided to swallow her amusement and embarrassment with wine.

“As cunning as ever.”

“I always aim to please,” he smirked before glancing off to the side to scan the room. Erza did not need to do so herself; the way his jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed told her well enough that he had locked onto their target. “He’s sitting four tables away, to your ten o’clock.” Casually sipping at the bitter wine in the crystal glass, Erza languidly turned in her chair as if she were relaxing herself, but cast a sordid gaze in the indicated direction. Sure enough, he was sitting across the room with a handful of well-to-do-looking gentlemen, the picture of decorum and propriety despite the fact that they were illegally dealing forbidden magical artifacts. “I recognize a few of them. Those are some of the most prolific magical artifact dealers in all of Fiore.”

“He must have something quite special in stock.”

“Let’s get a closer look.” Without waiting for her agreement, Jellal stood and ironed out the creases of his suit before holding out a hand for her. Erza knew it was important but was a little put-off, and the first thing that came to mind was that they hadn’t even eaten anything yet besides some small appetizer salads. You’re not here for the food, Erza; you’re here to catch a criminal! She scolded herself. It really wasn’t about the food so much as frantically trying to think up an excuse not to do what Jellal was asking because she was so unsure of what little scheme he was hatching in that handsome head of his. Still, she had to do it. She breathed in deeply before rising from the chair, the picture of beauty with her upturned chin and pin-straight back. Her hand slid smoothly into Jellal’s; a jolt of electricity rocketed up her arm as his fingers gently enclosed around it. As if that wasn’t enough, he flashed her that irritatingly sexy smirk and brought her hand to his mouth to press his lips against the top of her hand. It took all her willpower not to yank her arm away and maybe whack him upside the head for good measure.

“What are you doing?” she hissed under her breath at him.

“Playing the part. You attract far too much attention, Erza…” With a frantic glance around the room, Erza could easily find that he was right. Her regal, sensual aura had lassoed the attention of the room with frightening ease; men and women alike were looking at her with palpable jealousy, though for far different reasons. While the women in the restaurant were lamenting the fact that they couldn’t be her, their male partners were wistfully wishing they could bed her. Such a lecherous thought brought a blush to her cheeks, and, unable to take the implicative stares, she focused her attention on Jellal. Likely sensing her newfound unease, he tugged on her arm to pull her body flush to his, that unrelenting cocky smile painting her face with further hues of red. “Far too much attention. I’m going to have to show this room that you’re mine tonight.”

As if it were effortless, Jellal had pulled the infallible Erza into a whirlwind from which she could not escape.

Before she knew it, he had swept her to the dance floor, which was conveniently located right next to their target’s table. Not that Erza really noticed that; her mind had descended into a fog, with Jellal the only lighthouse that illuminated her misty reality. All she could do was stare like a helpless, trapped rabbit in the grasp of a cunning fox. Erza was painfully aware of his hand running down the bare skin of her arms, leaving goosebumps trailing from his touch, before it jumped to settle firmly on her hip. His other hand still held hers captive, holding it aloft. Her body automatically settled her other on his shoulder, more because she subconsciously knew it was the proper form for a dance than of her own volition. Jellal’s eyes glittered like a galaxy, and Erza was lost in their cosmos, an unwitting astronaut plunging into their depths. The string quartet set to their instruments, and with the serene shimmer of a love song, they began to dance.

Erza had never really danced before, but somehow, she did not completely manage to bungle things as Jellal guided her about the dance floor. Her body was pretty much on autopilot, moving at his command like a marionette by its masterful puppeteer. A few other couples danced around them, but Erza was hardly aware of them; her attention was completely captivated by the stunning man before her. The way he fixated on her with that roguishly inviting smile, piloting her body as if he knew it intimately, staring through her into the very depths of her quivering soul, Erza almost thought that he could love her.

“Erza, it would be helpful if you could assist in me keeping an eye on that fellow over there.” Her body stiffened as she realized she had been caught red-handed. Her hands weren’t the only things red, either; she knew her face was afire as she discreetly peered over Jellal’s shoulder to watch the men and try to catch snippets of their conversation. The businessmen looked quite heated now, as if they were not pleased with what they had been offered.

“… Now, gentlemen, there is no need to get so heated. Ten million is quite a gracious place to start the bidding on my part. After all, it’s not every day that you’re offered a relic of the dark wizard Zeref, is it?” At the mention of their former adversary’s name, Erza drew in a sharp breath. Jellal continued to sweep her around the dance floor but took care to keep her well within earshot of the table. “The Magus Staff is an extraordinary magical artifact.” A ripple of unease circled through the potential buyers.

“The Magus Staff is also forbidden!”

“What’s the Magus Staff?” Erza whispered to Jellal. She had never heard tale of such an artifact. Jellal frowned deeply, staring off at a point beyond her shoulder.

“It’s one of the many dark magic artifacts that Zeref created. Apparently the thing channels ‘Erasure’ magic. Anything the user wants to erase just vanishes without a trace… people, objects, entire armies. Its potential is limitless. That’s why it’s so dangerous and classified as forbidden,” he explained grimly. In the background, the music was reaching a crescendo, the various stringed instruments screaming in melodic cacophony. Erza was about to tune back into the conversation, but Jellal suddenly swept her away from the table in a few whirling spins, leaving her impossible dizzy.

“Jellal, what-“

“He’s watching.” Erza had to swallow the urge to glance back at the table, knowing that doing so would just confirm the buyer’s suspicions. She could feel his prickling gaze searching her back, and was suddenly uncomfortable that her dress plunged in the back and her shoulder blades were on full display. “Erza, you’re not very good at espionage, are you?” Jellal grinned, and he stole a loud gasp from her throat as he suddenly hiked her leg up around his waist, pulling her across the dance floor with her heel scratching against the tile. The song had finished and the band had begun playing a simmering, intense beat, a tango; the rest of the patrons had abandoned the effort, leaving the two of them alone- plenty of room for Jellal to do as he wished with her.

“I’m beginning to think that you’re enjoying this too much,” she pouted up at him as he dropped her leg only to pull her body against his such that there was not a millimeter of space between the fabric of their clothes. Her chest was pressed up against his and her back arched, forcing her to look directly up at him, at that smirk that starting a fire in her belly and those eyes that threatened to strip her armor away and bear her tremoring heart to him. It was hammering against her rib cage, driven crazy by the sheer amount they were touching and the overwhelmingly lusty atmosphere. Jellal’s hand was pressed against her lower back, guiding her around the dance floor in a sordid display that commanded the attention of everyone around them.

“Oh, I’m definitely enjoying it.” His husky whisper sent a shiver traveling up Erza’s spine. Did his face have to be that close? As the music hitched, so did Jellal’s moves, and once again Erza was flung about in a complicated turn. Except the music didn’t descend back into the intense calm, but exploded into the storm, trapping Erza in its maelstrom and stealing her breath away. Erza didn’t even have time to think about where Jellal had learned to dance so expertly as she was whisked around the dance floor; she was a sword in Jellal’s hand, brandished around and shining with the light and ringing with the sound of singing steel. Her heels clattered across the dance floor like popping firecrackers, barely striking the shiny tile before they were gone again. As the music crescendoed in a tumultuous symphony, Jellal grabbed Erza and plunged her into a deep bend backwards, holding up one of her legs while the other kept her suspended so far down that a few loose strands of her crimson hair touched the floor. There was a moment of deep silence before the room exploded in impressed claps. Erza’s chest was heaving with exertion and her skin was tingling with electricity from the exceptionally… erotic experience. She watched with wide eyes as a bead of sweat rolled down Jellal’s face. That smirk was intoxicating now; just looking at it was making her drunk. He eyed her triumphantly before his gaze flickered upwards.

“They’re leaving.” Erza tipped her head backwards. Though the image was upside-down, she could see the dealer and the businessmen rising from the table to exit down a nearby hallway. She gasped as Jellal suddenly jerked her up and spun her around to stand at his side. He looped her arms in his as he guided her off the dance floor, walking smoothly as if nothing had just happened, but Erza’s legs were trembling so much that she could barely walk in her heels. She leaned slightly against his body, and that smirk of his widened. What is he doing to me? she thought wildly.

There had always been something explicitly unspoken between Erza and Jellal, but that was all it had ever been; a whisper, a sigh, a wistful fantasy of what may be. This, however… This was not unlike the tango they had just danced to, a rising storm threatening to thunder upon the coast, exploding into a destructive force that would change everything. Erza was but a small vessel caught in the thrashing waves, being borne to whatever island that the hurricane Jellal was leading her towards. Erza had never really expected anything to ever come of the unspoken thing between them, but it was rapidly becoming apparent that she had been very wrong. It both scared and excited her.

But was now really the time?

They tailed the party of criminals outside the restaurant and to the side alley. Their target meandered down to the end, and Erza watched in mild horror as he picked up something long and thin wrapped in cloth from behind a dumpster. He yanked off the cloth to reveal a crooked black staff.

“Jellal, we have to- Oh!” Her words were cut off as he suddenly shoved her against the brick wall of the restaurant, hands on either side of her waist as he pinned her there. His face was so close that she could feel his hot breaths on her lips. He was staring out of the corners of his eyes, and she followed suit to see the party of criminals staring at them suspiciously.

“Erza, just follow my lead- and please don’t hit me,” he mused, and no sooner than he had turned her gaze back to him did he tilt up her face and press his mouth against hers.

Her mind didn’t need the Erasure magic to go blank.

Catching the criminals flew to the far reaches of her mind as Jellal’s mouth moved rhythmically against hers. If the night had been like a red-hot tango, then their lips were dancing in a smooth, melodious waltz, pure as moonlight and soft as silk. Erza abandoned herself to the calmness of the sea, allowing the breeze of Jellal to drift her further into bliss. She had never realized how much she wanted it until now- to be kissed by him, held by him, loved by him.

Too bad it was all an act.

As he relinquished her mouth to pepper kisses over her jawline, down her neck, and across her shoulders, his hands tracing intricate patterns on her sides, Erza felt her eyes flood with water. She could not choke down the small sob that escaped her lungs; it was just so painful, so unfair, that things had turned out this way. Jellal suddenly stopped kissing her too look up at her quizzically. “Erza…?” Her face was contorted in agony as she tried to tell him what was wrong, but she couldn’t force the words out of her throat. He watched her, confused and worried, and just so happened to glance out of the corners of his eyes.

It was a good thing he did, or it would’ve been the end for both of them.

“Look out!” he cried and wrapped her in a tight embrace before flinging himself to the side. They crashed to the ground together, and Erza looked up in time to see a blob of dark energy crash into the place on the wall she had just been. The brick seemed to melt into nothingness, vanishing without a trace to leave a large hole in the structure. The music from the dance floor and the din of conversation drifted out into the alley. Erza tossed a glance over her shoulder to see the dealer brandishing the Magus Staff with a dark sneer.

“Well, that wasn’t the demonstration I had in mind, but it’ll do, I suppose,” he snickered. Erza pushed herself up with a huff, and ribbons of light enveloped her figure as she changed into a more suitable outfit for fighting. Jellal blushed darkly, because his face was extremely close to her chest as she was pretty much bare save for a few ribbons of light in very strategic places, but Erza had finally managed to dispel the fog from her mind now that she was in her element. Speed was obviously going to be her ally so she selected her Flight armor from her vast inventory, cladding herself in the cheetah-patterned, ruffle-adorned armor. She stood up just as her two swords materialized into reality, and spun on her heel to kick off in a savage sprint down the alleyway. A vortex formed in her wake, buffeting the shocked Jellal and inadvertently sending him blasting out into the street.

“She’s a Fairy Tail wizard!” the businessmen panicked and attempted to scale the wall behind them, while the startled magical artifact dealer sent another blast of the dark magic careening toward her. Erza ducked to avoid the projectile and it claimed the dumpster instead, melting a hole in it and sending trash spilling out into the alley way.

“Take this!” Erza howled and brought up her swords, then delivered savage blows with the blunt sides to his abdomen. He went down pathetically easily, dropping the staff and flying backwards. He and his compatriots crashed through the brick and mortar to sail several yards down the adjoining alleyway, landing right at a very disappointed Natsu’s feet.

“Aw, man… You couldn’t save any of the fun for us, Erza?”

~~~~~~~~~~

With the criminals arrested and the Magus Staff in safe hands, Erza changed back into her dress and walked back into the street where Jellal was still sitting there pouting.

“I think you did that on purpose,” he sighed up at her. Erza smiled kneeled down in front of him, offering a hand. He smiled wryly and took it, allowing her to pull him to his feet.

“Consider it payback for all the teasing you’ve done to me tonight.” Now that they were alone again, Erza could feel his lips ghosting across the skin of her neck; she raised a hand to cover it, to chase away the phantasms of his lips that would haunt her for the remainder of the night. As her expression took on an obviously depressed edge, Jellal smiled and took her hand again, kissing the top of it like he had done previously that evening.

“Erza, you really are dense,” he mused quietly. Before she could inquire what he meant, he grabbed her by her upper arm and yanked her forward, catching his an intensely passionate kiss. His lips crashed against hers like the waves finally carrying Erza home after what felt like years at sea... home, into Jellal’s waiting arms. She melted against him, desperately trying to match the fervent rhythm he was playing against her mouth. His hands snuck into her scarlet hair to pull it loose from its up-do, and he buried them into the wavy, crimped strands as he aggressively but not painfully tousled it loose, the countless bobby pins that his eager fingers plucked free clattering down to the street like rain. Erza’s hands ran down his chest, feeling his abdominals even through the thick fabric of his suit flexing powerfully as he leaned further into the kiss. He teased her mouth open to envelop his tongue in her own, twisting and writhing with it in a zealous desire that left her knees weak. As she collapsed against him, held up only by the firm arm around her waist, she felt that fog drifting over her mind again; it was all right, though, because Erza was now safe upon the shores of ardent love, grounded in the man that she had desired for so, so, so long.

She had begun to cry again. Jellal pulled away from her, though her aching lips desired him still; her face followed after his, desperately chasing that feeling, until his hand caught her face and held her still. His thumb swept across her cheek to catch the tears falling like stars to earth.

“I love you,” she gasped, desperate, needing him to hear her before the words failed her again. “I love you, Jellal, I want you now and forever, I-“

“It’s okay,” he crooned softly, killing her babble with the softest of breaths. “You have me, Erza. Now and forever.” She felt her throat tighten as the intense emotion that she was feeling choked her, and all she could do was nod. He continued to gently stroke her face even long after her tears had dried. He didn’t kiss her anymore, only gazed at her with those eyes like galaxies, the cosmos that Erza wanted to find the farthest reaches of and belong to. Now and forever.

Enjoy this oneshot? Feel free to peruse my Table of Contents!

[lowcarbnutrients]

The #1 Mistake Parents Make When It Comes To Feeding Kids

We all know that our children need certain nutrients for correct development and development, so when they choose not to consume, turn their nose approximately new foods or request the exact same point over and over and over again, we begin to feel frustrated and defeated. We consider strategies such as paying off (' if you consume 3 more attacks of broccoli you can have treat'), shaming (' your bro always consumes his veggies, so why can't you ?!'), punishing (' no TV tonight for you due to the fact that you didn't consume all your supper') or compeling (' you could not come down from the table up until you have had two more attacks') which may act as short term solutions, however could adversely impact our kids' consuming and nutrition lengthy term. You are not a negative moms and dad if you have reached the end of your rope and selected the short term solution-you are actually a good moms and dad. One that desires your youngster to gain the benefits of good nutrition now.

By doing this, though, you may be establishing your kid for failing later on.

You are additionally aiming to control something that you can't and shouldn't.

The biggest blunder that well-meaning moms and dads make when it comes to feeding is aiming to regulate if and how much their child eats. This is actually 100% the child's responsibility.

Do your job and also let your child do theirs:

Child feeding specialist, Ellyn Satter, developed the 'Division Of Duty Of Eating,' which describes the duties of both moms and dads and also kids when it involves eating. Moms and dads are eventually in charge of what kids eat, when kids eat and where youngsters eat. Simply puts, it is your job to offer healthy, balanced meals as well as snacks at routine as well as ideal periods, in a designated, distraction-free (the majority of the moment) area, such as the family members table. Children, on the various other hand, are in charge of whether or not they eat and how much they consume. As well as I need to inform you, as a moms and dad of a young child myself, one of the hardest parts of feeding is allowing your youngster do their task. As soon as you do, your life will be a whole great deal less complicated. The table will certainly no longer be a field of battle and also the stress will lastly be taken off everyone.

Mealtime CAN be positive and also satisfying.

Most of the moment, choosy consuming is normal eating:

One of the most usual ways kids and also young children insist their self-reliance is through consuming and food choices. Children this age desire some type of control over their lives, and consuming is one way they do this. After the age of 2, growth begins to stabilize and children come out of their 'critical nutrition period,' which implies that their food intake (together with their appetite), slows down a bit.

We can relax as parents, knowing that our youngsters will likely get enough nourishment over the duration of a week, despite the fact that it seems as though they don't consume enough throughout one day. As kids come close to the age 2, they normally come to be a lot more discerning with their food options (asserting their independence) and also parents typically get inhibited that their formerly outstanding eater is now turning down several foods. This is completely typical as well as doesn't imply that your kid is a picky eater. As a matter of fact, as discussed in Maryann Jacobsen, RD as well as Jill Castle, RD's publication 'Courageous Feeding' (I extremely recommend this book incidentally), children have even more preference buds than adults do, making them a lot a lot more sensitive to bitter compounds found in foods like veggies (this is among the reasons your kid could instantly decline veggies).

Bitter substances, in historic times, signalled 'poisonous' or 'hazardous,' so this could describe why kids often deny them. Kids also have a biologically-driven affinity to sweeter foods, which may be a safety function as well (sweetness signals 'energy-rich'). Although this choice for pleasant foods and tendency to deny bitter foods such as vegetables is usual amongst children, many youngsters discover to love a range of foods in their own time, as long as we continuously present them in a non-pressured means.

"I don't like that, it's yucky!"

You may observe that your youngster declines to attempt a brand-new or strange food by saying 'I don't like that food, it's yucky' prior to ever before sampling it.

A usual reply may be 'yet you've never ever attempted it before-how do you understand that you don't like it? Take a bite."

The hesitation to attempt a brand-new or strange food is called a food neophobia and also although confirmed to be extremely frustrating for a lot of parents, it is a relatively typical consuming problem for kids (food neophobias appear to peak around the ages 2 as well as 6). Some research study reveals that food neophobias are genetically linked. One study looked at 66 pairs of doubles between ages 4 and also 7 years of ages, and also discovered that genetics describe over 70 percent of the variation in the tendency to avoid new foods. If your kid is always the one that shies away from new foods while various other children seem even more adventurous, it might extremely well be a hereditary quality. Some researchers likewise believe that food neophobias (particularly when it pertains to bitter vegetables) stem from hunter-gatherer times, to shield people from harmful or hazardous material (which likewise have the tendency to be bitter-tasting). Kids court food by its look, so if they recognize that one green veggie was bitter tasting (which naturally doesn't interest many children), they may transform their nose approximately other eco-friendly vegetables.

A trend that I'm seeing a whole lot lately is parents 'concealing' vegetables in various other foods. This sly method might function short-term, but if it is done consistently, it is sending out the incorrect message to youngsters, that will eventually catch you and think 'it's SO negative that she needs to CONCEAL it?!' When it involves food neophobias, your work as the moms and dad is to proceed re-introducing new or previously rejected healthy foods (approximately 15-20 times), without pressure, knowing that your kid will ultimately learn to accept them in his own time.

One technique that I often make use of with my son is the 'food experiment' where I claim 'why don't you placed a tiny piece of that food in your mouth, and also if you like it, you can eat as well as ingest in as well as if you don't like it, you can nicely spit it out in your paper napkin.' Often he shocks himself (and also me) by gobbling it up, and sometimes he winces and also spits it out. In any case, I provide him a high five for attempting and also leave it at that. He's one step closer to ultimately approving it and that's all I can ask for.

Other pointers that I commonly offer moms and dads of children that refuse brand-new foods are:

- Let your kid serve himself occasionally. Instead of plating his food for him every night, let him choose what foods he is going to consume and also what foods he is going to leave. The objective is to allow him seem like he has a little control and to take the stress off.

- Constantly offer at the very least one food that you know he likes. This will certainly make strange or unaccepted foods appear a little much less 'unpleasant' or scary. - Maintain reestablishing unaccepted foods in different kinds. Rather of making baked yam like you generally do, make yam 'french fries' and also offer with ketchup to make it more fun.

- Model healthy and balanced consuming. Youngsters think that exactly what Mother and father do (and consume) is typical and healthy and balanced-- they are watching you and also will mimic actions that you take, such as consuming healthy foods.

' Can I have yogurt as well as a banana ... once more?'

Another common eating problem with kids as well as young children is the food jag, whereby a child requests the exact same food (or 2 foods) over and over once more and also refuses to eat anything else. It's essential to recognize that this phase is extremely regular and also might take place a times throughout childhood years. As moms and dads we could not force our children to broaden their palates throughout this finicky stage. And however, the simplest option (succumbing to your child's wish for the very same food every day) will only raise the intensity as well as duration of the food jag.

Therefore, it's essential to withstand the impulse to play 'short-order cook' for your kid and also cater to his slim taste buds and rather, continuously supply a selection of foods at dishes and also snacks (when in a while including his beloved food), leaving it approximately him whether he eats it and also exactly how much he eats. The procedure of discovering how to approve as well as like a food can be tiresome as well as tedious but you will certainly see that it deserves it over time.

Nurture user-friendly consuming instead of reliance on exterior feeding hints:

At around the age of three, kids end up being a lot more susceptible to external consuming signs, such as mom or dad informing them that they should have '3 more bites' or that they 'ought to quit eating now,' or a television commercial advertising and marketing burgers from McDonalds. Before the age of 3, kids count simply on their instinct when it concerns eating-they consume when they are hungry and also stop when they are full.

As moms and dads, we desire to support intuitive eating by allowing them to choose if and how much they eat at a meal or snack, to ensure that they continue to trust their body as opposed to counting on outside and environmental signs. This, in turn, will certainly result in your kid having a healthier partnership with food long-lasting.

If you discovered this valuable, you may additionally wish to check out the 5 expressions you should understand to finish mealtime battles completely along with 7 ways to get your kids to eat their school lunches. I additionally continuously publish free family members nutrition sources as well as topple on my Facebook page, so please really feel free to check it out if you haven't already.

[portmanteaurian]

Murder She Wrote S01E03: Fuck Off Freddy

I adore this woman. I’ve already decided.

Anyway if this is the episode I think it is we are in for a wild ride and a bit of a mixed bag.

An idyllic scene to be sure. I can’t remember if every episode’s title card is a view of the lighthouse? We’ll see, I suppose.

Fave guest star name today: BART BRAVERMAN

Also noteworthy:

MARIAAAAAAA/I JUST MET A GIRL NAMED MARIAAAA

Only one of these people is dressed for jogging

Mr. Three-piece is demanding to be paid because he’s finished with...something he has agreed to do. Velour Tracksuit insists he’s not finished til Tracksuit SAYS he’s finished, and he won’t get the money til then.

Three-piece is named howard and his hair is very round

also sorry for implying this guy (Al) would wear a velour tracksuit I think it’s actually...corduroy???

Another guy, Mike, shows up, and also is trying to get money out of Al. He alludes to a deal. Al is not a well-liked guy!

i could give you context for this image of mike but I choose to let it stand alone

we meet Howard’s fiancee, who is attempting to stop a priest from aggressively upselling her on a bigger, more “festive” wedding

she alludes to an aunt from Maine and we all know what that means, she’s one of Jessica’s innumerable legion of relatives.

Howard and fiancee (we still don’t have her name) argue because he keeps having to cancel evening plans with her (five nights in a row!) to meet with “very important” clients and so forth. As audience members we already know Al has demanded Howard do something for him tonight, so we know Howard is ~keeping secrets~.

Meanwhile the priest is like “I do actually have things to do other than your wedding rehearsal, please set me free”

free him

We cut to dinner Vicky (that’s her name!) and Jessica, where we learn some details about Howard. He was a small-time actor in NY when she met him but now, she says, he sells life insurance. I have my doubts. (And am cheating because I do remember elements of this episode. but the doubts would exist regardless).

They’ve known each other for a year which I guess could be long enough to get married but does seem quick to me.

Vicky: I would love Howard no matter what business he was in. I really love him -- and he loves me! He really does, I mean, I know that. For a certainty.

Jessica...

seems a little concerned by how intensely Vicky is hammering this point.

there is a long and awkward pause.

Jessica talks about some last-minute doubts being normal and Vicky drops a bombshell: she stopped by Howard’s office to surprise him the other day, and was told he hadn’t worked there for a month!!

Jessica:

Vicky lays out other information she’s gathered: a lipstick-stained handkerchief, the smell of perfume, matchbooks from a nightclub. She wants to go there and find out what’s going on, but she also asks “if I love him, how can I justify spying on him?”

If I were her I would consider, like, TALKING to my fiance, but I am not a straight person and do not understand their ways.

We cut to the bar.

Surprise! Al’s in charge. We learn the club is very successful and that people have been trying to get him to sell but he has not been willing to. We also learn there’s a musician named Freddy who works there as an exclusive, and the guy who tells us this (his agent?) also informs Al that Freddy wants to be able to play other places as well. Al refuses.

Vicky ruthlessly attempts to finagle a table by capitalizing on Jessica’s fame. Al has no idea who this old lady is. After Vicky rattles off some of her accomplishments though, he is suitably impressed.

Sidenote: we learn here Jessica has SIX bestsellers and I officially have no idea how much time is meant to be passing between episodes of this show. In episode one she wrote her first book!!

Freddy appears. We learn he is a drummer/comedian??? An unexpected venn intersection. He’s not very good.

Carol Lawrence is here, as Al’s wife, and instantly brings up the episode’s glamour quotient several hundred percent.

Anyway speaking of glamour, Freddy (finally) gets off the stage and we are introduced to our headliner:

Michelle DuPont! She is a drag queen. It is a drag club!

Now I remember being skeptical of this reveal when I first watched the episode but pleasantly surprised at things being less bad than I’d feared. We will see if this remains true on rewatch.

Michelle’s set is interrupted by another queen running out from backstage and attempting to get out of the building, as the backstage manager yells for them to be stopped because “He’s a murderer!!”

The queen is tackled to the ground right by Jessica and Vicky’s table, and we learn she is Howard! This is the secret he has been keeping.

I’m not posting pictures of that specific revelation because I don’t love its visual framing.

Anyway, we learn Al has been shot and people are saying Howard did it. He is now under police guard in his dressing room. Vicky demands to be able to see him. The officer agrees

Anyway so here’s the thing I do like: it would be very easy for the show to treat this as a shocking and horrible revelation and really have Howard’s reluctance to tell Vicky be justified? Like, it could have had her react in a real gross and offensive way very easily. 

But instead she’s thrilled to learn that he’s alright and that the thing he was hiding was a job not an affair -- and the nature of the job doesn’t seem to trouble her at all.

So thanks, Murder, She Wrote, for being chiller about drag and gender presentation than a lot of media that is made even today! As someone who presents as male-ish in day to day life but feels much more comfortable performing in a dress and other ‘feminine’ clothing, I genuinely really appreciate not being made to feel like that’s something incredibly shameful.

They’re so engrossed in “reconciling” (making out) that they don’t even notice when this guy comes in to arrest Howard for murder!

But that very much is a problem that still needs addressing.

Barb informs the detective that she didn’t see the killing per se but did walk past the open door and saw Howard standing over Al, with the gun. Given the flashiness of Howard’s stage clothes (and wig) and the fact that she presumably saw him from behind, I do wonder if someone else could have been wearing the costume -- but that’s a variation on the first episode’s mystery so we may not come back to that well just yet.

Jessica is also in the room, hanging out with the REAL star of this episode. She comments on the presence of a small white feather on Al’s jacket, to which the detective reasonably responds “who are you??”

He then asks her to do him a favour, she responds eagerly that she’ll help any way she can, and he tells her to leave. It’s one of the more realistic things to happen in this series.

Freddy can’t stop making bad jokes even while making a police statement about a murder. He’s the worst.

Jessica: [barges into room immediately after Freddy leaves]

Detective:

there’s no escape, buddy!!

“Lady, I’ve been up all night with this case” “I too have been up all night, and I have jet lag! I was supposed to go on a TV show this morning, but I cancelled! Now either you find time to talk to me, or I will go on that show and my subject will not be my next book, it will be the insensitivity and arrogance of this city’s homicide division”

I’ve said it before and will say it again: Jessica Fletcher is every horrible white woman demanding to speak to a manager, except she uses her powers for good.

The detective relents and lets her see Howard for ten minutes. Her first question to him is whether he killed Al, which he of course denies.

“Now, I’d like to believe that, but you did lie to Victoria” 

Cold, Jessica. Cold.

Anyway Howard explains that after losing his job at the insurance company he knew that he still wanted to be a performer, and unless he gave it a real chance he knew he’d be unhappy and that would carry over into his marriage. Which is legit. Doesn’t explain why he didn’t talk to Vicky about it though.

Howard continues, saying that it was meant to be a temporary gig but that the audience liked him because he was clumsy and they thought it was funny, and that Al “wouldn’t let me quit! He knew I was broke, so he held back on my wages”.

“That still doesn’t explain why you were standing over him with a MURDER WEAPON in your hand!!”

Howard explains he had just gone into the room to confront Al about his money, and that he picked up the gun before realizing Al was dead (his chair was turned away from the desk, toward the back of the room). This means my earlier speculation was wrong and it was Howard Barb saw. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Oh, Howard, I am so relieved. We’ve only had one killer in our family”

(she was talking about the revolutionary war, it is not as wild a story as it sounds)

Jessica returns to the club, where Freddy’s agent -- who is there for reasons I don’t understand -- promptly tries to get her to hire him. She politely demurs.

Mrs. Drake has taken over business now that her husband is dead and she berates Michelle (now out of drag), who insists that if Mrs. Drake is going to criticize performance, they do it in the privacy of the dressing room.

So...yeah. This is a thing I don’t like about this episode, is that they do go to some pains to show that neither drag performer seen is actually gay. Like...obviously plenty of men who do drag are interested in women but it is a bit disingenuous to have an episode about a drag club where you don’t actually have any textually queer characters.

Jessica goes and has a conversation with Freddy in his dressing room. They don’t talk about anything important but Jessica looks over to the couch and this happens

so clearly she did learn SOMETHING of note. She excuses herself in a hurry and eavesdrops on a conversation between Barbara and Mrs. Drake

“Frankly, Barbara, I don’t know how I ever could run this club without you. But I’m gonna try. You’re fired.”

guys I think Mrs. Drake might know about her husband’s affair.

Jessica entices Barbara into her cab, offering a lift to wherever she needs to go.

Mrs. Drake looms overhead.

In the cab, Barbara suggests she wouldn’t be surprised if Mrs. Drake was the one who did the murder, and described her as “Lucrezia Borgia in furs” which is a pretty solid burn. She then spills the beans on the affair Mrs. Drake and Mike were having.

This is Barbara’s gossip face. She said earlier that the most valuable skill she had as an office manager is knowing how to keep her mouth shut so either she’s full of shit or she has been holding in this gossip sesh for a LONG time. 

In addition to her suspicions of Mrs. Drake and Mike (who apparently was secretly trying to buy the club), she points a finger at Bill Patterson, Freddy’s agent -- could he have wanted to get Freddy out of his contract?

Jessica: “It’s so nice to talk to someone who knows how to be discreet”

Portrait of a man defeated (Jessica has him running tests to see whether a gunshot would have been heard during Freddy’s act)

DEATHTRAP ALERT. second time this week I have watched someone nearly killed by falling theatrical tools. Thanks, Riverdale!

We cut to the following day, where Jessica has moved on to bothering the detective at home.

“The last thing in the world I want to do is interfere, Lieutenant”, says Jessica -- somehow avoiding being struck down by god for such a blatant untruth.

She immediately goes to interfere by talking with Mrs. Drake, who basically warns her to stay out of her business -- but also provides a lead Jessica did not have. Freddy’s contract was not with the club but with Al himself -- and with his death it is null and void. 

Jessica proceeds to whisk herself off to go talk to Freddy some more. She’s admirably consistent.

celebrating in style

are you allowed to bring wine in to the hospital??

Anyway Jessica drops off some flowers, allows Bill Patterson to upbraid her a bit for potentially thinking he or Freddy could be involved, and then smiles and saunters off. She’s up to something.

naptime epiphany!

She has realized the sound of the shot was muffled with a pillow, hence why there was a feather on the body. And that means the murder could have happened earlier than was hitherto believed

Anyway the person who obviously would have had reason to make it seem like the shot happened during Freddy’s set was Freddy -- and that also explains the inexplicable couch closeup earlier, showing an absence of pillow.

And indeed, he shows up at the club where Jessica is explaining her theory to the lieutenant.

“I’m not just a comedian, I’m Freddy York! I’m the first guy who did his own rimshots. I’m like the Edison of comedy”

“Fair is fair. He gave me a shot...I gave him a shot” is a pretty dark fucking joke but it is also the closest to being funny out of anything Freddy has said all episode. He of course ruins it immediately with a sad little spoken “ba-dum-bum” at the end.

And we close with the wedding! I enjoy Vicky’s skirt-suit wedding outfit, very practical.

The fact that the only guests are the people from the club that accused Howard of murder, and the cops who arrested him......................

But Bill found him an acting job! Happy ending, smiles all around

SEE U NEXT TIME i need a catchy sign off phrase fuck

[multi-mused-menagerie]

━━━━━ ✮ CLOSED STARTER | TSURUMAKI KOKORO

     WAS KOKORO LOST? Perhaps, but was that such a bad thing? She didn’t think so! If anything, being lost in a strange and new city was fun! Of course, if the suit people were here, they’d try to get her to get back on task and follow the pre-planned path, but they weren’t here right now, which meant that she could have the most amount of fun!

     And after only ten minutes of wandering, her eyes settle on a boy she’s never met, but is already intent on making friends with. Target sighted.

     Not wasting any time, she runs over, immediately getting into the poor boy’s personal space as she smiles. “Hi! I’m Kokoro! What’s your name?” Of course, she’s very loud, forgetting to check her volume due to her excitement at meeting a new person. But, then again, most things are exciting to the blonde.

@worthkept​

[raylovesrp-blog]

In recent times, increasingly more campaign descriptions include claims that some form of gaming is being exploited. What value is just above the value of the word in the Hong Kong advertising picture? Rick Increase speaks with two businesses which have gained its awards

Recreation Guidelines

“I really don't think gaming is something new in APAC or the world,” says CEO Penny Chow Reprise in HK

Last yr Reprise The group has had considerable success using gaming in Nike and Coca-Cola campaigns. However Chow thinks the business has quite a lot of concept.

“There is a very big misunderstanding in which people think that gambling is a game or a game,” he says.

”Previously, individuals requested what’s gaming? & # 39; and different individuals would say: & # 39; You employ games to verify something. Which means recreation techniques or implementation may also help you obtain one thing. Should you ask me, I might say that gaming has now turn out to be an advertising or advertising device that in itself differs from many other methods we use.

Like many gamers in the business, he believes that individuals are dependent on the technological meanings of the time period and strongly resemble advertising that gaming precedes smartphones, AR and VR.

Toys might have changed, however previous standards, resembling loyalty packages, coupons, and the potential to collect all involved recreation parts lengthy before their digital

”Marketers have all the time used playing to become involved with their shoppers when something shouldn’t be straightforward to take , ”he says.

This wisdom aside continues to be plain that increasingly more businesses are using a wide range of digital capabilities to convey the parts of the world of games to their campaigns. “I think playing isn't just your face, it's your head. It makes an emotional connection to the audience and leads to a longer relationship, not to fear brand awareness, ”says Alco Ho, Artistic Manager at Webs.

He also supplies a purpose for sudden gaming. 19659004] “Campaigns are no longer a sustainable form of marketing because consumers get smarter. They are blind to traditional ads. In order to reach our target audience, we need to incorporate a fun and competitive element into our marketing strategy. ”

Ho presents its own definition of gaming, which is the integration of brand name gross sales via challenges and rewards. For instance, an peculiar free product package deal with a thematic relevance to the model might be better promoted by way of competitions.

”It triggers a way of accomplishment and exploits the competitiveness of people and encourages them to visit the app / web site much more, just because they take pleasure in it, he says.

Chow additionally believes that video games touch one thing that was buried deep in our collective psyche.

”Once we performed video games once we have been young, we accepted it because we needed to get more, we needed to see more, and needed to gather more. So I feel it's enjoying with shopper psychology or considering. ”

All Songs

Producing a gambling marketing campaign seems to be a frighteningly difficult proposition in a digital world full of data and always up to date. However, Ho believes that the key to success is dumbing issues up.

“Maintain things easy, easy and enjoyable. What is the most essential level of gaming? How internet individuals? So it's straightforward to win, easy recreation construction and consumer pleasant. Make engaging content material the place every consumer can feel like a master. Who wouldn't need it?

Ting Shie, a staff that leads the social and content workforce on Webs s & # 39; up, urges marketers to withstand the complexity of complexity and as an alternative advocates a complete strategy to branding

Shie says, "We need to make it silly. Simplicity is endurance. You haven’t any endurance to determine the right way to play. You need to fix it instantly or in seconds, then it attracts the consumer to play or even share it later. ”

It's one in every of the obvious drivers we've seen in advertising. [19659004] The businesses will not be simply making an attempt to make use of the capability to supply – by way of promises of reward or honor – motivation that permits users to participate. The actual promise of the combined recreation world is that gamers pull each other into their recreation, rivals, allies or just as viewers.

However, as Chow factors out, attracting gaming isn’t solely a fast opportunity to spread it, however a top quality of every hit.

“When you have a social video that you use to watch or comment or share. But playing means you practice longer and deeper. ”

He mentions the distinction in strategy. Reprise might have handled the Coca-Cola marketing campaign.

”It is straightforward to ask solely teenagers to drink more Coca-Cola every summer time. We will rent the most popular bands or singers in Hong Kong and give them loads of prizes in a cheerful guess. But then shopper activity stops there. Once they drink a chef, they cease. They don't like when I’ll drink it once more? ”

“ Playing is not just your face, it is your head. ”

Reprise decided to launch the Tetris cellular activation, where clients collected pieces of the recreation puzzle from the purchased cans. This hauled them emotionally and drove them to their next purchase.

Chow says, “I feel enjoying performs magic. If you should use it intelligently, you’ll be able to actually keep in touch with shoppers for longer and deeper. “

Nevertheless, as he says for advertising, it's not simply what he calls" bling bling "beverage, trend, or way of life brands. commitment works. The truth is, the largest gaming know-how beneficiaries might stay in model categories which might be thought-about calm.

”Who needs to find out about banking? For those who start a branding campaign and say "OK, we'll put you at the heart of the business and we have these services you can choose …" however the younger era is just not fascinated with figuring out more. So gaming could be a essential place in this space if the marketer knows easy methods to use it.

If the model has the info and the capacity to not directly inform younger shopper teams what the brand is, they will

”You possibly can have many various methods you will get concerned with those shoppers who are usually not simply related and telling them onerous your messages in additional fascinating methods, ”Chow says. 19659004] Shie and Ho agree and inform us that they assume every brand can have a recreation marketing campaign. Nevertheless, this campaign won’t magically produce results until it will get into the discussion.

Ho says: “Local cultural elements can be placed in a marketing strategy. Ride on hot topics, KOLs and local slang to make the audience more aware. ”

Score (19659003) Despite the temptation to hire a developer army to build a obtrusive multi-layered software, our matter agrees that it’s a rash. While some strategies require something like that, Reprise and Webs have efficiently set up campaigns around gaming and have a way more economical strategy.

It started with a stay teaser video displaying the native rock band Pricey Jane, who encountered out-of-country occasions outdoors the venue.

At the similar time, the agency had also pulled a total of 200 KOLs / influencers who had concurrently despatched them, had the similar experience of the similar night time. Larger curiosity attracted clients to Style Walk, where the final actual stage of gaming began by challenging guests to physically seek for and scan codes at totally different places in the mall.

Shie says, “We had to think a lot of elements all together. We knew that fashion walks by attracting younger fashionists who really care about what they use. Then we get Looney Tunes and Marvin Mars. ”

From a improvement perspective, it took somewhat greater than rewarding website creation for patrons, but the off-beat strategy increased conversations with the viewers and the customer. [19659004Webssup'knockeddowntheheadofthecrowdinthemidstofadeeperinterestinthecontentoftheopportunitytocometoataxinarine”

And while this undertaking sounds minimalist, Chow tells Advertising how Reprise built Nike for the cash recreation campaign in 2018, however Instagram and one page on an present website.

“It’s common follow that in case you start one thing for a World Cup, for instance, football garments, you’ll send e-mails to all your members. One other method is to ship e-mail to the soccer members you will have in the pool. But final time during the World Cup, we talked to the shopper about not having sufficient.

Using hashtag, #BelieveToUnlock, users discover coded messages in Instagram posts that could possibly be used to open rewards, comparable to buying. reductions, occasion tickets and coaching periods with local actors

Nike had an enormous amount of details about her HK users about e-commerce activities that have been so numerous in engagement and influence courses – from VIP to casual – Reprise was in a position

It obtained big outcomes, doubled membership, doubled membership and elevated clickthrough fee, sales and promotional code usage. Using a bit more than hashtag, Chow decides that it has solely the right info

"If the brand really needs to play, they need to understand their audience first, what their way of doing what they want," he

. need one thing, whether you’re an software or an outside event or just a simple Instagram or Fb activation, they’ll contact you to know their habits or intentions if you would like them to take action. ”

Shie presents his own view of social significance:“ Ninety-five percent of all gaming must go through social channels. No one wants to download the app to play just a few games. So we've designed a lot of games based on Facebook and Instagram DNA. And now YouTube allows you to continue with interactive paths where you can choose A or B. ”

Endgame

As a result of clients are encouraged to take part in prizes, game-infused campaigns supply marketers an amazing reward: info. The laws have made access to consumer info harder, however gaming creates a fairly low worth for shoppers who grant the vital permissions.

“All customers want to gather information that increases or increases the audience. So we can make games a filled in form of incentives and rewards (and) that only need to provide some personal information. It can be quite sensitive, so it is natural for people to try it, ”Ho says.

“We choose the consumer to offer info, play the recreation and redeem his wage. “

Chow agrees on how games can reassure customers:“ If a bank asks you to offer them with info or sign up with their software and provide them with info to use the app, individuals are pretty skeptical. But what in the event you say, "Here is a pretty good campaign, you can enjoy these benefits or play with friends, and you just have to sign up for your information"?

He concludes: "It is basically a very good channel by which marketers can gather information that they could not usually tell more."

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[mrhotmaster]

Zoom Security: Simple Steps For Employees, Teachers & Students To Stay Safe During The Calls

Zoom Security: If You Are A Employee, Teachers & Students, Follow The Simple Steps Here To Stay Safe During The Calls

Although Zoom operates at a quick pace to make its application safer, right now you can do anything to avoid incidents.

Zoom has had a harsh scarcely any weeks. Since the time detonating into prevalence, Zoom ended up shelled by reports of protection and security issues. These further provoked numerous to stop the stage, and digital security specialists to give warnings. Fortunately, Zoom itself seemed to pay attention to issues, roping in key digital security faces, for example, ex-Facebook security head Alex Stamos, and all the more as of late Katie Moussouris of the Pentagon bug abundance acclaim. In any case, while the security highlights are being incorporated with the framework sooner rather than later, there are still a significant number advances that you, as a client, need to take in the event that you need to shield your protection and information safe from being taken. By and large, these means likewise benefit as much as possible from the new devices that Zoom itself has reported for clients to embrace without anyone else. While the onus was to a great extent on Zoom to improve its application, it is additionally a key time for clients to turn out to be knowledgeable with essential security includes that ought to be followed all over the place.

ALSO SEE

Steps To Instantly Make a Video Call On Zoom Meeting App

In view of that, here's taking a gander at a couple of key advances that you have to take, if in spite of the security and wellbeing concerns, you despite everything happen to utilize Zoom for your official video conferencing prerequisites. Signing in and passwords: The main key advance is to guarantee that no outsider module is utilized to sign in to Zoom. By utilizing Facebook or Google, you basically interface your private records to Zoom, which expands the danger of your private data being taken if Zoom is penetrated and its connected APIs are followed by aggressors. Continuously guarantee that you utilize a remarkable client name and secret phrase. On the off chance that you are a participant, demand your host to utilize a secret key ensured interface, and furthermore utilize a naturally created gathering ID for each welcome. Once signed in, guarantee that you utilize a secret key secured meeting welcome, on the off chance that you are a host. This limits the danger of 'zoombombing', a demonstration where Zoom gatherings were barraged by noxious clients with racial slurs or obscene themes. In the event that you are joining a gathering just, attempt to not sign in to the administration by any stretch of the imagination, since joining just expects you to enter in the gathering ID and secret word. On the off chance that you are a participant, demand your host to utilize a secret phrase secured connect, and furthermore utilize a naturally produced gathering ID for each welcome. Steps for educators: Zoom expresses that educators should shun posting pictures of their virtual study halls to secure advanced ID. Besides, instructors are likewise demanded to utilize the 'lock meeting' alternative once all homeroom participants have joined the meeting. This is fairly like the physical locking of a study hall entryway, when a class has started, to guarantee that no unapproved access can occur.

ALSO SEE

Zoom Meeting App Are Not End To End Protected

Instructors may likewise compulsorily require their understudies to enroll their email addresses, with the goal that any unidentified email address of loathsome members can be immediately spotted and evacuated. They are additionally mentioned to utilize haphazardly created gathering IDs rather than their own, fixed gathering ID. This can support the instructors, and thusly all the understudies, from being found on the web and followed to dynamic gathering rooms. Schools can likewise have their understudies pursue official Zoom accounts, and just these records can be confirmed for utilizing the administration in a specific gathering room. To uphold further limitations, educators can forbid understudies to join an online homeroom before they themselves do. Different limitations incorporate incapacitating member comment, or debilitating sound and video feeds of members that might be troublesome. Are these means idiot proof? All things considered, not exactly. For one, Zoom is yet to improve its encryption standard. Zoom despite everything utilizes AES-256 ECB ecryption standard, which just requires an effectively understandable AES-128 security key to unscramble a bundle (or a greater part of data) that has been caught in the middle of servers. It is this that is vital to programmers discovering touchy client data, which they were apparently selling on the dim web. Truth be told, an ongoing report by Motherboard uncovered significantly progressively zero-day misuses on Zoom's Windows and Mac applications, which were purportedly being circled on the dim web for $500,000. In the following not many weeks, Zoom will move a more secure 256-AES GCM encryption standard, and in the long haul, are chipping away at a start to finish encryption venture The encryption viewpoint, combined with the way that Zoom utilized Chinese server farms to go information through, prompted clients speculating that Chinese digital undercover work operators might be tapping outside information with no responsibility. To offer some kind of reparation for this, Zoom has expressed that it will presently let clients select the server farm where their information will be put away.

ALSO SEE

Delete Your Zoom Account By These Simple Means If You Are Not Satisfied?

Zoom is additionally including a 'report client' highlight to boycott any 'zoombombers', compulsorily add complex passwords to distributed storage records, and make the information course increasingly straightforward to every one of its clients. On this present, Zoom's Stamos likewise as of late referenced that in the following barely any weeks, Zoom will relocate a more secure 256-AES GCM encryption standard, and in the long haul, are chipping away at a start to finish encryption venture with top cryptographers. This doesn't detail if Zoom will be adopting the decentralized strategy to totally get rid of any doubt of observation from its clients. While matters at Zoom can essentially improve, they are as yet a beginning. Meanwhile, on the off chance that you should utilize Zoom to make video calls, the previously mentioned advances are basic to be followed.

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[mastcomm]

At the Stroke of Brexit, Britain Steps, Guardedly, Into a New Dawn

LONDON — To the recorded peals of Big Ben and the gentle fluttering of Union Jacks, Britain bade farewell to the European Union at 11 p.m. on Friday, severing ties to the world’s largest trading bloc after nearly half a century and embarking on an uncertain future as a midsize economy off the coast of Europe.

For Britain, having transitioned in the postwar era from a globe-girdling empire to a reluctant member of the European project, it was yet another epoch-making departure.

It is a departure that will upend settled relations in virtually all areas of society, the economy and security matters, while confronting Britain with new questions of national identity. Three and a half years after the former prime minister, Theresa May, proclaimed that “Brexit means Brexit,” the British government will finally have to decide precisely what that means.

Britain must still negotiate its future trade relations with the European Union, a thorny process that could take through the end of the year, or longer.

On Friday, the departure elicited both hope and trepidation from Britons. Many simply were relieved that the bitter and divisive debate over Brexit is over.

“This is the moment when the dawn breaks, and the curtain goes up on a new act in our great national drama,” said Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in an address to the nation on Friday night that he also posted on his Twitter account. Brexit, he said, was a chance to “spread hope and opportunity to every part of the U.K.”

Mr. Johnson, whose vow to “Get Brexit Done” won him a commanding majority in elections last month, vowed to knit together a country that had been split geographically and generationally by the Brexit debate. Even the future of the United Kingdom now seemed uncertain, with Scotland threatening to renew its drive for independence and Northern Ireland musing about unification with Ireland.

On Friday, Mr. Johnson’s cabinet met in Sunderland, an industrial city in the north, a traditional Labour stronghold where the early returns after the referendum in June 2016 foretold the country’s stunning decision to leave the European Union. The prime minister celebrated Brexit as a triumph for self-government, and promised to undertake the “biggest revival of our infrastructure since the Victorians.”

For all the historical resonance, the celebrations of Britain’s departure were oddly attenuated. A countdown clock flickered on the darkened wall of 10 Downing Street, while inside the prime minister hosted a party with British-sourced food and English sparkling wine.

British embassies were instructed to hold low-key affairs — no special events — and to avoid anything that smacked of “triumphalism.”

In a chilly Parliament Square, several thousand Brexiteers gather to sing “God Save the Queen” as the clock struck 11 p.m. Even the timing of the exit seemed a compromise: the European Union decided to make Britain’s departure effective at midnight in its Brussels headquarters.

Some British commentators complained that the Europeans made a greater show of Britain’s leaving, which they had opposed, than Britain did. Brussels staged a light show in the Grand Place on Thursday, while members of the European Parliament serenaded their departing British colleagues with “Auld Lang Syne.”

The ambivalence attested to the divisions that still run through Britain. Pro-Europe activists were despairing, some channeling their anger into efforts to help Europeans in London navigate the reality of reduced rights and a more tenuous life in a country they had long made their home.

Still, even the most vociferous opponents of Brexit seemed eager to end, or at least suspend, the toxic debate, make the best of the outcome and try to forge a new relationship with the European Union more to their liking.

“Britain can alter its political relationship with Europe, but it can’t alter its historical or geographical relationship and, in the end, we’ll have to find a way of working together,” Tony Blair, a former prime minister and ardent opponent of Brexit, said on Friday to foreign journalists in London.

“It’s a destiny-changing decision and obviously it’s one I’m profoundly sad about,” said Mr. Blair, who had his own struggles with Britain’s fitful relationship with Europe. “But you’ve got to take a big historical look at this.”

As Britain casts off from Europe, Mr. Johnson hopes to deepen his country’s alliance with the United States, starting with a trade deal that the government wants to negotiate in tandem with its agreement with the European Union. President Trump avidly encouraged Brexit and his emissary welcomed Britain’s new status.

“America shares your optimism and excitement about the many opportunities the future will bring,” Robert Wood Johnson IV, the United States ambassador to Britain, said in a statement.

Yet, doubts remained about what sort of a trade deal Britain could expect from President Trump.

“He believes in America first,” said Kim Darroch, the former ambassador to the United States, in an interview with the Guardian. “And he believes, particularly, in rewarding people who vote for him — and that is American farmers and big American corporations.”

For Mr. Johnson, whose capacious Parliamentary majority leaves him with few domestic constraints, the question is which sectors of the economy to prioritize and what trade-offs to make in the post-Brexit era.

His government argues that by freeing itself from European regulation, it could become a leader in new technologies like artificial intelligence. As Mr. Johnson’s influential adviser, Dominic Cummings, once put it, Britain can become the best place for those who want to “invent the future.”

Yet in leaving Europe’s single market and customs union, Britain is sacrificing the smooth and frictionless flow of goods across its borders — something businesses currently take for granted.

Whatever the outcome of the trade talks, exporters and importers will almost certainly face extra layers of bureaucracy and border checks. That will affect industries, from aerospace to food, and could cost jobs in parts of the country where Mr. Johnson’s Conservatives won unexpected victories in last month’s general election.

Formal negotiations between London and Brussels are expected to start in late February or early March. Mr. Johnson has insisted they must conclude this year, but critics say the timetable is unrealistic.

Though the European Union is the far bigger economic entity, it is wary of allowing Britain to become a competitor with lighter regulations, which could undercut European producers. Its goal will be to extract pledges from Britain not to dilute its environmental, labor, or antitrust rules.

Britain will probably want to negotiate everything simultaneously, while also engaging in talks with the United States and other nations — a strategy that it hopes will increase its leverage. In Sunderland, Mr. Johnson said he hoped to strike deals covering 80 percent of British trade within three years.

In time, Brexit will overhaul how the country trades. But well before that, the split has sent tremors through the lives of Europeans who make their homes in Britain, instantly unraveling the promise that they could live and work there without question.

For British cities shaped by waves of migration, none more so than London, the change could be seismic. In shops, restaurants and cultural centers, Europeans talk of going back to their home countries sooner than planned. They bemoan the application required to stay. And those who might once have taken their place are increasingly choosing not to come at all.

“Through no fault of their own, people who thought they had forever built their lives on their rights as European Union citizens are all of a sudden having the rug pulled out from under them,” said Maike Bohn, a co-founder of the3million, a group that promotes European citizens’ rights.

When the links between Britain and the European Union are severed at the end of the transition period, European citizens’ rights to live and work in Britain will end, as will the rights of Britons to move and work throughout the bloc.

For Britons, too, the date of Britain’s departure hardly means an end to rancorous debates that have split families and friends over the last three years. The wounds remain raw. And the labels born of Brexit — Remainers who fought to keep Britain in the European Union, and Leavers who fought to do the opposite — have yet to wear off.

Amanda Chetwynd-Cowieson, a co-founder of For our Future’s Sake, a youth-led group that campaigned to hold a new Brexit referendum last year, said there was only so much healing that could happen while the battle over what kind of Brexit Britain should pursue rages on.

Coming from a family with many members who supported Leave, and from a part of England that voted to leave, she said the three years of turmoil were still taking their toll.

“We’ll have a couple months of people trying not to talk about it again, trying to pretend it’s not a thing that’s happening, trying not to bring it up at dinner,” Ms. Chetwynd-Cowieson said. “But realistically it’s not going to be sorted in a year. It’s going to start rearing its head and opening divisions within families again.”

Mr. Blair, the former prime minister, warned that Mr. Johnson would have to work hard to prevent the breakup of the country, given renewed calls for Scottish independence and Irish unification.

A majority in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted against Brexit in 2016, and on Friday evening, the headquarters of the Scottish government in Edinburgh was lit up in the colors of the European flag.

Mr. Blair acknowledged that the British had always been ambivalent about European integration. But he said, “the tragedy is that it was actually quite a successful relationship.” Those who dream of Britain rejoining the bloc one day will have to wait for a while, he added.

“Who knows?” Mr. Blair said. “The thing I’m sure about is that there’s no point in occupying a lot of time on that now.”

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[thisdaynews]

What Mayor Pete Couldn’t Fix About the South Bend Cops

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/what-mayor-pete-couldnt-fix-about-the-south-bend-cops/

What Mayor Pete Couldn’t Fix About the South Bend Cops

SOUTH BEND, Indiana—Pete Buttigieg emerged from his black Suburban outside the police department Friday night, and stepped into the middle of the tensest moment of his nearly eight-year career as mayor. Protesters, angered by a police shooting five days earlier, pressed a list of 10 demands into his hands. On the list: Would he support an independent investigation by the Justice Department?

After quickly scanning the document, Buttigieg agreed. But there were nine more issues and the crowd wasn’t appeased.

Story Continued Below

“Can you say it to us today in front of all these cameras that black lives matter?”

“Did you just ask me if black lives matter?” the normally unflappable Buttigieg replied, anger in his voice.

“Yes, we want to hear you say it,” another said.

“Of course black lives matter,” Buttigieg said into a microphone.

“You running for president and you expect black people to vote for you?” a black woman asked him.

“I’m not asking for your vote,” Buttigieg said.

“You ain’t gonna get it either,” the woman shot back.

This confrontation in his hometown was not where the 37-year-old mayor had expected to be on Friday night. Buttigieg’s schedule had him in South Carolina at Rep. Jim Clyburn’s World Famous Fish Fry. Recently, he had been riding a carpet of congratulatory headlines about his robust fundraising and his surging presidential campaign. He was on a glide path to center stage at next week’s Democratic debates.

But early last Sunday that all changed, when a white police officer in Buttigieg’s South Bend police department who had been accused of excessive force in the past shot and killed a 54-year-old black man. Officials said the victim was rifling through parked cars and armed with a knife; the officer hadn’t activated his body camera video and the camera on his dash hadn’t switched on either so there was no independent record of the fatal encounter. Buttigieg left the campaign trail to deal with fallout from an encounter that almost instantly was swept into the fraught national debate over how police treat minorities in their communities.

Over the course of the week, under the gaze of a horde of national media, Buttigieg struggled to reclaim control of the narrative that he has nurtured during his surprising candidacy—the thoughtful, compassionate technocrat whose smart policies have reinvigorated his once beleaguered Rust Belt city. On Thursday, a black pastor interviewing Buttigieg on a radio show noted pointedly that Buttigieg was “running two campaigns: One is for the presidency of the United States of America; and the other is damage control after a Father’s Day shooting of Mr. Eric Logan.” A day later, Logan’s grieving mother screamed at him during the march: “I’m tired of hearing your lies.”

The shooting has exposed a lingering and bitter conflict between South Bend’s black community and a predominantly white police department—a department that has grown only whiter since Buttigieg became mayor in 2012. As mayor, Buttigieg, who has pledged transparency and professionalism, sometimes seemed to make matters worse. Three months intohis first term, he forced out the city’s first black police chief, who had been accused of illegally recording his officers, some of whom were said to have made racist remarks; since then, there have been a number of controversies with racial overtones—violent confrontations between police and minority residents, and lawsuits by black officers alleging that Buttigieg’s handpicked police chiefs engaged in racially discriminatory behavior.The officers involved in the shooting and its aftermath each have been accused multiple times of using excessive force against black people. On Friday, the lawyer for the victim’s family specifically targeted Buttigieg in an interview,saying the shooting was a byproduct of the Buttigieg administration’s “acceptance” of police misconduct.

The criticism comes at a particularly sensitive time on his campaign. After having been dogged by concerns that he wasn’t a viable candidate with black voters – scoring as low as 2 percent in some polls – he had begun to make some progress.When word came of the shooting, Buttigieg had just finished a trip to South Carolina, where he campaigned on his so-called Douglass plan, a policy proposal aimed at fostering black entrepreneurship and lowering incarceration rates. A Post and Courier-Change Research poll last week showed him surginginto third place behind Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, a gain of 6 percent among black voters there. Buttigieg the presidential candidate has caught fire, in part, due to his knack for connecting local and national issues,but the shooting this week dredged up a kind of history that could tie them together in the most damaging way.

On Wednesday morning, after two days of private meetings with community members, Buttigieg emerged to make his first public remarks since Sunday’s late-night press conference. He went to a local Board of Public Safety swearing-in ceremony to address six new police officers and their parents. “As you know, you are also joining this police department at a very challenging moment here in South Bend,” he told them. “We gather in the wake of a shooting that has left family members grieving the loss of someone they love and leaves an officer and his family dealing with the consequences of a lethal encounter.”

Buttigieg acknowledged that relationships between city leaders and police and community members had frayed. The mayor expressed frustration that the officer hadn’t activated his body camera—part of a $1.5 million technology investment a year ago—when it mattered most. He had also instituted implicit bias training for his police force and created a website where citizens could review documents related to complaints against police. This, he said, “is just one reminder of how much work is yet to be done.”

“How far we will have to go before the day when no community member or officer would hesitate to trust one another’s word—and ultimately, how far we have to go before we live in a society where none of the circumstances leading to Sunday morning’s death could have happened in the first place?”

After his speech, Buttigieg fielded media questions that focused on how he was handling the response: Why hadn’t he attended a vigil for the victim at the scene of the shooting Monday evening? “I took some advice from community leaders on this and reached the decision that it would be more of a distraction if I were to attend.” Buttigieg faced what seemed to be a no-win situation: attend the vigil and be accused of co-opting it for the sake of his presidential campaign or not attend and be criticized for callousness. What about the optics of appearing publicly with police first instead of in the community or with victims? “I’m not really concerned about optics so much as making sure that the community is headed in the right direction.”

On Thursday, Buttigieg took to a local radio station, WUBS, where he was asked a question by black pastor, the Rev. Sylvester Williams Jr., that seemed to strike closer to the heart of Buttigieg’s record on racial issues. Why, he was asked, were all six of the new officers he had just sworn in white?

***

Buttigieg responded with an apology—“We need people of color on the police department,” Buttigieg said, “and I have failed to get us a more diverse police department”—but that uniformly white array of new cadets wasn’t an aberration under Buttigieg’s administration.

In 2014, during his first term in office, black officers made up more than 10 percent of the 253-person department. By last year, that figure had dwindled to 5 percent. Contrary to its national image as a white, working class, Catholic town, South Bend is 40 percent non-white, comprised of 26 percent blacks and 14 percent Hispanics. And yet its police force each passing year under Buttigieg has looked a little less like the city itself.

While South Bend’s police department problems began long before Buttigieg arrived in office, a decision he made early in his administration set him back. In March 2012, three months into his term, Buttigieg asked for the resignation of his popular police Chief Darryl Boykins, the city’s first black chief. He had learned that Boykins illegally recorded members of the force whom he believed had used racist language, and that Boykins was under investigation by the FBI for it.

Buttigieg phoned Boykins and asked him to resign. (Buttigieg has said that call was a mistake, and that since then he has conducted all personnel changes in person.) “I sat at the end of the conference table in my office, and contemplated which scenario was more likely to tear the community apart—a well-liked African-American police chief potentially being indicted over compliance with a very technical federal law, or me removing him for allowing things to reach this point?” Buttigieg writes in his memoir,Shortest Way Home. “There was no good option: the community would erupt either way.”

Buttigieg’s prediction was right. The backlash was fierce and the storyline virtually swallowed his first year in office.

“This issue, previously an abstraction for me, was now hitting home,” Buttigieg writes in his memoir. “Ferguson and everything that followed in the Black Lives Matter movement came after the tapes controversy exploded locally, but their urgency grew from the same root: the fact that many of the worst historical injustices visited upon black citizens of our country came at the hands of local law enforcement. Like an original sin, this basic fact burdens every police officer, no matter how good, and every neighborhood of color, no matter how safe, to this day.”

The now-infamous tapes case has earned Buttigieg tough press nationally since he entered the crowded presidential race, but it was only one of a series of race-related policing controversies he has faced in office, all of which contributed to the raw emotions that emerged in the wake of the shooting.

The names of the two officers involved in the shooting Sunday were already familiar to many of the city’s black and Hispanic residents and activists. According to court documents, Ryan O’Neill, the officer who fired the fatal shot, had been named in two lawsuits related to racially motivated misconduct. In 2008—several years before Buttigieg took office—a man namedDerrick Burton claimed that O’Neill called him a “stupid n—–” and “tazed me unconscious.” In another 2008 lawsuit against multiple officers, Michael Alexander accused O’Neill of leveling “multiple blows to my head and my back.” Alexander alleged that the officers had tasered him and that he heard them “laughing about how I was flopping like a fish.” Both cases, which were filed while in custody by the men themselves and without legal help, were dismissed by judges.

In July of 2008, South Bend police Lt. David A. Newton wrote in an internal affairs report, which POLITICO has viewed,that O’Neill should be removed as a field training officer because of otherracist remarks he made. Looking at a black woman, O’Neill allegedly asked a fellow officer, “Do you want to get some of that black meat?” O’Neill told the officer that he had dated black women in high school. But when they later saw a black man walking with a white woman, O’Neill remarked to his fellow officer: “Man, I hate seeing that. It makes me sick.” The incident was investigated by an African-American member of the police department. A spokesperson for the South Bend Police Department told POLITICO that the document was “one person’s testimony on an internal affairs investigation. The assertions presented were determined to be ‘not sustained’ at the conclusion of the investigation.”

Last Sunday’s incident also involved a second officer, Aaron Knepper, who drove the wounded man, Eric Logan, to the hospital in a squad car. He had called for an ambulance, but decided not to wait, according the account he gave officials. (Logan, who was shot once in the abdomen, died later.) Knepperalso had a history. In 2016, he was the subject of public protests that called for his dismissal because of a series of incidents over the years. Police Scott Ruszkowski, Buttigieg’s police chief, pulled Knepper off the streets, citing threats to Knepper. Four months later, Knepper was back on the beat.

In August of 2012, Knepper was one of three officers who tricked a mentally disabled 7-Eleven clerk into eating a spoonful of cinnamon in 60 seconds. The man became violently ill. His family sued. The city offered a settlement before trial of $15,000, but the family declined it, and the jury awarded $8,000.

“Obviously I’m not pleased,” Buttigieg said at the time.

That same year, Knepper and other officers entered a black family’s home in the middle of the night, and punched 17-year-old Deshawn Franklin six times and stunned him with a Taser. The officers had mistaken him for someone else. A federal jury decided that Knepper and his fellow officers violated Franklin’s constitutional rights, but awarded him and his family $18. More public outrage ensued.

Buttigieg deflected calls for Knepper’s firing, placing the onus on his police chief and board of public safety, which by state statute is the only entity that has the authority to hire and fire police officers. “Obviously, a firing-level personnel decision is made by the Board of Public Safety,” he said in 2016. “But just to be clear, I accept responsibility for appointments to the Board of Public Safety and (police) chief.”

In the interest of promoting equity, Buttigieg has appointed three African-Americans to the four-member Board of Public Safety (one seat is vacant). At a board meeting in September 2016, protestors interrupted a panel on which Buttigieg sat with Ruszkowski, the former head of the local police union who became police chief in 2015. “I don’t think this can be resolved by targeting any individual,” Buttigieg said. “It can only be resolved by making sure we have a higher level of trust in the community that’s borne out by consistently positive behavior and consistently fair discipline.”

Today, Buttigieg is on his third police chief. After dismissing Boykins, Buttigieg hired Ron Teachman, a white native of Bedford, Massachusetts. Police officers claimed Teachman had “run amok” while Buttigieg, a Navy reserve officer, was on leave from his mayoral duties to serve a nine-month tour in Afghanistan. A local activist accused Teachman of using racist imagery in a sermon, according a local media report. Davin Hackett, a military veteran with expertise in explosives, filed a lawsuit against Teachman for racial discrimination when he was denied a position on the bomb squad. Later, he claimed in a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, that he was passed over for a promotion to sergeant in favor of a less qualified white candidate. In retaliation, Hackett says he was “subjected to unjustified investigations and discipline,” according to local news reports. Two other black officers filed race discrimination suits within the same year.

Asked on Wednesday by reporters what he had learned from tensions erupting over race-related policing issues, Buttigieg nodded to his early lack of deftness handling a complex subject that has ended the careers of other mayors.

“When I first took office almost eight years ago, I may have had a theoretical understanding of what’s at stake in issues of race and racism and policing, but it’s different when you bear responsibility for a police department and for the wellbeing of a community. I’ve learned about how raw these issues are.”

***

By mid-week, it seemed like Buttigieghad been speaking non-stop since he arrived three days earlier—talking publicly and privately, making sweeping statements about the long tail of racial injustice and issuing specific orders about the use of body cameras. He had met privately with Logan’s family and publicly pledged the city’s support for them and his commitment to a thorough investigation of the shooting.

On the night of the shooting, he talked openly about how his response was shaped by past mistakes. “We’ve had prior cases of use of force incidents and officer involved shootings where I hesitated, frankly, to get in front of cameras because we didn’t know very much, and it was out of our hands.”

Buttigieg spent hours on the phone with local leaders. “We don’t want to have to wait for final word from the different investigations to be taking next steps here to fortify community relationships, to keep channels of communication open, and to determine what we can do going forward that will be positive.”

And he sought advice from people he called “experts from around the country.” One of them was the Rev. Al Sharpton, the long-time New York activist who has been at the center of numerous racial controversies over the decades. Sharpton shared the advice he gave Buttigieg with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. “I told him, ‘You’ve got to be very honest. You’ve got to be transparent. And this family wants justice.’”

But Sharpton also made it clear that history, especially involving race and policing, is difficult to shake: “I think the fact that he had a problem with the black police chief in the past—this brings all of this back.”

Buttigieg was not without support from some local leaders. “He’s been methodical about addressing what’s happened since Sunday,” Apostle Michael Patton, president of the local NAACP Chapter, told me. And one of his staunchest critics, City Councilor Regina Williams-Preston, who lost her primary bid to replace Buttigieg in May, even applauded his decision to step away from the campaign. “I think that was the right thing to do to come back and help us through this tragedy.”

On Thursday evening, Buttigieg blasted a lengthy email to supporters about his crisis back home. “Eric’s death,” he wrote, “no matter what details emerge about the circumstances and the actions of the officer involved – shines a bright light on a subject that impacts my life, your life, and the lives of Americans from all walks of life. All police work and all of American life takes place in the shadow of racism, which hurts everyone and everything it touches.”

Through it all there was the sense that despite all that Buttigieg had said, he still was not making headway with some of the most aggrieved of his constituents.

“The family has not had the consoling that they would’ve appreciated,” Oliver Davis, another black city councilor who ran unsuccessfully for Buttigieg’s seat in May, told me. He was shocked that neither Buttigieg nor a member of his administration attended the vigil for the victim Tuesday night.

Meanwhile, Coffman, the Logan family attorney, told POLITICO he planned to file suit against the city on Monday. “There’s several things that don’t add up in the case,” Coffman told me.

Then on Friday, Buttigieg’s campaign announced that he would not attend as planned Rep. Clyburn’s fish fry—a sign of how much he is struggling to extract himself from the crisis and return his focus to the campaign. Though he returned to South Bend for the march on Friday night, he resumed his campaign schedule Saturday to appear at the South Carolina Democratic Party Convention, a Planned Parenthood forum, and then a town hall in North Augusta. He planned to shuttle back to South Bend Saturday night in advance of atown hall of his own he hoped to hold as soon as Sunday. Meanwhile, as the investigators continue their probe of the shooting, the St. Joseph Prosecutor’s Office announced on Thursday that Prosecuting Attorney Kenneth Cotter hasn’t yet decided whether to appoint a special prosecutor in the case. Buttigieg has said he would support an independent investigation by the Department of Justice.

Whatever the outcome, the crisis doesn’t seem likely to be resolved soon.

Back on the basketball court, at the memorial for Eric Logan, in the muggy heat of an Indiana summer, Buttigieg furrowed his brow and placed his thumb and index finger on his chin. He was dressed up in his campaign uniform of white shirt and blue tie with a navy suit jacket. His husband Chasten stood next to him, hands clasped. “We have to learn to listen, as well as to speak,” he told reporters that morning at a press conference outside of South Bend Police Department. And so he was listening.

It was after 6 p.m. by now, the national reporters had left (only temporarily, it turned out). Across the park, black men shoved white styrofoam cups in the gaps of a chain link fence surrounding a baseball field, spelling out Logan’s name.

“We can’t keep getting hurt like this. There’s only so much that we can bear,” said Eli Cantu, the Hispanic activist who organized the memorial, addressing the mayor and other city officials. “This is an opportunity for you, Pete. You can really bridge this gap by addressing this issue correctly. These people need to be held accountable.”

“The officers need to be held accountable,” Cantu told me.

After the last person spoke, Cantu asked people to say something they loved about South Bend.

“The people,” one person said.

“The weather,” said another, causing people to laugh and breaking the tension of the moment.

And then Cantu directed everyone to put their hands in the middle of the circle. “South Bend on three,” he said. Buttigieg and his husband put their hands in the circle.

“South Bend,” they yelled, like it was a team huddle.

As the circle disbanded, and community members milled about, I asked Cantu how Buttigieg was handling the crisis. “I’d give him an ‘E’ for effort,” Cantu told me. “Has it gone somewhere? He’s trying. But is he making the necessary moves? I haven’t seen them yet.”

And Buttigieg kept trying. On Friday night, at the end of the march, he made a promise to the crowd. “I want you to know we’re serious about fixing this.”

There was a smattering of applause.

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[ethelbertpaul444-blog]

Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up

I’m not sure if you’re aware, but the launching of Apple Maps went inadequately. After a rough firstly impression, an apology from the CEO, many years of patching holes with data partnerships and some hints of flame with long-awaited transit tendencies and improvements in business, parking and sit data, Apple Maps is still not where it needs to be to be considered a world-class service. Maps demands fixing. Apple, it is about to change, is aware of this, so it’s re-building the maps part of Maps. It’s doing this by exerting first-party data gathered by iPhones with a privacy-first methodology and its own fleet of cars bundled with sensors and cameras. The new product will launch in San Francisco and the Bay Area with the next iOS 12 beta and will cross Northern California by fall. Every version of iOS will get the updated delineates eventually, and they will be more responsive to changes in roads and structure, more visually rich is dependent on the specific context they’re viewed in and piece more detailed ground cover, foliage, funds, pedestrian pathways and more. This is nothing less than a full re-set of Maps and it’s been four years in the making, which is when Apple began to develop its new data-gathering plans. Eventually, Apple will no longer rely on third-party data to provide the basis for its planneds, which has been one of its major pitfalls from the beginning. “Since we pioneered this six years ago — we won’t rehash all the issues we’ve had when we introduced it — we’ve done a huge investing in get the delineate up to equality, ” articulates Apple SVP Eddy Cue, who are currently owns Maps, in an interview last week.“When we launched, a lot of it was all about tendencies and getting to a certain place. Find the place and getting attitudes to that lieu. We’ve done a huge asset of inducing millions of changes, contributing millions of locations, informing the map and changing the delineate most frequently. All of those thoughts over the past six years.” But, Cue supposes, Apple has room improvements to the quality of Maps, something that most useds would agree on, even with recent advancements. “We wanted to make this to the next stage, ” suggests Cue. “We have been working on trying to create what we hope is going to be the best delineate app in the world, taking it to the next step. That is constructing all of our own delineate data regarding the ground up.” In addition to Cue, I spoke to Apple VP Patrice Gautier and more than a dozen Apple Maps squad representatives at its planning headquarters in California this week about its efforts to re-build Maps, and to do it in such a way that be in conformity with Apple’s very public posture on user privacy. If, like me, you’re wondering whether Apple thought of improving its own planneds from scratch before it propelled Maps, the answer is yes. At the time, there was a choice to be made about whether or not it wanted to be in the business of planneds at all. Returned that the future of mobile designs was growing clearly articulated, it knew that planning would be at the core of nearly every aspect of its maneuvers, from photos to tacks to locating services available to apps. Decision stirred, Apple plowed ahead, constructing a product that relied on a patchwork of data from partners like TomTom, OpenStreetMap and other geo data dealers. The cause was underwhelming. Almost immediately after Apple launched Maps, it realized that it was going to need help and it indicated on a assortment of additional data providers to fill the gaps in location, base map, point-of-interest and business data. It wasn’t enough. “We decided to do this just over four years ago. We remarked,’ Where do we are seeking to take Planneds? What are the things that we are seeking to do in Maps ?’ We realized that, contributed what we wanted to do and where we wanted to take it, we needed to do this ourselves, ” supposes Cue. Because Maps are so core to so many offices, success wasn’t confined to really one capacity. Maps needed to be great at transit, driving and marching — but too as a practicality used by apps for point service and other functions. Cue says that Apple required to own all of the data that goes into making a planned, and to restrain it from a better quality as well as a privacy perspective. There’s also the matter of adjustments, updates and changes recruiting a long loop-the-loop of submission to validation to update when you’re dealing with external spouses. The Maps team would have to be able to correct roads, pathways and other updating is available in periods or less , not months. Not to mention the potential competitive advantages it could benefiting from building and revising commerce data regarding hundreds of millions of iPhones, rather than relying on spouse data. Cue points to the proliferation of designs racing iOS , now over a billion, as a choosing ingredient to change its process. “We felt like because the shift to devices had happened — building a map today in the way that we were traditionally doing it, the path that it was being done — we could improve things vastly, and improve them in different ways, ” he announces. “One is more accuracy. Two is being able to update the delineate faster based on the data and the things that we’re ensure, as opposed to driving again or get the information where the customer’s proactively telling us. What if we could actually see it before all of those things? ” I query him on the rapidity of Maps updates, and whether this new map philosophy intends faster changes for users. “The truth is that Maps needs to be[ informed more ], and even are today, ” responds Cue. “We’ll be doing this even more with our brand-new maps,[ with] the ability to change the map in real epoch and often. We do that every day today. This is expanding us to enable us to make love across everything in the planned. Today, there’s certain things that make longer to change. “For example, a road network is something that takes a much longer time to change currently. In the new map infrastructure, we can change that relatively quickly. If a new street opens up, instantly we can see that and conclude that change terribly, very quickly around it. It’s much, much more speedy to do changes in the brand-new delineate environment.” So a new endeavour was created to begin making its own base planneds, the very lowest building block of any really good mapping plan. After that, Apple would begin layering on living place data, high-resolution spacecraft imagery and brand new acutely high-resolution persona data gathered from its floor vehicles until it had what it find was a” excellent in class” mapping product. There is only really one big company on dirt that owns an part planned stack from the ground up: Google. Apple knew it needed to be the other one. Enter the vans. Apple vans spotted Though the overall activity started earlier, the first view most folks had of Apple’s regenerated efforts to build the best Maps product was the vans that started appearing on the roads in 2015 with “Apple Maps” signs on the side. Covered with sensors and cameras, these vans sounded up in various cities and precipitated unrestrained discussion and speculation. The new Apple Maps is likely to be the first time the data collected by these vans is actually used to construct and inform its planneds. This is their came to see you party. Some beings have commented that Apple’s rigs seem most robust than the simple-minded GPS+ Camera layouts on other mapping vehicles — going so far as to say they look more along the lines of something that could be used in autonomous vehicle training. Apple isn’t commenting on autonomous vehicles, but there’s a ground the displays appear more advanced: they are. Earlier this week I took a ride in one of the vans as it led a sample road to reap the kind of data that would go into building the new delineates. Here’s what’s inside. In addition to a beefed-up GPS rig on the roof, four LiDAR regaliums organized at the regions and eight cameras hitting overlapping high-resolution likeness, there’s likewise the standard physical valuing tool attached to a rear wheel that allows for precise tracking of distance and image captivate. In the back there is a surprising lack of bulky rig. Instead, it’s a simple Mac Pro bolted to the floor, attached to an regalium of solid state drives for storage. A single USB cable itineraries up to the dashboard where the actual mapping-capture application races on an iPad. While mapping, a driver…drives, while an operator takes care of the roadway, guarantee that a coverage neighbourhood that has been assigned is amply driven, as well as monitoring idol capture. Each drive captivates thousands of likeness as well as a full point cloud( a 3D map of cavity be decided upon by flecks that represent surfaces) and GPS data. I subsequently got to consider the raw data presented in 3D and it absolutely looks like the quality of data you would need to begin teaching autonomous vehicles. More on why Apple involves this grade of data detail later. When the images and data are captivated, they are then encrypted on the hover and recorded on to the SSDs. Once full, the SSDs are pulled out, ousted and jam-pack into a speciman, which is delivered to Apple’s data center, where a suite of application extinguishes from the epitomes private info like fronts, license plates and other info. From the moment of capture to the moment they’re cleaned, the objective is encrypted with one key in the van and the other key in the data center. Technicians and software that are part of its mapping exertions down the pipeline from there never encounter unsanitized data. This is just one element of Apple’s focus on the privacy of the data it is apply in New Maps. Probe data and privacy Throughout every conference I have with all member states of the team throughout the day, privacy is brought up, underlined . em> This is obviously by design, as Apple wants to impress upon me as a columnist that it’s making this very seriously certainly, but it doesn’t change the facts of the case that it’s clearly built in from the ground up and I could not find a untrue tone in any of the technical says or those discussions I had. Indeed, from the data security tribes to the people whose position it is to actually oblige the planneds work well, the constant avoid is that Apple does not experience that it is being held back in any way by not hoovering every segment of customer-rich data it is feasible to, storing and parsing it. The consistent message is that the team feels it can deliver a high-quality navigation, point and mapping produce without the directly personal data used by other platforms. “We specifically don’t collect data, even from phase A to target B, ” memo Cue. “We collect data — when we get it on — in an anonymous pattern, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that ran from stage A to station B. We’re mustering the some part of it. As you can imagine, that’s always been a key part of doing this. Honestly, we don’t think it buys us anything[ to obtain more ]. We’re not losing any boasts or capabilities by doing this.” The segments that he is referring to are shredded out of any made person’s sailing time. Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers , not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the” dirt fact” data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this” examination data” was sent out from iPhones. Because merely random segments of any person’s drive is ever mailed and that data is entirely anonymized, there is never a road to tell if any expedition was ever a single individual. The local arrangement clues the IDs and simply it knows to whom that ID directs. Apple is running very hard here to not know anything about its useds. This kind of privacy can’t be added on at the end, it has to be woven in at the ground level. Because Apple’s business model does not rely on it serving to you, do, an ad for a Chevron on your route, it doesn’t is a requirement to even tie advertise identifiers to users. Any personalization or Siri askings are all handled on-board by the iOS device’s processor. So if you get a drive notification that is to say it’s time to leave for your travel, that’s learned, retained and delivered locally, not from Apple’s servers. That’s not new, but it’s important to document given the brand-new act to take away now: Apple is flipping on the dominance of having millions of iPhones passively and actively to strengthen their mapping data in real time. In short: Commerce, real-time road conditions, artery systems, new construction and changes in pedestrian walkways are about to get a plenty better in Apple Maps. The confidential sauce here is what Apple announces probe data. Basically little slices of vector data that represent tendency and fast channelled back to Apple wholly anonymized with no way to confine it to a specific consumer or even any opened expedition. It’s contacting in and sipping a tiny amount of data from millions of users instead, paying it a holistic, real-time video without accommodation user privacy. If you’re driving, sauntering or cycling, your iPhone can already tell this. Now if it knows you’re driving, the committee is also can send relevant freight and routing data regarding these anonymous flakes to improve the entire work. This only happens if your Maps app has been active, say you check the map, look for attitudes, etc. If you’re actively abusing your GPS for moving or driving, then the updates are more precise and can help with go improvements like mapping new pedestrian paths through ballparks — building out the map’s overall quality. All of this, of course, is governed by whether you opted into orientation assistances, and can be toggled off consuming the planneds location toggle in the Privacy section of settings. Apple says that this will have a near zero impact on battery life or data application, because you’re already applying the’ maps’ boasts when any probe data is shared and it’s a fraction of what power is being drawn by those activities. From the top gloom on up But delineates cannot lives on foot faith and mobile data alone. Apple is also assembling brand-new high-resolution satellite data to combination with its dirt truism the necessary data for a solid cornerstone planned. It’s then layering satellite imagery on top of that to better calculate foliage, pathways, plays facilities, build figures and pathways. After the downstream data has been cleaned up of registration plate and faces, it gets run through a cluster of computer perception programming to pull out residences, street signeds and other points of interest. These are cross referenced to publicly available data like homes held by the city and new construction of vicinities or roadways that comes from metropoli planning departments. But one of the special sauce flecks that Apple is adding to the mix of mapping tools is a full-on level mas that delineates in 3D “the worlds” all over the mapping van. This allows them all kinds of opportunities to better understand what items are street mansions( retro-reflective rectangular object about 15 hoofs off the grind? Maybe a street indicate) or stop mansions or velocity restraint signs. It seems like it also could enable positioning of sailing arrows in 3D infinite for AR navigation, but Apple declined to comment on” any future schemes” for such things. Apple also exploits semantic segmentation and Deep Lambertian Networks to analyze the point cloud coupled with the persona data captured by the car and from high-resolution satellites in sync. This allows 3D identification of objects, ratifies, roads of congestion and builds and break into categories that can be highlighted for easy discovery. The coupling of high-resolution likenes data from auto and spacecraft, plus a 3D level mas, decisions in Apple now being able to produce full orthogonal renovations of city streets with compositions in place. This is massively higher-resolution and easier to read, visually. And it’s synchronized with the “panoramic” images from the car, the moon look and the raw data. These techniques are used in self-driving lotions because they provide a really holistic panorama of what’s going on around the car. But the ortho panorama can do even more for human viewers of the data by enabling them to “see” through brushing or tree make that are typically obscure roads, builds and addresses. This is hugely important when it comes to the next step in Apple’s battle for supremely accurate and useful Maps: human editors. Apple has had a team of implement developers use specific on a toolkit that can be used by human journalists to vet and parse data, street by street. The editor’s collection includes tools that allow human editors to delegate specific geometries to flyover buildings( contemplate Salesforce tower’s unique ridged dome) that enables them to be instantly conspicuous. It makes journalists look at real idols of street mansions shot by the car right next to 3D reconstructions of the stage and computer perception spotting of the same mansions, instantly recognizing them as accurate or not. Another tool chastens addresses, giving an journalist immediately move an address to the center of a building, determine whether they’re misplaced and change them around. It also allows for access points to be rectified, shaping Apple Maps smarter about the” last 50 feet” of your wander. You’ve shaped it to the building, but what street is the admittance actually on? And how do you get into the driveway? With a got a couple of sounds, an writer can fix that permanently visible. When you look at residences like San Francisco or big cities from that perspective ,” answers Cue,” you have addresses where the address mention is a certain street, but really, the entryway in the building is on another street. They’ve done that because they want the better street honour. Those are the kinds of things that our brand-new Maps really is going to shine on. We’re going to make sure that we’re making “youve got to” precisely the right place , not a lieu that might be really close by.” Water, swimming pool( new to Maps perfectly ), boasting the regions and vegetation are now most prominent and fleshed out thanks to brand-new computer vision and satellite imagery lotions. So Apple had to build editing tools for those, as well. Many hundreds of editors will be using these tools, in addition to the thousands of hires Apple already has is currently working on delineates, but the tools had to be built first , now that Apple is no longer relying on third parties to vet and proper issues. And the team also had to build computer seeing and machine learning tools that allow it to determine whether there are issues to be found at all. Anonymous probe data from iPhones, envisaged, looks like thousands of scatters, ebbing and spurting across a entanglement of streets and walkways, like a luminescent entanglement of dye. At first, chaos. Then, patterns rise. A street opens for business, and nearby drums spout orange blood into the brand-new route. A signal is provoked and an writer glances to see if a new road need to see a specify assigned. A brand-new intersection is added to the web and an journalist is signalled is responsible for ensuring that the left gyrate paths connect accurately from all the regions of the overlapping mantles of directional congestion. This has the added benefit of massively improved aisle lead in the brand-new Apple Maps. Apple is counting on this compounding of human and AI pennant to allow journalists to first workmanship basi delineates and then likewise to be retained as the ever-changing biomass unleashes ravage on roads, places and the occasional park. Here there be Helvetica Apple’s new Maps, like many other digital delineates, spectacle enormously differently is dependent on flake. If you’re zoomed out, you get less item. If you zoom in, you get more. But Apple has a crew of cartographers on faculty that work on more artistic, regional and aesthetic heights to ensure that its Maps are intelligible, recognizable and useful. These crews have goals that are at once concrete and a bit out there — in the best heritages of Apple pursuits that meet the technological with the artistic. The maps required to usable, but they also need to fulfill cognitive destinations on cultural levels that go beyond what any given user might know they need. For instance, in the U.S ., it is very common to have delineates that have a relatively low level of detail even at a medium zoom. In Japan, nonetheless, the delineates are utterly parcelled with details at the same zoom, because that increased information density is what is expected by users. This is the department of details. They’ve restored replicas of several hundred actual superhighway indicates is responsible for ensuring that the shield on your navigation screen parallels the one you’re discovering on the superhighway artery indicate. When it comes to modes of public transport, Apple licensed all of the type fronts that you visualize on your favorite subway systems, like Helvetica for NYC. And the line numbers are in the exact same order that you’re going to see them on the platform signs. It’s all about reducing the cognitive laden that it takes to alter the physical world you have to steer into the digital nature representatives to Maps. Bottom line The new explanation of Apple Maps is currently in preview next week with exactly the Bay Area of California moving live. It will be hemmed seamlessly into the “current” version of Maps, but the difference in quality elevation “mustve been” instantly conspicuous based on what I’ve seen so far. Better road structures, more pedestrian information, athletics orbits like baseball diamonds and basketball courts, more shore cros, including grass and trees, represented on the map, as well as builds, constructing shapes and sizes that are more accurate. A map that feels more like the real world you’re actually traveling through. Search is also being rewrote to make sure that you get most relevant solutions( on the correct continents) than ever before. Navigation, peculiarly pedestrian advice, too gets a big improve. Parking the regions and build details to get you the last few hoofs to your end are included, as well. What you won’t attend, for now, is a full visual redesign. “You’re not going to see huge blueprint changes on the delineates, ” suggests Cue. “We don’t want to combine those two things at the same time because it would effect a lot of confusion.” Apple Maps is get the long-awaited attention it actually deserves. By making ownership of the project amply, Apple is committing itself to actually causing the map that users expected of it from the beginning. It’s been a lingering dark on iPhones, extremely, where alternatives like Google Maps have offered most robust piece defines that are so easy to compare against the native app but inconceivable to access at the deep organization level. The argument has been made ad nauseam, but it’s usefulnes doing again that if Apple thinks that planning is important enough to own, it should own it. And that’s what it’s trying to do now. “We don’t think there’s anybody doing this position of study that we’re doing, ” contributes Cue. “We haven’t announced this. We haven’t told anybody about this. It’s one of those occasions that we’ve been able to keep pretty much trade secrets. Nobody certainly knows about it. We’re energized to get it out there. Over the following financial year, we’ll be reeling it out, segment by segment in the U.S.” Read more: https :// techcrunch.com/ 2018/06/ 29/ apple-is-rebuilding-maps-from-the-ground-up /~ ATAGEND http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/07/21/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-from-the-ground-up/

[multi-mused-menagerie]

━━━━━ ✮ TAG DROP | TSURUMAKI KOKORO

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✮ no matter how much i space out; i bump into encounters | musings; tsurumaki kokoro

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✮ during day; during night; during morning; im singing so loud | music; tsurumaki kokoro

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✮ of course; i smile with a smile | visuals; tsurumaki kokoro

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✮ even during class i unconsciously research musicianship | starter call; tsurumaki kokoro

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✮ even though we didnt promise so; we unintentionally get together after school | open starter; tsurumaki kokoro

✮ no matter where the place the members are gathered is; its instantly our stage | closed starter; tsurumaki kokoro

✮ adults say so; they say we’ll fail doing only the things we love… | dash comm; tsurumaki kokoro

✮ …but is that true; what will we do | dash games; tsurumaki kokoro

✮ smiles to the world; hello happy world | untold verse; tsurumaki kokoro

✮ well sing a song that will make the whole world smile and well bring the fun to you | main verse; tsurumaki kokoro

✮ blindness; blindness; i want blindness which realizes the only happy truth | bsd verse; tsurumaki kokoro

✮ but ill make sure that we are for real for your name is juliet | tsurumaki kokoro x seta kaoru; amlgmation

✮ if it would please you come with me; throw everything away and well run to the land of the east | tsurumaki kokoro x seta kaoru; oflegends

[mastcomm]

At the Stroke of Brexit, Britain Steps, Guardedly, Into a New Dawn

LONDON — To the recorded peals of Big Ben and the gentle fluttering of Union Jacks, Britain bade farewell to the European Union at 11 p.m. on Friday, severing ties to the world’s largest trading bloc after nearly half a century and embarking on an uncertain future as a midsize economy off the coast of Europe.

For Britain, having transitioned in the postwar era from a globe-girdling empire to a reluctant member of the European project, it was yet another epoch-making departure.

It is a departure that will upend settled relations in virtually all areas of society, the economy and security matters, while confronting Britain with new questions of national identity. Three and a half years after the former prime minister, Theresa May, proclaimed that “Brexit means Brexit,” the British government will finally have to decide precisely what that means.

Britain must still negotiate its future trade relations with the European Union, a thorny process that could take through the end of the year, or longer.

On Friday, the departure elicited both hope and trepidation from Britons. Many simply were relieved that the bitter and divisive debate over Brexit is over.

“This is the moment when the dawn breaks, and the curtain goes up on a new act in our great national drama,” said Prime Minister Boris Johnson, in an address to the nation on Friday night that he also posted on his Twitter account. Brexit, he said, was a chance to “spread hope and opportunity to every part of the U.K.”

Mr. Johnson, whose vow to “Get Brexit Done” won him a commanding majority in elections last month, vowed to knit together a country that had been split geographically and generationally by the Brexit debate. Even the future of the United Kingdom now seemed uncertain, with Scotland threatening to renew its drive for independence and Northern Ireland musing about unification with Ireland.

On Friday, Mr. Johnson’s cabinet met in Sunderland, an industrial city in the north, a traditional Labour stronghold where the early returns after the referendum in June 2016 foretold the country’s stunning decision to leave the European Union. The prime minister celebrated Brexit as a triumph for self-government, and promised to undertake the “biggest revival of our infrastructure since the Victorians.”

For all the historical resonance, the celebrations of Britain’s departure were oddly attenuated. A countdown clock flickered on the darkened wall of 10 Downing Street, while inside the prime minister hosted a party with British-sourced food and English sparkling wine.

British embassies were instructed to hold low-key affairs — no special events — and to avoid anything that smacked of “triumphalism.”

In a chilly Parliament Square, several thousand Brexiteers gather to sing “God Save the Queen” as the clock struck 11 p.m. Even the timing of the exit seemed a compromise: the European Union decided to make Britain’s departure effective at midnight in its Brussels headquarters.

Some British commentators complained that the Europeans made a greater show of Britain’s leaving, which they had opposed, than Britain did. Brussels staged a light show in the Grand Place on Thursday, while members of the European Parliament serenaded their departing British colleagues with “Auld Lang Syne.”

The ambivalence attested to the divisions that still run through Britain. Pro-Europe activists were despairing, some channeling their anger into efforts to help Europeans in London navigate the reality of reduced rights and a more tenuous life in a country they had long made their home.

Still, even the most vociferous opponents of Brexit seemed eager to end, or at least suspend, the toxic debate, make the best of the outcome and try to forge a new relationship with the European Union more to their liking.

“Britain can alter its political relationship with Europe, but it can’t alter its historical or geographical relationship and, in the end, we’ll have to find a way of working together,” Tony Blair, a former prime minister and ardent opponent of Brexit, said on Friday to foreign journalists in London.

“It’s a destiny-changing decision and obviously it’s one I’m profoundly sad about,” said Mr. Blair, who had his own struggles with Britain’s fitful relationship with Europe. “But you’ve got to take a big historical look at this.”

As Britain casts off from Europe, Mr. Johnson hopes to deepen his country’s alliance with the United States, starting with a trade deal that the government wants to negotiate in tandem with its agreement with the European Union. President Trump avidly encouraged Brexit and his emissary welcomed Britain’s new status.

“America shares your optimism and excitement about the many opportunities the future will bring,” Robert Wood Johnson IV, the United States ambassador to Britain, said in a statement.

Yet, doubts remained about what sort of a trade deal Britain could expect from President Trump.

“He believes in America first,” said Kim Darroch, the former ambassador to the United States, in an interview with the Guardian. “And he believes, particularly, in rewarding people who vote for him — and that is American farmers and big American corporations.”

For Mr. Johnson, whose capacious Parliamentary majority leaves him with few domestic constraints, the question is which sectors of the economy to prioritize and what trade-offs to make in the post-Brexit era.

His government argues that by freeing itself from European regulation, it could become a leader in new technologies like artificial intelligence. As Mr. Johnson’s influential adviser, Dominic Cummings, once put it, Britain can become the best place for those who want to “invent the future.”

Yet in leaving Europe’s single market and customs union, Britain is sacrificing the smooth and frictionless flow of goods across its borders — something businesses currently take for granted.

Whatever the outcome of the trade talks, exporters and importers will almost certainly face extra layers of bureaucracy and border checks. That will affect industries, from aerospace to food, and could cost jobs in parts of the country where Mr. Johnson’s Conservatives won unexpected victories in last month’s general election.

Formal negotiations between London and Brussels are expected to start in late February or early March. Mr. Johnson has insisted they must conclude this year, but critics say the timetable is unrealistic.

Though the European Union is the far bigger economic entity, it is wary of allowing Britain to become a competitor with lighter regulations, which could undercut European producers. Its goal will be to extract pledges from Britain not to dilute its environmental, labor, or antitrust rules.

Britain will probably want to negotiate everything simultaneously, while also engaging in talks with the United States and other nations — a strategy that it hopes will increase its leverage. In Sunderland, Mr. Johnson said he hoped to strike deals covering 80 percent of British trade within three years.

In time, Brexit will overhaul how the country trades. But well before that, the split has sent tremors through the lives of Europeans who make their homes in Britain, instantly unraveling the promise that they could live and work there without question.

For British cities shaped by waves of migration, none more so than London, the change could be seismic. In shops, restaurants and cultural centers, Europeans talk of going back to their home countries sooner than planned. They bemoan the application required to stay. And those who might once have taken their place are increasingly choosing not to come at all.

“Through no fault of their own, people who thought they had forever built their lives on their rights as European Union citizens are all of a sudden having the rug pulled out from under them,” said Maike Bohn, a co-founder of the3million, a group that promotes European citizens’ rights.

When the links between Britain and the European Union are severed at the end of the transition period, European citizens’ rights to live and work in Britain will end, as will the rights of Britons to move and work throughout the bloc.

For Britons, too, the date of Britain’s departure hardly means an end to rancorous debates that have split families and friends over the last three years. The wounds remain raw. And the labels born of Brexit — Remainers who fought to keep Britain in the European Union, and Leavers who fought to do the opposite — have yet to wear off.

Amanda Chetwynd-Cowieson, a co-founder of For our Future’s Sake, a youth-led group that campaigned to hold a new Brexit referendum last year, said there was only so much healing that could happen while the battle over what kind of Brexit Britain should pursue rages on.

Coming from a family with many members who supported Leave, and from a part of England that voted to leave, she said the three years of turmoil were still taking their toll.

“We’ll have a couple months of people trying not to talk about it again, trying to pretend it’s not a thing that’s happening, trying not to bring it up at dinner,” Ms. Chetwynd-Cowieson said. “But realistically it’s not going to be sorted in a year. It’s going to start rearing its head and opening divisions within families again.”

Mr. Blair, the former prime minister, warned that Mr. Johnson would have to work hard to prevent the breakup of the country, given renewed calls for Scottish independence and Irish unification.

A majority in Scotland and Northern Ireland voted against Brexit in 2016, and on Friday evening, the headquarters of the Scottish government in Edinburgh was lit up in the colors of the European flag.

Mr. Blair acknowledged that the British had always been ambivalent about European integration. But he said, “the tragedy is that it was actually quite a successful relationship.” Those who dream of Britain rejoining the bloc one day will have to wait for a while, he added.

“Who knows?” Mr. Blair said. “The thing I’m sure about is that there’s no point in occupying a lot of time on that now.”

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/at-the-stroke-of-brexit-britain-steps-guardedly-into-a-new-dawn/

[ethelbertpaul444-blog]

Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up

I’m not sure if you’re aware, but the launching of Apple Maps went inadequately. After a rough firstly impression, an apology from the CEO, many years of patching holes with data partnerships and some hints of flame with long-awaited transit tendencies and improvements in business, parking and sit data, Apple Maps is still not where it needs to be to be considered a world-class service. Maps demands fixing. Apple, it is about to change, is aware of this, so it’s re-building the maps part of Maps. It’s doing this by exerting first-party data gathered by iPhones with a privacy-first methodology and its own fleet of cars bundled with sensors and cameras. The new product will launch in San Francisco and the Bay Area with the next iOS 12 beta and will cross Northern California by fall. Every version of iOS will get the updated delineates eventually, and they will be more responsive to changes in roads and structure, more visually rich is dependent on the specific context they’re viewed in and piece more detailed ground cover, foliage, funds, pedestrian pathways and more. This is nothing less than a full re-set of Maps and it’s been four years in the making, which is when Apple began to develop its new data-gathering plans. Eventually, Apple will no longer rely on third-party data to provide the basis for its planneds, which has been one of its major pitfalls from the beginning. “Since we pioneered this six years ago — we won’t rehash all the issues we’ve had when we introduced it — we’ve done a huge investing in get the delineate up to equality, ” articulates Apple SVP Eddy Cue, who are currently owns Maps, in an interview last week.“When we launched, a lot of it was all about tendencies and getting to a certain place. Find the place and getting attitudes to that lieu. We’ve done a huge asset of inducing millions of changes, contributing millions of locations, informing the map and changing the delineate most frequently. All of those thoughts over the past six years.” But, Cue supposes, Apple has room improvements to the quality of Maps, something that most useds would agree on, even with recent advancements. “We wanted to make this to the next stage, ” suggests Cue. “We have been working on trying to create what we hope is going to be the best delineate app in the world, taking it to the next step. That is constructing all of our own delineate data regarding the ground up.” In addition to Cue, I spoke to Apple VP Patrice Gautier and more than a dozen Apple Maps squad representatives at its planning headquarters in California this week about its efforts to re-build Maps, and to do it in such a way that be in conformity with Apple’s very public posture on user privacy. If, like me, you’re wondering whether Apple thought of improving its own planneds from scratch before it propelled Maps, the answer is yes. At the time, there was a choice to be made about whether or not it wanted to be in the business of planneds at all. Returned that the future of mobile designs was growing clearly articulated, it knew that planning would be at the core of nearly every aspect of its maneuvers, from photos to tacks to locating services available to apps. Decision stirred, Apple plowed ahead, constructing a product that relied on a patchwork of data from partners like TomTom, OpenStreetMap and other geo data dealers. The cause was underwhelming. Almost immediately after Apple launched Maps, it realized that it was going to need help and it indicated on a assortment of additional data providers to fill the gaps in location, base map, point-of-interest and business data. It wasn’t enough. “We decided to do this just over four years ago. We remarked,’ Where do we are seeking to take Planneds? What are the things that we are seeking to do in Maps ?’ We realized that, contributed what we wanted to do and where we wanted to take it, we needed to do this ourselves, ” supposes Cue. Because Maps are so core to so many offices, success wasn’t confined to really one capacity. Maps needed to be great at transit, driving and marching — but too as a practicality used by apps for point service and other functions. Cue says that Apple required to own all of the data that goes into making a planned, and to restrain it from a better quality as well as a privacy perspective. There’s also the matter of adjustments, updates and changes recruiting a long loop-the-loop of submission to validation to update when you’re dealing with external spouses. The Maps team would have to be able to correct roads, pathways and other updating is available in periods or less , not months. Not to mention the potential competitive advantages it could benefiting from building and revising commerce data regarding hundreds of millions of iPhones, rather than relying on spouse data. Cue points to the proliferation of designs racing iOS , now over a billion, as a choosing ingredient to change its process. “We felt like because the shift to devices had happened — building a map today in the way that we were traditionally doing it, the path that it was being done — we could improve things vastly, and improve them in different ways, ” he announces. “One is more accuracy. Two is being able to update the delineate faster based on the data and the things that we’re ensure, as opposed to driving again or get the information where the customer’s proactively telling us. What if we could actually see it before all of those things? ” I query him on the rapidity of Maps updates, and whether this new map philosophy intends faster changes for users. “The truth is that Maps needs to be[ informed more ], and even are today, ” responds Cue. “We’ll be doing this even more with our brand-new maps,[ with] the ability to change the map in real epoch and often. We do that every day today. This is expanding us to enable us to make love across everything in the planned. Today, there’s certain things that make longer to change. “For example, a road network is something that takes a much longer time to change currently. In the new map infrastructure, we can change that relatively quickly. If a new street opens up, instantly we can see that and conclude that change terribly, very quickly around it. It’s much, much more speedy to do changes in the brand-new delineate environment.” So a new endeavour was created to begin making its own base planneds, the very lowest building block of any really good mapping plan. After that, Apple would begin layering on living place data, high-resolution spacecraft imagery and brand new acutely high-resolution persona data gathered from its floor vehicles until it had what it find was a” excellent in class” mapping product. There is only really one big company on dirt that owns an part planned stack from the ground up: Google. Apple knew it needed to be the other one. Enter the vans. Apple vans spotted Though the overall activity started earlier, the first view most folks had of Apple’s regenerated efforts to build the best Maps product was the vans that started appearing on the roads in 2015 with “Apple Maps” signs on the side. Covered with sensors and cameras, these vans sounded up in various cities and precipitated unrestrained discussion and speculation. The new Apple Maps is likely to be the first time the data collected by these vans is actually used to construct and inform its planneds. This is their came to see you party. Some beings have commented that Apple’s rigs seem most robust than the simple-minded GPS+ Camera layouts on other mapping vehicles — going so far as to say they look more along the lines of something that could be used in autonomous vehicle training. Apple isn’t commenting on autonomous vehicles, but there’s a ground the displays appear more advanced: they are. Earlier this week I took a ride in one of the vans as it led a sample road to reap the kind of data that would go into building the new delineates. Here’s what’s inside. In addition to a beefed-up GPS rig on the roof, four LiDAR regaliums organized at the regions and eight cameras hitting overlapping high-resolution likeness, there’s likewise the standard physical valuing tool attached to a rear wheel that allows for precise tracking of distance and image captivate. In the back there is a surprising lack of bulky rig. Instead, it’s a simple Mac Pro bolted to the floor, attached to an regalium of solid state drives for storage. A single USB cable itineraries up to the dashboard where the actual mapping-capture application races on an iPad. While mapping, a driver…drives, while an operator takes care of the roadway, guarantee that a coverage neighbourhood that has been assigned is amply driven, as well as monitoring idol capture. Each drive captivates thousands of likeness as well as a full point cloud( a 3D map of cavity be decided upon by flecks that represent surfaces) and GPS data. I subsequently got to consider the raw data presented in 3D and it absolutely looks like the quality of data you would need to begin teaching autonomous vehicles. More on why Apple involves this grade of data detail later. When the images and data are captivated, they are then encrypted on the hover and recorded on to the SSDs. Once full, the SSDs are pulled out, ousted and jam-pack into a speciman, which is delivered to Apple’s data center, where a suite of application extinguishes from the epitomes private info like fronts, license plates and other info. From the moment of capture to the moment they’re cleaned, the objective is encrypted with one key in the van and the other key in the data center. Technicians and software that are part of its mapping exertions down the pipeline from there never encounter unsanitized data. This is just one element of Apple’s focus on the privacy of the data it is apply in New Maps. Probe data and privacy Throughout every conference I have with all member states of the team throughout the day, privacy is brought up, underlined . em> This is obviously by design, as Apple wants to impress upon me as a columnist that it’s making this very seriously certainly, but it doesn’t change the facts of the case that it’s clearly built in from the ground up and I could not find a untrue tone in any of the technical says or those discussions I had. Indeed, from the data security tribes to the people whose position it is to actually oblige the planneds work well, the constant avoid is that Apple does not experience that it is being held back in any way by not hoovering every segment of customer-rich data it is feasible to, storing and parsing it. The consistent message is that the team feels it can deliver a high-quality navigation, point and mapping produce without the directly personal data used by other platforms. “We specifically don’t collect data, even from phase A to target B, ” memo Cue. “We collect data — when we get it on — in an anonymous pattern, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that ran from stage A to station B. We’re mustering the some part of it. As you can imagine, that’s always been a key part of doing this. Honestly, we don’t think it buys us anything[ to obtain more ]. We’re not losing any boasts or capabilities by doing this.” The segments that he is referring to are shredded out of any made person’s sailing time. Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers , not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the” dirt fact” data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this” examination data” was sent out from iPhones. Because merely random segments of any person’s drive is ever mailed and that data is entirely anonymized, there is never a road to tell if any expedition was ever a single individual. The local arrangement clues the IDs and simply it knows to whom that ID directs. Apple is running very hard here to not know anything about its useds. This kind of privacy can’t be added on at the end, it has to be woven in at the ground level. Because Apple’s business model does not rely on it serving to you, do, an ad for a Chevron on your route, it doesn’t is a requirement to even tie advertise identifiers to users. Any personalization or Siri askings are all handled on-board by the iOS device’s processor. So if you get a drive notification that is to say it’s time to leave for your travel, that’s learned, retained and delivered locally, not from Apple’s servers. That’s not new, but it’s important to document given the brand-new act to take away now: Apple is flipping on the dominance of having millions of iPhones passively and actively to strengthen their mapping data in real time. In short: Commerce, real-time road conditions, artery systems, new construction and changes in pedestrian walkways are about to get a plenty better in Apple Maps. The confidential sauce here is what Apple announces probe data. Basically little slices of vector data that represent tendency and fast channelled back to Apple wholly anonymized with no way to confine it to a specific consumer or even any opened expedition. It’s contacting in and sipping a tiny amount of data from millions of users instead, paying it a holistic, real-time video without accommodation user privacy. If you’re driving, sauntering or cycling, your iPhone can already tell this. Now if it knows you’re driving, the committee is also can send relevant freight and routing data regarding these anonymous flakes to improve the entire work. This only happens if your Maps app has been active, say you check the map, look for attitudes, etc. If you’re actively abusing your GPS for moving or driving, then the updates are more precise and can help with go improvements like mapping new pedestrian paths through ballparks — building out the map’s overall quality. All of this, of course, is governed by whether you opted into orientation assistances, and can be toggled off consuming the planneds location toggle in the Privacy section of settings. Apple says that this will have a near zero impact on battery life or data application, because you’re already applying the’ maps’ boasts when any probe data is shared and it’s a fraction of what power is being drawn by those activities. From the top gloom on up But delineates cannot lives on foot faith and mobile data alone. Apple is also assembling brand-new high-resolution satellite data to combination with its dirt truism the necessary data for a solid cornerstone planned. It’s then layering satellite imagery on top of that to better calculate foliage, pathways, plays facilities, build figures and pathways. After the downstream data has been cleaned up of registration plate and faces, it gets run through a cluster of computer perception programming to pull out residences, street signeds and other points of interest. These are cross referenced to publicly available data like homes held by the city and new construction of vicinities or roadways that comes from metropoli planning departments. But one of the special sauce flecks that Apple is adding to the mix of mapping tools is a full-on level mas that delineates in 3D “the worlds” all over the mapping van. This allows them all kinds of opportunities to better understand what items are street mansions( retro-reflective rectangular object about 15 hoofs off the grind? Maybe a street indicate) or stop mansions or velocity restraint signs. It seems like it also could enable positioning of sailing arrows in 3D infinite for AR navigation, but Apple declined to comment on” any future schemes” for such things. Apple also exploits semantic segmentation and Deep Lambertian Networks to analyze the point cloud coupled with the persona data captured by the car and from high-resolution satellites in sync. This allows 3D identification of objects, ratifies, roads of congestion and builds and break into categories that can be highlighted for easy discovery. The coupling of high-resolution likenes data from auto and spacecraft, plus a 3D level mas, decisions in Apple now being able to produce full orthogonal renovations of city streets with compositions in place. This is massively higher-resolution and easier to read, visually. And it’s synchronized with the “panoramic” images from the car, the moon look and the raw data. These techniques are used in self-driving lotions because they provide a really holistic panorama of what’s going on around the car. But the ortho panorama can do even more for human viewers of the data by enabling them to “see” through brushing or tree make that are typically obscure roads, builds and addresses. This is hugely important when it comes to the next step in Apple’s battle for supremely accurate and useful Maps: human editors. Apple has had a team of implement developers use specific on a toolkit that can be used by human journalists to vet and parse data, street by street. The editor’s collection includes tools that allow human editors to delegate specific geometries to flyover buildings( contemplate Salesforce tower’s unique ridged dome) that enables them to be instantly conspicuous. It makes journalists look at real idols of street mansions shot by the car right next to 3D reconstructions of the stage and computer perception spotting of the same mansions, instantly recognizing them as accurate or not. Another tool chastens addresses, giving an journalist immediately move an address to the center of a building, determine whether they’re misplaced and change them around. It also allows for access points to be rectified, shaping Apple Maps smarter about the” last 50 feet” of your wander. You’ve shaped it to the building, but what street is the admittance actually on? And how do you get into the driveway? With a got a couple of sounds, an writer can fix that permanently visible. When you look at residences like San Francisco or big cities from that perspective ,” answers Cue,” you have addresses where the address mention is a certain street, but really, the entryway in the building is on another street. They’ve done that because they want the better street honour. Those are the kinds of things that our brand-new Maps really is going to shine on. We’re going to make sure that we’re making “youve got to” precisely the right place , not a lieu that might be really close by.” Water, swimming pool( new to Maps perfectly ), boasting the regions and vegetation are now most prominent and fleshed out thanks to brand-new computer vision and satellite imagery lotions. So Apple had to build editing tools for those, as well. Many hundreds of editors will be using these tools, in addition to the thousands of hires Apple already has is currently working on delineates, but the tools had to be built first , now that Apple is no longer relying on third parties to vet and proper issues. And the team also had to build computer seeing and machine learning tools that allow it to determine whether there are issues to be found at all. Anonymous probe data from iPhones, envisaged, looks like thousands of scatters, ebbing and spurting across a entanglement of streets and walkways, like a luminescent entanglement of dye. At first, chaos. Then, patterns rise. A street opens for business, and nearby drums spout orange blood into the brand-new route. A signal is provoked and an writer glances to see if a new road need to see a specify assigned. A brand-new intersection is added to the web and an journalist is signalled is responsible for ensuring that the left gyrate paths connect accurately from all the regions of the overlapping mantles of directional congestion. This has the added benefit of massively improved aisle lead in the brand-new Apple Maps. Apple is counting on this compounding of human and AI pennant to allow journalists to first workmanship basi delineates and then likewise to be retained as the ever-changing biomass unleashes ravage on roads, places and the occasional park. Here there be Helvetica Apple’s new Maps, like many other digital delineates, spectacle enormously differently is dependent on flake. If you’re zoomed out, you get less item. If you zoom in, you get more. But Apple has a crew of cartographers on faculty that work on more artistic, regional and aesthetic heights to ensure that its Maps are intelligible, recognizable and useful. These crews have goals that are at once concrete and a bit out there — in the best heritages of Apple pursuits that meet the technological with the artistic. The maps required to usable, but they also need to fulfill cognitive destinations on cultural levels that go beyond what any given user might know they need. For instance, in the U.S ., it is very common to have delineates that have a relatively low level of detail even at a medium zoom. In Japan, nonetheless, the delineates are utterly parcelled with details at the same zoom, because that increased information density is what is expected by users. This is the department of details. They’ve restored replicas of several hundred actual superhighway indicates is responsible for ensuring that the shield on your navigation screen parallels the one you’re discovering on the superhighway artery indicate. When it comes to modes of public transport, Apple licensed all of the type fronts that you visualize on your favorite subway systems, like Helvetica for NYC. And the line numbers are in the exact same order that you’re going to see them on the platform signs. It’s all about reducing the cognitive laden that it takes to alter the physical world you have to steer into the digital nature representatives to Maps. Bottom line The new explanation of Apple Maps is currently in preview next week with exactly the Bay Area of California moving live. It will be hemmed seamlessly into the “current” version of Maps, but the difference in quality elevation “mustve been” instantly conspicuous based on what I’ve seen so far. Better road structures, more pedestrian information, athletics orbits like baseball diamonds and basketball courts, more shore cros, including grass and trees, represented on the map, as well as builds, constructing shapes and sizes that are more accurate. A map that feels more like the real world you’re actually traveling through. Search is also being rewrote to make sure that you get most relevant solutions( on the correct continents) than ever before. Navigation, peculiarly pedestrian advice, too gets a big improve. Parking the regions and build details to get you the last few hoofs to your end are included, as well. What you won’t attend, for now, is a full visual redesign. “You’re not going to see huge blueprint changes on the delineates, ” suggests Cue. “We don’t want to combine those two things at the same time because it would effect a lot of confusion.” Apple Maps is get the long-awaited attention it actually deserves. By making ownership of the project amply, Apple is committing itself to actually causing the map that users expected of it from the beginning. It’s been a lingering dark on iPhones, extremely, where alternatives like Google Maps have offered most robust piece defines that are so easy to compare against the native app but inconceivable to access at the deep organization level. The argument has been made ad nauseam, but it’s usefulnes doing again that if Apple thinks that planning is important enough to own, it should own it. And that’s what it’s trying to do now. “We don’t think there’s anybody doing this position of study that we’re doing, ” contributes Cue. “We haven’t announced this. We haven’t told anybody about this. It’s one of those occasions that we’ve been able to keep pretty much trade secrets. Nobody certainly knows about it. We’re energized to get it out there. Over the following financial year, we’ll be reeling it out, segment by segment in the U.S.” Read more: https :// techcrunch.com/ 2018/06/ 29/ apple-is-rebuilding-maps-from-the-ground-up /~ ATAGEND http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/07/21/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-from-the-ground-up/