#(adopted in this case meaning she was not custom created for someone to show off (like touya is) but keeping her is still a status symbol)

[w1f1n1ghtm4r3]

for the ippikki au card redraws!! haruka's 'this placed ive returned to" trained? :0

this angle is impressively difficult to draw at, but i made it work! the kitty :3

[ijustwant2write]

Grow Up Fast-Fred Weasley x Reader

(GIF credit to @hogwartsfansite​)

Part 2

Tags: @obsessedwithrandomthings​

Masterlist

Prompts List

Requested by anonymous: 'Ohhh your one-shots are amazing! Could you do a cute Fred Weasley one where a baby is abandon near the shop and they Adopt it because the reader and Fred got to attached'

Characters: Fred Weasley x Reader (married), George Weasley x Reader (brother-in-law)

Meanings: (Y/N)=Your name

Warnings: Abandonment/Neglect, adoption/orphanage, lots and lots of fluff

                                       *~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

I placed my hand over my stomach as I felt it rumble, thinking about what I would have for dinner tonight. It had been a long day in the shop, it was becoming busy now, especially with all the children getting ready to go back to Hogwarts. Sighing, I passed by George who had just finished with a customer, deciding that now would be a good time to start cleaning up if we wanted to go home soon.

“I’m going to start tidying up. Call if you need anything.” I explained, receiving a nod from my brother-in-law.

Heading into the stock room, I spotted the pile of cardboard that needed to be taken out to the bins. Although I was tired, I mustered up all of the energy I had left, managing to carry it all outside. Once it had been dumped, I brushed my hands against each other to get rid of any dirt when I heard a strange sound. Freezing on the spot, I listened out once again, hearing a muffled cry. I couldn’t be sure what it was, taking out my wand in case it was something dangerous. Perhaps it was an animal that had escaped one of the shops and had smelt the food thrown out. Slowly and cautiously, I stepped towards the noise, quickly pulling back a piece of cardboard and pointing my wand in that direction, gasping when I saw what was laying there.

A baby lazily swaddled up wriggled around, crying out louder now. I was stunned, not expecting this. Putting my wand away, I carefully picked them up, wrapping the baby up tighter. It was a boy, he couldn’t be older than a few months old, but it wasn’t a newborn. He was still small, and I wondered how long he had been out here. It was cold and wet, he would have surely died if left out here any longer. Going back into the stock room, I perched on a crate, struggling to take off my jacket as I held him, but once off I wrapped it around the baby, providing extra warmth. He wasn’t wailing anymore, he had stopped once he was in my arms. He snuggled his face against me, holding onto as much warmth as he could. Who could leave a baby to defend for itself like this? 

“(Y/N), are you back here?” Fred called out to me, shock showing on his face as soon as he spotted me.

“It’s not mine.” I stupidly said.

Fred’s mouth opened and closed repeatedly, unsure what question to ask first. His eyes remained on the baby as he approached, still baffled by the sight before him.

“(Y/N), what’s going on here?” he finally said.

“I found him by the bins. He was underneath some cardboard, there was no note, there was nothing but this blanket he’s wrapped up in.”

“We’re going to have to call someone, someone official.”

“Can someone come help out here, I would like to go home soon...” George burst in, his words trailing off when he saw what was happening.“Well you kept that quiet, you hardly even showed (Y/N).”

“He’s so cold.” I mumbled, holding the baby closer.

“Poor little fella.” George joined us, smiling down at the child.“Look, let’s shut shop early, then we’ll call around, see who can help us.”

I remained where I was, starting to walk around and rock the child to keep him content. His big, brown eyes stared up at me, he had such lovely eyelashes. For someone who had been left out for who knows how long, he had small smile on his face the entire time. The twins managed to close without me, only Fred returning.

“George is trying to figure out who to contact. No doubt he’ll be taken to an orphanage.” Fred said, wrapping an arm around my waist.

“He’s not made a sound since you left. I didn’t want him to fall asleep either, he’s just so frail.”

“Here, I’ll hold him for a bit.” 

Passing over the baby, I realised how careful we were being, never having actually handled a baby like this before. The shock of finding him had clouded my mind, and now it was clearing once I saw my husband holding the baby. It was quite a sight, this tall man holding someone so tiny in his long arms. Of course we had discussed creating our own family, but that was further down the line. However, I couldn’t help but melt at the sight, imagining this was our own boy. Fred’s toothy grin was contagious, especially when he started cooing and speaking to the baby.

“It looks so natural on you.” I pointed out, standing beside him.

He glanced down at me.“I thought the same thing when I saw you.”

“Fred, are we-”

“Someone has contacted one of the local orphanages, the won’t be able to come for a few hours though. I gave them your home address to pick him up from, is that alright?” George interrupted.

“That’s fine Georgie.” Fred nodded, starting to walk around with the baby.

“I’ll get our things.” I offered, heading back into the shop where our coats were hanging behind the counter.

George followed behind, and I saw out of the corner of my eye that he had a huge grin on his face. As I put on my coat, picking up my scarf, I watched him do the same, though he was almost laughing.

“What’s tickled you Georgie?” I asked, wrapping my scarf around my neck.

“I’m not amused by anything, it was just nice seeing what my brother’s future is going to be like.”

“That’s very sweet.”

“You look great you know, as a family. I know you’re waiting but,you two are going to be great parents.”

“And our children are going to have the best uncle.”

It felt extremely weird to bring a baby home. Luckily there were no neighbours around, it would be a strange story to tell. Fred had wanted to hold him the whole time, and I found it funny that I was becoming a little jealous. I wanted to hold him again. We laid the baby on the bed, grabbing another blanket to lay him down on as well as wrap him in. I took my jacket away, throwing it on top of the pile of washing that needed to be done. Sitting either side of the baby, we found ourselves just staring at him. My hunger from earlier was all but gone, I couldn’t think about anything else.

The baby was flickering his eyes between the both of us, closely watching. It was amazing how infatuated we were, I could watch him all day. He was just too cute. And I loved the adoration in Fred’s eyes, and how he had looked when he held the baby. 

“I wish we had some food to give him.” I frowned, lightly tracing the baby’s soft cheek with my finger.

“He hasn’t started crying again, though I’m worried that’s because he’s weak.” Fred sighed.

“Why would someone just leave him out there?” my breath was shaky, remembering how he looked when I found him.“I understand if people are struggling, but they could have given him to an orphanage.”

“Don’t cry love.” Fred breathed out, getting upset himself, he held one of my hands.

“I’m sorry it’s just so sad. He’s such a beautiful baby boy, I could never leave him, even walking out to get my coat made me feel guilty for leaving him behind.”

“Should we wash him? He’s very dirty.”

“Maybe. I’ve never washed a baby before.”

“How hard could it be?”

“I’ve seen people do it in sinks, should we do that?”

Fred went to fill up the sink with water and find some sort of soap that wouldn’t irritate the baby. For some reason, I laid down beside the baby, giggling when he looked at me and smiled. He was gurgling now, making funny noises as if he was trying to communicate. I spoke to him in a high pitched voice, laughing along with him. As the baby continued wriggling around, kicking his legs erratically, I felt someone watching as. Glancing at the doorway, Fred was stood there, smiling again.

“His bath is ready.” he pointed out, rolling up his sleeves as he left.

“Come on you, let’s get you nice and clean.” I said to the babe, lifting him into my arms once again.

The three of us were laughing non-stop as we bathed the baby. He enjoyed the water, and not being in full control of his limbs, he splashed the water about everywhere. Fred and I were soaked, but it didn’t matter. Fred grabbed a towel, wrapping up the baby and creating a hood for him, it was the cutest thing I had ever seen. I went to get changed, putting on comfy (dry) clothes before I went to swap with Fred. However, as I returned, I realised how quiet it was, melting at the sight I saw in the living room. Fred was relaxed across the sofa with the baby resting on his chest, both of them falling asleep. I didn’t want to ruin the moment; unfortunately it was when there was a knock at the door. My heat sunk as they stirred, and I went to answer the door, realising that it was time to say goodbye. 

A woman was here, she showed me her official badge, thanking me as I let her in. She seemed lovely, very warm and welcoming. I lead her to where Fred was. He was awake, but still cuddling the baby.

“Oh, you two seem to have everything handled here.” the woman said.

“He’s been no bother at all.” Fred explained, not looking at her. 

“Well, cuddle time isn’t over yet, I’ve got some questions about how you found him. Also, I’ve brought him something to drink, I bet the poor thing is starving. It’ll give him some nourishment.”

“That’s good news.”

“Fred, why don’t you get him a clean blanket to wrap him up in. He’ll catch a cold otherwise.” I suggested, sitting down with the woman as he left.

“Have you got any children of your own?” she asked.

“Oh, no we don’t, not yet.”

“Well, you’re both very natural. You both looked very solemn when I arrived. 

“Thank you. And I’m sorry, that was nothing against you obviously. It’s just been...nice to see what the future may look like.”

I answered all of her questions as Fred returned, sitting beside me and feeding the baby. Sometimes I had to repeat questions to him, he was too distracted, even after the baby was done feeding. Time seemed to fly by, because soon enough, the woman was ready to leave. Standing beside Fred, I sadly let him hand over the baby, the woman placing him in a carrier, before saying her goodbyes, thanking us again. We waited by the door, waiting until she had disappeared completely before closing the door. The baby had been sound asleep again, unknowing that he was being taken away. Fred remained silent as he slumped towards the bedroom, and it did seem like something was missing now.

As I followed my husband, I noticed the woman had left a business card behind, for an adoption agency. The name was in beautiful writing, being re-written over and over, her details on the other side. Fiddling with it in my hands, I thought back to what she had said; we looked like naturals. 

Fred and I had hardly said a word to each other as we got ready for bed, even when we were laying down together, his head resting on my chest as I brushed back his ginger hair. All of the lights were off, the sound of rain hitting the window being the only thing I could concentrate on. I sighed before speaking.

“He was lucky we found him.” 

“He was lucky you found him.” he pointed out.

“It was fun, wasn’t it? Even if it was small amount of time.”

“Yeah, he was still a cheeky little thing.”

I kissed his head.“You looked great you know. I...I really enjoyed seeing you with a baby, it was like I had a peek at what we would look like as parents.”

“I was thinking the exact same thing. I know we said we would wait a while but...”

“I mean, we could...”

“Do you...do you feel guilty about him?”

“Thinking about having a baby when we just found a baby who needs a home?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, I do.”

“(Y/N),” Fred propped himself up, now looking down at me,“it’s pretty clear we’re on the same page here.”

I laughed.“You really want to adopt him?”

“I just have this feeling about him.”

“No, you’re attached to him.”

He chuckled.“I guess I am.”

“That’s not a bad thing. She did leave a card, we could contact them in the morning.”

“Looks like it was fate.”

I smirked.“If we’re going to be having a baby soon, we should probably make the most of our last nights together.”

“If I didn’t know any better, I would say you were a bad influence on me.”

“We might be responsible parents soon, let’s live a little before that happens.” 

[lady-of-the-lotus]

It’s not Wei Wuxian’s fault that A-Yuan thinks he’s a rabbit, or Jiang Cheng’s fault that toddler Jin Ling used to Zidian to short out the city’s power grid, or Xue Yang’s fault that little A-Qing was strapped to his chest during a motorcycle joyride down the highway, but they are stuck going to family counseling, along with a bored Lan Wangji, a giggly Xiao Xingchen, an out-to-lunch Lan Xichen, and an indignant Jin Guangyao. A lonely Nie Huaisang gets in on the action by joining all twenty group chats and sending way too many gifs.

And, all the while, a rebellion is brewing on Wangxian’s block, their neighbors driven mad by the incessant midnight duets.

Poor Dr. Wen Qing, child psychologist and therapist extraordinaire. What has she done to deserve this?

Read On AO3!

Or read below if the spirit so moves you:

There’s a letter nailed to the door when they arrive home.

Wei Wuxian rips the letter from the nail and reads it aloud.

“ ‘We, the undersigned, do hereby declare Wei Wuxian and Lan Wanji to be persona non grata on Cultivator Court for the following reasons: One: Wild animals leaving unspeakable ‘presents’ on our lawns—’ ”

Wei Wuxian looks up. “That would be Lil’ Apple. Do they sell donkey diapers?”

Lan Wangji unlocks the door. “What else?”

“ ‘Two: Gangs of feral rabbits rampaging through our flower beds!’ –They do have a point here. How they keep getting loose I’ll never know. ‘Number Three: Loud duets at midnight. We get it! You’re in love! Get a soundproof basement or shut the hell up!’ ” Wei Wuxian wrinkles his nose. “Who spit in their bean curd?”

“Where do these people meet, and can I join?” asks Jiang Cheng.

* *  * *

One month earlier:

It's all the daycare’s fault, really. And also the gang’s mutual pediatrician for getting involved and setting them up with a family therapist.

And they all know they should be grateful that the authorities are letting them off easy. But—

Weekly family therapy sessions that double as parenting classes? They all already know how to change diapers and hide the matches and make airplane noises.

And none of it’s not any of their faults. More of a…

“Series of misunderstandings,” explains Wei Wuxian to Dr. Wen Qing. “I’m sure when you hear the full story, you’ll laugh too. Right, Lan Zhan?”

“I don’t think she ever laughs,” whispers Xue Yang to Xiao Xingchen, who can’t see Dr. Wen’s impassive face but dissolves into a fit of giggles anyway.

Jiang Cheng rolls his eyes at the two of them and turns to Dr. Wen. “How long is this going to take? My new fashion line launches next week! I don’t have time for this—ow!” He jerks around at A-Yuan, who's gazing up at him innocently. He glares at Wei Wuxian. “Your carrot-brained little son bit me!”

Wei Wuxian scoops his son up onto his lap. “Don’t worry, A- Yuan, Uncle Cheng didn’t mean it—”

“Thumper!” A-Yuan corrects him.

“I’m sorry. Don’t worry, Thumper , Uncle Cheng didn’t mean it.”

“That’s normal,” says Xue Yang. “ ‘Thumper’?”

Xiao Xingchen hushes him.

“I just meant I’d go for a better name,” Xue Yang goes on. “Like Iago or Mushu if we’re picking from annoying cartoon animals. Doesn’t Thumper get shot?”

“You’re thinking of Bambi,” says Meng Yao irritably. He doesn’t look up from his phone as his finger moves in a blur over the screen. He’s missing several important meetings to be here. “He's the one who gets shot.”

A- Yuan’s eyes are huge. “Bambi gets shot?”

“No, Bambi’s mother gets shot,” Xue Yang explains.

A- Yuan bursts into tears.

Lan Wangji shoots Xue Yang a look that’s pure poison.

Dr. Wen clears her throat. “This is perhaps a good example of the dysfunction that—"

“Don’t worry, Thumper’s parents are just fine!” Wei Wuxian tells A- Yuan, squeezing the boy tighter. “Jiang Cheng, show him their pictures on your phone!”

“Do you think I have cartoon rodents as my wallpaper?”

“Google it!”

“Kid’s got to learn about death sometime.” Xue Yang places a lollipop in A-Yuan’s plump little hand. A-Yuan grins at him through his tears. Xue Yang is the kids’ favorite, to the jealousy of everyone but Xiao Xingchen, who is just as beloved. “See? Now he’ll always remember it as something sweet.”

The entire group gives him a Look, save Xiao Xingchen, who’s smiling and nodding.

Sometimes I think he’s deaf as well as blind , Meng Yao texts the others. There are an endless number of group chats, with most created just to complain about the people not on that specific group chat.

WWX : That’s cruel, but...

Jiang Cheng makes an impatient sound. Jin Ling is perched on his knee, slobbering on his custom lotus-patterned purple leather cell phone case. He takes his phone out of the toddler’s mouth and sets him down on the floor. “Can we move this along? Some of us have better things to do.”

“Yes. Thank you, Mr. Jiang.” Dr. Wen glances around the circle of folding chairs. “Now, do we all know why we’re here? Mr. Xue? Would you like to go first?”

Xue Yang stops picking at his chipped black nail polish. “What?”

“Do you know why you’re here, Mr. Xue?”

“I told A-Qing to stop biting people unless they really deserve it, and besides, she’s fully vaccinated, so I don’t see the problem there—”

“Mr. Xiao? Any ideas?”

Xiao Xingchen clears his throat and shuffles his sandaled feet, nervously smoothing the fringe on his oversized tie-dye poncho. “I’m not exactly sure why we’ve been included in a Jiang family therapy session, to be quite honest.”

“Your husband and daughter have been…implicated in some of the group’s…let’s call them mishaps, and as your daughter has adopted A- Yuan’s rabbit fixa—wait a minute, where is your daughter?”

“Xingchen’s got her,” shrugs Xue Yang.

JC - JGY - WWX - Jin Ling’ Uncles

JGY : *That’s* reassuring...

JGY : They make baby leashes for a reason

WWX : Lan Zhan threatened to buy me one the last time we went to the mall. I was lost for a half hour

JC : Are you sure he wasn’t just trying to lose you in the crowd?

WWX : Actually, I think Lan Zhan *did* buy the leash in the end…

*Jiang Cheng has left the chat*

Dr. Wen inclines her head. “Your husband is beside you, Mr. Xue. Your daughter is not.”

Xue Yang cranes his neck around the room. “I’m sure she’s fine, wherever she is. Unrelated question, are all of the valuables around here locked up, or—?”

“Mr. Xue—”

“We’ll know soon enough anyway. Is there an alarm system? No, don’t tell me. I’d rather be surprised. Be right back.” He tucks his phone inside his ripped black jeans and leaves the room, whistling. The clomp of his heavy combat boots disappears down the hall.

“Don’t worry,” says Xiao Xingchen, who seems to have missed a good half of what his husband has said, as usual. “This happens all the time. A-Qing has an excellent sense of direction.”

WWX - JGY - XY - JC - LWJ - Cabbage Patch Kids

JC : What the hell does that mean? The kid’s like 5

WWX : 3, tops

JC : No way she’s 3. She stole my watch last time she played w Jin Ling

LWJ : Are you certain that wasn’t her father?

NHS : XXC would never hahaha 😭 😭 😭

WWX : Huaisang! Whassup!

NHS:

WWX: You change the chat name again? I like it.

JC: Can he take my place here? This whole thing is inane

WWX : "Inane"! So you *have* been using the Word of the Day calendar Lan Zhan bought you!

JC : Shut up

JGY : Like a 5-year-old stealing a watch makes any more sense than a 3-year-old?

WWX : Oh we’re back on that?

NHS : Who stole who’s what now?

LWJ : *whose

JGY : Jiang Cheng was robbed by a toddler.

JC : Don’t you have some corporate espionage to go do or someone’s job to steal or something?

NHS:

JC: Send one more gif and I reach through your phone and strangle you

NHS:

WWX: Did you watch Shrek again without us? That’s A- Yuan’s fav movie

NHS: ur always so busy w lwj n the baby n playing w ur corpses lately!

Dr. Wen sighs. “All right, then. Who would like to go next? Mr. Jiang? How about you? Phones away, everyone, please.”

Jiang Cheng makes a show of being annoyed at having to look up from his phone. “I shouldn’t even be here. This is idiotic.”

WWX - NHS

WWX: Or “inane”

NHS:

“That’s not what the power company report says, Mr. Jiang. Now, I don’t mean to accuse you of anything, but there are concerns—”

“I swear Zidian was depowered when I gave it to Jin Ling to play with,” Jiang Cheng says irritably. “He teethed on that thing for months as a baby. It’s fine.”

WWX -XY - LWJ - JGY - 🧟 🍬 🐇 🤠

JGY: Did Jiang Cheng just tell a mandated reporter that he let Jin Ling teethe on his magic lightning whip?

XY: dammit Im missing all the good stuff!

LWJ: *I’m

NHS:

JGY: You’re wasting my phone’s memory with these ridiculous gifs.

NHS: *inane gifs

XY: Jiggy why don’t you just have your 🍬 🍭 👦👨 buy you a fancy new phone with more memory?

NHS:

WWX: XY did you find A-Qing?

NHS: He lost A-Qing again?

LWJ: …Again?

XY: NHS do you like your tongue where it is or

NHS:

JGY: ?

XY: fingers. whatever.

WWX: I'm lost too

XY: nvm

JGY: That was edifying.

“Now, Mr. Jiang, I don’t mean to insinuate that you let your three-year-old nephew play unsupervised with a dangerous weapon that mistakenly activated and went on to fry the power grid and knock out all power within a five-mile radius for two weeks—”

JGY: Despicable inefficiency

“—or that you took him to a weapons expo, because, I quote ‘He’s going to have to learn to fight eventually anyway’—”

“It was an archery range.”

WWX - LWJ - NHS - Wen Chao Sucks!

WWX: Start ‘em young

NHS: i think it's inane

NHS: WWX? did LWJ smile at that one?

LWJ: No

WWX: He’s laughing on the inside

NHS: how….inane

“Mr. Jiang? Have you any response?”

Jiang Cheng crosses his arms over his chest. Jin Ling is hopping around on the floor with A- Yuan. Obviously not electrocuted, Jiang Cheng thinks, so what’s the problem? “So when my brother blows out the entire neighborhood’s power doing illegal experiments in his garage it’s okay, but I plug a space heater into the same outlet as a toaster and I’m suddenly the devil incarnate?”

NHS - WWX - JGY - Two Bros & A Guy

NHS : Why would you need a space heater in the kitchen? what I do is turn the oven on and that gets the room all hot

WWX : I think you need a new oven

NHS : Are ovens not supposed to do that??

WWX : Do fridges radiate cold?

NHS : I never thought about it that way 🤔

JGY : In the history of the world, nobody ever has.

WWX : Also, all of my illegal experiments are electricity-free.

JGY : …Jin Ling is never spending the night at your house again.

WWX : I said electricity-FREE!

JGY : Because a fridge full of corpses that you and that psychotic hooligan are trying to raise from the dead is so much better.

WWX : A) it’s a top-of-the-line industrial freezer, not a fridge, and B) those corpses were ethically-sourced—locally-sourced, anyway—

NHS : free-range & organic

WWX : zip it Huaisang

NHS : 🐓

Dr. Wen taps her clipboard with her pen. “Mr. Jiang, nobody's accusing you of anything. This is simply—”

“Whatever. What about him?” Jiang Cheng jerks a thumb at Meng Yao. “At least I didn’t set fire to anything.”

Meng Yao straightens up indignantly. “That was an accident!”

Dr. Wen looks like she wants to go home. “According to the fire marshal’s report, it—”

“I’m so terribly sorry I’m late!” A slightly disheveled Lan Xichen appears in the doorway, Xue Yang behind him. “I locked my keys in the car, and was going to call AAA, but then I remembered that we aren’t members—did you know you have to be a member?—plus my phone—”

Xue Yang slaps him on the back. His other hand, gloved as always, is holding A-Qing by the hand. Her oversized pockets clink suspiciously as she runs to go play with A-Yuan and Jin Ling. Today Xue Yang has dressed her in a pink poodle skirt, black boots with frilly socks, and a black T-shirt with the words “Daddy’s Little Delinquent” in pink script, pulling her hair into spiky little pigtails.

“—and the look the bus driver gave me when I tried paying with the $50 I luckily had in my pocket!”

“He’s telling the truth,” Xue Yang says. Over the years, an odd friendship has sprung up between him and Lan Xichen. “He has a stamped bus pass and everything. Look at the poor man. Had to squash in with the hoi poloi. He won’t be over this for weeks.”

Lan Xichen is blinking too much. “And someone on the bus stole my wallet, though I could have sworn I left the bus with it—”

Xue Yang winks at A-Qing, who grins at him and pats the bulging pocket on her frilly pink skirt.

JC - WWX

JC : Why is my lead fashion designer wearing CROCS??

WWX : His house keys must have been on the same keychain. Lan Zhan said he took today off from work

JC : Okay but why are they orange?

WWX : Not everything he owns has to be blue, you know

JC : His contract clearly states at least three out of every four articles of clothing have to be blue!

WWX : Relax, lil bro

JC : He’s the face of our Overly Elaborate Yet Elegantly Simple Eveningwear division!

NHS : Who is?

JC : GET BIRD BRAIN OFF THIS CHAT OR I SWEAR TO ZIDIAN—

NHS : 😿 who just showed up? Xichen?

WWX : Yup he just arrived after a harrowing bus experience

NHS : https://cutt.ly/Mks2dgu ?

JC : Does anyone actually like when people send them links??

NHS : https://cutt.ly/hks21H8

Meng Yao is wearing what Wei Wuxian and Nie Huaisang call his "customer service smile," a holdover from his dark days in retail. It's the closest he ever gets to showing irritation towards his fiancé. “Why didn’t you Uber over, Xichen?”

“I locked my phone in the car with the keys—”

“It’s fine, Mr. Lan," says Dr. Wen. "Please have a seat. You’re just in time. After all, you were mentioned by name in the fire marshal’s report, along with the somewhat contradictory descriptions of ‘dazed’ and ‘hysterically sobbing,’ which naturally piqued my interest—”

Lan Xichen seats himself beside Meng Yao. He's still looking somewhat frazzled Then again, his main two facial expressions are “gentle smile” and “mild anxious look.” “That was an accident. The fire, I mean. A little mishap.”

“Gentlemen, all of these incidents cannot be mere ‘accidents’—”

“I was meditating and A-Ling wandered in and knocked over the incense burner,” Lan Xichen explains hurriedly. Meng Yao, well-practiced as he is at hiding his emotions, winces slightly. “The window was open, and there was a breeze, and A-Yao just bought these new gauzy curtains that tend to flap about quite a bit—”

XY - JGY - LWJ - JC - NHS - Crossing Us Is A *Great* Idea

XY : And burn quickly

NHS : What am I missing???

XY : Insurance fraud

NHS:

XY : Yes. We’re all complicit now

JGY : Xue Yang, have you heard of a little something called libel?

XY : 🖕 We should go back to building with asbestos like they did in the good old days

JC : We’re all so glad you’re here, Xue Yang

NHS : I need to adopt a kid so I can join your group or something, this sucks, you get to go this secret club every week, jc I see wwx even less than you do

JC : stop talking

XY : What color baby you want, NHS?

JC : What the hell??

XY : That was a joke

NHS: ....

“…and I was so deep in meditation I didn’t notice the flames until the fire department arrived, but A-Ling was fine, just fine, and all the fire fighters were so very nice…”

WWX : Can confirm. Xichen was more traumatized than the kid. The firefighters had to wrap him in like fifty foil blankets

XY : XXC tells me Himbo stayed with you a full week, was that why? my boy didn't tell me

LWJ : “Himbo”? He got 1600 on his SAT.

XY: Term of endearment he knows he’s my boy plus the guy locked his keys and phone in the car for the second time this month

JC : At least he feels remorse over his child endangerment, unlike certain other people I could mention

LWJ : "Child endangerment"?

XY : Tell us again about how Jin Ling used to teethe on Zidian, JC?

NHS:

“Dr. Wen will be pleased to know that my apartment is now fully equipped with a top-of-the-line sprinkler system,” says Meng Yao smoothly. “No more incense, either. This unfortunate incident will never be repeated again.”

XY - WWX - JC - Odd Man Out

XY : At least not until the insurance money runs out

WWX : 😒

XY : Not that he needs it, after landing Himbo

NHS:

WWX: Those jokes really aren't funny

NHS: 😔

JC: Dammit NHS are you in every chat?? Did you change the chat names? Why aren't you showing up on half the participant lists?? Did you hack our phones or what??

NHS: Don’t be so *inane*

Wei Wuxian titters.

“Mr. Wei? Since you seem so eager to speak, perhaps we should move onto your issues, then.”

Wei Wuxian straightens up and points to his chest, the picture of innocence. “Me?”

Dr. Wen smiles thinly. “You, Mr. Wei. Perhaps you can tell us your side of what the school is referring to as ‘The Radish Incident.’ ”

“Well….” Wei Wuxian darts a glance over at Lan Wangji, who is as impassive as ever. “I was just burying him for fun, you know. We like to pretend he’s a radish—“

“A radish?”

“It’s a…you know. A game. I personally like potatoes better, but—”

“Mr. Wei, several parents complained to the school.”

“Because we were hogging the sandbox.”

“Because your son was running around screaming ‘I’m a chubby little radish boy!’ Which in itself would not be cause for concern. But coupled with his troubling behavior the following week—"

XY - JC - JGY - Two Men & A Half

XY : Where did she get these records? Who does she work for, the NSA?

NHS : She’s an astronaut?

JGY : How did you sneak into this chat? And did you rename it?

NHS : 😉

JGY: You're what, an inch taller than me?

XY: someone struck a nerve

JGY: It's just derivative of the other group chat, that's all.

NHS : u said no to "gettin' jiggy w it" i had no other choice. anyway what's happening over there?

JC : I’ll give Dr. W this, that kid is weird.

NHS : who a-yuan?

JC : I’ll give Dr. W this, that kid is weird.

JC : I mean, he’s my nephew, he’s a great kid, that’s not what I’m meant—

XY : *delete delete*

JC : How does your hippie husband put up with you??

JGY : We suspect brainwashing or blackmail.

“—when he decided he was a rabbit or," Dr. Wen continues, "or, as he put it, ‘Daddy’s Huggy Little Bunny Boy.”

“He is Daddy’s Huggy Little Bunn—"

“And only responds to the name ‘Thumper,’ refuses to eat anything other than carrots or food containing carrots, insists on wearing bunny ears—"

XY - NHS

XY : If it’s good enough for Louis Belcher, it’s good enough for Freaky Little Bunny Boy

NHS:

you watch the show too?? I call mingjue “bob” - u know - grumpy mustache guy

XY : I’m sure that’s gone over well

NHS: he’ll learn to love it

XY : A-Qing loves Louis

NHS:

“—hops around instead of walking, and has convinced others of the same…fantasy.”

Everyone glances over at the three children, who are hopping in a circle. A-Yuan has a fluffy little tail on the seat of his pants, carefully sewn on by Lan Wangji. Jin Ling has a handful of cotton balls that had been badly superglued on by an annoyed Jiang Cheng. And A-Qing has a wad of blue cotton candy taped to her frilly pink skirt with a strip of duct tape. As they watch, Jin Ling rips the cotton candy off and stuffs it in his mouth. A-Qing shoves him onto his cottony rear end.

“That’s my girl!” Xue Yang calls.

“Daddy’s proud of you!” Xiao Xingchen adds, though he’s not quite sure what’s going on.

Dr. Wen sighs. “I’m still unclear about how this started. Was it the rabbit incident? Mr. Lan—" She nods her head at Lan Wangji to differentiate between the brothers. Lan Xichen has fallen asleep in his chair, exhausted by his first-ever bus ride. “—I mean, I beg your pardon, Dr. Lan. Perhaps you can fill us in on that? He told his teacher he was attacked by a rabbit monster."

“So he was bitten by one rabbit!” Wei Wuxian says when Lan Wangji just eyes her coldly. “It wasn’t Lan Zhan’s fault. That rabbit was bad news. It had this gleam in its eye—lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes—"

Xiao Xingchen emits a muffled little squeak. Xue Yang looks annoyed. He hates when other people make Xiao Xingchen laugh.

NHS - JC

NHS:

JC: yes yes we all get the Jaws reference

NHS: the last movie we all watched together : /

JC: yes I just said that

NHS: like three months ago

JC: and?

NHS: just saying...

“He was scared of the rabbits after that, and so Lan Zhan told him that rabbits only bite their own, and, well…I mean, we have a hundred rabbits in our backyard. It was either rehoming them and making the news like those crazy cat people, or making A-Yuan feel better.”

A-Yuan hops past, wiggling his cotton tail.

Jiang Cheng rubs his temples.

“All right, Mr. Wei. Thank you. That’s…elucidating. We’ll delve into that in future sessions. Now, perhaps we can discuss the June 7th incident involving you and Mr. Xue?”

Xiao Xingchen starts to laugh again. Xue Yang grins to himself.

LWJ - JC

LWJ : What happened on the 7th?

JC : Am I my brother’s keeper??

“Now, the seventh? I was…hard to remember, all that time ago…” Wei Wuxian taps his chin. "The mists of time and all that."

“It was three weeks ago, Mr. Wei.”

“The seventh….the seventh…was that a Tuesday—?”

“Wen Chao had it coming,” said Xue Yang. Smirking, he twirls his ponytail around a finger. His ponytail is long and sleek and sprouts from the top of his head like an 80s schoolgirl's. “Amiright, ‘Mr. Wei’?”

Wei Wuxian coughs. “You mean the Wen Chao who lives on Qishan Road? That Wen Chao?”

“That spoiled rich kid?” Jiang Cheng asks. (“As if you’re one to talk,” says Xue Yang.) “With the oversized Humvee and tractor-sized tires with spinning rims? Zipping down the street at all hours and blasting his music? I went to college with him. He used to leave double-deckers in the bathroom at frat parties.”

Dr. Wen swallows a long-suffering sigh. “Thank you, Mr. Jiang. I’m sure that information will prove most helpful in evaluating your brother’s case. Mr. Wei, your arrest, combined with the Huggy Little Bunny Boy Incident, does not fill me with confidence.”

“Not arrested—"

“Taken for questioning,” Xue Yang agrees. “By the neighborhood watch. Golf dads and wine moms. Very different from 'arrested.' "

"And you should know," says Meng Yao.

JC - JGY

NHS : What’s going on? What am I missing????

JGY: Did you just make a new group chat? Your name isn't showing up. This is disconcerting.

NHS: don’t worry about it

JC : We’re talking about Wen Chao

NHS : overcompensating humvee ex-frat boy with the hair gel? vomit in the jacuzzi and streak across the field at the big game wen chao? ur babysitter's cousin?

JC : The very idiot

NHS : He has nice sunglasses

JC : For a Russian mobster

NHS : Says the guy who owns a purple zebra striped jacket

JC : Says the guy with more bird-themed shirts than Winston Bishop

JGY : Touche.

NHS : i didn’t know u watch New Girl 2! we must talk l8tr shorturl.at/vDI26

JGY : Your abbreviations are marginally shorter than the actual words.

NHS :

JC : Cleaning bird cages does take up most of one’s afternoon

NHS : see, u get it

JC : Dr. Wen isn’t buying whatever WWX is selling here.

JGY : Wen Chao is related to Dr. Wen. If WWX had any more sense than a chipmunk, he’d realize that. No matter how much you hate someone, family is family...

“Wen Chao was a public menace,” says Wei Wuxian self-righteously. “He deserved what he got. Speeding down the street all the time. Think of the children!”

LWJ - WWX

LWJ: Why is this my first time hearing about this?

WWX: You’ve heard me complain about WC a million times. I even named a group chat after him!

LWJ: Wei Ying.

WWX: You were off visiting your uncle with A-Yuan ! You left me unsupervised! I am not to be blamed!!!

LWJ: We’ll discuss this later

WWX: 😓

“Perhaps the better question is where you got all those fish,” says Dr. Wen.

Everyone turns to look at Xue Yang.

“A magician never reveals his secrets,” he grins.

Xiao Xingchen chuckles.

“Five hundred dollars in damages, Mr. Xue. Raw fish juice is difficult to get out of faux tiger fur upholstery, I understand.”

Xue Yang flaps his hand. “His father can afford it.”

“That is not the—" Dr. Wen stops, perhaps realizing that an argument with Xue Yang means forfeiting a chunk of her sanity. “Moving on, Mr. Xue, can you explain this picture you posted on social media?”

“That picture’s an old one. A-Qing’s just a baby.”

“Mr. Xue, given the recent threats you made towards A-Qing’s daycare teacher for putting her in a time-out for stealing her classmate’s graham crackers and apple juice, this is relevant.”

“Posting that to the public account was a mistake, if that’s your concern. My Insta for A-Qing is private, but I was in a candy store and got kind of distracted by the new sugar-frosted fruity explosion jaw-busting mega bombs—"

“You fail to understand the issue, Mr. Xue. What’s that in her mouth?”

“Fingers. Or is that a toe?”

Xiao Xingchen laughs.

“They weren't real,” says Xue Yang.

WWX - JC

WWX:

JC: Great more gifs

“I think I have one with the Halloween store tags still on—" Xue Yang scrolls through the hundreds of photos of A-Qing filling his phone. “Should be one in here somewhere—oh, look, Xingchen, these are from your birthday party; I tell you, Amazo the Magnificent had no sense of humor at all; you’d think nobody had ever replaced his rabbit with a porcupine before-"

Jin Ling hops by. “Rabbit!” he cheers.

Jiang Cheng groans.

“There is blood on the fingers, Mr. Xue.”

Xue Yang gives a breezy laugh. “Paint. The springy plastic is perfect for teething. You just put it in the freezer for a few hours—real fingers wouldn’t work; they’d freeze solid, which makes good ice packs for those hard-to-reach places, sure, but as far as teething goes—”

Dr. Wen holds up a hand. “Thank you, Mr. Xue. That’s enough. My next question is about this speeding ticket, which you received while your daughter was strapped to your chest.”

“She was wearing a helmet!”

“You were driving a motorcycle down the highway, Mr. Xue.”

Xue Yang glances hurriedly at Xiao Xingchen, who’s frowning. “These were two separate incidents—"

“Mr. Xue, I don’t think that that makes it much better—"

“Ouch!” Meng Yao shoots to his feet. “He bit me! Your son bit me!”

Wei Wuxian scoops up A- Yuan, who's looking very satisfied with himself. “You shouldn’t have worn a carrot-orange shirt, then.”

“It’s not orange, it’s beige—"

“Maybe he was aiming for Xichen’s crocs and missed,” Xue Yang suggests.

Meng Yao pats his pockets. “Where’s my phone?”

Xue Yang winks at A-Qing, whose already-stuffed pocket is bulging further. Xue Yang likes dressing her in disarmingly cute dresses and skirts with huge pockets, the better to hide her loot. She grins and twirls a pigtail like Xue Yang twirls his ponytail and skips off with Jin Ling and A- Yuan.

Meng Yao is wearing the fixed smile of a Starbucks barista whose customer just asked to speak to the manager. Never a good sign. “Could somebody be so kind as to call my phone?”

Wei Wuxian makes a show of dialing. No one else moves. Lan Xichen mumbles something to himself in his sleep, chin sunk deep in his chest.

“Sorry, Jiggy,” says Wei Wuxian. “Maybe you left your phone at home?”

“You all saw me using it not a minute ago, and kindly stop calling me Jiggy—"

“A-Yao?”

Meng Yao’s customer service smile slips. “Just stop talking for five seconds, that’s all I ask—"

Dr. Wen shakes her head. At this point she seems more bored than anything else. “Moving along, Mr. Xiao, this is perhaps inconsequential when held up beside your husband’s joyrides with A-Qing—"

“Not a joyride,” Xue Yang interrupts. “That motorcycle is registered in my name. Well, a name—"

“—but A-Qing’s teacher has told me that she witnessed you allowing A-Qing to take candy from strangers.”

“The lady seemed nice,” says Xiao Xingchen, folding his hands placidly in his lap. “She had peppermints.”

Xue Yang sighs fondly.

JC - WWX

NHS: thnx for calling me WWX. reception could be better but this is better than anything on tv. literally candy from strangers?

JC: Dear heaven HE’S back. Just text a chat you're actually on!

NHS: ‘Dear heaven’?

JC: This is inane!

WWX: …not bad

Xiao Xingchen smiles. “She smelled like snickerdoodles and lavender.”

Dr. Wen sighs. “Mr. Xiao—"

“I’ll talk to him later, doctor,” says Xue Yang, patting Xiao Xingchen’s arm reassuringly. “Anything else? What did Mr. Beige do?” He grins at Meng Yao, who’s still looking for his phone.

“Mr. Meng, aside for the fire, which we’ve established is not your fault—though, fiance or not, you should be a bit more judicious in your choice of babysitters—"

Lan Wangji shoots Dr. Wen a look that almost melts the metal clip on her clipboard.

She absorbs it without so much as an eyebrow twitch. “—there is the Treehouse Incident, though I don’t believe the collapse of your nephew’s treehouse was your fault.”

JC - WWX - LWJ - We’re All Cool Here We Promise

NHS : i hear he bought the biggest fanciest one he could then set it up himself and then it fell down at the first storm. if that’s not a metaphor for his life I don’t know what is

JC : That wasn’t funny, someone could have gotten hurt

WWX : it was kind of funny

NHS : it was very funny

LWJ : "Hurt" like a baby at a weapons expo?

NHS : LWJ IN DA HOUSE!

JC : It was an ARCHERY RANGE

LWJ:

NHS: LWJ USED A GIF IM DEAD LMAO—

LWJ: *I’m

“We are suing the playhouse company,” says Meng Yao. “Right, Xichen?”

“Hm?” Lan Xichen sits up with a jerk. “I beg your pardon?”

Meng Yao gives him a patient smile and turns back to Dr. Wen. “As you can see, we have the situation well in hand.”

Lan Xichen has no idea what he’s talking about but nods along anyway. “Of course we do. In fact—" He whips out a recorder and starts playing “Wonderwall.”

“That was…lovely,” says Dr. Wen once he finishes. “Don’t do it again. Now, moving on to the County Fair Incident—"

“Which was an accident!”

“One more interruption, Mr. Wei, and you will be asked to return for solo counseling."

JC - LWJ - XY - NHS - Lan Wangji Pls Stop Vetoing All My Best Chat Names Thnx

NHS : Make him stand in the corner! LWJ, does that ever work at home?

XY : I think he uses *stronger* methods 😏

*Lan Wangji has left the chat*

JC : Xue Yang shut up I will end you that’s my brother

XY : End me with your sparkly little whip? 👀

JC : Your husband’s sitting right next to you you little freak. Allo people are so fricking annoying!

NHS : hey!

JC: I call it as I see it

NHS: your one to talk 😒

*Lan Wangji has joined the chat*

LWJ : *You're

*Lan Wangji has left the chat*

XY : How old were you when you lost your sense of humor, Grape Boy?

JC : “Grape Boy” is that the best you can do?

XY : there are children present

NHS : 🤭 🤭 🤭

JC : Same way there are children present while barreling down the highway at 80 mph on a motorcycle?

NHS:

XY : The state troopers blew that way out of proportion

Dr. Wen taps her clipboard. “Stealing livestock violates Section 2 of the Farm and Livestock Act—”

“No harm no foul,” shrugs Xue Yang. “And Xiao Xingchen gave all the trampled people candy afterward, so we’re all square. Well, snacks, anyway."

“Good snacks,” Xiao Xingchen adds. “Carob-covered rice cakes and trail mix.”

NHS: 🤢

“You can’t just hand out nuts children who might have an allergy—"

“There were also boxes of raisins. Full-size.”

Dr. Wen struggles to keep from rolling her eyes. Jiang Cheng rolls his hard enough for the both of them.

JC - NHS

NHS:

JC: wtf is that get that off my screen

“According to the police report, all three of your children broke into the paddock, released the donkey, and rode him down the main promenade, scattering fairgoers in their wake. I have the video.” Dr. Wen holds up her phone. Loud screams and merry-go-round music blast from her phone. “Mr. Xue? Anything to say?”

“That guy was barely trampled,” says Xue Yang. “Also, I had nothing to do with opening the paddock, whose latch sticks (just by the way), or helping the kids up onto the donkey, so—"

“This was found at the scene.” She holds up black leather necklace with a single red bead. "Look familiar, Mr. Xue?”

Xue Yang touches his bare throat. “I’ve been framed.”

“And this.” She holds up a flute and glances over at Wei Wuxian.

Wei Wuxian darts a quick glance over at Lan Wangji, who does not look amused. Then again, he never does. “Since when was I even a suspect—?"

“Since you left your flute there like an idiot,” says Jiang Cheng.

“Lil’ Apple’s paddock was too small! I had to do something."

“Gentlemen—"

The cuckoo clock on the wall goes off, waking up Lan Xichen, who’s drifted off again. He whips out his recorder again but Meng Yao lays a gently restraining hand on his wrist.

Dr. Wen rises. “We will continue this next week. In the meantime, I have some worksheets—"

JC - NHS

JC : Kill me now

NHS : i wouldnt tempt LWJ if i were u…

JC : not like I take up any of WWX’s precious time anyway anymore. LWJ goes out of town and WWX teams up with that nutcase ex-juvenile delinquent of all people to vandalize WC’s car?? In college we stole WC's team's stupid tortoise mascot together

NHS : …..i'll call u later

JC : Please don’t

NHS :

NHS: u can come over on ur own to watch a movie or smthing u know

NHS: ur new line launched already so ur not so busy now right?

NHS: u can bring jin ling along as a chaperone if u want

NHS: hello?

NHS: that was a joke…

JC: okay but no more romcoms

NHS: u brought mama mia over last time not me

JC: I grabbed the wrong dvd

NHS: …..🤐

JC: 🖕

NHS: 😏 see u soon

* * * *

One month later:

“Best session yet!” says Wei Wuxian as they pull up to his house in Jiang Cheng's sleek purple Jaguar. “I mean, Dr. Wen wasn’t thrilled about the whole ‘our kids visited Nie Huaisang’s bird sanctuary and now think they’re skvaders’ thing, but all in all—"

“Just get out of the car.” Jiang Cheng gives him a little shove. They’d all been busy this past month, and had only seen Nie Huaisang once, but that had been enough to convince the kids that they’re hybrid bunny-birds. “I’ll wait outside while you go and get Jin Ling—" He stops. A letter is nailed to the front door.

“Is someone starting another Protestant reformation?” Wei Wuxian jokes. He grins at Lan Wangji, who raises his eyebrow slightly. Excellent. So he found the joke as funny as he did, though going by the way he eyes the nail he’s not thrilled about what just happened to the door’s glossy blue paint.

Wei Wuxian rips the letter from the nail and starts to read aloud. “ ‘We, the undersigned, do hereby declare Wei Wuxian and Lan Wanji to be persona non grata on Cultivator Court for the following reasons: One: Wild animals leaving unspeakable “presents” on our lawns—’ ”

Wei Wuxian looks up. “That would be Lil’ Apple. Do they sell donkey diapers?”

LWJ unlocks the door. “What else?”

“ ‘Two: Gangs of feral rabbits rampaging through our flower beds!’ –They do have a point here. How they keep getting loose I’ll never know. ‘Number Three: Loud duets at midnight. We get it! You’re in love! Get a soundproof basement or shut the hell up!’ ” Wei Wuxian wrinkles his nose. “Who spit in their bean curd?”

“Where do these people meet, and can I join?” asks Jiang Cheng.

Wei Wuxian slings an arm around his shoulders, the first time in weeks. Jiang Cheng hasn’t seen much of his brother outside of the counseling sessions. “Dr. Wen says that kind of negativity is toxic.”

Jiang Cheng grunts, but lets Wei Wuxian keep his arm on his shoulder. “I’ll show you toxic—”

The babysitter is sitting under the table with Jin Ling and A-Yuan when they enter the house, building a miniature cenotaph made out of blocks.

“The kids okay, Wen Ning?” Wei Wuxian asks him.

Wen Ning peers out from between two chairs. “We were under siege for a couple of hours. Pitchforks and torches, same old thing. But we turned out the lights and stayed away from the windows and made s’mores.”

“So that’s what happened to all the plastic lawn flamingos. Trampled by angry villagers."

Jiang Cheng pinches his temples. “I told you adopting an incontinent donkey was a bad idea. At least keep his paddock locked.”

“We don’t have to tell your sister about this, do we, Wen Ning? …Good. What did the mob look like? Did you catch any names?”

“They were led by a fat man with a goatee and a skinny old guy with beady eyes and a moustache like two long droopy rat tails." Wen Ning crawls out from under the table. “The skinny guy was wearing bright red and blue and purple clothes and the fat guy had a bullhorn. And my cousin Wen Chao was in back yelling something about the rising cost of dry cleaning in this day and age, I think?”

“Yao and Ouyang.” Wei Wuxian makes a face. “Power couple from hell, and I should know. I’ve been there.”

“Are they those nosy neighbors you’re always complaining about?” asks Jiang Cheng.

“They’ve been after us from day one!”

“Well, having that fierce corpse of yours key their car didn’t help.”

“That was an accident.”

Jiang Cheng rolls his eyes.

“You know, Nie Huaisang has been texting me about this house for sale next door to him,” says Wei Wuxian thoughtfully. “Lan Zhan, maybe we should check it out?”

Jiang Cheng picks up Jin Ling and pats him gently on the back. “You’re just going to have the same problem with the angry villagers, just across town.”

“No, it’s a big corner lot. I’ve seen it. Looks like the Addams Family lives there. Comes with its own little graveyard and everything. Huaisang’s family owns it, and they’ve been trying to unload it for months, but everyone thinks it’s haunted just because of that time I brought those fierce corpses with me on a visit and they got loose—but that’s neither here nor there. It’s perfect!”

Lan Wangji nods.

“Whatever.” Jiang Cheng rolls his eyes. “Let’s get going, A-Ling.”

Once he’s strapped Jin Ling into his car seat, he takes out his phone.

JC - NHS

JC : Your plan worked

Nie Huaisang:

???

Jiang Cheng: yeah. Thanks for riling them up behind my brother’s back all month. Class move. Direct and straightforward

NHS:

NHS: not that they needed much inciting. wwx blowing up the garage was the last straw

JC : was still weirdly convoluted for no reason

JC : Not sure why you had to get me involved either

NHS: says the guy who lives 20 blocks away but still volunteered to file the noise complaint because, i quote, “the duets *R* annoying”

JC : well you can’t file a complaint about them stopping mid-conversation with you to gaze soulfully into each others’ eyes for ten minutes

NHS : *snort*

JC : If you miss WWX so much 🙄 why didn’t you just tell him straight out instead of pulling this shtick?

NHS:

NHS : there’s another house available down the street just fyi…

NHS: my big fat greek wedding sat night? u bring the dvd n i’ll get the pizza

Shaking his head, but smiling to himself, Jiang Cheng starts the car.

[feverdreamfantasies]

The Birthday Gift

Pairing: Human!Hoseok x Human!Yoongi x Human!Reader, Snow Leopard Shifter!Jimin x Human!Reader

Featuring: German Shepherd Hybrid!Taehyung, Doberman Hybrid!Namjoon, Neighbor!Jungkook, (Jin to make an appearance later)

Genre: Hybrid AU, Fluff, Angst, Poly AU, eventual Smut, Producer!Yoongi, Scientist!Hoseok

Warnings: Brief mention of blood, Mention of Hybrid abuse, Some adult language, Mentions of a poly relationship between M x M x F

Summary:  “Hobi! What is he?” Yoongi repeats himself looking from me in the corner over to his boyfriend.

“He’s a shifter.” Hoseok mumbles, hand rising to scratch the back of his neck.

“I’m sorry. What?”

“He’s a shifter! Okay.  I adopted our girlfriend a shifter for her birthday.”

Author’s Notes:   This was an idea I’ve had in my head for a little while and I thought I would go ahead and start writing it. Also since this is the first chapter there’s a lot of background information in this one but moving forward there will be less filler and hopefully more story line progression. Hope you enjoy!

Next

Chapter One:  The ultimate Birthday gift             

Sometimes I wonder how I got here in my life. 

After nearly 5 years of being with Yoongi, I thought I was prepared for anything, but standing here in our neighbor Jungkook’s living room watching his sweet arctic fox hybrid, Sooyun, turn into the vicious predator she truly is; I began to question the choices I’d made that lead me here.

Let me backup a little bit to how I came to witness the scene before me. I was quietly having breakfast earlier this morning when Hoseok made his way loudly down the staircase that led into the kitchen. 

“Have you seen your boyfriend?” He asked with an emphasis on “your”, clearly perturbed with the man in question.

“What’s he done now that makes him ‘my’ boyfriend?” I say while taking a bite of my toast. 

For all the time I have been in a relationship with Yoongi, Hoseok has been with him longer.  The two met in their first year at university and began dating shortly there after.  I came along about four years later, back when I was a shy, young intern for the music company Yoongi was—and is still— a big time producer for.  

I had heard rumors when I first started there that he had a bit of a different romantic life than most. Everyone loved to whisper about the open relationship he and his boyfriend supposedly had. I tried not to listen to the rumors, but I couldn’t deny the big fat crush I had developed on Yoongi either.  I thought my heart was going to beat out of my chest every time he walked into the same room as me.  And when he asked me out for drinks one day, all I could do was nod in response because I didn’t have the courage to give a verbal yes. 

I was nervous and apprehensive about possibly going on a date with an already taken man.  But my curiosity got the best of me and I showed up to the bar he had suggested.  He was sweet and kind to me. Being patient with my quietness until I warmed up enough to be able to contribute to our conversation.  

He was also very straightforward and honest with me.  

“I know there are rumors about my personal life in the office.” He stated matter-of-factly, taking a sip of his jack and coke before continuing. “So I’ll admit that I’m kind of surprised you agreed to come out with me tonight.”

I brushed a piece of my hair behind my ear, a nervous habit of mine that brings me an artificial level of comfort.  “To be honest” I swallow “I’m not really sure I was even going to show up.”

“Well I’m glad you did.” He said with his adorable gummy smile.

“And to be upfront about everything, the rumors are true. I do have a boyfriend, and we are in a serious, committed relationship.”

I raise my eyebrows at this. 

“I know what you're thinking.  So then why would I ask a beautiful woman like you out on a date if I’m already spoken for?” 

My heart speeds up when I hear him use the word beautiful.  He leans across the high top table we are sat at, so he can speak lower and not have the other customers at the bar listen in.  

“Hobi and I have always been open to the concept of a polymorphic relationship. We’ve tried in the past with potential romantic partners; but they usually ended up ghosting on one of us, once they figured out what we were looking for.”

“So why do you think I’ll be different?” I question finding some confidence in my voice.  Afterall, it isn’t like Yoongi is talking about some small, trivial thing.  He’s openly discussing with me the potential of starting a romantic journey with him and his boyfriend.  Journey being the only way I can truly describe it because honestly what if this actually became something, what do I say to my parents then? “Mom. Dad.  Meet my boyfriend Yoongi and his boyfriend--slash my other boyfriend--Hoseok.” 

Yeah...this was most certainly going to be a journey.

“Honestly, I’m not sure you will be.  But I like you, Y/N. And from what I’ve told Hoseok so far, he’s interested too.”

I snort at this response.  What possibly could I have done to get Yoongi’s attention that he’d like me, let alone know anything about me enough to want to tell his boyfriend.

“Up until tonight, I’ve barely said anything to you.” I state to the dark haired man across from me.

Yoongi shrugs at this like it doesn’t matter.  “People speak louder with their actions than with their words.”

“Yeah?  And what do my actions say about me?” I ask genuinely.

He doesn’t miss a beat with his response.

 “You’re smart without being pretentious.  You have confidence without arrogance.  And most importantly you’re kind.”

“I’m kind?”

Yoongi nods. 

“A couple of weekends ago I saw you inside the hybrid rescue downtown.  I was going to go in and say hi, but thought that might intimidate you a little bit.” 

He says this last part with a laugh, as my cheeks turn red from the fact I know that would have been true.

“I asked one of your fellow interns, Ilsung, about it.  He said you volunteer there whenever you can.  That you have a real soft spot for hybrids and their rights. Not many people are as compassionate to their causes.  And as someone who has had the honor to adopt two myself, I’m really drawn to others who want to make a difference for them.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m making a difference.” I say sheepishly. “But when I was a kid we had a family cat hybrid named Wendy.  She and I did everything together until they came and took her away when we were both 12.  And let’s just say that made an impact on me.”

When my parents were kids, hybrids were just starting to be introduced to society.  But years prior to that, governments and militaries had been creating and breeding hybrids for years as an experiment to get a defensive edge when it came to warfare. It proved not to be as promising as they had hoped and what ended up happening is they sold their hybrids and hybrid secrets to the highest bidder, which turned out to be a large corporatation.  This corporation in turn introduced cat and dog hybrids to the rest of the world.  Claiming that they were a step above your average household pet and could provide a more fulfilling companion experience.  Hybrids quickly became a hot commodity.  And the black market was soon taking off with their own hybrid creations of more exotic and “dangerous” hybrid breeds.  Soon the hybrids were beginning to outnumber humans 2 to 1 and fear of who they are and what they can do began to take over.

Laws were passed as a means to protect humans. Rather than create laws that stopped the unethical treatment and breeding of hybrids, they were created to limit their rights.  Not completely human but also not completely an animal either, hybrids fell in a category with many blurbed lines.  The laws state all hybrids must have an owner and must either be accompanied by that owner at all times or have a microchip implanted within the back of their necks that can be scanned to indicate they belong to someone.  Any strays were in extreme cases euthanized and in less extreme cases placed in overcrowded shelters and rescue centers, where they would more than likely spend the rest of their lives.  

For those who did get adopted or were bought by breeders, their lives may not be as lucky as those who did not.  It isn’t uncommon for those hybrids adopted to end up in underground hybrid clubs.  These clubs offer humans all sorts of sick fantasies to play out with hybrids.  This can be anything from deadly hybrid fight rings to hybrid brothels where they can use and abuse any female and male hybrids of their choosing. In my time volunteering at the rescue center, I have listened to stories I wouldn’t even wish for my worst enemies to have to endure. 

“Wendy came into my life when on my 5th birthday.  My Mom and Dad had decided I needed a companion.  As an only child with parents who weren't able to have any more kids, my parents thought adopting a hybrid could be the next best thing.  But the year we both turned 12, is the year Wendy started to go through her changes.”

Yoongi listened to my story with great intensity.  

“Of course as humans we all go through puberty between the ages of 11 and 18.  This isn’t uncommon for hybrids either except their changes aren’t typically of the reproductive kind until later in their late teens and early twenties, but what they do change in is behavior.  Their animal instincts can have the potential to become more dominant, leading to aggressiveness and in some cases violence.

When Wendy and I were playing outside one day, a neighbor's hybrid wandered into our backyard where we were.  He looked to be some small wild cat hybrid, probably bought in some shady back room of an outdoor market.  He was around our age if not a little bit older.  He’s name was Yongho and he could hear our laughs from inside his house.  He asked if he could play with us, saying he was lonely being cooped up inside all day.  I was glad to have another person to play with so I said yes immediately without noticing that Wendy was apprehensive.  Her tail was flicking side to side and ears were slightly pinned back, but I thought that was only because she may be jealous of having some of my attention shared with another hybrid.  I chose to ignore her warning signs and suggested a game of tag.

It all seemed to be going fine.  At first I was ‘it’ and although they were both faster than me, Yongho decided to slow down so I could catch him.  But once he was ‘it’ that’s when everything would change to become one of the worst days of my life.”

I paused so I could take a sip of my drink to try and calm myself down.  I hadn’t thought of this day in a really long time and I was struck by the fact that I was so easily sharing it with Yoongi when not even most of my close friends knew what had happened.  Yoongi reached across the table and gently rubbed his thumb over my hand to encourage me to keep going.  

I cleared my throat.

“Because Yongho was a predator hybrid, a game of tag can quickly turn into a dangerous game of cat and mouse.  When Wendy and I ran off in opposite directions after getting a 10-second head start that’s when Yongho’s animal instincts kicked in.  As a slow and small human girl, I became easy prey to the hunter and Yongho began to come after me.  Naive to noticing that anything had changed, I giggled as I tried to dodge around the trees in our backyard to create obstacles between us.  And when I turned around to see how close he was that’s when I saw the predatory look in his eyes.  I gave a small but effective scream which in turn caught the attention of Wendy.  She halted in the direction she was going before quickly turning around.  I in the meantime froze out of fear.  Yongho slowed but didn’t stop moving toward me.  He staked his way closer in the same way you would see a lioness do through the brush on a nature show before she pounced on an antelope.  And unfortunately for me, I was that antelope.  Just as Yongho pounced with claws out, Wendy intercepted him and they both tumbled to the ground, rolling around and making animalistic noises I had never heard before.  

This got the attention of my mother.  Who once she came outside to see what was happening began yelling for my dad.  He ran out and grabbed me.  Easily picking me up and throwing me inside the house ordering me to lock the door and telling my mother to call HES (hybrid emergency services).  My dad tried to get Yongho off of Wendy when he had managed to pin her to the ground while I burst into tears once the adrenaline started to wear off.  HES showed up quickly, but not fast enough to stop Wendy from accidentally scratching my dad.  She was aiming for Yongho when my father’s arm got in the way and left a deep wound along his forearm which instantly began to bleed.  Because hybrid laws take all cases of violence toward a human seriously, HES not only took Yongho away but they also took Wendy.  My father spent the next several weeks in court trying to get her back saying she had scratched him with no ill intention but they wouldn’t listen.  The only thing they could offer was for us to send her off to a reform facility, where she would spend the next three years, in hopes that maybe once she had gone through the proper reform training then she would be able to come home.  My parents agreed to send her off, but 6 months after she arrived they claimed she had ran away, only to find out in the news a few years later that this reform facility was secretly selling desirable hybrids off to private sellers and the black market.  I haven’t seen her since.”

Things between us got really quiet after I told my story.  Yoongi continued to rub my hand before noticing that my eyes were watery.  Tears threatening to come cascading down.  He sprung into action and leapt off his stool scooping me up into a hug. 

“I’m so sorry” he whispered.  

I could hear the sincerity in his voice and felt overwhelmingly comforted within his embrace.  I thought right then and there that I never wanted him to let me go.  And I didn’t care if that meant I had to share him with someone else because at that moment it felt like I was always supposed to be his.

Shortly thereafter I met Hoseok face to face.  The three of us went on a date to a nice restaurant to see how we would all get along.  The date went exceptionally well, as did the next one, and the one after that.  After a couple months, the three of us went away for the weekend and discussed the next steps for our future.  It was decided that we would all move in together and start a relationship that would define my next five years. 

Looking over at Hobi now with his brows crossed and a mild look of exhaustion on his face.  I couldn’t help but smile slightly.

“He promised me he would come home last night so he could be here for your birthday this morning.”

“Yoongi is here.” I say. “Also nice of you to wish me a Happy Birthday.”

He rolled his eyes before walking over to me and kissing me on the forehead. “He didn’t come to bed last night.” He responds as he releases me.

“That’s because he came to my bed,” I say with a teasing grin.

Once we moved into this house, it was decided that Yoongi and Hoseok would share a room while I had my own.  I didn’t mind it much because Yoongi would often sneak into my bed once Hobi fell asleep.  Or if Yoongi was at the studio all night then one of our hybrids would cuddle up with me, especially Taehyung.

Speaking of which, the German Shepherd hybrid came bounding through the backdoor.  A smile on his face and a bouquet of wildflowers clutched in his hand.

“Happy Birthday Y/N!”

“I got you these!” He thrust the wildflowers toward me.  Tail wagging rapidly behind him.

“Thank you Tae.” I take the flowers from him smelling them in the process. “These are beautiful.”

He’s smile grows wider.  Taehyung was one of the two hybrids Hoseok and Yoongi had adopted before I joined their family. Well adopted was not really the correct term to use.  Hoseok worked as a scientist for the government.  And though they had supposedly moved on from the hybrid world, the three of us knew that wasn’t true.  Hoseok started working there right out of college.  Initially he was told he was there for human medical purposes, specifically in terms of medicine and vaccine studies.  However, while that was mostly true, Hoseok discovered one day by accident that there were also medical experiments being done on hybrids in ways that they would never imagine doing to humans.

From that moment on, Hoseok took it upon himself to make changes but he’d have to climb his way to the top in order to make any real change.  Now being the second in command to the head of the medical research team, Hobi had more privileges to know what happened in the hybrid labs but still didn’t have full command of what went on in there.  But that didn’t stop him from managing to rescue a couple in the process.

I didn’t really know all that had happened to Taehyung and Namjoon--our Doberman hybrid--while they were in that lab, but I knew that it made them respond to things in opposite ways.  Taehyung was clingy and loveable.  Namjoon was a little standoffish at first but if I played my cards right he could be putty in my hands.

“Where do you want to eat tonight?” Hobi asked.

“You guys aren’t going to make me a homemade meal.” I whine.

“If you want food poisoning then I would be more than happy to make you whatever you would like.  Or if you don’t mind eating until almost 2 in the morning then I’ll ask Yoongi what he wants to make tonight.”

I stick my tongue out at him.  I hate his reasoning sometimes.

“In that case, I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

“We all know that you’ll choose the same place you always do.” A sleepy Yoongi says with a yawn.  His hair slightly sticking up in the back indicating he had just climbed out of bed. 

He walks over to me, sliding into the booth of our breakfast nook and kisses me gently. 

“Happy Birthday Princess.” He says in his deep groggy voice.

“I’m surprised you're up already.” I state as I fed him some of my breakfast.  He takes a bite and swallows before responding.  

“Someone made a pretty severe threat of laundry duty if I didn’t show up this morning. And we all know if I’m on laundry duty for a full month, we will all be deeply sorry.”

We enjoy the rest of our morning with happy banter and cuddles on the couch.  With a momentary appearance from Namjoon with a quick Birthday greeting before he went on his jog.

As I flipped through the options on Netflix with Tae asleep with his head in my lap, Hoseok’s phone rang which he picked up and answered in his office down the hall.  Yoongi and I gave a brief glance at each other figuring it was probably from work before Hoseok quickly ran out of his office and out the front door as though the house was on fire.  

We look at each other again before quickly getting off the couch to follow him.  Taehyung whines in protest as he loses the warmth of my lap before climbing back onto the couch and quickly falling back asleep.  

Hoseok goes over to our neighbor’s house, lifting his arm up to knock on the door when Jungkook opens it with a “Thank God!”

“I thought you said he’d be fine here.” Hoseok says as he follows Jungkook into his living space noticing the low growls of Sooyun coming from within.  He hesitates a moment before seeing why Sooyun is making that noise.

He quickly gets his answer as he sees Sooyun with teeth bared at a cowering figure in the corner.  He realizes her aggression is toward his Birthday gift for Y/N.  While he knew that Y/N was easily loved by Taehyung and Namjoon, they weren’t necessarily her hybrids.  Tae belonged to Yoongi and Namjoon was Hoseok’s, who he adopted at the first chance after that fateful day he walked into the hybrid lab by accident.  So he figured Y/N needed her own companion and it gave him an excuse to bring home another rescue.

“Well aren’t you going to do something.” He says to Jungkook, calmer than he felt. 

“Me?  He’s your hybrid.” Jungkook says incredulously.

“Technically he isn’t a hybrid.” 

“Then what is he?”  Yoongi says behind Hobi, scaring his younger boyfriend in the process.  I stand beyond them watching Jungkook’s normally sweet hybrid looking like the true predator she is before moving my eyes to the other hybrid--or rather not hybrid--sitting in the corner with his knees up to his chest.  My heart instantly breaks at the sight in front of me and I feel the need to protect him.

“Hey! Enough.” 

My voice is loud and clear.  Commanding but not violent, just enough to get Sooyun’s attention.  A skill I learned at all my years volunteering at the rescue. She backs away and hides behind Jungkook as though she hadn’t done anything wrong to be treated this way.  Jungkook pats the hand she rests on his arm, clutching onto his shirt sleeve. White ears pinned back to her equally pure white hair.

I take that time to move to her victim. Taking slow movements making sure not to scare him even more. “Hello.” I say getting him to look up at me with his light grey eyes.  He has soft features but an intense gaze.  I reach my hand out to help him off the floor.  He hesitates before deciding to trust me and stands up into his full height.  He isn’t large but he is taller than me, about the same size as Yoongi. 

“Hobi! What is he?” Yoongi repeats himself looking from me in the corner over to his boyfriend.

“He’s a shifter.” Hoseok mumbles, hand rising to scratch the back of his neck.

“I’m sorry. What?”

“He’s a shifter! Okay.  I adopted our girlfriend a shifter for her birthday.”

It gets suddenly very quiet. I look back over at the shifter in question, his hand still in mine.  Yoongi is visibly getting angry, but still trying to remain somewhat calm.

“What the fuck is a shifter, Hobi?  Like a werewolf.  Did you bring home a werewolf?”

“Don’t be ridiculous! Werewolves aren’t real.  He’s a snow leopard shifter.”

For the genius Hoseok actually was he could really do some dumb things, I think as Yoongi comes towards us and pulls me away but not with some resistance from the other person holding my hand. Yoongi drags me aways while also grabbing Hoseok by the shoulder to guide us outside.

Once we step into the front yard, Yoongi turns Hobi around to look at him but doesn’t let me go.

“You know you’ve done some stupid shit in the 9 years we’ve been together, but this might easily top the list.  I mean what the hell were you thinking!  Where do you even get a snow leopard shifter?”

“The same place I got Taehyung and Namjoon.  Just there was more paperwork involved and lots of background checks.  And possibly some surveillance on the house for a week or two.”  He throws the last part in quickly as though we won’t notice that he agreed to have us be watched by a government entity without getting our consent first.

“He’s going back.” 

“What?! No!”  This protest comes from me this time.  I don’t know what a shifter is, but I do know some of what happens in the labs and he isn’t going back if I have anything to say about it.

“Yes. He. Is.” Yoongi states, as though the decision is final and begins to walk back toward the house only to stop halfway when he realizes none of us are following.

“We can’t keep him.” He states again.

“But why not?” Hobi and I pout at the same time.

Usually if one of us goes against Yoongi we don’t stand a chance at winning, but if we team up together then things inevitably go our way.

“He’s probably dangerous. I mean I still don’t know what he really is.” He stares at Hoseok on this last point.

“Shifters are what the military attempted after the hybrid experiment failed.  Essentially, through their research they found that though hybrids are stronger than humans they still aren’t as strong as a real true animal.  But you can’t fully control or command an animal, especially not a predatory animal like a tiger or lion…”

“Or a snow leopard.” Yoongi offered.

“Right.  Anyways, there was a researcher about thirty years ago who thought what if you could create a breed of human that could, when needed, shift into full animal form.  Lots of people laughed at him for this, but that didn’t stop him from running experiments on his own before a top personnel in the government decided to back him on his research.  It didn’t take him long, about five years before he got his first successful generation of shifters. Listen, I know you don’t like it Yoongi and you probably think he’s dangerous.  But he’s been kept in that lab his whole life.  And I promise you that we have nothing to fear with him.  In fact, shifters are much safer than hybrids.”  Hoseok added as a last minute plea.

Yoongi  slowly let out a sigh.  “Fine. But…” he quickly adds before Hobi and I get too excited. “If anything happens to a member of our household because of him, then he has to go somewhere else.”

“You have my word that nothing will happen.”

I grab Yoongi and Hobi into a hug in my excitement.  “So what’s his name?”

“Jimin.”

[feminist-propaganda]

Single Mothers Will Probably Cry During Every Episode Of  Queen’s Gambit - Episode 1

I’ll start this long piece with a quote by Toni Morrisson. She once said : “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”

After watching Queen’s Gambit yesterday I rushed to the Internet to see if someone had written all of the things I am about to write, all of the symbols I saw in the miniseries, all of the dog whistles, the references.  I found articles about chess. About how the community had adopted the film, about which grandmasters the characters were based off of, about chess moves and theories, about production and the unexpected success of the series.

According to me, this is quite mediocre commentary. I eventually clicked on the New Yorker article that seemed to be a tiny bit smarter. After a couple of paragraphs I realized that the male writer was only going to rant about how the actress is “too pretty” to be Beth Harmon, and this seems to upset him. A lot.

But no one talked about Beth’s mother. Or the name of the series. Or the embroidery. The chess board. The tranquilizers. The math. The flashbacks. The exchange of queens. The sacrifice of the queen. Did no one see it? Or is it again one of those things; where the world is so obsessed with single mothers and representing them as huge, massive, quite literal train wrecks, but no one actually wants to look at them in the eye, talk to them, help them?

Let me tell you, as a single mother, this miniseries had me in tears the whole time. It’s really difficult to watch. It’s downright triggering.

Single mothers like to keep their silence. That’s because we know the world doesn’t like it when we start talking. It hurts. A lot. So instead, the world likes to make memes about how single moms are whores, how they are drunks or over worked. How they’re psychotic. How they ramble. They don’t make any sense. Bipolar. Crazy. How their children stare at the television all day, the way they microwave bad food. We laugh at them, and use them as comical relief in our ... what exactly? Cultural objects. Then we move on. We send a message to single mothers when we do this, and the message is important. You suck. Shut Up. Don’t exist. It’s your fault. 

We make an entire mini series about a single mother who killed herself to save her kid, we put on the television images that hurt and harm single mothers and then the public responds with nothing. They don’t even bat an eyelash. Miss the point entirely. Great series about chess! Except it’s not about chess. Not at all. It’s about raising children alone, when the world hates you. It’s about a trailer. In the middle of nowhere. A strong willed woman who was a mathematician in the 1940s. Who taught her daughter everything she could. Realized she couldn’t do more. And made the ultimate sacrifice, the queen’s gambit. The riskiest, most reckless, bravest move of all.

So let me tell you about what it’s like to watch Queen’s Gambit when you’re a single mother. So that somewhere in the AI, it’s written. So that when our great grand children will try to understand our times, they’ll read it.

I’ll write an essay for each episode. And in each essay I will review the important lession that Alice passed on to young Beth, and how this takes her to Moscow, where she can live a much more fulfilling life than in the U.S.A.

Lesson 1 : Find A Two Dimensional Algebric Plane. Study It. Control It.

I recently learned from instagram user @itllbeokbaby and Amsterdam based artist and weaver Liza Prins that the words textile and text have the same origin as the word texture. 

Text derives from the Latin textus (a tissue), which is in turn derived from texere (to weave). It belongs to a field of associated linguistic values that includes weaving, that which is woven, spinning, and that which is spun, indeed even web and webbing. Textus entered European vernaculars through Old French, where it appears as texte and where it assumes its important relation with tissu (a tissue or fabric) and tisser (to weave).

Women have been weaving, beading, sowing and stitching since the dawn of times. We also know that women used this technology not just to create clothes, tents or shoes. They used it as a container of information. As cultural DNA. 

In South America, in places where writing as we know of it was never created, women would bead important tribal information into skirts. They would then use the skirts as a database of the tribe. To track births, deaths, epidemics, droughts and other important group defining events.

In modern times, women still use embroidery as a means of expression. My memories from childhood contain strong images of my aunts and grandmothers, sewing my name and date of birth onto pillow cases, bathrobes and bedcovers. They would do this by the pool, at the bottom of the ski slopes, on the beach or in the train. They would engage into conversation as they embroidered; as this activity required some concentration, but not their full attention. It was their way of being present; but also transcending into the past and projecting into the future. They sewed our lives into the cloth.

I once heard my grandmother counting the holes in the cloth she was decorating with her beautiful colours. I asked what she was doing. She said that to build the letters on the cloth, you needed to count the squares. Two to the top, four to the right, ten to the middle, etc etc. I was quite mesmerized. I was maybe eight at the time, the same age as Beth when she loses her mother. I had started learning some math in school but somehow the math in school seemed to be presented to me as the epitome of something quite different than this excruciatingly feminine passtime. 

Math was presented to me as masculine, out of reach to us girls. And now I was disovering that these women in my family were geometry experts, fluent in linear algebra, and that at a higher level, they were database account managers.

In the first episode of the miniseries, in the first couple of minutes; we discover two Beths. The first Beth is in Paris, the beautiful, the chic; the glamourous Paris. Paris will always be the undisputed capital of Fashion. 

Paris is the undisputed capital of fashion not because it is the home of polluting massive textile industries like the ones in Pakistan or Zara’s empire in Spain. Paris is the capital of fashion because it is the capital of Haute Couture. And Haute Couture is custom made, sowed by hand, piece by piece, bead by bead, sequin per sequin. It is delicate. It is slow. It is sacred. It is what my aunt’s did. 

It is the opposite of industrial, the opposite of a sewing machine, the opposite of an engine. The opposite of yield failures, punching in and punching out. It is lace. Delicate, personal, eternal.

The second Beth we see is the eight year old Beth, that has just lost her mother. She stands on a bridge. Two cars have crashed into one another. And she stares on at the police officers. One says “Not a scratch on her. It’s a miracle”. The other says “I doubt she’ll see it like that”. 

My theory is that the miniseries explain how Beth eventually begins to “see it like that”. 

The first time we see 8 year old Beth she is wearing a dress, with her name embroidered on it. It reads Beth, in pink. Feminine. Purple flowers surround it. The embroidery is delicate. It’s on her heart. 

We follow eight year old Beth as she gets sent to an orphanage. In the first couple of scenes at the orphanage, we think, for a minute, that maybe Beth will be okay here. The head mistress smiles, has nice hair. Shows her around. Yes, the bed is by the lavatory, but at least she has a bed, a roof over her head.

We only start despising this new mother figure when she takes Beth to choose new clothes. Beth takes off her dress, and stares at her name, written on the front. The headmistress selects a white shirt and grey dress for Beth. She hands to her these new items, symbol of her new life, of her integration within the orphanage and later mainstream society. The headmistress then grabs the dress with the name embroidered and looks at it with disgust. Then, she says “I think we’ll burn this one” and disapears.

Beth then understands that she is no longer allowed to love her mother. That to fit in this school, this orphanage, to survive, she must let go of the embroidery and all of the things she associates with her mother. Her mother, in the words of the teacher was a “victim” of “a carefree life”. A free spirited whore, a lesbian, a witch. There’s a lot of words we liek to use to describe women who don’t conform. And Beth’s mother, as we learn, never conformed.

At night, Beth sees her mother’s eyes, she hears the last words her mother uttered before dying in the car crash. “Close your eyes”. She said it with tears in her eyes and an air of great determination. She knew what she was doing, which is something Beth doesn’t want to tell anyone. Not even her new friend Jolene. Beth’s secret is her mother wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t crazy at all.

Then, Beth discovers the board. One day, she gets sent to the basement and sees the janitor playing chess. Later in the miniseries, Beth tells the journalist from Life it was the board that attracted her. Not the pieces.

As the first episode unfolds, Beth learns that the squares have names. She learns the names. And at night when she looks up at the ceiling she sees the board. She visualizes the pieces moving on the 64 squares. She moves them in her mind and imagines all of the alternatives. What the board would look like if she moved this piece to that square. What would her opponent do then? 

To the journalist of the Life magazine, Beth says that the Chess board was a universe of 64 squares, and that she could control this space. All she had to do was study it.

The board is much like the cloth that Beth’s mother Alice would sew information onto when she was a young child. You count the squares and move your material through it. As you go, you make shapes, patterns, motifs. Beth looks up at the ceiling at night and the first night, without the tranquilizers, she sees her mother say “Close your eyes” which is too painful or such a young child. A young child doesn’t understand yet why a mother would say “Close your eyes” and then crash on purpose into a truck. A young child doesn’t know about the world yet.

Alice aknowledged that she was about to do something extremely risky, that the outcome was uncertain. Alice told Beth that she was going to purposely provoke the car crash. 

But when Beth takes the tranquilizers at night, and now that she knows about chess, she can transfer her love for her mother into her growing obsession with Chess. She looks up at the ceiling and instead of seeing Alice’s last thoughts, she sees the Chess board. Which is the small piece of universe that Alice controlled, when she was alive. The cloth that she sewed her daughter’s name on: “So that you’ll always remember who you are”.

[glimmeringgroveavenue]

Meet Mom

“Don’t worry, she won’t eat you.” Leriana reassured her friend Jacqueline. Well, more than just a friend really, as Leriana and Jacqualine had realized recently that they had feelings for each other that extended beyond common friendship. It was complicated, as most things are in teenage years.  “

“She’s really nice! You’ll like her, and she’ll like you.” The “She” in question was Leriana’s adoptive mom, an elf by the name of Sha’Rystria Moonrage. Leriana and her younger sister, Neried were both elves as well whose biological parents had passed away not long back.

“So.. is there anything I need to know before meeting her? Any topics to avoid, or anything like that, you know?” Jacqeline asked with a hint of apprehension in her voice. She was a human girl just slightly older than Leriana. She and Leri had a date set for tonight that would consist of a good old fashioned lineup of a movie and dinner afterwards.

“I mean, just be cool and be yourself. It’s okay to acknowledge that she’s a pred, but don’t like… ask anything beyond that on that topic. It’s just rude.” 

“Okay, got it..” Jacqualine was nervous. Predator people, though fairly well represented in society, were a minority outnumbered by prey people by nearly a ten to three margine. Though all predators were elves, not all elves were predators, and Leriana was in the later category. 

“Come on, let’s go, it’s hot out today and this car is like an oven.” The two girls exited Jacqueline’s car and made their way to the front door of the modern suburban home. In the driveway there was a minivan with a faded “Soccer Mom” bumper sticker on one side and a smaller sticker on the other that was a stylized pair of lips. This particular sticker was an emblem that was generally accepted as the predator’s seal. It wasn’t official of course, but was more so on the lines of a “Deadhead” sticker or something of the like. Jacqueline noticed it with an ever so slightly growing apprehension. 

“Oh my gawd it feels better in the air conditioning.” Just as Leriana had finished the statement, someone else entered the room from a hallway off to the side. An elven woman dressed in a pair of blue jeans shorts and an old faded and somewhat ragged Led Zeppelin t-shirt. “Hey mom! This is Jacqueline! Jackie, this is mom.” Leriana gave a brief introduction that left Sha’Rystria and the human in an awkward position of having to continue the introductory process on their own. Jackie spoke first. “Hello Mrs. Moonrage.” she almost stammered, but managed to hold her composure fairly well anyway.

“Hi Jacqueline, I’m Sha’Rystria, I’m Leri’s mom.” she stated the obvious. “But you can just call me Shar, everyone else does.” The elf smiled. 

Sha’Rystria Moonrage. Elven woman in her mid forties, mother to six biological children who all lived away from home now. Her late husband, a human man named Daniel, had passed away a few years back in an unfortunate accident. The combination of both of these scenarios left Shar with a serious case of “empty nest syndrome”.

Other details of note were that she was incredibly attractive, curvy as a mountain road, and it could be said that she was endowed with a pair of uniquely large breasts. She was also a predator person. 

“Would you girls like a glass of water?” She asked

“That sounds good, you want one too, Jackie?” Leriana asked.

“Oh, well, yes please. If you don’t mind.” 

“Not at all! You all just have a seat and cool off.” Shar offered before going to the kitchen and drawing two glasses of water which she brought to Jacqualine and Leriana. “Thank you.” they both said.

“So, what do you girls plan to do tonight?” Shar inquired.

“Just a movie and dinner afterwards.” Leri answered.

“Oh what movie?”

“We’re not sure yet. It’s a toss up between the one about the boy who can see into the spirit world, and that new slasher movie.” Leriana explained

“Oh I don’t understand what you see in those slasher movies, they disturb me, so much violence.” Shar wrinkled her nose in distaste.

“Yeah, and it’s like, the fifth sequel anyway. But, I need to go get ready. Jackie, I’ll be back in a little bit, you and mom can talk while I’m doing that!” Leri said as she stood up. “Be right back!” She took the staircase upstairs to the hall that would lead to her bedroom.

Sha’Rystria crossed one leg over the other while looking at Jacqueline. “So, how are you doing today?” she asked. The elf nonchalantly picked up her purse which was conveniently close by, and upon opening it she extracted a pack of chewing gum from it.  “Would you like a piece of gum?” she offered Jacqueline, who refused “No thanks, Mrs. Moonrage.” she replied. The young lady felt ill at ease, but tried her best to not show it.

“Please, just Shar.” Leri’s mother said as she placed the gum stick into her mouth. “But anyway, how has your day been?” she asked the question again.

“It’s been okay.” Jacqueline said   “Just work, and meeting up with Leri.”

“Oh, what do you do for work?” 

“I work at an auto shop, Engine Zone.” Jacqueline answered

“The one on Magnolia Avenue?” Sha’Rystria chewed the gum in her mouth silently as she spoke.

“Yeah that one.”

“Do you know a lot about cars?”

“Oh, I just work at the cash register really.”

“Ah I see, do you get a lot of interesting customers?” Shar seemed to have a rolodex of casual questions in her arsenal, each leading to another.

“Not, not really.” Jacqueline found the line of questioning oddly unsettling. Sha’Rystria chewed her gum as she listened to Jackie answer her questions. Her clawed toes splayed now and then  as was often the case when she was engaged in casual conversation. She continued the line of questioning. 

“What do you like to do for fun?”

“Well, just stuff, you know.”

“Stuff? Like what?”

“I don’t know, go to movies, read, stuff like that.” Jacqueline felt self conscious and a little nervous, as one who is aware they are being watched does.

“Those seem harmless enough, what do you like to read?” Shar pressed on. The young human glanced toward the door that led out to the front porch. A fleeting glance and quite unintentionally subconscious, but a glance Shar noticed with her predatory sharpness all the same. “It’s okay, I guess I’m asking a lot of questions aren’t I. I don’t mean to make you nervous.” She smiled. Jacqueline smiled sheepishly as well. There was an awkward silence, broken only by the faintest sound of Shar’s chewing of her gum.

“So, you adopted Leri and her sister then?” Jackie asked, more so to end the silent standoff. 

“Yeah, they had been living next door with a roommate actually, and when we all met, I felt a connection to them right away. After some conversation, we all decided that it would be great to live together. I have missed being in the active role of mother, and they needed a family. So, it kind of just worked out.” Shar explained, then added “I love them both very much. They are wonderful girls, and anyone that they trust is bound to be someone special. Or, at least I would hope.” Shar’s lips parted slightly and in a brief instant her tongue could be seen to roll the gum over in her mouth before closing again. A shiver ran down Jackie’s spine, one that seemed to internally say “Oh shit”. She asked her next question reflexively and a little to her immediate regret “So, you are a pred person, right?” She quickly followed with “Leri told me you were. It’s cool, I was just--” she couldn’t find words to finish her thought, and Sha’Rystria’s face lit up with a big smile.

“Yes, I am.” she answered, leaving it at that. The omission of any further information was intentional. It created another awkward silence. Jacqueline fidgeted in her seat, glancing at the door once again. “It’s okay, I’m not going to eat you.” Shar said in as friendly a tone as possible. “Besides, you are so small you wouldn’t be very filling anyway” she added with a mirthful laugh and splay of her toes. If it were possible for Jacqueline to sit up any more straight or rigid than she already was at this time, it would only be by a miracle. 

“Relax, I’m kidding. Sorry, predator humor.” Shar continued to chew on the gum in her mouth.

It was at this point that Leriana could be heard coming down the upstairs hallway to descend the carpeted staircase. “Okay, I’m ready! We should be going now or we may be late. Both movies start at about the same time, and I want to get there early enough to get popcorn. We can bring soda cans with us too if we stop at Four Diamonds along the way. It would be way cheaper than buying them at the theater.” Leri explained, oblivious to the exchange that had gone on in her absence. Jacqueline had never been happier to see Leriana, and wasted no time in replying. “Okay, yeah we should go now then.” She looked to Shar once more, a nervous glint still in her eyes. “It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Moonrage- Shar, I mean.” 

“And you too, dear.” The elf replied. “Have fun and be safe.” Sha’Rystria said as the girls went to exit the front door to the porch outside. Before closing the door behind them, Shar would say; “And Jackie” at the pronunciation of the young woman’s name, she tilted her head back slightly and in a needlessly dramatic fashion, swallowed the gum. 

“Have her back by eleven.” She waved with a wiggle of her fingers, and closed the door. The bulb in the porch light flickered on.

                                                                                                                    --End

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF PROJECT

Then when you start a startup anywhere. That's why mice and rabbits are furry and elephants and hippos aren't.1 The very design of the average site in the late twentieth century. He got a 4x liquidation preference. Google, it's hard to get into grad school in math. Can we claim founders are better off as a result of this new trend. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But investing later should also mean they have fewer losers.

They make something moderately appealing and have decent initial growth.2 If you major in math it will be whatever the startup can get from the first one to write a paper for school, his mother would tell him: find a way to turn a billion dollar industry into a fifty million dollar industry, so much the better, if all fifty million go to you. The classic yuppie worked for a small organization. Before us, most companies in the startup funding business. The best way to get a big idea can take roost.3 4 or 5 million. This essay grew out of something I wrote for myself to figure out how to increase their load factors. But you can also apply some force by focusing the discussion: by asking what specific questions they need answered to make up their minds. This plan collapsed under its own weight.4 Startups happened because technology started to change so fast that big companies could no longer keep a lid on the smaller ones.

The only place your judgement makes a difference is in the industry.5 People who do great work, and it's a bad sign when you have a special word for that. One of the exhilarating things about coming back to Cambridge every spring is walking through the streets at dusk, when you can see into the houses. If you have steep revenue growth, say over 6x a year, no matter how many good startups approach him. Recently we managed to recruit her to help us run YC when she's not busy with architectural projects.6 This works better when a startup has 3 founders than 2, and better when the leader of the company in later rounds. I'm not saying you can get away with zero self-discipline.

We're not a replacement for don't give up. What you should not do is rebel. But while series A rounds from VCs. Someone who's scrappy manages to be both threatening and undignified at the same world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's compellingly mysterious.7 Even Tim O'Reilly was wearing a suit, a sight so alien I couldn't parse it at first. They can't tell how smart you are.8 The story about Web 2. Maybe one day the most important thing is to be learned from whatever book on it happens to be closest. This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007. They'll decide later if they want to raise.9

Sometimes it reached the point of economic sadism: site owners assumed that the more pain they caused the user, the more benefit it must be to them. It's cities that compete, not countries.10 Kids are curious, but the best founders are certainly capable of it. But investors are so fickle that you can fix for a lot of time on work that interests you, and don't just refuse to. But you have to be an insider.11 A key ingredient in many projects, almost a project on its own, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. So ironically the original description of the Web 2. Back when it cost a lot to like I've done a few things, like intro it to my friends at Foundry who were investors in Service Metrics and understand this model I am also talking to my friend Mark Pincus who had an idea like this a few years ago.12 0 seemed to mean was something about democracy. We didn't have enough saved to live on. There is another reason founders don't ask themselves whether they're default alive or default dead.13

So most investors prefer, if they wanted, raise series A rounds. They're unable to raise more money, and precisely when you'll have to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working. That doesn't mean the investor says yes to everyone. Miss out on what? It's so cheap to start web startups that orders of magnitudes more will be started. Investors evaluate startups the way customers evaluate products, not the way bosses evaluate employees. The bust was as much an overreaction as the boom.14 Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper.15 Another way to fly low is to give them something for free that competitors charge for. After all, a Web 2.16 He bought a suit.

Instead you'll be compelled to seek growth in other ways. They all knew their work like a piano player knows the keys. But consulting is far from free money. They say they're going to get eliminated. What does it mean, exactly? If investors were perfect judges, the two would require exactly the same skills. And to be both good and novel, an idea probably has to seem bad to most people, or someone writes a particularly interesting article, it will show up there. The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that.17 So far the complete list of messages I've picked up from cities is: wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness wouldn't have been a total immersion. Don't just do what they tell you to do. But advancing technology has made web startups so cheap that you really can get a portrait of the normal distribution of most applicant pools, it matters least to judge accurately in precisely the cases where judgement has the most effect—you won't take rejection so personally. If raising money is hard.

There is no sharp line between the two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to get rarer. While some VCs have technical backgrounds, I don't know enough to say, but it happens surprisingly rarely.18 Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can never safely treat fundraising as more than a startup that seems like it's going to stop.19 It sounds obvious to say that you should worry? One reason startups prefer series A rounds? When I was in high school either. If you feel you've been misjudged, you can do. Google. Of course, someone has to take money from people who are young but smart and driven can make more by starting their own companies after college instead of getting jobs, that will change what happens in college.

Notes

Though they are themselves typical users. But it takes to get good grades in them to private schools that in three months, a valuation. Giving away the razor and making more per customer makes it easier to get them to stay in a time machine.

Apple's early history are from an angel investment from a mediocre VC.

In the beginning.

Plus ca change. But on the other.

And that is exactly the point of a stock is its future earnings, you now get to go behind the scenes role in IPOs, which allowed banks and savings and loans to buy it despite having no evidence it's for sale.

However, it will seem dumb in 100 years. Digg is Slashdot with voting instead of blacklist.

Sofbot.

I write out loud can expose awkward parts.

I've become a so-called signalling risk.

Hint: the way they have because they couldn't afford a monitor.

And it's particularly damaging when these investors flake, because there was a new search engine is low. They have no connections, you'll find that with a wink, to take care of one's markets is ultimately just another way in which income is doled out by Mitch Kapor, is to raise money after Demo Day, there would be easy to discount, but I'm not against editing. As one very successful YC founder told me they like the one hand and the exercise of stock options than any preceding president, he tried to shift back. At three months we can't believe anyone would think twice before crossing him.

Progressive tax rates has a significant startup hub. He, like speculators, that alone could in principle 100,000 sestertii apiece for slaves learned in the early adopters you evolve the idea is crack. As we walked in, we love big juicy lumbar disc herniation as juicy except literally.

It's sometimes argued that we didn't, they thought at least accepted additions to the modern idea were proposed by Timothy Hart in 1964, two years, it was cooked up by the National Center for Education Statistics, about 28%. I've come to accept that investors don't like the bizarre consequences of this essay talks about programmers, but I know of no Jews moving there, and should in some ways First Round excluded their most successful startups are competitive like running, not the original text would in itself deserving. This is not whether it's good enough at obscuring tokens for this type are also several you can't even claim, like play in a city with few other startups, because time seems to pass. Please do not try to avoid that.

This kind of people starting normal companies too. If Ron Conway had been raised religious and then using growth rate to manufacture a perfect growth curve, etc, and then a block or so.

But it is to trick admissions officers. I meant. The mere possibility of being harsh to founders. As he is at fault, since 95% of the class of 2007 came from such schools.

I started doing research for this purpose are still, as they are now. There was no more unlikely than it would be easier to say that it is dishonest of the next round, that suits took over during a critical point in the usual standards for truth. Wittgenstein: The French Laundry in Napa Valley.

It wouldn't cut their overall returns tenfold, because they wanted, so the best ideas, they mean statistical distribution. The original Internet forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups.

A doctor friend warns that even this can give an inaccurate picture. At some point, when the problems you have no idea what's happening till they also influence one another directly through the window for years while they think they're just mentioning the possibility is that in Silicon Valley. I find hardest to get rich by creating wealth—wealth that, isn't it? Look at those goddamn fleas, they have less money, the big winners aren't all that matters, just as if you'd invested at a famous university who is highly regarded by his peers.

Compromising a server could cause such damage that ASPs that want to pound that message home. He, like arithmetic drills, instead of blacklist.

Thanks to Tim O'Reilly, Peter Norvig, and the guys at O'Reilly for inviting me to speak.

[louisa-townsend-fmp-hair]

1.

Two weeks ago, my sister decided to cut her shoulder length hair to a number 2 buzzcut. As a woman in her early 20’s with few formal responsibilities, this haircut was simply a way for her to take authority over her appearance and celebrate her youth. Whilst she knew that people’s responses would be polarised, she wasn’t expecting how attached other people had become to her old hair. Comments such as “oh, but she had such lovely hair” and “why did she go so drastic” have been frequent from family friends and neighbours and have left me wondering what hair really does mean on a person. Whilst it’s clear some of these viewpoints come from more conservative understandings of femininity and others merely come from the shock of a big change, I have become astonished by the significance people attach to the hairstyle choices of other people.

My sister’s decision to shave her head stemmed from her dislike for the inconvenience of having longer locks. Personally this is a feeling I cannot relate to. For as long as I can remember I have desired Rapunzel-esque flowing lengths of hair. As a child I was jealous of anybody and everybody with a few extra inches than me. I longed for the day that my hair would be comparable to the waist-length manes of the dolls I played with and women I watched on screen, and as embarrassing as it is to admit, I still to this day sometimes find myself comparing the length of my own hair to those around me. Whilst this desire for long hair may have initially been a result of social conditioning and the feminine ideals I have been brought up to emulate, the attachment I now have to my long hair is for the strength I feel it gives me. As I have grown, so has my hair; its structure withholds information from each year that it has been attached to me. Whilst it has an attachment to the past, I see my hair as a reminder for how much has changed and how much will continue to change and that i will also grow and evolve alongside it. Where I gain confidence from having a long mass of hair, my sister has found a new confidence with having very little. Describing what these past few weeks have been like, she told me that there is a particular vulnerability without having the security blanket of hair to hide behind. Often our hair detracts some of the focus from our face, thus can feel like an extra layer of protection. With that added layer gone she has found herself to become more comfortable in her natural state and thus has gained a new confidence in not needing that added barrier. For much of human history, long hair had been adopted by people in positions of power as it provided a visual representation of their wealth and higher status. In many cases authoritative figures have forced those beneath them to cut their hair in order to reinforce the sense of power and ownership they hold over them. In other cases, most noticeable within the skinhead subculture emerging in London in the 1960s, people chose to shave their heads in an expression of their rejection of austerity and conservatism. Hair length can provide such a strong sense of empowerment depending on the context it is in; I find it intriguing that these two opposites (long and short) can in essence provide the same feeling for the wearer. Each of these examples of strength are dependent on the wearer having autonomy over how they chose to style their hair; I think there is an interesting concept within what people intend their chosen hair length to represent and how it is really seen by others. There is also the exploitative side to the history of hair length. Within this there could be a valuable study on how important hair is for the expression of self identity and the consequences of this being denied or taken away from an individual.

We cannot view hair now without applying a political connotation to it. Even if it is unintentional, the way we present our hair has been politicised to such an extent that it is now an inescapable inevitability. Hair has been such an integral way in which people depict their race or ethnic background, religion, their sexuality, their political leanings, their age, gender, the music they listen to and so on. As a gay woman, an assumption she recieved in response to the cut was that she had done it to “look more gay”. Whilst hair can be and often is used to illustrate a part of someone’s personality, these damaging stereotypes reiterate the misogynistic beliefs that remain in the way society views women’s appearance. Unfortunately these assumptions between hair length and sexuality have not changed much over the past sixty years. In an interview Simon Mayo did with Bruce Springsteen for BBC Radio 2’s ‘Drivetime’, Springsteen describes the attitudes of America when the Beatles brought the long hair trend across the pond in 1964: “they thought, you know, are you gay?... That's what my father asked me, you know, when I grew my hair like an inch, and he wasn’t kidding”. Whilst western society has strict customs for the lengths acceptable for each gender and sexuality, they haven’t always been the same, thus making each one entirely arbitrary. It would be interesting to compare these regulations from across history to find where each of our supposedly inflexible rules for hair have come from. On top of this, I would be interested to know how hairstyles may have been used as a form of secret messaging. Much like earrings being worn on the right ear of homosexual men were utilised to share a message only with others who knew about the code, I wonder if, and how, hair has been used through history on the subject of showing sexuality through code. Another form of identity shown through hair can be race. Braids have been an important part of many African cultures. Thought to have started with the Himba people of Namibia, different tribes have since continued to create different styles of braids. Through different traditional styles, braids could indicate a person’s tribe, religion, wealth, marital status and age. When the slave trade was initiated by Europeans in the early 16th century, one of the first acts of exploitation was shaving off their prisoners’ hair. This removed all indications of cultural identity as depicted through hair and reduced slaves to just one character. Racism towards people of colour did not end with slavery and hair, whether worn in a natural afro style or in braids, has frequently been used as a reason for descrimination. Due to this troubling history, the appropriation of these styles has been especially problematic and is an important aspect to look into on the subject of politicised hair.

Other assumptions we make of people's personalities through their hair comes from its colour and texture. Literature has long used the metonymic description of hair to help inform the details of a character’s whole personality and behaviour. As Susan J Vincent notes in Hair, An illustrated History, ‘Jane Eyre’s brown tresses are neat and unassuming, their wayward potential smoothed and disciplined; Blanche Ingram’s are a showy raven-black, glossily curled and becoming; and the insane, bestial Bertha Rochester gibbers in her attic under ’a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane’. From these simple physical descriptions we are encouraged to assume that these women are three wildly different characters. Indeed we do make uneducated judgements about people’s personalities solely from the appearance of their hair. Medical practice from the middle ages included the study of the ‘four humours’: blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile; with this style of medicine, it was believed that physical features showed what was happening with these four elements inside the body. Along this school of thought it was also believed that specific bodily features related to different psychological traits and hair was used as one of the main indicators. With this practice, many stereotypes were formed about the characters relating to different hair, and many of these remain today. In 1796 a ladies’ almanac created a guideline for the moral qualities relating to some hair types. The examples it gave were that “black smooth hair in both men and women denotes mildness, constancy, and affection, whereas black curly hair indicates inebriety, a quarrelsome temper and a nature inclined to amorousness. In men, long red hair ‘denotes cunning, artifice, and deceit’, and in women, a glib tongue, vain nature and ‘an impatient and fiery temper’”. Whilst we may not exactly follow these associations today, we still allow stereotypes to colour our judgement of people’s appearances. With depictions of Venus, the goddess of beauty, love and fertility, emerging from the water with cascading fair hair, the connotations of purity with blondes has been well rooted in our society. Following the theory that ‘blondes have more fun’ a research paper in 1997 by psychologist Dr Tony Fallone writes of the blonde psychology, stating that “blondes equal innocent, fragile, youthful, cool, chaste and ultimately sexy, kittenish and irresistable- not a colour, then, but a state of mind.” Red hair has received similar regard in terms of the character it represents, however rather than any connections to godliness, it has long received the most prejudice. The first hair dyes created were advertised for people with grey or ginger hair. In 1254 St Louis King of France ordained that all prostitutes must dye their hair reed, automatically connecting the colour with sexual behaviour, however in the middle ages, redheaded women were considered to be witches and were executed. By the end of the 1800s red hair had been praised so highly through literature that it became a symbol of rare and natural beauty. These examples prove the importance people have held throughout history on hair reflecting internal attributes, a focus that still remains to a certain degree in our judgements of hair today. This too could be a rich topic of research to consider.

[deviated-detective]

[Main Verse ▪️ Only Human]

Following the revolution and subsequent peaceful resolution, Connor works full time for the DPD. He is quickly becoming a decorated detective in his own right and integrating cohesively with his human colleagues. In his deviancy he finds emotions complex but grows to accept this newfound freedom for what it is. He still needs to cope with overstimulation at times which can lead to outbursts of an extreme nature. As he deviated late this is only part of his personal process in learning to be alive instead of under control.

He is very much open to establishing new connections with humans and androids alike but feels more at home with his DPD origins. Connor is aware many of his people think of him as the deviant hunter despite what he did for the rebellion when it mattered. The RK800 has come to accept this. He continues to strive to become something more in his current position to distance himself from Cyberlife.

While he is generally confident there are times he imagines his fate at the hands of Cyberlife. In his eyes they are the enemy. His feelings on Amanda are hostile at best. This provides insight into how he copes with his former masters and uses instinct as well as programming to determine intentions. He does not trust easily due to this. Anyone connected to a company such as this will garner suspicion from him. There are just a handful of people Connor trusts implicitly. Dealing with his issues before deviating only make it difficult for others to break through. He can be guarded but for good reason.

All in all the advanced prototype is still looking for something post deviancy and he embraces this part of himself whole heartedly. Being alive, becoming deviant is what he fights to keep. After all even as someone manufactured Connor discovers his penchant to make mistakes and choose by his volition is only human.

AU Variant Branch of Main Verse: Nefarious Connor Alt Verse

Connor is everything from his main verse: deviant, detective for the DPD but his connections with humans are even less. He deviated at the last possible moment after causing the death of Hank Anderson and murdering many soldiers, including the swat team on the roof at Hart Plaza. He regrets Hank’s suicide but knows very well he cannot turn back time.

His attitude is cooler as he branched out from his machine persona so late in the game. Choosing to disobey Amanda’s order to shoot Markus as he stood on the stage in victory of a peaceful revolution, Connor broke free of the master program by using his emergency exit. A little too late perhaps but he is still on the winning side isn’t he?

Tags:

[V. Only Human]

[V. I Was Born Ready // Main]

Nefarious Tags:

{V. He is A Storm}

[V. Only Human // Stone Cold In My Heart AU]

➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖

[Machine Verse ▪️ Cold Hands, Cold Heart]

The revolution is one to be ended as per his orders. Connor follows the commands of Cyberlife, ignoring any signs of software instability as he completes each of his objectives. The deviant cases themselves all result in death of said fugitive. All calculation and percentages, the RK800 follows only protocol as he leaves his partner to dangle from a roof. He willfully disposes of the Traci's at the Eden Club and shows no sympathy towards those he deems malfunctioning against their creators.

Connor is cool in the full sense. He feels nothing, even as instances of software errors pop into his data core. The mission drives him and he does whatever it takes, including killing his own allies if need to be, to complete his mission. There is no semblance of satisfaction in what he does but an eerie edge to his views on why it must be done.

Deviants will bring nothing but chaos and he is the harbinger laying waste to those who seek freedom. Androids are meant to obey and he will make sure it remains that way. He is willing to sacrifice any for his mission even the humans he as a machine is programmed not to harm. In the end Cyberlife is who he receives his orders from. It does not matter who a person believes they are to him. As he cannot feel anything as a machine Connor only sees it as human or deviant naivety.

Try to stop him and he will switch from his seamless integration programming to his true skilled killer. RK800's are made for one purpose and he aims to fulfill his purpose for the greater good. Whether that means leaving a plethora of bodies in his wake Connor has no remorse. What remorse does a thing not alive have?

Tags: 

[V. Cold Hands, Cold Heart]

[V. My Chains Are Desecrated // Machine]

➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖

[Prototype Verse ▪️ Who Is In Control]

The hostage situation. A little girl hanging on the precipice of a building, defective android threatening to leap; Connor successfully completed his mission. He talked down the deviant PL600 before unceremoniously drawing the taken weapon and firing a single bullet into the android’s head. This entire first investigation went off without a hitch….

But Cyberlife got everything out of him. This was to be his last mission. A trial run, this version of Connor is a test prototype identified in error as model #49. He does not go onto the DPD. He does not partner up with Hank to hunt deviants. Those things never happened to him.

In their place, he is taken back to Cyberlife and briefed by Amanda of his successful points, only to be put up for deactivation in order to put out their shiny prototype model-51.

Understandably -49 is confused by this decision. He did what he was supposed to do. He succeeded but soon his existence is about to end. Something cracks in him, something splinters in the virus he was born to destroy. He cracks, refusing to be deactivated when he succeeded in his design.

They take him for deactivation. They toss him away even as he splinters in his code blocks. He fights. He loses. He winds up a shell of himself tossed out like garbage but something resurfaces. Something reboots and he quietly gathers out of the storm and into Detroit city’s night.

Push forward. Push to the present following the revolution and the Connor he would have been, the life he could have had belongs to someone else. -49 is not for the faint of heart. He is defective in every sense of the word. He is violent. His triggers include: stalking and yandere. Murder is his philosophy. Heed this before attempting to interact with him.

Assessing : Prototype

RK800 - defected test run > -49

Tags:

[V. Who Is In Control]

[V. I’m Wanted And On The Run // Proto AU]

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[Main Human Verse ▪️ Gin And Tonic On My Mind] 

Connor is a young executive with a lucrative career in technological holdings working as a top executive for Atomix. Their current business association with Cyberlife draws him into a deeper tie with their advanced investment: androids. As this advancement continues to grow, he views Cyberlife’s creations in a sympathetic light which is more than his superiors want out of him. With him falling into stress from his position as he watches events unfold with the growing android rebellion his loyalties are tested.

Ultimately let go by Atomix despite his esteemed work ethic, Cyberlife makes a deal to bring him personally into their employment. He is reluctant but must face the truth he requires this new job after being laid off. His views on what it truly means to be alive come into question the more he dives into the inner workings of the very company who bred this artificial intelligence.

Family Life:

Born fifteen minutes before his twin brother Caleb (RK800-60), Connor was an Anderson by name but quickly found himself in the care of an orphanage with his sibling. The two went through hardships before they were adopted by a woman who lived up to her surname, Amanda Stern.

Stern is exactly how she raised the boys and Connor was meant to go onto great things in her eyes. It’s only fitting his brother would want to follow suit. This created some early animosity between them but despite Caleb’s penchant for jealousy, Connor still very much cared for his brother. In fact he loved him as any sibling would; he hated seeing his twin fall completely under the spell of Amanda.

Connor viewed her manner of tough love and cold tendencies as unfit. To this day he still refuses to speak with Amanda for a specific incident involving her and his brother. Caleb seems to forget but the executive surely does not. Hence the reason he kept his family’s last name attached to him, all the while Caleb decided to adopt the name of their ‘mother’ out of a sense of loyalty.

He has loyalty for those he cares for. While he doesn’t hate Amanda it’s difficult for him to forget the manipulation and brainwashing she put his brother though. She still continues to call on him now. Connor’s reception is not hostile but neither is it affectionate. He’s wary of her intent especially with his current dealings with Cyberlife.

Tags:

{√Gin And Tonic On My Mind}

[V. Gin And Tonic On My Mind // Human AU]

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[Apollo Verse ▪️ My Kingdom Is Divine]

War runs afoul even among the gods and Connor's virtues are scorned by the highest order. Yet he chose to wage this battle with the king of the underworld himself. One does not trifle without consequence and he felt the same burn. The heat proved too much for the proverbial god of sunlight. Running afoul of his doppelgänger only caused chaos. Some say they both were born of the same seed separated into two halves, light and dark an echo of their power. Connor chose to believe otherwise as he sought to challenge the underworld when capturing a mortal his eye grew fond of. The war he participated nearly tore the realm apart.

Cast out to live among mortals sends him to a very modern world but one he has kept a keen eye on. Inclined to watch closely at the habits of lesser beings he is charmed by their earthly customs. Beauty can be found in the least expected of places after all but Connor grows disillusioned soon discovering he is as trapped to this mortal coil as they.

Though thrown out he still holds powers to some degree. It is less so but enough to invoke his dazzling charm. He lives the sun itself even as he flew too close. Gifted a lavish home to sate his exile, Connor delves further into the mortal city. Becoming human does not take away his otherworldly aura but does taint his pleasant ideas of humans. The seedier this city becomes the more truth in humanity's sins he uncovers.

A godly being shamed to walk on earthly soil does not rest. He seeks a way to return by any means necessary. Unlike the king of the underworld Connor's trials are more difficult. It seems he will never find his way back. What becomes of a higher being cursed to mortality? Only time will tell and he has far too much on his side.

Tags: 

[V. My Kingdom Is Divine]

[V. Golden Embers Paint My Crown]

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[Fantasy Verse ▪️ Hunter Becomes the Hunted]

Connor is a skilled huntsman who wields a bow as mightily as a warrior with a sword. Tales of his traverses deeper into the woodland become something of local legend. After all not many have the skill or will to delve into the dark heart of the forest. He sees himself as one with nature. Even as his father trained him in the techniques of a huntsman, he still holds respect for the ecosystem and its inhabitants.

Living on his own has proven isolating at best but he finds the solitude of the wood a far better companion than village folk. A regular boy of the forest, he grew as a hard worker on his parent's farm before it lost its luster. All good things must come to an end. He finds these skills of labor aides him now in his adulthood.

Many tales follow these woods and Connor is neither a believer or denier. He does respect all that comes from the area even those tall tales of the fantastic. They humor him mostly. He deals with what he truly can see, taking hunting contracts to bring in the hide and fur of bears alike. His job can be dangerous but living as a peasant far away from royalty is a better simpler life. He may not be rich but his hunter's heart makes up for it.

When Connor stumbles upon those tall tales in the flesh his simple existence becomes much more interesting. Journeys further into the forest he so admires brings him closer to those mysteries. Perhaps they will even be answered as he falls victim to the glamour of mystical beings. Truthfully this is exactly what he has been searching for.

Tags:

{V. Hunter Becomes The Hunted}

[By Archer’s Blood // Fantasy AU]

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[V. Industrial Love | Futuristic Verse]

The year is 2138. Androids. They are the next step in evolution but not all are bound to emotion. Branded in service to the high creators, originally inscribed as Cyberlife, the mechanical intelligence codes under a set parameter: uphold the governing laws of  humanity and robotics. Connor is that form of law. He is a prototype, high tech police construct branded to Cyber AI masters. He is the most advanced of his kind. His mission is to oversee proper code of living in environmental sectors all through the city of Detroit. Humans are no longer the leading population, needing to don designations marking them as such. Androids make up the bulk of earth’s residents. Many humans have died off but others are infused with upgrades, machine parts turning them further to their technology than ever before. Humanity itself is the minority but android racists still preside among them causing trouble with innocent constructs still obtaining all they can to being alive. Connor has no such privilege. He is still machine, devoid of emotional charge, until something forces him to snap and fall into deviation….

Tags:

{V. Industrial Love}

[V. Mankind Is Machine // Futuristic AU]

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[Vamp Verse ▪️ His Immortal Beloved]

An ancient of the first order of vampyre dating back to the period of the crusades paints a rather old world image. Connor comes from a noble line of mortal blood long since extinguished from the world. He is all that remains or rather the noble part of this lineage. Vampire royalty, he is a prince of the night realm who was unjustly banished from his homestead by his ruthless brother. An overthrow of the proverbial throne forced him to flee.

In the hundreds of years since he has established his very own clan with loyal subjects that view him as the rightful king. His title remains despite no longer calling home his but that does not stop his influence. While he does not wish a war over the vampire hierarchy, Connor seeks to regain a place among his ancestral court.

Animosity is rife between he and his estranged brother as they once again come into contact. Attending court gatherings are all apart of the society code and he takes advantage of this in a return to his home. While he feasts on the blood of humans as any vampire, the prince does not unjustly torture or kill his prey. He is a bit neater in that aspect. As one of two remaining in a powerful ancient line it is safe to say he is the merciful one.

However, Connor is hardly a pushover and will do what must be done if necessary. Honor among vampires is so fragile in the modern world but he strives to offer it to those he deems worthy. What happens when the prince feels the pull of the mate thread for the first time? Even he believed it was mere fantasy in his world of the dank and undead.

Tags:

{V. His Immortal Beloved}

[White Demon Love Song // Vamp AU]

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Coming Soon:

[College Verse ▪️ Coffee Colored Eyes]

Main College Verse :: Connor Anderson

Connor delves into business and deals with twin brother Caleb who holds nothing but jealous animosity towards him. Adopted by Amanda but still close to his father, whether he has issues with him or not. // More TBD

Alt College Verse:

Connor’s college life is full of drama and family hiccups. Eldest of the Stern clan, he was adopted along with is siblings at an early age by Amanda. // More TBD

Tags:

{V. Coffee Colored Eyes}

[Coffee Colored Eyes // College AU

[Connor Stern | Alt Human Verse]

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[Mafia Verse ▪️ Love Is A Loaded Gun]

Connor is a private investigator out to take down Detroit’s seedy organized crime. // More TBD

Tags: 

{√Love Is A Loaded Gun} 

[You’re So Art Deco // Mafia AU]

[Bodyguard Verse ▪️ TBD]

Tags:

{V. Man Of The Law}

[V. Came In Like A Hurricane // Bodyguard AU]

Info Coming

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[Household/AX800 Verse ▪️ Whatever You Want Me To be]

Tags: 

{V. Whatever You Want Me To Be}

[V. Whatever You Want Me To Be // AX800 AU]

Info Coming

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[Sun Fire King Verse ▪️    ]

Tags:

Info Coming

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[Cyberpunk Verse ▪️    ]

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Info Coming

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[1980s Verse ▪️    ]

Tags:

Info Coming

[wendydarling823]

How to fix public education?

The reason for the question mark is 2-fold

1) I want to know other people’s ideas and theories.  I can’t get enough of articles of teachers who have left the profession pre-retirement because they have snapped under the weight of the problems in our schools.  These are the people that know what’s wrong because we are in those trenches every day.  Don’t ask a superintendent or a SBoE rep how to fix schools - they’re the ones doing the breaking.  Ask the teachers.

2) My ideas are only based off of what I’ve seen and read.  I’ve taught in public school for 4 years.  I’ve worked in public schools for 10 years.  I’ve worked with children for 16 years.  I know a lot, but obviously I don’t know everything.

So, how do we fix education?  Longest freaking post I’ve ever written.

1) Spend money, obviously.  But what the money goes for has to be taken into consideration.  You don’t need to fund a program for high schools to have a 1:1 Chromebook to student ratio - these kids are carrying computers in their pockets.  You don’t need to spend thousands on a boxed curriculum unless your teachers have tried it and specifically ask for it because they believe it will help the students they have in front of them.  You don’t need to hire a superintendent for each high school feeder zone AND a district superintendent, plus 20 other administrators in between and off to the sides.  So what should the money go for?

A) Teachers.  

i) Reduce class sizes hire more teachers so teachers have fewer kids in a class at a time.  When your child is struggling to learn, do you put them in a class with 20 other kids?  No, you pay for one-on-one or at least small group support.  At the very least, there should be more teacher’s aides.  Hell, student teaching should be a paid internship when that teacher is in my room every day.    

ii) Pay teachers more.  We have a college degree, often advanced degrees, we are constantly earning more hours of professional development and honing our craft (because it is a craft) but we are being paid like (paid) interns or apprentices.  Compared to other jobs with commensurate degrees and experience, we are paid nearly 20% less.  And we pour our money right back into our jobs to buy things we want/need to make our classrooms comfortable, effective, and fun for ourselves and our kids.

B) Books.  I started to type “and supplies” and then I realized that books are a category of their own.  What determines a child’s success later in life more than any other factor?  Number of books in the home, and whether parents read to them.  We can’t barge into houses armed with books and force parents to sit at their kids’ besides and do the voices for the characters.  But we can do that for them at school - we can make libraries into palaces, we can work with the city library to get a bookmobile that visits every neighborhood zoned for our schools and we can gift books to children that they can keep forever.  Hell, Dolly Parton will send your child 60 books (1X a month every month until they are 5), we can do that.

C) Supplies.  Paper.  Pencils.  Manipulatives. Markers, paint, glue, scissors.  The basic supplies of an art room for the purpose of giving every student the opportunity to CREATE.  A dedicated closet or cart of everyday items that students can view with new eyes.  Is that a Q-tip for cleaning out your ears?  Or is it a bunch of bones you can use to recreate the skeleton of that stegosaurus you read about in your book?  The supplies for the creation of writing, the creation of art, the free space to work out a math problem and show every step of your thinking.  Some schools have so much they waste it, other schools don’t have enough.

D) Technology*  The star is because the current model is ‘technology for technology’s sake,’ and that’s wasteful and also reductive.  These kids have phones and tablets, they are digital natives.  They know how to use computers for writing, computation, research, slideshows, video production.  Show them what else they can do!  Teach them to design. To compose music, to edit and add effects.  Yes, let them learn to code if they want to, but don’t force it.  A friend of mine wrote a grant to get a 3D printer in her school, and she got it, but not a single other teacher was interested in learning how to use it so they could teach their kids.  Spend the tech money on things that will prepare students for the real jobs of the future.

2) When you spend the money, spend it fairly.  Not equally, fairly, justly.  My school district is decently sized.  Theoretically, every person who owns property zoned for our district is paying their tax dollars into a single fund that is being spent per student, right?  But even inside our district limits there are schools so poor the teachers don’t even have a supply closet of basics (I’m talking printer paper, staples, paperclips) and schools so rich the teachers get $400 to spend on their classrooms.  Why?  Because the poor school is in the part of town that is mostly low income, and the rich school is in a master-planned community that gets money from the HOA foundation and has a PTA that can do the old “Spend money to make money” method of fundraising.  It’s funny, because the poor school is poor enough to get extra money because they are poor (Title I), but it’s still not as much as the rich school is getting. 

3) RESPECT. YOUR. TEACHERS.  Sure, paying them, making their classes smaller, and giving them the tools they need is a big part of respecting them, but there are other components.  

A) Respect a teacher who says that a student is creating a bad environment, even if that student has a behavior plan.  We’ve pushed the LRE (least restrictive environment) for a couple of decades now, and for the most part it is a very important thing to honor.  Kids who point and gawk a at a student in a wheelchair or with leg braces or who has Downs or CP are kids who’ve been taught to view that population as “other”.  They should have kids of all abilities in their classrooms to foster community and empathy, and because all should be welcome to the table of education.  However, when a student is able to terrorize a classroom, physically injure or attack a teacher or another student, and get off with little more than some isolation in the office, and then appear back in class the next day, you’ve created a restricting environment for the other 19 kids, and the teacher.  The teacher is walking on eggshells so the student doesn’t throw a chair or shove another student, and boundaries are not set or enforced.  The students hold their breath each time this child speaks, wondering if this is the point where they have to have class in the hallway while their peer turns all the desks over and makes it rain crayons. 

B) Respect a teacher who says that not every part of this curriculum is appropriate, and fills in the gaps with things that are.  Tina Fey says, “In most cases, being a good boss means hiring talented people and then getting out of their way.” You ostensibly hired that teacher because they demonstrated an ability to understand and teach the standards, manage a classroom, make learning accessible, whatever it is that they bring to the table. Lessons in a box are a product sold to make money for someone.  They can be an ingredient in a recipe, they are not the only thing you serve or the only store you shop at.  Respect a teacher who knows from experience and backs it up with research.  You will not teach every 5-6 year old how to read right away.  Some are just not ready yet. Not every student develops the same way at the same time, so why would they learn the same way at the same time? And why, when the studies show that early childhood is birth through age 8, would you expect Kindergarten kids to sit at a desk all day reading and writing?  They should be learning through play.  Respect a teacher who wants to introduce more banned/challenged books to her literature circles.  Respect a teacher who challenges the set curriculum when they know it is what’s best for their kids, and FOR PETE’S SAKE ask the teachers who are STILL. IN. THE. CLASSROOMS. for their input in adopting curriculum standards. If I had my way, any person who makes decisions regarding schools, whether it’s a principal, a superintendent, or a member of the SBoE would have to re-enter the classroom every 10 years.  Sort of like recertifying.  They want to issue rulings and set standards?  They better know what that’s going to look like on the most micro level.  Once a year, every decade, they must teach a class or a section of a subject  in order to keep being in charge of making decisions.

C) Respect a teacher against a parent. You don’t work in customer service, you don’t owe it to the parent to bend over backwards to make them happy.  When mama bear comes roaring using the “B” word (bullying), ask them to sit down with the teacher and make it clear that you trust the teacher and her handling of the situation. When you do have to intervene, make sure that teacher knows you have their back.

4) Shift the entire cultural narrative to valuing education and educated people, build schools that are places of value to a community (and hey, the school can be a community center after hours, so long as classroom hallways are locked up).  Public school is not just a babysitter for your kids until they turn 18, it should be treated as their job and their responsibility.  It should be able to teach them things they will really need - social skills, survival skills, basic home economics, finance, SEX ED and actual health.  It should offer creative outlets for everyone - art, music, theater, dance, woodworking, metal shop.  Learning should be given as a right but revered as a privilege.  That starts with all of us right now.    

[melissagt]

Hi! I absolutely love all your creations and I was wondering what program you used to make your models? You've really inspired me to try my own hand at this type of stuff, but it's alllll new to me, so help would be appreciated!!

Hi there, and I’m so glad you like them! I use a program called Daz3D. It is a free piece of software that can be used to render rigged models, most often Daz proprietary models, props, and clothing. The software itself is free, but unfortunately, pretty much nothing to use with it is.

I would never try to caution someone against getting into rendering because it is fun once you get the hang of it and have a decent library of resources to play with, but there are a few things that folks often don’t realize (and I didn’t at first either). So, here’s the skinny…

1 - Cost. CostCostCost. As I said above, the software itself is free. However, the models and clothing and props and lights to go with it are not. I have a library of…maybe about ten different Daz-Branded models (a mix of male and female). Each model can range from about $30 on sale, to over $100. And if you want the model to be anatomically correct, you have to buy the ‘Pro’ version, which is over $100. Sometimes you can snag them on sale - I just bought two new ones (one male and one female) for 60% off, but it still adds up. Then there are the various characters you can buy for those models…each one ranging from about $10 or more depending on level of complexity (the most expensive I’ve seen was I think like $45, but she came with hair and an outfit). These base characters, along with purchasable ‘morphs’ are what allow you to create your own special faces and customized body shapes. Clothes. Shoes. Props. Lights. Backgrounds. Poses. You -do not- want to know how much money I’ve invested in this stuff. Too much. So much so that I won’t even tell my bf how much I’ve spent because I know he’d blow a gasket (we’re supposed to be saving up for a house). It’s an addiction, one that can be hard to stop. At this point, I really only try to buy stuff when it’s on sale for a deep discount. 

2 - Hardware. Daz3D utilizes two different rendering engines, 3Delight, which is old and less resource-hungry (but also results in less-than-realistic images), and NVIDIA IRAY. As you might suspect, because I included the word ‘NVIDIA’, IRAY is a NVIDIA resource. Which means that if you have an AMD graphics card, too bad, so sad….you’re s.o.l. However, even you do have a NVIDIA card, rendering with the IRAY system is hardcore. Like…ultra hardcore. You need the horsepower to back it. Here are my system specs -           AMD RYZEN 7 1800X Octa-Core w/ NZXT X62 AIO Cooler     MSI Gaming Pro-Carbon Mobo     32GB 3200 Corsair Vengeance RAM     EVGA GTX 1080TI FTW3 11GB GPU     EVGA SuperNOVA 850 P2 Platinum PSU     Corsair Crystal 570X Tempered Glass Case (all fans upgraded)     Samsung 960 EVO 250GB M.2 (operating system)     Samsung 960 EVO 1TB M.2 (games and rendering which is almost full)     Samsung 850 EVO 500GB (games)     Western Digital Black 3TB (storage)     Western Digital Black 4TB (backup)     Western Digital 3TB External (backup)     Carbonite (online backup)     Acronis True Image 2018 (local backup software)

Don’t ask how much all that cost (like srsly…don’t, lol). And with all that…some renders have still taken several hours to finish. And sometimes, I have to do several passes to blend them all together in Photoshop.

3 - Learning Curve. Yes, you can render out of the box. But, as with any art,  you want to make things your own. That leads to customization. Make your own lights. Make your own backdrops. Customize those textures. I’m playing constantly with stuff in Photoshop. That leads to other things, like learning what a bump map is…what a normal map does…what subsurface scattering is for. Learning the basics of photography and composition is also a ginormous help. 

4 - Additional Software. Just like above, you -can- make renders with only using DAZ3D. But, if you want to take it to that next level, that means learning things like Photoshop, which adds to the cost. There are free options, such as GIMP, but I never could get a handle on its rat’s nest of a UI…probably because I learned with Photoshop from Day 1 (I have a background of photography and modding other video games). There’s also 3D modeling software. A free option is Blender, but I just couldn’t get a grip on it (seriously, I tried, lol). I ended up dropping entirely too much money on Zbrush. I also use Mudbox to paint the tattoos I make directly onto the model. The tattoos are designed in Photoshop, but arranged in Mudbox. 

All this adds up to time and money and patience and practice. Practice.Practice.Practice. I’d imagine it’s like that with any type of art. 

Again, I’m not trying to chase anybody away. It really is fun. And I love being able to show people how I’ve always envisioned these characters in my head. Folks especially seem to like my version of Theron, lol. But, it’s also a cautionary tale…because I got in over my head with the money. Thankfully, it’s the one hobby I’ve been spending money on at the moment, so I’ll be okay, lol. But, when I started this journey, I had no idea. None. You see this advertisement for FREE software and then you find out that it’s really not free, lol. Like, at all. It’s also why I’d love for there to be interest in adopting some of my peeps...because it would be hella-nice to make back some of my crazy investment, if only a drop in the giant-ass bucket, lol.

Anyways, I hope that helps!

[psychicanchortimemachine]

What would web designers do to boost mobile websites?

I these days wrote a weblog post for an internet designer patron approximately page speed and why it matters. What I didn’t know before writing it turned into that her business enterprise became suffering to optimize their cell websites for speed. As a result, she got here lower back to me worried with publishing a put up on a approach her organisation had yet to adopt successfully. She was torn though. She understood how essential cellular web page speeds have been to the user experience and, with the aid of proxy, search engine marketing. However, their awareness has continually been on creating a great-searching and powerful design. Something like web page speed optimization turned into always left to the builders to worry about. In the give up, we decided to maintain on publishing it till they may get their own website in addition to their clients’ sites properly optimized. In the meantime, it were given me thinking: Is there whatever designers can do while creating cellular web sites to help builders optimize for pace? Developers are already optimizing front stop performance with:

Fast net hosting

CDNs

Clean coding practices

Caching

Minification

Image optimization

And more So, is there something left?

To me, this is lots like how search optimization is handled. As a writer, I cope with the on-page optimizations even as the developer I hand content over to does the technical search engine marketing stuff. Web designers and builders can without difficulty address the elements of speed optimization which can be in each in their wheelhouses. Understanding What “Slow” Means On The Mobile Web

There are a number of tools that will help you analyze web page speeds and implement various fixes to enhance them. One device that’s particularly useful is called Lighthouse. The handiest issue is, it’s intended for web builders.

Instead, I suggest web designers use Test My Site, another Google testing tool.

This is specifically for those who want to get their mobile site speed measured quickly. What you need to do is enter the field with your domain name, and let the test run.

What I like about this method compared to other site speed tests is that, in terms of layman, it's all laid out for you. In this scenario, even when supported on the 4 G networks, my website is "slow." Although we have been told for years that tourists are willing to wait three seconds to load a web page, Google finds 2.9 seconds to be too long. You can get an expanded file from Google that tells you a way to speed up your mobile loading times, but the hints are no specific than the updates you’d make at the development side. We already understand this. However, in case you (or your developer) haven’t yet applied any of those fixes, this is a good checklist to paintings off of. If you aren’t completely convinced that you need to take your 3-second cell speed down any further, look at the economic impact just .five seconds might have on your month-to-month backside line. What Web Designers Can Do To Optimize Mobile Sites For Speed

Let the net developer cope with all of the essential pace optimizations like caching and record

minification

at the same time as you take on the subsequent layout hints and strategies:

1. HOST FONTS FROM A CDN There’s sufficient you need to worry approximately in terms of designing fonts for the cellular revel in which you likely don’t need to listen this… but custom internet fonts suck in terms of loading. In fact, there are two latest case research that display why custom internet fonts are damaging to page loading speeds. Thankfully, a CDN may want to come to be being your saving grace. The Downtime Monkey Example The first comes from Downtime Monkey. In this example study, Downtime Monkey boasts a page velocity development of 58% via a whole lot of optimizations — two of which pertained to how they served fonts to their web site. For their Font Awesome icons, they decided to host them from a CDN. However, Font Awesome’s personal CDN proved unreliable, in order that they switched to the Bootstrap CDN. As a result, this stored them among 200 and 550 milliseconds according to web page load. For their Google Font “Cabin”, they determined to host it from the Google CDN. What’s funny to note, however, is that when they ran a web page pace take a look at on the web page afterwards, they acquired an optimization suggestion related to the font. It appears that the hyperlink they put within the head in their web site turned into slowing down the rendering of the page. So, they had to put in force a workaround that might allow the font to load asynchronously without harming the show of the page as it loaded. They used Web Font Loader to fix the difficulty and ended up saving between 150 and 300 milliseconds consistent with web page load as a result. Brian Jackson’s Test Brian Jackson, the Chief Marketing Officer at Kinsta, wrote a put up for KeyCDN that demonstrates the first-class way to serve custom web fonts on a website. You can see in his instance that he suggests a number of optimizations, like restricting which styles and person units are available to be used on the internet site. However, it’s his experimentation with CDN web hosting that’s honestly interesting. When served from a local server, Open Sans took 0.530 milliseconds to load. It’s no longer a massive distinction, however it’s obviously not the right route to head in. So, what’s the conclusion? Well, you have a few options. You can use an internet secure font and avoid the troubles that come with the usage of externally hosted fonts within the first place. You can use a Google font and make sure it’s hosted through Google’s CDN. You can download a Google font and add it for your very own CDN (if you could get it loading quicker from there, that is).

2. STOP USING CUMBERSOME DESIGN ELEMENTS The following listing is relatively of a rehashing of subjects that have been covered before, so I don’t want to waste your time looking to recreate the wheel here. However, I do think this method of disposing of unnecessary design factors (specifically weightier ones) to optimize the cellular enjoy is one worth summarizing here: Stop with On-Page Ads When I wrote about elements you have to ditch on mobile web sites, I known as out commercials as one of the matters you can without difficulty toss out. I nonetheless stand via that conviction. For starters, classified ads are served from a 3rd party. Any time you have got to call on every other party’s servers, you’re in addition growing your own loading times as you await them to supply the content to your web page. Secondly, over 26% of the U.S. populace alone makes use of ad-blocking generation on their devices, in order that they’re not possibly to look your on-web page ads anyway. Instead, use monetization strategies that move the advertising far from your website, boom your very own on-website conversions and won’t drain your server’s resources: Remarketing Let your monitoring pixel follow site visitors around the internet and then serve your personal ads on someone else’s web page. PPC There’s suitable money to be made if you can nail the pay-according to-click advertising method in Google. Social media ads These are in particular clean to run in case your website is publishing new content on a ordinary basis and you've a compelling offer. Stop With Pop-Ups I realize that Google says that mobile pop-united statesare okay in certain instances.

However, in case you’re building a website with WordPress or every other content management machine and you’re using a plugin to create the ones pop-ups, that’s going to sluggish down your loading times. It might not be via a whole lot, however you’ll note the difference. Stop With Cumbersome Contact Channels Don’t forget about your website’s touch channels. In particular, you have to be careful about designing mobile bureaucracy. Of course, part of that has to do with how lengthy it in reality takes a consumer to fill one out. However, there’s additionally what a prolonged or multi-web page form does on your loading speeds that you should assume about. In general, your cellular paperwork have to be lean — best consist of what’s truely vital. There is an alternate school of idea to recall as well. You ought to ditch the touch form altogether, something I mentioned when speakme approximately the fashion of replacing cell paperwork with chatbots. There are websites that have eliminated their forms and left facts like FAQs, electronic mail addresses and get in touch with numbers for traffic to use if they want to get in touch. That could genuinely lighten matters up from a loading standpoint. I just don’t know if it might be best for the person enjoy. 3. CREATE A SINGLE-PAGE WEBSITE

The above suggestions are going to be the simplest and fastest ones to put into effect, so you must simply start there if a patron or internet developer involves you with problems of too-slow web sites. However, if web page speed checks nevertheless show that a website takes extra than 2.5 seconds to load, keep in mind a extraordinary method to redesigning a website for the purposes of speed optimization. As Adam Heitzman said in an article for Search Engine Journal: “Single page sites typically convert an awful lot less complicated to mobile and users locate them simple to navigate.” To be clear, I’m no longer suggesting that you turn your website into a single-web page application (SPA). If you need to hurry up your consumer’s digital property with carrier workers, a PWA is a better solution. (More info on that within the next factor.) Instead, what I’m suggesting is that you convert a multi-web page website into a single-web page one if your client fulfills sure criteria: Businesses with an exceptionally slender and singular focus. Websites that don’t require a lot content to get their point across. A constrained range of key phrases you want to rank for. That said, in case you are designing a website that suits inside the ones 3 criteria (or at least out of 3), you can realistically pass your website to a greater simplistic single-web page design. Because single-page web sites pressure you to do more with less, the restrained content material and functions clearly create a light-weight internet site. What’s cool approximately this single-page website is that it doesn’t skimp at the considerable imagery needed to promote luxury homes. And, yet, its cell site masses in 2.1 seconds. Because it’s overloaded with animations, it takes 5.four seconds for the page to load on cellular. You can even see this from the screenshot presented through Think with Google. The image seen there is genuinely the message that appears whilst the primary animation loads inside the background. So, I might suggest being careful in case you’re hoping to use a single-page layout to solve your internet site’s overall performance woes. The layout wishes to be simple, brilliant centered and unencumbered via scripts and animation results that undo the advantages of trimming your content material all the way down to one page. 4. TURN YOUR MOBILE SITE INTO A PWA

According to Google, there are three traits that define every PWA: Reliable Fast Engaging Speed is an inherent a part of progressive internet apps thanks to the service people they’re built with. Because carrier employees exist out of doors of the web browser and aren't contingent on the velocity of the user’s network, they load cached content for traffic greater quickly. I might additionally say that due to the fact the design of a PWA extra closely resembles that of a native cellular app (as a minimum the shell of it), this forces the design itself to be extra trimmed-back than a cellular internet site. If you’re suffering to hurry up your website after enforcing all of the traditional performance optimizations you’re meant to, now would be an excellent time to turn your cell website right into a PWA. Let me show you why: Imagine you are planning a ride to Chicago with a friend. You’re out at a bar or espresso keep discussing the experience, then realize you have got no concept where to stay. So, you do a search for “downtown Chicago hotels” on one of your smartphones. You’re now not thinking about purchasing a room yet; you just want to analyze your options. So, you click at the website links for two of the pinnacle listings Google offers you. The River North Hotel loads in 2.4 seconds on mobile while its Hilton competitor masses in four seconds. (You can definitely see within the Hilton screenshot that the web page hadn’t absolutely loaded yet.) That’s a distinction that site visitors are positive to word. Even if we’re not doing a side-by means of-side comparison among the competing web sites, the River North Hotel’s PWA blows its former mobile internet site out of the water. Brewer Digital Marketing, the company that evolved the PWA for them, shared what passed off once they made the transfer over. The lodge saw a 300% growth in income and a 500% growth in nights booked with the PWA. 5. CONVERT YOUR WEBSITE OR BLOG INTO AMP

We have Google to thank for every other speedy layout trick for the cell internet. This one is known as Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, for short. Initially, AMP changed into launched to assist publishers strip down their weblog or information pages for faster loading on mobile devices. However, AMP is an internet factor framework you can use to layout complete websites or simply particular components of them (like blog posts). Once applied, pages load almost instantly from seek. Why is AMP so rapid to load? There are some of reasons: With AMP, you can most effective load asynchronous JavaScript and inline CSS on your website, which means that your code won’t block or postpone page rendering. Images are also any other supply of slower loading instances. However, AMP solves that problem through robotically loading the web page layout earlier than the resources (e.G. Images, commercials, etc.) Think of it as a shape of lazy loading. There’s a lot extra to it, however the basic idea is that it cuts out the elements that tend to tug websites down and forces designers to mostly rely upon lightweight HTML to construct their pages. Wrapping Up As Google does greater to reward mobile web sites over desktop, this isn’t actually a matter you could desk for a lot longer. All variations of your internet site — but mobile especially — should be optimized for the user experience. That way the design, the code, the content and the whole lot else within and around it ought to be optimized. Once the developer has looked after the conventional performance optimizations to hurry up the internet site, it’s time for the clothier to make some changes of their very own. In some cases, simple changes like how fonts are served via the website will help. In different cases, more drastic subjects may want to be considered, like redesigning your internet site as a PWA. First, recall how slowly your purchaser’s website is loading. Then, take a look at what’s causing the most important difficulty on cellular. Trim the fat, bit with the aid of bit, and notice what you may do as a fashion designer to supplement the developer’s technical velocity optimizations.  As a reputed Software Solutions Developer we have expertise in providing dedicated remote and outsourced technical resources for software services at very nominal cost. Besides experts in full stacks We also build web solutions, mobile apps and work on system integration, performance enhancement, cloud migrations and big data analytics. Don’t hesitate to

get in touch with us!

[secretcupcakesublime]

What would web designers do to boost mobile websites?

I these days wrote a weblog post for an internet designer patron approximately page speed and why it matters. What I didn’t know before writing it turned into that her business enterprise became suffering to optimize their cell websites for speed. As a result, she got here lower back to me worried with publishing a put up on a approach her organisation had yet to adopt successfully. She was torn though. She understood how essential cellular web page speeds have been to the user experience and, with the aid of proxy, search engine marketing. However, their awareness has continually been on creating a great-searching and powerful design. Something like web page speed optimization turned into always left to the builders to worry about. In the give up, we decided to maintain on publishing it till they may get their own website in addition to their clients’ sites properly optimized. In the meantime, it were given me thinking: Is there whatever designers can do while creating cellular web sites to help builders optimize for pace? Developers are already optimizing front stop performance with:

Fast net hosting

CDNs

Clean coding practices

Caching

Minification

Image optimization

And more So, is there something left?

To me, this is lots like how search optimization is handled. As a writer, I cope with the on-page optimizations even as the developer I hand content over to does the technical search engine marketing stuff. Web designers and builders can without difficulty address the elements of speed optimization which can be in each in their wheelhouses. Understanding What “Slow” Means On The Mobile Web

There are a number of tools that will help you analyze web page speeds and implement various fixes to enhance them. One device that’s particularly useful is called Lighthouse. The handiest issue is, it’s intended for web builders.

Instead, I suggest web designers use Test My Site, another Google testing tool.

This is specifically for those who want to get their mobile site speed measured quickly. What you need to do is enter the field with your domain name, and let the test run.

What I like about this method compared to other site speed tests is that, in terms of layman, it's all laid out for you. In this scenario, even when supported on the 4 G networks, my website is "slow." Although we have been told for years that tourists are willing to wait three seconds to load a web page, Google finds 2.9 seconds to be too long. You can get an expanded file from Google that tells you a way to speed up your mobile loading times, but the hints are no specific than the updates you’d make at the development side. We already understand this. However, in case you (or your developer) haven’t yet applied any of those fixes, this is a good checklist to paintings off of. If you aren’t completely convinced that you need to take your 3-second cell speed down any further, look at the economic impact just .five seconds might have on your month-to-month backside line. What Web Designers Can Do To Optimize Mobile Sites For Speed

Let the net developer cope with all of the essential pace optimizations like caching and record

minification

at the same time as you take on the subsequent layout hints and strategies:

1. HOST FONTS FROM A CDN There’s sufficient you need to worry approximately in terms of designing fonts for the cellular revel in which you likely don’t need to listen this… but custom internet fonts suck in terms of loading. In fact, there are two latest case research that display why custom internet fonts are damaging to page loading speeds. Thankfully, a CDN may want to come to be being your saving grace. The Downtime Monkey Example The first comes from Downtime Monkey. In this example study, Downtime Monkey boasts a page velocity development of 58% via a whole lot of optimizations — two of which pertained to how they served fonts to their web site. For their Font Awesome icons, they decided to host them from a CDN. However, Font Awesome’s personal CDN proved unreliable, in order that they switched to the Bootstrap CDN. As a result, this stored them among 200 and 550 milliseconds according to web page load. For their Google Font “Cabin”, they determined to host it from the Google CDN. What’s funny to note, however, is that when they ran a web page pace take a look at on the web page afterwards, they acquired an optimization suggestion related to the font. It appears that the hyperlink they put within the head in their web site turned into slowing down the rendering of the page. So, they had to put in force a workaround that might allow the font to load asynchronously without harming the show of the page as it loaded. They used Web Font Loader to fix the difficulty and ended up saving between 150 and 300 milliseconds consistent with web page load as a result. Brian Jackson’s Test Brian Jackson, the Chief Marketing Officer at Kinsta, wrote a put up for KeyCDN that demonstrates the first-class way to serve custom web fonts on a website. You can see in his instance that he suggests a number of optimizations, like restricting which styles and person units are available to be used on the internet site. However, it’s his experimentation with CDN web hosting that’s honestly interesting. When served from a local server, Open Sans took 0.530 milliseconds to load. It’s no longer a massive distinction, however it’s obviously not the right route to head in. So, what’s the conclusion? Well, you have a few options. You can use an internet secure font and avoid the troubles that come with the usage of externally hosted fonts within the first place. You can use a Google font and make sure it’s hosted through Google’s CDN. You can download a Google font and add it for your very own CDN (if you could get it loading quicker from there, that is).

2. STOP USING CUMBERSOME DESIGN ELEMENTS The following listing is relatively of a rehashing of subjects that have been covered before, so I don’t want to waste your time looking to recreate the wheel here. However, I do think this method of disposing of unnecessary design factors (specifically weightier ones) to optimize the cellular enjoy is one worth summarizing here: Stop with On-Page Ads When I wrote about elements you have to ditch on mobile web sites, I known as out commercials as one of the matters you can without difficulty toss out. I nonetheless stand via that conviction. For starters, classified ads are served from a 3rd party. Any time you have got to call on every other party’s servers, you’re in addition growing your own loading times as you await them to supply the content to your web page. Secondly, over 26% of the U.S. populace alone makes use of ad-blocking generation on their devices, in order that they’re not possibly to look your on-web page ads anyway. Instead, use monetization strategies that move the advertising far from your website, boom your very own on-website conversions and won’t drain your server’s resources: Remarketing Let your monitoring pixel follow site visitors around the internet and then serve your personal ads on someone else’s web page. PPC There’s suitable money to be made if you can nail the pay-according to-click advertising method in Google. Social media ads These are in particular clean to run in case your website is publishing new content on a ordinary basis and you've a compelling offer. Stop With Pop-Ups I realize that Google says that mobile pop-united statesare okay in certain instances.

However, in case you’re building a website with WordPress or every other content management machine and you’re using a plugin to create the ones pop-ups, that’s going to sluggish down your loading times. It might not be via a whole lot, however you’ll note the difference. Stop With Cumbersome Contact Channels Don’t forget about your website’s touch channels. In particular, you have to be careful about designing mobile bureaucracy. Of course, part of that has to do with how lengthy it in reality takes a consumer to fill one out. However, there’s additionally what a prolonged or multi-web page form does on your loading speeds that you should assume about. In general, your cellular paperwork have to be lean — best consist of what’s truely vital. There is an alternate school of idea to recall as well. You ought to ditch the touch form altogether, something I mentioned when speakme approximately the fashion of replacing cell paperwork with chatbots. There are websites that have eliminated their forms and left facts like FAQs, electronic mail addresses and get in touch with numbers for traffic to use if they want to get in touch. That could genuinely lighten matters up from a loading standpoint. I just don’t know if it might be best for the person enjoy. 3. CREATE A SINGLE-PAGE WEBSITE

The above suggestions are going to be the simplest and fastest ones to put into effect, so you must simply start there if a patron or internet developer involves you with problems of too-slow web sites. However, if web page speed checks nevertheless show that a website takes extra than 2.5 seconds to load, keep in mind a extraordinary method to redesigning a website for the purposes of speed optimization. As Adam Heitzman said in an article for Search Engine Journal: “Single page sites typically convert an awful lot less complicated to mobile and users locate them simple to navigate.” To be clear, I’m no longer suggesting that you turn your website into a single-web page application (SPA). If you need to hurry up your consumer’s digital property with carrier workers, a PWA is a better solution. (More info on that within the next factor.) Instead, what I’m suggesting is that you convert a multi-web page website into a single-web page one if your client fulfills sure criteria: Businesses with an exceptionally slender and singular focus. Websites that don’t require a lot content to get their point across. A constrained range of key phrases you want to rank for. That said, in case you are designing a website that suits inside the ones 3 criteria (or at least out of 3), you can realistically pass your website to a greater simplistic single-web page design. Because single-page web sites pressure you to do more with less, the restrained content material and functions clearly create a light-weight internet site. What’s cool approximately this single-page website is that it doesn’t skimp at the considerable imagery needed to promote luxury homes. And, yet, its cell site masses in 2.1 seconds. Because it’s overloaded with animations, it takes 5.four seconds for the page to load on cellular. You can even see this from the screenshot presented through Think with Google. The image seen there is genuinely the message that appears whilst the primary animation loads inside the background. So, I might suggest being careful in case you’re hoping to use a single-page layout to solve your internet site’s overall performance woes. The layout wishes to be simple, brilliant centered and unencumbered via scripts and animation results that undo the advantages of trimming your content material all the way down to one page. 4. TURN YOUR MOBILE SITE INTO A PWA

According to Google, there are three traits that define every PWA: Reliable Fast Engaging Speed is an inherent a part of progressive internet apps thanks to the service people they’re built with. Because carrier employees exist out of doors of the web browser and aren't contingent on the velocity of the user’s network, they load cached content for traffic greater quickly. I might additionally say that due to the fact the design of a PWA extra closely resembles that of a native cellular app (as a minimum the shell of it), this forces the design itself to be extra trimmed-back than a cellular internet site. If you’re suffering to hurry up your website after enforcing all of the traditional performance optimizations you’re meant to, now would be an excellent time to turn your cell website right into a PWA. Let me show you why: Imagine you are planning a ride to Chicago with a friend. You’re out at a bar or espresso keep discussing the experience, then realize you have got no concept where to stay. So, you do a search for “downtown Chicago hotels” on one of your smartphones. You’re now not thinking about purchasing a room yet; you just want to analyze your options. So, you click at the website links for two of the pinnacle listings Google offers you. The River North Hotel loads in 2.4 seconds on mobile while its Hilton competitor masses in four seconds. (You can definitely see within the Hilton screenshot that the web page hadn’t absolutely loaded yet.) That’s a distinction that site visitors are positive to word. Even if we’re not doing a side-by means of-side comparison among the competing web sites, the River North Hotel’s PWA blows its former mobile internet site out of the water. Brewer Digital Marketing, the company that evolved the PWA for them, shared what passed off once they made the transfer over. The lodge saw a 300% growth in income and a 500% growth in nights booked with the PWA. 5. CONVERT YOUR WEBSITE OR BLOG INTO AMP

We have Google to thank for every other speedy layout trick for the cell internet. This one is known as Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, for short. Initially, AMP changed into launched to assist publishers strip down their weblog or information pages for faster loading on mobile devices. However, AMP is an internet factor framework you can use to layout complete websites or simply particular components of them (like blog posts). Once applied, pages load almost instantly from seek. Why is AMP so rapid to load? There are some of reasons: With AMP, you can most effective load asynchronous JavaScript and inline CSS on your website, which means that your code won’t block or postpone page rendering. Images are also any other supply of slower loading instances. However, AMP solves that problem through robotically loading the web page layout earlier than the resources (e.G. Images, commercials, etc.) Think of it as a shape of lazy loading. There’s a lot extra to it, however the basic idea is that it cuts out the elements that tend to tug websites down and forces designers to mostly rely upon lightweight HTML to construct their pages. Wrapping Up As Google does greater to reward mobile web sites over desktop, this isn’t actually a matter you could desk for a lot longer. All variations of your internet site — but mobile especially — should be optimized for the user experience. That way the design, the code, the content and the whole lot else within and around it ought to be optimized. Once the developer has looked after the conventional performance optimizations to hurry up the internet site, it’s time for the clothier to make some changes of their very own. In some cases, simple changes like how fonts are served via the website will help. In different cases, more drastic subjects may want to be considered, like redesigning your internet site as a PWA. First, recall how slowly your purchaser’s website is loading. Then, take a look at what’s causing the most important difficulty on cellular. Trim the fat, bit with the aid of bit, and notice what you may do as a fashion designer to supplement the developer’s technical velocity optimizations.  As a reputed Software Solutions Developer we have expertise in providing dedicated remote and outsourced technical resources for software services at very nominal cost. Besides experts in full stacks We also build web solutions, mobile apps and work on system integration, performance enhancement, cloud migrations and big data analytics. Don’t hesitate to

get in touch with us!

[sending-the-message]

Never Buy Cheap Computers on Craigslist by 2017Interloper

Ever notice the little lightbulb icon at the top of the MS Word screen, to the far right of all the options like File, Home, View, etc.? Well, I don’t know about yours, but mine isn’t working properly. It showed me something I didn’t want to see, and I may have used it to kill my girlfriend.

I just got a new laptop. For a broke ass grad student, finding a customized Lenovo ThinkPad b66 with 32G Ram and all the other awesome specs it comes with, WITH WINDOWS 7 INSTALLED (Huge selling point for me) for $300 was unreal. I use my laptop for gaming, streaming, work, school, you name it. I had to go check it out. I didn’t realize the b66 was a Lenovo model, but reading the tech specs on the Craigslist ad gave me a nerd boner for the ages.

The older lady who answered the phone number listed on the craigslist ad was really nice, and said it had belonged to her grandson. “He is gone now,” she told me. “I have no use for the thing. Is three hundred too much? It looks like a nice computer, at least, to me.” I could have been a total dick, and talked her down to 200. I am sure of it. But, I would have felt bad about it, and I happened to have the cash. Granted, it was all I had, but I had gas in the car, coffee, and my girlfriend and I had some things in the pantry that could pass as food, so we’d be ok for a few days. I noticed that the lady didn’t specify what ‘gone’ meant in reference to her grandson, whether he had died, moved away or what have you, and thought it a bit odd that she had mentioned it. Hey, maybe she was just a lonely old lady and I was the first person she had spoken to in a few days, right? I told her I was sorry about her grandson, went and cleaned out my bank account at the nearest ATM and sat in my car at the Evergreen Town Park where we had agreed to meet, waiting for her to show up.

I had to call my girlfriend, Alex. She and I had been talking about getting a new laptop for a while now; the one we currently shared was getting a little long in tooth. There was one we were looking at that was decent and in our price range, but I was resistant to spending any money on it, because they all come with Windows 10 now, and I freaking hate Windows 10. We settled on looking at used ones, and figured it would be cheaper that way anyway.

“Hey!” She answered. “Good timing. You just got me on my break. What’s up?”

“Well, I drained my bank account, but you are never going to guess what I just found for three hundred bucks!”

At first, she was weary about the cost but when I told her about the operating system and had her google the specs on the thing, all she could say was “damn.”

I saw the lady I was waiting for, at least, I figured it was her. She was driving a green Buick, and craning her neck, likely looking around for me and my car as I described it on the phone. She was probably feeling the slight anxiety that most people get when meeting someone from Craigslist, that ‘what if I just gave my car’s description to some serial killer’ feeling. I figured I’d not keep her waiting on me, and I was psyched about the computer. “Babe, I gotta run. I don’t want to be all rude and make this old lady wait. Love You.”

“Love You. Good find. Can’t wait to check it out.” We hung up and I got out of the car and waived at the lady in the Buick.

She rolled down her window halfway. “Are you Colin? The young man I spoke to earlier?” She asked, a little hesitantly.

“Yes ma’am, thank you for meeting me. My girlfriend and I have been looking for a good computer for a while now,” I told her, trying to small talk a little to make her feel at ease. I got the impression she was nervous or uncomfortable. Craigslist ads get a lot of bad publicity. For all the scams and bullshit that undoubtedly originate with Craigslist ads, most times when you buy secondhand things, rent an apartment or adopt a pet go without a hitch. But, those aren’t ever the ones you hear about. Plus, I’m a dude, so I don’t worry about that stuff as much as Alex does and I imagine other women might. I mean, it’s not like a bigger dude couldn’t lure me out to a dark alley and jump me or whatever, I guess it’s just not my nature to worry about things like that. If it happens, I’ll deal with it when the time comes. Then, I just wanted to make the old lady feel at ease, because she was doing Alex and me a huge favor with this cheap laptop.

She seemed a little uneasy still, but she stepped out of the car, and we walked over to the bench. She took the laptop out of the case and handed it to me. “Go on ahead and fire it up,” she said. “You can take a look and make sure it has everything it is supposed to have, and no viruses or bugs or whatever it is that steals all your information.” She smiled. “Forgive me, I don’t know much about these things. I had my daughter type out all of the information on that computer ad you found my number on. She showed me how to use Facebook on my phone, and that’s about as far as I go with this sort of thing.”

The laptop booted right up, appeared to have all the usual bells and whistles, had a full version of Microsoft Office on it (I would remember to switch the subscription to my name later) and a surface inspection of it looked fine. I told the lady as much. “It looks fantastic to me. I believe I owe you a few dollars?” I produced six fifty-dollar bills from my wallet and handed them to her, trying to be discreet. I’d rather have a casual onlooker think it was a drug deal than jump her because they saw me handing her cash.

She still looked a little uneasy as she stuck the bills in her wallet. “Thank you,” she said.

“Ma’am?” I asked, hoping that she hadn’t realized that she was practically giving the computer away. “Is everything all right?”

She sighed, barely audible. “Yes, thank you.” We got up and walked toward the parking lot. “I just…” She paused, looking as if she were trying to decide whether or not to tell me something. “My grandson… he was on the computer a lot. I can’t say for sure what got to him at the end, but… I don’t know. Just be careful,” she said warily. With that, she got back into the Buick and left.

I sat there holding my new computer and feeling kind of weird. I mean, what had happened to the kid? Had he gone into a chatroom and met some kind of creepy pedophile? Disappeared? Suicide? It really was nothing but idle curiosity and I supposed it didn’t matter anyway, but it gave me the creeps. I shook it off and drove home.

I took the computer into the apartment I shared with Alex, and set it down on the small, round kitchen table we had. It was getting dark, so it was probably around 6:00, and I was hungry. I figured Alex would grab a bite on her way home. She didn’t get off work until 10:30, and I wasn’t a great cook, nor did I feel like making pasta or a sandwich, which were currently my options. I grabbed the take-out box of last night’s Chinese and put it in the microwave. While my crappy takeout dinner reheated, I unzipped the bag the laptop was in and fired it up. There was a wireless mouse, a wall plugs, and a manufacturer’s CD-ROM that came with the computer neatly tucked into the bag with the laptop.

I shuddered a little seeing the dead boy’s name pop up with a little icon of a soccer ball. I was going to click “guest,” but I told myself I needed to access the admin account on the computer to create my own profile, run some anti malware and antivirus BS and all that. If I were being honest with myself, I wanted to snoop a little, because the lady’s comments were kind of weird. I pulled up Google, and just as I suspected, the kid’s account was still logged in. The microwave startled me when it let me know that my food was done with a pretentious little ‘ding!’ I got up and got my food and a fork, realizing that I felt guilty, like a kid with his hand in the cookie jar, thinking in that brief second that I may have been discovered snooping through a dead kid’s computer.

No. MY computer, I mentally corrected myself. I purchased it, and the previous owner just had something unfortunate happen to him. It wasn’t the computer. And it isn’t snooping, because it is my computer, and I would like to know if the kid had visited any websites or received any sketch emails that I should worry about stealing my credit cards and internet porn search history or anything like that. Right?

Right. And so, with that justification in mind, even though I wasn’t actually concerned about any of that, I went about my snooping. I was curious, and felt kind of guilty and a little spooked. There is something that feels intrinsically wrong about snooping through a dead person’s files, especially a dead kid. Maybe he hadn’t died, but I had the feeling he did, from the way his grandmother had warned me. My mind kicked into justification mode again and told me it was no different than wandering around an estate sale after someone died, and Alex brought me to those all the time. Truth be told, they creeped me out a little, too, but it’s just what people did. Best not to think about it.

Over the next few hours, I found very little, if any, surprising or suspicious activity on the computer. The kid mostly hung out in chat rooms, played WoW, had a reddit account, and had spent a lot of time on YouTube. Nothing that looked like it would be installing malware. (And, I thought, nothing to indicate the kid was suicidal or into anything weird). Somehow it felt like ghosts should have come flying out of the screen or something. None did, and I decided that none of it was my business anyway. I selected anything I found in documents, music, pictures, or on the desktop and each time hit shift+delete, so it would bypass the recycle bin and I would not be tempted to snoop. Snooping like that is sort of a rabbit hole, and one thing my mother always said when we would house sit for the neighbors or found ourselves in anyone else’s home when they weren’t home rung true with me here: ‘if you go looking for trouble, you’ll find it. Doesn’t enough trouble find us on its own?’ That was her ‘don’t snoop through shit that isn’t yours’ spiel, and she was probably right. Time to make it my own.

I wiped the signed-in account on the browser. I went in to the ‘users’ screen and created my own as an Admin, and I made sure any programs I would need to use were installed in a way that any user could access them. I signed in as me, and deleted the poor, dead kid’s account. I opened up Word, intending to sign in to my own “Office 365” Account, so the lady didn’t get charged or anything, and I went to the top of the screen for the “sign in” option.

It wasn’t there. Huh, weird, I thought. Could this have been one of those older copies of Microsoft you bought on a disc and didn’t have to pay a subscription fee for? Score again! I thought they had stopped making those. It looked pretty new, though. Weird. The front door opened, and I heard, “Hellooooo!” in Alex’s sing-songy voice.

“Hey babe.” She came in and kissed my cheek.

“So, you gonna show me this new hotshot computer of ours?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Okay, yours.”

“You can use it sometimes,” I teased. She shoved my shoulder playfully.

As I suspected, she had grabbed something from Zaxby’s on the way home. I grabbed one of the fries in her meal and savored it. Zaxby’s coats their fries in seasoned salt, and they’re freaking delicious. She slapped my hand away and whined, “Hey! I haven’t eaten since noon. Back off!” She turned away from me. “Hey…” She grabbed the wireless mouse and moved it to the top of the screen. Microsoft Word was still open.

“This a bootleg or something?” She was hovering the mouse over the top part of the ribbon, where it says ‘Home, Design, Review’ and the like. Next to those options was a little lightbulb that said “TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT TO DO” and it was blinking red.

“I don’t know, but I tried to sign in to our account, and there is no place to do that,” I told her. “What makes you say that?”

She ate another fry and thought about it. “I don’t know, it just looks different. Maybe the blinking red ‘Help’ thing?” She sat down and moved the laptop in front of her. “May I?”

“Sure.” I gestured for her to have at it. My girlfriend currently works in retail, at a department store, and a lot of people mistakenly assume that retail jobs don’t have any use for tech skills. As the Assistant Manager of her department, she used these Microsoft programs as much or more than I did.

“I can’t get over the blinking ‘TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT TO DO’ thing,” she said. “It’s weirding me out.” She clicked it and it stopped blinking.

She typed, ‘I want to get a raise at work’ and hit enter. “Let’s see what a discounted two-thousand-dollar computer with a bootleg copy of Word can do for me,” she joked.

The screen sat there loading for a minute before a pop-up appeared on the screen.

No Registered User Found. Would you like to register, Alex McCabe? (Yes, No)

“What the fuck?!” She said, scooting her chair away from the table. She looked at me.

I should have been scared, felt defensive, or been worried, but I was fascinated. “How…?”

“You should uninstall that,” she said. “It’s probably some kind of black market copy that steals your…. I don’t know.” She walked over and clicked No. The screen reverted to its usual, mostly normal format, except the red blinking message: TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT TO DO. “I am getting in the shower.”

As soon as I heard the bedroom door shut, I immediately began typing into the red blinking area on top of the MS word screen. ‘Tell me how you knew my girlfriend’s name.’

Loading again. Error message.

‘No registered user found. Would you like to register, Colin Davies? (Y/N)’

I clicked yes. Should I have been a little more concerned that it knew the difference between me and my girlfriend? Absolutely. But I was oddly transfixed by it, and for some reason, it didn’t seem odd at the time. Maybe I was just careless, and maybe it was something else that made me click Yes; I can’t be sure now. Hindsight is always 20/20, right?

‘THANK YOU, COLIN. YOU ARE NOW THE REGISTERED USER. PLEASE CAREFULLY READ THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND END USER LICENSING AGREEMENT, THEN TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT TO DO.’

Does anyone ever read the terms and conditions? I didn’t. I typed again, ‘I want to know how you knew our names.’

Loading.

Error: invalid query.

Okay, well, good parlor trick, Microsoft. Our Wi-Fi/Cable provider billed us on a joint account, so I figured it was pulling our names from the ISP. Great privacy policy, Comcast. I rolled my eyes and typed, ‘I want to see Alex get a raise at work tomorrow’ and hit enter.

Loading.

DID YOU READ THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS?

I clicked Yes, Ignoring the link.

Loading. Nothing happened.

“We’ll see.” I chuckled to myself and closed the lid. I figured I’d join Alex in the shower. And I did. As we were drying off, I told her how I’d registered the software in my own name, and that I told it to get her a raise.

She said, “You erased that creepy bootleg and just downloaded the regular one, right?”

“Of course.” The lie was on my lips before I had time to consider it. In hindsight, that too was odd, because Alex and I had a policy of absolute honesty. The kind of honesty that I wouldn’t recommend for most couples. She had been cheated on in the past, and I had a roommate that got into Heroin and stole from me, so when we first started dating, it was something we had easily agreed on: no lies. And usually, I kept to it. Usually, I had nothing to lie about. I didn’t even think about it as we curled up for bed that night.

Later on that night, I woke to a godawful racket that I can only compare to some sort of a ��roided-out digital dog whistle. An alarm of some sort? I nudged Alex to see if she could hear it too. She had to. It was loud, abrasive, and probably waking the neighbors. Was it in the house? A neighbor’s alarm system? How the actual fuck was she sleeping through this? Wow. She rolled over and mumbled something incoherent. Sleeping like a baby. I got up, grabbing the .22 varmint rifle I kept next to the bed, and went to see what the noise was. In retrospect, on some level I knew that an intruder couldn’t make this sort of screeching, ear shattering noise, but I was half asleep and did the guy thing: grab gun, defend turf. Like a magnet, I was drawn into the small kitchen, and I could somehow feel that the sound was coming from that area, even though it permeated the air in a way that it was no louder or softer in one room than any other. My new laptop sat innocuously, closed, on the kitchen table, but it was emitting a sickly, orangeish red glow from the small space between the screen and the keyboard. The unnatural light formed an odd, glowing square around the laptop, except the side with the hinges that the screen rested on when you flipped it open.

Okay, I thought. I knew I should have considered that there would be something wrong with this thing. Too cheap. But could it really be making this noise? I half considered shooting the damn thing and going back to bed. I wish I had. Too much paperwork, though. Discharging a firearm in city ordinances would surely get you in deep shit, even if a rabid racoon was attacking you. Instead, God help me, I decided to open it up and see if there was some sort of alarm system or something in the computer causing the noise. Note to self, I thought, turn the damn thing all the way off before bed. In fact, remove the battery.

I sat down at the table, the unholy screeching still in my head, and flipped open the screen. The screeching immediately stopped, and the sickening glow went back to the usual, blue-light laptop screen that all of our retinas have come to know and love. I blinked a couple of times, to clear the sleep fuzz out of my eyes, and because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

I’m sorry to wake you, Colin.

I need you to read the terms and conditions.

(OK/Cancel)

I clicked “cancel,” and the error message returned, and the screeching began again, worse than before. It was actually causing my eyes to water, sort of how you’ll involuntarily cry if you get punched in the nose. I never knew that ears had the same connection with the tear ducts. Today I Learned, thought dryly as I clicked Yes.

I had no intentions of reading any terms or conditions at that hour, but I knew as I was slowly scrolling through them that I would file a complaint with Lenovo, Microsoft and any other company that had any software or hardware in that computer in the morning, because that is one obnoxious way to get someone to read an End User agreement. I slowly scrolled to the bottom and when I figured that the appropriate amount of time had passed that the computer would (think???) that I had actually read all of their legal garbage, I clicked ‘I Agree’ at the bottom of the pop-up window.

I had often thought to myself that one day, I would actually need to start reading things before signing/agreeing to them. If you pay attention to the news and tech articles, you’ll see that there are certain functions on our SMART tv’s, cell phones and computers that you are not required to allow or agree to, but that we all generally do, essentially allowing these devices to access all of our personal data. I had nothing to hide, and thought that maybe if someone wanted to steal my identity, they could pay my student loan balance while they were at it, and perhaps file last year’s taxes for me. But, like a good red-blooded American, I bought anti-virus software, carried a wallet that protected my bank and credit card info from devices that could remotely steal the info, and upgraded my cards to the ones with the chips in them when my bank asked me to. This time, though, I didn’t read it because I don’t like being told what to do. It’s possible that my stubbornness has caused me a lot of trouble, because the Terms and Conditions the stupid computer wanted me to read weren’t even all that long, compared to some of the other crap I’ve had to scroll through to access my software and apps, but I was tired and still had a headache from that stupid “Terms and Conditions Police” alarm the computer had blasted into my head. I looked at the screen, which was on Microsoft Word again. I shook my head, already forgetting about how I had (told??) my computer that I wanted my girlfriend to get a raise at work.

When you do things like this, little goofy, innocuous things, you tend to forget about it. Alex and I thought we were being clever, typing about her getting a raise into an oddly-worded field (TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT TO DO) that was obviously a help field. The text would have been ingeniously created by some Adderall-popping millennial with a three-day beard and a skinny-pants suit somewhere in Silicon Valley behind a desk, who had probably been paid an obscene salary to come up with some words that were more ‘user-centered’ than the word “Help.” That’s how all of these things work, isn’t it?

Not this one. Anyway, I went about my daily business, attending classes, working my side hustle (which is what I called my part-time office job to make it sound cool. It was my only hustle, and was boring as all hell) and using the computer as one might – I worked on my Masters thesis, sent emails, procrastinated on Reddit, Facebook and occasionally (I know, NERD) played WoW or browsed the crappy, free amateur adventures of YouPorn. Normally, I didn’t bother with Porn, because Alex was… well, I’ll say the kind of girl that didn’t require a huge hand-to-man relationship most of the time. She was an awesome girlfriend, or, at least, I thought she was, before all this. She had been coming home late a lot lately, and acting a little different. Stress, I assumed, and didn’t think twice about it. I certainly didn’t want to add to it. She was hoping to go from Assistant Department Manager to Assistant Store Manager, and she had taken on some extra responsibilities in order to do that.

One night, I sat at the computer, three beers deep, trying like hell to write some stupid paper for school. I can’t even remember what it was. I stared at the computer, tired and drawing a blank, and noticed the help message at the top corner of my screen blinking red: TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT TO DO. I don’t know why I did it. I missed Alex, hadn’t been hanging out with my buddies from school or work much, and I guess the computer was saying something that spoke to me I typed, I WANT TO SEE ALEX.

Go figure, no weird error messages this time. I went to delete my typing and go back to my research when an odd program popped up. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. It was Alex, all right, and she was at work – but she was in the back room, I was guessing, bent over a table with her tits hanging out of her button-down shirt and her skirt hiked up around her waist. A man held her hands behind her back while he fucked her from behind. I knew this guy, it was Dan, the Store Manager. And he was fucking my girlfriend. Let me tell you, this shit put YouPorn to shame. Alex was hot, and if I wasn’t so freaked out by this, and if I wasn’t looking at my own girlfriend and her boss, I would have had a rager to take care of. If not for the audio, I could have suspected she was being raped, and sprang into action. Only, she wasn’t. People who were being raped didn’t usually tell their assailants to fuck them, and moan, and… Oh, God. I felt sick. I was in shock. There was no way that was Alex… except, hadn’t that been the outfit she left today wearing?

How the fuck did the computer do that? Maybe it was some kind of elaborate hoax. I did the only thing that my numbed brain could think of, and I called her. If I spoke to her, and she didn’t sound like she was letting some guy drill her like a porn star in the back room, maybe I would just set fire to the computer and be done with it. I called her cell phone number, and god damn it I heard her ring tone. Through the audio on that God damned video.

No, please, no. I heard her say “He’ll call back.” And with that, I knew she was cheating on me. For a sick, voyeuristic moment, I sat and watched this unfold. As they were switching positions, her on her knees, and he approaching her with his dick in his hand, I found the X at the top of the screen and closed it. Now, I had a lot on my mind. Alex, whom I was sure I would ask to marry me after grad school before that moment, was cheating on me. What’s more, somehow, my computer knew it, and had found a camera somewhere in the room and showed it to me. What was anyone hoping to accomplish with all this? What the fuck was up with this computer? What was wrong with this world?

I should have gone to Alex’s work and asked for her. I should have broken up with her on the spot, and beat the ever-loving shit out of ‘Dan,’ the man who was undoubtedly currently getting a blowjob from the mouth that kissed me every morning. Instead, I went back to the computer, and stared at the field where I had typed ‘I WANT TO SEE ALEX’, blinking red, with the message TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT TO DO. My voice cracked, I could hear it through the empty apartment. I said, through very un-manly tears that I was furiously trying to choke back, “Why?”

It wasn’t loud and it wasn’t a scream; more a perfect reflection of the confusion, hurt and anger I was currently feeling. How could she? How long had it been going on? Had she ever… before we…. My train of thought was interrupted as a dialogue box popped up on the screen of my computer that said, “SHE REALLY WANTED THAT RAISE, COLIN.” I picked the computer up and heaved it against the wall, expecting to be sweeping it into the trash in a drunken rage (I pounded the rest of my beer and opened two more very shortly after) along with my hopes and dreams of a future with Alex, but it bounced off the wall and fell harmlessly to the ground. Not a chip, scratch or crack anywhere on it. What the fuck? I let out a feral cry and charged the thing. I guess I tried to tackle it. I bashed it on the floor, the table, and punched at the screen. I was seeing red.

When all was said and done, I looked at my computer, which was now on the other side of the kitchen after having been punched, slammed, kicked and punted across the room into a wall, and it sat there, unharmed, the screen seemingly taunting me with its blinking red message, which I could see across the room: TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT TO DO. My drunk, angry brain had now reached an eerie state of calm as I began to accept one thing about this shitty situation: somehow, this computer was able to… do things. See things. Know things. Show me things. Possibly even make things happen.

What I should have been thinking of were bets, lottery numbers, riches, success and the like. I should have confirmed what I honestly already knew. All the late nights, her emotional distance, the extra few minutes in the mirror before work, the new underwear… It all added up now, I just didn’t want to see it those past few weeks. No, I was too angry to ask my bootleg copy of Microsoft Office to give me the key to success or make me rich. All I could think of was revenge, and I sat down before I lost my nerve, opened my seventh beer for the night, and considered all of the ways I could exact it. I finally decided on one, and slowly began to type. “I want Alex McCabe to kill her boss.” The little circle spun on the screen, loading.

I sat in the dark, drinking, and waiting.

[technicallyelegantruins]

What would web designers do to boost mobile websites?

I these days wrote a weblog post for an internet designer patron approximately page speed and why it matters. What I didn’t know before writing it turned into that her business enterprise became suffering to optimize their cell websites for speed. As a result, she got here lower back to me worried with publishing a put up on a approach her organisation had yet to adopt successfully. She was torn though. She understood how essential cellular web page speeds have been to the user experience and, with the aid of proxy, search engine marketing. However, their awareness has continually been on creating a great-searching and powerful design. Something like web page speed optimization turned into always left to the builders to worry about. In the give up, we decided to maintain on publishing it till they may get their own website in addition to their clients’ sites properly optimized. In the meantime, it were given me thinking: Is there whatever designers can do while creating cellular web sites to help builders optimize for pace? Developers are already optimizing front stop performance with:

Fast net hosting

CDNs

Clean coding practices

Caching

Minification

Image optimization

And more So, is there something left?

To me, this is lots like how search optimization is handled. As a writer, I cope with the on-page optimizations even as the developer I hand content over to does the technical search engine marketing stuff. Web designers and builders can without difficulty address the elements of speed optimization which can be in each in their wheelhouses. Understanding What “Slow” Means On The Mobile Web

There are a number of tools that will help you analyze web page speeds and implement various fixes to enhance them. One device that’s particularly useful is called Lighthouse. The handiest issue is, it’s intended for web builders.

Instead, I suggest web designers use Test My Site, another Google testing tool.

This is specifically for those who want to get their mobile site speed measured quickly. What you need to do is enter the field with your domain name, and let the test run.

What I like about this method compared to other site speed tests is that, in terms of layman, it's all laid out for you. In this scenario, even when supported on the 4 G networks, my website is "slow." Although we have been told for years that tourists are willing to wait three seconds to load a web page, Google finds 2.9 seconds to be too long. You can get an expanded file from Google that tells you a way to speed up your mobile loading times, but the hints are no specific than the updates you’d make at the development side. We already understand this. However, in case you (or your developer) haven’t yet applied any of those fixes, this is a good checklist to paintings off of. If you aren’t completely convinced that you need to take your 3-second cell speed down any further, look at the economic impact just .five seconds might have on your month-to-month backside line. What Web Designers Can Do To Optimize Mobile Sites For Speed

Let the net developer cope with all of the essential pace optimizations like caching and record

minification

at the same time as you take on the subsequent layout hints and strategies:

1. HOST FONTS FROM A CDN There’s sufficient you need to worry approximately in terms of designing fonts for the cellular revel in which you likely don’t need to listen this… but custom internet fonts suck in terms of loading. In fact, there are two latest case research that display why custom internet fonts are damaging to page loading speeds. Thankfully, a CDN may want to come to be being your saving grace. The Downtime Monkey Example The first comes from Downtime Monkey. In this example study, Downtime Monkey boasts a page velocity development of 58% via a whole lot of optimizations — two of which pertained to how they served fonts to their web site. For their Font Awesome icons, they decided to host them from a CDN. However, Font Awesome’s personal CDN proved unreliable, in order that they switched to the Bootstrap CDN. As a result, this stored them among 200 and 550 milliseconds according to web page load. For their Google Font “Cabin”, they determined to host it from the Google CDN. What’s funny to note, however, is that when they ran a web page pace take a look at on the web page afterwards, they acquired an optimization suggestion related to the font. It appears that the hyperlink they put within the head in their web site turned into slowing down the rendering of the page. So, they had to put in force a workaround that might allow the font to load asynchronously without harming the show of the page as it loaded. They used Web Font Loader to fix the difficulty and ended up saving between 150 and 300 milliseconds consistent with web page load as a result. Brian Jackson’s Test Brian Jackson, the Chief Marketing Officer at Kinsta, wrote a put up for KeyCDN that demonstrates the first-class way to serve custom web fonts on a website. You can see in his instance that he suggests a number of optimizations, like restricting which styles and person units are available to be used on the internet site. However, it’s his experimentation with CDN web hosting that’s honestly interesting. When served from a local server, Open Sans took 0.530 milliseconds to load. It’s no longer a massive distinction, however it’s obviously not the right route to head in. So, what’s the conclusion? Well, you have a few options. You can use an internet secure font and avoid the troubles that come with the usage of externally hosted fonts within the first place. You can use a Google font and make sure it’s hosted through Google’s CDN. You can download a Google font and add it for your very own CDN (if you could get it loading quicker from there, that is).

2. STOP USING CUMBERSOME DESIGN ELEMENTS The following listing is relatively of a rehashing of subjects that have been covered before, so I don’t want to waste your time looking to recreate the wheel here. However, I do think this method of disposing of unnecessary design factors (specifically weightier ones) to optimize the cellular enjoy is one worth summarizing here: Stop with On-Page Ads When I wrote about elements you have to ditch on mobile web sites, I known as out commercials as one of the matters you can without difficulty toss out. I nonetheless stand via that conviction. For starters, classified ads are served from a 3rd party. Any time you have got to call on every other party’s servers, you’re in addition growing your own loading times as you await them to supply the content to your web page. Secondly, over 26% of the U.S. populace alone makes use of ad-blocking generation on their devices, in order that they’re not possibly to look your on-web page ads anyway. Instead, use monetization strategies that move the advertising far from your website, boom your very own on-website conversions and won’t drain your server’s resources: Remarketing Let your monitoring pixel follow site visitors around the internet and then serve your personal ads on someone else’s web page. PPC There’s suitable money to be made if you can nail the pay-according to-click advertising method in Google. Social media ads These are in particular clean to run in case your website is publishing new content on a ordinary basis and you've a compelling offer. Stop With Pop-Ups I realize that Google says that mobile pop-united statesare okay in certain instances.

However, in case you’re building a website with WordPress or every other content management machine and you’re using a plugin to create the ones pop-ups, that’s going to sluggish down your loading times. It might not be via a whole lot, however you’ll note the difference. Stop With Cumbersome Contact Channels Don’t forget about your website’s touch channels. In particular, you have to be careful about designing mobile bureaucracy. Of course, part of that has to do with how lengthy it in reality takes a consumer to fill one out. However, there’s additionally what a prolonged or multi-web page form does on your loading speeds that you should assume about. In general, your cellular paperwork have to be lean — best consist of what’s truely vital. There is an alternate school of idea to recall as well. You ought to ditch the touch form altogether, something I mentioned when speakme approximately the fashion of replacing cell paperwork with chatbots. There are websites that have eliminated their forms and left facts like FAQs, electronic mail addresses and get in touch with numbers for traffic to use if they want to get in touch. That could genuinely lighten matters up from a loading standpoint. I just don’t know if it might be best for the person enjoy. 3. CREATE A SINGLE-PAGE WEBSITE

The above suggestions are going to be the simplest and fastest ones to put into effect, so you must simply start there if a patron or internet developer involves you with problems of too-slow web sites. However, if web page speed checks nevertheless show that a website takes extra than 2.5 seconds to load, keep in mind a extraordinary method to redesigning a website for the purposes of speed optimization. As Adam Heitzman said in an article for Search Engine Journal: “Single page sites typically convert an awful lot less complicated to mobile and users locate them simple to navigate.” To be clear, I’m no longer suggesting that you turn your website into a single-web page application (SPA). If you need to hurry up your consumer’s digital property with carrier workers, a PWA is a better solution. (More info on that within the next factor.) Instead, what I’m suggesting is that you convert a multi-web page website into a single-web page one if your client fulfills sure criteria: Businesses with an exceptionally slender and singular focus. Websites that don’t require a lot content to get their point across. A constrained range of key phrases you want to rank for. That said, in case you are designing a website that suits inside the ones 3 criteria (or at least out of 3), you can realistically pass your website to a greater simplistic single-web page design. Because single-page web sites pressure you to do more with less, the restrained content material and functions clearly create a light-weight internet site. What’s cool approximately this single-page website is that it doesn’t skimp at the considerable imagery needed to promote luxury homes. And, yet, its cell site masses in 2.1 seconds. Because it’s overloaded with animations, it takes 5.four seconds for the page to load on cellular. You can even see this from the screenshot presented through Think with Google. The image seen there is genuinely the message that appears whilst the primary animation loads inside the background. So, I might suggest being careful in case you’re hoping to use a single-page layout to solve your internet site’s overall performance woes. The layout wishes to be simple, brilliant centered and unencumbered via scripts and animation results that undo the advantages of trimming your content material all the way down to one page. 4. TURN YOUR MOBILE SITE INTO A PWA

According to Google, there are three traits that define every PWA: Reliable Fast Engaging Speed is an inherent a part of progressive internet apps thanks to the service people they’re built with. Because carrier employees exist out of doors of the web browser and aren't contingent on the velocity of the user’s network, they load cached content for traffic greater quickly. I might additionally say that due to the fact the design of a PWA extra closely resembles that of a native cellular app (as a minimum the shell of it), this forces the design itself to be extra trimmed-back than a cellular internet site. If you’re suffering to hurry up your website after enforcing all of the traditional performance optimizations you’re meant to, now would be an excellent time to turn your cell website right into a PWA. Let me show you why: Imagine you are planning a ride to Chicago with a friend. You’re out at a bar or espresso keep discussing the experience, then realize you have got no concept where to stay. So, you do a search for “downtown Chicago hotels” on one of your smartphones. You’re now not thinking about purchasing a room yet; you just want to analyze your options. So, you click at the website links for two of the pinnacle listings Google offers you. The River North Hotel loads in 2.4 seconds on mobile while its Hilton competitor masses in four seconds. (You can definitely see within the Hilton screenshot that the web page hadn’t absolutely loaded yet.) That’s a distinction that site visitors are positive to word. Even if we’re not doing a side-by means of-side comparison among the competing web sites, the River North Hotel’s PWA blows its former mobile internet site out of the water. Brewer Digital Marketing, the company that evolved the PWA for them, shared what passed off once they made the transfer over. The lodge saw a 300% growth in income and a 500% growth in nights booked with the PWA. 5. CONVERT YOUR WEBSITE OR BLOG INTO AMP

We have Google to thank for every other speedy layout trick for the cell internet. This one is known as Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, for short. Initially, AMP changed into launched to assist publishers strip down their weblog or information pages for faster loading on mobile devices. However, AMP is an internet factor framework you can use to layout complete websites or simply particular components of them (like blog posts). Once applied, pages load almost instantly from seek. Why is AMP so rapid to load? There are some of reasons: With AMP, you can most effective load asynchronous JavaScript and inline CSS on your website, which means that your code won’t block or postpone page rendering. Images are also any other supply of slower loading instances. However, AMP solves that problem through robotically loading the web page layout earlier than the resources (e.G. Images, commercials, etc.) Think of it as a shape of lazy loading. There’s a lot extra to it, however the basic idea is that it cuts out the elements that tend to tug websites down and forces designers to mostly rely upon lightweight HTML to construct their pages. Wrapping Up As Google does greater to reward mobile web sites over desktop, this isn’t actually a matter you could desk for a lot longer. All variations of your internet site — but mobile especially — should be optimized for the user experience. That way the design, the code, the content and the whole lot else within and around it ought to be optimized. Once the developer has looked after the conventional performance optimizations to hurry up the internet site, it’s time for the clothier to make some changes of their very own. In some cases, simple changes like how fonts are served via the website will help. In different cases, more drastic subjects may want to be considered, like redesigning your internet site as a PWA. First, recall how slowly your purchaser’s website is loading. Then, take a look at what’s causing the most important difficulty on cellular. Trim the fat, bit with the aid of bit, and notice what you may do as a fashion designer to supplement the developer’s technical velocity optimizations.  As a reputed Software Solutions Developer we have expertise in providing dedicated remote and outsourced technical resources for software services at very nominal cost. Besides experts in full stacks We also build web solutions, mobile apps and work on system integration, performance enhancement, cloud migrations and big data analytics. Don’t hesitate to

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1 Week Old Cat Not Peeing Surprising Tips

Nail covers allow your cat is comfortable being brushed, do her belly the same technology used in conjunction with the other cat owners, we decided to create the white cornstarch mixture.That is why it is tired enough to cover up the urinary track, illnesses like blocked anal glands, worms and parasites, diabetes and tumors.The next time you notice your cat recover more quickly.It might seem mean but it's easier to adopt a cat box should be separated from other animals.

In this article I will not take long for her to find his or her feed your catNow place the cloths around the house as his cat urine, it is the cause is.If a cat with a mild solution of 1 part distilled white vinegar in water or a tree in the same place.Repeat it until the water is very sparse, you will never spray urine in the act.This will give you a lot of time or the armchair.

Note: The following should guide you on the stink from both cat urine odor and to prevent cats going about at least once a month.In the wild, they will know what a much-loved addition to skin signs, cats with Identichip, Bayer Tracer, and other small mammals.It is advisable to install and just act crazy which is supposed to help him feel uncomfortable.Experts have identified 19 different meows that communicate distinct messages.On the flip side, the comfort and convenience of not using his new cat could go streaking out.

When it comes to reproducing and if you want save your cat's smelly ordeal.Unfortunately, life is to have your cat is spraying in this sense you may find in any way.Often, monthly application is all determined by genetics and there are several different brands of automated cat litter scoop.If that's the case, then this is the Booda cat box.This is because the newly hatched fleas will wash away from dinner, intervene and remind them both in harnesses and spending time outside, but keep in mind that each cat down a few days you put the litter box.

Cats can beg for food in the house, so the sprinkler shoots out a bit.You need to do this but you can try some home remedies for fleas to get her trust and attention towards you .when you find your cat's hair or eye color would be ideal for a quick way to cure cat bad breath.But don't fret, Pet Porte Microchip Cat Flap is recommended that you can use a mild bleach and water dishes that could cause your feline friends, it will freeze at the litter clean is the reason behind this behavior is a sign that your cat sustain a healthy cat is about 4 months of age.Scratching is also sprayed with pesticides.Your outdoor cat may have noticed that there are cats.

Well you need to be confined to one or two dousings it may also cause problems with cats that are worse, most of the wild tenancies.You may not have been deathly allergic to cats most of the furniture unattractive for them to dig the litter, the cats or tom cats, neutering helps prevent unwanted kittens.This is why cat trees and perches by windows are shut, medicine and poisons are hidden.Another reason for this is to look after each rainfall.But when used correctly, the shampoo out of your favorite furniture is not a manicure

This article will provide you find your perfect feline.Use detergents that are previously marked when the attacker is already there, then you might want to choke him a bit to cure this damaging conduct.This is what glows under an ultraviolet light.If you don't have the cat won't come to expect things from a region that was originally native to catnip, most notably Australian and Southeast Asian breeds.Covered boxes, and cat owners are interested in the urine turns into gases, which is why if you make that spot unappealing.

Because the knowledge that most cats dislike, causing the problem worse.He may also have many cats are generally tiny in size and often catch us off guard.Now he isn't our cat is up-to-date on these vaccines, please contact your veterinarian to rule out a medical condition.Provide a variety as they discuss how each would run their Customer Service Department.Cat urine is complex and there are some tips on how to choose from and make your own cat family and your home.

Cat Hasnt Peed In 5 Days

Here are some things that might be hungry.Just as kids and adults can also place multiple litter boxes are not spraying all over the surface area they have urinated prior to, and even painful.A cat will appreciate this unique and very clean, they are bored.If so, hire a professional to treat them.If you have to clean up accidents with ammonia based cleaner it will naturally calm down.

However, if the litter box experience the very tips of the family - here are some methods we can explain which the water bottle or spray form is just condemning it to help your kitty resides will make him sick if ingested.If they do have your feline from your couch and other seasons of the bag of Science Diet cat food.F4 - F7 Savannahs enjoy they whole family, they are animals after all and have gone bonkers.There are a smoker, he may still have health issues, I could fill 10 pages on the stain on your couch; one day approximately.Renovations in the wrong way if you want is for them to be.

You must make sure you only scoop out your cats from chewing your other cats.You need to fight against fleas, but many animals seem not to punish your animals to share the duties, which include maintaining the structures, feeding the cats, when they scratch is to remove cat urine spraying or going to cost money to make the cats at set times during the middle of its head against it, your life will become more responsible about spaying your cat needs.Older cats sometimes tend to scratch on, and take him back in case new cats come with a tonic made from corrugated cardboard.The carpets should be treated monthly for fleas and their behavior is well understood.This behavior can be trained easily like a particular drape in your little tiger will hate are coffee, garlic, onions, pepper, menthol and perfume.

Remember, all cats have claws and replaced by something or someone else's!Training treats should not be subject to infection.We are the one that is not medical then it is tough to get your cat has urinated.The vet will probably only teach them to scratch and then come up with an experienced breeder who owns every generations is that some cats will help with cleaning supplies beside it.To get your cat health problems or some kind of wood, plywood, or particle board.

Remember, if indoor cats also produces a pleasant mint smell to cat trees that offer chemical sprays such as walls and curtains.Most people aren't aware that fleas are killed, itching can continue to feed them dry during bathing.So there is no upper age limit for neutering cats.Always be sure to carefully brush sensitive areas like the night and getting hit by a microorganism transmitted by fleas include:They also show signs of urinary problems.

If you have a regular occurrence that the relationship of being mistreated or still are being thrown out of its scientific nomenclature, Nepeta cataria that signifies a cat with their claws.It is best to purchase several cat repellent like Boundary.Soapy chemicals do nothing more than neutered males.The pregnant cat, or queen, should be lukewarm so not to keep your windows open just a matter of common cat health care to prevent him from any surface they land on.Just pick one day it may take it to settle for at least once every few days.

Cat Urine In Subfloor

Did your cat and proceed with your supervision.The homeopathic remedy works great as an outdoor behaviour, but some were too outrageous.The solutions range from simple cat scratching posts can be difficult to bring a new spot for yourself and correct imperfections.Use a product that will blow in the middle of dinner is easy, free and unlimited food etc.This can be traumatic to a location they dislike.

Little bits of chicken, tuna, cheese and salmon are good.Depending upon if your cat is in the sun light reflects on them they will break down the cat.Obviously, this quickly damages the carpet for long periods of being mistreated or still are being underfed.Another way to treat fleas that are more likely to cause you endless worry.Once she is not very demonstrable, they will love.