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johnaleitner · 2 years

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Member News: Samsungs Fridge Art Sirianos DVX Deal New CEO at SieMatic Chapter News and More

By Dianne M. Pogoda

Company News

Samsung’s fridge art: Samsung introduced its Bespoke line a couple of years ago, allowing homeowners to customize the refrigerators by using interchangeable panels with different colors and finishes. Its latest version, MyBespoke, allows consumers to upload their own images, photography or artwork to create custom panels, and also offers prints by artist Matt Jacobson to use. More info at Samsung here.

DXV partners with Siriano: Fashion designer Christian Siriano revealed his collaboration with luxury kitchen and bath brand DXV, part of the LIXIL portfolio, for a limited-edition collection of luxe bathrobes and hand towels. Siriano unveiled the collection, his first foray into home goods, during New York Fashion Week in February. He was inspired by his own home renovation in Easton, CT, in which he installed DXV’s Belshire Collection. The towels and robes reflect the fixtures with golden trim and unique fabric detailing, evoking the opulence of the 1920s Golden Era. Learn more here.

People News

Henkes returns to SieMatic: Hans Henkes, a longtime leader in the kitchen and bath manufacturing space, has rejoined SieMatic North America as president and CEO. Henkes previously helmed the premium kitchen cabinetry manufacturer from 2008 to 2017, driving the company to record sales growth. SieMatic, based in Germany, markets fourstyle collections — PURE, URBAN, CLASSIC and MONDIAL — in more than 60 countries. More info here.

NARI CEO Departs: After just seven months, Christine Melendes has stepped down as CEO of the National Association of the Remodeling Industry. NARI has experienced some turbulence in the past few years, with management changes and several of its local chapters breaking off from the national organization. Melendes, who joined last July, is the association’s third CEO in less than five years. Chief Operating Officer Elsie Iturralde will serve as interim CEO while NARI conducts a search for a successor. More about NARI here.

Industry News

KCMA Continues green efforts: After announcing a partnership with Climate Positive NOWTM last month, the Kitchen Cabinet Manufacturers Association (KCMA) has implemented a plan to assure kitchen and bath showrooms that its lines are environmentally responsible. Through a rigorous testing process, the Environmental Stewardship Program (ESP) certifies that KCMA members are compliant with air quality and pollution prevention through documented energy conservation programs. At least 80 percent of materials used in KCMA’s cabinets are sustainably sourced and certified through a recognized sustainable forestry program, and that waste is minimized via comprehensive recycling and processing programs. For more information, go here.

Architectural Digest on KBIS: From graphite nickel finishes to color in the kitchen and expansive appliance walls, Architectural Digest weighs in on six key kitchen trends gleaned from KBIS. Read more at AD Pro.

Trade Events

Coverings set for Orlando: The Coverings 2023 tile and stone surfaces trade show will take place April 18-21 at the Orange County Convention Center, North and South Halls, in Orlando, FL. Nearly 1,000 tile and stone exhibitors from more than 35 countries exhibit, and the show offers CEU-qualified educational sessions. Registration for the show and educational sessions is free. Click here for more info.

ICFF Slated for May: The International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), is ramping up for its May 21-23 show at the Javits Center in New York, presenting modern furnishings and products for residential, office and hospitality design. The show is taking place concurrently with WantedDesign Manhattan, which features a focus on emerging design. Both expos are organized by Emerald. More info and registration here.

New Tech Show: Clarity AV International, organizer of the Integrator Network and Technology & Business Summits that CEDIA acquired in 2018, will host a consumer event in Southern California this fall. The Home Tech Expo will take place Oct. 20-21 and will showcase real-world home technology in an in-person format. Consumers will be able to see, touch and experience technology like traditional, custom integration “AV,” as well as lighting, smart appliances, electric vehicles, and more firsthand. KBB has the story.

Chapter News Hello, Columbus: The Central Ohio Chapter is hosting a Participatory Dinner Party on March 23, from 5-8 p.m., at The Kitchen, 231 E. Livingston Ave. in Columbus. It’s not a cooking class, but guests will collaborate and prepare a meal guided by staff. NKBA members are $40, non-members are $50, and a portion of all ticket sales is donated to the Mid-Ohio Food Collective. Info and registration here.

The post Member News: Samsung’s Fridge Art, Siriano’s DVX Deal, New CEO at SieMatic, Chapter News and More appeared first on NKBA.

References:

By: NKBA Staff Title: Member News: Samsung’s Fridge Art, Siriano’s DVX Deal, New CEO at SieMatic, Chapter News and More Sourced From: nkba.org/2023/03/member-news-samsungs-fridge-art-sirianos-dvx-deal-new-ceo-at-siematic-chapter-news-and-more/ Published Date: 03-12-2023

Choose Canadian Home Style for your Vancouver kitchen renovation projects.

Canadian Home Style is your family-owned and operated custom cabinetry retailer with a showroom in North Vancouver, BC. We are the official dealer of Cabico custom cabinetry in the Lower Mainland, providing complete kitchen renovations with an extended lifetime warranty. We always keep up to date with the latest trends and are proud members of the NKBA, National Kitchen and Bath Association. In addition, we have won the Consumer’s Choice Awards back-to-back in 2021, 2022 and 2023 for our commitment to business excellence. We are considered one of the highest-rated kitchen and bath design and renovation experts in Metro Vancouver. Book now to visit our North Vancouver showroom, where you can get expert advice from one of our kitchen and bath designers. We’re happy to be a part of your journey with your next kitchen renovation project in Metro Vancouver.

Our mission is to help homeowners create beautiful homes that reflect their lifestyles while reducing energy consumption and conserving resources. We do this by providing our clients with innovative products, services and education. Our vision is to become Canada’s leading sustainable kitchen design and custom cabinetry solutions provider. Our values include integrity, respect, honesty and transparency. These principles guide us as we strive to provide outstanding customer service.

We believe that our success depends on the success of our clients and their customers. We work hard to ensure our clients get the most out of their investments. Our team consists of highly skilled professionals who are experts in their field. They have years of experience working together and know what works and what doesn’t. They understand how to solve problems quickly and efficiently. We are committed to providing excellent customer service. We listen carefully to our client’s concerns and suggestions. We take these into account when planning and executing projects. We always strive to exceed expectations.

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Flooring

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Main Areas of Service in British Columbia:

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Frequently Asked Questions

Which colour is best for white kitchens?

Although a white kitchen can be done in many colours, walnut will work well. The space will feel warm and inviting thanks to its natural wood tones. These two colors will complement each others well. If you are looking for something subtler, black and gray are good options. You can also choose bright colours like yellow and red if you are looking to make an impact. Whichever way you go, make sure your decor fits in with the style.

How do you style a small white kitchen?

Small white kitchens require a lot creativity. It is possible to create a beautiful small white kitchen design using natural materials like stone, wood, and glass. It is important to organize white kitchens and keep them clean.

Add personal touches to the space. This will make your kitchen feel more homey.

Should I install a countertop or backsplash first?

Installing a backsplash and countertops requires that you first install the countertops. You can then measure the backsplash and cut it to fit perfectly on top of the countertop. For proper backsplash installation, the countertop must be installed before any appliances and plumbing fixtures.

Are you going to regret your kitchen renovation?

Remember to be patient. The renovation process can take time.

Renovating your kitchen is a big undertaking that will significantly impact your daily life. Do your research before you start. This comprehensive guide will save you from regrets when renovating your kitchen.

Consider your lifestyle first.

Choose suitable materials according to your goals and budget.

Consider the maintenance of your countertop, not only its appearance.

Choose the right appliance in terms of size and style.

Find the perfect backsplash for you.

Examine the interior of your cabinets and walls.

Communicate with your kitchen contractor and designer all the way.

To fit your appliance and gadgets, customize your storage design

Don’t get your lighting lightly.

Don’t ignore kitchen ergonomics!

You don’t want to waste space in your kitchen.

Select the right cabinet color and finish.

You must plan before you can commit.

You should hire the best people for the job.

Make sure you have somewhere to dump your garbage.

Are open-concept kitchens on the decline?

Open-concept kitchens are still popular because they offer a modern look while allowing easy access to all kitchen areas. For many reasons, some homeowners choose to return to more traditional kitchen designs.

One reason is that an open-concept kitchen can be pretty noisy. An open-concept cooking area can make it difficult to clean, due to the amount of dust and cooking fumes that circulate through the house.

Family members who love to cook together will appreciate open-plan kitchens. They can be dangerous for children who like to cook and aren’t always listening to their parents. You should carefully weigh the pros & cons of an open-concept style kitchen before you make your decision.

Statistics

Your most significant cost investment for a kitchen remodel will usually be cabinets, typically comprising 25 percent of your budget. (hgtv.com)

Experts also recommend setting aside 20 percent of your budget for surprises, including unpleasant demolition discoveries. One is water damage, the electricity that is not up to code, or other budget-spiking gotchas. (hgtv.com)

According to Burgin, some hinges have this feature built-in, but it’s an add-on cost for other models of about $5 retail, adding up to $350 to $500 for an entire kitchen, depending on size. (hgtv.com)

This is rather grim, but according to Business Insider, 12 percent of couples consider getting a divorce while renovating their home! (familyhandyman.com)

“We decided to strip and refinish our kitchen cabinets during a heat wave with 90-plus-degree temperatures and 90 percent humidity in a house with no air conditioning. (familyhandyman.com)

External Links

homeguide.com

2022 Kitchen Remodel Cost Estimator

Add A Room per Square Foot

remodeling.hw.net

Cost vs. Value 2021

Cost vs. Value Project: Minor Kitchen Remodel

familyhandyman.com

Dos and Don’ts From a First-Time DIY Subway Tile Backsplash Install

Create an Open, Craftsman-Style Kitchen (DIY)

hgtv.com

Choosing Kitchen Appliances | HGTV

Creating a Kitchen for Entertaining

How To

How to design your kitchen layout

Although there’s no perfect layout for a kitchen, some layouts work well in certain spaces. Here are some suggestions for designing a kitchen that is best suited to your space.

Start with the basic ingredients. The first step in determining what you have in your kitchen is to decide what can be sacrificed. You may not require a large oven or stove if you don’t cook a lot.

The traffic flow is important. Next, think about how your family uses the kitchen. Also consider how traffic flows through it. You will need to make sure there is enough space for everyone to move about freely, without bumping into one another.

Maximize storage. The third step involves maximising storage space in your kitchen. This applies to both cookware and food storage. You will want to ensure that everything has a home and is easily accessible.

Your style should be incorporated. The fourth step is to incorporate your style into the kitchen layout. This includes everything from the cabinets and countertops to the flooring and appliances. You can choose finishes and materials that reflect your personal style.

Get in touch with a professional. A professional kitchen designer is the fifth and final step. They will be able to help you create a layout which meets all your requirements and works within your space.

Helpful Resources:

The post Member News: Samsung’s Fridge Art, Siriano’s DVX Deal, New CEO at SieMatic, Chapter News and More appeared first on Canadian Home Style.

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source https://canadianhomestyle.weebly.com/blog/member-news-samsungs-fridge-art-sirianos-dvx-deal-new-ceo-at-siematic-chapter-news-and-more

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latent-thoughts · 4 years

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The Pursuit of a Simple Life (Chapter 2 - Pizza My Heart)

[Co-Authored with @emeraldrosequartz]

Rating : 18+ (there be lots of citrus here).

Warning: None

Pairing: Loki/Original Female Character

Summary: Three years after returning to Earth with the other Asgardians following Ragnarok, Loki finds himself working for SHIELD, truly just trying to fight the boredom. While on an undercover mission, he unexpectedly begins to fall for his co-worker, Gemma, and she seems to feel the same way…about Dave, his alter ego while in disguise. Can Loki continue a relationship with her while keeping his true identity a secret? How many lies can the 'God of lies' spin to keep his pursuit of a simple life?

[Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017); THOR IS A GOOD BRO AND TOTALLY NOT HOW HE WAS IN RAGNAROK, THNX; Infinity War Doesn't Exist; Everyone lives]

A/N: Gemma and 'Dave' get to know each other a bit more over 'doggy style' pizza. And then she discovers certain things about him which are just too-good-to-be-true.

_________________________________

IMPORTANT NOTES:

Bold Text = Loki's POV

Normal Text = Gemma's POV

_________________________________

She took his hand, hoping he couldn’t feel her shaking. She felt like she was in a daze. Of Dave. A Dave Daze...

The restaurant - called “Pizza My Heart” (how awkward!) - was only a block away, so they walked over and found a booth next to the salad bar where the table wasn’t dirty or sticky.

After a few giddy minutes, Gemma finally relaxed enough to enjoy their conversation after her first slice of the “Doggy Style” pizza - Dave insisted he didn’t know what the term meant, but Gemma had her doubts. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to actually say what it meant.

And they talked...for hours. They talked about how stupid their jobs were, mostly. But he asked her so many questions about herself...she felt... special. Dave made her feel interesting and funny and cool. And as she got more comfortable with him...she started seeing him as less intimidatingly handsome and more...approachable. Like he might actually be more than just a distant infatuation.

Suddenly, the waiter told them that they were closing. Gemma looked around--they were the only ones left in the restaurant, and she hadn’t even noticed.

And it was two in the morning.

“Oh my GOD! I’m going to be a wreck tomorrow...” she groaned, but with a very happy smile on her face. “That’s ok. It was worth it. Best dinner I’ve had in a long time. Thank you, Dave!”

She raised her plastic soda cup in a toast.

Loki nudged his soda cup to hers, smiling widely. "I, for one, am very glad that I got to monopolize your time today. Finally got to know the girl who I only knew the name of. Though a beautiful name it is, I wanted more."

He watched the red creep up her peachy cheeks in response to his words. Really, making her blush was so much fun, it was almost like a game to him now.

What else could he say next to make little Gemma go red? It gave his overactive mind something nice to do, when it was not thinking about the mission.

Still, he knew that he couldn't afford to think too much about Gemma, or he'd... fixate. He had this odd habit of becoming near obsessive over things and people he developed a liking for. Moderation wasn't in his nature, Thor had once commented on it after settling on Midgard, seeing him develop an obsession over Midgardian climates and their corresponding architecture.

Oh well... for at least three years he had kept himself busy enough to not fixate on anything. The SHIELD missions were enough stimulation for his needy brain.

But now, seeing the smiling, blushing pretty face of Gemma, he was getting the feeling that his brain needed another type of stimulant.

Or was it his body?

Her brightness and endearing awkwardness contrasted him so much, it was hard not to be drawn to her. He was so full of dark thoughts, many of which had manifested during his rampage across Midgard not long ago, brought to the surface by the Scepter. While he was a churning storm, Gemma was like a fluffy fair-weather cumulus.

As they got out of their booths and headed back towards their company office, he briefly wondered how it would've been had he met Gemma back in 2012. Norns, he probably would not have shown the restraint he was showing now; he would've ended up doing something very, very bad.

Like abduct her and keep her with him. Like a pretty trinket.

But Gemma is not a possession, he reminded himself. Gemma is a person. She decides what she does, not me.

And yet, a tiny part of his psyche still wanted to possess her. He strangled that part quickly.

"So, I was thinking I should drop you home," he said, grasping her delicate hand as she headed toward the nearby, empty bus stop. "It's pretty late, and I don't want you traveling alone."

He used his very persuasive tone with her, knowing that it worked well with Midgardians and Asgardians alike. And his request was earnest as well. He actually felt protective of her and didn't want her to be vulnerable.

She was a good girl, after all. So sweet and well mannered, not a single blemish marred her gentle heart.

“But...I...it’s fine, really. I take the bus everywhere. And frankly, I’m still totally wired on caffeine. I think I’ll probably be up all night anyway...”

Oh, she knew what he was doing. But after the hours of friendly banter, she was feeling...secure. And as much as she swore she would never sleep with a co-worker...come ON. This was turning out to be the makings of a story she would remember for years to come, about how she --the humble, awkward little Gemma--slept with her hot British co-worker. And besides, the way he talked, it sounded like he was already looking for jobs at other companies, and she couldn’t blame him. This job sucked.

“Um...would you mind...if I came over for a drink? I don’t have anything at my house...”

Oh, that was a lame excuse. But she hoped it worked.

Loki grinned at her as she fumbled with her words again, still not letting go of her hand.

"Sure, I'm glad you mentioned it. I could use another drink as well, I think. And at my place, you'd be spoiled for choice."

He led her to his car then, while still mentally admonishing himself for taking this step. She was not a permanent fixture in his life, and he simply shouldn't take things in the direction he was taking them.

Alas, he was a selfish man, and he wanted to indulge himself.

Once settled in the car, he made sure to fix her seatbelt for her before getting started. Midgardians needed that bit of safety measure. Always.

As he pulled the car out of the complex, he decided that he'd probably share a drink or two with her, and then he'd... and then he'd let her be.

It was for the best.

Gemma slid down into the black leather seat of the nicest car she had ever seen. It was not just “clean,” but perfectly so, like it had been driven from a showroom. It was a beautiful white--even in the harsh yellow of the parking lot lights it looked amazing. The Jaguar XF had obviously been customized to his exacting standards, from the elegant emerald green trim on the interior, to the intricately carved details in the dashboard.

And he put her seatbelt on . She was vibrating with excitement as he walked around the car and got in, turned the ignition, and pulled out of the empty lot.

“I like your car,” she said, feeling dumb. What she wanted to say was Holy SHIT this is the fanciest car I’ve ever seen in my life! But, thankfully, she resisted. “You must be a pretty good salesman.”

"Thank you, I had purchased it back in London," he replied warmly, liking the fact that she looked as mesmerized by the interiors as she was with the exterior.

Loki was used to the attention that his cars received. He had chosen this one in particular for this mission, for he had to build a life for himself as marketing personnel, someone with a good lifestyle and a lot of extra income.

Not that he got a car for each of his missions... but SHIELD was pathetic in building this kind of a charade for the lack of funds on their part.

Loki certainly had no lack of funds, and using them on his missions was like a hobby of his.

"You have an interest in cars?" he asked conversationally as he maneuvered the vehicle easily on the now near empty roads.

“I do now!” she said, running her hand over the dashboard. It felt like silk under her fingers, and she noticed that the carvings were inlaid with gold.

Her mind drifted off, imagining what it would be like to fuck him in the back seat...

Woah, girl...it was just pizza.

She laughed silently to herself, then watched the streetlights pass over his face as they drove.

“What’s London like? I’ve never been there...”

“It's mostly quieter than New York, and parts of it really take you back in time," he replied, giving her a wink and turning his eyes back on the road. "I still have some ties to it. My family cottage on the outskirts and my house in West Brompton. I think you'd like it there."

Why was he talking to her about his life? Those actually were his properties in London, but he should not be imparting that information to her.

Well, it didn't jeopardize the mission in any way, so it was fine. Fury would never know, and even if he did, what could he do about it?

Loki knew that he was now a valuable asset for SHIELD. Fury would never do anything to change that.

As they pulled up to his apartment building, Gemma stared up and up and up the glass sides. It was massive, gorgeous, and right in the heart of downtown Manhattan. He glided up to the entrance, then got out and handed his keys to the valet before walking around and opening her door.

Gemma felt weak in the knees...and INCREDIBLY underdressed and out of place in her Avengers gym shirt and work skirt. If she had known asking to come to his place meant coming here...she would have at least wanted to touch up her make-up.

But then...he looked at her. He smiled at her! He held her hand gently and led her from the car into the enormous, luxurious lobby. Her expression probably made her look like an idiot, and if there were anything she could have done to stop it, she would have.

Unfortunately, she was well and truly dumbstruck by his apartment building. “What floor are you on?” she asked breathlessly as he led her toward the elevators.

"Oh, you'll see," he answered impishly as they entered the elevator.

He pushed the button for the penthouse, then turned to witness her reaction. She was already looking so nervous about being here, it was so very... cute.

Gemma hugged the walls of the elevator, eyes flicking rapidly between Dave’s face and the button he pushed. She honestly thought he might be messing with her, and she was waiting for him to laugh and hit the button for a lower floor. But he didn’t...and the higher up they went, the harder her heart pounded.

“Wow...I am in the wrong line of work...” She gasped, eyes wide as the elevator slowed to a stop. She heard a soft ding, and the doors opened.

Loki chuckled as he led her out of the elevator and into his penthouse apartment. Really, seeing her this impressed, he was very tempted to take her to France and to lead her into the castle he had there.

Her reaction to that would be something else...

"It's not all about the work, I come from a line of old money," he stated as he turned the lights on. "I've been very... lucky in life."

Well, at least in terms of having monetary stability and luxury…

Gemma hadn’t let go of his hand since he had helped her out of the car, but now she took a few steps away, looking at him suspiciously.

“Why the hell are you working at PAC & Co? Do they seriously pay you enough to keep doing that shitty job when you have all this?”

As impressed and amazed as she was, this just wasn’t making sense. A few hours ago they were stuck late in that crappy office with a malfunctioning printer...now she was looking out over the New York skyline from his penthouse.

Oh dear... he should've expected her sharp and curious mind to reach its own conclusions about him. This was why he had never fraternized or made friends on his missions.

This was why bringing her here was unwise. But now, it had been done, and he had to do some damage control.

It wasn't like his other missions, where he could just kill off an inconvenient loose end. Gemma was an innocent...

He let out a loud laugh at her suspicious question. "Gemma, why do you think I'm here, if not for a transitional job that won't break my job experience and give me enough time to find a better one?"

She narrowed her eyes at him, still unsure. But GOD, was she hoping he had a good reason, because she was definitely going to fuck him if he could convince her.

“What’s a transitional job? Transitioning from what?”

"I told you, I came here from London. That kind of move requires a lot of transition, no?" he asked, stepping up to her and grasping her shoulder gently. "I didn't want to be without a job during this time, for it would reflect poorly on my resume."

He had turned his voice deeper and deeper as he explained his situation to her, hoping to distract her with it.

"Do you feel differently about me now, than when we were at that pizza place?" He frowned as he asked that question, wondering why he would care so much if indeed she were to think him... what?... snobbish and obnoxious for being wealthy?

He WAS indeed wealthy. He was still a prince by his true title.

Also... if she was so suspicious of wealth, how much would she judge him if she learned his true identity? He was known all over Midgard as a wicked, unscrupulous and cruel man, after all.

“Of course I do!” she said, looking around at the luxurious furnishings. “I’m...I’m just...a little overwhelmed...” She touched the wall behind her just a bit to regain her balance.

“Maybe that drink would help?” She smiled softly, really trying to pull herself together. Dave was... amazing . Almost too good to be true...

"Sure," he responded, pulling away and leading her to his spacious, plush sofa. That monstrosity took up nearly half of the living room, and he hadn't used it much during his three month stay here.

From here, the view of the city was fantastic, displayed finely in the floor-to-ceiling windows that occupied the whole western wall of the living room. He loved watching the sunsets from here.

His bedroom was made in a similar fashion, but with east facing floor-to-ceiling windows. All in all, it was a nicely made apartment, by Midgardian standards.

"What would you like? Wine? Vodka cocktail? Beer? I'm myself going for a whiskey."

“Beer sounds great.” Her voice was small as she continued to look around the lavish apartment. So...he was from old money. In London. And this job was just helping him transition to living and working in New York. Ok. Cool.

She wanted to believe him so badly...and so she pushed down her other questions and that gnawing feeling in her gut that told her that there was more to his story.

He handed her a chilled glass of some sort of amber ale, and taking a sip of the cold beverage instantly relaxed her.

“Ahhhhh,” she sighed, settling back on the sofa. “You better be careful. I could get used to this.”

Loki could see that she was still doubting his 'old money' story about his wealth, and he had to praise her sharp mind for it.

Doubt was always healthy... especially when it came to him.

Still, he put the charm on her to keep her distracted. "Ah, then maybe I'd be tempted to spoil you."

He sipped his single malt and kept his eyes on her, which he knew, from experience, unnerved many people. For her benefit, he toned his gaze down so that she'd not feel uncomfortable, but still, made sure that she knew she had his full attention.

"So, tell me more about your family, Gemma. You talked very little about them. Do your parents visit you here? What about your sister?"

The way he looked at her over the rim of his glass sent shivers down her spine...and what did he mean he might be “tempted” to spoil her...was that...could this be more than a one-night stand? She decided not to think about it; better to just appreciate this crazy experience for what it was and not hope for anything more to come of it.

Then he brought up her family. Uuuggghhh...

“Oh, yea. They don’t...they’ve never come out here to visit.” She laughed nervously, rubbing her hand on the back of her neck, under her mousey blond ponytail. “They prefer my hometown...and they don’t understand why I moved here. My sister feels the same - she hasn’t even brought the kids over, even though I’ve invited them. But that’s how it goes sometimes, you know? Stupid perfect older sister...Mom and Dad just love her and her perfect husband and her perfect house that’s just down the block from them and her perfect life. Me, I’m just the weird one. I couldn’t wait to move out. I thought living in New York would be a lot more exciting but...well, I didn’t realize it would be so hard being on my own...”

Holy SHIT why am I SAYING all this? Way to kill the mood, Gem...

Loki couldn't help but relate to her. Younger child, perfect elder sibling, unrelatable family, loneliness...

Even though his life had its own complications, and he had contributed to his problems to some extent.

But really, he was quite surprised that Gemma's family was cold towards her. She wasn't even adopted!

"I must say, I'm very curious to know what kind of family it is that just... ignores their daughter. A daughter who is but a mix of sweetness and kindness," he murmured, putting his now empty glass away. Grasping her hand once again, he shifted closer to her to give her his earnest support. "I can see that you're taking it upon yourself, thinking that there's something wrong with you, but there isn't. You're perfect."

His sudden flattery took her by surprise, and her brain short-circuited a little. THE Dave just said she was... perfect?!

Even with all the red flags and warning bells going off in her head...she wanted him to keep saying nice things about her. It had been so long since she’d tried to flirt or gotten dinner or had drinks with someone...was he just playing with her, or...could he really mean that?

No, there were far too many layers of self-consciousness and doubt for her to accept his words at face value. She was sure he was trying to get into her pants--well, her skirt--but that wasn’t a bad thing. She appreciated what he said anyway.

And she flushed red, smiling shyly. “Stop it,” she giggled. Then she took another sip of her beer. “What about your family, Mr. Moneybags? Why did you move away from London?”

Loki sighed heavily, squeezing her hand as he looked down. Now, the lies would come pouring out of his mouth as usual. Par for the course...

"My parents died a few years ago. Rainy day, slippery road." He glanced up to see if she was going to doubt him again, but so far, she seemed to be listening intently, her beautiful chocolate eyes wide and dilated. "I have no siblings, and the extended family isn't very warm. The aunt I used to have a lovely relationship with had also died a long time ago, due to illness. So basically I was very alone and kind of depressed."

He laughed without humour, then, hoping that she'd buy his story, for the sadness in his eyes was real. He was indeed lonely. Had been for years.

"I knew that I had to do something about it before I just succumbed to it. Moreso, I knew I had more work related opportunities here in the US. So I jumped over the pond, trying to start a new life for myself."

His already frayed conscience screamed at him as he leaned towards her, locking his gaze with her intimately. She knew nothing about his true identity and he was drowning her in his charm, essentially fooling her. She'd hate him for it if she somehow learned the truth.

Oh... but she was so beautiful and pure of heart… he felt an inexplicable pull towards her.

His hand reached up and cupped her cheek.

So warm and soft...

He'd had no lovers in so long...

"I can now say that I'm glad I moved here." He moved in and nuzzled her neck, wondering if she'd pull away and reject him. Reject Dave, that is.

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[PREVIOUS CHAPTER] Ch-1; [NEXT CHAPTER]

#Loki fanfiction #Loki fanfic #MCU Loki #Loki/OFC #TPSL Chapter 2 #TPSL #The pursuit of a simple life #Loki x OFC #Loki x Original Female Character #romance #fluff #angst #Loki in disguise #false identity #idiots in love

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ingek73 · 5 years

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Royals

8 Designers on What It’s Like to Dress Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex

8 Slides

By Gina Marinelli

August 2, 2019

Meghan Markle arrives at the Terrance Higgins Trust World AIDS Day charity fair at Nottingham Contemporary on December 1...

Christopher Furlong

Everyone remembers their first time. They compare it to feeling like a kid on Christmas morning and recall their phones exploding with more notifications than humanly possible to respond to. Some need to take a step back in order to fully understand the significance of the moment—when Meghan Markle gave their fashion brand her personal stamp of approval.

Influencer marketing may be powerful, but these brands can attest: Not much compares to the Duchess of Sussex's being photographed wearing one of your pieces, triggering the Meghan Markle Effect. It can shift conversations entirely for those already established brands, and it can throw a little-known at-home operation onto the global stage in an instant.

“In terms of growing our business exponentially, Meghan has enabled us to do this in a very tangible, immediate way,” says James Bartle, founder and CEO of Outland Denim. The Australian brand is on a mission to create responsibly made denim while supporting ethical work conditions, especially in its facility in Cambodia. Markle wore the label repeatedly during her royal tour of Australia in 2018, and its sales skyrocketed, allowing the under-the-radar business to grow. “You cannot put a price on the brand recognition nor the credibility that the duchess is able to bestow on a small, socially oriented enterprise such as ours,” says Bartle.

Outland's success story isn't unique. Many other designers that the Duchess of Sussex has touched since her public persona shifted from actress to royalty, British Vogue guest editor, curator of her own fashion collection, and [pal to Beyoncé],(https://www.glamour.com/story/beyonce-meghan-markle-lion-king) can attest to her impact. In their own words, the designers ahead explain exactly what happened when Markle wore their creations.

1/8

Sentaler

Meghan Markle was initially introduced to Sentaler when she visited the flagship showroom while living in Toronto. She had been seen wearing Sentaler coats in Toronto while out and about as well as while she was filming Suits. Before her engagement to Prince Harry, it was amazing to see her continue to wear the brand. She was seen wearing the Sentaler Royal Baby Alpaca Classic Wrap in Sand Grey, which instantly spiked global demand and we now call the Meghan Wrap.

The most significant appearance—and one of the most memorable days for me as a designer—was when Meghan once again appeared in Sentaler during her first official appearance with the queen, during the Christmas service in Sandringham in 2017. She wore the Long Wide Collar Wrap Coat in Camel, a signature style that has been in my collections from the early days. She styled it impeccably, and I was so honored that she chose to wear Sentaler on such a significant day for her.

Meghan appeared in Sentaler once again in early 2019, wearing the Long Wide Collar Wrap Coat in our fall 2019 Color of the Year, Scarlet Red. This was one of Meghan’s most memorable appearances. The bold, unconventional red and purple color combination was striking and so perfectly put together.

We've experienced the Meghan Markle Effect many times. The impact of her appearances are tremendous and always cause a major spike in our e-commerce traffic and social media channels. Every coat she has worn has immediately sold out and gone on multiple back orders, while also causing similar ripple effects throughout our entire product offerings. We received media attention and awareness from all over the world. She's an incredible style icon, and her influence is simply palpable. —Bojana Sentaler, president and creative director of Sentaler

2/8

Karen Walker

Her royal highness’s style feels very authentic to me. It isn’t forced at all—it’s real and captures her personality. That’s what people love about her approach to fashion.

She first wore our designs in 2014 and many times since, but I think my favorite moment would have to be when she emerged from a plane, after touching down in New Zealand, wearing our Banks Trench. It was a thrill to have her first official appearance in my country wearing one of our pieces—and wearing it so well.

Obviously, anytime the right product is worn by the right person at the right time, there’s a commercial impact. We’ve been lucky enough to experience that on countless occasions with all sorts of people and from all areas of our work. However, with her royal highness, there was something even more: an interest, intrigue, and genuine curiosity about her that reaches past any other notable person we’ve ever had wear our pieces. She’s probably the person I get asked about most, and I think that that speaks to the real affection people have for her. —Karen Walker

3/8

Charlotte Elizabeth

On March 23, 2018, the Duchess of Sussex stepped off a plane in Belfast, where she was attending a royal engagement alongside Prince Harry. This was one of their final outings before the wedding, so the Meghan Markle Effect was in full force. At the time Charlotte Elizabeth was running from my bedroom—among bags here, there, and everywhere in my parents' house!—so it felt monumental seeing the duchess happily wearing the Chestnut Bloomsbury bag so beautifully among other well-respected designers. It was the most surreal day of my life.

Within seconds of the duchess wearing the Bloomsbury, we had orders from around the world. Our Instagram pretty much broke my phone. At that moment in time, I was a one-man band, so it was a pretty crazy experience, to say the least!

Over the weekend that followed the royal engagement, I began to realize the [impact of] the Meghan Markle Effect. Because each bag was handmade, we had to extend the wait time to eight months. We worked tirelessly to fulfill every order. It was tough to go from bedroom business to a larger one overnight and sacrifice other parts of life, but I have learned so many invaluable lessons throughout this experience, which has set me up for our future at Charlotte Elizabeth. An industry expert told me that what I experienced in a year was what most start-ups would in 10 years, so I’m grateful for every lesson and challenge I learned from.

Eventually we caught up with our wait list, which was the greatest sense of relief ever. I ordered myself a big cheesy pizza and I finally got some sleep (without dreaming of packing up bags for delivery)! I'm really excited to announce that we will be launching new Charlotte Elizabeth products later this year. It really is down to each and every individual supporting us to get us to where we are and where we are going. I'm deeply grateful to have been given such a tremendous opportunity and wish to use our success to inspire other women to go after their own dreams.

If I’m totally honest, it definitely didn’t sink in for about a year…. I have loved watching the gentle transition of Meghan’s style since announcing her pregnancy through now. As women, we all experience changes throughout our life that influence how we wish to portray ourselves in the world through fashion and beauty. It must be even tougher in the scrutiny of the public eye to go through such changes, but the duchess continues to inspire through her fashion choices and ability to create a look according to the event. Meghan gives us all a sense of realness, and ability to re-create attainable looks fit for a duchess! —Charlotte Elizabeth Jones, founder of Charlotte Elizabeth

4/8

Outland Denim

The first time the Duchess of Sussex appeared in Outland Denim was October 17, 2018, during the duke and duchess's visit to Dubbo. At the time I was in Cambodia visiting our production facility. I woke up to hundreds of notifications on my phone. Our staff couldn't quite believe a duchess was wearing our jeans! Meghan continued to wear her Harriet Black jeans several times during that visit.

Meghan's choosing to wear Outland Denim once is a reflection of alignment with our values. But the fact that she has chosen to wear the brand multiple times shows her preference for the product’s fit, comfort, and style, and perhaps a desire to help us achieve our mission as well. It's her subtle, dignified way of saying she cares about the work we are doing.

Meghan has opened doors for Outland Denim. She’s enabled us to not only create visibility for our brand globally but also to tell our story around the employment of vulnerable women and sustainability. Retailers, the media, and the public alike have been very keen to get to know Outland Denim thanks to her endorsement.

The immediate effect of the duchess's wearing the jeans was a website traffic increase of 3,000% to our home site and about 948% to our global group of sites. Sales increased 640% for the week following the first sighting of Meghan in our jeans. The black Harriet jeans she wore sold out in Australia in the first 24 hours.

Thanks to the Meghan Markle Effect, we were able to employ a further 46 seamstresses in our Cambodian production. When you think about the fact that what we try to do with Outland is imbue our staff members in Cambodia with a sense of dignity in their work and their value as human beings, a quiet, dignified royal endorsement such as this—while unofficial, in the sense that we don't have a Kensington Palace seal/badge—is incredibly helpful. —James Bartle, founder and CEO of Outland Denim

5/8

Strathberry

We were simply delighted when Meghan Markle chose to carry our Strathberry Midi Tote during her first royal engagement with Prince Harry in Nottingham in 2017. Then seeing her in our hometown of Edinburgh with our East/West Mini was an absolute honor. Her outing in Dublin was a special one for me, being from the Emerald Isle.

Immediately following her first outing in Nottingham, we saw sales increase considerably (by 200% to 300%). Visitor numbers to the website were also amazing. At one stage, they were up tenfold against our daily average. We had already started to take the brand international, but the support from Markle has definitely helped elevate Strathberry further. It has been such an exciting time of growth for the brand. We now employ over 30 people in our Edinburgh headquarters, with smaller teams working in Spain, London, and China. We have also just opened our second flagship store on London’s iconic Mount Street, following the opening of our first boutique in Burlington Arcade last November.

Meghan Markle always looks elegant and effortless. She mixes high-end designers with more affordable brands, which makes her style more relatable and approachable. It's also fantastic that she has been willing to support smaller brands, which in turn helps to promote and grow these labels. —Leeanne Hundleby, founder and co-owner of Strathberry

6/8

Nonie

Meghan Markle's style today has seen an incredible evolution as she’s embraced royal standards while still honoring her personal taste. She brings a modern, contemporary approach with regal flair. More than anything, I think she radiates her personality through her clothing. She knows who she is and isn’t afraid to be herself with her personal expression in fashion.

When Markle wore the classic Sleeveless Trench in Blush as a dress to the Nelson Mandela Centenary Exhibition in July 2018, it marked a monumental moment for both myself and the brand. Her effortless approach to style radiated impeccably through photos, and I think she styled it perfectly. I was tremendously honored to have her royal stamp of approval and see her nod to her previous home in Canada by supporting Canadian designers. Her unofficial endorsement helped change the future of the brand, something I'm forever grateful for.

I still feel the effect today—it's incredible. The moment she wore the trench, we sold out immediately and had a generous wait list. Because of the demand, we had to go to the mill and produce more fabric specifically for the trench dress. To this day, we're still producing the trench! Markle's support has aided in generating international recognition and global exposure for the brand on an expedited time frame. The global reaction was immediate. —Nina Kharey, founder and creative director of Nonie

7/8

Adina Reyter

The first time was the best. Meghan Markle wore the 3 Amigos Diamond post earrings to her first public engagement with the queen. I spotted my piece on the cover of a magazine—a profile of her face, a beautiful smile—and I felt a rush of excitement and shock. How did she get my earrings? Am I dreaming? We jumped through hoops in the office to figure out how this could have happened and figured out she had bought them on her own. Totally thrilling! Meghan has since worn two additional pieces, the Pavé Diamond Teardrop Necklace and Large Pavé Curve Wing Earrings, many times.

I loved the way she styled each piece—sometimes formal, most times casual. She seemed to have never taken them off, which is exactly how I designed them. Meghan’s style is simple, classic, chic, and most important, accessible. Fashion doesn’t have to be incredibly costly, and women are smart shoppers: They want to invest in pieces that are going to last. Meghan exemplifies the woman who trusts her own taste and doesn't chase trends. The fact that she chooses to wear us over and over is an honor and a testament to our brand identity: accessible fine jewelry that is designed for everyday wear.

Every time Meghan Markle appears in our jewelry, it immediately sells out on adinareyter.com and with our retailers. When Meghan wore our Diamond Pavé Teardrop Necklace, it sold out online within minutes and with all retailers nationwide by end of day. One of our most popular retailers reordered the necklace nine times and still can’t keep it in stock! —Adina Reyter

8/8

Theia

It was her royal highness's visit to the island nation of Tonga, where she wore a custom Theia gown to the state dinner hosted by the king and queen at Nuku'alofa. I felt like a six-year-old on Christmas morning! I was running around the house screaming with delight at 5:25 a.m.

It was a remarkable vote of confidence in Theia, to have been chosen to be included in that all-important royal tour, knowing every outfit would be scrutinized by the entire world. Her royal highness looked absolutely radiant, and the positive reviews she received the world over in our ivory gown were thrilling. She styled the gown with a black Givenchy clutch and the Aquazzura slingbacks. The icing on the cake was the fabulous aquamarine ring that once belonged to Princess Diana and was a gift to the duchess from her husband, the Duke of Sussex. I couldn’t have wished for a greater endorsement of my work and our brand.

Our brand was instantly talked about around the world. We're still trying to determine the long-term effect it had, but we saw huge spikes in our Instagram and web traffic. The day she wore it, we saw an additional 42,000 views on our Instagram profile and an additional 13,000 visits to our website.

The effect has been remarkable. The entire nation of Ireland collectively shared in my elation. "We" had dressed the Duchess of Sussex, and a wave of national pride swept across the nation. It truly was a remarkable day for me, my family, my colleagues here at Theia, and practically everyone on Ireland.

Her royal highness is chic, elegant, and modern. She’s a marvelous role model and an intelligent woman with an all-inclusive view of the world. And I love her clean, streamlined choices. —Don O'Neill, creative director of Theia

#meghan markle #duchess of sussex #glamour #fashion #brf #royalty #designers

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alvdaz · 5 years

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Star Citizen, le retour

Ah mes amis, la vie, quelle aventure !

Etant relativement disponible en ce moment *tousse*, je me suis dit que ça serait peut-être intéressant de refaire un tour sur Star Citizen. La dernière fois que j’en avais parlé ici, c’était il y a DEUX ans (en décembre 2017 pour être exact) et je me suis dit que ça serait pas mal de revenir dessus pour voir ce qui a changé, et démêler un peu le vrai du faux dans tout ce qui se dit sur ce jeu qui déchaîne les pa$$ions...

...

Ouais, ok, j’avoue, en vrai je veux pouvoir continuer à trasher ce jeu et le seul moyen de pouvoir lui allumer la gueule sans risquer de me faire crimetime par ses adeptes, c’est de connaître le sujet. C’est n’importe quoi, cette époque.

Bref, let’s go

Si vous avez lu mon précédent post à ce sujet, l’aspect Alpha du jeu transpirait par tous les pores. Nous sommes en 2019, le jeu est toujours en alpha MAIS des efforts ont été faits.

Commençons par l’effort le plus notable: j’ai payé 60 balles. Oui, vous lisez bien, moi, Daz de Elite Dangerous du JDM, j’ai accepté de PAYER pour m’essayer à ce que je considère toujours comme étant une arnaque à grande échelle. Le calcul était simple: j’en avais assez de m’appeler Monsieur Lam et de conduire une Autobianchi spatiale (un Aurora). Donc dès que j’ai croisé un vaisseau starter qui me faisait un peu plus penser à ce que j’utilise dans Elite, j’ai dit banco. Désormais je suis donc DazJDM in-game et je pilote un Anvil C8X Pisces Expedition ou “Pisces” pour faire simple. C’est lui, là:

Il est tout choupi et il permet d’embarquer 3 personnes et du cargo, ce qui change des monoplaces sans aucune soute que j’utilisais jusqu’à présent. Pas de couchette en revanche, donc impossible de l’utiliser comme point de sauvegarde itinérant, je suis obligé d’aller me docker quelque part avant de déco (sinon on repart du dernier point de spawn et ça peut être un peu long).

Alors oui, vous m’insultez mais laissez-moi vous parler du 2nd effort observé: le jeu est désormais plutôt fluide. Tous les détails au taquet, en 2160x1440 (QHD), je tourne à 52 fps de moyenne. DE MOYENNE, CARL. Y a des drops quand on arrive sur des environnements complexes comme les planètes-villes mais rien d’insurmontable et surtout sans aucune comparaison avec les 17 fps ressentis en 2017, du côté de Port Olisar, l’historique station spatiale de départ.

Mais si j’ai payé, c’est aussi parce que je considère que le jeu est arrivé à un point où il est tout à fait jouable.

Dans ce post, je ne parlerais que de ce qui existe et est actuellement visible in-game. Je n’aborderais pas les promesses de la CitizenCon comme le cycle météo, les mécaniques de survie et de gestion de la T° de notre avatar et toutes les sucreries évoquées le mois dernier par Chris Roberts. On reviendra dessus quand ça sera dispo (mdr).

En l’état le jeu est jouable donc et de mon point de vue ça passe par 2 aspects :

L’aire de jeu

La persistance (partielle, mais quand même)

Commençons par l’aire de jeu: Il y a 2 ans, nous n’avions en tout et pour tout que 3 lunes en orbite autour d’une géante gazeuse (Crusader) et la station de Port Olisar.

Deux ans plus tard, �� cette planète initiale se sont ajoutées 2 autres planètes (Hurston et ArcCorp) autour desquelles gravitent d’autres lunes et a priori l’update 3.8 prévu pour ce mois-ci devrait ajouter à la sauce une 4e planète nommée Microtech. Ajoutez à cela des ceintures d’astéroides, des stations intermédiaires et des outposts disséminés un peu partout à la surface des planètes. On a donc toujours qu’un seul système à se mettre sous la dent nommé Stanton, mais on peut réellement commencer à s’amuser. Je vous mets d’ailleurs une map du système en question pour que vous vous rendiez compte:

(Ok on voit que dalle, cliquez ICI pour ouvrir un carte lisible)

Là normalement les élitos qui me lisent vont me dire:

“Daz, t’as méfu, comment un seul système peut te satisfaire là où Elite t’en propose 400 milliards ?!?”

Et ils n’auront pas tort. Ce qui sauve ce jeu, c’est sa gestion des distances. J’explique.

Dans Elite, le joueur a véritablement une stature de voyageur des étoiles. On peut se rendre n’importe où dans un système relativement vite et on peut sauter de système en système en un battement de cil, où que l’on se trouve. On sort d’une station et pouf, on se barre dans un système à 15 aL (années lumières) de là comme ça, littéralement à 3 km de la porte de la station.

Dans Star Citizen, c’est différent. Les sauts inter-systèmes ne peuvent se faire que via des Jump Points situés à des endroits précis et qui ne sont que des passages entre 2 systèmes uniques. Sur la capture du dessus, vous en voyez un qui permet(tra) d’aller dans le système Pyro localisé en haut à gauche. Cela veut dire que si un jour l’envie me prend d’aller à Pyro alors que je suis du côté de la planète Hurston, il va d’abord falloir que je couvre la distance Hurston-Jump Point avant. Et ce trajet intra-système mes amis, il ne se fait pas en 3 ou 4 minutes comme dans Elite. Il y a bien un mode de propulsion rapide baptisé Quantum Drive, mais ça n’a RIEN à voir avec le FrameShift Drive d’Elite. J’ai vérifié pendant un trajet, mon vaisseau couvre 1M de km en environ 22 secondes. Un trip entre Crusader (la gazeuse) et ArcCorp quand les 2 planètes sont diamétralement opposées avec l’étoile au milieu fait 50M de km. 50 x 22 = 1100 secondes soit

DIX-HUIT MINUTES DE TRAJET

18 minutes en ligne droite pendant lesquelles tout peut arriver en plus. Et ensuite, il faut encore manoeuvrer, se docker et aller chercher l’objectif de la mission.

Du coup, le jeu propose un truc qu’Elite peine à offrir au début: un sentiment d’appartenance à un endroit. D’être un peu “local” quoi. Dans Elite, on se limite généralement à visiter une station par système ou une planète au gré des missions et on checke notre statut et notre inventaire sagement docké en station. Dans Star Citizen le saut vers un autre système est déjà tellement un voyage en soi qu’un bicraveur peut parfaitement faire carrière en commerçant strictement intra-système. On utilise ces moments de trajet pour régler notre vaisseau, checker les missions, paramétrer notre stuff etc... C’est un parti-pris qui risque de mettre les explorateurs en galère, mais pour nous autres les traders, c’est ultra cool de connaître tous les points du système et de se dire qu’avant de livrer la came à tel endroit, va falloir faire un stop dans une station de refuel en chemin. Et je vous passe les bleds tentaculaires comme Lorville dans lequel on trouve un système de métro avec 4 lignes et des correspondances. Je peux vous dire que quand il a fallu que j’aille livrer une putain de caisse à la gate 02, au fin fond de la ligne rouge, je les ai senti passer les 15 minutes de trajet.

Deuxième point, la persistance. L’économie fonctionne à peu près et les thunes engrangées sont bien sauvegardées d’une partie à l’autre. Idem pour l’inventaire. Si vous quittez le jeu avec des caisses de marchandise dans votre vaisseau, vous le récupérerez avec les mêmes caisses situées au même endroit. Et ça c’est quand même cool et ça rend le jeu intéressant à jouer. Il y a toujours des wipes entre les différents patches mais -apparemment- la 3.8 permettra de conserver ses acquis, modulo les wipes souhaités par les devs. En attendant, si on se fait fait fumer, on ne perd pas ce qu’on était en train de faire. Je ne pense pas qu’il faille commencer à grinder comme des salauds pour autant puisque quoiqu’il arrive, tout ce qui a été obtenu en alpha sera dégagé en phase de béta puis de version release. Mais quand même, ça change du showroom virtuel qu’était le jeu il y a 2 ans.

Illustration: je pars de Port Olisar pour aller sur une lune de Hurston. Trajet quantum, je chope la caisse en chemin et en arrivant sur la lune je foire ma descente, pour résumer, au dernier moment j’ai vu un autre joueur déjà posé à proximité de l’outpost donc j’ai voulu me poser + loin et m’approcher à pieds en fufu (les rencontres hors zones “d’armistice” sont généralement funestes) et en manœuvrant je m’explose comme une merde à une vingtaine de bornes de la destination. Pouf, je respawn sur Port Olisar mais Ô SURPRISE, la mission est toujours active et la caisse disponible. Je suis donc reparti sur cette lune située à 22M de km de là, me suis posé à proximité du cargo que j’ai récupéré (je ne sais pas en quoi sont faites ces caisses mais boudiou c’est du solide) puis je suis allé à l’outpost et j’ai encaissé la prime. Et bah je peux vous dire que j’ai trouvé ça UUUUUULTRA COOL. C’était peut-être un bug remarquez parce qu’il parait que normalement les missions résistent pas à la mort (edit: non c’est normal en fait, les missions résistent à tout sauf à la déconnexion). Et les bugs, on va pas se mentir, c’est pas ce qui manque dans cette 3.7.

Du coup parlons-en de ce qui déconne dans Star Citizen

Le HUD est toujours nul à chier, l’affichage est parfois illisible avec, au pif, le soleil dans la gueule par exemple, ce qui n’arrive JAMAIS QUAND ON EST DANS L’ESPACE, LOL ! A côté de ça, tous les systèmes de vol sont aux fraises, on comprend rien, c’est inutilement compliqué, la gestion des limiteurs de vitesse et d’accélération est expliquée nulle part, y a 3 fonctions distinctes qui servent à peu près à la même chose bref c’est n’imp et faut vraiment prendre le temps de binder les fonctions sur le HOTAS pour tenter de comprendre à quoi ça sert, et en mode combat, c’est pire. La carte de navigation est dans le ton (à chier) avec une UI pas intuitive pour 2 sous et toujours uniquement appelable depuis le smartphone accroché au bras du perso et qu’on appelle avec F2. Ce qui veut dire que si je suis en vol et que je veux target une destination proche, faut que je quitte mon HOTAS pour repasser sur le clavier. C’est: NUL. Sinon, autre technique, je peux activer le Quantum Drive et tenter de m’y retrouver dans les 42 points de saut qui apparaissent partout à l’écran. Je peux vous dire que quand on veut se barrer d’une confrontation qui vire chocolat, c’est un véritable délice d’essayer de se battre avec l’affichage.

Les missions sont toujours buguées parfois en bien (cf le cas précédent), souvent en mal (impossible de livrer le cargo à destination) et je ne parle que des missions basiques de delivery. J’ai pas encore testé les autres mais je ne me fais guère d’illusion. La fonction “attraper des trucs” m’a l’air d’être un bourbier sans nom qui semble être une surcouche ajoutée à la va-vite, à Port Olisar tout le monde se balade avec sa boite de fayots ou sa canette, c’est génialement useless. L’inventaire perso est géré comme le HUD et les systèmes de vol, c’est à dire que c’est trèèèèès moyen. Et c’est le problème de CIG avec cette volonté de mixer 3 modes de jeu en un seul. Faut faire le grand écart pour accorder tous les modes entre eux et on se retrouve avec résultat qui satisfait personne. Ajoutez à la sauce une centaine de vaisseaux et on comprend que la phase d’équilibrage risque de durer plus longtemps que le développement lui-même.

En gros, le jeu est très beau à regarder et parfois on tombe sur un truc encore en travaux, ça fait désordre, mais c’est une alpha.

Alors, on prend ou pas ??

Franchement, y a déjà moyen de bien s’amuser en l’état. Si on se limite à l’existant, sans se préoccuper des promesses de Roberts ou du prix de vente débile des vaisseaux, on a un tout de même un titre assez solide et qui propose un terrain de jeu super vaste, très agréable à parcourir avec des potes. Ok, on a pas les 400 milliards de systèmes d’Elite, on en a même pas 2 à vrai dire, mais du coup le chiffre de 120 systèmes évoqués au début du dev me parait suffisant vu comment chaque système est déjà un univers en soi finalement. Si vous avez 60 balles à claquer, vous pouvez y aller mais uniquement si le contenu ACTUEL vous satisfait. J’insiste. Vous en aurez pour votre argent mais ne mettez pas plus et surtout, surtout, ne misez pas en écoutant les features miraculeuses de Chris Roberts qui dit que dans 9 mois ça sera génial ou celles de la communauté qui claque des mille et des cent en tentant de gratter la TVA au passage; les promesses n’engagent que ceux qui y croient et tout flatteur vit aux dépends de celui qui l’écoute.

Cette leçon vaut bien un Pisces, sans doute.

EDIT:

On m’a parlé sur Twitter des specs requises pour faire tourner le truc et c’est vrai que je l’ai pas précisé. Voici les specs de mon PC:

CPU: Ryzen 7 1700X (3,4 GHz)

RAM: 16 Go

GPU: 1080 Ti

jeu installé sur un SSD

Avec ça, j’atteins donc les 52 fps de moyenne, à tout hasard, cette page permet de voir où se situe notre config par rapport à la config minimale et recommandée.

#Star Citizen #CIG #MMO #SCAM #CITIZEN

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contrabassconversations · 5 years

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634: Dan Styffe on exploring new musical territories

Dan Styffe is constantly pushing new boundaries and exploring new territory on the double bass. He has been extremely active on a number of fronts since our last podcast with him back in 2017.

We caught up with Dan at the 2019 International Society of Bassists Convention to chat about some of his many recent premiers and recording projects. Enjoy!

Listen to Contrabass Conversations with our free app for iOS, Android, and Kindle!

Contrabass Conversations is sponsored by:

D'Addario Strings

This episode is brought to you by D’Addario Strings! Check out their Zyex strings, which are synthetic core strings that produce an extremely warm, rich sound. Get the sound and feel of gut strings with more evenness, projection, and stability than real gut.

The Bass Violin Shop

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Steve Swan String Bass

Steve Swan String Bass features the West Coast’s largest selection of double basses between Los Angeles and Canada. Located in Burlingame, just south of San Francisco, their large retail showroom holds about 70 basses on display. Their new basses all feature professional setups and come with a cover at no additional cost. Used and consignment instruments receive any needed repairs and upgrades before getting a display position on the sales floor.

Modacity

Modacity is a practicing app that helps musicians be more effective at practice. They help you get the results you want, while keeping you encouraged and motivated to stick with it and reach those goals – however big, or small, they may be.

Kolstein Music

The Samuel Kolstein Violin Shop was founded by Samuel Kolstein in 1943 as a Violin and Bow making establishment in Brooklyn, New York. Now on Long Island, over 60 years later, Kolstein’s has built a proud reputation for quality, craftsmanship and expertise in both the manufacture and repair of a whole range of stringed instruments, and has expanded to a staff of twelve experts in restoration, marketing and production.

A440 Violin Shop

An institution in the Roscoe Village neighborhood for over 20 years, A440's commitment to fairness and value means that we have many satisfied customers from the local, national, and international string playing communities. Our clients include major symphony orchestras, professional orchestra and chamber music players, aspiring students, amateur adult players, all kinds of fiddlers, jazz and commercial musicians, university music departments, and public schools.

Upton Bass String Instrument Company

Upton's Karr Model Upton Double Bass represents an evolution of our popular first Karr model, refined and enhanced with further input from Gary Karr. Since its introduction, the Karr Model with its combination of comfort and tone has gained a loyal following with jazz and roots players. The slim, long “Karr neck” has even become a favorite of crossover electric players.

nkoda

nkoda is a sheet music app for iOS, Android, and many platforms. It includes music from over 100 of the major music publishers like Boosey & Hawkes and Barenreiter. Practice, play and perform your sheet music, and mark up your parts as needed. This subscription service has received praise from Sir Simon Rattle and Joyce DiDonato. Start your free trial at nkoda.com.

Contrabass Conversations production team:

Jason Heath, host

Michael Cooper and Steve Hinchey, audio editing

Mitch Moehring, audio engineer

Trevor Jones, publication and promotion

Krista Kopper, archival and cataloging

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#doublebass #bass #music #interview #orchestra #teaching

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yescrispygardencollectorforlove · 5 years

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Possible Meryl-Fedor Wedding Venue

Le Mas des Poiriers – A Farmhouse in Provence

Our family's renovation of an 18th century farmhouse in Provence set on 65 acres of pear orchard and sunflowers. Bienvenue!

🌻🍐

For additional information, please visit Le Mas des Poiriers and follow @provencepoiriers on Instagram for daily inspiration.

August 4, 2017

For years, American expatriates Shauna Varvel and her husband enjoyed spending summers with their five children in Provence. In 2014, kismet led them to rent the home that is now Le Mas des Poiriers, an 18th century farm house nestled among 65 secluded acres including working pear orchards. The family fell in love, and a year later when the property became available for sale, they decided to buy it. Le Mas des Poiriers underwent extensive renovation by the esteemed Alexandre Lafourcade. Landscape architect Dominique Lafourcade transformed the gardens, and Susan Bednar Long redesigned the interiors using Pierre Frey fabrics exclusively. Every inch is true to the spirit of Provence.

Le Mas des Poiriers is available for rent, and I am fantasizing about a dream vacation in Provence! In the meantime, I am delighted to welcome Shauna Varvel to The Glam Pad today for a virtual holiday…

Q: How did Le Mas des Poiriers receive its name, and what is the English translation?

A: Our farm, Le Mas des Poiriers, produces 60 tonnes of pears annually and the house sits adjacent to the pear orchard. The actual and original name of the house is Grange Neuve, which we use, but we have named the farm Le Mas des Poiriers, which translates as “The Pear Trees Farm House.”

Q: In what year was Le Mas des Poiriers built, and what is its history?

A: The house was built over 200 years ago as a farm house, or a “Mas.” The Rhone River divides near Avignon and the Palace of the Popes and the farm sits between the two arms of the Rhone, on an island. Thus the property’s land is very fertile and green, which is unusual in this dry and rocky region. The farm was formerly in a flood plan and had a high platform near the barn that served as a place to put the animals during during a flood.

Q: What inspired you to purchase this beautiful property?

A: Provence has been a passion of mine for many years. When my five children were young, we would rent a house for a month or so in the summertime, spending our mornings at the markets or visiting ancient Roman ruins, our afternoons by the pool, and our evenings making dinner together and eating al fresco in the garden to the tune of cicadas. We created beautiful memories as the children ran around in the Provencal sun without the distractions of everyday life, picking grapes and pears and enjoying the beauty and serenity of the region. In the summer of 2014, we rented the home that is now Le Mas des Poiriers and fell in love with it for its uniquely large structure and distinct location, being within minutes from the charming city of Avignon and yet in a secluded world of its own on a fertile island within the Rhone River. We were thrilled a year later to discover that the property had been listed for sale. We knew that we loved having 10,000 square feet in one building to fit our large family (many properties in Provence connect small buildings together to make one), the high volume in the ceilings and the flat and green land surrounding the property. We also knew that it would be a lot of work but we felt that in the end, the effort and investment would pay off in a way that it couldn’t in other properties.

Q: Please tell me about the architectural, interior, and landscaping renovations you have overseen.

A: We hired the Alexandre Lafourcade architect team for the renovation. They are the clear specialists in this region for these kinds of old houses. Through their vision we were able to re-organize the exterior, adding a new front door in a new location, tearing out ceilings and staircases to make a new beautiful front entry, add a new master bedroom, family bedroom, living room and mud room in a space that had formerly been a barn, with a dirt floor. We tore out floors, walls, all bathrooms, added antique fireplaces, new floors throughout, etc. We used finishings that would have been used traditionally in the house, like Dordogne stone floors, on the main level, reclaimed antique terracotta floors on the upper level and traditional marble cut in a Provencal style in the bathrooms. We completely changed the landscape working with the famed Provencal landscape designer, Dominique Lafourcade. We moved the swimming pool from the south side of the house to the west, the kitchen side of the house which made more sense to us. We added a tennis court adjacent to the swimming pool and Dominique designed a charming tennis court house on the east side of the court, painted a beautiful French blue. The property boasts 75 200-year-old plane trees in three allées, which were cleaned and pruned to highlight their beauty. Additionally, we added very tall cypresses to form a cypress allée coming off the center axis of the house. We added a wisteria covered arched walkway to the pool and also a beautiful rose covered archway off of the living room. The tennis court is surrounded by old olive trees, lavender and plants that would be found in the Luberon valley, giving it a distinct feeling that is different from the rest of the property. There was an old decrepit barn on the property that we renovated to house two staff apartments with a two-bedroom apartment upstairs and a one-bedroom apartment downstairs. On the east side, there is a view of Mount Ventoux and we have a large room that can be used as a rec room or a staff room.

Q: What was your vision for the beautiful interiors, and were you able to work with antiques original to the home? How did you decide to use Pierre Frey fabrics exclusively throughout?

A: The house is very large and could have been decorated and finished to feel more like a Bastide or a Villa, but I felt strongly that it should maintain the feeling of the country farmhouse that it is. I absolutely love and was inspired by the La Mirande Hotel that is just across the river from us. The La Mirande is a city hotel and is very elegant but we took inspiration from their fabrics, bathrooms and from their Chef’s Table kitchen, in the basement of the hotel. In fact, our kitchen, was built by the son of the gentleman who built the Chef’s Table kitchen years ago. We did inherit some antiques with the house and have used them in a few places. We inherited some lovely hunting dog paintings that feature in the entry and living room and two small desks that are in the living room. Additionally, I travelled between Paris, shopping on the left bank and at the weekend market, Isle sur la Sorgue in Provence and London for the Decorative Antique Fair, every few months collecting antiques and art. It took the full two years to find all of the pieces needed to fill the house.

Regarding Pierre Frey, I have long loved their traditional French country fabrics and was thrilled to be able to integrate them here. I worked with a decorator, Susan Bednar Long, with whom I have had a long professional relationship. We worked together on this project and sat in the Pierre Frey showroom in Paris for two days straight pulling fabrics and creating fabric schemes for each room. The manager of the Paris showroom, Eleonore, came to the house several times during the project and recommended the seamstress and upholsterer that Pierre Frey uses in Paris.

Q: For a guest staying at Le Mas des Poiriers, what does a typical itinerary look like for a long weekend visit? And for a week or more? What activities do you recommend?

A: We rent the entire house for approximately 4 – 5 weeks a year on a weekly basis. In a week, you could cover many of the famous Provencal villages in the area and visit some of the most popular markets. There are a myriad of sites and markets to visit in Provence. We recommend that you take it slowly and balance days out with days lounging by the pool or playing tennis, touring the gardens, sunflower fields or pear orchard at Le Mas des Poiriers attended by our thoughtful and professional staff. Gordes is a favorite among most visitors along with the other hilltop villages in the Luberon Valley such as Bonnieux, Lacoste and Menerbes. When visiting Gordes do not miss the lovely Abbey Senanque with its lavender fields, just beyond Gordes in a beautiful canyon. Avignon is just ten minutes away and is home to the Palace of the Popes, one of the largest and most important Medieval Gothic buildings in Europe, and a UNESCO Heritage Site. Pont du Gard, the highest and one of the best preserved Roman Aqueduct and another UNESCO Heritage Site, is just 30 minutes away to the west. St Remy and Eygalières are very popular market towns with markets Wednesday and Friday mornings. Arles boasts a beautiful Roman Coliseum that rivals the famous coliseum in Rome and Nimes is home of the beautiful Roman Maison Carree.

Lavender fields at Abbey Senanque

Q: Your culinary team sounds amazing, please tell me about dining at Le Mas des Poiriers.

A: Our culinary team are state of the art with experience from New York’s Park Avenue to fine French kitchens. They are on-hand to create a personalized menu for each meal during your stay, moving your dining experience from our patio to the plane tree allée, the cypress allée or by the pool for a beautiful and varied experience at each meal.

Q: How many guests can Le Mas des Poiriers accommodate at one time? I would imagine this would be an ideal venue for a destination wedding!

A: We have nine double bedrooms and have a maximum sleeping capacity of 18 guests. Le Mas des Poiriers is a perfect wedding venue and we collaborate with the incredible talented team of Matthew Robbins Design to coordinate events.

Thank you, Shauna, for sharing your enchanted home with us today! Le Mas des Poiriers is now at the top of my bucket list.

With seven bedrooms in the main house and two additional bedrooms in the guest house, Le Mas des Poiriers offers the utmost in seclusion and luxury. The property boasts a tennis court and swimming pool, and it is professionally staffed with a culinary team of two chefs and two waiters, as well as full-time housekeeping. Within easy reach of Avignon, Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Gordes, St. Remy, and Aix-en Provence, Le Mas des Poiriers is ideally situated to access all that the region has to offer, should you decide to spend a day away from the peaceful property.

Le Mas des Poiriers Vacation Rental

The property's 65 acres offers true seclusion, amidst working pear orchards, which produce six tonnes of fruit annually.

With seven bedrooms in the main house and two additional bedrooms in the guest house, Le Mas des Poiriers offers the utmost in seclusion and luxury. The property boasts a tennis court and swimming pool. The interiors, which are undergoing final touches, include Pierre Frey fabrics exclusively. Drawing from the iconic style of the nearby La Mirande hotel, every inch is true to the spirit of Provence.

The home has recently undergone extensive renovation by the esteemed Alexandre Lafourcade, with gardens overseen by Dominique Lafourcade, the famed Provencal landscape architect. The house is professionally staffed with a culinary team of two chefs and two waiters, as well as full-time housekeeping.

Within easy reach of Avignon, Chateauneuf-du-Pape, Gordes, St. Remy, and Aix-en Provence, Le Mas des Poiriers is ideally situated to access all that the region has to offer, should you decide to spend a day away from the peaceful property.

Accommodations Le Mas des Poiriers is an 18th century farm house in Provence, located near the Medieval city of Avignon on Isle de la Motte.

Overview

Rates

Information

Map

Reviews

Date Picker: Guest

Travel Dates

Bedrooms

Min. Night Stay

Currency:Currency:

Now to Dec 31, 2019 97

9,008

/per night

Security Deposit: €10,000 + APA €10,000 (Advance Provisional Allowance) needed for the cost of food and drinks.

Minimum Stay: 7 Nights. Minimum night stay may vary by villa. Please contact a villa specialist to confirm.

Important! Non-USD rates above based on approximate currency conversion. Please confirm rate and currency with your Villa Specialist at time of booking.

Main House

7 Double bedrooms

Large Dining Room with seating for 18

Living Room

Family Room

Kitchen with Family Dining Area

Mud Room

Orangerie with Herve Baume dining table to seat 22

Gym

TV Room

Guest House

2 Queen bedrooms

Sitting Room

Provence Travel Guide

Understated Elegance

Provence, located in the south of France, is one of France’s most beautiful provinces. It’s perhaps most famous for its striking, fragrant lavender fields which bloom in early summer. But you don’t have to time your visit to the lavender; the region offers plenty more to see and do.

The delightful city of Aix-en-Provence is a highlight in the region with its Cours Mirabeau, a miniature Champs-Elysees, which is alive with restaurants and shops. On the coast of Provence you’ll find the fishing village of Cassis, where you can take a boat tour of the harbor. And further west you’ll find Marseille, France’s oldest city and an important trading port throughout history.

Other notable destinations include the Roman city of Arles, the city of Avignon with its famous medieval bridge, the Pont d’Avignon, and Les Baux de Provence, a fortified hilltop village. And throughout your Provence villa vacation, you can enjoy regional produce like olives and truffles, as well as famous Provençal dishes such as bouillabaisse and boeuf en daube, which, like Provence, are meant to be savored.

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latvian-spider · 2 months

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Heavy Sword

Originally Uploaded on DeviantArt as WinxPossible on Sep 10, 2017

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Original Description:

The kid might need help.

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No comment.

#Church Square #Summer Fair #Knights #Swords #Photo #Spiders Scribbles #Snapshots #2017 The Fair Showroom

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is6621 · 6 years

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Mall the Small Things -Kelsey Sullivan

In a span of just a few weeks, a number of retailers have announced store closings. In a CNBC article, as of March 1, more than 4,309 store closures have been announced by retailers so far this year. Victoria’s Secret, Gap, JC Penney and Tesla all announced store closures within the past 2 weeks - leaving hundreds of storefronts empty and hundreds of shoppers questioning.

Victoria’s Secret plans to shut down 50 locations in 2019 - 4x more than their average twelve per year. Gap - 230 closures over the next two years and spinning off Old Navy, and JC Penney, between department stores and home and furniture locations, 27. And what’s a blog post without mention of our favorite social media guru, Elon Musk and Tesla - announcing they will move all sales online and close showrooms. But, don’t worry, you can buy a Tesla in the matter of a minute on your phone. eMarketer predicts Amazon will control nearly 54% of all retail ecommerce by 2019.

Since the rise of online stores, like that of Amazon, many large retailers (as mentioned above) are left feeling bruised and broken. Sure, online shopping is all about convenience. Heck, as I sit here writing this blog, I have googled hairspray, cleaning spray, and a few other items I need but am too lazy to go out and pick up (move the car, lose the parking spot, fight the crowds, change out of my Sunday lazy attire, i can make up a number of excuses) to see if I can purchase online, cheaper, with the instant gratification of having by tomorrow. I stopped when my travel hairspray delivery date was Friday and came to my senses that i can just get tomorrow while at work with a quick trip to CVS. But, therein lies my point. Convenience is there, yes. but convenience still lies within the brick and mortar stores too. Convenience, the key here, and highly valued but not the holy grail.

PRO: In Store shopping - Personalized. Experience

In a nutshell, online shopping is a glorified google search. You are searching, scrolling, clicking thru and for results. Chat bots are there for you, but are they real? Can they tell if those jeans make your butt look nice, or if the shoulders on the blouse make you look boxy? Nope. They may provide customer service, but nothing like that you would get in store. Forget clothes for a second. What about big purchases? TVs, cameras, computers, appliances - are you going to trust a bot to help you find what’s best for YOU? No. Again, a better experience to be had in store, checking out the products, asking the pros, who are real-time and subject matter experts. Online, things like customer reviews and photos have helped bridge that gap, but having someone walk through your large purchase, with you in mind, now that is personalized. That is an experience. And back to my hairspray example, one of the main reasons people still believe in buying something in-store is more satisfying than online is because you’re able to get that item immediately. A Fluent survey found that the reason most likely to be cited for shopping in-store is the ability to see or try on items in person. According to a study by Autotrader, 88% of shoppers prefer to purchase a car in person. Maybe that’s for the test drive before, be as it may - buyers want to have that experience before the drop their hard earned dollars.

As e-commerce continues to change the way retailers think about brick-and-mortar locations, it’s clear there are just too many of them.

PRO: Online shopping. Convenience.

There is no argument that online shopping is much more convenient. You can do in your robe, in between loads of laundry, dishes, or as your about to run out of paper towels. Outside of black Friday, the Internet is the only shopping experience that is there for you 24/7. You are not at the mercy of store hours, South Boston parking, Massachusetts pike traffic, or mother nature. Save time, save effort. Buying a gift? Even better - skip the step of wrapping, packing, and sending.

CON: In store shopping: Price comparisons. Shopping the deals.

For multichannel retailers - those who sell both in physical stores and online - pricing becomes tricky. Retailers all have different price matching strategies - some brick-and-mortars (Best Buy, Target, Staples) will match online prices in store upon customer request, while others (Home Depot, Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s) stand ground on a hard no. Self-matching would seem smart to most, appeasing customers and maintaining fairness - a strategy to earn higher profits according to Harvard Business School professor Elie Ofek. who found that price matching is not just a necessary evil; it can be a competitive tool and boost a company’s bottom line.”

Shopping online gives us the opportunity to compare prices, vs. in store, we do not have as easy of access to. You forget the prices you’ve seen in the previous shops, so you can’t compare them. One of the biggest questions faced by brick-and-mortar retailers today is whether prices should be the same online and in stores. Macy’s reported a decline in store sales, resulting in a 10% stock price drop. But it’s these stores that have to continue to find ways to face and defeat disruption - ramping up web operations, but more importantly creating new reasons and values for customers to patronize stores. Price strategies are what can keep all retailers afloat and results in an immediate effect. Prices can be changed tonight and profits can start rolling in tomorrow morning.

CON: Online Shopping. Scams, Fraud, Identity Theft, Phishing, Abuse. (all the things that scare you)

The Internet knows more about us that we do. Think about how many times a day you are entering personal information via your phone, your computer, your tablet. We are entering our credit card number like its our name in a drawing and simultaneously running the risk of our lives being hacked. Online shopping fraud was up 30% in 2017, while every year since seems to break records. As e-commerce grows, e-commerce fraud grows even faster. This is not to say do not shop online as it is not safe, but it is a caution so shop smart. Most online retailers have secure sites and have every security measure needed, but we just need to be more...aware. Not purchasing from shady sellers (mom and pop sites vs. Target.com). We have to question safety, quality, and lots of inconvenience spent dealing with the repercussions.

There is data to support that physical stores are still important to consumers. We are not ready to forego altogether. Stats from 2018 support the importance of physical retail environments include:

- According to google, 61% of customers would rather shop with brands that have a physical location than with brands that are online only. Also, nearly 80% of shoppers go in-store when there is an item they need or want immediately.

- 57% of cusomers say that the closing of many department stores has negatively impacted their perception of ecommerce (Avionos)

- And then there’s Amazon, now with brick and mortar Amazon Go stores in three cities across the U.S.

The in store experience allows customers to engage with the brand. At the end of the day, both in store and online shopping are important and relevant to consumers and therefore cannot be forgotten. The retail space is going thru an evolution of which is fueled by consumer behavior and expectations. To be successful, brands need to take steps to account for shopping wherever and whenever it happens.

1. Be ready to capture at any stage of the journey

2. Create a seamless experience between both experiences

3. Use data to fuel and customize both experiences.

To succeed in the modern world of retail, whether brick and mortar or internet, retailers need to embrace web AND in-store operations as unique operations and remember that at the end of the day, it’s all about what the customer wants. Adhere to my needs and price sensitives, and I will support you whether in store or online.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/01/gap-victorias-secret-tesla-store-closures-hit-malls-in-the-middle.html

https://www.emarketer.com/content/the-pros-and-cons-of-in-store-and-digital-shopping-experiences

https://b2b.autotrader.com/oem/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Car-Buyer-of-the-Future_NAS-Client-Presentation.pdf

https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2018/04/24/e-commerce-fraud-rose-nearly-twice-as-fast-as-e-commerce-sales/

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/abs/10.1287/mksc.2017.1035

https://binaryic.com/knowledge-center/how-customers-prefer-to-shop-online-vs-in-store/

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baderah-blog · 6 years

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Analysis on a successful leaflet distribution business model -Logiforce

Key facts about the leaflet distribution industry

More, than any other marketing channel, 89 percent of the receivers are more likely to remember leaflet advertising. (Source: DMA)

45% of the leaflet are kept on the pinboard and the kitchen drawer. (Source: DMA)

However, according to DMA the average response is 1 percent.

According to the ranking developed by DMA, industries that benefit the most through leaflet distribution are:

Retail industry

FMCG brands

Restaurants and

Local services

The recurring customers of the industry due to higher ROI are as follows:

Real estate agents

Gyms

Car sales showrooms

(Source: DMA)

Keeping the above facts into consideration, the response rate varies with the type of business. For instance, established businesses are more likely to receive more response than the new businesses. Further, non-durable goods producers and sellers are more likely to receive the higher response rate than the durable goods ones.

However, the key to understand here is the potential return on investment rather than the response rate. This is because more perishable goods need to be sold in order to equate the durable ones in terms of their value. Hence, the return in monetary terms matters rather than the response rate.

The essential ingredients for the successful leaflet distribution campaign are as follows:

Drip effect marketing

Long-term horizon

Targeted to the consumers

The previous year’s trends have been as follows:

Households now received fours door drops per month

The reduction in weights of the door drops can be attributed to the fact that the industry has become more environmental friendly.

There has been improvement in planning, printing and targeting campaigns.

Over the years from 2013 to 2017, the industry volumes and its expenditure has been falling.

Additionally, the frequency of door drops to a particular households have also fallen over the given period of time. According to the estimates, the door drops reduced by 43 percent in 2017 when compared to the level of 2012. However, this reduction in the frequency of door drops can be attributed to the following factors:

Better data

Efficiencies in printing technology

· According to the Advertising association, the door drop spend increased by 0.3 percent over the last six years.

The industry trends are expected to be positive in 2019 on the backdrop of:

High levels of consumer engagement

Longevity of the flyers at home

Planning and forecasting ability of the industry will be affected by the political uncertainty such as the Brexit.

The rise in cost of paper is expected to have negative impact on the industry. However, the cost of paper used in the campaigns can be reduced, given the adoption on environmental standards such as ISO 9001 and ISO 14001.

The improvement in targeting technology and better data is going to play a pivotal role in the future landscape of the industry.

The trends of reduction in the volumes are flattening out and the report by DMA estimates a steady growth in the volumes over the next few years.

Company overview

Logiforce is the leaflet distribution company that applies its unique and proprietary analytics to service its clients more efficiently and effectively. The company believe in transparency and fair play in its conduct and operations. Therefore, it has allowed its clients a greater degree of flexibility in handling their campaigns according to their preferences. Further, the company is expanding and is poised to become one of the largest leaflet distribution companies in the UK, having a coverage of accessible areas all over the country.

Customer Analysis

According to the company data from 2012 to the present, nighty eight percent of the customer’s orders are greater than £100. Such data shows the company’s commitment towards the goals of its esteemed customers. In this way, the mutual interests of the firm and the client can be fulfilled in a business partnership. Moreover, Logiforce has delivered on average two million, five hundred and fifty seven thousand items per month, over the period of the past five years.

Large customers book hundreds of orders in a year with a recurring interval of less than a week. This shows the confidence and trust the customers has on the operations of the company. Additionally, eighty five percent of the total customers of the Logiforce are the recurring customers.

Company strategies

The company’s main strategies can be classified into three parts:

Financial strategies

Operational strategies

Marketing strategies

Financial strategies deal with the policy adopted by the management of the company to make decisions related to the finances of the company. In a company such as Logiforce, these decisions are centered at three aspects:

Operating leverage of the firm

Working capital management policy

Prospective and current capital structure of the firm

The operating leverage of the firm in its overall is high due to the prevalence of fixed costs related to its overall administration and maintenance of its IT systems. With the exception of the final year, the steady rise in the sales has added to the profit margin of the firm. Additionally, as the industry sales are expected to grow in the longer run, the company is expected to improve its operating margins further.

Working capital management policy is extremely conservative, where a large amount of cash has been piled up into the accounts of the company. This has eased the liquidity risk of the company on one hand, but has also resulted in inefficient utilization of cash in terms of its opportunity costs. The debt policy of the company is prudent, given the trajectory of its future interest rate environment. Therefore, in this context, the increase of equity in the overall mix, softens the risk of solvency of the company.

Operational strategies largely deal with the core competencies of the company. The elaborate, transparent and controlled advertisement by the leaflet distributors of the company equipped with massive IT infrastructure are the main core competencies of the company. These competencies help the company to become a competitive force against its rivals. The industry dynamics are such that leaflet distribution companies are not providing more of a data analytics in order to rival each other. Logiforce is also adopting the similar strategy by gaining its customer through advance analytics.

Marketing strategies of the company are more of a traditional in nature. The company initially sprang up through the word of mouth due to its quality service delivery. Further, the placement and promotion of the product is of essence in this industry. This is because the company is not only confronting the competitive rivalries within its industry but also with other sections of the advertising media. The company’s services and its website is not promoted into digital landscape. For instance, the company’s website is no ware to be seen on the queries related to the leaflet distribution in the UK.

Conclusion of the company

The company has to work on its sales and marketing strategy in order to leverage itself from the expected rise in the sales volumes of leaflet distribution. Promoting itself online through both paid and organic rankings on the search engine should be of paramount importance given the usage and prevalence of internet in acquiring advertisement services.

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thenewdep224 · 2 years

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Apr 09, 2021 · CARDI B has left little to the imagination after strutting around in a skimpy thong swimsuit and gold heels. The WAP rapper, 28, videoed herself walking back and forth in her bathroom, giving fans a good look at her curvaceous butt. 13 Cardi B has flaunted her backside in a thong swimsuit Credit: Instagram/ Cardi B 13. WILD Cardi B has posed for fans in her sexiest bikinis, thongs and pasties long before she accidentally posted a nude photo on Instagram. The 28-year-old rapper shared and deleted a topless snap ea…. Jan 16, 2019 · Drops Trou in the Car. 1/16/2019 7:32 AM PT. She may not have meant to do it, but Cardi B just came up with the title of her next hit track... "P***Y BREATHIN'!" The rapper was riding in a car in.

Cardi B Responds To Jaw-Dropping Leaked Nude Video: "Ya.

Nov 29, 2017 · Cardi B Responds To Jaw-Dropping Leaked Nude Video: “Ya Always Talking About How I Got No Nipples – Well Now You Know” in NEWS by SOHH Squad 11/29/17 ∙ 8:46 AM. Cardi B Pics & Gfys Subreddit. Press J to jump to the feed. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. Search within r/CardiB. r/CardiB. Log In Sign Up.... Pokies. nsfw. 0 comments. share. save. hide. report. 100% Upvoted. Log in or sign up to leave a comment. Log In Sign Up. Sort by: best. Offset joins Cardi B and her "golden nipples" in Paris in late September. Getty Images Cardi B's birth chart shows that conflict is a way of life. Some people are born into peace. Others.

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A post shared by Cardi B (@iamcardib) on May 26, 2020 at 9:50pm PDT. "Suck it in life," she captioned the video of herself revealing her relaxed stomach to her 66 million followers. People.

Cardi B Bikini Pictures: Her Sexiest Swimsuit Photos.

Later, Cardi strips down completely naked, though her nipples and other areas are blurred out. Her dancers also ditch their clothes and perform in the nude. In a following scene, they lay there. Oct 13, 2020 · Another day in the life for Cardi B! The rapper accidentally bared it all on Tuesday morning when a pic in which she lay topless on a couch was uploaded to her Instagram Story by accident. But you.

Cardi B Plastic Surgery REVEALED! (Before & After Photos 2021).

Cardi B also responded to people on social media who somewhat intrusively decided to ask about the size of her areolas. She said: "I breastfed a baby for three months t*****s got bigger so nipples. Oct 13, 2020 · Presumably drunk after a long weekend of birthday celebrations, Cardi B accidentally posted a selfie exposing her breasts to her Instagram Story. After getting lit all weekend in celebration of.

Cardi B’s Nipples Are Way Too Big For Me | Know Your Meme.

Oct 19, 2020 · On October 13th, 2020, Cardi B posted a nude photograph of herself on Instagram Story revealing her breasts and nipples. (1) After the photo began circulating across the web, some criticized the appearance and size of Cardi B's areolas. That day, Twitter (2) user @pitbullnuts tweeted a photograph of a person on a mattress on the floor with feet.

"Why Are Your Nipples So Big?" Cardi B Reacted Sarcastically.

Cardi B stepped out in an over-the-top Schiaparelli ensemble during Paris Fashion Week on Wednesday, sporting a tweed jacket with two strategically placed golden circles at the bust — complete. Cardi B's Nipples Are Way too Big for Me is a parody of the reaction to a leaked nude photograph of rapper Cardi B. In the meme, the men saying the like are typically depicted as disheveled and slobbish, indicating that their opinion is invalid. All. Trending. Sorted by: Newest Oldest Comments Favorites High Score Low Score Views.

Cardi B Goes Completely Naked in Violent "Press" Music.

Oct 13, 2020 · Yesterday Cardi B accidentally leaked her topless photo and the internet cant stop talking about it. As soon as she posted it, things escalated quickly. The internet started trolling Cardi B for having nipples that they say look like “watery pancakes”. Nipples actually come in different shapes and sizes, so I must admit that a lot of the. Aug 27, 2017 · August 27, 2017, 9:44 PM. Wardrobe whoops! Rapper Cardi B was presenting Demi Lovato's performance of "Sorry Not Sorry" at the 2017 MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night when she suffered a major. Cardi B shocked her fans by sharing an explicit video to Instagram while backstage at the Billboard Awards on Wednesday. The 26-year-old rapper stripped off to just a tiny thong and made crude.

Cardi B shows off her real body in ‘honest' video: ’Suck it.

Cardi B’s video explored. In a video that was uploaded by a YouTube user who goes by the name ‘The 5%,’ Cardi can be seen walking to the stage for an event.. While she is.

Photos: Fans Cant Stop Talking About Cardi B & Her Giant Nipples.

Feb 20, 2021 · Cardi B Fixed Her Teeth. Cardi B received many criticism for her crooked teeth on Instagram so she sought a cosmetic dentist, Dr. Catrise Austin, to fix them. This was the same expert that did DJ Khaled’s teeth. The procedure, which involved surgical rearrangement and veneers, costed around $40,000. It’s not known if Cardi had braces. Jul 04, 2022 · Cardi B is a fearless and hard-working queen in the music industry with enviable swimwear style. Not only has she released chart-topping rap singles, including “I Like It Like That,” but she. Cardi B got honest about how her body has changed since giving birth to daughter Kulture M:takesWebUpload47502A1#TIPS517-PE By Kaitlyn Frey September 27, 2018 11:41 AM.

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The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek, or, the Luminescence of Debauchery By Catherynne M. Valente

Issue #200, Special Double-Issue

, May 26, 2016

AUDIO PODCAST

EBOOK

(Finalist, Eugie Foster Memorial Award, 2017)

When my father, a glassblower of some modest fame, lay gasping on his deathbed, he offered, between bloody wheezings, a choice of inheritance to his three children: a chest of Greek pearls, a hectare of French land, or an iron punty. Impute no virtue to my performance in this little scene! I, being the youngest, chose last, which is to say I did not choose at all. The elder of us, my brother Prospero, seized the chest straightaway, having love in his heart for nothing but jewels and gold, the earth’s least interesting movements of the bowel which so excite, in turn, the innards of man. Pomposo, next of my blood, took up the deed of land, for he always fancied himself a lord, even in our childhood games, wherein he sold me in marriage to the fish in the lake, the grove of poplar trees, the sturdy stone wall, our father’s kiln and pools of molten glass, even the sun and the moon and the constellation of Taurus. The iron punty was left to me, my father’s only daughter, who could least wield it to any profit, being a girl and therefore no fit beast for commerce. All things settled to two-thirds satisfaction, our father bolted upright in his bed, cried out: Go I hence to God! then promptly fell back, perished, and proceeded directly to Hell.

The old man had hardly begun his long cuddle with the wormy ground before Prospero be-shipped himself with a galleon and sailed for the Dutch East Indies in search of a blacker, more fragrant pearl to spice his breakfast and his greed whilst Pomposo wifed himself a butter-haired miller’s daughter, planting his seed in both France and her with a quickness. And thus was I left, Perpetua alone and loudly complaining, in the quiet dark of my father’s glassworks, with no one willing to buy from my delicate and feminine hand, no matter how fine the goblet on the end of that long iron punty.

The solution seemed to me obvious. Henceforward, quite simply, I should never be a girl again. This marvelous transformation would require neither a witch’s spell nor an alchemist’s potion. From birth I possessed certain talents that would come to circumscribe my destiny, though I cursed them mightily until their use came clear: a deep and commanding voice, a masterful height, and a virile hirsuteness, owing to a certain unmentionable rootstock of our ancient family. Served as a refreshingly exotic accompaniment to these, some few of us are also born with one eye as good as any wrought by God, and one withered, hardened to little more than a misshapen pearl notched within a smooth and featureless socket, an affliction which, even if all else could be made fair between us, my brothers did not inherit, so curse them forever, say I. No surprise that no one wanted to marry the glassblower’s giant hairy one-eyed daughter!

Yet now my defects would bring to me, not a husband, but the world entire. I had only to cut my hair with my father’s shears, bind my breasts with my mother’s bridal veil, clothe myself in my brothers’ coats and hose, blow a glass bubble into a false eye, and think nothing more of Perpetua forever. My womandectomy caused me neither trouble nor grief—I whole-heartedly recommend it to everyone! But, since such a heroic act of theatre could hardly be accomplished in the place of my birth, I also traded two windows for a cart and an elderly but good-humored plough-horse, packed up tools and bread and slabs of unworked glass, and departed that time and place forever. London, after all, does not care one whit who you were. Or who you are. Or who you will become. Frankly, she barely cares for herself, and certainly cannot be bothered with your tawdry backstage changes of costume and comedies of mistaken identity.

That was long ago. So long that to say the numbers aloud would be an act of pure nihilism. Oh, but I am old, good sir, old as ale and twice as bitter, though I do not look it and never shall, so far as I can tell. I was old when you were weaned, squalling and farting, and I shall be old when your grandchildren annoy you with their hideous fashions and worse manners. Kings and queens and armadas and plagues have come and gone in my sight, ridiculous wars flowered and pruned, my brothers died, the scales balanced at last, for having not the malformed and singular eye, neither did they have the longevity that is our better inheritance, fashions swung from opulence to piousness and back to the ornate flamboyance that is their favored resting state once more.

And thus come I, Master Cornelius Peek, Glassmaker to the Rich and Redolent, only slightly dented, to the age which was the mate to my soul as glove to glove or slipper to slipper. Such an age exists for every man, but only a lucky few chance to be born alongside theirs. For myself, no more perfect era can ever grace the hourglass than the one that began in the Year of Our Lord 1660, in the festering scrotum of London, at the commencement of the long and groaning orgy of Charles II’s pretty, witty reign.

If you would know me, know my house. She is a slim, graceful affair built in a fashion somewhat later than the latest, much of brick and marble and, naturally, glass, three stories high, with the top two being the quarters I share with my servants, the maid-of-all-work Mrs. Matterfact and my valet, Mr. Suchandsuch (German, I believe, but I do respect the privacy of all persons), and my wigs, my wardrobe, and my lady wife, when I am in possession of such a creature, an occurrence more common and without complaint than you might assume, (of which much more, much later). I designed the edifice myself, with an eye to every detail, from the silver door-knocker carved in the image of a single, kindly eye whose eyelid must be whacked vigorously against the iris to gain ingress, to the several concealed chambers and passageways for my sole and secret use, all of which open at the pulling of a sconce or the adjusting of an oil painting, that sort of thing, to the smallest of rose motifs stenciled upon the wallpaper.

The land whereupon my lady house sits, however, represents a happy accident of real estate investment, as I purchased it a small eternity before the Earl of Bedford seized upon the desire to make of Covent Garden a stylish district for stylish people, and the Earl was forced to make significant accommodations and gratifications on my account. I am always delighted by accommodations and gratifications, particularly when they are forced, and most especially when they are on my account.

The lower floor, which opens most attractively onto the newly-christened and newly-worthwhile Drury Lane, serves as my showroom, and in through my tasteful door flow all the nobly whelped and ignobly wealthed and blind (both from birth and from happenstance, I do not discriminate) and wounded and syphilitic of England, along with not a few who made the journey from France, Italy, Denmark, even the Rus, to receive my peculiar attentions. With the most exquisite consideration, I appointed the walls of my little salon with ultramarine watered silk and discreet, gold-framed portraits of my most distinguished customers. In the northwest corner, you will find what I humbly allege to be the single most comfortable chair in all of Christendom, reclined at an, at first glance, radical angle, that nevertheless offers an extraordinary serenity of ease, stuffed with Arabian horsehair and Spanish barley, sheathed in supple leather the color of a rose just as the last sunlight vanishes behind the mountains. In the northeast corner, you will find, should you but recognize it, my father’s pitted and pitiful iron punty, braced above the hearth with all the honor the gentry grant to their tawdry ancestral swords. The ceiling boasts a fine fresco depicting that drunken uncle of Greek Literature, the Cyclops, trudging through a field of poppies and wheat with a ram under each arm, and the floor bears up beneath a deep blanket of choice carpets woven by divinely inspired and contented Safavids, so thick no cheeky draught even imagines it might invade my realm, and all four walls, from baseboard to the height of a man, are outfitted with a series of splendid drawers, in alternating gold and silver designs, presenting to the hands of my supplicants faceted knobs of sapphire, emerald, onyx, amethyst, and jasper. These drawers contain my treasures, my masterpieces, the objects of power with which I line my pockets and sauce my goose. Open one, any one, every one, and all will be revealed on plush velvet cushions, for there rest hundreds upon hundreds of the most beautiful eyes ever to open or close upon this fallen earth.

No fingers as discerning as mine could ever be content with the glazier’s endless workaday drudge through plate windows and wine bottles, vases and spectacles and spyglasses, hoping against hope for the occasional excitement of a goblet or a string of beads that might, if you did not look too closely, resemble, in the dark, real pearls. No, no, a thousand, million times no! Not for me that life of scarred knuckles whipped by white-molten strands of stray glass, of unbearable heat and even more unbearable contempt oozing from those very ones who needed me to keep the rain out of their parlors and their spirits off the table linen.

I will tell you how I made this daring escape from a life of silicate squalor, and trust you, as I suppose I already have done, to keep my secrets—for what is the worth of a secret if you never spill it? My deliverance came courtesy of a pot of pepper, a disfigured milkmaid, and the Dogaressa of Venice.

It would seem that my brothers were not quite so malevolently egomaniacal as they seemed on that distant, never-to-be-forgotten day when our father drooled his last. One of them was not, at least. Having vanished neatly into London and established myself, albeit in an appallingly meager situation consisting of little more than a single kiln stashed in the best beloved piss-corner of the Arsegate, marvering paltry, poignant cups against the stone steps of a whorehouse, sleeping between two rather unpleasantly amorous cows in a cheesemaker’s barn, I was neither happy nor quite wretched, for at least I had made a start. At least I was in the arms of the reeking city. At least I had escaped the trap laid by pearls and hectares and absconding brothers.

And then, as these things happen, one day, not different in any quality or deed from any other day, I received a parcel from an exhausted-looking young man dressed in the Florentine style. I remember him as well as my supper Thursday last—the supper was pigeon pie and fried eels with claret; the lad, a terrifically handsome black-haired trifle who went by the rather lofty name of Plutarch—and after wiping the road from his eyes and washing it from his throat with ale that hardly deserved the name, he presented me with a most curious item: a fat silver pot, inlaid with a lapis lazuli ship at full sail.

Inside found I a treasure beyond the sweat-drenched dreams of upwardly mobile men, which is to say, a handful of peppercorns and beans of vanil, those exotic, black and fragrant jewels for which the gluttonous world crosses itself three times in thanks. Plutarch explained, at some length, that my brother Prospero now dwelt permanently in the East Indies where he had massed a fabulous fortune, and wished to assure himself that his sister, the sweet, homely maid he abandoned, could make herself a good marriage after all. I begged the poor boy not to use any of those treacherous words again in my or anyone’s hearing: not marriage, not maid, and most of all not sister. Please and thank you for the pepper, on your way, tell no one my name nor how you found me and how did you find me by God and the Devil himself—no, don’t tell me, I shall locate this lost relative and deliver the goods to her with haste, though I could perhaps be persuaded to pass the night reading a bit of Plutarch before rustling up the wastrel in question, but, hold fast, my darling, I must insist you submit to my peculiar tastes and maintain both our clothing and cover of darkness throughout; I find it sharpens the pleasure of the thing, this is my, shall we say, firm requirement, and no argument shall move me.

Thus did I find myself a reasonably rich and well-read man. And that might have made a pleasant and satisfying enough end of it, if not for the milkmaid.

For, as these things happen, one day not long after, not different in any hour or act than any other day, a second parcel appeared upon my, now much finer, though not nearly so fine as my present, doorstep. Her name was Perdita, she was in possession of a complexion as pure as that of a white calf on the day of its birth, hair as red as a fresh wound, an almost offensively pregnant belly, and to crown off her beauty, it must be mentioned, both her eyes had been gouged from her pretty skull by means of, I was shortly to learn, a pair of puritanical ravens.

It would seem that my other brother, Pomposo—you remember him, yes? Paying attention, are we?—was still in the habit of marrying unsuspecting girls off to trees and fish and stones, provided that the trees were his encircling arms, the fish his ardent tongue, and the stones those terribly personal, perceptive, and pendulous seed-vaults of his ardor, and poor, luckless Perdita had taken quite the turn round the park. Perhaps we are not so divided by our shared blood as all that, Pomposo! Hats off, my good man, and everything else, too. Well, the delectably lovely and lamentable maid in question found herself afflicted both by Little Lord Pomposo and by that peculiar misfortune which bonds all men as one and makes them brothers: she had a bad father.

Perdita told me of her predicament over my generous table. She spoke with more haste than precision, tearing out morsels of Mrs. Matterfact’s incomparable baked capon in almond sauce with her grubby fingers and fumbling it into that plump face whilst she rummaged amongst her French pockets for English words to close in her tale like a green and garnishing parsley. As far as I could gather, her cowherding father had, in his youth, contracted the disease of religion, a most severe and acute strain. He took the local clergyman’s daughter to wife, promptly locked her in his granary to keep her safe from both sin and any amusement at all, and removed a child from her every year or so until she perished from, presumably, the piercing shame of having tripped and fallen into one of the more tiresome fairy tales.

Perdita’s father occupied the time he might have spent not slowly murdering his wife upon his one and only hobby: the keeping of birds of prey. Now, one cannot fault the man for that! But he loved no falcons nor hawks nor eagles, only a matched pair of black-hearted ravens he called by the names of Praisegod and Feargod (there really can be no accounting for, or excusing of, the tastes of Papists) which he had trained from the egg to hunt down the smallest traces of wickedness upon his estate and among his children. For this unlikely genius had taught his birds, painstakingly, to detect the delicate and complex scents of sexual congress, and the corvids twain became so adept that they were known to arrive at many a village window only moments after the culmination of the act.

Now you have taken up all the pieces of this none-too-sophisticated puzzle and can no doubt assume the rest. My brother conquered Perdita’s virtue with ease, for no such dour and draconian devoutness can raise much else but libertines, a fact which may yet save us from the vicious fate of a world redeemed, and put my niece (for indeed it proved to be a niece) in her with little enough care for anything but the trees and the fish and the stones of his own bucolic life. No sooner than he had rolled off of her but Praisegod and Feargod arrived, screeching to wake the glorious dead, the scent of coupling maddening their black brains, and devoured Perdita’s eyeballs in a hideous orgy of gore and terribly poor parenting. Pomposo, ever steadfast and humbly responsible for his own affairs, sent his distress directly to me and, I imagine, poured a brimming glass of wine with which to toast himself.

“My dear lady,” said I, gently prying a joint of Mrs. Matterfact’s brandied mutton from her fist, hoping to preserve at least something for myself, “I cannot imagine what you or my good brother mean me to do with a child. I am a bachelor, I wish devoutly to remain so, and my bachelorhood is only redoubled by my regrettable feelings toward children, which mirror the drunkard’s for a mug of clear water: well enough and wholesome for most, he supposes, but what can one do with one? But I am not pitiless. That, I am not, my dear. You may, of course, remain here until the child... occurs, and we shall endeavor to locate some suitable position in town for one of your talents.”

Ah, but I had played my hand and missed the trick! “You misunderstand, monsieur,” protested the comely Perdita. “Mister Pompy didn’t send me to you for your hospitalité. He said in London he had a brother who could make me eyes twice as pretty as they ever were and would only charge me the favor of not squeezing out my babe on his parlor floor.”

Even a thousand miles distant, my skinflint family could put the screws to me, turn them tight, and have themselves a nice giggle at my groans. But at least the old boy guessed my game of trousers and did not give me up, even to his paramour.

“They was green,” the milkmaid whispered, and the ruination of her eye sockets bled in place of weeping. “Like clover.”

Oh, very well! I am not a monster. In any event, I wasn’t then. At least the commission was an interesting enough challenge to my lately listless and undernourished intellect. So it came to pass that over the weeks remaining until the parturition of Perdita, I fashioned, out of crystal and ebony and chips of fine jade, twin organs of sight not the equal of mortal orbs but by far their superior, in clarity, in beauty, even in soulfulness. If you ask me how I accomplished it, I shall show you the door, for I am still a tradesman, however exalted, and tradesmen tell no tales. I sewed the spheres myself with thread of gold into her fair face, an operation which sounds elegant and difficult in the telling, but in the doing required rather more gin, profanity, and blows to the chin than any window did. When I had finished, she appeared, not healed, but more than healed—sublimated, rarefied, elevated above the ranks of human women with their filmy, vitreous eyes that could merely see.

I have heard good report that, under another name, and with her daughter quite grown and well-wed, Perdita now sits upon the throne of the Netherlands, her peerless eyes having captivated the heart of a certain prince before anyone could tie a rock round her feet and drop her into a canal. Well done, say all us graspers down here, reaching up toward Heaven’s sewers with a thousand million hands, well done.

Now, we arrive at the hairpin turn in the road of both my fortunes and my life, the skew of the thing, where the carriage of our tale may so easily overturn and send us flying into mud and thorns unknown. Brace your constitution and your credulity, for I am of a mind to whip the horses and take the bend at speed!

It is simply not possible to excel so surpassingly as I have done and remain anonymous. God in his perversity grants anonymity to the gifted and the industrious in equal and heartless measure, but never to the splendid. Word of the girl with the unearthly, alien, celestial eyes spread like a plague of delight in every direction, floating down the river, sweeping through the Continent, stowing away on ships at sea, until it arrived, much adorned with my Lady Rumor’s laurels, at the palazzo of the Doge in darling, dripping Venice.

Now, the Doge at that time had caused himself, God knows why or by dint of what wager, to be married to a woman by the name of Samaritiana. Do not allow yourselves to be duped by that name, you trusting fools! Samaritiana would not even stop along the side of the road to Hell to wrinkle her nose at the carcass of Our Lord Jesus Christ, though it save her immortal soul, unless He told her she was beautiful first. Oh, ’tis easy enough to hate a vain woman with warts and liver spots, to scorn her milk baths and philtres and exsanguinated Hungarian virgins, to mock her desperation to preserve a youth and beauty that was never much more enticing than the local sheep in the first place, but one had to look elsewhere for reasons to hate Samaritiana, for she truly was the singular beauty of her age. Black of hair, eye, and ambition was she, pale as a maiden drowned, buxom as Ceres (though she had yet no issue), intoxicating as the breath of Bacchus. Fortunately, my lady thoughtfully provided a bounty of other pantries in which to find that meat of hatred fit for the fires of any heart.

She was, quite simply, the worst person.

I do not mean by this to call the Dogaressa a murderess, nor an apostate, nor a despot, nor an embezzler, nor even a whore, for whores, at least, are kindly and useful, murderers must have some measure of cleverness if they mean to get away with it, apostates make for tremendous company at parties, despots have a positively devastating charisma, and, I am assured by the highest authority, which is to say, Lord Aphorism and his Merry Band of Proverbials, that there is some honor amongst thieves. No, Samaritiana was merely humorless, witless, provincial, petty, small of mind, parched of imagination, stingy of wallet and affection, morally conservative, and incapable, to the last drop of her ruby blood, of admitting that she did not know everything in all the starry spheres and wheeling orbits of existence, and this whilst believing herself to possess all of these that are virtues and eschew all that are sins. Can you envisage a more wretched and unloveable beast?

I married her, naturally.

The Dogaressa came to me in a black resin mask and emerald hooded cloak when the plague had only lately checked into its waterfront rooms, sent for a litter, and commenced seeing the sights of Venice with its traveling hat and trusted map.

Oh, no, no, you misapprehend my phraseology. Not that plague. Not that grave and gorgeous darkling shadow that falls over Europe once a century and reminds us that what dwells within our bodies is not a soul but a stinking ruin of fluid and marrow and bile. The other plague, the one that sneaks on nimbly putrefying feet from bedroom to bedroom, from dockside to dinner party, from brothel to marital bower, leaving chancres like kisses too long remembered. Yes, we would have to wait years yet before Baron von Bubœ mounted his much-anticipated revival on the stage, but never you fear, Dame Syphilis was dancing down the dawn, and in those days, her viols never stopped nor slowed.

That mysterious, morbid, nigh-monstrous and tangerine-scented creature called Samaritiana darkened my door one evening in April, bid me draw close all my curtains, light only a modest lantern upon a pretty lacquered table inlaid with mother of pearl which I still possess to this day, and stand some distance away while she removed her onyx mask to reveal a face of such surpassing radiance, such unparalleled winsomeness, that even the absence of the left eye, and the mass of scars and weals that had long since replaced it, could do no more than render her enchanting rather than perfect.

It would seem that the Dogaressa danced with the Dame some years past. Her husband, the Doge, brought her to the ball, she claimed, having learned the steps from his underaged Neapolitan mistress, though, as I became much acquainted with the lady in later years, I rather suspect she found her own way, arrived first, wore through three pairs of shoes, departed last, and ate all the cakes on the sideboard. But, as is far too often the case in this life ironical, that mean and miserly soul found itself in receipt of, not only the beauty of a better woman, but the good fortune of a better man. She contracted a high fever owing to her insistence upon hosting the Christmas feast out of doors that year, so that the gathered noblility could see how lovely she looked with a high winter’s blush on her cheeks, and this fever seemed to have driven, by some idiot insensate alchemy, the Dame from the halls of Samaritiana forever, leaving only her eye ravaged and boiled away by the waltz.

All was well in the world, then, save that she could not show herself in public without derision and her husband still rotted on his throne with a golden nose hung on his mouldering face like a door knocker, but she had not come for his sake, nor would she ever dream of fancying that it was possible to ask a boon of that oft-rumored wizard hiding in the sty of London for any single soul on earth other than herself.

“I have heard that you can make a new eye,” said she, in dulcet tones she did not deserve the ability to produce.

I could.

“Better than the old, brighter, of any color or shape?”

I could.

She licked her lily lips. “And install it so well none would suspect the exchange?”

Perhaps not quite, not entirely so well, but it never behooves one to admit weakness to a one-eyed queen.

“You have already done me this service,” said she to me, loftily, never asking once, only demanding, presuming, crushing all resistance, not to mention dignity, custom, the basest element of courtesy, beneath her silver-tooled heel. She waved her hand as though the motion of her fingers could destroy all protestation. The light of my lantern caught on a ring of peridot and tourmaline entwined into the shape of a rather maudlin-looking crocodile gnawing upon its own tail, for she claimed some murky Egyptian blood in the dregs of her familial cup, as though such little droplets could mark her as exceptional, when every dockside lady secretly fancies herself a Cleopatra of the Thames.

“Produce the results upon the morrow! I will pay you nothing, of course. A Dogaressa does not stoop to exchange currency for goods. But when two eyes look out from beneath my brow once more, I will present you with a gift, for no particular reason other than that I wish to bestow it.”

“And if I do not like your gift, Clarissima?”

Puzzlement contorted her exquisitely Cyclopean visage, causing a most unwelcome familial pang within my breast. “I do not take your meaning, Master Peek. How could such a thing possibly occur?”

There is, it seems, a glittering point beyond which egotism achieves such purity that it becomes innocence, and that was the country in which Samaritiana lived. In truth, had she revealed her gift to me then, or even promised payment in the usual manner, I might have refused her, just to experience the novel emotion of rejecting royalty—for I am interested in nothing so much as novelty, not love nor death nor glass nor gold. Something new! Something new! My kingdom for something new! But she caught me, the perfumed spider, wholly without knowing what she’d done. I did indeed take up her commission, and though you may conclude in advance that this recounting of the job will proceed according to the pattern of the last, I shall be disappointed if you do, for I have already told you most vividly that herein lies the skew of my tale.

For the sake of the beautiful Dogaressa, I took up my father’s battered old pipe and punty. I cannot now say why; for a certainty I owned better instruments by far, and had not touched the things in eons except to brush them daintily with a daily sneer. Perhaps a paroxysm of sentimentality seized me; perhaps I despised her too much even then to waste my finer appliances on her pox-punched face, in any event, I cannot even say positively that the result blossomed forth from the tools and not some other cause, and I fear to question it now. I sank into the rhythm of my father and grandfather and his before him: the dollop of liquid glass, the greatbreath of my own lungs expelled through the long, black pipe, the sweet pressure and rolling of the globule against the smooth marver stone, the uncommon light known only to workers of glass, that strange slick of marmalade-light afire within crystal that would soon ride a woman’s skull all the way through the days of her life and down into her tomb.

The work was done; I fashioned two, an exquisitely matched pair, in case the other organ required replacement in the unseen feverish future. Samaritiana, in, so far as I may know or tell, the sole creative decision of her existence, chose not one color for the iris but all of them, dozens of infinitesimal shards chipped from every jewel in my inventory: sapphire, jade, emerald, jasper, onyx, amethyst, ruby, topaz. The effect was a carnival wheel of deep, unsettling fascination, and when I sewed it into her flesh with my golden thread she did not wail or struggle but only sighed, as though lost in the act of love, and, though her faults were called Legion, they were as yet unknown to me, thus, as my needle entered her, so too did my fatal softening begin.

The Dogaressa departed with her stitching still fresh, leaving in her wake but three souvenirs of our intimate surgery: one gift she intended, one she did not, and her damnable scent, which neither Mrs. Matterfact nor Mr. Suchandsuch, no matter how they scrubbed and strove, could remove from the premises. I daresay, even this very night, should you venture to my old house on the High Street and press your nose to its sturdy bones, still yet you would snatch a whiff of tangerine and strangling ivy from the foundation stones.

The gift she intended to leave was a lock of her raven hair, the skinflint bitch. The other, I did not perceive until some weeks later, when I adjourned to my smoking room with a bottle of brandy, a packet of snuff, and a rare contemplative mood which I intended to spend upon a rich, unfiltered melancholy as sweet as any Madeira—for it is a fact globally acknowledged that idle melancholy, like good wine, is the exclusive purview of the wealthy. To aid in my melancholy, I fingered in one hand the mate to the Dogaressa’s harlequin eye, rubbing my thumb over that strange, motley iris, marveling at the milky sheen of the sclera, admiring, unrepentant Narcissus that I am, my own skill and artistry. I removed my own, ordinary, unguessable, nearly flawless glass eye and held up the other to my empty socket like a spyglass, and a most thoroughly stupendous metamorphosis transpired: I could seethrough the jeweled lens of that artificial eye! Truly see, without cloud or glare or halo—ah, but what I saw was not the walls of my own smoking room, so tastefully lined with matching books chosen to neither excite nor bore any guest to extremes, but the long peach-cream and gold hall of the palazzo of the Doge in far-distant Venice! The chequered black and white marble floors flowed forth in my vision like a houndstooth river; the full and unforgiving moon streamed glaucous through tall slim windows; painted ceilings soared overhead, inlaid with pearl and carnelian and ever-so-slightly greyed with the smoke of a hundred thousand candles burnt over peerless years in that grand corridor. Women and men swept slowly up and down the squares like boats upon some fairy canal, swathed in gowns of viridescent green cross-hatched with silver and rose, armored in bodices of whalebone and opal, be-sailed in lacy gauze spun by Clotho herself upon the wheel of destiny, cloaked and hooded in vermillion damask, in aquamarine, in citron and puce, their clothing each so splendid I could scarce tell the maids from the swains—and thus looked I upon a personal paradise heretofore undreamt of.

But there were worms in paradise, for each and every beauty in the Doge’s palace was rotting in their finery like the fruit of sun-spoiled melons within their shells. Their flesh putrefied and dripped from their bones and what remained turned hideous, sickening colors, choleric, livid, cyanic, hoary, a moldering patina of death whose effusions stained those bodices black. Some stumbled noseless, others having replaced that appendage with nostrils of gold and silver and crystal and porcelain, and others, all hope lost, sunk their visages into masks, though they could not hide their chancred hands, the bleeding sores of their bosoms, the undead tatters of their throats.

Yet still they laughed, and spoke animatedly, one to the other, and blushed in virtuous fashion beneath their putridity. Such is the dance of the Dame, who enters through the essential act of life, yet leaves you thinking, breathing, walking whilst the depredations of the grave transact upon your still-sensate flesh, making of this world a single noisy tomb.

My breath would not obey me; my heart ricocheted amongst my ribs like a cannon misfired. Was it truly Italy I saw bounded in the tiny planet of a glass eye? Had I stumbled into a drunken sleep or gone mad so swiftly no asylum could hope to catch me? I shot to my feet, mashing the eye deeper into my socket until stars spattered my sight—closer, look closer! Could I hear as well? Smell? Taste the tallowed air of that far-off moonlit court?

I could not. I could not hear their footsteps nor inhale their perfume nor feel the fuzzed reek of the mildewed canals on my tongue nor move of my own volition. I apprehended a new truth, that even the impossible possesses laws of its own, and those unbendable. I could only observe. Observe—while my vision lurched forward, advancing quickly, rocking gently as with a woman’s sinuous gait. Graceful, slender arms extended as though from my own body, opening with infinite elegance to embrace a man whose head was that of a Titan cast down brutally into the pit of Tartarus, so wracked with growths and intuberances and pulsating polyps that the plates of his skull had cracked beneath the intolerable weight and shifted into a new pate so monstrous it could no longer bear the Doge’s crown, which hung pitifully instead from a ribbon slung round his grotesque neck. Those matchless arms which were not my own enfolded this hapless creature and, encircling the middle finger of the hand belonging to the right arm, I saw with my altered vision the twisted peridot and tourmaline crocodile ring of the Dogaressa Samaritiana.

I cast the glass eye away from me, sickened, thrilled, inflamed, ensorcelled, the fire in my midnight hearth as nothing beside the conflagration of curiosity, horror, and the beginnings of power that crackled within my brain-pan. In that first moment, standing among my books and my brandy drenched in the sweat of a new universe, an instinct, a whisper of Truth Profound, permeated my spirit like smoke exhaled, and, I confess to you now, all these many years hence, still I enshrine it as an article of faith, for it was with breath that God animated the dumb mud of Adam, breath that woke Pandora from stone, breath that demarcates the living and the dead, breath with which we speak and cry out and divide ourselves from the idiot kingdom of animals, and breath, by all the blasted saints and angels, with which the glassblower shapes his glass! The living breath of Cornelius Peek yet permeates every insignificant atom of his works; each object broken from his punty, be it window or goblet or cask or eye, hides the sacred exhalations of his spirit co-mingled with the crystal, and it is this, it is this, I tell you, that connects the jeweled eye of the Dogaressa with the jeweled eye in my hand! I dwell in the glass, it cannot dispense with me any further than it can dispense with translucency or mass, and therefore it carries the shard of Cornelius whithersoever it wanders.

Let us dispense with a few obnoxious but inevitable inquiries into the practicality of the matter, so that we may move along past the skew. How could this mystic connection have escaped my notice till now? It is only sensical: Perdita vanished away to the Netherlands with both marvelous eyes, and no window nor goblet nor cask is, in its inborn nature, that organ of sight which opens onto the infinite pit of the human soul. Would any eye manufactured in the same fashion result in such remote visions? They would indeed, my credulous friend. Does every glassblower possess the ability to produce such objects, should he but retain one eye whilst selling the other at a fair price? Ah, here I must admit my deficiency as a philosopher, for which I apologize most obsequiously. It cannot be breath alone, for I made subtle overtures toward the gentleman of the glassmen’s guild and I can say with a solemn certainty that none but Master Peek can perform this alchemy of sclera and pupil. Why should it be so? Perhaps I am a wizard, perhaps a saint, perhaps a demiurge, perhaps the Messiah returned at last, perhaps it owes only to that peculiar rootstock of my family which grants me my height, my baritone, the hairiness of my body. Grandfather Polyphemus’s last gift, lobbed down the ancestral highway, bashing horses as it comes. I am a man of art, not science. I ask why Mrs. Matterfact has not yet laid out my supper oftener than I ask after the workings of the uncluttered cosmos.

Thus did I enter the business of optometry.

When you have placed a mad rainbow jewel in the skull of a Dogaressa as though she were nothing but a golden ring, a jewel which drove the rotting men of Venice insane with the desire to tie her to a bridge-post and stare transported into the motley swirling colors of the eye of God, lately fallen to earth, they began to say, somewhere in Sicily, advertisement serves little purpose. I opened my door and received the flood. It is positively trivial to lose an eye in this wicked world, did you know? I accepted them warmly, with a bow and a kerchief fluttered to the mouth in acute compassion, a permanently sympathetic expression penciled onto my lips in primrose paint—for that moth-eaten scab Cromwell was finally in the grave, where everything is just as colorless and abstemious and black as he always wished it to be, so full of piss and vitriol that it poisoned him to the gills, and Our Chuck, the Merry Monarch, was dancing on his bones.

Fashion, ever my God and my mother, took pity upon her poor supplicant and caused a great miracle to take place for my sake—the world donned a dandy wig whilst I doffed my own, sporting my secret womanly hair as long and curled as any lord, soaking my face in the most masculine of pale powders, rouges, lacquers, and creams, encasing my figure, such as it ever was, in lime and coral brocade trimmed in frosty silver, concealing my gait with an ivory cane and foxfurred slippers, and rejoicing in the knowledge that, of all the men in London, I suddenly possessed the lowest voice of them all. So hidden, so revealed, I took all the one-eyed world into my parlor: the cancerous, the war-wounded, the horse-kicked, the husband-beaten, the inquisitor-inquisited, the lightning-struck, the unfortunately-born, the pox-blighted, and yes, the Dame’s erstwhile lovers, for she had made her way to our shores and had begun her ancient gambols in sight of St. Paul’s. And for each of these unfortunate angels of the ocular, I fashioned a second eye in secret, unknown entirely to my custom, twin to the one that repaired their befouled faces, with which I adjourned night by night to a series of successive smoking rooms, growing grander and finer with each year, holding those orbs to the light and looking unseen upon every city in Christendom, along with several in the Orient and one in the New World, though it could hardly be called a city, if I am to be honest. And Venice, always Venice, the first eye and only, her eye, gazing out on the water, the moonlight, the dead.

In this fashion, I came to know that the Doge had died, succumbed to the unbearable weight of his own head, long before Samaritiana appeared on my night-bestrewn doorstep, the saffron gown she wore in the moonlight, and every other in her trunk, torn violently, soaked with bodily fluids, rent by the overgrown nails of the frenzied rotting horde who had chased her from the palazzo through every desperate alleyway and canal of the city, across Switzerland and France, in their anguished longing to touch the Eye of God, still sewn into the ex-Dogaressa’s skull, to touch it but once and be healed forever.

But of course I aided the friendless and abandoned Good Samaritiana as she wept beside her monstrous road. Oh, Clarissima, how dreadful, how unspeakable, how worthy of Mr. Pepys’ vigilant pen! I shall have to make introductions when you are quite well again. I sent at once for a fine dressmaker of my acquaintance to construct a suitable costume for the lady and save her from the immodesty of those ragged silken remnants of her former life with which, even then, she attempted to cover her body with little enough success that, before the dressmaker could so much as cross the river, I learned something quite unexpected concerning the biography of Samaritiana, former queen of Venice.

She was quite male. Undeniably, conspicuously, astonishingly, fascinatingly so.

I called up to Mrs. Matterfact for cold oxtongue, a saucer of pineapple, and oysters stewed in Armagnac, down to Mr. Suchandsuch for carafes of hot claret mulled via the latest methods, and listened to the wondrous chimera in my parlor tell of how that famous Egyptian blood was not in the least of the Nile but of the Tiber, on whose Ostian banks a penniless but beautiful boy had been born in secret to one of the Pope’s mistresses and left to perish among the reed-gatherers and the amber-collectors and the diggers of molluscs.

But perish the lad did not, for even a grass-picker is thoroughly loused with the nits of compassion, and the women passed the babe one to the other and back again, like a cup of wine that drank, instead, from them. Now, it is well known to anyone with a single sopping slice of sense that the Pope’s enemies are rather like weevils, ever industrious, ever multiplying, ever rapacious, starving for the chaff of scandal with which to choke the Holy Father and watch him writhe. They roved over the city, overturning the very foundational stones of ancient Rome in search of the Infallible Bastards, in order, not to kill them like Herod, but to bring them before the Cardinals and etch their little faces upon the stained glass windows as evidence of sin. My little minx, having already long, lustrous hair and androgyne features more like to a seraph than a by-blow son, found it at first advantageous to effect the manners and dress of a girl, and then, when the danger had passed, more than that, agreeable, even preferable to her former existence. Having become a maid to save her life, she remained one in order to enjoy it. Owing to the meager diet of the Tiber’s tiniest fish, little Samaritiana never grew so tall nor so stout as other boys, she remained curiously hairless, and though she escaped the castrato’s fate, her voice never dipped beneath the pleasing alto with which she now spoke, nor did her organ of masculinity ever aspire to outdo the average Grecian statue, and so, when the Doge visited Ostia after the death of his first wife, he saw nothing unusual walking by the river except for the most beautiful woman in the Occident, balancing a basket of rushes on her hip with a few nuggets of amber rolling within the weave.

“But surely, Clarissima,” mused I, savoring the tart song of pineapple upon my tongue, “a bridegroom, however ardent, cannot be so easily duped as a vengeful Cardinal! Your deception cannot have survived the wedding bower!”

“It did not survive the engagement, my dear Master Peek,” Samaritiana replied without a wisp of blush upon her remarkable cheek. “Oh, mistake me not, I do so love to lie—I see no more purpose in pretending to be virtuous in your presence than I saw in pretending to be fertile in his. But there could be no delight in a deception so deep and vast. It would impair true marriage between us. I revealed myself at Pentecost, allowing him in the intensity of his ardor to unfasten my stays and loose my ribbons until I stood clad only in honesty before His Serenity and awaited what I presumed to be my doom and my death. But only kisses fell upon me in that moment, for the Doge had long suppressed his inborn nature, and suffered already to get upon his departed wife the heirs he owed to the canals, and though my masquerade, you will agree, outshines the impeccable, he would later say, on the night of which you so confidently speak, that some sinew of his heart must always have known, since first he beheld me with my basket of amber and sorrow.”

I did not exchange trust for trust that night among the oysters and the oxtongue. I have a viciously refined sense of theatre, after all. I made her wait, feigning religion, indigestion, the vicissitudes of work, gout, even virginity, until our wedding night, whereupon I allowed Samaritiana, in the intensity of her ardor, to unfasten my stays and loose my ribbons until at last all that stood between us was the tattered ruin of my mother’s ancient bridal veil, and then, not even that.

“Goodness, you don’t expect me to be surprised, do you?” laughed the ex-Dogaressa, the monster, the braying centaur, the miserly lamia who would not give me the satisfaction of scandalizing her! That eve, and only that eve, under the stars painted upon my ceiling, I applied all my cruellest and most unfair arts to compel my wife to admit, as a wedding present, that she had not known, she had never known, never even suspected, loved me as a man just as I loved her as a woman, and was besides a brutal little liar who deserved a lifetime of the most delectable punishment. We exchanged whispered, apocryphal, long-atrophied names beneath the coverlet: Perpetua. Proteo.

Samartiana treated me deplorably, broke my heart and my bank, laughed when she ought to have wept, drove Mrs. Matterfact to utter disintegration, kept lovers, schemed with minor nobles. We were just ferociously happy. Are you surprised? I, too, am humorless, witless, provincial, petty, small of mind, parched of imagination, stingy of wallet and affection, a liar and a cad. He was like me. I was like her. I had, after all, seen as she saw, from the very angle of her waking vision, which in some circles might be the definition of divine love. I have had wives before and will have again, far cleverer and braver and wilder than my Clarissima, but none I treasured half so well, nor came so near to telling the secret of my smoking room, of the chests full of eyes hidden beneath the floorboards. Samaritiana had her lovers; I had my eyes, the voyeur’s stealthy, soft and pregnant hours, a criminal sensorium I could not quit nor wished to.Yet still I would not share, I held it back from her, out of her reach, beyond her ken.

The plague took her in the spring. The Baron, not the Dame. The plague of long masks and onions and bodies stacked like fresh-laid bricks. I buried her in glass, in my incandescent fury at the kiln, for where else can a man lose his whole being but in a wife or in work? These are the twin barrels in which we drown ourselves forever.

It soon came to pass that wonderful eyes of Cornelius Peek were in such demand that the possession of one could catapult the owner into society, if only he could keep his head about him once he landed, and this was reason enough that, men being men and ambition being forever the most demanding of bedfellows, it became much the fashion in those years to sacrifice one eye to the teeth-grinding god of social mobility and replace it with something far more useful than depth perception. Natural colors fell by the wayside—they wanted an angel’s eye, now, a demon’s, a dryad’s, a goblin’s, more alien, more inhuman, less windows to the soul than windows to debauched and lawless Edens, and I, your servant, sir, a window-maker once more. I cannot say I approved of this self-deformation, but I certainly profited by the sudden proliferation of English Cyclopses, most especially by their dispersal through the halls of power, carrying the breath of Peek with them into every shadowy corner of the privileged and the perverse.

I strung their eyes on silver thread and lay in a torpor like unto the opium addict upon the lilac damask of my smoking room couch, draping them round and round my body like a strand of numberless pearls, lifting each crystal gem in turn to gaze upon Paris, Edinburgh, Madrid, Muscovy, Constantinople, Zurich—and Venice, always Venice, returning again and again, though I knew I would not find what I sought along those rippling canals traveled by the living dead. It became my obsession, this invasion of perspective, this theft of privacy, the luxurious passivity of the thing, watching without participating as the lives of others fluttered by like so many scarlet leaves, compelled to witness, but not to interfere, even if I wished to, even if I had liked the young Earl well enough when I installed his pigment-less diamond eye and longed to parry the assassin’s blade when I saw it flash in the Austrian sunset. I saw, with tremulous breath, as God saw, forced unwilling to allow the race of man to damn or redeem itself in a noxious fume of free will, forbidden by laws unwritten not to lift one hand, even if the baker’s boy had laughed when I offered him a big red eye or a cat-slit pupil or a shark’s unbroken onyx hue, any sort, free of charge, even the costliest, the most debonair, in honor of my late wife Samaritiana who in another lifetime paid me in hair, not because she would wish me to be generous but because she would mock me to the rafters and howl hazard down to Hell, begging the Devil to take me now rather than let one more pauper rob her purse, even if I saw, now, through his eye, saw the maidservant burning, burning in the bakery on Pudding Lane, burning and screaming in the midnight wind, and then the terrible, impossible leap of the flames to the adjoining houses, an orange tongue lasciviously working in the dark, not to lift one hand as what I saw in the glass eye and what I saw in the flesh became one, fusing and melding at last, reality and unreality, the sight I owned and the sight I stole, the conflagration devouring the city, the gardens, and my house around me, my lovely watered ultramarine silk, my supremely comfortable chair stuffed with Arabian horsehair, my darling gold and silver drawers, as I lay still and let it come for me and thee and all.

I did not die, for heaven’s sake. Perish the thought! Death is terrifically gauche, don’t you know, I should never be caught wearing it in public. I simply did not get up. Irony being the Lord of All Things, the smoking room survived the blaze and I inside it; though the rafters smoked and blackened and the walls swelled with heat like the head of a Doge, the secret chambers honeycombing the place contained the inferno, they did not stove in nor fall, save for one shelf of books, the bloody Romans, of all things, which, in toppling, quite snapped both my shinbones beneath a ponderous copy of Plutarch. Mrs. Matterfact and Mr. Suchandsuch fought valiantly and gave up only the better part of the roof, though we lost my lovely showroom, a tragedy from which I shall never fully recover, I assure you. And for a long while, I remained where the fire found me, on the long damask couch in my smoking room, wrapped in lengths of eyes like Odysseus lashed to the mast and listening to all the sirens’ mating bleats, still lifting each in turn and fixing it to my empty socket, one after the other after the other, and thus I stayed for years, years beyond years, beyond Matterfact and Suchandsuch and their replacements, beyond the intolerable plebians outside who wanted only humble, honest brown and blue eyes again, their own mortal eyes, having seen too much of wildness. And what, pray tell, did I do with my impossible sight, with my impossible span of time?

Why, I became the greatest spy the world has ever known. Would you have done otherwise?

Oh, I have sold crowns to kings and kings to executioners, positions to the enemy and ships to the storm, murderers to the avenging and perversities to the puritanical, I have caused ingenious devices to be built in England before the paint in Krakow finished drying, rescued aristocrats from the mob and mobs from the aristocracy by turns, bought and traded and brokered half of Europe to the other half and back again, dashed more sailors against the rocks than my promethean progenitor could have done in the throes of his most orgiastic fever-dream. I have smote the ground and summoned up wars from the deeps and I have called down the heavens to end them, all without moving one whisper from my house on Drury Lane, even as the laborers rebuilt it around me, even as the rains came, even as the lane around it became a writhing slum, a whore’s racetrack, a nursery rhyme.

Look around you and look well: this is the world I made. Isn’t it charming? Isn’t it terrible and exquisite and debased and tastefully appointed according to the very latest of styles? I have seen to every detail, every flourish—think nothing of it, it has been my great honor.

But the time has come to rouse myself, for my eyes have begun to grow dark, and of late I spy muchly upon the damp and wormy earth, for who would not beg to be buried with their precious Peek eye, bauble of a bygone—and better—age? No one, not even the baker’s boy. The workshop of Master Cornelius Peek will open doors once more, for I have centuries sprawled at my feet like Christmas tinsel, and I would not advance upon them blind. I have heard the strange mournful bovine lowing of what I am assured are called the proletariatoutside my window, the clack and clatter of progress to whose rhythm all men must waltz. There is much work to be done if I do not wish to have the next century decorated by some other, coarser, less splendid hand. I shall curl my hair and don the lime and coral coat, crack the ivory cane against the stones once more, and if the fashions have sped beyond me, so be it, I care nothing, I will stand for the best of us, for in the end, the world will always belong to dandies, who alone see the filigree upon the glass that is God’s signature upon his work.

After all, it is positively trivial to lose an eye in this midden of modernity, this precarious, perilous world, don’t you agree?

#Catherynne M. Valente #The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek #Or #The Luminescense of Debauchery #short story #actually long story

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