#I also liked the shoelaces idea but the execution was very lacking

[sandinthepipes]

I really wanted to buy the colour of the sky socks from tumblr shop but I was low on money and by the time I had some spare the tumblr shop closed and now they'll only exist in my heart

[saundraswriting]

Missed Signals Chapter 1

SUMMARY: Reki might have a problem. He gets hyperfixated. He is too loud. He has a delayed sleep schedule. He forgets to eat and drink sometimes. He zones out a lot, and even more when he tries to pay attention. He fidgets with his hair and his clothes and his skin to the point of injury. His brain works, sometimes. Other times he has to fight it. He has learned to cope enough over the years but just like everything else, some days are better than others.

WARNINGS: Nothing too grand, descriptions of ADHD symptoms,

NOTES: I am trying to cope with what I am thinking is undiagnosed ADHD by projecting onto my favorite characters. I mean no harm and no offense.

Ao3 // Missed Signals Masterlist // Main Masterlist

Next Chapter

With the sound of the last bell, Reki and Langa tore off to the skate park. They had just finished mid terms. Both boys were lookin forward to the three day weekend. They both missed going to 'S' and the skate park and even Joe's place, trying to studying as much as possible. Langa was still terrible with his Japanese and Math even though he was getting better. Reki's English and Biology scores were dismal, but he seemed to be scoring consistently well on his other tests.

"Hey, Langa, Reki! Over here!" Joe called. "Long time no see." The four other skaters were standing near a bench in the skate park all seeming to wait for the two high schoolers.

"Joe! Cherry!" Reki's bright grin was visible to them from the entrance.

"Shadow! Miya!" Langa was a little more subdued in his greater but no less enthusiastic.

Both boys felt a weight shift off their shoulders at the presence of their friends. They were really finished with midterms, they had three days to hang out and skate with each other. Their week of hard work seemed to finally pay off.

"Hello there, boys. How did midterms go?" Cherry asked. He was dressed in his robes but had his hair up.

"I think we did okay. It helps that we struggle in different subjects. I am glad we decided to take the days to review things." Reki said.

"It was a smart idea to use past test to study off of, instead of just notes. Your notes are also so lacking but you do so well on the tests." Langa commented absently as he bent to retie his shoe.

"What do you mean?"' Joe asked Langa. They all watched as Langa fiddled with his shoelaces.

"Oh. Um. Reki often forgets his homework or his notes are very scattered. Rarely does he remember his homework and take good notes. But he scores high on his tests. I even overheard the teachers discussing that if he applied himself and did his homework and took better notes Reki easily could be a top student." At the second mention of his name, Reki stopped looking at his phone and came back to the conversation, glancing at Langa who was sighing at his shoe.

"Langa, your aglet is broken. You'll need new laces. but for now I think some tape will do." Reki said. Everyone looked at him confused. "What? The thing on the end of your laces is called an aglet. It is derived from old French meaning 'needle' or 'pin' designed for lacing shoes or bags easier. Originally they were for ornamental reasons." Reki rattled off unprompted into the silence. His face grew pink at the attention of the others.

"Reki, why do you know that?" Miya asked.

"I had a period of time where I customized shoes for people. I liked how different it was from doing a board. I could show off my art skills better and helped steady my hand a bit more." Reki shrugged, not seeing the big deal.

"You know the old French origins of a part of a shoe no one cares about but you can't be bothered to learn English?" Cherry demanded.

Reki shrugged again, rubbing the back of his neck, embarrassment evident. "I don't mean to not do it. I sit down and I get ready to do it but then my mind blanks. Sometimes I can force myself but then I am frustrated quickly and easily irritated. Sometimes I work on it at school but then my notes are shitty." Reki rubbed his forehead, voice hard. "Sometimes the lights are too bright. Sometimes my brain says no to English but yes to physics and even sometimes my brain says no to everything and I just sit there telling myself all the things I need to do but it is all too much and not enough." Reki's hands begin to shake, while Joe and Cherry share a look over his head.

"Skating is the only thin that helps. But when I skate I give up time that I could be studying or working on the homework. I don't mean to be bad at school, just sometimes I can't help it." Reki seemed to curl in on himself, drawing his shoulders up and ducking his head down. His voice grew small and weak.

"Reki we didn't mean to make you upset. We were just curious. You aren't the only person that has issues organizing their thoughts or staying focused. Has this been an issue for a while?" Cherry gently asked. Reki seemed to relax when the group stayed quiet, seeming to expect derogatory comments.

"I think I began noticing in my second year of middle school." Reki spoke to the ground, unable to look at anyone in the eye. Langa could see his muscles tensing, sensing Reki's desire to bolt.

"That is enough of that. We came here to skate. Let's skate." Joe broke the tension seeming to sense Reki's urge to flee.

"Yes! I have something I want to show you slimes." Miya skated off after joe towards the halfpipe, throwing taunts over his shoulder as he went. Reki and Lana flew after him, throwing their own teasing comments at Shadow, who deemed himself the adult supervisor of the rowdy children.

Cherry and Joe hung back a bit, watching them all tear off. The previous conversation still lingering in the air. Both adults tracking a brightly laughing Reki as he skated around Miya and Langa.

"Poor kid. That must be so frustrating. He tried to make it out like it was no big deal but even if he learned some coping mechanisms, they won't work all the time if he doesn't know what the source of the problem is." Cherry said.

"He won't. He isn't self aware enough to know that he even has symptoms. He seems to have an executive dysfunction though." Joe said, thinking back to his high school days, where everything was too much and not enough, the days of skating until the small hours to hopefully be able to focus, the cooking and baking he did to keep from tearing things apart.

"Maybe we can help him? Maybe if we play our cards right he will even let us. He is so smart, it must be terrible to be stuck in your own head like that." Cherry said, finally picking up his board. Joe followed suit.

"The hardest part is the executive dysfunction. You need and want to do the thing but because you're frontal cortex didn't develop fully you completely freeze and your brain checks out and you are worthless all day. No one else can really get it unless they know. It is hard to explain it to neurotypicals." Joe tried to explain to the best of his abilities. Cherry nodded and made a mental note to research neurotypicals and neurodevelopment disorders.

The two adults finally made it over to see everyone was in the middle of a trick imitating game. Miya was keeping the tricks to a lower difficulty than normal so Reki wouldn't get to disheartened Joe noticed. Langa was doing pretty well, some of the more subtle footwork tripping him up since he wasn't a long term veteran. They skated for a few more hours before finally taking a water break. They were leaning against the fence or the bench or even each other in Reki and Langa's case. Langa had his full attention on Reki as he lectured on another topic, Cherry wasn't sure but it seemed to be about the manhole covers in the streets.

"They have to be round cause any other shape will fall in when turned upright. It is to save the people who are in the pipe below it." Reki was saying. Langa soaked up every word, and Cherry almost felt sorry for how gone the kid was for Reki.

"Honestly kid, why do you know that?' Joe said, looking just as interested. Cherry could only sigh and hope he wasn't as readable on how gone for his idiot gorilla.

"I collect interesting facts. I like to keep them in my brain, never know when you need them." Reki said. Joe just smiled down at the young man, fondly.

"Of course you do, kid. Of course you do."

[noquirk-a]

(ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ *:･ﾟ✧  seven  topic  things  about  your  muse  !

name of your muse .   izuku midoriya, commonly known more as analyzer or deku. it really depends on which alias he introduces himself with or how you’ve heard of it. ( which is unlikely bc he’s a very ... lowkey guy. even if he was outed no one would know how he looked like, and every ‘ public info ‘ about him wld be extermely vagued. )

one picture / icon of them you like .   this is homophobic.............but hes so fake here JSGMJSKGMSJKMGSJKGMSJKGM

two things your muse regrets .   oh. his entire life HSGMSJKGMSJKGM no but seriously speaking  (  i.  ) hoping in the first place. he always wished he could’ve just. dropped the dream / idea of him being a hero dead the moment he’s aware that he’s quirkless. but the thing is, and he’s completely right about, why should it matter that he is quirkless? even in my perspective ( bc im a biased bitch ^_^ ) and in his own, a hero still is a hero regardless of possessing an uncanny ability or not. but of course, society’s society, so it doesn’t work that way. the amount of trauma and backlash he’s gotten for this false hope simply caused him to ... idk? be ruined to the point he completely lost his self. another thing is ( ii. ) attempting to enroll in yuuei. yes, he publicly embarrassed himself, and that only adds to the cave of misery he’s been living in. he’s digging his grave deeper with this but you know. he’s desperate. he’s literally fucking desperate to the point he doesn’t care and he still wants to try anyway. he’s got so many people looking down on him now too, not 2 mention the top students of class 1A. if that makes sense

three phobias / fears you muse has . i’d like to think ... deck’s ripped off whatever canonical fear iz/uku has, so erase that. but ( i. ) failing. deck’s basically OP in terms of intelligence and strategy, so someone actually managing to beat his intelligence and foil his plans? his pride wouldn’t allow that. it’d be hard, yes, so the mere thought of it is honestly so severe he wouldn’t believe it when it happens.  (  ii.  ) losing his mother. yes, his mother still means THAT much to him and losing her would just straight out ruin everything for him even more.  he loves his mother unconditionally even whilst being a villain.   (  iii.   )  everything not falling into place according to plan. ok this is similar to the first one basically but i can’t think of anything else HFMSJFMSJKFMSKJFM but. thing is. if kat/suki does end up a hero? all ight succeeds or w/e? the league fails? everything he wanted doesn’t happen? bullshit. that’s not fucking fair.nothing’s worked for him and he knows everything good will prevail, but nothing GOOD happened to him and that’s just downright unfair. the altruism he used to burn with has transitioned into pure, utter selfishness and so he wants everything right to work out for him this time. he just wants to know what it’s like to be ... i don’t know. victorious. something that isn’t useless. someone who can actualy fucking do something rather than nothing as everyone’s told him. he wants to prove everyone wrong and he wants everyone to bow their head at shame. and honestly? if that doesn’t happen? he doesn’t know. he would be so upset.

four headcanons you have for them that you never told anyone .   this is so hard i never shut up about him what the fuck. well,   (   i.   )  weirdly enough i have planned some execution methods he has for other characters SFJMSMKSFKMFLMS like. in the end he plans to like. amputate shi/garaki’s other hand and use his own hand to decay himself, if that can work, i dunno. ( idk if his quirk works on himself but LMAOO ) since he plans on killing them in the end anyway bc he doesnt trust anyone ^_^ JKSFMSKFMSJFLKSM B  (  ii.  ) deck doesn’t tell anyone he’s trans unless he’s like. caught maybe. say he was changing and he’d just straight up tell them, or if the topic’s brought up. he, in reality, is honestly very lowkey of the fact bc almost no one knows other than k/atsuki and his mother. he’s honestly terrified of the other’s reaction, esp if it’s his s/o or someone close.  (  iii.  )  deck likes to wear makeup! he sometimes does in general and puts it underneath his eyes to hide his bags. but that’s rlly unlikely bc most of the time he couldn’t care less about his appearance unless he’s required to go to some fancy place or w/e. also he likes being feminine in general bc ... gender roles who?   (  iv.  )   he often falls asleep on his desk . basic ass hc but he’s that much of a loser. he couldnt be bothered to move and is, like, so obsessed over his work that he just doesn’t take care of himself anymore tbh.

five things your muse has on their bucket list .     (   i.   )  watch all might fall. he’s met him, and he knows his little secret and he wants to witness it for himself. he wants to see him reach his fall and smile at him, all shit-eating grin with a ‘ i guess you were right. maybe i can’t be a hero, anyway. but neither were you. what kind of hero turns a kid into a villain? ‘ or something similar ... its 1 am. stop.   (   ii.   )   watch kat/suki fall. but of course. the amount of trauma he’s put him through, he honestly just ... wants to see karma rise and burn him out alive. iz/uku in general isn’t really one for ‘ karma ‘ but this is deck we’re talking about. he wants to fight / kill ka/tsuki by himself, crush his hands or at least remove his quirk and have him battle him physically. no quirks. no guns. just pure power. he wants to hold him and kill him with his bare hands while saying ‘ kacchan ... tell me. what is it like being powerless, now that you don’t have your quirk? what’s it like to be quirkless and useless? you always rely on your quirk but you’re nothing without it. what’s it like to be defeated by this useless little roach? ‘ and u kno. kill him w/ his bare hands bc, ‘ quirks are so boring. those aren’t you. that’s some shitty ability God’s cursed us with so we can become even more animalistic than we already are. guns are boring--- you’re relying on a fucking small bullet. so are knives. but this, kacchan? this is what it’s like to be independent. this is relying on your own true strength. no knives. no guns. no weapons, no shitty quirks. just me! all me! ‘ anyway.   (   iii.   )  watch the league fall as well. he’s annoyed by the fact that these ... ppl r blessed with such? powerful quirks only to use them for what? pure destruction? suppose it’s hypocritical of him bc hello? hes a villain himself but listen. he hates both heroes and villains alike. truth be told he’s a one man army who’s simply manipulating everyone.   (   iv.  )  leave a mark in this world. either good or bad, but he wants to be known as the guy who proves that even the quirkless can step up and do something! that even quirkless people can be heroes, fuck what society says. the discrimination between the two has grown so MUCH and that annoys him. there is no number 5, that’s all he wants.

six things your muse likes doing in their free time .    (    i.    )   study.  i don’t mean .. actually studying. he dropped off his old school. but study like for the sake of his job. like, what cancels nitroglycerin? what’s the easiest way to mute / block out sound ? what’s an element that can cancel both heat and ice at the same time if it exists? purely shit for defenses and all that, and so he can easily know a hero’s weakness / smth to use against them.   (   ii.   )   his ugly lil .... lab thingy.   rmbr when i said he amputates ... ya. he keeps the limbs and studies them, where the specific x exits and how does it rise, what difference does it hold from a quirkless human to a quirk user, the genes it possess, this and that, everything that ... well, maybe, can give him a quirk too. but he doesn’t rlly want one for himself. just a thought.   (   iii.   )  talk. he likes to interact with others every once in a while. maybe make friends in yuuei or w/e and trick them into thinking he’s just a lil teen who’s a fan of theirs. just so he could know how to defeat them easier and to do what he does best, fool them into becoming his pawn. he literally sees almost everyone else as a pawn and his entire routine almost revlves on that. get him a hobby. help.   (   iv.   )  ok but he does love reading tho, like he loves science so maybe that’s a plus to him studying. science genuinely fascinates him in all means and aspects that he reads it as a pastime. as unholy as it is he also likes math.   (   v.   )  ok... he does like to take naps. he’s still human and he takes it time to time. about 30-5 hours. none more, none less.    (   vi.   )  draw!! LMAOOOOOO SSKJSMF bc he draws hero costumes n everythin he actually likes sketching every once in a while. i picture him having a...idk? semi realistic art style. it’s nothing serious tbh, he lacks shading n doesn’t do full canvases.

seven people that your muse loves / likes .   o my god he doesn’t like every1 we’ve established this. SKFMSJKFMSKJFMSFMSHFMSHJFMJSMFJKSFM but! he does love his mom still, that’s  a fact. in my twin verse w/ zana he loves his brother izuku genuinely and wholeheartedly ... ! uh. he loves nooni but wouldn’t admit that, tho he does show it from time to time. and another ship ... sho/uto!!! even tho his boyfriend lies abt wearing shoelaces.

tagged by :   @noricks :* tagging :    o my god everyone this is so fun

[autstudy]

I can not begin to explain how much you have changed my life. I came across your post on autistic study advice two days before finding out that I could not go back to my college. It was the first time I ever heard that my asperger's could affect thing that weren't social. It was the first time I ever heard about executive dysfunction. I got to talk to my mom about it and we reframed so many of my lifelong struggles that night, and when I foud out about my college, it made it easier on both of us

“So thank you for this blog. I’ve just been looking through it for a few minutes and I can’t tell you how happy it makes me. I feel the love and care you put into it and it makes me feel like I am supported. I just can’t express how much you have impacted my life and the life of my family (i have 2 siblings also on the spectrum and I love being able to help them) this is a great resource, keep up the great work!”

Thank you for such kind words, but I can’t really take credit for this because almost every single thing I put in that post is stuff I learned from other autistic people: in books, articles, YouTube videos and tumblr posts. And the reason I’ve decided to make this blog in the first place is because that knowledge, a fraction of which I put into the post, really did change my life as well.

From the beginning of middle school I started struggling a lot and because I was previously considered a “gifted child” (hyperlexic, interested in science, speaking like a little professor, a dozen more autism stereotypes and traits…) everyone thought I was just being lazy and not trying hard enough. But lazy wasn’t a significant part of it, not at all! It was so many things.

First of all because I didn’t have any problems whatsoever before the age of 11/12, I never learned how to learn. Before I used to be the person who got everything on the first try and was bored half the time in class and got straight As with practically no effort. I hated a lot of things about school - the noise, the food I couldn’t eat, the PE classes, sitting still for an entire lesson, etc - but many things were forgiven. I had a good teacher, I had friends who protected me, I had parents who would literally tie my shoelaces up until I was ten or so. I managed.

But then in middle school the help was suddenly gone, responsibilities increased, and so many things changed. I no longer had that kind, understanding teacher, and my friends went to a different school. I tried to make new friends but I couldn’t and half a year later the bullying started, and lasted for several years (which gave me severe social anxiety). And since I didn’t have the learning skills I started struggling with school material - I didn’t fail classes, but I stopped being a straight As student, and everyone told me I was just lazy. But I wasn’t. I was working hard, and it didn’t work.

And now I recognize all these problems: sensory overload, executive dysfunction, delayed sleep phase disorder, communication problems, and so on. But back then I didn’t. I thought I was defective or broken. I thought it was all my fault.

Scroll forwards several years, and I have changed schools after being so burnout and miserable I literally refused to leave my room ever again, tried to adapt at a new school, failed, got a permission to be homeschooled (for physical health problems), was expelled from that school for being too difficult to deal with, and finished high school partially at home, partially in a “school for adults”.

Being homeschooled I finally learned how to study properly and built a friendly environment for myself, by trial and error, not knowing how it worked. I passed my exams okay but it wasn’t a big achievement. I was often too embarrassed to tell anyone that I didn’t actually go to high school or that I didn’t have a prom. And then I discovered what autism was.

Long story short, I spent months doing research, came to the conclusion I was probably autistic, and got my ASD diagnosis in January 2016. It explained everything. Suddenly I wasn’t broken or defective, I was just different! And so many of my problems… they had a solution. A very easy solution, often enough. If only I knew that in middle school… I have no idea how different my life would be.

And now I’m a student in the oldest university of Poland, studying in a foreign language that I honestly don’t even speak that well, and I finished my first semester with an average grade 4.2 out of 5 average. Five years ago I would laugh at that. It seemed unbelievable. I planned a quiet future for myself - work in a library, write stuff on the weekends, etc. Now I’m on my way to my dream job - a scientist.

All my problems are still with me, but now I solve them, thanks to the wisdom of the autistic community. Yes I’m still disabled and frankly rather weird (find another student whose dad accompanies them to lectures and back…) but now I’m living as a disabled person and not like a defective abled person. I recognize were the disability comes from and try to accommodate for it, and I don’t pretend that it doesn’t exist.

More than that, now I can actually share my experience and compile my knowledge into posts and articles because I wanna prove to other autistic people that things they think are impossible might not be so, if they are provided with adequate help and support. I wanna give them solutions to their problems and help them believe in themselves. “Yes you can!” is bullshit - sometimes you lack the support and accommodations needed to “can”. But maybe I can help. Maybe others can help if they will know how. Instead, I say “You can more than you think you do - you just need to know HOW”.

And this got ridiculously wrong but I guess I had a lot to say.

[johnesmithiii]

[Honeycomb Academy Open up Course] Just how do the initial generation of gamers in China start to see the advancement of "blockchain video games"?

On April 23, Wanxiang Blockchain Honeycomb Academy invited Yu Kai, the top of the PlatON community, as a guest in the live broadcast area of the web open up class of Wanxiang Blockchain Honeycomb Academy, and delivered everyone "The Advancement of "Blockchain Games" from Traditional Games". Yu Kai is the first generation of gamers in China, and now he switched to blockchain. As a senior game player, what does he think about blockchain video games? Please start to see the full textual content of Yu Kai's discussing in the live broadcast area below. Hello everyone! Let me introduce myself very first. I have been working for the computer newspaper since 1999. At that time, I visited the game square to do the game column, generally responsible for the game preview and strategy. I should be regarded as the 1st group who began to make video games in China. WHEN I entered the game industry, the Internet slowly emerged in 1999 and 2000. Games played a great function in the popularization of the Internet in China. From traditional video games to blockchain video games, there are numerous things that I, a traditional game person, wish to consult with you. Today's theme is "Considering the advancement of chain video games from traditional video games". Today's training course will be divided into five components: some misunderstandings about chain video games, what a chain video game should appear to be, regulations of the advancement of the chain game, an era that is about to emerge, and a series of problems that need to be solved. Some misunderstandings about chain games First, share quite a few data. According to the inference of the amount of online games at the top three open public chains, you can find currently about 350 chain games on the market, and the amount of chain video games provides declined compared with the same period last year. The head product is approximately 4,500 per day. If this number is positioned in the traditional game field, you can find about 500-600 million gamers in China, and the number is nearly negligible. The transaction level of the top product is just about 7800 US dollars a day. The deal volume is the information of the deal volume between gamers and games. As for the amount of cash that game developers and operators can receive, it really is uncertain. I think you can find four obvious troubles in current blockchain games: 1. An individual threshold is extremely high. For customers, the threshold is quite high. We are also making video games ourselves, and friends give me suggestions when they play, and they get trapped when they play and they hardly learn how to pay later. Threshold is the most basic issue facing chain video games at present. An individual experience is not considered 1st, which greatly hinders the advancement of chain video games. 2. Lack of gameplay. Most video games, such as CryptoKitties, have no basic gameplay. Just how do gamers overcome difficulties along the way of enjoying the game? What kind of honor can you obtain? Satisfaction? nothing. 3. Finance is higher than games. At present, most games are usually mainly based on speculation and speculation, that leads to the fact that customers who actually want to have fun with games are nearly unable to have fun with chain video games and cannot accept them. Some good gamers may also be discussing the advancement route of chain video games with us. As a game promotion, it isn't promoted to video game players, but rather for investors. This is a manifestation of the current financial higher than the game. 4. The advancement team is not professional. Compared with traditional game manufacturers, chain game developers are mainly individuals and small teams, which may be understood as "two nos": the state of no one and no money. Consequently, the quality of the game is tough to perform well. After the release of new video games this year, they will have steadily improved, especially the production level of overseas items (Korea items) is very good. It implies that the foremost is the introduction of talents; the second reason is the help of capital, all of which are helping chain games to build up well. From the current circumstance, the chain video game is in a very early stage, similar to the traditional video game industry in the beginning. So what is really a chain game? 1. Games aren't financial products. Considering the industry's understanding and judgment as a monetary item, this is rare in the traditional game industry. It is possible to play video games with or without spending money. One is named Krypton Gold and the other is named Liver. But playing games to make cash feels a bit astray. In the event that you play video games for income, you get rid of the original intention of the game. Games must not be financial products. 2. Become pure in playing games. Game developers (content companies) should make a good game for customers to have fun with, don't think about other things, you bow your mind in the melon industry and tie your shoelaces and say you haven't stolen the watermelon, who believes it? Producing pure games is what developers should do. 3. The game is not just throwing a sieve. Although randomness is an important assistance for the fun of the game, the game should nevertheless reproduce the fun and artistry of the random outcomes through various product packaging. This is my understanding, rather than throwing randomness straight while watching user , This rudeness is a good destruction to the wonder of the game. To sum up, blockchain games shouldn't have "blockchain functions". These functions cannot cover all the blockchain, but only a small component. Nowadays, the majority of the blockchain video games have performed a small component to the maximum, replacing the initial functions of the game. The above is the current misunderstanding of chain video games. What should chain video games look like? You can find three discourses. These three discourses aren't directly linked to the game, but linked to the blockchain, however in reality these three points explain the direction for future years advancement of the game. It generally originates from the opinions mentioned in public areas speeches by many extremely respected leaders around me. Dr. Feng Xiao mentioned: “Any new application based on disruptive technologies has always experienced two routes. Path 1: Regard new technology as an instrument, improve traditional company models, and get marginal benefits. Path 2: Use new technology As something to reconstruct the underlying logic of company." At present, many video games are made in accordance with the idea of ??route one, replacing parts of traditional video games with blockchains, thereby obtaining benefits and rewards. I think this is not the direction that blockchain video games should go. Blockchain has brought many new points and very important model changes. It is necessary to follow Path 2 to provide new gameplay for this change. This requires every video game practitioner to believe carefully in what blockchain may bring to customers. What's coming? Did it provide something really fun? This is actually the future development direction of blockchain video games. Mr. Sunlight Lilin mentioned: "At this time, today's blockchain provides pushed the open up network of mankind to a new peak, completely start, so that everyone can participate, and motivate everyone to contribute. ." Based on the blockchain program, more things could be opened right up to permit everyone to participate, so openness is the focus associated with upcoming blockchain games. Dr. Chuanwei Zou mentioned: "The Decentralized Economy (DeCo) provides two main characteristics: one is the blockchain because the infrastructure; the other is the autonomy of the city, so general public affairs administration is carried out in a decentralized way. " Games may also be a distributed economy, which is governed by the city. In fact, this design is unique to the blockchain. Traditional video games cannot do that. Traditional games should be the counterparty partnership of operators, channels, media, and gamers. There exists a zero-sum video game in a certain sense. But blockchain video games have the opportunity to split through this system and join the community, so that all partners and gamers can join the community, so that game administration can be executed in a decentralized way. This aspect is worth exploring, and it will bring new things to the future advancement of the game. Let's discuss this is of my knowledge of video games. The video games I understand will be the artwork of killing period supported by high-tech. Why is high-tech support? Regardless of the computer, the Internet, the mobile Web, or the blockchain, whenever a new technologies appears, the game has always been at the forefront, which is in line with the law of traditional development. Passing the time is the most normal requirement for playing games, along with other goals added to the game can make it deviate. The primary is fun. The game is really a work of art. Don't destroy the creative sense of the game because of other unnecessary elements. This is a issue that game developers need to consider. 1. Chain video game mission. The existence of chain video games comes with an important mission, which is exactly like other games. Back then, online games popularized the Internet, and mobile video games popularized the mobile Internet. Mobile video games became popular after 3G and 4G. Blockchain games likewise have a mission. Blockchain video games should help more ordinary people find out and accept the blockchain. It is far from possible in today's design, and there is no solution to help normal people accept, adjust, and accept the area. Block chain. 2. Academic definition. The overall game needs to provide a well-described worldview and immerse the ball player on earth. Everyone has viewed the "Number One Player" movie. The game inside it is another world, nearly parallel to the real world. The overall game must set up a world view. 3. Visit the blockchain. Games need to focus on the problem of blockchain. The blockchain ought to be hidden being an infrastructure, and the blockchain cannot be experienced when playing games, so that gamers can accept it more easily. Just what does blockchain bring to video games? I understand it really is trust. Because of two points: (1) Blockchain data cannot be tampered with; (2) The smart agreement running on the chain will be automatically executed. The original Internet is one of the transmission of information, and the blockchain is the transmission of trust. This may make a profound shift in the production and operation of the game. At the same time, in this context, a larger-level division of work is achieved, producing the game ecosystem more fair and simply, and the identities among video game suppliers, operators, and gamers will become very, very equivalent. "Have confidence in" in blockchain video games is really a huge opportunity for SMEs. What's the most precious on earth? Trust is an extremely precious thing. It is also very hard for a large organization like Facebook to gain trust. Why is Libra so hard? Because even Congress doesn't believe in Libra much. Therefore, getting trust is an important direction for potential future breakthroughs in blockchain video games. A principle of game development Let me share with you the guidelines of game advancement, which are generally applicable to domestic games.

Check out this row associated with games. In 1995, "The Legend of Sword and Fairy" was launched, and China's Computer industry entered the embryonic stage. With "Legend of Sword and Fairy" because the representative, most single-player games prospect many younger Chinese to obtain in touch with and become acquainted with computers. We were educated and enlightened by video games. 2000 was the initial season of online games in China. The initial video game "King of Kings" was released, produced by Taiwan Lei Jue. This video game is amazing. After a lot more than ten years, I went back to watch the "King of Kings" mode. Numerous games right now can't perform it. "The King of Kings" in 2000, including the later "Legend", "Stone Age group", and "Miracle" produced the era of online games in China and greatly assisted the popularization of the Internet. At that time, going to Web cafes to have fun with online games was Extremely popular group activity. "Zhengtu" is more criticized than praised by the industry and gamers, but "Zhengtu" is essential to the game industry. "Zhengtu" brings a free of charge mode. Now many games come in this mode. Its not necessary money to have fun with games. You only need cash to get props and skills in the game. Before the emergence of the model, video games were all billed, either for single-player video games to get a license, or for online games to get some cards, have fun with for an hour and pay for an hour, pay 1st before playing. Under the paid design, small gamers in the game industry have no chances, however the free design differs, because many video games have a lot of possibilities for display. To put it simply, games with bad artwork but OK gameplay, and video games with good commercial styles at the cost level 've got good opportunities. "Zhengtu" has directed the free-to-play model, which includes increased the ARPU worth of the game industry by a big phase, allowing many little and medium-sized manufacturers to thrive. Even when Tencent and NetEase are usually so powerful, there are still several video game companies that are quite "nourishing. This is a major contribution created by "Zhengtu". "Group of Legends" and "King of Glory" should be very familiar to everyone, ushering in their particular eras. In 2010 2010 and 2011, traditional large-level MMORPG games slowly declined. However, following the release of "Group of Legends", MOBA originated. Instead of spending money on the ability, the mode of spending money on the unique game encounter became popular, leading online games to move forward for another 3 to 5 years. After 3G and 4G arrived, it entered the era of mobile games, and the star at the moment was "Glory of the King". "King of Glory" is really a item with a each day income greater than 100 million yuan. This type of income level and ability is difficult for many Web products to match. With the development of China's information technology, games are leading the way in the widespread application of new technologies every five years, from 1995, 2000, 2005, 2011, 2015 to 2020. The maturity of the blockchain in conjunction with historical possibilities may usher in the explosion of the chain video game industry during 2020. This is a essential rule, and good products can happen at the moment. There is also a historical possibility in 2020. Numerous sectors are turbulent under the epidemic, and the game industry has been able to create great progress despite global fluctuations and economic downturns. Individuals in the game industry I know have been busy lately. AMERICA includes a description of the economic phenomenon-the "lipstick effect". Once the economy is down, folks are not ready to spend big money, such as buying luxury goods, traveling abroad, investing in wealth management items, etc., everyone puts the money in their own hands , There will be some remaining cash. It is also quite unrealistic for folks not to spend money, therefore lipstick will be used as a cheap and unnecessary item release a consumer desire in special situations. The overall game perfectly matches the characteristics of cheap but nonessential lipsticks. Games will be the cheapest entertainment on earth. There is no entertainment product cheaper than playing games. The economy is hit during the epidemic, and the game industry will develop well. Advancement treats all video games equally, not just traditional video games, but also blockchain video games. How exactly to seize the traditional opportunity? Everyone of insight in the market need to seize the chance together. An era that's ready to emerge New blockchain games should appear, and the chain online game industry will enter a new era. There are various troubles in centralized video games. Games are saved on centralized servers. The advancement team is managed and the advancement team has total control. You can find risks and troubles in security and openness. Blockchain technologies is likely to produce a revolution in faith mechanisms, bring new technological reliable structures, establish faith ecology, and provide the game to a new historical stage. It is not an opponent video game between your operator and the ball player, but an ecological style of everyone's co-construction. Upon this basis, we submit a new concept of blockchain games-Decentralized Autonomous Games (DAG). Make full use of the consensus initiative, after reaching a consensus, it can spontaneously produce behavior, not just the behavior of playing games, but the behavior of helping and building the ecology and the city. Decentralized autonomous video games derive from code operation governance mechanisms, not controlled by business entities, and decentralized, so that they tend to be more objective, open up, and secure. There will certainly be a lot of collective wisdom used right here, the city and the game will grow concurrently, and the game will continue to update and improve itself. Once the video game is played based on the core features of the blockchain, the game will be pushed to a state of self-operation, self-administration, and self-development. "Self-operating" implies that the game revenue-expense routine is publicized about the blockchain. The main organization supported by the blockchain smart agreement represents all gamers. The ultimate in the future would be to operate immediately and manage the operation of the game through the inner program of the game. "Self-administration" continuously adjusts and regulates the behavior of gamers in the game by way of a consensus initiative system, rather than relying on a strong external program and everyone's consensus to regulate the behavior. "Self-development" video games form a new self-development video game model through community governance. This is exactly what I think into the future games, that will become "living" games, rather than "dead" games under centralized control. The string of urgent problems The vision is beautiful and the road is longer. As a participant in the chain video game industry, I'm also focusing on a game, and I seriously feel that there exists a group of troubles that need to be solved urgently. You can find three points at an individual level: 1. User threshold. Blockchain games need to be de-blockchainized and de-financed. What's definancialization? For example, the first access of the blockchain is really a wallet, which is a financial-grade item, which manages the property of a large number of customers and requires total security. Regarding absolute security, an individual experience will be sacrificed pretty much, and it is especially unfriendly to new users. However the blockchain video game itself is really a video game, and an individual of the game puts security factors on the second account, and the initial consideration should be experience. Do players really value safety when playing? Might not care therefore much. Traditional gamers cannot be kept out because of the monetary attributes and security of blockchain items. This is a little bit different and needs to be improved in the future. 2. User guidance. On the main one hand, the threshold for video games is quite high; however, most video games are carrying out small points with blockchain under the name of the game. "Searching for benevolence and getting benevolence", the current behavioral features of gamers and users are usually advocated by the game itself, and gamers cannot be blamed for the design of the game. User assistance needs to fundamentally change what sort of game is made. 3. User relationship. There is quite a few opposition (zero-sum video game) between operators and users. In the future, they will gradually shift to a more open up and community-based design to achieve decentralized qualifications. From the developer's point of view, the current public chain is not friendly sufficiently for developers. Traditional games certainly are a quite mature development program. A lot of entrepreneurs can simply enter the machine, and the threshold for chain video games is relatively high. Right now the underlying functionality does not support very complex video games, and future technologies needs to be improved. The above-mentioned situation will affect the advancement of chain games. It is for the industry to become more mature and assist chain video game producers and developers to achieve a more playable level of chain video games, so that chain video games could be popularized by the general public. The mission of the block chain is really a problem that needs to be solved urgently in chain video games. It's the mission that blockchain video games should shoulder in the future to get players in the game circle outside the chain and currency circles to utilize the blockchain by performing chain games. Today my sharing is here, this is actually the game we are doing right now, Horseman Move, welcome everyone to see. The following is the interactive exchange content Question: You just mentioned that the threshold of chain video games is higher than that of traditional video games, and there are numerous problems that need to be solved urgently. How long do you consider it is until the emergence of popular blockchain video games? Are you optimistic? Yu Kai: I'm quite optimistic. When AR and VR technology come out, everyone will believe that new video game types should come out, which includes cloud games that were very popular last year. These should result in a wave. Nevertheless, it did not actually happen. These video games are just easy technology replacements , nor constitute a fundamental model change. Nevertheless, the emergence of online games, free video games, and MOBA video games before is really a fundamental business design change, so it succeeded. Today, blockchain video games are much better in functionality than before. The new changes including Ethereum 2.0 may provide a lot of game developers in to the industry. Traditional veteran online game companies, such as Ubisoft, are doing blockchain games, and it's time and energy to explode after such a long time of accumulation. We are also trying to take our own game route, and we are able to develop a new video game design on HorsemanGO items. I hope that more talents and much more funds will be invested in blockchain video games. Under this premise, I believe that there will be explosions in chain video games during the past one or two 2 years. I think that the hallmark of a hot item is out of the circle. Avoid being in the chain circle. Visit the video game circle to get gamers and let them have fun with blockchain video games. The hot cash will certainly appear, and it will definitely lead the advancement of the chain video game. . Question: Reveal about the Horseman GO video game. Yu Kai: Both Horseman Move and PlatON are projects supported by the LatticeX Foundation. It can be said that the game Horseman GO wants to discover new ways of merging blockchain projects and games. During the past, blockchain projects were still supported by ecological items. In our design, we straight devote ourselves to video game operation and distribution in a more intimate manner. In this way, resources could be much better collected, the benefit can be used, and the game could be made better. The Horseman GO product puts all game revenues in the central wallet of the smart contract. It can be understood that the amount of money after purchasing things is not all ours. We make use of section of it as price assistance and handling charges, and most of the amount of money is returned to the game. Designated to players. It is equal to "extracted from the ball player and useful for the ball player". Everyone consumes to greatly help the game grow quicker and develop much better. At the same time, I wish to use a section of it being an incentive bonus for novices to guide more players in to the game world. It is still in the testing stage and there are numerous shortcomings. There are a lot of communities and partners helping us to make the game much healthier. Our idea would be to start the core 1st, and open it upward a bit in the future. After all the video games are opened up, the community will need greater responsibility in the advancement of the game and make the game create better. This is our original intention. Horseman Move is founded on learning to be a fun video game. Fun games nevertheless have plenty of pressure to create right now, but this is actually the street that chain traveling should take.

Wanxiang Blockchain Honeycomb Academy invites skillfully developed to visit Wanxiang Blockchain B's live broadcast area every Thursday at 20 o'clock to share the latest blockchain technology, newest opinions, and interesting encounter in the market. Add the line number (fengchaoxueyuan) of Wanxiang Blockchain Assistant, and you will book another course.

[christophertheodore-org]

Chapter 5 - 1984 By George Orwell

In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The room was already very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could be bought at ten cents the large nip.

‘Just the man I was looking for,’ said a voice at Winston’s back.

He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research Department. Perhaps ‘friend’ was not exactly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades: but there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than that of others. Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you.

‘I wanted to ask you whether you’d got any razor blades,’ he said.

‘Not one!’ said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. ‘I’ve tried all over the place. They don’t exist any longer.’

Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had two unused ones which he was hoarding up. There had been a famine of them for months past. At any given moment there was some necessary article which the Party shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades. You could only get hold of them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on the ‘free’ market.

‘I’ve been using the same blade for six weeks,’ he added untruthfully.

The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he turned and faced Syme again. Each of them took a greasy metal tray from a pile at the end of the counter.

‘Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?’ said Syme.

‘I was working,’ said Winston indifferently. ‘I shall see it on the flicks, I suppose.’

‘A very inadequate substitute,’ said Syme.

His mocking eyes roved over Winston’s face. ‘I know you,’ the eyes seemed to say, ‘I see through you. I know very well why you didn’t go to see those prisoners hanged.’ In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.

‘It was a good hanging,’ said Syme reminiscently. ‘I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue — a quite bright blue. That’s the detail that appeals to me.’

‘Nex’, please!’ yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle.

Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. On to each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch — a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.

‘There’s a table over there, under that telescreen,’ said Syme. ‘Let’s pick up a gin on the way.’

The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs. They threaded their way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays on to the metal-topped table, on one corner of which someone had left a pool of stew, a filthy liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit. Winston took up his mug of gin, paused for an instant to collect his nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting stuff down. When he had winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenly discovered that he was hungry. He began swallowing spoonfuls of the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat. Neither of them spoke again till they had emptied their pannikins. From the table at Winston’s left, a little behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which pierced the general uproar of the room.

‘How is the Dictionary getting on?’ said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.

‘Slowly,’ said Syme. ‘I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating.’

He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.

‘The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,’ he said. ‘We’re getting the language into its final shape — the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.’

He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant’s passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well — better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words — in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.‘s idea originally, of course,’ he added as an afterthought.

A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.

‘You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,’ he said almost sadly. ‘Even when you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in “The Times” occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?’

Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:

‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’

‘Except ——’ began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.

It had been on the tip of his tongue to say ‘Except the proles,’ but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.

‘The proles are not human beings,’ he said carelessly. ‘By 2050 — earlier, probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’

One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.

Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned a little sideways in his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At the table on his left the man with the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with everything that he said. From time to time Winston caught some such remark as ‘I think you’re so right, I do so agree with you’, uttered in a youthful and rather silly feminine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an instant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston knew the man by sight, though he knew no more about him than that he held some important post in the Fiction Department. He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just once Winston caught a phrase —‘complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism’— jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front — it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle of his spoon was tracing patterns in the puddle of stew. The voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily audible in spite of the surrounding din.

‘There is a word in Newspeak,’ said Syme, ‘I don’t know whether you know it: DUCKSPEAK, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.’

Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston thought again. He thought it with a kind of sadness, although well knowing that Syme despised him and slightly disliked him, and was fully capable of denouncing him as a thought-criminal if he saw any reason for doing so. There was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was something that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could not say that he was unorthodox. He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe, yet the place was somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used to gather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself, it was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades ago. Syme’s fate was not difficult to foresee. And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston’s, secret opinions, he would betray him instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else, for that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.

Syme looked up. ‘Here comes Parsons,’ he said.

Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, ‘that bloody fool’. Parsons, Winston’s fellow-tenant at Victory Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the room — a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face. At thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish. His whole appearance was that of a little boy grown large, so much so that although he was wearing the regulation overalls, it was almost impossible not to think of him as being dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirt, and red neckerchief of the Spies. In visualizing him one saw always a picture of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms. Parsons did, indeed, invariably revert to shorts when a community hike or any other physical activity gave him an excuse for doing so. He greeted them both with a cheery ‘Hullo, hullo!’ and sat down at the table, giving off an intense smell of sweat. Beads of moisture stood out all over his pink face. His powers of sweating were extraordinary. At the Community Centre you could always tell when he had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of the bat handle. Syme had produced a strip of paper on which there was a long column of words, and was studying it with an ink-pencil between his fingers.

‘Look at him working away in the lunch hour,’ said Parsons, nudging Winston. ‘Keenness, eh? What’s that you’ve got there, old boy? Something a bit too brainy for me, I expect. Smith, old boy, I’ll tell you why I’m chasing you. It’s that sub you forgot to give me.’

‘Which sub is that?’ said Winston, automatically feeling for money. About a quarter of one’s salary had to be earmarked for voluntary subscriptions, which were so numerous that it was difficult to keep track of them.

‘For Hate Week. You know — the house-by-house fund. I’m treasurer for our block. We’re making an all-out effort — going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won’t be my fault if old Victory Mansions doesn’t have the biggest outfit of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me.’

Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate.

‘By the way, old boy,’ he said. ‘I hear that little beggar of mine let fly at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him a good dressing-down for it. In fact I told him I’d take the catapult away if he does it again.’

‘I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,’ said Winston.

‘Ah, well — what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn’t it? Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them, but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies, and the war, of course. D’you know what that little girl of mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out Berkhamsted way? She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon following a strange man. They kept on his tail for two hours, right through the woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, handed him over to the patrols.’

‘What did they do that for?’ said Winston, somewhat taken aback. Parsons went on triumphantly:

‘My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent — might have been dropped by parachute, for instance. But here’s the point, old boy. What do you think put her on to him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of shoes — said she’d never seen anyone wearing shoes like that before. So the chances were he was a foreigner. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?’

‘What happened to the man?’ said Winston.

‘Ah, that I couldn’t say, of course. But I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if ——’ Parsons made the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.

‘Good,’ said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from his strip of paper.

‘Of course we can’t afford to take chances,’ agreed Winston dutifully.

‘What I mean to say, there is a war on,’ said Parsons.

As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call floated from the telescreen just above their heads. However, it was not the proclamation of a military victory this time, but merely an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.

‘Comrades!’ cried an eager youthful voice. ‘Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us. Here are some of the completed figures. Foodstuffs ——’

The phrase ‘our new, happy life’ recurred several times. It had been a favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty. Parsons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat listening with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom. He could not follow the figures, but he was aware that they were in some way a cause for satisfaction. He had lugged out a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred tobacco. With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week it was seldom possible to fill a pipe to the top. Winston was smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully horizontal. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too — in some more complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, ALONE in the possession of a memory?

The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies — more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient — nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one’s body aged, was it not a sign that this was NOT the natural order of things, if one’s heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one’s socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?

He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal — tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree — existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party.

The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on another trumpet call and gave way to tinny music. Parsons, stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of figures, took his pipe out of his mouth.

‘The Ministry of Plenty’s certainly done a good job this year,’ he said with a knowing shake of his head. ‘By the way, Smith old boy, I suppose you haven’t got any razor blades you can let me have?’

‘Not one,’ said Winston. ‘I’ve been using the same blade for six weeks myself.’

‘Ah, well — just thought I’d ask you, old boy.’

‘Sorry,’ said Winston.

The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily silenced during the Ministry’s announcement, had started up again, as loud as ever. For some reason Winston suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs Parsons, with her wispy hair and the dust in the creases of her face. Within two years those children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police. Mrs Parsons would be vaporized. Syme would be vaporized. Winston would be vaporized. O’Brien would be vaporized. Parsons, on the other hand, would never be vaporized. The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be vaporized. The little beetle-like men who scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine corridors of Ministries they, too, would never be vaporized. And the girl with dark hair, the girl from the Fiction Department — she would never be vaporized either. It seemed to him that he knew instinctively who would survive and who would perish: though just what it was that made for survival, it was not easy to say.

At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with a violent jerk. The girl at the next table had turned partly round and was looking at him. It was the girl with dark hair. She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious intensity. The instant she caught his eye she looked away again.

The sweat started out on Winston’s backbone. A horrible pang of terror went through him. It was gone almost at once, but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind. Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following him about? Unfortunately he could not remember whether she had already been at the table when he arrived, or had come there afterwards. But yesterday, at any rate, during the Two Minutes Hate, she had sat immediately behind him when there was no apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real object had been to listen to him and make sure whether he was shouting loudly enough.

His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not actually a member of the Thought Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all. He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: FACECRIME, it was called.

The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after all she was not really following him about, perhaps it was coincidence that she had sat so close to him two days running. His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it carefully on the edge of the table. He would finish smoking it after work, if he could keep the tobacco in it. Quite likely the person at the next table was a spy of the Thought Police, and quite likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love within three days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted. Syme had folded up his strip of paper and stowed it away in his pocket. Parsons had begun talking again.

‘Did I ever tell you, old boy,’ he said, chuckling round the stem of his pipe, ‘about the time when those two nippers of mine set fire to the old market-woman’s skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches. Burned her quite badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But keen as mustard! That’s a first-rate training they give them in the Spies nowadays — better than in my day, even. What d’you think’s the latest thing they’ve served them out with? Ear trumpets for listening through keyholes! My little girl brought one home the other night — tried it out on our sitting-room door, and reckoned she could hear twice as much as with her ear to the hole. Of course it’s only a toy, mind you. Still, gives ’em the right idea, eh?’

At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle. It was the signal to return to work. All three men sprang to their feet to join in the struggle round the lifts, and the remaining tobacco fell out of Winston’s cigarette.

[flauntpage]

The Big Baller Brand Doesn't Need Lonzo Ball to Be Good

Quinn Velazquez is sitting courtside at the Thomas and Mack Center for a summer league matchup between the Los Angeles Lakers and his favorite team, the Sacramento Kings. All around him, his fellow Kings fans are roasting Lonzo Ball for supposedly ducking their own rookie point guard, De'Aaron Fox. The twenty-something Velazquez is wearing, of all things, a Big Baller Brand T-shirt.

"It's fun to be on the ground floor of something big," he says. "Or it could be the most expensive thrift store shirt I've ever bought."

Big Baller Brand (BBB), an apparel and footwear company founded last year by the Ball family, is putting out its own products, and taking on shoe giants like Nike and Adidas. If everything goes as planned, the brand could occupy the same space that Kanye West's Yeezy fashion line filled: exclusive, expensive (BBB ZO2's start at $495 a pair), and yet undeniably anti-establishment. The brand could easily become a cautionary tale. Or it could upend the sneaker business entirely.

"There's always an outlier," says Sonny Vaccaro, former footwear executive, subject of an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, and the man who famously signed Michael Jordan to Nike. "And LaVar Ball became that outlier."

But you, along with the rest of America, already know this.

"No press is bad press," says Velasquez courtside, of Lavar Ball. "I respect that. How he carries himself, I don't necessarily know if I agree with." At the time, LaVar was fresh off a WWE appearance. Since then, he has made news for any number of things, from having a female referee ejected from a game to opting to home-school his youngest son, LaMelo. The list is ever-growing.

"I don't necessarily associate BBB with Lonzo. I associate it more with LaVar."

You can hardly blame him. Lonzo's debut drew 17,000 fans, selling out the Thomas and Mack Center for the first time in Summer League history, yet it was LaVar Ball crowded by fans, angling for a mere glimpse, an opportunity to touch him. Prior to his preseason debut, the stairway leading to LaVar's lower-bowl seats was packed to the brim with autograph-seekers. In the offseason, ESPN commissioned a poll, asking whether LaVar or Lonzo would be a bigger storyline this season. OddsShark just released presidential odds for 2020, including LaVar on the list.

I've heard casual fans mix their names up. Hell, I've mixed their names up.

This is, in part, a manifestation of their personalities, and it serves them well. Every time LaVar opens his mouth, his son, by way of tacit contrast, looks better: the quiet assassin who'd rather, as he has put it many times, do his talking on the court.

It's also good business. There are a legion of fans, like Velazquez, who are willing to bet on BBB merely because the Ball family has bet on themselves. The ethic supersedes the antics, and the athlete. And Darren Moore, Lonzo's manager, knows it. "We're trying to build a narrative of: You can believe in yourself, and not even feel like you have to roll the dice because you know what you're worth."

The personification of that attitude is not Lonzo. It's his hypeman, the boisterous, no-holds-barred LaVar.

Lavar Ball is already turning his family's popularity into income. Photo: Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports.

Even if Lonzo had an opinion about this, it would be hard to find out what it is. The Ball family is now charging $15,000 for interviews that extend past Ball's media obligations as a member of the Lakers. The very fact of that absurd fee reveals more than Lonzo, with his piercing stare and cliche-ridden answers ever would—it reveals the ethic that they insist we understand: no stone un-monetized.

And why wouldn't Lonzo charge for his time. The equation that governs PR, that celebrities must exchange their internal lives for coverage, doesn't apply to him. He could tie his shoelaces a different way, and we would cover it judiciously. In fact, we did.

Ball wore Nike's at his third summer league game and posted a triple-double. He then toggled to Adidas and UnderArmour, raising questions about whether his footwear decisions would be registered as an indictment on the quality of his own ZO2's. It turned out to be just another day of Lonzo being a trending topic across America.

Now, ask yourself this: does any casual fan know which shoe brand Markelle Fultz, the No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft, signed with?

"This is a singular situation," says Vaccaro. " Everywhere in history, in the shoe industry, was dictated by the individual being able to perform. They cut past everything. His team didn't win the championship. He got beat in the second round. He got his ass kicked by [De'Aaron] Fox. There was nothing monumental about his college career."

"They did more in five minutes," says Vaccaro, "than anyone on a shoe contract's done since LeBron James."

Individual NBA stars wield increasing power. As we saw this offseason, they can force trades to a preset list of attractive teams. If they're flexible about the size of their paychecks, they can form super-teams. LeBron James is basically a multi-national corporation. But even the most talented rookies have been exempt. They have lacked leverage. Until now.

In 2014, Andrew Wiggins was the No. 1 pick in the draft, and he was being shuffled away from autograph signings at the risk of a reporter asking what he thought of the idea he could be traded to the Timberwolves. This season, Boston traded the No. 1 pick, essentially the rights to Markelle Fultz, to Philadelphia. His botched Instagram post, wherein some long-forgotten social media manager forgot to replace "(city)" and "(team name)" with Philadelphia and the Sixers before posting a picture of him on draft night, was oddly poignant. He was somebody else's for the taking.

Could you imagine, on the other hand, a universe where Lonzo's Instagram drafts have such a structure? Was there ever a doubt that he was going to the Lakers? We are bearing witness to the first rookie who doesn't seem like a pawn in somebody else's game.

Lonzo cut his teeth in Chino Hills, on the crooked driveway in the backyard of their home, honing the janky jump-shot that's the source of so much existential dread. It will haunt the rest of the NBA, or it will haunt the Lakers. L.A. is home, but it's also where the family imagines its wildest dreams coming true.

"If the Lakers make the playoffs, he sells a million shoes," Vaccaro says. "What does that mean? That means this is what innovation is."

Name recognition is one thing. Turning that popularity into cash is another. Their reality TV show, Ball in the Family, has been picked up for a second season. Lonzo, who has dabbled in rapping since his youth, just released a track. Just this week, Big Baller Brand released an Emoji app, in case anybody thought this all wasn't already feeling a smidge too modern.

And this is where the true genius of the Big Baller Brand comes to bear. Even if (when) Lonzo struggles to run an intricate NBA offense and a not-so-talented team, Lavar will still be there to push the family name. His adherents will still be loyal.

And, in the unlikely worst case scenario that Lonzo is not good, after a short career of being paid on potential, of taking a flier here and there, one can easily envision a scenario where he transitions smoothly into the most lucrative business in Hollywood—the one his dad is already in—celebrity for its own sake.

"He's got interest from people who don't give a damn, personally" says Vaccaro. "Lavar created a marketplace. He put a Tiffany's in a place where a store like Tiffany's never would have existed before. He created space where there was no space before, for his son."

Given the stronghold the Ball family has in Los Angeles, and the growing potency of the Big Baller Brand name, Lonzo Ball doesn't even have to live up to the hype. There are failsafes in place. There's LaMelo (and to hear them tell it, LiAngelo, who is not nearly as touted a prospect as his brothers).

They are going to be a part of our lives, for a long time.

But there's a difference between making the bet pay off and making so much money that it fundamentally changes the shoe industry, just as there's a difference between a rookie shoe deal and the 9-figure deals that follow them.

For generations," says Moore, Lonzo's business manager, "a lot of players fall into the mold of signing with Nike, Adidas, Under Armour. The way the basketball world is ran, you don't have anybody that's gonna tell you [BBB] is an option. It's an option that players always have that I think they should look at."

Tonight, a one-man million dollar industry will take the floor, lanky and nineteen, for the most glamorous franchise in the NBA. Everything he does out there for the Lakers will connect the man to the myth. We have awaited his arrival with bated breath, and we will watch dutifully because we think what Lonzo does will give us clarity about his family, about the Lakers, about the Big Baller Brand.

Through it all, the most pertinent question will continue to linger. What matters more: what we're watching, or that we're watching?

The Big Baller Brand Doesn't Need Lonzo Ball to Be Good published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[amtushinfosolutionspage]

The Big Baller Brand Doesn’t Need Lonzo Ball to Be Good

Quinn Velazquez is sitting courtside at the Thomas and Mack Center for a summer league matchup between the Los Angeles Lakers and his favorite team, the Sacramento Kings. All around him, his fellow Kings fans are roasting Lonzo Ball for supposedly ducking their own rookie point guard, De’Aaron Fox. The twenty-something Velazquez is wearing, of all things, a Big Baller Brand T-shirt.

“It’s fun to be on the ground floor of something big,” he says. “Or it could be the most expensive thrift store shirt I’ve ever bought.”

Big Baller Brand (BBB), an apparel and footwear company founded last year by the Ball family, is putting out its own products, and taking on shoe giants like Nike and Adidas. If everything goes as planned, the brand could occupy the same space that Kanye West’s Yeezy fashion line filled: exclusive, expensive (BBB ZO2’s start at $495 a pair), and yet undeniably anti-establishment. The brand could easily become a cautionary tale. Or it could upend the sneaker business entirely.

“There’s always an outlier,” says Sonny Vaccaro, former footwear executive, subject of an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, and the man who famously signed Michael Jordan to Nike. “And LaVar Ball became that outlier.”

But you, along with the rest of America, already know this.

“No press is bad press,” says Velasquez courtside, of Lavar Ball. “I respect that. How he carries himself, I don’t necessarily know if I agree with.” At the time, LaVar was fresh off a WWE appearance. Since then, he has made news for any number of things, from having a female referee ejected from a game to opting to home-school his youngest son, LaMelo. The list is ever-growing.

“I don’t necessarily associate BBB with Lonzo. I associate it more with LaVar.”

You can hardly blame him. Lonzo’s debut drew 17,000 fans, selling out the Thomas and Mack Center for the first time in Summer League history, yet it was LaVar Ball crowded by fans, angling for a mere glimpse, an opportunity to touch him. Prior to his preseason debut, the stairway leading to LaVar’s lower-bowl seats was packed to the brim with autograph-seekers. In the offseason, ESPN commissioned a poll, asking whether LaVar or Lonzo would be a bigger storyline this season. OddsShark just released presidential odds for 2020, including LaVar on the list.

I’ve heard casual fans mix their names up. Hell, I’ve mixed their names up.

This is, in part, a manifestation of their personalities, and it serves them well. Every time LaVar opens his mouth, his son, by way of tacit contrast, looks better: the quiet assassin who’d rather, as he has put it many times, do his talking on the court.

It’s also good business. There are a legion of fans, like Velazquez, who are willing to bet on BBB merely because the Ball family has bet on themselves. The ethic supersedes the antics, and the athlete. And Darren Moore, Lonzo’s manager, knows it. “We’re trying to build a narrative of: You can believe in yourself, and not even feel like you have to roll the dice because you know what you’re worth.”

The personification of that attitude is not Lonzo. It’s his hypeman, the boisterous, no-holds-barred LaVar.

Lavar Ball is already turning his family’s popularity into income. Photo: Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports.

Even if Lonzo had an opinion about this, it would be hard to find out what it is. The Ball family is now charging $15,000 for interviews that extend past Ball’s media obligations as a member of the Lakers. The very fact of that absurd fee reveals more than Lonzo, with his piercing stare and cliche-ridden answers ever would—it reveals the ethic that they insist we understand: no stone un-monetized.

And why wouldn’t Lonzo charge for his time. The equation that governs PR, that celebrities must exchange their internal lives for coverage, doesn’t apply to him. He could tie his shoelaces a different way, and we would cover it judiciously. In fact, we did.

Ball wore Nike’s at his third summer league game and posted a triple-double. He then toggled to Adidas and UnderArmour, raising questions about whether his footwear decisions would be registered as an indictment on the quality of his own ZO2’s. It turned out to be just another day of Lonzo being a trending topic across America.

Now, ask yourself this: does any casual fan know which shoe brand Markelle Fultz, the No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft, signed with?

“This is a singular situation,” says Vaccaro. ” Everywhere in history, in the shoe industry, was dictated by the individual being able to perform. They cut past everything. His team didn’t win the championship. He got beat in the second round. He got his ass kicked by [De’Aaron] Fox. There was nothing monumental about his college career.”

“They did more in five minutes,” says Vaccaro, “than anyone on a shoe contract’s done since LeBron James.”

Individual NBA stars wield increasing power. As we saw this offseason, they can force trades to a preset list of attractive teams. If they’re flexible about the size of their paychecks, they can form super-teams. LeBron James is basically a multi-national corporation. But even the most talented rookies have been exempt. They have lacked leverage. Until now.

In 2014, Andrew Wiggins was the No. 1 pick in the draft, and he was being shuffled away from autograph signings at the risk of a reporter asking what he thought of the idea he could be traded to the Timberwolves. This season, Boston traded the No. 1 pick, essentially the rights to Markelle Fultz, to Philadelphia. His botched Instagram post, wherein some long-forgotten social media manager forgot to replace “(city)” and “(team name)” with Philadelphia and the Sixers before posting a picture of him on draft night, was oddly poignant. He was somebody else’s for the taking.

Could you imagine, on the other hand, a universe where Lonzo’s Instagram drafts have such a structure? Was there ever a doubt that he was going to the Lakers? We are bearing witness to the first rookie who doesn’t seem like a pawn in somebody else’s game.

Lonzo cut his teeth in Chino Hills, on the crooked driveway in the backyard of their home, honing the janky jump-shot that’s the source of so much existential dread. It will haunt the rest of the NBA, or it will haunt the Lakers. L.A. is home, but it’s also where the family imagines its wildest dreams coming true.

“If the Lakers make the playoffs, he sells a million shoes,” Vaccaro says. “What does that mean? That means this is what innovation is.”

Name recognition is one thing. Turning that popularity into cash is another. Their reality TV show, Ball in the Family, has been picked up for a second season. Lonzo, who has dabbled in rapping since his youth, just released a track. Just this week, Big Baller Brand released an Emoji app, in case anybody thought this all wasn’t already feeling a smidge too modern.

And this is where the true genius of the Big Baller Brand comes to bear. Even if (when) Lonzo struggles to run an intricate NBA offense and a not-so-talented team, Lavar will still be there to push the family name. His adherents will still be loyal.

And, in the unlikely worst case scenario that Lonzo is not good, after a short career of being paid on potential, of taking a flier here and there, one can easily envision a scenario where he transitions smoothly into the most lucrative business in Hollywood—the one his dad is already in—celebrity for its own sake.

“He’s got interest from people who don’t give a damn, personally” says Vaccaro. “Lavar created a marketplace. He put a Tiffany’s in a place where a store like Tiffany’s never would have existed before. He created space where there was no space before, for his son.”

Given the stronghold the Ball family has in Los Angeles, and the growing potency of the Big Baller Brand name, Lonzo Ball doesn’t even have to live up to the hype. There are failsafes in place. There’s LaMelo (and to hear them tell it, LiAngelo, who is not nearly as touted a prospect as his brothers).

They are going to be a part of our lives, for a long time.

But there’s a difference between making the bet pay off and making so much money that it fundamentally changes the shoe industry, just as there’s a difference between a rookie shoe deal and the 9-figure deals that follow them.

For generations,” says Moore, Lonzo’s business manager, “a lot of players fall into the mold of signing with Nike, Adidas, Under Armour. The way the basketball world is ran, you don’t have anybody that’s gonna tell you [BBB] is an option. It’s an option that players always have that I think they should look at.”

Tonight, a one-man million dollar industry will take the floor, lanky and nineteen, for the most glamorous franchise in the NBA. Everything he does out there for the Lakers will connect the man to the myth. We have awaited his arrival with bated breath, and we will watch dutifully because we think what Lonzo does will give us clarity about his family, about the Lakers, about the Big Baller Brand.

Through it all, the most pertinent question will continue to linger. What matters more: what we’re watching, or that we’re watching?

The Big Baller Brand Doesn’t Need Lonzo Ball to Be Good syndicated from http://ift.tt/2ug2Ns6

[christophertheodore-org]

Chapter 5 - 1984 By George Orwell

In the low-ceilinged canteen, deep underground, the lunch queue jerked slowly forward. The room was already very full and deafeningly noisy. From the grille at the counter the steam of stew came pouring forth, with a sour metallic smell which did not quite overcome the fumes of Victory Gin. On the far side of the room there was a small bar, a mere hole in the wall, where gin could be bought at ten cents the large nip.

‘Just the man I was looking for,’ said a voice at Winston’s back.

He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research Department. Perhaps ‘friend’ was not exactly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades: but there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than that of others. Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you.

‘I wanted to ask you whether you’d got any razor blades,’ he said.

‘Not one!’ said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. ‘I’ve tried all over the place. They don’t exist any longer.’

Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had two unused ones which he was hoarding up. There had been a famine of them for months past. At any given moment there was some necessary article which the Party shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades. You could only get hold of them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on the ‘free’ market.

‘I’ve been using the same blade for six weeks,’ he added untruthfully.

The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he turned and faced Syme again. Each of them took a greasy metal tray from a pile at the end of the counter.

‘Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?’ said Syme.

‘I was working,’ said Winston indifferently. ‘I shall see it on the flicks, I suppose.’

‘A very inadequate substitute,’ said Syme.

His mocking eyes roved over Winston’s face. ‘I know you,’ the eyes seemed to say, ‘I see through you. I know very well why you didn’t go to see those prisoners hanged.’ In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.

‘It was a good hanging,’ said Syme reminiscently. ‘I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue — a quite bright blue. That’s the detail that appeals to me.’

‘Nex’, please!’ yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle.

Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. On to each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch — a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.

‘There’s a table over there, under that telescreen,’ said Syme. ‘Let’s pick up a gin on the way.’

The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs. They threaded their way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays on to the metal-topped table, on one corner of which someone had left a pool of stew, a filthy liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit. Winston took up his mug of gin, paused for an instant to collect his nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting stuff down. When he had winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenly discovered that he was hungry. He began swallowing spoonfuls of the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat. Neither of them spoke again till they had emptied their pannikins. From the table at Winston’s left, a little behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which pierced the general uproar of the room.

‘How is the Dictionary getting on?’ said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.

‘Slowly,’ said Syme. ‘I’m on the adjectives. It’s fascinating.’

He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.

‘The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,’ he said. ‘We’re getting the language into its final shape — the shape it’s going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we’ve finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words — scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won’t contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.’

He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant’s passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.

‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well — better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words — in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.‘s idea originally, of course,’ he added as an afterthought.

A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.

‘You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,’ he said almost sadly. ‘Even when you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in “The Times” occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?’

Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:

‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. ‘Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’

‘Except ——’ began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.

It had been on the tip of his tongue to say ‘Except the proles,’ but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.

‘The proles are not human beings,’ he said carelessly. ‘By 2050 — earlier, probably — all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’

One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.

Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned a little sideways in his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At the table on his left the man with the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with everything that he said. From time to time Winston caught some such remark as ‘I think you’re so right, I do so agree with you’, uttered in a youthful and rather silly feminine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an instant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston knew the man by sight, though he knew no more about him than that he held some important post in the Fiction Department. He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just once Winston caught a phrase —‘complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism’— jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front — it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle of his spoon was tracing patterns in the puddle of stew. The voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily audible in spite of the surrounding din.

‘There is a word in Newspeak,’ said Syme, ‘I don’t know whether you know it: DUCKSPEAK, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.’

Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston thought again. He thought it with a kind of sadness, although well knowing that Syme despised him and slightly disliked him, and was fully capable of denouncing him as a thought-criminal if he saw any reason for doing so. There was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was something that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could not say that he was unorthodox. He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe, yet the place was somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used to gather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself, it was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades ago. Syme’s fate was not difficult to foresee. And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston’s, secret opinions, he would betray him instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else, for that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.

Syme looked up. ‘Here comes Parsons,’ he said.

Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, ‘that bloody fool’. Parsons, Winston’s fellow-tenant at Victory Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the room — a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face. At thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish. His whole appearance was that of a little boy grown large, so much so that although he was wearing the regulation overalls, it was almost impossible not to think of him as being dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirt, and red neckerchief of the Spies. In visualizing him one saw always a picture of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms. Parsons did, indeed, invariably revert to shorts when a community hike or any other physical activity gave him an excuse for doing so. He greeted them both with a cheery ‘Hullo, hullo!’ and sat down at the table, giving off an intense smell of sweat. Beads of moisture stood out all over his pink face. His powers of sweating were extraordinary. At the Community Centre you could always tell when he had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of the bat handle. Syme had produced a strip of paper on which there was a long column of words, and was studying it with an ink-pencil between his fingers.

‘Look at him working away in the lunch hour,’ said Parsons, nudging Winston. ‘Keenness, eh? What’s that you’ve got there, old boy? Something a bit too brainy for me, I expect. Smith, old boy, I’ll tell you why I’m chasing you. It’s that sub you forgot to give me.’

‘Which sub is that?’ said Winston, automatically feeling for money. About a quarter of one’s salary had to be earmarked for voluntary subscriptions, which were so numerous that it was difficult to keep track of them.

‘For Hate Week. You know — the house-by-house fund. I’m treasurer for our block. We’re making an all-out effort — going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won’t be my fault if old Victory Mansions doesn’t have the biggest outfit of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me.’

Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate.

‘By the way, old boy,’ he said. ‘I hear that little beggar of mine let fly at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him a good dressing-down for it. In fact I told him I’d take the catapult away if he does it again.’

‘I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,’ said Winston.

‘Ah, well — what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn’t it? Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them, but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies, and the war, of course. D’you know what that little girl of mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out Berkhamsted way? She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon following a strange man. They kept on his tail for two hours, right through the woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, handed him over to the patrols.’

‘What did they do that for?’ said Winston, somewhat taken aback. Parsons went on triumphantly:

‘My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent — might have been dropped by parachute, for instance. But here’s the point, old boy. What do you think put her on to him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of shoes — said she’d never seen anyone wearing shoes like that before. So the chances were he was a foreigner. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?’

‘What happened to the man?’ said Winston.

‘Ah, that I couldn’t say, of course. But I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if ——’ Parsons made the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.

‘Good,’ said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from his strip of paper.

‘Of course we can’t afford to take chances,’ agreed Winston dutifully.

‘What I mean to say, there is a war on,’ said Parsons.

As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call floated from the telescreen just above their heads. However, it was not the proclamation of a military victory this time, but merely an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.

‘Comrades!’ cried an eager youthful voice. ‘Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us. Here are some of the completed figures. Foodstuffs ——’

The phrase ‘our new, happy life’ recurred several times. It had been a favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty. Parsons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat listening with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom. He could not follow the figures, but he was aware that they were in some way a cause for satisfaction. He had lugged out a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred tobacco. With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week it was seldom possible to fill a pipe to the top. Winston was smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully horizontal. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too — in some more complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, ALONE in the possession of a memory?

The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies — more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient — nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one’s body aged, was it not a sign that this was NOT the natural order of things, if one’s heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one’s socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?

He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal — tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree — existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party.

The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on another trumpet call and gave way to tinny music. Parsons, stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of figures, took his pipe out of his mouth.

‘The Ministry of Plenty’s certainly done a good job this year,’ he said with a knowing shake of his head. ‘By the way, Smith old boy, I suppose you haven’t got any razor blades you can let me have?’

‘Not one,’ said Winston. ‘I’ve been using the same blade for six weeks myself.’

‘Ah, well — just thought I’d ask you, old boy.’

‘Sorry,’ said Winston.

The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily silenced during the Ministry’s announcement, had started up again, as loud as ever. For some reason Winston suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs Parsons, with her wispy hair and the dust in the creases of her face. Within two years those children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police. Mrs Parsons would be vaporized. Syme would be vaporized. Winston would be vaporized. O’Brien would be vaporized. Parsons, on the other hand, would never be vaporized. The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be vaporized. The little beetle-like men who scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine corridors of Ministries they, too, would never be vaporized. And the girl with dark hair, the girl from the Fiction Department — she would never be vaporized either. It seemed to him that he knew instinctively who would survive and who would perish: though just what it was that made for survival, it was not easy to say.

At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with a violent jerk. The girl at the next table had turned partly round and was looking at him. It was the girl with dark hair. She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious intensity. The instant she caught his eye she looked away again.

The sweat started out on Winston’s backbone. A horrible pang of terror went through him. It was gone almost at once, but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind. Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following him about? Unfortunately he could not remember whether she had already been at the table when he arrived, or had come there afterwards. But yesterday, at any rate, during the Two Minutes Hate, she had sat immediately behind him when there was no apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real object had been to listen to him and make sure whether he was shouting loudly enough.

His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not actually a member of the Thought Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all. He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: FACECRIME, it was called.

The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after all she was not really following him about, perhaps it was coincidence that she had sat so close to him two days running. His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it carefully on the edge of the table. He would finish smoking it after work, if he could keep the tobacco in it. Quite likely the person at the next table was a spy of the Thought Police, and quite likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love within three days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted. Syme had folded up his strip of paper and stowed it away in his pocket. Parsons had begun talking again.

‘Did I ever tell you, old boy,’ he said, chuckling round the stem of his pipe, ‘about the time when those two nippers of mine set fire to the old market-woman’s skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches. Burned her quite badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But keen as mustard! That’s a first-rate training they give them in the Spies nowadays — better than in my day, even. What d’you think’s the latest thing they’ve served them out with? Ear trumpets for listening through keyholes! My little girl brought one home the other night — tried it out on our sitting-room door, and reckoned she could hear twice as much as with her ear to the hole. Of course it’s only a toy, mind you. Still, gives ’em the right idea, eh?’

At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle. It was the signal to return to work. All three men sprang to their feet to join in the struggle round the lifts, and the remaining tobacco fell out of Winston’s cigarette

[flauntpage]

The Big Baller Brand Doesn't Need Lonzo Ball to Be Good

Quinn Velazquez is sitting courtside at the Thomas and Mack Center for a summer league matchup between the Los Angeles Lakers and his favorite team, the Sacramento Kings. All around him, his fellow Kings fans are roasting Lonzo Ball for supposedly ducking their own rookie point guard, De'Aaron Fox. The twenty-something Velazquez is wearing, of all things, a Big Baller Brand T-shirt.

"It's fun to be on the ground floor of something big," he says. "Or it could be the most expensive thrift store shirt I've ever bought."

Big Baller Brand (BBB), an apparel and footwear company founded last year by the Ball family, is putting out its own products, and taking on shoe giants like Nike and Adidas. If everything goes as planned, the brand could occupy the same space that Kanye West's Yeezy fashion line filled: exclusive, expensive (BBB ZO2's start at $495 a pair), and yet undeniably anti-establishment. The brand could easily become a cautionary tale. Or it could upend the sneaker business entirely.

"There's always an outlier," says Sonny Vaccaro, former footwear executive, subject of an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, and the man who famously signed Michael Jordan to Nike. "And LaVar Ball became that outlier."

But you, along with the rest of America, already know this.

"No press is bad press," says Velasquez courtside, of Lavar Ball. "I respect that. How he carries himself, I don't necessarily know if I agree with." At the time, LaVar was fresh off a WWE appearance. Since then, he has made news for any number of things, from having a female referee ejected from a game to opting to home-school his youngest son, LaMelo. The list is ever-growing.

"I don't necessarily associate BBB with Lonzo. I associate it more with LaVar."

You can hardly blame him. Lonzo's debut drew 17,000 fans, selling out the Thomas and Mack Center for the first time in Summer League history, yet it was LaVar Ball crowded by fans, angling for a mere glimpse, an opportunity to touch him. Prior to his preseason debut, the stairway leading to LaVar's lower-bowl seats was packed to the brim with autograph-seekers. In the offseason, ESPN commissioned a poll, asking whether LaVar or Lonzo would be a bigger storyline this season. OddsShark just released presidential odds for 2020, including LaVar on the list.

I've heard casual fans mix their names up. Hell, I've mixed their names up.

This is, in part, a manifestation of their personalities, and it serves them well. Every time LaVar opens his mouth, his son, by way of tacit contrast, looks better: the quiet assassin who'd rather, as he has put it many times, do his talking on the court.

It's also good business. There are a legion of fans, like Velazquez, who are willing to bet on BBB merely because the Ball family has bet on themselves. The ethic supersedes the antics, and the athlete. And Darren Moore, Lonzo's manager, knows it. "We're trying to build a narrative of: You can believe in yourself, and not even feel like you have to roll the dice because you know what you're worth."

The personification of that attitude is not Lonzo. It's his hypeman, the boisterous, no-holds-barred LaVar.

Lavar Ball is already turning his family's popularity into income. Photo: Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports.

Even if Lonzo had an opinion about this, it would be hard to find out what it is. The Ball family is now charging $15,000 for interviews that extend past Ball's media obligations as a member of the Lakers. The very fact of that absurd fee reveals more than Lonzo, with his piercing stare and cliche-ridden answers ever would—it reveals the ethic that they insist we understand: no stone un-monetized.

And why wouldn't Lonzo charge for his time. The equation that governs PR, that celebrities must exchange their internal lives for coverage, doesn't apply to him. He could tie his shoelaces a different way, and we would cover it judiciously. In fact, we did.

Ball wore Nike's at his third summer league game and posted a triple-double. He then toggled to Adidas and UnderArmour, raising questions about whether his footwear decisions would be registered as an indictment on the quality of his own ZO2's. It turned out to be just another day of Lonzo being a trending topic across America.

Now, ask yourself this: does any casual fan know which shoe brand Markelle Fultz, the No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft, signed with?

"This is a singular situation," says Vaccaro. " Everywhere in history, in the shoe industry, was dictated by the individual being able to perform. They cut past everything. His team didn't win the championship. He got beat in the second round. He got his ass kicked by [De'Aaron] Fox. There was nothing monumental about his college career."

"They did more in five minutes," says Vaccaro, "than anyone on a shoe contract's done since LeBron James."

Individual NBA stars wield increasing power. As we saw this offseason, they can force trades to a preset list of attractive teams. If they're flexible about the size of their paychecks, they can form super-teams. LeBron James is basically a multi-national corporation. But even the most talented rookies have been exempt. They have lacked leverage. Until now.

In 2014, Andrew Wiggins was the No. 1 pick in the draft, and he was being shuffled away from autograph signings at the risk of a reporter asking what he thought of the idea he could be traded to the Timberwolves. This season, Boston traded the No. 1 pick, essentially the rights to Markelle Fultz, to Philadelphia. His botched Instagram post, wherein some long-forgotten social media manager forgot to replace "(city)" and "(team name)" with Philadelphia and the Sixers before posting a picture of him on draft night, was oddly poignant. He was somebody else's for the taking.

Could you imagine, on the other hand, a universe where Lonzo's Instagram drafts have such a structure? Was there ever a doubt that he was going to the Lakers? We are bearing witness to the first rookie who doesn't seem like a pawn in somebody else's game.

Lonzo cut his teeth in Chino Hills, on the crooked driveway in the backyard of their home, honing the janky jump-shot that's the source of so much existential dread. It will haunt the rest of the NBA, or it will haunt the Lakers. L.A. is home, but it's also where the family imagines its wildest dreams coming true.

"If the Lakers make the playoffs, he sells a million shoes," Vaccaro says. "What does that mean? That means this is what innovation is."

Name recognition is one thing. Turning that popularity into cash is another. Their reality TV show, Ball in the Family, has been picked up for a second season. Lonzo, who has dabbled in rapping since his youth, just released a track. Just this week, Big Baller Brand released an Emoji app, in case anybody thought this all wasn't already feeling a smidge too modern.

And this is where the true genius of the Big Baller Brand comes to bear. Even if (when) Lonzo struggles to run an intricate NBA offense and a not-so-talented team, Lavar will still be there to push the family name. His adherents will still be loyal.

And, in the unlikely worst case scenario that Lonzo is not good, after a short career of being paid on potential, of taking a flier here and there, one can easily envision a scenario where he transitions smoothly into the most lucrative business in Hollywood—the one his dad is already in—celebrity for its own sake.

"He's got interest from people who don't give a damn, personally" says Vaccaro. "Lavar created a marketplace. He put a Tiffany's in a place where a store like Tiffany's never would have existed before. He created space where there was no space before, for his son."

Given the stronghold the Ball family has in Los Angeles, and the growing potency of the Big Baller Brand name, Lonzo Ball doesn't even have to live up to the hype. There are failsafes in place. There's LaMelo (and to hear them tell it, LiAngelo, who is not nearly as touted a prospect as his brothers).

They are going to be a part of our lives, for a long time.

But there's a difference between making the bet pay off and making so much money that it fundamentally changes the shoe industry, just as there's a difference between a rookie shoe deal and the 9-figure deals that follow them.

For generations," says Moore, Lonzo's business manager, "a lot of players fall into the mold of signing with Nike, Adidas, Under Armour. The way the basketball world is ran, you don't have anybody that's gonna tell you [BBB] is an option. It's an option that players always have that I think they should look at."

Tonight, a one-man million dollar industry will take the floor, lanky and nineteen, for the most glamorous franchise in the NBA. Everything he does out there for the Lakers will connect the man to the myth. We have awaited his arrival with bated breath, and we will watch dutifully because we think what Lonzo does will give us clarity about his family, about the Lakers, about the Big Baller Brand.

Through it all, the most pertinent question will continue to linger. What matters more: what we're watching, or that we're watching?

The Big Baller Brand Doesn't Need Lonzo Ball to Be Good published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

[flauntpage]

The Big Baller Brand Doesn't Need Lonzo Ball to Be Good

Quinn Velazquez is sitting courtside at the Thomas and Mack Center for a summer league matchup between the Los Angeles Lakers and his favorite team, the Sacramento Kings. All around him, his fellow Kings fans are roasting Lonzo Ball for supposedly ducking their own rookie point guard, De'Aaron Fox. The twenty-something Velazquez is wearing, of all things, a Big Baller Brand T-shirt.

"It's fun to be on the ground floor of something big," he says. "Or it could be the most expensive thrift store shirt I've ever bought."

Big Baller Brand (BBB), an apparel and footwear company founded last year by the Ball family, is putting out its own products, and taking on shoe giants like Nike and Adidas. If everything goes as planned, the brand could occupy the same space that Kanye West's Yeezy fashion line filled: exclusive, expensive (BBB ZO2's start at $495 a pair), and yet undeniably anti-establishment. The brand could easily become a cautionary tale. Or it could upend the sneaker business entirely.

"There's always an outlier," says Sonny Vaccaro, former footwear executive, subject of an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, and the man who famously signed Michael Jordan to Nike. "And LaVar Ball became that outlier."

But you, along with the rest of America, already know this.

"No press is bad press," says Velasquez courtside, of Lavar Ball. "I respect that. How he carries himself, I don't necessarily know if I agree with." At the time, LaVar was fresh off a WWE appearance. Since then, he has made news for any number of things, from having a female referee ejected from a game to opting to home-school his youngest son, LaMelo. The list is ever-growing.

"I don't necessarily associate BBB with Lonzo. I associate it more with LaVar."

You can hardly blame him. Lonzo's debut drew 17,000 fans, selling out the Thomas and Mack Center for the first time in Summer League history, yet it was LaVar Ball crowded by fans, angling for a mere glimpse, an opportunity to touch him. Prior to his preseason debut, the stairway leading to LaVar's lower-bowl seats was packed to the brim with autograph-seekers. In the offseason, ESPN commissioned a poll, asking whether LaVar or Lonzo would be a bigger storyline this season. OddsShark just released presidential odds for 2020, including LaVar on the list.

I've heard casual fans mix their names up. Hell, I've mixed their names up.

This is, in part, a manifestation of their personalities, and it serves them well. Every time LaVar opens his mouth, his son, by way of tacit contrast, looks better: the quiet assassin who'd rather, as he has put it many times, do his talking on the court.

It's also good business. There are a legion of fans, like Velazquez, who are willing to bet on BBB merely because the Ball family has bet on themselves. The ethic supersedes the antics, and the athlete. And Darren Moore, Lonzo's manager, knows it. "We're trying to build a narrative of: You can believe in yourself, and not even feel like you have to roll the dice because you know what you're worth."

The personification of that attitude is not Lonzo. It's his hypeman, the boisterous, no-holds-barred LaVar.

Lavar Ball is already turning his family's popularity into income. Photo: Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports.

Even if Lonzo had an opinion about this, it would be hard to find out what it is. The Ball family is now charging $15,000 for interviews that extend past Ball's media obligations as a member of the Lakers. The very fact of that absurd fee reveals more than Lonzo, with his piercing stare and cliche-ridden answers ever would—it reveals the ethic that they insist we understand: no stone un-monetized.

And why wouldn't Lonzo charge for his time. The equation that governs PR, that celebrities must exchange their internal lives for coverage, doesn't apply to him. He could tie his shoelaces a different way, and we would cover it judiciously. In fact, we did.

Ball wore Nike's at his third summer league game and posted a triple-double. He then toggled to Adidas and UnderArmour, raising questions about whether his footwear decisions would be registered as an indictment on the quality of his own ZO2's. It turned out to be just another day of Lonzo being a trending topic across America.

Now, ask yourself this: does any casual fan know which shoe brand Markelle Fultz, the No. 1 pick in the NBA Draft, signed with?

"This is a singular situation," says Vaccaro. " Everywhere in history, in the shoe industry, was dictated by the individual being able to perform. They cut past everything. His team didn't win the championship. He got beat in the second round. He got his ass kicked by [De'Aaron] Fox. There was nothing monumental about his college career."

"They did more in five minutes," says Vaccaro, "than anyone on a shoe contract's done since LeBron James."

Individual NBA stars wield increasing power. As we saw this offseason, they can force trades to a preset list of attractive teams. If they're flexible about the size of their paychecks, they can form super-teams. LeBron James is basically a multi-national corporation. But even the most talented rookies have been exempt. They have lacked leverage. Until now.

In 2014, Andrew Wiggins was the No. 1 pick in the draft, and he was being shuffled away from autograph signings at the risk of a reporter asking what he thought of the idea he could be traded to the Timberwolves. This season, Boston traded the No. 1 pick, essentially the rights to Markelle Fultz, to Philadelphia. His botched Instagram post, wherein some long-forgotten social media manager forgot to replace "(city)" and "(team name)" with Philadelphia and the Sixers before posting a picture of him on draft night, was oddly poignant. He was somebody else's for the taking.

Could you imagine, on the other hand, a universe where Lonzo's Instagram drafts have such a structure? Was there ever a doubt that he was going to the Lakers? We are bearing witness to the first rookie who doesn't seem like a pawn in somebody else's game.

Lonzo cut his teeth in Chino Hills, on the crooked driveway in the backyard of their home, honing the janky jump-shot that's the source of so much existential dread. It will haunt the rest of the NBA, or it will haunt the Lakers. L.A. is home, but it's also where the family imagines its wildest dreams coming true.

"If the Lakers make the playoffs, he sells a million shoes," Vaccaro says. "What does that mean? That means this is what innovation is."

Name recognition is one thing. Turning that popularity into cash is another. Their reality TV show, Ball in the Family, has been picked up for a second season. Lonzo, who has dabbled in rapping since his youth, just released a track. Just this week, Big Baller Brand released an Emoji app, in case anybody thought this all wasn't already feeling a smidge too modern.

And this is where the true genius of the Big Baller Brand comes to bear. Even if (when) Lonzo struggles to run an intricate NBA offense and a not-so-talented team, Lavar will still be there to push the family name. His adherents will still be loyal.

And, in the unlikely worst case scenario that Lonzo is not good, after a short career of being paid on potential, of taking a flier here and there, one can easily envision a scenario where he transitions smoothly into the most lucrative business in Hollywood—the one his dad is already in—celebrity for its own sake.

"He's got interest from people who don't give a damn, personally" says Vaccaro. "Lavar created a marketplace. He put a Tiffany's in a place where a store like Tiffany's never would have existed before. He created space where there was no space before, for his son."

Given the stronghold the Ball family has in Los Angeles, and the growing potency of the Big Baller Brand name, Lonzo Ball doesn't even have to live up to the hype. There are failsafes in place. There's LaMelo (and to hear them tell it, LiAngelo, who is not nearly as touted a prospect as his brothers).

They are going to be a part of our lives, for a long time.

But there's a difference between making the bet pay off and making so much money that it fundamentally changes the shoe industry, just as there's a difference between a rookie shoe deal and the 9-figure deals that follow them.

For generations," says Moore, Lonzo's business manager, "a lot of players fall into the mold of signing with Nike, Adidas, Under Armour. The way the basketball world is ran, you don't have anybody that's gonna tell you [BBB] is an option. It's an option that players always have that I think they should look at."

Tonight, a one-man million dollar industry will take the floor, lanky and nineteen, for the most glamorous franchise in the NBA. Everything he does out there for the Lakers will connect the man to the myth. We have awaited his arrival with bated breath, and we will watch dutifully because we think what Lonzo does will give us clarity about his family, about the Lakers, about the Big Baller Brand.

Through it all, the most pertinent question will continue to linger. What matters more: what we're watching, or that we're watching?

The Big Baller Brand Doesn't Need Lonzo Ball to Be Good published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv