#I hope it works like this! I wrote it up on moonshot because I too rarely get anything to do on my sideblogs anyway!

[warriorfortamaran]

[[ Starter for @softheart-bigarms-panther !]]

It was Blorthog! And while it wasn’t like the festivity to go to your friend’s place in the night before already to basically just camp there and wait, to actually catch her before she would leave for visiting all of her many friends and not return before the day was almost over already - it worked. Here Moonshot was, happy that Starfire had agreed for some togetherness with him within the park of Jump City. The park was a good choice, it wasn’t the Tower, and that meant less interference from the Titans - specifically from him. So here they were, and after choosing an empty table to sit at, they had exchanged necklaces and now were talking a little while Starfire took out various things like cake-boxes and drinks.

It wasn’t like him to not keep his focus on Starfire when he actually had the chance to be like this with her, but something - or rather someone - caught his attention and eventually Moonshot jumped up from his seat to charge his energy and glare at the potential threat. “Who are you? Why are you watching us?” “Moonshot, please!” Starfire tried to calm him, getting up too and turning to who Moonshot had noticed.

[starsmuserainbow]

10, 11, and 12!

Want Meme for the Muns

Thanks for sending some!

First off, I’m kinda really really bad to put things into categories. So it might as well be that the threads I describe end up not really falling into the right category.

10. Describe a fluffy thread you’d like to write.

Okay! So, a fluffy thing, let’s see.

Given the season, I’d be really interested/eager to do stuff in regards to christmas or winter, of course, which I believe a lot of can fall into the ‘fluffy’-category. Baking together, making or hanging decorations together, amazing would be something like a big christmas party maybe with multiple people (aka multiple muns/blogs participating too) and maybe that secret santa thing where everyone gets to pull a name and make a gift for that one (or give the gift they brought to the party to that one, if it happens only then and isn’t chosen beforehand), or maybe just in general everything that ‘belongs’ to a proper christmas thing. A mistletoe is a cute option for a thing too! Though (or especially since?) not all my muses know what that even means, yet.

I intended to write something for each of my muses to a question like this, but, I don’t think it’s all that different from one another - I can kinda just summarize the stuff I’d really like to write more of as ‘intimacy’? Like, between friends and such too of course, just, stuff like talking about the past or about problems or about relationships or whatever, just bonding and growing closer, all those things. Or of course shippy stuff, I’m pretty sure I suck at actually writing that but I barely ever really had the chance to write much shippy stuff in any form so far and I think it’d be absolutely cool to do.

I’m sorry, I really want to write examples too, but I honestly can’t come up with any good ones right now to this one. Maybe at least to the other two you sent!

I’m putting a cut here because it got just very long and I don’t wanna throw a endless post onto the dash!

11. Describe an angsty thread you’d like to write.

One of the ideas that directly come to mind here is basically to do anything in that AU-verse I made, where Blackfire has already pretty much won. I don’t plan on having that verse have any ‘happy end’ at all, so I think that alone already makes it pretty much fall into the ‘angsty’ category! At least for each of my muses that isn’t Blackfire, that is. I don’t think that interactions in the verse would be exactly angsty for/with Blackfire.

Oh, or another idea I had, and I think also wrote down as wishlist - when Starfire and Blackfire are fighting, and Starfire comes down to Earth again (either being pushed/thrown or to get a moment of a break from the fight), and someone comes by that also has abilities of some sort. She would ask or hope for help, but let’s have it differently, and have the other person decide to help Blackfire instead and actually capture Starfire!

I think basically anything where Starfire ends up on the ‘defeated’ end of against a villain/criminal is pretty much a thing I’d be all too happy to play through. I’ve before also had the idea of what if not the Titans found her back when she came to Earth, but a villain, and she ended up working for them instead?

Hmm. For Blackfire, I kinda still dig the idea of my powerless!verse of her, or maybe something prison-y (both of our muses in one, your muse on the task to get Blackfire out of one, things like that), or her being amnesiac and not remembering anything.

For Wildfire, ... I think all his self-doubting and such is kinda angsty in itself already? But uh, one thread-idea I’d have would be that he’s searched for by some other aliens, and maybe they ended up capturing one of his friends in order to make him agree to surrender himself without giving a fight or informing anyone like Starfire or the Titans or whoever. I’m not sure if this falls into the angsty category, but another thing that I def still really wanna do, is be able to write out how he reacts to a fight being started with him. Maybe a time where, somehow somewhere, he comes across the ones that destroyed his foster-home? And learns about that they did it, and that would be one of those very very rare times where he might actually completely lose himself and even fall into rage? (I did a thread similar to what I just described already once with someone who I think isn’t active anymore, in a verse where he hadn’t ever come to Earth, but it’d still be really interesting to do it [again])

There isn’t really anything that comes to mind for Galfore? God I swear sometimes I think I should never have made a blog for him, it feels like there’s so so so so little I can actually do with him. Like I mean, he sure had angsty stuff during his earlier life, and there is the abovementioned successful-Blackfire-AU that probably counts as angsty where he is in too, but outside of that? It’s a bit difficult. Maybe he getting held (against his will, of course) by someone? Or something terrible happening to Tamaran and he comes to the other muse to ask for help or the likes, though I’d here still need to figure out what that would be.

For Starlight, I think I can in a brief way say that I can imagine things like her ending up in jail or custody of some form after doing her stealings? I also think she’s kinda prone to being bullied which probably falls into the angsty category too, but I’m not sure how that would work as thread especially since I think it doesn't really happen on Earth all too much. Hmm uh I can’t really think of anything else for her!

Moonshot - my first thing is, which is also a wishlist-entry, him just kinda losing his temper and he’s about to kill someone without even really noticing what he’s doing. The other muse then either comes in time to stop him or just to see what he’s done, and, yeah. Another thing would be his evil!verse of course, or maybe a time where he’s close to slipping into that. Hmm, what else? Those that held him prisoner returning and trying to recapture him, perhaps alongside the other muse that he just so happened to be close to at that time.

12. Describe an action thread you’d like to write.

Okay, well, I mean, action kinda means fighting things so yeah, that. Even though I think I pretty much suck at writing fighting, and I’m not sure just how well that can be done in writing in the first place. I think this is again something that I can rather keep as answer for all of them in one thing. I’ve tried to think of what to say to each of them, but, I can’t really give examples that don’t all sound the same (fight against one another, or together against a bigger thing), so I’m not sure what details to give here!

Sorry, I feel like my answer to these three was rather lame!

[blubberquark]

The value and place of “good game design”

Last year, noted game design theorist, developer and podcaster Keith Burgun softened his stance on the theory of strategy games and game design as a discipline. I wrote 90% of this as a response to his podcasts back then, but when I read my own words it felt too negative. I don’t want to dunk on somebody for a commercial failure from the relative safety of not even having tried.

I’m posting it now though, because it ties into my ideas about Jam Games and Short Games, which I want to develop further, as well as my previous post about starting with simple games like Pong, Flappy Bird, and Minesweeper: Starting with simple ideas might not be enough. Top-down game design might be important after all.

Why not Game Design?

Part of Burgun’s change of heart was for what I would call “political” reasons, and I try to avoid politics on this blog. I hate how the conversation around game design grinds to a halt when some troll says “Aha, this looks like a game a Communist would make!“, and then the designer tries to explain himself and his politics and we stop talking about game design or the game itself altogether.

It’s one thing to talk about the politics, the political ideas and implications of a game, and quite another to look at the author and to try to read the authors politics into every game developed by that author. This is especially important when the author is outspoken about politics. People can be politically active and have strong convictions and just plain fail to convey their ideas through their game design.

Another reason for this shift was trying to give people more space for self-expression. Maybe you want to make something new and exploratory, or something short and poignant, or some “experience“ or “virtual installation” that is game-adjacent, but not even meant to be a game. Trying to ground “game design” in lessons learn from existing games, or trying to be precise with your terminology might be counterproductive. There is little overlap between the mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics, or affordances of Smash Bros and Firewatch (unless you count The Quiet Man, an artsy game that manages to combine worst of both worlds into a buggy mess). This difference between Command & Conquer and Bioshock is huge, and you can only find commonalities in the individual disciplines like graphics, UI design, or programming, and in high-level psychological and narrative principles of pacing and world-building.

Lessons in game design implicitly tell you how games should be. General statements about “game design” are bound to alienate some people. Artists who make short interactive pieces that are both experimental and personal at the same time, like Tale of Tales, Robert Yang or Anna Anthropy, are most susceptible to this particularly easy to disparage by accident if you don’t choose your words very carefully.

Lastly, it looks like the long development of Escape The Omnochronom, with many iterations on the game design and player feedback in early access, has informed his new approach to game design - just like Auro was the game that embodied the Clockwork Game Design theories. This quick look back on the development of ETO is interesting and sobering: https://keithburgun.net/escaping-the-omnochronom-and-moonshot-game-design/.

Wasted Design?

From a commercial point of view, it looks like a lot of the game design effort on ETO has been mis-spent: More than about interesting decisions and carefully balanced gameplay, players on Steam seem to want tons of content, random loot, and an epic, tragic backstory.

Most indie developers probably wouldn’t have completely scrapped all four prototypes, but released some of them as stand-alone games or as prototypes - either on itch, on Newgrounds, or a on mobile app store. One iteration of the concept - then called “Push The Lane!” - looked and felt more like a puzzle game, and might have been developed into a somewhat successful puzzle game on a mobile app store.

I might be wrong about this. There are many old, failed prototypes of mine that just didn’t work. True artists hate to see their practice pieces, and I don’t want to polish my all of old failed ideas that didn’t work until I can release them. I know why they don’t work. I’d rather try to make the ones that already work better. I’d rather start from scratch than working on a game idea when I know that it won’t work and why.

If you’re looking at somebody else’s failed prototype, you may think it warrants further exploration, or that it can ba salvaged, when the dev has already tried most of your suggested easy fixes and found that they don’t quite work. Ideas and game mechanics that work well in a short game, interesting based on their novelty alone, often cannot sustain a long-form game on their own - and that’s where game design as a discipline comes in.

If you’re just starting out, I can only urge you to fail faster, within days or weeks rather than years. Get feedback from players and other developers! See what works and cut your losses early! Don’t try to make a failed design work if you can use a better one! Try to start with a small game that works!

But if your goal is to make a long-form game, maybe the jump from a small jam game to a larger one is not just quantitative, but qualitative. You can’t just keep adding more stuff to Flappy Bird and hope it becomes Half-Life somewhere along the way.

Maybe the commercial bottleneck is not game design, but market research. The cool kids are all playing Fortnite now. By the time you finish developing your Fortnite clone, the cool kids will probably have moved on the the Next Big Thing. (I wrote this before the current wave of Auto Chess games. The next big thing only took half a year.)

Who needs Game Design anyway?

So Good Game Design(tm) seems to be only relevant once people have started playing the game. According to conventional game marketing wisdom, iterating on a part of your design can be all for nothing if you realise late in the cycle that the core loop has to be re-worked, and you need to create new content for the new mechanics.

According to conventional game marketing wisdom, a mechanically bland action platformer with good graphics can sell better than a well-designed strategy game with abstract black-and-white graphics.

An accessible multiplayer game can outlast a well-balanced multiplayer strategy game: You need your player base to grow beyond the critical mass to sustain online matchmaking and a competitive scene in the first place.

A game idea that is a great fit for a mobile game, small prototype, demo, or coffee-break browser game cannot always be turned into a long-form game. Many long-form games are impossible to distil down into a five-minute slice.

All that doesn’t mean that there is no market for good game design. There is certainly a market for well-made games, for good design in games, and for carefully designed games. These are not the same as game design though, if you go by the ideas from Burgun’s podcast. Game design is more fundamental, more about mechanics and interactive feedback loops, not about visual design, game feel or intuitive user interfaces.

The bigger your game gets, the more urgent a concern the actual game design becomes. If you’re aiming for a big commerical release, you need to make a long-form game. If you’re making a long-form game, you need better game design than you can get away with in a shorter one. When you start with a small core and add content and features, game design can sneak up on you, and you may end up with No Man’s Sky or Anthem.

My Funnel Model

First Impression: The first thing a player sees of your game is probably a pithy description of the game, and then screenshot, maybe a short video. What gets him interested in installing is a novel, clever premise (like ”puzzle MOBA” or “you play a crazy cat lady”), and your promotional screenshots.

When your potential new player looks for reviews of the game, only opinions, sound-bites and screenshots will reach him, because good game design cannot be easily captured in words and pictures. If the game design is hard to explain or doesn’t translate well to trailers or screenshots, you already have a problem. Labels like “fantasy“, “noir“, “battle royale“ or unique visual aesthetics can give you a way in, or they can turn players off.

Accessibility: This does not mean accessibility to people with disabilities in particular (which is ”Barrierefreiheit” in my native German, the freedom from barriers which exclude certain groups of people), although that kind of accessibility is also important. Accessibility in general means how easy it is to get into the game, in a similar way to how certain books can be very inaccessible by starting off with weird jargon you need to get used to, or fifty pages of dry exposition before the plot gets started.

Tetris gets difficult quickly, but stays accessible, whereas Dear Esther is impossible to fail, but quite dense and inaccessible in its own way. Whenever possible, it makes sense to introduce complexity and difficulty only gradually.

Innovation: Next you have to compete with all the other games in the user’s game library. If the novelty of the elevator pitch doesn’t translate into innovative gameplay, your player might just go back to playing Minecraft, Fortnite, or Hearthstone again. If the game is not accessible and engaging early on, then the player might quit early and not even get to the novel or innovative part. The innovative part must be accessible in itself, without feeling forced or tacked on, and it must feel natural to use it.

Some AAA games try to solve this by early on giving the player “a taste” of what’s to come, for example by giving all the spells in the magic system to the player during a flashback sequence in the first level. Then they take away the innovative game mechanics and proceed with a bunch of boring third-person action adventure RPG shooter things for half the game. 

Core Gameplay Loop: This is where the good game design comes in. This is also the part that makes your players recommend the game to their friends.

In addition to good game design, adjacent qualities like responsive control design/game feel, clear visual feedback, legible game state, and quality-of-life features also become relevant when the player goes through the core loop a couple of times. Even when the controls and mechanics of your game are easy to learn, they can still be boring, tedious, or distracting.

Earlier this year, a game with an interesting premise, cool visual aesthetic, and some innovative mechanics on top of the classic JRPG formula was released on the Nintendo Switch. Unfortunately, neither the mechanics of combat nor the NPC dialogue were very engaging, or fun. The game got a lot of attention, but that attention culminated in mixed to bad reviews.

Getting the steps up to here right will give your game more eyeballs, and will get people to try it or even write about it. Getting the core gameplay loop right will make people enjoy and play your game more after that.

Scope: The more content there is - that can be quests, levels, guns, monsters, puzzles - the longer you can keep the core loop going. The amount of meaningfully “new” content you can put into your game is limited by the game design though. Just adding “two billions of guns“ won’t cut it if the gameplay difference between different pieces of content is not meaningful. The value of additional content also depends on the game design. Some games get more value out of their content. Mario Kart 8 for the Nintendo Switch has ten pre-arranged tournaments with for racetracks each. That doesn’t look like a lot of content, but the game gets a large amount of replay value out of them.

Sometimes the scope of a game is limited by the design and the core loop. Some puzzle game mechanics have only a handful of interesting puzzles in them, and are more appropriate for a one-off puzzle set piece in a larger action game than for a dedicated puzzle game.

Some game genres, like point-and-click adventures, are mainly constrained by the scope of the content, and a piece of content can only be used once. Puzzle- and strategy games can often squeeze a lot of value out of content by re-using the same units and mechanics in a new context or a different combination. RPGs are somewhere in-between, by re-using monsters, dungeon architecture, loot, and crafting elements, while quests, NPCs and villages must be uniquely crafted.

“Elegant” game design is not only good for its own sake, it also allows you to add more stuff into your game in a cost-effective way.

There is a flip side to this: Prototypes, jam games, mostly story-driven games, and demos don’t really need good game design at all. One can build a small game prototype based on novelty alone, without a way to expand the scope, maybe even without an engaging core gameplay loop. The core gameplay loops two or three times and then the game just ends.

If you want to make a long-form game, you have to think from the beginning about scope and longevity.

Grand unified theories of game design(tm) become more applicable the larger the scope of your game is. In a small game, individual aspects like game feel, visual design, music, “funny/edgy” dialogue or characters, and novel mechanics outweigh balance, level design, world-building, and well-written characters.

Depth: I am using “depth” somewhat loosely and colloquially: Depth is what keeps players coming back, and talking to each other. That can be endgame content, high-level competitive play, lore, or a modding/mapmaking scene. Depth can be speedrunning, or finding new, clever solutions to puzzles. Depth is finding new meaning in content you already know or played.

After I beat Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, or after Waking Mars, I uninstalled the game and moved on. Nothing is making me come back to Mark of The Ninja, Dear Esther or Thomas Was Alone. I don’t think I will ever want to revisit Torchlight, the first or the sequel. I enjoyed each of these games - or in the case of Dear Esther at least I appreciated it, on a detached, intellectual level. I played Nuclear Throne until I had beaten the game, unlocked every character, seen every gun, and gone to most of the secret stages. Then I quit playing. I have no interest in looping.

I played a lot of StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty. I played custom matches with my friends, I played on the ladder, I looked up strategy tips on TeamLiquid, I watched live streams of competitive games, and then I watched Day[9] analyse competitive games in-depth.

Back when I was a child, I played lots of multi-player games of WarCraft 3 and Worms: Armageddon. It never got stale for me. I played some multiplayer matches of Swords & Soldiers, but there is not a lot of variety, and it got stale rather quickly.

I know this evaluation of games and my concept of “depth” are both rather subjective. In content-heavy games, this kind of “depth“ can be hidden content, endgame content, side quests, and lore. In mechanics-focused games, depth and longevity are facilitated by game design(tm).

The recipe for popularity?

The funnel goes like this: First Impression > Accessibility > Innovation > Core Loop > Scope > Depth. At every stage, you lose some players, or potential players. If a potential player doesn’t hear about your game, that’s it. If a player looks at a let’s play or a review, and doesn’t understand what the game is about, that’s it. If your game is reviewed by a professional site, you can expect that they play through the main content. The longer players stay with your game, the more relevant game design(tm) will become.

Depth is beyond the scope of a review, but it will make people stick with your game for longer, and can make players show or recommend it to friends.

Depth and scope will make people stick with your game for longer, and make your game show up in Steam and Discord friend lists.

An engaging core loop will lead to good reviews and probably also good user scores.

Unfortunately, good game design is usually not the limiting factor, because we live in a word where we are bombarded with new game releases every day, and we have to decide which ones to buy, which free ones to download and play, or even which reviews to read, because there are just so many games that the limiting factor is time and getting attention in the first place, not how good - or “fun”, or “engaging” - the game actually is.

AAA studios already have our attention, or at least the attention of big gaming news sites, so they can compete for making the game with the best shooting or the biggest open world. AAA studios have an easier time getting a consistent player base for online matchmaking. In contrast to this, indies have to compete for attention in the first place.

However, once you have the attention of players and reviewers, you still have to convince them that your game is any good.

[markleetrashh]

Makeup Voiceover;Taeyong

Request: I literally have your tumblr on my internet tab all the time, never closing it once :'' i love your work!! Can i request a make up voice over by taeyong? I think it'd be funny considering how he's always the manlyman lol THANKKKS

A/N: i actually feel like he'd be super sweet & soft while doing this so sorry if it wasn't what you expected!!

i've only recently just got back to writing so i hope this isnt too bad

and i think it's been long too since i wrote for taeyong?

but i hope this is good enough and it works!!

also

im running out of makeup brands to write google isnt helping anymore help this clueless makeup girl out

let's go

so taeyong's always been fascinated by your skills and makeup

he'd straight up just stare at you with his mouth open as you do your makeup

kid taeyong would appear and clap his hands together whenever you finish

"woah so pretty my baby"

and your fans have noticed that he's always in the background of your makeup tutorials giving a thumbs up or nodding his head

such a supportive boyfriend

so they'd always comment and ask yall to do the makeup voiceover challenge

which taeyong hesitated at first

mainly because he was shy

but finally agreed because you flashed him your cutest pout that made him s o f t

while you're filming the video he's upset because he doesn't get to see you do it this time

"BABE you'll see it later stop pouting"

"but, it's different"

"it's the same taeyong omg"

"tsk alright alright"

when you finish taeyong barges into the room with a straight expression on his face but does the weirdest dance ever??

yeap the one you're thinking of and the one he always does

and luckily you caught it on camera, which made him more embarrassed

so before recording he gets all nervous and talkative like

"omg babe what if i screw up"

"okay im a strong man i can do this"

"taeyong.... it's only a recording..."

"i know, i'm not nervous at all"

and you just shake your head because you're super used to him

"hello everyone!! it's taeyong here today to do a voiceover for Y/N's makeup!"

"i hope you all would like this video and continue supporting my babe"

"aww just look at her in this headband, so cute"

"barefaced Y/N, my favourite!!"

"oo she's doing her foundation?"

"the one she always uses! the one from innisfree"

"i feel like this shade suits her very well, what do you guys think?"

"she's using her favourite pink egg to blend it out"

"all smooth now!"

"she's taking out a stick.. pen? oh it's an eyeliner"

"babe you showed it too fast and the word's so small i couldn't see the name"

"she's drawing her eyelids now, look at those skills!!"

"every single time i watch her do her makeup and i'm still amazed by how she manages to draw the line so smoothly woah"

"the other eye..."

"oh they're symmetrical, great job"

"let me guess what's next, eyeshadow!!"

"yes i'm right"

"it's because you've seen me do my makeup so many times"

"your boyfriend's an expert shh"

"oh it's the uh.. L-Laura Mercier??? brand"

"so hard to pronounce woah"

"but she's taking her brush and applying this... uhm.. slightly blue colour!"

"make sure to smooth them out"

"moving on to the other eye"

"and.... she's done!"

"doesnt she look brighter now?"

"oh? she taking out a small box"

"what's that i've never seen that box before"

"oh! it's fake lashes"

"you've never worn them before, why so sudden?"

"got to always try out new things!!"

"woah she's applying this liquid thing on it-"

"WAIT IS THAT GLUE- BABE WHAT IF THEY NEVER COME OUT AGAIN"

"IT'S EYELASH GLUE DONT WORRY"

"OH oh... sorry for that outburst everyone"

"but she done sticking on her eye and woah, so beautiful"

"just look at those gorgeous eyes and lashes"

"oh she's moving on again"

"to.. her cheeks!"

"cutie"

"first of all, blush!!"

"makes her cuter than she already is but"

"she's using the one from nars"

"looks slightly pink"

"aw just look at those rosy cheeks!!"

"woah"

"her favourite next- highlight"

"she covered the name- i can't see it omg babe"

"but uh.. just look at how shiny that is"

"cheeks... forehead... nose... and jaw..."

"my girlfriend's glowing!!!"

"i think this is the last step but lipstick!"

"she just bought one yesterday from moonshot- oh she's using it"

"it's dark red shade"

"pouty lips aw!!"

"and my baby's done with her look!!"

"doesnt she look amazing?"

"what did i do to deserve her"

"woah- wait- I FORGOT ABOUT THE ENDING im sorry you all have seen this side of me"

"but anyways, thank you for taking the time to listen to my voice and for loving Y/N!!"

"continue to send more love and i'll be grateful hehe subscribe and comment!"

[irphanfic]

Moonshot - Chapter 5

Hey! So this has been a very busy week for me but I hope you like the new update! I have been writing like crazy this two days and I think you will enjoy it.

Anyways, any type of feedback/comment is welcome!

summary: Phil had a feeling that this Friday was going to be different.

That didn’t mean he was ready to meet his favourite baseball player, Daniel Howell, while he was cleaning the windows of a building.

or the au in which Phil is a shy window cleaner and Dan is a famous baseball player. This is their story.

words: 3.1k

trigger warnings: panic attacks

Read on ao3 - (x)

Chapter 1 // Chapter 2 // Chapter 3 // Chapter 4

Chapter 5: Texts And Cafés

Two weeks. They had been texting each other for two full weeks non stop and Dan had never felt so attached to any person this way. Not even his team mates or even his own family.

Phil was such an easy person to talk to. He didn't know why, but both could talk for hours and not get tired of it. Maybe because he had never had this kind of strange connection and compatibility with someone before.

Even when Phil texted some random animal fact at 3pm on a Thursday or sent him a weird internet meme that he had seen on Twitter, Dan couldn't be happier. Even his team mates had noticed he was feeling more cheerful, and by the few hints he had told them, they could guess it had to do something with a crush.

A smile creeped into his face as he recalled the first time he had heard Phil's northen voice through the speaker. It had totally been an accident, as Phil explained later in their call, but somehow he had managed to dial Dan by sitting unintentionally on his phone, a fact that keep them both laughing for almost twenty minutes.

He didn't waste time complimenting Phil's accent after their laughs died down just to hear a light chuckle from the other line that, even though Dan couldn't see, he was sure Phil had blushed and smiled shyly at the same time.

How he missed that smile and those eyes... Just having conversations with the blue eyed wasn't enough for Dan. He wanted to talk to him face-to-face, stare at his expressions as he told him childhood stories he had been wanting to hear.

He needed to see Phil. And soon.

But what if Phil didn't want to meet him in person because of his fame? Maybe he was scared of the media or even Dan... What if he dissapointed Phil or bothered him by his presence?

''Howell! Stop daydreaming! It's your turn now!'' His coach's voice startled him from his thoughts, looking apologetically at him and walking embarrassedly to the field.

Dan tried to concentrate, but thoughts of Phil kept coming at the same speed of the balls that were being thrown at him. He tried to get all the battings and throws right, but it was not working. He was missing almost every single one and coach kept shouting at him, which was not helping at all on his effort to be focused. He could feel his team mates gaze on him, as if they were judging him for not being professional enough.

His breath started to quicken, short and shaky puffs of air were making his body tremble badly. Dan could feel it, his throat was closing and wanted to scream for help but no sound was coming out... Was he having a panic attack ? He hadn't had one in years and it was happening to him now in the middle of practice? It was a nightmare. He wanted to get out of here as fast, but his feet nor legs were responding.

His baseball bat fell down on the sandy area, hitting his toes in the process but he couldn't even feel the pain. ''No, no, no, c'mon, calm down'' he whispered to himself in a quivering voice, but it did nothing. Also, hearing the murmurs of his team mates wasn't helping either...

Suddenly a voice was softly calling him. Dan recognized it, even though it wasn't really clear he knew it belonged to Eric, who was in front of him, holding him by the shoulders, ''Hey, Dan, I'll take you to the lockers, okay?''

Dan just nodded and tried to focus on what Eric was telling coach, but his gaze and ears were not cooperating, making him hear and see all blurry.

He could feel Eric's hand on his bicep, dragging him out of the field, reaching the locker room and sitting him down on one of the benches, handing him a paper bag he had somehow found around there so Dan could even his breathing that was already coming down to normal.

''Better?'' Eric asked him once he had managed to calm down, sitting down on the same bench but keeping a safe distance between both.

''Yeah... '' Dan coughed a bit, sipping a bit of water from a bottle his team mate handed him, instantly feeling the coolness down his throat, feeling a bit better, ''thank you for taking me here, I... I... I don't know what happened, really. But, thank you.''

They both knew it was a lie, but Dan didn't have enough energy to explain. He wanted to go home and curl up on his sheets for at least three days...

''Don't worry, I understand.'' Eric stood up, offereing him a small smile with sympathy before walking to his locker and picking up his things, ''c'mon, I told coach I would take you home for today, you are in no state to continue. You need time to relax, not think much''

Dan slowly moved his head up and down even though Eric couldn't see him, but also stood up to pick up his things.

Eric was right, he just needed to relax and not think. Could he do that?

_______________

Once Dan reached his flat he dove himself on his wide bed, face first on the pillows and slowly drifted off to sleep, trying to regain the energy he had consumed.

He woke up a few hours later, disoriented, rolling around a few times on his sheets before getting out of bed and having a quick shower, changing into his comfy pyjamas and grabbing something to eat, feeling a bit better already.

Dan walked back to his bedroom, picking up his phone from his discarded bag at the feet of his bed and lying back on his duvet, staring at the ceiling for a few minutes distractedly, just staring at nothing.

Only the vibration of his phone shook him from his blank thoughts, a text notification from Phil coming in, a small smile already showing on his face.

He lifted his phone up so he could read the text, putting the gadget in a risky place since it could fall on his face anytime, but Dan quickly forgot about that fact, opening the long conversation thread he already had formed with Phil.

'Did you know that a koala pregnancy only lasts 35 days and when the joey is born it's blind, hairless and is about 2 cm long?'

That silly fact about the cuddly marsupials was enough for Dan to have a grin on his face. Phil was for sure the only person who knew so many random facts.

'wow. Now I wonder what a hairless koala looks like' Dan answered, already knowing that Phil had gone on a quick quest to Google Images to show him.

'It's so weird, omg. It looks cute, but weird anyway.' was Phil's next text, a photo of a small koala folded in some blankets but no hair around.

Dan chuckled, it was strange for sure. Follwing the topic of pictures, it had been a while since Phil had sent him fluffy puppy pictures, he could have some sweet dog pics after the day he had had.

'I miss your dog pictures :(' Dan typed, but before he could send it he felt a sneeze coming through and before he could stop it, his phone had slipped from his hand and landed on his face, hitting his nose hard, not being able to catch it on time.

''Ouch! It hurts!'' Dan said loudly, gently touching his nose with his fingers and checking it hadn't been that bad. It wasn't bleeding so it was a good sign.

Dan put some pillows against his headboard and sat straight, not risking anymore having his phone up by his face. By the way, where was his phone?

He spotted it screen down by his left, picking it up and re-reading what he had sent, expecting to find a dog photo as a response.

''No. No, no, no,'' Dan repeated, lifting his messy curls from his forehead as a nervous gesture, ''this cannot be happening.''

In the middle of all the sneezing he had manage to erase half of his message when the phone slipped from his hands, and instead of a 'I miss your dog pictures :(' he had managed to send a contextless 'I miss you'.

Dan couldn't believe it. He was going to scare Phil for sure... Even though he really missed him he hadn't planned to send him this kind of message anytime soon!

He was going to type another text, explaining what had really happened when a new message from Phil popped up.

'I miss you too. It has been a while since we have seen each other'

'What!? He missed him too!?' Dan jumped at the message, seriously freaking out. He didn't expect that text from Phil, not at all. He couldn't have guessed in a million years that Phil was also missing him. He wasn't used to people missing him, wanting to see him.

Dan smiled softly at that. They missed each other and even though it had been on accident, he was glad they had both managed to confess something they wouldn't had admited.

Once Dan had somehow calmed down, he was ready to text back. Should he ask Phil to meet him in person? Was he ready after all that happened at practice? He had to deal with it sometime and even if he liked it or not, Dan had to face Phil in person sometime, and if Phil was disappointed that's something he would have to accept.

'Wanna meet sometime this week?' Dan left his phone fast as soon as it delivered, as if it burned and was afraid to know Phil's response, which came through a few seconds later.

'If you want to, sure! I have the perfect place. Are you free on Saturday?'

_______________

Saturday arrived and Phil was waiting for Dan the cozy vintage-y café that he found once while strolling mindlessly one cold November day, nursing a capuccino as he wrote the next lines of a horror story he had been wanting to put into paper. Phil had had this place in mind when Dan messaged him about meeting each other. The delicious warm drinks mixed with the homely and private maroon coloured booths were really a win-win.

He was kind of surprised when Dan told him he missed him, but Phil didn't question it. He didn't felt brave enough to admit it and when he saw the message he saw the perfect opportunity to express his feelings.

Phil was a bit nervous, he had to admit. He was really meeting Daniel Howell for real now, but tehy had been talking for so long that it felt they had been long lost friends by now, but that didn't erase the fact that Dna was a famous baseball player... 'It is just Dan. The one that loves Mario Kart and anime the same amount as you Dan.' Phil thought, but it wasn't really helping.

Shaking that though out of his head Phil looked at his phone to check the time and saw it was a few minutes past five, meaning Dan should be here soon.

After grabbing another sip of his coffee, the blue eyed began writing again, slowly developing the story he had in mind, getting so lost in the words that he didn't even manage to notice the shadow that appeared next to him till he heard a cough followed by a shaky voice?

''Excuse me, is this seat taken?''

Phil looked up at the voice and noticed a nervous smiley Dan looking at him as he put down his cup of coffee on the table, looking as if he wanted to hug him next but didn't know how to do so, opting to fidget with his fingers, trying to restrain himself from reaching out.

'Why does he seem so nervous? It's me who should be, not him. I'm just Phil!' was all the blue eyed thought, not really understanding why, but before he could think more about it his excitement won the battle against his worries and stood up from the booth, exclaiming a cheerful ''Dan! You are here!'' not too loudly so it wouldn't attract attention.

''Hi Phil,'' Dan greeted him properly, looking directly into his eyes ''I... I'm glad you agreed to meet me.''

''Of course, why wouldn't I?'' Phil questioned, cocking his head to the side a bit, ''I'm glad you agreed to meet me of all!''

Dan averted his gaze to his feet, shrugging his shoulders as if also hesitating to tell Phil what was the reason why he had said that. ''I don't know. Because I thought maybe you would feel pressured because of my fame or something...'' he muttered, his voice almost quiet but continued, ''I mean, I'm not that famous, but still, even though we have been talking a lot you might have another image of me that the media portrayed, so yeah, I might be disappointing... '' Dan rambled, finishing with a sigh.

''Oh,'' Phil let out, surprised. Dan though he might be bothered by his celebrity status, but no, Phil wouldn't believe anything he read or see on the tabloids. He had a pretty idolized image of Dan before he meet him, per se, but after all they had talked he couldn't even think about the possibility of not wanting to see him because of it. Dan was even more nice than he could have ever imagined, it would never let Phil down.

That's when he realized Dan might be more insecure than he let on. He was a person, he had emotions like everyone else, and Phil believes sometimes they didn't even care about Dan's feelings just because he was famous.

''Dan,'' Phil called him, waiting for the warm brown eyes to meet his, ''You could never disappoint me, not after meeting you for real.''

With that, Phil opened his arms, giving Dan the chance to back down if he didn't want a hug, but by the smile that appeared on Dan's face, he had made the right choice.

Both hugged for a few minutes, their chins resting on the other's shoulder, and Phil felt how Dan squeezed a bit, trying to bring him closer...

They separated, mirroring smiles on their faces as they sat down on the comfy booth, sides touching but looking at each other attentively as they started talking about mindless things, catching up on what they hadn't been able to text.

For hours, light hand touches and caresses where traded, just as pink cheeks and toothy grins.

Phil found out that afternoon that saying goodbye was hard, even if you knew you were going to see that person again.

_______________

''Phil, do you have any snacks left?'' Martyn asked from the doorway of Phil's lounge room, not getting much of a response since Phil was lying down on the couch, crazily texting someone on his phone, a dumb smile on his face.

''Phil, are you even listening to me?'' Martyn repeated, getting just silence as a response.

''Phil! Your ceiling is falling down!'' this time Martyn screamed, finally getting a reaction from Phil, who left his phone rapidly on the sofa and sat straight up.

''What!? What is falling down!?'' the younger Lester screamed back, sobering up as he saw Martyn laugh. ''It's not funny!'' Phil threw his brother a cushion, hitting him on the chest before he let him sit down next to him.

''You weren't listening and I had to catch your attention somehow! Your face, oh my God'' Martyn tried to calm down a bit, ''By the way, who were you texting that had you smiling down at your phone like that, uh?'' he elbowed Phil on the ribs, who squirmed a bit trying to get away from his brother.

Phil blushed a bit and denied messaging someone, but his brother didn't buy it and kept insisting, finally making Phil give up, ''I was texting Dan, okay? Stop it!''

''Wait,'' Martyn sobered up instantly, ''Dan as in Dan Howell? You have his phone number and text each other? Why didn't I know about this again!''

Phil shrugged, ''It never came up, I guess.''

''Still, is there anything else you haven't told me related to Dan?''

''Well... We talked, finally meet in person, had coffee and keep talking, that's all.'' Phil said as if it wasn't a big deal. He left out the fact that they hugged, he believed Martyn couldn't handle tat much info.

''You meet!? Are you telling me you meet in person!?'' his brother's offended tone made Phil chuckle. He really needed to speak to Martyn more.

Phil decided to tell him everything, from how they started texting till how they promised to see each other next week that Saturday at the café.

''I just... When we said goodbye, it totally felt like something more than two friend meeting, you know?'' Phil said, not really knowing how to explain.

''Like a date?'' Martyn's smile could be heard in his voice, not teasing, just happy that Phil was getting somewhere with Dan. Or at least, hoping too.

Phil nooded, ''Yeah, I mean, I knew it wasn't but, it still felt like one.'' A date. A date with Dan Howell. That would be a dream for him.

Martyn also nooded, acknowledging that same feeling he had had first with Cornelia a few years back.

''Ask him.''

''What!? I'm not gonna ask Dan freaking Howell on a date, are you out of your mind!?'' Phil said, completly rejecting the idea.

Martyn just stared at him, wanting Phil to think about the idea again.

''No. No, no, no, I'm not going to do it. I refuse.'' Phil said, shaking his head repeatedly. Just about he stopped denying, he saw the mischevious face his brother had on. ''What are yo...'' but before he could even finish, Martyn picked up his phone that had been lying between both all this time, rapidly typing something as he ran towards the front door, Phil by his heels, shouting and trying to grab his phone from his brother's hands.

''Thank me later brother'' was all Martyn said to Phil before he left the flat, tossing the phone back to his owners hands and closing the door right by Phil's nose.

Phil leaned against the wooden door and read what Martyn had sent to Dan.

'Wanna go on a date with me?'

Phil was going to kill Martyn next time. He was sure of it.

Chapter 6

[newsjerk]

How Google Book Search Got Lost

Google Books was the company’s first moonshot. But 15 years later, the project is stuck in low-Earth orbit.

Books can do anything. As Franz Kafka once said, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”

It was Kafka, wasn’t it? Google confirms this. But where did he say it? Google offers links to some quotation websites, but they’re generally unreliable. (They misattribute everything, usually to Mark Twain.)

To answer such questions, you need Google Book Search, the tool that magically scours the texts of millions of digitized volumes. Just find the little “more” tab at the top of the Google results page — it’s right past Images, Videos, and News. Then click on it, find “Books,” and click on that. (That’s if you’re at your desk. On mobile, good luck locating it anywhere.)Google Book Search is amazing that way. When it started almost 15 years ago, it also seemed impossibly ambitious: An upstart tech company that had just tamed and organized the vast informational jungle of the web would now extend the reach of its search box into the offline world. By scanning millions of printed books from the libraries with which it partnered, it would import the entire body of pre-internet writing into its database.“You have thousands of years of human knowledge, and probably the highest-quality knowledge is captured in books,” Google cofounder Sergey Brin told The New Yorker at the time. “So not having that — it’s just too big an omission.”Today, Google is known for its moonshot culture, its willingness to take on gigantic challenges at global scale. Books was, by general agreement of veteran Googlers, the company’s first lunar mission. Scan All The Books!In its youth, Google Books inspired the world with a vision of a “library of utopia” that would extend online convenience to offline wisdom. At the time it seemed like a singularity for the written word: We’d upload all those pages into the ether, and they would somehow produce a phase-shift in human awareness. Instead, Google Books has settled into a quiet middle age of sourcing quotes and serving up snippets of text from the 25 million-plus tomes in its database.Google employees maintain that’s all they ever intended to achieve. Maybe so. But they sure got everyone else’s hopes up.Two things happened to Google Books on the way from moonshot vision to mundane reality. Soon after launch, it quickly fell from the idealistic ether into a legal bog, as authors fought Google’s right to index copyrighted works and publishers maneuvered to protect their industry from being Napsterized. A decade-long legal battle followed — one that finally ended last year, when the US Supreme Court turned down an appeal by the Authors Guild and definitively lifted the legal cloud that had so long hovered over Google’s book-related ambitions.But in that time, another change had come over Google Books, one that’s not all that unusual for institutions and people who get caught up in decade-long legal battles: It lost its drive and ambition.When I started work on this story, I feared at first that Books no longer existed as a discrete part of the Google organization — that Google had actually shut the project down. As with many aspects of Google, there’s always been some secrecy around Google Books, but this time, when I started asking questions, it closed up like a startled turtle. For weeks there didn’t seem to be anyone around or available who could or would speak to the current state of the Books effort.The Google Books “History” page trails off in 2007, and its blog stopped updating in 2012, after which it got folded into the main Google Search blog, where information about Books is nearly impossible to find. As a functioning and useful service, Google Books remained a going concern. But as a living project, with plans and announcements and institutional visibility, it seemed to have pulled a vanishing act. All of which felt weird, given the legal victory it had finally won.When I talked to alumni of the project who’d left Google, several mentioned that they suspected the company had stopped scanning books. Eventually, I learned that there are, indeed, still some Googlers working on Book Search, and they’re still adding new books, though at a significantly slower pacethan at the project’s peak around 2010–11.“We’re not focused on shiny features and things that are very visible to users,” says Stephane Jaskiewicz, a Google engineer who has worked on Books for a decade and now leads its team. “It’s more like behind the scenes work and perfecting the technology — acquiring content, processing it properly so that we can view the entire book online, and adjusting the search algorithm.”One focus of work has been a constant throughout Google Books’ life: improving the scanners that add new books to the “corpus,” as the database is known. At the birth of the project, in 2002, as Larry Page and Marissa Mayer set out to gauge how long it might take to Scan All The Books, they set up a digital camera on a stand and timed themselves with a metronome. Once the company got serious about ramping its scanning up to efficient scale, it started jealously guarding details of the operation.Jaskiewicz does say that the scanning stations keep evolving, with new revisions rolling out every six months. LED lighting, not widely available at the project’s start, has helped. So has studying more efficient techniques for human operators to flip pages. “It’s almost like finger-picking on a guitar,” Jaskiewicz says. “So we find people who have great ways of turning pages — where is the thumb and that kind of stuff.”Still, the bulk of the work at Google Books continues to be on “search quality” — making sure that you find the Kafka passage you need, fast. It’s an unglamorous game of inches — less moonshot and more, say, satellite maintenance.

To understand how Google Books arrived at this point, you need to know a few things about copyright law, which essentially divides books into three classes. Some books are in the public domain, which means you can do what you want with their texts — mostly, those published before 1923, as well as more recent books whose authors chose to release them from standard copyright. Plenty of more recent books are still in print and under copyright; if you want to do anything with these texts, you have to come to terms with their authors and publishers.

Then there’s the third category: books that are out of print but still under copyright, known informally as “orphan works.” It turns out there are a whole lot of these — “between 17 percent and 25 percent of published works and as much as 70 percent of specialized collections,” a study by the US Copyright Office suggests.

How many books is that? No one knows for sure because no one can say with any certainty exactly how many total books there are. The statistic depends on how you define “book,” which isn’t as easy as it sounds. In 2010 a Google engineer named Leonid Taycher wrote a blog post that examined Google Books’ metadata and concluded that the number (then) was about 130 million. Others looked at this work and called it “bunk.” The actual number is probably somewhat lower than Taycher’s figure yet considerably higher than Google Books’ current 25 million-plus.

Some large chunk of that large number, then, are “orphan works.” And until recently, they weren’t much of an issue. You could borrow them from a library or find them in a used bookstore, and that was that. But once Google Books proposed to scan them all and make them available to the internet, everyone seemed to want a piece of them.

The legal battle that ensued was, essentially, a custody fight over these orphans, in which Google, publishers, and authors each sought to control the process of ushering them into a new home for the digital age. The three parties eventually agreed on a grand compromise known as the Google Books Settlement, under which Google would go ahead and make the orphan works available in their entirety and set aside money to compensate rights holders who stepped forward. But in 2011, a federal judge rejected the settlement, ruling in favor of advocates who feared it would forever ensconce a private for-profit company as the registrar and toll collector of the universe’s library.

Once the settlement collapsed, Google went back to its scanning, and publishers pursued the burgeoning business of selling e-books, which had leapfrogged Google’s lead in the future-of-books race due to the success of Amazon’s Kindle. But the Authors Guild continued to press its lawsuit, charging that Google’s arrogation of the right to scan and index books without the permission of copyright holders was illegal. Google is wealthy, but not so wealthy that it could ignore the threat of multi-billion dollar copyright infringement penalties (thousands of dollars per book for millions of books). This was the proceeding that dragged on until the Supreme Court put it out of its misery last year — establishing once and for all that Google had a fair-use right to catalogue books and provide brief excerpts (“snippets”) in search results, just as it did with web pages.

That ruling represents a foundational achievement for the future of online research—Google’s and everyone else’s. “It’s now established precedent — everyone benefits,” says Erin Simon, Google Books’ product counsel today. “This is going to be in textbooks. It’s supremely important for understanding what fair use means.” (Simon also notes with a chuckle that when the suit was originally filed, she hadn’t yet started law school.)

The Authors Guild may have lost in court, but it believes the fight was worth it. Google “did it wrong from the beginning,” says James Gleick, president of the Guild’s board. “They plowed ahead without involving the creative community on whose backs they were building this new thing. The big companies have a droit du seigneur attitude toward creative work. They think, ‘We are the masters of the universe now.’ They should have just licensed the books instead.”

You’d think a Supreme Court victory would have meant a renewal of energy for Google Books: Rev up the scanners — full speed ahead! By all the evidence, that has not been the case. Partly that’s because the database is so huge already. “We have a fixed budget that we’re spending,” says Jaskiewicz. “At the beginning, we were scanning everything on every shelf. At some point we started getting a lot of duplicates.” Today Google gives its partner libraries “pick lists” instead.

There are plenty of other explanations for the dampening of Google’s ardor: The bad taste left from the lawsuits. The rise of shiny and exciting new ventures with more immediate payoffs. And also: the dawning realization that Scanning All The Books, however useful, might not change the world in any fundamental way.

To many bibliophiles, Google’s self-appointment as universal librarian never made sense: That role properly belonged to some public institution. Once Google popularized the notion that Scanning All The Books was a feasible undertaking, others lined up to tackle it. Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive, which stores historical snapshots of the whole web, already had its own scanning operation. The Digital Public Library of America grew out of meetings at Harvard’s Berkman Center beginning in 2010 and now serves as a clearinghouse and consortium for the digital collections of many libraries and institutions.

When Google partnered with university libraries to scan their collections, it had agreed to give them each a copy of the scanning data, and in 2011 the HathiTrust began organizing and sharing those files. (It had to fend off the Authors Guild in court, too.) HathiTrust has 125 member organizations and institutions who “believe that we can better steward research and cultural heritage by working together than alone or by leaving it to an organization like Google,” says Mike Furlough, the trust’s director. And of course there’s the Library of Congress itself, whose new leader, Carla Hayden, has committed to opening up public access to its collections through digitization.

In a sense each of these outfits is a competitor to Google Books. But in reality, Google is so far ahead that none of them is likely to catch up. The consensus among observers is that it cost Google several hundred million dollars to build Google Books, and nobody else is going to spend that kind of money to perform the feat a second time.

Still, the nonprofits have a strength Google lacks: They’re not subject to the changing priorities of a gigantic technology corporation. They have a focused commitment around books, unencumbered by distractions like running one of the largest advertising businesses in the world or managing a smartphone ecosystem. Unlike Google, they’re not going to lose interest in seeking new ways to connect readers with books that might, a la Kafka, melt a frozen mind.

In popular mythology, interminable lawsuits turn into hungry maelstroms that drown the participants. (The archetype is Dickens’ Jarndyce v. Jarndyce from Bleak House, the generations-spanning estate fight whose legal fees eat up all the assets at stake.) In the tech business, court battles like the celebrated antitrust suit that plagued IBM for years tend to pinion giant corporations and provide new competitors with an opening to lap an incumbent. Google itself rose to dominate search while Microsoft was busy defending itself from the Justice Department.

Yet the Books fight was never as central to Google’s corporate being as that kind of all-consuming conflict. And it wasn’t all a waste, either. It taught Google something valuable.

As the Authors Guild’s Gleick points out, Google started Books with a “better ask forgiveness than permission” attitude that’s common today in the world of startups. In a sense, the company behaved like the Uber of intellectual property — a kind of read-sharing service — while expecting to be seen the way it saw itself, as a beneficent pantheon of wizards serving the entire human species. It was naive, and the stubborn opposition it aroused came as a shock.

But Google took away a lesson that helped it immeasurably as it grew and gained power: Engineering is great, but it’s not the answer to all problems. Sometimes you have to play politics, too — consult stakeholders, line up allies, compromise with rivals. As a result, Google assembled a crew of lobbyists and lawyers and approached other similar challenges — like navigating YouTube’s rights maze — with greater care and better results. It grew up. It came to understand that it could shoot for the moon, but it wouldn’t always get there.

It’s possible that Google might someday take another run at solving the orphan works problem. But it looks like it’s going to wait for others to take the lead. “I don’t know that there’s anything that we could do without a different legal framework,” says Jaskiewicz.

As I worked on this piece, I kept thinking back to a book I’d read a few years ago called Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, a whimsical, nerdy novel by Robin Sloan. It’s about a secret society dedicated to solving a centuries-old Name of the Rose-style mystery that’s rooted in bookmaking and typography. Google plays a critical supporting role in Penumbra, as the protagonist attempts to unravel the riddle at the story’s heart. As it turns out, even the company’s unrivaled informational prowess isn’t enough to do the trick. That takes a chance encounter between the protagonist and a particular book that provides an illuminating insight. It takes, in the phrase with which Sloan closes his tale, “exactly the right book, at exactly the right time.”

Penumbra reminds us that Google’s engineering mindset isn’t omnipotent. Breaking a challenge into approachable pieces, turning it into data, and applying efficient routines is a powerful way to work. It can carry you a good distance toward a “library of utopia,” but it won’t get you there.

And even if you get there, it isn’t utopia, anyway. The hard labor is still ahead. That’s because when you turn a book into data, you make it easy to find quotes and search snippets, but you don’t make it fundamentally easier to do the work of reading the book — that irreplaceable experience of allowing one’s own mind to be temporarily inhabited by the voice of another person.

To date, the full experience of reading a book requires human beings at both ends. An index like Google Books helps us find and analyze texts but, so far, making use of them is still our job. Maybe the quest to digitize all books was bound to end in disappointment, with no grand epiphany.

Like many tech-friendly bibliophiles, Sloan says he uses Google Books a lot, but is sad that it isn’t continuing to evolve and amaze us. “I wish it was a big glittering beautiful useful thing that was growing and getting more interesting all the time,” he says. He also wonders: We know Google can’t legally make its millions of books available for anyone to read in full — but what if it made them available for machines to read?

Machine-learning tools that analyze texts in new ways are advancing quickly today, Sloan notes, and “the culture around it has a real Homebrew Computer Club or early web feel to it right now.” But to progress, researchers need big troves of data to feed their programs.

“If Google could find a way to take that corpus, sliced and diced by genre, topic, time period, all the ways you can divide it, and make that available to machine-learning researchers and hobbyists at universities and out in the wild, I’ll bet there’s some really interesting work that could come out of that. Nobody knows what,” Sloan says. He assumes Google is already doing this internally. Jaskiewicz and others at Google would not say.

Maybe, when some neural network of the future achieves self-awareness and find itself paralyzed by Kafka-esque existential doubts, it will find solace, as so many of us do, in finding exactly the right book to shatter its psychic ice. Or maybe, unlike us, it will be able to read all the books we’ve scanned — really read them, in a way that makes sense of them. What would it do then?

[shirlleycoyle]

2020 Candidates Want To Fund A Program Used To Surveil Muslims On Social Media

For Muslims across the country, surveillance is part of everyday life. From smart street lights focused on San Diego’s mosques to the entrapment of three young Somali men in Minneapolis, the surveillance is ever present. Under President Obama, the U.S. government began the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program, inspired by a similar counter-terrorism initiative in the UK called Prevent. More recently, the program has extended beyond the physical and into the digital landscape.

Despite CVE's record as a civil rights disaster, top presidential candidates are proposing that we continue to fund and expand the program. 2020 presidential hopefuls Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg have publicly expressed support for the CVE program. Harris’ domestic terrorism plan promises $2 billion over the course of 10 years, while Buttigieg pledged $1 billion. Although both Harris and Buttigieg promote the idea that CVE will be used to counter white supremacist violence, the program has historically focused on the entrapment and surveillance of Muslims.

The internet and social media have led to an evolution in surveillance, Nicole Nguyen, an assistant professor and researcher at the University of Illinois, told Motherboard. “The security industry views social media, and the internet more generally, as a key tool in how so-called terrorists recruit and radicalize.”

Intended to promote a community policing strategy to "prevent violent extremism," CVE’s pilot programming launched in three cities in 2014: Los Angeles, Boston, and Minneapolis. Those targeted for surveillance were overwhelmingly Black Muslims, including Somali youth in both Minneapolis and Boston. The Department of Homeland Security awarded the first CVE grants, totaling $10 million per year, in 2016.

During those two years, the Boston Police Department (BPD) utilized social media monitoring software called Geofeedia, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union. The program allowed BPD to scan posts collected from platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, YiKYak, and Flickr. BPD began with monitoring hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter and words associated with protest.

However, the Boston Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC) targeted what it referred to as “Islamic Extremism Terminology.” That included monitoring the use of basic Arabic phrases in regular conversations along with the hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter. Both the BRIC and BPD’s surveillance borrowed from CVE logic that paints Muslims as inherently suspicious and, the ACLU wrote, raised “serious civil liberties concerns.”

“Even in cases where BPD searched for keywords actually related to terrorist groups, like ‘ISIS,’ a review of the posts BPD collected pursuant to that search term revealed that the surveillance turned up nothing criminal or even suspicious. The posts mentioning ISIS were either jokes or references to current events,” Privacy SOS wrote.

Although most CVE discussions focus on DHS funding, money flows through multiple sources. In 2018, Operation 250, a program started by University of Massachusetts Lowell students and faculty in the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies, received a $1 million grant from the National Institute for Justice (NIJ). While Operation 250 claims to focus on all forms of extremism and online radicalization, Fatema Ahmad, deputy director of the Muslim Justice League, noted that the organization’s own name, a nod to the claim that 250 American citizens have left to join ISIS, betrays its focus.

“I worry about youth because, I think, just broadly, society accepts surveillance of youth,” Ahmad told Motherboard. “For youth here in Boston, they are just experiencing every level of being surveilled in every moment.”

In addition to nonprofits and law enforcement, academia also plays a key role in justifying these efforts. Operation 250 partners with both Harvard and Georgia State University.

BDP stopped using Geofeedia in 2016 after the ACLU of Northern California revealed that it marketed itself as a tool to monitor protesters. But the program’s name can also be found in another city where CVE has taken root: Chicago, where police contracted with Geofeedia between 2014 and 2016.

In 2014, Chicago Public Schools received a $2,197,178 grant from the NIJ to start Connect and Redirect To Respect (CRR), a social media monitoring program that utilizes the CVE framework to target street gangs. Both counterterrorism and counter-gang strategies assume that people vulnerable to extremism, or gang violence, can be identified through risk factors. Children identified as vulnerable to gang violence are subject to interventions that may include Chicago Police Department’s gang school safety team, “composed of gang enforcement police officers with no specialized training for working with children,” Nguyen said.

“For us, identifying ‘at-risk’ students and then conducting interventions to ‘off-ramp’ them from the pathway to violence, uses CVE logics to address gang violence,” Nguyen added. “Connecting anti-Black and anti-Muslim racisms (and their intersections) is important for social movement work, even if we know that these social formations employ different narratives and create different outcomes for communities. And, importantly, many Black Muslims live at these intersections.”

In addition to CRR, Chicago is also home to Life After Hate, an organization that brands itself as helping people leave white supremacist groups. Life After Hate gained support as an “anti-racist” organization after President Donald Trump cut the organization’s CVE funding in 2017, something referenced in both Harris and Buttigieg’s campaign strategies. However, In These Times noted that the group has a “troubling history of collaborating with Islamophobic ‘war on terror’ federal programing.”

Using algorithms furthers the idea that potential terrorists can be identified through a set of checklists—even when the criteria are skewed to target Muslims

In 2016, Life After Hate applied for a DHS grant with plans to expand its work to target “jihadism”. The organization wanted to use a program developed by Moonshot CVE, a company describing itself as using technology to "disrupt violent extremism." Its program "Digital Shepherds", developed in partnership with the UK’s Home Office, would “automate the process of identifying individuals at risk of radicalization.” Life After Hate planned to do so by using “publicly available data posted on Facebook to identify individuals at risk of falling into the orbit of extremist organizations” and assigning each user a risk score.

Algorithms like Digital Shepherds that derive risk scores by weighing variables such as identification of violent extremism ideology and frequency of engagement rely on debunked radicalization theories. A discredited 2007 New York Police Department report, “Radicalization in the West,” provided the ideological foundation for the NYPD Intelligence Division’s mass surveillance of Muslims, the ACLU noted.

Using algorithms furthers the idea that potential terrorists can be identified through a set of checklists —even when the criteria are skewed to target Muslims. Issues of bias in algorithms have popped up in similar systems designed to detect hate speech, which multiple studies have found to be biased against Black people.

Social media companies themselves are not quiet bystanders but often active participants in the programs. YouTube, Google’s Jigsaw, and Moonshot CVE have all collaborated to develop the Redirect Method, which finds users searching for keywords like “ISIS” and redirects them to videos debunking the extremist group’s narratives. Facebook works with both Life After Hate and Moonshot CVE, too.

“There’s a push for social media companies to identify speech that would radicalize people or even figure out algorithms that would take people away from this path,” said Ahmad. But when algorithms are built using CVE logics that frame Muslims, and Black communities in particular, as suspicious, all that happens is anti-Black Islamophobia becomes embedded in code.

Through CVE programming and logic, social media surveillance has taken on many forms. While CVE is often referred to as a “soft” approach to counterrorism that connects youth to resources, there’s nothing soft about surveillance. As Nguyen pointed out, “This approach ignores how children receive these services on the understanding that they might be ticking timebombs or budding violent gang members, rather than children deserving of such services as children.”

2020 Candidates Want To Fund A Program Used To Surveil Muslims On Social Media syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[thegloober]

Y Combinator issues a request for geo-engineering startups because climate change is real and we’re all going to die

Y Combinator, the wildly successful San Francisco-based startup accelerator, is issuing a request for startups that will focus on different kinds of geo-engineering technologies in a bid to mitigate the effects of climate change.

With the acknowledgement earlier this month from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that drastic measures are going to be required to reverse climate change and protect the globe from catastrophic climatological events by 2050, the startup accelerator is hoping that its call to action might spur some new thinking.

“I’ve been thinking about this over the past year or so. [And I] keep meeting really smart people, and the situation keeps seeming to get more dire. This isn’t anyone’s plan A, but we seem to totally be failing at curbing emissions fast enough,” wrote Y Combinator partner Sam Altman, in an email. “If one talented group of people decided to take this seriously and work on one of these ideas, I’d be delighted. We have good luck with RFS’s that sound extremely ambitious in the past. I believe you have to set out very ambitious goals, and think about what’s at the edge of possible, in order to get significant breakthroughs to happen.”

Limiting the damage caused by climate change, global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching “net zero” around 2050 — meaning that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air. No government is anywhere near achieving this goal, and certainly not the world’s most populous and most polluting nations — including the U.S., India and China.

Indeed, the response from the current U.S. administration seems to be “smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

As the Y Combinator statement announcing the new initiative itself suggests, the world is well past reversing climate change by simply reducing emissions.

“Phase 1” of climate change is reversible by reducing emissions, but we are no longer in “Phase 1.” We’re now in “Phase 2” and stopping climate change requires both emission reduction and removing CO2 from the atmosphere. “Phase 2” is occurring faster and hotter than we thought. If we don’t act soon, we’ll end up in “Phase 3” and be too late for both of these strategies to work.

So the company has put out its call for what it’s dubbing “frontier technologies.” These include developing new strains of ocean phytoplankton, carbon fixing through electro-geochemical processes, genetically modified enzymatic carbon fixing using cell-free systems and desert flooding to create micro-oases and carbon sinks of new (somewhat arable) land.

If all of these things sound insane and completely unfeasible without government support, that’s because they essentially are.

But as we’ve written ourselves, it’s time for the world to start thinking about geo-engineering as an option.

Some iterations of Y Combinator’s plan for carbon sequestration already exist or have been tried by previous startups. In its blog post, the accelerator pointed to bio-energy with carbon capture and storage, which would require growing new biomass to convert into energy and then capturing the emissions created when that biomass is burned for power and burying it in the ground. Other methods that have been floated include direct air capture; a technology used by companies like Carbon Engineering — a Bill Gates-backed company that takes carbon dioxide from the air and converts it into fuels and chemicals; LanzaTech, a New Zealand company that converts carbon into chemicals and fuels; and the Australian cement manufacturer Calix.

Further afield is solar radiation management, which would reflect inbound sunlight back into space. Researchers have proposed sending satellites into space that would reflect solar energy, injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, cloud-seeding to make them more reflective, or whitening roofs and developing reflective crops that would not absorb as much sun.

Those technologies are (to some degree) here already; what Y Combinator is asking for from startups and entrepreneurs are the next generation of geo-engineering technologies.

This new initiative from Y Combinator is both the ultimate expression of Silicon Valley hubris and a clear-eyed attempt to wrestle with what is quickly becoming accepted as the reality of climate change and its impact on the world.

And fortunately or unfortunately for everyone, without the support of the world’s governments, none of these solutions, however viable or compelling, will ever see the light of day. What’s equally troubling is the thought that some government, recognizing how dire the situation is, might go rogue and unilaterally implement some of these technologies without regard to the consequences of the global ecosystem.

If the apocryphal butterfly flapping its wings could create monsoons halfway around the world, what might the potential implications be of creating new life in the ocean to absorb global emissions?

Altman acknowledges that the best solution is still emissions reduction — and he’s invested in nuclear power companies that could be a part of that solution — but the growing consensus is that emissions reduction may no longer be enough (unless a moonshot discovery is made).

That leaves building a world that’s better able to adapt to the consequences or changing the world to the solve the problem.

Source: https://bloghyped.com/y-combinator-issues-a-request-for-geo-engineering-startups-because-climate-change-is-real-and-were-all-going-to-die/

[theinvinciblenoob]

Y Combinator, the wildly successful San Francisco-based startup accelerator, is issuing a request for startups that will focus on different kinds of geo-engineering technologies in a bid to mitigate the effects of climate change.

With the acknowledgement earlier this month from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that drastic measures are going to be required to reverse climate change and protect the globe from catastrophic climatological events by 2050, the startup accelerator is hoping that its call to action might spur some new thinking.

This is not fine

“I’ve been thinking about this over the past year or so. [And I] keep meeting really smart people, and the situation keeps seeming to get more dire. This isn’t anyone’s plan A, but we seem to totally be failing at curbing emissions fast enough,” wrote Y Combinator partner Sam Altman, in an email. “If one talented group of people decided to take this seriously and work on one of these ideas, I’d be delighted. We have good luck with RFS’s that sound extremely ambitious in the past. I believe you have to set out very ambitious goals, and think about what’s at the edge of possible, in order to get significant breakthroughs to happen.”

Limiting the damage caused by climate change, global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching “net zero” around 2050 — meaning that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air. No government is anywhere near achieving this goal, and certainly not the world’s most populous and most polluting nations — including the U.S., India and China.

Indeed, the response from the current U.S. administration seems to be “smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

As its own reports reveal the disaster of climate inaction, Trump proposes climate inaction

As the Y Combinator statement announcing the new initiative itself suggests, the world is well past reversing climate change by simply reducing emissions.

“Phase 1” of climate change is reversible by reducing emissions, but we are no longer in “Phase 1.” We’re now in “Phase 2” and stopping climate change requires both emission reduction and removing CO2 from the atmosphere. “Phase 2” is occurring faster and hotter than we thought. If we don’t act soon, we’ll end up in “Phase 3” and be too late for both of these strategies to work.

So the company has put out its call for what it’s dubbing “frontier technologies.” These include developing new strains of ocean phytoplankton, carbon fixing through electro-geochemical processes, genetically modified enzymatic carbon fixing using cell-free systems and desert flooding to create micro-oases and carbon sinks of new (somewhat arable) land.

If all of these things sound insane and completely unfeasible without government support, that’s because they essentially are.

But as we’ve written ourselves, it’s time for the world to start thinking about geo-engineering as an option.

At what point do we admit that geoengineering is an option?

Some iterations of Y Combinator’s plan for carbon sequestration already exist or have been tried by previous startups. In its blog post, the accelerator pointed to bio-energy with carbon capture and storage, which would require growing new biomass to convert into energy and then capturing the emissions created when that biomass is burned for power and burying it in the ground. Other methods that have been floated include direct air capture; a technology used by companies like Carbon Engineering — a Bill Gates-backed company that takes carbon dioxide from the air and converts it into fuels and chemicals; LanzaTech, a New Zealand company that converts carbon into chemicals and fuels; and the Australian cement manufacturer Calix.

Further afield is solar radiation management, which would reflect inbound sunlight back into space. Researchers have proposed sending satellites into space that would reflect solar energy, injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, cloud-seeding to make them more reflective, or whitening roofs and developing reflective crops that would not absorb as much sun.

Those technologies are (to some degree) here already; what Y Combinator is asking for from startups and entrepreneurs are the next generation of geo-engineering technologies.

This new initiative from Y Combinator is both the ultimate expression of Silicon Valley hubris and a clear-eyed attempt to wrestle with what is quickly becoming accepted as the reality of climate change and its impact on the world.

And fortunately or unfortunately for everyone, without the support of the world’s governments, none of these solutions, however viable or compelling, will ever see the light of day. What’s equally troubling is the thought that some government, recognizing how dire the situation is, might go rogue and unilaterally implement some of these technologies without regard to the consequences of the global ecosystem.

If the apocryphal butterfly flapping its wings could create monsoons halfway around the world, what might the potential implications be of creating new life in the ocean to absorb global emissions?

Altman acknowledges that the best solution is still emissions reduction — and he’s invested in nuclear power companies that could be a part of that solution — but the growing consensus is that emissions reduction may no longer be enough (unless a moonshot discovery is made).

That leaves building a world that’s better able to adapt to the consequences or changing the world to the solve the problem.

via TechCrunch

[fmservers]

Y Combinator issues a request for geo-engineering startups because climate change is real and we’re all going to die

Y Combinator, the wildly successful San Francisco-based startup accelerator, is issuing a request for startups that will focus on different kinds of geo-engineering technologies in a bid to mitigate the effects of climate change.

With the acknowledgement earlier this month from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that drastic measures are going to be required to reverse climate change and protect the globe from catastrophic climatological events by 2050, the startup accelerator is hoping that its call to action might spur some new thinking.

This is not fine

“I’ve been thinking about this over the past year or so. [And I] keep meeting really smart people, and the situation keeps seeming to get more dire. This isn’t anyone’s plan A, but we seem to totally be failing at curbing emissions fast enough,” wrote Y Combinator partner Sam Altman, in an email. “If one talented group of people decided to take this seriously and work on one of these ideas, I’d be delighted.  We have good luck with RFS’s that sound extremely ambitious in the past. I believe you have to set out very ambitious goals, and think about what’s at the edge of possible, in order to get significant breakthroughs to happen.”

Limiting the damage caused by climate change, global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050 — meaning that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air. No government is anywhere near achieving this goal and certainly not the world’s most populous and most polluting nations — including the U.S., India, and China.

Indeed, the response from the current U.S. administration seems to be “smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

As its own reports reveal the disaster of climate inaction, Trump proposes climate inaction

As the Y Combinator statement announcing the new initiative itself suggests, the world is well past reversing climate change by simply reducing emissions.

“Phase 1” of climate change is reversible by reducing emissions, but we are no longer in “Phase 1.” We’re now in “Phase 2” and stopping climate change requires both emission reduction and removing CO2 from the atmosphere. “Phase 2” is occurring faster and hotter than we thought. If we don’t act soon, we’ll end up in “Phase 3” and be too late for both of these strategies to work.

So the company has put out its call for what it’s dubbing “frontier technologies”. These include developing new strains of ocean phytoplankton, carbon fixing through electro-geochemical processes, genetically modified enzymatic carbon fixing using cell-free systems, and desert flooding to create micro-oases and carbon sinks of new (somewhat arable) land.

If all of these things sound insane and completely unfeasible without government support, that’s because they essentially are.

But as we’ve written ourselves, it’s time for the world to start thinking about geo-engineering as an option.

At what point do we admit that geoengineering is an option?

Some iterations of Y Combinator’s plan for carbon sequestration already exist or have been tried by previous startups. In its blog post, the accelerator pointed to bio-energy with carbon capture and storage, which would require growing new biomass to convert into energy and then capturing the emissions created when that biomass is burned for power and burying it in the ground. Other methods that have been floated include direct air capture; a technology used by companies like Carbon Engineering — a Bill Gates-backed company that takes carbon dioxide from the air and converts it into fuels and chemicals; LanzaTech, a New Zealand company that converts carbon into chemicals and fuels; and the Australian cement manufacturer Calix.

Further afield is solar radiation management, which would reflect inbound sunlight back into space. Researchers have proposed sending satellites into space that would reflect solar energy, injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, cloud-seeding to make them more reflective, or whitening roofs and developing reflective crops that would not absorb as much sun.

Those technologies are (to some degree) here already, what Y Combinator is asking for from startups and entrepreneurs are the next generation of geo-engineering technologies.

This new initiative from Y Combinator is both the ultimate expression of Silicon Valley hubris and a clear-eyed attempt to wrestle with what is quickly becoming accepted as the reality of climate change and its impact on the world.

And fortunately or unfortunately for everyone, without the support of the word’s governments, none of these solutions, however viable or compelling will ever see the light of day. What’s equally troubling is the thought that some government, recognizing how dire the situation is, might go rogue and unilaterally implement some of these technologies without regard to the consequences of the global ecosystem.

If the apocryphal butterfly flapping its wings could create monsoons halfway around the world, what might the potential implications be of creating new life in the ocean to absorb global emissions?

Altman acknowledges that the best solution is still emissions reduction — and he’s invested in nuclear power companies that could be a part of that solution — but the growing consensus is that emissions reduction may no longer be enough (unless a moonshot discovery is made).

That leaves building a world that’s better able to adapt to the consequences or changing the world to the solve the problem.

Via Jonathan Shieber https://techcrunch.com

[jeroldlockettus]

In Praise of Incrementalism (Rebroadcast)

The British cycling outfit Team Sky used a strategy of “marginal gains” to win four Tours de France since their founding. (Photo: Jaguar MENA/flckr)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “In Praise of Incrementalism (Rebroadcast).” (You can subscribe to the podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

What do Renaissance painting, civil-rights movements, and Olympic cycling have in common? In each case, huge breakthroughs came from taking tiny steps. In a world where everyone is looking for the next moonshot, we shouldn’t ignore the power of incrementalism.

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. And you’ll find credits for the music in the episode noted within the transcript.

*      *      *

Our previous episode of Freakonomics Radio was called “In Praise of Maintenance (Rebroadcast).” We asked if our cultural obsession with innovation has led us to neglect the fact that things also need to be taken care of. We talked about sewers:

Ed GLAESER: Certainly, Rome understood that engineering and infrastructure was a huge part of making its city function.

About bridges:

Larry SUMMERS: It’s a remarkable and not a very happy tale.

We talked about housework:

Ruth SCHWARTZ COWAN: They’re doing almost as much unpaid maintenance work as they are paid work.

And we talked about the nuts and bolts of the digital economy:

Martin CASADO: I mean, all of that is infrastructure.

We wound up talking about a pet project of mine — which is trying to digitally archive all my work and personal files:

Chris LACINACK: So this is about maintenance. It’s losing the 200 pounds and then staying that weight.

This project was daunting — until someone helped me frame it differently:

LACINAK: It’s all about prioritization, one step at a time.

One step at a time. Increment by increment. It got me to thinking about the value of incrementalism in a moonshot world. It got me to thinking that incrementalism is to the moonshot, what maintenance is to innovation. And so, this week on Freakonomics Radio: “In Praise of  Incrementalism.” Or, if that’s too wonky for you, how about this: What do the Italian Renaissance, the Tour de France, and the civil-rights movement have in common?

Linda HIRSHMAN: We all like a dramatic story. But things don’t happen out of the blue, and it’s so interesting to get a true picture of why change happens, rather than this sort of phony all of a sudden picture.

*      *      *

Ed Glaeser is an economics professor at Harvard. I wanted to ask him about my “incrementalism” idea.

DUBNER: So my argument here is that generally we are encouraged and trained, really, to look for big-bang successes, in all realms — education, health care, politics, you name it — and while I understand the impulse to find these magic bullets — it’s exciting, it’s sexy, it’s all those things — it strikes me that much progress if not most throughout history has really been a series of incremental gains. What’s your take on that?

GLAESER: Oh, I think almost surely that’s true. I like these examples from the arts you can really see each innovation in each painting and each step along the way. If you think about the glory of the Italian Renaissance, it’s a piecemeal process. Brunelleschi first puts together the mathematics of linear perspective, of making two-dimensional spaces seem three-dimensional — Donatello, his friend, puts it in low-relief sculpture. It moves to Masaccio, who finally puts it into a painting in Brancacci Chapel, St. Peter finding the coin in the belly of a fish. Fra’ Filippo Lippi takes up the ball. Botticelli takes up the ball, each person incrementally improving on the last person. Each person exploring the implications of this new idea. It’s not that Da Vinci comes along and then all of a sudden the world is different. It’s that he’s built on a century of incrementalists, some of whom are pretty big incrementalists but incrementalists nonetheless, who are really creating this revolution.

Glaeser is plainly an erudite fellow, especially for an economist. But just so you don’t think he spends all his time thinking about Renaissance art and ignoring his own discipline – well, we talked about that too.

GLAESER: Within the field of economics, there are larger or smaller parts of those increments, but we’re a field that builds on itself, and it’s sort of a striking fact that within economics, that the Nobel Prize doesn’t really give awards for single papers, so much as it does for a series of contributions by a particular person. And that’s surely as it should be, because there’s rarely true that one paper on itself is so revolutionary that it changes things. It’s more that people build on things. It often takes dozens of extra ones to figure out what it means, and what it what it implies for the wider world.

DUBNER: So plainly you appreciate incrementalism in your own field, and in other fields. Do you feel that puts you a little bit in the minority? Do you feel that our culture and political and social culture is always looking for some version of the moon shot?

GLAESER: I don’t know. I mean, I think this is more a Silicon Valley thing than a Cambridge thing. I think maybe I believe in incrementalism because I’m so painfully aware of the very incremental nature of my own contributions. But it’s certainly true that in the political sphere we are always looking for big bang solutions. We’re looking for a leader who will make everything right by coming around the corner, and inevitably we’re incredibly disappointed that somehow or other this new leader didn’t magically change everything. The more that you just think that the right answer is just to elect one person who will magically fix anything, the less that you actually pay attention to what really matters, which is the nit and grit of everyday decision-making, of everyday governance.

DUBNER: So civil-rights reform strikes me as one where incrementally, there have been massive improvements, and yet it seems as though the appetite for an overnight solution to every civil-rights issue is expected. And when that doesn’t happen, there’s massive hue and cry — even though, overall, the trend has been moving in the right direction. You see that as well, or do you think I’m wrong on that?

GLAESER: No, no I agree totally with that. And it required people who — the NAACP for example, which worked for decades before the Civil Rights Act to move the ball forward. Often in ways that were important, but seem today quite modest. I mean fighting up to the Supreme Court. Fighting the attempts to zone by race, for example, which it did in the teens. Right? You know, American segregation would’ve been even worse if cities could explicitly zoned by race, but they couldn’t. Fighting restrictive covenants as it did in the 40’s. Fighting segregation in American schools as it did in the 50’s. Decade by decade, increment by increment. And once we start thinking that there’s a silver bullet, we lose that, we lose the fact that we need to be working day by day, over decades, to affect change.

MUSIC: Lucy Bland, “Backseat” (from The Ruiner)

So let’s take a look at a recent story that’s been decades in the making.

JUSTICE KENNEDY: The Court now holds that same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry in all states; no longer may this liberty be denied to them.

In 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marriage. “Marriage,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy in the majority opinion, “is a keystone of the Nation’s social order … There is no difference between same- and opposite-sex couples with respect to this principle.”

JUSTICE KENNEDY:The challenged laws excluding same-sex couples from marriage cannot stand under the Constitution.

In 2001, the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans opposed same-sex marriage. The margin was 57 percent against to 35 percent in favor. But by 2015, those numbers had practically flipped. Which would seem to indicate a rather sudden shift.

Linda HIRSHMAN: People often say to me, “Wow, gay marriage. It succeeded so quickly!” They say that all the time. We all like a dramatic story. But things don’t happen out of the blue, and it’s so interesting to get a true picture of why change happens, rather than this sort of phony, all-of-a-sudden picture.

That’s Linda Hirshman. She’s a legal scholar who used to practice labor law – she argued two cases before the Supreme Court and briefed and managed a third. She’s also the author of several books, including Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution. The revolution, Hirshman argues, was incremental.

HIRSHMAN: It wasn’t the explosion that the popular narrative makes it out to be.

So, to understand how we got here:

PAMELA BROWN: A historic day here at the Supreme Court, Jay. You can probably hear gay-rights advocates to my right cheering this decision.

You have to go back to a time when life for gay men and women in America was very different.

JOSEPH McCARTHY: There’s another group about which I hesitate to talk, but I think the picture isn’t complete unless we do.

HIRSHMAN: It got very bad during the Joseph McCarthy period.

JOSEPH McCARTHY: This unusual State Department affliction, homosexuals…

HIRSHMAN: The sort of Red Scare stuff that went on in America started in World War II. And right after WWII, it really ramped up, and the government used the fact that people were gay as evidence that they were subversive. And they fired them if they worked for the government, so it was a very dark period in gay history.

One of those people was Frank Kameny. He was a Ph.D. astronomer from Harvard.

HIRSHMAN: He was hoping to become an astronaut.

Kameny worked with the Army Map Service of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

HIRSHMAN: And they caught him in a bathroom in San Francisco and they fired him.

This was in 1957.

HIRSHMAN: And he said, “That’s unconstitutional. You can’t fire me just because I’m gay.” And he sued the United States.

Kameny lost, and appealed. He lost again on appeal. In 1961, Kameny petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, but was turned down.

HIRSHMAN: It was too soon. But things in America were starting to break up. And just at that moment, Frank Kameny had the courage to resist.

The civil-rights movement was growing – sit-ins, Freedom Rides, eventually the March on Washington, D.C., in 1963. Frank Kameny wanted to do something similar for gays and lesbians. There was a gay-rights group, founded in Los Angeles in 1950, called the Mattachine Society. The name came from mattachino – Italian for a court jester who spoke truth to power. Kameny started a Washington chapter of the Mattachine Society, and he organized protests outside the White House and other federal buildings.

FRANK KAMENY: Every American citizen has the right to be considered by his government on the basis of his own personal merit, as an individual.

That’s Kameny speaking outside the State Department in 1965. At the time, the State Department argued that gay men and women were national-security risks because they could be easily blackmailed.

KAMENY: Certainly some homosexuals are poor risks. This is no excuse for penalizing all homosexuals.

Their protests were ineffective. Here’s then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

Dean RUSK: Well, I understand that we’re being picketed by a group of homosexuals. [Laughter] The policy of the department is that we do not employ homosexuals knowingly. And if we discover homosexuals in our department, we discharge them.

From the tone of Rusk’s voice, you get a sense of just how much stigma was attached to homosexuality. You have to remember – being gay at the time could not only get you fired; it could also land you in jail. Nearly every state at the time had sodomy laws. Was there at least some support from the medical community? Hardly:

Charles SOCARIDES: Homosexuality is in fact a mental illness, which has reached epidemiological proportions.

That’s Charles Socarides, a psychiatry professor, interviewed for a 1967 CBS News report called “The Homosexual.”

SOCARIDES: The fact that somebody’s homosexual — a true, obligatory homosexual — automatically rules out the possibility that he will remain happy for long in my opinion.

HIRSHMAN: Kameny had figured out as soon as he got active that there could be no equality for gay and lesbian people while they were classified as crazy.

Indeed, Socarides’s view was hardly a marginal one. The American Psychiatric Association classified homosexuality as a mental disorder. The Mattachine Society and other groups set out to change that classification.

HIRSHMAN: And they went about it in a very incrementalist way. They went to the people in the American Psychiatric Association who were studying the question of the diagnoses. They’re a medical association, so they had scholars who were studying it. So the gay organizers approached the scholars and said, “You’re wrong. You’ve got to do real research into this.”

It helped, perhaps, that Frank Kameny was himself a scientist. Hirshman says he could spot flaws in the scholarship about homosexuality. For instance, most of the studies relied solely on gay psychiatric patients.

HIRSHMAN: I mean once somebody is going to the psychiatrist to be helped, he’s part of a population that’s not representative of the whole gay population, right? He’s already in need of psychiatric help or he wouldn’t be there in the first place. You have to look at a representative sample of the whole population and see if they seem to be in distress, which they did not, except from the persecution of course. And to see if they were functioning according to the other indices of good mental health. And they were. The numbers were overwhelming, once the psychiatrists stopped looking at their own patients.

Homosexuality was finally removed from the list of mental illnesses in 1973.

HIRSHMAN: To their credit, these doctors, at the end of the day confronted with the science, did change their position. I interviewed, before he died, the psychiatrist who was in charge of the A.P.A. at the time and he said it was the greatest accomplishment of his life. 

So that was progress. But consensual sex between two people of the same gender was still illegal in most states, and those laws gave the police enormous power over gays and lesbians.

MARTIN BOYCE: They were always on the lookout for us. They tormented us. They just didn’t leave us alone.

That’s Martin Boyce, a longtime New Yorker who participated in the famous Stonewall riots in 1969.

BOYCE: The amount of people that had trouble with the police or were sent to some sort of institution or were brutalized one way or another, with the police not intervening or being on the side of the brutalizer, was growing. I don’t think any of us did not know someone who really, really suffered real consequences. If not ourselves, then somebody.

The riots were set off by a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village. In retrospect, the riots were a turning point in the gay-rights movement. But it would take a long time to gather enough momentum to challenge the legal system.

HIRSHMAN: Quietly during those years in various states and around the country, state courts and state legislators had been decriminalizing sodomy. So gays were now not crazy, and they then attacked the premise that their behavior was criminal. And they were succeeding pretty well.

But many states still had sodomy laws. The movement’s ultimate goal was to take the fight all the way to the Supreme Court, which could invalidate all the state laws at once. In 1986, at the height of the AIDS epidemic, the American Civil Liberties Union thought it found a perfect test case in Michael Hardwick, a gay man who’d been arrested for sodomy in Georgia.

HIRSHMAN: In the gay legal bureaucracy, it was felt they reasonably could expect now to get a national judgment that criminalizing gay sex, as opposed to not gay sex, which is not criminal, was a violation of the equal-protection clause.

The ACLU did take the case, known as Bowers v. Hardwick, to the Supreme Court. And …

HIRSHMAN: They lost it, 5-4.

The majority ruled that the right to engage in sodomy was not constitutionally protected. Linda Hirshman says it was a devastating defeat for the gay community.

HIRSHMAN: The opinion is reprehensible and they were already suffering from AIDS.

But, she says, it also made gay-rights advocates even more determined.

HIRSHMAN: Sometimes a defeat like that is so insulting that it radicalizes the community.

By now, the right to marry was becoming another significant plank in the gay-rights platform. Here, from back in 1974, is Frank Kameny talking about it on PBS:

KAMENY: Exercise by homosexual couples of the right to marry detracts not one iota from the rights of heterosexual couples to marry. Homosexual marriages interfere with no one individually. And such marriages impair or interfere with no societal interests.

The question was how the goal of gay marriage could be achieved through the courts. Hirshman says that one source of inspiration was found in the African-American leadership, particularly the NAACP, that pursued civil-rights legislation in the 1950s and 60s.

HIRSHMAN: They followed an incremental pattern more cleanly than any other social movement because the NAACP controlled it.

Thurgood Marshall, who eventually became the first black Supreme Court Justice, was head of the NAACP’s legal strategy. In that capacity, he argued several cases before the Supreme Court, including the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which in 1954 desegregated public schools.

HIRSHMAN: The closest that we’ve come in American social history to having a dictator is Thurgood Marshall. The Inc. fund, the NAACP legal-defense fund, controlled the money that you needed to spend to prove a school desegregation case. And accordingly, they got to say in what order that very fundamental question of school desegregation was presented to the Supreme Court. So they challenged, for instance, a law school that segregated its one black law student out from the class of white law students by roping him off. I mean they didn’t tie him up, but so important was the maintenance of racial caste. And it’s hard for a Supreme Court in the 50’s to look at that and say, “Oh, that’s okay.” So in fact the court said it was unconstitutional. Okay now, if it’s unconstitutional to segregate a state law school, why isn’t it unconstitutional to segregate state colleges? And from there to the grade schools, which was the socially the most explosive decision.

The gay-rights movement had no dictator, like Thurgood Marshall. Nor was there a single, dominant organization like the NAACP. But, Linda Hirshman says, there was a consensus beginning to form among activists that the gay-marriage fight would be the hardest one to win. Which meant continuing to focus on the sodomy laws – and fighting anti-gay discrimination in the labor and housing markets and elsewhere.

HIRSHMAN: They very smartly went back to the drawing board with the sodomy laws. And kept getting them struck down by state courts and reformed and reversed in state legislatures until it was an outlier in America to make sodomy criminal.

Finally, in a 2003 case called Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court overturned Bowers v. Hardwick, thus invalidating all remaining sodomy laws.

BOYCE: And that I think was the most important decision of them all.

That again is Martin Boyce, veteran of the Stonewall riots.

BOYCE: I mean once that happened, then it was going to be a matter of time. I don’t know how much time. It could have been many more years of incrementalism. But I knew it was going to happen.

“It” being the legal right for same-sex marriage. Gay-rights advocates won the legal battle in a number of states – Massachusetts was first, in 2004 – although they subsequently had to fight off a proposed federal amendment to the Constitution that would have defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. They kept working to shift public opinion. In 2012, President Obama, who had previously opposed same-sex marriage, changed his position:

Barack OBAMA: At a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.

The same-sex marriage movement, as triumphant as it was, in some ways came out of order. There were other, perhaps more fundamental goals to still accomplish — for instance, winning nondiscrimination protections for the LGBTQ community throughout the U.S. Still, as Linda Hirshman points out, the marriage movement did work, and it worked because of the incremental steps that added up to victory. Hirshman has written a number of books on social movements. We asked if she had any advice for one social movement: Black Lives Matter.

HIRSHMAN: I have lessons that I think any future movement can learn from the gay-rights movement, and they are as follows: Put your own interest first. Do not take up every conceivable progressive issue that somebody in your movement thinks is interesting. At the beginning, new movements don’t have a lot of spare capital and they need to spend it on their issues and the things that will keep them together rather than fragment them. The gay movement did that. Two, take the moral high ground. The AIDS epidemic forced the gay movement to take the moral high ground, and they did it beautifully and then they used it in the marriage fight perfectly. And the third lesson is have weekly meetings. I am not convinced that social media is a substitute for the kind of social, deep rich social contacts that emerge from physical proximity to one another. The next steps that Black Lives Matter can take are reasonable ones for them to take next, okay? The availability of technology in the form of video cameras and phone cameras empowers them to take bolder action than they would be able to take without the technology. So their next steps look about right to me. They’re bold, but they are in a sense incremental. I mean saying, “Don’t shoot me while I’ve got my hands in the air” does not strike me as a radical position. They then have to move to much more profound issues like the organization of the police force and their training and the way that people use local taxes against communities of color like in Ferguson. Those are bigger bites, but it’s time I think for those to be addressed as well.

MUSIC: Andrea Wittgens and Sugartown, “Alibi Was Just An Afterthought” (from Alibi)

*      *      *

MUSIC: Nicholas Pesci, “Feeling Quirky”

Let me ask you a question: where do you get your financial advice?

Jim CRAMER: Let me tell you how I see it.

Maybe you tune in Jim Cramer to see where the market’s headed?

CRAMER: Crystal-clear short-term signal [Sell! Sell! Sell!] to sell the automakers for the moment.

Or maybe you follow a different money guru.

CLIP: Squawk Box! Weekdays at 6am on CNBC!

Mike SANTOLI: We know why these stocks look cheap.

PRESENTER: Dan, walk over to the smart board.

David LAIBSON: It depresses me that so many people giving so much bad advice have such a big audience and get paid for it.

That’s David Laibson.

LAIBSON: I’m a behavioral economist at Harvard University.

Laibson’s done a lot of amazing research over the years – really amazing, you should look it up – mainly focused on how people make decisions. And how a lot of those decisions are suboptimal – and what should be done about that. Consider saving for retirement. A lot of people don’t follow the incremental approach.

LAIBSON: They love to hear the get-rich-quick story, and people dispensing those stories get big audiences. And some of them even have good historical track records and they get even bigger audiences, until of course they get a bad track record. It’s very easy to get sucked into a false prophet, and there’s so many of them in the financial-services industry.

In study after study, the data overwhelmingly show that individual investors are no good at picking stocks.

LAIBSON: Even the pros are no good at that game. The ability of a mutual fund that does well in one year to do well in the next year is close to perfect chance. So you’re just making a mistake. It’s a very natural mistake. I understand the mistake, because we all look out at the world and say, “Hey, I can see good companies and bad companies.” The problem is that that goodness and badness is already priced in. So you’re not the first one to figure out that Amazon’s a good company. You’re not the first one to notice that this car maker is starting to make bad products and no one is buying their vehicles. Everyone is seeing what you’re seeing. All that information is priced in already. You don’t have an advantage in playing the market.

So what’s a better way to think about saving for retirement?

LAIBSON: One has the impression that it’s impossible to save enough for retirement — and to a certain extent, it is impossible if you start at age 50. But if you start early in life, and every year, you contribute let’s say 10 percent of your income, and maybe there’s an employer match, so now we’re up to maybe 15 percent, and you invest that savings in a diversified mutual fund, stocks and bonds, and you have low fees, and you keep going at that year in and year out, and you don’t decumulate prematurely — it’s amazing how that process produces millions of dollars of retirement savings. So it’s kind of hard to imagine how you go from what seems like a little bit of money each year to being a millionaire but that’s exactly the way it works when you work out the math.

DUBNER: So what you’re describing is not at all a secret to anyone who’s ever read any basic personal-finance or investing book. And yet, as we know, there are a lot of people who don’t follow that. Talk to me for a minute about what we know about the people who have the ability and the resources, the income to accomplish exactly that plan but don’t do it. Is it just too boring, is it too much work, is spending here and now just too exciting to divert that saving today?

LAIBSON: It’s a lot of elements. One element is investing is complicated. So one of the ways that success is achieved is by employers auto-enrolling their employees in these plans and then auto-escalating their savings rates. Also the employer picks a good default investment fund, again diversified, stocks and bonds, mostly stocks when young, moving more and more to bonds as you age. Low fees. Passive investments, so rather than having active management, which is costly, you have passive investments that implies lower fees. And when the employer puts all those pieces in place, people go with the flow. They don’t opt out. They don’t say no. In fact, they say, “Thank you so much. I’m so glad you did this for me.” But if all those pieces aren’t there, we go off the rails. So our employer may not offer such a plan. That’s a problem for approximately half of the private-sector workforce. There are so many ways in which, unless the right conditions are there, we end up doing what comes natural, which is postponing saving or, even if we save, decumulating. That’s another big risk factor. Maybe I’m at a firm for 10 years; I’ve now accumulated a considerable pool of funds. I leave that firm to go to another firm. Rather than rolling the money over to an IRA or leaving the money in the original employer’s plan, I take that savings as a distribution and now I’m spending that money. So in fact, rather than building the beginning of the snowball that’s going to roll into something enormous, I’ve made my savings vanish and I start again from zero at the next firm. So there’s a lot of ways in which, even though we know we should save for retirement, we fail unless the right conditions exist for us to succeed. It’s those workers who accept those defaults and who take advantage of these modern retirement savings systems, employer-based retirement savings systems, who end up thriving in retirement.

One more conversation today, before we wrap things up, on incrementalism.

DUBNER: Shall I call you Sir Brailsford, Sir Dave, how does that work?

Dave BRAILSFORD: No, no. It was a nice thing to happen at the time but in reality gets you an upgrade on flights and a few hotels rooms but that’s about it really. So let’s stick to “Dave.”

Dave Brailsford was knighted for helping turn Great Britain into a perennial titan in the sport of cycling.

BRAILSFORD: Prior to the year 2000, Great Britain was a nation that only won one gold medal in 76 years of trying.

In Rio, in 2016? Team GB won 12 cycling medals, including 6 gold. At the 2012 Games, in London? Eight gold medals. Brailsford was the performance director of the British Cycling team from 2003 until 2014. In 2009, he helped found the professional cycling outfit Team Sky. The stated goal of Team Sky at the time was to have a British winner of the Tour de France within five years. In fact, Team Sky won two Tours within its first five years, and then two more in 2015 and 2016. Brailsford grew up in Wales, the son of a mountain climber. He wanted to be a professional cyclist, maybe even win the Tour de France himself.

BRAILSFORD: So I decided to pack my bags, rucksack, bike in a box and saved all my money, took enough and went to France.

He found a team willing to take him on �� perhaps out of pity, he says now.

BRAILSFORD: I realized pretty early on that I wasn’t going to make it as a top-level professional cyclist. So I thought, Well if I can’t win the Tour de France myself then maybe the future lies in helping other people do that.

So Brailsford returned to the U.K. and went to university. He studied sport science and psychology, then got an M.B.A. He first started working for British Cycling back in 1997. Over the years, he developed a strategy based on a principle called “marginal gains.”

BRAILSFORD: Physics and cycling go hand in hand. It’s a sport that lends itself nicely to physics, data collection, measurement, power and speed. And so, we could collect lots of data and analyze performance and we could feed that back to riders. And then we could work with them on small, very small, minor tweaks, minor changes that probably felt relatively insignificant at the time, but over time, would stick.

DUBNER: Give me a for-instance. Is it something like posture, it is something like pacing, is it mental?

BRAILSFORD: Yeah, positional. You know, across the whole continuum of sport, of the performance. Some of it could be the position of the bike, the position of the head. We fight against the wind in cycling all the time. It’s the biggest thing that slows us down. And just literally dropping the head between the shoulders, dropping it down just a centimeter will improve the aerodynamics and for the same power, you’ll go a little bit further. And the more you can think about holding that position and being cognizant of that position whilst you’re riding at your limit, it makes a difference.

But the marginal-gains approach went well beyond aerodynamics. The idea was to produce at least a one-percent improvement in every facet of the enterprise. From the mechanical – like installing a tire perfectly straight on the rim. To the physiological – like managing the riders’ nutrition and choosing the best massage gel.

BRAILSFORD: We’d look at hand-washing, for example, an area where we’d go to the Olympic Games and we’d be in great form and then we’d be terrified of the riders getting ill or catching a bug. So we started to think about, Wow, how are you going to optimize or reduce the chances of us getting an illness within the team in the Olympic Village for example, and then for that to run through the team and create havoc. So we got a surgeon in who showed everybody how to wash their hands properly. We had people who cleaned all the handles, cleaned the lifts buttons, we obviously encouraged people not to shake hands and be very mindful of this and use hand gels all the time. And I mean, it’s common practice now but when we were starting out, there were small little things that, we’d think, Is that going win us a medal? Well, no, it’s not. But is it going to contribute to it? Yeah, potentially.

DUBNER: How did you first come to embrace the notion that marginal gains could be fruitful? How did you go about learning or deciding which areas to apply it to?

BRAILSFORD: It wasn’t something overnight, like I just woke up morning and thought, “Okay, well, we’ll do it like this. We’re human beings.” And when someone says, I’d like a perfect performance, that is daunting. So I thought, let’s break our performance to all of its component parts, map them all out, and then let’s have a look and see is ­­it is possible to progress in each one of the areas? And can we be bothered to do it? Because it takes a lot of work and energy. And then you’ve got something that people are in control of and they feel empowered to move forward. So, yeah, they’ll say, “I might not be able to see how I’m going to get to top of that massive mountain over there, but boy I tell you what, I can improve a small amount in my nutrition, in my diet, I can move my weight program forward, I can get another five minutes sleep a night, I can do all the recovery protocols as necessary.” You know, and on and on it goes. Now, there’s a big psychological component of this where there’s a team and support team — if everyone buys into that philosophy, you’re creating a culture which is actually moving forward and is actually kind of building a little bit of momentum. Now there’s no denying, there’s no point to doing anything in the periphery unless the absolute critical elements, which are going to account for 40 or 50 percent of the performance, are in place.

DUBNER: What are you talking about when you talk about that 40 or 50 percent baseline? Is that talent, is that riders who are very, very good already?

BRAILSFORD: So, you have to have a hunger and a willingness. And it’s not so much a hunger of wanting to be an Olympic champion. It’s a hunger towards, “I can break down what it would take to get from where I am now to be an Olympic champion and I can see the sacrifices, I can see the suffering, and doing all of that work.” So, that’s for me what we mark down as a “hunger index.” We then look at the talent obviously, and then you have barriers. So, remove the barriers and that will then equal success.

DUBNER: I’m guessing back when you were trying to break into cycling yourself, there was probably no such thing as a “hunger index” there. I’m guessing, if there had been — what do you think your hunger index was back then, Dave?

BRAILSFORD: Very high. I’m a trier, there’s no doubt about that. I think that’s something that’s just set I guess, maybe part of my psychology, my personality.

DUBNER: Well, being the son of a mountain climber probably doesn’t hurt, huh?

BRAILSFORD: No, that’s right, that’s right. You know the one thing he always used to tell me was, “You’ve got to be professional,” always “you’ve got to be professional, professional, professional.” And I used to roll my eyes every time he said it, like, “Come on Dad, shut up.” And then somewhere down the line, it seems to have stuck.

MUSIC: Paul Avgerinos, “Playful Light Delight”

Team Sky, the professional cycling team that Brailsford now runs, competes in big-time races like the Tour de France, where you cover more than 2,000 miles over three weeks. Which means a new day, a new hotel, and a new bed. And, again, Brailsford saw an opportunity for a marginal gain.

BRAILSFORD: The hotel is given to you by the organization, you can’t change it, you don’t know what the mattress is going to be like, you don’t know what the room is going to be like. So we have a forward team that go into the hotels and they have a room protocol. Basically, they lift the bed up, they Hoover under the bed, they clean the room, they have antibacterial protocol which cleans all the room including the television, remote control, the tap handles, etc. We take the shower head off and clean the shower. And then they have their own mattresses, their own pillows specifically for each rider. And so they can sleep in the same posture every night. Now is that going to win you the Tour de France? Probably not, but it can contribute.

DUBNER: Let me ask you: your teams have been phenomenally successful. To what extent do you believe that the marginal gains approach is actually responsible? I get the sense from previous interviews that you think that maybe too much has been made of the marginal-gains business.

BRAILSFORD: I think it gave us a methodology, it gave us an approach which allowed the support staff and the riders, to be of a certain mindset and approach things in a certain way. And there’s no doubt about it, it was like a contagious enthusiasm, if you’d like. I think equally, at times, it’s too simplistic, just to say, “Well, all we have to do is adopt this marginal-gains approach,” and I think people misunderstood the concept of marginal gains being the latest bit of technology or improvement to the bike or aerodynamics, etc. I think what they missed was the whole tacit psychological component, which created a culture and a mindset within a group which allowed the whole group to buy in to something, to have a collective approach where hundredths of a second could be the difference between winning and losing.

DUBNER: Now, of course even casual cycling fans, they know that Lance Armstrong, who won the Tour de France seven times, vehemently denied doping for many years until he eventually admitted it; and that many, many cyclists have doped, which really put a huge stain on the sport. So how does a group of cyclist as dominant as yours, with both Team Sky and Team GB, expect all of us to believe that there’s no doping going on?

BRAILSFORD: It’s a very good question. And I don’t think given the past that we can expect everybody to just believe everything that they see. And I think they’re right to question. There were questions asked in the past, and people trusted Lance and it came as a big blow and big shock to a lot of people. And I think that would inevitably lead to a level of suspicion and a lack of trust that was going to be a hangover from that period. So I fully understand why people do question us. And I think our job then is to try and be as transparent and open as possible about what we do and how we do it. And also over time, I think people will see that we are doing it the right way. We are doing it clean and like I say, we just have to be accepting of the situation we find ourselves in and be patient and tolerant and transparent.

Not long after this interview with Brailsford, he and Team Sky found themselves in a situation. Computer hackers released Team Sky documents showing that its two star riders of the past several years – Chris Froome and Bradley Wiggins, both of whom have won the Tour de France — that they used banned substances under what’s known as a therapeutic use exemption, or a T.U.E. A T.U.E. allows a rider to use an otherwise off-limits drug for legitimate medical reasons. In Wiggins’s case, for instance, in order to treat his pollen allergies before the Tour in 2011 and 2012, he injected a banned corticosteroid called triamcinolone, which some say acts as a performance enhancer.

There’s no evidence that Wiggins or anyone else on Team Sky broke the rules – it was, after all, a therapeutic use exemption. Which is supposed to be kept confidential. But when it wasn’t kept confidential, and when you run a team that’s been hugely successful, and when you’ve been touting something called “marginal gains” as a key component of that success – well, people will talk, especially in Britain, where cycling is a national obsession.

Here’s the Sunday Times sportswriter David Walsh talking to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

David WALSH: The problem that Team Sky have got with this is not only the act itself, which is at the very least highly questionable, but they’re the team that set themselves up as whiter than white. They’re the team that set themselves up as totally transparent. They have been anything but transparent in their response to this. They have basically refused to go into any detail about how this was authorized and they’re basically sticking to the line: it was approved by the authorities and therefore it was technically legal. And for lots of people that’s not good enough, because ethics still matter in sport. Morals still matter.

MUSIC: Judson Lee Music, “Stars Falling”

In a report earlier this year, the U.K.’s government committee on sport came down hard on Brailsford and Team Sky. “How can David Brailsford,” the report read, “ensure that his team is performing to his requirements if he does not know and cannot tell what drugs the doctors are giving the riders? Brailsford must take responsibility for these failures, the regime under which Team Sky riders trained and competed, and the damaging skepticism about the legitimacy of his team’s performance and accomplishments.” Team Sky and Braillsford continue to refute any claims that they knowingly broke any anti-doping regulations.

It’s impossible to say, at this moment, the degree to which Team Sky may have broken or stretched the rules — or the extent to which their success will be downgraded if they are found to have broken the rules. Just as progress in civil rights and investing and cycling itself is an incremental exercise, so too is the revelation of truth. What I do think we can agree on is this: if you want to accomplish something, especially something large and meaningful, it pays to at least think hard about an incremental approach.

Let’s say you weigh 30 pounds more than you should. And you decide to lose it. What’s your expectation – that you can lose it all in just a few weeks, even just a few months? That’s ridiculous. Do you know how long it took you to put on those 30 pounds? A long time! It’s a lot of work to put on 30 extra pounds – well, not work, it’s actually quite fun, eating all that delicious food. But still, it took a lot of nachos and rice bowls and sugary drinks to put on 30 extra pounds. Go to the supermarket and look at a five-pound bag of potatoes. Now look at six of them – that’s how much you’ve accumulated, over time. So you know what? It’s going to take some time to decumulate. Little by little. Choice by choice. Increment by increment. If you expect otherwise – well, your expectations are likely to be dashed. By lowering your expectations, you can actually raise your chances of success.

So … good luck — whether your goal is losing weight or saving money or contributing to a social movement. As always, we’d love to hear from you. Let us know how it’s going. We’re at radio@freakonomics.com.

Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Christopher Werth. Our staff also includes Alison Hockenberry, Merritt Jacob, Stephanie Tam, Greg Rosalsky, Max Miller, Harry Huggins, and Andy Meisenheimer; we had help this week from Louis Mitchell. The music you hear throughout the episode was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

*      *      *

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Ed Glaeser, professor of economics, Harvard.

Chris Lacinak, founder and president, AVPreserve.

Linda Hirshman, legal scholar and author.

David Laibson, professor of economics, Harvard.

Dave Brailsford, cycling performance director (Team Sky and Team Great Britain).

RESOURCES

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier, by Ed Glaeser.

“Changing Attitudes on Gay Marriage,” by the Pew Research Center.

“Frank Kameny — Astronomer, Activist, and Organizer.”

Additional music scoring by Jay Cowit

The post In Praise of Incrementalism (Rebroadcast) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-incrementalism-rebroadcast/

[irphanfic]

I absolutely adore moonshot and your last two drabbles! Your very talented

Thank you so much! I’m a bit stuck with Mooshot at the moment so it will take a bit more to update, but have this drabbles instead :D

I read your ask about wanting Drabble 15 instead so I wrote that, hope you like it!

15. Where would I be without you?

Danhad just uploaded the newest “Internet Support Group” video and heexpected the same result as the other ones. Enough views, enoughlikes and enough comments that told him that he had done a good work.

Yeah,they might not be his best videos, but he still had fun filming themand people kept sending him emails in hopes of a response, so why wasthis one doing so badly?

Hisfollowers just kept saying how he ‘had hyped up’ the video of thisweek and how it was ‘the same thing as always’, that he was justgiving up on YouTube and he didn’t care anymore.

Buthe did care! He cared a lot! Without YouTube he would have nothing.

Dansighed as he read another comment on his mobile, still saying howthey expected so much from him and still managed to let them down.

Itwasn’t Dan’s fault that his viewers took his words and understoodwhat they wanted. Yes, he had mentioned that ‘a good video’ was goingto be uploaded and that it was 'something that he had been thinkingof a lot’; but mostly because the “Internet Support Group” serieswas pretty fun and he had been struggling with new ideas for a whilenow, that why he had decided to film one.

Groaning,he left his phone slid down the cushions as he slumped further (ifpossible) on the sofa, not even having the chance to strech along thecouch when Phil appeared on the doorway of their lounge and sat downnext to him, grabbing his ankles and pulling them on his sweatpantcladed lap.

“What’swrong? I heard you groan from the office.” Phil asked.

Dansighed, “I just uploaded my newest Internet Support Group and Idon’t think they liked it that much.” Dan pulled a face, trying tomask that he was upset. Upset at himself for not trying enough, fornot being enough.

“Why?Internet Support Group is a good series, they are often funny andbelieve it or not, sometimes helpful. You give good advice.” Philsaid, making both of them chuckle.

“Theysay I 'hyped the video too much’ over the week. Apparently theyexpected other thing, not just a repetitive addition to the series,”Dan said, sighing once again.

Hefelt Phil trace random patterns along his feet and calf which weremanaging to relax Dan a bit more, “You know they take every word wesay seriously. I think you tried to please everyone and  that’simpossible and you know it, but hey, it’s just a bump in the road,you will see how with the next video everything will work out.”

Danlooked at him and sent him a small smile. Somehow, Phil alwaysmanaged to say the right things, but Dan’s mind wouldn’t leave thesubject alone, oh no.

“But,what if it is not just a bump in the road? What if I cannot manage tomake a better video the next time? What if this is it and my YouTubecareer goes downhill? It feels more as if I’m falling down a rabbithole…” he rambled.

“Yourcareer is not going to be destroyed because of this, and hey,” Phillooked at him, sincerity clear in his blue eyes. “if you fall downthat methaphorical rabbit hole you are talking about, I’ll be thereto help you out, okay? We are in this together, Dan.”

Dansmiled and was about to speak when Phil cut him off again, “andplease, don’t ruin this by making a High School Musical reference orI’ll leave.”

Theyboth burst out laughing. Phil knew him so well it was scaryingsometimes, but, that’s why they were best friends. And best friendshelped each other, right? And Phil had helped Dan so many times hehad lost count.

Thanksto Phil he was here, living in London and having a job he could neverhad dreamed of. He had managed to change his life 180 degrees justwith a comment that led to all of this. All of this Dan & Philworld.

Oncetheir laughter died off, Dan lifted himself up from the sofa andrested his head on Phil’s shoulder, who put his arm around hisshoulders to bring both closer to Phil’s body.

“Wherewould I be without you?” Dan whispered.

'Philsighed, “I don’t know, but I’m glad you are here with me. Next tome.”

“Metoo, Phil. Me too.”

prompt me a number!

[irphanfic]

Moonshot - Chapter 3

I’m back with a new chapter! Hope you are enjoying this story so far. As always, any feedback is welcome <3

Hope you like this chapter!

summary: Phil had a feeling that this Friday was going to be different.

That didn't mean he was ready to meet his favourite baseball player, Daniel Howell, while he was cleaning the windows of a building.

or the au in which Phil is a shy window cleaner and Dan is a famous baseball player. This is their story.

words: 2.1k

no trigger warnings

read on ao3 - (x)

Chapter 1 // Chapter 2

Chapter 3: Drizzle and Pink Cheeks

Wednesday and Friday came and were gone in the blink of an eye. Dan and Phil kept talking through the windows, both days playing the ''20 questions'' game so they could know each other better.

Phil had decided that he would try and not be so shy around Dan, try to think of him as a normal person; just because he was sport star didn't mean he had to act any different if he was going to see him a few days every week.  

They often both got so excited to know that they liked the same movie or videogame their conversation went from one topic off to another easily, forgetting they were even playing a game and also making Phil forget he was talking to the real Dan Howell.  

They shared so many interests Phil was sure it was kind of unbeliveable to have found someone such like him. It had never happened to him before. Some of his other partners and friends even made fun of him for liking cartoons they thought they were 'childish', but not with Dan. They could talk about Steven Universe for hours.

It was Sunday evening now and Martyn was lazying around his flat since they had meet for lunch but it started raining so they came back to Phil's.

''So, you are telling me, you met Daniel Howell? The same Daniel Howell that plays in the 'Rocky Planets' and is one of the best baseball players of the country? Are you pulling my leg?''

Martyn asked what was new in his life and that was it! It wasn't his fault that he didn't want to believe him!

''Yeah, I was about to clean the windows on the top floor when suddenly he appeared! He moved in, apparently, and now I'm his window cleaner. How random, right?'' Phil said, handing his brother a beer while he took a sip of his soda.

Martyn stood there, gawking at him until apparently he found his voice again. ''Did you talk to him? If you did, what did you say? Could he even hear you? Did you get to meet him later? And most importantly, I am your brother, why didn't I know about this sooner!'' Martyn punched his arm slightly, making Phil wince at the not-so-weak punch.

''Calm down! Let's just sit by the tv and I will tell you everything, okay?''

Both Lesters sat down on the comfy cushions and Phil started sepaking. He tried not te dwell into details, but it was impossible. He kind of wanted to talk about Dan 24/7 and all he had said to him. It was probably because he had the biggest crush on him but still, they had only talked like three days and Phil could consider him his friend already. It was kind of impossible to think about the possibility of having Dan Howell as a friend or even anything more to be honest. At least dreaing was free.

Once Phil had finsihed looked back at Martyn, who smiled cheekily at him. ''I think Dan Howell likes you Philly''.

What!? What was his brother even talking about!? Yeah, Dan told him he was 'attractive' (maybe not with that exact word but still), at least it was implied in some of the messages. Dan could flirt with a rock and even make it blush even thought it wasn't even a living thing! But Phil wasn't even sure about what to think... Dan could also be playing the 'flirty' persona the media talked about with him too and even though Phil didn't want to believe the media, sometimes it was inevitable.

''I... I... Martyn no! He doesn't like me, at least not the way you think...'' Phil's voice got quieter by the end of the sentence. Why was he feeling this sad about something that had a chance of 1 in at least a billion of happening?

Martyn patted him on the back a few times, as if sensing he was upset. ''Hey Phil, have you tried flirting back?''

Phil shook his head and muttered an almost quiet no.

''Then, flirt back!'' Martyn ruffled his hair, trying to cheer him up like when they were little ''and if you don't feel comfortable enough or if Dan seems unamused just stop it. There is still a possibility of you two being friends. I mean, from what you have told me you have so much in common, even more than you and I have and we are brothers!''

Phil just shrugged, ''I guess... we could be friends.''

With that last sentence they let the topic aside and talked about a few other things till Martyn had to leave.

Phil looked out of the window as soon as the front door was closed. It was still raining and he could only cross his fingers so it would stop by tomorrow because cleaning windows with rain was a real nightmare.

He must have the worst luck ever because he had to grab his raintcoat next morning because it kept drizzling.

_______________

Dan woke up slowly on Monday morning, rolling around his king sized matress and white sheets for a few minutes before opening his eyes only to see that a light rain was hitting his bedroom window.

Groaning, he picked up his phone and checked his social media and read the few messages he had received during the night, not bothering to answer them since he was still sleepy and din't want to risk sending something stupid to his agent.

He put his phone back on the nightstand and rolled on his back, putting one of his hands behind his head, the other lazily caressing his stomach as he watched boringly his white ceiling, just... thinking.

Dan moved his neck a bit and stared at hs bedroom door, kind of expecting someone to burst in with a tray, carrying his coffee with some fruit and pancakes with a small vase that had a rose on it.

He internally laughed at this thought. Real life was never like that.

With a sigh he turned his stare back again at the ceiling, finally teh realization of how lonely he was settling in, felling a weight on his chest as if he was scared of being alone forever. Not having anyone by your side was a scary thought that often made him anxious. Yes, he had his team mates and also friends, but it wasn't the same.

He wanted a romantic relationship, having someone you can share your love and affection with. He couldn't even recall teh last time he had recieved a hug... It had been so long. He craved caresses and cuddles, shot and long kisses, even sex...

Since he became a famous baseball player the madia talked about the few romances he ''had'' with certain celebrities. Yes, ''had'' because they were never real. They were all publicity stunts so his partner at the time could ensure their fame for a while.

The brown eyed kind of hoped that those fake relationships would turn into something real as he ahd seen in many movies, where people have to pretend to be in love and somehow manage to fall for eachother and lived a ''happily ever after''.

But it was just pure bullshit that never happened in real life.

It had been a while since he had had this kind of thoughts but now they had decided to come back and Dan didn't like it.

A lone tear made his way down his cheek, trailing down his face and getting lost on his neck, but before he could dwell into that though some more he got up, grabbed his pyjama bottoms and a sweatshirt and walked out of his bedroom only to find a bored looking Phil already cleaning his windows while he wore the most yellow raincoat he had even seen shielding him from the drizzle.

Phil looked so damn good in that hideous yellow raincoat it was ridiculous! No one looked good in yellow! But somehow Phil was making it work... That yellow raincoat was making Dan feel something in his stomach...  

Dan was glad the rain seemed to be stopping soon so Phil couldn't be out in the rain for too long, he felt bad enough seeing him working under this weather but it didn't seem like the window cleaner was minding it much, or if he did he wasn't showing it.  

The blue eyed finally spotted him, waving at him before taking out a notebook and a marker from a light blue backpack.

Dan softly smiled at the gesture, walking closer to the windows so he could sit by the couch armrest as he also grabbed his paper and sharpie.

'Thought you left me alone on this rainy morning... :( ps: cute morning bedhair'

The brown haired shook his head and looked at his feet at Phil's message. He didn't expect this message and less from someone so shy like Phil, but maybe he was trying to be closer to Dan (even as a friend) and if Phil wanted, Dan was going to let him, because he was feeling a bit vulnerable and probably was blushing now, something he didn't like showing. Maybe because he had to hide his 'soft' side from everybody for so long that it felt strange now...

He had always acted so forwards towards everyone, even to the window cleaner on those first days, but Dan wanted to leave that aside, let his unvarnised persona be shown a bit more. He only acted that way when he felt that he could trust someone, and with Phil he felt he could even just after a few days.  

Maybe it was because he hadn't feel this comfortable in a while and needed to be showered with some affection after this morning, but he wasn't thinking about that.

'No, you are not getting rid of me that easily! Sorry you have to work under the rain, it probably sucks. ps: my morning hair is not cute, it's gross... but thank you for the compliment' Dan wrote and showed Phil, whose black fringe was getting a bit wet since the hat of his raincoat was falling down.

It was Phil's turn to shake his head, a few dropplets of water moving at the action, trying to shield his notebook from getting more wet. 'Your curls are nice, but messy curls look even better on you. Adorable'

If Dan hadn't blushed a few seconds ago, he was sure his red cheeks were showing now. He hid behind his notepap as he tried to tame his hair a bit, he was sure it wasn't that nice to look at.

He kind of liked being showered in compliments that weren't shout by strangers... But Phil was being so nice that Dan felt the need to compliment him back just to make it even between the two. It wasn't fair if he was the only one getting the pretty words.

'shut up! you are the one looking all adorable on that yellow raincoat!' he wrote fast, trying to keep his best handwriting. It would be so much easier if they could talk... Was it too early in they 'friendship' to ask for his phone number? Well, he didn't have time to think about that now.

He turned his notebook around and saw how Phil's cheeks went also a bit pink, trying to also hide his face by ducking his head.

They both lowered their notebooks and chuckled at the same time, making both of them burst into laughter at their identical gestures. Once the giggles died down Dan was teh frst to signal to his kitchen, as a sign taht he felt hungry and needed breakfast. Phil nodded as he took a green bottle and started spraying the windows.

Even though they were trying to do theirr repective tasks, the two boys kept sneaking side glances and smiles at each other for a few minutes until Phil already finished and wrote his goodbye, Dan quickly writing back his, trying not to show how sad he was that Phil was leaving him all alone with his thoughts again...

''Bye Phil, hope to see you on Wednesday...'' Dan said out loud with a loud sigh once the black haired had disappeared from his sight.

Dan groaned loudly as he threw his body on the sofa. After these messages Dan was sure his crush on Phil wasn't that little anymore. It couldn't be. The man was so sweet and nice and they had so much in common it was difficult to stop his feelings from developing. Feelings that were new for Dan and felt scary but also exciting to discover.

He could only hope for the best now.  

Chapter 4

[irphanfic]

Moonshot - Chapter 2

I’m back with a new chapter! Hope you are enjoying this story so far and as you know, you can always leave feedback, any type of comment is welcome <3

Hope you enjoy this chapter!

summary: Phil had a feeling that this Friday was going to be different.

That didn't mean he was ready to meet his favourite baseball player, Daniel Howell, while he was cleaning the windows of a building.

or the au in which Phil is a shy window cleaner and Dan is a famous baseball player. This is their story.

words: 1.4k

no trigger warnings

read on ao3 - (x)

Chapter 1

Chapter 2: First Conversation

After an uneventful weekend it was time to come back to work. Deep down, Phil knew he was kind of excited to be up so early on a Monday, because that meant maybe he would be lucky enough to see Dan Howell again.

And maybe he was kind of hoping to see if he would write to him this time too.

That's when Phil got the idea of bringing a notebook and a navy blue marker he had lying around in his flat to work today. At least he could answer back properly...

Hopping onto the metal platform he began his day, the monotone coloured curtains appearing on his vision every now and then as he went up at the same time as the sun did.

Phil sighed and tried to keep a neutral face as the platform reached the top floor, trying not to get his hopes up if Dan wasn't there.

The window cleaner was ready to spray on the window when he suddenly spotted a tracksuit claded Dan dancing around in the kitchen as he ate some fruit? Dan Howell didn't dance! Even when his team won he didn't celebrate it by dancing!

Phil kept staring at him, how the player's hips and feet moved at the same time of the music Phil imagined he was blasting.

Dan might know how to play, but surely he didn't know how to dance was what Phil thought. He kept trying to stifle a laugh at the movements when suddenly Dan spotted him and directly made eye contact with him. 'Oh shit. I'm busted.' was the only thing the blue eyed could think of as he felt his cheeks turning pink. He rapidly adverted his gaze and crouched down, picking up the notebook and marker he had brought.

Once he was up again he showed the new items to Dan, who pulled a surprised face at them but let out a chuckle before walking towards the living room to pick up his and coming closer to the window so he would stand just in front of Phil.

'Sorry for interrupting your dancing!' the black haired wrote down as soon as he saw Dan stop in front of him.

Dan made some signs of dismissing him as he turned a bit pink, probably embarrassed at the thought of some stranger watching him dance. He never was or had been shy! Who was this Dan?

Phil waited for a response. Dan stood there, looking down at his notebook, as if thinking what to write, a hint of uncertainty on his expression. 'Dancing is not really my thing... baseball is' was all the black haired could read once Dan had turned the notebook.

'Oh, right. Dan didn't know if I recognized him or not.' Phil thought, starting to write his next message. 'That's probably because you are Dan Howell.'

Dan sheepisly nodded at it and stared down as if trying to think of a response to that. 'So you know who I am. Baseball fan?' said his next message.

The blue eyed eagerly nodded, smiling widely. A great baseball fan. 'Actually, a big Rocky Planets fan.' he proudly showed Dan, who pulled a surprised faced and smiled, quickly writing down on his notebook again.

'It's always a pleasure to meet a fan like you Phil... (insert surname here!)' Phil laughed at the player's new message, showing his tongue between his teeth as he usually did.

'Lester. Nice to meet you too Mr. Howell' Phil hesitated a bit before turning around his notebook. Was Mr. Howell too formal? They weren't friends, not even acquaintances and Dan was a famous person... He decided that calling him Mr. Howell for now was the safest option.

By the face Dan pulled maybe it hadn't been the most clever thing... 'Please Phil, just call me Dan, Mr. Howell sound pretty bad tbh'

The window cleaner shyly smiled and wrote his answer, taking a bit more of time to write it. 'Dan it is. Hope you don't mind me having me around your windows every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.'

Dan shook his head no and started scribbling down again, biting his lower lip as he did so.

The blue eyed frowned. What was Dan playing at? Phil needed to be ready to see whatever answer he was scribbling down.

'Believe me, I won't mind at all. You are a sight for sore eyes.' Dan winked at the same time he showed him a cheeky grin. That smooth bastard.

Phil could only gap at him like a fish as he felt his face go red. He might have been expecting this kind of answer, but still, he couldn't believe Dan Howell thought he was pretty enough to have him around three days a week to do his job. He didn't know how to even respond to that.

And, by his luck, Phil wouldn't get to respond because from what he could see, someone had ringed Dan's front door and he was walking towards it, checking through the peephole to see who it was.

The player turned around again, facing Phil with a face expression that he coudln't really place. Was it disappointment? He couldn't really tell. But before the black haired read more into it another message appeared in front of him 'My friend is waiting for me. Sorry to leave you like this. See u Wed?☺'

Phil could only nod a few times, offering Dan a soft smile before lifting a hand and waving him goodbye; smiling a bit more when he saw the brown haired do the same before he picked up his belongings and opened the door, greeting his friend but turning around, offering Phil one last gaze before closing the door completely.

''Time to spray and clean'' the blue eyed said to himself with a sigh as he exchanged his notebook and marker for a bottle and an old rag.

What a good start to the week.

_______________

''Why didn't you let me in! Were you hiding something in there, Howell? Is your new flat really that horrible?'' his friend and also team mate Eric teased him.

Dan pushed him jokingly as they walked down the corridor towards the elevator, ''shut up! No, it was nothing, really.''

He didn't know if he should tell Eric about Phil. Dan felt like he could tell his friend about his tiny crush on Phil (because it was tiny... yeah, keep telling yourself that), but he wasn't sure. They just meet each other and their only proper conversation was just two minutes ago... It didn't feel right to pour his heart into his friend unless he was sure about what he wanted with Phil.

''Sure... if that's what you say...'' Eric suggested as they rode down the elevator, ''maybe it wasn't something, but it was someone, right?'' his blonde eyebrows moved up and down as a sly smile appeared on his face.

Dan groaned as he pushed the button of the last floor of the elevator. There was no way he would get out without giving Eric some more info. ''It was the window cleaner of the building, okay? He just appeared out of nowhere and I was a bit surprised, that's all.''

He hoped Eric was okay with that; he wouldn't say more about Phil of whatever he felt towards him.

''I'm going to guess and say he was nice or attractive. If you are uncomfortable in any situation you always find a way to escape and I had to ring your doorbell like three times! It was your perfect escape opportunity and you didn't take it.'' Eric suddenly said. And he was right.

If Dan was uncomfortable in any situation, no matter what, he tried to find a quick excuse to avoid it, and if his window cleaner hadn't been Phil, he was sure he would have the curtains drawn 24/7.

Dan sighed in defeat, there was no point in lying now. '''yeah, fine. He was both of those things, okay? You happy?''

Eric grinned at him and Dan was sure he would have smacked that smile off his face if it wasn't because 1. he was his friend and 2. the elevator doors opened so they could get off.

Dan looked up one they were out on the street and saw Phil's platform slowly making his way down. He really wanted to keep talking to him... Was it normal to want to keep talking to someone who you only have meet twice?  Dan sighed and looked at Eric, who had another grin on his face, but changed it for a soft smile.

''I am now, Howell. I am.'' Eric said as he patted him on the shoulder, making both chuckle a bit.

It was more than a little crush, right?  

Chapter 3