#I once spent three hours on a call with a senior product engineer and we couldn’t figure out why the thing that was supposed to be working

[ziparumpazoo]

Like…you know we can see in your log files that you didn’t, right?

[dise7se]

threshold

by: @spideysforce (7k)

rating: general/teen and up audiences

relationships: peter parker & tony stark, peter parker & mj & johnny storm & gwen stacy

characters: peter parker, tony stark, michelle jones, johnny storm, gwen stacy, &  ned leeds

summary:

peter: 17, a little shit camper, teenager, about to leave for college and it’s the end of summer

tony: a tired, 27 year old man, turns into a teeangers dad

buzzfeed unsolved au, a msyterious warehouse at summer camp, and found family

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When Peter first got to camp, it was tortuous. It felt like aunt May was sending him for some kiddie math camp, for fuck’s sake, he was 17. 

Stark Camp was an elite stem camp, only the brightest minds arrived here, no matter what their demographic, income, or social status. He applied, or was forced to apply by May, to work on robotics projects whilst there. To Peter’s absolute horror, whoever this billionaire trust-fund guy Stark was, was his camp counselor. 

His fucking camp counselor. 

Peter heard about the first summer camp session, he was participating in the second, which started at the beginning of August. His friends came back home to Queens from Stark camp, a ghost rattling in the old shell of their bodies, their soulless eyes begging for reprieve, the dark circles under their eyes indicating their primal instinct for victory in the camp competitions, to impress the mysterious genius billionaire they so desperately wanted to rob.

He spent the entirety of the summer trying to escape the camp, it was like everyday Mr. Stark (no, he won’t call him anything else,) targeted him only, saw some sort of promise in him, but he’d merely point to his friends and take the burden of being recognized off of him. May’s math camp. No. He can’t be noticed here, because maybe they’ll start talking about college, and how to prepare for college. Yuck.

Not that Peter was avoiding going to college, of course he’s applying. But it’s summer. His last summer before college, he needs to go out with a bang. Not some nerd camp in upstate New York. At least MJ is here. He’s 99% sure she joined to make fun of everyone’s projects, be condescending, and cause as many issues as she can while simultaneously keeping productivity to the bare minimum by scaring everyone. Yeah, that’s MJ right there.

He peeked back at her from over his shoulder and away from his robotics equipment during their scheduled tech building time, she sat at the table behind him to talk to the group about, 10 minutes ago, Peter forgot while he secretly executed Plan Ghouls, (yes MJ named it), while Tony oversaw everyone in the recreation center at camp, and maybe it’s because the Stark family is fucking rich they don’t deserve any money at all, this building looks way too nice to be here. 

It was like Tony Stark, this billionaire who is barely even 30 years old, was fucking with him, Peter Parker personally. Did he enjoy tormenting his group? He acted warily around MJ, like finding a wire in a maze leading to a fuse. He’d never seen anything more glorious; a nearly thirty year old man scared of a 17 year old. Peter analyzed the older man and concluded that he is an eight year old with the wisdom of an eighty year old.

Ned promised he’d call every single day of camp, and Peter thought he’d actually die without his best friend at camp, disintegrate on the spot like some formidable being pulling apart every atom, until he’s lost in the atmosphere, drifting away like he never existed. He missed his best friend, okay? Who else would he talk to about.. the thing, his weird spider senses, and possible crime he could stop from 100 miles away from Queens.

His guy on the computer had other plans for the end of the summer, his family was going to visit their cousins that Ned conveniently was ecstatic to go on, leaving Peter to rot and die alone in summer camp. A haunted summer camp.

Peter snuck another entire circuit board into his pocket. Morally, this is very wrong. He reprimands himself over it. But, technically, he paid for this with his camp fee? 

He uses less equipment for his actual projects than.. their secret project. He will use the same amount of equipment, just one is not prohibited because he technically can’t make secret projects on the side that may or may not pertain to the spooky warehouse half a mile out that Tony Stark refuses to comment on.

“Hey!” MJ yells right beside his ear, and he fumbles the lego pieces he contemplated taking in his hands and screeches. She laughs, holding her side, “Did I scare you?”

Peter plasters the best glare he can on his face, “No, you didn’t, I just yawned.” She will not win, whatever contest she made up in her head for the…. ghost catching competition, he will be two steps ahead of her and he will win. No matter how many horror movies they watch, and no matter how scared he is of her when she has no reaction except for laughter during their movie nights in the woods at night with the rest of the camp.

Countdown to Plan Ghoul’s execution: 3 days, 6 hours, 20 minutes.

—

They became acquainted with the weird, annoying show-off Johnny the second week of camp. So, last week. Peter wouldn’t call Johnny his friend, maybe not even acquaintance, but Johnny wears ugly cargo pants and stuffs them with extra robotics lab equipment like beakers, (what the fuck do they need beakers for?), and somehow stuffed a Kit in his shirt. He’s sure Johnny is going to forget and sit down with a beaker in his pants and break his ass with glass.

MJ was the first to initiate the alliance at the beginning of camp. They’ve been here for the second half of their summer, so of course she devised a devious plan. 

They both hated Johnny at first, and that is exactly why Peter watched MJ reel Johnny into their plans once they’re in the Stark Camp Lab. MJ acted dryly and sarcastically around everyone she hated, drawing her to Johnny and Peter suffered the consequences. Peter lost count of the amount of times Johnny showed off his projects to the camp counselors, not long after stealing parts from a group nearby. MJ watched, intrigued, and Peter would always end up with his head down on his desk. And MJ would follow suit with Tony’s back to them, she would gather up all of Johnny’s wrenches, bolts, his keychain, and he’s pretty sure she got an arm of the collaborative robot in the corner.

And then the next dewy morning, the humidity was too thick and their eyes were unable to open from the night before because Tony told a story about a demon coming to life at the campfire, it’s real Tony has totally seen it, MJ and Peter were on breakfast duty with the camp counselors. The smell of tinder reeked on their flannels, but Tony pulled out the chocolate chips the moment he arrived, the other camp counselors shot glares at him. Peter had to turn away to hide his snicker.

This is when they met Gwen. She was part of another camp counselors group, and the two of them had their hair done, Gwen had cool piercings, even one on her face, with a vinyl knapsack by her feet full of patches. Her camp counselor has an itinerary, and oh, my god, it’s laminated, and Peter’s eyes widen and he thinks his pupils turned into the shape of hearts. The last time he saw an itinerary and Tony did not lose them while hiking was the first day of camp. Gwen’s camp counselor, Jen, even brought snacks for all of them. 

MJ propped herself up on a nearby table in the kitchen and Tony rambled on about how his father never sent him to camp, and if he knew he’d practically be a boy scout out here in the woods he might’ve considered it. Peter thinks he heard the man say he was working towards his bachelor degree at their age. What a weird guy.

Johnny walked in, and Jen, the cool camp counselor reads out his last name and it’s Storm?! Peter imagines Johnny is the type of guy to steal his hypothetical sister’s toys and bury them in his suburban backyard and blame it on ghosts, and of course he tells MJ this theory.

MJ flips pancakes on the stoves, the hiss of the pancake mix to heat loud enough to drown out her inconspicuous whispers Peter nearly drops his spatula from her blaring whisper, “I sketched a prototype and stole Tony’s pencil. Our first prototype is called the Poltergeist Machine.”

He lowers his shoulders and sends his best glare, snarling and pointing with his head at Tony who is two feet away and yelling at someone on the phone about the physics kit they needed for today. “Are you crazy?! Also, that’s the ugliest name I’ve ever heard.”

MJ snarls back and throws her arms up, “Okay, well maybe names are not my forte!” And when Peter mumbled maybe under his breath, he really did know from a sixth sense that her shove was coming. And his shoulder nudges into something, and ouchie, that hurt, and it’s fucking Tony, off the phone and staring at them with his eyebrow quirk. Peter thinks he practices it in the mirror every night before bed, like brushing his teeth. He does it every day. He had never seen the man’s reaction into Peter physically bumping into him, though they did like messing with him. He was their counselor, they were bound to test his boundaries to see how much it would take to get in trouble, they’re sweet teenagers and not heathens. 

Tony did nothing, and awkwardly shoved him away when Peter just stared and gawked at him. 

Johnny and Gwen talked about college with Tony, who stayed on his phone and muttering, “Yeah, kids, you’ll get in,” and, “sure, yeah, we can work out a letter of rec,” and Peter pondered over his inability to plan more than three minutes ahead and felt a drop low in his stomach, because in two weeks he’d be beginning his college applications for senior year. 

He and Ned had their own college plan, to keep his guy in the chair nearby while he could vigilante his college town and get a physics degree. Ned gravitated toward an engineering degree or a journalism degree, he’d probably double major. That was the best plan they’ve made so far. This, and their plan ghoul, Ned had sent cryptic messages about the nearby warehouse being abandoned and never showing up on maps online. Ned had yelled very loudly over the phone to be careful because this might require Spider-Manning, and Peter yelled over his voice so nobody else could hear. 

Johnny had glared at him from ten feet away in the field during that phone call and walked away.

And he looked at him the same way now. This little shit. I  will get into college. Maybe I’ll get my own Tony letter of rec without showing off. 

Peter knows what’s going to happen next when he turns to stomp away, his foot caught in the strap of MJ’s backpack she left thrown on the floor and sends him skidding. Geez. He hears metal clanking, and what the fuck, did he knock over a table or something? And MJ throws herself towards her backpack before his brain can connect her actions to conclusion, and there’s a robot hand skidding across the floor the same, resigned way he did. 

The robot hand. The fucking robotic hand. 

They’d have to face Mr. Stark’s wrath, and he feels like he’s entered Hell, forget the commandment and We should fear and love God so we do not tell lies about our neighbor, betray him, slander him and he hears the robotic and smash into the table and break, and Tony lunges at it like it’s some family heirloom that he intentionally broke.

“MJ!” He squeaks, like he hasn’t been through puberty and is nearly an adult. Johnny’s mouth falls open and he tugs on Gwen’s sleeve as if everybody here to cook breakfast wasn’t staring in awe, and he hears war cries from MJ demanding whoever planted these supplies come forward and reveal themselves or she’d send a witch to curse them. 

It was like a 1995 school drama show, the pancakes burning on the stove and the unamused camp counselors fiddle with the ends of their shirts and Tony stares at the sight of devastation and MJ sheepishly smiles. Gwen is the first to break the silence, she snorts unattractively and covers her face. “Sorry. That was a little funny.”

Tony merely zeroed in his gaze  on the two of them, hovering over them though he wasn’t much taller, attempting to humble them with his menacing face. He points two fingers at his eyes in the I’m watching you way, signaling his two fingers back to them. It’s not like they hadn’t witnessed Tony the day before steal the flags for their ‘capture the flag’ game because they kept losing.  

--

Stem camp was camp, Peter woke up scrambled every day, usually covering his face from the morning sun when Tony would pound on the door and swing it open and let the morning sun blind him. He isn’t sure how he woke up MJ, but he always waits 15 minutes after he wakes up Peter, and he thinks he hears gentle knocks and a little, “Good morning!” before he takes off to begin his day with way too much caffeine and energy.

Tony, in all his glory, is a hot mess and begs his supervisor to let him join the kids’ activities, and she usually says no but he jumps into the lake, anyways, yelling at MJ and Peter to use life vests. The camp supervisor, Virginia Potts, is usually in leggings and a t-shirt or tank top, her strawberry-blond hair in a ponytail, and always has her clipboard in her arms with tidied stacks of paper. She is always smiling, is modulated and soothing, like honey in a comb in the sun. Whenever Peter runs into her, he immediately straightens his back and wonders if its worth borrowing the robotics equipment before they put it back for plan ghoul. 

Pepper usually stands at the edge of the lake, a fixed gaze set on a floating Tony, her tin tucked in and her hip out. The first time Tony decided to ditch his camp counselor duties and join in with them and was approached by Pepper, he waved to her from the top of a rock enthusiastically. “Tony!” she exclaimed and everything she lectured him about seemed to go in one ear and come out the other.

“What is the number one rule of being a camp counselor, Mr. Stark?” Pepper had asked, while Tony striked Peter with a toy lightsaber they built that afternoon, and he nearly doubled over but was grabbed by the shoulders and held up by the menace in question. The weight of the saber wasn’t very heavy and it was made up of plastic, but Peter yanks the cool metal sword from his counselor’s arm. He’s never had any siblings and doesn’t know if Tony has either, but talking about baseball and college and physics having someone surprisingly grounding and comforting when he wandered off while hiking and busted his knee, for some reason Tony was good at first-aid.

--

“We totally  deserve a team pet!” Peter huffed at the campfire, their group settling in after a round of night zip-lining. 

“For God’s sake, we will not adopt a stray racoon for the team,” Tony yells from inside the cabin, bringing his stash of s’mores supplies he kept hidden and possibly explains the ants on the premise and not secured in the kitchen. “A mascot, maybe.”

“Please, this is Cranberry Lake, we do not need a pet to keep us from the ghosts,” Gwen declares, and before she can continue Peter screeches.

“So, you do admit there are ghosts!” 

Tony shivers dramatically once he rejoins the group in front of the campfire and the fire crackles in his face. Peter gasps, and Tony turns in worry, fearing the fucking kid is fucking asphysxiating. “You see! Tony just shivered when you mentioned the ghosts.” “Lowering your voice won’t do anything, you dipshit!” Johnny unnecessarily adds, getting tossed by a marshmallow and being directed into the direction of the nearby trees to sit in timeout by the all-knowing being Tony who declared if they cussed anymore they’d be sent to timeout, the Goddamned Almighty. 

“One more bad word out of you guys and next time you’re going to watch me swim in the lake, using all of your floaties while you watch from the dirt, wallowing in your own despair.” 

“Can I go back to Jen’s group?”

“Absolutely not. You three are keeping me alive at camp as it is,” Tony informs them as if they hadn’t noticed the man was really an 8 year old in an adult’s body. “Even Pepper agreed. She says my campers keep me alive.”

--

Tony floats on his back in the outdoor pool, the cold water reflects the sun and Peter floats nearby on a yellow inflatable pool float with printed dandelions on it. 

His friends chatter nearby, but his head leaning against the plastic floaty drowns the sound out. He hears his inner ear and hates it. Tony grunts, moving to grab his glass with juice and a small umbrella in it. This billionaire, the head of a company producing the world’s greatest and innovative technology was ridiculous. 

“Queens is..” Peter starts their conversation again, afraid he’s too quiet and the older man didn’t hear him. “Queens is my home. May and Ben raised me there, and being away from it sucks. I can’t be there to help.”

MJ sits at the other end of the pool on the hot cement, gasping when she lowers her legs in. She sounds too far away to them, in their own little corner. He raises his head to see if Tony had even heard him, but he seemed sipped from his drink and hummed to himself.

He waited for an answer before he nearly blew his cover again.

“Hometown of Parker. On Long Island, Citi Field, and supposed home of a vigilante, I think,” Tony supplies an answer, and Peter thinks, shit, he knows, “Once, Spider-Man dropped a hot-dog on my head.”

Peter laughs, freely, and shit, act natural, Peter, because the older man that he trusts but can’t seem to get the words off his tongue, his identity reveal, he’s never wanted to tell anybody else. Ever. It was his responsibility, his alter-ego, but he trusts him, for some reason.

The earth aligned them together, and whatever brought them together doesn’t make any sense. 

A mentor who understood him, who was a mere 10 years older than him, who had regrettably become friends with his Aunt May, and those two were forces in his life he wouldn’t know what to do without. Maybe that’s what happens when someone mentors you all summer and genuinely cares.

Tony was brilliant. Sure, him being here was confusing, but he wanted hands on experience in his company. Tony told them stories of the previous campers and which ones reminded Tony of them. When in the college application workshop the camp offered, he revised Peter’s papers and saw another piece of him on paper. 

Tony Stark was caring, gentle, he was a walking encyclopedia, his skepticism had kept a barrier around him at the beginning of the summer, but slowly thawed out the more he lived. If words have had no weight his entire life, he’s owing it to every teenager here to keep his promises and Peter wonders if anyone has ever kept their promises to Tony. A glass barrier, built from sand and liquid and carefully molded to protect him and encase him. 

Practically a kid when he lost his parents. Peter had read about it in the papers and saw news channels open every fragile wound on TV, and he remembers the news reporters surrounding Uncle Ben’s death. 

He isn’t sure what else has the older man so guarded, but he knows they are slowly breaking the crystalline around him, his meddling heart wrapped around this camp and the brilliant minds. He knows Tony is good, past his cynicism is pure optimism, and is is an excessive coffee drinking, smells of motor oil and marshmallows, mentors anybody he can, and the damaged heart he hides, who makes special tech presents for the students, smudged ink on his hands from his blueprints, is good. 

And Peter hopes he can model who he is after Tony. Spider-Man can strive to be someone like Tony, because the 27 year old understands what it means to invest in his community. And Queens is his home, he’s sure Tony will take care of it once he’s gone for college. Tony is human, he bleeds, he hurts, he doesn’t crack under pressure but quakes alone.

The man who emerges from the tech lab every morning at 6am because he forgot to sleep, yeah, that’s Peter’s mentor. How’d he get himself in this spot?

He turns back to Tony, “My uncle Ben used to tell me people are ugly, unlovable, they are their failures, but then they’d constantly prove him wrong. He wasn’t a pessimist, he was the opposite. But he saw the ugliness in New York, in Queens. But then he’d see sons hugging and kissing their mothers, he’d see local students building churches from scratch, and older siblings wiping their siblings’ tears when they played outside.”

Tony quirks a brow, but listens. He really listens, and he doesn’t know if he can finish. “He talked in constant epithets with our neighbors. Their gardens, his wisdom, and about how people always came together. Always.

“Maybe that’s who Spider-Man is trying to save, trying to represent in Queens. I think it’s what people like Ben would want to help. And I don’t want to leave, it’s my little sanctuary. This is the longest I’ve been away from Queens.”

Tony playfully flicked water towards Peter, who dodged it and splashed water back. He could be petulant, too. “I hope this spider-guy is watching over you in Queens. I know your Uncle Ben is. And I know, I know, it’s cheesy as hell, but he really is. I remember my Ma used to visit me in my dreams at my worst times.

“I had no one to go to. My family was gone, and I wanted to do better. Be better. At my rock bottom, I was brought back up by my dad’s best friend. He stayed by my side since they died.. And when I found out he wanted to steal the company from me, I knew I could never let people like that taint more kids in the future in this field. In any field, really. I think I have a responsibility with this camp, and I know my mom would be proud of me. And I know your uncle will be proud, too, because I’ve got your back, too.”

The breath is knocked out of Peter, because oh fuck, this camp counselor who was unwilling to budge, had opened up and was vulnerable and was scared of being stabbed in the back but trusted him.

Tony cracks a smile, supine on his back over the water again in no time and drags the pool floaty with him after he kicks off the wall. They float over to the group, and the weight in Peter’s sternum subdues. An ache he forgot was there, learned to live with, and Tony’s words ring in his head the rest of the day. He tells May about it and never stops missing her.

--

Peter reached into his canvas duffle bag with the initials, ‘BFP,’ embroidered into it and found the white baseball jersey he last remembers seeing when he was twelve years old. His cabin is chilly today, so it must be cold outside. The sun hides behind the clouds so he shrugs a long sleeve shirt on, then the jersey. 

They were going to play a game of baseball this morning, his muscles still aching from rock climbing and hiking the previous day. He was Spider-Man, he had a lot of endurance, but he hadn’t been exercising for a while. He missed feeling this; feeling fatigued but not from a night out as a vigilante. He and MJ climbed the rocks at least three separate times, their ropes clipped snugly to their bodies and Tony had reached the top to tie their ropes. They stupidly swung over the edges, dangling over the forest and had views of the lake. Johnny wasn’t scared of heights, but yelped every time his foot slipped and loose gravel jerked around him. Gwen swung back and forth, in a way that made Peter’s heart lurch when she kicked her feet off the rocks and threw her head back, lowering herself down.

It was an exhaustion that had a lightweight feeling to it. 

He wasn’t dizzied from the adrenaline of catching a perpetrator in time, or whatever criminal of the night presented themselves in Queens. 

Johnny had chased Peter, while rock climbing, and Peter felt genuine warmth for his friends. His best friends. They sent videos to Ned, Johnny and Gwen had been on a Facetime call with them the day before and declared whoever is friends with Peter, are their friends now. MJ shared her flannel, the one she wore around her waist once she noticed Peter’s calloused and cold hands when they brushed hands on the ropes. Gwen threatens to beat the shit out of Johnny if he bumps into her again, and once they reach the waterfall past the mounds of boulders they push each other in. 

Tony had sat on the side, pretending that he didn’t have a camera strapped around his neck and two bundles of film gathered from the summer.

And seeing the initials on his dufflebag this morning, Peter wishes he could march into his home, what it was once before, and announce his future profession to Uncle Ben. Because he’s stuck. Ben Parker would laugh, reminding Peter he wasn't much of a scientist himself, yet they’d ponder over every possibility they could. 

Ben, who smelled of cinnamon and coffee and New York, and Tony knocked on his cabin door before he could wrestle the baseball jersey on because the sight of it sent him reeling. Maybe May had accidentally packed it? Did she do this on purpose? They knew he would become homesick; he hasn’t left May’s for long. The longest he stayed away was for his DC trip in freshman year.

“Come in!” Peter calls.

“Hey, kid,” Tony opens the door, dressed in basketball shorts and a sweatshirt, with bags under his eyes that he seems to have everyday. He looks young; but he can notice the signs of smile and worry lines around his young-adult face. “You’re late. The kiddos sent me to check on you. We’re all waiting.”

“Sorry, I just needed to get dressed--”

Peter cuts himself off, breathing in the baseball jersey while he slides it over his head. And it was a smell he hadn’t smelled in years. May was more of a nostalgic and sentimental person, and held onto Ben’s objects. They’d peer through photo albums together, and Peter would silently grief sometimes, but he was back at the Mets game Ben fought to buy tickets for and took to. The fresh air, the golden sun, Ben’s oversized hat covered Peter’s forehead and eyes. Ben was in every stitch of the material. His mind retrieved whatever image of Ben it could, and Peter couldn’t breathe.

“I--” His breath wavered and betrayed him, and Tony looked at him with a concerned face. 

Peter can hear his phone buzzing with texts from Ned, probably responding to his breakdown over possible college majors he sent in a daze this morning when he saw an article about comets in their solar system, composed of water, dust, ice, and carbon monoxide. And he felt like one of those comets now, launched into the air with no destination and freefalling. 

The jersey was his actual size now, and Johnny yelled from outside the cabin, “Pete, hurry up or you’ll be catching the whole game!” Tony stared back at Peter in concern, maybe he could see through him. He hadn’t hidden his teen angst that much this summer, maybe Tony still remembers teen angst. Hopefully he didn’t call him out over his childish brain losing it on a Saturday morning at camp. Was it homesickness? Tony probably only dealt with kid campers being homesick.

“Sorry, shoot, I just lost track of my sentence,’ Peter says and it comes out like a question. 

He didn’t expect for Tony’s face to soften; the usual distant and withdrawn appearance is replaced with a small smile and a squeeze to his shoulder. “Come on, kiddo. Let’s play ball and possibly pop one of our shoulders out of our sockets by accident again.”

Peter snorted passed the burning tears threatening to spill, wiping them across his sleeve and noticed the man take a step back towards the door. “Yeah, right, ‘us.’ That was you, old man.”

Tony ducks his head, wrapping an arm around Peter’s shoulders and leaving a gap of space between them. He gives him a slight shove to the field, and Peter catches the ball in time before it strikes him in the face. Of course, that was MJ’s doing. 

They played until Peter fell over on the floor, dust spreading in the air around him on the field and stinging his eyes. He definitely hurt his shoulder.

Tony had half the mind to chortle at him once he sat Peter up, already sending Gwen to grab an ice pack and the first aid kit. He couldn’t help it; he’s clumsy. His spider senses are quiet here, only arising once this entire summer: when Tony followed him, Johnny, Gwen, and MJ down the rocks and found Tony huddled on a narrow precipice clutching his chest. He had a distant look in his eyes; Peter thought he had recognized that look on himself before. He was out of breath and his face was pale. Gwen chimed in from behind, “Are we still canoeing later today? Or is today archery?”

And that was smart. Tony schooled his face, and he must have tons of practice if it came so easily. He wouldn’t have guessed Tony was working himself out of a panic attack if it weren’t for the paleness of his face, but Gwen’s questions were good. They were about fifty feet off the ground, and he had almost slipped. At least, that’s what he heard.

The quietness of his spider senses didn’t scare him. It should have, but it didn’t. Maybe it would soon enough. Johnny sits down on the other side of him, asking Peter to squeeze his hand if he needs to. 

“Ah, shit, I promise it’s not that bad,” Peter says, already heading towards the nearest wall to reset his shoulder himself. He’s done this once before, thinks; once, there was an apartment building fire and he pulled out dozens of people, smoke fumes messing with his vision and chest. He had to reset his shoulder before pulling out a teeanger, grunting and pushing his arm against a nearby wall with the fire on his heels.

“Hey, kid,” Tony asserts, holding his hands up. “Can I? It hurts more if you do it. I can promise you that.”

Maybe it was because of being emotional over Ben’s baseball jersey, or missing May’s hugs and Ned’s hugs, meeting him by his locker every morning and how much he’ll miss them all for college that is a year away, was just stupid. And stupid over being upset over having to leave the nerdy stem camp and leave Tony behind. 

It wasn’t fair for him to be attached. He was like a mentor, an older brother, just from the past month. It wasn’t fair for him to ask for advice constantly, but has a feeling this man was more than a camp counselor to their group. For fuck’s sake, he shed a tear in front of him and the man let him.

Peter nods to his answer, already ducking his head and inhaling a deep breath. “Good, yeah, deep breath. You’ve got the right idea,” Tony says, grabbing his shoulder. There’s a slight pop when Tony pushes, and Peter bites back his pain and tastes blood. 

Tony holds onto his arm, and nods towards the rest of the concerned group, searching for any indication that Peter is okay. Gwen wipes a tear from his cheek, and he wonders what he would’ve done this summer without them. And what he’ll do if he doesn’t see them again. Maybe they’ll keep in touch, or apply to the same colleges. He didn’t want to lose them and the safety he felt with them.

--

“Okay, Peter, I told you for the millionth time, you connect the black wire to the circuit to get R2’s voice commands working,” Ned ordered the phone, and had given him, Johnny, MJ, and Gwen directions to the abandoned warehouse. 

It was kind of Tony’s fault for demanding a nap and leaving the four of them with another camp counselor that wasn’t as competent as he was.Well, to call Tony competent is a bit of a stretch, his methods are nonchalant. Hence, MJ is in the corner reading them murder stories from the 1930s and remindingthem the ghosts still linger in the woods of upstate New York, right where they are.

“Yeah, yeah, MJ, the eighty-year old ghost is here to haunt us,” Peter mutters, ignoring Ned’s directions because he is totally wrong. “Ned, no. Absolutely not. What is this, LEGOs sensors?”

“Oh, my God, if you’re going to tell a joke then make it funny,” Johnny groans, “It looks like a UFO.”

“Fuck you, Johnny!” Peter yells, tossing a wrench and then deciding he shouldn’t have done that, and hoped Johnny ducks his head in time, “It’s not UFOs! It’s R2D2, you stupid piece of shit!”

Maybe Peter was a little unhinged today. 

“Hey, ghost, knock this bookshelf down if you’re mad at us,” Gwen declares, drawing out her voice like she’s reading a ghost story to kids, “Or hold a candlestick in the middle of the room.”

The warehouse is small, it’s dark, and they use the sunlight as their lightsource. It was probably really stupid of them to break in, but this is it. Plan ghoul. And it’s the second to last night of camp, and they had vlogged the entire venture to the warehouse. 

MJ had kept all the equipment they gathered from the summer. Either Tony was completely oblivious, unaware of his surroundings at all times and chose to ignore the lack of passion in their projects all summer for this, R2D2 and Johnny’s soccer laying robot, and Gwen’s killer robot obstacle course, or Tony didn’t care. 

He was a billionaire. MJ still yells at the older man over his salary, but yesterday, he asked MJ to consult as an intern for his company and have input on the charity work the company participates in. And it was perfect for her. This was how they were wrapping their summer up; some of them receiving internships, letters of recommendation, and Peter stayed the same with the sick feeling in his stomach that he’d ruin his own life, or never be as far ahead as his peers. 

“Peter, I have the same kit in front of me. I gave you these blueprints!” Ned yells into his ear, and Peter drops his phone and breaks off R2D2’s arm. Gwen laughs, pointing out how much uglier the robot is.

“Can your ugly R2 even fit in my obstacle course?” Gwen asks, playing robot soccer with Johnny. Their controllers are loud, they beep too much, and the obstacle course is ugly. It’s really not, but he’d never admit to his new best friend how beautiful the course is and he wishes he could shrink down and play in it.

“Ghouls!” MJ yells, fiddling with her tiny robotic sensor that he’s pretty sure is a tracker she’s been planting. He makes a mental note to check his things later before leaving camp.”My bot says Johnny is in first place!”

Their robots race across the obstacle course of the filthy warehouse, the sun’s going down so they placed flashlights around the room and the golden hour sun basked the room as it set on the horizon. The room was full of laughter, MJ’s ghost monitor with activity levels he can’t understand, and Gwen runs into their pseudo soccer field to knock R2D2 over. 

They spent the rest of the night planning for college, planning to keep in touch, and devising another plan to take over Stark Industries once they all get jobs there. Peter knew he needed to go to college. He knew he couldn’t risk his family and friends and his identity.

They hear a crash outside, all of their movements hault. Peter doesn’t dare breathe, they all let their hearts pound in their chests. The sun had set by now, and Peter discreetly used his senses to listen and smell what, or who was outside. Gwen shows Peter her arm, the goosebumps set all over and she grabs the flashlight to use as a weapon. He’s impressed with her pose, but oh, shit, is it another camp goer? Did MJ fucking summon a ghoul?

Johnny shushes them, o-fucking-kay Johnny, shush the quiet group. Obnoxious. Peter blows out MJ’s candle, while she gets out her Poltergeist machine, where did she even keep it?

“Hide!”

The kids scatter, and MJ rambles through her theories of clues she’s found. “Is that a fucking bat?”

“Is it fucking Batman?”

“Peter, shut the fuck up!” Gwen chastises, elbowing him while they search for refuge behind the nearby bookcase full of dust and spiders. The shadow from outside looms, and the room is too dark to make out whoever kicks the door open.

The door was kicked open, and the group screamed. His brain clicked, his senses didn't go off.

It was fucking Tony.

Tony fucking Stark, with a casing of gold metal under his arm. And it’s his gold and red robot. 

Let’s just say Tony dragged the four of them back to the camp after destroying their robots in robot-killer-soccer. 

--

Tony does not know the impact he had on each teenagers’ lives. Maybe it was just Peter, and he was being sappy, but it was the last day of camp and the sun was setting and he was tired of the pinewood. It’d take him at least a week to get the smell of earth out of his clothes.

MJ shows affection, she hugs Gwen before they depart. Oh, God. They’re really gonna miss camp.

The summer is ending, case closed. Everybody’s packing their bags, and Peter’s pretty sure he will never recover from his scare during plan ghoul. Who would’ve known Tony had the same idea as them.

His friends, who wear his hats, who steal his food, and who wipe his tears are leaving. He has MJ. He has Ned. 

Peter had set his flannel on fire but they put him out. It was really stupid. 

Peter talked to Tony about Ben one night. He used metaphors, but he knew about Tony’s parents' loss in a car crash.

“Kid,” Tony says, pulling his attention away from the camp departures. Peter practically hopped on his toes of anticipation, walking closer to the older man. A father-figure? No. Older-brother figure? Maybe. Yes. 

“You better work hard on your college applications, kid, because I’m going to need a student researching with me at MIT,” Tony smiles, kindly, and Peter blinked. 

It still hadn’t set how much Tony believes in him. He knows he could be saying this out of kindness, out of pity maybe, but he had been the one to pull him from his reeling thoughts all summer long. 

Tony had welcomed him in the threshold, their own threshold they built together, when Peter needed someone there, to take him in, and he continued to stay in once school began. This had been the place Peter spent half the summer in, did summer homework at the poolside with Tony’s help, he accidentally left candy wrappers in Tony’s cabin and left even more ants, and grew comfortable.

“Pete, when you go off to college, I’m not kidding, don’t forget to call,” Tony says, because Peter probably looks too intense right now and doesn’t know how to unweb himself from his comfortable cocoon of a summer, and he admires his camp counselor so much.

“I’m scared,” Peter breathes, and shit, his eyes well up. And Tony is there, the smell of coffee and some sweat, pulling him into a hug and he closes his eyes and tries to breathe.

“Oh, kid,” Tony says, “Remember all the shitty advice I gave you. Do exactly what I wouldn’t do. And remind Aunt May I’m just a camp counselor and to stop yelling at me on the phone.”

Peter chuckles, because, oh God, knowing Tony and May, they’ll both team up to watch his back. 

“I don’t want to let go of everyone here. I don’t want self pity, or anything, but like, this is the first time I felt like I’ve lived, as cheesy as that sounds,” Peter admits, wiping his sleeve. 

Gwen is the first one to tackle the both of them, then Johnny, and Tony curses to the air. “Why did I become a camp counselor. The little boogers won’t leave me alone.”

“Stop lying, you know you came here for Pepper,” MJ snorts, “Old man.”

At the end of the summer, Peter is a teenage vigilante with a secret identity, but chose to relish in being a teeanger this summer. He was his grief or loss or anxiety, he was Peter Parker. And he wouldn’t ever just be Peter again. He thinks about what he wants, and he knows he wants them in his life. And Tony had given him this threshold, one that felt like a home away from home, and a family away from his small one.

[urlology]

How Netflix Reinvented HR

https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr

by

Patty McCord

From the January–February 2014 Issue

Sheryl Sandberg has called it one of the most important documents ever to come out of Silicon Valley. It’s been viewed more than 5 million times on the web. But when Reed Hastings and I (along with some colleagues) wrote a PowerPoint deck explaining how we shaped the culture and motivated performance at Netflix, where Hastings is CEO and I was chief talent officer from 1998 to 2012, we had no idea it would go viral. We realized that some of the talent management ideas we’d pioneered, such as the concept that workers should be allowed to take whatever vacation time they feel is appropriate, had been seen as a little crazy (at least until other companies started adopting them). But we were surprised that an unadorned set of 127 slides—no music, no animation—would become so influential.

Netflix culture slide deck

People find the Netflix approach to talent and culture compelling for a few reasons. The most obvious one is that Netflix has been really successful: During 2013 alone its stock more than tripled, it won three Emmy awards, and its U.S. subscriber base grew to nearly 29 million. All that aside, the approach is compelling because it derives from common sense. In this article I’ll go beyond the bullet points to describe five ideas that have defined the way Netflix attracts, retains, and manages talent. But first I’ll share two conversations I had with early employees, both of which helped shape our overall philosophy.

Crafting a Culture of Excellence

The first took place in late 2001. Netflix had been growing quickly: We’d reached about 120 employees and had been planning an IPO. But after the dot-com bubble burst and the 9/11 attacks occurred, things changed. It became clear that we needed to put the IPO on hold and lay off a third of our employees. It was brutal. Then, a bit unexpectedly, DVD players became the hot gift that Christmas. By early 2002 our DVD-by-mail subscription business was growing like crazy. Suddenly we had far more work to do, with 30% fewer employees.

One day I was talking with one of our best engineers, an employee I’ll call John. Before the layoffs, he’d managed three engineers, but now he was a one-man department working very long hours. I told John I hoped to hire some help for him soon. His response surprised me. “There’s no rush—I’m happier now,” he said. It turned out that the engineers we’d laid off weren’t spectacular—they were merely adequate. John realized that he’d spent too much time riding herd on them and fixing their mistakes. “I’ve learned that I’d rather work by myself than with subpar performers,” he said. His words echo in my mind whenever I describe the most basic element of Netflix’s talent philosophy: The best thing you can do for employees—a perk better than foosball or free sushi—is hire only “A” players to work alongside them. Excellent colleagues trump everything else.

The second conversation took place in 2002, a few months after our IPO. Laura, our bookkeeper, was bright, hardworking, and creative. She’d been very important to our early growth, having devised a system for accurately tracking movie rentals so that we could pay the correct royalties. But now, as a public company, we needed CPAs and other fully credentialed, deeply experienced accounting professionals—and Laura had only an associate’s degree from a community college. Despite her work ethic, her track record, and the fact that we all really liked her, her skills were no longer adequate. Some of us talked about jury-rigging a new role for her, but we decided that wouldn’t be right.

So I sat down with Laura and explained the situation—and said that in light of her spectacular service, we would give her a spectacular severance package. I’d braced myself for tears or histrionics, but Laura reacted well: She was sad to be leaving but recognized that the generous severance would let her regroup, retrain, and find a new career path. This incident helped us create the other vital element of our talent management philosophy: If we wanted only “A” players on our team, we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit, no matter how valuable their contributions had once been. Out of fairness to such people—and, frankly, to help us overcome our discomfort with discharging them—we learned to offer rich severance packages.

With these two overarching principles in mind, we shaped our approach to talent using the five tenets below.

Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults

Over the years we learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get better results, and at lower cost. If you’re careful to hire people who will put the company’s interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. Most companies spend endless time and money writing and enforcing HR policies to deal with problems the other 3% might cause. Instead, we tried really hard to not hire those people, and we let them go if it turned out we’d made a hiring mistake.

Adultlike behavior means talking openly about issues with your boss, your colleagues, and your subordinates. It means recognizing that even in companies with reams of HR policies, those policies are frequently skirted as managers and their reports work out what makes sense on a case-by-case basis.

Let me offer two examples.

When Netflix launched, we had a standard paid-time-off policy: People got 10 vacation days, 10 holidays, and a few sick days. We used an honor system—employees kept track of the days they took off and let their managers know when they’d be out. After we went public, our auditors freaked. They said Sarbanes-Oxley mandated that we account for time off. We considered instituting a formal tracking system. But then Reed asked, “Are companies required to give time off? If not, can’t we just handle it informally and skip the accounting rigmarole?” I did some research and found that, indeed, no California law governed vacation time.

So instead of shifting to a formal system, we went in the opposite direction: Salaried employees were told to take whatever time they felt was appropriate. Bosses and employees were asked to work it out with one another. (Hourly workers in call centers and warehouses were given a more structured policy.) We did provide some guidance. If you worked in accounting or finance, you shouldn’t plan to be out during the beginning or the end of a quarter, because those were busy times. If you wanted 30 days off in a row, you needed to meet with HR. Senior leaders were urged to take vacations and to let people know about them—they were role models for the policy. (Most were happy to comply.) Some people worried about whether the system would be inconsistent—whether some bosses would allow tons of time off while others would be stingy. In general, I worried more about fairness than consistency, because the reality is that in any organization, the highest-performing and most valuable employees get more leeway.

The company’s expense policy is five words long: “Act in Netflix’s best interests.”

We also departed from a formal travel and expense policy and decided to simply require adultlike behavior there, too. The company’s expense policy is five words long: “Act in Netflix’s best interests.” In talking that through with employees, we said we expected them to spend company money frugally, as if it were their own. Eliminating a formal policy and forgoing expense account police shifted responsibility to frontline managers, where it belongs. It also reduced costs: Many large companies still use travel agents (and pay their fees) to book trips, as a way to enforce travel policies. They could save money by letting employees book their own trips online. Like most Netflix managers, I had to have conversations periodically with employees who ate at lavish restaurants (meals that would have been fine for sales or recruiting, but not for eating alone or with a Netflix colleague). We kept an eye on our IT guys, who were prone to buying a lot of gadgets. But overall we found that expense accounts are another area where if you create a clear expectation of responsible behavior, most employees will comply.

Tell the Truth About Performance

Many years ago we eliminated formal reviews. We had held them for a while but came to realize they didn’t make sense—they were too ritualistic and too infrequent. So we asked managers and employees to have conversations about performance as an organic part of their work. In many functions—sales, engineering, product development—it’s fairly obvious how well people are doing. (As companies develop better analytics to measure performance, this becomes even truer.) Building a bureaucracy and elaborate rituals around measuring performance usually doesn’t improve it.

Traditional corporate performance reviews are driven largely by fear of litigation. The theory is that if you want to get rid of someone, you need a paper trail documenting a history of poor achievement. At many companies, low performers are placed on “Performance Improvement Plans.” I detest PIPs. I think they’re fundamentally dishonest: They never accomplish what their name implies.

One Netflix manager requested a PIP for a quality assurance engineer named Maria, who had been hired to help develop our streaming service. The technology was new, and it was evolving very quickly. Maria’s job was to find bugs. She was fast, intuitive, and hardworking. But in time we figured out how to automate the QA tests. Maria didn’t like automation and wasn’t particularly good at it. Her new boss (brought in to create a world-class automation tools team) told me he wanted to start a PIP with her.

I replied, “Why bother? We know how this will play out. You’ll write up objectives and deliverables for her to achieve, which she can’t, because she lacks the skills. Every Wednesday you’ll take time away from your real work to discuss (and document) her shortcomings. You won’t sleep on Tuesday nights, because you’ll know it will be an awful meeting, and the same will be true for her. After a few weeks there will be tears. This will go on for three months. The entire team will know. And at the end you’ll fire her. None of this will make any sense to her, because for five years she’s been consistently rewarded for being great at her job—a job that basically doesn’t exist anymore. Tell me again how Netflix benefits?

“Instead, let’s just tell the truth: Technology has changed, the company has changed, and Maria’s skills no longer apply. This won’t be a surprise to her: She’s been in the trenches, watching the work around her shift. Give her a great severance package—which, when she signs the documents, will dramatically reduce (if not eliminate) the chance of a lawsuit.” In my experience, people can handle anything as long as they’re told the truth—and this proved to be the case with Maria.

When we stopped doing formal performance reviews, we instituted informal 360-degree reviews. We kept them fairly simple: People were asked to identify things that colleagues should stop, start, or continue. In the beginning we used an anonymous software system, but over time we shifted to signed feedback, and many teams held their 360s face-to-face.

HR people can’t believe that a company the size of Netflix doesn’t hold annual reviews. “Are you making this up just to upset us?” they ask. I’m not. If you talk simply and honestly about performance on a regular basis, you can get good results—probably better ones than a company that grades everyone on a five-point scale.

Managers Own the Job of Creating Great Teams

Discussing the military’s performance during the Iraq War, Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, once famously said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” When I talk to managers about creating great teams, I tell them to approach the process in exactly the opposite way.

In my consulting work, I ask managers to imagine a documentary about what their team is accomplishing six months from now. What specific results do they see? How is the work different from what the team is doing today? Next I ask them to think about the skills needed to make the images in the movie become reality. Nowhere in the early stages of the process do I advise them to think about the team they actually have. Only after they’ve done the work of envisioning the ideal outcome and the skill set necessary to achieve it should they analyze how well their existing team matches what they need.

If you’re in a fast-changing business environment, you’re probably looking at a lot of mismatches. In that case, you need to have honest conversations about letting some team members find a place where their skills are a better fit. You also need to recruit people with the right skills.

We faced the latter challenge at Netflix in a fairly dramatic way as we began to shift from DVDs by mail to a streaming service. We had to store massive volumes of files in the cloud and figure out how huge numbers of people could reliably access them. (By some estimates, up to a third of peak residential internet traffic in the U.S. comes from customers streaming Netflix movies.) So we needed to find people deeply experienced with cloud services who worked for companies that operate on a giant scale—companies like Amazon, eBay, Google, and Facebook, which aren’t the easiest places to hire someone away from.

Our compensation philosophy helped a lot. Most of its principles stem from ideals described earlier: Be honest, and treat people like adults. For instance, during my tenure Netflix didn’t pay performance bonuses, because we believed that they’re unnecessary if you hire the right people. If your employees are fully formed adults who put the company first, an annual bonus won’t make them work harder or smarter. We also believed in market-based pay and would tell employees that it was smart to interview with competitors when they had the chance, in order to get a good sense of the market rate for their talent. Many HR people dislike it when employees talk to recruiters, but I always told employees to take the call, ask how much, and send me the number—it’s valuable information.

In addition, we used equity compensation much differently from the way most companies do. Instead of larding stock options on top of a competitive salary, we let employees choose how much (if any) of their compensation would be in the form of equity. If employees wanted stock options, we reduced their salaries accordingly. We believed that they were sophisticated enough to understand the trade-offs, judge their personal tolerance for risk, and decide what was best for them and their families. We distributed options every month, at a slight discount from the market price. We had no vesting period—the options could be cashed in immediately. Most tech companies have a four-year vesting schedule and try to use options as “golden handcuffs” to aid retention, but we never thought that made sense. If you see a better opportunity elsewhere, you should be allowed to take what you’ve earned and leave. If you no longer want to work with us, we don’t want to hold you hostage.

We continually told managers that building a great team was their most important task. We didn’t measure them on whether they were excellent coaches or mentors or got their paperwork done on time. Great teams accomplish great work, and recruiting the right team was the top priority.

Leaders Own the Job of Creating the Company Culture

After I left Netflix and began consulting, I visited a hot start-up in San Francisco. It had 60 employees in an open loft-style office with a foosball table, two pool tables, and a kitchen, where a chef cooked lunch for the entire staff. As the CEO showed me around, he talked about creating a fun atmosphere. At one point I asked him what the most important value for his company was. He replied, “Efficiency.”

“OK,” I said. “Imagine that I work here, and it’s 2:58 PM. I’m playing an intense game of pool, and I’m winning. I estimate that I can finish the game in five minutes. We have a meeting at 3:00. Should I stay and win the game or cut it short for the meeting?”

“You should finish the game,” he insisted. I wasn’t surprised; like many tech start-ups, this was a casual place, where employees wore hoodies and brought pets to work, and that kind of casualness often extends to punctuality. “Wait a second,” I said. “You told me that efficiency is your most important cultural value. It’s not efficient to delay a meeting and keep coworkers waiting because of a pool game. Isn’t there a mismatch between the values you’re talking up and the behaviors you’re modeling and encouraging?”

When I advise leaders about molding a corporate culture, I tend to see three issues that need attention. This type of mismatch is one. It’s a particular problem at start-ups, where there’s a premium on casualness that can run counter to the high-performance ethos leaders want to create. I often sit in on company meetings to get a sense of how people operate. I frequently see CEOs who are clearly winging it. They lack a real agenda. They’re working from slides that were obviously put together an hour before or were recycled from the previous round of VC meetings. Workers notice these things, and if they see a leader who’s not fully prepared and who relies on charm, IQ, and improvisation, it affects how they perform, too. It’s a waste of time to articulate ideas about values and culture if you don’t model and reward behavior that aligns with those goals.

The second issue has to do with making sure employees understand the levers that drive the business. I recently visited a Texas start-up whose employees were mostly engineers in their twenties. “I bet half the people in this room have never read a P&L,” I said to the CFO. He replied, “It’s true—they’re not financially savvy or business savvy, and our biggest challenge is teaching them how the business works.” Even if you’ve hired people who want to perform well, you need to clearly communicate how the company makes money and what behaviors will drive its success. At Netflix, for instance, employees used to focus too heavily on subscriber growth, without much awareness that our expenses often ran ahead of it: We were spending huge amounts buying DVDs, setting up distribution centers, and ordering original programming, all before we’d collected a cent from our new subscribers. Our employees needed to learn that even though revenue was growing, managing expenses really mattered.

The third issue is something I call the split personality start-up. At tech companies this usually manifests itself as a schism between the engineers and the sales team, but it can take other forms. At Netflix, for instance, I sometimes had to remind people that there were big differences between the salaried professional staff at headquarters and the hourly workers in the call centers. At one point our finance team wanted to shift the whole company to direct-deposit paychecks, and I had to point out that some of our hourly workers didn’t have bank accounts. That’s a small example, but it speaks to a larger point: As leaders build a company culture, they need to be aware of subcultures that might require different management.

Good Talent Managers Think Like Businesspeople and Innovators First, and Like HR People Last

Throughout most of my career I’ve belonged to professional associations of human resources executives. Although I like the people in these groups personally, I often find myself disagreeing with them. Too many devote time to morale improvement initiatives. At some places entire teams focus on getting their firm onto lists of “Best Places to Work” (which, when you dig into the methodologies, are really based just on perks and benefits). At a recent conference I met someone from a company that had appointed a “chief happiness officer”—a concept that makes me slightly sick.

During 30 years in business I’ve never seen an HR initiative that improved morale. HR departments might throw parties and hand out T-shirts, but if the stock price is falling or the company’s products aren’t perceived as successful, the people at those parties will quietly complain—and they’ll use the T-shirts to wash their cars.

Instead of cheerleading, people in my profession should think of themselves as businesspeople. What’s good for the company? How do we communicate that to employees? How can we help every worker understand what we mean by high performance?

Here’s a simple test: If your company has a performance bonus plan, go up to a random employee and ask, “Do you know specifically what you should be doing right now to increase your bonus?” If he or she can’t answer, the HR team isn’t making things as clear as they need to be.

At Netflix I worked with colleagues who were changing the way people consume filmed entertainment, which is an incredibly innovative pursuit—yet when I started there, the expectation was that I would default to mimicking other companies’ best practices (many of them antiquated), which is how almost everyone seems to approach HR. I rejected those constraints. There’s no reason the HR team can’t be innovative too.

A version of this article appeared in the

January–February 2014

issue of Harvard Business Review.

[ktaebwi]

[TRANS] ‘WINGS’ Concept Book Interview - Suga

© floofyjimin KRN - ENG © ktaebwi

『 What I’m thankful to Bang Shihyuk PD and our music production team is, there are originally a lot of people who don’t know a good sound even if we present them one. Everyone has a different preference so it’s hard to pick the sound we think is the right answer, but there’s always the sound close to the right answer in our music. Mixing or mastering is as important as composing, and having a company with the ability to differentiate between good sources and good sounds is a huge blessing. 』

2016 was a meaningful year to both BTS and Suga personally. “It was hectic. Lots of things happened too. My life’s always hectic but last year was even more so. We told ourselves ‘We went through a lot, everyone all worked so hard’. Luckily it turned out well so we could look back on last year like this.”

But you don’t seem to be carried away by that good mood. “We are a realistic team. We can enjoy the happiness because we have been and will be doing well, but we have never once been content with ourselves. It’s been like that from before debut. Every time we release an album, we always worry whether or not it would do well, and they said this album was the most important one. That’s why we received even more stress, but we do not settle and continue to work on it, that’s the strength of our team.”

Why? “From before debut, our company was small and had no money. We came out when the company was on the verge of falling down. Some friends who used to train with me left the company and even suggested going with them, but then I debuted. So we always tell each other not to be content with ourselves, to look forward and keep going. I think showing what we can do steadily is the top priority.”

How did you work on the album? From the mixtape released under the name of Agust D to “Blood, Sweat & Tears” and repackage album, you’re slowly reflecting the stories of yourselves into the albums more and more. “Bang Shihyuk PD-nim once said this too, a person would brighten up after releasing a mixtape. He even asked where that incisive person full of wrath from before had gone. It was my complex and the way to solve it was music that I need to make. Thinking about how many idols can have this chance, I’m making music in a very good environment. BTS, Agust D or a human named Min Yoongi, it all comes from the same person, so if I put in the real stories of mine, many people can listen and relate to it.”

What’s the difference between releasing as BTS and releasing mixtape? “My mixtape is purely just shouting out. (laughs) I figure that the influence my mixtape brings is different from what BTS’ albums bring, with BTS, I need to refine. Firstly, there’s not much I can use. To compress what I want to say into as short as possible, I have to think more compared to when making mixtape.”

Was “First Love” from <WINGS> that point of contact? “It’s a meaningful song too. “First Love” talks about the piano I used to play when I was young, which also means the only friend I had. I cried a lot while recording. I kept crying at the emotion explosion part in the latter half. It was when I just finished working on the ‘Agust D’ mixtape and moved onto the album right away, so I didn’t have much time, I wrote it quick and recorded all by myself. Right after I cried and recorded the song, I sent it and went to the airport, but then they called and said it might need to be re-recorded because the file was broken. I cried that hard while recording but! (laughs) I recorded again after going back to Korea and went to catch a flight again 4, 5 hours later. It was stressful but fun.”

What led you to choose the current message of your solo songs among many stories you can tell? “Bang Shihyuk PD-nim informed us there would solo songs when we talked about the album concept. I thought a lot about what kind of song I should do and suggested ‘So Far Away’, which is currently in the mixtape. It’s something I can pull off well and also public-friendly, so I asked ‘How do you think?’, they said it was fine but we need to discuss a little more. Then the song was put in the mixtape. After listening to other members’ songs, I felt like if my song is depressing, it would sag the mood of the whole album down. I asked how about doing the ‘tough’ style that I can pull off the best, but it would not fit the flow of the album. So I started making a rap-only track. Actually, the main line of ‘First Love’ is the same as ‘So Far Away’. I remembered the orchestra sesssion I wanted to put in but couldn’t because of the lack of time and made use of it. If you listen to ‘First Love’, there’s just straight up rapping for 3 minutes 9 seconds. It’s not that common nowadays so it was fun.”

You don’t tend to show your emotions much, seems like you relieve it through rapping. “I don’t think I live an ordinary life.. I started making music since I was young, and left home since I was young too. Many interesting things happened in my life. I don’t show it much usually. Basically not at all. But I always live hoping someone would know it. I relieve through music. It’s like I resolve it by performing and making music. I think of music as my release. That’s why I made ‘Agust D’ freely. It was a load off my mind.”

What happened in the past? “There was a time I had to live with just 300,000 won ($262) a month. I couldn’t eat three meals a day. It was hard and I wasn’t that rich, but I think I enjoyed it. Why? My inferiority complex and the desire of wanting to do well quick was strong after debut. It wasn’t like a total failure, just my high ideals made it hard. Back in high school, I spent my days playing around and having fun with my friend. I went to my old school, took a walk, sorted out my thoughts and got to know what I need to do.”

Is “First Love” or “Spring Day” the result? “Yes. ‘Agust D’ is my turning point. It’s probably the best thing I did in 2016. I was very emotionally exhausted then. There were also the worries of being an idol. I met an old acquaintance not long ago and they said I became a completely different person. If you ask me whether I’m satisfied with the music in ‘Agust D’ or not, I would say I’m not. I didn’t have enough time and many parts could have been better, but if you ask I regret releasing the mixtape or not, I want to say I really like it. The members said the same too. They told me my mixtape is too ‘fierce-fierce-fierce-fierce’. (laughs) I said I couldn’t do anything other than it. I don’t regret making it that way at all. I became more relaxed making music after that. More naturally too. There is no longer a limit like before.”

How did you work on “Blood, Sweat & Tears”? “I heard the beat made by Pdogg-hyung first and it was so good. What I’m really thankful to our company staff is, they always develop, even Pdogg-hyung and Bang Shihyuk PD-nim. Pdogg-hyung made half of the title track and the rest was on us, so I started working on it without much pressure. It’s like, if it doesn’t do well, let it be. I tend to be really stressed when working but that time I wrote the song while playing games. I unknowingly finished the outline after playing a few rounds.”

Was it difficult putting your individual into the sound or flow that’s different from before? “I became really sensitive to sound when working on ‘Agust D’. I modified every single beat and even personally participated in mixing. For this album, I would give it 93 out of 100 in terms of sound. What I’m thankful to Bang Shihyuk PD and our music production team is, there are originally a lot of people who don’t know a good sound even if we present them one. Everyone has a different preference so it’s hard to pick the sound we think is the right answer, but there’s always the sound close to the right answer in our music. Mixing or mastering is as important as composing, and having a company with the ability to differentiate between good sources and good sounds is a huge blessing. We all got goosebumps when we listened to the album for the first time in Pdogg-hyung’s room. Truthfully, it doesn’t lose to foreign artists’ sounds.”

Now you must have gained the confidence to be able to bring in a certain quality when making songs without worrying too much. “Good things don’t always come when there’s stress. I pursued for perfection a lot before. Actually, people called perfectionists, they’re not perfect, they have a complex there. You can’t know at the time how it would be when looking back after everything’s done. What makes it hard is keeping being greedy despite of that. Thinking this way eased my mind. I couldn’t live telling ‘So what if I fall’, ‘So what if I’m hurt’ through music. I can’t fall, if I fall it’s the end, I have to endure even if I’m hurt, I used to think like this but now my thoughts changed a lot, because I’m a human too.”

How high is Suga’s goal? “I think being a musician, we need to be satisfied as late as possible. Money and the standard of success are important too, but I’m just curious. How far can BTS and also Min Yoongi go? Bang Shihyuk PD-nim told us this. That at this level, we need to carve the new way for the juniors. Not the juniors in our company, but the juniors in the Korean music industry. I used to think whether we could success more if we debuted 3 years earlier, but not anymore. I think we too are walking on the way paved by many seniors and receiving a lot of generational benefits like Naver VLIVE and Twitter. We need to carve a new way so more musicians could introduce better music to the world more easily.”

How does it feel having people all over the world listen to your songs? “This is probably half of the goal I set before. I used to work as a studio engineer while composing and performing at the same time in Daegu. But there was no one when I performed. 50 people was a lot. I lost money every day, I didn’t even have money to eat after performing. I had had enough of it. If I want to make the kind of music that satisfies myself only, it would be better for my mental health to make it alone at home. (laughs) I came up to Seoul because I wanted to let many people hear my music, so BTS’ achievements feels like a miracle. It’s also the reason I became an idol.”

What stories do you want to bring people now? “Whether by rapping or by whatever method, I have decided what kind of music I want to make. Hopeful songs like ‘Tomorrow’ or ‘So Far Away’ from the mixtape. Many people find it weird how the least hopeful person would want to make such kind of music. (laughs) I grew up listening to Epik High. At that time, songs about dream or hope were a trend, and the reason I like Tablo-hyung was because he made that kind of music. I want to make such music too. I have an influence now, and I want to use that influence in the right direction.”

[shaizstern]

Article from WSJ: The Office Is Far Away. Can Its Culture Survive?

Bosses fear that if remote working arrangements last much longer that relationships will fray and innovation may suffer

Image Credit: PETER OUMANSKI

By Chip Cutter

An online plank-holding contest. Walk-and-talk meetings held outdoors via Zoom. A companywide game show based on Netflix’s “Love Is Blind,” capped with a virtual dance party.

American companies are experimenting with new ways to replicate the camaraderie that once defined day-to-day life inside an office as a pandemic-induced period of remote work approaches three months—with no clearly-defined end in sight.

Millions of workers have proved they can do their jobs at home for now—sometimes surpassing their productivity in the office. But as more managers come to accept the reality that employees may be apart for a while longer, they are fretting about how they can instill culture and encourage innovation when employees who once spent days together now rarely see each other in person.

“It’s the foremost concern,” says Daniel Lubetzky, founder and executive chairman of snack-bar maker KIND LLC. “None of us really knows how this movie will play out if it continues like this for much longer.”

Another reminder of how difficult it can be to maintain morale remotely came this week as companies looked for new ways to connect with employees reeling from civil unrest and anguish over racial disparities.

In an employee meeting Wednesday, WW International Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mindy Grossman shared her personal perspective on recent events and the company then made time for employees to reflect in silence during a roughly seven-minute guided meditation—all done via a video call, she says. At the Denver nonprofit Uncharted, CEO Banks Benitez broke the organization’s employees into breakout groups to share their feelings.

“Obviously, Zoom is not the ideal format for this stuff,” he says. “It’s where we are.”

Some companies trying to keep their staff unified during a period of extended uncertainty are leaning on old methods of corporate communications to build connections. At trash hauler Waste Management Inc., not all employees had email when it sent about 20,000 employees home in March, says Jim Fish, the company’s chief executive. So it introduced an internal app in April that linked to brief video messages from Mr. Fish and other top executives. Eyeglass maker Warby Parker doubled the number of all-company town halls, and now holds brief sessions twice a week to keep every employee in the loop, says Neil Blumenthal, a co-founder and co-CEO.

KIND’s strategy is to hold two to three virtual water-cooler check-ins a week in which anyone can show up and chat, Mr. Lubetzky says. Many of the firm’s 320 employees only stay for about 15 minutes. Teams within the New York-based company also moved interoffice competitions online as well, including a recent challenge to see who could hold a plank the longest. (Avery Tarasov, a senior manager of security engineering and threat operations, was the winner after maintaining a plank for three hours, according to a spokeswoman.)

Even before the pandemic, certain companies in recent years elected to shift many of their employees to remote work, believing that would yield better access to talent, a better culture and more productivity. Even big-company bosses who are new to remote work had prior training at communicating a shared set of values and goals to decentralized offices spread around the world.

Yet there are signs that some employees are losing touch with their company’s essence during this period of extended uncertainty. More than half of the 2,050 full-time U.S. workers across many industries who responded to a survey conducted for Prudential Financial Inc. in March and April say they felt less connected to their organizations as remote workers. Prudential Vice Chairman Robert Falzon says at his own company those who worked together on new products before the pandemic seem more in sync than those who only interacted remotely.

He worries about a slow decay in company culture if the remote-working arrangement continues. “This should be keeping leaders up at night,” Mr. Falzon says.

Some of the tactics deployed early in the crisis to reassure employees are starting to lose their effectiveness, says Jimmy Etheredge, chief executive officer of Accenture North America. Mr. Etheredge still holds the occasional meeting for 60,000 Accenture employees in North America, but is also encouraging team leads and project managers to do their own regular check-ins with workers so they can quickly solve their own issues. Employees, he says, are “being town-halled to death.”

Ellen Kullman, chief executive of 3-D printing startup Carbon, says she fears virtual work setups could eventually lead to a decline in new ideas. She knows employees sometimes come up with new creations following a conversation in a lunch line or a quick catch-up with a colleague outside the building.

“What I worry about the most is innovation,” she says. “Innovation is hard to schedule—it’s impossible to schedule.”

Carbon is known for its collaborations with Ford and Adidas. Many of the company’s 500 employees have rallied in recent weeks to ensure the company’s 3-D printing technology could make face shields or nasopharyngeal swabs for Covid-19 testing. Some have tried to replicate walk-and-talk meetings by connecting via Zoom while walking near their homes, she says. But to maintain the pace of new inventions, Ms. Kullman says some employees will need to return to offices because only so many ideas can be hatched from afar.

A number of companies say they have been successful in working remotely, in part, because employees already know each other. After years of working alongside one another, many can decipher colleagues’ facial expressions on video calls, for instance, or anticipate a co-worker’s preferences. Over time, executives worry that new hires who are remote, who have not developed such bonds, may have trouble acclimating, or that an organization’s core culture could deteriorate.

Nearly all of the 65 employees at Buoy Health, a startup whose AI-based health assistant was started by doctors and scientists at Harvard University and is used by states and companies as part of Covid-19 screenings, have worked together at offices in Boston and New York. Buoy recently hired four employees remotely, and has five more positions it aims to soon fill.

“What I’m worried about if we have to scale from where we are today to doubling or tripling in size, now you have a majority of people who have never met each other in person,” says Andrew Le, the company’s chief executive. “Will that cultural debt add up?”

Before the pandemic, Buoy’s teams went out for drinks after work. In an attempt to recreate some of those exchanges, employees have organized virtual gatherings to fight against the doldrums of being home all the time under intense work pressure. They include a dedicated Slack channel to discuss “quarantine binges,” an online book club, remote trivia tournaments and a companywide game show based around the Netflix reality dating series “Love Is Blind” that ended with a virtual dance party.

Even so, the most difficult conversations at work are still better done in person, Dr. Le says. That could be a performance review or disagreements about the direction of a product. “You kind of need everything at your disposal—whether that be a warm handshake, or a pat on the back after, or multiple expressions of listening and understanding.”

Andi Owen, chief executive of furniture giant Herman Miller Inc., says she can’t find a substitute for dropping by an employee’s desk and asking about his or her children. “That unplanned kind of interaction that contributes so much to how we build relationships with people and how we build culture, those things are what are missing,” she says.

[bloomsburgu]

The sound of success

Enrique Josephs was cooling his jets at LAX waiting for a flight. A call came in on his cell from his agent. A quick trip to the men’s room where he opened up a suitcase on a changing table to reveal his mobile recording studio. Ten minutes later ... mission accomplished. Spot recorded and delivered to the client.

For a voice-over artist, working in strange locations at all hours of the day and night is part of the business. It’s a career that Josephs, better known to his friends as EJ, never even knew existed if not for a chance meeting at a summer event on campus.

It’s already been a meteoric journey for the 26-year old with many big dreams still in his future. Among his credits is work for NFL Films, the History Channel, MLB Network, ESPN and the Emmy-nominated Harry Connick Jr. television show. Along the way though, there were lots of twists and turns and a bit of luck.

Josephs was a highly-recruited football offensive lineman from West Chester. One of his high school teachers, John Adams, the father of a former BU football player Stefan Adams, suggested he give BU a serious look for both its football team and its strong mass communications program.

“The late Mr. Adams really influenced me to attend BU,” said Josephs. “I loved playing football and had dreams of becoming a news anchor. He thought Bloomsburg University would be good for me with both a strong football team and mass communications department.”

“My early goal was to be a news anchor,” said Josephs. Those dreams of being an on-camera celebrity soon changed. “I realized I liked being behind the scenes as an editor or on the radio more. I could let my personality come through without being worried about the camera.”

After his football career ended due to injury, fate would intervene for EJ when former teammate Franklyn Quiteh recommended his friend to the BU athletic department for a job as a PA announcer at the school’s home games. Once the staff heard him on the microphone, Josephs was quickly hired.

“Working as a PA announcer taught me how to make adjustments on the fly in a stressful situation,” EJ continued. “Initially I was fearful of what people would think of my voice, but I grew into enjoying the interaction I had with the fans as well as still being part of a sport without actually playing.”

In the mass comm department, EJ was actively involved in many areas. “I started volunteering more for projects the mass comm department was working on with Jason Genovese, now chair of the department, and Mike DiGiorgio (former assistant in the IT area),” Josephs added.

“EJ always had the talent, the golden pipes, but you need more than that, and he knew it,” said Genovese. “He had a work ethic that has already carried him to great heights in the television industry and will continue to do so.”

“As a senior I attended the first Confer Radio Institute held at BU,” said Josephs. “I met Pat Garrett one of the top voice-over guys. I never knew doing that kind of work could be a career. Pat let us use his equipment to record demos and also told us to keep working and not give up. It was great advice that I never forgot.”

But a journey from ‘keep working hard kid’ to NFL Films doesn’t just happen. Along with skill, EJ needed some luck and a few breaks.

By day Josephs was working as a video instructor at the Glen Mills school for troubled youth. By night he was interning for an independent baseball team, the Camden River Sharks, learning as much as he could and getting tips from the public address announcer Kevin Casey, now the voice of the Philadelphia Union professional soccer team.

On a career day at Glen Mills, an engineer from NFL Films was on site. A co-worker of EJ’s introduced him to the engineer. After a brief conversation, EJ was asked to send in a demo.

“I scrambled that night at home to put something together and quickly sent it in,” Josephs continued. “The company surprised me by calling me in for an interview. It went so well, a few months later I was offered a job as a production assistant, ironically just a few days after landing a full-time position with the school.” (He quickly quit his job at the school.)

EJ’s big break came just months later when he was tabbed to be the voice of the post-game spot announcing the opportunity to purchase gear and a highlight DVD of the Super Bowl. Later he worked

on a highlight film of the Super Bowl becoming the first seasonal production assistant hired for that role.

“I had to sleep at NFL films multiple nights to meet the deadline,” said Josephs. “The same producers who recorded his demo gave him a shot to do the narration on the Super Bowl 50 highlights. It was huge. They loved it.”

Later that year EJ caught another big break and landed a spot as the voice of the NFL’s Top 100 when the original voice of the show was arrested. “I was working with the show’s Emmy Award-winning producer doing some training. After the original voice-over artist was dropped, the producer hired me to be the new voice that year. We had to re-record two episodes which had aired already and now I am one of three regular voices of the program.”

Most recently Josephs did the narration for the History Channel’s summer show “Evel Live,” which was the most-watched live show outside of a sporting event on television in 2018 with more than 3.5 million viewers.

“The production company for the show, Nitro Circus, had heard some of my work and asked me to audition,” Josephs said. “A short time after sending in my audition, my agent called me to tell me I got the job.” Of course, that day was also his first day of vacation in Virginia.

“I had to call a friend, who called someone he knew, and I landed time in a studio. In all, it took about two hours to record all the narration so I didn’t lose too much of my vacation.”

While the profession may seem simple to an outsider, just like an athlete, EJ has to train, practice and of course take care of his most valuable asset…his voice.

“Each week I work with a voice coach because it’s easy to strain the vocal chords if you’re not careful,” said Josephs. “Recently, I went to a concert, but couldn’t scream. I also drink a lot of water, tea with honey, and eat lots of apples. I’ve also stopped drinking milk because lactate creates too much mucus. And, my girlfriend’s grandmother put me on to echinacea and I haven’t been sick in more than three years (knock on wood),” said Josephs laughing.

“Originally I was very hard on myself and would critique all my work,” Josephs continued. “I don’t do it as much now. Now I’m just interested in making sure my clients are happy with my work.”

So what’s next for the guy who originally was hoping to be a news anchor?

“It’s been an amazing few years for me, but I do not want to be complacent,” said Josephs. “I see my future in promos, commercials and narrations. It would be great to be able to do a long-term series for Nat Geo or the Discovery Channel. I’d love to be synonymous with one show.”

“Ultimately, the Olympics for voice-over artists are movie trailers. Right now two guys have most of the work in this area. I’m not rushing things; I’ve still got a lot to learn about the industry. But movie trailers is where I hope to one day land.”

Despite his growing status in the voice-over world, EJ still finds time to give back. “I’m mentoring three young men at my church in the voice-over business and recently spent an hour on the phone with an intern from NFL Films answering her questions. “For me, it’s about helping others on their journey,” said Josephs. “I learned a lot by trial and error. My goal is to help others achieve their dreams.”

Dreams. We all have them. For some, the dreams don’t always come true. For others, like EJ, each day is a dream come true and more exciting than the last. Where that dream takes him, only time and his voice will say.

[robotsdotftw-blog]

So what do you do in the world’s most awkward summer? (between high school and college)

It’s been over two weeks since graduation so I feel semi-qualified to answer this question.

It’s the summer between being a high school senior and a college freshman, where I don’t really know what to call myself anymore? It’s kinda sad realizing that I won’t be there in the fall to shepherd my chosen underclassmen through their crises but from afar. And overall setting up myself to live somewhere else long-term. It’s finally sinking in that through all the myths and legends you get to read about, I’m going to be an everyday student at MIT. I don’t know anymore where to hype it up or down, especially since I spent the last six months with a fervor equivalent to any fandom phase (which sure doesn’t help with the whole Avengers binge I was just on, damn you Tony Stark for being inspirational).

I keep in “weekly correspondence” with a friend I met at ISEF, a freshman in Pennsylvania who was part of my delegation. (sidenote: my week in Phoenix for ISEF was the longest time I’d ever been far from home alone. And I’m going to see Spider-Man Far From Home this Tuesday so that’s all convenient and tangential.) I tried once to keep a diary with the belief that habit is a decent motivator. When I started logging build updates for my projects I was more motivated to wake up and log some kind of work done. 

Inertia: a body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an equal and opposite force.

So my inertia is a lot of sleep and productivity in neglected hours. High school quite honestly burned me out, creatively and socially. I got the most done towards the end with self-imposed deadlines and freedom.

I graduated on June 13th, an early date this year, and spent a week being lazy and “recovering” so to speak. Technically, I spent the night before graduation panicking and assembling my graduation cap, which used one of those LED matrix panels to play gifs. I thought I fried the microcontroller by putting too much voltage through it (5V instead of 3V, but never again for that Teensy) but it was just that my code was bad. I will put up a video eventually on what it does and how I, an absolute novice, read through a lot of documentation and simplified things with some dumb understanding of where to plug in stuff. Future electrical/mechanical/whatever engineer in the making, folks! Always with the flashy end goal in sight, building the plane as I fly it.

I obviously wasn’t valedictorian or salutatorian or anything because I believed that a perfect GPA wasn’t as important as doing something beyond the classroom too. Yay for side projects. I balanced and made it out with only a few final B+’s (and some from junior year, but that was fine) and did something good and fun and novel. 

And then, one crazy night later, I spent a week sleeping until 4pm every day. Ah, the luxury. 

Figuring that this summer is my summer to catch up on all the movies and pop culture I missed during all these years I was busy studying, it’s now...

SUMMER OF NOSTALGIA

in which I decide to catch up on everything I missed, Captain America style.

First was getting a Nintendo Switch as a “sorry your friends abandoned you at the eleventh hours because they were jealous of you outdoing them in science competitions and college stuff” graduation gift. And Let’s Go Pikachu. I dumped a lot of hours into catching them all and I’m glad to have finally experienced a Pokemon game instead of just Pokemon Go on my phone.

ADORABLE

Continuing on the Avengers thread, I rented movies from the library and watched all 22 movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, including the Endgame re-release just last Friday. So here’s my current rating: Link

Naturally, in my Tony Stark admiration I 3D printed an arc reactor nightlight the night before the Endgame rerelease, where I saw it for the first time. And shoved said arc reactor down my shirt for photos. I’m thinking it’s going to be neat dorm lighting and a last-minute Halloween costume. #ProofThatTonyStarkHasAHeart

love you 3000. ☆ aka 3D printing an arc reactor nightlight before going to the endgame rerelease to cry over iron man for three hours. I think we should all keep a little Tony Stark desire to innovate in ourselves.

A post shared by Shayna (@skaiashayna) on Jun 28, 2019 at 1:00am PDT

On the less fun side of things, I’ve also been taking edX courses online to prepare for MIT’s Advanced Standing Exams (ASEs) to see if I can get some credit out of intro-level programming (6.0001) and biology (7.01x) classes after taking these exams during orientation. Still a good time sink and refresher of some things I haven’t seen since freshman year bio/sophomore year AP CompSci.

And now, it’s the night before I’m going to see Far From Home. Sure, I still need to clean up my room and pack for college and prep for being a space ambassador at the Apollo 50th celebrations in a few weeks (that’s a whole other explainer post), but for now I’m just being and enjoying. And that’s enough.

How am I going to change the world? Well, I’m just going to wait and see what hits me. For now, we chill, free of expectations.

[nrip]

How to Use Digital Marketing to Grow your Healthcare Practice

As a healthcare practice, it is really important to stay top of mind with your current patients and also future patients. By using digital marketing there are so many ways to stay connected.

One question we get asked a lot is:  

“How do we increase our engagement and promote our practice with digital marketing?”

Well, that answer is a little tricky since there are many different options out there. It’s more of a combination of different tools to make your digital marketing work for you. In the digital marketing world, it is about trial and error, seeing what your audience responds to the most and how to start those conversations. 

In this blog, I am going to talk about 5 ways to help increase your engagement and promote your practice. 

Word of mouth and referral marketing are still the best ways to grow your practice, but with people being able to access information from SO many places we have to be a little more creative and think outside the box to build those relationships and loyalty.

Once they have come into your practice you want to make sure you stay top of mind, more importantly, you want to make sure you have good online profiles so it is easy for your audience to refer you.

How many of you have wanted to try something new with digital marketing but just don’t know where to start or what to try?

Social media marketing is one of the most popular ways to get in front of your current audience and potential new patients.

You can do this organically or implement paid ads as well. This is not an overnight success, it does take time, but it does work!

Let’s talk about the 5 Ways to Help Increase Your Engagement and Promote Your Practice:

1. Instagram

We have been talking about Instagram a lot this year and we will continue to do so, it is one of the fastest growing social media platforms with the average age 35-65-year-olds. Instagram is all about the visuals, from building a strong brand presence on your feed, having font styles on your images, color scheme, image theme, etc. this makes your feed look clean and interesting. Let’s dive into how to master Instagram Stories

This biggest thing with Instagram right now is the Instagram Stories, these stories only stay up for 24-hours, so this is a great place for:

Behind the scenes

An employee of the week

Tips

Myths

Polls

Questions

National Observance Days

Events

One really cool thing you can do with these stories is “Highlight” them, this saves them into an area about your feed pictures, you can categorize them so all your stories go to the correct boards.  This turns into a great resource for your audience, each video on Instagram Stories can be 15 seconds long, you can record a 45sec to a 1 min long video and then use this app called CutStory and it automatically cuts your video into 15-second increments for you to share.

You can also create branded Instagram stories images with Canva, they have different themes you can choose from, you can use your own font styles, brand colors, logo, and images.

Now, you may be thinking what if I do a video that is more than 1-minute long, where should I put that? Well, don’t worry, Instagram has you covered and that is where IGTV comes into play. This is similar to YouTube but it allows your audience to watch the full video on Instagram, they don’t have to leave the platform.

A few ideas to create IGTV videos around are:

New mother tips

Birthing Plan

Vaccines

Physical Therapy

Counseling Tips

National Observance Days

Surgery Tips

New medical practices

Interviews with nurses and doctors

Instagram has a lot of bells and whistles you are able to tap into and really grow a long-lasting relationship with your audience.

2. Video Marketing

It’s 2019 and it’s all about the videos! Video marketing is huge and will continue to grow. Videos are great because it allows your audience to connect with you quicker. We wrote a blog a few months ago about “How to Create a Strong Video Marketing Strategy” videos are something you either love or hate.

Videos can be educational for your audience, videos with closed captions are even better. Here are a few good stats about video:

Let’s dive into the statistics behind healthcare marketing with video:

About 46% of people say they’d be more likely to seek out information about a product or service after seeing it in an online video. (Source: Eloqua)

Video is now the sixth most popular content marketing tactic, as 70% of B2B marketers use some form of online video with their overall strategies. (Source: Eloqua)

Of the 80% of internet users who watched a video ad, 46% took some sort of action after viewing the ad. (Source: Video Brewery)

The average user spends 88% more time on a website with video. (Source: Mist Media)

Video and e-mail marketing can increase click-through rates by more than 90%.(Source: Mist Media)

Video equals higher viewer retention. The information retained in one minute of online video is equal to about 1.8 million written words. (Source: Brainshark)

Video attracts two to three times as many monthly visitors, doubles their time spent on the site and has a 157% increase in organic traffic from search engines. (Source: MarketingSherpa)

Blog posts incorporating video attract three times as many inbound links as blog posts without video. (Source: SEOmoz) 

59% of senior executives prefer video over text. (Source: Brainshark)

Having a video on the landing page of your site makes it 53% more likely to show up on page 1 of Google. (Source: Mist Media)

Source Here

When you think of video marketing, most people think you have to have a studio, pay a professional, take a lot of time on editing, props, backgrounds, and more. In all honesty with the technology of the newer smartphones and HD cameras, you can really shoot your own videos in office. Actually, the more authentic videos are the ones that get the most engagement online.

A couple of things to remember when shooting a video from your smartphones when you are recording a video for Instagram be sure to have your phone vertical, and when shooting a video for YouTube, Blogs, or Facebook you will want your phone horizontal.

Let’s start recording! Be Authentic, real, give value, and have fun!

3. Facebook Groups

Facebook groups are climbing higher on the list for digital marketing, gone are the days where just having a Facebook page worked, Facebook pages work great if you plan on spending money on ads.

There are a ton of Facebook groups out there that your practice can join, you can even start your own group.

For example – Let’s say you are a women’s medical office, Your services include OB-GYN, birthing center, primary care, pediatrician, etc. But, one special thing that your office focuses on is wanting to help new mothers with education. Vaccines, breastfeeding, car seats, home care, feeding, etc. Most of your patients come from within a 25-mile radius of your office, you can create a group on Facebook called “Tips for New Mothers YOUR CITY” in this group you can invite your current patients to join, post daily, as your group continues to grow you will post two or three times a day. You are creating a community of women that are going through the same thing and want answers. You can allow the members of the group to post questions and concerns for your practice to answer. This is a wonderful way to create trust with your patients. You can then start to mention the other services your practice offers.

In this video below, I will show you how to start a group from scratch and also how to search for groups to join.

4. Email Marketing

Email marketing is NOT dead, I know some may think that email marketing and newsletters are a waste of time, but they actually work great. It is a convenient way to stay top of mind with your patients. With social media marketing and the algorithms it’s hard to really know who has seen your organic posts, then to monitor the engagement. Now, the insights and analytics on the social media platforms tell you how many likes, comments, and shares you had on posts. With email marketing, you can actually see who opened your emails, who read them, and who clicked through to your website.

There are a few ways to incorporate email marketing into your plan:

Content Upgrades, also known as Free downloads. This is a piece of content you put together for your ideal patient to download, in order for them to download it they have to submit their name and email. For example – if we go back to the example in number 3, you could create:

Newborn checklist

Going home checklist

Breastfeeding Tips

New Momma Myths

Top 10 products to have at home for your new baby

etc.

This pdf would then be uploaded to your website and linked into MailChimp or Leadpages to create a landing page with the form for name and email, you can then push this out to social media, your current email list of current patients. Over time you will create quite a few content upgrades. Make a list of different checklists, ebooks, resources you can create for your patients now and then you push that out to gain new email subscriptions to grow your email list. This is an example of what a sign-up form looks like:

  Newsletters – You can send weekly or monthly newsletters to your lists, in some cases you may have multiple lists and can customize a newsletter for each list based on your audience. It is important to understand what your audience wants to know about so you can pack your newsletters with valuable content. It doesn’t matter if you do weekly updates or monthly, what matters most is consistency. Whatever you choose to do be sure to stick with it. You can also incorporate your videos into these emails, this allows you to build those deeper relationships!

5. Blogging

Blogging serves dual purposes, it is great for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and it allows you to show your expertise. When you are promoting your practice on social media your end goal is to get them back to your website to sign-up for your email list, book an appointment, or fill out paperwork, how do you give them an incentive to go back to your website?

When blogging just like everything else we have spoken about it is all about consistency. One blog per month or two, as long as you do one each month, these are no longer 300-500 word blogs, these are cornerstone blogs which means 1500+ words per blog. We recently wrote a blog on how to share your blog, in that post there is a FREE download, a blog checklist, you can download it here.

Your blogs should cover content that your audience wants to learn about, whether this is myths around vaccines, childbirth, new momma tips, etc.

This is where you tie the above 1-4 items into your blogging. In each blog post you will be:

Making an image you can share onto Instagram

Make a “teaser” video for Instagram with 3 inside tips from your blog

Create a longer video for IGTV about your blog

Create videos to go inside your blog post – you will place these videos on YouTube then insert them into your blog posts

You can also create a content upgrade or call to action for your readers to sign-up for your email list. Here is an example of a great blog post

Your website/blog is your hub, you want to drive traffic to your hub. Once your blog is complete you can then share it to multiple platforms with links back to your site, this helps reach new potential patients as well.

As you can see through these 5 different marketing platforms, they each allow you to grow your practice and connect with your audience on a deeper level. They all work based on consistency and planning. This is why having a digital marketing plan is so important.

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/technology/how-a-high-school-student-stumbled-upon-apples-facetime-bug-and-tried-to-report-it/

How a high school student 'stumbled upon' Apple's FaceTime bug and tried to report it

Grant Thompson was trying to get some friends together to play video games one Saturday when he discovered an alarming glitch in Apple‘s popular FaceTime application.

Interested in Apple?

Add Apple as an interest to stay up to date on the latest Apple news, video, and analysis from ABC News.

“I stumbled upon this glitch that like the whole world knows about now,” Thompson told ABC News in an interview Tuesday night.

The 14-year-old student in Tucson, Arizona, called his friend Nathan using FaceTime on Jan. 19, but he wasn’t answering. So Thompson swiped up on his iPhone to add another friend, Diego, to the call, a now-disabled feature in the app that — to Thompson’s surprise — immediately connected him to Nathan even though he still hadn’t picked up.

“Once I added Diego, it forced my first friend Nathan to join [the FaceTime call],” Thompson told ABC News. “He hadn’t answered yet, but it had that answering ring tone, and so I said, ‘Hey, Nathan, what’s up?'”

“He was like, ‘Grant? You can hear me?” Thompson recalled. “He told me that he never even answered the call, yet both of us could hear each other crystal clear.”

Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, speaks about group FaceTime during an announcement of new products at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, June 4, 2018, in San Jose, Calif.

The three friends spent the next half hour trying to recreate what happened on each other’s iPhones — and it worked every time.

“We were all shocked,” Thompson said. “We realized this was an actual bug that forced people to answer the calls.”

The teen shared the discovery with his mother, Michele Thompson, who was skeptical.

“At first she was pretty suspicious, she didn’t really believe that I found a glitch,” he said. “I used my phone, her phone and my sister’s phone to make my mom’s phone force answer, without ever clicking ‘Accept.’ And once that happened, she believed that I could really do this.”

Over the next week, the Thompsons tried to notify Apple of the bug via emails, telephone calls and social media — but largely to no avail.

Michele Thompson said she even tried getting the tech company‘s attention through its bug bounty program, which offers monetary rewards for finding and reporting security flaws. The program, launched in 2016, pays up to $200,000 for detecting vulnerabilities in certain Apple software.

“I knew [Apple] had a bounty reward program, they had a security manual that was 80 pages that I looked at,” Michelle Thompson told ABC News in an interview Tuesday night. “I didn’t know if this qualified, and by no means am I a tech expert.”

But the program wasn’t user-friendly to non-developers like herself trying to flag a major flaw, she said.

“I do wish they had a better process to let a citizen report a bug,” she added, “because it was a pretty complicated process.”

Apple did not immediately respond to ABC news’ request for comment Wednesday about the Thompsons’ bug report.

On Monday, media outlets caught word of the glitch and the story went viral. That evening, Apple temporarily disabled its Group FaceTime app.

“We’re aware of this issue and we have identified a fix that will be released in a software update later this week,” an Apple spokesperson said in a statement to ABC News on Monday night.

Michele Thompson said she received an email from Apple’s security team on Tuesday afternoon.

“It said, ‘Dear Michele, we’ve received your bug report. We like to give credit to those who find bugs on our website. We’d like to know what name you’d like us to use.’ And that’s all it said,” she told ABC News. “I think we’ve done our part, I reached out to them. I would love to talk with them further.”

ABC News’ Thomas Austen contributed to this report.

[myyearofgivingdaily]

I am the Egg Man

Gangrene happens when a lack of oxygen-rich blood causes tissue to die in some part of the body, often the hands or feet.

Or it happens in a parking lot when you’re a teenage boy named Boogman pulling 360s in a hand-me-down sedan. 

Van Halen’s “Jamie’s Cryin’” is probably playing on the radio and six of your closest hooligan friends – Lurch, Yo, Kinger, among them – are careening around inside the tank. They hoot and holler as one of their own crawls out of the passenger-side window and onto the hood.

The gang eggs him on as Boogman burns rubber. But then he hits the brakes too hard and the daredevil rolls to the pavement.

And gets run over.

Fear not. This story is not about gangrene or “blood on the highway.” Everyone lives, I promise.

Anyway, the 17-year-old idiots in the car did their best to nurse their fallen comrade and keep their accident a secret. They tried some Civil War surgery techniques and fed the patient lots of whiskey until even they realized the leg was looking mighty grim. The doctor said the timing was critical, and fortunately gangrene had not set in. (I beg of you here and now: NEVER google gangrene.) 

Gang Green, however, did set in at my high school from that day forth. 

Call it a pack mentality, but once this mass of misdirected testosterone embraced its true identity as Gang Green, the infection for which it was named spread like necrosis on steroids. It was especially pronounced during Field Day of our senior year.

Every fall, the three classes would compete for athletic and creative supremacy in an all-day event. Each class voted on a theme that would inspire a winning costume, song, march, floorshow, and banner. Jocks, hippies, brainiacs – everyone participated. We spent hours and hours practicing the march, rehearsing the song, and building costumes from garbage bags. On the day of the event there were tugs of war, three-legged races, 100-yard dashes, and a whole lot of unsanctioned tomfoolery -- before, during, and after.

Here are some fresh-faced newsboys, circa 1979. We were “Making Headlines,” dontcha know. I’m fairly certain we’d each consumed at least one PBR tallboy before this shot was taken at about 8 a.m. Sorry, Mom.

For the members of Gang Green, Field Day offered a license to declare all-out war each weekend during football season. The enemy: Any unwitting member of the junior or sophomore class. The weapon of choice: Egg. The mode of transportation: War Wagon.

During the fall season it was wise to travel with friends whose cars could pass for War Wagons, i.e., the  rusted-out Pintos, T-Birds, and station wagons that could handle heavy (egg) fire without incurring too much obvious damage. Some kids even pooled their hard-earned minimum wages to purchase a dedicated clunker that would be trashed soon after Field Day. 

Gang Green, though, took it to the next level. They bought a dirt-cheap van with an engine that promised one last gasp of life. Boogman, Kinger, Lurch, et al, painted the body olive green with flames blazing down each side. A toothy grin stretched across the front grill, curling around each front door. The words Gang Green War Machine clearly identified my friends as the egg-tossing villains, which may not have been the brightest move. 

Did I mention the guys took a blowtorch to the top of the van and removed the roof? Look closely and you will see a tarp draped over the opening. That way these misguided miscreants could perfect their mode of attack.

As the weeks passed and the leaves changed colors, Jax Car Wash recorded a brief uptick in business. Mothers took a break from baking, and scratched their heads at the ongoing disappearance of dairy products. And cartons and cartons of eggs were sacrificed to Gang Green’s cause. 

It hurts my heart today to think of all that precious food we dumb, privileged kids wasted while driving around in cars and pummeling each other with yolks. So today my philanthropy goes to my local Meals on Wheels, an organization whose mobile volunteers actually deliver food – that can be eaten, on a plate – while driving around in cars. I submitted the application for the Michigan territory and hope I am driving on a day when they serve omelets.

The timing is perfect, since I am getting a new car this weekend. My 2006 Nissan Sentra is starting to smack of my old high-school junker, a 1970 Nova that I had inherited from three of my elder and accident-prone siblings. It had an eight-track player (shoutout to Andy Gibb!) and a trunk full of empty Stroh’s cans. The engine sometimes idled as high as 25 mph, so I would just take my foot off the gas and drive to school with my legs crossed. 

In the fall of senior year, I was leaving the parking lot and someone yelled: “Hey, nice War Wagon!” 

I was mortified. It was not Field Day. And that Nova was my actual car. 

About this blog: Causes and Effect: My Year of Giving Daily, was started in 2013 by entertainment and culture journalist Melinda Newman, who made daily donations to a wide variety of nonprofits and wrote about her experience. USA Today music writer, Brian Mansfield, took on this monumental task in 2014. This year, 12 individuals will contribute, each taking over the blog for one month.  

About Deborah Holdship: Deborah Holdship is the editor of Michigan Today, a digital alumni magazine distributed monthly to some 300,000 alumni of the University of Michigan. She also produces a podcast called “Listen in, Michigan” about U-M history and happenings. For many years, she worked as an entertainment journalist in Los Angeles (with the byline Deborah Russell) at Billboard, LAUNCH, and Yahoo. After 20 years in sunny So-Cal, Holdship returned “home” to Michigan, where she lives happily with her husband/musician, Barry; their dog, Charles; and a kooky cat named Brando.

[jobsearchtips02]

The Used Market Is Finally Starting To Cool

Photo: Getty Images (Getty Images)

The Morning ShiftAll your daily car news in one convenient place. Isn’t your time more important?

The used market is finally showing signs that it’s cooling, the former chairman of Mitsubishi is dead, and mayflies. All that and more in The Morning Shift for August 31, 2020.

1st Gear: Used

The used-car market has been setting records all summer in the midst of the pandemic, as production shutdowns resulted in new-car scarcity and consumers turned to used vehicles because of economic uncertainty.

The boom is beginning to cool off, though, according to Automotive News:

For the week ended Aug. 23, wholesale auction prices dipped by an average of 0.7 percent, according to J.D. Power. That marked the first material decline since the week ended April 23 and the second consecutive week that wholesale prices were flat or down, the company said.

“Used prices have been just insanely strong, white hot, since May, after bottoming out in the middle part of April,” said Larry Dixon, J.D. Power’s senior director of valuation services. “They rose week in, week out, really until just two weeks ago.”

J.D. Power is forecasting wholesale prices will continue to move lower into September as pent-up demand cools and headwinds related to the coronavirus pandemic grow. The company expects prices at year-end to be slightly higher than pre-virus levels.

G/O Media may get a commission

I have contemplated more than once selling my 12-year-old Honda Fit because the local dealer keeps calling to offer to buy it. I’m pretty sure I could get a decent price for a well-maintained small Honda in the New York City era right now — and yet I can’t bring myself to let go.

2nd Gear: Electric Cars Are More Expensive To Make Than Gas Cars

This will cut into automakers’ profit margins, which is not a thing you should really care about unless you are a shareholder of an automaker. But more broadly, the reshaping of the auto industry is an interesting thing to monitor. The biggest cost is the battery.

From the Financial Times:

Data compiled by consultancy Oliver Wyman for the Financial Times found that while the total cost of manufacturing a compact emissions-free vehicle will fall by more than a fifth by 2030, to €16,000, this will still represent a 9 percent gap when compared with petrol or diesel models.

The findings highlight the threat to the profit margins of groups including Germany’s Volkswagen and France’s PSA, even as the price of electric car batteries — their most expensive component — is set to almost halve over the next few years.

European carmakers, faced with a sharp decline in overall demand for their legacy products in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, are set to unveil dozens of new electric cars over the next few years.

“There can be money made from electric vehicles, but it will be lower than [petrol and diesel models] historically,” said Simon Schnurrer, an automotive partner at Oliver Wyman.

3rd Gear: Mayflies

This story is somewhat curious!

From Automotive News:

GM believes the insects, also known as fishflies, are responsible for stubborn black residue dotting more than 2,600 Chevrolet Tahoes and GMC Yukons that were built in Arlington, Texas, and waiting to be shipped to dealerships.

The mess has delayed shipments of the redesigned 2021 SUVs to dealerships already coping with tight inventory levels. Some stores have spent hours working to carefully remove the substance without harming the paint.

One Tahoe that arrived at Pete Eischen Chevrolet in Fairview, Okla., last week — three months after it was built — has been hit so hard that the hood has to be painted, Sales Associate George Eischen said. The chrome accents, painted panels, windows and wheels also were spattered.

“We were told all would be cleaned before delivery. We waited three months for nothing,” he said.

That all seems sort of believable — insects are a gross necessity to our natural environment as it is currently constituted — until you get to the part in which an expert says, “Hmm.”

The SUVs were being stored near a lake after leaving the Arlington plant. High populations of mayflies are common around lakes, said Molly Keck, an entomologist and specialist with the Integrated Pest Management Program at Texas A&M AgriLife in San Antonio. The emergence of a big population “may not happen every single year, but it definitely happens,” she said.

[…]

Mayflies “don’t really make a stain,” Keck said. “When they emerge from the lake, they’re not feeding. So there’s nothing in their gut for them to be able to excrete out.”

Regardless, it’s an unlucky hiccup in a year when GM and its dealers and everyone else could’ve used a break.

4th Gear: Mitsubishi Motors’ Former Chairman Is Dead 

Osamu Masuko died of heart failure at 71. He resigned as chairman earlier this month because of his health. The company said he died on Friday. Masuko’s tenure at the head of Mitsu wasn’t exactly a huge success.

Per Reuters:

Masuko was at the helm of Mitsubishi during a 2016 scandal in which the automaker was found to have overstated the mileage on its vehicles. An investigation uncovered slack governance and pressure on resource-starved engineers as chronic issues at the company.

The scandal – Mitsubishi’s third in two decades – pummeled profits and further tarnished the automaker’ s brand. At the height of the furore, Nissan lent its smaller rival a lifeline, offering it $2.2 billion for a 34% controlling stake.

The deal was agreed between Masuko and then Nissan CEO Ghosn, and brought Mitsubishi in as a junior partner in the Nissan-Renault automotive alliance.

Masuko later denounced his ties with Ghosn following the latter’s 2018 arrest in Japan over suspected financial misconduct.

Mitsubishi Motors just keeps on keeping on despite making mediocre products and not really trying at all for years. It’s a model for all of us, really.

5th Gear: Ford Is Happy To Outsource Its Batteries

Tesla, GM, Volkswagen and Daimler are all pouring money into their own battery plants, but Ford says it is happy to continue to outsource its batteries for cars like the Mustang Mach-E. For now. The company is wary about the technology shifting.

From Automotive News:

Hau Thai-Tang, Ford’s head of product development and purchasing, said this month on an analyst call that Ford would need to produce 100,000 to 150,000 EVs annually for its own battery plant to make sense.

“We don’t have that volume initially to justify that capital expenditure,” he said, adding that local content requirements in North America and China further complicate the issue. “There’s insufficient scale for any one OEM, other than somebody who’s a full-line battery-electric manufacturer like Tesla, to justify that spending.”

[…]

“It gives us the ability to access the latest technology and innovation across multiple suppliers,” Thai-Tang said. “So I know exactly what the state of the art is from the Korean suppliers, the Japanese suppliers, the Chinese suppliers, and I’m able to compare notes across them maybe better than they can. And then, of course, we have the competitive tension with dealing with multiple suppliers, which allows us to drive the cost down.”

Despite its insistence that the supply base is prepared, Ford has said tight battery supplies would limit the upcoming Mustang Mach-E to 50,000 vehicles globally in its first year of production.

Automotive News quotes an analyst as calling this strategic decision a “crapshoot,” and that feels right. The EV market is interesting right now insofar as companies are laying down billion-dollar bets and no one really knows how any of those will pan out just yet. Not even Tesla, despite its recent surge.

Reverse: Solar Cars

This will probably never be a thing in my lifetime but sheesh we have been trying for awhile.

Neutral: How Are You?

I went to the Museum of Modern Art yesterday, drove into midtown Manhattan with little traffic and street-parked the Fit quite easily a block away from the museum. I hope the tourists and rich people and Manhattanites below 59th Street who have fled for the exurbs never come back.

%

from Job Search Tips https://jobsearchtips.net/the-used-market-is-finally-starting-to-cool/

[luckylq8-blog]

Discussions with Puma are also due to take place this week

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[stephmolliex]

Looking back at Steve Jobs's NeXT, Inc -- the most successful failure ever

It seems little went right for NeXT and certainly nothing remains of this once promising company -- except that it is the reason Apple survives and it's how the web began. AppleInsider on the peculiar story of the company Steve Jobs formed after leaving Apple on September 12, 1985. For a company that changed the world -- no exaggeration -- it is surprisingly hard to pin down a date for when NeXT Computer began. However, the very first time Steve Jobs announced the company in any official way was on September 12, 1985. It would be at least days before it had a name, weeks before it had premises other than Jobs's home and months before it was incorporated. However, September 12, 1985 was the day Jobs told Apple's board of directors about it. He specifically told them that he was going to take a few employees and start a firm to make computers for higher education. According to the book Apple Confidential 2.0, he played it all down and even described those Apple employees as "low level" ones. Apple meetings reportedly started at 7:30am in those days and at the one on the morning of Friday September 13, Jobs then listed the people he was taking. Rich Page, Bud Tribble, Susan Barnes, Dan'l Lewin and George Crow were far from low-level staffers. Between them they were senior controllers, engineering managers and marketing people. Not only were they important at Apple but they were inextricably involved with every detail of the company -- and yet here was Steve Jobs, extricating them. The end of Steve Jobs at Apple After Jobs presented his list of the people he was going to take away with him to a new company, CEO John Sculley discussed removing Jobs as Apple chairman. That sounds asinine as Jobs had reportedly made clear he was leaving but in a formal letter Jobs recounted what had happened. "This morning's papers carried suggestions that Apple is considering removing me as chairman. I don't know the source of these reports, but they are both misleading to the public and unfair to me. You will recall that at last Thursday's Board meeting I stated I had decided to start a new venture, and I tendered my resignation as chairman. The Board declined to accept my resignation and asked me to defer it for a week. I agreed to do so in light of the encouragement the Board offered with regard to the proposed new venture and the indications that Apple would invest in it. On Friday, after I told John Sculley who would be joining me, he confirmed Apple's willingness to discuss areas of possible collaboration between Apple and my new venture. Subsequently the Company appears to be adopting a hostile posture toward me and the new venture. Accordingly, I must insist upon the immediate acceptance of my resignation." Just to make certain his position and version of events was widely known, Jobs sent copies of that letter to newspapers. Two days later, the New York Times ran a profile of Jobs headed Apple Computer Entrepreneur's Rise and Fall and it contains the first public mention of what would become NeXT. "Mr Jobs said Tuesday night that his new company would work on products for the education market. These products are likely to be high-powered computers that will not use the same software as Apple computers. But he said plans for the new company are still vague. 'We are going to listen to these people and find out what they want,' he said, referring to users of computers in schools." Within a week, Jobs was being sued by Apple. Absurd and a Shock On Monday September 23, 1985, Apple filed a lawsuit claiming Jobs was misappropriating Apple secrets and breaching his fiduciary responsibility by his planning to create a new company and bring people with him, all while still Chairman. Jobs again turned to the press and told journalists that the lawsuit was absurd and a shock. He told the New York Times that he and Apple had been negotiating a way to proceed. "We spent hour upon hour upon hour with them," he said, "and as of Friday evening, we thought we had reached an agreement." Apple would quite quickly settle out of court: the case concluded the next January. The agreement reached was that Jobs would not hire any more Apple people for six months and that NeXT machines would be more powerful than any of Apple's computers. That last seems a peculiar stipulation but back then there was a view that there were personal computers and there were workstations. The former were on their way to becoming mass-market consumer items and the latter were much higher-powered, much more expensive tools for corporations and academia. Apple didn't want the workstation market. While all of this was going on, there would be one more piece of publicity that radically changed the fortunes of NeXT. H. Ross Perot One evening in November 1984, businessman and later politician H. Ross Perot was watching PBS when a documentary by John Nathan called "The Entrepreneurs" came on. It featured Steve Jobs and this is what Perot saw. Subscribe to AppleInsider on YouTube The next morning, Perot phoned Jobs and offered to invest in his company. Jobs then waited a week so as not to appear desperate, but he took up the offer the moment he could. It wasn't that NeXT had no money. Jobs had invested $7 million of his own at the start -- and would later add a further $5 million -- but Perot chipped in $20 million and also represented respectability. This was an outside investor contributing significantly and also taking a seat on the board. Perot reportedly hoped to see a tenfold return and said: "in terms of a startup company, it's one that carries the least risk of any I've seen in 25 years in the computer industry". Money changes everything If you were one of the senior staff at NeXT and had joined at the start, then officially your salary in 1985 was $75,000 or in today's money, around $176,000. Everyone else earned $50,000 ($117,000 today). Officially. In practice, engineers could get more elsewhere so NeXT sometimes added in incentives such as a substantial signing bonus or relocation package. More famously, Paul Rand earned $100,000 ($234,000) for doing just one thing. He designed the NeXT logo. You've seen his work before. Rand, then aged 71, had famously designed IBM's striped logo and reportedly is who persuaded the firm to go by initials instead of International Business Machines. He was officially working for IBM in 1985, at least to the extent that he felt working for NeXT would be a conflict of interest. Jobs had to get IBM to agree to his using Rand. Even then, though, Rand wasn't about to get caught up in Jobs's company. He offered a one-shot, take it or leave it deal: he would design a logo and he would not then change it in any way. This part of the story is often reported and it's made to sound as if Rand sketched out the NeXT logo and pocketed a hundred grand. Logo design is far more intensive than that: you typically ended up with a very thick book of instructions. There would be the logo but then that same logo at different sizes, for different purposes such as print or online. There would be four-color versions and black and white ones. Back in the days when people wrote letters, we've seen design books that specified the positioning of a logo on the page. Stationery printed to the design specifications also sometimes included a tiny dot to mark where you were supposed to start typing. We don't know the exact details of Rand's proposal but you can see the book, you can see his June 1986 presentation of the logo to NeXT in this profile of the company released in 1986. Small firm, big ideas Rand made his presentation to the NeXT staff at their office in the Stanford University Industrial Park on Deer Park Road in Palo Alto. They'd moved there after some months working out of Steve Jobs's house at 460 Mountain Home Road and would later settle in offices in Redwood City. Perhaps they should've stayed in Jobs's spare rooms a little longer. For all that NeXT started with very few employees, it had big plans from the very beginning. Author Randall E Stross reported in his 1993 book "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing" that the company planned to be huge. He quotes Susan Barnes, cofounder and chief financial officer, as explaining that: "The necessary organization was already in place for the time when NeXT would be a billion-dollar company, Barnes proudly said, 'so that we won't be breaking down just at the time we get that big.'" No sign of a computer The year 1985 became 1986 and then 1987 and still there was nothing to actually show anyone. Purportedly, you couldn't even see a NeXT prototype if you were offered a job at the company: you had to take the position first. Jobs broke that rule whenever he liked yet still managed to keep an air of mystery about the computer. So much so that when he took to a stage to reveal the NeXT computer three years after he left Apple, it was an event. Subscribe to AppleInsider on YouTube Newsweek claimed that there were 3,000 people in the audience. It's also known that some 4,500 invitations were sent and hundreds of those invited got there early to queue up. According to Stross, one of them was noted photographer Richard Smolan who flew in overnight from the opposite coast. "Missing this would be like missing Thomas Edison unveil the phonograph," said Smolan. "I don't want to tell my grandchildren I was invited but didn't go." As with the Macintosh launch in 1984 and again with the iPhone in 2007, Steve Jobs took the audience through a demonstration that hid how unfinished the devices were. At any point during the three hour show, the computer could've crashed but it didn't. Bill Gates Years later, Bill Gates would mock the original iMac by saying that it meant Apple was now the leader in color. Computerworld says that in 1988 he derided the launch of NeXT, saying in part: "If you want black, I'll get you a can of paint." Curiously enough, that might've helped. The black paint that NeXT was actually using would get marked and scuffed when being shipped to customers. It would take a long time before the machine was ready to be shipped, though, and there would never be that many customers. That's despite a slow realisation that academic institutions weren't going to be the big source of income the company hoped. In March 1989, NeXT announced a deal with Businessland, a company used to selling PCs in huge numbers to corporate clients. By the end of the year, Businessland had sold only 360 NeXT machines. Compare that to the 400,000 Apple sold of the original Mac in its first year - and that was considered a failure. Every NeXT machine was made at a purpose-designed factory which was now producing around 100 machines per month instead of the thousands upon thousands it was built to make. Things would surely get better with the next NeXT computer. A second go On 18 September 1990, Steve Jobs launched NeXT again at San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall. Subscribe to AppleInsider on YouTube This time out he was actually willing to acknowledge publicly that the original machine had been expensive, slow and lacked the capability for a color display. However, he of course said all this in order to promote how the new NeXT workstation was cheaper, faster and "we're going to show you the best color that's ever been". What he wasn't going to show the audience was this was the riskiest presentation he ever made: this was the one that came closest to failing on stage. In fact, it did fail on stage but before the audience arrived. The NeXT computer Jobs was to use crashed irrevocably and was not replaced. Instead, when Jobs sat down at it, the NeXT monitor in front of him was connected to a different machine out of sight back stage. It's not clear why they didn't just swap the dead NeXT machine for the live one but reportedly there were engineers controlling every machine on stage in case of this failure. NeXT computers had this ability to have multiple users connected at once and it was a boon for certain types of academic work. It was a good idea for this presentation, too. For Jobs pressed a key on the NeXT machine keyboard to start his demo and did not remember that he had to first switch off the screensaver. An unknown NeXT engineer connected backstage switched it off for him. That already sounds like an engineer being on the ball but it wasn't just a case of wiggling the mouse to stop the screensaver, he or she had to type a Unix command to close it. Perhaps you could take that as a sign that the computer worked quickly when needed but speed and color were not enough to help NeXT's fortunes. This new computer was selling for $5,000 and so while cheaper, wasn't significantly so and that didn't particularly help it sell. Over its entire lifetime, the various NeXT computer models are believed to have sold just 50,000. OpenStep Come 1990 and Businessland was dead. Not the deal with NeXT, but the business. This giant sales operation went under and Jobs switched from one reseller to trying one hundred smaller ones. It didn't work. In retrospect it seems nothing ever did but even as Businessland went under, things appeared to be good for NeXT -- or good enough that Jobs was able to spin tales of success with Government interest in orders. At least, he could until the company had to start making redundancies in 1991. Around this time, Jobs started talking about having an initial public offering - and didn't mention laying off around five percent of NeXT staff. That was around 30 people but the next year, on February 10, 1993, they were followed by a further 280 staff. After this "Black Tuesday" there were 250 people left working for NeXT. On the same day, Jobs announced that he was selling the firm's entire hardware side to Canon in order to concentrate on the software, NeXTSTEP. It wasn't a bad idea. NeXTSTEP is an operating system that looks good even today, more than two decades after its launch. A startling number of NeXTSTEP innovations do now seem commonplace -- specifically because over many years they made their way into the Mac. Apple buys NeXT They would, though, because today's macOS and its predecessor OS X were fundamentally based on NeXTSTEP. It's surprising now that NeXTSTEP and therefore NeXT managed to limp on for several more years with various plans to have it running on PCs. In December 1996, though, that all ended because Apple bought NeXT for $429 million plus 1.5 million shares of Apple stock. The company got NeXTSTEP - and Steve Jobs. Jobs would admit to having wanted to say at Apple for his whole life. There is an idea that ultimately his entire goal with NeXT was to get back into Apple. That seems far-fetched yet it's got enough credence that the point was addressed in Aaron Sorkin's 2015 movie, "Steve Jobs". End of one era Today many of us are using macOS daily and unaware that features such as the Dock were born in NeXTSTEP. We're definitely all on the web and even among those who know Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, few know he did it on a NeXT cube. You can see the very NeXT machine he did it on at the National Museum of Science and Media in Bradford, UK. It's officially in a temporary exhibit, though it's been there for some years now, so check out the online catalog with its photographs. If you ever develop apps for macOS or iOS, too, you can still see evidence of NeXTSTEP's DNA: there are foundational elements in Objective-C that were created for NeXTSTEP and whose names begin with NS. Or try visiting Next.com online. Despite the UK clothing company Next trying to buy it, the familiar owners are still hanging on over twenty years since the NeXT logo vanished into history. Keep up with AppleInsider by downloading the AppleInsider app for iOS, and follow us on YouTube, Twitter @appleinsider and Facebook for live, late-breaking coverage. You can also check out our official Instagram account for exclusive photos. https://goo.gl/158emG

[party-hard-or-die]

Alan Bean, moon-walking U.S. astronaut turned painter, dies in Houston

(Reuters) – American astronaut Alan Bean, who walked on the moon in 1969 during the Apollo 12 mission and commanded a crew on the Skylab space station in 1973 before giving up his career to become a full-time painter, died in Houston on Saturday, officials said.

Bean, 86, a former U.S. Navy test pilot who became one of only 12 people ever to set foot on the moon, died at Houston Methodist Hospital, his family said in a statement released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He had fallen ill two weeks ago while traveling in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

“Alan was the strongest and kindest man I ever knew. He was the love of my life and I miss him dearly,” said Leslie Bean, Bean’s wife of 40 years, in a statement. “A native Texan, Alan died peacefully in Houston surrounded by those who loved him.”

Leaving his footprints on a region called the Ocean of Storms, Bean in November 1969 became the fourth man to walk on the moon as one of the astronauts on the second of NASA’s lunar landing missions, Apollo 12.

For the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11’s moon landing, Bean exhibited his paintings of lunar scenes at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Bean’s lunar quest came just four months after American Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon in NASA’s historic Apollo 11 mission in July 1969.

Bean served as lunar module pilot on Apollo 12. He and crew mate Pete Conrad explored the moon’s surface and conducted experiments while Richard Gordon orbited overhead in the command module, scouting landing sites for future moon missions.

“I remember once looking back at Earth and starting to think, ‘Gee, that’s beautiful.’ Then I said to myself, ‘Quit screwing off and go collect rocks.’ We figured reflection wasn’t productive,” Bean told People magazine in 1981.

The mission was a success, even though it started with a jolt. Shortly after liftoff, the rocket was struck by lightning but the crew was able to continue the three-day flight to the moon. Bean and Conrad spent more than 31 hours on the lunar surface, including more than seven hours working outside of the module.

In 1973, Bean commanded the second mission to Skylab, the first U.S. space station. Along with crew mates Owen Garriott and Jack Lousma, he spent 59 days in low-Earth orbit.

Bean later played a key role in preparing future astronauts, serving in that role until the first flight of the space shuttle in 1981. He even worked with “Star Trek” actress Nichelle Nichols on outreach efforts to prospective astronauts.

FILE PHOTO: Retired Astronaut Alan Bean, 66, poses for a portrait in his spacesuit at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, U.S., in this undated photo. Bean, who was the fourth man to walk on the moon in 1969, left NASA in 1981 and made a successful transition from spaceman to a full-time professional artist. REUTERS/Stringer/File Photo

‘LIVE YOUR DREAM’

His decision in 1981 to give up his NASA career to become a full-time artist surprised some of his colleagues.

“You have to live your dream even if other people think it’s screwed up,” Bean told a 2010 NASA oral history interview. “About half the astronauts thought it was a midlife crisis or something. The other half, the ones that were more right-brain, thought it was a pretty good idea.”

Bean remembered telling a senior NASA official named George Abbey the reason he was leaving the space agency.

“I said, ‘I’m going to be an artist,’” Bean recalled. “If he hadn’t had the window behind him, he would have gone over backwards. … His first comment: ‘Can you earn a living at that?’ … I said, ‘I don’t know, but if I can’t I’m going to go to work at Jack in the Box (the fast-food hamburger chain).”

Working at his home in Houston, Bean created paintings that focused on the Apollo missions, with images of himself and other astronauts on the moon rendered with the authenticity in lighting and color that only an eyewitness could provide. His paintings sold for tens of thousands of dollars apiece.

His former colleagues became admirers. Armstrong once said, “Alan Bean and his ‘astroartistry’ recreate the drama and excitement of man’s exploration of the moon as only could be chronicled by one who has been there.”

“I think I would like to be remembered in the end as an astronaut and an artist,” Bean told People. “I think everyone can do more than one thing with his life.”

Bean was born on March 15, 1932, in Wheeler, Texas, and grew up in Fort Worth. He aspired to become a pilot and started flight training at age 17. He earned a degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Texas, then was commissioned as an officer in the Navy.

FILE PHOTO: Astronaut Alan L. Bean holds a Special Environmental Sample Container filled with lunar soil collected during the Apollo 12 mission in this NASA handout photo provided November 19, 1969. NASA/Handout/File Photo via Reuters

He trained as a Navy test pilot under Conrad, who years later during their astronaut days played a key role in getting Bean designated for the Apollo 11 mission.

The retired Navy captain lived with his wife, Leslie, in Houston. He had two children by a previous marriage.

Reporting and writing by Will Dunham; Additional reporting by Gina Cherelus; Editing by Susan Thomas

The post Alan Bean, moon-walking U.S. astronaut turned painter, dies in Houston appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2xd8JZD via Breaking News

[dani-qrt]

Alan Bean, moon-walking U.S. astronaut turned painter, dies in Houston

(Reuters) – American astronaut Alan Bean, who walked on the moon in 1969 during the Apollo 12 mission and commanded a crew on the Skylab space station in 1973 before giving up his career to become a full-time painter, died in Houston on Saturday, officials said.

Bean, 86, a former U.S. Navy test pilot who became one of only 12 people ever to set foot on the moon, died at Houston Methodist Hospital, his family said in a statement released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He had fallen ill two weeks ago while traveling in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

“Alan was the strongest and kindest man I ever knew. He was the love of my life and I miss him dearly,” said Leslie Bean, Bean’s wife of 40 years, in a statement. “A native Texan, Alan died peacefully in Houston surrounded by those who loved him.”

Leaving his footprints on a region called the Ocean of Storms, Bean in November 1969 became the fourth man to walk on the moon as one of the astronauts on the second of NASA’s lunar landing missions, Apollo 12.

For the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11’s moon landing, Bean exhibited his paintings of lunar scenes at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Bean’s lunar quest came just four months after American Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon in NASA’s historic Apollo 11 mission in July 1969.

Bean served as lunar module pilot on Apollo 12. He and crew mate Pete Conrad explored the moon’s surface and conducted experiments while Richard Gordon orbited overhead in the command module, scouting landing sites for future moon missions.

“I remember once looking back at Earth and starting to think, ‘Gee, that’s beautiful.’ Then I said to myself, ‘Quit screwing off and go collect rocks.’ We figured reflection wasn’t productive,” Bean told People magazine in 1981.

The mission was a success, even though it started with a jolt. Shortly after liftoff, the rocket was struck by lightning but the crew was able to continue the three-day flight to the moon. Bean and Conrad spent more than 31 hours on the lunar surface, including more than seven hours working outside of the module.

In 1973, Bean commanded the second mission to Skylab, the first U.S. space station. Along with crew mates Owen Garriott and Jack Lousma, he spent 59 days in low-Earth orbit.

Bean later played a key role in preparing future astronauts, serving in that role until the first flight of the space shuttle in 1981. He even worked with “Star Trek” actress Nichelle Nichols on outreach efforts to prospective astronauts.

FILE PHOTO: Retired Astronaut Alan Bean, 66, poses for a portrait in his spacesuit at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, U.S., in this undated photo. Bean, who was the fourth man to walk on the moon in 1969, left NASA in 1981 and made a successful transition from spaceman to a full-time professional artist. REUTERS/Stringer/File Photo

‘LIVE YOUR DREAM’

His decision in 1981 to give up his NASA career to become a full-time artist surprised some of his colleagues.

“You have to live your dream even if other people think it’s screwed up,” Bean told a 2010 NASA oral history interview. “About half the astronauts thought it was a midlife crisis or something. The other half, the ones that were more right-brain, thought it was a pretty good idea.”

Bean remembered telling a senior NASA official named George Abbey the reason he was leaving the space agency.

“I said, ‘I’m going to be an artist,’” Bean recalled. “If he hadn’t had the window behind him, he would have gone over backwards. … His first comment: ‘Can you earn a living at that?’ … I said, ‘I don’t know, but if I can’t I’m going to go to work at Jack in the Box (the fast-food hamburger chain).”

Working at his home in Houston, Bean created paintings that focused on the Apollo missions, with images of himself and other astronauts on the moon rendered with the authenticity in lighting and color that only an eyewitness could provide. His paintings sold for tens of thousands of dollars apiece.

His former colleagues became admirers. Armstrong once said, “Alan Bean and his ‘astroartistry’ recreate the drama and excitement of man’s exploration of the moon as only could be chronicled by one who has been there.”

“I think I would like to be remembered in the end as an astronaut and an artist,” Bean told People. “I think everyone can do more than one thing with his life.”

Bean was born on March 15, 1932, in Wheeler, Texas, and grew up in Fort Worth. He aspired to become a pilot and started flight training at age 17. He earned a degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Texas, then was commissioned as an officer in the Navy.

FILE PHOTO: Astronaut Alan L. Bean holds a Special Environmental Sample Container filled with lunar soil collected during the Apollo 12 mission in this NASA handout photo provided November 19, 1969. NASA/Handout/File Photo via Reuters

He trained as a Navy test pilot under Conrad, who years later during their astronaut days played a key role in getting Bean designated for the Apollo 11 mission.

The retired Navy captain lived with his wife, Leslie, in Houston. He had two children by a previous marriage.

Reporting and writing by Will Dunham; Additional reporting by Gina Cherelus; Editing by Susan Thomas

The post Alan Bean, moon-walking U.S. astronaut turned painter, dies in Houston appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2xd8JZD via Online News

[newestbalance]

Alan Bean, moon-walking U.S. astronaut turned painter, dies in Houston

(Reuters) – American astronaut Alan Bean, who walked on the moon in 1969 during the Apollo 12 mission and commanded a crew on the Skylab space station in 1973 before giving up his career to become a full-time painter, died in Houston on Saturday, officials said.

Bean, 86, a former U.S. Navy test pilot who became one of only 12 people ever to set foot on the moon, died at Houston Methodist Hospital, his family said in a statement released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He had fallen ill two weeks ago while traveling in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

“Alan was the strongest and kindest man I ever knew. He was the love of my life and I miss him dearly,” said Leslie Bean, Bean’s wife of 40 years, in a statement. “A native Texan, Alan died peacefully in Houston surrounded by those who loved him.”

Leaving his footprints on a region called the Ocean of Storms, Bean in November 1969 became the fourth man to walk on the moon as one of the astronauts on the second of NASA’s lunar landing missions, Apollo 12.

For the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11’s moon landing, Bean exhibited his paintings of lunar scenes at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Bean’s lunar quest came just four months after American Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon in NASA’s historic Apollo 11 mission in July 1969.

Bean served as lunar module pilot on Apollo 12. He and crew mate Pete Conrad explored the moon’s surface and conducted experiments while Richard Gordon orbited overhead in the command module, scouting landing sites for future moon missions.

“I remember once looking back at Earth and starting to think, ‘Gee, that’s beautiful.’ Then I said to myself, ‘Quit screwing off and go collect rocks.’ We figured reflection wasn’t productive,” Bean told People magazine in 1981.

The mission was a success, even though it started with a jolt. Shortly after liftoff, the rocket was struck by lightning but the crew was able to continue the three-day flight to the moon. Bean and Conrad spent more than 31 hours on the lunar surface, including more than seven hours working outside of the module.

In 1973, Bean commanded the second mission to Skylab, the first U.S. space station. Along with crew mates Owen Garriott and Jack Lousma, he spent 59 days in low-Earth orbit.

Bean later played a key role in preparing future astronauts, serving in that role until the first flight of the space shuttle in 1981. He even worked with “Star Trek” actress Nichelle Nichols on outreach efforts to prospective astronauts.

FILE PHOTO: Retired Astronaut Alan Bean, 66, poses for a portrait in his spacesuit at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, U.S., in this undated photo. Bean, who was the fourth man to walk on the moon in 1969, left NASA in 1981 and made a successful transition from spaceman to a full-time professional artist. REUTERS/Stringer/File Photo

‘LIVE YOUR DREAM’

His decision in 1981 to give up his NASA career to become a full-time artist surprised some of his colleagues.

“You have to live your dream even if other people think it’s screwed up,” Bean told a 2010 NASA oral history interview. “About half the astronauts thought it was a midlife crisis or something. The other half, the ones that were more right-brain, thought it was a pretty good idea.”

Bean remembered telling a senior NASA official named George Abbey the reason he was leaving the space agency.

“I said, ‘I’m going to be an artist,’” Bean recalled. “If he hadn’t had the window behind him, he would have gone over backwards. … His first comment: ‘Can you earn a living at that?’ … I said, ‘I don’t know, but if I can’t I’m going to go to work at Jack in the Box (the fast-food hamburger chain).”

Working at his home in Houston, Bean created paintings that focused on the Apollo missions, with images of himself and other astronauts on the moon rendered with the authenticity in lighting and color that only an eyewitness could provide. His paintings sold for tens of thousands of dollars apiece.

His former colleagues became admirers. Armstrong once said, “Alan Bean and his ‘astroartistry’ recreate the drama and excitement of man’s exploration of the moon as only could be chronicled by one who has been there.”

“I think I would like to be remembered in the end as an astronaut and an artist,” Bean told People. “I think everyone can do more than one thing with his life.”

Bean was born on March 15, 1932, in Wheeler, Texas, and grew up in Fort Worth. He aspired to become a pilot and started flight training at age 17. He earned a degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Texas, then was commissioned as an officer in the Navy.

FILE PHOTO: Astronaut Alan L. Bean holds a Special Environmental Sample Container filled with lunar soil collected during the Apollo 12 mission in this NASA handout photo provided November 19, 1969. NASA/Handout/File Photo via Reuters

He trained as a Navy test pilot under Conrad, who years later during their astronaut days played a key role in getting Bean designated for the Apollo 11 mission.

The retired Navy captain lived with his wife, Leslie, in Houston. He had two children by a previous marriage.

Reporting and writing by Will Dunham; Additional reporting by Gina Cherelus; Editing by Susan Thomas

The post Alan Bean, moon-walking U.S. astronaut turned painter, dies in Houston appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2xd8JZD via Everyday News