#I want to have roughly the same amount of stuff for sale as last year but fingers crossed as to whether I'll actually manage to do it

[yutaan]

He's a pacifist he's an alien he's a crack shot he's a plant he's a natural disaster he's a regular disaster he's a babygirl he's a walking insurance claim

Papercraft Vash! I blazed through Trigun Stampede in pretty much a single shot and have been vibrating with glee ever since. What a spectacle of a show! So of course I had to turn on the soundtrack and make a Vash to express my feelings.

[claraxbarton]

Oh hey!

A thing about John Winchester!!

Remember when Dean is sent back to save his Dad from joining the Scooby gang in s4e3 The Beginning.

Remember also how John is greeted by Townie #6 as Corporal and “good to have you back”?

Also, just putting this out here, but dear John was born in 1954.

Now, we all know how much SPN takes care to preserve continuity (script supervisor? Literally who is SHE???) but.

That makes John 19.

And sure, in Vietnam when you were drafted you served for 18-24 months (roughly). So theoretically John could have done his time and come home.

Except.

Except.

John Winchester was a Marine.

And the Marines? They didn’t take draftees. You had to volunteer for that shit. Which meant three years of service minimum.

Okay.

So now we know that.

Let me draw our attention back to John’s rank: that of Corporal. That’s the first Non-Commissioned Officer rank. Which means he led fire teams, was someone other people respected and listened to.

Typically it takes 26 months (today) to get promoted to corporal. Which... we’ve already established John didn’t serve that long. So either he got a battlefield promotion (discontinued after Vietnam but totally still in effect during) or he got it as a kind of honorary pat on the ass when he was discharged. Which... questionable.

See those medals and badges?

Let me tell you a bit about them.

First off we have our Rifle Expert. This means John was THE SHIT with a rifle. This is the highest marksman you can achieve wjth a rifle, and John was a marine- not to be all “this branch is better” (after all my grandfather was a Green Beret so fuck the Marines is what I’m saying) but the Marines in general are THE SHIT with rifles during Vietnam. So good job Johnnie.

Then we have this random friend- if any of you know what the fuck she is, please share.

Because MY research suggests that she’s some weird version of the Pathfinder Badge.

Which is a thing you get for completing ARMY Pathfinder School at Fort Benning (this is a big deal, it means you’re a badass who is cool to leap out of shit and save the day- think Sam Wilson but he was Air Force so just... paratrooper badass okay? Not as badass as Ranger School, okay? But like... more badass than basic.

So notice I said Army Pathfinder School.

It’s okay. You could be from any branch and complete that kind of training. Pathfinder school takes 3 weeks. So not a huge amount of time but. Let’s just keep that in mind.

Add that to the basic training for the USMC was 8 weeks (cut down from 11). Which together adds up to 11 weeks okay?

THEN AGAIN look what I found on ye olde Uncle Jeff’s website for sale.

Huh. Look at her. Not the same- literally I cannot find that enamel pin in the US military (and before you asked yeah I checked Canadian hardware but didn’t find a match either). But she exists and there’s no reason for Properties to make a fake enamel pin when they could run down the street to literally any military surplus store and get all the pins they need.

But if it IS this pin, okay so the Marine Pathfinders were- like the Army kind- the first in, last out kind. The scouted the territory.

That sounds fair and fine right?

Well the thing is, Marine Pathfinders were always part of Force Reconnaissance. Without going into too much detail... basically these dudes went in deep, found out all the shit needed to keep allies alive abs kill enemies dead and a lot of times did a lot of enemy dead actions themselves. They operated independently behind enemy lines.

Listen my dudes. Friends and foes.

John Winchester was 18/19, a Rifle Expert, a Corporal when he should have been a Private, a Pathfinder and in FORECON. I cannot stress enough... how mindblowingly scary this makes him?

This kind of scary.(if you haven’t seen Full Metal Jacket I cannot in good conscience recommend it. But if you want a character study of John Winchester you MUST watch that and Deer Hunter).

So now to those pretty pretty ribbons.

These are pretty standard but still worth explaining for anyone who hasn’t had to costume military period pieces before like I have.

First up we have our Bronze Medal.

So she’s been awarded since 44 (my dudes in no way is it appropriate to call them ladies- so of course I call them ladies). Given for engaging in action against a US enemy; engaged in military operations involving conflict with an opposing foreign force; serving with friendly forces engaged in an armed conflict against opposing forces when the US isn’t a belligerent.

Basically this means people shot at you and you shot back and no one can prove you shot the wrong people.

Look not to sound trite because it Is a medal and you DO earn that shit. 719,969 were given out during Vietnam (about 2.5 million soldiers served).

This means John was definitely in the combat zone and he definitely didn’t embarrass anyone.

Next up we have the Purple Heart.

(Scroll to the top to see her)

You get this when you are wounded or killed in combat.

Now we can ASSUME John didn’t die in combat- but please rec any fics you’ve got where he did.

I’m gonna skip that pretty maroon badge for just a minute now and go to the yellow dude: our Vietnam Service ribbon. I can’t add any more images so scroll back to the top to see it.

So yes, John served in Vietnam.

But

But

Now let’s look at that sexy maroon and blue ribbon okay?

Because this baby...

Well.

This is the Good Conduct Award

Do you know how you earn her in the Marine Corps?

“Three consecutive years of honorable and faithful service” are required to be eligible.

Which means Johnnie needs to be 21 (20 if he got in at 17) to earn this.

Unless

Of course

John Winchester was already pulling scams before the yellow-eyed demon ever came into the picture.

Anyone else have no difficulty imagining 16 John Winchester handing over fake papers to enlist in the Marines?

—

Then again... anyone else have no difficulty imagining the writers not actually thinking about it enough to do the math?

Either way, there’s some John Winchester stuff for you all to chew on.

Let me know what you think friends and foes!

[chimaerabutt]

I’m at a loss for how to word an incredibly uh. Mixed maelstrom of emotions and anxieties and problems. This is going to be a mess. I apologize. It’s long and rambly and at least 90% me wanting to sort my feelings in to text for myself.

I’ll start by saying my art tumblr is @chimaerasketch and I’ll reblog this there with a list of my sales locations I guess.

So, I live in Texas. This means I’m honestly incredibly screwed. It didn’t even start with Covid, but Covid kicked all of my inertia out from under me, functionally reset all the work I had to do, and in that time it’s gotten exponentially harder and slower of a climb. I’ll try to organize these thoughts below the cut ;

- algorithms ;

So, before algorithms super heavily dictated content you’d see and what would get boosted or suppressed, I had a lot of luck getting discovered organically. People found my stuff neat enough in the hashtags to click on. I was doing pretty great while I was in college getting my BFA, and sold a fair bit of the jewelry I was starting to experiment with by my last year. I didn’t really have to dedicate more time than dead time at my desk job uploading a few pictures to make posts, and I had people in person helping me network online. I had reasonable success with people finding me via keywords. It wasn’t enough to support myself, sure, but it was a slow steady gain of new folks finding me for either my illustration, mixed media, or my jewelry. It helped me coast while I was working my minwage job for the school. It was pretty reliably a good $400 extra a month. With each year, though, I guess social media platforms learned they could algorithmically skew stuff to hook people in to staying on their platforms longer, and that meant a lot of (especially small creators) getting buried. My social media traffic started to dry up, and for a period after Facebook bought out Instagram which was back in 2012? things were still ok. I think the first algorithm change that started making things really rough was back in 2016. That was when the feed was changed so that your posts weren’t actually guaranteed on followers’ dashes. I actually LOST followers on a lot of my accounts in this time, not just on Instagram.. I don’t remember when the similar change Twitter made was, but it was about as rough. Etsy also rolled out a lot of undesirable and sketchy things back to back but I’ll get to that in a moment. Lately algorithm changes have been more and more frequent. A lot of this has been a result (my thoughts, anyway) what few companies own all the pieces now fighting over the increasingly gentrified internet, and they’re all trying to copy one another. EVERYONE has to have stories. And of course, now Instagram has reels.

- Etsy;

My traffic on Etsy was dropping for a while, but once they started pushing free shipping, it functionally vanished outside of outside sales I was pushing myself and largely could have made in person.The final straw for me was when, after Etsy sent me the umpteenth email to connect Etsy to square so that I could sell my online stock in person, they then started taking a % from every single sale I made through square. Not JUST my Etsy catalogue. I lost a sizable chunk from a painting I sold from a gallery I work at, and was never able to get that back via dispute. I switched to Storenvy. Since I’d already had to pay to list I announced I was doing a closing sale on Etsy and opted to let existing listings expire or be bought out. No one bought anything. Etsy literally rolled out the google ads they were forcing on high performing users within the same month. Storenvy did pretty well for me a little while, and I was still driving about the same amount of organic traffic while paying less, plus I could just disable or retire products that sold in person with no loss of profit.The problem is that my shop traffic came from roughly two locations; what I could drive via social media, and what I could drive via in person sales. When I setup at booths, my business cards go FAST, and people do (did) check my shop out after taking them.

- Covid;

I think everyone kinda knew this was coming next. I didn’t realize to what degree in person sales were driving my online presence until there WASN’T an offline presence to feed in to my online. My sales vanished. And I mean VANISHED. I don’t mean “down to one a month,” I mean... I think I made two sales the whole year from random people asking to buy things before I’d even listed them. To date post the start of the pandemic I’ve only made a total of 3 sales on Storenvy. I applied for numerous pandemic relief grants that were out there for artists, including one specific to queer artists, and I was denied every single time. Such is life. I have to question the response that I “wasn’t showing sufficient need” though when the pandemic took my income from the $400-2k monthly range to uh... $0-50 a month, though. Unfortunately, I live in Texas. This means that Abbott the shitstain is my governor, the state is wide open, tons of people are dying, the ICU is 100% full not just in my city but in my entire service area, and... since the state isn’t “shut down” I’m no longer applicable for any pandemic relief. It’s not safe to do in person events, but I’m forced to because unfortunately the capitalist hellscape didn’t stop squeezing you dry just because a plague is also killing people. And most groups trying to make these events “safer” aren’t... doing a great job. The governor made it ILLEGAL to require masks anywhere, so even though we’re adding anywhere from 50-90 new cases a day (and they refuse to test anyone not showing symptoms outside of contact tracing,) I have to persevere with the only source of income I can get. There’s a lot of last minute alterations being made left right and center while both the plaguecarrier covid deniers and more cautious folks both scream about how shit a job is being done from their perspectives. It’s miserable. The long and short is that while the two in person events I do a month used to net me from $100-200 each, and then create online traffic after, lately I’ve been lucky to break $50. The last event I setup for, which was particularly soul crushing, I didn’t see a single sale all day and those of us vending outside felt absolutely abandoned by the gallery organizing everything. That’s an entirely different rant, however. If anyone’s curious, I can share.

SO that leaves me... trying to figure out how to beat the algorithms? I’ve started following trends aggressively, figuring out what’s being boosted, and the success from that is always both fleeting and not worth the exhaustion. Once data came out on the sort of reels Instagram was highlighting, and that daily posting would boost you more, I started caching content from my studio work to upload daily. My views suddenly dropped, and I learned it was because Instagram was now suppressing any posts they detected a logo on. Okay. Fine. I still had the raw video, even if I was frustrated having to upload the same raw content TWICE instead of being able to crosspost from Tiktok. Views rose again. ...and then my reels dropped to lower numbers than I even have followers and people that follow me told me they weren’t seeing my content at ALL on their dashes. My best guess is I tripped a spam filter? Because my reels went back to being boosted again after I didn’t post for two days. I’m exhausted. I’m tired of this. And I hate how the algorithms seem designed to suppress anyone not tailoring content to them until you have a big enough following to get engagement without caring about said algorithm. I feel like I spend more time catering to said algorithms than I actually do creating. I even tried paying for ads! Twice! Instagram guaranteed “at least 1000 views”. I got... 200ish? Both times.

Turns out Instagram still words it as “views” when what they actually measure based off of now is impressions, IE, the thumbnail for your content appearing whether or not anyone clicks on it.

Sigh. I don’t know what to do anymore.

[e-king-court]

It’s that time of year again...

...and by that I mean it's my birthday.

 I don't generally celebrate my birthday. It became A Thing after my parents divorce, and since then, it is definitely a cursed day (last year I got a whole pandemic, so...)

This year, however, I decided I wanted to write me a story. Some months back, while scrolling through Facebook (I know, I know) I came across a post of a post that was a plot bunny. It was a tweet from user @JohannesEvans that read:

Hot goth in the woods that keeps answering the door and sighing and going "no, I'm not the witch, he lives over there" and points across the street to a dazzling pretty boy wearing a gold waistcoat who's waving excitedly at them

I immediately wanted to write it. So I did.

 Now, to no one's surprise, I didn't start this story until roughly a week ago, so... well, it's almost done. So, for now, just to say I've properly celebrated my birthday, please allow me to share with you the first half or so of this silly story. It's rough, really rough, and doesn't have a title. I'm not thrilled with it, but... guilty pleasures, etc. Enjoy!

Quiet. That’s what the little alternative community in the woods had offered. Peace, acceptance, solitude. Quiet.

So Locke bit back a curse when someone knocked on his door for the hundredth time that day. Poppy seeds scattered across his work bench when he jumped because of course he hadn’t used a measuring spoon. Why would he use a measuring spoon for the smallest ingredient? Obviously, pouring straight from the bottle is the best way to measure poppy seeds.

The knocking persisted. Locke sighed and set the bottle down with a thud and rattle of chains. He stomped his way up front and tugged the door open, startling the pair of young women standing on his doorstep. Their eyes widened and the three of them stared at each other for longer than Locke thought was polite.

“Can I help you?” He didn’t growl. This was good communication skills.

The two seemed to shake themselves. “Are you Mr. Devereux?”

Locke sighed. “Which Mr. Devereux?”

They blinked and exchanged a confused glance. “We, um… we’re looking for a spell.”

“Then you want the witch.” He pointed a long arm over their heads toward the obnoxious display across the street. “That Mr. Devereux.” As one, they turned and Locke followed their gaze.

Sebastian was lounging in a pool chair, a cheap thing with neon yellow piping and no pool in sight. He was surrounded by colorful plants, flowers, and enough suncatchers to make any light fairy jealous. Locke was dismayed to see that he was sunning. Long legs, waxed and bronzed, stretched up to the hem of a pair of nautical striped boyshorts. A too small gold waistcoat revealed a pierced belly button and parted with sequined lapels and a collection of charms and pendants against his chest and the hollow of his throat. Golden blond hair was classically cut, cropped close to the sides and left almost strategically messy on top. Locke was not surprised to see the flash of glitter, either put there intentionally, or polluted from the obnoxious, glittery, sun-shaped sunglasses taking over most of his heart-shaped face.

His smile was almost blinding as he waved. “Hey, gorgeous!”

Locke frowned as his face went hot and wished for the hundredth time since moving in that he was the kind of goth that wore full face makeup. “That’s the witch.”

The women gawked at Sebastian, turned and gawked at Locke glowering in the doorway, and then looked at each other.

“Umm… sorry,” the apparent speaker of the duo said, and they turned and fled across the street, whispering to each other as they went. Sebastian stood and stretched, that waistcoat riding higher and those boyshorts hugging… well, everything. Locke sighed and shut the door with a snap.

Newlight Falls was advertised as a quiet town with a village-like atmosphere, tucked away in the old growth forest and home to those who didn’t fit in elsewhere. It was home to all sorts of paranormals, which included an uncommon amount of witches, plenty of fairies, and the obligatory pack of werewolves. Being that it was only an hour away from three major cities, it had become a bit of a tourist attraction, replete with warm-weather festivals that the fairies almost exclusively coordinated. Locke wasn’t a fan, but they were good for the town and good for business.

Even with all that, Locke fell in love with the place almost as soon as he saw it. He’d found the listing on Will’o, trying to find something close to the doctors he needed, but not directly in the city. Not only was his dark little cabin perfectly suited to him, but being back in the woods meant plenty of shade and long trails that he could disappear into if the festivities got to be too much.

It was also supposed to be haunted, which, perfect, but so far he hadn’t experienced much more than a few things being moved and a book or two knocked to the floor. No great shakes, really.

With the image of Sebastian’s sparkling navel piercing embedded in his mind, Locke sulked back to his work room to clean up the poppy seeds and see if the tea could be saved.

“Locke!” Benji’s happy voice boomed, big arms open and face nearly split by his smile.

Locke returned his smile but stayed sequestered on the front stoop out of the sunlight. Benji came to him without question, wrapping him up in the kind of bear hug only large goblins could give. He grunted and gave Benji’s back a pat as the air was squeezed out of him. “Hey, Benj.”

“Good to see you, you look good. This place looks great,” he said, stepping back to appraise the front of the house. To most, it needed some work, but Locke was partial to the busted exterior shutters and chipping grey paint.

“Thanks, the web is real, orb weaver, real beauty,” he said, motioning to the port window overhead.

Benji’s smile went tight and strained. “Love it,” he grunted like it hurt. He cautiously turned his attention away from the spider. “Thanks for letting me come.”

“Of course! Make my favorite sibling miss Fairy Fest after listening to him whine about it for ten years? Fat chance. C’mon, I’ll show you your room,” he said, motioning Benji in.

Benji grabbed his suitcase and thundered up the steps. “This place has a guest bedroom?”

“Eh….” Locke whined and didn’t answer further. It did, but the guest bedroom was where he’d put his workroom and it would have been too small for his hulking brother anyway. Instead, Locke had cleaned up his own bedroom and got a cot for his workroom. It wouldn’t be the most comfortable, but he could deal with it for the week that Benji was visiting. It wasn’t often they got to spend time together one on one.

They wandered in. Locke waved over the small living room, through the doorway to the small kitchen and dining nook, the water closet under the stairs, and then brought him up to the attic that made his bedroom and the full bathroom for his use during his stay. Benji caught on quick, but didn’t say anything, no doubt having considered how small the house was.

“We’ll have to share the shower, but otherwise, this room is yours for the week. I, uh… can’t say I’d be real thrilled if you picked someone up at the Fest, but, I’ll be the best wingman I can be,” Locke said, drawing the curtains back from the port window to let some light into the room.

Benji chuckled. “I wouldn’t do that to you. Thanks, man, this place is great. Mostly,” he said, eyeing the spider visible through the window.

Locke smirked. “Ghost isn’t too rowdy, either.”

“Ahha, of course you’d have a ghost,” Benji said with a self-deprecating laugh. Locke’s grin went cocky and he thumped his way back down the stairs.

“I gotta make a product run when dusk rolls around if you want to see the town proper tonight. There’s not a lot except some kitschy shops, but you might like one of the little restaurants for dinner,” he said, wandering into the kitchen.

Benji hummed and sniffed the air, eyes landing unerringly on the box that took up most of the little dining table. It was full of Locke’s teas, creative little blends in labeled linen baggies waiting to be delivered to the shops in town he was contracted with. “Sure, I’d love to see the place.”

“Cool, you can carry the box,” Locke said, wandering back to his workshop. Benji’s laugh made the windows rattle.

A few hours later, with the sun set enough that it didn’t irritate Locke’s eyes and skin overly much, he was leading an easily distracted Benji through town. The whole town was decked out for Fairy Fest, covered in lights and flowers and full to bursting with fairies. They flitted about in showers of sparkling color, some already celebrating by tossing petals or handful of pixie dust over the myriad of tourists also steadily filling the streets. Locke would have felt out of place in all his black and chains, but there were plenty of darker fae around, too. If anyone stood out, it was his rather large foster brother, his impressive figure causing people to practically dive out of the way, even as poor Benji apologized.

“Stop apologizing, Benj, you’re only walking,” Locke said with a smirk.

Benji was all tight frowns. “I feel bad, though.”

“Don’t, you’re fine. This is us, though,” he said, veering for a shop door. Benji followed, uttering a few more unnecessary apologies as they went.

The dark little mystic shop was one of Locke’s favorites. It was an evening shop and sold pretty much the same stuff that the rest of the kitschy shops sold, but it was themed dark. Spangled black and purple curtains and tapestries kept most of the natural light out, the shelves all made of cast iron and mahogany. The goods skewed toward occultish, but nothing available to the general public could cause any trouble. Even the obsidian athames were blunter than a letter opener. There were more exotic wares in the back, but the owner, Ms. Gloushire, was highly selective when it came to those sales. Even Locke, who was a resident, didn’t have her convinced, but he was getting there. Not that there was anything fancy he needed for his teas.

Benji, of course, veered right for the collection of polished stones and crystals. Locke grinned and teasingly hissed for him not to touch all of them. Benji glared at him but didn’t put down the peacock ore he’d already snatched from the display.

“Ms. Gloushire?” he called when he saw the front end empty.

“Is that you, Locke!?” a muffled shout echoed from the back.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, sliding his sunglasses onto the top of his head.

A moment later Ms. Gloushire was whacking her beaded curtain out of the way and she smiled warmly at Locke before her eyes settled on Benji. “Oh, you have a friend today.”

“Yep. My brother, Benji,” he said. “I have the tea for you for the Fest. The Starry Night, Full Moon, and Crossroads.” He set his box down on her counter beside the register and pulled back the flaps.

Her face lit up and she rubbed her hands together. “Ooh, excellent. Everything work out all right with your last check?”

“Yes, ma’am, not problems at all,” he said, smiling softly.

“Good. All this newfangled equipment. I know it’s more convenient for the Norms, but electronics and magic don’t always mix well. But if everything’s fine, then it’s fine,” she said, casting her new POS system a distrustful glare as she dug into the box of teas. Locke just chuckled and waited patiently for her to finish her counting and inventorying. Satisfied, she marked it all down and set the box aside.

“All right, dear, everything looks to be in order. If I need anything else, I’ll call you,” she said.

“Yep, you know where to find me. I gotta stop at Coriander’s. You have a good night,” he said, flicking down his sunglasses.

“You too, Locke. Pleasure to meet you, Benji,” she said with a suspiciously sharp smile. Benji tittered nervously, thanked her, and they were off.

The stop at Coriander’s was brief and uneventful. Locke handed over the second box of teas, things packaged in lighter bags with more spritely names, while Benji was one again glued to the shiniest objects the shop had to offer. Even with Coriander chatting at top speed about a new topic every few seconds, they were done relatively quickly. He said his farewells to the bubbly sprite, flicked his sunglasses down, and turned toward the door, only to be blinded anyway.

Sebastian was in the doorway, pushing his outrageous sunglasses onto the top of his head as he meandered into the shop. As soon as he saw Locke he smiled and Locke frowned at the butterflies in his stomach.

“Hey beautiful,” Sebastian said, smooth and a little high. His eyes instantly flicked to Benji and his expression went briefly blank, before he smiled again and got a little swagger. “Well, well, who is this delightful new face?”

Locke glanced over his shoulder and wasn’t surprised to see Benji’s face dark with blush. His greenish skin and purplish blood made him look a little brown, but it was definitely a blush. Locke didn’t blame him.

“Sebastian,” he said. “My brother, Benji. Here for the Fest.” He cleared his throat before his voice broke and ignored the look Benji gave him.

Another expression briefly flickered across Sebastian’s face, this time more surprised than blank, and quickly settled into a coy grin. “Brother? Well, welcome to Newlight Falls, Mr. Benji. I’m Sebastian Devereux, Locke’s neighbor,” he said, sauntering forward and offering his hand. He was a head shorter than Locke, which had Benji nearly towering, but as usual Sebastian’s confidence was unwavering. Locke figured it would have to be with a neon pink sequin sarong over those...shorts.

“Good to meet you, Mr. Devereux,” Benji said. “Which neighbor would you be?”

“The one across the street, handsome. Incase you ever need to borrow a cup of sugar,” he said with a wink. Benji grinned stupidly and Locke nervously fussed with his lip ring. “If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I have some tea to stock up on.” He winked at Locke, who barely resisted watching as Sebastian sauntered past. He huffed, tugging his hood closer to his face, and hurried out of the shop, leaving Benji to scurry after him. Maybe the hood and sunglasses disguised his blush enough? He certainly hoped so.

--

“So how are the infusions going?”

Locke looked up from pushing around his caprese. “Hmm? Oh, they’re fine. They’re infusions.” He cut a bite of cheese and tomato. “I had one last week and I think I’m scheduled for the week after next. Mostly vitamin D right now.”

Benji nodded, obliterating a half-pound cheeseburger and fries. “I remember summers are harder.”

Locke shrugged. “Yeah, but being here has been really great. The woods are so dense that I don’t always get a rash, so I can be outside more during the day.”

Benji’s face lit up. “Oh! That’s really cool! Mom and dad will be happy to hear it. See? I told them this was a good move for you.”

Locke huffed. “What, me telling them how great it is wasn’t enough?”

Benji waved him off. “You know how they are, they always worry about you.”

It wasn’t unwarranted. Locke had been a sick kid with all kinds of health issues and sensitivities, not the least of which was chronic anemia. At the time, being in and out of foster homes like he was, it had been difficult to narrow down his symptoms. Until Dan and Lori snagged him, the pale, scrawny, constantly exhausted thing that he was, and gave him a solid foster home to grow up in. Within the first year they’d discovered he had vampire heritage, which explained the majority of his weird symptoms. It wasn’t enough that he had to have transfusions, but it still meant he was anemic and allergic to too much direct sunlight. After that, with the support of his new foster family, Locke improved enough that he was able to finish school, and even got a degree.

Now, with a healthy lifestyle, he could live pretty normally, even if he still needed to be monitored monthly. Newlight, on top of being paranormally inclusive, also happened to be an hour away from the office that handled his case, which was still better than the two and a half hours he’d been traveling while still living near Dan and Lori. They might not have adopted him, but they still considered themselves his parents, and made quite the fuss when he moved so far away from them.

“Well, I really am doing great. You can tell them that I'm happy and healthy and even the ghost doesn’t bother me too much,” he said.

Benji snorted. “Lori would flip her lid if she knew you had a ghost.”

Locke grinned and didn’t think Lori would honestly be too surprised.

Other than the caprese salad, the choice of restaurant had been deliberate. It sat across from a stretch of woods with a marked path, and that path just so happened to let out a few yards from Locke’s house. The dark fae of Newlight loved to fill it with all sorts of mischief, some of which was quite pretty depending on the mood. With it being tourist season, and the endless woodland trails a huge attraction, Newlight had strict ordinances for what was and wasn’t allowed on the public paths. Benji was hesitant to take the woods home, but Locke assured him it was quite safe so long as they stayed on the path.

True to form, the woods were full of eerie giggles and mysterious lights, shrubs shaking and twigs snapping in the shadows along the lit path. The usual lamps that ran along the ground had been replaced with overhead string lights, zigzagging back and forth  like a trail of will-o-the-wisps. Since the sun had finally set, Locke was able to shuck his hoodie and take off his sunglasses. Extreme temperatures had never really bothered him, but the summers could be pretty oppressive. It was nice to feel cool night air on his skin.

Half way home, a fairy appeared, a curvy woman in a diaphanous lavender dress and long, curling black hair. She hovered her way across the path, watching them with a wicked grin and shining black eyes.

“Evening, Iris,” Locke said casually. Benji made some choking noises behind him and Locke suppressed a grin, imagining his brother was blushing so hard he was almost purple.

“Hello, Locke. Who’s your friend?” she asked, moving a little closer.

“This is my brother, Ben.”

Her grin got even more mischievous. “Nice to meet you, Ben,” and she was off again, disappearing into the trees on the opposite side of the path. A symphony of chittering laughs hit them and Locke snorted.

“Wow,” Benji huffed as they kept moving, eyes nearly glued to the spot.

“She works in Mrs. Gloushire’s sometimes,” Locke said with a shrug.

“Oh yeah?” Benji mumbled absently, still searching through the darkness. Locke wanted to tease him, but it was his turn to blush when another fairy appeared.

“Hello, Galena,” he nearly deadpanned, glad it was so dark.

Galena was tall and willowy, built lean like a swimmer and burnished like bronze. He was dressed in what Locke could only call a poison green loincloth with a braided rope of poison ivy draped across him like a sash and pinning back half of his long, curling brown hair.

“Hello, Locke.” He did a little spin, purple wings beating wildly. “What do you think of my Absinthe costume?”

Locke blinked. “Isn’t that the same costume from last year?”

Galena scoffed. “You’re no fun!” he snarked, but blew Locke a kiss anyway and darted off again. Locke sighed and picked up the pace.

“Are the woods always like this here?” Benji nearly whispered to a chorus of laughter.

Locke shrugged. “No, they’re just excited for the Fest. It’s pretty quiet outside of tourist season.” Benji just hummed softly and got a little closer when something shrieked nearby.

[lgbtyrus]

TJ’s Playlist (Final Ep Anniversary Bonus)

So it's been a year since I cried to the finale because tyrus was canon, and I wanted to travel back in time to some of the happiest memories I had because of this show. I had a thing in Macaroni's POV, but it was a little lame and didn't want to finish it so I went this route instead. It's also always bothered me that this story ended on 19 chapters, and I thought this was the perfect chance to even it out with a perfect 20. If you're reading this, I love you very much and thank you for coming back (or getting here for the first time). Goodbye to TJ's Playlist for real now <3 

Ao3 Link | Wattpad Link

-

TJ ran down the hall, pushing by students who couldn’t get out of his way fast enough. It was the last day of middle school, and everyone was lingering behind to say goodbye to their friends who might go to a different high school. TJ had been doing the same before remembering he had promised Cyrus he would meet him up front.

Cyrus was standing with Buffy and Marty, laughing at something one of them said when TJ caught up. “Hi,” TJ told him, bending over to catch his breath. “Sorry I’m late. I forgot how fast time can go.”

“It’s fine.” Cyrus smiled. “I wasn’t going to leave without you.” Cyrus reached over to hold TJ’s hand, making him smile.

Buffy said to Cyrus with a grin, “So yard sale?” Cyrus’s neighborhood had a large yard sale once a year, and they chose the last day of school to do it. Cyrus’ parents invited all of them to take their things to sell.

“Yes! Come by with anything you want to get rid of,” Cyrus replied. “I’m so excited. It feels like a cleanse and the first step into high school.”

“Can’t wait,” Buffy said. “I’m going to stop by home first for my stuff, pick up Andi, and meet you guys there.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Cyrus said and gave her a thumbs up. They said bye to Marty and Buffy who walked off holding hands, leaving TJ with his boyfriend. Cyrus turned to look at him and asked, “So. Did you think about it?”

TJ bit at the inside of his cheek for a moment. “I did.”

“And?”

“I think I’m going to sell them.”

Cyrus jumped up. “Yes? Really?”

“Just the repeats!” TJ smiled, taking a step back to avoid getting stepped on.

“Yes, that’s amazing. That’s perfect. The people in the neighborhood are going to love you,” Cyrus said. “We’ll look up the value of every single one before we set them out.”

“Already did that. That’s actually the reason why I decided to sell them.”

“Are they worth a lot?”

“Not as much as the cameras would be, but it’s a decent amount of money to pay for basketball camp.” TJ and Cyrus started walking away from their now former middle school, not looking back.

“How long would you be gone for?” Cyrus asked him.

“Three weeks. We can handle that, right?” TJ asked him, squeezing his hand. The coach at Grant High School recommended he go to basketball camp to secure a spot on the varsity team the next year, but it was a little pricey even with both of his parents working at the time.

“Of course.” Cyrus squeezed his hands back, smiling at him. “Let’s go get your things.” After going through his GG’s stuff for the first time, TJ realized there was a lot of valuable items that included comic books and vinyls. He was letting go of all the comic books because he wasn’t interested in that, but he didn’t have the desire to let go of any music. There was more vinyl’s in the attic than he realized and even though he didn’t have a player, he wanted them for the day he did have one.

Cyrus was talking to TJ about his last day of dance and how he wasn’t looking forward to regular PE at all as they headed to the Kippen’s house. “I need to have PE with Buffy at all costs next year. If not, I’ll definitely get picked last for every team.”

“You’re already stressed out for PE next year?” TJ snickered. He knew Cyrus well enough at this point to know his fear of public humiliation in PE was insurmountable “You need to relax a little. It’s summer break.”

“I know, but I tend to plan every minute of my future and PE is an inevitable part of it.”

“Let’s make a deal. You put off thinking about PE until a month before school, and I’ll let you be there when I get my report card in the mail.” TJ liked to open his report card alone considering he has done really bad in math in the past, but Cyrus really wanted to see how much TJ had improved now that he had a proper tutor.

Cyrus hummed to himself before saying, “Deal. But only because I can’t wait to see the look on your face when you see how well you did.”

“My C average does bring out my best smile.”

“All of your smiles are your best smiles.”

“You literally told me my dancing to old music is my best smile.”

“It’s a little biased because you dance with me.”

“It does make me smile when you slow dance with me,” TJ admitted to him. Cyrus smiled, blushing at the comment and making TJ’s heart skip a beat. There hadn’t been a single day where TJ doubted his feelings for him.

-

They got to the Kippen’s empty house, Macaroni the cat waiting in the yard. He was jumping after a grasshopper before he saw Cyrus and TJ come up. He ran to Cyrus and meowed, making him grin. “Hello, friend,” Cyrus said as he bent over to pick him up.

“Needy,” TJ muttered to Macaroni as he roughly petted his ears. Macaroni swatted at TJ who pulled his hand away on time.

Cyrus held Macaroni closer and said, “You have to be gentle with him. He’s old.”

“He’s okay,” TJ said, sticking his tongue out at the cat. He went to go unlock the door while Cyrus asked Macaroni about his day. The cat simply purred in his arms.

Inside, Cyrus put him down and followed TJ without asking upstairs to his room, little footprints tapping against the wood floors. Cyrus felt like the Kippen’s gothic house was his second home. It was Halloween themed according to his parents, but he liked the charm it gave off. TJ’s parents were younger than his after all and when the air was clear, it was fun to be there.

TJ had two boxes on the floor ready to go. “Can you take the vinyl one? It’s lighter,” TJ asked Cyrus as he picked up a box.

“For sure,” Cyrus said. He got the box and looked around the room that seemed to be more crowded as TJ dug out things from the attic. It made Cyrus smile every time TJ called him with a new discovery. A new photo album from the 70s. More polaroid photos he took of TJ and Amber when they were little. A random trinket TJ thought was cool. One time he didn’t find anything of his GG’s. He found a bunch of new t-shirts from his dad’s old band and a few CD’s TJ couldn’t stop laughing at for an hour. His dad was in makeup that really did make him look like a vampire.

Cyrus said goodbye to Macaroni who rubbed against his leg before walking out with TJ and walking down to his house. Around the block, people already had their yard sales open and people from all over Shadyside were visiting there. Even though TJ lived so close to him, his neighborhood seemed to be a completely different world from his. TJ didn’t know his next door neighbors, and he had just found out a month ago that Marty had lived across the street from him practically his entire life.

They got to Cyrus’ house where his parents had set out tables. Cyrus’ old toys and clothes were out and ready to go to new homes. He gave up most of his children’s books, but he kept a few favorites just in case he ever had kids to read them to one day. “You’re selling all your Pokemon cards?” TJ asked him as he set his box on an empty table.

“There will be someone who appreciates them more.” Cyrus then added, “They’re also fake.”

“Dollar store packets?” TJ smiled knowingly.

“Yes!” Cyrus laughed. “I always wondered why the ones at Kmart were more expensive and now I know why.”

“They were still fun to play with, though.”

“I honestly never learned how to play with them,” Cyrus admitted. “I just liked looking at them.”

“That’s me with my vinyl records right now,” TJ said. “I opened every single one of them because some had notes and receipts from GG. Some silly stuff like saying to pick up my grandma from school or just lists of other singers.” Cyrus stared at TJ as he set out the records, wondering if now was the time to give him what he just bought him. He wanted to hold out for his birthday but watching TJ talk about the vinyl’s made him realize how much listening to that music meant to him.

“There’s actually something I want to give you,” Cyrus said.

“Now?” TJ raised an eyebrow.

“Think of it as the first part of your birthday present.”

“First part? Of my birthday present? My birthday that’s in July?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes,” Cyrus nodded. “So, do you want it or not?”

“Can it be the only gift you give me?” TJ asked him.

“Of course not. The other thing is on its way already.”

“Oh god, Cyrus. You really didn’t have to get me anything.”

“Says the guy that gave me a present everyday of the week leading up to my birthday.” TJ smiled, Cyrus knowing that he finally got him to give in.

“Fine. Surprise me.”

Cyrus took TJ’s hand. “Come on! I can’t wait for you to see it.” Cyrus led TJ inside his house where they walked past his parents, TJ barely able to say a full hello to them. They went into his room where Cyrus let go of his hand and dug through his t-shirt drawer where he pulled out a wrapped present.

“You already wrapped it?” TJ asked, smiling as Cyrus handed him the box.

“Had to be ready just in case you ever found it.”

“You’re the one that snoops through my things, not me,” TJ reminded him.

“Just open in,” Cyrus said impatiently. TJ put the present on the bed and started ripping the wrapper. With a single tear down the middle, TJ knew what it was and gasped.

“Cyrus,” he whispered. “You really shouldn’t have.”

“I wanted to. Really badly.” TJ finished unwrapping the green record player and held out the box in his hands, staring at it in awe. “Now you can listen to everything your GG left you.”

“Yeah,” TJ said with a smile. “I really can.” He put the box down and went over to face Cyrus. “Thank you so much.” TJ bent down and kissed him, both smiling into the kiss.

“You are very welcome.”

TJ held onto Cyrus’ hand and told him, “Let’s go play some music.”

[kessielrg]

[Kingdom Hearts] Busy Bees

Summary:  By far, Ven’s got the most boring job at the flower shop; the cashier. Sitting day in and day out for someone to browse along the rows of flowers and gardening tools, then probably walk right out again. Sometimes an interesting thing would happen- but they were few and far between. [flower shop AU focused on UX kids][Part 3 in a series of oneshots][VenxOC][EphemerxOC/F!Player]

Rating: K

Word Count: 1,682 words

If you liked this story, please reblog!

- - -

Roughly a week before Easter, and Ventus was spending his time rearranging some displays in the hope someone would buy one. It could have been worse- he could have been placed on Easter basket making duty. Strelitzia and Lauriam were already in the back making some. Even more so, at least he wasn't on Easter Bunny duty. That was an event planned for the last day of March most of the time. And, thankfully, it was Ephemer who became their Easter Bunny. Not that anyone else wanted to volunteer...

The bell above the door twinkled as someone came into the shop. Ventus gave a half-hearted look up to give a customer service 'how are you today?' before recognizing that it was just Brain. Trailing right behind Brain was his sister, Sabrina (to whom Ventus absolutely did not have a crush on because she would never give him the time of day). Sabrina was giving her brother a rather irate glare as she sipped on her strawberry milkshake. Likely because Brain was going on about some tech video he saw earlier.

“Why don't you get how neat it was, Sabi?” Brain teased as they lingered near the entrance, possibly so Sabrina could finish her milkshake. “This guy was able to encode a full 5 minute video on a 3 inch floppy disk, and the quality was amazing. Amazing for what it could be, of course.”

Sabrina took her lips off her straw just to rasp, “Nerd.”

“Alright there peanut gallery,” Brain snorted, “I see how it is.”

He then attempted to mess up her hair, but Sabrina dodged it with a casual swoop to the side. It only lead to Brain to laugh at her even more.

“Oh!” he then realized, digging into a paper bag he was holding, “We got something for you Ven.”

Ven blinked, as if he were unaware of his own presence, as Brain pulled out a large muffin. Sabrina started to sip her milkshake again, starting to give Ven a rather judging look. He was more aware of her looking at him than the muffin.

“Are you guys going to help Strelitzia and Lauriam?” he asked, taking the muffin with care.

“Yup.” Brain grinned. “Even managed to drag Sabi into it because she needs something to do than staying at home managing her fashion blog.”

Sabrina huffed. “As if it's my fault that Elie Saab's idea of escapism is 'cirque du soleil' extravagance. 'Designed with his costumers in mind', my well manicured pinkie toe.”

“For the record, you should probably cover them with something.” Brain told her, pointing down to her feet. They were well manicured, and presently being showed off with lace-up sandals. “We're putting small bags of potting soil in the baskets this year.”

Everyone looked down at Sabrina's feet as she wiggled them a bit at the idea. After a moment, she just shrugged.

“I have a pair of socks in your locker just for this reason.” she informed him before starting to head toward the backroom. Brain watched her leave with a grin on his face, his hand at the brim of his fedora in an equal amount of fondness. He looked over at Ven -who started picking at his muffin with some interest- and his grin grew a bit wider, as if he were thinking of something amusing.

“You can come join us, you know. I'm sure Skuld wouldn't mind you abandoning the store front for back end stuff.”

“I… I'll think about it.” Ven carefully replied, almost timidly. “There's a lot of stuff to do...”

“Gotcha.” the older of the two nodded, tipping his fedora at Ven before also heading to the backroom.

Brain casually strolled into the backroom to see what kind of operation the Fleur siblings had concocted to get the baskets done. He was impressed to find that they came up with an assembly-line sort of set up. It started with the round wicker baskets they were going to place everything in, then someone would set a decent sized teddy bear in, then add small, unpainted terracotta pots with a bag of potting soil placed inside, then a young orchid, and finally a packet of flower seeds tucked between the orchid and pots. It was going to be a nice little display in all said and done.

“Look at you busy little bees,” Brain teased, “You need some food.”

Strelitzia, who had been measuring the potting soil to place in the zip bags, looked up at Brain as if she hadn't been aware they had arrived.

“You didn't have to do that.” she told him. She then worked herself up and brushed the soil off her work uniform. Sabrina -now wearing a pair of socks instead of her sandals- took a few steps back with a look of disgust on her face.

“How many baskets did Skuld want this year?” Brain asked Lauriam as he handed him a bagel.

“Twenty-five.” the pink haired man informed him. “That was the only amount of baskets she ordered.”

“Quite a bit, don't you think?”

“Seems like it, but we're in an outdoor mall and pretty well known locally. We'll get rid of them eventually. Speaking of, Skuld wants us to take picture of the baskets so we can put them up online.”

“We should have Sabrina do it.” Strelitzia happily suggested as she went to the sink to wash her hands off.

Sabrina scoffed as she took a stool to the prep table- right where the pending orchids and teddy bears were. “Because last time you used me as a marketing ploy, sales were so high that we had a party to celebrate.”

“You have a very marketable face, sis.” Brain teased, playfully rubbing her back. Sabrina let out another indignant scoff. The banter between siblings made Lauriam and Strelitzia go into a light laughter.

After everyone had something to eat, it was back to business. Strelitzia went back to measuring out the potting soil. Sabrina made herself the one to place the teddy bear and orchid into the basket, Brain sat beside her to get the bags of soil from Strelitzia so he could place them in the little pots. This then left Lauriam with placing the seed packets inside, and decorating the basket with a ribbon. Once they found a comfortable groove to work with, that was when the four of them started to talk.

And since she didn't come around that often, Sabrina was the focus.

“Have you found a new job yet, Sabrina?” Strelitzia curiously asked.

“No.” came the rather annoyed sigh. “At this rate, I might as well get into politics.”

“So we should all be afraid, then?” Lauriam mused as he carefully tied off a bow.

“El Presidente Sabi the Tyrant.” Brain remarked before giving his sister a teasing side glance. Sabrina sneered before poking him with her elbow. He poked her right back without shame.

“Have you thought about working here?” Lauriam asked, a smile on his face reflective of the fun environment. “You and Brain could carpool. I'm sure Skuld would arrange schedules so you two share the same shift.”

“Or share it with Ven.” Sabrina immediately spat back. She paused for a moment, as if she wasn't quite sure of what she had just said. It was Strelitzia who didn't see this hesitation, so she thoughtfully asked without meaning any harm;

“Have you and Ven started dating yet?”

“Strelitzia.” Lauriam quickly -but still oddly gently- admonished.

Strelitzia's cheeks immediately started to flare a bright pink. “Oh. Is that still a sore subject? I'm sorry. I didn't mean...”

“You're fine, Strelitzia.” Sabrina told her with a wave of her hand- not that the woman could see it. “It's not your fault that some people can't mind their own business.” She shot her brother a dark glare that he just as easily shrugged off. After giving an exasperated sigh, Sabrina then went on to say, “I don't see why I'm the one that has to ask him. I get that it's obvious, but I'm not the one that needs to put a spine in him. If he can't do something that simple, then I will wait- for him or otherwise.”

“Sabrina, I hate to break it to you, but not everyone can be like Ephemer.”

“Don't be stupid- Anora was the one who took the lead in everything they did. Probably still does.”

Strelitzia let out a snort so unflattering that everyone turned to look at her.

“Do you have something to say, Zee?”

“N-no!” the young woman stammered- her face becoming a shade so red, it could have rivaled a blossoming rose. “Not at all!”

“Some things never change.” Lauriam calmly noted as he went back to work.

Meanwhile, Ventus was doing his absolute best to grow a spine. He was caught in a conflict over whether they could really use his help, or if he just wanted to sit by Sabrina and make it less than obvious that he was admiring her. Other than that, he remained in the front as he tried to look busy in case someone came in. If he did go help the others, then who would come out to help a costumer than came in? There wouldn't be much of a competition, would there? Everyone but Sabrina was still a clocked-in employee, after all.

It's not like everyone didn't know he liked her. Everyone at that stupid flower shop wouldn't hesitate to place the two of them in the same room so something would happen. If Ventus went back to help, and a costumer came in, he'd almost place a hundred bucks that Brain himself would go to help.

“You know what?” Ven mumbled to himself as he took a look outside the windows. There wasn't anyone that looked remotely interested in coming toward the shop, and so with a nod, Ven went to the backroom. His confidence in his choice nearly faded the closer he got. When he was just steps away from joining the others, Ven nervously cleared his throat before asking;

“Room for one more?”

[ehyeh-joshua]

Understanding the coming 2021 Economic Crisis.

TL;DR - the banks and hedgefunds have been screwing the US economy over and merely repeating what happened in 2008 is a good outcome at this point, with the worst case scenario being the complete collapse of the United States Dollar, and with it the entire global economy.

It's not an accident that Bank of America and JPMorgan have both issued Bonds totalling $15 billion and $13 billion dollars - both record breaking amounts - at the same time Warren Buffet has sold 100% of his JPMorgan stock.

To explain why goes back into the history of Wall Street greed; for decades they have been targeting companies to short-sell their stock (where a share is borrowed and sold, and replaced later at the lower price, causing a profit of the sale of the original share minus the cost of the replacement share and the interest fees on the borrowed share, which can be more profitable than holding the share for the person being borrowed from) on a massive scale; the goal is to make the victim company into a worthless penny-stock, and then force the company into bankruptcy by not having enough liquidity to pay off things like toxic debt, default on issued bonds.

They will even do it to their own; this behaviour was what truly killed Lehmann Brothers and Bear Sterns - Wall Street made hundreds of millions of dollars shorting those two all the way to the ground. In total, they made well over a trillion dollars shorting businesses that went bankrupt as a result of 2008.

There are hundreds of public companies - especially brick and concrete building based companies - that are affected by this, right now, on the stock exchanges; they've been hit hard during the last year, and Wall Street is betting that they will fail between Covid and the shift to online retail.

Then the second side of the attack comes in - they will replace the old leadership with their own team and blame the previous team for all the problems, ride the short term boost in confidence, then control the collapse of the business.

And knowing that the business will go bankrupt makes it safe to do a much more risky and profitable version of short-selling - counterfeit short-selling.

The difference between the two is that in a normal short sell, there is a share that is actually borrowed from someone else in order to be sold; in a counterfeit short-sale, they get a friendly market-maker - a company with the authority to create counterfeit shares as a normal part of trading (make a million of these IOU shares, and fill them with a million real shares milliseconds later in order to create liquidity in a stock, which is hedged by the sale of calls and puts options) to create these counterfeit IOU shares.

They can do this because in the actual transaction, although the money transfers instantly the actual shares transfer on a T+2 settlement system (day of the trade, plus two days) - it's a relic of the old days when physical share certificates had to be moved around.

The IOU share is treated as a legal share - to all legal purposes, you own the share. This is not a "Contract for difference" arrangement, in which you are just betting on the stock going up; this IOU, this synthetic share, is a legal share that is meant to be replaced by the real share during the T+2 system. When it doesn't deliver, it is called an FTD; a 'Fail to deliver".

But it is a fake share - instead of there only being X shares in existence, there are now X+Y shares in existence. This devalues the stock due to increasing the supply.

This is why the news media is going on about meme-stocks - a bunch of 4Chan and Reddit "retarded apes" figured it out and YOLOed their savings on these stocks, and because they refuse to sell the stocks and have bought as many of these counterfeit shares as they can afford (and a few actual retards have bought more than they can afford) and now Wall Street has been caught counterfeiting at least 140% of the shares (the absolute minimum, based on SEC fillings for institutional ownership of GME stock, which necessarily does not include the retail investors) ever issued by GameStop. If you go through the SEC's published data on FTDs, you see that typically hundreds of thousands of shares have failed to deliver each day in the case of GameStop. Hundreds of thousands of fake shares that have been sold and are now trading on the market, in dark pools or sat in some Ape's account.

Now, GME is not going to crash the economy, and this is from someone who fully believes the hype about a million dollars a share not being a meme; there aren't nearly enough retarded apes to make it so big that the dollar will crash, although I do think that GME will temporarily cause the dollar to halve or drop to a third of present value before it all gets spent as apes pay taxes and buy Lambos and houses and continue to make the badly judged options bets that made r/WallStreetBets famous.

The real big nuke is that Wall Street has been shorting the US Treasury Bonds market. Worst case scenario is seven times more Treasury Bonds - especially the ten year Bond - are trading than were ever issued by the Federal Reserve. Best case scenario they've only managed to double the Bonds in existence.

To explain just how terrifying this is:

Imagine that you are a major bank. You need liquidity - you have customers in so many sectors that you have departments to track what departments you have covering different sectors of finance.

So, you use the Treasury Bond; they are backed by the government so they can't go wrong. You buy them when you have money, sell them when you need cash; these things trade typically in total values of trillions of dollars each day. The whole system works because Bank A borrows from Bank B to pay Bank C who owe a Bond to Bank D who need a Bond for Bank E who owe Bank A a Bond; all the time all the members stay afloat, they can play hot potato with the Bonds.

As soon as one goes down, the dominoes fall.

"But what on earth could take out a Bank?"

The Mother Of All Short Squeezes.

GameStop going boom to a thousand dollars a share might take out a single hedgefund, but the damage stops there. And back in January, $1k per share was a meme amount even to the most dedicated autistic retard ape. These days, the apes realise that the economy is as screwed as it was in 2008, and they are using GME to hedge against another global financial crash, which contributes to why they want millions - it's no longer about Lambos and YOLO options bets, but about making sure their families don't lose their homes when banks go boom and the housing market crashes because the bubble pops. Its about having support systems for people who will be left with nothing.

Back in January, apes thought that it was just Melvin Capital - a single, not particularly big hedgefund only worth ~$20 billion in Assets Under Management. Subsequently, they discovered how deep in this Citadel group are; a group of companies that is ultimately worth a trillion dollars and handles 46% of all trades on the New York Stock Exchange.

Citadel are backed by Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. Bank of America is involved as part of their own short-selling position on GME.

When GME squeezes, the US stock market will crash as the Depository Trust Clearing Corporation margin call small fry like Melvin Capital, large players like Citadel and eventually major banks like Bank of America and JPMorgan. (Goldman Sachs have hedged their short position and will survive, the other two however...)

How do I know this?

Last week, the Biden administration appointed Gary Gensler - who oversaw the fallout from 2008 - to being the head of the Securities Exchange Commission; the organisation who regulates the US securities markets.

Six months ago, the Trump administration gave the US markets a respite on collateral to be deposited to be held to cover investments on margin.

The SEC has been kept up to date with the situation - once apes figured out that this was going to cause a 2008 style collapse they started sending it all in to the SEC; sure, they want Lambo and tendies, but they also want the economy to survive. They've watched The Big Short, and serveral times a day you'll see the Don't ****ing dance" quote cited because they've realised that they have discovered what Michael Burry found out back in 2005. They are terrified. I've had sleepless nights over the last month, and I'm long GME because I think it is the only hedge against the economic collapse that could be on it's way. I don't want to imagine what someone who knows about this stuff and isn't long GME is thinking.

What gives me hope is that the SEC are rapidly changing the rules - there have been three massive legal developments since I started following the situation - in order to contain the damage that can be done from GME going off. I believe that the SEC is coordinating with long institutional investors - particularly BlackRock and Fidelity - GameStop's leadership (who are pushing to turn the company around and need this dealt with so that they can move forward) crypto-currencies experts and the Federal government to ensure a situation where retail gets paid (roughly a hundred thousand Chinese people and a Chinese investment fund are long GME - the US government cannot afford to give the CCP the propaganda coup of betraying the principle of free markets, the US economy would never recover from the blow) and the system has a systemic crash this year and rebuilds much better now that a decades old criminal practice is gotten rid of and the shares system is converted to blockchain and instant settlement to make sure the factors that led to this disaster aren't repeated. I.e. I become a millionaire and retire at 28, buy the dip knowing that things are going to recover from a massive but temporary crisis.

A "normal" bad situation, where this does not completely worst nightmare wrong? I walk away from GME a billionaire, but a loaf of bread costs a million dollars.

Worst case? Well, the bit before Jesus' return in glorious victory is seven years of hell on earth, under an economy where no one can buy or sell without the beasts involvement. How you get that is you arrange a global financial crisis to bankrupt nations all over the world and make your centralised one world economy look like the saviour.

Whatever you do, don't rush to pull money out the banks - that only screws everything over guaranteed because if everyone has a run on the banks you immediately get a short squeeze on the Treasury Bonds, which nukes everything. If everyone pretends that life goes on as normal and the Fed gets away with giving Treasury Bonds to those who need them to complete their chains then only GME goes boom, and the economy survives, and therefore hundreds of thousands of people will not lose their jobs and houses. But they need GME to go boom so that they can use it as a cover story so that they can get away with covering up the Treasury Bonds problem.

As always, none of this is financial advice, and while I'm not a cat, I'm also not a financial advisor, and this is written by a guy who has 19 tickets on rocket built by self-proclaimed retarded apes knowing he only knows of one actual physicist among them, having YOLOed his savings on hope that his affordable investment won't lose value even in the event of 10,000% inflation.

This is going to be my last post on the subject, because frankly, I'm scared. I've seen the Cthulhuoid monster lurking in the depths, and I hope and pray I'm wrong.

[thebibliosphere]

Hello fam. This is a post brought to you by a Patreon request—I know, it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these—from Sarah G, asking my thoughts and opinions on the Zero Waste movement that is sweeping across certain parts of the online strata, particularly on youtube and pinterest. (Links are in bold for  ease of access and viewing, and are non affiliated.)

Sarah writes: Hi  Joy, I know this isn’t exactly in the realm of vampires (can’t wait for  Phangs!) but I feel this is something you might have some good advice  on if you have the spoons to talk about it. I recently started looking  into more eco-friendly ways to live after your posts about allergies and  toxic synthetics made me realize I had several things in my home that  were triggering my asthma and I came across the concept of zero waste,  which sounded really cool at first, and then I looked into it some more  and it just sort of seems fake and I was wondering what your thoughts  were on it.

Zero Waste is indeed something I’m familiar with, and like you, I have mixed feelings on the community around it. The principles of Zero Waste i.e. reducing the amount of waste you produce an the types  of waste you produce, are great. I think it’s a solid, good idea to try  and promote more ethical produce and buying habits, both for the planet and from a personal financial stand point. The more you can reuse and  recycle the better. But I also feel the … fandom (can you call it  that???) can be quite off putting and at times extremely self righteous and judgemental in attitude. Amidst the crunchy hippies, the minimalists and those just straight up trying to live a little better, are those who have managed to make something meant for the betterment of the planet into something about themselves, and they're willing and ready to make sure we know just how evil we are for still having plastic straws with our drinks. Cause, y’know, it’s not big companies doing the most damage to the environment, no sirree it’s you and your plastic water bottle, you monster. (Don’t  worry, we’ll get to why the war on plastic is being handled wrong.)

Yea, those people are very fake and very off putting, and I see a lot  of them on youtube. And a lot of the time, they’re actually giving  contradictory advice toward actually living a zero waste lifestyle.

When talking about this with other people, I have taken to calling this The Mason Jar Aesthetic.

A  while ago, while I was talking about sustainable living with a friend (hi Michael!), and he mentioned that he and his wife were thinking of using  mason jars as an alternative to buying expensive glassware, because if  one breaks, you’ll always be able to replace them easily and you'll always have a matching  set. Which blew my mind as genius because not only is that a super cost effective, but it’s also a really sustainable way of living, both from a zero waste ethic standpoint and financially too.

For example, where I am in the US,  for $15 I can usually get 12 half pint mason jars, if not for less  depending on where I shop. They come with lids and seal top discs, which  are easy to replace if I ever use them for canning and can also be safely frozen, sanitized and reused again and again, meaning they are long lasting and multi-purpose. And, if you are using them as drinkware and this is important to you, they all match.

For me however, the real benefit of the humble mason jar, is that they can be fully recycled, though it is important to note that in some regions, the tops may need to go to a separate facility from the glass jar itself, so you’d  need to check with your local recycling center on that. But regardless, the whole thing is recyclable, sturdy, multi-purpose, easily transportable (seal your drink and off you go!), cost effective, and some may even argue, aesthetically pleasing.

Pinterest certainly seems to think so:

[ID: a screenshot from the website Pinterest depicting many diy crafty projets for home and the kitchen involving mason jars]

Some of the larger pint ones, would also fit nicely into a mobility aid like a cup holder, for those of us who need easy to grip handles. (Also as an aside, if you need more stability and often lament that  there is no such thing as a two handed mug—or even if you find most mug  handles too small to get a good grip—those things are great, they just  clip right on. Life changing.) Because if your argument for sustainability isn’t inclusive, it’s not good enough.

Which  is where the war on plastic comes in. Looking at you “lets ban all  drinking straws regardless of the fact that plastic straws are a vital  necessity for some people with disabilities”, and no, pasta straws are not a safe alternative for everyone (allergies/celiac), metal is expensive and also inflexible, and neither are the bamboo, glass or silicone ones. Banning plastic straws at this moment in time, is not the solution.

Brighter minds than mine have tried to solve this, but as a general proposal, instead of an outright ban, until a sustainable and disabled friendly alternative is found, plastic straws in food establishments could be issued by request, without—and this is important—without shaming disabled people for needing to use something which you can easily opt to avoid if you desire  to do so. Because once more kids and with feeling, if your argument for sustainability isn’t inclusive, it’s not good enough.

(I am fully prepared to get hate over this, the arguments over this shit on twitter were wild. And no, it is not the responsibility of disabled people to come up with a solution to this, while subsisting on restricted income, restricted access to resources, and often times restricted mobility to boot. If you feel this strongly about disabled people using plastic straws, be part of the solution that helps to find a valid alternative. You want this problem fixed, you do it inclusively.)

Now, where was I, oh yeah. Mason jars.

By  contrast, a box of 4 glass tumblers of roughly the same volume, can be  anywhere from $10-$20 or even more depending on where you look. And  while they might look nice, they are single purpose, expensive, and  also—and this is important, cause not a lot of people know this—cannot be recycled.

But Joy, you say, waiting to throw the shards of the broken glass you just swept up off the floor into the recycling, how much damage can it  really do? Glass is just glass? Right?  

Well, here’s the thing about this type of glass. In order to make it thin and aesthetically appealing, it has to be treated with special chemicals (like molten potassium nitrate) to toughen it up and make it shock resistant to temperatures. The problem with this however, is that treated glass, doesn’t melt  at the same temperature as untreated glass, which can cause several  problems at recycling facilities, ranging from damaged equipment at the  plant (not good!) to creating flawed, glass which is too fragile for  use, and will ultimately, you guessed it, end up on the landfill. [Source] The same is true of mirrors and glass from doors and windowpanes. [Source]

So if you do drop your glass and it breaks, please don't put it in the recycling, wrap it up in brown paper and throw it in the trash. Similarly, if you are sick of the sight of your old glassware, don't pitch it. Instead consider giving it to goodwill or your local equivalent. Someone will use it.

And don't feel bad if you didn't know. I never knew this either till a while ago, but it made me  really think twice about how non-eco-friendly and sustainable my home life  is. And I’m not saying this to guilt anymore or make you feel bad that  you don’t do more, heck knows I never used to give a crap about any of  this stuff until I started getting sick and developed multiple chemical  sensitivities (Hi if you’re new here, I’m allergic to the modern world due  to some frankly dystopian levels of auto-immune problems that emerged  in the last few years, send help) and realized just how very not good a  lot of the things I was doing are, for both me and the planet.

I  am not a crunchy hippy by choice, but by necessity of survival. You  have to be when plastics and most mattress fillers and couch stuffing  starts bringing you out in a rash/makes you wheeze and suddenly you find  yourself wandering the aisles of “eco-friendly" stores wondering if the sales rep you’re listening to actually knows what they’re talking about or  if they’re a tinfoil hatter who also puts essential oils in their drinking water. (We've been over this, do not.)

But do you know what I also noticed in those supposedly eco-friendly stores?

Mason jar drinkware being sold at $20 a pop. Surely, I thought to myself, surely it’s $20 for a set of at least four?

Nope.

And  do you know what else? This wasn’t just a regular mason jar glass that  had been tinted blue, no, this was “treated shock resistant glass”. So  what they did was, they took an iconic recyclable object that is  actually very cheap to produce and buy, inflated the cost by a huge  amount, and then, made it non-recyclable, for profit.

Are-you-freaking-kidding-me?

And  that’s a huge problem I find, with trying to find information and  resources online about sustainable living and eco-friendly products, because a lot of them? Are actually hugely wasteful if not in actual material, then certainly in mentality.

I watched one notable youtuber vlog about how she got rid of everything in her  kitchen and replaced it with more eco-friendly (and extremely expensive) options, because she just couldn’t stand the thought of those  "toxic" things being in her kitchen … except … they weren’t doing her any harm, and they weren’t worn out. They weren’t falling apart. They were still very much safe and usable and might even have been donated to somewhere like goodwill for someone else to use … but she threw them out to replace them with shiny bamboo and kitschy ceramics, and now they’re heading toward a landfill, where they will not be used to their fullest extent, and where they will pollute the earth.

Surely by the zero waste ethos, it’s more sustainable to use the product until it has to be replaced, and then buy the eco-made alternative?

To  give you an example, I’m in the process of replacing all my tupperware with glass, metal and ceramics because I’m allergic to plastics, but also because I’d like to invest in more sustainable planet friendly options for the future. But I’m also doing it once piece at a time. Partly because my husband can and does still use those things, but also because, well, I  can’t afford to replace them all. I just plain can’t, it’s too  expensive to go out and replace all my leftover food containers with  stainless steel lunch boxes from Japan. I’d like to, and I wish I could,  but if wishes were horses then I’d need a much bigger yard. (That’s how  that saying goes, right?)

I guess the point of this lengthy  ramble, is a complaint that the aesthetic of sustainability is actually  more popular than actual ethical sustainable practices. Too many people  are concerned with looking like they care, but don’t actually  want to get into the nuance of things. And I get it, I do. It’s nice to  feel like you’re doing something good. Who doesn’t want to feel  like they’re taking responsibility for their time on this earth and  being the best version of themselves?

But it has to require  thought, and method, and looking beyond the narrow scope of your own four walls (metaphorical or otherwise) and what that one person on youtube said, while merely swapping one form of consumerism for another because it looks and feels ethical, but not actually exacting any kind of global change.

And that’s the difference between using a mason jar to drink out of, and the Mason Jar Aesthetic. Being aware of your impact on the earth and doing what you can within your limits and means (and respecting the means of others), vs wanting to be seen as such. And it's an important distinction and one that requires self reflection and a great deal more thought than buying into an aesthetic.

Me switching out all my plastics and turning my backyard into a compost heap might make my home more eco-friendly, but real change cannot be effected without also putting pressure on large corporations (looking at you Nestle) to change their practices, and boycotting those stores in favor of expensive organic and "ethical" brands is not the solution to this. It merely creates a niche market where the rich and privileged are able to live in a very small self-contained bubble of moral "eco purity", while actively punching down at those who cannot. Real change? Comes from getting involved in the community and lobbying against big corporations like Nestle turning round and extracting water from drought stricken states, and then selling it back for profit.  It's boots to the ground, and writing letters and emails, and doing more than just buying organic bamboo washcloths and telling yourself you saved the world one micro-bead of plastic at a time.

So do I think zero waste is a crock? Absolutely not, at the core it has some great points about how we use and consume products, which are things we should be thinking about in our day to day lives. But do I feel it places too much emphasis on the self rather than the global community? Absolutely. And at it's core sustainability isn't about the self. It's about community, and the changes we can affect together in order to make the world a little better than how we found it.

Otherwise it's just survivalism with a rose tinted aesthetic.

What do you guys think? Does anyone have anything to add? Let me know in the comments and see if we can get a discussion going. Also, if you’d like to see more of these types of posts, Patreon subscribers can expect to see them two weeks earlier than tumblr, and get a say in what we discuss, so if you’d like to see me talk about something, let me know :)

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[berlinaura]

Last spring in Finland I attended a course “German for those who are going to have an exchange year”. They told us about the stages which one usually goes through during an exchange. As far as I remember, the stages were roughly somewhat like this: firstly one views everything and everyone better than in their home country and everything is super interesting and fun. This basically means that the everyday life hasn’t kicked in yet. The next one is getting annoyed at everything and everybody. Comparing the country to your home country and maybe even feeling like it would have been a better idea to just stay home. After this comes the stage of adaptation where one gets used to customs and stops comparing everything to one’s home country. Last phase is coming back to home country and seeing it in a new way. And of course telling stories of the exchange year to friends and family until they are bored to death. 

I remember thinking two things when we were taught about this. Firstly, who the hell would go through a phase of hating the country they go to? It seemed so irrational. The second thing was “Now that I’ve heard about this stuff, I can rise above it and use my brain and self-knowledge to avoid it. Yeah... As you might guess, it did not happen. I admit, during last few weeks I have spend a huge amount of my time wallowing in “WHY DO YOU DO THIS LIKE THIS” “Why can’t you do it in the right way” “What the hell is wrong with Germans!”. Mostly my frustrations have been related to my university. The mornings I am usually in a good mood. I drink my coffee, get ready (I have started to care more about what I wear and how I look like now that I am in Berlin hahaha) and go to school. All in all it takes me around 45 minutes to get from my home to university which includes walking, tram and S-Bahn. The way there and back are usually my favorite bits of the day. I enjoy watching people, traveling through Berlin in S-Bahn and listening to music. On the way back from university the people in public transport are usually going to pubs or parties so it’s nice to see happy and lively faces. I try not to overwhelm myself with school even though I feel like I need to be constantly studying to keep up. The thing is, even though the courses seem a bit challenging, partly because I am not used to academic English and partly because I am studying in a new study field, I find all of them interesting and genuinely think they are useful. I think I will shortly find a balance because now I feel super drained after every day and still feel like I have the “responsibility” to do fun things and go to places whenever I am not studying. It’s like a freshman year all over again. 

So, what has happened after the last post? Quite a lot. I was on a Wanderlust trip to Dresden in October. We also visited a famous bridge (Bastei) in Saxony. The views and the scenery were incredible! Dresden was also very cozy and historical city. It was a lot smaller than I expected. We only had a few hours to browse through the city but we could easily reach the most important sights by just walking. On the bus we opened bottles of wines we got from Lidl and played some car games with the people who sat around me. I suggested searching “questions to get to know each other” so on the few hour way back we just simply shared our biggest secrets and fears as if we had been knowing for a long time. The french boy sitting in front of me got  interested as I mentioned we are throwing a sitting here, so he wanted to help. We formed a committee of 5 people for a sittning, planned it in a cafe and contacted international office. Their response was rather dry and due to International office organizing a similar event in December, we decided to postpone the sittning and start planning it again in January.

Wanderlust trip was good because everything was already planned and sorted out for us. We just had to be on time to catch the bus. I already booked another wanderlust trip to Magdeburg in December. They have a Christmas market there. I also want to see the city that was my other option to have an exchange year in. By the way, I am super glad I ended up choosing Berlin over Magdeburg. 

The next day me, the Austrian girl who sat next to me on the bus and her friend went to see a light show in the city centre. There is this light festival held in Berlin where they project things onto famous buildings and monuments. The one projected on Brandenburg gate left me speechless. They projected things like collapsing of the wall, JFK’s speech and techno culture of today’s Berlin.

One Friday evening my friend, my roommate and her friends decided to go to a burlesque show. The bar was super fancy as was the show. I just couldn’t get my eyes of the woman who performed. She danced to a remix of Britney Spears’ Toxic so naturally I had to ask her after the show if she liked Britney Spears. She said they only picked it because they needed something that people would recognize but at the same time something that isn’t the actual song. :( She was amazing tho.

In October I also went to see Prinz Pi live at Columbiahalle. I’ve never been to this venue before and it was so cozy! Man the concert just got better and better and I just had goosebumps for like half of the show. At the encore Prinz Pi said something in the lines of “You know.. The next place I go to.. You don’t want me to tell the audience that the audience of Berlin was dull? Go crazy then!” and I have never seen an audience getting so hyped during a song (”Gib dem Affen Zucker”). I got inspired of this so I already booked a ticket for Sido’s Christmas show in Columbiahalle. Actually I tried to go to his normal tour’s concert which is actually today, but I thought too long and it got sold out. People were asking 200€ per ticket (the original was around 45€) so I gave up. Then I decided to go to his christmas show but AGAIN thought too long because they are held in 20.-22.12. and I needed to sort out my flights to Finland first. But one day I decided to go to eventim’s page to see if someone was selling their ticket (they were, but overprized again) and I saw that there was one original ticket on sale even though it was sold out before. Someone had cancelled their ticket and some forces of the universe told me to refresh that page at a right moment. So now I have my ticket and just can not wait for it!

In the beginning of November I went to Prague to see my friend. The train ride was only 19 euros and I could easily do my homework and watch Kotikatu there. Priorities were sorted out! I navigated to Revnice where we went to a local brewery and shared things about our lives. The beer was the best beer I have ever had in my life which is sad because I literally can’t get it anywhere else than from there. Damn brewery! The next day we played board games, ate well and went swimming. My friend introduced me to a new thing: putting honey in a coffee. At first I doomed the though: ew, who the hell does that? Honey belongs to tea, not coffee. Then I tasted it and... it was delicious. It is yet to discover if it because of the honey or their super fancy coffee maker. Then we went to the brewery again and played a Czech card game called “bang”. I think I got the gist of it and even won the game once. On our last day we were just sightseeing and went to a concert together. The songs were translated to me and for a moment I felt super ambitious to learn Czech. I don’t want to miss out on funny songs just because I don’t know the language!

Last weekend there was a celebration in Berlin due to it being 30 years from the fall of Berlin wall. It was a bit similar to the light festival. We were out with friends two nights in a row and found a super cute place in Prenzlauer berg: Houdini. They have Indian food and cheap cocktails. We continued the evening to this living room looking place that was connected to a Späti. The Späti-drinking culture is something that is missing from Finland. Here Spätis are these small shops that mostly sell drinks (beer, soda, water, cider and so on) and candy.They are open late which is actually where the name Späti (Spätkauf = late shopping) comes from. There are often benches and tables where people can enjoy their drinks which are cheaper than in normal pubs of course. The Späti man asks if the beer is to be enjoyed in the living room and adds a small fee if it is. And there’s a bottle opener on the counter. Everything is sorted out so in my opinion Späti-drinking is a good way to go out and get drunk with small budget. 

Yesterday we had an excursion with my German class. We went to Berlinische Galerie which is a museum of contemporary art. They had an exhibition of Bauhaus, the art/design/architecture Academy in pre-WWII Germany that affected modern design and architecture. We were walking around and filling up a worksheet the teacher gave us. I enjoyed it so much and everything seemed so pleasing to the eye.

 Afterwards we went to a open stage event which was basically a talent show. There were 10 acts of which everyone had 10 minutes to convince the audience who voted for a winner. We also had beer and wine counter there naturally. My favorite was this one dude in tight ballet outfit who preformed a circus act which was funny and impressive at he same time. His background music was swan lake but the dude sang along in a terrible way which made it less serious. Then he juggled with 6 balls and every time he messed up, he cried out in a dramatic way. Then at the end of the show he turned his back to the audience and we could see he was digging something from his crotch and then he turned around and swiped of sweat from his face with a pile of tissues he had as a crotch-filler the whole time. The tipsy audience laughed so much that the winner was pretty much clear at that point. The dude who went after him performed a horrible keyboard improvisation and his face screamed “ I am sorry to be here, I just want to flee!” hahahahah. The act that came second was funny as well, they performed “Let it go” but with a German translation, the google translate type of translation. Conclusion is: the audience wants to laugh at talent shows, not see real talent. 

On top of all the events I have also been attending the hiphop dance class I think I told about. The teacher is super funny (and hot :D) and the dancing is so intensive and so much fun! I look terrible, though but it’s not the main point here. I might continue this hobby when I get back to Finland.

Now I have to start packing my things because I am going to Szczechin (Poland). I heard it is a city where Berliners go to shop because it is cheaper there. I feel like this trip can be either a massive success or a terrible flop. Time shows... 

[prorevenge]

Owner screws me over, screws up(s) his business.

To start, I won’t be saying the name of the shipping company franchise I worked for, suffice to say the title is very telling. This is a rather long story, so buckle in. You can skip the backstory and look for the revenge near the bottom. TL:DR at the end.

The Backstory

About five or six years ago I was relatively new to the workforce, having worked one minimum wage job at Mickey D’s. I had been there almost two years, but had little experience elsewhere. Well this one lady always came through early every morning to order a large Diet Coke, and would take a few minutes to talk to me. I mentioned to her that I was displeased with my bosses and the working conditions, and she invited me to come apply for a job at Not FedEx because they were always running low on employees! That should have been my first red flag.

The second red flag went completely over my head, because at this point I was 17 with no previous job experience. When I walked in for an interview, the boss (who I will call Jeph, because it sounds close enough to his name to allow him to remain anonymous) told me it would take five minutes. I wasn’t asked about my relevant experience, my goals within the company, or even told what position I was applying for. I assumed all interviews were different and went along with it, and started the next week with training. Everything went well for the first month. I basically just packed boxes, took down customer information, and sorted mail into the mailboxes we managed. The real trouble started after I was given my one month performance review.

I was deemed to be a valuable asset to Jeph’s franchise, and rightfully so. At 17 I was able to lift more and work better than the 20 and 30 something employees, and due to the work ethic my parents drilled into me I was never slacking off while at work. I was then informed that I would be swapping between Jeph’s two franchises, roughly 30 miles apart. (For context, the franchise I APPLIED TO WORK AT was roughly a mile from my house, so I could walk if I couldn’t get a ride.) Every other day I had to drive out to the location and somehow justify this with my slightly above minimum wage job. ($7.50 for those not in Texas.)

Overall my boss was a massive douche. His physical appearance could best be described as “troll like” with a shirt almost bursting, the top always undone to showcase his aging chest hair, and a face not unlike that of A&F owner Mike Jeffries. He openly cheated on his wife, bragging to coworkers about it constantly. He charged people one dollar for any amount of extra tape they needed on their package, despite the fact that we got roughly two rolls for that price in bulk. He had a special price calculator installed on the computers that charged people roughly 10% more than the package would be elsewhere. He would push employees (who he insisted didn’t work in customer service but sales) to never offer anything less than three day shipping even though we offered standard 7+ days and even cheaper options. I watched him actively lie to customers, claiming it was the price they had to pay blah blah blah, and almost yell at them to go to another store if they didn’t like it. But I digress.

Now here was the first dickish thing that my boss did to me specifically. Until this point, I was only working around 20 hours. After I graduated to working at both stores, Jeph had me sign a brand new W-2 for his second store, which was under a different company. (He owned both, naming one Blue (name for a .44 caliber bullet) and Blue (proper name for visible light)). Again, I had very little idea that this wrong because I had never had to deal with this before. He proceed to add another 20 or so hours to my schedule, bringing me up to 40 hours or more. But since I worked for two separate companies I never earned a dime of overtime or benefits of any kind.

At this point, I started accruing more and more duties, as my boss and coworkers started to trust me more and more. Buy my fourth month of employment (out of a total of eight) I was performing managerial duties such as: opening the store, counting the registers, closing the store, ordering product such as boxes and tape, and preparing shipments for transport. The work alone justified a raise, not to mention the hours I was being asked to work. However when I floated this idea by my boss, he very rudely insisted that since he had a manager for each store already, I was just doing my job and couldn’t earn a cent more.

Then came the second dickish move. We had a large company contract some drop off stuff with us, a telecom company we will say rhymes with Hey Tea and Tea. Customers would bring in their old cable boxes, wires, remotes and the like, and we would scan them and ship them back to Hey Tea and Tea, the company THAT LEGALLY OWNED ALL OF THIS HARDWARE. The customers would not pay us a nickel, but the telecom company would pay almost double what it actually cost to ship the package. There is no way Jeph could look that gift horse in the mouth and decide he was still owed the stable and all the horse’s tack as well, right? Surprise, surprise, Jeph had to take it one step further. ANY and ALL parts/cables/WiFi adapters/USB drives the customer returned to us that didn’t have a scan tag on them, Jeph would pull aside and either strip for copper or sell on eBay. And he would force us, the employees to package his eBay sales or copper wiring into boxes and ship them for him. He even popped batteries out of remotes and recycled them somewhere to get a tax credit. None of his employees ever saw a penny of this money (not that I would have accepted it). We estimated he raked in roughly three to four thousand a month just from stealing alone. For those of you bad at math, that is the price of TWO brand new 2018 Honda Civics.

The Revenge

The third (and fourth) final dick moves are what solidified my hatred for this boss, and my desire to strike back. They both came in the same week, roughly the same time, and both viscerally repulsive. My favorite coworker had recently gotten pregnant, and although the father got the hell out of dodge when he found out, she was doing very well for herself. She and I frequently closed together, and she promised she would bring the baby to sit in the back for the dull hours we had to kill from 6-10. We also had an annual store review from corporate that week, so our boss called a late night meeting after we closed one day. Our boss started out by saying that he was proud of our pregnant coworker for working so hard even with her “disability.” (Yes, even his sense of humor was slimy.) Then, in front of all fifteen employees, HE FIRED HER. He told her that because the Christmas season was coming up, and she would only slow down the store being pregnant and all, he had to let her go.

After she left, hatred seething in her eyes, he turned back to the fourteen of us who were left stunned, and continued on like nothing had happened. He proceeded to tell each of us our jobs for this weekend, leaving mine for last. My job, because I used to drive a decently sized mini van, was to ferry the corporate required supplies, cash for the safe, and OUR ONE WORKING FIRE EXTINGUISHER between the two stores while he kept corporate distracted between visits.

At this point I had taken enough shit from this guy, and I formulated my plan. I started by calling the Hey Tea and Tea fraud department, and telling them everything I knew. I took pictures and emailed them directly to the rep I was talking to, who seemed a little too excited about fraud being committed. I then scheduled a visit from a Hey Tea and Tea rep at the same time corporate was supposed to show up. My next step was to call Not FedEx and explain exactly what I just told y’all, with a few extra things thrown in that I couldn’t share for privacy reasons. They promised to send a rep as well, to the same store, at the same time.

The final step was put into action that Saturday. I dutifully loaded up my van with the supplies, cash (upwards of $4000 if I remember correctly), and fire extinguisher, and headed out. Except I did the exact OPPOSITE of what Jeph wanted. I took the crap to the first store he owned, which was the second one to receive a visit. After he texted the team saying they were moving on, I packed up all the shit and drove it to the other store they just left. Now I am unsure exactly what happened at the other store, but from some coworkers I pieced together that the Not FedEx rep showed up right after I left, but didn’t stay long, and the Hey Tea and Tea rep showed up just before Jeph had arrived and had time to hide his ill gotten gains in his office. The one coworker who was close enough to the office during the corporate meeting said there was lots of angry words being thrown and threats being made towards Jeph and his position as a franchisee. He also lost his franchises the ability to ship for Hey Tea and Tea, at least for a period of time.

Regardless, the very next day I was off because I was (and as cliché as this sounds I swear to God it’s true) helping my grandfather who just got out of the hospital. I receive a call from Jeph, saying I needed to come in right away, and work a double shift as well as close the store. I told him I couldn’t do that, and I was taking a personal day. He fired me right then and there, citing my usage of the work computer to run a photoshop business during work hours. (I’m assuming he was referring to the graphic design work I did FOR HIM, FOR FREE, which he asked me to learn how to do.)

The sad epilogue to this whole story is that he is currently still in business, and still running the same scams he was before. He WAS however fined for not having proper supplies in his stores, as well as forced to use corporate’s package rates rather than his own. So in some small way my revenge worked. He currently has a two star review on Yelp for both of his his businesses, and I hope to have a party outside his store one day when it goes belly up.

TL:DR: Boss is a total douche bag to me and customers, steals from a contract company, fires a pregnant woman for “slowing down the store” then gets his ass reamed by corporate and loses the major contract.

(source) (story by Chewbacca_Q_Wookie)

[thefinancialanalystposts-blog]

The Financial Analyst

Financial Regulation What Went Wrong?

Careers in monetary evaluation do not suggest careers that only cope with cash. This is just the start for a finance graduate. There are quite a lot of career options in this industry which requires new professionals. The multifaceted nature of the financial analysis trade provides diverse options with a number of sub industries offering area of interest alternatives. The best way out is to do thorough research and discover the finance profession different that is greatest suited to your wants and skills.

A monetary analyst is the one who research and analyzes financial data on behalf of their clients and guides them about how they need to channel their investments. Their accountability is to critically scrutinize the company details in which their shopper is keen on investing. The analyst research the monetary studies of the corporate and concludes about its efficiency and worth. The key facet to take up a profession in financial accounting is to have specialised knowledge, logical interpretation of info and good communication abilities in order that the individual is able to meet deadlines and multi-task effectively.

Company Finance: This can be a profession in financial accounting which contain working for a certain company to seek out in addition to handle the capital that is required to run the enterprise. Within the process, monetary dangers are minimized, whereas corporate value maximized. Sophisticated jobs in the field of corporate finance involve acquisition activity and mergers to determine the value of a division to ensure a spin-off. Positions that complement corporate finance include internal auditors and treasurers.

Industrial Banking: The positions span from local institutions to large our bodies and include a good array of economic providers from checking the financial savings accounts to loans and IRAs (individual retirement accounts). As far as monetary evaluation in business banking is anxious, your job choices span loan officers, bank tellers, department managers and operation marketers. That is where you possibly can advance from a job in an area department to a job on the company headquarters. Through commercial banking, you possibly can grow or department out to other fields like international finance.

Investment Banking: This can be a subject that comes with a few of the most intense and glamorous financial careers. The roles involve a issuing of company security and making them available for traders to buy. Funding TheFinancialAnalyst bankers handle wealthy buyers as well as giant corporations. As an investment banker, you have to interact with mergers and acquisition professionals for buying and selling bonds and shares in the securities market.

This is a time period used in affiliation within the auspices of the inventory market. It would most often be involved with whether an organization's revenue is progressing, or more simply put, rising. Does the company have the solvency it wants? Can it pay its debts? In other words is the business working as it ought to by making a profit? As a result of, if it is not; the question stays is that this enterprise a enterprise in any respect?

A extra aggressive and daring assessment may be vital, reviewing whether or not the company is in a firm sufficient position to out do it's cohorts or opponents in the future. What is management's approach to Social Profile Here the books? In any case, when this stuff are understood you've got initiated what is necessary in an effort to conclude your financial evaluation of whether this firm's inventory is an effective funding?

One other evaluation widespread to the stock market is key analysis. The basic evaluation is predicated on certainly one of two issues. Do you really know in case your expected measure on true value is right? Are you aware how long this "long term" might be before the true value will likely be revealed in the market place. This is where the unique, but important term of intrinsic value may be enlightening.

It's an strange understanding amongst those of inventory market information that the worth on inventory is not going to mirror its true worth. As a way to discover the intrinsic worth it is important to analyze costs on the inventory market. If the More about the author value have been at all times constant and always reflective of its true value, would there really be a purpose in looking for its actual value. For example, a stock trade is at $15, after further analysis it reveals its true worth to be $20.

A knowledgeable outcome that is applicable to any purchase of stock. The idea is to purchase it at a low worth. Much less value, proper! The other fundamental evaluation and assumption is within the context of "future." This theory believes there isn't any level in relying on real worth because even in time the stock market will never replicate its true worth. Even at that, who really is aware of how long the 'Long run" actually is. It may very well be days or years.

But, the true idea is more along the road of strictly enterprise; where an investor can have an idea of an organization's value and then search for the option to buy at a discount worth. Understanding the true value of the company ought to gauge a dependable future, and over time its market will match up to these fundamentals.

There are many vital modifications whereas observing the Stability Sheet. The principle change is the difference is cash available. For year 2002, the web cash quantity was $49,000 then the following year it rose to $sixty six,000. The last yr (2004) the cash quantity was $196,000 the quantity nearly quadrupled in comparison with the 2 previous years.

One other major change was the Retained Earnings. In year 2002, was $91,000, the following year it almost tripled to $273,000 (2003). The most recent yr 2004, retained earnings had been $492,000. Property Plant and Tools stayed pretty consistent. This may indicate that the corporate could not have any interest in increasing as of now. Long Time period Investments, as properly, stay consistent.

Account Payable amount reducing exhibiting that they are paying off debts. Probably due to the company having more cash readily available or ordering much less equipment and supplies. Evidence high help this idea is that the inventory stays the same. In yr 2002, the stock positioned in the asset category learn $653,000. In year 2004, the inventory is priced at 650,000. Apparently the company has no short time period investments.

"Good Will" is listed on the Steadiness Sheet. There may be net enhance of $87,000 between the years of 2002 and 2004. September 11th could have precipitated this as a result of the companies' principal product is airliner electronic tools. After the occasion airline industries were struggling and will have induced a discount in goodwill. Many employees had been laid off from Rockwell Collins due much less business. However a pair years later the airline business grew in recognition, probably growing the goodwill.

Another item I noticed on the Steadiness Sheet is the Complete Stockholders Equity. That quantity for the yr 2004 is $1,133,000. I divided the Internet earnings by the stock info. My result was roughly $.27 which signifies that for each dollar invested in the firm, there is a return of 27 cents.

Depreciation, on the Cash Circulation Statement, stayed consistent from 2002-2004. Depreciation in 2002 was $a hundred and five,000 and in 2004 it was $109,000. This could symbolize that Click here for Wikipedia the company had not bought any new equipment to extend the depreciation amount. Again this may very well be statistics supporting the idea the corporate is at the moment not increasing.

Additionally on the cash stream assertion, there's a substantial change in liabilities regarding the operating actions. In 2002, there was an quantity of -$30,000, in 2003, -$15,000 and in 2004 a optimistic quantity $59,000

On the Revenue Statement, the cost of revenue for 2002 and 2003 had been very related with 2002 cost of income being $1,863,000 and 2003 at $1,866,000. Then in 2004 the numbers sky rocketed to $2,144,000 as the price of revenue. So with a rise in COGS or Cost of Revenue, the Total Revenue must also tremendously enhance if gross sales stay per the 2 previous years.

After reviewing the financial info and statistics, I conclude that the company is doing nicely. I wonder with the rise of revenue and cash available if they https://thefinancialanalyst.net/ may soon broaden. If there is an increase in equipment and land, that can signify progress. However the firms statistics lack that evidence and data.

I would be curious on viewing the following info for the next two years on this company. I predict that the businesses gross sales will rise and carry on rising sooner or later.

[kelmcdonald]

Goals for the year 2017 vs 2018

New Post has been published on http://sorcery101.net/news/goals-for-the-year-2017-vs-2018/

Goals for the year 2017 vs 2018

Last year I did a blog post that compared my goals for 2017 to what I actually achieved. It’s a good way to kick off the year and get back into the groove of writing these business behind the scenes. So to start with let’s look at where the money came from in 2017 compared to 2018.

Here’s 2017 graph telling me where the money is coming from.

And here’s 2018.

Conventions

Conventions are still a big part of my income. Like I said last year, they wear me out a lot because of travel.  I went into 2018 with the goal to make the same amount at cons total but have it be a smaller piece of the pie. Sales at cons are up and the pie piece is a little smaller but not as small as I’d like. So at least for the foreseeable future I’m still gonna be going to a lot of conventions. My plan for 2019 right now is to set my own hours. Part of why cons take so much out of me is the hours keep getting longer and longer. Having to be on from 10-8 is rough. Then add being at the table early for set up before the show opens means I’m working usually 11 hours straight at conventions. From now on, the show starts at noon for me. I can be better rested, well fed, and can maybe go running before the show.

Freelance/publisher payments

So this category is basically covering all the money I got from publishers/companies this year. It includes some freelance editing I did for Iron Circus Comics, my advance for Jose Pimenta and I’s Know Not What We May Be, my advance for The Stone King, a work for hire writing gig, and some odds and ends. I predicted this piece would be bigger in 2018 and I was right. I want to keep growing this section. I’m doing more editing for Iron Circus Comics already. That combined with royalties from Iron Circus reprinting Cautionary Fables and Fairy Tales means it will at least have somethings coming it. I got a few pitches out the door too. So fingers crossed that this will keep getting bigger.

Ad Money/Comixology

I have the least control of either of these categories. Both are down in 2018. I think ComiXology is down because I didn’t put any new self-published stuff up there this year. All my self published stuff got delayed. So I’m only just now adding new titles to my comixology store. Hopefully, my comixology sales will go up now that The Stone King is out.

Ads on the other hand are still heading downward. I’m at this point just hoping my Drip picks up so I can ditch ads all at once.

Patreon/Drip/My Store

My new store seems to be working well. Even though site sales are a small piece of the pie, they did go up a significant amount. This is especially good because, well, I forgot to update it for roughly a year. This year I’m gonna try to keep it up to date and hope that lets it continue to grow.

As for Patreon/Drip. That went down. A lot of the things I tried to get newer patreons didn’t really work. Switching to Drip gave me an end of the year boost. But that founding period was a one time boost. I can’t do it again in 2019. I’m trying to think of new ideas to get people over there. The big one is I’m considering making my newest comic be Drip exclusive. But right now it would be hard to navigate a comic on Drip or Patreon.

[justforbooks]

Julian Barnes: my life as a bibliophile.

From school prizes to writing his own novels, the author reflects on his lifelong bibliomania and explains why, despite e-readers and Amazon, he believes the physical book and bookshops will survive.

I have lived in books, for books, by and with books; in recent years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to live from books. And it was through books that I first realised there were other worlds beyond my own; first imagined what it might be like to be another person; first encountered that deeply intimate bond made when a writer's voice gets inside a reader's head. I was perhaps lucky that for the first 10 years of my life there was no competition from television; and when one finally arrived in the household, it was under the strict control of my parents. They were both schoolteachers, so respect for the book and what it contained were implicit. We didn't go to church, but we did go to the library.

My maternal grandparents were also teachers. Grandpa had a mail-order set of Dickens and a Nelson's Cyclopaedia in about 30 small red volumes. My parents had classier and more varied books, and in later life became members of the Folio Society. I grew up assuming that all homes contained books; that this was normal. It was normal, too, that they were valued for their usefulness: to learn from at school, to dispense and verify information, and to entertain during the holidays. My father had collections of Times Fourth Leaders; my mother might enjoy a Nancy Mitford. Their shelves also contained the leather-bound prizes my father had won at Ilkeston County School between 1921 and 1925, for "General Proficiency" or "General Excellence": The Pageant of English Prose, Goldsmith's Poetical Works, Cary's Dante, Lytton's Last of the Barons, Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth.

None of these works excited me as a boy. I first started investigating my parents' shelves (and those of my grandparents, and of my older brother) when awareness of sex dawned. Grandpa's library contained little lubricity except a scene or two in John Masters's Bhowani Junction; my parents had William Orpen's History of Art with several important black-and-white illustrations; but my brother owned a copy of Petronius's Satyricon, which was the hottest book by far on the home shelves. The Romans definitely led a more riotous life than the one I witnessed around me in Northwood, Middlesex. Banquets, slave girls, orgies, all sorts of stuff. I wonder if my brother noticed that after a while some of the pages of his Satyricon were almost falling from the spine. Foolishly, I assumed all his ancient classics must have similar erotic content. I spent many a dull day with his Hesiod before concluding that this wasn't the case.

The local high street included an establishment we referred to as "the bookshop". In fact, it was a fancy-goods store plus stationer's with a downstairs room, about half of which was given over to books. Some of them were quite respectable – Penguin classics, Penguin and Pan fiction. Part of me assumed that these were all the books that there were. I mean, I knew there were different books in the public library, and there were school books, which were again different; but in terms of the wider world of books, I assumed this tiny sample was somehow representative. Occasionally, in another suburb or town, we might visit a "real" bookshop, which usually turned out to be a branch of WH Smith.

The only variant book-source came if you won a school prize (I was at City of London, then on Victoria Embankment next to Blackfriars Bridge). Winners were allowed to choose their own books, usually under parental supervision. But again, this was somehow a narrowing rather than a broadening exercise. You could choose them only from a selection available at a private showroom in an office block on the South Bank: a place both slightly mysterious and utterly functional. It was, I later discovered, yet another part of WH Smith. Here were books of weight and worthiness, the sort to be admired rather than perhaps ever read. Your school prize would have a particular value, you chose a book for up to that amount, whereupon it vanished from your sight, to reappear on Lord Mayor's prize day, when the Lord Mayor of London, in full regalia, would personally hand it over to you. Now it would contain a pasted-in page on the front end-paper describing your achievement, while the cloth cover bore the gilt-embossed school arms. I can remember little of what I obediently chose when guided by my parents. But in 1963 I won the Mortimer English prize and, being now 17, must have gone by myself to that depository of seriousness, where I found (whose slip-up could it have been?) a copy of Ulysses. I can still see the disapproving face of the Lord Mayor as his protectively gloved hand passed over to me this notoriously filthy novel.

By now, I was beginning to view books as more than just utilitarian, sources of information, instruction, delight or titillation. First there was the excitement and meaning of possession. To own a certain book – one you had chosen yourself – was to define yourself. And that self-definition had to be protected, physically. So I would cover my favourite books (paperbacks, inevitably, out of financial constraint) with transparent Fablon. First, though, I would write my name – in a recently acquired italic hand, in blue ink, underlined with red – on the edge of the inside cover. The Fablon would then be cut and fitted so that it also protected the ownership signature. Some of these books – for instance, David Magarshack's Penguin translations of the Russian classics – are still on my shelves.

Self-definition was one kind of magic. And then I was slowly introduced to another kind: that of the old, the secondhand, the non-new book. I remember a line of Auden first editions in the glass-fronted bookcase of a neighbour: a man, moreover, who had actually known Auden decades previously, and even played cricket with him. These facts seemed to me astonishing. I had never set eyes on a writer, or known anyone who had known a writer. I might have heard one or two on the wireless, seen one or two on television in a Face to Face interview with John Freeman. But our family's nearest connection to literature was the fact that my father had read modern languages at Nottingham University, where the professor was Ernest Weekley, whose wife had run off with DH Lawrence. Oh, and my mother had once seen RD Smith, husband of Olivia Manning, on a Birmingham station platform. Yet here were the ownership copies of someone who had known one of the country's most famous living poets. Further, these books contained Auden's still-echoing words in the form in which they had first come into the world. I sensed this magic sharply, and wanted part of it. So, from my student years, I became a book-collector as well as a book-user, and discovered that bookshops weren't all owned by WH Smith.

Over the next decade or so – from the late 1960s to the late 70s – I became a tireless book-hunter, driving to the market towns and cathedral cities of England in my Morris Traveller and loading it with books bought at a rate that far exceeded any possible reading speed. This was a time when most towns of reasonable size had at least one large, long-established secondhand bookshop, often found within the shadow of the cathedral or city church; as I remember, you could usually park right outside for as long as you wanted. Without exception these would be independently owned shops – sometimes with a selection of new books at the front – and I immediately felt at home in them. The atmosphere, for a start, was so different. Here books seemed to be valued, and to form part of a continuing culture.

By now, I probably preferred secondhand books to new ones. In America such items were disparagingly referred to as "previously owned"; but this very continuity of ownership was part of their charm. A book dispensed its explanation of the world to one person, then another, and so on down the generations; different hands held the same book and drew sometimes the same, sometimes a different wisdom from it. Old books showed their age: they had fox marks the way old people had liver spots. They also smelt good – even when they reeked of cigarettes and (occasionally) cigars. And many might disgorge pungent ephemera: ancient publishers' announcements and old bookmarks - often for insurance companies or Sunlight soap.

So I would drive to Salisbury, Petersfield, Aylesbury, Southport, Cheltenham, Guildford, getting into back rooms and locked warehouses and storesheds whenever I could. I was much less at ease in places that smelt of fine bindings, or that knew all too well the value of each item of stock. I preferred the democratic clutter of a shop whose stock was roughly ordered and where bargains were possible. In those days, even in shops selling new books, there was none of the ferociously fast stock turnaround that modern central management imposes. Nowadays, the average shelf-life of a new hardback novel – assuming it can reach a shelf in the first place – is four months. Then, books would stay on the shelves until someone bought them, or they might be reluctantly put into a special sale, or moved to the secondhand department, where they might rest for years on end. That book you couldn't afford, or weren't sure you really wanted, would often still be there on your return trip the following year. Secondhand shops also taught the lesson of the writer who has gone out of fashion. Charles Morgan, Hugh Walpole, Dornford Yates, Lord Lytton, Mrs Henry Wood – there would be yards and yards of them out there, waiting for fashion to turn again. It rarely did.

I bought with a hunger that I recognise, looking back, was a kind of neediness: well, bibliomania is a known condition. Book-buying certainly consumed more than half of my disposable income. I bought first editions of the writers I most admired: Waugh, Greene, Huxley, Durrell, Betjeman. I bought first editions of Victorian poets such as Tennyson and Browning (neither of whom I had read) because they seemed astonishingly cheap. The dividing line between books I liked, books I thought I would like, books I hoped I would like and books I didn't like now but thought I might at some future date was rarely distinct.

I collected King Penguins, Batsford books on the countryside, and the Britain in Pictures series produced by Collins in the 1940s and 50s. I bought poetry pamphlets and leather-backed French encyclopaedias published by Larousse; cartoon books and Victorian keepsakes; out-of-date dictionaries and bound copies of magazines from the Cornhill to the Strand. I bought a copy of Sensation!, the first Belgian edition of Waugh's Scoop. I even made up a category called Odd Books, used to justify eccentric purchases such as Sir Robert Baden-Powell's Pig-Sticking or Hog-Hunting, Bombadier Billy Wells's Physical Energy, Cheiro's Guide to the Hand and Tap-Dancing Made Easy by "Isolde". All are still on my shelves, if rarely consulted. I also bought books it made no sense to buy, either at the time or in retrospect – like all three volumes (in first edition, with dust-wrappers, and definitely unread by the previous owner) of Sir Anthony Eden's memoirs. Where was the sense in that?

My case was made worse by the fact that I was, in the jargon of the trade, a completist. So, for instance, because I had admired the few plays of Shaw that I'd seen, I ended up with several feet of his work, even down to obscure pamphlets about vegetarianism. Since Shaw was so popular, and his print-runs accordingly vast, I never paid much for any of this collection. Which also meant that when, 30 years later, having become less keen on Shaw's didacticism and self-conscious wit, I decided to sell out, a clear minus profit was made.

Occasionally, there were thrilling discoveries. In the back warehouse of F Weatherhead & Son of Aylesbury, I found a copy of the first two cantos of Byron's Don Juan, published without the author's name in 1819. This rare first edition, bound in blue cloth, cost me 12/6d (or 62.5p). I would like to pretend (as I occasionally used to) that it was my specialist knowledge of Byronic bibliography that led me to spot it. But this would have been to ignore the full pencil note from the bookseller inside the front cover ("Cantos I and II appeared in London in July 1819 without the name of either author or bookseller in a thin quarto"). The price of 12/6d therefore couldn't have been an oversight; more likely, it was an indication that the book had been on the shelves for decades.

Just as often, however, I would make serious mistakes. Why, for instance, did I buy, from DM Beach of Salisbury, Oliver Twist in its original monthly parts, as first issued by Bentley's Miscellany? It was a good idea because they were in perfect condition, with fine plates, covers and advertisements. It was a bad idea because one of the parts (either the first or last) was missing – hence the set's near-affordability. It was an optimistic idea because I was sure I would be able to track down the missing part at some moment in my collecting life. Needless to say, I never did, and this idiocy rebuked me from my shelves for many years.

Then there were moments when I realised that the world of books and book-collecting was not exactly as I'd imagined it. While I was familiar with famous cases of book forgery, I always assumed that collectors were honest and straightforward folk (I used to think the same about gardeners, too). Then, one day, I found myself at the Lilies in Weedon, Bucks – "by appointment only" – a 35-room Victorian mansion so stuffed with books that a visit occupied most of the day. Among its first edition section I found a book I had been chasing for years: Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. It lacked a dustwrapper (which was normal – few early Waugh-buyers failed to discard the jackets), but was in pristine condition. The price was … astonishingly low. Then I read a little pencilled note which explained why. It was in the handwriting, and with the signature, of Roger Senhouse, the Bloomsburyite publisher who was Lytton Strachey's last lover. It read – and I quote from memory – "This second impression was left on my shelves in the place of my own first edition." I was deeply shocked. Clearly, it had not been a spur-of-the- moment act. The culprit must have arrived chez Senhouse with this copy concealed about him – I assumed it was a he not a she – then managed the switch when no one was in the room. Who could it have been? Might I ever be tempted to such action? (Yes, I subsequently was – tempted, that is.) And might someone do that to me and my collection one day? (Not as far as I know.)

More recently, I heard another version of this story, from a different point of view. A reader sent a rather famous living author a copy of an early novel of his (one whose first print-run was under a thousand copies), asking for a signature and enclosing return postage. After a while, a parcel arrived containing the novel, duly signed by the author – except that he had retained the valuable first edition and sent a second impression instead.

Back then, book-hunting involved high mileage, slow accumulation and frequent frustration; the side-effect was a tendency, when you failed to find what you wanted, to buy a scattershot array of stuff to prove that your journey hadn't been wasted. This manner of acquisition is no longer possible, or no longer makes sense. All those old, rambling, beautifully-sited shops have gone. Here is Roy Harley Lewis's The Book-Browser's Guide to Secondhand and Antiquarian Bookshops (second edition, 1982) on DM Beach of Salisbury: "There are a number of bookshops on sites so valuable that the proprietors could realise a small fortune by selling up and working from home … While property prices in Wiltshire cannot compare with (say) London, this marvellous corner site in the High Street is an enormous overhead for any bookshop." Beach's closed in 1999; Weatherhead's (which had its own printed paper bag) in 1998; the Lilies – which was full of stray exhibits such as John Cowper Powys's death-mask and "the clock that belonged to the people who put the engine in the boat that Shelley drowned in" – is no more. The bigger, and the more general, the more vulnerable, seems to have been the rule.

Collecting has also been changed utterly by the internet. It took me perhaps a dozen years to find a first edition of Vile Bodies for about £25. Today, 30 seconds with abebooks.co.uk will turn up two dozen first editions of varied condition and prices (the most expensive, with that rarest of Waugh dustwrappers, run from $15,000 to $28,000). When the great English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald died, I decided as homage to buy first editions (with dustwrappers) of her last four novels – the four that established her greatness. This all took less time than it would to find a parking space nowadays near the spot where Beach's bookshop used to exist. And while I could go on about the "romance" and "serendipity of discovery" – and yes, there was romance – the old system was neither time- nor cost-effective.

I became a bit less of a book-collector (or, perhaps, book-fetishist) after I published my first novel. Perhaps, at some subconscious level, I decided that since I was now producing my own first editions, I needed other people's less. I even started to sell books, which once would have seemed inconceivable. Not that this slowed my rate of acquisition: I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop.

The current pressures on both are enormous. My last novel would have cost you £12.99 in a bookshop, about half that (plus postage) online, and a mere £4.79 as a Kindle download. The economics seem unanswerable. Yet, fortunately, economics have never entirely controlled either reading or book-buying. John Updike, towards the end of his life, became pessimistic about the future of the printed book:

For who, in that unthinkable future When I am dead, will read? The printed page Was just a half-millennium's brief wonder …

I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader. Nor do I think the e-reader will ever completely supplant the physical book – even if it does so numerically. Every book feels and looks different in your hands; every Kindle download feels and looks exactly the same (though perhaps the e-reader will one day contain a "smell" function, which you will click to make your electronic Dickens novel suddenly reek of damp paper, fox marks and nicotine).

Books will have to earn their keep – and so will bookshops. Books will have to become more desirable: not luxury goods, but well-designed, attractive, making us want to pick them up, buy them, give them as presents, keep them, think about rereading them, and remember in later years that this was the edition in which we first encountered what lay inside. I have no luddite prejudice against new technology; it's just that books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information. My father's school prizes are nowadays on my shelves, 90 years after he first won them. I'd rather read Goldsmith's poems in this form than online.

The American writer and dilettante Logan Pearsall Smith once said: "Some people think that life is the thing; but I prefer reading." When I first came across this, I thought it witty; now I find it – as I do many aphorisms – a slick untruth. Life and reading are not separate activities. The distinction is false (as it is when Yeats imagines a choice between "perfection of the life, or of the work"). When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life's subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.

• A Life with Books (£1.99) is a pamphlet published by Jonathan Cape to celebrate Independent Booksellers Week and is available exclusively in independent bookshops.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[bmaxwell]

Shit I Played This Year: Ratropolis

I’ve played a lot of games this year. More than most years. There’s a pandemic on, riots in the streets, and America is moving ever closer to being a full and open fascist police state. I’ve distracted myself with Steam sales and coffee as much as I can, and I hope that doing a little frivolous writing about the video games can act as a daily salve. I aim to largely avoid current events on here, so this will hopefully be the last of that. Don’t worry, I’m not sticking my head in the sand. I’ll still be refreshing Twitter and feeling bad far too often.

So anyway, on to the shit. Not that Ratropolis is shit. It’s not. I thought it might be for awhile. You see, I’m level 3 susceptible to marketing. Well, no. That’s not exactly true. I feel like I’m level 1 susceptible to marketing in general, but where video games are concerned I am a level 5. When I saw that the descriptors on Ratropolis consisted of things like “Card Battler,” “Indie,” and “Strategy”...well. I’m pretty good at talking myself into things. I LIKE ALL OF THOSE WORDS HERE IS THE MONEY

I played it a little and got that familiar morning-after regretful feeling of “Oh. I actually don’t like this at all and I feel stupid and I want my $14.99 or whatever back.” It felt like chaos to me. Ratropolis happens in real time, so you are drawing cards, spending gold to play them, managing your funds and defenses as invading forces roll in from each side of the screen. Every dozen seconds or so, you can discard your hand of cards and draw a new one. Tax income rolls in at about the same rate, and enemy waves invade from either side (or both sides) roughly every minute. There is a shop for new cards, events, rewards after each wave, and 6 leaders each with unique cards. This checks a LOT of boxes for me.

                                                      WHIMSY

Like most any deckbuilding game, you start with a deck of basic cards and slowly add to it, building a strategy along the way. You recruit various types of mousey military units to do battle for you, erect buildings to grant bonuses, and use spells and economic cards to get one-time, uh, stuff. Each leader has their own play style, and a subset of unique cards. The Merchant is great at racking up money, while the Shaman revolves around spending souls fallen in battle, and the builder, um, builds. 

I was immediately hooked. Or rather, I immediately wanted to be hooked. Each time though, I’d make it to about stage 20 (30 is considered a win) and get overwhelmed. I didn’t feel like I was playing poorly so the losing felt frustrating because I couldn’t find a cause. First I did something I used to deplore doing, but have grow comfy with over the years: I changed the difficulty from Normal to *gasp* Easy. That helped quite a bit. The other thing that helped was looking up strategy videos and articles. It turns out Ratropolis is a game about building an economic engine at least as much as it is about battle. Holding back some funds and building a strong economic base makes that late game pressure manageable.

                                           Man, these fucking lizards

After unlocking all the cards* and winning on Easy with each leader, I’m now at the point where I can win on Normal a reasonable amount of time. Ratropolis, like all video games, is in Early Access. The devs have been continuously adding and balancing, and this sort of run-based game has been perfect for giving my brain something with constant decisions to focus on in these times, which are shit.

*Fuck yes

[southbournegrp]

Things Buyers Ask Their Real Estate Agents

(This article is intended pertaining to buyer's - not agents) What Are Real Estate Short Sales and profits? With our economy and woodleigh residences sales still in the doldrums, the majority of real estate sales in the California area are deemed short sales. But what are real estate short sales? From the real estate industry, the term Short Sale seems to have only re-appeared in the last few years. The title is very confusing to some individuals, including some Realtors® themselves. When we use the phrase Quite short Sale, it conjures up all sorts of ideas in our thought process. I have been asked if it is anything to do with the length of time the purchase takes, or whether there is a shortage of that type of residential, and many other impressions of what this type of sale actually is. A real estate short sale is brought about when a home owner cannot afford his mortgage payments any more, and then finds out his or her home is worth far less than what it was worth just simply two or three years ago when he bought it. He has no decision but to go to his lender and explain the situation with them. A real estate agent is usually called in to negotiate a settlement amount the fact that the bank will accept to pay off the home owner's debt, so the commercial lender can get it off their books. The bank eventually says to a price and the property is put on sale for those price the bank is prepared to accept - usually plenty of dollars short of what the home owner owes - hence the term Short Sale. At some stage this homeowner contacts the bank or lender to advise individuals that he is in financial trouble and cannot keep up with your monthly payments. The homeowner often has to stop paying the monthly payments and his account goes into delinquency. If the household owner has a good agent, he will approach her and convey to her of the situation. The agent will subsequently make sure to contact all interested parties - there may be a second property loan on the home, or a couple of liens. All parties are actually advised of the situation with this lender and mostly all of us involved agrees to accept lower amounts than are were supposed to pay to them - eventually. Typically, everyone agrees to accept a fabulous payment that is short of the amount owning and a Short Purchase is then introduced to the real estate market. Why are There A great number of Short Sales? Everywhere we look these days, there definitely seems to be Short Sales all over the place. We do not see too many common, traditional sales listings like we were used to discovering. Why is this? The main reason is that during the recent country's economy problems, so many people have been affected by the downturn. Their providers have laid people off till business increases, others simply get rid of people under the guise of "downsizing. " Many folks have simply had their weekly working time reduced, some even put on part time. Whatever has manifested in the workplace it has affected most of the general public, and has had an enormous time knock-on effect. With many workers now bringing home a reduced a pay-check, they can no longer afford the things they could before. They are now having a job to meet a monthly mortgage payments, pay for rising grocery store prices, pay for heightened gas prices, and so the list goes on. When a family is known for a reduced income, they spend less on grocery goods, buy less gas and try to make it last longer, place off their weekly yard maintenance service and complete the work themselves, spend less on eating out and cook in your home. All the services they are cutting down on are therefore going to have problems with the knock-on effect - not from one family, and yet from hundreds in the area that are in the same boat. In concert, the cutbacks they are making will affect the local market and then local businesses start to suffer and the cycle remains as it builds into serious concerns. Having considered the aforementioned, our typical family will start to have problems making all the monthly mortgage payments due to the lower pay-check. Eventually they eliminate paying and the arrears start to build up. Of course, they optimism and pray that things will improve soon, so they really hang on for as long as they can clutching to that hope. The situation pretty much never improves though and they are forced to sell their homes. Individuals call in a real estate agent for help and advice, only to be advised : to their horror - that their home that they bought just for $500, 000 four years ago is now worth around $295. 000. They are devastated, of course, but they have no other decision than to try and sell. But they owe far more than the place is now worth. This is known in financial circles to be "upside down. " Let's say they still owe the particular or lender $450. 000. How are they likely to settle their mortgage when they are only likely to get $295, 000 for their home? The real estate agent approaches the financial institution for them and explains the position and hopes that the mortgage lender will play ball. Usually the bank has to settle for less than is owed, and the real estate agent is contracted for you to conduct the sale - a typical Short Sale -- known because the lender is agreeing to sell the property for a amount SHORT of what is owed. Multiply this one family through several thousand in your area, and you have the answer to the original question... the reason are there so many short sales? Will a Short Sale Impinge on My Credit Rating? The short answer is yes and no! If you have had fallen way behind in your mortgage payments and are in what's commonly known as default or delinquency, then the lender will almost certainly article your arrears to the three credit bureaus. This means that your history of credit will now be tagged with this "failure to pay, inch and as a result your credit history will be tarnished and your credit score will probably indeed go down. If you have managed to keep up with your monthly payments and possess kept the bank informed of your financial status, they have hardly any reason to report anything to the credit bureaus as you are not likely yet in default - because you have worked out an important payment agreement. If you can arrange with the bank to accept a sale agreement because of your situation - you will have to send the letter proving hardship etc . - and can continue to produce payments, you are likely to come out of the transaction unscathed. The most important help that most people do not adhere to when they run into trouble will be "they do not go to their lender and tell them with regards to their financial position. " This is one of the first things you might want to do. You may have a caring lender who is able to renegotiate your loan resulting in much lower payments - thus offering you and your family to keep your home and not lose it. For how long Does a Real Estate Short Sale Take? There is no authentic answer to how long a real estate short sale will take. At some point, it is all in the hands of the homeowner's bank or perhaps lender. After a short sale has been agreed by the bank or investment company, the home is then put on sale as a real estate list of and everyone sits back and waits for the presents to come rolling in. All clever stuff, right? And yet is it! The problem with a real estate short sale is the lender usually is in no hurry at all to accept the offer and send it off to Escrow. For some serious unknown reason, the bank just sits on the offers and also does nothing constructive to effect a sale. The sale listing may have as many as 20 offers on it - many of them far in excess of what is being asked - however banks do nothing much about these offers. Working with a short sale in this situation helps nobody - not even the bank, the seller, or potential buyer. I am often quizzed: "why doesn't the bank get off its butt and get the show on the road? The answer is a simple "I don't know. inches Agents, whether for sellers or buyers, are continuously frustrated by the bank's actions - or lack thereof. I have been involved in many short sale transactions. There were roughly 12 offers on one of my properties, some way earlier mentioned what the sale price was, but the bank will not move for months. It eventually went into property foreclosure. Now that makes no sense at all! With some of the why a real estate short sale is delayed mentioned above, the response to the original question is that if a bank possesses a mind to get this property off their books, he or she can do it in a very short time. But to do this, they have to actually commit to take action and accept an offer to let the technique begin. Getting the bank to accept an offer is the the important point in why a short sale can take so long. Typically, the sale can be done and dusted in as little as 30 days should the bank has a mind to do it. But these swift sales are few and far between. In reality, a real estate short good discounts can take six months or even up to a year to get them to decision. Why are the Banks So Slow on Short Revenues? I'd like a dollar bill for every time I have discovered this one. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or answer why the banks are so slow to make up the minds over offers for their short sales listings. I really enjoy seeing, it appears that they seem to think that the properties are not looking anywhere and there is plenty of time to sort them through. This is how it appears! I'm sure the banks will have other strategies on it. There is a saying in any buying and selling process that your first of all loss is your best loss. Simply put, if you hang on plus hang on for a better offer, there is the likelihood that one will never be forthcoming and that the original one you rejected is not right now there anymore. Have the banks heard of this, I wonder? However banks do have their rules and regulations as designated by your "powers that be" up in Head Office. So localized bankers may not be in the position to do too much about the issue. Their hands may be tied by internal red video tape. But we often don't know that, do we? Therefore perhaps we shouldn't be too hard on our local bankers. But somebody, somewhere, is causing these delays also it doesn't make financial sense to keep sitting on all these delinquent properties. Surely it would make more sense to accept an offer that equals the selling price and deal with it to the next one. Do I Have to Pay Commission on a Realty Short Sale? The real seller of the property in a quite short sale is the lender or the bank. It is they who sadly are pulling the short sale strings - all as your representative, of course. Buyers never have to pay a real estate agent commission when they will be purchasing a property. They may negotiate certain things or concessions throughout the buying process, but this rarely affects the actual selling price and is usually taken care of in the Escrow process. Owners do not usually pay a commission when their property is it being sold as a short sale. The bank is usually behind any short sale process and it is they that take care of the particular selling agent's commission. After all, if a family can't afford to pay for to make their mortgage payments and are in arrears, they don't bear much chance of paying a commission either. So , to all circumstances, neither the buyer or the seller has to pay typically the selling agent's commission. However , a traditional (regular) real estate selling is very different. The homeowner, with his agent, generally enquiries all the shots during the sale, and the homeowner is also answerable for paying the broker/agent's commission. What Happens After a Short Good discounts is Closed? After a short sale is closed as well as completed, the buyer is usually delighted at being able to purchase the house hold for a fraction of what it cost just a few yrs ago. It is the buyer that wins in a situation such as a Short Selling. Sadly, however , the seller is in a totally different position. He has lost his home, any equity he might have had has long been wiped out, and he is left with all his goods - sometimes out on the street - mostly through basically no fault of his own. This situations puts a tremendous force on any marriage, and all too often, families break up therefore. If you are involved in this type of situation, try to ensure that you have a method to go - well before the house transaction closes. Even if this can be a mobile home on the outskirts of town, you will however have a roof over your heads, and with your family in one piece. Above all else, get a roof over your family's head. Sure, it is degrading, and yes, your are now at rock bottom, but you still have your family and your health and strength (hopefully) to fight another day. It can be done!

[tenacioususedcars]

Should you buy a new car? When to buy new & the 9 reasons why it’s worth it

Almost every personal finance pundit says to buy a used car over a new car. I disagree. Here's how to know when to buy a new car instead of used and why.

“Should I buy a new car?”

If you asked almost every personal finance pundit that question, they’ll give you a bunch of reasons why you should buy used instead.

Some common reasons they give:

“Used cars for sale Nissan Kuils River dealerships sell cost less.”

“Used cars have lower insurance.”

“Cars depreciate fastest in the first two years of ownership.”

“Cars are built better than ever so there’s less risk than before in buying used.”

So of course, we should all be buying used … right?

I disagree.

Used cars can be a good way to go. But to apply a broad rule that “used is the best” is short-sighted. In fact, I think there are many more reasons why people should buy a new car than used.

“Should I buy a new car?”

I wound up asking myself that question years ago. I figured I’d rather not be stuck somewhere because my stupid 12-year-old van broke down.

So that November, I started looking for a new car. (The date was intentional: You can get amazing deals at the end of the year when dealers like Group 1 Cars want to beat their quotas.)

First, I test-drove a few cars and researched them. I decided to get a Honda Accord. Now I had to choose between buying a new or used car.

9 reasons you should buy a new car instead of a used car

Here are a few things I debated before choosing a new over a used car — and you should too.

Cost. Sure, a new car costs more. But over the long term, not that much more. And the value — not just monetarily — can be much higher.

Reliability. Above all, I wanted to get a car that wouldn’t break down. I had enough stuff going on in my life and I want to avoid car-repair issues (time, $) as much as possible. I was willing to pay slightly more for this certainty.

Not a piece of crap. Buying a car takes an enormous amount of time. I planned to have this car for many years and I didn’t want another piece of crap. As a result, this baseline requirement reduced the disparity between new and used prices. In other words, I wouldn’t save a ton of money getting a used car because I wanted a pretty good car, regardless. Quick note: This is admittedly a little bit of vanity. But I’ve written time and time again about spending on things you love (more on this later). I love driving and I do it a lot. It’s not strictly functional for me. I even sprang for the V6 model. Plus, there are other ways to minimize your total cost, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Cash I’d have to put down. This is important. If you don’t have any cash (or very little), a used car is more attractive because the down payment (i.e., the money you have to pay immediately) is typically lower. And if you put $0 down, the interest charges on a new car will be much more. In my case, I had cash available to put down.

Interest rate. The interest rate on your car loan will depend on your credit, which is why having a good credit score is so important. If you have a solid credit score, your interest rate will be lower. This becomes more important over a longer-term loan. Each dealership will negotiate differently. Don’t be afraid to walk out if the dealer tries to change the finance terms on you last minute. This is a common trick.

Resale value. One of my friends bought an R286,000 Acura Integra, drove it for about seven years, and then sold it for 50% of the price. That means she got a fantastic deal on driving a new car for seven years. To check out how your potential car might fare, visit Kelley Blue Book and calculate the resale prices in five, seven, and 10 years. You’ll be surprised how quickly most cars depreciate and how others (Toyotas and Hondas especially) retain their value.

Insurance. The insurance rates are lower for a new car compared to a used car. Even if they’re only slightly different (say, R700 / month), that can add up to real savings over a few years.

Gas mileage. With gas prices on a roller-coaster ride, you may want to hedge your bets and consider a fuel-efficient or even hybrid or electric car. This could be an important factor determining the value of a car over the long term. And let’s be honest: How cool would it be to be the only guy on your block with a Tesla?

New-car smell. Good god, is there a better smell on earth? This wasn’t really a requirement but I just wanted to mention how much I love it. This, and the smell of Payless ShoeSource. Find me at the mall, walking in and out of Payless over and over.

When SHOULDN’T I buy new?

This isn’t a black-and-white situation though. There might be times when, yes, maybe you should buy used or even think about holding onto the car you DO have for a little longer.

There are only two reasons, though, that truly determine whether or not you should get a new car: Your ability to afford it, and your Rich Life.

First, you need to be able to afford the car. This might seem obvious but I promise you, you’d be shocked at how many people jump into one of the biggest purchases of their lives without first asking themselves, “How am I going to pay for this car?”

And so they end up signing a financing contract that they can’t really afford and end up not being able to make monthly payments.

If you do that, there are ways to get out of it. But prevention is better than the cure.

You can find out how much new car you can afford right now with the 20/4/10 rule.

This easy back-of-the-napkin trick can give you a rough idea of what’s realistic for you and your finances.

Here’s how it works:

20% down payment on the car.

4-year car loan or less.

10% or less of your gross monthly income goes towards car expenses including gas, insurance, DMV fees, repairs, parking/speeding tickets, and interest payments.

Imagine you want to purchase a new car for R430,000 and you earn roughly R715,000 a year. That means you need to put at most a down payment of R86,000 (20% of the cost) and spend no more than R6,000 a month (10% of your income) on expenses for it.

The second reason you might not want to buy a new car is your Rich Life. I’ve talked about this philosophy many times before but here’s a quick breakdown: Your Rich Life is being able to spend and invest money into whatever makes you happy while ignoring everything else.

It can be something like buying first-class flights for your parents to come visit you, or something as simple as ordering appetizers when you go out.

While you spend on the things you love though, you’re also conscious in mercilessly cutting out the costs of things you don’t actually care about.

For example, I have a friend who spends R72,000 / year on shoes. At first, that seems like an eye-popping amount. HOWEVER, my friend is able to afford it because she makes a healthy six-figure salary, she has a roommate, she doesn’t buy lunches every day because she eats for free at work, and doesn’t spend her money on things like the gym, electronics, or anything else she doesn’t care about.

The result: She can spend R4,000 – R7,000 on around 10 – 15 pairs of shoes each year.

The same can be applied to you and a new car. Ask yourself, “Does a new car fit into my vision of a Rich Life? Will it really make me happy or am I just doing it for societal pressures?”

If the answer is no, you shouldn’t get that new car. If it’s yes, then awesome!

Here’s the bottom line: I don’t like when pundits say that buying a used car is the only way to go. It’s not.

Buying a new car can be a smart choice if you pick the right car, negotiate extremely well, and stay disciplined about shopping for insurance, maintaining your car, etc.

Because buying a car is such a big purchase, I’m fine spending a little more money and time upfront to mitigate risk and get a great car that will last for a long time. And by being sensible about how long you drive your car for (longer is better), you can get a new car for a great value.

It doesn’t have to be a purely numbers-oriented decision. I loved my car — it was fun to drive, and if I had 10x the money, I would still get it.

Article source: https://secondhandvehicles.weebly.com/journal/should-you-buy-a-new-car-when-to-buy-new-the-9-reasons-why-its-worth-it