#Online bike deliveries

[bikesolve]

Motorbike Rental Safety: What You Need to Know Before You Ride

Renting a motorbike can be an exhilarating experience, offering freedom to explore places at your own pace. However, before you hop on and hit the road, safety should always be your top priority. Whether you're an experienced rider or renting a motorbike for the first time, understanding the key safety tips is crucial for a smooth and enjoyable ride.

In this blog post, we'll walk you through the essential motorbike rental safety tips and provide answers to some frequently asked questions. At BikeSolve, your safety is our primary concern. That's why we encourage all riders to follow these guidelines for a secure and worry-free riding experience.

1. Choose the Right Motorbike for You The first step in ensuring safety when renting a motorbike is to choose a bike that suits your skill level, size, and comfort. If you're a beginner, opt for a smaller engine size, as it is easier to handle and control. If you have more experience, you might feel comfortable with a larger bike.

At BikeSolve, we offer a range of motorbikes, from beginner-friendly models to more powerful bikes for experienced riders. Make sure to test the bike's seat height, controls, and weight before making your choice.

Key Points to Consider:

Engine Size: Opt for a smaller engine if you're new to riding. Bike Weight: Ensure the bike isn't too heavy to maneuver comfortably. Seat Height: You should be able to place your feet flat on the ground while seated.

2. Inspect the Motorbike Thoroughly Before heading out, it's important to inspect the motorbike for any potential issues. This ensures that the vehicle is roadworthy and prevents breakdowns or accidents. Here are some key areas to check:

Tires: Make sure the tires are inflated properly and the tread is in good condition. Brakes: Test both the front and rear brakes to ensure they are responsive. Lights and Indicators: Check the headlights, taillights, and indicators to ensure they are working. Mirrors: Adjust the mirrors to your eye level for a clear rear view. Fluid Levels: Ensure that oil, coolant, and brake fluid levels are appropriate.

At BikeSolve, we inspect all motorbikes before renting them out, but it’s always a good idea to do a quick check yourself to double-check the bike’s condition.

3. Wear the Right Gear Wearing protective gear is non-negotiable when it comes to motorbike safety. Accidents can happen, even to the most cautious rider, so it's essential to be well-prepared. At BikeSolve, we provide helmets with every rental, but you should also consider wearing the following gear:

Helmet: Always wear a high-quality helmet that fits well. Helmets are the most critical piece of safety gear. Jacket and Gloves: A padded jacket and gloves can protect you from abrasions in case of a fall. Boots: Wear sturdy boots that cover your ankles for added protection. Pants: Jeans or specialized riding pants are a good option to protect your legs.

4. Familiarize Yourself with Local Traffic Laws Every region has its own set of traffic laws, and it’s essential to familiarize yourself with them before hitting the road. Ignorance of the law can lead to fines or, worse, accidents. Make sure you know the speed limits, helmet laws, and whether lane-splitting is allowed.

At BikeSolve, we provide our customers with a quick briefing on the local traffic laws of the area. Always ensure you're riding legally and safely within the regulations.

5. Plan Your Route and Stay Alert Before embarking on your journey, it's a good idea to plan your route in advance. Knowing where you're going will help you stay focused on the road, rather than being distracted by maps or GPS. Choose roads that you feel comfortable riding on, and avoid areas with heavy traffic if possible.

While riding, remain alert at all times. Keep an eye out for pedestrians, other vehicles, and potential hazards like potholes or debris. At BikeSolve, we recommend avoiding night rides unless you're familiar with the roads.

6. Ride Defensively When renting a motorbike, you must ride with caution and assume that other drivers may not see you. Motorcycles are smaller than cars and can easily get lost in a driver’s blind spot. Always keep a safe distance from other vehicles and avoid riding in blind spots.

Additionally, be mindful of sudden stops, lane changes, and other unpredictable moves from drivers around you. At BikeSolve, we encourage all riders to practice defensive driving to reduce the risk of accidents.

FAQs 1. Do I need a special license to rent a motorbike from BikeSolve? A: Yes, at BikeSolve, we require all riders to have a valid motorcycle license. This ensures that you have the necessary skills and experience to handle the bike safely.

2. What safety equipment is provided with the rental? A: We provide a high-quality helmet with every rental. However, we recommend that you bring your own protective gear, such as gloves, jackets, and boots, for additional safety.

3. What should I do in case of an emergency or accident? A: If you are involved in an accident, prioritize your safety and call for emergency services if necessary. Notify BikeSolve as soon as possible so we can assist you with the next steps.

4. What are the age requirements for renting a motorbike from BikeSolve? A: You must be at least 18 years old to rent a motorbike from BikeSolve, and possess a valid motorcycle license.

5. Can I rent a motorbike if I’m a beginner? A: Yes! At BikeSolve, we offer beginner-friendly motorbikes and can provide you with tips and guidance for a safe and enjoyable experience.

Conclusion Motorbike rental can be an exciting way to explore new places, but it’s important to prioritize safety before you ride. By following the tips outlined above—choosing the right bike, inspecting it thoroughly, wearing the appropriate gear, knowing local laws, and riding defensively—you can ensure a safer and more enjoyable trip.

At BikeSolve, your safety is our top priority. We’re here to provide you with the best rental experience, backed by well-maintained bikes, safety equipment, and expert guidance. So, whether you're an experienced rider or a beginner, you can enjoy the ride with peace of mind.

[avaf00rd]

Leah Williamson relationship HC

A better fic will be out soon hang tight.

This is a scrap I made.

I would barely classify these as head cannons as they are very long. They are just about your relationship in general☺️

————————————————————————-

-you and Leah were best friends and crazy close when you first joined Arsenal in 2017. When you left to go to Barcelona in 2019 you both felt like a huge part of your lives were missing. When you came back to Arsenal in 2021 you both realised you were in love and started dating

-you always praise Leah for being the most fashionable person you know. You weren’t terrible yourself but you were always getting her to help you with what to wear daily

-whenever you two go to events together Leah will always make sure you get to the after party. Your pretty good at calling it a night often, which means Leah is dragging you for more drinks more often that not

-you, Leah and Alex Scott were sort of a trio. Sure Leah and Alex were a tad closer. But you had all been on multiple trips together

-your the cook of the house. She can’t go much further than toast. She tried to make frozen chicken one time for you both, but it ended up breaking the oven due to a weird setting she turned the oven on to.

-when she did her ACL you were in tears for her. When she walked off, She told you to get a goal for her. You didn’t in the end which made you sick to your stomach. You felt terrible and was just as devastated as Leah.

-your Australian. So bringing Leah over to your home was your favourite thing.

-Christmas in your house was amazing. You both decked out the house completely and danced and sung to Christmas songs all December.

-when buying your first house together. You had the biggest say. You had great taste is properties to buy so you kind of found a flat online and showed Leah. She said yes so you immediately booked an inspection. You got that flat two days later.

-You also bought all the furniture one night when you were both on international break and got it delivered to where Leah was. She was a bit shocked when she FaceTimed you after coming home to 45 delivery boxes.

-your taste in movies was so divergent. She liked the more fantasy movies like lord of the rings and Harry Potter. She also loved horror. Which was terrible for you. You loved romance movies, you’re either making Leah watch that or some stupid documentary you heard of.

-you were a huge dog person. And Leah already owned a dog when you first moved in together, but you had 2. So now it’s a crazy house 24/7.

-you love being together in the kitchen, listening to music and goofing around with a good bottle of wine. You both turn on old love songs and slow dance around the kitchen.

-she made you late to most trainings. Due to her stuffing around in the mornings. It got even worse when she cut her bangs

-one afternoon you were both chatting on how she used to have a fringe as a child. You said she would suit one (but you think she suits anything). So of course 2 weeks later she texts you to let you know she’s going to the hairdresser…

-Leah can be kinky asf. Come on we all know this

-sometimes after dinner you will beg her to play on the piano for you. She’s actually outstanding at it and you’re so proud of her. You will take your wine glass over and sit on the seat next to her while she plays.

-you tried to convince her to get Santa photos with the dogs. Which she very quickly declined.

-you were very good at makeup. You became obsessed with it as a teenage girl. So you find yourself doing Leah’s a lot for nights out and events. Even just doing a big look for fun.

-the girl couldn’t ride a bike to save her life. So you always tried to help teach her . She would somehow always say yes, Even if it was just an excuse to get a good laugh out of you.

-you and your Matilda’s team played in the World Cup and came fourth after being knocked out by her country in the semis. Your heart ached that you couldn’t finish it for your country, but it ached just the same at the fact that your girlfriend couldn’t lead her country to the grand finals like she had always dreamt of.

-every night you slept with your head tucked into the crook of her neck, arms cuddling onto her torso. It was just the best way both of your bodies melted together.

-sometimes she tried to take you on golfing dates. The first time she did, she told you she was good. Like the powerful Leah Williamson would. You were humble and said you would need her help. But when you swung your shot you actually made a great one and it had Leah’s jaw on the floor.

-you both had your first photo shoot together in 2020 just before covid. And you lived very minute of it. Now you have done heaps for brands like Calvin Klein, bikini brands, and more together, you both now being known for your hot couple photo shoots.

-you were both completely clumsy. The worst thing was when Leah and you had to screw a window nail tighter. Don’t ask why. But you apparently weren’t holding it properly. Causing it to fall out the other side of the frame. Completely shattering into the pool.

-though you were always chasing after her for outfit inspiration. You both looked phenomenal wherever you went. You would both be shot on camera court-side of a basketball game, on vacation or at dinner in the best outfits and hair.

-you though she was the hottest girl you had ever seen in your life. You had only had boyfriends who play football in your life before Leah. So you always blamed Leah for being gay.

-her love for country music was one of the things that made you fall in love with her. Along with her charming personality

-you were a striker for arsenal. When you scored in a game, you would do your celebration jump with your fists in the air and always try to look for Leah, to see if it was her arms you could jump into first. And she was always there, screaming at you for your goal with her arms wide open.

-your a bottom most of the time. But sometimes you switch it up and she lives for your dominant side.

-you suffered a severe back injury in 2022 while in Australia. You were scared you would never play again. Leah was on the next plane out to Australia, even though she was told not to. Just so she could sit next to your bed and hold your hand for hours.

-seeing Leah back in training after doing her ACL. With the brightest smile on her face, made your heart melt every time.

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

Candy Girl 4

Warnings: this fic will include elements, some dark, such as cheating, age gap, noncon/dubcon, and other untagged triggers. Please take this into account before proceeding. It is up to curate your online consumption safely.

Summary: as you’re about to take the next step with your boyfriend, doubts begin to arise. (short!plus!reader)

Characters: Thor (boyfriend’s dad/silverfox)

Author’s Note: Please feel free to leave some feedback, reblog, and jump into my asks. I’m always happy to discuss with you and riff on idea. As always, you are cherished and adored! Stay safe, be kind, and treat yourself. <3

After a quick flight, both thankful to Thor and embarrassed that he witnessed his son’s behaviour, you don’t know if you ever want to go back. As much as you love Magni, you’re not sure if it’s worth it. He never seems to want to do anything but play video games or sex. The latter remains a touchy subject for both of you. 

You’ll let Magni cool off, and yourself. 

This isn’t the end. You would know if it was. You send him your usual texts. Good mornings, good nights, and check in when you can. His lack of response isn’t unusual. He’s probably playing around with his bike again. You wonder if he’s figured out how to put it back together yet. 

The days pass in a blur. You have work to keep you busy. With summer in full swing, you have more than enough driving around to do. 

Between deliveries, your mind wanders. You’ll have to talk to him face-to-face, get this sorted out. You're not mad at him. It was a bad morning and a strange night. You can move past it. Right? 

You grab the next order and check the address as you get in your front seat. Huh, it’s in Magni’s neighbourhood. Maybe you can swing by and surprise him. 

You turn the engine and blast your stereo. Rihanna pumps from the speakers, a bit scratchy, but still a bop. You hunch over the wheel as you follow the rush hour traffic, tapping the breaks as you crawl along. Finally, you get to a turn off and dip down some side streets.  

You turn down the A/C as the car begins to shake. You don’t use the air much, your old beater doesn’t much like any extra stress. You turn down the volume and give an anxious look to the venting in the hood. That’s not smoke, you’re just imagining things. 

Before the job, you couldn’t tell left from right but now the whole city is imprinted in the back of your head. You know which orders to make quickly and ones where you can leave the car unlocked while you run up to the door. Magni’s is the latter. 

You roll down the avenue lazily and come up before a big white house, squinting at the number on the front door. You get out and stretch, just a few more hours. You grab the insulated bag and the paper bag with the cans of soda. You bounce up the front steps and balance it all as you ring the bell. 

You wait, glancing around at the lush greenery. It’s kind of lame to dream of living in a place like this. Basic, your friends tease, but you just want to know what it’s like. Maybe it’s just as bad as what you have, just painted up nice. 

You can’t really complain. You have a roof and food and job. Could be a lot worse. 

The door opens and jolts you from your internal turmoil. You blink and step back, once more looking around. You know for sure you didn’t go to the wrong house. Thor’s house isn’t even the same colour. So what is he doing there? 

“Ah, little one, I was hoping it would be you,” he booms. 

“Huh?” You make a dumb face. 

“I thought it’d be a fun surprise,” he grins, “my friend’s,” he points up then reaches into his back pocket, “they suggested pizza and I told them I knew just the place.” 

“Oh, wow, thanks,” you smile and unzip the bag. 

“Hmm,” he hums as he counts out bills, “funny, they got a little thing like you carrying around all that.” 

“Mr. Odinson,” you chirp, “I’m not that small.” 

“Suppose most people are too me,” he grins and holds out the money, “keep the change.” 

You accept the bills with the pizza against your hip and the paper bag on top. You blink dumbly at the folded bills. He can’t be serious. 

“Mr. Odinson.” 

“Thor,” he purrs. 

“Thor, er, I think you miscounted.” 

“I didn’t, I have generous friends,” he shrugs, “we put in together. Now,” he reaches to take the paper bag, “allow me to relieve your burden.” 

You gulp and tuck away the money. You finish unzipping the bag and slide out the pizzas. It’s awkward as the boxes are so big. He gets closer to help and you slide them right into his hand. As you finish unsheathing them, he steps back. 

“How about you have a slice before you go?” He offers, “you have much to go?” 

“Halfway through,” you fold the empty bag against your stomach, “that’s real nice, but they time us.” 

“Oh, too bad,” he nods, “well, I suppose I’ll see you... haven’t lately. Not that I can blame you.” 

“Oh, uh, I’ve been real busy,” you say, not a complete lie. Still, you have been avoiding it. 

“Yes, you work hard. Wish I could say the same of Magni.” 

“Sorry,” you frown. 

“Sorry? For him? He’s not your responsibility. Only myself to blame, I am his father,” he sighs, “anyhow, don’t let me keep you.” 

“Thanks again,” you try to brighten up. “I’m... I’m going to talk to Magni tomorrow. It's my day off.” 

“Ah, yes, well, I hope it isn’t a waste of time,” he resigns and gives a wave. 

He stays at the door as you turn away, his words ominous as they leave an unsettling flutter in your chest. You hop down the steps and open the back door of your car. You toss the empty bag inside and close it, getting in the front.  

You shove the key in the ignition and twist. The engine rumbles but doesn’t flip. You huff and try again, leaning your weight into the effort. As the motor kick, you look up to find Thor still watching you from the porch. 

The engine turns and you sigh in relief. As you go to shift into reverse, there’s a pop, then a bag, and several more noises. The exhaust puffs one last time and the engine dies. No! No! Not now baby. We made it so far. 

You get out as black smoke plumes around the edges of the hood and you hear a shuffle from the porch. Shoot, shoot, shoot. Thor puts the pizza down on the bench and hurries down to you. As if you haven’t embarrassed yourself enough in front of him. 

“You alright?” He asks. 

“Yeah, fine,” you pout, “I’m not worried about me.” 

“Hm, may I?” He gestures to the hood. You shrug. 

He pops it open and moves the stick to prop it up. He waves away the smoke and squints through it. You cross your arms and stand back. You wouldn’t know where to begin. 

“Hmm, lucky it wasn’t a full blown fire. Fuel lines are rotten,” he says and moves out of the path of the smoke. “One finally burst.” 

“Oh,” you mope, “no...” 

“Sorry, little one, it’ll need a professional.” 

“Uh, at least... I guess the tip will help with that,” you sniff, “but... I gotta work. What am I gonna tell Karl?” 

“Karl?” He echoes curiously. 

“My manager,” you utter, “and my parents...” You look at him, “sorry, this isn’t your problem.” 

“I would gladly take it on,” he assures you, “why don’t you call Karl, tell him you’re having some difficulties, you can’t finish your shift.” 

“Urgh,” you frame your forehead in frustration, “but...” 

“I know someone who can look at the car. I’ll give him a call.” 

“Oh gee,” you huff and turn your head up, dropping your hands. “This isn’t happening.” 

“Don’t worry, little one, I will take care of it. Please, it’ll be alright.” 

You look at him again. It isn’t his responsibility and you shouldn’t let him but you don’t have much of a choice. What else are you going to do? Borrow Magni’s broken motorcycle? 

“Right, I’ll... I’ll call my boss.” 

“Please, I don’t like to see you upset,” he says, “call him then have some pizza and I’ll take you to mine. You can make up with Magni, eh? At least that’s something.” 

“Thank you, Mr. Odinson,” you give a bittersweet smile, “really, you don’t have to do all that.” 

“Ah, but why wouldn’t I?” He winks and turns away, “Bucky!” 

He stomps up the steps and pulls open the door, the pizza forgotten on the bench. He calls the same name again and you take out your phone. At least Karl is a nice guy. He’ll let you make it up once you get your car running again. 

[mystrothedefender]

My incredibly bad day has gone like this:

- late for work

- bike broke

- delivery driver left my fridge open at work so I had to throw EVERYTHING out

- couldn't make anything so I had to do online orders (which I fucking hate doing)

- dog got out. Found by someone and taken to the vets. The vets wouldn't release him to my mum without my say so, but when I called them they put me on hold for 10 minutes and then hung up. I had to leave work early.

- got charged £40 for my bike to get fixed.

- had to socialise with my brother (the one who uninvited me from his birthday party because he doesn't like my post-t voice). Because he was with my mum when we picked up the dog.

- my shopping delivery got delivered to the wrong address

- when I called up to ask why that happened the person on the phone didn't believe I was the account holder

-had a panic attack

This whole day has been like 'hey what if your worst nightmare happened' -bike brakes broke&dog got out while I was at work&somehow get my food delivered to the wrong place&get misgendered over the phone

[turtle-tanks-biggest-fan]

btw last week i found this online

and i... i bought it. with my money. rise merch is kinda hard to find and most of it is real ugly if im being honest, but the bike... she called to me.

i got it over the weekend (fast delivery!) and heres how it looks:

not bad, not bad! and it actually closely resembles the bike in the show too

but donnie, ooh.... donnie needs help.

i am going to give him a full makeover..

as for the bike, i am looking into led lighting from underneath and i might even see if i can rig up a hovering display stand with magnets........

Don't know how long it will take me to finish but i am pretty excited to work on it!

[suzieb-fit]

Who's ready for an essay?

Grab a cup of tea, sit comfortably and I shall begin.....😂😂

The never ending insulin pump saga continues....

I'm trying different hacks, tweaks and resets to try fix the algorithms. It's been a nightmare trying to get any kind of decent blood sugar "flatline". It seems to have got too high a number that it's trying to keep me at.

A few days ago, I switched it over to "manual mode", which means the background insulin delivery is set by me. Same as the old system I was using.

And mostly, it's been good. Less highs. But a few crashing lows. Like REAL lows. Last night was crazy. It was dangerously low for hours. Made no sense. So I had some supper. I was having a pretty serious hypo.

So that means a digestive rest phase of 12 hours. I don't personally class that as a fast.

And I've switched back to automated mode this morning. That means the pump automatically adjusts my background insulin, according to the information from the CGM. They are linked up.

Oh, and I'm expecting a new homeopathic treatment through the post today. The mucus thing hasn't actually been too bad the last few days. A few glare ups, but nothing terrible. But she wants to try something else, as I'm still not seeing a real difference.

Anyway, on with my day.

A 30 minute walk, then a short home workout. Full body strength.

Breakfast of collagen coffee and nuts, as usual.

In an unrelated topic, I'm actually really busy with my online training work just now. I've signed up three new people since Sunday.

I'm not complaining. Busy is better than bored!

I've done three workouts today.

Starting with that full body one after my walk.

Then I did some lower body.

I once again have to force myself to push away from upper body.

I decided that as I was already halfway through that first workout.

Anyway, I had lunch soon after lower body strength.

Bacon, scrambled egg, cheese, cottage cheese and salad. One of my favourites. But I say that about almost everything 😂

I then had an appointment in town, which meant a short bike ride.

Then an afternoon client session.

Very active day, and much needed!

Yep....an essay. Well, I did warn you 😂.

[sugdenlovesdingle]

Ugh fuck PostNL (Dutch post)

I ordered some pet supplies online and it was supposed to be delivered yesterday between 5 and 7pm.

Only I got an email pretty early in the day saying the delivery date had been changed to tomorrow (aka today). So I just went about my day, walking my dog around the same time as usual, I did see a PostNL van outside my building on the way back but didn't think anything of it because my stuff wouldn't be delivered yet anyway, right?

Wrong.

Because APPARENTLY when they say we're not coming today, they mean we *are* coming today at the original time and you better be home, bitch.

So now this huge ass 20+ kilo package is on the way to a nearby post office and I have to figure out a way to get it here with just my bike.

So yeah fuck PostNL with a rusty fork.

[bethie-crossing]

🍓 New Animal Crossing Ideas 🍓

I predicted some things in horizons let’s hope these happen too lol, my main want is more progression!

Island types: choose between a classic walled in or “forest” island, a tropical island, a snowy island, a desert island, like Happy Home Paradise! You can still pick the hemisphere. Because there’s many types, you can have multiple saves but you have the same character (to avoid online issues etc)

Transport: arrive by train, taxi, boat, water plane, or bus, depending on the type of island you pick! You can use a bike and cart when doing deliveries for Nook

You can buy and use a bike of your own as you progress, you can add a cart & a hand basket, very customisable, add decorations like flowers, bell or horn, & lights, lanterns! You can also buy & customise a caravan! (Stationary?)

Camp ground: tents and caravans overseen by Harvey, you can do cute outdoor activities like roasting marshmallows, pitching and chilling out in a tent, & cloud watching / stargazing! Celeste comes by sometimes with a telescope, you can invite her to the museum this way!

Villagers interests & hobbies: learn about villagers favourite foods, items, activities, dream job, etc. There is special dialogue when their related favourites are mentioned or with what they interact with, maybe you can encourage them to pursue their dream!

You can also invite them to do activities and mini games (they can say no if you have low friendship or are sick or enraged)

Activities: meet-ups (e.g inviting to hanging out in a certain area), and mini games, you can invite animals to do these in dialogue or letters (for later dates), you invite friends to do these via the NookPhone

Odd jobs: work for Tom Nook to pay off the first debt, Brewsters coffee job in New Leaf returns, working at Able Sisters!!! Offering styling to villagers, unlocked with Labelle? Shine shoes at Kicks? Put together bouquets requests with Leif! Cook and serve at the restaurant / café! Design shops and animals homes!

You’re payed in bells and special items. Animals can also work odd jobs depending on their interests. Doing odd jobs can increase friendship with NPC characters

Shops: Tom Nook upgrades to Nookingtons, Able Sisters has a top floor where the sister live that you can visit when you gain friendship with them, Auto Shop from Pocket Camp to buy Bikes etc, restaurant, school(?), and hospital are customisable & furnishable (happy home paradise), Gracie Gracie, Kicks, Re-tail, shampoodle, theatre (dr shrunk), Katrina fortunes, HHA, dream suite also returns

In the theatre, you can obtain emotes from Shrunk and buy cinema food & drinks. Villagers with a theatre interest will also do short performances on stage which plays when you sit down, you can leave at anytime.

Villagers with a film interest will showcase or act in “films” (depending on their preference for acting or filming), similar to stage performances. If you have high friendship, you can be invited to join in on these!

The Hospital building is where you will go when you fall off your bike or faint, villagers will also go here for the same reasons as well as extended sickness (can happen if not given medicine). Gulliver can be found here if you don’t find him on the beach the day before. If not new NPC, possibly Luna or Leilani runs it

Shop functions: other than odd jobs, you can order food and drinks, buy a custom bouquet, and be styled by your villagers and NPCs, return of post office to send letters and gifts

Tasks: NPC / special characters and villagers can ask for more things like craftable items and foods, shop items like paper for letters, and obtainable clothing and accessories

Personal interests: you can set your own faves (in the scrapbook) which you can mention to villagers and NPC when relevant, they can give you items based on these and share their opinions in dialogue and letters

Collecting: stickers and stamps, medals (achievements), gyroids (you can give these to Brewster), crafting recipes, bugs & fish

Scrapbooking & letters: type or hand write letters and draw on them, as well as your scrapbook. You can decorate both with stickers and stamps! You can also send letters to special characters like Isabelle!

The Scrapbook is where you can see a calendar, planned events, interests, friendship levels, collections and recipes, achievements (medals), saved letters and photos! Custom designs also

NookPhone: you can use the phone to call or message villagers to locate them (sometimes they ignore you!) or make meet-ups, friends list & messaging, online shopping, and take photos! (All the Social things)

Event planning: events from other games return but you can also make your own! There are templates but you can do custom events, also set optional tasks to do at these events

Rainbow day - basically a pride parade, similar to festival, face paint & colourful outfits, a proud atmosphere, can march along a selected path

Beach party - take part in beach activities and mini games with animals and friends (sunny warm days only), vacation juice crafting recipe obtainable

Valentines Day - craft chocolate to give to animals or encourage them to give to others, high friendship villagers can also give you chocolate! Kaitlin can teach you to make chocolate related recipes on this day

Friendship levels: you can progress from small talk and exchanging letters with animals, tasks, exchanging gifts, meet-ups, being invited over and inviting them over, getting their photo, photo booth photo together (customisable), can hug them or ask for a hug

Friendship levels also apply to animals, your villagers will gain friendship with other villagers! Most will inform you if they have a best friend, but more polite villagers will only talk about who they’re not friends with / might dislike at a high friendship level

Crafting: instead of recipe cards you can read books (take one a day) in the Museum Library (Celeste runs it as well as the planetarium), or are given certain types of books by villagers with the relevant interest or NPCs - Tom will give you some to start out (furniture) and also sell all skill books

Cooking & baking: so many more recipes and you can do relevant mini games if you choose to do so! Giving a villager their fave food homemade will avoid them getting sick when it’s cold! It will also make them feel better after taking machine if the medicine doesn’t heal them the first time

Many cake options for birthdays and also event themes. You can also learn to cook from Franklin, he stops by occasionally to sell food at events! Joan and Daisy Mae will teach you turnip related recipes. Katie’s mum, Kaitlin, will teach you baking recipes and icing piping at her night class (at the restaurant or café)

More fruits & ingredients: all the New Leaf fruits return plus strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, red and white grapes, black currents. You can also make pasta. When sending food items they appear as a cake box or delivery box and open like a wrapped gift

Online & other stuff: Tortimer Island returns! A new plaza area for players? Shows featured player custom designs, showcases player homes and customised houses, you can auction items, race bikes with friends!

Custom designs: shirts, jumpers, hoodies, dresses, shorts & trousers, skirts, shoes, hats, face paint & accessories. You can change the length and style of each item!

I have more ideas probably but I can’t think of the rest rn, I might draw some concepts :]

[jacktrammell]

Unelegant Universe

06/12/2024

Transportation Accessibility Analysis for Unelegant Universe

A Google search leading to an “I Love New York” type web site revealed that visiting restaurants in Hell’s Kitchen was one of the site’s most recommended attractions in New York City for people who are wheelchair users.  As part of my study of the role of transportation and innovative technology in facilitating access for people with disabilities, I conducted a wheelchair experiment to test that out.  I started at the Hampton Inn on 337 West 39th Street in the Garment District.  Level one transportation is the motorized chair, which had little problem leaving the hotel through the automatic door openers, although the second/outer door was a little quick on the close.

Once on the sidewalk, there were level two transportation options.  In New York City that could be cab, bus, personal auto, subway, private van service, etc.  For people not using wheelchairs there are biking, scooter, and rickshaw options that obviously weren’t a good choice; Uber and other private rides are not often accessible.  A personal auto is also not recommended in Manhattan for nearly anyone due to congestion and parking costs.  The subway does not serve Hell’s Kitchen from that direction (and many subway stations remain inaccessible to wheelchair users, so that would need scouted out in advance even if it were an option).  The cost for a private van was prohibitive compared to bus or cab fare, so ultimately the realistic choices were walking (i.e., moving by chair), cab, or bus.

The New York Times reported that the wait time for an accessible cab had been reduced from 34 minutes to 13 minutes, but my calls to cab services and talks to locals suggested that it still would be at least a 30-minute wait, and probably longer.  That left bus and just walking (chairing).  A quick look at the bus routes showed that there would be two quick changes of routes, and a couple of blocks jaunt to a bus stop.  It seemed since it was a sunny day that maybe a relaxing walk (chair ride) would just be the best option.  (Sidenote: MTA claims that 100% of their buses are accessible; of the 13 I saw on our journey all had accessibility equipment; there was no way to check that all were working…)  Since the restaurant area of Hell’s Kitchen was in theory less than ten blocks away, I decided to just go on my own.

I turned to the right and immediately encountered a construction enclosure over the sidewalk, but unlike others I would soon pass through, this one was wide enough that someone using a chair could pass by someone walking by in the opposite direction.  I reached the corner of 39th and Ninth Avenue and turned right.  So far, so good.�� People, for some unnatural reason, seemed to want to steer clear of me, although personally I am starting to notice bad, uneven stretches of sidewalk that ultimately are a wear and tear on me, and on the chair, too.  I continued up Ninth past the bus garage and ultimately up to 42nd Street.  I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the charming stores or small cafes had an eight inch or so threshold to get into the door.

I crossed over Ninth, trying to ignore a couple of delivery bikes clearly violating traffic patterns, and headed toward 10th Avenue on 42nd Street.  For the first time, I encountered sidewalk construction coverings that only had room for my chair and not so much for another person to pass.  This caused some awkwardness for others but not so much for me as I know I am entitled to the right of way.  Turning right onto Tenth Avenue and entering Hell’s Kitchen proper, then heading NE I encounter my first missing curb cut.  Why here? I wondered.  But it wasn’t long before a city repair crew blocked another intersection which did have a curb cut; but one not available to me!

About 46th Street (I don’t want to be too specific and give away anyone’s real business) we reached the restaurant we had scoped out online in advance, and it turned out that they, too, had a significant threshold.  The woman at the entrance offered first to have us sit outside in a sidewalk seating area (which I definitely didn’t want to do), and then seemed to toy with the idea of her brother helping me and the chair in, but I could tell she knew she shouldn’t do that and I ultimately acquiesced to sitting outside.

The space was cramped.  The woman helpfully scooted one table to the side, but from my perspective that was ad hoc and kept someone else from sitting outside who might have wanted to.  None-the-less, the food was as good as advertised and it was a delightful meal.  The people there were genuinely kind, attentive, and fun to talk to.

Leaving the restaurant, we decided to cut back over on 46th Street to head back to the hotel, making essentially a big square pattern.  Within the first two blocks, a sidewalk was fully closed for a stretch and I had to backtrack and recross to the other side; there were also more stretches of buckled and rough sidewalk; there were more narrow construction sidewalk coverings; and there were people who sometimes put on the expression that I was the problem slowing them down.

By the time we returned to the hotel, I was thoroughly exhausted, physically and mentally.  To say that restaurants in Hell’s Kitchen are an ideal attraction for people with disabilities including wheelchair users seems a bit problematic…

###

Postscript.  I don’t normally use a wheelchair, but I conducted this experience on foot trying to imagine what it would actually be like.  Since transportation has been a major battleground over disability rights, and an incredible emerging technology over the last two-hundred years, transportation is one of the “innovation lens” through which I am trying gauge the impact of Artificial Intelligence on people with disabilities.  The moral of this short, mostly “true” story is: “Will the reality match the promise?” and “When has a new technology ever seriously changed people’s views about disability?”

My coming book on this is entitled: The Unelegant Universe, and I can be reached at j.k.trammell@msmary.edu if you have thoughts to share or would agree to be interviewed for the project.

[fabioafterdark]

sometimes i feel the urge to order something online just so i can track its journey. i love to observe the slow and unpredictable movement of an object across borders, through distribution centres, from one sorting office to another, slowly slowly it must be in a van now, maybe a courier has it on the back of their bike, its been undergoing a process of 'processing' for three hours and fortyseven minutes, can you hear the doorbell ring? ignore it, turn off the lights, nobody is home, footsteps retreating, oh no! delivery unsuccessful, i suppose they'll just have to start again and i will slither back to my computer and enter my order number and watch the object on the move once again, tracking it through the streets, my eyes like satellites inferring the location of my object and watching, always watching

[bikesolve]

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[sachyriel]

Last night I dreamt

I was working this gig-economy delivery service for some extra money and I had a bike. So I go to the pick up point and it's a bunch of packages and mail for an international student, ok cool. Pack it up in my backpack and start heading out to a nice part of downtown Ottawa. Get to the right street and I'm looking for the number but it skips upwards not by 2 but by 4. Go past it, circle around and check the back. These big brick buildings have a second address at the back, so 153 whatever street isn't visible at the front. Drop off the students stuff and tell him "if I were you I'd pay those bills before I forget" because somehow I know the contents of his mail, some of it was loose envelopes and some was parcels (from family and online orders). I don't think he takes my advice but he's not suspicious cause I hand it to him as a bunch of loose envelopes and packages. Very professional, me, giving unsolicited advice from the fact I saw his ISP on the envelope.

But this was my last (first and only) delivery of the day, so I'm off to the gig economy office to get my payout and reward. Cause they'd have an office? No apparently not, it's just a pick up point for getting paid and picking a coupon prize? I scratch off my prize... It's a couple of FREE TACOS ... From KFC? I didn't know KFC did Tacos?

I meet a friend from another job from a while back, he's on a bike and I'm walking. We're hanging out, going from a grocery store in his neighborhood (no longer downtown but still urban) and walk/biking to a convenience store. While we're going there he talks about why he doesn't get why people like fast food, especially KFC? IDK man, people like cheap and easy.

We get to the convenience store and I don't feel like spending money but I need to use the wifi, but thee. store cashier guy lets me use his phones hot spot, I update my map cause I'm too cheap to buy cell service (very realistic dream). I think about getting a medium drink but while I grab a cup other people come in and I have to wait in line. Good thing I didn't fill up the cup, this medium cup is 10$? Okay, but he rings it up as 14$? Bro I'm not paying 14$ for sugar water, he shrugs and me and my friend leave. I don't have my bike, but we're off to another convenience store.

Walk/biking down a bigger street in the neighborhood we get to the bigger convenience store. My friend has to go soon so he doesn't stay long. I'm looking at the baked goods and doughnuts, I pick up this weird pyramidal kind of glazed doughnut, it's got stripes on one side like a hand pie, but its made out of triangles like a pyramid and cut in half parallel to the striped side. Really interested in this pyramidal, flaky and sticky doughnut but I put it down and circle the baked goods.

[zaenaris]

**i actually thought about Inupi’s parents more than Koko’s because I had an half idea for a fic, but it would be too long and idk if i’d had time to multichapter,** hhoo =) could you tell us more about it? =)

more than a fic, it's just an idea, Inupi and Koko meeting with first Seishu's mom but the meeting is absolutely casual and not planned at all, like she agreed to drop something to Seishu, but another day, for some reason she presents another day without really having time to call Seishu, Koko thinks it's the courier (they ordered something online) and presents himself at the door in pitiful conditions since, like, he has so many problems after the KMG fight, disbanding, possible investigations etc (also maybe he has some visible hickey Inupi left on him, but Koko thinks it's just the delivery boy at the door, he just doesn't care lol) so the last person he expects to see at the door is Mama Inui.

And I love too think that the first thing they both says the moment they see the other is "oh fuck" (obviously they know each other and even if the haven't seen in years, they immediately recognize each other)

Idk why, I have this HC that Mama Inui was a former delinquent herself, bike, long skirt and all - I can't deny this HC is heavily influences by Tohru's mom, Kyoko Honda/Fruits Basket lol

So yeah, I don't think Mama Inui would inform Koko's parents, she perfectly understands the situation and she admits the Inuis and the Kokonois weren't the best parents when their kids needed them the most, but, even if it's not easy and she know Koko cut ties with his family, she encourage Koko to reflect on what to do

I didn't really thought about the plot or anything, it's just a scene that appeared in my mind lol

Inupi's dad is very much like Akane, very sweet, kind but firm in his beliefs

Both Seishu and Akane look like their mom, but Seishu in particular. She's obviously incredibly beautiful, but also scary if you don't know her, like a Valkyrie ahaha, but, just like Inupi, once you know her, she's the most loving and loyal person ever.

[quino7]

Delinquent Au Shirazu

In contrast with Saiko, he’s the spitting image of a delinquent. He’s vulgar, he’s got naturally blond hair, he’s a smoker, and he has a penchant for violence.

Because of unfortunate circumstances, he’s always been an outcast of sorts. He’s half Japanese, his mother leaving while he was young, he’s intimidating and has a face that’s always scared people away, he’s worn second hand clothes his entire life. Because of all of that, most of the adults in his life had given up on him at a young age. Was it really any surprise that he became a delinquent after that, he’s just one of those who slipped through the cracks of society

Even with all of that stated, none of those were the main reason he became a delinquent, in reality it was quite simple, crime pays. His sister got diagnosed with cancer when he was in his second year of middle school and he and his dad needed a way to pay for her treatment.

At first shirazu would just go around picking fights and robbing his victims. He’d also steal Bōsōzuku bikes, taking them apart to sell their valuable modified parts online for some quick cash. With all of that taking place, it’s no surprise he caught the eye of Aogiri, the dominant gang in the area.

He was forced to join up with the gang after they caught him trying to steal the bin brothers’ bike. They were originally just going to make an example out of him, but Eto admired his guts and offered (read forced) him to be an errand boy for the Bin bros. Once he was part of the gang, Eto covered his sister’s medical bills, important now that his main source of income was gone.

Shirazu was one of the members who got arrested when the cops raided their base in the sixth. Since he was still in middle school, he was able to escape most consequences by agreeing to go to 2nd academy once he entered high school.

After being separated from his previous gang, he’s managed to get a delivery job with his bike, with the income from that and his dads job, they’re still barely able to cover his sisters bills. That in mind, they don’t have much money to spend on anything else. Most of the food he gets are either school meals or shoplifted from convenience stores near him.

At his school he’s managed to find a gang of sorts. They’re really just a group of delinquents, but two of them have bikes and Urie insists on calling them a gang so Shirazu goes along with it.

[oral-history]

WHY AUDIO NEVER GOES VIRAL Is This Thing On? (One of the Best Pieces Ever)

Stan Alcorn

· Jan 15, 2014

With a community of creators uncomfortable with the value of virality, an audience content to watch grainy dashcam videos, and platforms that discourage sharing, is a hit-machine for audio possible? And is it something anyone even wants?

Skip Dolphin Hursh

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Last October, several dozen audiophiles gathered in a basement auditorium for an all-day conference about “the future of radio in a digital age.” Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian finished a talk he’s been giving to college campuses about the Internet and the transformative power it can unleash when it mobilizes a mass of people around an idea, a video, a website, a tweet. When he took questions, I asked: Why does the Internet so rarely mobilize around audio? What would it take to put audio on the Reddit front page?

Ohanian leaned back, contemplating the question, apparently for the first time. “That’s interesting,” he said. “I’m thinking of a lot of the viral content.” You could practically see the memes and GIFs pass across his brain. He started to point out that most viral videos are under three minutes, while the best audio storytelling was usually longer, but interrupted himself with a story about Upworthy.

When the founders pitched him on their plan — to make “socially good content” “go viral” — Ohanian invested “out of passion,” not because he thought it would work. Now Upworthy is one of the fastest growing media properties on the Internet. Sure, sound may not go viral today, but Ohanian is optimistic. “Probably someone here in the audience is going to show us all wrong,” he said, “and a year from now we’re going to look at the Upworthy for audio."

“So go make it.”

Easier said than done.

Cat Video Vs. The Cat’s Meow

Bianca Giaever has always been obsessed with radio. As a child, while she biked her newspaper delivery route, she listened to an iPod loaded exclusively with episodes of WBEZ’s “This American Life.” At Middlebury College, she stalked her classmates, dragging them to her dorm room to record interviews she edited into stories for the college station and smaller audiences online. “I was fully planning on working in radio,” she says. “My whole life.” That is until, the day after graduation, she became a viral video star.

When she painstakingly crafted moving audio narratives, her parents and brother listened. When she added video to her final college project, “The Scared is Scared” — a 6-year-old’s dream movie brought to life — “It just. Blew. Up.”

“At first I was like, ‘Wow. A lot of people are sharing this on Facebook,’” she recalls thinking, “‘I have such nice friends!’” Then it was friends of friends. Then strangers. By the time websites like Mashable and CBS News picked it up, she could only picture the audience as a number. Waiting on the tarmac for her post-grad vacation to begin, she watched on her phone as that number spiked into the thousands, then hundreds of thousands, seemingly crashing the site that hosted it. “These French people were yelling — because I had my phone on as we were taking off — that I was going to kill them,” she recalls. “They were like, ‘Is whatever you’re doing worth our possible death?’ And I was like, ‘Maybe? This is the biggest thing that’s happened in my life!’”

Of the 100 most-shared news articles on Facebook, three were from NPR, but none included audio. Two of these were reblogs of YouTube videos.

I’m a public radio reporter and this doesn’t happen in my milieu. There is no Google Sound, no BuzzFeed for audio, no obvious equivalent of Gangnam Style, Grumpy Cat or Doge. If you define “viral” as popularity achieved through social sharing, and audio as sound other than music, even radio stations’ most viral content isn’t audio — it’s video. A 17-minute video interview with Miley Cyrus at Hot 97 has nearly 2 million views. An off-the-rails BBC Radio 1 video interview with Mila Kunis: more than 12 million. In June 2013, the list of the 100 most-shared news articles on Facebook included three from NPR, but none included audio. Two of these stories were reblogs of YouTube videos (this one and this one), found on Gawker and Reddit.

“Audio never goes viral,” writes radio and podcast producer Nate DiMeo. “If you posted the most incredible story — literally, the most incredible story that has ever been told since people have had the ability to tell stories, it will never, ever get as many hits as a video of a cat with a moustache.”

It’s hardly a fair fight, audio vs. cat video, but it’s the one that’s fought on Facebook every day. DiMeo’s glum conclusion is an exaggeration of what Giaever reads as the moral of her own story: “People will watch a bad video more than [they will listen to] good audio,” she says.

Those in the Internet audio business tend to give two explanations for this disparity. “The greatest reason is structural,” says Jesse Thorn, who hosts a public radio show called “Bullseye” and runs a podcast network called Maximum Fun. “Audio usage takes place while you’re doing something else.” You can listen while you drive or do the dishes, an insuperable competitive advantage over text or video, which transforms into a disadvantage when it comes to sharing the listening experience with anyone out of earshot. “When you’re driving a car, you’re not going to share anything,” says Thorn.

The second explanation is that you can’t skim sound. An instant of video is a still, a window into the action that you can drag through time at will. An instant of audio, on the other hand, is nothing. “If I send someone an article, if they see the headline and read a few things, they know what I want them to know,” a sound artist and radio producer told me. “If I send someone audio, they have to, like… listen to it.” It’s a lot to ask of an Internet audience.

For some radio makers, social media incompatibility is a sign of countercultural vitality. Thorn has called his own work “anti-viral,” and believes that entertaining his niche audience is “still so much better than making things that convince aunts to forward them to each other.”

“That’s A-U-N-T-S,” he clarifies.

But when I suggest the situation doesn’t seem to concern him, he interrupts, “To say that it doesn’t concern me — it concerns me profoundly. I think about it all the time.” In his view, social media warps our consumption patterns, and not for the better. “It’s a serious problem in my life. And not just in my media-making life, in my day-to-day life.”

After Giaever’s video went viral, she turned down an internship at “This American Life” — “my dream since I was nine” — to become a “filmmaker in residence” for Adobe. She gets paid to make her own movies, which she still approaches as radio stories with added visuals. It’s the proven way to get people on the Internet to listen. “The entire concept of what I’m doing seems problematic to me,” she says. “What’s so beautiful about radio is you can’t compete with what people are imagining in their heads, right? And yet I still continue to do it.”

Because audio doesn’t go viral.

Except that sometimes, it does.

Kids Say The Darndest Things

Most viral audio wasn’t intended for the Internet. Recordings made for some other purpose are excerpted and uploaded: voicemails, speeches, and calls to 911 and customer service hotlines.

One category of viral audio is the document, bits of audio that serve as evidence in a news story. It’s easy to imagine text transcripts being distributed in audio’s absence: Bradley Manning’s testimony, the 911 calls of the Trayvon Martin case, Obama’s oft-quoted “clinging to guns and religion.” The primary advantage of audio over text is that it lets the listener confirm a quote with her own ears and determine if meaning is altered by nuances of emphasis or emotion.

Another category of viral audio is the rant or comic diatribe, where emphasis and emotion are the entire point. For instance, an irate San Francisco Chronicle reader chewing out the editor for referring to a “pilotless drone,” or a voicemail becomes an increasingly laugh-filled narration of the aftermath of a car crash. A transcript of these would be like lyrics without a melody.

Somewhere in between these two is a subcategory that could be called “celebrities gone wild”: Alec Baldwin cursing out his 11-year-old daughter, Christian Bale cursing out his director of photography, Mel Gibson cursing out his ex-girlfriend, etc.

These brief, emotional, sometimes-newsworthy clips of people speaking have cousins in viral video. In fact, the two are sometimes difficult to distinguish. Mitt Romney’s infamous “47% comment” was captured and distributed as a video featuring blurry donors’ backs. A recent viral “video” titled, “Potty Talk! [Original] 3 year old contemplates the effects of his diet on the toilet” is merely a shaky shot of a bathroom door. When documenting a primarily auditory event from the vantage point of a single recording device, adding a video camera to the microphone gives slightly more information, and the advantage of keeping the eyes occupied.

But these amateur, one-shot videos are a small and shrinking section of the viral video pool. “We’re seeing a lot more professional work in [the viral video] space, and I don’t just mean advertisers,” says YouTube trends manager Kevin Allocca. The “top trending videos” of 2013 were all intentionally shot and edited for an Internet audience: music videos (“What Does The Fox Say?”) and ads (Volvo’s “epic split” with Jean-Claude Van Damme) but also low-budget productions like the Norwegian army’s “Harlem Shake.” They all have had over 90 million views.

Analogous audio — deliberately constructed and virally distributed — is a rarer and more recent phenomenon.

Ask a public radio journalist for an example of viral audio, and one piece comes up again and again: “Two Little Girls Explain The Worst Haircut Ever.” It’s two minutes and fifty seven seconds of cute, as five-year-old Sadie and three-year-old Eva tell the story of an ill-advised haircut to their patient interviewer and father, WNPR reporter Jeff Cohen. For public radio, Cohen has covered gangs, unemployment, and the aftermath of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary school. He won a magazine writing award for a story in the Hartford Courant about Connecticut’s first Iraq war widow.

“I’ve done a lot of work as a reporter that I’m pretty proud of,” he says. “I will never be recognized for anything for the rest of my life, except for this.”

It, too, resembles a viral video: it’s short, self-contained and driven by cute children. But not only does it lack any images of said children, it isn’t a straightforward record of what unfolded in front of the microphone. Cohen recorded two interviews, one with each daughter, and then carefully edited them into a fast-paced, seamless whole. Unlike Alec Baldwin’s voicemail, “Two Little Girls” is a showcase of audio’s power to create what appears to be an unedited version of reality, but is in fact a tightly constructed story, with a beginning, middle and end.

To explain why millions of people have listened to “Two Little Girls” — and why this is still so exceptional — you have to look at its convoluted path to fame.

What We Mean When We Talk About ‘Viral’

Taken literally, “viral” brings to mind an infectious agent bumping around inside its host, spreading accidentally by breath or touch. When “viral marketing” emerged in the 1990s, the medical referent was apt. The disease vector typically took the form of email and “virals” — as such ads were then called — that lived in the inbox. Invisible to the wider world, they spread from individual to individual, as when Hotmail stuck a sign-up ad beneath its users’ signatures. Or when the movie “American Psycho” sent compulsively forwardable emails from its psychotic main character, Patrick Bateman.

Today, those seeking to “go viral” have the same essential goal — to increase their audience by reaching the audience’s audience (and their audience, ad infinitum) — but the web has changed beyond the dynamics of disease transmission. Instead of invisible, one-to-one emails, today’s Internet infections spread by a cascade of publicly visible, one-to-many “likes,” “shares,” “tweets,” and “reblogs,” accelerated and amplified by an expanding web publishing industry. “Sharing” implies a deliberate effort, but social media sharing skews toward a mix of self-representation and what Tumblr creative technologist Max Sebela refers to as “speaking in content”: You might share Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” not because you want people to watch the video, but to make a joke about the fact that today is Friday.

“How does it happen,” YouTube’s Kevin Allocca asked in a 2011 speech called “Why Videos Go Viral.” “Three things: tastemakers, communities of participation, and unexpectedness.”

Tastemakers are like virus broadcasters, picking up outstanding, or “unexpected,” Internet phenomena that might otherwise never spread beyond their initial communities, and spraying their spores onto larger followings.

For Cohen’s “Two Little Girls,” the key tastemaker, without whom it may well have languished in Internet obscurity, was Gawker’s Neetzan Zimmerman. (Note: I spoke with Zimmerman before he announced his plans to leave Gawker to become editor-in-chief of a social network startup called Whisper.)

Zimmerman is the closest thing to a one-man embodiment of what he calls “the viral industry.” When Gawker hired him in early 2012, his boss A.J. Daulerio approvingly called him, “a total freak” for his ability to methodically scour the corners of the Internet for the video, memes, and Internet ephemera that would grow to popularity after being seeded with Gawker’s audience. “Before I used to do basically 20 hours a day,” Zimmerman says. “Now there’s a night shift, so I don’t have to worry as much.” In the last three months of 2013, his posts were responsible for more than half of Gawker’s pageviews and two thirds of the site’s unique visitors — nearly 40 million in total — according to Gawker’s public stats. For comparison, that’s more than 1/3 of the traffic of the entire the New York Times website.

Zimmerman’s work is a more extreme version of the new, upside-down dynamic of web publishing. Instead of the publisher’s megaphone guaranteeing its articles an audience, the publisher only has an audience insofar as the articles “go viral.” Tens of thousands of readers see most of the dozen items Zimmerman posts each day, but millions see his blockbusters.

For those hits, the content and the clickbait headline are as important as the timing. He describes “going viral” like surfing: boarding a wave at the earliest possible point. “You don’t want to wait too long because you’ll miss that initial cresting,” he says. “It’s a race against everyone else.”

Zimmerman chooses what to cover by scanning for signs of that wave rather than looking deeply at the constituent molecules of content. “The way the system works is I keep a mental note of instances of occurrence on a certain tier of sites,” he says. This lets him identify “viral momentum,” even when his personal judgment might suggest otherwise. “The purpose of the system is to override my biases and to override whatever personal feelings I have.”

Sometimes this lets Zimmerman not only beat the competition, but also popularize something that might otherwise never bubble into the mainstream from a less-trafficked corner of the Internet. But the system — Zimmerman’s and that of the “viral industry” more generally — has an obvious bias of its own toward content that is already being shared on the Internet.

For Bianca Giaever’s “Scared” video, first college and radio friends shared it on Facebook, then Vimeo made it a “staff pick,” then major media websites like CBS News, BuzzFeed, Jezebel and Mashable blogged about it. Within three days, hundreds of thousands were watching.

For Cohen, it took four months, and a lot of luck.

‘Invisible As the Radio Waves Themselves’

Jeff Cohen had interviewed his daughters many times, in the same way other fathers shoot home videos. “I’m sappy that way,” he says. But he thought enough of the haircut piece to play it for colleagues at the radio station. “It was about five minutes long, and my boss and friends said, ‘Cut it down to three minutes and put it on PRX.’”

PRX is the Public Radio Exchange, and as the name suggests, its website is a marketplace where station managers shop for stories. After Cohen uploaded his new, tighter version of “Two Little Girls” in February of 2012, it was discovered and licensed by a handful of local stations: KOSU in central Oklahoma, KUT in west Texas, KSJD in southwest Colorado.

But to the Internet, all this was invisible as the radio waves themselves. “PRX is designed as a business-to-business marketplace,” says PRX CEO Jake Shapiro. “We’re not designed for listeners… yet.”

The circuitous route that “Two Little Girls” took to Gawker didn’t start with PRX, but at a monthly event called “Ear Cave” hosted by one of Cohen’s colleagues at a coffee shop in Hartford, Connecticut. “I call it BYOB, BYOE,” says the event’s creator Catie Talarski. “Bring Your Own Beer, Bring Your Own Ear.” She dims the lights, sets up chairs, and projects a photograph of an old radio, so the audience has something to look at while a chosen curator presses play on a laptop. That April, “Two Little Girls” was the grand finale.

“It was just a huge hit,” recalls Adam Prizio, an insurance auditor who was in the audience that night. Two months later, Prizio, with the voices of Eva and Sadie bouncing around his head, decided to google it. Finding the audio on PRX, he posted a link to community blog MetaFilter, with no description other than a mysterious quote (“It happens three times in every life. Or twice. Or once.”) and the categorization “SLAudio,” a riff on “SLYT” (Single Link YouTube).

Overnight, the comments swelled. “Amazing.” “Adorable.” “Better than the Car Guys.” “OH MY GOD THIS IS FUCKING BALLER.” There were fewer comments than a link published ten minutes later — “Fundamentalist Christian schools in Louisiana will soon be citing the existence of the Loch Ness monster as proof that evolution is a myth” — but they were comments of single-minded delight. The next morning, Zimmerman saw the thread in his morning Internet regimen, and within an hour had put up his own post that would go on to gather some 1.3 million views entitled, “Public Radio Reporter Interviews His Two Little Girls After One Gives the Other the ‘Worst Haircut Ever.’”

“It didn’t really matter that it was audio,” says Zimmerman. “It was more about how it was being received online.”

In one sense, it followed the same trajectory as all viral content, or what YouTube’s Kevin Allocca has defined as a combination of “community participation” and “tastemakers.” Something becomes popular in a niche community, whose public enthusiasm attracts the notice of a tastemaker, who then repackages it to suit a larger audience, where the entire process repeats on a larger scale.

But really “Two Little Girls” succeeded in spite of its immediate community. Cohen first had to be convinced to put it online at all, and even then it was on a website searched only by public radio station managers. While Cohen says it made the rounds of his Facebook friends, it only took off after audio enthusiasts heard it at a coffee shop.

Compared to other media, even young, tech-savvy audiophiles are less likely to share audio on a weekly basis, and when they do, they’re more likely to use email instead of social media.

The barriers that nearly blocked “Two Little Girls” from finding a larger audience are a mix of culture and technology. While home videos make the leap to YouTube all the time, audio makers tend to keep their scraps to themselves. When I took an unscientific poll (n=60), it backed up what I heard anecdotally: Compared to other media, even young, tech-savvy audiophiles are less likely to share audio on a weekly basis, and when they do, they’re more likely to use email instead of social media.

Several echoed the sentiment of occasional radio producer Laura Griffin, who said, “I tend to assume that most people don’t have the same patience and appreciation for audio that I do, so I am selective about what audio I share and with whom.”

Others pointed to technological limitations. The files themselves are large and often forbid downloading. Audio-hosting websites employ an inconsistent potpourri of players, many of which disallow the embedding that has helped make online video ubiquitous. (Some PRX audio can be embedded, but Gawker had enough trouble with its player that they uploaded the audio into their own.) “I often don’t share NPR audio because their player isn’t embeddable and requires going to another website to listen,” notes multimedia producer Will Coley.

There is one standard format for distributing digital audio, but rather than resolving these barriers to sharing, it may be their most perfect expression: the podcast.

The Podcast Problem

If you don’t know what a podcast is, you’re in the majority.

Technically, it’s an RSS feed containing links to files (“podcast” typically implies an audio file). Using podcast-listening (formerly “podcatching”) software, you can “subscribe,” setting your computer or smartphone to automatically download the new and get rid of the old.

It’s hard to appreciate in 2013 the enthusiasm with which this simple idea was met by the mid-2000s media.

“I haven’t seen this much buzz around a single word since the Internet,” computer programmer Carl Franklin told the New York Times in 2004.

By letting everyone become broadcasters (or really “podcasters”), it was supposed to disrupt radio in a way that was predicted to parallel that other online media format with a horrible portmanteau name: blogging. In fact, the name “podcast” was tossed off by the Guardian's Ben Hammersley between the alternatives “audioblogging” and “GuerillaMedia.”

It wasn’t all hype. Anyone can start a podcast, just as anyone can blog. The podcast did close the loop, in its clunky way, between where people download and where they typically listen. And aficionados can point to a long list of programs, especially covering technology and — more recently — comedy, which never would have existed otherwise.

12% of Americans listened to a podcast in the last month, the same percentage as three years ago.

But while much of online publishing now takes the form of the blog, interest in podcasting seems to have flatlined. According to Nielsen Audio (formerly Arbitron), 12% of Americans listened to a podcast in the last month, the same percentage as three years ago. It is a substantial niche, but smaller than the percentage of people who create online videos, and less than a sixth the number who watch them.

“There was a huge wave of initial excitement around podcasting changing and disrupting and turning upside-down radio seven years ago, or longer,” says PRX’s Jake Shapiro. “And then it kind of just petered out.”

While the number of podcasts has proliferated, the vast majority of episodes have audiences in the double or triple digits, judging from the experience of podcast hosting giant Libsyn. “If you want to do the average, our mean podcast? Now you’re looking at like 200, 250 downloads per episode,” Libsyn’s Rob Walch told NextMarket Insights's Michael Wolf. The majority of top podcasts, far from being grassroots disruptors, are major public radio shows: “This American Life,” “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me,” and “Radiolab.” It’s the dominant way of finding an on-demand audio audience on the Internet, but it’s more Hulu than YouTube.

The absence of disruption is, in part, baked into the technology. “It’s clearly the number one barrier to wider listenership,” says Jesse Thorn. Apple gave the format a big boost when it brought it into the iTunes store in 2005, but that walled garden of a market has come to delimit the podcast’s reach. To watch a YouTube video, you click play, wherever it exists on the web. With another click you can immediately share it by putting a player in the feed of your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or even LinkedIn accounts.

To listen to a podcast, however, you have to search for it on an app or in the iTunes store, sign up for it, wait for it to download. (Of course there are other ways to download podcasts, but the majority of podcast downloads occur through Apple.) Click “share” on Apple’s podcasting app, and you’ll be prompted to post an RSS feed, which is a bit like trying to share a new Tom Junod article and instead passing on a password that readers can use to subscribe to Esquire.

These hurdles don’t hamper podcasts that are already well known. Thorn’s podcast audience has been growing steadily by approximately 50% each year. “Radiolab” and “This American Life” — public radio shows that are among the most popular podcasts and the aesthetic guiding lights for young public radio producers — are both approaching a million digital listens for each new episode. For these shows, the occasional episode will get shared more than others, but that “viral” bump is on the order of 10 to 20 percent, and even that seems driven less by social media than old-fashioned word of mouth. “Google is a much bigger referrer to any given episode [than Facebook],” says WNYC’s Jennifer Houlihan Roussel. In other words, podcasts don’t go viral. Nor are they designed to.

As the Guardian’s technology editor, Charles Arthur, points out in the Independent back in 2005, “Podcasts take content and put it into a form that can’t be indexed by search engines or be speed-read, and which you can’t hyperlink to (or from). A podcast sits proud of the flat expanse of the Internet like a poppy in a field. Until we get really good automatic speech-to-text converters, such content will remain outside the useful, indexable web.”

A Cloud Atlas?

If there is any company attempting to create a modern web alternative to the podcast, it’s SoundCloud.

“Podcasting: It’s a fairly old school method of distribution,” says its co-founder and CTO Eric Wahlforss. “We are certainly of the opinion that SoundCloud is the superior way of broadcasting your show across the web.”

If you’ve played audio from Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr, you’ve likely seen it: the slow crawl of orange across a gray waveform. This omnipresent, embeddable player is what has most clearly attracted the moniker “YouTube for audio.” Hoping to make sound as sharable as video, SoundCloud delivers this content via a streaming player instead of a dressed-up file download.

In a Facebook message, data scientist Lada Adamic told me: “Soundcloud does seem to have a lot of sharing activity (everything is dwarfed by YouTube but soundcloud is holding its own) [sic].” SoundCloud was the 11th most commonly submitted domain on Reddit as of March 27, 2013, according to Reddit data scientist Chad Birch, above the Huffington Post, the Guardian and Vimeo. The number of YouTube domains submitted was almost 22 times as high.

But the SoundCloud content accumulating most on social media isn’t what the company calls “audio.” “In our world, in terms of viral content, the real viral content is actually music,” Wahlforss says.

For non-music “audio,” SoundCloud lets broadcasters and podcasters have it both ways, encouraging them to make their shows available on SoundCloud’s platform, while also creating a podcast-ready RSS feed. “We are trying to blur that distinction a little bit,” says Wahlforss.

“We’re on SoundCloud because they have a nice player for sharing on Facebook and Twitter,” says Seth Lind of “This American Life.” But the total plays of their hour-long episodes on SoundCloud peak at roughly 3% of its digital listenership, and are usually under 1%, hovering around 5,000. A look at SoundCloud’s “trending audio” page presents a similar picture: podcast episodes and radio shows, with listenership in the hundreds or low thousands.

Clearly, technology alone doesn’t ensure the virality of an hour-long show with a headline designed for consistency rather than clickability (e.g.: “#513: 129 Cars” from “This American Life”). “It’s probably not going to be as popular as a Gangnam Style,” Lind notes, dryly. The audio that has gone viral takes a different tact: short, tailored specifically for SoundCloud, and providing a near-immediate pay-off that fulfills the headline’s promise.

Much of it is some mix of rant and newsworthy document, like AOL’s Tim Armstrong firing Patch’s creative director, or Charles Ramsey’s 911 call after he helped rescue three kidnapped women in Cleveland.

But the most heard, and most truly social example of SoundCloud’s viral audio is a New Zealand radio host’s dramatic reading of a series of text messages from a one-night stand gone unhinged: “This Is What Crazy Looks Like Via Text Messaging.” “Fletch & Vaughan” host Vaughan Smith found the texts on BuzzFeed and performed them as part of a four hour-long drive-time show. He then uploaded it to SoundCloud and shared it on Facebook to appease callers who wanted to hear the skit — but only that one skit — again.

“At the end of the weekend it hit a million plays,” says Smith. “It was mental.” With more than six million plays to date, more people have heard the version from “Fletch & Vaughan” than have read the BuzzFeed article it was adapted from — a triumph of sound over text.

It couldn’t have gone viral without a player as sharable as SoundCloud, but perhaps more importantly, it couldn’t have gone viral without the active unearthing of comedic gold buried within a longer broadcast. “In public radio, only within the last few years has there been a big value seen in disaggregating content from shows,” says PRX managing director John Barth. “And there’s still a pretty big debate about that.” These concerns echo the now-largely-obsolete resistance of other media to the Internet. They want listeners to experience the whole enchilada, not take the ingredients and re-contextualize them.

As for creating a whole new audio cuisine — work cooked up specifically for a SoundCloud audience — the successful examples are elusive. “We mostly use it as a promotional tool really,” says Smith. “We use it to promote the podcast.”

The Message Is The Medium

Last October, Reddit's Alexis Ohanian told a basement full of audiophiles to go make "the Upworthy for audio," but in a sense, we already have the Upworthy for audio: Upworthy. With its scientifically-selected, clickbait headlines, it  is the reason nearly two million people have heard the future president of Ireland Michael Higgins dress down rightwing talk show host Michael Graham (“A Tea Partier Decided To Pick A Fight With A Foreign President. It Didn’t Go So Well.”) It’s the reason hundreds of thousands have heard Geoffrey Gevalt tell a small poignant story, set to music, about his daughter (“A Toddler Gets Totally Profound In a Way Most Adults Don’t”) and Summer Puente about her father (“Every Night This Dad Falls Asleep in Front of the TV. There’s a Beautiful Reason Why.”)

The Upworthy sector of the Internet economy isn’t just healthy, it’s insatiable and omnivorous in its appetite for content it can coax people into clicking and sharing. “Whether it’s audio, whether it’s video, whether it’s still images, whether it’s text: my system remains pretty much the same,” says Neetzan Zimmerman. “For me it doesn’t really matter.”

The viral industry can help solve audio’s skimming problem, but only if it can find the content in the first place. “Radio doesn’t do a very good job of marketing itself to the viral industry, for whatever reason,” says Zimmerman. “Maybe it thinks too highly of itself, or thinks of ‘viral’ as a cheapening of its content. I really disagree with that. I think there’s a lot there to be mined, and a lot that gets ignored.”

“Marketing” makes it sound like radio makers simply need to do a better job of drawing attention to their work. And it’s true: active, public sharing directed at non-audiophiles is how Zimmerman found “Two Little Girls.” If there were a website that showed what audio was “trending” in some smaller community, Zimmerman says it would become part of his system. “One hundred percent. No doubt about it.”

There are also plenty of short podcasts and single-serving radio stories that are poorly labeled on obscure web pages or presented in unembeddable players. “Nobody that I’ve seen, even the best of them, spends time thinking about how to create the metadata or the descriptions: the things that might actually catch your attention,” says PRX’s Jake Shapiro.

More fundamental than marketing is the question of where audio makers see a market. “So far nobody is producing audio, really, for an audience that might be scanning for things to enjoy,” says Shapiro.

“It’s somewhat of a chicken and egg thing,” he says, “Until producers have any kind of confidence that there’s an audience or some money to be made — or preferably both — they’re not really targeting it.”

“If it can’t be used for pornography it’s never going to be the most popular thing.”

Perhaps Facebook will tweak its algorithms to favor audio. Perhaps SoundCloud or PRX or Apple will make a social alternative to podcasting. “It’s possible that someone will make this app that’s all about sharing audio that will be the next Snapchat,” suggests Seth Lind. “That’s obviously not going to happen,” he quickly adds, to make sure I know he’s joking. “If it can’t be used for pornography it’s never going to be the most popular thing.”

But Jeff Cohen and “Fletch & Vaughan” demonstrate that audio makers don’t have to wait for a deep shift in technology to court a viral audience. They would, however, have to create audio not for already-dedicated radio and podcast listeners, but for the distracted, impatient crowd that is the web. Audio enthusiasts would have to evangelize on that work’s behalf, not just in coffee shops or emails to each other, but online, loudly, with the same manipulative, click-chasing techniques wielded by the rest of the web.

The day “Two Little Girls” went viral, Jeff Cohen tweeted: “I fear I may disappoint new Twitter followers once they realize that I mostly write on Hartford, government, and healthcare. Not my kids…” That is still more or less his beat, though he does also have a children’s book (“Eva and Sadie and the Worst Haircut EVER!”) due out this summer.

“I don’t know anything about the Internet, really,” Jeff Cohen says. But the way he sees it, although he got lucky, he also made his own luck.

“I didn’t cut anybody’s hair. But when you see an opportunity, you take advantage of it.”

Stan Alcorn is a print, radio and video journalist based in New York City. He regularly reports for WNYC, Marketplace and NPR and is a staff writer for Fast Company's Co.Exist.

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@wvsteria || Shmi for Jacen

.｡.:*☆ "Excuse me," Shmi started, giving the young man a small smile as she did.

"I am looking for this adress." she had found an add online from someone selling a bike, and well, Shmi really needed one. Like, the one she was using daily was not in the best shape anymore. And she would not be able to do any deliveries without it.

"I really thought I could find it myself, but it seems I ended up getting lost instead."