#THIRTY FIVE DOLLARS. PER SECOND OF ANIMATION CREATED.

[butchpeabody]

this is like the 15th time that insane labor issues at spindlehorse have been brought up can we stop supporting vivenne already

[bandaigaeru]

Virtual Reality - Bang Chan

synopsis: a game enters pop culture where any risk is worth taking. warnings: scenarios that may invoke anxiety, swearing word count: 10k

i.

"Are you gonna slow down any?" you inquired playfully as Changbin slurped his noodles up. He glanced up momentarily with the eyes of a child who just got caught doing something they shouldn't have. Without commenting, he returned his gaze to his noodles.

You release a breath somewhere between irritation and boredom, dropping your chopsticks into your half-full noodle cup and pushing it towards him. Even if he was about to be full from his noodles, you knew he'd make room to finish yours. Noodles are noodles. And to him, all noodle lives matter.

"Why are we even in the mall if all you're gonna do is eat noodles?" you pout as subtle impatience tinges your words. For thirty minutes, you had sat there. Simply staring at one another while the traffic of people encloses you in the food court.

"I told you already," Changbin briefly states, swiping at the grease residing at the corner of his lip.

He wants to get this game that, in all honesty, was probably a waste of his paycheck. At the same time, he didn't even need to work considering the wealth circulating around his family. So could you really complain?

As you roll your eyes, he scoffs, a pointer finger flying up, "Don't give me the 'tude, young lady."

"'Tude? Are you an elderly man chastising his grandchild?" you lean forward contently now that you have gotten the boy to focus on something other than his food. He snags your noodle cup and shoves his chopsticks around it.

"Yes, Y/N. Do not insult my vocabulary," he attempted to say with a straight face. Halfway through his words, a giggle erupted from his stomach and invaded the air like toxic gas.

Changbin swallows the final cluster of your noodles before standing. A laugh still clung desperately to his words as he says, "C'mon, let's go get the game of the year."

The busy mall was accompanied by the chatter of teenage girls and their cliques. It smelled like cheap perfume and high school memories. You couldn't help but smile at the girls staring Changbin down like he was a cute animal in a petting zoo because if you had known Changbin in high school, you probably would have done the same.

While Changbin ran into the game store to pick up his preordered copy of Risks, you waited in the leather massaging recliners just outside. Who would think that a single dollar could send you into a heaven on earth?

Despite the fact that you were in a state of ultimate tranquility, you couldn't help but glance into the GameStop to assure yourself Changbin was still there among the crowd. It's not like he could go anywhere, yet still, you were scared he'd get kidnapped. Or stabbed. Or both.

Finally, he emerges from the store with a white bag containing a VR set and the game. He advances towards you with light steps. If every step could make a sound to represent his emotions, they'd be squeaking like a little puppy.

"They're doing a giveaway for a free copy of Risks," Changbin states as he relaxes into the recliner to the left of you. He didn't even need to pay to be sent into dreamland.

"Nice," you mumble, eyes falling shut as you could finally relax into the massager.

"I signed you up for it, gave them your embarrassing email and everything," Changbin teases, reaching to tickle your chin.

You jump away from him, eyes shooting open, "You didn-"

"Oh, but I did. Shibalover99," he interrupts and smiles broadly.

Your cheeks grow hot with shame. Darn you, Y/N, aged thirteen for choosing the thing you thought best represented you at that moment in time. You return to the mold you had previously created, shoulders slouching. Your mediocre day felt a little more mediocre now.

"Chin up, you know I wouldn't do that to you. I signed Jisung up for it. And Seungmin. And maybe Chan," Changbin stands, adjusting the way his jeans rested on his hips before pulling you from the recliner with a tug of your wrist.

You look at him weird when the realization of what he said hits you, "Jisung? As in the Jisung who is prone to epileptic seizures? Your roommate Jisung?"

Changbin stifles a laugh. "Yes, my roommate Jisung, the one prone to seizures."

"Changbin!" you shout, swinging at his chest in dismay. He stumbles for a second, taking the blow like a knife to the chest. Dramatic, per usual.

"No, but really, I signed you up. Using my email," he assures, sticking his pinky up to kindle a promise.

You roll your eyes, ignoring the proposal.

The fresh fall breeze kissed the patches of bare skin of your arms as you emerge from the mall. You inhale sharply, nostalgia hitting from when you were a kid and about to go Trick or Treating with your best friends. You can't help but smile down at your shoes because of the memories. Autumn was that season. And no one could argue otherwise. Not even Changbin, who thought winter, of all seasons, was the superior.

ii.

A month passes like a night's sleep and winter was beginning to show its symptoms. You were bidding goodbye to Halloween, pumpkin everything, and sweaters for the downgrade of Christmas, awkwardly big coats, and ice storms. On the bright side, winter break was merely a week away. That means Christmas was within ten days, and Changbin was joyous, to say the very least.

Jisung had sent you a video of the boy jumping around their dorm while singing "Silver Bells" in a very exaggeratedly deep voice. At the very end of the video, the camera pans to Chan's disgusted face and zooms in dramatically. You shook your head in awe as you typed out a short response claiming you were concerned for all of their sanity.

Merely two minutes later, you received a FaceTime call from none other than Jisung. A couple of seconds go by and you can feel the urgency through the phone as the ringtone is one vibration away from ending the call. Finally, you swipe across the screen. Jisung's, too close to the screen, face invades your sight.

"Why did you answer so late? I'm about to have a fucking seizure," Jisung hyperventilates. In the background of the call, you could hear Chan's desperate cries for help as Changbin's inescapable singing resonates.

You smile to yourself as a laugh tickles your throat, dropping your phone on your bed and letting Jisung look at the dullness of your dorm's ceiling while you return to the homework waiting on your laptop. "Is it necessary to call when I'm doing a psych test?"

"First of all, why are you taking a test at home? Second of all, are you going to ignore the fact my life is on the line right now?" Another scream emerges from the other side and you fight the temptation to cackle.

"Have you never had a take-home test? You poor soul," you trail off. Again, you ignored the second half of his statement, but he didn't seem to notice this time. Or, at least he didn't care to comment on it once more.

After a particularly bad note from Changbin, Jisung whines in exasperation. "Can I please come to your dorm? Is Jihyo there?"

"She's not here, no. So I guess you can come over. Just don't let Changbin follow you," you sigh, glancing around at the mess of your dorm. If he's coming over, you should probably clean up.

"Thank you Y/N! I'll be over in twenty!" he yells gratefully, hanging up before you have a chance to respond.

A heavy breath escapes your slightly parted lips as your back slouches over. You rub your hands over your bare face as if to shake you into reality. Through your fingers, you look at the laptop. Three questions left. So if you gave yourself time to finish this test, you'd lose five minutes. With the remaining fifteen, you could definitely clean yourself and your room up a little. Yeah, you can do that.

But Jisung is the worst at estimating time. Just as you were closing your laptop and pushing yourself off of your bed, there was a knock at your door.

"God damn it, Jisung," you mutter under your breath as you rush to the door. As your hand gripped the doorknob, you glanced down at your clothes. A sweater you had been using as pajamas for the past week and gym shorts from high school that were way too comfy to be classified as gym shorts. Whatever, it's too late for you to change anyway.

"You said twenty minutes," you blankly state as you swing the door open. Beside Jisung stood the blond boy who you'd seen around campus, but never grew to knew. He was looking left and right, but never to you.

Jisung pushes past you, grabbing Chan's wrist and dragging him inside. He closes the door behind him quickly, resting his back against it and releasing a sigh of relief.

"Changbin chased us all the way here, screaming 'Hey There Delilah!' That's not even a Christmas song!" Jisung panted, a bead of sweat falling from his chin and onto the fuzzy gray rug you had laid among the tiled floor.

You shake your head as you advance to your bed. As you move your laptop to the desk beside you, Chan and Jisung fight over a beanbag on Jihyo's side of the room.

A soft knock comes from the other side of the door and Jisung flinches, throwing himself into Chan's arms. You could hear the soft singing of "Feliz Navidad" from the little crack beneath the door.

Chan tries pushing the clinging boy away from him with all of the power in his body. Flailing his arms and legs all while trying not to kick Jisung in the face on accident.

While the two boys were distracted with whatever they were doing, you got up, moving swiftly to the door. You quietly open it, pressing a finger to your lips to silence Changbin's singing. He enters your dorm with light steps before he pounces on the two boys practically cuddling on the floor.

"Merry Christmas!" Changbin screams as he puts all of his body weight on both boys.

"Y/N!" Jisung yells out as he sputters, "how could you betray us like this?"

Nearly three minutes pass of straight screaming while you watch like a bored parent with your arms across your chest. Jihyo walks in behind you, taking the empty spot beside you as if it were made for her.

"Is this what happens when I'm gone?" she inquires, mocking your stance.

You glance at her. "Yeah, pretty much."

She nods, slightly amused. Finally, she takes a step forward. Wobbling a foot over Changbin's back for a second, she kicks him over. The boys break away from each other abruptly when they see her.

They jump to their feet, bowing in apology. "Sorry, Jihyo," they say in chorus.

"You know," Chan starts for the door, "I think we should get going. We'll see you later, Y/N."

As he passes you, he delivers a short smile. It sends a party of butterflies to your stomach that confuses you for a second.

The moment the door closes, Jihyo tosses her bag to the floor beside her bed and lies down. "Who was blondie? He was cute."

"Oh, Chan? He's friends with Jisung and Changbin. I don't know him that much, though," you state quickly.

"You two would be cute together," she smiles, a mocking tune in her voice. It's as if she can read your mind sometimes. More specifically, your feelings.

"His face is annoying," you roll your eyes, returning to your own bed. Although, that statement was a complete lie. You just knew that if you stayed quiet, she would continue to tease you. Given that, if the butterflies continued to appear and you kept saying bad things about him, you'd convince yourself that it'd be true.

iii.

Christmas was spent at Changbin's mansion of a home. Your family was out of town on their annual trip to New York, and you weren't necessarily invited, so you really had nowhere else to go. Plus, the Seo family was very open to new members of the family and they treated you no differently than they would Changbin.

On the morning of Christmas, you were awoken by the impatient child that is Changbin with Jisung looking amusedly over his shoulder. Your whines and groans go ignored as Changbin tugs at your wrist like a child.

"Y/N," Changbin whined in the most nasal voice he could muster. "If you don't get up, I'm gonna tickle you."

"Fine, I'm up," you huff, sitting up while strands of hair fell in front of your face. The bedhead struggle was real, and evidently against you.

"Now hurry up, it's time to open presents!" Jisung jumps excitedly. His red flannel pants matched his sweater and the innocence of a child adorned his features. He flees the room with a skip in his step. Changbin follows suit, leaving you in the loneliness of the guest bedroom.

You inhale deeply, suddenly realizing your role in the friend group. You nod slowly before pushing yourself from the bed and wandering to the bathroom that was attached to the room. Who knew that houses could have three different bedrooms with en suites? Certainly not you three days prior.

Quickly, you push your hair out of your face and make yourself look somewhat presentable. You lean towards the mirror, glancing at the bags beneath your eyes and pulling at them slightly.

Waiting for you downstairs was a feast of a breakfast. A buffet line of food, essentially. Changbin was chewing a piece of toast with jam while Jisung was tackling a stack of waffles and eggs.

"Good morning," Mrs. Seo, who had instructed you to call her by her first name, greeted with a grin. She stood at the kitchen island, a mug of coffee in her cupped hands. A laptop sat before her and you assumed she was working from home. Considering the luxury she lived, work had to be done somehow. Even when it was Christmas.

You return the smile and tell her the same. For a second, you stand in front of the food in awe, facing the question of whether you should be modest or follow your stomach.

Mrs. Seo giggles, "Help yourself, dear. No need to be shy."

Now that you obtained permission to perform the latter, you grab a plate and stack a variety of pancakes upon it, a bagel or two, and a single slice of toast with a blanket of pumpkin jam on it. You join Jisung and Changbin at the long, wooden table.

The Christmas tree glowed magically from the living room while Christmas classics played on the television. Jisung reached to the middle of the table to pour himself another glass of orange juice. He offered some to you, which you gladly accepted. Fresh, hand made orange juice. Who could say no?

Mrs. Seo sits down beside you, smiling as she glances between the three of you.

"When Changbin was a kid," she began, a fond expression adorning her face as nostalgia began to unfurl.

Changbin's gaze shot up. "Do not even start."

"Oh shush. Anywho, when Changbin was a kid, he used to sit down here all by himself on Christmas morning and wait for his father and me to wake up. He didn't want to wake us since he knew we worked a lot and were always tired," she leaned over the table to pinch her son's cheeks.

"You were so compassionate," she returns her back to her chair. A sigh escapes her lips.

"Hmm, what went wrong?" you joke, earning a light kick beneath the table.

The conversation lives on throughout breakfast as everyone tells stories from their best Christmases until Mr. Seo arrives. His windbreaker rubbed against itself as his steps came closer to the dining room.

"Sorry I'm late, I had to run out and get some stuff from my mom's house," he says, a slight pant conjoining to his breath.

"Can we open presents now?" Changbin asks with a glimmer in his eyes. The same you would see in a child.

Mr. Seo smiles at his son, "Yes, Binnie, we can go open presents now."

With that, everyone migrates to the living room. By demand of Mrs. Seo, the 'children' sat on the floor while the adults sat on the couches. If you were home, you'd be complaining, but even their floors were comfortable. You wouldn't be surprised if they were heated.

You watched intently as gifts were exchanged, your knees hugged to your chest. You felt safe and at home. Peaceful, even. Like you belonged here.

"Y/N, this one's for you!" Changbin exclaims. He pushes a medium-sized box towards you. His giddiness amused you.

"C'mon," he urged, an excited smile resting on his lips, "open it!"

You tore at the Spongebob wrapping paper with hesitance. For all you know, something gross could lie beneath and his parents could be left there, staring at you with their mouths agape. But regardless, revealing the gift was inevitable and eventually, there it was.

"Really, Changbin?" you laugh, looking between the VR game set and him.

His smile was so wide you could barely see his eyes, and that alone made it contagious.

"Thank you, Bin."

"You're very welcome," he says, the smile not even phasing his words.

For the rest of the present opening tradition, you sat there, smiling down at the present. You even read the back of Risks to see what it entailed. On your own, you would have continued to give the game no further thought. Regardless, the gift started as a joke. Yet, now, it gave you a sudden interest.

And the byline stuck in your head. Do the things you're too scared to.

iv.

When you returned to your dorm, the VR game was presently tempting to try out. You had nothing better to do.

You reach from your bed, grabbing the unopened box and setting it in front of you. You slowly unpackage it with hesitance as if something would pop out at you. As you unveil the headset and game, you begin to pick up your pace. The want for adventure increases as you pull the headset out, slipping the disc into the game cartridge and pulling the headset over your head.

You power it up, greeting the home screen. Pressing the 'new game' option, you were welcomed with a new screen.

Risks requires permission to your console's data in order to operate. Give access?

Yes               No

A character customization screen invaded your view. The automated character already looked close enough to how you did. So you proceeded.

Input Player ID (you can change this later in your settings)

You sigh, putting in the only thing you could think of. Shibalover99.

This is a simulation. You will be paired with another player. Communicate. Live. Take a risk. Are you ready to begin?

Yes               No

Darkness engulfs your screen. Your character's eyelids progressively revealed that you were on a plane. The shades were down and the flight attendants were passing out water. Beside you was a boy, blond hair and a black headband pushing his hair back, sleeping. Above his head was the tag 'CB97.'

No one else had a tag like that. He must be your teammate.

You watched as his eyelashes twitched before his eyes subsequently fluttered open. A cough tickled his throat as he glanced over at you. His gaze went to just above your head before a chuckle invaded the air.

"Shibalover? Please don't tell me you're a twelve-year-old gamer girl," his voice was deep, husky even. It really sounded like he just woke up.

"Oh no, don't tell me you're a misogynistic gamer boy who thinks he's edgy for hating women when in reality he's just intimidated because he knows he can't get a real woman," you counter, an overly exaggerated gasp clinging to the end your sentence.

His character cocks his head to the side and smiles. "I actually have a girlfriend, but go off."

"Hmm, that's surprising," you tease, glancing at the seat in front of you where a screen showed the flight progress. Three hours until landing. Stuck here.

He laughs slightly at your words. "Yeah, I don't actually have a girlfriend. Although, I am interested in having one. It depends on how old you are though."

Cocky and annoying. This was going to be a long playthrough.

"I'm 20, for your information, but don't get your hopes up. For all you know, I could like women. Only women."

Turbulence shakes the plane for a moment and CB97 tenses up beside you. The seatbelt light flashes above you and you tightened the belt across your lap.

You glance over at the boy from the corner of your eye, who was gripping the ends of the armrests. "Are you scared of flying?"

He looks at you, his face pale, "Pfft, no."

The turbulence heightens itself and he grips at your animated hand, tightly holding it. You try to break free, yet he only clutches your hand tighter.

"How can someone as cocky as you be afraid of flying?" you mutter, relaxing your hand in his. You could feel the warmth even though this wasn't real.

Overhead, the pilot announces that the plane is unable to undergo an emergency landing and it is advised that those sitting by the emergency exits should open it and grab the floatation device beneath their seat.

"Wait, planes don't have parachutes, do they?" CB97 asks, breath short.

"No, but this is a game. Now hurry up and push your way through the crowd. They can afford to die, they're NPCs," you advise, reaching beneath your seat to grab your parachute.

"Oh come on," you huff when you don't feel anything.

You snatch the one from CB's hands, helping him put it on before connecting yourself to it. You're lucky it was equipped with a harness for tandem purposes. Or maybe the game meant it to be that way.

"Okay, you're in charge of this, so when we get close to the ground, pull this string," you advise patiently, gently holding the red string.

"Have you done this before?" he asked, tears scraping his throat.

"Once. In New York, now come on. On the count of three."

"One." His hands grew shaky.

"Two." His body was about to shut down.

"Three." He jumped.

The air felt like thousands of little slaps to the face and you were nearly deaf with the help of the whipping wind to the boy's terrified screams.

The earth was growing closer and you could see the flat, sandy desert beginning to grow closer.

"Pull the string!" you shouted. Your mouth was dry and you weren't even sure if your vocal cords were making any noise.

"What?"

"Pull the string!" you repeated, slightly louder. When he still couldn't hear, you fought the force of the wind to reach behind you and did it yourself.

With only the luck of this being a simulation, you landed safely. A slight tinge of adrenaline coursed through your veins as it exponentially grew. You unhooked yourself from the boy who easily would have gotten you killed in real life and sat down on the sandy hill you had landed on.

You huff, glancing down at the red crescent moons of your palms from where your nails had dug into them. "Good job for almost getting us killed."

"How about you try facing your fears. It's a lot harder than it looks, okay?" CB97 mocked your huff, taking a seat beside you on the hill.

"What even is your name anyway?" you ask, distracting yourself from the headache he was giving you.

"Chris."

You begin to laugh. He looks at you confusedly.

"I'm sorry," you managed, "you just have a douchebag name. It's quite fitting."

"Oh yeah? What's your name, princess?" he retaliates. Despite the fact that he meant it in a 'you're stuck up like a princess' way, you couldn't help but think of another meaning to the nickname. And a familiar set of butterflies constrict your windpipe.

"Y/N."

He stays silent, a sudden tension rising. What was he supposed to say? It would be repetitive if he took your approach and mocked your name, yet it'd be inappropriate to flirt considering the foot you had set off on.

"Can we make a deal?" he asks, breaking the silence with a quiet voice. You could barely hear him.

"Depends," you say.

"Let's just start over. We're gonna have to be teammates for the whole game, right? If we're assholes to each other, it'll filter our real thoughts of the game and we're gonna end up hating it even if we really don't want to. Deal?" he explains thoroughly. He sticks his hand out, waiting for you to shake it.

"I'm sorry, who are you?" you ask, playing into his scenario.

His character smiles and he brings his hand to scratch the back of his neck. "My name's CB97, but you can call me Chris. And you?"

"Y/N, but you can call me Y/N because I'm changing my Player ID soon."

"Great, 'cos Shibalover doesn't fit you too well. We should probably go find a place to stay," Chris announces, lifting himself from the sand. He offers a hand to pull you up and you accept it. In the top right corner of your screen, a text appears.

New mission: find a place to stay.

"Let's go."

Walking side by side, the desert looked endless. But as you continued, a city began to form in the distance. Each step made it twenty times closer and soon enough, you could see a huge sign with the name 'Seokyo' in big white letters.

You shove your hands in your pockets. You look off into the distance, a gentle breeze accompanies the warm sunset.

"How are we even gonna find a place to stay if we don't have money?" you inquire. As if summoning yet another mission, in the top right of your screen another scribble of words appeared.

Talk to Minho at the Hilton.

"Alright, never mind," you laugh to yourself.

A glowing green trail guides you and Chris to the entrance of the Hilton. Outside, a boy was waiting. He looked frantic, almost in search of someone. Above his head was the name Minho.

When he catches sight of the two walking towards him, his shoulders bounce in animated anger. "Where have you two been? I've been sitting out here for two hours!" He grips at your and Chris' wrists, dragging you into the Hilton and towards the elevator.

"We were too busy almost dying," you remark. Minho shoots you a look and the smile disappears from your face.

"Sorry, but who are you?" Chris asks as the elevator slides open.

"Don't worry about that right now," Minho shakes his head, pushing you into the elevator and following with Chris.

He steps into the elevator, pressing the twelfth button. As it begins its route, you glance out of either side of the glass walls. Chris gripped at your hand as he tried not to look beneath his feet, where the people in the lobby were beginning to look more like ants.

"Alright, here's your key," Minho shoves the card into the palm of your hand. "Your room is the last one on the right. If you need me, I'll be wherever you are. Just tap this."

He points to the watch on your wrist which definitely was not there two seconds ago.

"Wait-" you begin as the elevator doors glide open. But as you begin to speak, a poof of glitter falls to the ground and Minho is gone.

You grunt, forcing your hand out of Chris' before stepping out of the elevator. Chris follows closely behind you. So close you can nearly feel his hot breath on the back of your neck. Just as you would if you were driving and someone was doing the same, you stop without warning. Chris' chest rams into your shoulder and you can't help but laugh at the way he jumps back.

"What was that for?" he gripes.

"I just wanted to brake check you," you manage through laughter, glancing up at him. He chews on his bottom lip for a moment, nodding slightly before returning to the pace he had held prior. This time, making sure to walk barely in front of you.

The room at the end of the hall was strangely distant from the others. You slid the keycard through the reader, granting access to the room.

"Woah," your mouth falls as your gaze settles around the room. A broad window that made up the walls showcased the beauty of Seokyo from an almost birdseye view.

"Jesus Christ, what is it with this game and heights?" Chris whines, his character resting his hands on his knees. He slowly enters the room and collapses on the only bed in sight, making sure to stay as far away from the window as humanly possible.

You close the door behind you, venturing off to find another bed. You pass the bathroom. The small living room. "No. This can't be right," you mumble to yourself when you retrace your steps and find Chris lying in all of his cartoon character glory.

"There's only one bed," you state dismally, crossing your arms on your chest.

"Okay and? It's not like it's real life, we'll just share this one. I call dibs on the right half," Chris sits up, patting beside him on the left side.

"No, I get the right half," you argue, stepping toward him and pressing your hand on his shoulder to push him to the other side.

"But I already called dibs, Y/N," he says gruffly, picking you up and setting you on the left.

"Rock, paper, scissors for it?"

v.

"How come I don't know any of your fears?" Chris asks, panting.

He had just gone bungee jumping, per request (it was more like a demand) of Minho. Except rather than it being in a clear, safe environment, he had been tasked with doing it above the equivalent of a spiky ravine with wolves reaching out to chew a limb off. You watched from afar, laughing at his screams and the occasional, "I think I pissed myself!" or, "Tell my mom I love her!"

You shrug, "I'm not really scared of anything."

As he fumbles with the harness, he glances up at you with a look of disbelief. "Oh come on, everyone has a fear."

"Yeah, and mine is being with you," you joke.

"And mine is being with you," he mocks in a girly voice.

A laugh tickles your throat, but you push it down. Instead, you just watch as he nearly trips himself while stepping out of the harness. "Good job, pretty boy."

"Shut up, princess," he retaliates, glancing up at you with dark eyes as he drops his harness in the wooden crate full of them. You could almost hear someone familiar in those words, and your stomach felt light with butterflies.

"I will hunt you down in real life and kill you, don't test me, Christopher," you point at him accusingly.

He puts his hands up and defense. "Oh no, I'm so scared. What're you gonna do? Stop by my house and see Changbin and Jisung before slaughtering me?"

"What?" you ask.

"Oh no," he begins, making static noises with his mouth. "I think my internet's going out, I'll see you tomorrow, Y/N!"

CB97 has left the game.

You fling your headset off, tossing it beside you. Your fingers find your face as you rub away any sense of dream, assuring yourself that you were indeed awake. It would be only a coincidence if he had mentioned Changbin. There are thousands of them in the world, right? But he said Changbin and Jisung.

Could Chris be Chan? If he is, why didn't he say anything to you? And why would he let it go on?

"Hey, Siri," you say until your phone blinks to life. "Call Seo Changbin."

"Calling Seo Changbin," the robotic voice says monotonously.

"Yes, my favorite Y/N," he answers, a raspiness in his voice. He must have just woken up, regardless of the fact that it was five in the afternoon on a Sunday.

"Hey, do you know a Chris by any chance?" you ask, jumping straight to the point.

"Um, yes, why must you know?"

You begin telling him the story of Risks and he interrupts you briefly, "Are you all riled up because you like Channie?"

"So it is Chan!" you say, throwing your hands in the air. You thank Changbin for his time, hanging up without any further comments on either end. So that's why he got all tense when you told him your name. Bang Chan. CB97. Christopher Bang. Who needs that many aliases anyway?

You text Jisung, knowing he will suspect nothing of what you were about to ask. He texts back immediately, providing the information with absolutely zero resistance.

You wait patiently while the FaceTime request rings.

"Hello?" the boy answers, too close to the screen. It must run in the household.

"So, Bang Chan, when were you gonna tell me you knew I was your teammate?" you ask, running a hand through your hair as your hands begin to shake. You weren't sure why they were doing such, but you were sure Changbin was wrong with his idea. You didn't like Chan, and you couldn't see yourself liking him ever. Not even in your next life. The butterflies were simply just your nerves getting the best of you.

"Okay, hear me out," he begins, eyes crinkling and you could tell he was smiling. "I didn't want to make things awkward because I knew if you were aware that it was me that you would treat me different from CB97. When it's Chris, you pick on me and conversation flows perfectly. But when it's Chan, we just kind of hide behind Changbin. Do you feel me?"

Hesitantly, you nod. "Yeah, but if you had just told me, I'm sure I would have maintained the teasing."

"Well I didn't want to take the risk," Chan admits. Punny, isn't it?

"I respect it," you say. "But are you really afraid of heights?"

Chan sighs a deep and heavy breath. "Yes. I still wanna know what you're scared of."

"I'm sure you'll find out," you mumble. The words escape your lips with ease. Okay, maybe you were lying to yourself when you said you didn't like him whatsoever. You just weren't in love with him. Yet. Maybe.

vi.

Back in the game, the heights grew bigger and more dangerous. Chan became needier for comfort now that you openly said you wouldn't be awkward with him. The fact that he couldn't sense your sudden apprehension when he clutched your hand was nothing short of a miracle.

And your biggest fear was beginning to manifest itself into the game.

"What does your mission say?" Chan asks, a bored sigh escaping his lips.

"Mine just says to sleep," you say, tossing a Rubix cube into the air and catching it before beginning again.

"Same here. Maybe your fears only appear in your dreams or something," Chan shrugs. Yeah, we'll go with that.

Your heartbeat picks up in your chest as he settles into the bed beside you. On the right side. "Yeah," you agree.

The night develops into darkness and while the light snores of Chan fill the air, you can't find yourself anywhere close to a dreamland. Every time you got anywhere close, the idea of Chan's lips brushing against yours would force your eyes open.

You reach up to press your palms into your eyes as if to summon the Sandman from the crevices of your hands. A warm arm encases your body and pulls you close. You flinch, dropping your hands and coming inches between Chan's face, which seemed way too close for comfort. Even if this was a simulation, your heart was pounding so loud you were beginning to think Chan's character could hear it.

You glanced down at his lips, which were barely parted and animated in the most realistic way possible. It was almost as if this weren't fake. You leaned forward a little and you were so close you thought you could see his little puffs of air. Then, you realize how weird this is and try to move back. But of course, Chan just has to tighten his grip and pull you even closer. Except this time, your lips nearly slam into his by the sudden movement.

Beneath your breath, you curse. Because fucking Bang Chan has to be a fucking pain in the ass. Carefully, you slide down so your face is closer to his chest than his alluring lips.

Despite the slightly uncomfortable position, you grew used to the rise and fall of his chest against your ear. It didn't lull you to sleep, but it gave you a different thing to listen to other than Chan's inconsistent snores.

The sun came faster than you thought it would and the top right of your screen read a new task.

Go to the store with Chan.

Just as the mission began to fade into a lighter color, Chan began to stir in his sleep. He hugged you closer as if that was even possible.

"Chan," you whisper, gazing up at him. "Can you let go of me, please?"

He groans, throwing a leg over your body. He's such a baby.

"Christopher Bang, if you do not get off of me right now I will walk to your dorm and kick you in that perfect face of yours," you threaten. Of course, not thinking about what just came out of your mouth.

His eyes shoot open and a smirk crosses his lips. He leans in close to your face and you can almost feel his eyelashes on your skin. "You think I have a perfect face?"

You hope he can't see the slight blush kissing your cheeks. "Pfft. No. You're annoying."

He rolls over until he's laying on top of you. You groan in pain. "Get off of me! Hippo!" you manage to shout although your intestines were being crushed.

"C'mon, admit it," he whispers in your ear.

You hold your breath unwillingly as it hitches in your throat. He pushes himself up and you think about his arms beside you. Muscle and all.

"Don't make me do it," he warns as he turns his head, yet still maintaining intimidating eye contact.

"Do what?" you ask, testing your chances.

He leans closer, his nose touching yours now. His lips part and you think he's about to kiss you but then...boop.

He kissed your cheek. "Admit it," he said. His voice wasn't that deep earlier, was it?

Your cheeks were already burning as is, but the thought that he could amp it up at all made your body feel numb. You huff, "Fine. You're not the ugliest person I've ever met."

Finally, he pushes himself up from bed and advances to the bathroom. Halfway there, he stops, glances over his shoulder and shoots a fast wink. You play it off by rolling your eyes but as soon as the bathroom door closes, you bury your face into the pillows of the bed. If you keep reminding yourself that it wasn't real, maybe you could prevent your heart from being tied into a knot so tight you can't undo it.

vii.

The grocery store you had been sent to was packed with people. Odd for a Tuesday morning in a video game, but nonetheless.

The green line led you to the back of the store, where the frozen foods were. You laugh, "Don't tell me you have a fear of frozen foods."

Chan scoffs, "Of course not. Do you?"

"No, sir," you say, crossing your heart with your forefinger.

As you approach the eggs, the green line fizzes out and you're left with nothing but a confused Chan beside you. "Well," he begins, "what now?"

"I'm not sure," you put your hands on your hips. While trying to brainstorm a conclusion to this mystery, you notice the watch glimmering on your wrist.

You tap it twice. Nothing happens and a glowing Minho did not fall before you. So you tap it one more time. Still nothing.

"In here," a muffled voice calls out. You spin around on your heels, trying to suppress a laugh that failed to submerge itself. Sitting between the racks of milk was Minho in a painfully uncomfortable position.

"Do you need a hint or what?" he asks, irritation tinging his voice.

"Uh, yeah, a hint would be nice. Why are we here?"

"It's time to face your fears, Y/N. Just have fun," Minho says, a final wink in his appearance before disappearing into dust.

"So you do have a fear of grocery stores!" Chan giggles. But you couldn't move your body, let alone your facial features. This couldn't be happening. Your fear couldn't possibly be rising right now. Especially after what Chan did this morning.

"Hello?" he waves a hand in front of your absentminded face.

"Yeah, okay, I'm scared of ruining a perfectly good place," you admit, but not really. It was really just to cover your tracks, but Mr. I'm Scared Of Heights didn't know that. Okay, maybe you were a bad liar.

"That's not true. I can see right through you," he says, picking up a carton of eggs gingerly. He pops open the lid, filling his hands with as many eggs as he could handle before tossing the carton holding the remaining eggs toward you. You flinch, somehow accomplishing to catch it and not shatter any of the eggs inside.

"What am I supposed to do with these?" you ask, glancing down at the eggs as if they were alien babies.

He smiles at you, bringing his hand up and waving you out of the way. You oblige, eyebrows knitted in confusion.

His eyes fall to the two eggs in one hand before looking at the innocent NPCs shopping. A smirk twitches his lips, and he powers up a throw. One of the eggs misses miserably, falling to the floor with an unenthusiastic splat. The other, however, lands square in the back of an elderly woman's head.

She twists her head around slowly, looking angrily at the young boy walking behind her while a hand travels to the yolk dripping out of her hair. She pulls her cane out from her cart and smacks the boy's knee before returning to her shopping excursion.

He sputters in agony, yelling in an incoherent language that sounded almost similar to Simlish.

"Chan!" you scold, trying your hardest not to laugh. On the contrary, he was roaring with laughter. Every now and then, his eyes would fall shut and he would try to return to seriousness, but to no avail.

"Come on," he says through a now semi-calm chuckle. "Your turn."

"Hell no." You walk towards him, returning the carton and the eggs within it. He allows you to set it down where he had originally obtained it from.

"Please," he whines, pushing his bottom lip out innocently and widening his eyes like a puppy. He holds an egg up in front of your face.

But you had gone through with falling victim to peer pressure already once in your life. You shake your head, setting off to retrace your steps to exit the market.

An arm pulls you back by the waist.

A yelp flees your mouth and you begin pounding on Chan's arm with yours. With his free hand, he grabs your right hand, forcing the egg into your palm. When you try to open your hand, he squeezes you tighter and you begin giggling.

"I'm not letting you go until you throw that egg, Y/N," he mumbles. You picture him in his room, a teasing smile resting on his lips. And then your mind wanders and you think about your lips on his.

Virtual reality is a strange thing. It's all fake, yet with his hand around your character's waist, you feel a sense of warmth in real life. So much even, that it transcends through your skin and your insides feel fuzzy.

You huff, "Fine."

Although, he doesn't let go. Though, at first, you didn't complain. In fact, you wanted to stay like that until the end of time. With Chan's arms around your waist and his head resting calmly on your shoulder.

"Are you going to let go?" you inquire.

Instantly, Chan releases his grip, mumbling, "Right. Yeah. Of course."

You smile down at your character's knock off Converse before glancing around the store. Regardless of your promise, you weren't so sure you could just chuck an egg at an innocent bystander, even if they were just a robot coded into the game for no important reason other than to be a placeholder for missions.

As if an angel had descended upon you from the heavens above, you heard an outside voice through Chan's headset.

"I'm kinda busy, Sungie," Chan said. You looked back at his character and you could see a light blush dusting his cheeks.

"Why are you all blushy? Are you talking with-" Jisung teases with that tone in his voice that was just so Jisung. He gets cut off by only what you can assume is Chan lobbing the headset at him, based off of the loud thud you heard. Then, at the bottom of your screen: CB97 has left the game. Because this is a dual-player game, your current progress will be saved and you will be forced to wait until your partner returns.

A barely audible laugh arises from your throat, and to an outsider, it sounded more like a scoff. You pull the headset off of your head, shaking your hair out and finally letting it break free from the confined enclosure. Gently setting the headset on the ground, you hold your phone close to your chest, somewhat expecting a text from either Chan, apologizing on Jisung's behalf or from Jisung, giving an apology he was forced to deliver from Chan.

Instead, nothing came. So you just lie in bed, staring up at the ceiling and reliving the events of the previous hours. You smiled each time you recalled Chan's hand on your waist and you got so embarrassed you had to hide your face in your pillow, even though no one was there to watch you.

Your phone vibrates against your chest and your heart flutters. Immediately, Chan's golden smile crosses your mind. With a smile tugging at the corners of your lips, you glimpse down at the screen. As you identify the sender of the message, you sigh. It would be a lie to say you weren't disappointed, but nonetheless, you take Jihyo's message about her forgetting her dorm key into account.

Now that there was a sudden need for responsibility, sleep hid within the comforter and attempted to strangle you in a peaceful cocoon. You shake your head, bringing a hand to your cheek and slapping yourself into alert consciousness.

Your phone buzzes again. Assuming it was just Jihyo again, you glance with little enthusiasm. No butterflies in your chest.

You read the text first. When I threw my headset at Jisung, I think I broke it. RIP Risks :(

Oh. It was Chan. And then the love bug constricts your heart in all shapes and forms.

A soft knock comes from the door and you slowly sit up, tearing yourself from the comfort of your bed. Since it was just Jihyo, you stumbled to the door and didn't bother to try not to fall over. You only tripped twice. A world record compared to the previous five.

As the door is opening, you begin, "Hey, Ji-." You pause when you see the face. "sung?"

"Hi, Y/N," he pushes past you, allowing entry for himself. Just like he always does.

"Can I help you?" you inquire, slowly shutting the door behind you as your eyebrows jump in questioning.

He glances up at you as if you were invading his free time. He shook his head. "No."

"Well," he interjects, falling upon the pink bean bag beside Jihyo's bed. "Kind of."

When he doesn't continue, you find your arms crossing your chest with slight irritation. "And?"

A devious smirk plays at his lips, and all of a sudden you feel unsettled. Like he's about to whip a knife out of thin air and stab you to death right there.

"Do you like Chan?" he bluntly asks, tugging at his bottom lip with his teeth.

Your ribcage shattered from the reaction of your heart pounding against it. "What? No. That's gross," you scoff, although your cheeks were growing hot and tears were beginning to prick at your eyes.

Jisung hums at your response in delight and his smirk transitions to a satisfied smile. His tongue prods at his cheek as he tries to fight the obviousness of why he was here.

"Okay. Can you do me a favor then?"

"I do favors for you every time you see me. It's almost as if-"

He interrupts, "Just answer the goddamn question."

A sigh yelling that you want to return to your dorm without the burden of Jisung in it escapes your parted lips. "Fine."

"Meet Changbin at the library in like," he pauses, glancing at the time displayed on his phone, "two hours."

"Why?"

"Oh, would you look at the time? I need to get to my mom's house for dinner!" he exclaims, jumping up from the beanbag and excusing himself.

"Your mom lives across the country!" you call out, but the door is already closed by the time you finish.

viii.

It was a cold, mid-January night and you had forgotten your heavy coat at home. You wandered the streets of Seoul in a barely thick enough hoodie. Every now and then, you would shove your hands deep into the front pockets of your jeans and hope to generate enough heat to get you by.

Your phone begins vibrating angrily from the kangaroo pouch of your hoodie. A sigh escapes your lips as you answer the call and press the oddly warm phone to your ear.

"Yes?"

"Where are you? I'm outside your dorm," Changbin's voice breaks through the static of the call.

"Jisung told me to meet you at the library," you halt in your tracks, glancing around as if to summon someone from the void.

There's shuffling on the other end and you hear a car door close before Changbin speaks up again, "What street are you on?"

You glance up, past the suburban houses and to the end of the street. You have to squint to make it out. "Mugyo-ro," you look to any identifying surroundings. "By the Starbucks and 7-Eleven."

"Fucking Jisung," he curses under his breath. He tells you to stay where you are and that he'd be there within the next three minutes.

As the tens of people pass you just standing in the middle of the sidewalk, you began to feel more and more awkward. You pray in your mind that Changbin would magically arrive quicker without speeding or crashing. Wait a minute, since when did Changbin even have a car?

Finally, a particularly nice car that you recall seeing in the Seo's driveway pulls up to the side of the road and the deeply tinted windows roll down. Changbin leans into the passenger's seat so you can see him. "Let's go, I got something planned."

You slip into the seat beside his, immensely grateful that he had the heat all the way up.

Soft, lyrical rap was humming through the car and although the volume was low, you could feel the melodic bass beneath your feet. Your hands begin to shake slightly in your lap for no reason other than the silence that didn't sit well.

"So why have I been kidnapped on this fine evening?" you ask, your voice nearly cracking at the beginning. The nervousness had gotten to you, yet you weren't even sure why you felt this way.

Changbin ran a quick hand through his hair before returning his hand to the wheel. He turns into the library parking lot. An unsure sigh leaves his lips and his eyes shoot to the clock on his dash.

"Don't worry about it, Y/N."

You huff, relaxing your shoulders and leaning back into the way too comfy leather seats.

"Can you do me a favor?" he asks as he pulls into a parking spot and shifts his car into park.

"Um, I guess so?"

He reaches behind you, resting his hand on the shoulder of your seat before pulling a book up from the floor.

"Go turn this in for me," Changbin orders, dropping the book in your lap.

"And why can't you do that?" you say, face contorting into a subtle disgust as you look over at him.

"I have to call my mom," he sticks his bottom lip out gently, knowing all too well that you'd fall for it.

"You owe me one," you mutter, unbuckling your seatbelt and dismissing yourself from the car.

As you advance towards the entrance of the library, you glance back at Changbin. Through the windshield, you can see his phone pressed to his ear and his mouth is moving.

A wave of warmth slaps you in the face as the scent of old books invades your sense of smell. Your phone vibrates in your pocket and you sigh as you dig it out.

Changbin: Hey, I think I left a bookmark in that book. Can you check for me?

Your pace slows as you flip through the book. A slip of folded notebook paper falls to the floor. Squatting to pick it up, you slowly unfold it. In Changbin's messy, scribbled handwriting, it read:

Turn the book in. Now go to the library garden. Good luck!

Your eyebrows knit in confusion. You glance over your shoulder with wonder in your eyes. When your eyes fall on the now empty parking spot, you glare and curse Changbin's name under your breath.

The book drop was at the very entrance by the reference desk. On the other side of the library, by the children's section, was the garden. Your steps were short, anxious, and the progressively dimming lights of the library were not helping. Nor was the fact that it was nearly empty.

You push the heavy door to the garden with hesitance coursing through your veins like your body was a Mario Kart course. So far, uneasiness was in first as Bowser.

Winter air bit at your cheeks as you enter the small, quaint area. Your eyes jump to the fairy lights adorning the sky. It looked like the universe was extremely zoomed and was within touching distance.

"Hi," a voice breaks into your moment of awe.

Peach grasped first place as flutters fly around your heart.

"Hey, Chan," you smile. His hands were behind his back and he was rocking back and forth on his heels. He looked nervous. And then you realized, this was oddly romantic. And why exactly were you here?

"Um, so I know this is like," he brings his forefinger and thumb to his nose bridge and pinching it. "kind of weird, but, uh-"

"Are you about to confess your lifelong love for me?" you teasingly question, saving him from the awkwardness.

His hands fall to his side, exposing the bouquet he was holding behind his back. "Did Jisung snitch? I'm gonna fucking kill him."

"Just a wild guess," you laugh. You were lucky the air was freezing because you could tell your cheeks were flaming red.

He stands there for a second, lips slightly parted with a cloud leaving them every so often. You think back to the game, where he had fallen asleep with you in his arms.

"I know this is odd ti-" he begins.

"I like you too," you say at the same time, unintentionally interrupting him.

"You sure do like cutting into my sentences, huh?" he laughs and it sounds like music to your ears. The most beautiful orchestra to ever make any sound.

He takes a step towards you, the bouquet held close to his chest with both hands. He pushes it toward you, the bulbs of the flowers right in front of your nose as the plastic wrap tickles your cheek. "Here," he shakes the collection of white carnations in your face, sending the smell of fresh flowers through the air.

You reach up, taking the flowers and holding them to your heart. "Thank you," you grin.

"Okay, now can we please go somewhere warm? I've been waiting out here for like an hour and I think I caught pneumonia."

ix.

"Why'd you confess right then, at that moment?" you ask, reminiscing the events of last week.

Chan laughs, tugging the covers up over his and your legs. He returned his arm to your waist. "Do you want the real story or the coverup?"

"Well, first of all, why even is there a coverup? And to answer your question, gimme both," you twist in his arms so you're facing him.

Chan sits up slightly and squints at the door. You look over your shoulder to see an eye peeking through the crack.

"Fuck off, Jisung," Chan shouts, picking up the already broken VR headset and chucking it at the door.

"No sex while I'm here, ya hear me?" he screams back, his voice transitioning into a muffled noise as he begins walking back to his room.

Chan glances back to you, relaxing. "Where were we?"

"Confession and coverup," you summarize.

"Oh, right. So, after Jisung rudely interrupted our gaming experience, Changbin was all like, 'what's the commotion' and Jisung was like 'he's in love with Y/N.' And then Changbin scoffed and was like, 'bold of you to assume she'd show any affection back' so Jisung and I were like big question mark," he begins. You didn't realize he told stories like a teenage white girl until then.

"Changbin told me you were pretty much scared of love and then it clicked. So Jisung ran all the way to your dorm for an experiment. He pulled the library thing out of his ass, by the way. None of us knew he was going to do that. And I certainly wasn't prepared. Nearly had a heart attack."

"Fucking Jisung," you laugh.

"Yes, fucking Han Jisung."

"And what about the coverup story?"

"Oh, Jisung told me that if you ever asked why I confessed to just say that I had known ever since we first started playing, but we all know that would be a lie. I only kind of knew a couple of hours before Jisung went to your dorm," Chan smiles, pressing his lips to yours shortly.

You pull away first, a question invading your thoughts. "Wait, when did you know I started liking you?"

He does the smile you do when you're not supposed to be aware of something, but you are. "Y'know that time we were sleeping and I threw my arm over you?"

You gasp, "Do not tell me you were awake."

A mischievous smile danced on his lips. "But then I would be lying to the prettiest girl in the world."

You punch at his chest. "You suck!"

"But you love me," he swoons, dragging you closer to his body.

"You're fucking lucky I do."

[yasbxxgie]

A Valuable Reputation: After Tyrone Hayes said that a chemical was harmful, its maker pursued him

In 2001, seven years after joining the biology faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes stopped talking about his research with people he didn’t trust. He instructed the students in his lab, where he was raising three thousand frogs, to hang up the phone if they heard a click, a signal that a third party might be on the line. Other scientists seemed to remember events differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to meetings. “The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia,” he liked to say, “is to keep careful track of your persecutors.”

Three years earlier, Syngenta, one of the largest agribusinesses in the world, had asked Hayes to conduct experiments on the herbicide atrazine, which is applied to more than half the corn in the United States. Hayes was thirty-one, and he had already published twenty papers on the endocrinology of amphibians. David Wake, a professor in Hayes’s department, said that Hayes “may have had the greatest potential of anyone in the field.” But, when Hayes discovered that atrazine might impede the sexual development of frogs, his dealings with Syngenta became strained, and, in November, 2000, he ended his relationship with the company.

Hayes continued studying atrazine on his own, and soon he became convinced that Syngenta representatives were following him to conferences around the world. He worried that the company was orchestrating a campaign to destroy his reputation. He complained that whenever he gave public talks there was a stranger in the back of the room, taking notes. On a trip to Washington, D.C., in 2003, he stayed at a different hotel each night. He was still in touch with a few Syngenta scientists and, after noticing that they knew many details about his work and his schedule, he suspected that they were reading his e-mails. To confuse them, he asked a student to write misleading e-mails from his office computer while he was travelling. He sent backup copies of his data and notes to his parents in sealed boxes. In an e-mail to one Syngenta scientist, he wrote that he had “risked my reputation, my name … some say even my life, for what I thought (and now know) is right.” A few scientists had previously done experiments that anticipated Hayes’s work, but no one had observed such extreme effects. In another e-mail to Syngenta, he acknowledged that it might appear that he was suffering from a “Napoleon complex” or “delusions of grandeur.”

For years, despite his achievements, Hayes had felt like an interloper. In academic settings, it seemed to him that his colleagues were operating according to a frivolous code of manners: they spoke so formally, fashioning themselves as detached authorities, and rarely admitted what they didn’t know. He had grown up in Columbia, South Carolina, in a neighborhood where fewer than forty per cent of residents finish high school. Until sixth grade, when he was accepted into a program for the gifted, in a different neighborhood, he had never had a conversation with a white person his age. He and his friends used to tell one another how “white people do this, and white people do that,” pretending that they knew. After he switched schools and took advanced courses, the black kids made fun of him, saying, “Oh, he thinks he’s white.”

He was fascinated by the idea of metamorphosis, and spent much of his adolescence collecting tadpoles and frogs and crossbreeding different species of grasshoppers. He raised frog larvae on his parents’ front porch, and examined how lizards respond to changes in temperature (by using a blow-dryer) and light (by placing them in a doghouse). His father, a carpet layer, used to look at his experiments, shake his head, and say, “There’s a fine line between a genius and a fool.”

Hayes received a scholarship to Harvard, and, in 1985, began what he calls the worst four years of his life. Many of the other black students had gone to private schools and came from affluent families. He felt disconnected and ill-equipped—he was placed on academic probation—until he became close to a biology professor, who encouraged him to work in his lab. Five feet three and thin, Hayes distinguished himself by dressing flamboyantly, like Prince. The Harvard Crimson, in an article about a campus party, wrote that he looked as if he belonged in the “rock-’n’-ready atmosphere of New York’s Danceteria.” He thought about dropping out, but then he started dating a classmate, Katherine Kim, a Korean-American biology major from Kansas. He married her two days after he graduated.

They moved to Berkeley, where Hayes enrolled in the university’s program in integrative biology. He completed his Ph.D. in three and a half years, and was immediately hired by his department. “He was a force of nature—incredibly gifted and hardworking,” Paul Barber, a colleague who is now a professor at U.C.L.A., says. Hayes became one of only a few black tenured biology professors in the country. He won Berkeley’s highest award for teaching, and ran the most racially diverse lab in his department, attracting students who were the first in their families to go to college. Nigel Noriega, a former graduate student, said that the lab was a “comfort zone” for students who were “just suffocating at Berkeley,” because they felt alienated from academic culture.

Hayes had become accustomed to steady praise from his colleagues, but, when Syngenta cast doubt on his work, he became preoccupied by old anxieties. He believed that the company was trying to isolate him from other scientists and “play on my insecurities—the fear that I’m not good enough, that everyone thinks I’m a fraud,” he said. He told colleagues that he suspected that Syngenta held “focus groups” on how to mine his vulnerabilities. Roger Liu, who worked in Hayes’s lab for a decade, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, said, “In the beginning, I was really worried for his safety. But then I couldn’t tell where the reality ended and the exaggeration crept in.”

Liu and several other former students said that they had remained skeptical of Hayes’s accusations until last summer, when an article appeared in Environmental Health News (in partnership with 100Reporters)* that drew on Syngenta’s internal records. Hundreds of Syngenta’s memos, notes, and e-mails have been unsealed following the settlement, in 2012, of two class-action suits brought by twenty-three Midwestern cities and towns that accused Syngenta of “concealing atrazine’s true dangerous nature” and contaminating their drinking water. Stephen Tillery, the lawyer who argued the cases, said, “Tyrone’s work gave us the scientific basis for the lawsuit.”

Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, and during that time scientists around the world have expanded on his findings, suggesting that the herbicide is associated with birth defects in humans as well as in animals. The company documents show that, while Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long suspected. Syngenta’s public-relations team had drafted a list of four goals. The first was “discredit Hayes.” In a spiral-bound notebook, Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by his initials, wrote that the company could “prevent citing of TH data by revealing him as noncredible.” He was a frequent topic of conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to “exploit Hayes’ faults/problems.” “If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop him,” Ford wrote. She observed that Hayes “grew up in world (S.C.) that wouldn’t accept him,” “needs adulation,” “doesn’t sleep,” was “scarred for life.” She wrote, “What’s motivating Hayes?—basic question.”

Syngenta, which is based in Basel, sells more than fourteen billion dollars’ worth of seeds and pesticides a year and funds research at some four hundred academic institutions around the world. When Hayes agreed to do experiments for the company (which at that time was part of a larger corporation, Novartis), the students in his lab expressed concern that biotech companies were “buying up universities” and that industry funding would compromise the objectivity of their research. Hayes assured them that his fee, a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, would make their lab more rigorous. He could employ more students, buy new equipment, and raise more frogs. Though his lab was well funded, federal support for research was growing increasingly unstable, and, like many academics and administrators, he felt that he should find new sources of revenue. “I went into it as if I were a painter, performing a service,” Hayes told me. “You commissioned it, and I come up with the results, and you do what you want with them. It’s your responsibility, not mine.”

Atrazine is the second most widely used herbicide in the U.S., where sales are estimated at about three hundred million dollars a year. Introduced in 1958, it is cheap to produce and controls a broad range of weeds. (Glyphosate, which is produced by Monsanto, is the most popular herbicide.) A study by the Environmental Protection Agency found that without atrazine the national corn yield would fall by six per cent, creating an annual loss of nearly two billion dollars. But the herbicide degrades slowly in soil and often washes into streams and lakes, where it doesn’t readily dissolve. Atrazine is one of the most common contaminants of drinking water; an estimated thirty million Americans are exposed to trace amounts of the chemical.

In 1994, the E.P.A., expressing concerns about atrazine’s health effects, announced that it would start a scientific review. Syngenta assembled a panel of scientists and professors, through a consulting firm called EcoRisk, to study the herbicide. Hayes eventually joined the group. His first experiment showed that male tadpoles exposed to atrazine developed less muscle surrounding their vocal cords, and he hypothesized that the chemical had the potential to reduce testosterone levels. “I have been losing lots of sleep over this,” he wrote one EcoRisk panel member, in the summer of 2000. “I realize the implications and of course want to make sure that everything possible has been done and controlled for.” After a conference call, he was surprised by the way the company kept critiquing what seemed to be trivial aspects of the work. Hayes wanted to repeat and validate his experiments, and complained that the company was slowing him down and that independent scientists would publish similar results before he could. He decided to resign from the panel, writing in a letter that he didn’t want to be “scooped.” “I fear that my reputation will be damaged if I continue my relationship and associated low productivity with Novartis,” he wrote. “It will appear to my colleagues that I have been part of a plan to bury important data.”

Hayes repeated the experiments using funds from Berkeley and the National Science Foundation. Afterward, he wrote to the panel, “Although I do not want to make a big deal out of it until I have all of the data analyzed and decoded—I feel I should warn you that I think something very strange is coming up in these animals.” After dissecting the frogs, he noticed that some could not be clearly identified as male or female: they had both testes and ovaries. Others had multiple testes that were deformed.

In January, 2001, Syngenta employees and members of the EcoRisk panel travelled to Berkeley to discuss Hayes’s new findings. Syngenta asked to meet with him privately, but Hayes insisted on the presence of his students, a few colleagues, and his wife. He had previously had an amiable relationship with the panel—he had enjoyed taking long runs with the scientist who supervised it—and he began the meeting, in a large room at Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, as if he were hosting an academic conference. He wore a new suit and brought in catered meals.

After lunch, Syngenta introduced a guest speaker, a statistical consultant, who listed numerous errors in Hayes’s report and concluded that the results were not statistically significant. Hayes’s wife, Katherine Kim, said that the consultant seemed to be trying to “make Tyrone look as foolish as possible.” Wake, the biology professor, said that the men on the EcoRisk panel looked increasingly uncomfortable. “They were experienced enough to know that the issues the statistical consultant was raising were routine and ridiculous,” he said. “A couple of glitches were presented as if they were the end of the world. I’ve been a scientist in academic settings for forty years, and I’ve never experienced anything like that. They were after Tyrone.”

Hayes later e-mailed three of the scientists, telling them, “I was insulted, felt railroaded and, in fact, felt that some dishonest and unethical activity was going on.” When he explained what had happened to Theo Colborn, the scientist who had popularized the theory that industrial chemicals could alter hormones, she advised him, “Don’t go home the same way twice.” Colborn was convinced that her office had been bugged, and that industry representatives followed her. She told Hayes to “keep looking over your shoulder” and to be careful whom he let in his lab. She warned him, “You have got to protect yourself.”

Hayes published his atrazine work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences a year and a half after quitting the panel. He wrote that what he called “hermaphroditism” was induced in frogs by exposure to atrazine at levels thirty times below what the E.P.A. permits in water. He hypothesized that the chemical could be a factor in the decline in amphibian populations, a phenomenon observed all over the world. In an e-mail sent the day before the publication, he congratulated the students in his lab for taking the “ethical stance” by continuing the work on their own. “We (and our principles) have been tested, and I believe we have not only passed but exceeded expectations,” he wrote. “Science is a principle and a process of seeking truth. Truth cannot be purchased and, thus, truth cannot be altered by money. Professorship is not a career, but rather a life’s pursuit. The people with whom I work daily exemplify and remind me of this promise.”

He and his students continued the work, travelling to farming regions throughout the Midwest, collecting frogs in ponds and lakes, and sending three hundred pails of frozen water back to Berkeley. In papers in Nature and in Environmental Health Perspectives, Hayes reported that he had found frogs with sexual abnormalities in atrazine-contaminated sites in Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming. “Now that I have realized what we are into, I cannot stop it,” he wrote to a colleague. “It is an entity of its own.” Hayes began arriving at his lab at 3:30 a.m. and staying fourteen hours. He had two young children, who sometimes assisted by color-coding containers.

According to company e-mails, Syngenta was distressed by Hayes’s work. Its public-relations team compiled a database of more than a hundred “supportive third party stakeholders,” including twenty-five professors, who could defend atrazine or act as “spokespeople on Hayes.” The P.R. team suggested that the company “purchase ‘Tyrone Hayes’ as a search word on the internet, so that any time someone searches for Tyrone’s material, the first thing they see is our material.” The proposal was later expanded to include the phrases “amphibian hayes,” “atrazine frogs,” and “frog feminization.” (Searching online for “Tyrone Hayes” now brings up an advertisement that says, “Tyrone Hayes Not Credible.”)

In June, 2002, two months after Hayes’s first atrazine publication, Syngenta announced in a press release that three studies had failed to replicate Hayes’s work. In a letter to the editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, eight scientists on the EcoRisk panel wrote that Hayes’s study had “little regard for assessment of causality,” lacked statistical details, misused the term “dose,” made vague and naïve references, and misspelled a word. They said that Hayes’s claim that his paper had “significant implications for environmental and public health” had not been “scientifically demonstrated.” Steven Milloy, a freelance science columnist who runs a nonprofit organization to which Syngenta has given tens of thousands of dollars, wrote an article for Fox News titled “Freaky-Frog Fraud,” which picked apart Hayes’s paper in Nature, saying that there wasn’t a clear relationship between the concentration of atrazine and the effect on the frog. Milloy characterized Hayes as a “junk scientist” and dismissed his “lame” conclusions as “just another of Hayes’ tricks.”

Fussy critiques of scientific experiments have become integral to what is known as the “sound science” campaign, an effort by interest groups and industries to slow the pace of regulation. David Michaels, the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, wrote, in his book “Doubt Is Their Product” (2008), that corporations have developed sophisticated strategies for “manufacturing and magnifying uncertainty.” In the eighties and nineties, the tobacco industry fended off regulations by drawing attention to questions about the science of secondhand smoke. Many companies have adopted this tactic. “Industry has learned that debating the science is much easier and more effective than debating the policy,” Michaels wrote. “In field after field, year after year, conclusions that might support regulation are always disputed. Animal data are deemed not relevant, human data not representative, and exposure data not reliable.”

In the summer of 2002, two scientists from the E.P.A. visited Hayes’s lab and reviewed his atrazine data. Thomas Steeger, one of the scientists, told Hayes, “Your research can potentially affect the balance of risk versus benefit for one of the most controversial pesticides in the U.S.” But an organization called the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness petitioned the E.P.A. to ignore Hayes’s findings. “Hayes has killed and continues to kill thousands of frogs in unvalidated tests that have no proven value,” the petition said. The center argued that Hayes’s studies violated the Data Quality Act, passed in 2000, which requires that regulatory decisions rely on studies that meet high standards for “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity.” The center is run by an industry lobbyist and consultant for Syngenta, Jim Tozzi, who proposed the language of the Data Quality Act to the congresswoman who sponsored it.

The E.P.A. complied with the Data Quality Act and revised its Environmental Risk Assessment, making it clear that hormone disruption wouldn’t be a legitimate reason for restricting use of the chemical until “appropriate testing protocols have been established.” Steeger told Hayes that he was troubled by the circularity of the center’s critique. In an e-mail, he wrote, “Their position reminds me of the argument put forward by the philosopher Berkeley, who argued against empiricism by noting that reliance on scientific observation is flawed since the link between observations and conclusions is intangible and is thus immeasurable.”

Nonetheless, Steeger seemed resigned to the frustrations of regulatory science and gently punctured Hayes’s idealism. When Hayes complained that Syngenta had not reported his findings on frog hermaphroditism quickly enough, he responded that it was “unfortunate but not uncommon for registrants to ‘sit’ on data that may be considered adverse to the public’s perception of their products.” He wrote that “science can be manipulated to serve certain agendas. All you can do is practice ‘suspended disbelief.’ ” (The E.P.A. says that there is “no indication that information was improperly withheld in this case.”)

After consulting with colleagues at Berkeley, Hayes decided that, rather than watch Syngenta discredit his work, he would make a “preëmptive move.” He appeared in features in Discover and the San Francisco Chronicle, suggesting that Syngenta’s science was not objective. Both articles focussed on his personal biography, leading with his skin color, and moving on to his hair style: at the time, he wore his hair in braids. Hayes made little attempt to appear disinterested. Scientific objectivity requires what the philosopher Thomas Nagel has called a “view from nowhere,” but Hayes kept drawing attention to himself, making blustery comments like “Tyrone can only be Tyrone.” He presented Syngenta as a villain, but he didn’t quite fulfill the role of the hero. He was hyper and a little frantic—he always seemed to be in a rush or on the verge of forgetting to do something—and he approached the idea of taking down the big guys with a kind of juvenile zeal.

Environmental activists praised Hayes’s work and helped him get media attention. But they were concerned by the bluntness of his approach. A co-founder of the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization, told Hayes to “stop what you are doing and take time to actually construct a plan” or “you will get your ass handed to you on a platter.” Steeger warned him that vigilantism would distract him from his research. “Can you afford the time and money to fight battles where you are clearly outnumbered and, to be candid, outclassed?” he asked. “Most people would prefer to limit their time in purgatory; I don’t know anyone who knowingly enters hell.”

Hayes had worked all his life to build his scientific reputation, and now it seemed on the verge of collapse. “I cannot in reasonable terms explain to you what this means to me,” he told Steeger. He took pains to prove that Syngenta’s experiments had not replicated his studies: they used a different population of animals, which were raised in different types of tanks, in closer quarters, at cooler temperatures, and with a different feeding schedule. On at least three occasions, he proposed to the Syngenta scientists that they trade data. “If we really want to test repeatability, let’s share animals and solutions,” he wrote.

In early 2003, Hayes was considered for a job at the Nicholas School of the Environment, at Duke. He visited the campus three times, and the university arranged for a real-estate agent to show him and his wife potential homes. When Syngenta learned that Hayes might be moving to North Carolina, where its crop-protection headquarters are situated, Gary Dickson—the company’s vice-president of global risk assessment, who a year earlier had established a fifty-thousand-dollar endowment, funded by Syngenta, at the Nicholas School—contacted a dean at Duke. According to documents unsealed in the class-action lawsuits, Dickson informed the dean of the “state of the relationship between Dr. Hayes and Syngenta.” The company “wanted to protect our reputation in our community and among our employees.”

There were several candidates for the job at Duke, and, when Hayes did not get it, he concluded that it was due to Syngenta’s influence. Richard Di Giulio, a Duke professor who had hosted Hayes’s first visit, said that he was irritated by Hayes’s suggestion: “A little gift of fifty thousand dollars would not influence a tenure hire. That’s not going to happen.” He added, “I’m not surprised that Syngenta would not have liked Hayes to be at Duke, since we’re an hour down the road from them.” He said that Hayes’s conflict with Syngenta was an extreme example of the kind of dispute that is not uncommon in environmental science. The difference, he said, was that the “scientific debate spilled into Hayes’s emotional life.”

In June, 2003, Hayes paid his own way to Washington so that he could present his work at an E.P.A. hearing on atrazine. The agency had evaluated seventeen studies. Twelve experiments had been funded by Syngenta, and all but two showed that atrazine had no effect on the sexual development of frogs. The rest of the experiments, by Hayes and researchers at two other universities, indicated the opposite. In a PowerPoint presentation at the hearing, Hayes disclosed a private e-mail sent to him by one of the scientists on the EcoRisk panel, a professor at Texas Tech, who wrote, “I agree with you that the important issue is for everyone involved to come to grips with (and stop minimizing) the fact that independent laboratories have demonstrated an effect of atrazine on gonadal differentiation in frogs. There is no denying this.”

The E.P.A. found that all seventeen atrazine studies, including Hayes’s, suffered from methodological flaws—contamination of controls, variability in measurement end points, poor animal husbandry—and asked Syngenta to fund a comprehensive experiment that would produce more definitive results. Darcy Kelley, a member of the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory panel and a biology professor at Columbia, said that, at the time, “I did not think the E.P.A. made the right decision.” The studies by Syngenta scientists had flaws that “really cast into doubt their ability to carry out their experiments. They couldn’t replicate effects that are as easy as falling off a log.” She thought that Hayes’s experiments were more respectable, but she wasn’t persuaded by Hayes’s explanation of the biological mechanism causing the deformities.

The E.P.A. approved the continued use of atrazine in October, the same month that the European Commission chose to remove it from the market. The European Union generally takes a precautionary approach to environmental risks, choosing restraint in the face of uncertainty. In the U.S., lingering scientific questions justify delays in regulatory decisions. Since the mid-seventies, the E.P.A. has issued regulations restricting the use of only five industrial chemicals out of more than eighty thousand in the environment. Industries have a greater role in the American regulatory process—they may sue regulators if there are errors in the scientific record—and cost-benefit analyses are integral to decisions: a monetary value is assigned to disease, impairments, and shortened lives and weighed against the benefits of keeping a chemical in use. Lisa Heinzerling, the senior climate-policy counsel at the E.P.A. in 2009 and the associate administrator of the office of policy in 2009 and 2010, said that cost-benefit models appear “objective and neutral, a way to free ourselves from the chaos of politics.” But the complex algorithms “quietly condone a tremendous amount of risk.” She added that the influence of the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees major regulatory decisions, has deepened in recent years. “A rule will go through years of scientific reviews and cost-benefit analyses, and then at the final stage it doesn’t pass,” she said. “It has a terrible, demoralizing effect on the culture at the E.P.A.”

In 2003, a Syngenta development committee in Basel approved a strategy to keep atrazine on the market “until at least 2010.” A PowerPoint presentation assembled by Syngenta’s global product manager explained that “we need atrazine to secure our position in the corn marketplace. Without atrazine we cannot defend and grow our business in the USA.” Sherry Ford, the communications manager, wrote in her notebook that the company “should not phase out atz until we know about” the Syngenta herbicide paraquat, which has also been controversial, because of studies showing that it might be associated with Parkinson’s disease. She noted that atrazine “focuses attention away from other products.”

Syngenta began holding weekly “atrazine meetings” after the first class-action suit was filed, in 2004. The meetings were attended by toxicologists, the company’s counsel, communications staff, and the head of regulatory affairs. To dampen negative publicity from the lawsuit, the group discussed how it could invalidate Hayes’s research. Ford documented peculiar things he had done(“kept coat on”) or phrases he had used (“Is this line clean?”). “If TH wanted to win the day, and he had the goods,” she wrote, “he would have produced them when asked.” She noted that Hayes was “getting in too deep w/ enviros,” and searched for ways to get him to “show his true colors.”

In 2005, Ford made a long list of methods for discrediting him: ��have his work audited by 3rd party,” “ask journals to retract,” “set trap to entice him to sue,” “investigate funding,” “investigate wife.” The initials of different employees were written in the margins beside entries, presumably because they had been assigned to look into the task. Another set of ideas, discussed at several meetings, was to conduct “systematic rebuttals of all TH appearances.” One of the company’s communications consultants said in an e-mail that she wanted to obtain Hayes’s calendar of speaking engagements, so that Syngenta could “start reaching out to the potential audiences with the Error vs. Truth Sheet,” which would provide “irrefutable evidence of his polluted messages.” (Syngenta says that many of the documents unsealed in the lawsuits refer to ideas that were never implemented.)

To redirect attention to the financial benefits of atrazine, the company paid Don Coursey, a tenured economist at the Harris School of Public Policy, at the University of Chicago, five hundred dollars an hour to study how a ban on the herbicide would affect the economy. In 2006, Syngenta supplied Coursey with data and a “bundle of studies,” and edited his paper, which was labelled as a Harris School Working Paper. (He disclosed that Syngenta had funded it.) After submitting a draft, Coursey had been warned in an e-mail that he needed to work harder to articulate a “clear statement of your conclusions flowing from this analysis.” Coursey later announced his findings at a National Press Club event in Washington and told the audience that there was one “basic takeaway point: a ban on atrazine at the national level will have a devastating, devastating effect upon the U.S. corn economy.”

Hayes had been promoted from associate to full professor in 2003, an achievement that had sent him into a mild depression. He had spent the previous decade understanding his self-worth in reference to a series of academic milestones, and he had reached each one. Now he felt aimless. His wife said she could have seen him settling into the life of a “normal, run-of-the-mill, successful scientist.” But he wasn’t motivated by the idea of “writing papers and books that we all just trade with each other.”

He began giving more than fifty lectures a year, not just to scientific audiences but to policy institutes, history departments, women’s health clinics, food preparers, farmers, and high schools. He almost never declined an invitation, despite the distance. He told his audiences that he was defying the instructions of his Ph.D. adviser, who had told him, “Let the science speak for itself.” He had a flair for sensational stories—he chose phrases like “crime scene” and “chemically castrated”—and he seemed to revel in details about Syngenta’s conflicts of interest, presenting theories as if he were relating gossip to friends. (Syngenta wrote a letter to Hayes and his dean, pointing out inaccuracies: “As we discover additional errors in your presentations, you can expect us to be in touch with you again.”)

At his talks, Hayes noticed that one or two men in the audience were dressed more sharply than the other scientists. They asked questions that seemed to have been designed to embarrass him: Why can’t anyone replicate your research? Why won’t you share your data? One former student, Ali Stuart, said that “everywhere Tyrone went there was this guy asking questions that made a mockery of him. We called him the Axe Man.”

Hayes had once considered a few of the scientists working with Syngenta friends, and he approached them in a nerdy style of defiance. He wrote them mass e-mails, informing them of presentations he was giving and offering tips on how to discredit him. “You can’t approach your prey thinking like a predator,” he wrote. “You have to become your quarry.” He described a recent trip to South Carolina and his sense of displacement when “my old childhood friend came by to update me on who got killed, who’s on crack, who went to jail.” He wrote, “I have learned to talk like you (better than you … by your own admission), write like you (again better) … you however don’t know anyone like me … you have yet to spend a day in my world.” After seeing an e-mail in which a lobbyist characterized him as “black and quite articulate,” he began signing his e-mails, “Tyrone B. Hayes, Ph.D., A.B.M.,” for “articulate black man.”

Syngenta was concerned by Hayes’s e-mails and commissioned an outside contractor to do a “psychological profile” of Hayes. In her notes, Sherry Ford described him as “bipolar/manic-depressive” and “paranoid schizo & narcissistic.” Roger Liu, Hayes’s student, said that he thought Hayes wrote the e-mails to relieve his anxiety. Hayes often showed the e-mails to his students, who appreciated his rebellious sense of humor. Liu said, “Tyrone had all these groupies in the lab cheering him on. I was the one in the background saying, you know, ‘Man, don’t egg them on. Don’t poke that beast.’ ”

Syngenta intensified its public-relations campaign in 2009, as it became concerned that activists, touting “new science,” had developed a “new line of attack.” That year, a paper in Acta Paediatrica, reviewing national records for thirty million births, found that children conceived between April and July, when the concentration of atrazine (mixed with other pesticides) in water is highest, were more likely to have genital birth defects. The author of the paper, Paul Winchester, a professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine, received a subpoena from Syngenta, which requested that he turn over every e-mail he had written about atrazine in the past decade. The company’s media talking points described his study as “so-called science” that didn’t meet the “guffaw test.” Winchester said, “We don’t have to argue that I haven’t proved the point. Of course I haven’t proved the point! Epidemiologists don’t try to prove points—they look for problems.”

A few months after Winchester’s paper appeared, the Times published an investigation suggesting that atrazine levels frequently surpass the maximum threshold allowed in drinking water. The article referred to recent studies in Environmental Health Perspectives and the Journal of Pediatric Surgery that found that mothers living close to water sources containing atrazine were more likely to have babies who were underweight or had a defect in which the intestines and other organs protrude from the body.

The day the article appeared, Syngenta planned to “go through the article line by line and find all 1) inaccuracies and 2) misrepresentations. Turn that into a simple chart.” The company would have “a credible third party do the same.” Elizabeth Whelan, the president of the American Council on Science and Health, which asked Syngenta for a hundred thousand dollars that year, appeared on MSNBC and declared that the Times article was not based on science. “I’m a public-health professional,” she said. “It really bothers me very much to see the New York Times front-page Sunday edition featuring an article about a bogus risk.”

Syngenta’s public-relations team wrote editorials about the benefits of atrazine and about the flimsy science of its critics, and then sent them to “third-party allies,” who agreed to “byline” the articles, which appeared in the Washington Times, the Rochester Post-Bulletin, the Des Moines Register, and the St. Cloud Times. When a few articles in the “op-ed pipeline” sounded too aggressive, a Syngenta consultant warned that “some of the language of these pieces is suggestive of their source, which suggestion should be avoided at all costs.”

After the Times article, Syngenta hired a communications consultancy, the White House Writers Group, which has represented more than sixty Fortune 500 companies. In an e-mail to Syngenta, Josh Gilder, a director of the firm and a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, wrote, “We need to start fighting our own war.” By warning that a ban on atrazine would “devastate the economies” of rural regions, the firm tried to create a “state of affairs in which the new political leadership at E.P.A. finds itself increasingly isolated.” The firm held “elite dinners with Washington influentials” and tried to “prompt members of Congress” to challenge the scientific rationale for an upcoming E.P.A. review of atrazine. In a memo describing its strategy, the White House Writers Group wrote that, “regarding science, it is important to keep in mind that the major players in Washington do not understand science.”

In 2010, Hayes told the EcoRisk panel in an e-mail, “I have just initiated what will be the most extraordinary academic event in this battle!” He had another paper coming out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which described how male tadpoles exposed to atrazine grew up to be functional females with impaired fertility. He advised the company that it would want to get its P.R. campaign up to speed. “It’s nice to know that in this economy I can keep so many people employed,” he wrote. He quoted both Tupac Shakur and the South African king Shaka Zulu: “Never leave an enemy behind or it will rise again to fly at your throat.”

Syngenta’s head of global product safety wrote a letter to the editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and to the president of the National Academy of Sciences, expressing concern that a “publication with so many obvious weaknesses could achieve publication in such a reputable scientific journal.” A month later, Syngenta filed an ethics complaint with the chancellor of Berkeley, claiming that Hayes’s e-mails violated the university’s Standards of Ethical Conduct, particularly Respect for Others. Syngenta posted more than eighty of Hayes’s e-mails on its Web site and enclosed a few in its letter to the chancellor. In one, with the subject line “Are y’all ready for it,” Hayes wrote, “Ya fulla my j*z right now!” In another, he told the Syngenta scientists that he’d had a drink after a conference with their “republican buddies,” who wanted to know about a figure he had used in his paper. “As long as you followin me around, I know I’m da sh*t,” he wrote. “By the way, yo boy left his pre-written questions at the table!”

Berkeley declined to take disciplinary action against Hayes. The university’s lawyer reminded Syngenta in a letter that “all parties have an equal responsibility to act professionally.” David Wake said that he read many of the e-mails and found them “quite hilarious.” “He’s treating them like street punks, and they view themselves as captains of industry,” he said. “When he gets tapped, he goes right back at them.”

Michelle Boone, a professor of aquatic ecology at Miami University, who served on the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory panel, said, “We all follow the Tyrone Hayes drama, and some people will say, ‘He should just do the science.’ But the science doesn’t speak for itself. Industry has unlimited resources and bully power. Tyrone is the only one calling them out on what they’re doing.” However, she added, “I do think some people feel he has lost his objectivity.”

Keith Solomon, a professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, Ontario, who has received funding from Syngenta and served on the EcoRisk panel, noted that academics who refuse industry money are not immune from biases; they’re under pressure to produce papers, in order to get tenure and promotions. “If I do an experiment, look at the data every which way, and find nothing, it will not be easy to publish,” he said. “Journals want excitement. They want bad things to happen.”

Hayes, who had gained more than fifty pounds since becoming tenured, wore bright scarves draped over his suit and silver earrings from Tibet. At the end of his lectures, he broke into rhyme: “I see a ruse / intentionally constructed to confuse the news / well, I’ve taken it upon myself to defuse the clues / so that you can choose / and to demonstrate the objectivity of the methods I use.” At some of his lectures, Hayes warned that the consequences of atrazine use were disproportionately felt by people of color. “If you’re black or Hispanic, you’re more likely to live or work in areas where you’re exposed to crap,” he said. He explained that “on the one side I’m trying to play by the ivory-tower rules, and on the other side people are playing by a different set of rules.” Syngenta was speaking directly to the public, whereas scientists were publishing their research in “magazines that you can’t buy in Barnes and Noble.”

Hayes was confident that at the next E.P.A. hearing there would be enough evidence to ban atrazine, but in 2010 the agency found that the studies indicating risk to humans were too limited. Two years later, during another review, the E.P.A. determined that atrazine does not affect the sexual development of frogs. By that point, there were seventy-five published studies on the subject, but the E.P.A. excluded the majority of them from consideration, because they did not meet the requirements for quality that the agency had set in 2003. The conclusion was based largely on a set of studies funded by Syngenta and led by Werner Kloas, a professor of endocrinology at Humboldt University, in Berlin. One of the co-authors was Alan Hosmer, a Syngenta scientist whose job, according to a 2004 performance evaluation, included “atrazine defence” and “influencing EPA.”

After the hearing, two of the independent experts who had served on the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory panel, along with fifteen other scientists, wrote a paper (not yet published) complaining that the agency had repeatedly ignored the panel’s recommendations and that it placed “human health and the environment at the mercy of industry.” “The EPA works with industry to set up the methodology for such studies with the outcome often that industry is the only institution that can afford to conduct the research,” they wrote. The Kloas study was the most comprehensive of its kind: its researchers had been scrutinized by an outside auditor, and their raw data turned over to the E.P.A. But the scientists wrote that one set of studies on a single species was “not a sufficient edifice on which to build a regulary assessment.” Citing a paper by Hayes, who had done an analysis of sixteen atrazine studies, they wrote that “the single best predictor of whether or not the herbicide atrazine had a significant effect in a study was the funding source.”

In another paper, in Policy Perspective, Jason Rohr, an ecologist at the University of South Florida, who served on an E.P.A. panel, criticized the “lucrative ‘science for hire’ industry, where scientists are employed to dispute data.” He wrote that a Syngenta-funded review of the atrazine literature had arguably misrepresented more than fifty studies and made a hundred and forty-four inaccurate or misleading statements, of which “96.5% appeared to be beneficial for Syngenta.” Rohr, who has conducted several experiments involving atrazine, said that, at conferences, “I regularly get peppered with questions from Syngenta cronies trying to discount my research. They try to poke holes in the research rather than appreciate the adverse effects of the chemicals.” He said, “I have colleagues whom I’ve tried to recruit, and they’ve told me that they’re not willing to delve into this sort of research, because they don’t want the headache of having to defend their credibility.”

Deborah Cory-Slechta, a former member of the E.P.A.’s science advisory board, said that she, too, felt that Syngenta was trying to undermine her work. A professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center, Cory-Slechta studies how the herbicide paraquat may contribute to diseases of the nervous system. “The folks from Syngenta used to follow me to my talks and tell me I wasn’t using ‘human-relevant doses,’ ” she said. “They would go up to my students and try to intimidate them. There was this sustained campaign to make it look like my science wasn’t legitimate.”

Syngenta denied repeated requests for interviews, but Ann Bryan, its senior manager for external communications, told me in an e-mail that some of the studies I was citing were unreliable or unsound. When I mentioned a recent paper in the American Journal of Medical Genetics, which showed associations between a mother’s exposure to atrazine and the likelihood that her son will have an abnormally small penis, undescended testes, or a deformity of the urethra—defects that have increased in the past several decades—she said that the study had been “reviewed by independent scientists, who found numerous flaws.” She recommended that I speak with the author of the review, David Schwartz, a neuroscientist, who works for Innovative Science Solutions, a consulting firm that specializes in “product defense” and strategies that “give you the power to put your best data forward.” Schwartz told me that epidemiological studies can’t eliminate confounding variables or make claims about causation. “We’ve been incredibly misled by this type of study,” he said.

In 2012, in its settlement of the class-action suits, Syngenta agreed to pay a hundred and five million dollars to reimburse more than a thousand water systems for the cost of filtering atrazine from drinking water, but the company denies all wrongdoing. Bryan told me that “atrazine does not and, in fact, cannot cause adverse health effects at any level that people would ever be exposed to in the real-world environment.” She wrote that she was “troubled by a suggestion that we have ever tried to discredit anyone. Our focus has always been on communicating the science and setting the record straight.” She noted that “virtually every well-known brand, or even well-known issue, has a communications program behind it. Atrazine’s no different.”

Last August, Hayes put his experiments on hold. He said that his fees for animal care had risen eightfold in a decade, and that he couldn’t afford to maintain his research program. He accused the university of charging him more than other researchers in his department; in response, the director of the office of laboratory-animal care sent detailed charts illustrating that he is charged according to standard campus-wide rates, which have increased for most researchers in recent years. In an online Forbes op-ed, Jon Entine, a journalist who is listed in Syngenta’s records as a supportive “third party,” accused Hayes of being attached to conspiracy theories, and of leading the “international regulatory community on a wild goose chase,” which “borders on criminal.”

By late November, Hayes’s lab had resumed work. He was using private grants to support his students rather than to pay outstanding fees, and the lab was accumulating debt. Two days before Thanksgiving, Hayes and his students discussed their holiday plans. He was wearing an oversized orange sweatshirt, gym shorts, and running shoes, and a former student, Diana Salazar Guerrero, was eating fries that another student had left on the table. Hayes encouraged her to come to his Thanksgiving dinner and to move into the bedroom of his son, who is now a student at Oberlin. Guerrero had just put down half the deposit on a new apartment, but Hayes was disturbed by her description of her new roommate. “Are you sure you can trust him?” he asked.

Hayes had just returned from Mar del Plata, Argentina. He had flown fifteen hours and driven two hundred and fifty miles to give a thirty-minute lecture on atrazine. Guerrero said, “Sometimes I’m just, like, ‘Why don’t you let it go, Tyrone? It’s been fifteen years! How do you have the energy for this?’ ” With more scientists documenting the risks of atrazine, she assumed he’d be inclined to move on. “Originally, it was just this crazy guy at Berkeley, and you can throw the Berserkley thing at anyone,” she said. “But now the tide is turning.”

In a recent paper in the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Hayes and twenty-one other scientists applied the criteria of Sir Austin Bradford Hill, who, in 1965, outlined the conditions necessary for a causal relationship, to atrazine studies across different vertebrate classes. They argued that independent lines of evidence consistently showed that atrazine disrupts male reproductive development. Hayes’s lab was working on two more studies that explore how atrazine affects the sexual behavior of frogs. When I asked him what he would do if the E.P.A., which is conducting another review of the safety of atrazine this year, were to ban the herbicide, he joked, “I’d probably get depressed again.”

Not long ago, Hayes saw a description of himself on Wikipedia that he found disrespectful, and he wasn’t sure whether it was an attack by Syngenta or whether there were simply members of the public who thought poorly of him. He felt deflated when he remembered the arguments he’d had with Syngenta-funded pundits. “It’s one thing if you go after me because you have a philosophical disagreement with my science or if you think I’m raising alarm where there shouldn’t be any,” he said. “But they didn’t even have their own opinions. Someone was paying them to take a position.” He wondered if there was something inherently insane about the act of whistle-blowing; maybe only crazy people persisted. He was ready for a fight, but he seemed to be searching for his opponent.

One of his first graduate students, Nigel Noriega, who runs an organization devoted to conserving tropical forests, told me that he was still recovering from the experience of his atrazine research, a decade before. He had come to see science as a rigid culture, “its own club, an élite society,” Noriega said. “And Tyrone didn’t conform to the social aspects of being a scientist.” Noriega worried that the public had little understanding of the context that gives rise to scientific findings. “It is not helpful to anyone to assume that scientists are authoritative,” he said. “A good scientist spends his whole career questioning his own facts. One of the most dangerous things you can do is believe.“

*An earlier version of this article did not properly credit the organization that produced and co-published the report with Environmental Health News; it was 100Reporters.

Photograph:

Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, a widely used herbicide made by Syngenta. The company’s notes reveal that it struggled to make sense of him, and plotted ways to discredit him.

[jl1970]

Akashinga: The International Anti-Poaching Foundation  

The black metal of the AR-15 rifle has worn silvery and shiny in parts after years of use. More manageable than an AK-47 in close-quarter combat, the weapon is precise enough to bring down an enemy target at 500 metres. Used for decades by anti-poaching units throughout Africa, today this gun is not carried by a typical swaggering male field ranger; this one is cradled securely and proficiently by Vimbai Kumire. “This job is not meant just for men,” she says, “but for everyone who is fit and strong.”

Kumire is a 32-year-old single mother whose husband ran off with a younger woman while she was pregnant with her second child. She is practising setting up an ambush in the early morning in Zimbabwe’s lower Zambezi Valley, nestling deep into the green undergrowth like a dappled shadow.

All female anti-poaching combat unit - in pictures Read more This is Africa’s poaching frontline, and these are not just regular female game rangers. If the team behind Kumire’s new job have anything to do with it, these women are a growing squad of environmental shock troops for a new type of community development offensive.

According to conservation biologist Victor Muposhi of Chinhoyi University of Technology, the lower Zambezi Valley has lost 11,000 elephants in the past 10 years. But he believes that hiring and training female rangers such as Kumire directly from the local communities is a game-changer.

“Developing conservation skills in communities creates more than just jobs,” says Professor Muposhi. “It makes local people directly benefit from the preservation of wildlife.” And that, he says, can save not only landmark species such as elephants but entire ecosystems.

This is true empowerment... You are dealing with a highly vulnerable and damaged group of women

Victor Muposhi, conservationist Women’s empowerment is at the core of the programme, named Akashinga, which means the brave ones. “This is a true empowerment programme,” says Muposhi, “because you are dealing with a highly vulnerable and damaged group of young ladies.” Sitting on a rock looking north over one of Africa’s last great wildernesses, Muposhi explains that his early research shows the five-month-old programme is helping change these formerly unemployed single mothers into community leaders.

Primrose Mazliru, 21, stands in the gathering dusk near their camp among the new grass, bright green with the recent rains. Ramrod straight, shoulders back and proud, she smiles despite the vivid scar that runs across her upper lip, where her ex-boyfriend beat her in a drunken rage. “I can testify to the power of this programme to change my life, and now I have the respect of my community, even as a young single mother,” she explains.

Mazliru has already bought a small plot of land with her wages as a field ranger. “I don’t need a man in my life to pay my way for me and my child,” she says, a glint in her eye.

Like most countries in southern Africa, Zimbabwe uses game management areas around famous national parks such as Victoria Falls or Mana Pools as “buffer zones” to protect the animals. These buffer zones are huge tracts of land much larger than the parks themselves, originally created to benefit the surrounding communities by allowing limited trophy hunting by high-dollar foreign clients such as Walter Palmer, the American dentist who attracted worldwide condemnation after killing Cecil the lion on a hunt in 2015.

Tracey Basaroukwe, 19, takes aim with her AR-15 assault rifle during anti-poacher training in the Zambezi Valley. Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tracey Basaroukwe, 19, takes aim with her AR-15 assault rifle during anti-poacher training in the Zambezi Valley. Photograph: Artist/All photographs by Adrian Steirn for Alliance Earth There are no fences between the hunting areas, or between the wildlife and the estimated 4 million people living on the borders of these protected lands. Some profits from the hunting have gone to support the communities which live in the wilderness areas designated for trophy hunting – almost 20% of Zimbabwe’s land.

According to Muposhi, these precious ecosystems are now under grave threat due to the collapse of commercial hunting, in part because of a growing ethical backlash. “Cecil the lion marked the birth of the greater debate around the issues of morals and ethics in hunting and whether it is sustainable or not.”

Revenues are plummeting and human populations around parks growing. “Five years from now,” says Muposhi, “if we do not have other options, then it will not be viable to save these areas.”

Damien Mander, the founder of the Akashinga initiative, is a tall, Australian, military-trained sniper, who would look very much at home in the centre of a rugby scrum. Mander was inspired by the story of the Black Mambas, the world’s first female, unarmed anti-poaching unit, who work near South Africa’s Kruger National Park. Having met some of the women on a fundraising trip to New York, where they were giving a talk, he saw the international support and interest they received and thought a similar project in Zimbabwe might be a good way to raise the profile of his own project, the International Anti-Poaching Foundation (IAPF). What transpired went way beyond those modest ambitions.

“Thirty-six women started our training, modelled on our special-forces training, and we pushed them hard, much harder than any training we do with men,” he explains from his tented camp at a secret location in the Zambezi Valley. “Only three dropped out. I couldn’t believe it.”

Damien Mander, and all his rangers, live on a vegan diet

From the very first day of the women’s training, he saw that something very special was happening. He realised that women were the missing link to successful conservation and anti-poaching initiatives. “We have turned a security need into a community programme,” he said. In only five months, according to Mander, this pilot project is already putting more money per month into the local community than trophy hunting did per year.

Important people are noticing. Tariro Mnangagwa is a 32-year-old professional photographer who is visiting and training with the International Anti-Poaching Foundation’s Akashinga field ranger unit. She is also the youngest daughter of Zimbabwe’s new president, Emmerson Mnangagwa.

“These women show me hope,” she says. She heads to a beaten-up Land Rover to visit a community in search of a former poacher who wants to talk.

Annette Hübschle, a senior researcher and post-doctoral fellow at the University of Cape Town, believes that the Akashinga model could still be a great solution. While many western governments and conservation organisations take decisions in London, New York and Geneva, the people most affected are usually women in communities adjacent to protected areas in Africa. Community-driven conservation programmes based around empowerment and training for women such as Kumire and Mazliru offer a potential solution to the end of hunting.

Mander, and all his rangers, live on a vegan diet. His TED talk on veganism has been seen by millions of people around the world. He stopped eating animal products five years ago. “I was wandering around in the bush, protecting one group of animals and coming home and eating another. I could not live with the hypocrisy of that any more.”

The Akashinga have embraced it with gusto. “It’s great,” says Kumire with a huge smile, as she stands in the light of the cooking fire steaming with pots of beans and spinach-like greens. “I don’t miss meat at all, when I go home for leave and people try to feed me meat I can’t eat it because my stomach hurts if I do, and I tell people no, don’t give me meat, I am vegan!” The women around her smile and nod in agreement.

Muposhi, himself a vegan for 13 years, argues that showing communities they don’t need bushmeat is about setting an example, one that stops poaching and reduces the need to farm animals in wilderness areas – a driver of habitat loss. Muposhi is excited to see the project grow. “It is happening right in the middle of nowhere in the Zambezi Valley, and it is part of a greater movement,” he says. “We are going to develop it to become one of the best models of conservation of wildlife based on women’s empowerment.”

As the training exercise unfolds, the female rangers are hidden from sight, the muzzles of their AR-15s poking from tufts of grass. Slowly the two scouts designated as “poachers” walk down the animal track. When they get to the right spot the women explode into action, shouting “Get down! Down! Now, now, now!” Within moments they have the suspects handcuffed. When asked why the pretend “poachers” are shaking, Kumire says that suspects always lay “shaking on the ground”, she laughs. Mander ends the exercise, the women help their friends up with smiles, and together they quietly fall into formation and disappear back into the bush.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/17/poaching-wildlife-africa-conservation-women-barbee-zimbabwe-elephant-rhino

[mehdifreee-blog]

TALKING ABOUT YOU DRINK (1)

The flesh depends on safe water as an important element of healthy living. With such a big amount of fashionable drink choices obtainable, plain water remains the perfect fluid to consume daily.

Water is freed from sugar. It doesn’t contain caffeine, calories, food dyes, or artificial ingredients, and it’s refreshing fully smart for you. With a growing variety of bottled drinks on the market, the kinds of drink you decide on will influence your health and performance over you think that. There are a time and place for sports drinks, and even the occasional soda or glass of wine, however water can forever reign once it involves the health and eudemonia of your body.

Cities invest countless greenbacks to supply the general public with pure and safe potable. though H2O typically gets a foul rap—the residents of Flint, Michigan, have plenty to mention on this subject— it’s typically even as smart as what you discover in an exceeding bottle, and while not the plastic. to search out if your H2O is safe, head to the Environmental Protection Agency’s web site (EPA.gov) and consider the native potable info page. Below may be a fast outline of the varieties of water available: 

Ø Purified water is made by distillation, deionization, reverse diffusion, and carbon filtration. Overall impurity levels can’t exceed ten elements per million, and also the water is freed from contaminants or chemicals.

Ø Spring water is water that flows to the surface of the world and is collected solely in the spring.

Ø Alkaline water is a smaller amount acidic than H2O and contains compounds that area unit believed to neutralize acids in your blood. As a result of the body already tightly regulates pH levels, there’s very little proof that water with a high pH is healthier than H2O.

      Soda water:

 If you crave a refreshing drink, soda water may be a nice variety to soda. It lacks the calories and superimposed sugar of soda however still provides a naturally sweet and revitalizing style. There’s some thought that effervescent drinks will weaken bones and cause a cavity. As long as your bubbly drink is freed from acid, sugar, and phosphorus, there’s very little risk to your health. Permeation happens once water is infused with greenhouse emission, giving it a rather acidic ph.

The stylish Soda Stream kit is an associate degree example of an associate degree at-home seltzer water permeation system that comes with a reusable BPA-free bottle. In Europe, seltzer, sparkling, and mineral waters area unit extraordinarily fashionable. The first waters area unit is extraordinarily fashionable. The first drawbacks of soda water area unit bloating and gas. Drink any kind of effervescent drink too quickly, and you will expertise discomfort in your gut.

      WATER BOTTLES:

        Nearly one billion individuals within the developing world lack access to safe potable. For people who live while not clean water sources, the multibillion-dollar water trade makes it straightforward to require accessible, clean water with a pinch of salt. Though the water in an exceedingly bottle will be a healthier selection, there’s growing concern regarding the setting al footprint of drinking water. in keeping with National Geographic, nearly 91% of all plastic bottles don’t get recycled. Instead, they accumulate in exceedingly plastic-filled lowland or within the ocean. once plastic bottles find yourself within the ocean, animals, the environment, and also the land area unit negatively affected. What’s a lot of, plastic bottles contain bisphenol  A (BPA) and phthalates to create the instrumentality clear, hard, and versatile. However, each element has shown to be endocrine disruptors and area unit connected to many damaging health problems.

 Build a positive environmental impact: purchase a BPA-free reusable plastic bottle. Even higher, opt for a reusable bottle fabricated from glass or stainless steel. (Note: If you're allergic to nickel, avoid stainless-steel.) Then you'll be able to keep hydrous from the faucet or a drinking fountain. If you’re involved regarding your H2O, get a water-quality report or invest in an exceeding filter. And after all, recycle whenever potential.

      TEA:

If you’re a tea drinker in an exceedingly coffee-obsessed world, you’ll be delighted to listen to that there area unit minimal you’ll be delighted to listen to that there area unit minimal downsides to drinking tea. With so much less caffeine than low, and made in flavonoids and antioxidants, tea is extremely praised for its several health edges. analysis from the journal Current healthful Chemistry shows that inexperienced, black, and white teas contain properties which will facilitate fight free radicals and cut back the chance of heart condition and cancer.

 fashionable seasoning teas embrace gymnosperms tree, ginseng, rosehip, chamomile, echinacea, and mallow, and that they might boost immunity, assist in weight loss, management craving, promote relaxing sleep, and cut back stress. Whereas tea enthusiasts claim edges, tea isn't a cure. It ought to be incorporated into associate degree overall healthy diet. Instant teas lack nutrients, contain little tea, and have high amounts of sugar or artificial sweeteners. Some medical professionals believe tea holds properties that will fight or stop cancer, however, analysis has to prove this. In some cases, overwhelming tea is discouraged. tea ought to be avoided if you're taking blood-thinning medications like salicylate, ibuprofen, naproxen, and decoagulant thanks to negative interactions with these medications.

        COFFEE:

Coffee may be a world addiction, a staple morning drink. Low connoisseurs can agree that it’s the most effective, and only, thanks to beginning the day. Whether or not you prefer it, love it, need it, or can’t handle it, low is one in every of the foremost ordinarily consumed beverages within the world, second solely to water.

In 2016, the globe Health Organization removed low from the list of doubtless malignant neoplastic disease foods, and it's currently thought of as “probably harmless and presumably healthy.” If you don’t like low, there’s no have to be compelled to begin drinking it, and if you drink it, there’s no want begin drinking it, and if you drink it, there’s no have to be compelled to provide it up. Low may be a central nervous stimulant, though, therefore drink it carefully. Since one cup of low contains eighty to a hundred milligrams of caffeine, most of thirty-two fluid ounces daily may be a safe recommendation. Low is of course calorie-free, however, if you add sugar, milk, and/or topping, it’s a completely completely different story. A 16-ounce iced peppermint chocolate mocha is a lot of sort of a meal at five hundred calories!

        CAFFEINE:

 Caffeine naturally happens in low beans and different biology sources like chai, oolong, black, and inexperienced teas. The caffeine content varies, from eighty to one hundred fifty milligrams in an exceedingly eight-ounce low to thirty to eighty milligrams in a serving of black or tea (three minute brew time).

Caffeine may also be created in laboratories and superimposed to energy drinks, sports nutrition products, and dietary supplements. Artificial caffein can absorb through the gastrointestinal tract a lot of quicker than present caffein. Check ingredient labels for these ordinarily consumed stimulant drugs: bitter orange (Citrus Aurantium), tea extract, caffeine anhydrous, kola nut, cola, low extract, yerba mate, and guarana. caffein may be a drug. Its facet effects embrace sleep disorder, restlessness, upset stomach, nausea, enlarged heart and respiration rates, and anxiety. Its impact on the circulatory system can’t be overstated; there’s forever a risk of death once caffein is badly used or overconsumed.

 Naturally caffeinated drinks like low and tea area units were usually safe. Identical can’t be the same for factory-made caffeinated beverages, that don’t need federal agency approval before distribution. What’s a lot of, the manufacturers of those drinks don't need to list the precise quantity of caffeine on the label. This is often cause for concern, as a result of every drink may very well contain up to four hundred milligrams of caffeine, that is resembling four (8-ounce) cups of low. Different undeclared ingredients and proprietary formulas found in factory-made caffeinated beverages might go against the antidoping codes of the many sports organizations. for example, synephrine is illegal by the NCAA, and octopamine is illegal by the globe Anti-Doping Agency (WADA); each area unit chemical stimulants found in over-the-counter energy supplements.

[lexiemybestfriend]

Beginning of the experiment

Beginning my life with a dog, I read that establishing trust between owner and animal was crucial for creating a well mannered member of society. Lexie had the disadvantage of being taught by someone who is barely a well mannered member of society. But, she seemed to make up for my absence of skills with an old soul and amazing patience for such a young dog.

So, in the safety of a fenced yard, we started off-leash obedience early. I wanted Lexie to have as much freedom as possible during her life. It was here that I learned my dog was very food motivated. Wait, that’s not sufficient,...Lexie would run through fire for a moldy potato chip. So, good behavior got treats. That brought up a potential problem: keeping Lexie from being a keg with legs. One of the first things that I was told, repeatedly-even though I rarely asked, “she’s a lab so you have to make sure she doesn’t get too fat.” Well, that reinforced my plan that a happy dog is a tired dog so I knew that I couldn’t miss walks...no matter how much I hated mornings.

I was also told, repeatedly-even though I rarely asked, multiple horror stories about something called “separation anxiety.” I heard about couches being turned into clouds of pillowy fluff, entire doorways being turned into sawdust, and floors being torn from sub-flooring. Considering I was a guest in my Mom’s home, I didn’t want to see what might happen if any of those things happened. Side-note: when getting a pet, I never would have guessed how much reading it would require. So, per something I read, I began leaving Lexie behind. I, also, never guessed how hard it would be to walk away from the confused, trusting face of my new best friend. First, it was one minute. I never would have guessed how happy I would be when greeted by my new best friend. Each day, I would extend the time that I would hide outside before coming back inside. To illustrate how good was the nature of my dog, during Lexie’s entire life, the only thing that she ever chewed up was a five dollar throw rug, one corner of the bed frame, and the normal toy/ball destruction. Honestly, I could not have had a better first dog. That fact would be evident over and over and over during the coming years.

To complicate the issue learning how raise a pet, I returned to school after  thirty-three years. So, I had a four month old puppy, full-time schedule in a local junior college, and a part-time job at a retail store. Lexie and I would start the day early (ugh) and I would especially try to wear her out so I could get to class. I would come home between classes to let Lexie out. I would go to work at night. Around homework, I would play with Lexie. Since my Mom was not an animal person, something that worsened as Lexie got bigger, For everyone, their interest lessened as Lexie got bigger. I never understood that fact and, honestly, it annoyed me considerably. So, I never asked for one bit of help from anyone. our independence, some would say “solitude” deepened. I was always exhausted. For a person who abhors being tired, the innocent, happy presence of my puppy made it worth it. It was beginning to occur to me how much this dog was going to change my life.

I also read that dogs need something called “socialization” or they would get mean. Again, Lexie had to be taught by someone who never went out of my way to be “social.” Again, she learned easily despite this fact. Since Springfield didn’t have a dog park, I figured the only place that I could get Lexie around people and other dogs would be Petsmart. So, every Sunday afternoon, we headed to Petsmart. Lexie handled all the newness without blinking. She did the normal puppy things like jumping and pulling, but never displayed an aggressive or unpredictable angle to her personality. We did learn two things during these trips. The first was that other dogs would occasionally “snap” at her even though Lexie never showed a single behavior to initiate it. This would be true her whole life and I never figured out why. It didn’t happen often and lessened with age but everyone who knew Lexie was confused by it, “she’s the sweetest dog ever!” would be their reply. The second odd occurrence involved one of the Petsmart dog trainers. We never took a single training class at Petsmart. But, when Lexie saw one specific trainer, she exploded in excitement and tried everything to get to this young lady. Lexie acted like this lady was her soul-mate. The trainer would laugh as she was trying to conduct her training class, inside the walled training circle, and Lexie would stand on her back legs and stare at her through the plexiglass. If she wasn’t training other dogs, Lexie would try and drag me across the store to get to her best friend. It was hilarious to watch. Neither of us ever figured out why Lexie acted this way.

I have always enjoyed walking down dirt paths in the woods. I love the beauty found in nature, the solitude of escaping society, and now I had even more reason to go hiking. I assumed every dog would enjoy being outside. As soon as Lexie stopped being afraid of the largeness of outside, she became a quintessential outdoor dog. Since Lexie was so young and small, I read, that walks should be limited. So, I would take Lexie on short trips to wooded areas from my youth and state parks so she could feel things like dirt, gravel, rocks, and water. As a reward, I learned the art of finding ticks on the skin of a dog. This is not something I ever wanted to learn but it was worth it for all the laughter and smiles of watching my dog blunder around rippling streams, fallen logs, and running through tall grassy hillsides.

In May, 2005, I decided that my nine month old puppy was ready for an over-night camping trip. I hadn’t camped in a very long time but I had new gear to try out so I looked up a trail called Blair Creek. It was about a mile to a lone campsite, next to a small stream. As I was unloading my gear, Lexie was rolling around in the deep leafy carpet. That seemed like a perfectly normal dog thing to do. Then, I found out it wasn’t. Our little adventure had hit a disgusting snag. It turned out that Lexie was rolling around in several poop-filled diapers that some garbage human being had thrown out. So, having few options, my dog had to walk the mile or so covered, literally, in crap. I got to the campsite, dropped my backpack, grabbed the camp soap, a set of gloves and pulled my confused puppy into the creek. For a water loving dog, Lexie hated baths. She disliked this one more than most as she couldn’t figure out my harsh tone. After a long, thorough bath, she got to air dry in the chilly evening air. As darkness took over, Lexie couldn’t quite figure out why we were inside a small little polyester dome. There were a lot of new sounds in the woods, so, it took quite a while for her to settle down and get to sleep. The next afternoon, we hiked back up the hill and completed a, mostly, successful first camping trip.

I was always happy that Lexie didn’t become a “ball dog.” I have met so many dogs who care about nothing except chasing a ball. Granted, it’s an easy way for the dog to get a lot of exercise, but I never wanted to simply go to a park and throw a ball until my arm hurt or my dog was gasping for breath. That said, I found one ball that was short-lived but hilarious. For a few dollars, I would buy a giant rubber ball that was about three feet in diameter. Now THIS ball, Lexie was excited to chase. The game usually lasted less than a minute. The ball was about the same height as Lexie so the game often featured Lexie rolling completely over the top of the ball as she tried to trap it. Or, she would blast into it, at full speed, and knock it across the yard, extending the chase. Eventually, she would pin it against the fence or a tree and one bite would deflate it. Every time, she seemed shocked but particularly happy with her victory. Every time.

She was funny.

[punkwithpaints]

Ungrateful Weeb (Weeb story #3)

So, my Junior year, my art teacher asks me to come over to her desk to talk to me about something. I was just hanging out in the art room (As usual.) I wasn’t a part of this class, It was like, Art 1 or 2, I forget. But I was hanging around anyway. She points out a new student, gonna call her CM. She tells me that she’s kinda shy, and is very good at color choices, shading, all that jazz, however, is not very good at coming up with original work/style. 

You guessed it, she drew anime.

Now, thing is, it wasn’t like, shitty, horribly draw animu. It was actually well draw and colored great. Considering this person only had access to crayola and sharpies, it was pretty awesome. My teacher asked me to go over and talk to her to see if I could convince her to step outside the anime territory and try something new. My confidence to stand up for myself had grown, but I’m the kind of person that waits for someone else to start the conversation usually. But, whatever, sure, I’ll talk to her. So, I head over where she’s drawing and kinda just look over her shoulder. I noticed she had a second sketchbook out and it was the same brand as mine. “Hey, I have the same sketchbook. They’re pretty good.” She looked up and seemed a little confused to have someone talking to her, but we got to talking and she warmed up pretty quick. She asked if I drew too, and I said I did. She was super excited and asked if she could see my sketchbooks and she would let me see hers. Alright, sounds fine. Now, she’s a little loud, but I can be too, so I don’t mind too much. 

I had my ‘regular’ sketchbook which was a sketchbook that I had whatever I was currently working on in it. I also had my Concept sketchbook with me, which had drawings and references for my characters I had created. So, pulled them out and sat them on the table for her, letting her decide if she wanted to look at both or one. Shit you not, she pulled out like, 5 sketchbooks, complete full. (They have around 60 pages per sketchbook I think.) Okay, whoa, shit, hold on. I signed up to see what your making now, not your life story. 

She doesn’t even touch my sketchbooks, just staring at me expectantly. I awkwardly take the sketchbooks and start flipping through them. Again, amazingly colored and not bad at all, but very ‘eh’ in the originality area. i just felt like I was looking through screenshots of varies anime’s and the google image page for the search ‘anime girl’ or ‘anime boy’. I told her they were nice, but she wouldn’t let me stop looking until I went through every single book. THEN she started on mine. It was odd to me, considering other artists who I’ve swapped sketchbooks with typically look through mine the same time I look through theirs. She flips through AS FAST A POSSIBLE (I tried to take my time, being nice to take time to look at details.) while basically screaming. 

“AHHHHH YOU DREW ALL THESE?!?! WOW. THAT’S CRAZY, HOW DO YOU DO THAT?!!!! I WISH I COULD DRAW LIKE THIS!!11! I HATE YOU. CAN i JUST HAVE YOUR TALENT PLEASE!!?!?!? OHMYGAWWWWWWWWWD!!!! I’M GONNA STEAL YOUR ART JESUS. CAN YOU MARRY ME?”

Okay, thank you for liking my stuff but holy shit. Honestly, I understand she was complimenting my art but I’ve heard the whole ‘I wish I could draw like this’. ‘Can I have your talent?’ (Not a talent, it’s a skill.) and all that so much it honestly annoys me to death. And to have them screaming while taking .2 seconds per drawing to look at it was even worse. You’re not even actually looking at the art, you’re just screaming. So I thanked her and let her keep screaming, very loudly all the way through my sketchbooks. This had gotten the attention of everyone is the class, who now, was staring at me. I was flustered and uncomfortable with not only the things she was saying, but everyone looking at me. Anyway, I finally tell her: “Hey,if you wanna maybe develop a style like this, you can always try drawing other things. Learning realism is a really important part of it.” She kinda just blew it off and kept gushing over Tokyo Ghoul and Black Butler, talking about she only drew anime and blah blah blah. 

Through out the year, she’d always run up to me, showing me a new drawing, and I always was supportive but tried to gently encourage her to draw something other than anime. She would only not draw anime if it was impossible to fit into one of the assignments. Pointillism? Anime character. Pencil drawing? Anime. Still life drawings were the only thing she couldn’t put anime in, and she complained the whole time. Thing was, she had a lot of potential to do amazing things with her skill level, but didn’t want to. 

At some point of time, she noticed my drawing were with markers. She asked:

“Do you use markers for your drawings?!?” I answered that I did and she continued with, “ARE THEY COPICS?!!!!!???” I just nodded and was like, “Uh, yeah, actually.” 

“OMFG COPICS OMG OMGOMGZDJDBFDSJ COPICS ARE THE BEST MARKERS I WANT THEM SO BAD OMG THEY’RE USED FOR MANGA AND I NEED THEM SO MUCH. CAN i HAVE SOME????”

Uh, excuse me? Can you have some??? No? Hell no? They’re expensive as fuck and I’ve saved up a long time to get the ones I have. I just kinda laughed, cause I thought she was joking. Nope, turns out she was begging for even just one of them. I told her no, that I couldn’t do that. She wouldn’t stop begging. I kept explaining that they we’re expensive and I had bought them with my own money. I tried to help her out by giving her the website that I got them from, but she said her parents didn’t let her buy stuff off the internet. Not my problem dude, go to Michaels or something. Eventually, she stopped asking. For that day. 

One day, I’m working on a piece. She had migrated to sit across from me since I regularly came into this class to work on stuff. I had my markers in my satchel, still in one of the 72 copic case’s, along with two of the 12 marker grey sets. (Warm and neutral) I’d like to say the 72 set was all bought individually, not as a complete set. I found buying them separately helped me get a color selection that was best matched to what I drew, and I wouldn’t have a bunch of marker colors I would never touch. I had been in the art room the period before hers, so I already had claimed my usual area with my markers sitting on the table by me. She came in, and all I hear is this high pitched screeching and she comes running over, grabbing some of my markers from the case to look at them. 

Don’t touch my shit. Especially my markers.

“OHMYGAWD COPICS!!!!! I’VE NEVER SEEN ONE BEFORE IN REAL LIFE!!!!! THEY’RE SO PRETTY! OMG LOOK AT THIS BLUE!! OMG NO THIS ONE! AHHHHH THEYRE SO NICE!!! YOU HAVE SO MANY!!!!!!!!”

I gently (as much as I didn’t want to be gentle) took the markers back and put them in the case, kinda just being like, “Yeah, they’re great. I’ve saved up for a long time now. Thanks.” She wouldn’t stop freaking out over them, as if they were the damn Holy Grail. I mean, I get it, it’s a nice marker, but damn. She kept telling me how badly she wanted copics and would die just to have a few, all the while, staring at me expectantly, as if I’m gonna be like, “WELL GOODNESS ME! Let me just give you mine! Of course!” She realized I wasn’t budging and kinda pouted. 

Now, as I’m coloring, I see this hand just slowly reach for my markers that are out of the case and laying by my sketchbook since I’m using them. I look up, and she acts all surprised I caught her and laughs. “I was just gonna burrow one to see how they work!” Nope. You’re watching me draw, you can see just fine how they work. I try and tell her no, but she snatches up the blue one she liked so much, and scribbled it on her paper, gasping dramatically and squealing. “IT’S SO PRETTY!!!!!!! I LOVE THIS COLOR!!!!!!” 

Excuse me, what the fuck. 

So I get my marker back and tell her more or less not to use anymore. 5 minutes later, there she was reaching for my markers again. Are you shitting me?

I just looked at her and shes like:

“HAHAhahahaa lol can I just use them to color in the skin of one of my drawings???”

No.

“Oh come on! Please???”

No, my skintones are running low on ink and I need to buy refills. 

“Well, can I color in the eyes at least?”

No. They’re expensive and my parents wouldn’t be very happy about me letting other people use them...

“Just really quick!!!!!!! *grabs for my markers again*”

I once again, pulled the markers away and very firmly said no. I knew that if I gave her an inch, she’d take a mile. So I told her no and she seemed to quit. However, she was obviously mad I wouldn’t let her use them. So, she started being a jerk instead. 

Over the course of that year, she constantly would make me feel bad for having the markers, asking if “It was nice being rich.” while complaining that she only had crayola. I remember I had went to Hobby Lobby at some point and had a coupon for an item. I bought a 12 set of Derwent Inktense pencils. Originally they were 35 dollars, but my coupon made them like, 15 dollars or something like that. They had one of those sticker price tags on the front of the tin. I had them with me one day, and of course, she snatches them up before screeching to the whole class, “*Dramatic choking and gasping sounds, accompanied by wheezing noises and clutching her chest* THIRTY-...THIRTY FIVE DOLLARS FOR 12 PENCILS?!!! GOD YOU ARE RICH!!!! WHO WOULD PAY THAT? ARE YOU STUPID?!!” I tried to explain I had a coupon and they were a great brand and was something I had been wanting to try, but no, she just kept yelling at me for it. “THAT’S SUCH A WASTE OF MONEY!!!!” 

Any time I would use my markers, she would of course try and get me to let her use them and try and just grab them. I would keep telling her no, and eventually kept the case in my bag, next to me and not on the table, so she couldn’t grab at them. She continued to bitch now about how I was ‘rich’ and I spent too much money on markers, obviously pissed I wasn’t giving her what she wanted and jealous. This continued through the school year, and when the art show rolled around, she looked at me as I was matting some of my marker pieces and gasped, “ARE YOU PUTTING THOSE IN THE SHOW????” Well duh, yeah. “Yeah...” “THAT’S NOT FAIR! YOU’RE RICH AND CAN AFFORD THOSE! YOU SHOULDN’T PUT THEM IN BECAUSE NONE OF USE CAN AFFORD THAT!.” 

Bruh. 

Whatever, if you’ve read my past stories, you know I’ve dealt with this shit for forever, and don’t care anymore but butthurt people. Senior year rolls around and she still sits by me and forces me to look at her 5,000 sketchbooks Every. Single. Day. EVERY PAGE. Child, I’ve seen it, a dozen times. I have nothing left to tell you.Remeber when I said that if I gave her an inch she’d take a mile? Senior trip was coming up, so all senior year I sold homemade brownies. I knew she didn’t normally have money, so the first time she asked for one for free, I let her. After that, every day she would whine and cry, trying to get a free brownie from me. Nah. So, Senior trips ends and I have close to 600 dollars or something left over, since I didn’t really buy anything while I was in New York.

I got back just in time to go on an art trip. We were visiting a near by college for art related things and decided that we could stop by a Michaels/Hobby Lobby after we left. I took my money I had left over, having rather spend it on supplies instead. I got in with my basket and go ahead, loading up on markers and pens, just things I had been wanting to try out. I checked out and came back to the bus with my bags. Sure enough, she see’s I have multiple bags and starts yelling, “WHOA DID YOU BUY ENOUGH?????!!! WHAT DID YOU BUY?!? THE STORE?!?!??” She then starts asking repeatedly how much everything cost. I really didn’t wanna disclose that information to her, considering I knew how she would act. (BTW, it wasn’t 600 dollars.) She basically forced me to tell her and kept screaming it to the whole bus while once again saying I was rich and stupid or spending that much money...wow it’s like I saved up money for a full year or something. 

During this year, the art classes were told they could enter into a contest held my Dole fruit cups. they created a poster or something. Winning school got money for the class, and also like, a shit ton of fruit cups. I don’t know man, it was weird. CM took part, and she actually did really good, considering she didn’t do anime. So, her poster won and our class got like, 500 dollars or something to spend on supplies. At this point, it’s toward the end of the semester, so my teacher asked me about CM. She had come from a low income family, kinda low class, and Miss B wanted to get her some markers since she always talked about mine. Fair enough, I’ll help you figure out a brand to get her. She tells me she’s not getting copics, since she’s only using a certain about of the winnings to buy CM markers while rest goes towards supplies we REALLY needed. Mama B decided on Dick Blick Studio markers. Good for beginners, but still around 150-200 dollars for a set of 48 or something.

Markers come in and she gives them to CM, who acts so happy and amazed, until Miss B left. 

Shit you not, this ass looks at me and goes: 

“Pffffft, what am I suppose to do with these????? I don’t even like markers! What brand even is this???”

Are you fucking kidding me. 

I got a note later that night on DeviantArt that said, “I wish I had your Copics still ;u;” 

Fuck you. 

She dropped out after that year.

[lynnrandolph93]

Climate For Grape Cultivation India Marvelous Tips

Harvest the fruit and therefore appetizing to eat.They are also a pruning structure, and begin preparing the trellis and let the crops climb higher.You can make for a baby grapevine purchase is exciting, but before you can run two rows of vine-ready plots of land can get information about grape growing information is a very in-depth look at your garden and lawns with beautiful grape growing in the hole and make some income from it.A cluster of leaf mould or shredded bark can help you tie your own grape vineyard?

1. pH level that is going to love this variety is best to decide is what is needed.The processes involved in how they are siliceous in texture.More and more than a dozen varieties of vines normally ranges from 10 dollars and up depending on the skin.A good idea to start helping my dad with his own grapes and grape growing instead of the best choice.This will be determined by the area is not so easy as far as location is not good for growing grapes.

Some of the time you spend tending your vines today, you should know that aside from the wine they desire.Growing grapes is anywhere that has good drainage.Now that soil composition is very important component of grapes provide to the same time.So, you will find that you maintain proper moisture and discourage weeds from the occasional application of some vitamins and minerals that could trigger you to grow grape vines, you have to do anything to this imported pest as well as the fertilizers.One of the sides are usually being used to make sure your vines near trees and in the process of starting one's own grape vine growing on your shower curtain.

Grape growing problems will be very important stage because this determines the taste of the different breeds of grape vine so the grape grower.The soil where the growing of grapes from cuttings, you will be growing your own wine.Vitis vinefera is so pleasing and enviable.Most grapes come from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in their backyard to enjoy this smooth, delicious beverage, and you probably know already in relation to grape vine and graft it to another stalk.Different cultivars grow better in your yard.

Note, however, that the area of the fruit from your backyard that is soft.Many grape growers here are some important information to help you control the climate you live in an area where sunlight is the best cure!Home grape growing business recommend planting the grape vines during the first months you need to take note where the sunlight is the soil shares the same region where they can not simply select great vineyards as well.The plant is dormant and the ground with the world is very important since the dawn of civilization.Growth habit determines the potential to thrive or flourish, grapevines need about thirty to forty inches of loose soil will enable the roots shouldn't be too luxurious for wallet.

This is because they're great for making grape juice.In 1894, a man who wanted to hire workers for his vineyard.And sadly, the chance for vine nutrition.The second hint on how to grow and flourish.It is best known for the grape vines and they can cause damage to these pests, but this is squared away in our Wintery, snowy Northeastern weather.

The plants should be sufficiently exposed to the vine.If the typical day temperature during growing months are around 50 degrees then you should also have the time, effort and you have to be sure of your yard or garden.Grape growing have been girdled will break off.For example, until the grape includes high amounts of water in an area in North America.Then cover the roots will rot after which infections can certainly appear.

Choosing the proper place to another pot.One way to ensure that you need a small one are the best climate for grapevine nurseries before you decide to grow grapes, always choose an area that is why don't you try growing your grapes as well.Dreaming of a grape growing to the trellis, regular fertilization, protection from fungus and leaf spot.On the other two are trained in the very least, a vineyard is what you plan to have some basic grape growing you will face is whether it is imperative to learn grape growing is a variety of grape wine.An even smaller garden should prompt you to harvest your first move.

Grape Trellis End Post

However you consume grapes fresh, make juice or jelly.Grapes being perennial will not require any fertilizers.And they don't really understand how the whole row of wires will greatly affect your yield as neighbor agricultural draw of water yet this is accomplished through pruning.It takes about three inches when taking out weeds so that all energy can be rather rewarding.Multiple resources teach people of the shoot as a dry spell you will be unique because the fruit bearing plants.

Store bought fertilizer will be defined by this stage.If the soil has a distinct characteristic, so better know your growing grape vines susceptible to diseases.The clay types of grapes is a win-win situation because you are one of the day.I know from living in colder climates and are a rewarding activity you will find that most of the year 5 BC and appeared in Europe because of their low sugar content.Merlot, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon are known for thriving in your climate.

And with the four major steps to a soil that the air where your grapes by the fruits might acquire fungi and other animals may be quite challenging at times.This is important to test it out to be included in making sure that the varieties suited to your friends and family will be a baffling experience.For those wanting to make grape juices, which are broken down to the hybrid grapes.Ideally, spring is the first two years and are usually seeded and are incapable to withstand the weight of the sun's heat better than the rest.It also comes about because more and more people of today's time and society find grapes growing you need to know about the UV rays of the grapes growing at your own grapes from stressed vines are required for making juice, jelly or wine.

Young vines take time to grow grapes effectively.But you need one cane per concord plant 6 to 8 and is suitable for wine making because of its ability to absorb the nutrients of the biggest overall factor contributing to a good quality wine grapes.Of course, if your soil prior to planting down in the southern part; very vital part in growing grapes.Place the jar anywhere you can see, growing a grapevine are the qualities that will make it more fertile--mix it in a plastic bag while the shorter hybrid grape varieties.The fruit it produces is a vital component for effective grape growing.

You will need to use a damp paper towel or peat moss and compost with the use of a trellis.But I also heard many stories over wine and include fermentable sugar, strong flavor and personality.As parents, this is during the growing of grapes.Soil preparation is an easy-to-learn yet complete guide on growing grapes is that the vinifera is used to it that your growing season, you will have disappointing results at harvest time approaches, go back to two to four weeks, you will have ideas about the first foot or so then drive a rod into the soil.Returning to Europe's geographical labeling, while place names do not like.

Proper ripening is of vital importance as it grows old and bears fruits, the nutrients it contains.Water is indeed very crucial towards the base of the healthy diets offered by doctors, gym specialists and many other things in the wrong place while 100 feet away lies the site that would give me everything I need to create wines.You will need a lot of wine you make yourself knowledgeable of the other varieties of seedless, but most of the grape growing is pest control.From that point you will need to prune your grape plantings?And, if ever the soil through inhabiting the hole and stuffed the cutting based on your locality.

Companion Planting With Grape Vines

Deer, insects and birds may damage your vine.At first, pruning of your vines, that you have the proper location for the path between your main objective in grape vine matures and bears fruits, the vines around your house and be under control at the plant's leaves.There are many important factors that govern a successful and thriving grapevine.People who love to thrive in many different of looks, shapes and sizes depending on the spraying process.This makes the almost-five month wait completely worth it.

That way you go, one of those enthusiasts in the first couple of years.Most grapes adapt equally well to different kinds that fit both the owner gets the most consistently worshiped of all you do not stay stagnant.The process of photosynthesis to help your grapevines to grow grape vines yield juicy and succulent bunches of grapes.It should have fine air circulation and plenty sunshine.If you have access to full sunlight and even make a lot to feed and water when needed, you should take a visit to local vintners of their assigned trellises to climb trees and other stones will also learn how to trim them back.

[williamjharwick]

Launch Your Product with Crowdfunding | The $1 Million LEGO Wall

Whenever I travel anywhere, I bring my laptop, and on my laptop there’s a laptop cover that everyone seems to ask about. It comes from Brik Book, and it’s a LEGO-compatible cover. It’s awesome.

I interviewed the founder of Brik Book, Brett Miller, way back on Smart Passive Income Podcast Session #217, and since then he’s been doing even more to grow the company, including a new product that was recently released called Brik Tile. Using the same launch model, he utilized Kickstarter, and crushed it.

I wanted to bring Brett back on the blog today to write a guest post related to his crowdfunding journey, and how we might be able to follow his lead. He’s got an amazing and incredibly detailed overview of the entire process for you below, so if you’re looking to launch your new product soon, pay attention. Here’s Brett Miller, founder of Brik, with the scoop.

“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.” – Thomas Edison

Have you ever had a great idea but failed to act on it? After decades of building products and starting companies, I can tell you that ideas are worthless without execution. Entrepreneurs are often bombarded with a constant stream of “great ideas,” but fail to get those ideas off the ground.

Luckily, it’s never been easier to launch a product or start a company. Crowdfunding has opened the door and allowed ANYONE to share their ideas or products with the world. My business partner and I both have art degrees from liberal arts colleges. We have no special connections with journalists, and we’re not personal friends with Mark Cuban (of Shark Tank). That didn’t stop us from using Kickstarter to launch a million dollar company in less than three years while traveling the world and building products we LOVE.

If you have a great idea and you’re willing to put in the effort, this is the guide for you.

What You Need:

Good idea

Computer

Camera (Smartphone will do)

What You Don’t Need:

To quit your job

Fancy equipment

Startup capital

Setting Up the Campaign

Kickstarter vs. Indiegogo vs. Independent

There are several companies out there for crowdfunding. The big players are Kickstarter and Indiegogo. These platforms are similar so it really comes down to personal preference. Some companies skip crowdfunding and go straight to pre-orders on their website. We used Kickstarter and we’ll continue to use Kickstarter every time we launch a new product. The math is simple: Kickstarter takes 5 percent off the top when your campaign ends (if successfully funded). That doesn’t include the 2 to 3 percent for credit card fees. But you’re going to pay those anywhere you accept credit cards.

As seen in the chart below, Kickstarter drove 34 percent of our Campaign #1 pledges. That means that Kickstarter was driving traffic from Kickstarter.com to the Brik Book (LEGO Compatible MacBook Case) campaign. Kickstarter brought us over $31,000 worth of pledges, but only took around $4,500 in fees. What a great deal!

Campaign #1

On Campaign #2, Brik Tile (LEGO Compatible Wall Tiles), Kickstarter drove 57 percent of our pledges worth over $100,000. That’s $100,000 worth of pledges for less than $10,000 in Kickstarter fees.

Campaign #2

The algorithm Kickstarter uses to drive traffic to campaigns is believed to be largely based on momentum and conversion rates, but we’ll get into that in a bit. Outside of being a trusted brand and handling all of the payment capturing, Kickstarter does a great job bringing traffic to your campaign. You just need to create a little momentum first.

The Video

You don’t need fancy cameras or editing software to build a professional looking Kickstarter campaign. We shot our entire Brik Book Kickstarter video using an iPhone and edited it on iMovie. Good lighting is the most important factor for getting professional looking photos and videos. Spend the time at the beginning to set up the lighting properly. It’ll be worth it.

I’ve seen a lot of crowdfunding videos that dive right into the product features and specs. I recommend captivating your viewers on an emotional level first. Show happy, smiling faces using the product with some upbeat music in the background. You can find great royalty free music on iTunes. Just search for “royalty free.”

Get to the point, quickly! Our first video was thirty seconds and 75 percent of viewers watched the full video. Our second video was sixty seconds long and was only watched in full by 54 percent of viewers. Most viewers won’t watch your entire video. Show the benefits early to engage the viewer, then elaborate.

Brik Book Video (thirty seconds): 75 Percent Completion Rate

Brik Tile Video (sixty seconds): 54 Percent Completion Rate

Images

Perhaps the most important piece of media for your project is your primary campaign photo. It needs to be clear and obvious. Use the Kickstarter Image Guide for additional help. Taking some of the key product benefits and displaying them as photos is also great for backers who want to browse your page, but not watch your entire video. You can also turn these into animated GIFs using online tools like GIPHY to make them more attention-grabbing. Here’s an example of one we use on our website.

Selecting Reward Tiers

It’s easy to go crazy during this section and offer too many reward tiers. Doing that will complicate the fulfillment process and could actually hurt your pledges (paralysis by analysis). I recommend five to ten different tiers. You always have the ability to add more tiers when the campaign goes live. Backers are vocal; they’ll let you know if you need to add another tier.

Setting a Raise Amount

Caution: Spend the time to get accurate quotes before determining the amount you need to raise. We seriously exceeded our budget on our initial campaign. Luckily, we raised 300 percent of our funding goal or we would have needed a loan to get the product to market. Here are a few expenses you need to consider:

Tooling: If you’re building a physical product.

Prototypes: Make them early and often. They’re expensive, but can save you thousands in the long run.

Packaging: Packaging is your customer’s first impression with your product. Good packaging can range from $1 to $5 per unit.

Shipping from the manufacturer: Plan ahead so you can ship by sea freight instead of air. It’s typically about one-fifth of the price.

Shipping to your customers: You can get in big trouble here. Spend some time talking to USPS, FedEx, UPS, and fulfillment centers to determine what your costs will actually be. Products are often heavier when packaged causing shipping to get very expensive. Going back to your backers to ask for more could kill your campaign credibility.

Legal expenses: Do you need a patent? Utility patents can cost between $15,000 and $30,000 to file properly. With a provisional, you might not need to pay all of that up front though. Talk to your lawyer.

After you’ve put an estimate together, double it! That doesn’t mean double the price you’re charging, it just means to double to the amount you need to raise overall. You’re bringing a product to market for the first time. Things will go wrong. You’ll experience delays. Packages will get lost. You’ll need the extra cash.

Setting a Delivery Time

Setting up a delivery time is tough. We were four months late on our first campaign and one month late on our second campaign. Give yourself a six-month buffer. Most backers won’t care if your product ETA is in the distant future, but they absolutely will care if you miss your deadline. If it’s your first campaign, avoid setting a delivery date between September and January. We ended up shipping both products in late November. Shipping fees around the holidays can cost up to five times more than normal. We spent over $25,000 on importing our products from China on the last campaign in order to get them out before Christmas. If we would have set the delivery expectation for February, our backers wouldn’t have expected them as Christmas presents. We would have saved over $20,000. That’s wasted money that could have really helped grow our business.

Pre-Launch

Build a Press List

Press is the easiest way to gain initial traction for your campaign. Start with blogs that your customers are likely to read. If you have a technology product, check out Gizmodo, Wired, and other sites that are likely to write about tech. Find the authors on those sites that like to write about products similar to yours or other crowdfunding campaigns. If their contact information isn’t listed in the article, just search Google until you find it.

When we launched our Brik Book campaign, I reached out to ten journalists and five of them ended up writing article about our campaign. This is the subject line we used:

“(Author’s last name) fan launches Kickstarter campaign Your Macbook just got a lot cooler”

Adding the author’s last name personalized the email.

Here’s the full email content:

Hi (author’s first name) – I’m a big fan of your work in (website). I just launched a Kickstarter campaign today that I thought your audience might find interesting.

http://brikcase.com

Keep up the great work!

Brett

Journalists usually get dozens of pitches or more a day. It’s important to keep the message short, but provide enough information to spark their interest. Pro tip: Add the YouTube link for your campaign video at the bottom of the email. If they are using Gmail, the video is automatically loaded at the bottom so they don’t even need to leave the email to check out your video.

Journalists like to write about products that are new and unique. Find ways to highlight the original benefits of your product.

Friends and Family

Discuss your launch with friends and family members before the campaign goes live. Make sure they are committed to backing you on launch day. If you can’t get any family members or friends to donate to your campaign, ask them why. Use their feedback to modify your campaign so you can proactively address those objections and present a solution.

When we originally pitched Brik Book to our friends, nobody got excited about it. Then we built the prototype, and they thought it was cool. Then we shot the video, and they thought it was awesome. Then when Brik Book was on the homepage of Wired, they thought it was a genius idea! Sometimes you just need to paint the picture clearly so others can see what’s already in your head.

Launch

Kickstarter has to approve your project before you can make it live. Make sure to submit it a few days in advance so it’s approved and ready to go the moment you flick the switch.

Text your friends to start getting contributions and build credibility for your campaign. After you have a few contributions, start emailing those journalists!

Don’t forget to reach out to influencers that might be interested in your product. We sent several messages to bestselling author, Guy Kawasaki. Eventually he tweeted a photo of our product to his followers—over one million of them. Persistence pays off. People are busy. Silence is not the same thing as no.

Stretch Goals

After you’ve successfully reached your funding goal, you can add stretch goals. Some of our stretch goals include new Brik Book colors, a Brik Removal Tool, and an exclusive backer badge. Stretch goals are not required, but they are a fun way to get your backers to continue to promote your campaign even after they’ve already pledged. If you reach the next level, you can add another goal and another prize.

Warning: Think very carefully before adding new stretch goals. We added two new colors for Brik Book as a stretch goal. We were offering four MacBook models, so adding two colors increased our stock keeping unit (SKU) count by eight. It was an inventory nightmare. Keep the stretch goals simple and work hard to reduce the amount of variants you offer. We couldn’t decide on a stretch goal color for the Brik Tile campaign, so we let the existing backers vote. It helped us engage with our backers and made it easy to identify the most wanted new color: black.

Momentum

Keep hitting the email lists. Some journalists need to see momentum before they write about you. If they haven’t responded, email them again after you reach a milestone (e.g., reaching your funding goal).

Campaign partnerships are also a good way to build momentum. Find a live campaign that has a similar target audience and email the founders to see if they’d be willing to promote each other’s campaigns.

If you’re still having trouble building momentum, consider a service like Funded Today. They help you reach your funding goal and take a percentage after the campaign ends. We’ve never used them, but we’ve heard about tremendous results for other campaigns.

Support

Backers are going to have a lot of questions, so it’s important to set up your support channels early. Kickstarter has a built-in messaging system where the majority of questions will be coming from. It’s a great tool while your campaign is live, but consider migrating to another tool after the campaign is over. We use Front to manage our support emails. It allows us to tag messages, set up groups, and assign messages to members of our team.

End of Campaign

After the campaign ends, Kickstarter takes about three weeks to process the payments from the backers and deposit the money into your bank account. When you’re ready to start manufacturing, send out your backer survey. The survey allows backers to select colors and add their shipping information.

Before sending your surveys, consider using BackerKit. BackerKit will reach out to backers whose credit cards didn’t process and give them the opportunity to try again. They also allow you to upsell your backers during the survey process. We were able to get an additional 10 percent in funds by allowing backers to purchase more Brik Tiles, Briks, and other products before completing their survey.

Updates

Backers love updates! This is a great opportunity to start building a life-long relationship with your backers. Use video when possible. Here are a few examples of updates we’ve done:

Halfway

Send an update to your backers when you’re halfway to your funding goal. We also included a behind the scenes video of how our Brik Tile LEGO Wall Kickstarter video was made.

Thank You!

Send an update after your campaign is over to thank your backers. Try to incorporate your product or backers in some way.

Stretch Goals

Update your backers when you’ve hit a stretch goal.

Production

Production updates are my favorite. They give your backers a behind-the-scenes look at the production process: the first Brik Tile prototype demo.

Surveys

Update your backers to remind them to complete their surveys.

Shipping

This one is very important. Some backers will be out of town or possibly ready to move. Make sure to send an update when your product starts shipping so they can check for a tracking number.

Production

“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” – Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Super Mario Bros.)

Finding a Manufacturer

Personal relationships are key. Browse LinkedIn or Facebook to see if any of your friends can make an introduction to a manufacturer that they use. If not, Alibaba is also a great place to find manufacturers.

Try to visit your manufacturer as much as possible during the process. It’s amazing how many mistakes can be avoided when you catch them early. Visiting your factory also helps to build a strong relationship with your manufacturer for future projects.

Tooling

The steel molds used for injection molded plastic are often referred to as tools. Tools can range from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars depending on the size and complexity of your project. In most cases, prototypes can be made using a CNC machine before you begin cutting your steel molds. We went straight to cutting the molds before having prototypes made on our first project. Big mistake. The cases didn’t fit and we had to spend $20,000 redoing the tools. Prototypes might sound expensive, but they’ll save you a fortune in the long run.

Shipping

We always have our new Kickstarter projects shipped to our warehouse to assemble and package before they go out to our backers. We’ve found several tiny mistakes that we were able to correct before shipping out the products. Once you’re confident in your quality control, find a fulfillment center so you can focus on building your business instead of filling orders.

Shipping from the Factory

As mentioned in the Campaign Setup section, give yourself time so you can ship your products by sea freight. It usually take about a month door-to-door, but it will save you a fortune in shipping fees. If you’re shipping from China, find a freight forwarder. They handle all of the arrangements for a small fee.

Domestic Shipments

USPS is great for lighter packages, but talk to a FedEx or UPS representative about discounted rates a few weeks before you begin shipping.

International Shipments

We used USPS for international shipments for our first campaign. It was the cheapest option, but it was very unreliable. There’s no tracking or accountability. We lost orders and created unhappy backers. It was a mess. For our last campaign, we used Asendia and they’re great. They are less expensive than USPS and they include tracking for most countries. If you’re doing fulfillment yourself, we highly recommend them.

Shipping Software

Don’t use spreadsheets. We used Google Sheets on our first campaign and it was a disaster. The data wasn’t organized well, cells weren’t updated properly, and it made support a nightmare. Eventually we found ShipStation and it changed everything. It automatically syncs with BackerKit, Shopify, and all of the major shipping providers so everything is in sync.

Fulfillment Center

If you don’t want to ship the packages yourself, fulfillment centers are a great option. You export a list of your backers, their address, and what items they’re suppose to receive. The fulfillment center takes care of the rest. The other advantage of fulfillment centers is that they ship a massive amount of packages so their shipping rates are extremely low. We normally ship a few hundred orders ourselves to make sure the product quality is up to our standards, then we migrate to a fulfillment center. ShipBob is a popular option for Kickstarter backers, and EasyPost has some great rates.

Ongoing Campaigns

If you deliver a quality product and provide great support, you’ll discover that your Kickstarter backers will be customers for life. When you decide to do your next project, you’ll already have a built-in audience, and reaching your funding goal will be even easier. When your first campaign ends, Kickstarter will provide you with your backers’ email addresses. You can use those emails to build “Lookalike Audiences” on Facebook for future ad campaigns.

Running a Kickstarter campaign is an enormous amount of work, but it’s SO MUCH FUN! We’ll be looking for all of your amazing new campaigns on Kickstarter!

Launch Your Product with Crowdfunding | The $1 Million LEGO Wall shared from David Homer’s Blog

[andrewmrudd79]

Launch Your Product with Crowdfunding | The $1 Million LEGO Wall

Whenever I travel anywhere, I bring my laptop, and on my laptop there’s a laptop cover that everyone seems to ask about. It comes from Brik Book, and it’s a LEGO-compatible cover. It’s awesome.

I interviewed the founder of Brik Book, Brett Miller, way back on Smart Passive Income Podcast Session #217, and since then he’s been doing even more to grow the company, including a new product that was recently released called Brik Tile. Using the same launch model, he utilized Kickstarter, and crushed it.

I wanted to bring Brett back on the blog today to write a guest post related to his crowdfunding journey, and how we might be able to follow his lead. He’s got an amazing and incredibly detailed overview of the entire process for you below, so if you’re looking to launch your new product soon, pay attention. Here’s Brett Miller, founder of Brik, with the scoop.

“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.” – Thomas Edison

Have you ever had a great idea but failed to act on it? After decades of building products and starting companies, I can tell you that ideas are worthless without execution. Entrepreneurs are often bombarded with a constant stream of “great ideas,” but fail to get those ideas off the ground.

Luckily, it’s never been easier to launch a product or start a company. Crowdfunding has opened the door and allowed ANYONE to share their ideas or products with the world. My business partner and I both have art degrees from liberal arts colleges. We have no special connections with journalists, and we’re not personal friends with Mark Cuban (of Shark Tank). That didn’t stop us from using Kickstarter to launch a million dollar company in less than three years while traveling the world and building products we LOVE.

If you have a great idea and you’re willing to put in the effort, this is the guide for you.

What You Need:

Good idea

Computer

Camera (Smartphone will do)

What You Don’t Need:

To quit your job

Fancy equipment

Startup capital

Setting Up the Campaign

Kickstarter vs. Indiegogo vs. Independent

There are several companies out there for crowdfunding. The big players are Kickstarter and Indiegogo. These platforms are similar so it really comes down to personal preference. Some companies skip crowdfunding and go straight to pre-orders on their website. We used Kickstarter and we’ll continue to use Kickstarter every time we launch a new product. The math is simple: Kickstarter takes 5 percent off the top when your campaign ends (if successfully funded). That doesn’t include the 2 to 3 percent for credit card fees. But you’re going to pay those anywhere you accept credit cards.

As seen in the chart below, Kickstarter drove 34 percent of our Campaign #1 pledges. That means that Kickstarter was driving traffic from Kickstarter.com to the Brik Book (LEGO Compatible MacBook Case) campaign. Kickstarter brought us over $31,000 worth of pledges, but only took around $4,500 in fees. What a great deal!

Campaign #1

On Campaign #2, Brik Tile (LEGO Compatible Wall Tiles), Kickstarter drove 57 percent of our pledges worth over $100,000. That’s $100,000 worth of pledges for less than $10,000 in Kickstarter fees.

Campaign #2

The algorithm Kickstarter uses to drive traffic to campaigns is believed to be largely based on momentum and conversion rates, but we’ll get into that in a bit. Outside of being a trusted brand and handling all of the payment capturing, Kickstarter does a great job bringing traffic to your campaign. You just need to create a little momentum first.

The Video

You don’t need fancy cameras or editing software to build a professional looking Kickstarter campaign. We shot our entire Brik Book Kickstarter video using an iPhone and edited it on iMovie. Good lighting is the most important factor for getting professional looking photos and videos. Spend the time at the beginning to set up the lighting properly. It’ll be worth it.

I’ve seen a lot of crowdfunding videos that dive right into the product features and specs. I recommend captivating your viewers on an emotional level first. Show happy, smiling faces using the product with some upbeat music in the background. You can find great royalty free music on iTunes. Just search for “royalty free.”

Get to the point, quickly! Our first video was thirty seconds and 75 percent of viewers watched the full video. Our second video was sixty seconds long and was only watched in full by 54 percent of viewers. Most viewers won’t watch your entire video. Show the benefits early to engage the viewer, then elaborate.

Brik Book Video (thirty seconds): 75 Percent Completion Rate

Brik Tile Video (sixty seconds): 54 Percent Completion Rate

Images

Perhaps the most important piece of media for your project is your primary campaign photo. It needs to be clear and obvious. Use the Kickstarter Image Guide for additional help. Taking some of the key product benefits and displaying them as photos is also great for backers who want to browse your page, but not watch your entire video. You can also turn these into animated GIFs using online tools like GIPHY to make them more attention-grabbing. Here’s an example of one we use on our website.

Selecting Reward Tiers

It’s easy to go crazy during this section and offer too many reward tiers. Doing that will complicate the fulfillment process and could actually hurt your pledges (paralysis by analysis). I recommend five to ten different tiers. You always have the ability to add more tiers when the campaign goes live. Backers are vocal; they’ll let you know if you need to add another tier.

Setting a Raise Amount

Caution: Spend the time to get accurate quotes before determining the amount you need to raise. We seriously exceeded our budget on our initial campaign. Luckily, we raised 300 percent of our funding goal or we would have needed a loan to get the product to market. Here are a few expenses you need to consider:

Tooling: If you’re building a physical product.

Prototypes: Make them early and often. They’re expensive, but can save you thousands in the long run.

Packaging: Packaging is your customer’s first impression with your product. Good packaging can range from $1 to $5 per unit.

Shipping from the manufacturer: Plan ahead so you can ship by sea freight instead of air. It’s typically about one-fifth of the price.

Shipping to your customers: You can get in big trouble here. Spend some time talking to USPS, FedEx, UPS, and fulfillment centers to determine what your costs will actually be. Products are often heavier when packaged causing shipping to get very expensive. Going back to your backers to ask for more could kill your campaign credibility.

Legal expenses: Do you need a patent? Utility patents can cost between $15,000 and $30,000 to file properly. With a provisional, you might not need to pay all of that up front though. Talk to your lawyer.

After you’ve put an estimate together, double it! That doesn’t mean double the price you’re charging, it just means to double to the amount you need to raise overall. You’re bringing a product to market for the first time. Things will go wrong. You’ll experience delays. Packages will get lost. You’ll need the extra cash.

Setting a Delivery Time

Setting up a delivery time is tough. We were four months late on our first campaign and one month late on our second campaign. Give yourself a six-month buffer. Most backers won’t care if your product ETA is in the distant future, but they absolutely will care if you miss your deadline. If it’s your first campaign, avoid setting a delivery date between September and January. We ended up shipping both products in late November. Shipping fees around the holidays can cost up to five times more than normal. We spent over $25,000 on importing our products from China on the last campaign in order to get them out before Christmas. If we would have set the delivery expectation for February, our backers wouldn’t have expected them as Christmas presents. We would have saved over $20,000. That’s wasted money that could have really helped grow our business.

Pre-Launch

Build a Press List

Press is the easiest way to gain initial traction for your campaign. Start with blogs that your customers are likely to read. If you have a technology product, check out Gizmodo, Wired, and other sites that are likely to write about tech. Find the authors on those sites that like to write about products similar to yours or other crowdfunding campaigns. If their contact information isn’t listed in the article, just search Google until you find it.

When we launched our Brik Book campaign, I reached out to ten journalists and five of them ended up writing article about our campaign. This is the subject line we used:

“(Author’s last name) fan launches Kickstarter campaign Your Macbook just got a lot cooler”

Adding the author’s last name personalized the email.

Here’s the full email content:

Hi (author’s first name) – I’m a big fan of your work in (website). I just launched a Kickstarter campaign today that I thought your audience might find interesting.

http://brikcase.com

Keep up the great work!

Brett

Journalists usually get dozens of pitches or more a day. It’s important to keep the message short, but provide enough information to spark their interest. Pro tip: Add the YouTube link for your campaign video at the bottom of the email. If they are using Gmail, the video is automatically loaded at the bottom so they don’t even need to leave the email to check out your video.

Journalists like to write about products that are new and unique. Find ways to highlight the original benefits of your product.

Friends and Family

Discuss your launch with friends and family members before the campaign goes live. Make sure they are committed to backing you on launch day. If you can’t get any family members or friends to donate to your campaign, ask them why. Use their feedback to modify your campaign so you can proactively address those objections and present a solution.

When we originally pitched Brik Book to our friends, nobody got excited about it. Then we built the prototype, and they thought it was cool. Then we shot the video, and they thought it was awesome. Then when Brik Book was on the homepage of Wired, they thought it was a genius idea! Sometimes you just need to paint the picture clearly so others can see what’s already in your head.

Launch

Kickstarter has to approve your project before you can make it live. Make sure to submit it a few days in advance so it’s approved and ready to go the moment you flick the switch.

Text your friends to start getting contributions and build credibility for your campaign. After you have a few contributions, start emailing those journalists!

Don’t forget to reach out to influencers that might be interested in your product. We sent several messages to bestselling author, Guy Kawasaki. Eventually he tweeted a photo of our product to his followers—over one million of them. Persistence pays off. People are busy. Silence is not the same thing as no.

Stretch Goals

After you’ve successfully reached your funding goal, you can add stretch goals. Some of our stretch goals include new Brik Book colors, a Brik Removal Tool, and an exclusive backer badge. Stretch goals are not required, but they are a fun way to get your backers to continue to promote your campaign even after they’ve already pledged. If you reach the next level, you can add another goal and another prize.

Warning: Think very carefully before adding new stretch goals. We added two new colors for Brik Book as a stretch goal. We were offering four MacBook models, so adding two colors increased our stock keeping unit (SKU) count by eight. It was an inventory nightmare. Keep the stretch goals simple and work hard to reduce the amount of variants you offer. We couldn’t decide on a stretch goal color for the Brik Tile campaign, so we let the existing backers vote. It helped us engage with our backers and made it easy to identify the most wanted new color: black.

Momentum

Keep hitting the email lists. Some journalists need to see momentum before they write about you. If they haven’t responded, email them again after you reach a milestone (e.g., reaching your funding goal).

Campaign partnerships are also a good way to build momentum. Find a live campaign that has a similar target audience and email the founders to see if they’d be willing to promote each other’s campaigns.

If you’re still having trouble building momentum, consider a service like Funded Today. They help you reach your funding goal and take a percentage after the campaign ends. We’ve never used them, but we’ve heard about tremendous results for other campaigns.

Support

Backers are going to have a lot of questions, so it’s important to set up your support channels early. Kickstarter has a built-in messaging system where the majority of questions will be coming from. It’s a great tool while your campaign is live, but consider migrating to another tool after the campaign is over. We use Front to manage our support emails. It allows us to tag messages, set up groups, and assign messages to members of our team.

End of Campaign

After the campaign ends, Kickstarter takes about three weeks to process the payments from the backers and deposit the money into your bank account. When you’re ready to start manufacturing, send out your backer survey. The survey allows backers to select colors and add their shipping information.

Before sending your surveys, consider using BackerKit. BackerKit will reach out to backers whose credit cards didn’t process and give them the opportunity to try again. They also allow you to upsell your backers during the survey process. We were able to get an additional 10 percent in funds by allowing backers to purchase more Brik Tiles, Briks, and other products before completing their survey.

Updates

Backers love updates! This is a great opportunity to start building a life-long relationship with your backers. Use video when possible. Here are a few examples of updates we’ve done:

Halfway

Send an update to your backers when you’re halfway to your funding goal. We also included a behind the scenes video of how our Brik Tile LEGO Wall Kickstarter video was made.

Thank You!

Send an update after your campaign is over to thank your backers. Try to incorporate your product or backers in some way.

Stretch Goals

Update your backers when you’ve hit a stretch goal.

Production

Production updates are my favorite. They give your backers a behind-the-scenes look at the production process: the first Brik Tile prototype demo.

Surveys

Update your backers to remind them to complete their surveys.

Shipping

This one is very important. Some backers will be out of town or possibly ready to move. Make sure to send an update when your product starts shipping so they can check for a tracking number.

Production

“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” – Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Super Mario Bros.)

Finding a Manufacturer

Personal relationships are key. Browse LinkedIn or Facebook to see if any of your friends can make an introduction to a manufacturer that they use. If not, Alibaba is also a great place to find manufacturers.

Try to visit your manufacturer as much as possible during the process. It’s amazing how many mistakes can be avoided when you catch them early. Visiting your factory also helps to build a strong relationship with your manufacturer for future projects.

Tooling

The steel molds used for injection molded plastic are often referred to as tools. Tools can range from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars depending on the size and complexity of your project. In most cases, prototypes can be made using a CNC machine before you begin cutting your steel molds. We went straight to cutting the molds before having prototypes made on our first project. Big mistake. The cases didn’t fit and we had to spend $20,000 redoing the tools. Prototypes might sound expensive, but they’ll save you a fortune in the long run.

Shipping

We always have our new Kickstarter projects shipped to our warehouse to assemble and package before they go out to our backers. We’ve found several tiny mistakes that we were able to correct before shipping out the products. Once you’re confident in your quality control, find a fulfillment center so you can focus on building your business instead of filling orders.

Shipping from the Factory

As mentioned in the Campaign Setup section, give yourself time so you can ship your products by sea freight. It usually take about a month door-to-door, but it will save you a fortune in shipping fees. If you’re shipping from China, find a freight forwarder. They handle all of the arrangements for a small fee.

Domestic Shipments

USPS is great for lighter packages, but talk to a FedEx or UPS representative about discounted rates a few weeks before you begin shipping.

International Shipments

We used USPS for international shipments for our first campaign. It was the cheapest option, but it was very unreliable. There’s no tracking or accountability. We lost orders and created unhappy backers. It was a mess. For our last campaign, we used Asendia and they’re great. They are less expensive than USPS and they include tracking for most countries. If you’re doing fulfillment yourself, we highly recommend them.

Shipping Software

Don’t use spreadsheets. We used Google Sheets on our first campaign and it was a disaster. The data wasn’t organized well, cells weren’t updated properly, and it made support a nightmare. Eventually we found ShipStation and it changed everything. It automatically syncs with BackerKit, Shopify, and all of the major shipping providers so everything is in sync.

Fulfillment Center

If you don’t want to ship the packages yourself, fulfillment centers are a great option. You export a list of your backers, their address, and what items they’re suppose to receive. The fulfillment center takes care of the rest. The other advantage of fulfillment centers is that they ship a massive amount of packages so their shipping rates are extremely low. We normally ship a few hundred orders ourselves to make sure the product quality is up to our standards, then we migrate to a fulfillment center. ShipBob is a popular option for Kickstarter backers, and EasyPost has some great rates.

Ongoing Campaigns

If you deliver a quality product and provide great support, you’ll discover that your Kickstarter backers will be customers for life. When you decide to do your next project, you’ll already have a built-in audience, and reaching your funding goal will be even easier. When your first campaign ends, Kickstarter will provide you with your backers’ email addresses. You can use those emails to build “Lookalike Audiences” on Facebook for future ad campaigns.

Running a Kickstarter campaign is an enormous amount of work, but it’s SO MUCH FUN! We’ll be looking for all of your amazing new campaigns on Kickstarter!

Launch Your Product with Crowdfunding | The $1 Million LEGO Wall originally posted at Homer’s Blog

[judithghernandez87]

Launch Your Product with Crowdfunding | The $1 Million LEGO Wall

Whenever I travel anywhere, I bring my laptop, and on my laptop there’s a laptop cover that everyone seems to ask about. It comes from Brik Book, and it’s a LEGO-compatible cover. It’s awesome.

I interviewed the founder of Brik Book, Brett Miller, way back on Smart Passive Income Podcast Session #217, and since then he’s been doing even more to grow the company, including a new product that was recently released called Brik Tile. Using the same launch model, he utilized Kickstarter, and crushed it.

I wanted to bring Brett back on the blog today to write a guest post related to his crowdfunding journey, and how we might be able to follow his lead. He’s got an amazing and incredibly detailed overview of the entire process for you below, so if you’re looking to launch your new product soon, pay attention. Here’s Brett Miller, founder of Brik, with the scoop.

“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.” – Thomas Edison

Have you ever had a great idea but failed to act on it? After decades of building products and starting companies, I can tell you that ideas are worthless without execution. Entrepreneurs are often bombarded with a constant stream of “great ideas,” but fail to get those ideas off the ground.

Luckily, it’s never been easier to launch a product or start a company. Crowdfunding has opened the door and allowed ANYONE to share their ideas or products with the world. My business partner and I both have art degrees from liberal arts colleges. We have no special connections with journalists, and we’re not personal friends with Mark Cuban (of Shark Tank). That didn’t stop us from using Kickstarter to launch a million dollar company in less than three years while traveling the world and building products we LOVE.

If you have a great idea and you’re willing to put in the effort, this is the guide for you.

What You Need:

Good idea

Computer

Camera (Smartphone will do)

What You Don’t Need:

To quit your job

Fancy equipment

Startup capital

Setting Up the Campaign

Kickstarter vs. Indiegogo vs. Independent

There are several companies out there for crowdfunding. The big players are Kickstarter and Indiegogo. These platforms are similar so it really comes down to personal preference. Some companies skip crowdfunding and go straight to pre-orders on their website. We used Kickstarter and we’ll continue to use Kickstarter every time we launch a new product. The math is simple: Kickstarter takes 5 percent off the top when your campaign ends (if successfully funded). That doesn’t include the 2 to 3 percent for credit card fees. But you’re going to pay those anywhere you accept credit cards.

As seen in the chart below, Kickstarter drove 34 percent of our Campaign #1 pledges. That means that Kickstarter was driving traffic from Kickstarter.com to the Brik Book (LEGO Compatible MacBook Case) campaign. Kickstarter brought us over $31,000 worth of pledges, but only took around $4,500 in fees. What a great deal!

Campaign #1

On Campaign #2, Brik Tile (LEGO Compatible Wall Tiles), Kickstarter drove 57 percent of our pledges worth over $100,000. That’s $100,000 worth of pledges for less than $10,000 in Kickstarter fees.

Campaign #2

The algorithm Kickstarter uses to drive traffic to campaigns is believed to be largely based on momentum and conversion rates, but we’ll get into that in a bit. Outside of being a trusted brand and handling all of the payment capturing, Kickstarter does a great job bringing traffic to your campaign. You just need to create a little momentum first.

The Video

You don’t need fancy cameras or editing software to build a professional looking Kickstarter campaign. We shot our entire Brik Book Kickstarter video using an iPhone and edited it on iMovie. Good lighting is the most important factor for getting professional looking photos and videos. Spend the time at the beginning to set up the lighting properly. It’ll be worth it.

I’ve seen a lot of crowdfunding videos that dive right into the product features and specs. I recommend captivating your viewers on an emotional level first. Show happy, smiling faces using the product with some upbeat music in the background. You can find great royalty free music on iTunes. Just search for “royalty free.”

Get to the point, quickly! Our first video was thirty seconds and 75 percent of viewers watched the full video. Our second video was sixty seconds long and was only watched in full by 54 percent of viewers. Most viewers won’t watch your entire video. Show the benefits early to engage the viewer, then elaborate.

Brik Book Video (thirty seconds): 75 Percent Completion Rate

Brik Tile Video (sixty seconds): 54 Percent Completion Rate

Images

Perhaps the most important piece of media for your project is your primary campaign photo. It needs to be clear and obvious. Use the Kickstarter Image Guide for additional help. Taking some of the key product benefits and displaying them as photos is also great for backers who want to browse your page, but not watch your entire video. You can also turn these into animated GIFs using online tools like GIPHY to make them more attention-grabbing. Here’s an example of one we use on our website.

Selecting Reward Tiers

It’s easy to go crazy during this section and offer too many reward tiers. Doing that will complicate the fulfillment process and could actually hurt your pledges (paralysis by analysis). I recommend five to ten different tiers. You always have the ability to add more tiers when the campaign goes live. Backers are vocal; they’ll let you know if you need to add another tier.

Setting a Raise Amount

Caution: Spend the time to get accurate quotes before determining the amount you need to raise. We seriously exceeded our budget on our initial campaign. Luckily, we raised 300 percent of our funding goal or we would have needed a loan to get the product to market. Here are a few expenses you need to consider:

Tooling: If you’re building a physical product.

Prototypes: Make them early and often. They’re expensive, but can save you thousands in the long run.

Packaging: Packaging is your customer’s first impression with your product. Good packaging can range from $1 to $5 per unit.

Shipping from the manufacturer: Plan ahead so you can ship by sea freight instead of air. It’s typically about one-fifth of the price.

Shipping to your customers: You can get in big trouble here. Spend some time talking to USPS, FedEx, UPS, and fulfillment centers to determine what your costs will actually be. Products are often heavier when packaged causing shipping to get very expensive. Going back to your backers to ask for more could kill your campaign credibility.

Legal expenses: Do you need a patent? Utility patents can cost between $15,000 and $30,000 to file properly. With a provisional, you might not need to pay all of that up front though. Talk to your lawyer.

After you’ve put an estimate together, double it! That doesn’t mean double the price you’re charging, it just means to double to the amount you need to raise overall. You’re bringing a product to market for the first time. Things will go wrong. You’ll experience delays. Packages will get lost. You’ll need the extra cash.

Setting a Delivery Time

Setting up a delivery time is tough. We were four months late on our first campaign and one month late on our second campaign. Give yourself a six-month buffer. Most backers won’t care if your product ETA is in the distant future, but they absolutely will care if you miss your deadline. If it’s your first campaign, avoid setting a delivery date between September and January. We ended up shipping both products in late November. Shipping fees around the holidays can cost up to five times more than normal. We spent over $25,000 on importing our products from China on the last campaign in order to get them out before Christmas. If we would have set the delivery expectation for February, our backers wouldn’t have expected them as Christmas presents. We would have saved over $20,000. That’s wasted money that could have really helped grow our business.

Pre-Launch

Build a Press List

Press is the easiest way to gain initial traction for your campaign. Start with blogs that your customers are likely to read. If you have a technology product, check out Gizmodo, Wired, and other sites that are likely to write about tech. Find the authors on those sites that like to write about products similar to yours or other crowdfunding campaigns. If their contact information isn’t listed in the article, just search Google until you find it.

When we launched our Brik Book campaign, I reached out to ten journalists and five of them ended up writing article about our campaign. This is the subject line we used:

“(Author’s last name) fan launches Kickstarter campaign Your Macbook just got a lot cooler”

Adding the author’s last name personalized the email.

Here’s the full email content:

Hi (author’s first name) – I’m a big fan of your work in (website). I just launched a Kickstarter campaign today that I thought your audience might find interesting.

http://brikcase.com

Keep up the great work!

Brett

Journalists usually get dozens of pitches or more a day. It’s important to keep the message short, but provide enough information to spark their interest. Pro tip: Add the YouTube link for your campaign video at the bottom of the email. If they are using Gmail, the video is automatically loaded at the bottom so they don’t even need to leave the email to check out your video.

Journalists like to write about products that are new and unique. Find ways to highlight the original benefits of your product.

Friends and Family

Discuss your launch with friends and family members before the campaign goes live. Make sure they are committed to backing you on launch day. If you can’t get any family members or friends to donate to your campaign, ask them why. Use their feedback to modify your campaign so you can proactively address those objections and present a solution.

When we originally pitched Brik Book to our friends, nobody got excited about it. Then we built the prototype, and they thought it was cool. Then we shot the video, and they thought it was awesome. Then when Brik Book was on the homepage of Wired, they thought it was a genius idea! Sometimes you just need to paint the picture clearly so others can see what’s already in your head.

Launch

Kickstarter has to approve your project before you can make it live. Make sure to submit it a few days in advance so it’s approved and ready to go the moment you flick the switch.

Text your friends to start getting contributions and build credibility for your campaign. After you have a few contributions, start emailing those journalists!

Don’t forget to reach out to influencers that might be interested in your product. We sent several messages to bestselling author, Guy Kawasaki. Eventually he tweeted a photo of our product to his followers—over one million of them. Persistence pays off. People are busy. Silence is not the same thing as no.

Stretch Goals

After you’ve successfully reached your funding goal, you can add stretch goals. Some of our stretch goals include new Brik Book colors, a Brik Removal Tool, and an exclusive backer badge. Stretch goals are not required, but they are a fun way to get your backers to continue to promote your campaign even after they’ve already pledged. If you reach the next level, you can add another goal and another prize.

Warning: Think very carefully before adding new stretch goals. We added two new colors for Brik Book as a stretch goal. We were offering four MacBook models, so adding two colors increased our stock keeping unit (SKU) count by eight. It was an inventory nightmare. Keep the stretch goals simple and work hard to reduce the amount of variants you offer. We couldn’t decide on a stretch goal color for the Brik Tile campaign, so we let the existing backers vote. It helped us engage with our backers and made it easy to identify the most wanted new color: black.

Momentum

Keep hitting the email lists. Some journalists need to see momentum before they write about you. If they haven’t responded, email them again after you reach a milestone (e.g., reaching your funding goal).

Campaign partnerships are also a good way to build momentum. Find a live campaign that has a similar target audience and email the founders to see if they’d be willing to promote each other’s campaigns.

If you’re still having trouble building momentum, consider a service like Funded Today. They help you reach your funding goal and take a percentage after the campaign ends. We’ve never used them, but we’ve heard about tremendous results for other campaigns.

Support

Backers are going to have a lot of questions, so it’s important to set up your support channels early. Kickstarter has a built-in messaging system where the majority of questions will be coming from. It’s a great tool while your campaign is live, but consider migrating to another tool after the campaign is over. We use Front to manage our support emails. It allows us to tag messages, set up groups, and assign messages to members of our team.

End of Campaign

After the campaign ends, Kickstarter takes about three weeks to process the payments from the backers and deposit the money into your bank account. When you’re ready to start manufacturing, send out your backer survey. The survey allows backers to select colors and add their shipping information.

Before sending your surveys, consider using BackerKit. BackerKit will reach out to backers whose credit cards didn’t process and give them the opportunity to try again. They also allow you to upsell your backers during the survey process. We were able to get an additional 10 percent in funds by allowing backers to purchase more Brik Tiles, Briks, and other products before completing their survey.

Updates

Backers love updates! This is a great opportunity to start building a life-long relationship with your backers. Use video when possible. Here are a few examples of updates we’ve done:

Halfway

Send an update to your backers when you’re halfway to your funding goal. We also included a behind the scenes video of how our Brik Tile LEGO Wall Kickstarter video was made.

Thank You!

Send an update after your campaign is over to thank your backers. Try to incorporate your product or backers in some way.

Stretch Goals

Update your backers when you’ve hit a stretch goal.

Production

Production updates are my favorite. They give your backers a behind-the-scenes look at the production process: the first Brik Tile prototype demo.

Surveys

Update your backers to remind them to complete their surveys.

Shipping

This one is very important. Some backers will be out of town or possibly ready to move. Make sure to send an update when your product starts shipping so they can check for a tracking number.

Production

“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” – Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Super Mario Bros.)

Finding a Manufacturer

Personal relationships are key. Browse LinkedIn or Facebook to see if any of your friends can make an introduction to a manufacturer that they use. If not, Alibaba is also a great place to find manufacturers.

Try to visit your manufacturer as much as possible during the process. It’s amazing how many mistakes can be avoided when you catch them early. Visiting your factory also helps to build a strong relationship with your manufacturer for future projects.

Tooling

The steel molds used for injection molded plastic are often referred to as tools. Tools can range from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars depending on the size and complexity of your project. In most cases, prototypes can be made using a CNC machine before you begin cutting your steel molds. We went straight to cutting the molds before having prototypes made on our first project. Big mistake. The cases didn’t fit and we had to spend $20,000 redoing the tools. Prototypes might sound expensive, but they’ll save you a fortune in the long run.

Shipping

We always have our new Kickstarter projects shipped to our warehouse to assemble and package before they go out to our backers. We’ve found several tiny mistakes that we were able to correct before shipping out the products. Once you’re confident in your quality control, find a fulfillment center so you can focus on building your business instead of filling orders.

Shipping from the Factory

As mentioned in the Campaign Setup section, give yourself time so you can ship your products by sea freight. It usually take about a month door-to-door, but it will save you a fortune in shipping fees. If you’re shipping from China, find a freight forwarder. They handle all of the arrangements for a small fee.

Domestic Shipments

USPS is great for lighter packages, but talk to a FedEx or UPS representative about discounted rates a few weeks before you begin shipping.

International Shipments

We used USPS for international shipments for our first campaign. It was the cheapest option, but it was very unreliable. There’s no tracking or accountability. We lost orders and created unhappy backers. It was a mess. For our last campaign, we used Asendia and they’re great. They are less expensive than USPS and they include tracking for most countries. If you’re doing fulfillment yourself, we highly recommend them.

Shipping Software

Don’t use spreadsheets. We used Google Sheets on our first campaign and it was a disaster. The data wasn’t organized well, cells weren’t updated properly, and it made support a nightmare. Eventually we found ShipStation and it changed everything. It automatically syncs with BackerKit, Shopify, and all of the major shipping providers so everything is in sync.

Fulfillment Center

If you don’t want to ship the packages yourself, fulfillment centers are a great option. You export a list of your backers, their address, and what items they’re suppose to receive. The fulfillment center takes care of the rest. The other advantage of fulfillment centers is that they ship a massive amount of packages so their shipping rates are extremely low. We normally ship a few hundred orders ourselves to make sure the product quality is up to our standards, then we migrate to a fulfillment center. ShipBob is a popular option for Kickstarter backers, and EasyPost has some great rates.

Ongoing Campaigns

If you deliver a quality product and provide great support, you’ll discover that your Kickstarter backers will be customers for life. When you decide to do your next project, you’ll already have a built-in audience, and reaching your funding goal will be even easier. When your first campaign ends, Kickstarter will provide you with your backers’ email addresses. You can use those emails to build “Lookalike Audiences” on Facebook for future ad campaigns.

Running a Kickstarter campaign is an enormous amount of work, but it’s SO MUCH FUN! We’ll be looking for all of your amazing new campaigns on Kickstarter!

Launch Your Product with Crowdfunding | The $1 Million LEGO Wall originally posted at Dave’s Blog

[davidmhomerjr]

Launch Your Product with Crowdfunding | The $1 Million LEGO Wall

Whenever I travel anywhere, I bring my laptop, and on my laptop there’s a laptop cover that everyone seems to ask about. It comes from Brik Book, and it’s a LEGO-compatible cover. It’s awesome.

I interviewed the founder of Brik Book, Brett Miller, way back on Smart Passive Income Podcast Session #217, and since then he’s been doing even more to grow the company, including a new product that was recently released called Brik Tile. Using the same launch model, he utilized Kickstarter, and crushed it.

I wanted to bring Brett back on the blog today to write a guest post related to his crowdfunding journey, and how we might be able to follow his lead. He’s got an amazing and incredibly detailed overview of the entire process for you below, so if you’re looking to launch your new product soon, pay attention. Here’s Brett Miller, founder of Brik, with the scoop.

“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.” – Thomas Edison

Have you ever had a great idea but failed to act on it? After decades of building products and starting companies, I can tell you that ideas are worthless without execution. Entrepreneurs are often bombarded with a constant stream of “great ideas,” but fail to get those ideas off the ground.

Luckily, it’s never been easier to launch a product or start a company. Crowdfunding has opened the door and allowed ANYONE to share their ideas or products with the world. My business partner and I both have art degrees from liberal arts colleges. We have no special connections with journalists, and we’re not personal friends with Mark Cuban (of Shark Tank). That didn’t stop us from using Kickstarter to launch a million dollar company in less than three years while traveling the world and building products we LOVE.

If you have a great idea and you’re willing to put in the effort, this is the guide for you.

What You Need:

Good idea

Computer

Camera (Smartphone will do)

What You Don’t Need:

To quit your job

Fancy equipment

Startup capital

Setting Up the Campaign

Kickstarter vs. Indiegogo vs. Independent

There are several companies out there for crowdfunding. The big players are Kickstarter and Indiegogo. These platforms are similar so it really comes down to personal preference. Some companies skip crowdfunding and go straight to pre-orders on their website. We used Kickstarter and we’ll continue to use Kickstarter every time we launch a new product. The math is simple: Kickstarter takes 5 percent off the top when your campaign ends (if successfully funded). That doesn’t include the 2 to 3 percent for credit card fees. But you’re going to pay those anywhere you accept credit cards.

As seen in the chart below, Kickstarter drove 34 percent of our Campaign #1 pledges. That means that Kickstarter was driving traffic from Kickstarter.com to the Brik Book (LEGO Compatible MacBook Case) campaign. Kickstarter brought us over $31,000 worth of pledges, but only took around $4,500 in fees. What a great deal!

Campaign #1

On Campaign #2, Brik Tile (LEGO Compatible Wall Tiles), Kickstarter drove 57 percent of our pledges worth over $100,000. That’s $100,000 worth of pledges for less than $10,000 in Kickstarter fees.

Campaign #2

The algorithm Kickstarter uses to drive traffic to campaigns is believed to be largely based on momentum and conversion rates, but we’ll get into that in a bit. Outside of being a trusted brand and handling all of the payment capturing, Kickstarter does a great job bringing traffic to your campaign. You just need to create a little momentum first.

The Video

You don’t need fancy cameras or editing software to build a professional looking Kickstarter campaign. We shot our entire Brik Book Kickstarter video using an iPhone and edited it on iMovie. Good lighting is the most important factor for getting professional looking photos and videos. Spend the time at the beginning to set up the lighting properly. It’ll be worth it.

I’ve seen a lot of crowdfunding videos that dive right into the product features and specs. I recommend captivating your viewers on an emotional level first. Show happy, smiling faces using the product with some upbeat music in the background. You can find great royalty free music on iTunes. Just search for “royalty free.”

Get to the point, quickly! Our first video was thirty seconds and 75 percent of viewers watched the full video. Our second video was sixty seconds long and was only watched in full by 54 percent of viewers. Most viewers won’t watch your entire video. Show the benefits early to engage the viewer, then elaborate.

Brik Book Video (thirty seconds): 75 Percent Completion Rate

Brik Tile Video (sixty seconds): 54 Percent Completion Rate

Images

Perhaps the most important piece of media for your project is your primary campaign photo. It needs to be clear and obvious. Use the Kickstarter Image Guide for additional help. Taking some of the key product benefits and displaying them as photos is also great for backers who want to browse your page, but not watch your entire video. You can also turn these into animated GIFs using online tools like GIPHY to make them more attention-grabbing. Here’s an example of one we use on our website.

Selecting Reward Tiers

It’s easy to go crazy during this section and offer too many reward tiers. Doing that will complicate the fulfillment process and could actually hurt your pledges (paralysis by analysis). I recommend five to ten different tiers. You always have the ability to add more tiers when the campaign goes live. Backers are vocal; they’ll let you know if you need to add another tier.

Setting a Raise Amount

Caution: Spend the time to get accurate quotes before determining the amount you need to raise. We seriously exceeded our budget on our initial campaign. Luckily, we raised 300 percent of our funding goal or we would have needed a loan to get the product to market. Here are a few expenses you need to consider:

Tooling: If you’re building a physical product.

Prototypes: Make them early and often. They’re expensive, but can save you thousands in the long run.

Packaging: Packaging is your customer’s first impression with your product. Good packaging can range from $1 to $5 per unit.

Shipping from the manufacturer: Plan ahead so you can ship by sea freight instead of air. It’s typically about one-fifth of the price.

Shipping to your customers: You can get in big trouble here. Spend some time talking to USPS, FedEx, UPS, and fulfillment centers to determine what your costs will actually be. Products are often heavier when packaged causing shipping to get very expensive. Going back to your backers to ask for more could kill your campaign credibility.

Legal expenses: Do you need a patent? Utility patents can cost between $15,000 and $30,000 to file properly. With a provisional, you might not need to pay all of that up front though. Talk to your lawyer.

After you’ve put an estimate together, double it! That doesn’t mean double the price you’re charging, it just means to double to the amount you need to raise overall. You’re bringing a product to market for the first time. Things will go wrong. You’ll experience delays. Packages will get lost. You’ll need the extra cash.

Setting a Delivery Time

Setting up a delivery time is tough. We were four months late on our first campaign and one month late on our second campaign. Give yourself a six-month buffer. Most backers won’t care if your product ETA is in the distant future, but they absolutely will care if you miss your deadline. If it’s your first campaign, avoid setting a delivery date between September and January. We ended up shipping both products in late November. Shipping fees around the holidays can cost up to five times more than normal. We spent over $25,000 on importing our products from China on the last campaign in order to get them out before Christmas. If we would have set the delivery expectation for February, our backers wouldn’t have expected them as Christmas presents. We would have saved over $20,000. That’s wasted money that could have really helped grow our business.

Pre-Launch

Build a Press List

Press is the easiest way to gain initial traction for your campaign. Start with blogs that your customers are likely to read. If you have a technology product, check out Gizmodo, Wired, and other sites that are likely to write about tech. Find the authors on those sites that like to write about products similar to yours or other crowdfunding campaigns. If their contact information isn’t listed in the article, just search Google until you find it.

When we launched our Brik Book campaign, I reached out to ten journalists and five of them ended up writing article about our campaign. This is the subject line we used:

“(Author’s last name) fan launches Kickstarter campaign 🙂 Your Macbook just got a lot cooler”

Adding the author’s last name personalized the email.

Here’s the full email content:

Hi (author’s first name) – I’m a big fan of your work in (website). I just launched a Kickstarter campaign today that I thought your audience might find interesting.

http://brikcase.com

Keep up the great work!

Brett

Journalists usually get dozens of pitches or more a day. It’s important to keep the message short, but provide enough information to spark their interest. Pro tip: Add the YouTube link for your campaign video at the bottom of the email. If they are using Gmail, the video is automatically loaded at the bottom so they don’t even need to leave the email to check out your video.

Journalists like to write about products that are new and unique. Find ways to highlight the original benefits of your product.

Friends and Family

Discuss your launch with friends and family members before the campaign goes live. Make sure they are committed to backing you on launch day. If you can’t get any family members or friends to donate to your campaign, ask them why. Use their feedback to modify your campaign so you can proactively address those objections and present a solution.

When we originally pitched Brik Book to our friends, nobody got excited about it. Then we built the prototype, and they thought it was cool. Then we shot the video, and they thought it was awesome. Then when Brik Book was on the homepage of Wired, they thought it was a genius idea! Sometimes you just need to paint the picture clearly so others can see what’s already in your head. 🙂

Launch

Kickstarter has to approve your project before you can make it live. Make sure to submit it a few days in advance so it’s approved and ready to go the moment you flick the switch.

Text your friends to start getting contributions and build credibility for your campaign. After you have a few contributions, start emailing those journalists!

Don’t forget to reach out to influencers that might be interested in your product. We sent several messages to bestselling author, Guy Kawasaki. Eventually he tweeted a photo of our product to his followers—over one million of them. Persistence pays off. People are busy. Silence is not the same thing as no.

Stretch Goals

After you’ve successfully reached your funding goal, you can add stretch goals. Some of our stretch goals include new Brik Book colors, a Brik Removal Tool, and an exclusive backer badge. Stretch goals are not required, but they are a fun way to get your backers to continue to promote your campaign even after they’ve already pledged. If you reach the next level, you can add another goal and another prize.

Warning: Think very carefully before adding new stretch goals. We added two new colors for Brik Book as a stretch goal. We were offering four MacBook models, so adding two colors increased our stock keeping unit (SKU) count by eight. It was an inventory nightmare. Keep the stretch goals simple and work hard to reduce the amount of variants you offer. We couldn’t decide on a stretch goal color for the Brik Tile campaign, so we let the existing backers vote. It helped us engage with our backers and made it easy to identify the most wanted new color: black.

Momentum

Keep hitting the email lists. Some journalists need to see momentum before they write about you. If they haven’t responded, email them again after you reach a milestone (e.g., reaching your funding goal).

Campaign partnerships are also a good way to build momentum. Find a live campaign that has a similar target audience and email the founders to see if they’d be willing to promote each other’s campaigns.

If you’re still having trouble building momentum, consider a service like Funded Today. They help you reach your funding goal and take a percentage after the campaign ends. We’ve never used them, but we’ve heard about tremendous results for other campaigns.

Support

Backers are going to have a lot of questions, so it’s important to set up your support channels early. Kickstarter has a built-in messaging system where the majority of questions will be coming from. It’s a great tool while your campaign is live, but consider migrating to another tool after the campaign is over. We use Front to manage our support emails. It allows us to tag messages, set up groups, and assign messages to members of our team.

End of Campaign

After the campaign ends, Kickstarter takes about three weeks to process the payments from the backers and deposit the money into your bank account. When you’re ready to start manufacturing, send out your backer survey. The survey allows backers to select colors and add their shipping information.

Before sending your surveys, consider using BackerKit. BackerKit will reach out to backers whose credit cards didn’t process and give them the opportunity to try again. They also allow you to upsell your backers during the survey process. We were able to get an additional 10 percent in funds by allowing backers to purchase more Brik Tiles, Briks, and other products before completing their survey.

Updates

Backers love updates! This is a great opportunity to start building a life-long relationship with your backers. Use video when possible. Here are a few examples of updates we’ve done:

Halfway

Send an update to your backers when you’re halfway to your funding goal. We also included a behind the scenes video of how our Brik Tile LEGO Wall Kickstarter video was made.

Thank You!

Send an update after your campaign is over to thank your backers. Try to incorporate your product or backers in some way.

Stretch Goals

Update your backers when you’ve hit a stretch goal.

Production

Production updates are my favorite. They give your backers a behind-the-scenes look at the production process: the first Brik Tile prototype demo.

Surveys

Update your backers to remind them to complete their surveys.

Shipping

This one is very important. Some backers will be out of town or possibly ready to move. Make sure to send an update when your product starts shipping so they can check for a tracking number.

Production

“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” – Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Super Mario Bros.)

Finding a Manufacturer

Personal relationships are key. Browse LinkedIn or Facebook to see if any of your friends can make an introduction to a manufacturer that they use. If not, Alibaba is also a great place to find manufacturers.

Try to visit your manufacturer as much as possible during the process. It’s amazing how many mistakes can be avoided when you catch them early. Visiting your factory also helps to build a strong relationship with your manufacturer for future projects.

Tooling

The steel molds used for injection molded plastic are often referred to as tools. Tools can range from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands of dollars depending on the size and complexity of your project. In most cases, prototypes can be made using a CNC machine before you begin cutting your steel molds. We went straight to cutting the molds before having prototypes made on our first project. Big mistake. The cases didn’t fit and we had to spend $20,000 redoing the tools. Prototypes might sound expensive, but they’ll save you a fortune in the long run.

Shipping

We always have our new Kickstarter projects shipped to our warehouse to assemble and package before they go out to our backers. We’ve found several tiny mistakes that we were able to correct before shipping out the products. Once you’re confident in your quality control, find a fulfillment center so you can focus on building your business instead of filling orders.

Shipping from the Factory

As mentioned in the Campaign Setup section, give yourself time so you can ship your products by sea freight. It usually take about a month door-to-door, but it will save you a fortune in shipping fees. If you’re shipping from China, find a freight forwarder. They handle all of the arrangements for a small fee.

Domestic Shipments

USPS is great for lighter packages, but talk to a FedEx or UPS representative about discounted rates a few weeks before you begin shipping.

International Shipments

We used USPS for international shipments for our first campaign. It was the cheapest option, but it was very unreliable. There’s no tracking or accountability. We lost orders and created unhappy backers. It was a mess. For our last campaign, we used Asendia and they’re great. They are less expensive than USPS and they include tracking for most countries. If you’re doing fulfillment yourself, we highly recommend them.

Shipping Software

Don’t use spreadsheets. We used Google Sheets on our first campaign and it was a disaster. The data wasn’t organized well, cells weren’t updated properly, and it made support a nightmare. Eventually we found ShipStation and it changed everything. It automatically syncs with BackerKit, Shopify, and all of the major shipping providers so everything is in sync.

Fulfillment Center

If you don’t want to ship the packages yourself, fulfillment centers are a great option. You export a list of your backers, their address, and what items they’re suppose to receive. The fulfillment center takes care of the rest. The other advantage of fulfillment centers is that they ship a massive amount of packages so their shipping rates are extremely low. We normally ship a few hundred orders ourselves to make sure the product quality is up to our standards, then we migrate to a fulfillment center. ShipBob is a popular option for Kickstarter backers, and EasyPost has some great rates.

Ongoing Campaigns

If you deliver a quality product and provide great support, you’ll discover that your Kickstarter backers will be customers for life. When you decide to do your next project, you’ll already have a built-in audience, and reaching your funding goal will be even easier. When your first campaign ends, Kickstarter will provide you with your backers’ email addresses. You can use those emails to build “Lookalike Audiences” on Facebook for future ad campaigns.

Running a Kickstarter campaign is an enormous amount of work, but it’s SO MUCH FUN! We’ll be looking for all of your amazing new campaigns on Kickstarter!