#TL:2019:04

[rkmb]

             —————————————   𝙡𝙚𝙚  𝙨𝙪𝙬𝙤𝙤𝙣𝙜  𝘧𝘰𝘳  𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘦  𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵  𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘦  !                              𝐫𝐚𝐩 ( self-written, 35s )  /  𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 + 𝐝𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 ( 0:00 -  1:22 )

        lee suwoong!

        he perks at the sound of his name.

        please make your way to the stage!

        “here.”  he shoves his phone into his friend’s hand.  “record me, and make sure to get my good side.”  not that he has a bad side, but y’know.

        with that, he ushers toward the stage, slowing for a brief moment to greet the attendant at the bottom of the stairs with a slight bow.  then, he’s at the center of the stage with countless pairs of eyes bestowed upon him.  something flutters within his chest -- anxiety, excitement, he can’t tell the difference, but one thing’s for sure:  he loves the attention, loves the way everyone peers up at him, waiting, anticipating.

        and so he does what he does best:  he performs.

        unlike most others he’s seen, he doesn’t start with the typical introduction.  he knows a simple “hi, my name is . . .” will go over the judges’ heads, so he has elected -- albeit jokingly at first -- to rap his introduction.  it’s a calculated risk.  he’s not the best at rap, buuut the judges don’t know that.  if he messes up, chances are the judges won’t catch on 'cause it’s his own rap;  they don’t know how it’s supposed to go, right?  right.

        his fingers tighten around a small object fitted perfectly in the palm of his hand as he starts:

mirror, mirror, don’t you see? memorize, mesmerize, this nobody. lee suwoong, didn’t hear that wrong. memorize, mesmerize, this swan song.

look at me, look into my eyes. notice the way i perform with a smile. curved lips, just can’t disguise, coming here’s a choice worthwhile.

        he slowly makes his way toward the end of the stage that’s closest to the judges, his eyes locked on one of them in particular, unwavering, unfaltering.

i know what you’re thinking, i sense your state of mind. your gaze betrays you, you’ve got results defined.

        he sinks down into a low crouch, his voice dropping an octave.

paralyze, pacify, pervade, and pray. here, take this inhaler---

        he sets the hidden object in his hand down at the edge of the stage.  it’s an actual inhaler.  how did he get one?  no one knows.

just in case i take your breath away.

        and to finish off his introduction, he gives the judges a wink before slinking up and walking back to the center of the stage.  once there, he remains in position, with his back to the audience.  now, it’s his time.

        the music begins.  it’s a rather upbeat song that he starts off by snapping along to, and as the second phrase starts  ( 0:06 ),  he swivels on his heel to face the crowd again.  the sequence that follows is a choreography he has learned from youtube with just a few modifications to enhance the playful attitude that’s reflective of his persona.  he grins, scrunches up his nose, quirks one eyebrow, then both---all in the name of being expressive  ( which is, quite frankly, the only thing he’s got going for him ).

        it’s only a second after making a surprised expression that he realizes he has missed the first two BAAM!s that he was supposed to sing.

        or shout.

        his choice song doesn’t quite showcase his vocals as much, but ah, he’s dancing at the same time, so there’s gotta be some sacrifice.

        after that blunder, he settles into a rhythm, rolling his hips and biting his lip at key points.  he sings the parts, though he doesn’t quite remember doing so once the words leave his mouth  ( practice has ingrained the lyrics into him, so that he can focus on what matters more -- the dance, the show ).  at one point, he catches a glimpse of his friend filming him and throws a finger-heart in their direction  ( for lisa, who he’ll later send the video to ).  and just as quickly as everything starts, it ends:  his chest heaves, his eyes flickering to seek approval between the audience and the judges, before finally landing on his friend who looks like they’re torn by laughter and agony.  his eyes narrow for a second.  of all reactions, he isn’t expecting this one.  

        but whatever.  

        he recasts his attention to the crowd and blows a farewell kiss, his mouth splitting into its usual grin shortly thereafter.  adrenaline spurs him to exit the stage, and he does so quickly, leaving the inhaler behind as a memoir to his audition.

        all in all, it’s . . well, it’s a performance.

        he’s sure he could’ve done better, but it is what it is.

[rkzhengting]

﹢cuckoo-ssi and 𝘬𝘶𝘯-𝘬𝘶𝘯

        kun is going through it.  then again, he’s been going through it since the day he was born  ( why else would he pop out crying? ).  jokes aside---he’s feeling a little more exhausted than usual on this fine monday morning, and he briefly contemplates staying in bed.  but then he remembers how much tuition is, and he’s on his feet not two seconds later  ( honestly, whoever said money’s not a motivator is a big, fat liar ).

        point is, he’s completely and utterly done with today, and today hasn’t even started.  he’s got two classes, back to back, but those are pretty okay.  he likes the instructors and tolerates his fellow peers.  but then, later in the afternoon, he has a group project meeting, and he really, truly, from the bottom of his bottomless heart, wants to shoot himself in the foot---but he won’t, because he kind of needs his foot for dancing.  annnd also for stabilization, since he’s supporting the entire project.

        but he digresses.

        the line for morning coffee crawls along, and for a moment, he’s plagued by the question of how he got here.  ( rolled out of bed, washed up, ran for the train, right. )  he stands there, arms folded across his chest, eyebrows furrowed just a tad.  and as one should, he minds his own business.  all is well until he hears the person behind him say something . . strange.  his head nearly whips around.  nearly.  “the what are crying now?”  because surely, surely he misheard.

        ---  @rkars

[analyzen]

Italian Fandom Meta | Most Popular Types of Pairings on EFP vs. AO3

EFP (2001–, Fanlore) is the most popular writing archive in Italy, and it hosts both fanfic and original fiction. Under the cut you’ll find a breakdown of the most popular types of pairings on EFP in comparison to the most popular types of pairings in the Italian section of AO3.

The Italian version of this analysis can be found here.

TL;DR:

53% of all the chapters ever posted on EFP have been deleted

49% of the registered users on EFP have deleted their accounts

M/F works amount to 60% of the whole website

EFP’s three most popular fandoms (Harry Potter, One Direction, Original Fiction – Romantic) all have a majority of M/F works

On AO3, most Italian works are M/M (56%)

F/F doesn’t have much content on either site (4-5%)

Methodology

I’ve followed @olderthannetfic’s methodology from this earlier Fanfiction.net analysis. Basically, I picked a sample size of 666 chapters and organized them in four categories (M/M, M/F, F/F, Not tagged; more on this later).

Why I chose chapters instead of stories

On EFP you don’t have specific links for every single story. Instead, every chapter you post gets a unique id, which can be seen in the link itself. For example, at the time of writing this the last updated chapter on EFP was this one:

viewstory.php?sid=3974099

Which means that this was the 3'974'009th chapter ever posted on EFP.

Ids follow the usual numerical order, so if a link reads id=3, then there have to be id=1 and id=2, and the next link will have id=4.

So I’ve used a randomizer to select ~1200 unique ids to analyse.

Weren’t 666 chapters enough?

I started out with 700 chapters, but half of them weren’t working. That’s because 53% of all the chapters ever posted on EFP have been deleted from the website.

Thanks to the link of the last updated chapter, we know that almost 4 millions chapters have been posted on the EFP. But EFP's homepage shows different stats:

Registered users: 602395, 205974 of which are authors Last registered user: [blacked out] Total of stories: 517083 Total of chapters: 1869573 chapters Total of reviews: 6222695 Online users: 17 logged in and 53 visitors

While we should have almost 4 million chapters, the stats show ~2 million chapters. Why? Because the stats only show the stories, chapters and users that are still on the website, and they don’t show the stories, chapters and users that have been deleted.

(Sorry, I forgot to translate this one. It reads: Total of chapters posted on EFP between 2001 and today. Orange: deleted chapters. Blue: chapters that are still online.)

Thanks to the stats on the homepage we also have a link to the last registered user. User ids follow the same numerical order as chapter ids, so once again we know that 49% of the users ever registered on EFP have deleted their accounts. That's a lot of deleted accounts.

Categorization

After selecting 666 (accessible) chapters, I organized them into 4 categories:

M/M: contains all stories tagged as “yaoi”, shounen ai” and “slash”

M/F: contains all stories tagged as “het”

F/F: contains all stories tagged as “yuri”, “shoujo ai” and “femslash”

Not tagged: which contains a) poetry, b) stories tagged as “no pairing”, and c) untagged het stories.

As for the untagged het stories, there are two issues:

Many M/F fics simply aren’t tagged

Many gen fics include untagged M/F ships

If the description made it clear that the story included a heterosexual relationship, I added the story under the M/F tag. Otherwise I left it under not tagged.

Also, on EFP “yaoi”, “shounen ai” and “slash”, and “yuri”, “shoujo ai” and “femslash” actually mean different things.

This screenshot here is from the posting page on EFP. It reads:

Pairings * You must select at least one tag from the list, and you can choose up to three tags. Het: for heterosexual relationships Shonen-ai: for male/male relationships with anime/game characters; stories with no sex scenes Shojo-ai: for female/female relationships with anime/game characters; stories with no sex scenes Yaoi: for male/male relationships with anime/game characters; stories containing sex scenes Yuri: for female/female relationships with anime/game characters; stories containing sex scenes Slash: for male/male relationships from TV shows/movies/books FemSlash: for female/female relationships from TV shows/movies/books

The thing is. People either respect the rules and use different tags for different kinds of stories, or they use these tags interchangeably to maximise the chance to appear in other users' searches. Which means that you’ll find RPF tagged with “shoujo ai”, and Attack on Titan fics tagged as “slash”. (More info on this later.)

Findings

On EFP, the majority of the stories are M/F.

To confirm this, I checked some specific fandoms:

Some notes:

Because EFP doesn't have metatags like AO3, what I did was: 1) go to a specific fandom, 2) filter through every single tag, and 3) jot down the number of pages per search. Every page contains up to 15 stories, so for example searching for het in Original Fiction – Romantic gives you 846 pages, which amounts to around ~12690 stories.

The tag in red, “Nessuna”, means “no pairing”. It is used for gen fics but also for untagged M/F fics. This is especially true in some fandoms, ie. Original Fiction – Romantic, and Harry Potter.

EFP’s filtering system sucks. You can only filter through stories with specific relationship tags, but you can’t filter out relationships tag. So what you see in the graph is how often a tag is used... which brings us to some issues. For example, Harry Potter is the biggest fandom on EFP, so much that Harry Potter stories amount to 11% (!) of the whole website. But in the graph it looks like the One Direction fandom has more stories—wrong. Actually, One Direction has many stories tagged as both slash and het, while Harry Potter stories tend to be either one or the other.

EFP’s filtering system sucks, part 2. Because “shounen ai”, “yaoi” and “slash” are often used at the same time, you can't really smash together all three of the tags to get a total amount of stories. I'd say that around 50% of the stories tagged as shounen ai and yaoi probably overlap, but there is no easy way to find out because, again, EFP’s filtering system sucks. The same goes for “shoujo ai”, “yuri” and “femslash”.

Fandoms with a majority of M/M stories

While there are some fandoms with more M/M stories (ie. Death Note, Hetalia, Glee, Sherlock, Supernatural, Teen Wolf), these fandoms are simply extremely small in comparison to other bigger fandoms full of M/F fics. Which obviously skews the numbers in favor of M/F fics.

What about femslash?

EFP suffers from the same lack of femslash as AO3 as a whole. In the fandoms I've analysed, only two have a big enough number of F/F. The fandoms are Glee (which has more F/F stories than M/F stories) and Grey's Anatomy (which has as much F/F as M/F stories, with little M/M).

Original Fiction

I thought it might be interesting to explore the original sections too, especially because Original Fiction – Romantic is the third biggest fandom on EFP after Harry Potter and One Direction. These Big 3 all have a disproportionate amount of M/F stories.

By logic, this would mean the the majority of the userbase on EFP prefers M/F stories. But then, aren't fans always complaining about “too much slash”? If “Any Two Guys” were enough to find slash appealing, wouldn't it be easier to simply write original M/M?

I think that looking at original stories might help us understand why people might prefer slash over het in some fandoms. For example, the amount of M/F stories in Original Fiction – Romantic implies that, when authors have to chance to choose what types of stories to create from scratch, they might prefer M/F stories.

This would support the theory that many people might prefer slash because of the lack of (well written/primary) canonical female characters + how well M/M relationships, both platonic and romantic, are written in canon texts in comparison to M/F or F/F relationships.

Obviously, we have to keep in mind that not all fanfic writers write original fiction and viceversa, so I'm not trying to find a universal explanation here. Also because not every website has a majority of M/F stories.

Which brings us to...

AO3 vs. EFP

As per today 20/04/21, the Italian section of AO3 contains “only” 24777 stories, divided between many different fandoms. To make a comparison, the Italian stories on AO3 amount to 5% of all the stories available on EFP. To make another comparison, the whole Naruto fandom on EFP has 20129 stories in total.

EFP has also been active for 20 years, while the boom of Italian fics on AO3 only started around 2018. We can't really make a 1:1 comparison between the two archives, but we can still try to understand the preferences of their users.

M/M and M/F stories on EFP vs. AO3

EFP: 60% M/F, 25% M/M

AO3: 56% M/M, 23% M/F

The percentages are almost swapped.

This might be because of the archives themselves. EFP has always been the general website for any Italian fandom (and actually at first it mostly hosted M/F content), while AO3 has always had a big M/M userbase. I'm basing this statement on this AO3 analysis from 2013, in comparison to this FFN analysis from 2018 which showed a majority of M/F fanworks, and finally this AO3 vs. FFN vs. Wattpad analysis from 2019, which showed that AO3 has always been the outlier for its majority of M/M content.

Then again, M/M stories on EFP have always been subject to the “usual” type of borderline-to-direct harassment that M/M fans are used to, which is something that still happens to this day especially in certain writing groups on Facebook, where the Italian writing community is pretty active. It wouldn't be weird for slashers to move to AO3, where they know they'll find more like-minded people and less headaches. (Also, the Italian section of AO3 has a lot of M/M RPF that's banned on EFP.)

The “Multi” tag on EFP

The only thing that barely resembles a multi tag on EFP is threesome, which for some reason is often used as a synonym for love triangle. So from the tags it isn't easy to understand if a fic includes an actual threesome (as in, a sex scene), a polyamorous relationship, or a simple love triangle.

This doesn't mean that there aren't poly stories on EFP—it simply means that they're impossible to find using the search system.

And that's all, I think!

[literaticat]

Hi Jenn! I was hoping you could explain the difference between self-ended and color-ended end pages for a PB dummy. Thanks!

If you want the TL;DR, just click the link on the bottom of the page, it has example layouts of each type.

If you want the whole explanation:

Parts of most hardcover books, from the outside:

* book jacket --you know what a book jacket is! the cover is THE FRONT of the jacket, the flaps are the foldy bits - the whole thing is the jacket

* the spine -- where the pages are bound; often sewn together into a block and then glued to a piece of fabric

* the boards -- these are what make the hardcover hard!

* the case -- the spine and the boards are put together and covered with some kind of material. In fancy/olden days books, this is sometimes cloth. (that's why sometimes you see hardcover books referred to as "cloth"). In less fancy books it's probably paper. They might be plain, or embossed with a design, or printed on to have a different image from the jacket, or printed on to have the same image as the jacket. Those books that are jacketless hardcovers, like say, Diary of a Wimpy Kid? That's called "paper-over-board" or POB.

And the inside:

* the endpapers -- these are the pages that are glued onto the boards to help make the book block stay in the case.

* the paper -- sounds obvious, like, that is where the story is, right?

BUT:

Picture books (well all books basically but whatever) are printed in "signatures" -- the process starts with a VERY LARGE piece of paper, which is then folded and cut into a 16-page bundle. That bundle is a signature. If you look at the spine of a hardcover book, you will probably be able to easily see that the pages are in these "bundles" and bound together.

This is why PBs are typically 32 pages long - that's two signatures. They could be 48 pages long - that's three signatures. They COULD theoretically be something in between, but each time you add pages you are making it more expensive, and if you aren't using a whole signature, you are wasting paper (which is expensive).

So now that you know that, you can probably understand, or deduce, the definitions you asked about:

* "Self-ended" means the first and last page of the signatures are the ones glued onto the boards. There are then at least two fewer pages in the story itself, but the endpapers can be illustrated, it's made of the same paper as the rest of the book.

* "Separate-ended" (or, I guess, "color-ended") means that there is an additional folded piece of paper on each side of the pages, and THAT is what is glued to the boards. This is often a plain color (though I suppose it MIGHT be printed with a design?) but anyway, it's typically a different kind of paper and that is why sometimes there's an EXTRA page at the front and back.

More info, as well as layouts of each type: https://www.wordsandpics.org/2019/04/illustration-knowhow-picture-book-basics.html

[helenaspencer]

intro to helena

Is that HELENA SPENCER-MAY? Wow, they do look a lot like PHOEBE DYNEVOR. I hear SHE is an EIGHTEEN year old FRESHMAN who are studying HISTORY  at Luxor University. Word is they are an ARISTOCRAT student. You should watch out because they can be CHILDISH and SNOBBISH, but on the bright side they can also be GENEROUS and CHARMING. Ultimately, you’ll get to see it all for yourself. [YUNI, 21, GMT, SHE/HER]

lord knows why i did this. im sorry.

01: basic information

Full Name: Lara Helena Spencer-May

Nicknames: Helena - she insists on being referred to only by her middle name.

Date Of Birth: August 12, 2002 (currently aged 18)

Zodiac: Leo sun, Leo ascendant, and Libra moon.

Place Of Birth: New York

Nationality: American and Swiss.

Sexual Orientation: Bisexual

Course: History (Freshman)

02: physical

Faceclaim: Phoebe Dynevor

Ethnicity: White (Swiss, English)

Height: 173cm (5′8)

Weight: 56kg (124lbs)

Eye Colour: Blue

Hair Colour: Blonde

Distinctive Features: a tangible air of disdain for anyone who earns less than 100k a year

Clothing Preference: Helena won’t wear anything which isn’t designer, but even then, she has her preferences. Perhaps stereotypically, she adores Chanel, closely followed by Versace. Her sense of style is fairly feminine, with a lot of dresses and skirts, and she wouldn’t be caught dead in a pair of jeans.

03: personality

Overview

Positive Traits: Generous, charming, loyal, creative

Negative Traits: Childish, snobbish, insincere, judgemental

MBTI: ESTP

Religious Beliefs: Atheist

Description

Helena has pretty much the emotional maturity of Veruca Salt. Which is to say, she cares about one person in the world, and that is herself. She doesn’t make long term plans, instead pursuing short term happiness - which means that whatever she wants in that moment, she will go for. And if you stand between her and whatever she wants, no matter how dumb - whether it’s a bag or a college - she reacts dramatically. She’s not above throwing tantrums, literally stomping her feet and screaming, scratching, you name it, until she gets what she asked for. She once keyed an ex boyfriend’s car because he understandably refused to invite her to his sister’s wedding and Helena had already picked out her (white) outfit. In addition to this, Helena’s sheltered upbringing has made her extremely ignorant to the world as a whole. She fails to comprehend how anyone can not be rich, since it’s all she knows, and so she tends to assume that poor people are always lazy and unambitious. As a result, she refuses to associate herself with anyone who is a scholarship student or comes from a poor family, as she insists that mindset might be contagious and drag her down. Her mood can switch very rapidly - one minute she is being sweet and charming to you, and the next minute she is screaming and crying. She’s also extremely adept at crocodile tears, which she uses on everyone she wants something from, seeing no problem with manipulating others if it gets her what she wants. She generally has a very superior outlook on herself as opposed to others, hence why she just assumes she’s going to inherit the May family’s company, over her cousins.

04: past

Biography:

Lara Helena Spencer-May was born in New York to a Swiss father, Matteo May, and English mother, Margaret Spencer. Her father works for the family’s pharmaceutical company, her mother is from British landed gentry and works as a classicist for the British Museum. Helena spent the first few years of her life in New York, before moving back to Switzerland, although she continued to spend a lot of time in New York over the summer, where she would later meet Zander Driskell.

Although her first name is legally Lara, Helena forced everyone to call her by her middle name from the age of eleven. Firstly, she thought that Lara sounded common, and slightly too similar to her cousin Loren’s name, and secondly, as her classicist mother told her the story of Helen of Troy, who she had been named after - and there was nothing which sounded better in Helena’s shallow mind than being beautiful enough that men started wars over you.

Helena is her parents only child, and she was absolutely spoiled rotten from the moment she was born. Her father gives her anything she asks for, and pretty much dotes on her; her mother also treats her as if she’s the centre of the universe. As a result, Helena has become accustomed to never being told no, and has no idea of a good way to act if she is - hence her tendency to throw tantrums if she doesn’t immediately get what she wants. She’s far too used to being able to manipulate daddy with a few tears into giving her an extra 5k in her bank account.

From the age of six, Helena was sent away to attend Ecole des Roches, a prestigious boarding school in Paris. She would either come back to Switzerland over the summer, or spend summers in New York. One such summer was spent in Saratoga Springs when she was sixteen, where she met Zander Driskell - and who she began dating, with Helena deciding to stay in New York after summer ended to be closer. Despite this, their relationship quickly turned toxic, with Helena’s spoiled and selfish nature making it difficult for her to put up with Zander not giving her everything she wanted - they broke up and got back together multiple times over the course of the next year, before a particularly bad break up caused Helena to up and leave for Paris again, finally finishing her high school education in Paris.

Then came the time for college. To be honest, Helena has no actual interest in gaining a degree. As far as she is concerned, she is just going to get a degree for the sake of having one, as she is convinced she is going to inherit the family business. Still, she had ambitions to attend the  University of St Andrews  in Scotland, primarily because she knew Kate Middleton met Prince William there, and Helena would love to be a Queen one day. However, her grandparents instead gently pushed her to attend Luxor University, suggesting that Helena would benefit from some bonding time with her cousins. She instantly refused - and was thus incredibly shocked when for once, her father put his foot down, insisting that either Helena attend Luxor, or he would cut her allowance. No number of tantrums, screaming, threats to jump out of the window, or run away would work - Helena ended up at Luxor, much to her upset, surrounded by her dreaded scholarship students.

Timeline:

August 12 2002 - Helena is born in New York

2006 - Helena moves back to Switzerland

September 2008 - Helena is sent to Paris to attend boarding school. She returns to either Zurich or New York over the summers following.

Summer 2018 - Helena meets and begins a relationship with Zander Driskell. They have many fights and an on and off relationship.

December 2019 - After a particularly bad argument, Helena throws a tantrum and leaves New York, returning to Paris to finish her high school education.

September 2020- Helena begins attending Luxor University.... fashionably late.

05: other trivia

- Helena speaks fluent Swiss German, Swiss French, and English. In addition to this she is fluent in High French, since she attended school in Paris. Her accent when speaking English is sort of an amalgamation of American, English, and French due to her upbringing and her English mother, and it tends to change depending who she’s speaking to - if she’s speaking to someone English, for instance, it will be more on the English side as she subconsciously matches them, whereas if she’s speaking in English to a French person, it becomes more French.

- Adores the British monarchy. Especially Princess Diana. And yes, Spencer means she’s a distant relation. She won’t let you forget it.

- If you call her Lara, she will spit on you.

-She loves classical paintings, and collects art. Her dorm room walls are covered with paintings and reproductions of Greek tapestries. She dresses as Helen of Troy every. single. Halloween.

- She can play the piano, and the flute. She is constantly in a stage of quitting and rejoining the concert band though, as she joins, can’t take any criticism at all, quits, and then misses it and wants to rejoin.

- Massive fan of Lana Del Rey.

06: notable connections

Within Luxor:

- Friendships: ...

- Former Relationships: Zander Driskell

- Cousins: Loren Velazquez, Zelda Reese

NPCS

- Matteo May and Margaret Spencer May: Her parents, who she has wrapped around her little finger.

07: connection ideas/wcs

Friends

Although Helena is often too childish to hold friendships for long, she can be fun for a party, so I see her having a lot of friends who she just drinks with or parties with every once for a while, without any genuine connection going on or spending too much time together

Enemies

Maybe someone who is annoyed by her antics and has been on the receiving end of one of her tantrums and thus sees the immature side of her personality as an annoyance.

Hookups

As long as she doesn’t perceive you as poor (god forbid), she loves a good hookup or friends with benefits.

08: tl;dr

Helena is highly immature, childish, and spoiled. She is rich to the point of not being able to understand or appreciate anything cheap or anyone poor in life, and looks down on pretty much anyone who isn’t at her level of rich as a result, seeing them as lazy. She truly believes she is superior to her cousins and that she’s going to inherit their family’s company, purely because she wants it that way.

[ariahotelresort]

Pháp Lý Căn Hộ Aria Đà Nẵng Hotel & Resort đã đầy đủ chưa, có an toàn khi đầu tư không?

Pháp lý Dự Án Căn Hộ Aria Đà Nẵng Hotel Resort có đầy đủ pháp lý chưa?

Đối với các dự án bất động sản, pháp lý là một vấn đề được nhiều nhà đầu tư quan tâm, Aria Đà Nẵng cũng không ngoại lệ. Theo thông tin chính thức từ chủ đầu tư, mọi thông tin về pháp lý của dự án này đều được công khai và minh bạch. Aria Đà Nẵng Hotel & Resort tự hào là dự án hoàn thiện 100% pháp lý.

Ngày 20/07/2015: Sở Kế hoạch và Đầu tư Thành phố Đà Nẵng cấp Giấy chứng nhận đầu tư số 3737208457, chứng nhận cho Công ty Cổ phần Đầu tư Du lịch Hà Nội Non Nước đầu tư dự án Khu du lịch nghỉ dưỡng cao cấp ven biển Non Nước (tên thương mại: Aria Đà Nẵng).

Ngày 23/04/2019: Sở Kế hoạch và Đầu tư TP Đà Nẵng đã ban hành Quyết định số 116/QĐ-SKHĐT chấp thuận giãn tiến độ thực hiện dự án Khu du lịch nghỉ dưỡng cao cấp ven biển Non Nước của Công ty Cổ phần Đầu tư Du lịch Hà Nội Non Nước trong thời hạn 24 tháng, kể từ tháng 01/2019 đến tháng 01/2021 theo quy định tại Điều 46 Luật Đầu tư năm 2014. Nguyên nhân là do dự án đã chậm thời gian triển khai khoảng 4 năm, kể từ ngày 20/7/2015.

Tháng 6/2019 UBND thành phố Đà Nẵng quyết định phê duyệt điều chỉnh quy hoạch chi tiết TL 1/500 thiết kế đô thị và quy định quản lý kiến trúc, xây dựng đối với khu nghỉ dưỡng cao cấp ven biển Non Nước phường Hòa Hải, quận Ngũ Hành Sơn có tên thương mại là dự án Aria Đà Nẵng Hotel & Resort. Văn bản quyết định phê duyệt dự án với tổng diện tích 7 hecta và có vị trí tiếp giáp ...

Quý khách có thể xem thêm bài viết “Pháp lý dự án Căn Hộ Aria Hotel & Resort” ở nguồn bài viết tại đây: https://aria.vn/phap-ly-du-an-can-ho-aria-da-nang-hotel-resort-da-day-du-chua/

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[buckley-diaz]

Hi, hi ! So you guys seem to know a lot about 911 and what's coming.... Is it true that Eddie has a confirmed love interest coming in 3B 😱 ?

Hello nonnie! I’m so glad you came to me to ask. I’ve always wanted to be a place people have felt they could come to ask questions.

So this got way longer than I was anticipating so its going below a cut...

I swear I’ve seen something that confirmed Eddie would be getting a new love interest at some point. Granted, I go through so many posts and article clips a day that it’s quite likely I saw something a fan posted. I even dug through months of my Buddie tag to see if I could find anything. (If you want to go through my tags for yourself you can do so here: https://buckley-diaz.tumblr.com/navigation)

BUT! Do not fear. I have still come up with some interesting evidence that somewhat suggests a romantic relationship for Eddie (and for Buck).

This is from season 3A when Eddie was developing a relationship with Lena:

https://ew.com/tv/2019/12/02/9-1-1-boss-fall-finale-spoilers/

It does seem to hint that Eddie will at some point engage in a new romantic relationship, but it’s not exactly confirmed.

This is more recent and is discussing the impact that Abby’s return may have on Buck:

https://tvline.com/2020/01/13/911-connie-britton-returning-season-3-buck-abby-interview/

It hints at Buck entering a new relationship and that a big issue in that is finding the right person for that relationship.

This is from Ryan Guzman discussing Eddie’s relationship with Lena in 3A:

https://www.usmagazine.com/entertainment/news/9-1-1s-ryan-guzman-teases-connection-with-ronda-rouseys-lena/

This to me is implicit of Eddie coming to terms with Shannon’s death and him potentially moving on with a new love interest.

Tim Minear in this next excerpt is discussing the potential of Buddie after the season 2 Christmas episode (2x10):

https://tvline.com/2019/12/04/911-buck-eddie-relationship-oliver-stark-buddie/

To me, him mentioning not only the scene, but their decision with making the fountain shoot up behind them is his way of saying they recognize the potential for Buddie and want to lay the foundation for it should they choose to follow through with their relationship.

This last piece of evidence is up to interpretation even more so than the others. Its from a discussion about what Aisha Hinds hinted at:

https://www.tvguide.com/news/911-season-3-premiere-date-and-first-look-released-by-fox/

This could be discussion Hen’s character building a better relationship with Eddie (which we’ve seen some of, especially in the Christmas episode when Hen and Denny came over). However, it could also be expressing that Eddie is working on his relationships in general, which may very well include romantic relationships.

I’m so sorry this got so long. I’m sure you were expecting a cut and dry yes or no answer.

TL;DR: I distinctly recall reading something that confirmed Eddie would be getting or attempting a romantic relationship in 3B. I cannot find what I read or if it was fanmade or actually put out by someone at Fox.

If anyone has seen an article that confirms Eddie will be getting in a romantic relationship this season please send it to me. Or if you have questions about 911 or 911 Lone Star don’t be afraid to drop an ask.

[portable-wing-wang]

Gender, Sexuality & Me

Right, here goes.

I've never properly talked about my gender or sexuality on here and feel as if I need to clear things up for friends, family and even myself.

Of course I'm very gender positive, I think everyone should explore themselves thoroughly in order to better understand their place in this world. What I experience will be different from other people and I may even disagree with others who share my experience as everyone is different. Just good to clear the air before we continue.

My name is Will(iam) Kirton. I was born at 1:04 AM on the 10th of April 2000. I was born with male attributes and was such designated a "boy". I have little problem with this. A baby knows itself very little and cannot comprehend itself properly and so adults assign labels which, for the most part, do help with development as a child is introduced to social spaces (schools etc.).

When young, gender means little and so I thought little of it. I never felt apart or different from my schoolmates. I did however feel uncomfortable and didn't know why. Constantly feeling as if I wasn't explaining myself properly and getting confused easily. I was bullied for this by many of the other boys and when trying to defend myself, I was made an outcast. This led to me to very female dominated spaces.

I tried my hardest to join the other boys (as I thought I was supposed to) but time and time again, I'd be pushed away. I did, however, make good friends with a few boys a couple of which I'm still friends with today. But my fondest memories come from my friendships with the girls and how they shaped me as a person.

I didn't know it then but through them I began to question myself, sub-conciously at first but very soon after it started to dominate my thinking. By the age of 14 I knew something was off for sure, but I didn't know what, so I started researching to find an answer.

First, I started to look at trans-folk and see how they saw it."Trans," Such an illusive word. To me it seemed so simple to begin with. Someone wanted to be something else because they felt uncomfortable. I felt uncomfortable. "Maybe there's something in this?" I thought, so I kept digging here and there with little motivation until I was about 15 when GCSEs took over and I didn't have time to think about it much until the summer of 2016. The thoughts came back in a big way. Why? I started going to parties.

Now it may seem a little silly but getting drunk and forgetting to hide myself allowed me to express myself in ways I'd never had the chance to before. Mannerisms began to appear that I wasn't controlling intentionally. I started speaking differently, stopped feeling like I had to explain myself and started having fun. This was the next big step of my self-discovery.

I then started playing DnD. Now, laugh if you wish but I had a human bard character names Steve who I categorized as a projection of myself if a little exaggerated. While playing as Steve, those mannerisms I gained started to take over even when sober. This was the last proof I needed to know I was queer but I didn't know what labels to use. I settled with saying I just had "queer tendencies" and left it at that but I still felt uncomfortable when I wasn't playing Steve.

So, I'm definitely queer, that's for sure but what kind?

I'm researching properly now. And not just gender, but sexuality as well. Bi, pan, gay, ace, etc.. I looked up everything and kept finding new labels. To help ease my brain, I focused on sexuality first. I knew I liked girls but I also liked boys however both in different ways. I timidly said I was bi for a couple years and then came out properly soon after my 18th birthday. I felt comfortable. For now . . .

I was still, however, confused. I couldn't work out whether I was a boy or a girl and it kept making everything else seem so confusing. At this point (16 or so) most of my good friends were male, I was decent at sports and I had a big ol' bass voice. BOY, right?

But there was something still bugging me.

I couldn't figure it out. Not until the summer before Uni, something slipped into place. I had completed my A Levels, I was out as bi, my shitty friends had left me, all was good. Wrong. I was more tense than ever. All I could think about was gender. Gender this, gender that. Constantly thinking, even with the distraction of the Edinburgh Fringe. I was also listening to a lot of Steam Powered Giraffe who, of course, have a trans woman playing the "Rabbit" character. I was obsessed. I wanted to find out everything about her and luckily, she posted a whole set of videos cataloguing her transition and thoughts all the way through. Finally, someone was essentially saying to me clearly what "trans" actually meant. Things began to make sense. I knew then that I was probably not cis but i didn't really feel comfortable saying I was "fully" trans, if you get my meaning.

But then I went to Uni. I finally had a chance to express myself freely and boy oh boy, did I do just that. I became so much more feminine than I ever had been in my life. It was so freeing. But I still didn't feel trans.

Then, someone introduced me to the concept of being "non-binary". A new term. I hadn't heard of it before. Is it like being trans? Or something completely different. I dived in head-first and came out the other end with even more answers but so many more questions.

Finally, I took the plunge (I'm sorry for so many swimming metaphors).

One evening in February 2019 after Uni I was in the loo before a musicals rehearsal. I hadn't felt well all day and was wearing something particularly feminine and caught myself in the mirror. I studied myself for a good few minutes. Each detail, each curve, how my body felt and looked in the clothes I was wearing. I stood there staring. Luckily no one walked in on me.

And something just clicked. After so many years of worrying and tensing, I finally understood. I was genderqueer.

Now, I should explain (here I go again), I didn't just decide then and there. I few months prior, my new uni friend "tom" (she goes by a different name now) had introduced me to a youtuber called Contrapoints. Before anyone says anything, I know she's caused a lot of discourse but I don't feel as if this is the right time to make any cases. Anyway, she didn't used to be openly trans and used to go by the label genderqueer. At the time, she made a very comprehensive video explaining what is and what it meant for her.

It intrigued me so, naturally, I did some more research and found that it fit my situation quite adequately but I didn't feel comfortable falling myself "genderqueer" yet either.

For those who don't know, genderqueer is an umbrella term for a wide range of traits which are either predominantly female, male or androgynous. It doesn't necessarily have a perfect definition and can be different for anybody who identify themselves as such.

My own genderqueerness could be described as a complete rejection of the male binary and so I carry more female and androgynous traits. This affects the way I speak, move my body, dress and my perspective on greater society. I also experience gender dysphoria. Now, to some, this would mean I was most likely just trans and using this a stopping-point before going further. This I feel is not the case. Whilst I am made uncomfortable by my flat chest, copious hair and broad shoulders, I do not feel the same about my genitalia or Adam's apple.

There are also more political connotations with the term genderqueer over non-binary. Genderqueer is a lot more aggressive but it gets the point across more clearly but I wouldn't say I wasn't non-binary. In fact, I think they're one and the same in practice but I do use my identity as a statement and so the genderqueer label feels more appropriate.

So yeah, I came out as genderqueer that February evening. First to my partner, then my friends and only now, almost a year later, am I attempting with my family.

I am so much happier for it too. I kept myself hidden for so long and have only now started to just accept myself and give in to the voice in my head telling me to let go. I'm much more relaxed too. Since coming out and using more neutral and even feminine pronouns, my dysphoria has become less of an issue. I still get it and I have bad days of course but for the first time in a long time, things are looking up.

I can't change the world, but I've been able to find myself in it more clearly and that helps a bunch.

TL;DR: I'm genderqueer. I'm bisexual. I've been out for a considerable time now and feeling better because of it.

Anyway, if you did read the whole thing, thank you. I'm not saying this'll be the same forever but this is me now and I'm still breathing so come get me world!

Feel free to reblog this, I hope it helps others realise themselves too.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic, your daily link-dose: 28 Feb 2020

Today's links

Clearview AI's customer database leaks: Sic semper grifter.

The Internet of Anal Things: Recreating Stelarc's "Amplified Body" with an IoT butt-plug.

Oakland's vintage Space Burger/Giant Burger building needs a home! Adopt a googie today.

Fan-made reproduction of the Tower of Terror: Even has a deepfaked Serling.

Drawing the Simpsons with pure CSS: Impractical, but so impressive.

Let's Encrypt issues its billionth cert: 89% of the web is now encrypted.

AI Dungeon Master: A work in progress, for sure.

How to lie with (coronavirus) maps: Lies, damned lies, and epidemiological data-visualizations.

This day in history: 2019, 2015

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

Clearview AI's customer database leaks (permalink)

Clearview is the grifty facial recognition startup that created a database by scraping social media and now offers cops secretive deals on its semi-magic, never-peer-reviewed technology. The company became notorious in January after the NYT did a deep dive into its secretive deals and its weird, Trump-adjascent ex-male-model founder.

(the Times piece was superbly researched but terribly credulous about Clearview's marketing claims)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html

Yesterday, Clearview warned its customers that it had been hacked and lost its customer database. Today, that customer database was published.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/clearview-ai-fbi-ice-global-law-enforcement

It seems that the NYT weren't the only ones to take Clearview's marketing claims at face value. Its client list includes the DoJ, ICE, Macy's, Walmart, and the NBA. All in all the dump includes more than 2,200 users, including "law enforcement agencies, companies, and individuals around the world."

Included: state AGs, university rent-a-cops, and clients in Saudi Arabia.

"BuzzFeed News authenticated the logs, which list about 2,900 institutions and include details such as the number of log-ins, the number of searches, and the date of the last search."

What does Clearview, a sercurity company, say about this ghastly security breach? "Unfortunately, data breaches are part of life in the 21st century."

Big shrug energy.

"Government agents should not be running our faces against a shadily assembled database of billions of our photos in secret and with no safeguards against abuse," ACLU attorney Nathan Freed Wessler, said to BuzzFeed News.

It is amazing that this needs to be said.

"More than 50 educational institutions across 24 states named in the log. Among them are two high schools."

They are:

Central Montco Technical High School in Pennsylvania

Somerset Berkley Regional High School in Massachusetts

The log also has an entry for Interpol.

The Internet of Anal Things (permalink)

In 1994, the notorious/celebrated electronic artist Stelarc did a performance called "Amplified Body" in which he "controlled robots, cameras and other instruments by tensing and releasing his muscles"

https://web.archive.org/web/20120712181429/https://v2.nl/events/amplified-body

Now, artist/critic Dani Ploeger has revisited Amplified Body with his own performance, which is very similar to Stelarc's, except all the peripherals are controlled by Ploeger tensing and releasing his anal sphincters around a smart butt-plug.

https://www.daniploeger.org/amplified-body

He calls it "B-hind" and it's a ha-ha-only-serious. The buttplug is "an anal electrode with EMG sensor for domestic treatment of faecal incontinence," and the accompanying text is a kind of art-speak parody of IoT biz-speak.

https://we-make-money-not-art.com/b-hind-celebrating-the-internet-of-anal-things

"B-hind offers a unique IoT solution to fully integrate your sphincter muscle in everyday living. The revolutionary anal electrode-powered interface system replaces conventional hand/voice-based interaction, enabling advanced digital control rooted in your body's interior. Celebrating the abject and the grotesque, ‍B‒hind facilitates simple, plug-and-play access to a holistic body experience in the age of networked society."

B-hind was produced in collaboration with V2_, the Lab for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam, and In4Art.

Oakland's vintage Space Burger/Giant Burger building needs a home! (permalink)

Giant Burger was once an East Bay institution, known for its burgers and its gorgeous googie architecture.

https://localwiki.org/oakland/Giant_Burger

One of the very last Giant Burger buildings is now under threat. Though the Telegraph Ave location was rescued in 2015 and converted to a "Space Burger," it's now seeking a new home because it is in the path of the Eastline project.

https://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2015/02/24/space-burger-launches-in-uptown-oakland/

The Oakland Heritage Alliance is hoping someone will rescue and move the building: " Do you have an idea for a new location for this mid-century icon? Please contact info@oaklandheritage.org if you know of an appropriate lot, project, or site, preferably downtown."

(Image CC BY-SA, Our Oakland)

Fan-made reproduction of the Tower of Terror (permalink)

Orangele set out to re-create the Walt Disney World Twilight Zone Tower of Terror elevator loading zone in the entry area to their home theater. He's not only done an impressive re-make of the set, but he's also augmented it with FANTASTIC gimmicks.

https://www.hometheaterforum.com/community/threads/the-tower-of-terror-theater.365747/

It's not merely that's he's created a rain, thunder and lightning effect outside the patio doors…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QMzN0v4mJQ

Nor has he merely created props like this gimmicked side table that flips over at the press of a button.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY7gQLMnbeA

He's also created HIS OWN ROD SERLING DEEPFAKE.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=MIsjYJwOXSU

I kinda seriously love that he left Rod's cigarette in. The Disney version looks…uncanny.

Not shown: "exploding fuse box with simulated smoke and fire, motorized lighted elevator dial, motorized/lighted pressure gauge, video monitor playing Tower of Terror ride sequence seen through the elevator door wrap, motorized "elevator door'"

He notes, "I was once married, but now as a single person, I can do whatever I want, haha. NEVER getting married again."

Drawing the Simpsons with pure CSS (permalink)

Implementing animated Simpsons illustrations in CSS isn't the most practical web-coding demo I've seen, but it's among the most impressive. Bravo, Chris Pattle!

(not shown: the eyes animate and blink!)

https://pattle.github.io/simpsons-in-css/

#bart .head .hair1 { top: 22px; left: 0px; width: 6px; height: 7px; -webkit-transform: rotate(-22deg) skew(-7deg, 51deg); -ms-transform: rotate(-22deg) skew(-7deg, 51deg); transform: rotate(-22deg) skew(-7deg, 51deg); }

I especially love the quick-reference buttons to see the raw CSS. It reminds me of nothing so much as the incredibly complex Logo programs I used to write on my Apple ][+ in the 1980s, drawing very complicated, vector-based sprites and glyphs.

https://github.com/pattle/simpsons-in-css/blob/master/css/bart.css

Most interesting is the way that this modular approach to graphics allows for this kind of simple, in-browser transformation.

Let's Encrypt issues its billionth cert (permalink)

When the AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein walked into EFF's offices in 2005 to reveal that his employers had ordered him to help the NSA spy on the entire internet, it was a bombshell.

https://www.eff.org/tags/mark-klein

The Snowden papers revealed the scope of the surveillance in fine and alarming detail. According to his memoir, Snowden was motivated to blow the whistle when he witnessed then-NSA Director James Clapper lie to Senator Ron Wyden about the Klein matter.

Since that day in 2005, privacy advocates have been fretting about just how EASY it was to spy on the whole internet. So much of that was down to the fact that the net wasn't encrypted by default.

This was especially keen for @EFF. After all, we made our bones by suing the NSA in the 90s and winning the right for civilians to access working cryptography (we did it by establishing that "Code is speech" for the purposes of the First Amendment).

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech

Crypto had been legal since 1992, but by Klein's 2005 disclosures, it was still a rarity. 8 years later — at the Snowden moment — the web was STILL mostly plaintext. How could we encrypt the web to save it from mass surveillance?

So in 2014, we joined forces with Mozilla, the University of Michigan and Akamai to create Let's Encrypt, a project to give anyone and everyone free TLS certificates, the key component needed to encrypt the requests your web-server exchanges with your readers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let%27s_Encrypt

Encrypting the web was an uphill climb: by 2017, Let's Encrypt had issued 100m certificates, tipping the web over so that the majority of traffic (58%) was encrypted. Today, Let's Encrypt has issued ONE BILLION certs, and 81% of pageloads use HTTPS (in the USA, it's 91%)! This is astonishing, bordering on miraculous. If this had been the situation back in 2005, there would have been no NSA mass surveillance.

Even more astonishing: there are only 11 full-timers on the Let's Encrypt team, plus a few outside contractors and part-timers. A group of people who could fit in a minibus managed to encrypt virtually the entire internet.

https://letsencrypt.org/2020/02/27/one-billion-certs.html

There are lots of reasons to factor technology (and technologists) in any plan for social change, but this illustrates one of the primary tactical considerations. "Architecture is Politics" (as Mitch Kapor said when he co-founded EFF), and the architectural choices that small groups of skilled people make can reach all the way around the world.

This kind of breathtaking power is what inspires so many people to become technologists: the force-multiplier effect of networked code can imbue your work with global salience (for good or ill). It's why we should be so glad of the burgeoning tech and ethics movement, from Tech Won't Build It to the Googler Uprising. And it's especially why we should be excited about the proliferation of open syllabi for teaching tech and ethics.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jWIrA8jHz5fYAW4h9CkUD8gKS5V98PDJDymRf8d9vKI/edit#gid=0

It's also the reason I'm so humbled and thrilled when I hear from technologists that their path into the field started with my novel Little Brother, whose message isn't "Tech is terrible," but, "This will all be so great, if we don't screw it up."

https://craphound.com/littlebrother

(and I should probably mention here that the third Little Brother book, Attack Surface, comes out in October and explicitly wrestles with the question of ethics, agency, and allyship in tech).

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

AI Dungeon Master (permalink)

Since 2018, Lara martin has been using machine learning to augment the job of the Dungeon Master, with the goal of someday building a fully autonomous, robotic DM.

https://laramartin.net/

AI Dungeon Master is a blend of ML techniques and "old-fashioned rule-based features" to create a centaur DM that augments a human DM's imagination with the power of ML, natural language processing, and related techniques.

She's co-author of a new paper about the effort, "Story Realization: Expanding Plot Events into Sentences" which "describes a way algorithms to use "events," consisting of a subject, verb, object, and other elements, to make a coherent narrative."

https://aaai.org/Papers/AAAI/2020GB/AAAI-AmmanabroluP.6647.pdf

The system uses training data (plots from Doctor Who, Futurama, and X-Files) to expand text-snippets into plotlines that continue the action. It's a bit of a dancing bear, though, an impressive achievement that's not quite ready for primetime ("We're nowhere close to this being a reality yet").

https://www.wired.com/story/forget-chess-real-challenge-teaching-ai-play-dandd/

This may bring to mind AI Dungeon, the viral GPT-2-generated dungeon crawler from December.

https://aidungeon.io/

As Will Knight writes, "Playing AI Dungeon often feels more like a maddening improv session than a text adventure."

Knight proposes that "AI DM" might be the next big symbolic challenge for machine learning, the 2020s equivalent to "AI Go player" or "AI chess master."

How to lie with (coronavirus) maps (permalink)

The media around the coronavirus outbreak is like a masterclass in the classic "How to Lie With Maps."

https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo27400568.html

Self-described "cartonerd" Kenneth Field's prescriptions for mapmakers wanting to illustrate the spread of coronavirus is a superb read about data visualization, responsibility, and clarity.

https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/product/mapping/mapping-coronavirus-responsibly/

Both of these images are representing the same data. Look at the map and you might get the impression that coronavirus infections are at high levels across all of China's provinces. Look at the bar-chart and you'll see that it's almost entire Hubei.

Here's a proposed way to represent the same data on a map without misleading people.

Another point that jumped out: stop coloring maps in red!

"We're mapping a human health tragedy that may get way worse before it subsides. Do we really want the map to be screaming bright red? Red can connotate death, still statistically extremely rare for coronavirus."

This day in history (permalink)

#5yrsago Ad-hoc museums of a failing utopia: photos of Soviet shop-windows https://boingboing.net/2015/02/28/ad-hoc-museums-of-a-failing-ut.html

#5yrsago First-hand reports of torture from Homan Square, Chicago PD's "black site" https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/27/chicago-abusive-confinment-homan-square

#1yrago EFF's roadmap for a 21st Century antitrust doctrine https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/antitrust-enforcement-needs-evolve-21st-century

#1yrago Yet another study shows that the most effective "anti-piracy" strategy is good products at a fair price https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kg7pv/studies-keep-showing-that-the-best-way-to-stop-piracy-is-to-offer-cheaper-better-alternatives

#1yrago London's awful estate agents are cratering, warning of a "prolonged downturn" in the housing market https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47389160

#1yrago Bad security design made it easy to spy on video from Ring doorbells and insert fake video into their feeds https://web.archive.org/web/20190411195308/https://dojo.bullguard.com/dojo-by-bullguard/blog/ring/

#1yrago Amazon killed Seattle's homelessness-relief tax by threatening not to move into a massive new building, then they canceled the move anyway https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/huge-downtown-seattle-office-space-that-amazon-had-leased-is-reportedly-put-on-market/

#1yrago The "Reputation Management" industry continues to depend on forged legal documents https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190216/15544941616/pissed-consumer-exposes-new-york-luxury-car-dealers-use-bogus-notarized-letters-to-remove-critical-reviews.shtml

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Allegra of Oakland Heritage Alliance, Waxy (https://waxy.org/), We Make Money Not Art (https://we-make-money-not-art.com/), Sam Posten (https://twitter.com/Navesink), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org), Kottke (https://kottke.org) and Four Short Links (https://www.oreilly.com/feed/four-short-links).

Hugo nominators! My story "Unauthorized Bread" is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

Canada Reads Kelowna: March 5, 6PM, Kelowna Library, 1380 Ellis Street, with CBC's Sarah Penton https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445

Currently writing: I just finished a short story, "The Canadian Miracle," for MIT Tech Review. It's a story set in the world of my next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I'm getting geared up to start work on the novel now, though the timing is going to depend on another pending commission (I've been solicited by an NGO) to write a short story set in the world's prehistory.

Currently reading: Just started Lauren Beukes's forthcoming Afterland: it's Y the Last Man plus plus, and two chapters in, it's amazeballs. Last week, I finished Andrea Bernstein's "American Oligarchs" this week; it's a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I'm getting really into Anna Weiner's memoir about tech, "Uncanny Valley." I just loaded Matt Stoller's "Goliath" onto my underwater MP3 player and I'm listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Gopher: When Adversarial Interoperability Burrowed Under the Gatekeepers' Fortresses: https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/02/24/gopher-when-adversarial-interoperability-burrowed-under-the-gatekeepers-fortresses/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we're having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

[sadeceavukat]

TAŞIMA İŞLERİ * HAK DÜŞÜRÜCÜ SÜRE * VEKALET ÜCRETİ

ÖZET TTK’nın 1188.maddesinde belirtilen hak düşürücü sürenin geçtiği tespit ile davanın hak düşürücü süre nedeniyle reddine karar verilmesinde isabetsizlik bulunmadığından hükmün esasına yönelik istinaf nedenleri yerinde görülmemiş ise de davanın hak düşürücü süre nedeniyle reddine karar verilmesine rağmen davalı yararın nispi vekalet ücreti takdir edilmesi tarifenin 7.maddesine aykırı olduğundan HKMK nın 353-b-2, 3 gereği hükmün kaldırılmasına, davanın hak düşürücü süre nedeniyle reddine ve davalı yararına maktu vekalet ücretine hükmedilmiştir. İSTANBUL BAM 12. H.D. E.2019/2344 K.2020/180 T.12.02.2020

Taraflar arasında görülen dava neticesinde; Dairemizce verilen hükmün Yargıtay 11. HD tarafından bozularak iadesi üzerine yapılan duruşma sonunda dosya kapsamı incelenip gereği görüşülüp düşünüldü;

DAVA:

Davacı vekili dava dilekçesinde; müvekkili tarafından Fronting Blok Abonman Poliçesi ile sigortalanan … AŞ ye ait bakır kablo emtiasının İzmir / Türkiye ‘den Fellxstowe / İngiltere’ye taşıma işleminin … isimli gemi ile konteyner içerisinde taşıyan sıfatıyla davalı tarafından üstlenildiğini, söz konusu emtiaların deniz nakliyesi sırasında gemi kaynaklı bir problem nedeniyle sızan yakıtın emtia konteynerlerine ulaşması ve konteyner içindeki emtialara sirayeti sonucu hasarın meydana geldiğini, yapılan incelemelerde makara kenarında yakıt sirayetinin dış kablo sarımlarına kadar ulaştığının tespit edildiğini, fatura ve yapılan tespitler gereğince 48.234,53 euro (133.276,82- TL) sigortalı zararın, müvekkili şirket tarafından tazmin edildiğini, davalılara müracaatta bulunulduğunu ancak sonuç alınamadığını, buna ilişkin icra takibinin başlatıldığını, davalı şirketin borca itiraz ettiğini belirterek 48.234,53 euro (133.276,82- TL alacağa ilişkin icra takibine vaki itirazın iptaline, %20’den az olmayan oranda icra inkar tazminatının davalıya yükletilmesine karar verilmesini talep etmiştir.

CEVAP:

Davalı vekili, taşımanın deniz kısmının İzmir Limanından Felixstowe Limanına …’ya ait konişmento kapsamında yapıldığını, müvekkili şirketin dava konusu taşımada navlun komisyoncusu olarak faaliyet gösterdiğini, davaya ilişkin icra takibinin tahliye tarihinden bir yıl geçtikten sonra açıldığını, navlun komisyonculuğu yapan müvekkili şirketin dava konusu taşıma bakımından sorumluluğunun bulunmadığını, müvekkili şirketin navlun komisyoncusu olarak hareket ettiğinden söz konusu sızıntının meydana gelmesinden sorumlu tutulamayacağını, davacının sigortalısı tarafından yapılan usulüne uygun bir hasar bildiriminin bulunmadığını belirterek aktif ve pasif husumet yokluğu nedeniyle usul yönünden reddine, esas yönünden incelemeye karar verilmesi halinde müvekkili şirketin zarardan sorumlu olmaması nedeniyle davanın reddine karar verilmesini talep etmiştir.

İLK DERECE MAHKEMESİ KARARI VE SÜREÇ:

Mahkemece; icra takibinin 08/12/2014 tarihinde başlatıldığını, sigorta şirketi tarafından sigortalıya hasar tazminatının ödemesinin 05/05/2014 tarihinde yapıldığını, TTK’nun 1188/3.maddesinde rücu davası açma hakkı bu hakka sahip olan kişinin istenen tazminat bedelini ödediği veya aleyhine açılan tazminat davasında dava dilekçesini tebellüğ ettiği tarihten itibaren 90 gün içinde kullanılmadıkça düşeceği hükmüne yer verildiği, davacının sigortalıya ödeme yaptığı tarih ile icra takibinin yapıldığı tarih arasında bu maddede belirtilen sürenin geçtiğini, TTK’nun 1188/1 maddesinde ise eşyanın ziya veya hasarı ile geç tesliminden dolayı taşıyana karşı her türlü tazminat istem hakkının 1 yıl içinde yargı yoluna başvurulmadığı takdirde düşeceği hükmüne yer verildiğini,

ekspertiz rapor tarihinin 17/09/2013 tarihi olduğunu ve hasarın fark edildiği tarihin 05/06/2013 tarihi talep tarihinin 06/06/2013 olduğunun raporda belirtildiği, sigortalı tarafından davalıya 04/07/2013 tarihli ihtarname keşide edildiği, takip tarihinin 08/12/2014 tarihi olduğunu TTK’nun 1188.maddesinde belirtilen hak düşürücü sürenin geçtiğini, davacı vekili her ne kadar davalı şirket tarafından kendilerine gönderilen ihtarnameye rağmen geçerli ve yeterli cevap verilmediğini, ve TTK’nun 1189. maddesi gereğince hak düşürücü süre itirazından yararlanamayacakları belirtilmiş ise de TTK’nun 1189. maddesinde “tazminat isteminin muhatabı, zarar göreni dava açma süresini kaçırması sonucunu doğuracak şekilde oyalarsa, hak düşürücü sürenin geçtiği itirazından yararlanamaz” hükmüne yer verildiği,

ancak davacı vekilin bu hususa ilişkin yeterli delil ve belge sunmadığını,davacının dayandığı defter ve kayıtlarında oyalama hususunun ispatlanmasını sağlayamayacağını belirterek davanın hak düşürücü süre nedeniyle reddine karar vermiştir. İstinaf yoluna başvuran davacı vekili; davanın hak düşürücü süre nedeniyle reddine karar verilmesinin yerinde olmadığını,müvekkilinin 08.05.2014 tarihinde sigortalıya 46.307,38-euro ödeyerek TTK nun 1472 maddesi gereğince ihbar yazısı gönderildiğini, ihbar yazısına davalının cevap vermediğini ve kötüniyetli olarak hak düşürücü sürenin dolmasını hedeflediğini,

hasarın niteliği ve miktarını belgeleyen belgelerin mahkemeye sunulduğunu, konişmentoda yazılı taşıyıcıya 04.07.2013 tarihinde hasara ilişkin ihtarnamenin mevcut olduğunu, ayrıca hak düşürücü süre nedeniyle davanın reddine karar verilmesi nedeniyle davalıya nispi vekalet ücreti tayin edilmesinin hatalı olduğunu, belirterek kararın kaldırılmasını talep etmiştir. Dairemizce yapılan istinaf incelemesi neticesinde; gerek bilirkişi raporu gerek ekspertiz raporuna göre malın 18.06.2013 tarihinde hasarlı olarak tesliminin gerçekleştiği, ödemenin 5.5.2014 tarihinde yapıldığı 12.12.2014 tarihinde takip başlatıldığı davanın 12.3.2015 tarihinde açıldığı göz önüne alındığında teslim tarihinden itibaren 1 yıllık hak düşürücü süre içinde davanın açılmadığı gibi ödeme tarihinden itibaren 3 ay içinde takip talebinde bulunulmadığı, davacının sürenin geçirilmesini temin için davalı tarafından oyalandığı iddiasının dosya içeriğine göre ispatlanmadığı sonucuna varan mahkemenin takdirinde bir isabetsizlik bulunmadığı,ancak davalı yararına nispi vekalet ücretine hükmedildiği;

AAÜT 7. maddesi uyarınca davanın dinlenebilmesi için kanunlarda öngörülen ön şartın yerine getirilmemiş olması ve husumet nedeniyle davanın reddine karar verilmesinde tarifenin 2. kısmının 2. bölümünde yazılı miktarları geçmemek üzere üçüncü kısımda yazılı avukatlık ücretine hükmolunacağı düzenlendiğinden davalı yararına nispi vekalet ücretine hükmedilmesi tarife hükmüne aykırı olduğu gerekçesiyle istinaf başvurusunun kısmen kabulüyle hükmün bu kısma yönelik olarak kaldırılarak davalı yararına maktu vekalet ücreti ödenmesine hükmolunmuştur.

Dairemizin 2017/590 Esas-2017/566 Karar sayılı ve 08/11/2017 tarihli; İlk derece mahkemesinin hükmünün vekalet ücreti yönünden kaldırılmasına ve davalı yararına maktu vekalet ücreti ödenmesine ilişkin kararının, davalı vekilinin katılma yoluyla ve davacı vekilinin temyizi üzerine inceleyen Yargıtay 11. Hukuk Dairesinin 2018/1077 esas 2019/6585 karar sayılı ve 22.10.2019 tarihli ilam ile; “….6100 sayılı HMK’nın 353/1-b-1 maddesiyle, bölge adliye mahkemesince, incelenen mahkeme kararının usul veya esas yönünden hukuka uygun olduğu anlaşıldığı takdirde ve ancak bu halde başvurunun esastan reddine karar verileceği hüküm altına alınmıştır.

Hal böyle olmakla, aynı yasanın 353/1-b-2 ve 3. maddelerinde öngörüldüğü üzere, ilk derece mahkemesi kararında kanunun uygulanmasında veya gerekçesinde hata bulunması halleri ile ilk derece yargılamasına ilişkin tahkikat eksiklikleri duruşma yapılmaksızın tamamlanacak nitelikte ise bunların tamamlanmasından sonra yeniden esas hakkında karar verilmesi gerekir.

Bu durumda, ilk derece yargılaması aşamasında dava hak düşürücü süreden reddedilmiş ve davalı yararına nispi vekalet ücreti takdir edilmişken, bölge adliye mahkemesince vekalet ücreti yönünden yeni bir hüküm kurulabilmesi için öncelikle ilk derece mahkemesi kararı kaldırılıp esas hakkında HMK 353/1(b)2-3 maddeleri uyarınca yeniden hüküm tesis edilmesi ile birlikte vekalet ücreti yönünden de yeniden hüküm tesisi mümkün olacağından, istinaf başvurusunun dava hak düşürücü süreden reddedilirken vekalet ücreti yönünden kabulü ile yeniden hüküm kurulması doğru görülmemiş, bölge adliye mahkemesi kararının re’sen bozulması gerekmiştir. ” denilerek hak düşürücü süreye ilişkin olarak bildirilen istinaf sebeplerinin yerinde olmadığından bu kısma yönelik istinaf başvurusunun esastan reddine, vekalet ücreti bakımından kabulüne ilişkin hüküm bozulmuş, usul ve yasaya uygun bozma ilamına uyulmuştur.

Somut olayda; icra takibinin 08/12/2014 tarihinde başlatıldığı, tazminat ödemesinin 05/05/2014 tarihinde yapıldığı, TTK’nun 1188/3.maddesinde rücu davası açma hakkı bu hakka sahip olan kişinin istenen tazminat bedelini ödediği veya aleyhine açılan tazminat davasında dava dilekçesini tebellüğ ettiği tarihten itibaren 90 gün içinde kullanılmadıkça düşeceği hükmüne yer verildiği, sigortalıya ödeme yapılan tarih ile icra takibi tarihi değerlendirildiğinde, bu maddede belirtilen sürenin geçtiğini, TTK’nun 1188/1 maddesinde ise eşyanın ziya veya hasarı ile geç tesliminden dolayı taşıyana karşı her türlü tazminat istem hakkının 1 yıl içinde yargı yoluna başvurulmadığı takdirde düşeceği hükmüne yer verildiği,

ekspertiz rapor tarihinin 17/09/2013 tarihi olduğu ve hasarın tesbit tarihinin 05/06/2013 tarihi, talep tarihinin 06/06/2013 tarihi olduğu, sigortalı tarafından davalı şirkete 04/07/2013 tarihli Beşiktaş … Noterliğinin ihtarname keşide edildiği, takip tarihinin 08/12/2014 tarihi olduğu ve davalının davacıyı oyaladığı sabit olmadığından TTK’nun 1188.maddesinde belirtilen hak düşürücü sürenin geçtiği tesbit ile davanın hakdüşürücü süre nedeniyle reddine karar verilmesinde isabetsizlik bulunmadığından hükmün esasına yönelik istinaf nedenleri yerinde görülmemiş ise de davanın hakdüşürücü süre nedeniyle reddine karar verilmesine rağmen davalı yararın nispi vekalet ücreti takdir edilmesi tarifenin 7.maddesine aykırı olduğundan HKMK nun 353-b-2, 3 gereği hükmün kaldırılmasına, davanın hakdüşürücü süre nedeniyle reddine ve davalı yararına maktu vekalet ücretine hükmedilmiştir.

HÜKÜM:

Yukarıda açıklanan nedenlerle:

Davacı vekilinin istinaf başvurusunun KISMEN KABULÜNE;

İstanbul 17. Asliye Ticaret Mahkemesi’nin 13/10/2016 tarih, 2015/155 Esas-2016/457 Karar sayılı hükmünün HMK.’nın 353(1)b-2 maddesi gereği KALDIRILMASINA;

“Davanın hak düşürücü süreden REDDİNE,”

İlk derece yargılamasına ilişkin olarak; “Alınması gereken 54,40- TL harcın, davacı tarafından yatırılan 1.595,44- TL harçtan mahsubu ile fazla olan 1.541,04- TL harcın talep halinde karar kesinleştiğinde davacıya iadesine,

Davalı vekili için takdir olunan karar tarihinde yürürlükte bulunan AAÜT uyarınca belirlenen 1.980- TL maktu avukatlık ücreti ile 12-TL yargılama giderinin davacıdan alınarak davalıya verilmesine,

Davacı tarafından yapılan yargı giderlerinin üzerinde bırakılmasına,

İstinaf yoluna başvuran davacı tarafından yatırılan 31,40-TL peşin istinaf karar harcının istek halinde kendisine iadesine, Hükümden sonra davalı gider avansından karşılanan 25-TL istinaf yargılama giderinin davacıdan alınarak davalıya verilmesine,

Davacı vekili için takdir olunan 1.700-TL istinaf duruşma vekalet ücretinin davalıdan alınarak davacıya ödenmesine,

Davalı vekili için takdir olunan 1.700-TL duruşma vekalet ücretinin davacıdan alınarak davalıya ödenmesine,

Gerekçeli kararın bir örneğinin taraf vekillerine tebliğine,

HMK ‘nun 361/1. maddesi uyarınca kararın tebliğ tarihinden itibaren iki hafta içinde temyiz yoluna başvurulabileceğine,duruşmalı yapılan inceleme neticesinde taraf vekillerinin yüzüne karşı oy birliğiyle karar verildi.12/02/2020

[rkmb]

﹢ let it go, 𝘭𝘦𝘵 𝘪𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵

       if anyone asks ( not that anyone’s asking but hypothetically speaking - if someone does ), suwoong would tell them that he’s good at most things.  the only thing he isn’t particularly good at is staying out of people’s business.  friends and acquaintances alike would call that being nosy, but he likes to think of it as being tastefully curious in all things interesting.  and this little altercation in the middle of a family-friendly event meant to celebrate culture and bring people closer together---now, this is interesting.

        at first, he doesn’t think to interject.  he might stick his nose into everyone’s business, but he’s not stupid enough to get involved in something that’s clearly getting physical.

        except then, he does.

        granted, it’s for a good reason:  a toddler, giggling and completely oblivious to all things tense, waddles toward the pair, arms outstretched.  in the same moment, one of the guys involved moves and---”whoa, there.”  he finds his hands wrapped tight around the guy’s shoulders, stilling him just in time for the toddler’s mother to swoop in and snatch her child from being accidentally knocked over.

        and now he’s involved, albeit unintentionally.

        “come on, guys, let’s not fi---dongyoon?”  wait no, backtrack.  “dude,”  he starts again, this time dialing back his surprised tone for one that hints at familiarity.  “i’ve been looking everywhere -- seriously everywhere -- for you, and you’ve been here all this time picking fights?”  he slings an arm around his old cuddle buddy  ( ha! )  and turns to the other guy.  “sorry ‘bout him.  his dog just died, so he’s been in a really awful mood lately.  please excuse us.”  after flashing him a bright smile, he tightens his hold around dongyoon’s shoulders and leads him out.

        it’s only when they’re completely out of earshot does he finally let go.  he quirks an eyebrow at dongyoon then, almost as if asking what happened?  but instead, he says,  “what, no ‘thank you’ for getting you out of trouble?”   ———————   @floverrk

[rkzhengting]

            ———————————————   𝙦𝙞𝙖𝙣  𝙠𝙪𝙣  𝘧𝘰𝘳  𝘵𝘳𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘦  𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵  𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘦  !                𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 + 𝐝𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 ( 0:00 -  0:35 )  /  𝐝𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 ( 0:35 - 0:55 )  /  𝐫𝐚𝐩 ( 1:35 - 2:02 )

        he chews on his lower lip.  it’s a nervous habit he had picked up over the course of his time in south korea, where the winters are a lot dryer.  he knows he shouldn’t, his lips are already cracked enough, but he can’t help it;  nerves are eating him away, slowly but surely.  and if his parents on the other side of the phone have noticed how unsettled he is, then they’re quite the sadists for dragging out his misery.  it’s been five minutes, and they still haven’t gotten the audio to work.

        “it’s okay,”  he says after some time.  “you can just watch the dance portion.  my singing and rapping weren’t good.”

        his mother thrusts her face in front of the phone camera.  what did i say about that sort of talk?  she narrows her eyes.

        “my singing and rapping can be improved, so that it will be good one day,”  he responds, tone apathetic, almost as if he’s been forced to recite this for years.

        she beams.  that’s right.

        there’s some shuffling then got it!  his father exclaims from the background, turning the camera around so that kun can see the paused video of his triple threat challenge performance blown up on their tv screen.  he continues chewing on his lower lip while halfheartedly debating if he should make up a story so that he can excuse himself from this viewing.  it’s not that he’s embarrassed, per se, but there’s just something about his parents watching him perform that doesn’t sit well with him.  the video plays.  his confidence falters.

        the kun on-screen swoops into a low bow.  “my name is qian kun, and today i will be performing a rendition of christina perri’s ‘human.’  i hope you can enjoy my performance.”  and then he starts.  his movements are graceful, soft -- complimentary of his voice that carries the lyrics in practiced english:

i can hold my breath, i can bite my tongue, i can stay awake for days, if that’s what you want. be your number one.

        he flinches when his on-screen self falters a bit during the i can stay awake for days ( 0:25 ) part.  nervousness had caught him at that precise moment, and he had lost his breath.  that’s something he didn’t account for during his practices.  nerves.  right.  nerves could truly mess up a performance.  fortunately, the subsequent parts didn’t require him to carry out a tune.

        as a pre-recorded i can do it, i can do it, i can do it plays in the background, his on-screen self draws the audience’s attention with a running start that turns into a front aerial flip  ( 0:35 ).  he lands on one knee, a choreographed movement that had his knee scraped and red for days, before twisting upward and shedding off the thin outer layer of clothing to the flow of his arm gestures.

        his parents are quiet, making absolutely no sound nor movement, even at the front aerial flip part, which he believes was the highlight of his choreography.  it was intended to be the main focus, and when he had performed this in front of his dance class  ( since this choreography was originally created for an evaluation ), he was rewarded with reactions.  his parents are giving him no such luxury.

        fingers clenching into fists, he watches as his on-screen self graciously falls to his side  ( 0:52 ), before rolling onto his back.  his chest heaves, his eyes cast upwards as he begins the rap portion:

i'm the kid who's always picked last, easy to skim through and miss without noticing, i'm there when you pass.

always been the shortest in the class, i force a laugh 'cause my own friends push me to the ground and say they're only joking. i'm just hoping someone has my back, no stab.

        save for reaching up to grab a metaphorical rope, his on-screen self doesn’t move during the entire rap part.  there are too many words crammed into just a few seconds that would surely make him lose his breath if he were to layer it with dancing.  thus, he had scraped the choreography in this section in lieu of a stronger rapping performance.  compared to others, though, it’s still not as strong.  not enough feeling, he thinks as he watches his on-screen self finish off no stab in a whisper.

        the last few piano notes play as he sings ‘til i had enough to complete the verse.  if he closes his eyes, he can still feel the cool stage beneath his back, can still hear the applause that erupts afterwards.  it’s loud.  louder than the applause he had received back when he performed with the circus, which drew less than twenty audience members on most days.

        the popularity of idol companies . . how terrifying.

        and then the video cuts off, the camera shifts, and he’s faced with his parents’ reaction.

        i have a friend living in america, if you would like to move there,  his mother says.

        he blanks.  “america?”

        she laughs, waving her hand in front of her face.  so that you can pursue a rap career.  clearly joking.  his father chimes in:  don’t give him ideas.  america is too far away.  korea is already far enough.

        and though he knows that he should be happy with their indirect compliments---rap isn’t his strongest suit---he can’t help but feel . . off.  it’s not that he’s not happy, but this isn’t quite the reaction he was hoping to get  ( then again, what was he expecting? ).

        you did well,  his mother continues,  but you should work on your singing more.  singing is more pleasing to the ear.  you may even attract your future wife with singing, if you work hard to become the next li yugang.

        he can’t help but laugh at that.  “i don’t think i’ll ever achieve li yugang’s octave.”  a pause, then,  “what did you think about my dancing?”

        it was good, as always,  his father comments.

        good.

        as always.

        never better.

        he allows a tremor of a smile pass his lips.  “i will work harder.”

        and we know you will.

        they talk for another hour about his classes, about money, and about his future wife  ( whoever she may be ).  he sits through all of it with a hollow stomach, though an empty plate of food sits beside him.  always good.  his brow furrows.  never better.

[hope-erinn]

Gaming Communities: Social Gaming and Live Streaming

Week 10

Gaming has always been a part of my life, I wouldn’t consider myself a gamer by any means, but playing video games has been an interest of mine since my first Nintendo Gameboy in the noughties. This early indoctrination means that gaming has become a “familiar and resonant experience for me” (Taylor, 2018 p.2). Though recently the effect that video games has had on popular culture is more overt and noticeable than ever, with games like Pokémon Go and animal crossing, dominating the gaming sphere and social media culture, bringing a new “cultural legitimacy to the gaming industry” (Keogh 2016).

Image Source - https://gph.is/g/4L52KkR

The earliest incarnation of commercial video gaming emerged in 1967, called the “Brown Box” created by Ralph Baer, which allowed two users to control cubes, which chased each other across the screen; at this early stage, there was already a multiplayer aspect to gaming,. Fast forward to today in 2020, we see and massive variety of video gaming options, and a complex and establishing gaming culture, which is intertwined with popular culture, including live streaming to the masses though platforms such as twitch.

Demographics has always been a very important aspect to gaming, with your average gamer being envisioned as young, male and white. This perpetuated idea of white gamers is a direct result of the origins of gaming. Gaming consoles and gaming was limited to those who has the access and means, usually directly associated with economic and financial status, thus more often than not limited to the upper class; those who at the time were consequentially white. Though nowadays, the gaming community is diverse and complex, being inclusive to a variety of people from different religious backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations, also accessible to those who have a disability.

However, with all good, there too is the bad, the negative and problematic side of gaming. Whilst inclusion and accessibility has improved massively over time, there are still very present and raw issues associated with representation within games.

Image Source - https://tenor.com/view/harry-potter-what-matters-the-part-we-choose-to-act-on-thats-who-we-really-are-gif-15432950

The gaming industry is very often “criticised for being misogynistic”, despite a large amount of the gaming community being made up of women (Sainsbury 2013). A high percentage of video gamers are women, with 40% of regular players being women, and yet women are often seeing the same repetitive and tired gendered tropes and archetypes, some of my favourites being, “the damsel in distress, the scantily clad adventurer, and the disempowered sex worker” (Hamilton 2019). Many of these same demeaning and repeated tropes are also a reality for people of colour as well, with much of black representation being either gang related or associated with villainy; these tropes are offensive and have detrimental effects on those who see themselves represented in distasteful ways.  

Image Source - http://www.feedzig.com/top-seven-controversial-shows-mtv/

Another aspect of women’s portrayal in games, is they are more often than not “targets of violence, or victims” (Hamilton 2019). This glorification of grotesques violence against women, is problematic and quite frankly disgusting; a popular example of this is Grand Theft Auto, where you gain achievements and are rewarded for violently killing sex workers on the street.

I am not saying that violence doesn’t have its time of day in games, however the way in which it is portrayed is essential. For example, my favourite game at the moment, Assassins Creed Odyssey, of course has violence involved, being an assassin and all, however the violence isn’t gendered, obscenely gratuitous, or personal. In fact, Assassins Creed Odyssey includes an amazing platform that is inclusive, where you can play as a woman, man, and make decisions exactly the way you wish, you can even decide your sexual orientation. Though some claim this ‘inclusive revisionism’ to be false and forced, though I disagree. I believe that despite a lack of exact historical accuracy, the game is progressive and is a positive force, in a very male centric gaming industry.

Image Source - https://gph.is/2nANGsj

Another aspect of female representation is the unfair and unrealistic representation of the female body, where game developers “use provocative female characterisation to sell their games” (GameDesigning 2020). This is exampled by the evolution of Lara Croft’s character design over the years, coming far from your stereotypical portrayal of a barely dressed adventurer. The latest 3 part series of Tomb Raider games have revolutionised Lara Crofts portrayal, now we see a accurate female body, who actually looks like she could survive a trip to a jungle; This is also supported by Alicia Vikander’s portrayal in the latest movie, a portrayal which saw much negative attention her lack of curves, but instead tone and actual muscle (which lets be real, is what an actual female adventurer would look like). This hate that was received is just one example, of the ‘male gaze’ being shattered, instead men had to see what a real women looks like; such a refreshing portrayal to see on screen.  

Image Source - https://gph.is/2eXQglp

I got a little carried away there, because the gaming community and industry is just an amazing reflection of society and todays culture. The gaming community is diverse and colourful, and I can’t wait to see more progress and development in terms of representation in the near future.

References

Chikhani, R 2015, ‘The History of Gaming: An Evolving Community’, techcrunch, 1 Novemebr, viewed 23 May, <https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/31/the-history-of-gaming-an-evolving-community/>

Game Designing, 2020, ‘How Gaming Culture Has Envolved’, GameDesigning, 5 April, viewed  23 May, <https://www.gamedesigning.org/gaming/culture/>

Hamilton, J 2019, ‘Female Representation in Video Games: How are we doing?’, gamasutra, 24 July, viewed 23 May, <https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JoriHamilton/20190724/347246/Female_Representation_in_Video_Games_How_Are_We_Doing.php>

Keogh, B 2016, ‘You can’t ignore the cultural power of video games any longer’, ABC News, 6 April, viewed 23 May, <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-06/keogh-why-you-should-care-about-video-games/7303744>

Sainsbury, M 2013, ‘GTA V is realised, gets (rightfully) cristused for being misogynistic: fools throw tantrum’, DigitallyDownloaded, 17 September, viewed 23May, <http://www.digitallydownloaded.net/2013/09/gta-v-is-released-gets-rightfully.html>

Taylor, TL 2018, ‘Broadcasting ourselves’, Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming, Princeton University Press, pp.1-23

Wunsch, S 2018, ‘How Lara Croft has evolved over the years’, dw, 15 March, viewed 23 May, <https://www.dw.com/en/how-lara-croft-has-evolved-over-the-years/a-42976395>

[garrettrulefivewhitlock]

Why saying “Fuck the entire South” is incorrect and toxic

The Republican voting record of the Southern region in the US is not reflective of the entire population. It is reflective of the white population.

Since this country started giving the right to vote to people other than white man, the South has done all it can to stop these people from voting.

- After the Civil War, white men stood outside voting centers with weapons to intimidate black people who came to vote.

- State constitutions were rewritten to suppress the votes of newly enfranchised African Americans.

- Colfax Massacre: Former Confederate soldiers/KKK/White League mob opened fire on courthouse full of black men. After the black men surrendered, many were shot and hung. It’s estimated that anywhere from 60 to 150 free black men were killed.

- Efforts to deny black men the right to vote was so bad, we literally made a new Amendment to further protect the right (14th).

- Texas, in particular, worked to stop black women from voting decades after the 19th Amendment was passed. There was poll tax, literacy test, grandfather clause, violence, economic coercion that kept most black women ineligible.

- In 1923, Texas created the white primary, by declaring the Democratic party was a private organization, which cleared the way for Democrats to allow only white people to vote in the primary. At the time, the Republican party barely existed in Texas. The white primary was, in effect, the general election. (Keep in mind at this point in history, Democrats were conservative and Republicans were liberal).

- Texas had a pole tax until it was banned in 1964. The tax discouraged many from voting, as it cost $1.50 and later $1.75, which was a day’s wage. If you were poor, you couldn’t afford to spend a day’s wage on the vote.

- It wasn’t until 1965, with the passing of the Voting Rights Act, that literacy tests were banned and federal oversight of elections across the country was applied.

These efforts to stop anyone but white men from voting have created systematic oppression, government built upon decades of law created by white men, and a society that perpetuates all of this.

Sources: https://www.history.com/news/voter-suppression-after-reconstruction-southern-states https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1873-colfax-massacre-crippled-reconstruction-180958746/ https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/in-depth/2019/06/28/338050/100-years-ago-with-womens-suffrage-black-women-in-texas-didnt-get-the-right-to-vote/

Here are modern examples to show how the South does all it can to remove non-white voters/votes.

- “In the 2000 presidential election...Florida kept African Americans from the polls or ensured that their votes would never be added to the state’s tally...On election day, there were faulty voting machines, purged voter rolls (purges that targeted minorities) and locked gates at polling places that should have been opened. There was also a Florida Highway Patrol checkpoint at the only road leading to the polls in key, heavily black precincts in Jacksonville. Then there were the piles of ballots, especially in counties with large minority populations, left uncounted. The US Civil Rights Commission ‘concluded that, of the 179,855 ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53% were cast by black voters. In Florida,’ the commission’s report continued, ‘a black citizen was 10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter’ ”.

****Bush won Florida by 537 votes. According to the article, about 95,323 black votes weren’t counted. If even a fraction of those votes had been Democratic, Bush could have lost the election.

- In North Carolina, “after the US supreme court gutted the necessary protection of the Voting Rights Act in 2013...The state required ID’s which its research showed a disproportionate number of black people did not have...the GOP slashed the number of early voting sites in Guilford county, which is nearly 30% African American, from 16 in 2012 to a single location in 2016. Pleased with what they had accomplished, North Carolina Republicans ‘celebrated’ mowing down black access to the voting booth.”

- In Indiana, “The Republican-dominated legislature mandated that counties with more than 325,000 residents could only have one early voting location unless approved on a bi-partisan basis. The governor, Mike Pence, signed this into law in 2013. Once again, the targeting was clear. Only three counties in Indiana have more than 325,000 people and account for 72% of the state’s black population. The result, as the Indianapolis Star reported, is that Marion county, including the state’s largest city, Indianapolis, lost two of its sites and was reduced to only one early voting precinct, which was inaccessibly located downtown with no available parking. Not surprisingly, by design, in the 2016 election, early voting in the county plummeted by 26%.”

- There are a number of states who have laws in place to stop felons from voting. Georgia and Florida have laws saying anyone convicted of a “felony involving moral turpitude” cannot vote or require that “convicted felons must wait at least five years after serving their full sentences before they can apply” respectively.

Here’s incarceration rates by race in Georgia:

Here’s incarceration rates by race in Florida:

Here’s another statistic: “about one out of every 37 blacks in Florida is living in a prison, jail or detention facility, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday. Blacks make up 48 percent of all Florida inmates -- far exceeding their 15.5 percent share of the state's population.”

- In 2019, voters in Texas face new barriers like the Texas voter ID law and the recent statewide voter purge that removed 95,000 people from the rolls.

- Gerrymandering is still a very real issue.

- Disenfranchisement is not unique to black voters. The Asian and Hispanic voter turnout is also far lower that white turnout:

There is conclusive evidence that non-white populations do not vote as much as white populations in the South. This is not because they are lazy, this is not because they don’t have differing opinions, this is not because they don’t care. Non-white populations do not vote in Southern elections because they live in a society that tells them their votes don’t matter. The local/state governments have created a system that does everything in its power to stop these people from voting. They stop criminals from voting (again incarceration rates are significantly disproportionately non-white across the country), they make voting centers hard to access, they require ID that non-white people rarely have, and so on.

The non-white voters who do come out to vote, tend to disagree with white voters.

Here are exit polls from the 2016 presidental election:

If more non-white people voted, it is easy to assume this difference in opinion would remain, if not increase. If more non-white people voted, maybe non-white votes would have an impact on elections. But in the current state of the South, that won’t happen.

Do not dismiss these minority groups. They are victims of a biased system that works against them with a malicious tenacity. Dismissing the whole region and saying “Fuck the entire South” does nothing but further disenfranchise these people. They have grown up in a society that says they don’t matter and statements like “Fuck the entire South” further isolates the good people stuck in the quagmire of racism and oppression that is the South. Say “Fuck the white conservative South”. Say “Fuck the Southern government that enables this to continue in 2019”. But do not say “Fuck the entire South”.

Sources: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/in-depth/2019/06/28/338050/100-years-ago-with-womens-suffrage-black-women-in-texas-didnt-get-the-right-to-vote/ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/07/black-voter-suppression-rights-america-trump https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/21/us/felony-voting-rights-law.html https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/georigia-s-strictest-possible-reading-law-stop-felons-voting-n1011056 https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-2001-07-25-0107250314-story.html https://www.texastribune.org/2017/05/11/hispanic-turnout-2016-election/ https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls/texas/president https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/FL.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/GA.html

TL;DR: Saying “Fuck the entire South” is incorrect as the entire Southern population is not responsible for the current red wall of Republican voting that occurs in the region. Minorities have been silenced and/or oppressed by the society and legislature of the area to the point that their votes don’t matter. Saying “Fuck the entire South” is toxic because it doesn’t help the situation and discourages disenfranchised minorities from continuing to fight the uphill battle for their voices to be heard. Statements like “Fuck the entire South” are ignorant and make you a part of the problem.

[roamanov]

Class 1: The social aesthetics of confession.

Required reading 

Confessions by St Augustine (extract): Found here:  (Book 4 - http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/augconf/aug04.htm)

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (extract)

Reality Hunger by David Shields (extract)

Recommended reading

Shannon Keating, “Am I Writing About My Life, Or Selling Myself Out?” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/shannonkeating/personal-writing-social-media-influencers-caroline-calloway

Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion – introduction’: available in PDF on Blackboard and online via Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QT8YAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false

Marshall Berman, ‘Goethe’s Faust: The Tragedy of Development’ and ‘First Metamorphosis: The Dreamer’ from All that is Solid Melts into Air (on Blackboard)

‘But Enough About Me’ : what does the popularity of memoir tell us about ourselves?’ by Daniel Mendelsohn, New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/01/25/but-enough-about-me-2

Class 2: The stylised self in the world. Aesthetics of the insertion of the self in the story. Style and world view

Required reading 

The White Album by Joan Didion (PDF provided)

Extract from The Birth of New Journalism by Tom Wolfe (PDF provided).

Recommended reading

'Gonzos for the 21st Century', http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/books/review/the-new-new-journalism-gonzos-for-the-21st-century.html

Tom Wolfe, The Birth of New Journalism: An EyeWitness Report: http://nymag.com/news/media/47353/index6.html

Martin Amis on Joan Didion’s style: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v02/n02/martin-amis/joan-didions-style

Class 3: The writer’s subjectivity and physical space. Melding Interior/Exterior worlds.

Required reading

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.

Recommended reading

Anne Carson – Plainwater (extract provided)

Anne Carson – The Autobiography of Red

Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet (extract provided)

Ian Sinclair – Lights Out For the Territory (extract – chapter 8 Word doc provided)

Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities

Olivia Laing – The Lonely City – extract on blackboard

Review of Lights Out for the Territory: http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/29/reviews/990829.29hoffmat.html

Class 4: Writing Nature/Nature of Writing.

Required reading

'In History' by Jamaica Kincaid - PDF supplied

'Findings' by Kathleen Jamie - extract provided

'Landmarks' by Robert Macfarlane - extract provided

'A Claxton Diary' by Mark Cocker - extracts provided

Recommended reading

'The Kusi' by Jean McNeil

'Soil Turned to Song and Dance' - the TLS on Mark Cocker's nature writing: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/mark-cocker-naturalism/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1574952085

'The Thoreau of the Suburbs' - feature article on Annie Dillard

'The New Nature Writing' by Jos Smith - extract provided

'The Anthropocene Lyric: an affective geography of poetry, person, place' by Tom Bristow (book)

Class 5: The self, anxiety and history – the non-novels of Sebald.

Required reading

The Emigrants by WG Sebald

Recommended reading

Reviews/literary criticism of Sebald:

André Aciman: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/12/03/out-of-novemberland/

Cynthia Ozick – The Posthumous Sublime (on The Emigrants) on Blackboard

André Aciman: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/w-g-sebald-and-the-emigrants

Jonathan Coe: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n06/jonathan-coe/tact

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/30/reviews/970330.30wolfft.html

http://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/a-review-of-the-emigrants-by-w-g-sebald/

Class 6: Politics, alienation and self-displacement in South African and South American writing

Required reading

Summertime by JM Coetzee

Resistance (extract provided) by Julián Fuks

Recommended reading

Roland Barthes – The Death of the Author (on Blackboard)

Donald Powers, ‘Beyond the Death of the Author: Summertime and J. M. Coetzee’s Afterlives’, Life Writing, 2016. (on Blackboard)

Review: JM Coetzee, a Disembodied Man - https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/books/review/Dee-t.html?pagewanted=all

Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room - Galgut is a South African writer of the next generation. I've given an extract of this book, which is made up of three long novellas, here. 'The Lover' is the middle section in Galgut's trio of novellas.

Class 7: Walking and writing the city in fiction and non-fiction.

Required reading

Teju Cole – Open City

Recommended reading

Walter Benjamin – Berlin Chronicle (extract), One Way Street (extract) and Naples.

Joanna Walsh - Hotel (PDF provided)

Lauren Elkin – Flâneuse

Review of Open City: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/17/open-city-teju-cole-review

James Wood on Teju Cole: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/28/the-arrival-of-enigmas

Class 8: Irony - Unreliable and self-critique as narrative drama.

Required reading

10:04 by Ben Lerner.

Recommended reading

Ben Lerner: Leaving the Atocha Station

Review of Leaving the Atocha Station https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n16/sheila-heti/i-hadnt-even-seen-the-alhambra

Jenny Offil - Dept of Speculation

Sheila Heti - How Should a Person Be?

Zadie Smith – Two Paths for the Novel (from Changing My Mind) on Blackboard

Zinzi Clemmons - What We Lose

Colebrook, Clare. Irony. New Critical Idiom.  Routledge, 2004

Alejandro Zambra – Multiple Choice (extract on Blackboard)

Class 9: Contemporary autofiction - two texts.

Required reading

Rachel Cusk – Outline

Amit Chaudhuri - Friend of My Youth

Recommended reading

Rachel Cusk  – Transit (extract on Blackboard)

Rachel Cusk, Kudos

Marcel Proust - A la recherche de temps perdu

VS Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

Geoff Dyer – Out of Sheer Rage

‘Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel’ – profile in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/07/rachel-cusk-gut-renovates-the-novel

Class 10. Shame and the self in auto-fiction. Domesticity. The Japanese I-novel.

Required reading

Karl Ove Knaussgard - My Struggle (in whole if you can buy the book, or in extract) provided here. My Struggle: book two, a man in love, introduced by James Wood: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-birthday-party

Recommended reading

Extract from Yuko Tsushima's Territory of Light (to be uploaded soon).

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, ‘The Careful Craft of Writing Female Subjectivity’ https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/03/territory-light-yuko-tsushimas-vital-i-novel/585832/

Amit Chaudhuri ‘I am Ramu’: https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/i-am-ramu/

Review of Final volume of Knausgaard: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/29/the-end-karl-ove-knausgaard

'How Writing My Struggle Undid Knausgaard': https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/knausgaard-devours-himself/570847/

'Each Cornflake' - Review of Knausgaard by Ben Lerner in the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/ben-lerner/each-cornflake

Class 11: The aesthetics and politics of the sexual self

Required reading

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Recommended reading

Chris Kraus – I love Dick (extract on Blackboard)

Emilie Pine - Notes to Self

Catherine Millet – The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (extract on Blackboard)

Hélène Cixous – ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ http://lavachequilit.typepad.com/files/cixous-read.pdf

‘Virgins or Whores – Feminist Critiques of Sexuality’, in Veronique Mottier, A Short Introduction to Sexuality (on Blackboard)

Henry Miller – The Tropic of Cancer

Sarah Ahmed – ‘The Performativity of Disgust’ from The Cultural Politics of Emotion (PDF here)

Chris Kraus ‘The New Universal’ https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/new-universal/

Vivian Gornick http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/vivian-gornick-good-feminist-solnit-rhode-cobble-gordon-henry

Kathy Acker – Blood and Guts in High School

Class 12:  Using 'real' people in fiction.

Required reading

Megan Bradbury – Everyone is Watching

Zachary Lazar –  I Pity the Poor Immigrant 

Recommended reading

Zachary Lazar – Sway

James Wood in The New Yorker on Lazar – The Punished Land: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-punished-land

Miranda France in the Guardian on Everyone is Watching: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/22/everyone-is-watching-megan-bradbury-review-novel

[frozenmikan]

Inami Anju’s Blog 2019-04-26 - A Dream

_date,2019,04,26

  I wanted to let everyone know directly

That “I finally caught hold of it! I did it!”.

  After tripping, and falling, and crying,

But always keeping those moments a secret.

  Always struggling, thinking clumsy thoughts,

But encountering failures, always encountering failures.

  “I need to produce results!” I told myself, panicking.

My precious dream

There were times when I wanted to just throw it away.

  But.

  I’m glad I didn’t give up.

  From the bottom of my heart.

Yes, now that I think about it, I’m here today because of

Everyone who supported me all this while,

Who sent me all your words, and thoughts,

Even when I was on the verge of breaking down,

You believed in me.

  I love acting,

And I love singing too.

  That’s all.

  With that, if only I could become the trigger

To introduce all kinds of worlds to everyone

Through my acting, and the roles I play!

  If only I could turn something within you

Into something amazing, if I could bring you something like that.

  I talked about this a little

At my Christmas Live Event last year,

But I want to become

Someone who can support you kindly,

So that even when something painful happens,

I’ll be able to shine bright on your gloom.

  I want to become “the one and only star”.

  Just like how each and every one of you

Who have been supporting me all this while

Are precious, special stars to me.

  An seule étoile

  The me back then

Did not yet see this future coming.

That’s precisely why I decided

To once again work hard towards my goal

With the words “Improving day by day” in my heart, I swore that I’d do that, to everyone.

…I’m so happy.

  I can only feel surprise, and happiness.

  For one or two weeks after the results were released

I’m sure that even I myself didn’t truly believe it. (lol)

  I wanted to focus on so many other things

So I limited myself to Twitter

Only posting so that you’d know that I’m still alive,

And messages of gratitude as well

  It’s not that big of a deal

That’s what I was telling myself (´˘`)

  (Thanks to that, it now appears as if

I’m behind the times again...( ˙-˙ )

  But today

Now that I’m able to write about my “dream”

  I’m thinking that

It’d be nice if I could start updating Instagram and other places again

At my own pace as well.

  For things other than that

I’ll set them up when I get the resolve to start.

  But, from those,

My two precious radio shows, and Twitter

When I see what everyone has to say

I naturally become more cheerful

And that has transformed into courage

And that gave me the strength to continue working hard, and gave me smiles

  Thank you so so so much.

    With all the gratitude I can muster!!!

      Announcement!

    I, Inami Anju, will be starring in a musical!!!

  A first in Japan

The musical “Love’s Labour’s Lost”

As Katharine.

  <Official Site>

  From when I wanted to be an actress

The dream I have held for song long, a musical!

There’ll be a nationwide tour! We’ll be performing in 4 cities!

  I’ll do my best to improve day by day.

  Of course I’d be looking forward to the future!!!!

  Right now! There are so many people around me who’re celebrating with me

I’m living in that paradise.

  I’ll give it my all and do my very best!!!

  Please continue to support me from now on!!!!!

  Inami Anju

From Anchan's Official Blog

TL: xIceArcher