#also like. i say that but i have literally no right talking about ''fomo money'' after saying i wasn't gonna buy SV until Home 💀💀💀

[dragongirlafro]

↑↑↑ my dumb ass having hope that they'll announce a Home update for ScarVio sometime this week knowing damn well TPCi/Nintendo first and foremost want them sweet sweet fomo bucks from ppl bulk buying 3ds pokemon games before they kill the Eshop

[purplesurveys]

1200

Have you ever felt a baby kick? Yeah, when my mom was pregnant with my brother.

What color pants/shorts are you wearing? I have red shorts on at the moment.

When is the last time you did something truly fun, and what was it? Last Friday, I’d say? Hahaha. Counted down the hours and minutes before the Butter MV drop, celebrating and freaking out with Army when it finally came out, watched the OT7 VLive that happened that afternoon, and streamed the video for nearly 24 hours straight so we could break some records, all of which we ended up achieving. It feels great to stan a group again after being out of the loop for so long lol.

What was the scariest moment of your life? A few men have lunged towards me - just to get attention, I guess? - in the past, while I was just peacefully walking. I always hear them snickering once I’ve flinched, and I always ended up crying once I’ve processed the situation.

Have you ever heard of Leonard Cohen? I know of the name, but I have no clue who he is or what he does (did?).

Pancakes or flapjacks? I don’t even know what flapjacks are, so let’s go with pancakes.

What kind of computer are you on? I’m using a Macbook Air.

Do you eat Chinese food? If so, what's your favorite dish? Yes. Minced pork with eggplant.

What are you usually doing at midnight? On weekdays, I spend it in bed, either watching videos or already reading fanfics to get ready to turn in. On Friday nights and weekends, I will usually be found on the rooftop taking a survey or two.

Have you ever developed feelings for a friend, but you were already with someone? No, I’ve never developed feelings for another person while in a relationship.

If so, how did it turn out?

Give me your brief definition of love. I will always stick by this quote, “Love never says, ‘I have done enough.’”

What is the most beautiful part of the human body, male or female? This is subjective, of course, but personally I find it to be thighs.

What kind of shoes do you wear? I’m not wearing any at the moment; but in general, I like to wear sneakers.

What is the worst thing you've ever done when you were really angry? Physical violence.

Are there any pills you take on a daily basis? If so, what? Nope.

Do you like the smell of coconuts? Not so much. I like coconut milk, though.

What is the heaviest you think you can lift? I think my personal best was like 60 or 70 lbs, back when I had weight training classes for PE in college. I remember being in so much pain once I gave the 80 lbs barbell a shot.

Do you take Tums? No.

Have you ever walked on a pier at the beach? ...Ugh. I’m pretty sure I’ve taken this survey very recently but I might as well just take it again because I don’t feel like searching for another. Anyway, I haven’t... at least not that I can remember.

How about under one? Definitely not.

At what age do you first remember feeling butterflies in your stomach around someone? I was around 12 when I was starting to feel confused about getting nervous around Andi.

Do you feel that way around anyone now? I don’t.

Do you ever talk to yourself or think deep thoughts while on the toilet? No haha but I usually bring my phone with me to keep me company.

Do you ever sing to yourself? Pretty often.

What is a sound that relaxes you? Ocean waves.

How hard has it been to reach your main goal in life? I don’t have a main goal set in life. I just live in the now and try to do things or make decisions that would keep me consistently happy.

Do you remember the song about hoes in different area codes? HAHAHAHAHA definitely took this recently; this is so embarassing. No, I still don’t know about this song.

What is your main heritage? Filipino.

What kind of pickles do you prefer, if you like pickles? I hate pickles and I find them absolutely nasty, but there are other pickled things I like, like radishes.

What kind of cheese do you prefer, if you like cheese? Mozzarella and feta.

If you could have a sea creature as a pet, what would you want? No thanks. I’m not capable of providing them proper care.

How about a farm animal? I would just stick to dogs.

So, do you have hoes in different area codes?

What is the most annoying song you can think of that came out recently? I’ve been in a BTS bubble for a solid month or so and I honestly can’t tell you my opinion about songs that have recently come out, because I literally don’t know any.

What is a song that you hate to admit you like? There isn’t any I’m guilty about.

What inspires you to get off your bum and do something productive? Knowing I’ll feel accomplished once I do it.

Do you ever use Urban Dictionary? Never anymore. I used to browse through it only when I was a lot younger.

Do you find the definitions on there to be generally funny or stupid? Both.

What comes to your mind when you hear the word 'transformation'? The Transformers series, lol.

What was something you regularly played with as a child? I always liked clay and I never really graduated from that interest, since I find the texture fascinating and fun to play with.

Have you ever given in to peer pressure? Sure.

If so, what did you do? I had my first sip of alcohol at Kaira’s 18th birthday and I was feeling left out since literally everyone else was drinking. For vaping, Gabie introduced it to me; and for smoking, it was another case of FOMO that made me want to try it out.

What part of your body have you had the most problems with in your life? My back.

Do a lot of people check you out when you're in public? Idk? I don’t take note of that kind of attention, anyway; I would find it creepy.

How many people do you know for sure to be interested in you right now? Zero.

What is a good name for a turtle? I think it would be the same process as the way I think it would be for any other pet; it would depend on their personality, their aura, etc. 

Can you imitate any accents well? If so, which one(s)? Not really. I can read Hangul and am familiar with the different tonalities used in Korean but I wouldn’t say my imitation would be considered spot-on.

Do you like having your ear nibbled on? Yes.

What makes a good kisser a good kisser? When they know how to use their tongue in a teasing way, for one. Eugh it’s too early for this lol

How many times a year do you have a family thing? What even is a family thing?

What are the best things to put in a smoothie? I don’t like smoothies.

Do you ever eat with your eyes closed and just focus on the taste? Yup, especially when I’m either eating somewhere pricey or when I’m eating at one of my favorite restaurants.

What do you dislike most about where you live right now? It’s a pretty uneventful city, and if I want to have some fun I always have to go to Manila.

Has anyone ever given you a rose/roses? Yup.

Are you watching your weight? No.

Have you ever became really good friends with someone you found online? Yes. Aliyah and I are still friends and I’m glad we’ve been able to maintain our friendship even after mine and Gab’s falling out. It’s a shame the three of us didn’t get to meet in real life though, and it will 100% never happen now. I also used to have a group of Twitter friends back in my wrestling stan days but it’s been a very long time since we’ve gone our separate ways. I have yet to find friends on Army Twitter but I really doubt I would get to build established friendships any time soon because EVERYONE IS SO YOUNG OVER THERE

What makes your best friend your best friend? They understand me better than anyone else does.

Do you have a drunk uncle? I have a couple of them.

Do you hear weird noises in your house at night? Nope.

What is something you do that is generally more like something the opposite sex does? Ignoring this question.

What is the girliest thing you do, if you're a girl? Also ignoring this.

What is the coolest tattoo you've ever seen? I find line tattoos to be pretty cool and beautiful in general. The minimalist look it goes for works really well.

Have you ever created anything artistic that you're proud of? If so, what? That vase I molded during my Vigan trip :) It was the first (and so far) only thing I’ve made from scratch, and even though I didn’t get to take it home, I’m still glad I had the opportunity to try pottery.

Do you only eat the middle of the oreo, if you eat oreos? No? That’s pretty wasteful. I eat the whole cookie.

Do you know anyone with a huge ego? Hahahahaha. Yes.

If so, is there anything else about them you actually like? Not anymore, no.

Have you ever used a racial slur, even jokingly? Most likely as a stupid teenager when I didn’t know any better.

Do you have any friends who are more like siblings to you? Angela and Laurice.

If so, what about them do you like most? They’re very easy to talk to, and they’re both selfless and generous.

What is everyone else in your house doing right now? My mom is making dinner while I believe everyone else is just on their phones waiting for the dish to be made.

What is the most money you've ever had at one time? I don’t remember the exact amounts anymore but my mom used to hand me cheques and regularly assign me to pay for me and my sister’s tuition back in grade school and high school, since she had work during the day and didn’t have time to stop by the school herself.

How long do you think it would take you to run a mile? I don’t know but definitely longer than what would be considered a decent duration for a fit person.

Look down. What do you see? I can see my legs but just barely since it’s dark out.

What is a subject that makes you uncomfortable? Topics I don’t know too much about.

What is a subject you can talk on and on about and not get sick of it? BTS, my field, and history.

What kind of mood were you in most of today? Comfortable. We had the aircon on all day and I just watched BTS MVs and live performances, and I don’t really feel bad about being unproductive for once.

Has anyone ever walked in on you naked? Just once or twice.

Tell me an inside joke you have with someone. Togepi.

What is the worst thing someone could do to you emotionally? Tell me hurtful words.

What is the worst thing you've ever done to someone emotionally? Idk...maybe cut them off unexpectedly? I'll usually have no problem doing this with people who make me uncomfortable.

How do you feel now about the first person you ever dated? Nothing. She’s not in my life.

How about the last person (your last ex)? She’s the same person.

What is the best invention ever invented? The internet.

What is something that needs to be invented? Not a completely new invention but I wish programs that can identify songs for you, like Siri, can be more improved to be able to recognize songs just by humming the tone. So far they can only name songs if you play it clearly for a few seconds, but it can be a hassle if I wanna have access to a certain song but only remember the melody and otherwise have no idea what the lyrics are or who sang them.

Describe your eyes. I don’t think they’re anything special. I don’t count them as a striking feature of mine.

What always makes you burp? Eating quickly. And beer.

What is something you hate doing that most couples do? There isn’t anything.

What's your astrological sign? Taurus.

What are you doing tomorrow? I wanna finally watch the Friends reunion special since I didn’t feel like watching it today. I also have a press release to write for one of my clients – they requested for it Friday and want it by Monday :(

[ignis-scientia-estrogen-brigade]

~ISEB in Japan: A Photo Journal~

If you’ve been following me on Twitter lately, you’ll know that I’ve been traveling through parts of Japan the last couple of weeks with my Ignis Play Arts Kai figure in tow. I posted a few pictures over there during the duration of my trip, but those barely scratched the surface of everything I got to do while in Japan. So I thought I’d put together a blog post of my journey while it was still fresh in my mind, featuring everyone’s favorite strategist in what I’ve been dubbing my Great Final Fantasy XV Adventure of 2019!

[Image-heavy content + commentary under the cut]

A brief backstory: I’ve wanted to go to Japan my entire adult life. For years, I’ve watched friends make the trek while I’ve been stuck at home with a severe case of FOMO. The only thing that ever stopped me from going was money (or a lack thereof), so I made the decision last summer to buckle down and sock away every dime I made to make it happen. My only concern before hopping on the plane was that I had missed the wave of FFXV popularity by about a year, but I would quickly learn that—other than not getting to eat any of Ignis’ recipes at the Square Enix Cafe—I had little to worry about.

Literally the only reason I brought my Play Arts Kai figure was so I could take this picture of Ignis at the Citadel (a.k.a. the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building), which was the very first place I stopped at on my first full day in Tokyo. The building + the surrounding plaza, while not 100% accurate, is a fairly impressive facsimile of the one in the game. It’s located in Shinjuku, which also boasts a lot of similarities to Insomnia. Having finished Episode Ardyn mere hours before jetting off on my trip, it felt like I had stepped off the plane and right into the game!

There just so happened to be an Animate right near the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, so I popped in to get a feel for what kind of FFXV merch I’d be able to find two years after the game’s release and a year after its height of popularity. Turns out, there was quite a lot of swag to be found! Truth be told, I’ve never been one to chase down official merchandise (unfortunately my job doesn’t really afford that luxury), but I gave myself special permission while on vacation to buy anything I wanted. So I did! Including everything you see above. ^^;;

The next thing I did was take the train to Ginza to meet Lyle/@landscape-gonna  (@landscape_gonna on Twitter), and I simply cannot say enough nice things about her. If you don’t know who she is, there’s a 99.9% chance you’ve seen at least one of her Ignis costumes, and they are A. M. A. Z. I. N. G. We had chatted a bit previously on Twitter before I went full-on stan mode, asking her if she'd be willing to meet up with me (a total stranger) to have lunch and talk Ignis and Final Fantasy. Not only did she say yes, but she gifted me with copies of her incredible cosplay zines and was not the least embarrassed when I busted out my Play Kai Arts figure in the middle of a busy Japanese dessert restaurant haha.

See? Zero embarrassment here.

We even did Noct’s ultimate pose! In public!

I can’t begin to articulate how special meeting Lyle was for me—being brought together from opposite sides of the world to share in our love for Ignis/FFXV is a memory I will cherish my entire life. So Lyle, if you are reading this: どうもありがとうございます ! ٩( ᐛ )( ᐖ )۶

Lyle wasn't the only friend I had in Japan. Another friend of mine, Asuka (who happens to be well-versed in anime/video game culture), volunteered to be my guide through Ikebukuro/Otome Road the next day. Quick otaku lesson: Kbooks is a chain of stores that specializes in the resale of licensed merchandise. For example, if you missed out on some of the limited availability items from the Movic and the Square Enix Cafe collaborations, you might be able to find them at a Kbooks. Otome Road in particular has something like seven different Kbook shops in a 3-block radius, each one specializing in different products (sports anime, idols, cosplay, etc). I, of course, beelined for the video game shop...

...which is where I found this fucking thing:

I’m not gonna lie, I almost bought it. I just didn’t know what I would do with it besides scare the living daylights out of people when they least expected it lol.

Yoooo Adam I found ya boi in Ikebukuro

We popped into the cosplay Kbooks shop since it was right across the street and I found an Ignis costume for sale! Please enjoy this picture of me pretending to come up with a new recipeh (since this is likely the closest I’ll ever come to cosplaying as Ignis).

One of the things Asuka introduced me to was Hanami (picnic under the cherry blossoms, basically). I had timed my trip to coincide with the blooming of the sakura, and the experience of being in Japan during that time was indescribable. I took a bajillion pictures of the sakura while I was there and unfortunately none of my photos ever quite captured the beauty and magic of them in person, but here’s a lil’ pic of a tree in bloom at Yoyogi Park (with the Movic Ignis charm I bought at Kbooks earlier that day).

Another item on my Japan checklist was to stay at a ryokan (traditional Japanese inn) in Hakone, a town famous for its onsen/hot springs. Nothing in Hakone is cheap (at least, not during peak sakura season), and I had spent an absurd amount of money on a night at one particular ryokan with a private bath (shy husband haha). The private bath could only be reserved in 30-minute increments, and by the time we finally rolled into Hakone the bath we wanted only had one slot available for the rest of the night. So what did I do?

If you said, “Waste the first 15 minutes of your 30-minute, super-expensive onsen experience taking the perfect Ignis-in-a-hot-springs photo” then you would be absolutely correct lol.

I actually wasn’t planning on taking a bunch of photos of my Ignis figure on this trip, but after my husband tucked Ignis into my futon while I was in the bathroom, documenting my trip vicariously through Ignis ended up taking on a life of its own. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I popped back over to Tokyo after my stay in Hakone, which is when I finally got to make the Great Nerd Pilgrimage™ to the Square Enix Cafe! Had the FFXV collab been going on while I was there, I might’ve forked over the cash to eat at the cafe, but I opted to skip out on lunch so I could spend more money in their shop. They still had a small collection of FFXV merch...

...including this acrylic Ignis stand that I wanted but thought I would never own after failing to find it at Kbooks earlier in the week. Huzzah!

Also, I just feel the need to let everyone know that this is what the outside of the Square Enix Cafe in Tokyo looks like lmao.

Our next stop was Kyoto, which we arrived in on Gladio’s birthday (April 2nd). Unfortunately I didn’t have time to draw anything for his b-day, but we did stop for a Nissin Cup Noodle in honor of Gladio!

One of the most memorable moments of my trip was when this boating incident happened, and it requires a little bit of backstory. On my first full day in Kyoto, I attempted to field two of the most popular tourist destinations in Kyoto: the bamboo forest in Arashiyama, and the Fushimi Inari Shrine. Both places have their beauty and historical significance, and I suspect during the off-season are inspiring sites to behold. In my case, both places were absolutely swarming with tourists, which really put a damper on my enjoyment of them. Defeated, I followed a local canal back toward my hotel, which is where I spotted a miniature boat enthusiast controlling a boat that looked eerily similar to the Royal Vessel. I pulled my Ignis figure out with the intention of simply taking a photo of the boat in the background; when the man saw me holding my figure and fumbling with my phone, he flagged me over and gestured for me to put Ignis in the boat. I wish I had documented how it all went down a little better, but as I was literally wheezing with laughter, the above was the best I could capture.

One of the more off-the-cuff decision I made was to dress in kimono for a day while in Gion (Kyoto). As the cherry blossoms were at their height during my stay there, you couldn’t sneeze without hitting someone who was dressed traditionally for the numerous festivals that were taking place throughout the city. As a white foreigner, I initially had reservations about wearing a kimono (for fear of cultural appropriation), but I did everything I could to be as respectful and reverent whilst wearing the garb (and the rental shop was certainly happy for the patronage). It was an amazing experience and I would definitely do it again!

Speaking of being respectful, I made it a point not to take pictures of Ignis while visiting any shrines (because nothing screams ‘douchey American’ quite like whipping out an action figure on sacred grounds), hence why I don’t have pictures of any of the major shrines we visited in this post. I did, however, spot this miniature shrine arch in an alleyway, and thought it would be okay for my equally miniature strategist to pay his respects.

Literally, a tiny shrine in an alleyway. I suppose even alleys have their deities!

Osaka is about 20 minutes away from Kyoto by train, and since I had already traveled all the way out to Kyoto, I went the extra few miles to stop by the Square Enix Cafe in Osaka. They actually had a smaller selection of FFXV merch than the one in Tokyo and I didn’t end up buying anything, but I would’ve never stopped wondering if I had missed out on something if I hadn’t gone and seen it for myself!

My last day in Kyoto was a week into my trip, and I still had five days left to go. After walking ~10 miles every day (no joke, I have the GPS screenshots to prove it!), I was really starting to feel the grind. I’m sure Ignis was also desperate for an Ebony after being lugged around in the bottom of my purse for a week lol.

Back on the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Tokyo!

Weeeeeee (ﾉ^ヮ^)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧

Said hi to Fuji-san!

Stopped for a delicious matcha parfait! (Shout-out to my husband who never once got annoyed with me whenever I busted out my figure in public spaces lol)

This was without a doubt the craziest and most unexpected find of any of my merch runs. I had gone to the video game Kbooks in Ikebukuro earlier in the week and had sifted through all their Ignis merch with a fine-toothed comb. This particular Movic charm was one I had been on the lookout for, but it was a rare pull even when they were readily available a year ago, and the only Ignis charm I came across in my first trip to Kbooks was the normal Ignis one (see my Hanami pic). I had no real reason to return to Ikebukuro after I got back from Kyoto, but on a whim I went one last time and BAM—this guy was hanging out there in his lil’ baggie, just waiting for me to get my grubby little hands on him. Jackpot!

All in all, I spent way too much money and I couldn’t be happier for it. The only thing I couldn’t find for the life of me was the Ignis cologne by Movic, but after searching through several Animates and Kbooks, I began to suspect it might be an online-exclusive item that wasn’t available in stores. (Which was probably a good thing for me cause I was already stretching my budget to the limit by this point haha.)

On my last night in Japan, I went back to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building—only this time I went at night when it was all lit up! I also went up to the observation deck on the 45th floor (something I didn’t know you could do the first time I was there) and enjoyed a fantastic view of nighttime Insomnia Tokyo. It was the perfect bookend to a perfect trip, and my heart is absolutely overflowing right now with love for both Japan and Final Fantasy XV!

[thestudyfeels]

How To NOT Be Depressed.

(Or If You Prefer — How to Be Substantially Happy About Life.) 

WARNING: This is one rollercoaster ride of a post. Proceed with extreme caution. For some, the staggering levels of insight may induce true purpose and re-establish their warrior spirit. For others, side effects may include grammatically incorrect hate or aloof eyerolls. We advise exiting if the said group includes you, for we're very tired of cleaning vomit off the seats.

Step aboard at your own risk.

If you’re one of the brave souls who stayed back to join us, I congratulate you for even I am scared of how crazy this post truly is. Alrighty then, kick back and relax folks, today we’re having a mature, adult conversation. Merely another cheery afternoon spent talking about life and its realities. Not too bad, eh?

Before we begin, spoiler alert! For those of you already turned off by the mention of 'depression’ and packing their bunnies to leave, sit tight. This ISN'T really about depression. This is about HAPPINESS. No clickbait. That got your attention, right butterfly? Nice, now stay.

A welcoming, maybe demanding A/N: Do me a favor and read this in one go. Maybe even plug in those headphones and listen to the songs dedicated to each part as you read. It's long, you have the new Riverdale episode to catch up on, but don't hop away just yet because (I had a couple moments writing this, alright) it's life changing. You'll prolly cry a few tears of realization, nod all nod-able body parts in agreement, beat your chest at random instants 'cause the hype’s too real, and perhaps, if it isn’t too much to hope for, finally go change your life for the better. In case you've forgotten, this'll remind you that there’s always hope, that you're a born conqueror, and you were made to THRIVE, not survive. Convinced? Kay, roll the cams.

   To clarify first-hand, no, I'm not depressed although I’ve experienced mild depression for a period before. Glad to say I'm out of it but I still struggle with tackling what I'm about to detail next.

Insert bitter voice, it’s this: My life is nowhere near I want it to be. Though I know vaguely what I wanna do, I haven't yet figured out how the hell I’m supposed to get there, or how my dream life is to be sketched out. It’s all a blurry mess. Which, to put it bluntly, hurts. I HATE feeling powerless and worthless, roaming about aimlessly.

There are many such moments where I hit the brakes to wonder why I’m not living THE Life already. There have been several times when I curl up and cry a frickin’ Amazon. There are horrible nights where I'm shaking with emotions, but they won't release, leaving me choked. (…not in that way, you hoes. Um, just ruined the dramatic mood with a lame dirty joke, sorry.)

   They say talking helps and that's why I figured I'd drop in. But perhaps more importantly, I wanted to hang because no matter how unfocused the lens may seem at my future, I don't consider myself a dopey loser incapable of the crazy dreams or wild bucket lists I fantasize about– and I thought I'd skip along to remind you that neither should you. (Or maybe I just came to sniff the new appetizers, who knows?)

PS: I also broke a sweat listing six ways to get outta depression– alternatively, to be more of a conqueror– because y'all are always pestering me with asks that go “how do I conquer omg send supplies” (Like, imagine a conqueror saying that! Oh, the crime, the atrocity!)

So yes, you're welcome. Have a feast with this litness.  

The main reason behind people being so frightfully sad, I’ve found, is a huge lack of fulfillment. We don't do what we love, for either— [ 1 ] we aren’t living life the way we want to (since we keep doing things we feel we're supposed to do) OR [ 2 ] because Mama, Papa and Mrs. Carter next door feel that struggling is the only way, and project their traditional beliefs onto us. Either way, whether or not we consciously realize this, subconsciously, we're all hurting because of it. Badly.

That lingering feeling of emptiness never seems to leave. You feel drained every night when you drop into bed, not because you gave it your all, but because you couldn't. And so, we do the next best thing. Drugs. Maybe not literally, but figuratively. We numb out this subconscious pain by binge watching Netflix shows. We deaden ourselves to that discomfort by reading smut in the bathroom or by playing dumb video games all day. We try (and fail) to extinguish this feeling of not ‘being enough’ by having silly flings or fake friendships.

And ultimately, we NUMB ourselves out to LIFE for we can't bear to live the way we're living. There's a reason why “How to Stop Procrastinating” posts are so popular (they’re a blogger’s most foolproof way of paying the month’s rent, and yes, even I'm guilty of a couple). We’re constantly having FOMO and tuning into others' highlights on social media– completely missing out on our own lives in the process. We fail to realize that the culprit is lack of genuine purpose more than zero self-control (or maybe it’s both, but that’s a tale for another day).

[On a side note, obviously I did generalize a bit– video games can be a passion for you, watching shows a way of winding down. But for most, they’re only DISTRACTIONS, just another way of ignoring the calls of life by hanging up the phone.]

   And here's the bitter truth about depression: The longer you wait to start living authentically, the more you start tuning out the inner cries wanting change, the faster your dreams start to ebb away, and the more you'll want to become insignificant. And to me, that's the scariest part of this journey to my dream life.

Nothing frightens me more than knowing that the moment I stop pushing, the very moment I give in to distractions and fears, my goals will stop manifesting themselves and I'll be stuck in this small town with its small people eternally. And THAT, I'm certain, won't be any more fun than working your way through a soggy ham sandwich, ironic as soggy is what life has become. (Yes, I have a thing against soggy sandwiches. They were a kid's worst lunch nightmare.)

   If you relate, and I’m sure you do (it’s probably why you stopped scrolling through cheesy fanfic for ten minutes to read this, I know you amigo) — here are six ways to NOT be depressed. Or more accurately, to gift wrap yourself some sweet ol’ happiness.

You're a Samurai and the Following Be Your Katanas —

Hol’ up. The second you reach the End Card, I want you to drop your Cheerios and implement at least THREE of these six strategies. Just follow the Takeaways, I've made this really simple. And as a rule, one of them has to be this one. (Look, don't whine. If you wanna climb outta that dark hole, you gotta put in some effort. So pop that booty, and let’s get down to business!)

Here’s the most truthful, though cheesy thing I’ll ever say: I would be nowhere I am today without this blog. If not for it, I would most likely be weeping in a dug-out hole somewhere, drowning in my salty little pond of tears and chiming every loser’s favorite words (“there's no point”). Creating this blog gave me a definite purpose – putting out fiery content, dipping myself deep into my newly found passion for writing and influencing, and connecting with other conquerors on the platform.  

I meet a lot of folks, whether at Sad School, Mouldy Mall, or Boring Bus stop, who always seem to be in a state of death-inducing boredom. When asked about their favorite thing to do, they’ll mumble “sleep” or “food” like Siri narrating your cat’s evening routine. And then you see adults, dragging through life mindlessly. Utterly clueless, floating like a piece of driftwood in an ocean bubbling with life. My sympathy quota gets overdosed everytime I think about it.

   To spell it out, find something to do. Anything! Learn a language, try some ballet, take pictures of your neighbor's rose garden, make an art piece and show it to your mom, stitch buttons onto shirts for fun, heck, make an entire shirt out of buttons, take a break from reading smut to write your own, frutify your farts, WHATEVER, just get up and move.

And here’s why – nay, not to keep you engaged or make you feel less worthless, not that bullcrap. It’s to put in gear the journey of figuring out what is the shite that you love doing. Too often we get stuck thinking about what our oh-so-great passion is. Get this, passion is energy. A spark for something. A magical fortune cookie which, when cracked, seems to explain everything, gives you the very reason for being alive. You can only feel that fire, that wild love, when you actually do it. So get cracking is all I’ll say!

Takeaway:

Attempt something. Nah, scratch that, imagine you’re in a sweet shop with shelves lined with free samples and try everything. Pick up that Polaroid cam, take that dreaded history course, buy that children’s cooking kit– in short, start working. Pull out all the stops, get curious, and get creative. In the process, if you promise to try hard enough, you WILL (money back guarantee) find out what makes your little heart burst with mad happiness and would willingly do for free, if needed, because you really are that crazy about it. And that, my dear, will be your oh-so-great-indeed passion. Have no doubt, you’ll never be “bored” again.

Real talk, having a dream is a big deal. And unfortunately, I’ve witnessed, rarely anyone has one to begin with. They’re either more dead than the cheap skeleton I bought for Halloween or believe they have a dream, but in reality, it belongs to mom, dad, or Uncle Sammy. Listen, doing something for someone you love (my Uncle Sammy used to supply me with cold cash whenever he came around, loved that guy) is great! YET, if you’re willing to throw away your life to fulfill others’ expectations, convincing yourself it's because they love you, even when YOUR lonely heart craves bigger things than just a marketing job, then you, my friend? Are the biggest fool. Don’t get offended, we both know it, this girl needn't ramble.

Recently, my relatives were over (nope, sadly not Uncle Sammy) and my cousin and I had a chat about life (correct, I grab every opportunity to do so). It wasn't very exciting I must say, he kept staring off into the distance (I wonder why), but what he SAID is what I'll talk about. After I’d gushed about my dreams, he asked skeptically if being an influencer would still be an ambition two years from now when I graduate. I raised my eyebrows, mock hurt, like eff you son, I ain’t giving up on my dreams! But that question got me thinking.

Life is wild. Unpredictable. An unexpected call, a single person, a random BLOG POST (cough) – can turn your life upside down, sometimes in the affirmative, other times not. This variability of life isn’t uncommon, and everyone experiences some part of it– unpaid student loans, failing startups, talent and art going unnoticed in industries dominated by wealth and connections, you name it. If all of that doesn’t make you run for the Himalayas and abandon any dreams, throw in a quick side dish of dysfunctionale famiglia with a sprinkle of self-image issues.

It ain’t easy, darling. The world is one cruel headmistress; it loves slapping awake the daydreamers and wishful thinkers. That hasn't ever actually stopped the dropouts and class clowns from building castles in the air though. And the common blueprint you notice they follow? Let me introduce you to…  Madness. Obsession. Maniacal obsession, to say. (Yes, I'm done playing with my words.)

   I struggled writing this point. A pestering voice in my head kept mumbling – They'll go back to doing the same sad shit anyway. Um, does anyone even read your posts? Lol, call yourself an influencer, hun. Hesitation started creeping in. Then the irony of the situation struck me. I laughed, shook my head and got back to typing.

We ran out of juicy gossip weeks ago, so here’s your tea served cold: insecurities and self doubt WILL get in the way. That whiny voice was just a mild version of what you face when you go all in. Fear traps you in its cage, and those who prattled behind your back now progress to talking shit in your face. Criticism and self doubt resurfaces, so unless your defenses are strong, you'll be crushed. Destroyed REAL quick.

When hell breaks loose (oh honey, and it WILL), your self defense comprising of maniacal obsession must be well learnt. Let them attack, mock, heck, drag you away from the desk and hurl you at the top of a damn mountain, but you better STILL hike back down, show them the middle finger, and continue working. That's how bulletproof you've gotta be. That's how madly do you have to love your dreams. And if you really think this will be a cake walk or want to continue complaining about Stuart being born with a silver spoon, hop off the train already. Your destination isn't on the tour list.

Look, my dreams terrify me. But they certainly make me feel more alive than complying with what every parent said about getting good grades and holding together a roof on my head. My ambitions set me free, give me a reason to fucking live. And yet, every now and then, something makes me question them. A fear engulfs me, some doubter proclaims I suck, someone I love is so blinded they can't see my vision. And that's okay. My defenses are way stronger. The next day rolls round, and you'll find me hustling again, thriving again. All because I know that even if no one reads my posts (the worst case scenario, I know y'all love me lol), someday in the future, someone will. I know that even if I’m not an influencer yet, if just one reader becomes a conqueror because of my words, it would be a win. A big win. I'd have done my job. All because I’m wildly, yes maniacally, obsessed with my dreams.

So hey, cousin? This influencer thing? This will be my dream long after I've graduated. Till the day I die, and maybe even then I'll rise from my grave to give a dead pal a lively pep talk. My watchtower has just been upgraded, so thank u, next.

Takeaway: 

“General, we've arrived!” Finally! Position those cannons, Martha, let’s talk them through the defenses. All aboard? AHOY MATEY! (wait, that was one for the pirates). Step one, dare to create a dream in your mind’s eye. The bigger, the crazier, and the scarier, the better. Doesn’t matter how impossible it is, don’t care how many voice their opinion against it, just imagine, keep a million possibilities in mind.

Once you see the life you truly want (you’ll know, everything will seem to zing)— have a sip. Become OBSESSED for that life. Thirst after that vision, itch to manifest it, and pine for the satisfaction that’ll come to your soul once it’s made a reality. Fall madly in love with the process and how magical it feel when you do it. And THEN, bellow a loud war cry and charge headfirst into battle, shields held high at all the criticisms. We conquerors never cared much for them anyway.

(play ♬) Picture this: forehead stamped with beads of sweat. Calloused hands working their fingers to the bone and eyebrows furrowed in deep concentration. Conjure an image where powerful beats are pulsing hard in your ears, synced with your own elevated heartbeats, and you’re thriving. Performing. Winning. Guess the secret to that? Preparation. Champions prepare. You can’t throw anything to the winds or rely on ‘luck’ or chance to conquer.

Tough days are in everyone’s calendar, be it your extra cheerful neighbor, Sally, or lone wolf classmate, Derrick. We’ve all found ourselves sulking over an awful situation, scooping into mint ice cream to forget mistakes, errands, and ghosting exes. Yet guess what? The solution isn’t the proclaimed “be positive!” or “It all happens for a reason, don’t you worry” - the key is coming up with a method to dodge the discouraging effect these hiccups have on us.   

So every bad day, I bring out a mason jar containing a knot of chits and one secret letter which is, on most days, kept hidden on the top shelf of my cupboard. I make myself comfortable on the bed, read all my bits of paper carefully, including the letter addressed to yours truly, close my eyes, and mentally fight back whatever’s bringing me down.

A short while later, I get up, now a warrior, and go slay the rest of the day like it was my last one on this planet. That jar is my jar. A Conqueror’s jar. One look at those powerful reminders, and I’m grounded once again, the beast within me now unleashed to kill.

Takeaway:

Honey, go get yourself a jar. Along with some papyrus and ink. Then start jotting down. Document past victories, future visions, fears that mean zilch to the person you’re about to become, batty goals you’ve still gotta chase, reminders that the majority will never understand what it is you’re tryna do here, and how that’s perfectly alright 'cause you'll find your conquerors, your squad one day. Create your victory jar. And then go knock ‘em down dead. Bad days stand no chance against you. You’re a winner, a fucking rebel. Go take what’s yours.

Y’know, I’m perfectly aware that many muggles reading this will whine that dealing with depression ain’t no piece o’ pie and it’s hella hard to get up and take the crown when you feel like a pile of dino dung.

Stop it. Get some help. (See what I did? Like Michael- ok ok, calm thyself.) For real though, and I’m tired of repeating this with my kitten stamped microphone (but I’ll keep at it ‘cause it’s that significant) – whining is WORTHLESS. It saps up precious energy that could be used to make life a scrumptious smoothie. (Loothie? As in life + smoothie? Right, yes, I’m shutting up.)

And even THEN, we find denizens complaining about slow WiFis and thin crust pizzas and how the market’s down and the government’s incompetent. Because blabbering makes us feel important. Heard. But keeping yo’ trap shut and actually doing stuff? Hustling for your dreams when nobody’s watching? Actually walking the talk? C’mon, Emma, don't be naive, ain’t nobody getting recognition for that.

Trust me, I get it. The world is yet to become a feminist, turns out your boyfriend was cheating on you while you were looking up wedding dresses, mommy’s a drunk loser, and idiots are being voted into office. It’s a lot to handle. But thanks to our immense and ever increasing population (we folks really love our rumpy pumpy, can you tell) — there will surely be one chum, facing exactly the same misfortunes as you, but still turning up at every party and bulk-spamming his friends with puppy pictures while you sit and wail. (One Moaning Myrtle is enough, thank you very much.)

Look, I’m not undermining your worries or obstacles. I’m only reminding that you have the marvelous choice of positivity. To CHOOSE hope and a better future when others won't. To FIND (and it's always possible) something to look forward to even when the to-do’s a big snore. To KNOW, deep inside, that you're a magnificent conqueror, no matter what mess you’re in at the moment, and that the world dances to your rhythm. Realise that it's up to you to let yourself be happy. At any moment, you have the very say-so to get up and start rocking. Dumbledore said it himself, “It is our choices, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” So choose better, and you’ll unconsciously do better as well. And yes, that being said, this is the last HP reference, don't fret. Be positive instead. (Edit: Ha, look at these quips, the girl's all grown up now.)

Takeaway: 

Your new occupation is to be a sunflower. If you think back, you'll probably recall Miss Honey rattling on about phototropic movement in AP biology. No? Me neither. Point is, sunflowers always face the sun. Put them ANYWHERE, hide them in the dungeons, throw them in a trash bag and shoot it off to the moon, they’ll still turn around and face the sun. No matter what. And taking inspo from that, you too can stop scripting creative soliloquies for being depressed. Happiness is YOUR right, YOUR priority, don't let anyone take it away from you or diminish its importance. DON’T let sadness ruin your vibe, do what you've gotta do to protect yourself. Track happiness in yo’ journal, set 84 reminders on your phone, and tattoo “Long as you’re beaming up at the sun, all the shadows will be left behind” on your boobs. Do whatever, just don’t turn the corners of your mouth down. You’re so pretty this way.

The other day, I was doing the deathly Plié Alternative Heel Lifts (these names, I swear) and my legs felt dead. Gone. Put to sleep like the Wicked Witch of the East. Now obviously, the timer wasn’t not even halfway done yet, but my cheeks were already flushing red like dear Santa, and NOT because I was high on choco chip cookies. I sighed, and at that point, I was so over giving up. All this while, I’d been whining and protesting because my muscles felt sore, but in that moment, I made up my mind. I bit my lip and kept going. On and on. Keep pulsing, you got it, don't stop, was the mantra I kept chanting.

   Won’t sugarcoat it, I honestly hadn’t died this much since that time Miss Honey buried me alive with trig assignments. My legs were now basically Play-doh and I was shaking, fighting for balance. A few seconds in though, something crazy happened. My legs went numb. My grumbling mind quietened and the pain vanished. That evening, I had the upper hand, not my physical perceptions of myself. I was powerful. Flawless. (Hey Santa, do you even lift bro?) Real talk, I was in the Zone, bitches.

I’m not sure if that was the result of excessive pain or because Wonder Woman’s spirit possessed ma bod, but staying loyal to my love for metaphors, I’ll use the experience to explain what I’m tryna get at here.

   Look, here’s the real deal — if all of the greats gave up the second things got frowny, we probably would have no one to worship. Nix role models, nix inspirations, none to stalk on Insta - we’d all be bumbling about like Sad from the even sadder Emoji movie (no shade, emojis be lit).

And that'd be very sad (pun definitely intended). Hence, cue some tangible ways to boosting your grit, so that you can be your own superhero:

1) Get yo’self a goddamn motto,

2) Know your “Why,”

3) Repeat the cycle till it’s in your blood. Btw, Shawn, if you here, I’m still a single pringl—HEY PAL I SEE YOU, DON'T SCROLL.

Seriously, don't brush these prime steps aside. We're always going for the advanced modes, and deeming these basic levels a waste of time. Well guess what, compadre, YOUR LIFE IS A GODDAMN WASTE O’ TIME IF YOU DON'T HAVE YOUR BASICS RIGHT. Excuse my outburst, but listen. You can’t do a hundred bicep curls on your first workout if you haven't lifted anything more than a crisps packet. Likewise, if you simply jump into Life one day, and decide “ok, here it is, 12 habits to build, sleep schedule to fix, man to ask out, let's go,” you ain't getting nowhere, chum. Start small. Take baby steps. It's clearly not as fun (definitely negates the bragging on Facebook part of it) but it'll stick. You’ll create a consistency that not even Grandma's cake batter can achieve.

1. Talking mottos — For context, a motto that I always mutter (my mom thinks I'm cursing, oh what a bad child) every time I spill milk while making coffee is “Do more. Give more. BE more.” Not only does it help me stay right on track for the rest of the day but it helps me clean up my mess, figuratively and otherwise, or I’d just be sitting in a puddle of spilt milk, cursing adulting for real this time and with more laundry to do.

2. Why you need the Big Why — Owning up, I’m guilty of attempting to learn Welsh for less than 48 hours because I hadn't a single reason to speak the language. A similar thing happened with half of my 2018 resolutions, which had a bunch of rubbish like “Floss daily”, something my eyes got trained to skip because, um, who the hell flosses every day?

Lame humor aside, I still workout almost daily because I have my Why straight. 1) I want to feel good about my body and get closer to the confident badass I envision my future self to be, 2) I simply HAVE to sustain my health to live to build my legacy and fulfill my dreams of opening a bakery at 90 and 3) Because I’m an influencer, and want to walk my talk and be the inspiration people need. Those are the reasons as to why I turn up to my yoga mat everyday, shut my jabbering mind, and keep on pulsing. This “Why” strategy applies to everything. Wanna get outta depression? Why? Wanna lose 20 pounds? Why? Wanna listen to your dentist’s desperate pleadings and floss already? WHY EH? Unless you know your intentions, you’ll give up at the first chance you get to not act on your goals. And watch out, because there'll be a LOT of those.

For me, leaving a legacy behind means more than having a slice of cake or missing a workout because there’s a fun movie playing. Find what's important to YOU, make it your why, and go marry your goals.

3. And then, Repeat — Bear in mind, if you're not living your best life yet, there are NO weekends. NO work-shy days. No weak days, no pick-me-up days, no eat-candy-do-nothing days. Everyday is a damn Monday. EVERYDAY is life or death. Every holy day you wake up is a chance to push your limits, challenge your mindset, and see how far you can go. And every 24 hours, when the cycle starts again, it’s your mission to race to build a stronger, wiser and crazier you.

And who knows, perhaps one day, you and I will just be casually sipping tea in our dream home, laughing at how the milk is still being spilt but knowing, proudly, fiercely, that we’ve come so far, even though there’s still more left to do, more to give and so much more to be.

Takeaway: 

Quit quitting. You're, guaranteed, 20x stronger than you think. I doubted I could go through with the workout, it seemed beyond my present physical capabilities. But I did, because I treated it as life or death. Understand this, the second you start making excuses, for being depressed, for taking an unnecessary day off - you give away your power. You are a very powerful being. You're limitless, capable of everything.

I'm not throwing these words around to make you feel cute, I actually mean AND believe them. There’s so much that's been done already— the iconic four minute mile by Roger Bannister, invention of the light bulb, cars, toothpaste and other junk, people who lost both legs and climbed Mt. Everest, we sent a man to moon in frickin’ 1969 (50 YEARS ago), some ran a 26 mile marathon with zero training, love and hope is still strong in this world, oh let's also add coffee and motivational music— and YOU think you can't finish a workout or get outta depression or meet your idols or marry the man of your dreams or become the artist you wanna be? Ridiculous. Don't give away your power that easily, this ain't no charity shop.

(play ♬) Having personally dealt with unwelcome yet familiar feelings of emptiness quite often, I’ve now reached a point where each bad day is simply a reminder of how long my journey ahead is, and just how badly I want to reach my destination.

We finally near the end of this novel of a post (thanks for sticking around, bud), and my best advice would be this: Rather than wallowing in self pity and throwing one-man parties because your life is so awfully dreadful, know that even when life throws you to the floor, long as you can look up, long as you can read an entire book about defeating depression (cough)– you can GET UP too. Let those emotions of sorrow and frustration blaze up into a roaring, crackling fire that doesn’t consume you, but instead, urges you, fuels you.

Lately, no matter how much shit I go through, how many arguments I tumble into, or how barren my dreams look sometimes, I don’t break down. And no, it wasn't always like this. I never even had aspirations to name two years ago. Six months back, it had become a night routine to cry. Not anymore.

Now, every setback and every failure only pushes me to be stronger and give more than I ever gave. The day I made the decision to Conquer (truly, madly, deeply, with all of my heart) was also the day I said a big, loud ‘fuck you’ to every resistance that was to cross my path. I had finally understood that life was nothing but a battle of WILLS, that it was all in or nothing, and I made up my mind once and for all to NEVER give in to depression, or to society, or to anyone who tells me I cannot make it.

I had conquered depression. There was no looking back now.

Takeaway: 

Here’s something no one will tell you: the key to bringing depression to its knees is seeing it positively. Pretend that it's a friend continuously sending strong, aggressive signals urging you to be happy. And what do you do when a caring friend throws some holy light? You listen, push past your ego, and follow accordingly.

And if that parallel seems unconvincing, here's another one (sup, DJ Khaled. This post is turning musical, sorry): it's scared of you. Depression is scared shit of you. Y'know how bullies are, right? Majorly insecure, self-loathing too perhaps, hardly fans of self love, and always trying to numb all that subconscious pain by inflicting pain on others. Depression has the same instruction manual. Your fears and doubts are your (pathetic) bullies, and depression is the big ol’ crony who does the dirty work for 'em.

Whenever you decide shit this is it, I'm going for it, they go paranoid and try stopping you because they've seen no better. And if they succeed, BOOM, you're depressed, paralyzed, your qualms reigning over you again. Don't let them in. I'll say it a thousand times if I gotta because I want (HAVE) to see you conquer – you're so much stronger than you think you are. You can do so much more than you think. It's all in your head! Don't just sit there, click away, and go back to living a sad life. You’re better than that. DO better than that. You’re meant to freaking CONQUER, straight-up dominate, my pal. Pay heed to that voice craving freedom. You got this. And you better know it.

One thing’s fixed like the (beloved by all) proportionality constants in Physics, you will come across depressing mornings and sluggish evenings even in the future. I assure you. Lots o’ bad hair days in the calendar, sis. But here's what you’ll do: you'll deactivate the miserable thoughts, keep a cool head, remind yourself that this is yet another test (better, rap your new mantra) and USE that hurt, pain, and anger to create a fervor and passion that wreaks havoc on its obstacles and drives you to accomplish EVERYTHING you've ever wanted to do. The easy choice would be to just give up, bellyache about the situation, and want sympathy for your worries. Yet, what you'll never do is… exactly that.

Rule 1) NEVER give up. Stand your ground. Have faith in your strength. Know that you'll have your way soon enough anyway. Rule 2) NEVER complain. All it does is drain your energy, that precious fire you could to high jump your way into the clouds. Makes you a pathetic wimp too, definitely not something you want on a warrior’s resume. Lastly, Rule 3) NEVER seek validation. From anyone. It sure feels nice to be acknowledged and encouraged, but grasp this— this is your journey. YOUR life and YOUR vision. Validation won't get you anywhere, for there'll never be enough of it.

Cuz Marty, if you're tryna bring something new, different, and authentic into this world – you'll most likely be hated on badly, before you'll be loved madly (hi, me a rapper). Learn to invite hate instead—IMPORTANT: hate from others, not yourself. Sounds counterintuitive, but this is the real tea: hate is good. It means you're standing up for something, refusing to fit like a puzzle piece in society, and being UNAPOLOGETICALLY yourself. And it’s certainly a sign that you’re on the right path if you can ignore that hate and stick your tongue out at it.  

Yet another reason to never seek validation is simply this: you have to fight for yourself. In order to meet your own expectations, reach the doorstep of the best version of you, and transform this world, you'll have to go wildly IN. Toil and hammer away. Shut out all the haters and non-believers, listening only to your gut. Importantly, learn to accept the rejection slips, validating yourself not with what Molly says about it being okay, but with the reminder that your time is coming soon. Depend on yourself. Validation will NEVER be enough.

I get it, it's a lot of homework, but perhaps you already realize that it’s THIS work that'll change your life forever. Not “how to not procrastinate, Jesus take the wheel” or “HELLO, life's a mess so here are ten things to do (you won't believe number four!)”. Clickbaits don't work, stop believing that a fancy planner is going to be your savior. There is no rule to making your life a masterpiece. You'll have to get to know yourself and your dreams (journaling, meditation, silent pondering), build the work ethics and the mentality needed (lots of work in this one, yet no strict framework to go about it) and GET GOING.

AND with that firework, I'll begin to slip away now. Again, I won’t say it’s easy, that’s cock and bull. Life’s no fairytale. You will never feel ready to start bringing your dreams to fruition. But, my darling (I’m being so nice yo, follow me), you must. You must force yourself to work for the future you want till it becomes a habit, an obsession. The world badly needs heroes; confident people who can stand for themselves so that others can stare at first, maybe even hate a little, but then follow because they seem unstoppable and are, truthfully, having the most fun at life. YOU'RE one of them. No validation, just plain facts.

You see, conquering is a LOT of blood and sweat (K-pop, anyone? BTS? Lmao, this is me tryna clickbait y'all to read). Even getting up will seem huge when you're just starting out, and this is one long road, dear pal. Still then, I have enough faith in you to hope you don't give into your fears, I hope you willingly chase discomfort, and I hope you find the courage to do all that you want to do, while that heart's still beating.

I hope you conquer. I'll do too, and I'd really like to see some familiar faces during the ride.

Peace, amigo.

A loud ass A/N: And now, we come the most important part of this post. WAKE UP Luke, stop snoring, and take some notes. Remember kids, I won't accept anything but an A.

   If you couldn’t identify yourself throughout this post and currently are scoffing like um woman, that's not really why I'm depressed, hang in there a sec. Yes, you can stop singing It Ain’t Me now. You've a very nice voice by the way.

I'm not a doctor, and I don't have enough exposure to know why so many earthlings are depressed today. HOWEVER, by talking to many, following their stories, watching and reading stuff – I do know with firm conviction that a majority suffers from severe unfulfillment. Don't believe me? A study shows 85% of the working class worldwide hate their jobs. Do you realize what that actually means? EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT of the THREE BILLION PEOPLE employed today, hate being employed in the first place! They do it for prime survival, to sustain themselves. And that's just jobs. I won't scare you, but 50% (yes, HALF, you heard that right) of students HATE going to school. Kids waste SEVEN hours of their life every day going somewhere they dislike, doing something they hate. Who's singing now?

People find themselves trapped in golden handcuffs, taking the paycheck despite the passionless job. They push aside the art and business they love, to become a slave of good ol’ cash. Several surround themselves with negativity and get frustrated when unable to escape the choking (no, not THAT kind again, hello someone pour holy water over this post) atmosphere. An innumerable are forced into taking up courses that they don't care about under parental pressure. The reasons are endless, and I don't think I'll amuse myself listing all the sad excuses.

This has always been the story. Hundreds of influencers have preached the same words I’m tryna put into your head here and you’ll yourself say you’ve heard this a million times. YET, you’re dissatisfied. YET, you feel like crap everyday, feeding yourself the same lie that the next day will be better, that you’ll get up tomorrow– while you let life beat the shit out of you.

That’s why, all of my words, everything you’ve read today - all of that boils down to just one single question. A difficult but necessary choice. Will you let this happen to YOU? Will you, seriously, even after this wild ride together, go back to doing nothing and being nothing? Will you, for real, continue deceiving yourself, sacrifice your happiness for the sake of pleasing everyone else, and remain a statistic on a website?

   (play ♬) If you’re not sure of your answer, read: Look, making you feel guilty is not my intention, because that’s not how this works. I need you to understand instead. Guilt wears off, it’s only understanding that brings about change. So, just for old times’ sake, I’ll rant a bit more (ik, just can’t seem to leave y’all).

You’re so, so young right now. More than half of your life is yet to be experienced. None of this probably makes much impact right now but it will the day you die. Remember, on your deathbed, you won't EVER look back and say, “Damn, wish I'd spent more time at the office. Saved up just one more dollar. Could’ve got that promotion before Amy.” Nay, it won’t even be on the calendar. That day, one foot in the grave, you'll reflect and wonder why the heck you didn’t let yourself be happier. Why you took up that lacklustre, soul-sucking architect job when all you've ever wanted to do is keep laughing. Why you didn't ask your crush out, why you were so afraid to walk up to that audition, because dammit, you could’ve been running your own comedy show by now. Why you dragged around a karaoke machine all this time instead of singing your own song. Why you couldn’t love yourself. Why you submitted. Why.

And the moment you realize that you hadn't lived a life for you, you’ll be crushed. Broken. The arthritis in your grannie joints won't even compare and neither will the mild dissatisfaction you’re feeling right now. Those whys will haunt you, they'll terrorize you, break you. It'll hurt tremendously to know that there isn't a single thing in your long life that you could call completely your own.

 With every death today so many dreams are left unachieved, crazy things left unchecked on the bucket list, and unique potential left unexpressed.

DON'T let that be you. Please. I'm still a mess myself, struggling to reach class on time and studying subjects that aren't exactly fun, when all I want to do is create content (read: fireworks) that is at a level of insanity, influence folks to do better, hold crazy world tours and meet-and-greets to give hugs, and get an adorable puppy so I can create a dogstagram (yes, I'm that mom). Sure, I could declare it's too hard, hang onto small-minded and negative people who whine endlessly, and follow the crowd, getting lost in it, with ease.

But I won’t because I can’t take the burden of those regrets. That painful unrest and discontent that nothing could cure, not drugs, alcohol, buddies, not even true love. For then I’d be just another drone, my controller in the hands of society, forcing me to see the world through its eyes. I can’t give in because I’m scared, terrified even, of wasting away this one life doing the bidding of others- folks who won't even notice when I’m gone.

It’s easy to be depressed and crib your entire life. It’s easy to think you’re worthless and that trying is pointless since nothing ever goes your way.

But perhaps, if you rise, if you simply DECIDE to have the audacity to fight for what you believe in, if you work and focus on becoming better, things will go your way. Life will bend to you, in awe, at your incredible relentlessness. Life will take one look at you, wonder who the fuck is this person? How the fuck are they so incapable of giving up? And back right away. And then perhaps, life will be such a blast for you that depression would become the past you never had.

   I know you can get there, conqueror. It’s time you knew it too.

🌚🌝 Further reading? 🌝🌚

Last Post :— How To Get Back Into The Creative Process – For you, if you're in a creative rut. Get outta it and go create magic!

5 Reasons Why You're Unhappy — To help you identify & cut out CURRENT sources of sadness so that you can spice up yo’ life with some happiness instead. Definitely recommend reading AND implementing.

The Bubble Trap & How To Get Out Of It — One of my classics. Everyone is in one of these 'bubbles’ till they consciously do something about it; that's just how it is. Are you still in one? (Someone teach me marketing, lmao.)

The 5 Biggest Regrets of The Dying (from Greatist) — I LOVED reading this. Pretty much all you need to cut the crap and do meaningful stuff. Read it, memorize it, work it.

++ Want to request a blog post? Leave your request in my ask box! I'll get back to you with a reply, along with the average time I'll need to birth that magical idea.

Thanks for dropping by! It was a pleasure to have you around. If you wish to stick for a bit, I'd suggest picking one of the related posts mentioned above.

If you wanna check out my blog, here's a little something about me (y'all know I love the attention). What do I write about? Three arenas I dominate, Work, Lifestyle and Life, they are, my mate! Take your pick!

I post new blog posts bi-weekly, and my wins, & journal entries throughout the week, so follow me if you're into conquering life, leaving a legacy and being the baddest badass you can possibly be. I'll be your side pal, cheering you along.✨

And that was it, it's a wrap! Martha, shut the cams, Henry, pause the audio, and Nandita, I know you're pretending to be deaf, but Mom's yelling something about doing the dishes. Better skip along.

And you, fellow conqueror? Keep slaying life, doing the work and making it count. I hope you're well, stay strong and go conquer life. ✧

I'm sending you so much love, see you soon.

— Nandini 💌 (´｡• ᵕ •｡`) ♡

[tellywoodtrash]

kwk lb: aamir khan

every time karan calls this dumbass show of his NATIONALLLLLLLLL TELEVISION, i lose 3 years off my life.

uhhhhhhhhhh karan, you're not a millenial either.

god i cringe every time he tries to appropriate 'millenial culture'. ffs, you're like a decade outside the range.

also fomo is not a disorder, gtfo.

aditya chopra sounds like he's living my his best life.

what do these confessions of his have to do with the damn guest?????

lol thugs as a diwali release. aamir and srk switched their festivals this year.

gotta say aamir looks good. pretentious af, but good.

LMAO SACHAAI SEEDHE BAAHAR KI BRO IM JUST HERE FOR PR.

ugh karan hyping thugs ainvayi mein.

yeah you should be nervous about this movie, aamir. it looks like a spectacular trashfire. oh it'll make money, hundreds and hundreds of crores, but looks like a steaming hot heap of absolute trash.

can't believe aamir and srk have stooped to these kinda garbage movies now.

lmao karan not buying that aamir didn’t do dangal just coz he was “appeasing a certain sensibility”.

so basically a straight ripoff of jack sparrow. like, in every single way.

ugh karan stop kissing ass with the “progressive” shit.

yeah the home situation with reena/kiran is nothing new or interesting, pls move on.

ofc his kids want to be in the movies. do any of their kids not?

damn he sounds like a harsh critic. poor junaid.

UGH I DON'T GIVE ONE SINGLE FUCK ABOUT WHAT THESE TWO MEN HAVE TO SAY ABOUT #METOO.

“it's sad that women have had to come out and speak about it to have created this environment.”

YEAH. IT IS. AND WHAT DID YOU DO ABOUT IT, ASSHOLES? you knew this shit was happening. you always knew. and you did shit. and now for you to sit here and talk about it and gain cool progressive ally points, literally fuck outta here.

forget that song, dil as a movie itself is a misogynist fucking nightmare. he almost rapes her, and then at the last minute doesn't, AND SHE FALLS IN LOVE WITH HIM. FOR NOT RAPING HER. LIKE....................

uh huh “SHOCKED” i’m sure.

that it came out. not that it happened.

omfg this conversation is everything i hate about this topic. WHY THE FUCK WOULD ANYONE PREY ON YOU? YOU'RE AT THE FUCKING TOP OF TOTEM POLE. HOW THE HELL CAN YOU THINK, AFTER HEARING ACCOUNTS ABOUT SOMEONE, THAT OH HE DIDN'T BEHAVE THAT WAY WITH ME, SO HE ISN'T A PREDATOR? it's like saying oh charles manson didn't murder ME, so he's not a murderer. chutiyaaaa hai kya?

aaaaaaaaaaaaand he's walking away with the credit for “taking action”. amaze. 

and karan and his fucking tone-deafness. jfc what kinda delusion. what it must be like to live life as a privileged man with immense power.

please you fuckers are sleeping well at night no matter what. give me a break.

i'm feeling veryyyyyyyyyyyyyyy stabbyyyyyy right now after this fuckall performative garbage of a “segment”.

great sycophantry (that’s a word right?) towards bachchan now. ugh.

yeah bachchan does seem to have that sanki uncle persona, where if he calls, you’re like shit i’ve fucked up. esp. with his saltyass tweets on how no one will return his bday sms's/tweets or some shit. like get over it, grandpa.

ok aamir's pre-release “disorder” sounds like a right fucking nightmare.

blah blah blah is there any juicy goss this ep (that hasn't already been outed in the promos/previews) or should i stop watching already?

karan, if someone is playing THAT hard to get, then you should take the hint that they DON'T WANT to come. 

strong fraternity feeling uh huh. not at all a PR photo op.

yeah of course you and your mid-life crisis don't see any difference between you+srk/ranveer+ranbir

HOW MANY TIMES WILL YOU PLUG THE DAMN MOVIE KARAN. WE FUCKING GET IT. THUGS IS RELEASING THIS WEEK. LORD.

ugh this phone game sounds dumb af. it's like the phone a friend in kbc, except utterly pointless.

sorry too much second-hand embarrassment at the prospect of this only. fwding.

koffee shots - aka we couldn't find anyone to come with you in this episode coz no one likes you/tumhara ego kuch zyaada hi bada hai, toh karan has to play the game with you. it’s this show’s version of taking a cousin to prom.

why did they pair katrina with varun next week tho? so random. she could have come in this ep with aamir?

what are these shots of though? like what are they drinking?

lmao aamir laughing at karan's sex injury.

exactly who’s surprised that aamir’s cheated?

sexy intern??????????????? jfc karan.

y’all are grownass men, why the fuck are you still getting hickeys in places ppl can see them jfc.

yeah no one needed to know the shower bs.

of course karan regifts. we already knew from the last ep.

oh ho, malaika's dropped the khan finally.

and karan's indicating she's gonna switch it up for a kapoor. hmmmmmmm.

gotta say she looks amazing. lord may my mallu genes be as potent as hers and lead me to age this well.

aamir rating himself

he seems like a bit of a troll himself, which is why he doesn’t take them seriously. 

ew he smokes a pipe, how pretentious.

i am karannnn: “that was witty?????”

food/sex? “apne ko toh dono chahiye.”

don’t we all, but that was not the question.

god bachchan forced him to join twitter. sach mein he’s one unbearable sanki buddha. 

ugh these answers are so laaaaaaaaame.

HE'S NOT PICKINGGGGGGGG ANYTHINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG HE'S SO ANNOYINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG WITH HIS AINVAYI KA DIPLOMACY

welll done my asssssss. aise hi channe ki jhaad pe chadha rahi hai.

of course karan's an insta-stalker. why's this surprising to anyone?

“i love being followed.” godddddd.

lmao i suspect aamir's laughing coz he knows karan can never give up gossip. ever.

lol shopping ki bhi beizzattti.

awkwardness with katrina impending after that answer.

LMAO LIKE KARAN JOHAR'S EVER BEEN ON THE MUMBAI LOCAL.

real best friend: aditya chopra. hmmmm.  

but does it even count when you're cousins????

sexiest actor: john abraham

lolololol who even cares about HIM anymore???

how can the feeling that someone NEEDS you be... good?

(that too coming from the man who wrote “main kissi ki zaroorat nahi, kwahish banna chahti hoon.”)

WHAT THE FUCK HE PICKED KAREENA OVER TWINKLE

lol he’s prolly changing it to kareena coz she’s in takht and he has to kiss ass to get it done.

idk i feel shakun batra's the most promising outta the three? makes appropriately commercial movies, but pleasantly subversive ones. also gets good performances outta his actors. i think the choice was pretty clear.

FUCKING PICKKKKKKKKKKKKK ONE OF THEM, KARAN YOU ASSHOLE. THIS IS BULLLLLLLLLSHITTTTTTTTT.

LOL AAMIR'S GLEE AT HIS INABILITY TO PICK. 

pft ainvayi mein de diya isko hamper, ofc karan wouldn't take it on his own show. also that bhai answer was lame as fuck.

lmao karan is being salty.

ouff abhi bhi 10 min baaki hai quiz waali bakchodi ke liye.

“i'm not known for my speed.” ... good for kiran, i guess. snort.

“i'm not known for my information.” oh pls karan.

LAY OFF ALIA YOU PERV SHE'S WAY TOO YOUNG FOR YOU UGH THERE'S MANY OTHER AGE APPROPRIATE ACTRESSES

pffffffft the dumbass pet peeves list. hattt yahaan se, hypocrite.

how are some of these answers “correct”???? like, asking him his preferences? how is there a “correct” answer to those? 

snort aamir trying to psych karan out.

lolllllllllllll aamir's confusion at the concept/existence of a mochaccino.

why do these grownass men not know their warm colours?

THREE THINGS YOU CAN DO WITH YOUR HAND PE THARAK KI TARAF KYUN JAATA HAI TUM LOGON KA DIMAAG

HOLIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII SONGS COME THE FUCKKKKKKK ONNNNNNNNN OMG YOU’RE A BLIGHT ON THE NAME OF BOLLYWOOD

wow he picked resul pookutty over bhanu athaiya? surprising.

khud ke show par hi prize le gaya. pft.

some more thugs plugging, blearghhhhhhhhh.

next week looks more fun. lol @ varun and his always wanting to pee. he did that during the FC interview with anupama chopra/anushka too.

lmao sab ko shaadi kab ho rahi hai question. i love varun.

[itbeatsbookmarks]

(Via: Hacker News)

Obviously we’re going to talk about this today:

Ok, so. Up until this year, I would’ve told you that there are two general kinds of financial bubbles. 

The first kind of bubble is where everyone believes the future will be like the present. Think credit bubbles and real estate; think 2007-2008, where the fundamental belief that drove the bubble forward and into ruin was “We’ve figured this out. We can’t lose. The risk has all been worked out. Lever up, cowboy. We will never die.” 

There are two reflexive feedback loops at work here. The first is the positive feedback cycle between that belief, “We have the future figured out”, and rising asset prices – which confirm the invincible mentality and drive it forward. The second loop is that rising asset prices translate to lower cost of capital. In a mindset like this, we get excessively comfortable with investing that low-cost capital into businesses and investments that generate predictable future earnings, or the illusion of predictable. That cheap capital can then meaningfully contribute to those earnings actually materializing, on schedule. Bubbles can genuinely be self-fulfilling prophecies; to a point. Past that point it’s bad.

The second kind of bubble is where everyone believes the future will be different from the present. Think equity bubbles, startups, and crypto; think 1999, where the fundamental belief that drove the bubble forward and into ruin was “It’s a new economy. All the rules are different. The upside is unlimited. If you get in now, you’ll be rich. We’re going to live forever.”

As before, there are reflexive feedback loops at work here too. The first loop is the positive feedback cycle between that belief, “I’ve seen the future, and I believe”, and rising asset prices – which confirm the bubble mentality, and bring on the FOMO. The second loop, as before, is that rising asset prices actually do something useful here. It means we can fund cool startups! Wacky, speculative ventures, which under normal circumstances could never raise any money, are able to access capital at attractive valuations. Sometimes they do, in fact, build the future. These kinds of bubbles can be actually good.

Unlike before, where we rewarded predictable earnings (or, the perception of them) with low cost of capital, here it’s the opposite. We’re looking for unpredictable earnings; specifically, the prospect of unknowable but infinitely high upside. These bubbles can also become self-fulfilling prophecies (dot com speculation got us Amazon, and a whole lot of broadband cable), but they blow up when expectations get too detached from reality. 

There are certainly sub-categories and variations on these two themes. For instance, one driving factor you often see associated with bubbles is new financial instruments that give the retail buying public better access (or more aggressive leverage) to the object of speculation. Crypto is an obvious recent example, but this goes all the way back to the Mississippi Company and South Sea manias, with the invention of the joint stock company and the bubbles that resulted. Other stuff matters too, like economic cycles and political narratives. But in general, up until this year, I would’ve told you that these are the two basic kinds of bubbles. 

I was wrong. There is a third kind of bubble, and it’s happening spectacularly right now. If the first kind of bubble is “everyone thinks the future will be the same”, and the second kind is “everyone thinks the future will be different”, the third kind is “everyone thinks the future doesn’t matter.” 

If you remember, the 1999 bubble had a lot to do with technology and the future, sure, but also had something to do with boomers and early Gen Xers having all of this disposable money right as online brokerages became a thing. Right now, there’s a similar thing going on. Millennials have real paychecks to spend, and stock trading fees have all gone to zero. Trading has become gaming. 

Crypto gave us a taste of the wild a few years ago, for that brief autumn where random people from your past would message you about how much Filecoin to buy. But now that itch has hit the mainstream. The stock picking day traders are having their cultural moment, led by Dave Portnoy and an army of shitposters. 

Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy is leading an army of day traders | Sophie Alexander & Katherine Greifeld, Bloomberg

Portnoy’s “Davey Day Trader Global” escapades are hilarious and well-known, and he’s brilliantly playing the heel; credit to him for absolutely getting how it works, Barstool not withstanding. But the bigger story here is Wallstreetbets. I’m sure most of you have heard of the Wallstreetbets subreddit by now; if you haven’t, the best way I know how to explain it is that it’s like “multiplayer Jackass for the stock market.”

Wallstreetbets started as a bunch of random internet yahoos bragging about crazy YOLO trades they’d make (and would actually follow through on!), and what enormous percentages of their net worth they’d win or lose spectacularly. I really do think that Jackass is a good comparison here. Yes, these people are trying to get rich; but more importantly, they’re trying to provoke reactions. It’s a game of who can be the most shocking. There’s really not much difference between reading some of these WSB posts and watching an old Jackass sketch. You’ll laugh until you can’t breathe, and then keep laughing when you realize someone actually got kicked in the crotch that hard. 

But as it got more popular, some actually sophisticated (and supremely aggressive) traders are getting in on the fun, and it got highly competitive and weird. It’s the newest version of “the stock market as full-contact sports with legal gambling”, and it’s a lot of fun. No one here cares about valuation or fundamentals. It is explicitly a casino. Everyone is here to get in and out of a position in the most shocking way possible. And, astoundingly, there’s enough AUM getting accumulated behind these bets that it can actually start to move individual stocks inweird ways. 

Reddit’s profane, greedy traders are shaking up the stock market | Luke Kawa, Bloomberg Businessweek

The groundwork for this strange show has been built up over a few years, but when the pandemic hit, all hell broke loose. A perfect storm of events come together: first, generational volatility in the stock market as everyone tried to get in front of (and then out from) a global pandemic; second, everyone getting quarantined at home and desperate to feel something, and third: no sports. 

Enter Hertz. Hertz was in trouble anyway; it’s carrying around a ton of debt to pay for a fleet of cars that no one wants to drive, because we have Uber now. When the pandemic hit, they got called on their debt, couldn’t make it work, so they had to declare bankruptcy and start a restructuring process. 

But then weird things started to happen. Hertz’s stock, which is literally worthless, starts to go up. And up. And up. It gets bid up a whole 500% over a 3-day period last week. What is going on?

There’s no way to describe it other than, this is a Jackass sketch taking place. It started out as these internet YOLO traders playing an increasingly stupid game of chicken. But then it… caught on? Other people started to get in on this too. Hey, obviously the stock in the long run is worth zero. Everyone knows that. But it’s going up, and tomorrow it might go up more. If this were just some dumb penny stock with a cool story attached to it, that’d be old news. This is different. 

When you see a stock getting bid up like this, the only conclusion you can draw is “The future does not matter, because in between now and then, this is explicitly just spinning a roulette wheel. The stock could go up or down, who knows, but at least you know it has nothing to do with the underlying value of the stock (which we all know is zero!), and everything to do with other gamblers. 

So Hertz sees this happening, and they’re like, well, if there’s demand for our stock, we should go sell some! I mean, it’s a ridiculous kind of demand, and it’s not “real” demand, but hey, maybe it’s real enough. So Hertz files, and is granted, an emergency request to their bankruptcy judge to issue a billion dollars worth of new stock in order to take advantage of whatever this is. Tom Lauria, one of the attorneys representing Hertz, had an all-timer line: “New platforms for day traders may be facilitating this. There are forces at work that us non-financial people, that we can only observe.” The SEC, presumably between gasps of laughter, declined to weigh in on whether the transaction was legal, saying “it is up to the company to comply with securities law.”

Just to restate how funny this is: Hertz is granted permission, by their own bankruptcy judge, to sell stock in their company which has already declared bankruptcy, because due to weird mojo in the universe, there’s a small army of reddit trolls playing chicken with each other and it just might save the company. Financial Twitter goes crazy, and (of course!) people start bidding up stocks of other bankrupt companies. It was a great day to be online. (Matt Levine, as usual, has the best writeup.)

(By the way, here’s a hilarious aside: Business Insider reports on this, and says, “oh, by the way, Hertz share price fell on the news, which makes sense, as shareholders will face dilution” hahahahaha)

So how can we think of these events as a third model in our taxonomy of bubbles? We’ve got all three pieces of our reflexive loop at work. The first is a deep belief: not that the future will be the same, or will be different, but that it’s totally irrelevant. As Hertz’s stock price rises, it confirms this temporary suspension of reality, and furthermore, it confirms that the other people you’re trading against are also idiots, so there’s an opportunity to make money here. 

The second half of this reflexivity loop is even weirder. Unlike in a normal bubble, where it’s the perception of stability that drives an earnings multiple, or in an equity bubble, where it’s the perception of high upside that drives an earnings multiple, here there are no earnings. The future earnings here are presumed to be zero. But if everyone knows that, and everyone is okay with it, then everyone around the table can look at everyone else around the table in the eye, and know that they don’t care about earnings either. They only care about winning this YOLO trade. And so long as everyone thinks that, then the only limiting factor to how violent this bubble can be is how much cash you have, and how quickly the traders can find each other. The answer seems to be “lots”, and “fast”. 

I really do think that this deserves its own place on the financial tree of the life. It’s a genuinely unique form of financial stupidity that’s distinct from the other two kind of bubbles. And we’re going to see it again. Not exactly like this, but the genie’s out of the bottle now. There is enough AUM dedicated to these kind of stunts, and the internet has dropped the cost and latency of communication among these day trading Johnny Knoxvilles down to zero. 

The Hertz story is an exceptional situation. I do not think it’s likely to ever happen again. But you know what kind of public companies have zero earnings for years at a time, and where future earnings are so far away that it’s already understood by everyone to be a day-to-day game of chicken, just like this? Biotech companies. And you know what kind of companies are going to be really interesting in the aftermath of Covid? Biotech companies. 

At the end of last year in my Ten Predictions for the 2020s post, I threw out a take: “There will be a major speculative bubble in biotech companies.” I mean, I didn’t have this in mind, but you know what, this makes me feel pretty good about that prediction. One of the catalysts, I wrote, would be “A new kind of financial innovation that becomes the instrument of speculation. These aren’t a necessary component of bubbles, but they sure help. In this case, I bet there’s going to be some new clever financial product that bundles and securitizes the highly speculative IP of biotech companies, in a way that legally lets retail investors buy them through an ETF or something.” I’ll admit, at the time, I didn’t foresee the “new, creative instrument of financial speculation” being “the equity of bankrupt companies.” But why not! 

Anyway, in summary, ha ha ha ha ha. What a week.

Like this post? Get it in your inbox every week with Two Truths and a Take, my weekly newsletter enjoyed by 20,000 people each week.   

Like this:

Like Loading...

Related

[mariabblackyr2]

All Ur Viral Phenomena R Belong 2 Us - Lecture&Seminar + Set Task

Meme Dolly Parton - ‘ get you a women who can do it all’, photographs for different platforms - loads of people have followed - how one thing starts another - popular culture 

This is America - Childish Gambino - actor, rapper, young, black pop stars, poet - made the video of this is America - nothing you don’t see everyday on TV, home truths, reality of America, Black lives in America - harsh reality of violence against race?, stereotypes, riots, gun violence  - his culture

A society full of racism and black stereotypes - trousers and dance link back to slavery (Jim Crow - famous portrayal of black people in America) and how black culture came to America and were oppressed - legacy of slavery represented in song and music video 

The music video is a viral phenomenon 

  1 in 9 black men are in prison in America - more of our age group in this room more black people in prison rather than college

Mayflower 2020 - board is white, posh British yet the mayflower played part in killing 95% of the indigenous Americans 

Due to the video being a global phenomena it got memed - mixed together two massive things - call me maybe 

Developed into photographic memes as well - links to American politics in meme - Bernie vs Donald - progression from calm to violence

“Viral phenomena are objects or patterns that are able to replicate themselves or convert other objects into copies of themselves when these objects are exposed to them. They get their name from the way that viruses propagate” - spreads like an illness virus 

Meme that describes a meme - explaining their links to culture, etc - read intertextually 

Meme culture needs to look back over years of culture to understand 

 Intertext - every text is talking through something 

“The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as an attempt to explain the way cultural information spreads; such as beliefs, fashions, stories, and phrases” - the meme about him creating the meme - in his books talks about how we are memes due to over genes copying themselves - how cultural information spreads “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the same way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.” - we decide what a successful meme looks like

A virus population explodes by how many people it touches

Stanley Milgram - Conformity and Independence - if people were looking up in the street passers by looked up too - FOMO - memes are fomo - fear of missing out - we won't help until someone else steps out to help 

As humans we follow order to not be the weird link in the group - always trying to survive - are we really individuals? Following the leader within the group - been proven by social experiments in people were people are put in situations and filmed what they would do

‘That's clickbait’ - part of meme culture - we click on link

Hashtags -  ice bucket challenge - raising money for charity

#metoo movement - Tarana Burke launched me too movement - white washed out of the photograph 

Tarana Burke: "We owe future generations nothing less than a world free of sexual violence," she says. "I believe we can build that world." - against sexual assault  and harassment followed allegations from Harvey Weinstein

Great Thumberg image - cropped black women out of image that went out across the world - press said the image needed to be tightened - black young girls story is just as important but she got cropped out? Due to her race?

Racial violence went up after brexit.

Memes that reference themselves  - intertext 

Can do anything with a meme - take on mind of their own

‘Meme’ from 1920’s developed into modern day meme - copied and spread of variations of images

‘Lonelygirl15’ - video blog of her on YouTube - her life portrayed through videos was fiction 

Donna Haraway: “the cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience”

A “fiction and a fact of the most crucial, political kind” - we are now cyborgs- links to use of technology and memes - written about years ago - we are them as we are so connected

Donald Trump - Memes - reaction - people laughed at something that wasn’t meant to be funny - people of the free world laughed at him - next hour, next day memes of it came out

Blue and gold dress - was a marketing ploy 

Banksy work shredded after brought fro record money - ‘going, going, gone’ - shredder built into the frame incase it ever sold at auction  - sotherbys shocked by stunt 

The next morning - different versions of shredded art appeared on Instagram

Game of Thrones - very dark - ‘grimdark’ fiction - we live through very dark fiction due to the world happening around us - e.g. The Wicther and The Alienist 

Grimdark is being replaced by ‘hope punk’ e.g. star wars

Explore what it means to be good - look for good characters in film and tv

Set Task:

For the set task I decided to explore the role that photographers has in the Me Too Movement.

https://aperture.org/blog/fashion-photography-metoo-era/

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/photography-me-too-women-portraits_n_5acfa0ffe4b077c89ce68b22?ri18n=true&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAL8hBrcNJnlzvM2G5iJo89bWhtItoVcfNQkqoYM08qJfDV5TI08ARgriyFvDBtvqbeBjOEfwAaBztNDTaQ6YPMfyRNNNzs1h8Kw6rfO9wgPQFIFIUEYd0kJKA7ihh_f9L_RHULvXPsvWHxAsg9oYHqHcGmd-Ss7tlt9vnpR9iKTb&guccounter=2

Seminar:

Viral phenomena applies to narrative and telling stories

Things go viral for many different reasons 

Cultural studies is a way of trying to read how culture works

Books: 

The Posthuman: N. Katherine Hayles How we become: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics 

The Cyborg: Donna J, Haraway: A Cyborg Manifesto, 1984

How does this theme link back to previous lectures and seminars? It relates to the hauntology lecture with the idea of the end of history, stuck repeating the same things never coming to a conclusion. It also links to nostalgia with the past repeating itself within viral memes. Is creating memes and other viral phenomena a part of our collective utopia?

(Hills and Valleys- direct statement on federal government on women, birth control, family planning, controversial areas - depicts womens hips, vajazzle of government building  ) The art of going viral | Niki Johnson - ted talk -  gender, power and human rights, being clinically engaged is involved in her everyday life, one piece of work went viral twice - major world event at the same time the art was released,  had zero experience with media the first time - way out of comfort zone, art in the media is based on its ability is its public interest, meaning becomes unruly, piece had cultural significance, second cycle was virtual and newspaper

For the seminar task our group choose to focus on the most recent Banksy that has appeared in Bristol and went viral due to his Instagram post.

[adventuresaroundasia]

After two years of working as a college counselor in Beijing (and over five years of living in China), I’m finally moving on. That’s right, my job is finished, and soon I’ll be leaving my cozy Beijing apartment for bigger and better things.

I know, I can’t believe it either. I never thought this day would come, and now it’s almost here. I know quitting my job and leaving China is a huge deal, not just for me but for this site as well. But it had to happen someday, and that day is… six weeks from now.

Pin Me!

Let Me Fill You In

Leaving my job in China is obviously bittersweet. On the one hand, I’m super excited to finally be able to travel as long as I want and work for myself without having to worry about round-trip tickets and vacation days. On the other hand, China has become my home, and I know many of you are a bit upset that I won’t be living here anymore.

Who wants another bland, professional travel blogger who hops nomadically from country to country, living in cheap digital nomad hotspots like Chiang Mai and Bali. We have enough of those, thank you very much.

So today I thought I’d talk a bit about all of the huge changes going on in my life to give you all a little insight into where this site is headed.

Why did I quit my job? What’s next for me? Will I still be writing about China? Where am I going? How am I going to survive without a full-time salary?

Well, read along folks, because this one will answer all your questions!

My first few weeks as a college counselor in China!

Why I Quit My Job in China

Well, first things first, I didn’t actually quit my job in China. My two-year contract as a college counselor expired and I personally chose not to renew it, much to the disappointment of my boss and coworkers. While working as a college counselor was an incredible experience (and a great way to pay off all of my student loans!!), it just isn’t my dream job.

I’ll be honest, working as a full-time college counselor while also managing this site AND creating a new teach abroad site was REALLY HARD. I was constantly stressed and exhausted. During admissions season I developed panic attacks, and I suffered from some hard-core FOMO whenever I was offered an incredible opportunity I couldn’t take because I had to be at work.

My story is the same as any other person who wants to start their own business without the capital to quit their full-time job. Side hustles are hard. Developing a new business with a full-time job is time-consuming and exhausting. I haven’t had the time or energy to fully devote to this blog because I’ve been too busy actually working at work.

It’s my hope that leaving my job as a college counselor will actually give me the time and energy I need to make the most of this site. For the last year and a half, my traffic has been pretty much stagnant. I struggle to crank out posts on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, and I’m not making as much money as I would’ve hoped by this point.

But now you finally have my full attention, and that’s super exciting!

Me over two years ago, finishing up my dissertation at the University of Nottingham in China

So… I’m Still Actually Working for My Job in China

Wow. So many over-exaggerations! Not only did I not quit my job, I’m actually STILL working for my old company part-time.

As much as I want to dive head-first into being a professional travel blogger, I’m also a little too responsible for my own good. I’m not a fan of having a low bank account balance or taking any financial risks, and I couldn’t bear to leave my students right at the start of admissions season either. So, I decided to sign a part-time contract with my college counseling job for the remainder of the admissions season.

This fall I will be helping my students craft and design their college admissions applications remotely via email and Skype. I’ll be paid for each final draft I help my students complete, as well as each hour I meet with them to chat. So far, this hasn’t been too much work, but I know things will ramp up when deadlines start approaching.

I’ll also be coming into the office 1-2 days a week throughout October and the first half of November. I’ll be meeting a ton of students back-to-back to prep them for upcoming application interviews (my specialty!), and I may also teach a few large classes on specific topics like interviewing, essay advice, etc. Thankfully my company is paying me pretty well for these meetings, and I’ve been working closely with my coworker to schedule them all as tightly as possible.

Exploring the Summer Palace’s Suzhou Street

Why I’m Leaving China

I’ll obviously write a full post on this later because there are many, many reasons why I can’t stay in China forever, (crowds, pollution, censorship, food safety, bureaucracy, and if I get bumped into one more time…) but there are a few major reasons I can quickly address here.

I Want to See the World

Firstly, there’s just so much of the world I want to see that I haven’t been able to explore because I’ve been living as a full-time expat in China. There are even some major parts of China I still haven’t been able to travel to, mainly because I only get Chinese holidays off from work, and I don’t necessarily want to go to Huangshan at the same time as 2 billion other Chinese tourists.

I know that if I was paying rent in China, I’d constantly feel guilty whenever I was on the road. Why am I wasting all of this money on an apartment I’m not even in?! I know there’s Airbnb and subletting, but to be honest, I’d rather just put all my stuff in storage and actually travel without worrying about an apartment.

Bye bye expensive apartment

Beijing’s Rent is Way Too Expensive

Seriously, I paid more for my room in a 5-bedroom apartment in Beijing than my friend Edna did for a room in Paris! Sure, I could easily move to a cheaper city like Xi’an, Chengdu, or Kunming, which might be an option in the future, but why do that when I could have my own villa in Bali for half of what I’m paying to share a room in a tiny rundown apartment by the Beijing Zoo.

China is Horrible for Digital Nomads

Two words: internet censorship. Sure, I can get around it using VPNs, but I’m SO TIRED OF IT. Did you know I have 6 VPNs?! Yep, while I usually use Express, I have five other VPNs as a backup. FIVE.

I’m sick and tired of just not being able to get on Instagram, or having to drain my 4G to load a Snap. If I can’t get my VPN to work I have zero access to my email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, Snapchat, YouTube, GoogleDocs, Pinterest, and basically everything I need to actually do my job.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the Internet just worked? I’ve almost forgotten what that’s like.

Chillin’ with Mao in Tiananmen Square

I Need a Break From China

I love China. I just spent two weeks showing my parents around Beijing, Xi’an, and Yunnan. I had such a great time and even contemplated coming back to Yunnan for a month or more! I imagined myself picking out an apartment in Xi’an and possibly opening up a cute boutique hotel there (because for some reason Xi’an doesn’t have any boutique hotels).

China is incredible, but I need a freakin’ break! China is not the easiest place to live, and after 5 years, I just want some peace and quiet! I just need a break from the constant construction, crowds, pushing and shoving, oily food, pollution, and internet censorship.

I know I’ll be back, but for now, I need to take a breather so I can appreciate all of the good things about this incredible country without becoming the dreaded ‘Jaded China Bitch‘.

Big Adventures Ahead!

So… Where Are You Going?

With all of this free time comes the desire to pack it to the brim with adventures and travels. At one point I really thought I was going to show my parents around China in September, head to TBEX Ireland in October, travel around Ireland and UK, then go to WTM at the beginning of November, head to Africa in Mid-November, and Australia in December.

Oh my god. Not only would that completely drain all of the money I’ve saved up. I also wouldn’t have ANY time to actually work.

Thankfully I was able to put my foot down and give myself a solid 6 weeks for working here in Beijing. But come mid-November I will be traveling to Japan to work with the Mie Prefecture and spend two solid weeks hiking the Kumano Kodo Pilgrimage trail! Then Chris and I will be exploring a few other major cities: Kyoto, Osaka, and Tokyo!

After that, I’ll be heading to Australia to celebrate Christmas with Chris’ family in Ben Lomond Australia, a tiny village in Australia’s New England. To be honest, some peace and quiet after a few years in China sounds like heaven.

Finally, I’ll be visiting my parents in Palm Desert California, and then I’m onto a friend’s wedding in Atlanta!

What’s Happening With Adventures Around Asia?!

Australia? The US? What’s going to happen now that you’ve left China?

I get it. I’ve actually had multiple people message me saying that they’re disappointed I’m leaving China. People have come to associate me with this country, which is actually incredible, but also a bummer for many people now that I’m leaving.

So, to answer all your questions and quell any worries, here’s what’s happening with Adventures Around Asia!

Hanging out at the summer palace

I’m Still Going to Write About China

I have so much content on China I could literally create a new site tomorrow and never run out of blog post ideas. Seriously. I almost wish this blog was only about China so that I could have the time and energy to fill it to the brim with useful China content, crazy stories, and detailed guides.

Even though I’m not living in China full-time, I’ll still be writing about China. I’ll still travel to China, I’ll still create awesome guides, and I’ll be sure to keep all my info up to date. The only thing that will change on the China front is that I will no longer be continuing my expat monthly recaps, This Beijing Life.

I’ll still be covering Asia off the Beaten Path!

I Won’t Be Writing About Places Outside of Asia

I decided a long time ago that Adventures Around Asia will focus on Asia off the Beaten Path. I’m not going to all of a sudden start writing about Australia or Europe. I want to use this blog to show off the destinations and cultures that not everyone visits. I want to inspire people to explore like a local and get off the typical tourist trail.

There are enough blogs about Europe and North America. There are enough sites teaching you how to quit your job and travel the world as a backpacker or digital nomad, and there are far too many blogs talking about traveling Southeast Asia on the cheap.

I don’t want to compete with them. Frankly, they’ve been doing it better and longer than I have. While I do plan to share what’s going on in my life with all of you through personal posts and my new monthly recap series, The Freedom Life, I don’t plan on restructuring my blog to talk about something completely different.

Gotta update all the stuff from 2012!

I Will Be Writing More, and Updating Old Content

You know what’s great about not having a full-time job? Having the time and energy to actually commit to this site. Every time I read an old post about Sichuan or Yunnan from 2012, I squirm with embarrassment. Every time I check my most recent posts and see that I’ve barely written anything, I feel guilty.

Now I finally have the time and energy to fully commit to this site. Sure, I won’t be in China, but my China content will only get better in the following months. Promise.

Sometimes it feels like I’m the only blogger that’s NOT location independent

Aren’t You a Little Late to This Digital Nomad Game?

It’s a bit weird becoming a “digital nomad” when it feels like most travel bloggers are finally starting to settle down. To be honest, I almost feel like I missed the boat. Isn’t the digital nomad fad a huge cliche now anyway?

But despite all that self-doubt, I know I need to do this for me. There’s so much of the world I still want to see, and I want to be able to run my business and make money while doing it.

I know I’m late to the game, and I don’t care. I’m not becoming a “digital nomad” because it’s cool, or popular, or because everyone’s doing it. I just want to travel and see the world while also contributing, helping others, and growing a business I’m proud of (and without worrying about money all the time.)

I know the nomadic lifestyle doesn’t last, and I’m not even sure how long I’ll travel for. I’m an expat at heart, and once I’m tired of traveling, I’ll be settling down somewhere, probably in Taiwan. I’ll get a cute apartment and a cat, practice my Mandarin, find local friends, and buy some fuzzy blankets.

For me, “digital nomad” isn’t the dream. My dream is location independence. I want to be my own boss. Travel when I want to travel. Take opportunities when they come my way, and stop constantly worrying about vacation days and being in my office at a certain time, dressed a certain way, every. single. day.

I want freedom. I want control. I want to work for myself. Whether that’s on the road, as an expat, or at home in the USA is up to me.

What About Money? How Will You Survive?

Good question.

To be honest, I don’t make much money off of this site. It was my goal to be consistently making $1,000 USD a month by the time I quit my job. However, I can pretty much say I’m only hitting $600. While this isn’t a huge issue, it’s also not where I want to be, and definitely not enough to comfortably live in Beijing.

That said, I do have a few major income streams right now, and many more ideas where that came from!

Firstly, I had about $16,000 USD saved up when I quit my college counseling job. I have to say I’m pretty proud of myself for saving that much, considering I spent the first 1.5 years paying off $20,000 in student loans.

On top of my little nest egg, I have my part-time college counseling, which is a nice little consistent source of income. I’ve also been working as a recruiter for a few different schools and education companies in China. For every teacher that arrives in China, I make about $150-300 USD. This is a pretty slow moving process (especially since I’m SUPER picky about which schools I work with), so it can take months and months of work before I finally see a penny. However, I think this will be a pretty decent stream of income for me in the future.

Upcoming Business Projects!

In the next few months, I also really hope to work on boosting my passive income by fixing old blog posts to focus on affiliates. I feel like I’ve really been dropping the ball in this area, and I’d love to fix it.

FINALLY, I have a huge project I’ve been working on for the past few months. I can’t tell you all yet, but I will say it has to do with teaching abroad in China. I’m really hoping I’ll be done with everything by January, but it’s been a pretty slow-moving process.

If you’re at all interested in teaching abroad in China and you want to be one of the first to know about my HUGE MASSIVE INCREDIBLE PROJECT, be sure to sign up for my Free Teach Abroad Mini-Course and you’ll be the first to get all the info!

Just casually climbing a mountain in Yunnan

What About Your Boyfriend?

Oh, Chris? He’s coming too!

Chris has been location independent for a while now and works from home as a travel blogger and safari sales expert for a popular Tanzanian safari company. The only reason he lives in Beijing is because I’ve been stuck here (and his brother and nephew live here too).

To be honest, in the past I always imagined embarking on this new adventure alone. I was kind of excited about the prospect of long-term solo female travel. I embraced the challenge.

However, now I’m super excited about the idea of having someone to share everything with. Chris will be with me every step of the way, from hiking the Kumano Kaido, to working till the wee hours in a cafe with horrible wifi. Thankfully we have pretty much the same exact travel style, which makes things fairly easy.

…and we’re NOT combining blogs. I’m too much of a control freak for that. 

Anything Else You Want to Know?

I know these are some huge changes, and this is a lot of information to process. That’s why I want to know: Is there anything I haven’t covered? Is there something you want to know about in more detail? Please let me know in a comment so I know what to cover in my next few posts!

Also, are you curious about hearing more on how I’m surviving as a “digital nomad”? Would you like a monthly income breakdown with personal updates on how I make money and emotionally handle working for myself? If so, would you like to see it in a monthly recap or as a post of its own? Be sure to fill me in on your thoughts!

After FIVE Years in China, I’m Finally Moving On After two years of working as a college counselor in Beijing (and over five years of living in China), I'm finally moving on.

[chasingadventuress]

Road tripping - with a bunch of strangers

As exciting as it may sound when it comes to traveling going on any kind of trip with many people is something I dread so much, only because I strongly believe that when it comes to traveling one should be able to take in every single moment of the journey the way they want to without being limited. This time around I wanted to see how different it would be thus the reason why I was open to going on this said trip.

But Before going on a road trip with a number of people keep this in mind:

Trust me it gets difficult if you are with too many people and this I believe is only because no two people are alike, we all have our preferences. We all have certain things that we enjoy and certain things that may annoy us. So ask yourself if you will be able to adapt and understand the next person and if not then you should propabably not go.

With every trip there’s always some sort of planning that goes into it, if there is something that you really want to do, before the trip bring it up, you should be able to. Remember that nobody is going to say no to it and if anybody does then rather save your money for a trip where people will be open to listening to what you’d like to do as well.

When contributing to activity ideas try and go for activities that you or the others have not done. This is because when you all find yourselves doing things that are not familiar it creates an opportunity to get to know people better on a personal level.

Ask yourself if you’re open to doing more than what is just required from you. Its definitely nobody’s responsibility to clean up after someone else or do things for them but if you find yourself in a position where you are able to better help out then do so.

And remember to be your true self. If you’re loud then be loud, if your laidback then be laidback but don't change yourself because of the fear of what others may think of you.

So in a nutshell this is basically how the road trip I went on was like

 It all started off with a Hey, Tina. “Me and a group of friends from my church are planning on going on a road trip for the weekend, do you want to come with”?

And being the person that I am, that’s always open to experiencing, living and learning, I was like why not, I’ve never done it before and there’s never going to be a perfect time, so YES!!!

A few days later I was added to the ‘NO FOMO’ WhatsApp group and this is where we all basically kick started off talking, which I believe allowed us to create that comfortable safe space among one another.

We tried our outmost best to not fully plan out the trip as we generally just wanted to take the experience as it came.

Day 1

Fast forward to the day we had to leave, it was a Friday, we decided on a meeting point and that is where most of us met for the first time, hugged it out and we posed for a picture. We only ended up leaving just past 7pm which was like an hour after the agreed time.

But nonetheless before we left, we did pray via telephone seeing that we were all in three separate cars. Great thing is we made use of a digital tool that we constantly have in our hands 24/7 for a purpose that I assuming we all consider, worth it.

And off we were to the coastal city of Namibia, Swakopmund. The five hour drive was literally one of the best drives I’ve been on. I was with a friend whom I’ve known for seven years but only travelled with for the first time on this trip as well as another friend who I had just befriended two weeks before the trip.

We randomly just sang along to songs and joked around till we arrived. The great thing about the drive and getting there was that everyone just had a positive outlook for the trip.

As I sit here and write this I vividly still recall everyone’s excitement when we arrived and found the 8 bedroom house that we had booked to stay at. And because we were so thrilled we offloaded, got comfortable and we started a fire because I mean what's a trip without a barbeque.

In between the barbeque and the little chill session we had, a few of us found ourselves drinking and during the entire session I did not feel judged by anyone nor did I judge anyone. There were also a few conversations that came up, where we basically just spoke about our careers and an array of other topics.

And because the day had already been so long for many of us, we all eventually caved in and decided to go sleep just past 4am but agreed that we would also wake up by 6am to go to the beach just to breath in fresh air.

Day 2

Getting up really didn’t go as planned as some of us slept in. How eventually everyone did wake up , some went to the beach, some prepared breakfast and others got ready for the day.

We pretty much all left the house that morning by 11am as we were set to go to the Dead Sea.

Getting to the Dead Sea was another roller-coaster of a story. It started of all so great, we made several stops along the way , but then somewhat many of us seemed annoyed because as we kept driving, the further we went the further the Dead Sea seemed. However we eventually did find it.

So what and where is the Dead Sea?

Located north of Swakopmund, approximately a few kilometres before Mile 72, north of Fishermen’s Inn, after the Cape Cross sign.

The Deas Sea is an old worked out mine that is filled with underground water and due to the high presence of salt and minerals in it, it causes those who choose to swim in it to freely float. So basically no matter how hard you try to sink / push yourself down it will always push you right back up.

Only a couple of us swam because the rest including myself as I had mentioned earlier were annoyed from the long drive and there was not much will to get in. To be honest the Dead Sea is just one of those places that I believe one should tick of their bucket list but then probably won’t consider going back to, I for one know I wouldn’t.

Did I enjoy being there that much NO and this is because this is also where a few people from the group rubbed me off the wrong way. And I actually found myself wanting to go home because I felt like it was going to be very difficult to deal with the group going forward as I was upset.

The drive back from the Dead Sea too me was so much better as I was somewhat relieved that the route back seemed shorter and it meant I would get home sooner and just nap my anger away. And fast forward we finally got back to the apartment and I managed to sleep it off and actually felt better when I woke up. We all then had dinner, played a few games and called it a night

Day 3

This was basically our last day and getting up that day seemed easier as we had all gotten enough sleep and because we were set to drive back to Windhoek we still had some activities to do so we had to be up pretty early.

We booked to go quad biking, but before that one of the guys from the group brought it to the forefront that we had been doing so much but did not pray about it so we regrouped, held hands and prayed and then went quad biking. Which was a very nice and fun experience.

If you recall at the start of this I had mentioned that one should always bring up what they would like to do and there were a few things a quarter of us wanted to do and the rest didn't. Thus we all agreed that the best option would be splitting up for a few hours ad then linking up later again.

And so we did. Basically a few of us decided to go looking for the Salt Pans. Located just southwest of the Walvisbay lagoon is a salt-pan complex, which currently supplies over 90% of South Africa's salt. It's one of the three wetlands around Walvis Bay along with the lagoon and Bird Island, which together form Southern Africa's single most important coastal wetland for migratory birds.

The amazing thing about the salt pans is that the water there is pink. I wish I had a tour guide tell me why but I am guessing it has something to do with the salt that’s there hence the name.

Later that day we actually ended up driving back to Windhoek pretty late because we were obviously taken over by what seemed like a great idea at the time to park near the beach, eat and then hit the road but instead ended up soaked because who goes to the beach and does not get into the water.

So would I do this again?

In all honestly yes I would. I took away a few things and realised that getting along with everyone on the first go doesn’t happen overnight.

Would I have wanted to get to know some of the people better, yes I would have but I am hoping that it will someday happen on all the other trips we plan on taking because building genuine friendships I believe takes time.

Another thing that was also great to take note of is that teamwork all the way is important as well, everyone played their part especially when it came to cleaning up, preparing food, and everyone helped out despite how tired we all were at the end of the trip.

One thing I also learned was that people were open to praying out loud. It’s honestly not something that I know how to do yet other than when I am by myself but this just showed me that there is nothing to be afraid of and that there is no perfect way to pray or right words to say but just genuinely speaking from your heart.

My heading initially started off with a ‘Bunch of Strangers’ which I must say they aren’t anymore and that’s the beauty of life.

[noahbanfieldfestival-blog]

Fyre festival - Peter

The Fyre festival was a massive disaster, 

When promotions for Fyre Festival first appeared on Instagram feeds in December of 2016 - showing Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid and Hailey Baldwin frolicking in the Bahamian paradise of Pig Beach - it looked like any millennial influencer's dream weekend.

Guests were promised private planes, yachts, villas, wellness activities, free-flowing booze, and the chance of expanding their Instagram following by a few thousand.

Instead, they arrived to find the "exclusive villas" were FEMA tents and the promised meals by a celebrity chef were sad cheese sandwiches.

ADVERTISING

inRead invented by Teads

What had been billed as the ultimate case of #FOMO immediately became a late-night punch line. "If you had thousands of dollars to go on a trip to see Blink 182 that's on you. That is Darwinism at its finest," comedian Ron Funches joked.

As two new documentaries on the festival disaster drop on Netflix and Hulu this week, we asked people who were there what the scene was like on the ground. Buckle up...

"It looked like The Hunger Games. People were running around everywhere screaming, ‘Turn around, don't get off the bus!’"

Jon Dykert went with friends after buying tickets during the flash sale

I had a buddy who saw this Instagram marketing promotion and it just said "all you can drink, all you can eat, concert tickets," with a few of the headliners, all these things free, and it was a flash sale. Within two hours we had all Venmo-ed [our friend] $400 and he put it on his credit card.

The whole time none of us really knew what we were getting into. On the drive to the airport, all eight of us were making jokes that we were going to show up and no one would be there.

We arrived at the same time that almost everyone from Fyre Festival was showing up, so that was a good sign. But already it wasn’t quite how they had described it. They said they’d pick up the bags at the airport then drop them off at the luxurious cabin in the Bahamas. They promised charter planes, but it was just a normal airline with a bunch of kids on it. We were promised a limo but a really junky bus picked us up.

They had only two Fyre Festival employees telling everyone what to do, so it was just a bunch of rich kids trying to work out what they were doing.

We got to the gate and that’s when rumors started popping up. Blink 182 had apparently canceled, but we still figured some bands would be there.

We pulled up in this bus to what looked like a war zone. Our extravagant cabins were FEMA tents. It was just a bunch of igloos on a massive plot of land close to the water - not a great spot on the island at all.

It looked like The Hunger Games, people were running around everywhere screaming, "Turn around, don't get off the bus!"

Billy McFarland was standing on a table trying to delegate. All the furniture that was supposed to go in the tents was in Ikea boxes, it wasn’t set up yet.

They told us to pick our own tent and then tell [the organizers] our number. In the meantime, they were giving everyone free bottles of Casamigos tequila. They were trying to calm people down but it didn’t really work. Like the actual Hunger Games, people were fighting for tents, ripping mattresses out of them and bringing them to other tents to fit more people. We went back to tell them the number, but no one was there so it didn’t matter.

It got really rowdy as soon as everything shut down. There were a lot of kids ripping mattresses and throwing them into the ocean, floating on them, making fires on the beach.

We talked to some kid who loaded $11,000 onto his festival bracelet [to buy food and experiences guests were told to put thousands of dollars on their "Fyre Bands," since it was a cashless festival] that he was afraid he wasn't going to get back. Kids were going through withdrawal - they'd brought drugs in their luggage and lost it - they were freaking out. Some girl was freaking out so much she got completely naked on the beach and ran into the ocean.

Two trucks pulled up with tons of suitcases on the back that they then dumped in a pile on the ground. Everyone was sprinting over and looking through the bags. One guy was the security guard but he wasn't doing a thing. People were just scrounging, probably stealing things.

Even the bars and the snack shops that were supposed to be set up in a really cool way were halfway done. The food was in cardboard boxes. There were no people there so kids were ripping the boxes open and taking the candy, bags of chips, Gatorade, doing whatever they had to do.

A ton of people immediately left that day - their daddy flew them away on a private jet, or they'd come on yachts and left, or went back to the airport.

Late at night, we all got the first email apologizing from Fyre Festival, saying it was canceled and they were going to work as soon as they could to get everyone off the island. We had a moment of silence in the tent. We decided to stick this out until they kick us out.

We were the last eight on the island. We waited until they forced us to leave. They wouldn’t let us stay any longer. They said the government is issuing a shutdown for Fyre Festival and had to charter everyone home.

It made for a really good story. We ended up having a ton of fun. We had a free trip to the Bahamas, free drinks, and free food. We eventually got all of our money back too.

Unfortunately though, all eight of us did come down with food poisoning when we got back to the states - it wasn’t the sandwiches.

"I got a call from a publicist the night before and she basically begged me not to come"

Todd Plummer is a freelance reporter who was covering the festival for a national outlet

From the beginning, I was a little skeptical about the attention to detail. Originally, I was meant to stay in a hotel on site with all the other media. The people who invited me and were coordinating all the travel were from a huge reputable PR firm that does celebrity entertainment, not emerging music festival PR.

Two days before I was supposed to depart, I was notified that the accommodations were moved to a boat. The words they used were “luxury cruise liner anchored just off the main festival.” I’ve never met a luxury cruise liner I didn’t like, but changing accommodations three days before media is supposed to show up is a huge red flag that things weren’t planned.

I was supposed to be on a 6am flight out of JFK that Friday to Miami, then catch a plane to Exuma. I happened to be up late when I got a call from a publicist the night before at about 11:30, and she basically begged me not to come. She'd just got there and said it was not what I thought it would be.

My plus one had put money on her Fyre Band that I believe she has not been refunded to this day. About six weeks later in June, I was at St Ambroeus and saw Billy McFarland from across the room. I didn’t say anything but immediately after I left I emailed him [to ask for her money back], “Good afternoon, Billy, I hope you’re enjoying lunch” I wrote. He responded right away within an hour. Then there was no refund.

Billy did answer our follow ups four times - he did appear to be trying to make things right, but after a certain point, he just stopped.

"There’s absolutely no one in charge, pigs are squealing and pooping on people, and people are trying to take their picture"

Tyler went with co-workers after buying flash sale tickets

My group of friends is very fun and chill, so in full disclosure: we had a pretty enjoyable 36 hours on the island.

There was literally no communication beforehand. [I got frustrated and] emailed the people and basically lied, saying that I was some reporter who had questions. They responded right away very defensively. I also knew someone who worked for one of the architecture firms who had a last minute contract to build the site. He told me that it was a s*** show.

If the tents at the festival been spread out on a nice, grassy lawn, that would have been one thing. That’s what everyone was expecting, they were going to make them look nice, like glamping. In reality, they were put on an old construction site. There wasn't even dirt, it was hard clay, the tents were on top of rocks.  

We were held on the tarmac because it was raining on the island and the airport was so small they couldn’t land the plane in the rain. New York socialite Dori Cooperman was on our flight. I sat next to her and she was making polite conversation, but she ended up getting out of her seat and going up to the front and asking the stewardess to make an announcement. She said, "Hey, everyone, I’m friends with Billy McFarland, everything’s fine."

We fly in and the airport’s a room. This festival guy says, "Hey, welcome to Fyre Festival, I should know more information but I don’t. Good luck."

They brought us all to this random beach bar and no one was there, so they dropped us off while they figured out what to do. There was no food, no water, nothing. All of a sudden, random festival people showed up with cases of tequila and champagne. You could tell they were under express orders to get everyone super f****d up. They ended up just passing out the George Clooney tequila, not even making margaritas.

We pulled in and it looked like a massive shitty parking lot with rows of unmarked white tents. We slept eight people in a tent meant for four.

To go to Pig Beach they were trying to charge $1,000 a person beforehand, but once we were there it reached a point where they were just trying to keep everyone happy. It wasn’t officially canceled but everything became free. All these boats showed up and everyone piled on and went over to Pig Beach super blacked out. I saw a girl get tusked in the forehead and she was bleeding profusely. I was dunking her in the water - it probably looked like a weird baptism. There’s absolutely no one in charge, pigs are squealing and pooping on people - and people are trying to take their pictures. We finally got the girl back to the main island, which wasn't that much better.

It became Lord of the Flies, everyone milling around without direction. That’s when people realized there was no one in control.

We stayed that night and the next day people were freaking out trying to get off on the phone with the embassy. There were no more workers at the festival because they weren’t paying anyone. They had brought in tequila, Veuve champagne, and you could take whatever you wanted. You could go behind the bar and take champagne to the beach.

There was someone wheeled off of our airplane with a sea urchin in his foot. To remove it you need a certain syringe that dissolves it because it has serrated blades. They had to leave it in his foot on the flight to Miami.

There was this three-ring notebook piece of paper floating around. We had to sign it for a seat on the plane. We thought that didn’t make any sense but we signed it just in case. We got to the airport, which was super disorganized, and they were calling names off of the three-ring notebook. There were people who hadn’t signed it who had to stay on the island.

“I don’t mean to say it was really sinister fakery, but it was a very sexy version of what an experience is”

Nicco Quiñones is the filmmaker behind Under the Influence, which documents first-hand Fyre Fest stories. He didn't attend the festival but was on the ground in Miami and interviewed attendees once they landed

When you give it a couple of minutes of thought, the mystical experience [Fyre Festival promoters promised] doesn’t exist. From a professional perspective, I’m a little more familiar with smoke and mirrors. I don’t mean to say it was this really sinister fakery, but [the promotion] was a very sexy version of what an experience is. It was a concept of an experience, not an actual experience.

I think Billy [McFarland] said, "Let’s just do it and be legends," and that’s very emblematic of the times.

From what I heard from the crew who made the promotional video for the festival, Billy was very informal, he was talking about buying islands on a boat. It was just a joyride for this dude.

[timeforbeing]

tfw aaaaaauugghhhhh, honestly

suddenly feel like I’m facing three fairly major decisions at once with no clear side to take

- should I re-enter the mental health peer work programme I got half way through then burnt out of last year? they just contacted me to invite me back but I don’t know if i could manage it or if it’s compatible with our plans to leave london, expand our family, etc. and now I suddenly have to decide by may 8th

- wtf should I do about my parents? stick up for myself, be assertive, and explicitly instate a period of no contact? or avoid and ignore and just limit communication without taking a stand? I’m so scared and anxious about this I can’t begin to describe it. My inner conflict is higher than with any other issue in my entire life, for obvious childhood complex trauma reasons!

- less gravely, but still weighing on my mind and making me anxious, should I go back on facebook? I don’t miss it and don’t regret leaving it at all, however there’s still a total dearth of alternatives when it comes to semi-passively keeping in touch with specific people/groups in my life. I want to be able to interact casually, as my spouse has just started doing, with my other partner’s mum. also maybe with some of my own extended family (especially if I remove my parents from the picture). and I could do with increasing my social interaction with choir - currently I’m the weirdo who never socialises, since some of my original choir buddies have left. On the other hand I seriously do not want it to monopolise my online habits or encroach on my me-time, have constant guilt & FOMO because of events I don’t have the spoons or money to attend, feel obliged to keep in touch with - or even worse be tempted to lurk and check up on - dozens of people I never see, and I absolutely do not want to use it as a source of news or a place for politics or discourse because that’s just fucking overwhelming and could eat up way too much time & energy. And that’s not even considering the privacy/advertising/corporate downsides. I mean. That’s a lot of reasons why FB is worth keeping away from, right? I just wish there was an alternative for my relatives and/or choir and/or few closeish friends.

I kinda really dislike the concept of existing in the world as a social object tbh. I love relationships and I love individual humans and I love feeling able to share my real self and I love integrated interconnected family-style groupings and I love honest, generous, expansive love and I love real connection, but I just can’t DO ~socialising~! casual interaction/small talk/‘making conversation’ fills me with visceral dread and instantly has me out of my depth. the entire mechanism of going stranger –> acquaintance –> friend (–>possible circle of friends) is just????!??? a fucking??!!?!?!?? MYSTERY??!?!??? to me? I’ve literally never managed to do it. and I basically feel like an asocial alien freak at all times. so.

it’s incredibly frustrating and is one of the main focuses of my current long-term therapy yet still a massive fucking problem that is completely lagging behind other areas of my emotional healing :( (incidentally, this - the fact my ability to socialise in a vaguely normative/NT way has not remotely improved whilst most other aspects of my mental illness have - is partly why there’s reason to suspect I’ve had an underlying autism spectrum condition all along -plus- complex trauma on top, rather than the alternative of early complex trauma alone managing to -mimic- a developmental disorder. I mean, you’d think after over a decade of various interpersonal therapies I wouldn’t still declare in anguish that I feel like an asocial alien freak at all times, right? yet here we are.)

I actually feel a lot of contentment when I don’t hold myself to NT standards of socialising. maybe I should just keep doing that. but at the same time I know I’m a wonderful, unique, interesting person with a lot of warmth and love to give, who has grown and healed immensely throughout their adult life to a place of exceptional - and ever improving - emotional awareness and relationship skills, so surely I should be able to form rewarding connections with awesome people I meet, at least some of the time? But no, it still requires a secure attachment bond/love or sex being involved somehow/using existing people I’m attached to as a bridge :/

I could say 'the fuck is wrong with me??😩’ but it’s hardly a mystery. a duo of complex trauma disorders that kicked off with disorganised attachment & developmental trauma - possibly with preexisting autism as a substrate - that have expressed themselves with many avoidant traits… yep. that. that’s what’s wrong with me.

[khalilhumam]

‘Boca de Rua': The Brazilian newspaper produced entirely by people living on the street

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/boca-de-rua-the-brazilian-newspaper-produced-entirely-by-people-living-on-the-street/

‘Boca de Rua': The Brazilian newspaper produced entirely by people living on the street

After 19 years, Boca is still telling stories from the street

Marcos Scher selling the paper at traffic lights before the pandemic. Photo: Charlotte Dafol/Used with permission

Nineteen years ago in Porto Alegre, in southern Brazil, a newspaper made entirely by people living on the streets was created. Boca de Rua (Mouth of the Street, also known as Boca) newspaper was ideated by a group of journalists who wanted to provide this community with the tools to speak for themselves. The project was conceived in 2000 and a year later, during the first meeting of the World Social Forum, the first edition of Boca was launched. Today, the newspaper is the only member of the International Network of Street Papers (INSP) created entirely by people living on the streets. The ideas for stories, interviewees and questions are all developed by the community itself. Two journalists, who have been with the project since the beginning, are responsible for designing every new issue. A group of volunteers also helps with support such as recording meetings, guiding the reporters about notetaking, and transcribing notes on the computer. Published as a quarterly, Boca's coverage ranges from reports of abuses suffered by those on the street to positive stories. Over a period of three months, the group decides on the direction of the coverage, they go out into the field, conduct interviews, take photographs and gather testimonies for the stories. Member turnover is high, but on average, about 50 people work on each edition. After printing, each member of the group receives a share of copies to sell on the streets of Porto Alegre and all the proceeds go to the journalist/vendors. The publication is also sustained by donations from supporters, many of them anonymous. Rosina Duarte, one of the creators of Boca de Rua and the NGO ALICE (Free Agency for Information, Citizenship and Education), to which the newspaper is linked, said that the initial aim was “to give a voice to those who don't have one”. In time, however, they realized that this was presumptuous — the voices were always there, society just didn't listen to them, she says. In a telephone interview with Global Voices, Rosina says:

Quando nós chegamos, a gente tinha ainda aquele discurso bonito, que carrega muito resquício do “preconceito bonzinho”, como eu digo, que é o de querer dar algo a eles, de ajudar. Mas a gente percebeu que nós é que tínhamos que ser alfabetizadas na linguagem da rua. Eles não tinham a alfabetização da linguagem escrita, mas nós éramos analfabetas completas sobre a vida na rua.

When we arrived, we still had those pretty words which hold a lot of undertones of “nice prejudice”, as I call it, which is wanting to give something to them to help. But we realized that it was us who had to become literate in the language of the street. They didn't have literacy in written language, but we were completely illiterate about life on the street.

Catarina and Daniel wearing masks with Boca's logo | Photo: Luiz Abreu/Used with permission

The journalists’ original idea was to create a radio broadcast program using speakers installed on the city's lamp posts. But when they contacted a group of homeless people, they were adamant: “We want a newspaper about us”. Rosina says the idea worried her at first, but it worked:

Quando eles disseram que queriam um jornal, fomos atrás de financiamento, ainda tateando no escuro, sem saber o que fazer. Mas um dia caiu a ficha: ao contar o que acontecia nas ruas, eles faziam notícia. E, se eles tivessem consciência disso, o texto se organizava de uma forma muito clara. Porque a gente faz notícia o tempo inteiro. Tem os que fazem de uma forma mais objetiva, outros menos objetiva, mas a gente faz.

When they said they wanted a newspaper, we went after funding, still feeling our way in the dark, not knowing what to do. But one day the penny dropped: by telling what was happening on the streets, they were breaking news. And if they became aware of this, the paper would organize itself very clearly. Because we make news all the time. Some people do it in a more objective way, others less objective, but we do it.

Over time, the newspaper also became a kind of social movement. The group meets weekly to discuss collective demands and possibilities for supporting the individual issues of its members. It is also linked to initiatives in the field, such as the Movimento Nacional da População de Rua (National Movement of People on the Street) and Amada Massa (Loving Dough), a bakery that aims to generate autonomy for people with a history on the streets in Porto Alegre. Regarding the content of the stories told by the paper, Rosina recalls:

Parece que é só sofrimento, parece que é só dificuldade. E não é. Descobrimos essa alegria, essa resistência, valorizamos essa imensa, fantástica capacidade de sobreviver, não só de se manter vivo, mas de manter viva a esperança, a alegria, o afeto e todas essas questões.

It seems like it's just suffering, it seems like it's just difficulty. And it's not. We have discovered this joy, this resistance, we appreciate this immense, fantastic capacity to survive, not only to stay alive, but to keep hope, joy, affection and all these things alive.

Voices from the streets

In a telephone interview with Global Voices, Elisângela Escalante, who joined the group six years ago when she was on the streets, emphasized the importance of the newspaper in her life:

Muita coisa aconteceu comigo através do jornal. Ele me tirou da rua. Porque eu vivi três anos e meio na rua e eu saí depois de uns meses indo pro jornal. Eu fui guardando um dinheiro e comecei a alugar o meu espaço. Antes eu não ganhava o meu dinheiro, dependia do meu companheiro pra tudo. Faz diferença pra mim, eu gosto de ter meu dinheiro.

A lot happened to me through the paper. It got me off the street. Because I lived on the street for three and a half years and I got out after a few months going to the paper. I was saving some money and started to rent my own space. Before I didn't earn my money, I depended on my partner for everything. It makes a difference for me, I like to have my own money.

The cover of the edition which drew attention to the challenges of motherhood on the street. Photo: Agência ALICE/Boca de Rua, used with permission.

Elisângela remembers one edition in particular, where the cover story asked: “Why can't we be mothers?”. The report talked about the challenges that women with street backgrounds face in motherhood. While producing the report, some women members of the newspaper managed to regain contact with their children who they hadn't seen in years, Elisângela says:

Eu acho que o que a gente fala [no jornal] é a verdade. É o que a gente sente e o que a gente vive dentro da sociedade. Se não fosse o Boca, não teria outra maneira de fazer isso e ser ouvido por tanta gente. Através dele eu consegui muitas coisas e ajudei muitas pessoas também.

I think what we say [in the paper] is the truth. It's what we feel and what we experience within society. If it weren't for Boca, I wouldn't have any other way to do this and be heard by so many people. Through it I got a lot of things and I helped a lot of people too.

For the first time in its history, the newspaper is unable to be sold on the streets due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In an effort to alleviate the effects on the reporters’ income, Boca de Rua has been transformed into a digital version. With a contribution of 20 BRL (around 3.75 US dollars) every three months, readers access the latest edition of Boca, as well as old editions and other material. For the contributors and reporters, the most important thing is that the voices from the street continue to be heard during the pandemic. When asked in a telephone conversation about his feelings about the newspaper, Marcos Sher, a 13-year veteran of Boca, said:

Pra mim é bom, muito bom. Pra você ver que eu não largo, né? Às vezes eu dou um tempo, mas eu volto de novo. Pra mim o jornal foi uma maneira de sair do tráfico [de drogas] e voltar a trabalhar. É bom porque é alguma coisa pra fazer, pra me tirar de casa. Ter alguma coisa pra fazer é muito importante pra mim.

For me it's good, very good. So you can see I'm not letting go, right? Sometimes I stop for a while, but I come back again. For me, the newspaper was a way to get out of [drug] trafficking and go back to work. It's good because it's something to do, to get me out of the house. Having something to do is very important for me.

Editor's note: Talita Fernandes works with the newspaper Boca de Rua (Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul) and wrote a dissertation “Street, feminine noun: women in movement and the right to the body in the city”, by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).

< p class='gv-rss-footer'>Written by Talita Fernandes Translated by Liam Anderson · View original post [pt]

[click2watch]

Stable Times at Circle: A Crypto Startup Counted Out Is Riding High

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

As I walked from my car to Circle’s offices in Boston on a Friday afternoon in early November, the sun appeared to have already set, even though it would be up a while longer – past 4:00 p.m.

The weather was gray, windy and cold – above freezing, but only because it was due to rain biblically for the entire drive back to New York. If a bright orange parking ticket wasn’t already fluttering on my windshield, it would be soon. Oh, and bitcoin was down two-thirds from its peak less than a year beforehand, with further to fall.

Winter – crypto winter, winter winter – had arrived.

But Jeremy Allaire, Circle’s co-founder and CEO, didn’t seem to care. Asked if crypto market conditions had affected Circle’s business, he gestured to his co-founder and Circle’s president, Sean Neville. “Yeah, clearly, Sean’s wearing black.”

Everybody laughed.

Of course, one doesn’t weather a crash like 2014 – or 2008 or 2001, for that matter (Circle, founded in 2013, is not Allaire’s first rodeo) – without a bit of “bear market? what bear market” swagger. But there may be more than that to Allaire’s insistence that “the bubble deflates, but you actually have brought an enormous amount of capital and talent into the space, and innovation continues.”

Despite being a year of decline for the crypto sector as a whole, 2018 was a banner year for Circle.

In February the company acquired Poloniex, a troubled exchange whose reputation Circle is working hard to rehabilitate, for a reported $400 million. The following month it launched Circle Invest, a product that allows users to buy and sell 12 (at the time of writing) of the most well-known cryptocurrencies.

In May Bitmain, the China-based crypto mining hardware manufacturer, led a $110 million Series E investment in Circle, which valued the company at nearly $3 billion. At the same time, Circle announced that it would issue a dollar-linked stablecoin, USDC, to compete with the beleaguered incumbent, Tether.

Circle began issuing USDC in September, and Coinbase joined the Circle-led initiative behind the coin, Centre, the following month.

And finally, also in October, Circle signed a deal to acquire SeedInvest, a platform that lets companies raise equity from retail investors through crowdfunding, using an exemption from the 2012 Jobs Act.

Nothing about raising boatloads of money or jumping into multiple lines of business guarantees success, of course. ConsenSys, an ethereum-focused startup and incubator that recently announced layoffs and a strategy overhaul, is a cautionary tale in this sense.

But Circle has already been chastened by a long retrenchment, unlike the un-wintered ethereum ecosystem. In 2017, the year retail piled into crypto and seemingly every media outlet on the planet stoked the mania, Circle was mostly MIA – if a bit less so than most people realize. Meanwhile, Coinbase ate its lunch.

In 2018, however, Circle got back in the game. And if its timing meant a missed opportunity in the Year of FOMO (to be fair, Circle was still “meaningfully profitable” in 2017), that’s OK. Allaire has a longer timeline in mind: “it’s probably going to take 10 to 20 years to realize all these ideas,” he said, “but in the end, it literally can change the world.”

And by that, he means, “you could reconstruct the whole financial system on top of this.”

Sitting it out?

Almost exactly five years before I spoke to Neville and Allaire, Circle entered the world with a bang. The company’s $9 million Series A was the largest ever for a bitcoin company (this was before there was any “crypto” to speak of outside of bitcoin).

Allaire had just moved from CEO to chairman at his latest venture, the video platform Brightcove, and his goal with Circle was “making bitcoin extremely easy for consumers and merchants to adopt.”

That would prove easier said than done. The dream of merchant adoption faded, but Circle persevered. It completed a hard slog towards regulatory compliance, becoming the first company to win a BitLicense from New York state’s notoriously finicky Department of Financial Services.

It also won approval from British regulators, which allowed users of its flagship payments app, Circle Pay, to send money between the U.S. and Britain using bitcoin as a bridge. But as with merchant adoption, bitcoin’s promise of basically free, basically instant cross-border payments also proved illusory.

Meanwhile, Venmo was doing very well without any blockchain, thank you. And a focus on bitcoin – that first, clunky implementation of the “underlying technology” blockchain, in the emerging narrative – well, that was just quaint.

Allaire and Neville appear to have agreed. “You can find all kinds of stuff about us saying things that were critical of bitcoin,” Allaire told me recently, referring back to 2016. “That the developers weren’t moving, that innovation had stagnated, that a lot of the ideas that were important in this ecosystem weren’t happening.”

By mid-2016, Allaire was downplaying bitcoin’s role in Circle’s mission, saying the firm “was not positioned as a bitcoin thing, it was [about] making money work.”

“We tried to define the product around instant money,” he told CoinDesk at the time, “and underneath it was bitcoin.”

Allaire presents ‘Bitcoin’s Mainstream Moment’ at Bitcoin2014.

And then at the end of that year, bitcoin went from underneath to more underneath. In December 2016 Circle removed the ability for customers to buy and sell bitcoin, and to send it to other bitcoin addresses, using Circle Pay (customers who held bitcoin could still keep it in the app or convert it to fiat without charge).

That left the way open for Coinbase to take full advantage of a hype cycle that was – though few at the time could have guessed it – only six months away.

When I spoke to him in November, though, Allaire stood by the “heresy” that bitcoin had stalled out, arguing that “now everyone sort of acknowledges that it was all true.” Of course, he allowed, “there are still maximalists.”

Or biding time?

Yet that’s not the whole story. Circle did not abandon bitcoin. For one, cross-border payments on the Circle Pay app still used bitcoin, by way of a hazily defined new technology Circle spoke about at the time, called Spark.

More importantly, though, at least in retrospect, Circle maintained the trading operation it had built to power Circle Pay.

“What a lot of people don’t realize,” Allaire said, “is that starting in 2014, we started to become one of the largest buyers and sellers and traders of bitcoin in the world.” That business grew in 2014, 2015 and 2016, he added. And of course, in 2017, it grew “like crazy.”

“So while we turned off for a period of time the ability for the average retail individual person to be able to access and get bitcoin using Circle’s consumer product,” he said, “we were actually one of the biggest and still remain one of the biggest buyers, sellers, traders and market makers in the world, not just bitcoin but in all the major digital assets.”

Sean Neville onstage at Consensus 2018.

Despite its radio silence, in other words, Circle did not really miss out on the crypto boom.

And in a way, the out-of-control growth the industry experienced in 2017 provided Circle with rare opportunities to rebuild its crypto offerings.

First, one of its trading desk’s biggest customers was looking for help. Poloniex, a Boston-based exchange created by altcoin miner Tristan D’Agosta, hit – as Allaire put it – “a lot of the constraints that happen when a business grows really, really fast.”

In 2017, as token projects were proliferating and customers were flocking to the exchange, the relatively small team at Poloniex was having trouble keeping up on multiple fronts: operations (maintaining crypto wallets, for example), regulation (the SEC’s dim view of many token projects was becoming increasingly clear), customer service (there was a backlog of 185,000 open customer service tickets) and compliance (such as conducting know-your-customer [KYC] checks).

It was all too much to handle, and the exchange began talking to Circle about being acquired. Which was convenient, because as Neville told CoinDesk, “we had imagined much more of a broader marketplace for all kinds of assets that can be tokenized,” though they “didn’t necessarily decide to build that right away, in 2016 or 2017.”

Following the Poloniex acquisition, Circle has such a marketplace. And while the company has work to do to rehabilitate the exchange’s image, Allaire says they’ve made progress: open customer support tickets are down to 2,000, KYC checks are in place, a number of tokens have been delisted, and regulators are reportedly less keen on pursuing Poloniex for potential violations of securities law.

Another opportunity presented itself in the form of the ICO boom, which served as a sort of proof-of-concept for a form of crowdfunding Allaire and Neville are now planning to offer: sales of securities – such as debt and equity – to retail (that is, non-wealthy) investors.

The issue, of course, is that unless they register with regulators and comply with burdensome disclosure rules, companies are not allowed to issue securities to retail investors – only to “accredited” (read, “rich”) ones. That’s the crux of many token issuers’ current predicament: they may have broken the law by conducting unregistered securities offerings.

There’s a relatively obscure exception to those rules, however, which was passed as part of the 2012 JOBS Act but not implemented until 2015. It allows companies to raise limited amounts of capital from ordinary investors, providing an avenue to conduct what amount to compliant ICOs.

Yes, you can actually buy this crypto card and own it forever.

“It’s slightly different from … crowdfunding, slightly different from something like token sales that we saw last year – it’s a maturation of both in a new direction,” said Neville. To provide a platform for these security token offerings, Circle has signed a deal to acquire SeedInvest, a platform built around the Jobs Act exemption that already – as an “alternative trading system” – has the necessary regulatory approvals.

“Businesses can issue these digital tokens that may, in fact, be securities, and that’s OK,” Allaire said. “It’s not like a scary thing. A security is just a way to ensure that investors have some protections.”

Finally, the grinding saga of Tether – a wobbly “stablecoin” with nearly $2 billion in outstanding issuance – proved two things: that crypto traders want fiat-linked blockchain tokens, and that their go-to left much to be desired.

USDC (what eventually came of the “Spark” initiative) is Circle’s answer to that demand, and the coin has also been adopted by Coinbase as its stablecoin of choice.

Tokenize the world

A year ago, Circle’s product suite was an odd, barbell-shaped contrivance. The company had, as Neville put it, “Circle Pay at the extreme consumer end of the spectrum – people using crypto and they don’t even know they’re using crypto.”

At the other end, the company had “this sort of high-touch, high-value trading system, OTC that enabled that thing to work.”

To fill the “big gap” in the middle, the company created a retail investment product not unlike Coinbase’s. But the rollout of USDC and the acquisitions of Poloniex and SeedInvest do more than fill out a lopsided product offering. They point to a lofty ambition to create “a radically more open, global and inclusive financial world,” as Allaire put it.

Allaire kicks off day one at the BitFin conference in July 2014.

In a world of tokenized – well, everything – Allaire said, “an individual in one part of the world can not just send and receive value, but can enter into economic arrangements with other individuals over the internet without an intermediary.”

People could tokenize not just debts and equities and claim on cash flow, but contractual relationships – “all mediated by code on blockchains over the internet.”

“The level of economic integration that becomes possible on a global basis,” Allaire said, “is just staggering. And so for us, we’re just excited to create the platforms and markets and tools to let people take advantage of that.”

That “tokenization” has so far enabled little more than the creation of probably-immutable, probably-non-confiscatable cat-themed collectibles – is beside the point. “It’s sort of like in the early 90s saying, here’s all the websites that are out there, this is it, we’re done, the web’s done,” Allaire said.

Circle has capital, live products, experience and ambition – none of which guarantees success. But even if tokenizing the world falls flat, the company has proven the ability to survive a bad bet in the past, and go on to thrive.

Facilitating the adoption bitcoin – or whatevercoin – for day-to-day purchases will be some other firm’s coup if anyone ever manages it. Circle, for its part, has moved on.

––––––––––––––––––––––––

Art by CryptoKitties (@CryptoKitties)

Photos by David Floyd for CoinDesk

!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n; n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0';n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,'script','//connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '239547076708948'); fbq('track', "PageView"); This news post is collected from CoinDesk

Recommended Read

Editor choice

BinBot Pro – Safest & Highly Recommended Binary Options Auto Trading Robot

Do you live in a country like USA or Canada where using automated trading systems is a problem? If you do then now we ...

9.5

Demo & Pro Version Try It Now

Read full review

The post Stable Times at Circle: A Crypto Startup Counted Out Is Riding High appeared first on Click 2 Watch.

More Details Here → https://click2.watch/stable-times-at-circle-a-crypto-startup-counted-out-is-riding-high-3

[coin-river-blog]

Can the Coinmine One popularize mining and bring the cryptosphere to the general public?

There's a world in which water cooler gossip isn't just for talking about the new office memo or explaining why team so-and-so should fire their GM and start rebuilding. What if you and Lucy wanted to brag about how much Ether you mined last night while washing the dishes? Well, Coinmine, a Los Angeles-based company looking to simplify the world of crypto hardware, has launched the Coinmine One to bring blockchain mining to the masses.

Coinmine One, along with its Android- and iOS-compatible mobile apps, markets itself as the $799 solution to help "free our money and information from the hands of the few" and "make crypto easy." It is, quite literally, mining made easy, boiling the process down to three steps: plugging in the device, opening an app, and choosing which cryptocurrency to mine. From the app, users can choose between mining Ether (ETH), Monero (XMR), Zcash (ZEC) and Ethereum Classic (ETC), with options like Bitcoin Lightning node, Dfinity and Filecoin to come.

Although some of these features are "coming soon" without any specific date, the "over-the-air" upgrades only add to the user-friendly persona the Coinmine One is touting. Users will "receive software updates, for free, in order to participate in change protocols and brand new protocols." Just like the device will mine without you needing to know much about mining, the upgrades will allow you to continue to mine, or mine new cryptocurrencies, when protocols change without needing to know much about what is changing.

It's Like Tinder With Less, Um, Y'Know…

Coinmine's investors include Coinbase Ventures, Arrington Capital, and Morgan Creek partner Anthony Pompliano. These investors have helped make the Coinmine One a soon-to-be reality, but what does this device really mean for at-home miners?

Brian Norgard, chief product officer at Tinder and a Coinmine One backer, said:

"At Tinder, we removed the pain associated with setting up a dating profile so people could get to the action. When [Coinmine CEO and co-founder Farbood Nivi] initially came to me with the basis for Coinmine, I knew it was a radically novel solution to a messy problem – it was as they say, a perfect match. The limiting factor to scale in crypto continues to be complexity for the end user. Farb and the entire Coinmine team are one of the first companies attacking this problem head-on through a blend of hardware and software."

"Get to the action." That's an interesting concept when it comes to the world of crypto mining. Tinder has its issues, both technical and societal, but the app has had its impact on those looking to hook up and get to that "action." What, then, is Coinmine One's notch-in-the-bedpost equivalent? What is a home miner getting from swiping left or right on different cryptocurrencies?

It is probably not going to be much profit. A CNBC article today reports that using a mining rig that contains a GPU (as the Coinmine One does) went from a profit per month of "$150 last summer" to "$0 for November."

It doesn't look like it's necessarily the speed of the mining, either. Coinmine's website shows that ETH and ETC can be mined at 29 Mh/s, XMR at 800 h/s and ZEC at 290 sols/s. While it is almost $3,000 more, Qarnot's at-home GPU mining rig can mine at 60Mh/s (and it can be used as a space heater).

It also isn't clear, for now, how it helps users learn what to do with what they're mining. Coinmine's website talks about the cryptospace as a place where "money and information aren't controlled by just the few," and presents the Coinmine One as "built from the ground up to adapt to the future of crypto." It all sounds very good, and making a product that presents mining in a more digestible format is helpful, but what are the masses supposed to do with their coin? How can they use it or trade it?

The press release does state that users will be able to "add additional Coinmine devices to their account from an easy-to-read, centralized dashboard," and that may suggest that Coinmine has plans to integrate other products with the miner. The website also notes that users will be able to mine Grin, an ASIC-resistant cryptocurrency, and this may be where Coinmine One competes where its speed lacks, in anticipating ASIC-resistant mining.

Overall, Coinmine One's action – its left and right swipe – is hard to pin down. One could make an argument that it comes down to outright FOMO – fear of missing out. Fear of missing out on the cryptoworld, even if all this means is that the user is on the fringes as an at-home miner. But can $799 and the ability to tell Carl at the water cooler that they're mining ETC right now satiate one's FOMO? Probably not, but, at the very least, they're getting action, and for anyone who isn't looking for anything long term, maybe that's all they need.

Nicholas Ruggieri studied English with an emphasis in creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno. When he’s not quoting Vines at anyone who’s willing to listen, you’ll find him listening to too many podcasts, reading too many books, and crocheting too many sweaters for his dogs, RT and Peterman.

ETHNews is committed to its Editorial Policy

Like what you read? Follow us on Twitter @ETHNews_ to receive the latest Coinmine One, Tinder or other Ethereum technology news.

window.fbAsyncInit = function() { FB.init({ appId : '1761887554082917', xfbml : true, version : 'v2.7' }); }; (function(d, s, id){ var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;} js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

[marviinmelton]

The secret to happy UX, according to a legendary game designer

I don’t remember the last time that I looked at a screen and smiled.

But right now, I’m staring at my Nintendo Switch with a stupid grin on my face that’s wasted on anyone but my own reflection. It’s been at least a decade since I played Lumines, the rhythmic block-dropping game that was first released in 2004 for Sony’s Playstation Portable, and I’d forgotten how ingenious it is. Now that it’s being re-released in a “remastered” version for modern consoles, I’m playing it again.

Lumines‘s premise is simple. Tiles drop from the top of the screen, much like Tetris. But instead of lining up their geometries, you line up their colors. Your job is to create quadrants of four colors that match. And when you do, the blocks disappear, and your score goes up.

But to liken Lumines to Tetris is as ignorant as calling a flaky croissant “stale bread.” The game is designed at its core to induce synesthesia, to mix pixels with animations with sounds with music, to hotwire your senses and just make you feel good.

Five minutes into playing Lumines Remastered ($15 for Switch, Xbox One, and PS4, out now), I’m reminded that for all the Silicon Valley talk about designing “surprise” and “delight,” many of today’s apps are a stand-in for joy. They’re dopamine drips for happiness that mask their real intent of engagement for profit.

I don’t know if there’s a cure hiding in Lumines, but I can’t help calling up the father of Lumines–legendary Japanese game designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi who recently founded his own studio Enhance Games–to get his take on why his games make people happy while so many things on screens do not.

[Image: courtesy Enhance Games]

“How can we make you feel good?”

I’d forgotten in the decade since our last conversation that everyone just calls him “Miz.” Miz started his career at Sega, making arcade racing games, before taking over a new team that would make Space Channel 5 (1999) and Rez (2001), two landmark “rhythm games” that made you play to a beat. Rez, in particular, was anachronistically ambitious, simulating the player flying through a VR world a full 15 years before the Oculus Rift came out.

Lumines was next, and it was created specifically for the Playstation Portable (a.k.a. The PSP). The PSP’s legacy has been quickly forgotten between the age of the iPod and the iPhone, but it was really the first high fidelity portable gaming system that had a color screen with a wide gamut and powerful processors capable of 3D game and movie playback, along with audio quality that was on par with CDs. It was like having a home theater on the go.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi [Image: courtesy Enhance Games]

“Sony announced, ‘this is the interactive Walkman,'” recounts Miz. “So I got inspired from that concept, ‘what is an interactive Walkman? What kind of play feel would it have– what kind of interaction with the sound and music and visual change?”

Miz actually tried to license Tetris for the PSP, but he narrowly missed the window to get rights. So his studio developed Lumines instead. What a wonderful mistake, because the relationship between the PSP and Lumines became somehow intrinsic, as though they were literally made for one another. The PSP made it possible to play Tiger Woods PGA Tour or Tekken–some of the most popular 3D games of the time that were, until then, only possible to play through PC-sized consoles hooked up to televisions. And yet, I remember a fellow game journalist from the era casually calling his PSP “The Lumines Machine.” Lumines would be re-released for consoles like the Xbox 360 in subsequent years, and it was still good, but it lacked the same inexplicable pull that seemed to resonate every bit of the game right through my skin. It wasn’t until I played the latest rebuild for the Nintendo Switch, in handheld mode on my couch, headphones in my ears, did I feel it again.

“Many people mention the same thing. I don’t know why, exactly, but I think, maybe it’s a toy sensation,” says Miz when I ask why the game plays so well in your hands. “The moving, the blocks, the sound, and the music, and the colors, happening in your hand. It’s a gadgety or toy feeling, like a Rubik’s cube.”

This sensation is by design. Most games are built on the idea of introducing a cadence of novel mechanics while increasing difficulty at the same time. So Mario gets fireballs or a cape because the enemies get tougher or the gaps get too large to jump. The game keeps getting harder for the player, who has to attain new levels of mastery. Miz’s games have some of those mechanics, but they’re far less about the progression of challenges than the progression of what he calls the “feel-good feeling.” Or what, to me, sounds much like the meditative concept of flow.

[Image: courtesy Enhance Games]

There’s one constant, driving question behind Miz’s games. “How can we make you feel good? Or feel in a trance,” he says. To get there, Miz architects his games at the UX level first and foremost–bits of user interface amass to become the game, rather than a means to play the game. “It’s about very small pieces,” says Miz. “The rolling and the moving the blocks, and falling blocks . . . matching the colors, making a square, and the timeline to swipe and wipe out the blocks. Each action has a meaning.” Each action must also feel fun.

Eventually, those UX elements stack into explosive sensory overload, but during the design process, it starts as simply as possible. Miz’s team pares the interactions down to see if they’re even just a little enjoyable before designing them into a game, scrubbing them of color or animated flourish. If so, that’s when the design team layers on the audio-visual sprinkles–the satisfying glimmers, sparkles or explosions–to see how far they can increase the fun factor via UX.  Sound is key, Miz mentions again and again. Each level in Lumines is defined as much by its audio as its visuals. Locking in blocks sometimes sounds like chimes, and other times, the wet thunk of a bamboo pipe. As a result, the same game feels constantly new, despite never introducing new mechanics.

“It’s very simple, it’s like, the Japanese love that kind of design. It’s like a zen kind of style. Maybe it comes naturally to me,” says Miz, referencing how these basic components stack to a greater experience. “I love to do that kind of process, the making, game design process. It’s like architecture.”

[Image: courtesy Enhance Games]

The Problem With Lollipops

But if Miz’s games are successful at making you feel good because they build up the experience one tiny bit of interface at a time, why are our smartphones–filled with the “surprise and delight” of animations and sounds–making us so miserable?

He points out that smartphones are quite “task-based,” and that’s a theme that spans from productivity apps to the popular “free-to-play” games that have conquered mobile devices. Free-to-play games are designed to exploit the human need to progress at a task, then gradually require people to pay real money to do so. He calls this type of game “a psychological trap that’s already defined itself as something that’s not as delightful.”

I’d posit that you can say the same thing about smartphone apps themselves. They’re not designed with the end goal of making you happy. They’re built like dopamine drips, to engage you with the end goal of selling you something, directly or indirectly. While many of the UX techniques may look the same at first glance, the difference seems to be intent. The Valley has no impetus to ever satisfying you emotionally like Lumines might.

if(typeof(jQuery)=="function"){(function($){$.fn.fitVids=function(){}})(jQuery)}; jwplayer('jwplayer_2i5iDXGN_G2hQKLvX_div').setup( {"playlist":"https:\/\/content.jwplatform.com\/feeds\/2i5iDXGN.json","ph":2} );

The results are “like licking a lollipop,” says Miz of gaming apps. “There are so many different kinds, and maybe so many different flavors. But you continue to lick the lollipop, and there’s no depth to it, it feels like a routine.” Miz, however, has not given up on smartphone gaming. He sees processors getting stronger, and cloud-based computing allowing people on all sorts of different platforms to come together to play the same game. Give him two to three years, he muses, seeming to allude to an unannounced project.

As for why I love Lumines? It’s for every reason Miz already said–and maybe a few others, too.

Lumines came out in a very optimistic time for technology, before social networks and smartphones. No one had heard of FOMO or Cambridge Analytica, of location tracking or ad engines. And that optimism is reflected in every pixel on the screen–pixels that live for no other purpose than to create “that feel-good feeling.”

The secret to happy UX, according to a legendary game designer published first on https://petrotekb.tumblr.com/

[samanthasroberts]

Southern Charm Recap: Can They Get Any More White?

I have emerged from my two-day hangover solely to write this weeks recap. Guess killing brain cells is one of my hobbies now.

When we left off I wasnt sure if I was Team Kathryn or Team Whitney, and I dont think thats ever going to get resolved tbh. However, I did just notice Kathryns facial expression in the opening sequence more or less sums up her entire personality.

Thomas and JD, back at it again with the polo. Cause that ended really well the last time. Can they get any more white?

Whitney has some fruit salad and is making coffee and Larissas like, If that’s cooking, I’m about to be the next winner of.

Whitney trying to explain what going steady means to Larissa is pretty hilarious tho.

Kathryn andKody? Corey? Fuck, I forgetare getting a seaweed facial or some shit, AKA Bravo is pampering them so they can talk shit in style. Nice.

Kathryn is bummed that once she has her baby she has to go home alone with her two children.

Kathryn: Im a 24-year-old soon-to-be mother of two. If you dont think Im overwhelmed and nervous then you dont think.

Wow that was like, unnecessarily aggressive Kath.

Cooper? Cooper! Calls Thomas a 50-year-old playboy and is like,

Cooper: Instead of letting it frustrating you I just say let it strengthen you.

Cooper is the moral compass this show needs.

Meanwhile Thomas is sipping bourbon with JD on his porch because Kathryn really needs him.

JD: Hows the baby? Thomas: The doctor said fine… JD looks skeptical, because Im sure he knows better than a trained doctor.

JD: Kathryn moving up the due date seems awfully peculiarseems suspect.

JD is a regular Hardy Boy over here.

JD: I think women dont like being asked for paternity tests.

NO FUCKING SHIT.

JD is like, and Thomas is like, Its clear hes forgotten who hes about to have a kid with because Kathryn is NOT going to be down with Thomas basically accusing her of slutting it up and then trying to trap him into fatherhood. JUST SAYING.

Its date night with Craig and Naomie. Craig chooses going to L.A. over the biggest event for his company, because hes never been to L.A. before. And Craig wonders why hes not allowed to head a bourbon division. I don’t foresee this ending well AT ALL. Craig, youre a fucking idiot and for once Naomie is in the right to tell you youre fucking up.

Craig: Do you see how hard Im trying to justify this?

Yeah, because you KNOW YOURE IN THE WRONG. Thats literally what justification is.

Cameran and Landon meet up for a candle-making class and I am kind of jealous because that low-key sounds fun. Landons explaining her travel guide to Cam, so Im going to take a quick nap.

Cameran: I think its hard for Landon bc she was a typical Southern stereotype of the woman who got married young and was taken care of and she doesnt have that anymore.

Wait, how is this the first Im hearing of this failed first marriage? How has this NEVER come up before this season??

Cameran: So any man prospects? Landon: IDK not really its kind of sad and pathetic.

Landon is like Same tho. Cameran: Do you think the reason youre not meeting anyone is because you want something to work out with Shep? Landon:…Yeah

Cameran and I are both like, FINALLY!

*Cue a montage of them looking really couple-y* I’m rooting for you guys!

Landon brings up every middle schoolers dilemma which is that if she dates Shep, then shell lose him as a friend. Can we get like, a violin quartet to score some melodramatic music or something?

Craig and Shep make it to L.A. and Whitneys bachelor pad is sick. I guess this is what that Bravo money gets you. On an unrelated note, I have a very compelling idea for a new reality show, if you wanna get on board Bravo, Ill get you in at the ground level.

Craig: I wouldve had FOMO if I hadnt gotten to come out heresothanks.

Whitney: Meh whatevs

Whitney: #NewCraig has taken on this persona thats like, not chill dude.

Whitney basically lets it go with the caveat that he may never fully trust Craig again. Eh, Im sure theyll be fine.

Shep: You know when youre perfectly drunk and youre really good at pool? Is that like when Im really drunk and I think Im really good at dancing?

Classic Shmosby.

Larissa crashes the boys weekend which is not at all chill. Larissa is, I guess, the WGG of the group.

Shep: Should I change? I dont want to look all fratty and Southern.

Well that ship sailed like, approximately 36 years ago. Whitney makes a joke about waking up in the morning covered in blood and vomit. Was he secretly with me and my friends this weekend? Unclear. V. possible.

These two slutty-looking blondes show up and Shep is in fucking heaven. Craig low-key wants to kill himself.

Whitney: The goofy, disarming thing works in Charleston but not so much in L.A.

I’m sorry, Whitney, but who you callin goofy? You’re not exactly a chiseled Greek god over there. Whitney takes a casual shot at Craigs bourbon knowledge, or lack thereof, and now that hes gotten that off his chest this friendship is back on track.

The aftermath of Whitneys party looks a lot like the scene I dealt with Sunday morning. So, like, maybe they really were there.

Whitney: The marker of a good boys weekend is a pool of vomit with a partially digested meatball in the middle.

Whitney talks about how Shep didnt get any last night and Whitney said he had a meeting with Hand Solo which made me LOL.

Sheps like, and Im getting soooo mf sick of this trope. I am convinced Shep just acts this way because y’all expect him to be a fuckboy and nobody challenges him or holds him to a higher standard. Also, there’s just no way his dick games that good. THERE IS NO WAY.

JD is on the phone with Paula and SURPRISE, Craig basically didnt do shit for this festival yet still wants to be head of the bourbon division. The entitlement is strong with this one. Craigs phone is dead, party casualty, so JD is calling around to all Craigs friends like the angry dad he is. Did I mention this was dumb af, Craig?

Also, LMAO at how hungover they all look. Their hangovers are giving me life.

Craig: I just feel like Im being used to do all the bitchwork and its annoying. I lied, THIS is the whitest thing to happen on this show.

Shep: People take work too seriously. What happened to just drinking beer and laughing your balls off?

Yeah Shep, I think this may be why your restaurant is struggling to pay the rent.

Thomas and Kathryn are discussing the ins and outs of labor, which I will file away for future knowledge. Thomas calls Kathryn an expert at giving birth which is like, kind of rude lol. But I guess also accurate?

Kathryns opening up to Thomas about being alone this time around, looking up at him with big doe eyes, and Thomas is like,SHUT DOWN.

Thomas: The timing is really bad for me, could you just like, not give birth rn?

Kathryn: Thats why I like having you around, youre like a calming presence IDK why.

Kathryn, do you know what calming means? Im starting to think not.

Back at Whitneys, some massage therapist named Megan shows up, and Shep clearly has a boner.

Shep: So youre gonna give us all massages now?

Megan: Its like holding space to really connect more with yourself.

Shep is blatantly sexually harassing this poor girl. JFC. This is so creepy. Tone it the fuck down.

JD & Co. is launching his bourbon line at Charleston Cup, this horse race in Charleston. Craig is nowhere to be found, shockingly.

JD: Work isnt all roses and cherries. Sometimes its dirt and trenches.

Im putting that on a needlepoint for my office.

Sheps not going because his grandpa died. OK thats actually like, very sad. My condolences.

We will now resume with our regularly scheduled program of shit-talking.

Craig is taking forever to get readyCraig and Chad from are both the secret Betches interns.

Craig is hungover with an upset stomach and a sinus infection, which is literally what happens to me every time I drink. AKA right now. We’ll get through this, Craig. Emergen-c and green tea all mf day.

Cams like,

Craig apparently slept in and didnt do anything to help JD set up. Which, Im not surprised by, but again, is a really bad move for when youre trying to show initiative.

Cameran: #NewCraig is starting to run its course because at this point hes becoming #OldCraig

Dannis dropping some random whiskey fun facts and Craig is like, Fuck the bourbon division, Im not sure Craig is qualified to have any job at Gentry HQ, PERIOD. How the fuck is he going to be a lawyer if he never wants to do work? He’s gonna have a rude awakening if he ever makes it to first-year associate (I have heard).

Craig is there for all of two minutes and is already like, fuck this Im leaving.

Oh JK Craig didnt actually leave. JD gives a speech and what do you wanna bet Craig is gonna get shafted in this thank-you speech?

Wait for it..

BOOM. SHAFTED. I called it.

Cameran is so into this race its scary. How much money did she put down on that horse? Judging by her reaction to losing, Id say a lot.

Once again JD is dressed like a 1920s fat cat. Live your truth, JD.

JDs like, and Craig is like,

JD: Do you think you should have gone out of town? Craig: I mean Ive never had to give up a trip for a job so

Oh boy, Craig. I fear for you in the real world. I really do.

At Kathryns, she and Thomas are eating dinner. Kathryns going into labor tomorrow morning. I hope they dont actually film her birth. That would be kind of fucked.

Thomas: I want to have a traditional family, hear the shnookums running around, hear the house fill with laughter.

Lol, “shnookums” only makes me think of one thing:

Thomas: I still love Kathryn, I care about her but Im afraid a day of reckoning is forthcoming.

UH OH.

Kathryn asks Thomas how he feels and he says hes apprehensive and shes like, BRUH, FEEL APPREHENSIVE?!

Kathryn: If I say anything mean to you tomorrow just give me a free pass.

OK thats fair, she is giving birth and all.

Kathryn gets up and eats some generic brand Lucky Charms before giving birth. I take it all back, she really is struggling with money.

OK low blow. Sorry. Kind of.

Seeing the sheer amount of diapers in Kathryns house is enough to make me never forget to take my birth control.

Thomas: For some reason, maybe through divine intervention we were brought together. Steven Spielberg I believe said, Ive made a lot of movies, but my greatest creation of all was a child.

So I wonder at what point Thomas is gonna be like Who am I kidding, theyre gonna drag that out at least over the course of another epsiode.

OK enough shit-talking from me. That baby is cute. What did they name him?? How they gonna leave us hanging like that?

div.body_middle_part_right .bodypart:nth-child(n+2), a.prevBody{display: none;}

Source: http://allofbeer.com/southern-charm-recap-can-they-get-any-more-white/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/03/16/southern-charm-recap-can-they-get-any-more-white/