#and the way it serves as a relaunch of the show like everything that happens after 3a can be traced back to the nemeton

[blackhholes]

Teen Wolf as Horror Subgenres

Season three A: Folk Horror

[aion-rsa]

What’s Happening With Marvel’s X-Men?

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This article contains spoilers for recent Marvel X-Men stories.

A long time ago, back at the beginning of the interminable, endless month of March that the pandemic has trapped us in, Marvel’s X-Men books were barrelling towards their first big post-Dawn of X crossover, X of Swords. And then the world stopped, and plans changed for the X-Men while everything was paused.

Now that we’re back, plans have changed, and books are coming fast and furious. So what’s going on with Marvel’s Merry Mutants? Which book did Storm get sick in? What book should you read for a good Laksa recipe? New Mutants, but we can answer all your other questions on what’s going on with the X-Men below. 

While we won’t rehash the entire thing, House of X/Powers of X reset the entire X-Men line. Mutants can’t die anymore (or rather, if they do, they’re resurrected from clone bodies and emergency backup minds by The Five and Professor X). The X-Men, and all mutants alive, are now living on Krakoa, a living, mutant island in the Pacific that, at some point in the distant past, broke in half, sending one part of it to a dangerous, monster-infested realm with Apocalypse’s first Horsemen standing guard making sure it didn’t return. 

Humans are back to hating and fearing mutants on a wide scale, but this time it’s mostly because the mutants are vehemently anti-capitalism, flooding markets with cheap, life-extending and health-improving drugs and vowing to take down the human world with economic weapons of their own making. This has the humans initiating some pretty intense Sentinel programs, particularly around the sun, where Nimrod – the adaptive Sentinel whose existence dooms mutantkind in one Powers of X future – was very nearly created. 

And amidst all of that, Moira MacTaggert, the secret mutant mastermind with the power of Groundhog Lifeing (when she dies, her consciousness is immediately transported back to her prenatal self to be born again with all her old memories. She’s on life ten now, btw), is frantically trying to manipulate events so that mutants continue to exist in the long run as the next phase in human evolution, averting a future where man-machine hybrids (like Omega Sentinels and the Children of the Vault) develop while humans and mutants are busy fighting among themselves. She’s also not allowing Charles and Magneto to revive any mutants with precognitive powers, expecting them to see her plan and ruin Krakoan civilization.

X-Men

X-Men, by mastermind Jonathan Hickman with art mostly from Leinil Yu, is where big ideas are being seeded for later use.

This is where the story of Krakoa and its estranged, otherdimensional partner Arakko was further developed (following its introduction in Powers of X and setting up X of Swords, the first mutant crossover of the Dawn of X era). X-Men introduced Hordeculture (think the Golden Girls if they were also ecoterrorist botanists); reintroduced the Children of the Vault; showed how depowered mutants get in line to get their powers back; and saw Magneto and Apocalypse threaten humankind with the most terrible weapon of all: finance capitalism.

New Mutants

It also, just prior to the break, X-Men had a spiritual crossover with New Mutants, initially a split book by Hickman and Rod Reis on the space issues, and Ed Brisson, Flaviano, and Marco Failla on the Earth issues. Brisson, Flaviano and Failla’s story follows a group of Earthbound mutant kids (including Glob Herman and Boom Boom) as they track down stragglers to Krakoa, like Beak and Angel.

Hickman and Reis took the original New Mutants plus Chamber and Mondo into space to go pick up Cannonball (who was living on Chandi’lar with his wife, Smasher). On the way there, they stole a King Egg from the Starjammers and brought it back to Earth, where it turns out, we discover in X-Men, the King Egg is a bioweapon created by the Kree to control the Brood for an eventual war with the Shi’ar. Broo, the supersmart mutant Broodling from Wolverine and the X-Men, eats the egg and becomes the Brood King.

Excalibur

Excalibur is the shining star of the line so far. Tini Howard and Marcus To are growing the mythos of mutant magic with a very odd team that includes Betsy Braddock (now back in her original body and the new Captain Britain); Rogue and Gambit; Jubilee and her mysteriously dragonified son Shogo; new earth mage Rictor; and Apocalypse, who is clearly up to some stuff. Apocalypse picks a fight with Otherworld and places a newly resurrected but still batshit Jamie Braddock on the throne of the magical realm.

Excalibur was one of the first books to return from hiatus, and it came back with maybe the best single issue of the entire relaunch in issue #10. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Marauders

Marauders launched as the story about the Hellfire Trading Company, the corporate arm of Krakoa that distributes the miracle drugs around the world while also smuggling mutants in trouble home to Krakoa. But Gerry Duggan and Matteo Lolli’s book quickly turned into the mystery of Kitty Pryde – why she’s not able to use the Krakoan gates that allow instantaneous travel around the galaxy, and whether she can be resurrected by The Five. That story has just about come to a head, but it is worth noting that it still contains a great deal of Hellfire Trading Company intrigue between Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw, and a lot of drunken pirate antics. The resurrected original Pyro does get a tattoo of the Marauders skull on his face at one point. It’s fun.

X-Force

X-Force, by Ben Percy and Joshua Cassara, immediately killed Professor X. He was resurrected, of course, but it served as both a notice that everyone is fair game, and alongside Marauders, keeps some slight mystery to character death alive post-The Five’s perpetual resurrection machine. It’s also the story of the Krakoan CIA, so it sets up the global threats facing the mutant nation, and then sends Wolverine to get cut in half fighting them. Also, Forge creates a bio-mech loader suit and smashes the two halves of Logan back together at one point. If that’s something you find yourself chuckling at, this book is going to exceed expectations.

Fallen Angels

Fallen Angels focused mostly on resetting the current Psylocke’s status quo. Kwannon was brought back to life and placed in her old body shortly before the reboot (very quickly: Spiral switched Psylocke and Kwannon’s bodies, then before they could be reverted, Kwannon got the Legacy Virus and died, then when Betsy used a villain’s powers to recreate her old body and reinhabit it, Kwannon…uh…got better…). Here, she teamed with X-23 and Cable, with ops backup from Mister Sinister, to track down Apoth, a technological being selling cybernetic drugs to humans.

It’s mostly setup for Psylocke, X-23 (now Wolverine again, I think), and Sinister while adding another technological foe to the mix. It leads almost directly into Zeb Wells and Steven Segovia’s Hellions, a book about Sinister’s team of mutants who are all gleefully, unrepentantly screwed up and are currently on a mission cleaning up some old clones Sinister left lying around.

Cable, Wolverine, and More…

Cable, Wolverine and the Giant Size issues, are still mostly seeding future storylines. Cable, from Duggan and Phil Noto, has only had a couple of issues so far, but it’s brought the Galadorians (the Spaceknights minus ROM, who belongs to IDW now, I think) into mutant orbit and given Nathan a sword for the crossover.

Wolverine, by Percy, Adam Kubert and Victor Bogdanove, has Logan tracking down illicit Krakoan flower dealers, and also Omega Red works for Dracula now. And the Giant Size issues are mysteries piled on mysteries piled on incredible art. Hickman has scripted all three, and so far, Storm caught a technovirus from the Children of the Vault in the Jean Grey/Emma Frost issue (drawn by Russell Dauterman); we find out what’s up with Cypher’s techno-organic arm in the Nightcrawler issue (from Alan Davis); Magneto buys Emma an island from Namor with art from Ramon Perez; and we get actual backstory and incredible Rod Reis art in the Fantomex issue. 

Empyre

The recently wrapped Empyre: X-Men’s opening scene is simultaneously one of the most important to the metanarrative of mutant struggle that’s been developing since the Professor’s “No More” scene in House of X #4 AND the best setup/punchline in any Dawn of X comic. It also starts to deliver on some of the rumored-but-never-announced X-Men ideas that were floated early after the reboot – Angel and M are two of the leads, playing out a little of the boardroom drama we hoped for after an X-Corporation book was rumored.

X-Factor

X-Factor, from Leah Williams and David Baldeon, more or less just launched. It’s about the team investigating and verifying mutant deaths, to put those lives into the queue for resurrection. This feels like the book set up to deliver on the weirdest promises of the relaunch, and the creative team are inventive, fun storytellers, so keep an eye on this. Williams has a very sharp ear for patter and knows her characters well – while it’s not an X-book, Amazing Mary Jane is a stunning accomplishment of delightful character work. Early X-Factor is more of the same, with more mutant high concept.

And all this is leading to X of Swords, the new X-writers room’s attempt to outdo X-Cutioner’s Song: a 22-part Tini Howard-led crossover where everyone swordfights over half of Krakoa. And still dangling in the ether, unannounced but long discussed, are Vita Ayala and Bernard Chang’s Children of the Atom, following a group of mutant teenagers who idolize the X-Men, and a Moira X book that’s expected to fill in some of the gaps in Moira’s many, many timelines. 

The post What’s Happening With Marvel’s X-Men? appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[dccomicsnews]

Review: THE FLASH #750

  [Editor’s Note: This review may contain spoilers]

Writers: Joshua Williamson, Geoff Johns, Francis Manapul, Brian Buccellato, Marv Wolfman, Scott Lobdell

Artists: Rafa Sandoval, Stephen Segovia, Scott Kolins, Francis Manapul, Riley Rossmo, David Marquez, Brett Booth, Norm Rapmund

Colours: Arif Prianto, Michael Atiyeh, Ivan Plascencia, Alejandro Sanchez, Luis Guerrero

Letters: Steve Wands, Rob Leigh, Joshua Reed, Deron Bennett, ALW’s Troy Peteri

  Reviewed By: Derek McNeil

  Summary

The Flash #750: Beginning: “The Flash Age”! The story we’ve been building toward since issue #50 comes to a head! While a supercharged Speed Force wreaks havoc on Barry Allen’s life, a new threat appears on the horizon in the form of the deadly Paradox. Destined to destroy the Flash’s legacy, Paradox sends his herald, Godspeed, to trap the Flash family! Plus, in this special anniversary issue: tales from across the generations of super-speedsters by an all-star lineup of writers and artists!

  Positives

In honour of the 80th Anniversary of the title, DC has reverted back to legacy numbering. Thus, The Flash #750 hits the stands this week instead of the expected 89th issue of the series. “Legacy numbering” means that if the title kept the same incremental numbering through every relaunch of the title, then the number would have naturally progressed to issue #750 with this very issue.

This covers the tenures of DC’s primary three Flashes, Jay Garrick, Barry Allen, and Wally West, and appropriately, all three are well represented in the six stories included. As the current star of the title, Barry merits three stories, while Jay and Wally each get a single, yet important story each.

This first, and main, story is the first chapter of regular series writer Josh Williamson’s “The Flash Age”. I really liked this story, as it mostly gives a break and allows us to catch up with the current status of Barry’s world and the people in it, before pushing into the next big conflict. This makes the story a nice jumping-on point for new readers as well as providing a neat wrap up of the previous story arc.

Most importantly, it shows that Barry and Iris are back together and that their relationship is as strong as ever. In fact, things seemed to be going so well, that when Iris said, “I have something to talk to you about. A surprise”, I was expecting that she might propose to Barry.

Positives Cont.

Unfortunately, this is where the impending conflict cut into the story. Godspeed interrupts this moment, taking Barry to face Paradox. Paradox then gives Barry a choice between giving up being the Flash or fighting for his life against Godspeed. This is where the story leaves off, giving us a rather effective cliffhanger to bring readers back for the rest of “The Flash Age”.

I also love that this story includes several instances of Central City’s citizens showing their gratitude to the Flash for saving their lives or helping them in other ways. It’s a nice touch for an anniversary story. Plus, it provides a nice counterpoint to Paradox’s claims that Barry has been endangering everybody by the effect his powers have had on reality itself. Hopefully, this will help Barry realize that the good he has done outweighs any damage he has caused.

In the second story, Geoff Johns bring us an interesting little tale featuring Captain Cold, set during Wally’s tenure as the DCU’s primary Flash. In this story, we see that what Wally assumes that Cold goes on a rampage for the sole purpose of infuriating Wally.

However, the story shows us that the “rampage” came about unintentionally. Cold merely stumbled into the midst of an armed robbery when shopping at his local corner store. Through a series of misunderstandings, he finds himself in the middle of a confrontation with the Keystone City Police. While this doesn’t excuse Cold for his crimes, this does show how easy it is for events to quickly get out of control for a villain in the DCU.

Positives Cont.

The next story, by Francis Manapul and Brian Buccellato features Barry examining the question of whether the Flash has to be Barry Allen. He does this by using a previously unseen power to send his consciousness through other timelines where somebody else became the Flash instead of him. In each timeline, he finds that someone admirably fills the role of the Flash. He arrives at the moral of the  “Even if it doesn’t have to be me… I”m glad that it is”

However, I have to wonder why the examples of Wally and Jay aren’t enough evidence that that someone else could serve as the Flash other than Barry. I would have thought either would be proof enough to settle the question.

Marv Wolfman, the man wrote the story of Barry’s death in Crisis On Infinite Earths, returns to the character to tell of an interesting encounter between Barry and the Mirror Master. The interesting conceit of this story is that the Mirror Master’s mirrors in the story enact various transformations upon the Flash’s body. These transformations allow artist Riley Rossmo to revisit some of the bizarre transformations over the years, such as the time Abra-Kadabra turned Barry into a walking wooden puppet.

Next, regular writer Joshua Williamson gives us a story of Jay Garrick, set in the title’s inaugural year, 1940. The story centres around an encounter between Jay and the Thinker. However, the most intriguing bit of the story is when a mysterious figure, presumably the Reverse Flash, whispers in Jay’s ear, “They’ll forget you Jay Garrick. I’ve seen your future…”.

Positives Cont.

This seems to be setting up a future storyline involving Jay and the Reverse Flash, which is further borne out by the blurb at the story’s end. This blurb promises, “To be continued in The Flash in 2020″. Unfortunately, this seems to imply that we won’t see the followup immediately, but it is coming relatively shortly.

Also, I noticed that the image on that page also shows Wally and Bart. I hope this means that we will be seeing a full reunion of the Flash Family when this story continues.

Finally, the entire creative team for the Flash Forward miniseries returns to provide an epilogue to that miniseries. Writer Scott Lobdell  continues where that story left off, creating a bridge between it and the upcoming Generation Zero: Gods Among Us and subsequent Generation One to Five specials.

While little is known about this upcoming event, it has been speculated that it will involve a major shift in DCU continuity. That speculation seems to be borne out in this story, where Wally, now wielding the power and knowledge of the Mobius Chair, exams the current state of the DC Universe’s continuity.

It has been my theory for a while now that the time itself is unravelling in the DC Universe, and this story confirms that. Wally looks through his own personal timeline and sees that multiple contradictory events seem to concurrently exist in the current continuity. The original Silver Age origin of the Teen Titans happened as Wally remembers it, but the New 52 Teen Titans also exist as the first group to call themselves by that name.

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The Flash #750 1940s Cover

The Flash #750 1950s Cover

The Flash #750 1960s Cover

The Flash #750 1970s Cover

The Flash #750 1980s Cover

The Flash #750 1990s Cover

The Flash #750 2000s Cover

The Flash #750 2010s Cover

Positives Cont.

I must also interject that it’s great to see that Wally remembers the original Teen Titans costumes, and not the New 52/Rebirth re-imagined versions of the original outfit – even down to Robin’s short pants.

Wally confronts Tempus Fuginaut about the state of the DCU, stating, “Everything. Time. Space. Reality. It’s all broken. It all risks collapse”. And if there is any doubt about the severity of the situation in the reader’s mind, the story itself drop many significant keywords that indicate big reality-changing events in DC history: “Crisis”, “Flashpoint”, “Doomsday”, “Rebirth”, and others.

Truly, the DCU is reaching an important turning point. But there we are given ample reason not to dread this. When Fuginaut asks if Wally is up to the task of repairing this damage, Wally West, the DCU’s symbol of hope and rebirth replies, “My name is Wally West. I’m the Fastest Man Alive. I sit on the Mobius Chair. The power of a God races through me. So yeah. I got this”.

This speech gave me chills and reassures me that whatever the Generation special lead to, it bodes well for the future of the DCU.

Besides the amazing lineup of artists in each of the stories, there are also fine selection of pinups, as well as the multitude of gorgeous variant covers. I love the look of the decade covers. Especially, with the care taken to match the title logo and DC symbol for each time period. DC does pull out the stops to make sure these anniversary events look truly amazing.

    Negatives

However, there is a nasty side to all these variant covers. This is a book with a $7.99 cover price. But with ten different covers (including the blank cover), that’s almost 80 bucks. Now I didn’t mind this when Action Comics and Detective Comics reached issue #1000. That’s a once in a lifetime milestone. Now DC is doing the same for Wonder Woman and The Flash reaching #750, which is a bit much, but okay. But DC has announced similar 80th Anniversary events for Robin, Catwoman, The Joker, and Green Lantern. That’s one or two of these expensive specials a month. Such a cash grab is excusable when it is once in a blue moon, but DC is venturing into the realm of highway robbery. Please, DC! Have mercy on my bank account!

  Verdict

  Review: The Flash #750 Review: THE FLASH #750 Writers: Joshua Williamson, Geoff Johns, Francis Manapul, Brian Buccellato…

[evien-stark]

✧I Need You✧ Chapter 18 [5%]

It was sad when life had to eventually resume. A week into the new year you found yourself up on the back pathway of the mansion as he flew off into the sky. It was pointless to stand there and watch him disappear into the distance, but part of you couldn’t help it. You’d done it a few times now, and every single one you wondered if it would be the last time you’d see him. And you weren’t sure whether or not you wanted that ache to dull.

“The Ten Rings have a ship boarded and locked.” A military operation he was honing in on, if only because they were behind it. It helped his case a little bit that the Navy couldn’t free their own men, but hustling in on a government operation was asking for trouble.

Tony had been furiously researching every little thing he could find on the Ten Rings. The people that had kidnapped him. Every time he went out after them you remembered Coulson’s warnings in the debrief, “They’re not to be trifled with.”

And yet Tony was keen on doing a whole lot of trifling. As JARVIS read out the mission clear log hours after, you started wondering if it was just blind revenge. For someone that claimed he wanted information, all those operations ended up in every single terrorist dead. You also wondered if that was going to take a toll on him sooner rather than later.

Playing good guys versus bad guys… taking lives…

“I don’t remember asking for your help.” Nick Fury’s voice came over the computer in the lab and you turned away from your Stark Industries work to tend to your Iron Man work. He looked mad from his little square on the desktop. “Inserting yourself into my missions is begging for trouble. You want trouble?”

“As I heard it, your boys were stuck. So you can send a check to the office.” You were simultaneously scared and at the same time unafraid of Nick Fury. Mostly because you knew showing fear to him was probably the worst mistake you could make.

“Haha. Very funny. You think you’re cute, huh?”

Tony’s face came up on screen next to Fury’s. “As a button, I’ve been told. But really it’s more my chiseled handsomeness that people comment on the most.”

“How are you two gonna turn me down and then keep sniffing around my operations? You’re lucky you haven’t been dragged to a black site.” Despite his threats, he didn’t sound like he was even close to thinking about going through with them.

“What about something more like a gold site? Maybe a light cobalt?”

“Keep yucking it up, Stark. Yap, yap, yapping away.” You were wisely choosing to stay out of this as much as you could. “If I send you another packet you’d better sign your names to it. Otherwise keep out of my business. Or else.” And just like that he was gone.

“Or else. Pfft.” He was also resolved to be unafraid of Nick Fury and SHIELD.

“Maybe we shouldn’t keep pushing him, Tony.”

He made a face at you. “Look, when the guy stops coughing up dime-store villain lines, I’ll consider it. Until then, we’ve got work to do that they clearly can’t.”

You twirled a pencil around between your fingers. “It’s all fun and games for you, but if he comes after me, I don’t exactly have a bullet-proof suit to climb into and fly away in.” All you had were mind games. Ones you weren’t even good at. Ones you didn’t really want to be good at. It wouldn’t serve you if agents dropped in in the middle of the night and carried you off, anyway.

“About that...”

“No, Tony.”

“I’ll paint it your favorite color.”

“No.”

The world could only handle one Iron Man.

And you could barely even handle that. But for him, you’d press on.

                             ------------------------------------------------------

  “So you think it’s right for Tony Stark to operate a weapon unauthorized by our military?” Valentine’s Day and you’d rather be doing anything but getting yelled at by a Fox News correspondent. “We call that vigilante justice, and it’s punishable by law.”

“Tony has been protecting people. Saving people. Saving countless lives. Destroying weapons aimed at innocent people. Cleaning up a decades long mess that no one else has had the means to put a stop to.”

“Who gave him the right? Certainly not me! Here at Fox News we don’t condone vigilantes!”

“Is the peaceful silence hurting your bottom line?"

 You got in real trouble for that one. But it was worth all the undignified screams that came with it. For all the anchors did decrying Stark Industries and the mad woman sitting on the throne aside mad self proclaimed king Tony Stark, stocks shot through the roof. That may have had more to do with tentative whisperings about the Stark Expo relaunching. But you’d take well deserved victories where they came.

The world was different now. The louder, angrier, more violent voices were fading into the shadows. Scared they’d be heard by Iron Man and snuffed out. No one wanted their locations found. No one wanted their weapons destroyed. For once murder rates dropped. Killings stopped. War came tumbling down.

Some things about it still bothered you. Would always bother you. But you could only ever show a brave face and make sure you stood by Tony’s side. That was your job.

Besides that…

You loved him.

And as long as it kept making sense, as long as he didn’t fall down the path of Obadiah, choosing who lived and who died gleefully or start trying to turn a profit off of Iron Man’s activities… things would be okay. The fact that he’d turned down several military hearings and briefings and requests was all the proof you needed. It felt like every day those tensions were growing.

No more so than when the military tried to use him. “Thanks for taking the heat.” His voice and face came from your laptop in the early AM, just past three.

You’d been unable to sleep, not unusual when he was out. The bed was too empty to sleep in, so you’d curled up on the couch. Waiting. Waiting for this. “Just doing my job.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen that shade of red on TV.”

“She basically blended into her dress.” Snorting to yourself, taking a long sip of tea that had gone cold some time ago. “Are you on your way home?”

“Couldn’t get there faster if I tried.” The real reason he’d called, no doubt. Even so far away you could tell. He was upset.

You cradled the laptop closer. “What happened?”

“I know the military has been in a real hole since I pulled out of weapons, but letting Hammer take a lead on anything- how desperate can you get?” It sounded pretty bad. But you were already well aware. As soon as you’d read Hammer’s name on the dossier in the file, you knew this mission wasn’t going to be an easy one. A B-2 bomber had been charged across enemy lines inside a Hammer transport. It was very likely he was the sole reason Tony had been asked to come in.

“What did he screw up now?”

“He blew a whole mission on promises that his tech worked the way it was supposed to. Am I the only one with a brain out here?” He shook his head softly, roll of his eyes. “And Ross has another thing coming.”

That would be General Thaddeus Ross, who had asked for Tony’s help on a rescue mission. You worried, briefly, that lives had been lost. No doubt a fault of Ross, but Tony would shoulder the blame. A setup? “Talk to me, Tony.” If he was about to be thrown under the bus, purposefully, you needed to know everything.

His eyes squared on the camera, looking as if he was staring at you briefly before they shifted slightly, looking at your video window instead. “They were putting things where they shouldn’t have been, and got caught red handed. They fed me bullshit and sent me in on a shoot-to-kill. They told me it was Ten Rings activity. But it was just… soldiers fighting their own war.” Shaking his head again, eyes dropping for a few seconds. “They tried to trick me into murdering everyone there to cover up their own trail.”

“And blaming you if it ever got out.” It chilled you to your core, thinking about that. The military trying to use him like that. Like old times. Yet it somehow was completely unsurprising. “But you realized it.” Why else would he be debriefing you like that- talking to you, you reminded yourself. Not everything was a mission. You couldn’t let it be.

“Of course I did. On the list of people who think they’re smarter than they actually are, General Ross is sitting pretty right underneath Justin Hammer.”

You nodded. Foolish of them to think they could get one up over him. Even if you had worried. A thought you’d keep to yourself. “So you stop accepting pleas from them, if they can’t be trusted to do the right thing.”

“I’m nobody’s lapdog.” His tone had grown hard. “That is the last time I let someone talk me into flying into a war zone where I can’t tell who the good guys are and who the bad guys are.”

By contrast, you softened your own voice. “You know now.” There was a boom on the front landing, all metal and shockwave. “You’re home?”

“I just got in. Give me a minute, I’ll be right up.” With that his call ended and you couldn’t help but snap your laptop shut and move to stand. He’d still have to get the suit off, but that was no longer a thing you were shy about seeing. And even if he would be upstairs in just a couple of minutes…

It had been days since you’d seen him last. And he seemed pretty slighted. Good will carried you downstairs to the semi-darkened lab. The process of unpacking the suit had gotten much better. You knew Tony had been tinkering with it for a while. He was already out of it, standing at the computer console, pulling on a long sleeved shirt.

Something he did very abruptly as you opened the lab door, startled. “Couldn’t wait one minute? I mean, I know I’m irresistible, but stroking my ego this late in the evening seems like a pretty bad idea.”

Despite him being absolutely right about that you went to put your arms around him, giving him a little squeeze. “Welcome home.”

Easy satisfaction rolled through you when he hugged you back, a little tighter than usual. “Thanks.” His hands went to your shoulders, holding you at arm’s length. Just taking a good look at you. You let him… but there was this new sense of unease. You weren’t sure if it was just you… “Really. I’ll be right there. I just have to update my files.”

You gave him a little nod. “Do you want me to make you some tea?”

“Tea sounds great.”

Leaning up on your tiptoes you pressed a light kiss just underneath his cheekbone. You hadn’t seen him in a few days and just a touch of neediness found its way to you. Between his missions and work… he was very clearly still devoted to you.

Things were good.

You were happy, if not exhausted from work and worry. And he seemed…

How did Tony seem?

“How does tea in bed sound?” You dropped your tone. You weren’t an expert at flirting, but he didn’t need your senses to hear the promises there.

“Like a dangerous adventure.” His grin was weary and you immediately felt bad for choosing now of all times. Now was not a good time. He’d just been pushed around by Ross. Had just flown hours to get home.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. You kissed him on the other cheek, apology in your smile. “Tea and then bed.” Changing up the meaning entirely.

“Sounds perfect.”

You didn’t need much more of an excuse to run off and hide your embarrassment. Lucky he hadn’t called you out on it. He really must have just been exhausted.

                              ------------------------------------------------------

 He waited until she was all the way up the stairs and setting a kettle on the stove to lift his shirt again. “JARVIS, have the readings come back from the suit?” He kept his voice low despite the fact there was no way she’d be able to hear him.

“Yes, sir. Blood toxicity levels at 5%.”

The beginnings of a terrible, angry black etchwork had started lining his skin around the Arc Reactor. He’d gotten lightheaded and actually lost consciousness for a few seconds on the flight home. He couldn’t let that happen again. “What’s on the books for Palladium poisoning? Tell me green tea is the cure.” Slumping to sit in his desk chair.

“Unfortunately no, sir. There is no viable research into Palladium poisoning. There is no known cure.”

He sat with that diagnosis, staring blankly out into space. “How about that. We’ll figure something out.” What other choice did he have? “...in the meantime, run me a quick calculation- at the current rate of spread, how long do I have until I don’t have any longer?”

“My current estimate with lean for faster spread as time goes on… I’d say by the end of May.”

A breath of air escaped him, eyes closing, grinning to himself, shaking his head. “So. Either the best birthday present I’ve ever given myself or the last.” A cure- a workaround... or nothing. No other choice.

“Shall I inform Ms. INY?”

“No.” More guttural noise than anything as it exploded out of him. “Not a word. This goes under prime executive files. She can’t know.”

“With all due respect sir, I think you should allow her-”

“I don’t need your respect. Or what you’re about to tell me. You’re not telling her. Are we clear?” She couldn’t know about this. He couldn’t do that to her. He just couldn’t.

“...yes, sir.”

“Window some simulations for element replacement. Don’t wait up for me.” He pushed himself on his feet, knowing if he spent any more time there she’d grow suspicious. He had to keep this away from her. A daunting task on its own considering the thing. He just needed a clear head. And…

To not think about how soon May was coming.

There at the stove she was leaned half over two cups of tea, dunking bags in and out. When she saw him approaching she looked up and smiled like she’d just seen the stars for the first time. It killed him. “Let’s go to bed, honey.”

“Honey. That’s new.”

He put an arm around her and took the offered mug of tea in his other hand. “Trying it out.”

She hummed something soft in thought. “Try it out a few more times.”

“Yes, dear.” Smiling as she lightly elbowed his side.

“One thing at a time, I can only handle so much excitement.”

Her laughter got him going. Quiet and tired. Just basking in the enjoyment of each other’s presence. Upstairs she moved away to sit cross-legged on the bed, staring up at him again with those big wondering eyes. Unable to help himself, he sat next to her, reaching a hand up to cup the side of her face, holding her close, relishing in the close of her eyes and that soft sweet sigh as she leaned into his palm. As he kissed her it only became clearer.

 She can’t know.

She can’t know.

[royalsandchill]

My opinion (in bold) of this sugary sweet article about the influencing power of Meghan Markle. 

The Duchess is certainly familiar with how things in this space work, given her pre-royal career as an actress with her own lifestyle blog. But when Meghan was serving as a representative of the Queen, and receiving public funding, there were numerous rules and protocols she had to abide by—one of which governed the type of gifts she was able to receive.For designers and retailers, Meghan Markle's influence cannot be overstated. Almost everything she wears sells out—even faster if it's at a relatively affordable price point—and her royal stamp of approval can boost a brand's sales in a way few other people can.

Bianca Gates, the co-founder of the shoe brand Birdies, which Meghan has worn publicly on multiple occasions, says the so-called "Markle Sparkle," is the kind of marketing "you cannot buy."

Maybe at one point, sure. But I haven’t heard about that happening for a while now. Not only that, but some of the brands she has worn recently are experiencing backlash, some due to business practices (Stella McCartney) and some due to their response to aspects of COVID-19 (Victoria Beckham). The “Markle Sparkle”, something I have hated since the first time I heard it, is wearing off.

But now that Harry and Meghan have stepped away from their senior roles in the royal family, Meghan's endorsement, at least in theory, might be for sale.

Meghan’s endorsement is definitely for sale. Is that the point of this article? I’m starting to think it is, to let people know she’s for sale. 

It seems unlikely that Meghan would become a full-fledged company spokesperson, endorsing products. And even if the Sussexes relaunch their social media presence, I don't think she'll be doing sponsored posts anytime soon. That kind of overt promotion would be an extreme shift in her own personal brand. But it does seem possible that Meghan might begin to receive free clothes and products, from brands hoping she'll be seen sporting their wares.

She was endorsing products when she was still in the family! Though I think she thought she was being subtle about it. She wore three huge Pippa Small rings and one bracelet on her right hand to Eugenie’s wedding, an event where she was going to be photographed, and she happened to put her right hand up to her chest, perfectly showing off every piece of jewelry. I doubt that’s coincidence. Side note, that was all gaudy and ostentatious. 

The Duchess is certainly familiar with how things in this space work, given her pre-royal career as an actress with her own lifestyle blog. But when Meghan was serving as a representative of the Queen, and receiving public funding, there were numerous rules and protocols she had to abide by—one of which governed the type of gifts she was able to receive.

She continued to be familiar with it while she was in the family. 

Christine Ross, the creative director of Effervescence Media Group, a company that runs the popular royal fashion blog Meghan's Mirror, agrees. She thinks Meghan might begin to receive gifts from companies, but that she'll choose what to accept "responsibly."

"If an independent woman-owned brand reaches out to her and says 'Would you like to learn more about our brand, we’ll send you a necklace,' I could see that possibly happening," Ross says.

"But Meghan knows how influential her fashion choices are and how much of an economic phenomenon the Meghan effect is. We’ll never see her Instagramming flat tummy tea."

I don’t know where to start with Meghan’s Mirror. There’s something shady going on there, but I can’t put my finger on it. I also doubt that she will stick with “independent woman-owned brands”, she will go with what makes her money. 

In the end, this is insanity. They had a fraction of the followers others had on Instagram, even when they were royals (some of which were bots, allegedly). People seem to be losing interest in the celebrity culture ,across the board, as we try to recover from a worldwide pandemic. They are no longer royals, she really hasn’t started working much as an actress, and that means that they’re a drop in the celebrity ocean. General public doesn’t care about them, as evidenced by their low television ratings recently, many royal watchers can’t stand them, and I don’t know if they have the worldwide appeal that they think they do. She has managed to piss off so many people in the underhanded way she goes about business and that does not translate well as an influencer. 

[alpha-centari27]

If you’re unhappy with The Rise of Skywalker, and hoping that the holy grail of the #AbramsCut will make you feel vindicated, here’s some relevant news: The Abrams Cut is probably bullshit, but there might be yet another Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly script for Episode IX, that could be the answer to everyone’s unrealized Star Wars dreams.

According to writer and Hollywood insider Robert Meyer Burnett, at least one version of Trevorrow’s unfilmed Episode IX was called Duel of the Fates, and, even if you loved Rise of Skywalker, this leaked script sounds pretty incredible. On Monday, Burnett dropped a lengthy description of the unfilmed, alternate Episode IXon YouTube, and the details are compelling.

The trouble is of course, in determining the validity of the script Burnett claims to have read. Published on his YouTube channel, “Robservations,” Burnett talks for about 18-minutes about his background before getting into the nitty-gritty of the alleged Duel of the Fates script. Presumably, Burnett is making it clear that he’s been in and around Hollywood for a long time, and it’s not that weird to get your hands on an unfilmed script.

“Everything is gettable,” he claims, pointing out that after a movie is actually made, the interest in unfilmed versions of the movies is less important to the general public. Historically, he has a point, but relative to Star Wars, there’s obviously a huge interest (particularly now). Burnett also goes out of his way to sort of obscure how he got ahold of this supposed early Trevorrow draft of Episode IX, and even “jokes” at several points that “maybe I made this all up.”

On paper, the fact that Burnett cops to maybe inventing the script could scan as an admission that the whole thing is fake. But, the problem is, Burnett’s background indicates he has no reason to lie. Unlike full-time leakers like Jason Ward or infamous fake-Star-Wars-news guy, Mike Zeroh; Robert Meyer Burnett is a legit filmmaker who’s worked in Hollywood as a director for a long, long time. Along with Mark Altman, he co-wrote and directed the 1999 film Free Enterprise; a romantic comedy about two Star Trek fans who happen to meet William Shanter IRL. (It’s a pretty good movie!)

Burnett also is known for his work on DVD and Blu-ray special features and if you own any of the Star Trek series on Blu-ray or DVD, the chances you have at least one or two mini-documentaries produced and directed by him are pretty high. He also appears regularly on the podcast Inglorious Treksperts with Mark Altman (a huge, and respected journalist and producer of sci-fi/fantasy shows like The Librarians and Pandora). So it’s not like Burnett is a fanboy. He may be outspoken about his opinions on the directions of various franchises and has frequently tweeted out scathing viewpoints on the direction of Star Trek since its relaunch on CBS in 2017.

I don’t share Burnett’s viewpoints on Discovery, but even if he’s not everyone’s cup of Earl Grey, the reality is, he’s a guy who has worked in Hollywood for a long time and knows a thing or two about sci-fi franchises. So, the question with this Star Wars Duel of the Fates leak is: Why would he make this up and risk ruining his reputation?

Inverse has reached out to Burnett for clarification on a few aspects of the Duel of the Fates script and he has yet to respond. We will update this piece when he does. But for now, here are six major differences between the alleged Duel of the Fates script and The Rise of Skywalker.

Spoilers ahead.

6. The title and crawl

First off, you can tell right away this would have been a different movie. “Duel of the Fates” obviously references the John Williams composition of the same name, which was such a big deal in Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Here’s the alternate crawl:

The iron grip of the FIRST ORDER has spread to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. Only a few scattered planets remain unoccupied. Traitorous acts are punishable by death.

Determined to suffocate a growing unrest, Supreme Leader KYLO REN has silenced all communication between neighboring systems.

Led by GENERAL LEIA ORGANA, the Resistance has planned a secret mission to prevent their annihilation and forge a path to freedom…

5. Luke Skywalker’s role was much bigger

In this version of the story, the ghost of Luke Skywalker would have had an ongoing role throughout the film, and he wouldn’t just have been helping to train Rey. In this version, Luke’s ghost haunts Kylo Ren, too. In fact, Kylo Ren’s very first scene in the movie would have involved the ghost of Luke chastising him for going down the dark path. According to Burnett, Luke’s ghost says: “This is where the dark path leads; an empty tomb.”

This is pretty interesting, and clearly is a direct follow-up to Luke’s threat to Kylo Ren in The Last Jedi: “If you strike me down now, I’ll always be with you.” So, in the Duel of the Fates version, Luke takes that pretty literally, following Kylo Ren around, bugging him about being evil.

Luke also trains Rey in this script, (who is rocking a double-bladed saber from the very beginning) and even has a debate with her about the nature of the “balance of the Force.” In what seems like a meta-criticism, Rey questions Luke’s credibility in a pretty awesome exchange:

Rey: Balance? The dark suffocates the light, light extinguishes the dark. Over and over and over again. How is that balance in the Force?

Luke: I know that anger. My father had it too.

Rey: So says my master and his master before him. A thousand masters so eager to tell us how to live.

This is clearly very different than the chummy Luke and Rey we saw in The Rise of Skywalker. 

4. Palpatine is in one scene and he isn’t Rey’s grandfather

The dead speak! Only this time, it’s through a hologram. Just like in The Rise of Skywalker, Kylo Ren does return to the planet Mustafar, but it’s to get a Sith Holocron, not a “Wayfinder.” In this scene, the Emperor reveals to Kylo Ren that he had a back-up plan for Darth Vader if Luke and Vader ended-up being the last two Sith standing. In this recorded message, Palps tells Vader to go the planet Remnicore because there’s a secret Sith master hiding there named Tor Valum.

The Emperor is not alive, and Rey is not related to Palps in this version of the story. Also, the version of Mustafar that Kylo Ren hits-up is very clearly Darth Vader’s castle and not the random woodland area of the planet we got in The Rise of Skywalker.

As for Tor Valum, secret Sith Lord, it’s not explained how the existence of this new character would have been reconciled with the Sith “rule of two,” if at all. But Burnett does say the script describes Tor Valum as “7,000 years old” and “an alien of unknown origin [with] spindly, intense sinewy muscle…very Lovecraftian.” So, basically, a Sith monster.

Notably, Kylo Ren’s face would have been badly scarred by the Sith Holocron and he would have been forced to wear some kind of new mask that was partially made of Mandalorian armor.

3. Duel of the Fates would have returned to two hugely important Star Wars planets

According to Burnett, Unlike The Rise of Skywalker, the important events of Duel of the Fates would have taken place on two very pivotal and famous Star Wars planets: Coruscant and Mortis. In this version, the First Order has constructed a galaxy-ruling citadel on Coruscant, with Hux serving as Supreme Chancellor.

Thanks to Luke Skywalker’s journals, Rey discovers a “Force Beacon,” hidden deep within Coruscant, which would allow the broadcast to be sent out to all the possible allies of the Resistance. A subplot involves Rose, Finn, C-3PO, and R2-D2 heading to Courscant to “light the Beacon.” This feels like Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, which is weird, but also pretty cool. It’s very clear Rose had a bigger role in this movie as well. (Burnett claims she’s a major character, but based on the summary it’s hard to see how much more dialogue she has. She certainly has more to do, though!)

Meanwhile, Kylo Ren and Rey would eventually get to the planet Mortis, where they would basically battle to try and balance the Force. At other points in the script, Luke would point out that Rey was “something new” and not related to anyone and that the “Force chose her” for a higher purpose. 

2. Kylo Ren wasn’t redeemed

Although Burnett says Luke, Yoda and Obi-Wan’s Force ghosts would try to “release Ben Solo” in one scene, they aren’t successful and it doesn’t seem like Ben gets redeemed at all. There’s also no overt romance or kiss between him and Rey. It’s also revealed at one point that although Rey’s parents were “nobodies,” that Kylo Ren is actually the one who straight-up murdered them because Snoke told him to do it. (Snoke is not a Palpatine puppet in this version either.)

It’s tough to really see how Kylo Ren would have been redeemed or become the heroic guy we saw in The Rise of Skywalker. Basically, in this version, his journey ends as a giant bummer and in total tragedy.

1. The basic ending would have been similar, but for totally different reasons

Finally, Burnett notes that the idea of “good” Stormtroopers coming to the aid of the Resistance originates in this version of the script, but also says that it’s handled a little more organically. Another subplot early in the script involves the Resistance stealing a Star Destroyer, complete with AT-ATs and TIE Fighters, and then needing an army to operate them. Apparently, the rogue Stormtroopers help fix part of this problem, but, in the end, Lando rounds-up a bunch of smugglers and that fleet of ships seems to help turn the tide against the First Order. Which, though is similar to The Rise of Skywalker, happens for seemingly very different reasons.

Unsurprisingly, the First Order still loses, but the overall conclusion and climax to Duel of the Fates still feels murky. It’s not clear if he only had part of the screenplay or just chose to summarize the ending (or if the whole thing is a hoax) but at this point, it seems like one could imagine a similar ending to The Rise of Skywalker in terms of a space battle, just happening over a decaying Coruscant instead of Exegol (which sounds way cooler).

Is any of this legit? Does it matter? Right now, we don’t know, but if any aspect of what Robert Meyer Burnett presents as Duel of the Fates was ever really under consideration to be the real Episode IX, you have to ask yourself: What happened?

Was Lucasfilm totally against Kylo Ren ending up as such an irredeemable character? Was their pressure from elsewhere to bring in Palpatine back as a legacy villain? For the most part, for all of its specific differences, the broad strokes of this story are relatively the same, at least in terms of the larger galactic politics and the eventual balance of the Force. So we’re in a situation where the Dark side was in the details, and for whatever reason, those details caused a civil war inside of the Disney empire itself.

[elizadoolittlethings]

Mark Gatiss: ‘The League of Gentlemen was a premonition of Brexit’

After a turn on stage as George III, the co-founder of the League is returning to horror to recreate Dracula for TV. What he finds ‘frightening and debilitating’ now, though, is leaving the EU 

by Arifa Akbar

Mark Gatiss is recalling an early memory, rocking back and forth on the sofa as he talks. It is an “extraordinarily vivid” moment from when he lived opposite a psychiatric hospital in County Durham. The institution was central to his childhood, a “colony” in which his mother and father worked, where he went to swim, to trampoline, to see films. Except, on this occasion, he was left on one of the wards with his brother to wait for his parents. “I must have been around five. There was a boy rocking on a bed. As I remember it, he had an empty eye socket. He had his thumb in it and he was just rocking – like this.”

Gatiss takes his thumb to his eye and rocks some more. It is a baroque vision, creepy enough to make you squeal, and befitting for one of the creators of the stage show and TV series The League of Gentlemen. As Gatiss says: “You can’t get more northern gothic, can you?”

It is clear he enjoys playing up the northern gothic. His Twitter tagline reads: “Actor. Writer. Strangler.” In person, there is no hint of gloom. He is sweet and sunny, an optimist by his own admission. Still, an unprosperous northern childhood and those years of observing mental illness – and the world’s responses to it – continue to serve him at the age of 52. He is currently in Nottingham, in rehearsals to play the titular lead in Alan Bennett’s 1991 play, The Madness of George III, at the Nottingham Playhouse. The play – which was adapted for a 1994 film, The Madness of King George, starring Helen Mirren and Nigel Hawthorne – dramatises the monarch’s mental illness.

“It was very interesting [to grow up opposite the hospital]. I have a lot experience to draw on for this play. And it’s interesting to think about mental health in the 18th century … It’s a challenge to chart the king in his ‘normal’ state, as it were, and then what happens to him. You have to make sure there’s a journey into his condition, so you have somewhere to go.”

Brexit is like slitting your own throat and going to bed saying: ‘I’ll see how I am in the morning’

Since the TV version of the League – which followed the tormented outcasts and oddballs of the fictional town of Royston Vasey – landed in 1999 and earned Gatiss and his co-stars a legion of fans, he has helped to create some of the most popular shows on TV. These include the revived Doctor Who (as a writer and an actor) and Sherlock, a reimagining of Sherlock Holmes as a 21st-century detective, which he co-created with Steven Moffat and in which he stars as Holmes’s brother, Mycroft. In between, he has worked on films and written books and plays. His stint in Nottingham follows a nationwide tour ofthe League, an Oscar-tipped film (The Favourite) and The Dead Room, a yet-to-be-aired Christmas ghost story starring Simon Callow, which he wrote and directed. After The Madness of George III, he will team up with Moffat again for a BBC/Netflix adaptation of the vampire classic Dracula. “I do work hard and I think that’s a good thing,” he says. “Work hard, be kind, that’s my motto.”

Filming for Dracula will start next year, but Gatiss does not plan to act in it. He will not be drawn on who will be cast as the vampire, but says he and Moffat thought carefully before deciding to set the series in its original period, the 19th century: “We said when we started Sherlock that we briefly got custodianship of the keys to Baker Street and we felt: ‘It’s our go.’ So, we wanted to have ‘our go’ at Dracula and with that we wanted to do all the treats – a big, spooky castle and the rest of it.”

Sherlock was set in the modern day for the opposite reason: “We felt it had become so swamped with Victoriana that people had lost sight of what it was – which is essentially a flat-share story of two unlikely friends, one of whom solves crimes. That was the really exciting thing, to just go back to basics.” While the series has been a runaway success, there have been criticisms: one Guardian article lamented that his Sherlock was morphing into James Bond; it vexed Gatiss so much that he sent the Guardian a rejoinder in rhyme, outlining the differences between his hero and Ian Fleming’s.

There have been other charges of “unfaithfulness” in Gatiss’s adaptations, but he is adamant about his right to play with an original story. “I feel very strongly about not just drearily reproducing the book. You are duty-bound to think: ‘Here’s an idea, why don’t we flip this round,’ especially if people know it well. It doesn’t spoil the original. No one burns the manuscript … the Tardis would never have left the junkyard in the 1960s if it wasn’t about change.”

And what greater change than a female doctor? The new series is the first with which Gatiss has not been involved since Doctor Who relaunched in 2005. How does he feel about Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor? “First, it’s lovely that I’m enjoying watching it on a Sunday night and not knowing anything about it. I have even tried to avoid the trailer for the next time. And I have said for a very long time that there should be female Doctors. As soon as you watch it, you say: ‘Of course, why not?’ All you need, ever, is for the right person to be playing the part. Jodie is instantly likable, funny, delightfully odd.”

If that is the case, can we – should we – stop at Doctor Who or extend a gender-blind, colour-blind policy to all period dramas? It depends how literal we want to be, Gatiss says, but he balks at the prospect of a female Bond. “Doctor Who is an alien with two hearts who lives in a dimensionally transcendental phone box and can periodically change his or her appearance. James Bond is a man. There’s no way out of that. It becomes a very reductive argument. If you want to create a really kickass new heroine or hero, then do something else.”

If you were to create a female Bond, he adds, would you then follow Fleming’s blueprint of making her a sexist lothario? “What is it about James Bond you want to change? Is it just the sex or is it everything else? In which case, you’ve got a different character anyway.”

Gatiss was not long out of studying theatre arts at Bretton Hall College in West Yorkshire when he co-wrote the League with Jeremy Dyson, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, whom he met there. It has been a long, loyal partnership, even though they went their separate ways – and thrived – before returning after 13 years to take the show back on the road. “We never fell out, we just stopped doing it,” Gatiss says. “We had been doing it virtually day in, day out for 11 years. So, we decided to do other stuff. The extraordinary thing about the tour was that it felt like no time had passed, which is what great friendships are about.”

The League began as a stage sketch show in 1994, when standup was more dominant in comedy. Gatiss and the others were enlisted to fill a slot at a fringe festival. “We did it for five nights and it went down really well. I remember a friend of mine saying: ‘You should do something with this.’” They did – and won the Perrier award at the Edinburgh fringe in 1997. “We did what made us laugh. All the things we loved ranged from proper horror to the horror of embarrassment; Alan Bennett, Victoria Wood, Mike Leigh. It was very much about our northern upbringings, too – we were identifying our own experiences of the world of the north. It was real anger and despair and oddness.”

Bennett turned out to be a huge fan of the League. “It’s how I came to meet Alan and it was just astonishing to think that he liked The League of Gentlemen. We have always said what a major influence he was for us. I remember so well the first thing I saw of his was a play called Our Winnie [from 1982]. I only watched it because Winnie was my mother’s name. It’s a half-hour drama where Elizabeth Spriggs takes her mentally disabled daughter to the crematorium on a Sunday. I just remember looking at it and thinking: ‘How does he know all this?’ It was just like my life! The way people spoke, the colloquialisms and the amazing sense of oppressive Sunday tedium.”

Two decades on, Royston Vasey’s turned-in world seems to resemble Britain more than it did when it was conceived, I suggest – the local shop for local people, the suspicion of the outsider taken to its freakish, inbred, comic extremity. “Yes, I look at it and think: ‘It’s a bit like a premonition,’” he says. “The idea that: ‘There’s nothing for you here, go away.’ That’s why we pushed it a bit in the specials last year. We were never satirical, but we found it irresistible and deliberately got [the character] Edward to say: ‘It’s time we took back control.’”

The tour took Gatiss to 47 venues around Britain. Did he sense a change, post-Brexit? “Yes. Some places are rust-belt Britain. They’ve been abandoned. I thought constantly of Disraeli and ‘two nations’ [“Two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy”]. It made me think that some people must look at the events in Westminster as if they’re taking place on the moon. That’s why, when they were finally given the chance, they kicked back. And that’s why we’re in this fucking mess.”

It is not just the rising intolerance of the “immigrant” outsider that he fears, but also the erosion of other liberal, humanist values. As a gay man – he is married to the actor Ian Hallard – he has never felt personally threatened in London, where he lives, “but you go out of London and it’s very different. You go to certain parts of the country and you think: ‘I would modify my behaviour here.’”

The regions around his birthplace were the heartland for leave voters, but Gatiss is proud to have grown up in the north and in a working-class household: his father was the chief engineer at the psychiatric hospital and his mother was a carer and secretary. “I think my background did me an awful lot of good. There’s a very good line from Doctor Who: ‘Never lose sight of your horizons.’ There’s nothing wrong with coming from one place and moving to another place, but it’s good to know that and honour it. And also to acknowledge its flaws – it doesn’t have to be perfect.”

Brexit upsets him immensely. He speaks of it in irate exclamations and bloody analogies: “Brexit, to me, is like slitting your own throat and going to bed saying: ‘I’ll see how I am in the morning.’ I’m a sickeningly optimistic person and that’s what worries me about how depressed I am about it all. The temptation is to totally disengage because it’s so frightening and debilitating, but if you do that they’ve won.”

The Madness of George III is at Nottingham Playhouse until 24 November

[badgersmash9-blog]

2:00PM Water Cooler 11/13/2018

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

Trade

“Port Tracker report points to increased import activity ahead of next round of tariffs” [Logistics Management]. “United States-bound imports trended down from the pre-holiday peak while still coming in at higher-than-usual levels, with retailers importing merchandise in advance of a coming tariff increase in January, according to the new edition of the Port Tracker report issued today by the National Retail Federation (NRF) and maritime consultancy Hackett Associates…. ‘Imports have usually dropped off significantly by this time of year but we’re still seeing numbers that could have set records in the past,’ NRF Vice President for Supply Chain and Customs Policy Jonathan Gold said in a statement. ‘Part of this is driven by consumer demand in the strong economy but retailers also know that tariffs on the latest round of goods are set to more than double in just a few weeks. If there are shipments that can be moved up, it makes sense to do that before the price goes up.'”

“Growing trade restrictions are triggering tensions between companies in automotive supply chains. … [Q]uestions over tariffs have prompted some blunt warnings between buyers and suppliers and even a lawsuit between a major auto parts maker and a key components provider” [Wall Street Journal]. “Pierburg US LLC says a supplier is trying to exact ‘extortion’ by refusing to ship parts from China unless the 25% tariff cost is paid in full. The disputes highlight the complexity of supply chains that may take in roughly 30,000 individual parts and hundreds of direct or downstream suppliers. The business is underpinned by thousands of detailed long-term contracts that now have big new costs and uncertainty thrown into the mix.”

Politics

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” –James Madison, Federalist 51

2020

Perhaps not entirely safe for work:

Ojeda and Avenatti as candidates are like the guy who thinks good sex is pumping away while you’re making a grocery list in your head wondering when he’ll be done.

O’Rourke is like the guy who is all sweet and nerdy but holds you down and makes you cum until your calves cramp.

— Leah McElrath (@leahmcelrath) November 12, 2018

2018

“Most House Democrats Will Be in Majority for First Time Ever” [Roll Call]. “Of the 227 Democrats who are guaranteed to be serving in the 116th Congress — 10 House races remained uncalled as of Tuesday morning — 58 percent will be new to the majority. That includes 79 members who have served in Congress already and 53 new members. Only 95 Democrats returning next year have experienced life in the majority.” • And I can’t imagine anybody better equipped to show them the ropes than Nancy Pelosi….

Pelosi (1):

Nancy Pelosi: “None of us is indispensable, but some of us are just better at our jobs than others.” https://t.co/R0h3X8auA1

— Taegan Goddard (@politicalwire) November 13, 2018

Pelosi (2):

Now @Ocasio2018 has joined the sit-in by @sunrisemvmt & @justicedems at Pelosi's office calling for a #GreenNewDeal.

Pelosi has planned to relaunch a weak committee from 2008 to "study" the effects of climate change — essentially denying the serious reality of climate change. pic.twitter.com/tSjuJ5OTTU

— Waleed Shahid (@_waleedshahid) November 13, 2018

“Black Lawmakers Set to Assume More Powerful Roles in U.S. House” [Bloomberg]. “The Congressional Black Caucus is on the verge of becoming the most powerful bloc in the U.S. House when Democrats take control in January, with members to lead at least five committees and more than a dozen subcommittees.” • For more on the CBC, see Black Agenda Report: “The Black Political Class? The Congressional Black Caucus? These Joes Ain’t Loyal.” The black misleadership class, BAR calls them.

“Democrats Say Their First Bill Will Focus On Strengthening Democracy At Home” [NPR]. “The bill would establish automatic voter registration and reinvigorate the Voting Rights Act, crippled by a Supreme Court decision in 2013. It would take away redistricting power from state legislatures and give it to independent commissions. Other provisions would overturn the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which declared political spending is First Amendment free speech; they would mandate more disclosure of outside money and establish a public financing match for small contributions.” • We’ll need to see the details, of course, but this sounds good. However, I don’t see anything about hand-marked paper ballots, hand-counted in public. If the ballot system is broken, everything is broken, because no vote count can be trusted.

AZ Senate: “Kyrsten Sinema becomes first Democrat to win a Senate race in Arizona in 30 years” [Salon]. “Kyrsten Sinema has been elected as Arizona’s next senator — as well as the first openly bisexual United States Senator ever.” • She’ll immediately join the “Bisexuals Opposed to Medicare for All” caucus.

CA Leg: “Nearly a Week After Election Day, California Democrats Regain Supermajority in Legislature” [Governing]. “Democrats claimed victory Monday in two state Senate races, giving them back the two-thirds supermajority they lost in June when Orange County Democrat Josh Newman was recalled after he voted in favor of Gov. Jerry Brown’s gas tax increase.” • Great! Maybe now they can fix CalPERS without those pesky Republicans obstructing everything.

FL Vote: “Bay County accepted ballots through email—which state law doesn’t allow: report” [Florida Politics]. “Elections officials in Bay County, a Republican stronghold recently battered by Hurricane Michael, accepted votes via email. The catch: That’s counter to state law.”

ME-02: “Poliquin sues in federal court to stop ranked-choice vote count” [Portland Press-Herald]. “Republican 2nd District Rep. Bruce Poliquin filed a federal lawsuit Tuesday against Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap in an attempt to stop a tabulation of ranked-choice ballots in his race against Democratic challenger Jared Golden.” • This is ridiculous. Poliquin knew the rules going in.

The suit filed in federal court in Bangor is asking for an injunction against Dunlap to stop what would be the first congressional race in the nation to be decided through ranked-choice voting.

“The Week in Public Finance: How Tax Policies Fared at the Ballot Box” [Governing]. “With a few exceptions, voters across the country on Election Day approved statewide proposals to reduce or limit taxes while also widely rejecting any efforts to raise them. But that wasn’t the story at the local level, where several tax increases passed.”

2018 Post Mortems

Why you’ve got to focus on the districts:

I feel like the broad take I come away from 2018 is that voters don’t process ideology the way pundits do and the relationship between campaign coverage, candidate rhetoric, actual candidate positions and actual candidate votes is tenuous. https://t.co/VgVNsSxHBR

— we're going to abolish ICE (@SeanMcElwee) November 12, 2018

Focusing on the districts is something I wish I had had more time to do. It’s not just a useful corrective for the media critique, it’s more important.

“How Did Medicare for All Candidates Fare in the Midterms?” [Splinter News]. “This year, a majority of House Democratic candidates endorsed Medicare for All, according to the union National Nurses United. If you had told me in 2014, or even 2016, that this would happen, I would have frowned at you, walked away, and possibly tried to contact someone who cares about you out of concern for your mental health. This was pretty damn huge….Only seven candidates in the 30 races Cook labeled as toss-ups endorsed Medicare for All; of those candidates, two won, three lost and two races are still undecided, but only one reduced the vote share over 2016. Harley Rouda, who supports Medicare for All, increased the Democratic share of the vote by 10 percent to beat Dana Rohrabacher, per current totals. Incredibly, a district that previously looked at Dana Rohrabacher and said yes, I want him, now wants a guy who supports single-payer instead.”

Realignment and Legitimacy

A very unfair portrait of the Democrats:

pic.twitter.com/BG4IqS9qKB

— Max Jerneck (@MaxJerneck) November 12, 2018

An even more unfair portrait of the Republicans:

For the sake of fairness, I should provide the Republican credo as well pic.twitter.com/qK35PlEml7

— Max Jerneck (@MaxJerneck) November 12, 2018

Stats Watch

NFIB Small Business Optimism Index, October 2018: “Optimism among small business owners remains near record levels” [Econoday]. “Along with glowing business optimism, the NFIB October survey also showed inflation heating up, with the net percent of owners raising selling prices up… The survey results should thus reinforce the Federal Reserve’s resolve to continue in its current policy of gradual increases in the Fed funds rate.” But: “Small Business Optimism Index decreased in October” [Calculated Risk]. “Most of this survey is noise, but there is some information, especially on the labor market and the ‘Single Most Important Problem’…. Usually small business owners complain about taxes and regulation… However, during the recession, ‘poor sales’ was the top problem. Now the difficulty of finding qualified workers is the top problem.”d

Banks: “New Supervisory Rating System for Large Banking Organizations” [Sullivan & Cromwell]. “On November 2, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the “FRB”) issued a final rule (the “Final Rule”) that establishes a new rating system for the supervision of large financial institutions (“LFIs”). The LFI rating system applies to all bank holding companies with total consolidated assets of $100 billion or more…. [T]he new rating system still involves substantial subjectivity in the rating process.[25] Both the capital and liquidity components emphasize planning and risk management, as well as actual financial positions. The governance and control component is inherently subjective. The element of subjectivity may be intensified because an institution will not be considered well managed unless it is rated at least “Conditionally Meets Expectations” for each of the three rating components.” • Well, I imagine that whatever the banks can come up with, including the books, would involve a considerable amount of subjectivity in any case. No worries!

Retail: “How the ‘dark stores’ loophole helps big-box retailers evade millions in property taxes” [The New Food Economy]. “Since 2013, national retailers have successfully sued local governments in Midwest states to lower their property taxes. They claim that assessors shouldn’t determine their stores’ property value based on what they cost to build, or how much money the stores are taking in. In other words, they shouldn’t be taxed like occupied, functioning stores. Instead, say the stores (which also include supermarkets like Meijer, hardware stores like Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Menards, and pharmacies like CVS and Walgreens), the tax assessments should be based on what comparable stores sold for elsewhere. And that’s where things get tricky. For comparison, they’re pointing to so-called “dark stores”—those empty supercenters that blight small-town America…. The retailers were collectively seeking over $700 million in tax revenue.”

Shipping: “Think small when it comes to warehousing” [Logistics Management]. “[A]s the folks [ugh] at CapRock put it in a press release: ‘Typically less than 200,000 square feet in size and in a nearby infill location, and surrounded by housing with substantial purchasing power, small-box warehouses are now the linchpin in the e-commerce ecosystem.'” • My town used to have several small stores. Maybe now we’ll have a small warehouse instead. Exciting times.

Shipping: “Disruption in global oil trade is giving the tanker industry a much-needed boost. Daily freight rates for big crude carriers have soared four-fold to the highest levels in two years, WSJ Logistics Report’s Costas Paris writes, as buying patterns and shipping routes adjust to U.S sanctions on Iran and the trade battle with China” [Wall Street Journal]. “Tanker owners fear the rebound is short-lived, but they’re reaping the benefits now.”

Transportation: “Self-Driving Hotel Rooms May Soon Become a Reality” [Traveler (J-LS)]. “Imagine a world where you no longer fly between your house and your hotel. You drive there. Or more accurately, your hotel room drives you there.” • We call this a “train.”

Transportation: “Driverless cars will lead to more sex in cars, study finds” [MarketWatch]. “People will be sleeping in their vehicles, which has implications for roadside hotels. And people may be eating in vehicles that function as restaurant pods,” Scott Cohen [of Annals of Tourism Research said.] ‘That led us to think, besides sleeping, what other things will people do in cars when free from the task of driving?'” • Indeed. This works if the robot car industry retains today’s ownership model. If robot cars are hailed and rented, a la Uber, not so much. Who wants to find food, or body fluids, in their robot car?

Tech: “Apple’s new bootloader won’t let you install GNU/Linux — Updated” [Boing Boing]. “The chip comes with a user-inaccessible root of trust that allows for the installation of Apple and Microsoft operating systems, but not GNU/Linux and other open and free alternatives…. To make things worse, publishing tools to allow for bootloader overrides is legally risky under section 1201 of the DMCA, which provides for 5 year prison sentences and $500,000 fines (for a first offense) for anyone who trafficks in tools to override access controls for copyrighted works….. Update: After some doing, it’s possible to install GNU/Linux by disabling boot security altogether, though some further tweaking is required.”

Gaia

“Why did the Catastrophic Camp Fire Start Where it Did?” [Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog]. Good use of maps: “The power line failure occurred on the northeast side of a terrain feature, where the canyon narrowed. The terrain features would have blocked the flow and thus the winds could well have been substantially accelerated at EXACTLY the location of the failure.”

“Meat Has a Replacement But No One Knows What to Call It” [Bloomberg]. “Lab-grown. Cell-based. Clean. In vitro. Cultured. Fake. Artificial. Synthetic. Meat 2.0. These are all terms that refer to the same kind of food, one that’s not even on the market yet. But the companies making it have already raised hundreds of millions of dollars worth of investor cash and earned the close attention of U.S. regulators. Rather than methodically slaughtering animals, this industry uses science to grow what it claims is essentially the same thing as traditional meat. Given the planetary damage wrought by mass-market animal husbandry, such cellular agriculture is seen as the future of meat. But what to name it, and getting people to eat it, is another matter altogether.”

Guillotine Watch

“I understand your house is on fire….”

Fuck work. Fuck bosses. Fuck capitalism. pic.twitter.com/VPl3hu7yFp

— Los Angeles SRA (@LA_SocialistRA) November 11, 2018

I would love for this to be a hoax…..

Class Warfare

Interestingly, the Long Island City Amazon so-called HQ is on DSA’s patch. They’re on it. Thread:

As news spreads of a possible Amazon headquarters in Queens, let's review Amazon's history of worker abuses, shall we? https://t.co/3HiP0VGkHA

— New York City DSA 🌹 (@nycDSA) November 6, 2018

And DSA is canvasssing:

Wanna come canvass with us in Queens? https://t.co/F8cTuiKKwY

— Aaron Taube🌹 (@aptaube) November 13, 2018

Amazon is on AOC’s patch as well:

Amazon is a billion-dollar company. The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) November 13, 2018

So certainly the possibility for some interesting dynamics here. Chance for DSA to flex its muscles, if any.

* * *

“UPS Freight avoids strike, plans to accept new volumes ‘immediately'” [Supply Chain Dive]. “Teamsters Local 25 member and UPS Freight employee for 12 years Nicholas Mayo told Supply Chain Dive that closing the network and “threatening closure” of the UPS Freight business, as he described it, left voters fearing for their jobs. ‘Look, I and everyone else that voted ‘no’ understood their need to get the freight out of the system protecting the customers’ interests, but it was the initial planted threat that caused the about-face creating fear amongst those that knew no better,’ said Mayo. The Teamsters’ main issues with the contract as it stands approved are around the prevalence of subcontracting and a two-tiered wage system.” • Ugh. So UPS muscled the Teamsters.

“When low-income families can meet their basic needs, children are healthier” [Boston Medical Center]. Ya think? More: “The study team created a composite measure of hardships that included a family’s ability to afford food, utilities, and health care, and maintain stable housing. All hardships described in the study have previously been associated with poor child and caregiver health. This study, however, examined the differences between children living in hardship-free families versus those in families with any or multiple hardships. In all cities, living in a hardship-free family was associated with good overall health for children and caregivers, positive developmental outcomes for young children, and positive mental health among mothers.”

“The unequal vulnerability of communities of color to wildfire” [PLOS One]. “[O]ver 29 million Americans live with significant potential for extreme wildfires, a majority of whom are white and socioeconomically secure. Within this segment, however, are 12 million socially vulnerable Americans for whom a wildfire event could be devastating. Additionally, wildfire vulnerability is spread unequally across race and ethnicity, with census tracts that were majority Black, Hispanic or Native American experiencing ca. 50% greater vulnerability to wildfire compared to other census tracts. Embracing a social-ecological perspective of fire-prone landscapes allows for the identification of areas that are poorly equipped to respond to wildfires.”

“Plans to microchip UK workers spark privacy concerns” [Independent]. “Several legal and financial firms in the UK are reportedly in discussions with a company responsible for fitting thousands of people with chips in Scandinavia… ‘These companies have sensitive documents they are dealing with,’ Biohax founder Jowan Österlund told the publication. ‘[The subdermal microchips] would allow them to set restrictions for whoever.'” • “For whoever.”

Workerdote:

When you work alone a lot.

pic.twitter.com/DPdkVC5B0i

— laney (@misslaneym) November 12, 2018

News of the Wired

“New Study Details Toxic Particles Spewed by 3D Printers” [Gizmodo]. “A newly published, two-year investigation to assess the impacts of desktop 3D printers on indoor air quality, conducted by scientists at UL Chemical Safety and Georgia Institute of Technology, now overcomes these shortcomings. The results, published in two separate studies in Aerosol Science and Technology (here and here), were not encouraging; in tests, the researchers were able to identify hundreds of different compounds, some of which are known health hazards. These findings come at a time when these low-cost machines are increasingly appearing in commercial, medical, and educational settings.” • Of course. I should have known….

“Mother of Invention” [Nnedi Okorafor, Slate]. Short SF story. The premise: “The post-oil city New Delta is now the greenest place in the world, thanks to the innovative air-scrubbing superplant known as periwinkle grass, a GMO grass created in Chinese labs by Nigerian scientist Nneka Mgbaramuko.” • Also, smart houses.

“Stan Lee, Marvel Comics’ Real-Life Superhero, Dies at 95” [Hollywoood Reporter]. “Born Stanley Martin Lieber on Dec. 28, 1922, he grew up poor in Washington Heights, where his father, a Romanian immigrant, was a dress-cutter. A lover of adventure books and Errol Flynn movies, Lee graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, joined the WPA Federal Theatre Project, where he appeared in a few stage shows, and wrote obituaries. In 1939, Lee got a job as a gofer for $8 a week at Marvel predecessor Timely Comics. Two years later, for Kirby and Joe Simon’s Captain America No. 3, he wrote a two-page story titled “The Traitor’s Revenge!” that was used as text filler to qualify the company for the inexpensive magazine mailing rate. He used the pen name Stan Lee.”

“What Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee Thought About Death and the Afterlife” [E! News]. “‘I don’t fear death. I’m curious. I can’t imagine what it could be like, because I personally feel when you die, that’s the end. It’s the machine that the engine is off,’ Lee said on Hulu’s Larry King Now. ‘But how can there be nothing forever? You know what I mean? I can’t believe it.'”

“The ‘me’ illusion: How your brain conjures up your sense of self” [New Scientist]. “A mind is just an object that some brains can model, and so become aware of. Moreover, it is hard to establish whether this ability is associated with uniquely complex biological machinery.” • Hmm.

* * *

Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, (c) how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal, and (d) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. Today’s plant (EM):

EM writes: “Calocybe carnea possibly but I’m not sure. There are some brownish ones but no pink.” Readers?

* * *

Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser, now completed. So do feel free to make a contribution today or any day. Here is why: Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know I’m on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for five or ten days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of small donations helps me with expenses, and I factor that trickle in when setting fundraising goals. So if you see something you especially appreciate, do feel free to click below! (The hat is temporarily defunct, so I slapped in some old code.)

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This entry was posted in Guest Post, Water Cooler on November 13, 2018 by Lambert Strether.

About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

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West Week Ever: Pop Culture In Review - 6/16/17

  Hot on the heels of the poster reveal last Friday, we got a teaser trailer for Black Panther during the NBA Finals. And it did very little for me. Yeah, I know. Every other Black person I know is, as they say, “hype” for this movie, but I just have never cared about Black Panther as a character. And I know comic book movies require suspension of disbelief, but Michael B. Jordan plays a villain named KILLMONGER! That’s probably the comic bookiest name I’ve ever been forced to take seriously. It certainly looks colorful, and it’s gonna make all the monies, but I’m gonna need to see more before I get too excited.

Let’s talk about Black Panther for a minute, though, as I think people are conflating his comic book success with his appearances in all other media. At the moment, there are currently 3 Black Panther comics on the stands: 1) Black Panther, 2) World of Wakanda, and 3) Black Panther & The Crew. Also at this moment, the latter two have already been canceled. I’ve seen people online saying that Marvel should rethink their stance, considering all the views the trailer has racked up in its week online (22.6 million as I write this). I get what they’re trying to say, but it’s a faulty argument. Their assumption is that people are clamoring for all the Black Panther they can get, when it’s really just this one movie to which they’re looking forward.

When the Black Panther comic was relaunched last year, written by author Ta-Nehisi Coates, the first issue sold over 250,000 copies, which was a rare feat for 2016. Now, however, the book sells about 1/9 of that amount, and is still decreasing. Ya see, Coates was hot shit because of an article on reparations that he wrote for The Atlantic. Why someone thought that would translate into a successful stint writing comics is beyond me. Marvel struck while the iron was hot, though, and they were able to ride the Coates wave, but anyone who’s actually read the comic knows that he’s more about political drama than superhero action. People came to the table to see what he’d offer, but over time they’ve realized they’re not picking up what he’s putting down. Still, Marvel gave him yet another series, Black Panther & The Crew, which probably should’ve been called Black Panther and His Negrotastic Pals. I bought the first issue, but the book was canceled before I even had  the chance to read it, so womp womp. It could be argued that Coates wasn’t the right choice for the book, but I think a better explanation is that Marvel blew their wad too soon. They should’ve been launching these spinoffs in the wake of the trailer, not cancelling them. Still, the damage is already done, so it’s not like they can let them tread water until the movie is released. If anything, they’re gonna have to cancel and relaunch if they want to capitalize on movie buzz. The ship, however, has sailed for the books currently on the market because this trailer is not going to serve as the shot in the arm that some folks seem to believe it to be.

Fox has got the ball rolling on X-Men: Dark Phoenix, the follow-up to the disappointing X-Men: Apocalypse. It will be directed by Simon Kinberg, who has no directing experience by the way, and is slated to be released November 2nd, 2018. And the gang’s all here, with Fassbender, Lawrence, and McAvoy are all coming back. If you remember, they tried to act like they were on the fence about returning after Apocalypse, but I guess they love money too much. Meanwhile, they’re saying that Jessica Chastain is being pursued to play alien Shi’ar Empress Lilandra, who lets Xavier bone her every couple of years. Did I mention that Kinberg wrote X-Men: The Last Stand? Ya know, the LAST time they did the Dark Phoenix storyline?! THE ONE EVERYBODY HATED?! So they’re basically giving him do-over! Everything about this sounds terrible, but we’ll probably get another cool Quicksilver sequence out of it, this time set to La Bouche’s “Be My Lover” or some other disposable 90s pop song.

Normally, I’m all about those stories where they “get the band back together”, so I was definitely surprised when this video hit the Internet this week. I miss the age of the $20 million comedy, where Hollywood was cranking these things out monthly in the mid ’00s. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story was one of my favorites, so I had high hopes for this thing, whatever it was supposed to be. Still, 13 years have passed since the movie, and this “return to the well” felt just as stale as Zoolander 2. Its saving grace is the fact that it’s only 4 minutes long (which still, somehow, feel like an eternity). I don’t even know where to start with this thing. The unfunniness of Stiller? The weak delivery from Christine Taylor? Or the fact that I don’t have a clue as to what the Hell Omaze is? Apparently it raises money for non-profits, but it’s far from a household name. I don’t know if this is the bold step Omaze needed to take to make a name for themselves. “Hey, look – we’re making a mini sequel to a 13 year old movie that didn’t need a sequel!” This thing seems dead on arrival, and I’d love to somehow be able to track the success/failure of this marketing initiative. Ugh, so much potential, squandered.

Bachelor in Paradise had its production suspended this week after accounts of “misconduct” began to surface. According to varying reports, Corinne Olympios from the most recent season of The Bachelor was involved in some pretty “heavy petting”, as your grandma would call it, with DeMario Jackson from season 13 of The Bachelorette. From what I heard, they were both drunk and tried to have sex. DeMario, unfortunately, couldn’t…”ready his soldier for battle”, so he “went downtown” instead. Corinne’s friend, who’s a producer on the show, told her that it’d look bad for her to be getting serviced on camera like that. A lot of other contestants reportedly witnessed the event, and said that the two were even seen canoodling together later that night. Then, Corinne started saying that she couldn’t remember the events of the night, and that she had never given consent for what happened. So now both sides are lawyered up, blaming the other for character assassination and worse. Oh, by the way, if you’re not familiar with Bachelor In Paradise, it’s a spinoff where the contestants are encouraged to get drunk and try to fuck. So…mission accomplished?

The format of the show was just asking for a controversy like this, and I’m amazed that it took this long for something like this to hit the Bachelor franchise. I don’t know anything about DeMario, but the one season of The Bachelor that I watched featured Corinne as the villain of the season. She was constantly boasting of her sexual prowess, saying things like “My ‘vagine’ is platinum.” Her tactic to win the show was to throw herself at The Bachelor early and often. Now, some folks are gonna interpret this as me saying she “deserved” this. If this was sexual assault, nobody deserves something like that. All I’m saying is that she was strategic in using sex to get what she wanted, and quick to cower when it didn’t work out as planned. Bachelor Nick Viall rebuffed all of her advances last season, and she’d end up pouting in her room, or taking a nap during the rose ceremony. She was notoriously immature yet manipulative. Word on the street was that she was up for her own show, but this little episode might’ve jeopardized the chances of that.

The most interesting part of this whole thing is that THEY HAVE THE TAPE! LET’S GO TO THE DAMN TAPE! How damning is that tape that it hasn’t been released yet? The production is most likely over for good, as the contestants have been sent home. The future of the show is in jeopardy because of this ordeal as there doesn’t really seem to be any coming back from this. The reality show fuck house actually turned into a fuck house. I guess their plan worked a little too well. If the show does come back, this is a watershed moment for dating shows, as nothing will be the same after this. Remember how talk shows changed when the Jenny Jones Murder took place? After that, they all became more staged, and Jerry Springer thrived in its wake. Now you can’t trust anything you see during daytime, while a show like Donahue couldn’t exist in the current climate. They’re gonna have to treat future iterations of The Bachelor with kid gloves, which isn’t what people come to see. When folks watch these shows, they wanna see if the contestants are gonna hook up. Now, they realize that standards and practices won’t allow that to be shown, but they still wanna see as much as the network will allow them to see. All these years after Joe Millionaire aired on Fox, folks don’t remember it for its janky premise (poor guy pretends to be a millionaire in order to find love from a pool of gold diggers), but rather for the scene of “Joe” (Evan Marriott) and contestant Sarah Kozer in the woods with some intense slurping on the audio. Lewd, yes, but boundary-pushing for 2003 and everyone was talking about it. The goal of these shows is to produce something to dominate the conversation for a while and, in that case, this whole thing has been a success. Still, there are serious matters at hand that need to be addressed, as folks are losing jobs (DeMario got fired for the allegations), and could also end up in jail.

After something like a year in teases, we finally have our release date for the DuckTales reboot: Aug 12th. The show will premiere on DisneyXD as an hour-long “mini movie”, and then be rebroadcast for the next 24 hours on the channel. Then,  the series will officially premiere on September 23rd, with 2 new episodes. As you saw above, we also got the new credit sequence and theme song. Some of the old fuddy duddies have taken issue with the remixed theme, but I love it. The most surprising thing to me is the new jacked Mrs. Beakley, but I figure there’ll be an in-series explanation for all that.

In the world of toys, Hasbro unveiled the full Netflix wave of Marvel Legends figures, and they look so great. In the beginning, I was scared these were gonna turn out to be exclusive to a particular retailer, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. We already knew about Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Punisher, but the wave is rounded out by Elektra, as well as comic versions of Blade and Bullseye. As an added surprise, there’s a Build A Figure in the form of Man-Thing. That character means nothing to me, but I’ll be buying the whole wave, so someone give me a shout if you wanna buy Man-Thing off me. That’s right, I’m offering my Man-Thing in exchange for money. I think that might be illegal…

Song of the Week

This week’s song is Morgan Wallen’s “The Way I Talk”, mainly because I completely identify with it. If you’ve ever spoken with me, the first question people tend to ask is “Where are you from? You sound SOUTHERN!” Also, I spent more time than I’d like to admit trying to figure out if that actually was a sample from Spacehog’s “In The Meantime” at the beginning (verdict: inconclusive).

Things You Might Have Missed This Week

CMT is seriously considering reviving Tim Allen’s canceled ABC sitcom, Last Man Standing. They already air the reruns, so it seems like a natural fit.

An Injustice 2 eSports tournament will air on TBS in October. We’re really trying to make “eSports” a thing, huh?

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has been renewed for a 4th season at Netflix. One of these days I’ll finally finish seasons 2 and 3…

Aisha Tyler announced yesterday that she will be leaving The Talk at the end of the season, due to her current commitments on Criminal Minds, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and Archer. Plus, she’ll be directing an upcoming film. Yeah, that’s probably enough jobs for one person.

Someone named Anthony Padilla is leaving something called Smosh. Apparently it’s a thing on the YouTubes. If you’ve got a tween, they can probably explain whatever this means.

In an update to something I mentioned last week, Sony has revised their plans to sell clean versions of their movies. Since it was found that the plan violated union contracts, now Sony will only offer clean versions of movies that have been approved by the director.

ABC has renewed “Toy Shark Tank”, AKA The Toy Box, for a second season.

I took a trip down memory lane to talk about the old Toy Biz Customer Service hotline.

In a baffling move, Amazon is buying Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion. I haven’t been as confused about a business deal since K-Mart bought Sears.

When I first started West Week Ever, I came up with a No Death Policy. Even though I get kinda negative on here, I still want it to be a positive place. I have a bit of an odd history with death, as I became acquainted with it at an early age, so I like to stay away from all that. Plus, there’s that problem where if you mention one death, you’ve gotta mention ALL the deaths, and ain’t nobody got time for that – especially if that death didn’t really mean anything to me. Still, when I created this feature, I always knew there would be at least 2 important exceptions. I wasn’t looking forward to them, but given their age and health, I knew it would be something I’d have to tackle eventually. Sadly, one of those deaths occurred last Saturday.

When I was growing up, there were few things I looked forward to as much as the 1966 Batman series, weekday afternoons on Fox 5. While I’d gotten the Super Powers Batman and Batmobile toys when I was around 4, I really didn’t know anything about Batman until I was introduced to that show. Hell, I remember how I used to think Batman could fly. I mean, he had a cape! All people with capes fly, right? Anyway, like any kid, I was mesmerized by the POW! ZAP! BIFF! of the fight sequences. I was on the edge of my seat for the end of episode cliffhanger. I’d tie a sheet around my neck, and shadow box along with the Dynamic Duo as they fought King Tut’s goons. I also had a next door neighbor, Brian, who was a few years younger than me (he was 7 when I was 11, as I remember him thinking that was cool), and he worshipped the ground I walked on. He’d come over, and we’d be Batman and Robin, fighting invisible goons with gadgets I’d made from Construx and jump ropes. My concept of Batman was formed by Adam West and Burt Ward, walking up the side of buildings with their Bat Ropes.

As I grew up, I was introduced to other depictions of the Caped Crusader. I started reading comics in ’92, around the time that the classic Batman: The Animated Series debuted. Those versions of Batman were totally different than what I’d grown up knowing. The environment wasn’t as campy, the world was a darker place, and Batman wasn’t doing the Batusi. Over the years, I’ve had even more versions of Batman that I’ve compared to West’s rendition, but I’ve come to appreciate him even more. While the world around him was wacky, West’s Bruce Wayne/Batman was solid. He was smart, calculating, and always knew more than the folks around him. Can you imagine a “Tower of Babel” storyline (the classic JLA story where Batman takes down the rest of the Justice League using contingency plans he’d set up for all of them), starring West’s Batman? I can, and it would be AMAZING.

It seems life wasn’t too shabby for West offscreen, either. According to several stories, he was quite the hit with the ladies, and even had an 8-woman orgy with Riddler Frank Gorshin. ZOWIE! While he never really achieved mega success with anything else, he still established himself as a cult superstar, with his turn in Conan O’Brien’s failed pilot Lookwell, as well as his role as Mayor West on Family Guy, which introduced him to a new generation of fans. Other actors who portrayed Batman went on to other things. For Clooney, Kilmer, and Bale, the role is just another notch on the IMDB profile, but West WAS Batman. With the exception of probably Kevin Conroy, no one else has been so closely identified with the role as Adam West. At the end of the day, he’s the Batman that I always come back to, and the one to which I compare all newcomers. Adam West, born William West Anderson (hey, look at that!), was MY Batman and I think we were all lucky to have him. No, he didn’t have the West Week Ever. I don’t think that’s enough of an honor to indicate what he meant to me. So, with that in mind, Adam West is the inaugural inductee to the West Week Ever Hall of Fame. Farewell, old chum.

[womenofcolor15]

Gabrielle Union Opens Up About Hair Loss After IVF Treatments, Relaunches Haircare Line ‘Flawless’ + Terry Crews Apologizes To Gabby AGAIN

Gabrielle Union just relaunched her haircare line Flawless, serving up affordable haircare options for black women. And it’s now totally black owned. Get into Gabby’s haircare journey and the latest about her Terry Crews “AGT” drama inside…

Gabrielle Union has been working with her longtime hairstylist and friend Larry Sims to come up with a new line of products that cater to black women’s hair.

        View this post on Instagram

                  Today’s the day! @flawlessbygu is out in the world.... and it’s about celebrating YOU, your personal style, and your healthy hair journey. I hope you can feel the love that went into this Link in bio to shop.

A post shared by Gabrielle Union-Wade (@gabunion) on Aug 3, 2020 at 9:19am PDT

The multi-hyphenated star partnered up with Larry Sims to re-vamp her haircare line, “Flawless by Gabrielle Union,” which she originally launched in 2017. The new line features 12 products, which include co-wash, shampoo, conditioner, a mask, moisturizing treatments and scalp care. All of the products are available on Amazon for less than $10 each.

While undergoing IVF treatments in 2017, Gabby suffered with hair loss as a side effect. She didn’t feel right launching the brand at that time because “I was bald,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. It made her feel like a fraud pushing a product about hair when her own hair wasn't healthy.

”When you're launching a line called Flawless and you feel anything but flawless, you actually feel like a fraud. I didn't feel confident or transparent, and the investors and ownership group we had at the time didn't want to wait for my hair to grow back in,” she spilled.

”They only cared about deadlines, and I wasn't being listened to. I was like, ‘As soon as this time period is up, I want to relaunch Flawless. I want to wrestle back ownership and control of this company.’ And there's no way in hell I can be transparent about my hair journey without including Larry Sims, who was in the trenches crying right alongside me as my hair fell out.”

The “L.A.’s Finest” star said she and Larry discovered natural ingredients that grew her hair back.

”Larry would be like, ‘There's another spot,’ and I would break down every time a new bald spot would open up,” she shared. “We tried every home remedy we could find. So that's where we discovered bacuri butters, raw creatine, biotin, rice oil complex, rice water, aloe, and all of these things that actually grew my hair back. We kept a log of the last two years of my hair growth and of what was working, what didn't work. We literally took a magnifying glass and were like, ‘We've got sprouts! We've got action!’"

          View this post on Instagram

                  Be your most authentic self and live flawless. Out now! Link in bio

A post shared by Gabrielle Union-Wade (@gabunion) on Aug 3, 2020 at 2:05pm PDT

The “Being Mary Jane” star offered up advice to Black entrepreneurs aspiring to experience creative freedom like herself and Larry.

”I cannot say enough about Black ownership. When you do not control a majority ownership of anything, for the most part you have about as much of a say so as your percentage, and if you are just an endorser, that's a goose egg. If you have no equity or ownership in your company, or it's less than 51 percent, it doesn't mean you're going to be listened to. If you have investors that are not Black, they have to be on board with lowering your profit margins. It would actually make Larry and I assholes to figure out how to grow my hair back, create an amazing line, and then price our own people out of it. Everything is between $4 and $10.”

Good gems.

When she first started working in Hollywood, Gabby said she would wear her hair in “safe” hairstyles that gave her that “girl next door vibe.” Later, she began experimenting with weaves, which we know Hollywood loved. In Almost Christmas, she wanted her character to wear braids, so she made a boss move to make it happen.

”In Almost Christmas, I wanted to wear braids,” she told the publication. “They were like, ‘Well, the character's really sophisticated and she's really educated.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, so can I have Senegalese twists?’ There were all these conversations about what constituted an educated, sophisticated, Black, single mom. And braids wasn't it. I was like, ‘Oh, wait, I'm also an executive producer. So let me talk to myself about this. Okay, I've given myself permission.’ That was the first time I dared to buck the system. That was a Black movie. I realized that within our own community, we have different ideas about different hairstyles and what they mean.”

And that’s how it's done!

You can read more from her interview here.

In other news...

In June, Gabrielle Union filed a discrimination complaint in California against Simon Cowell, Universal TV, Syco Entertainment and Freemantle Productions North America. The filing came a week after NBC wrapped its investigation of the events that led to her firing from "America's Got Talent" in 2019.

NBC announced it had found "that no one associated with the show made any insensitive or derogatory remarks about Ms. Union's appearance, and that neither race nor gender was a contributing factor in the advancement or elimination of contestants at any time."

Before the investigation was complete, "AGT" host Terry Crews, who has been doing the absolute most with the absolute least on Twitter lately, was asked about Gabby's racism and sexism claims. He basically threw her under the bus, claiming "AGT" was one of the most diverse sets he has ever worked on and that he never experienced any racism behind-the-scenes. He followed up with tweets saying the only woman he needed to please on this earth is his wife. He later came back and apologized.

  @itsgabrielleu, I want you to know it was never my intention to invalidate your experience— but that is what I did. I apologize. You have been through a lot in this business, and with that I empathize with the struggle toward fairness and equality in the workplace.

— terry crews (@terrycrews) January 31, 2020

  In June, he apologized to Gabby again after he received backlash from comments he made about Black Lives matter on social media.

  It is in this light I want to make further amends with Black women, and in particular @itsgabrielleu for not recognizing the privilege I have - especially in the workplace- and adding this fact to my earlier apology.

— terry crews (@terrycrews) June 4, 2020

  Gabby appeared on Jemele Hill's Spotify podcast "Jemele Hill Is Unbothered" and the sports journalist asked her about Terry's controversial comments.

"People hit me [up] all day long and are like, 'What's happening,'" Gabby said. "And the only thing I know for sure is that Terry Crews gets three checks from NBC. So, I don’t know if being worried about job stability — which, listen, we all know that if you speak up about racism and white supremacy, you absolutely can be shown the door. We are both very clear on that. So, I don’t know if that’s the motivation.”

ICYMI, my guest on @JHillUnbothered is @itsgabrielleu, who opens up about being called a “witch” (and worse) for supporting her trans daughter, Zaya, and keeps it real about Terry Crews.

Download/subscribe FOR FREE. FULL POD -> https://t.co/96B2UDNSFh pic.twitter.com/psbE74BV3Y

— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) July 28, 2020

"People were like, 'Well, you weren't the only Black person on America's Got Talent, and I was like, 'No, I was on there with Terry Crews.' Based on his recent actions, do you really think Terry Crews was an ally, was helpful, was a sounding board? I think Terry Crews is showing us who he is and what he does during times of adversity, and it’s not solidarity.”

After Gabby called him out, the "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" star hopped on Twitter to apologize again:

  This will be my 3rd public apology to Gabrielle Union. If a 4th is needed, I will continue to apologize and push for reconciliation between the world, and more importantly, the culture I grew up in.

I'm sorry, @itsgabrielleu #reconciliation https://t.co/o7RCTcX92b

— terry crews (@terrycrews) August 1, 2020

  "This will be my 3rd public apology to Gabrielle Union," he tweeted. "If a 4th is needed, I will continue to apologize and push for reconciliation between the world, and more importantly, the culture I grew up in. I'm sorry, @itsgabrielleu #reconciliation"

Thoughts?

Photos: Kathy Hutchins/Shutterstock.com

[Read More ...] source http://theybf.com/2020/08/04/gabrielle-union-opens-up-about-hair-loss-after-ivf-treatments-relaunches-haircare-line-%E2%80%98f

[cathrynstreich]

Pet Project or Full-Time Hustle? One Startup’s Story

My name is Steven Wynands and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Peer Reputation. Over 60,000 real estate agents and brokers use our platform to discover and leverage their professional relationships. This is my personal reflection on what happened over our first 12 months that finally gave me the courage to believe in myself and pursue this project full-time. I hope you find it interesting and that it helps you if you’re going through the same decision. 

Facing The Big Decision

I never thought I’d find myself in this position. Saddled with student loans, credit cards, a mortgage, and childcare for two, it would be very irresponsible for me to leave my cushy, government job to pursue my own startup ambitions. I tried to delay this decision as long as possible. I sacrificed sleep so that I could be there for my family and deliver everything my job expected of me. Wishfully, I hoped that the universe would take care of it for me by turning the startup into an overnight success or burying it to the ground. Neither of those things happened, but I did get plenty of signs that helped me make a decision.

Getting Inspired (Again)

I was just one year removed from an unsuccessful real estate startup that spanned two years. I had no intention of jumping into another project, but one afternoon of phone calls changed everything. The first phone call was from a buyer’s agent whose clients were interested in one of my listings. Her call made me uneasy and I wanted to protect my sellers so I made a few more calls of my own. 

I reached out to other listing agents who had recently worked with this buyer agent and was surprised by the responses. I wasn’t connected to these other agents in any way yet they openly shared detailed warnings with me about working with this buyer’s agent. They were eager and grateful for the opportunity to protect other agents and consumers from reliving their nightmares and wished there was an easier way to do so. Thankful and inspired, I called up my friend Steve with an idea.

Starting Up, Extra Lean & First Signs from The Universe

I’ve known Steve since middle school. We worked together throughout secondary school as well as college where we studied computer engineer together at Virginia Tech. We continued working together on projects after graduation including the recent unsuccessful real estate startup. At this point we were each raising two small kids and a bit burned out from long nights and weekends so I approached him with a very simple project based on the phone calls I just had that afternoon. We discussed the backstory and basic specs and agreed to meet a few days later to test out my idea.

The basic premise was simple. I wanted to know if other agents were just as eager to share their feedback to protect other agents and consumers too. To test out this idea I created a list of 600 recently sold homes along with the listing and selling agent information, and Steve coded up a test project to request feedback between these cooperating agents. We built this out on Saturday and Sunday and were ready to launch the following Monday. 

Immediately after launching our test I was prepared to throw in the towel. I thought the experiment had failed and I was just happy to know that we had only spent a few days on it. It turned out that the only failure was my uninformed expectations and analysis. I showed the results of our testing from that day to my brother who enjoys marketing as a Product Manager for Zappos and he was blown away!  He said that we were hugely successful by achieving a 70% total email open rate and 20% email click rate. 

I still wasn’t sure exactly what we were building but I knew enough from his reaction that we had to keep on going. The next week we doubled the sample size and tweaked some wording in our emails and achieved an 80% total open rate and 27% click rate! It was very clear that we were building something that people wanted. We just had to keep it going while we figured out exactly what that thing was.

Product? Market? Fits!

Over the next few weeks, we increased our survey sample sizes and maintained high open and click rates. We received over 10,000 responses in our first month! The manual data loads were becoming so overwhelming that we didn’t have time to work on the platform. I buckled down and focused on creating a web scraper to automate the data routines while Steve worked on building out the infrastructure that could house a richer experience.

Four months after conducting our first test we finally had our platform shell in place. We relaunched our feedback platform more broadly in the same local market and watched the results come in immediately. Now that we finally had a user dashboard, agents were registering and interacting directly with us. A thousand agents registered the first month and I knew we had a hit when they were telling us how surprised they were that this kind of platform hadn’t existed before. They were also asking us for more features! We could not believe how smoothly everything was happening! Things were continuing to ramp up based on user demand.

Traction and Scaling

Eight months into our project, things were going very smoothly. Peter joined us as a co-founder and freed us up to be more strategic and engaged with the user community. Our friends saw their friends using our platform from social media and asked if they could help with our startup. We all had fun learning and growing together while watching thousands of feedback and hundreds of new users register every week, but I could feel the transformation of startup project to company taking place.

10 months into the project, I was spending nights and weekends at Steve’s house again. We’d plan and program into the morning hours and then I would sleep just enough that I could drive home safely and spend time with my family. I was also working nights and weekends to deliver on my full-time job and doing 20 real estate transactions on the side. I knew it was time to come out of the startup honeymoon and figure out if this thing was going to last before I burned out again and so we put ourselves through a major test-expansion.

For the first ten months, we only served one market as we built and fine-tuned the platform. We had grown at a compound monthly growth rate of 27%, and we were ready to find out if we could replicate our success nationally. We expanded to a few test markets and were thrilled to see that the email open and click rates stayed high as we increased our registered users 42% over the previous month! Everything was going so well but I couldn’t seem to take the leap of faith and work on this project full-time. This is around the time that the universe sent more signals my way.

Our Users Established Our Product Messaging

As an engineer who got into PropTech and then became a top-producing real estate agent, I’m keenly aware of how sensitive the real estate industry can be. I studied how RedFin pulled its Scouting Report project and how Keller Williams opposed AgentMatch. But I also saw how NAR and Houston Realtors had tried moving forward with ratings, and that the agent performance analysis was enough to propel HomeLight to a $40M Series B. Since our platform was built on top of agent-to-agent ratings, I didn’t feel comfortable taking the full-time plunge yet and thrusting myself into major industry scrutiny. That changed very quickly with one phone call from a real estate agent.

Every week we receive feedback from tens of thousands of real estate agents. We also get lots of phone calls and emails about our platform that I answer personally. After I finished my usual explanation on one of these phone calls, the agent responded, “Oh, it’s about professionalism? That’s awesome.” That was the key. Although our system was built on top of ratings that’s not really what we stood for. I learned from our users that they were actually utilizing it for professionalism and accountability. We finally had a message that we could promote publicly with great confidence and it came just in time for the next big moment.

Coming Out of Stealth Mode (Product Timing & The Parker Principles)

On April 2, 2018, Inman News published The Parker Principles: A Real Estate Manifesto. It was created based on input from agents, brokers, companies, and associations from around the country as a series of principles to make real estate better. It echoed so many tenets of our startup: Quality, professionalism, and accountability in real estate. When I read The Parker Principles I felt like these industry leaders were screaming for the solution our team had built. The universe was clearly telling me to pop out of my shell and so I did. I reached out to Inman News about our platform and they covered us two months later in June. I had outed myself as the real estate agent behind Peer Reputation and there was no going back now.

Something’s Gotta Give

We were about 11 months removed from the weekend project that turned into a full-blown startup and the major Inman Connect real estate conference was coming up in mid-July. I knew we had to keep the momentum going so I took a week off from work and flew out to San Francisco to mingle with the industry I had just revealed myself to. 

On the second day of Inman Connect I was standing in the lobby of the Hilton when the COO of Remine, Jonathan Spinetto, said, “Follow me.” He led me through a series of halls and we stopped outside of a suite. When the suite doors opened a few minutes later, MLS executives walked out and I walked into a dim room lit blue by a portable projector and populated with the CEO, COO, and CFO of Remine. Jonathan handed me a display cable and said, “Demo.” 

We went over the platform, the processes, team, and potential roadmap. At one point during our discussion I remember that Mark Schacknies, then-CFO and now-CEO, told me, “You need to sleep.” It actually wasn’t the first time I had heard something like that. When Gill South interviewed us for the Inman News article, she told me that I should devote my full attention to the startup. Smart industry folks were telling me that I needed to quit my full-time job and I was finally ready to consider it.

The Tipping Point & Decision

A few weeks after coming back from Inman Connect, my boss called me into his office and asked me, “Do you have outside employment?” I responded openly and honestly and from there my work life began to unravel. My telework was cut in half which meant I spent more time driving through grueling DC area traffic. I wasn’t prepared to scale back on my startup activities when things were going so well so I just continued sleeping less.

I was tired. The startup was going great and the work environment was souring. Why couldn’t I just quit and focus on the startup? The answer was that I wanted to provide a stable environment for my wife and children, and that requires income. I had been so focused on building the platform and acquiring users that I hadn’t considered income until now. Now I was motivated, confident, and ready to take a leap. On October 17th, 2018 Peer Reputation welcomed its first paid subscriber. 10 days later, I quit my job.

Fast Forward

It’s been 9 months since I quit my job and I don’t regret it one bit. Things have not slowed down and continue to look better and better. I’d love to write more about it but, unfortunately, I’m out of time! I’ve got to get back to preparing for some major events. I’m heading to Inman Connect in Las Vegas where we’ve been selected as a finalist for the Inman Innovator Award. I’ll also be pitching onstage at the conference as one of eight selected startups at Tech Connect. If you’re going to the conference as well please swing by our table in Startup Alley to say hi! (I still can’t believe this is all happening!)

The post Pet Project or Full-Time Hustle? One Startup’s Story appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Pet Project or Full-Time Hustle? One Startup’s Story published first on https://thegardenresidences.tumblr.com/

[brettseaton]

Pet Project or Full-Time Hustle? One Startup’s Story

My name is Steven Wynands and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Peer Reputation. Over 60,000 real estate agents and brokers use our platform to discover and leverage their professional relationships. This is my personal reflection on what happened over our first 12 months that finally gave me the courage to believe in myself and pursue this project full-time. I hope you find it interesting and that it helps you if you’re going through the same decision. 

Facing The Big Decision

I never thought I’d find myself in this position. Saddled with student loans, credit cards, a mortgage, and childcare for two, it would be very irresponsible for me to leave my cushy, government job to pursue my own startup ambitions. I tried to delay this decision as long as possible. I sacrificed sleep so that I could be there for my family and deliver everything my job expected of me. Wishfully, I hoped that the universe would take care of it for me by turning the startup into an overnight success or burying it to the ground. Neither of those things happened, but I did get plenty of signs that helped me make a decision.

Getting Inspired (Again)

I was just one year removed from an unsuccessful real estate startup that spanned two years. I had no intention of jumping into another project, but one afternoon of phone calls changed everything. The first phone call was from a buyer’s agent whose clients were interested in one of my listings. Her call made me uneasy and I wanted to protect my sellers so I made a few more calls of my own. 

I reached out to other listing agents who had recently worked with this buyer agent and was surprised by the responses. I wasn’t connected to these other agents in any way yet they openly shared detailed warnings with me about working with this buyer’s agent. They were eager and grateful for the opportunity to protect other agents and consumers from reliving their nightmares and wished there was an easier way to do so. Thankful and inspired, I called up my friend Steve with an idea.

Starting Up, Extra Lean & First Signs from The Universe

I’ve known Steve since middle school. We worked together throughout secondary school as well as college where we studied computer engineer together at Virginia Tech. We continued working together on projects after graduation including the recent unsuccessful real estate startup. At this point we were each raising two small kids and a bit burned out from long nights and weekends so I approached him with a very simple project based on the phone calls I just had that afternoon. We discussed the backstory and basic specs and agreed to meet a few days later to test out my idea.

The basic premise was simple. I wanted to know if other agents were just as eager to share their feedback to protect other agents and consumers too. To test out this idea I created a list of 600 recently sold homes along with the listing and selling agent information, and Steve coded up a test project to request feedback between these cooperating agents. We built this out on Saturday and Sunday and were ready to launch the following Monday. 

Immediately after launching our test I was prepared to throw in the towel. I thought the experiment had failed and I was just happy to know that we had only spent a few days on it. It turned out that the only failure was my uninformed expectations and analysis. I showed the results of our testing from that day to my brother who enjoys marketing as a Product Manager for Zappos and he was blown away!  He said that we were hugely successful by achieving a 70% total email open rate and 20% email click rate. 

I still wasn’t sure exactly what we were building but I knew enough from his reaction that we had to keep on going. The next week we doubled the sample size and tweaked some wording in our emails and achieved an 80% total open rate and 27% click rate! It was very clear that we were building something that people wanted. We just had to keep it going while we figured out exactly what that thing was.

Product? Market? Fits!

Over the next few weeks, we increased our survey sample sizes and maintained high open and click rates. We received over 10,000 responses in our first month! The manual data loads were becoming so overwhelming that we didn’t have time to work on the platform. I buckled down and focused on creating a web scraper to automate the data routines while Steve worked on building out the infrastructure that could house a richer experience.

Four months after conducting our first test we finally had our platform shell in place. We relaunched our feedback platform more broadly in the same local market and watched the results come in immediately. Now that we finally had a user dashboard, agents were registering and interacting directly with us. A thousand agents registered the first month and I knew we had a hit when they were telling us how surprised they were that this kind of platform hadn’t existed before. They were also asking us for more features! We could not believe how smoothly everything was happening! Things were continuing to ramp up based on user demand.

Traction and Scaling

Eight months into our project, things were going very smoothly. Peter joined us as a co-founder and freed us up to be more strategic and engaged with the user community. Our friends saw their friends using our platform from social media and asked if they could help with our startup. We all had fun learning and growing together while watching thousands of feedback and hundreds of new users register every week, but I could feel the transformation of startup project to company taking place.

10 months into the project, I was spending nights and weekends at Steve’s house again. We’d plan and program into the morning hours and then I would sleep just enough that I could drive home safely and spend time with my family. I was also working nights and weekends to deliver on my full-time job and doing 20 real estate transactions on the side. I knew it was time to come out of the startup honeymoon and figure out if this thing was going to last before I burned out again and so we put ourselves through a major test-expansion.

For the first ten months, we only served one market as we built and fine-tuned the platform. We had grown at a compound monthly growth rate of 27%, and we were ready to find out if we could replicate our success nationally. We expanded to a few test markets and were thrilled to see that the email open and click rates stayed high as we increased our registered users 42% over the previous month! Everything was going so well but I couldn’t seem to take the leap of faith and work on this project full-time. This is around the time that the universe sent more signals my way.

Our Users Established Our Product Messaging

As an engineer who got into PropTech and then became a top-producing real estate agent, I’m keenly aware of how sensitive the real estate industry can be. I studied how RedFin pulled its Scouting Report project and how Keller Williams opposed AgentMatch. But I also saw how NAR and Houston Realtors had tried moving forward with ratings, and that the agent performance analysis was enough to propel HomeLight to a $40M Series B. Since our platform was built on top of agent-to-agent ratings, I didn’t feel comfortable taking the full-time plunge yet and thrusting myself into major industry scrutiny. That changed very quickly with one phone call from a real estate agent.

Every week we receive feedback from tens of thousands of real estate agents. We also get lots of phone calls and emails about our platform that I answer personally. After I finished my usual explanation on one of these phone calls, the agent responded, “Oh, it’s about professionalism? That’s awesome.” That was the key. Although our system was built on top of ratings that’s not really what we stood for. I learned from our users that they were actually utilizing it for professionalism and accountability. We finally had a message that we could promote publicly with great confidence and it came just in time for the next big moment.

Coming Out of Stealth Mode (Product Timing & The Parker Principles)

On April 2, 2018, Inman News published The Parker Principles: A Real Estate Manifesto. It was created based on input from agents, brokers, companies, and associations from around the country as a series of principles to make real estate better. It echoed so many tenets of our startup: Quality, professionalism, and accountability in real estate. When I read The Parker Principles I felt like these industry leaders were screaming for the solution our team had built. The universe was clearly telling me to pop out of my shell and so I did. I reached out to Inman News about our platform and they covered us two months later in June. I had outed myself as the real estate agent behind Peer Reputation and there was no going back now.

Something’s Gotta Give

We were about 11 months removed from the weekend project that turned into a full-blown startup and the major Inman Connect real estate conference was coming up in mid-July. I knew we had to keep the momentum going so I took a week off from work and flew out to San Francisco to mingle with the industry I had just revealed myself to. 

On the second day of Inman Connect I was standing in the lobby of the Hilton when the COO of Remine, Jonathan Spinetto, said, “Follow me.” He led me through a series of halls and we stopped outside of a suite. When the suite doors opened a few minutes later, MLS executives walked out and I walked into a dim room lit blue by a portable projector and populated with the CEO, COO, and CFO of Remine. Jonathan handed me a display cable and said, “Demo.” 

We went over the platform, the processes, team, and potential roadmap. At one point during our discussion I remember that Mark Schacknies, then-CFO and now-CEO, told me, “You need to sleep.” It actually wasn’t the first time I had heard something like that. When Gill South interviewed us for the Inman News article, she told me that I should devote my full attention to the startup. Smart industry folks were telling me that I needed to quit my full-time job and I was finally ready to consider it.

The Tipping Point & Decision

A few weeks after coming back from Inman Connect, my boss called me into his office and asked me, “Do you have outside employment?” I responded openly and honestly and from there my work life began to unravel. My telework was cut in half which meant I spent more time driving through grueling DC area traffic. I wasn’t prepared to scale back on my startup activities when things were going so well so I just continued sleeping less.

I was tired. The startup was going great and the work environment was souring. Why couldn’t I just quit and focus on the startup? The answer was that I wanted to provide a stable environment for my wife and children, and that requires income. I had been so focused on building the platform and acquiring users that I hadn’t considered income until now. Now I was motivated, confident, and ready to take a leap. On October 17th, 2018 Peer Reputation welcomed its first paid subscriber. 10 days later, I quit my job.

Fast Forward

It’s been 9 months since I quit my job and I don’t regret it one bit. Things have not slowed down and continue to look better and better. I’d love to write more about it but, unfortunately, I’m out of time! I’ve got to get back to preparing for some major events. I’m heading to Inman Connect in Las Vegas where we’ve been selected as a finalist for the Inman Innovator Award. I’ll also be pitching onstage at the conference as one of eight selected startups at Tech Connect. If you’re going to the conference as well please swing by our table in Startup Alley to say hi! (I still can’t believe this is all happening!)

The post Pet Project or Full-Time Hustle? One Startup’s Story appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

Pet Project or Full-Time Hustle? One Startup’s Story syndicated from https://oicrealestate.wordpress.com/

[clarencevancleave]

Pet Project or Full-Time Hustle? One Startup’s Story

My name is Steven Wynands and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Peer Reputation. Over 60,000 real estate agents and brokers use our platform to discover and leverage their professional relationships. This is my personal reflection on what happened over our first 12 months that finally gave me the courage to believe in myself and pursue this project full-time. I hope you find it interesting and that it helps you if you’re going through the same decision. 

Facing The Big Decision

I never thought I’d find myself in this position. Saddled with student loans, credit cards, a mortgage, and childcare for two, it would be very irresponsible for me to leave my cushy, government job to pursue my own startup ambitions. I tried to delay this decision as long as possible. I sacrificed sleep so that I could be there for my family and deliver everything my job expected of me. Wishfully, I hoped that the universe would take care of it for me by turning the startup into an overnight success or burying it to the ground. Neither of those things happened, but I did get plenty of signs that helped me make a decision.

Getting Inspired (Again)

I was just one year removed from an unsuccessful real estate startup that spanned two years. I had no intention of jumping into another project, but one afternoon of phone calls changed everything. The first phone call was from a buyer’s agent whose clients were interested in one of my listings. Her call made me uneasy and I wanted to protect my sellers so I made a few more calls of my own. 

I reached out to other listing agents who had recently worked with this buyer agent and was surprised by the responses. I wasn’t connected to these other agents in any way yet they openly shared detailed warnings with me about working with this buyer’s agent. They were eager and grateful for the opportunity to protect other agents and consumers from reliving their nightmares and wished there was an easier way to do so. Thankful and inspired, I called up my friend Steve with an idea.

Starting Up, Extra Lean & First Signs from The Universe

I’ve known Steve since middle school. We worked together throughout secondary school as well as college where we studied computer engineer together at Virginia Tech. We continued working together on projects after graduation including the recent unsuccessful real estate startup. At this point we were each raising two small kids and a bit burned out from long nights and weekends so I approached him with a very simple project based on the phone calls I just had that afternoon. We discussed the backstory and basic specs and agreed to meet a few days later to test out my idea.

The basic premise was simple. I wanted to know if other agents were just as eager to share their feedback to protect other agents and consumers too. To test out this idea I created a list of 600 recently sold homes along with the listing and selling agent information, and Steve coded up a test project to request feedback between these cooperating agents. We built this out on Saturday and Sunday and were ready to launch the following Monday. 

Immediately after launching our test I was prepared to throw in the towel. I thought the experiment had failed and I was just happy to know that we had only spent a few days on it. It turned out that the only failure was my uninformed expectations and analysis. I showed the results of our testing from that day to my brother who enjoys marketing as a Product Manager for Zappos and he was blown away!  He said that we were hugely successful by achieving a 70% total email open rate and 20% email click rate. 

I still wasn’t sure exactly what we were building but I knew enough from his reaction that we had to keep on going. The next week we doubled the sample size and tweaked some wording in our emails and achieved an 80% total open rate and 27% click rate! It was very clear that we were building something that people wanted. We just had to keep it going while we figured out exactly what that thing was.

Product? Market? Fits!

Over the next few weeks, we increased our survey sample sizes and maintained high open and click rates. We received over 10,000 responses in our first month! The manual data loads were becoming so overwhelming that we didn’t have time to work on the platform. I buckled down and focused on creating a web scraper to automate the data routines while Steve worked on building out the infrastructure that could house a richer experience.

Four months after conducting our first test we finally had our platform shell in place. We relaunched our feedback platform more broadly in the same local market and watched the results come in immediately. Now that we finally had a user dashboard, agents were registering and interacting directly with us. A thousand agents registered the first month and I knew we had a hit when they were telling us how surprised they were that this kind of platform hadn’t existed before. They were also asking us for more features! We could not believe how smoothly everything was happening! Things were continuing to ramp up based on user demand.

Traction and Scaling

Eight months into our project, things were going very smoothly. Peter joined us as a co-founder and freed us up to be more strategic and engaged with the user community. Our friends saw their friends using our platform from social media and asked if they could help with our startup. We all had fun learning and growing together while watching thousands of feedback and hundreds of new users register every week, but I could feel the transformation of startup project to company taking place.

10 months into the project, I was spending nights and weekends at Steve’s house again. We’d plan and program into the morning hours and then I would sleep just enough that I could drive home safely and spend time with my family. I was also working nights and weekends to deliver on my full-time job and doing 20 real estate transactions on the side. I knew it was time to come out of the startup honeymoon and figure out if this thing was going to last before I burned out again and so we put ourselves through a major test-expansion.

For the first ten months, we only served one market as we built and fine-tuned the platform. We had grown at a compound monthly growth rate of 27%, and we were ready to find out if we could replicate our success nationally. We expanded to a few test markets and were thrilled to see that the email open and click rates stayed high as we increased our registered users 42% over the previous month! Everything was going so well but I couldn’t seem to take the leap of faith and work on this project full-time. This is around the time that the universe sent more signals my way.

Our Users Established Our Product Messaging

As an engineer who got into PropTech and then became a top-producing real estate agent, I’m keenly aware of how sensitive the real estate industry can be. I studied how RedFin pulled its Scouting Report project and how Keller Williams opposed AgentMatch. But I also saw how NAR and Houston Realtors had tried moving forward with ratings, and that the agent performance analysis was enough to propel HomeLight to a $40M Series B. Since our platform was built on top of agent-to-agent ratings, I didn’t feel comfortable taking the full-time plunge yet and thrusting myself into major industry scrutiny. That changed very quickly with one phone call from a real estate agent.

Every week we receive feedback from tens of thousands of real estate agents. We also get lots of phone calls and emails about our platform that I answer personally. After I finished my usual explanation on one of these phone calls, the agent responded, “Oh, it’s about professionalism? That’s awesome.” That was the key. Although our system was built on top of ratings that’s not really what we stood for. I learned from our users that they were actually utilizing it for professionalism and accountability. We finally had a message that we could promote publicly with great confidence and it came just in time for the next big moment.

Coming Out of Stealth Mode (Product Timing & The Parker Principles)

On April 2, 2018, Inman News published The Parker Principles: A Real Estate Manifesto. It was created based on input from agents, brokers, companies, and associations from around the country as a series of principles to make real estate better. It echoed so many tenets of our startup: Quality, professionalism, and accountability in real estate. When I read The Parker Principles I felt like these industry leaders were screaming for the solution our team had built. The universe was clearly telling me to pop out of my shell and so I did. I reached out to Inman News about our platform and they covered us two months later in June. I had outed myself as the real estate agent behind Peer Reputation and there was no going back now.

Something’s Gotta Give

We were about 11 months removed from the weekend project that turned into a full-blown startup and the major Inman Connect real estate conference was coming up in mid-July. I knew we had to keep the momentum going so I took a week off from work and flew out to San Francisco to mingle with the industry I had just revealed myself to. 

On the second day of Inman Connect I was standing in the lobby of the Hilton when the COO of Remine, Jonathan Spinetto, said, “Follow me.” He led me through a series of halls and we stopped outside of a suite. When the suite doors opened a few minutes later, MLS executives walked out and I walked into a dim room lit blue by a portable projector and populated with the CEO, COO, and CFO of Remine. Jonathan handed me a display cable and said, “Demo.” 

We went over the platform, the processes, team, and potential roadmap. At one point during our discussion I remember that Mark Schacknies, then-CFO and now-CEO, told me, “You need to sleep.” It actually wasn’t the first time I had heard something like that. When Gill South interviewed us for the Inman News article, she told me that I should devote my full attention to the startup. Smart industry folks were telling me that I needed to quit my full-time job and I was finally ready to consider it.

The Tipping Point & Decision

A few weeks after coming back from Inman Connect, my boss called me into his office and asked me, “Do you have outside employment?” I responded openly and honestly and from there my work life began to unravel. My telework was cut in half which meant I spent more time driving through grueling DC area traffic. I wasn’t prepared to scale back on my startup activities when things were going so well so I just continued sleeping less.

I was tired. The startup was going great and the work environment was souring. Why couldn’t I just quit and focus on the startup? The answer was that I wanted to provide a stable environment for my wife and children, and that requires income. I had been so focused on building the platform and acquiring users that I hadn’t considered income until now. Now I was motivated, confident, and ready to take a leap. On October 17th, 2018 Peer Reputation welcomed its first paid subscriber. 10 days later, I quit my job.

Fast Forward

It’s been 9 months since I quit my job and I don’t regret it one bit. Things have not slowed down and continue to look better and better. I’d love to write more about it but, unfortunately, I’m out of time! I’ve got to get back to preparing for some major events. I’m heading to Inman Connect in Las Vegas where we’ve been selected as a finalist for the Inman Innovator Award. I’ll also be pitching onstage at the conference as one of eight selected startups at Tech Connect. If you’re going to the conference as well please swing by our table in Startup Alley to say hi! (I still can’t believe this is all happening!)

The post Pet Project or Full-Time Hustle? One Startup’s Story appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.

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[wiremagazine]

OUT & ABOUT: PALACE

By Rafa Carvajal

Palace has heightened its success since owner Tom Donall reopened it at its new location, 1052 Ocean Drive in South Beach. The motto of "Every Queen Needs A Palace" is being enjoyed more than ever before by both tourists and local patrons who relish its famous drag shows, while dining and cocktailing on Ocean Drive. As part of the continued evolution of Palace, Tom Donall hired Ahmed Labib as the new general manager to take this beloved establishment to new heights, so I sat down with Ahmed to preview the improvements he is making at Palace, discuss what patrons should expect in the future and find out what the Palace team is planning for their New Year's celebration.

Rafa Carvajal: Why did you decide to become the new general manager at Palace? Ahmed Labib: I am a firm believer in the quote, “everything happens for a reason.” Upon completion of my contract with Segafredo L’Originale on Lincoln Road, where I functioned as general manager and renovation consultant, I wanted to continue working in an environment with high energy, rotating DJs, in a sexy, loungy aesthetic and secure an entrance into clubs, lounges, and Miami Beach nightlife. When I heard that Palace, the iconic and legendary location of 30 years, was looking for a general manager to take them to the next level, I knew I had found my true destiny, and feel like the universe has placed me right where I needed to be at that exact moment. To be selected and able to be the leader and brand ambassador of Palace, as well as the honor of celebrating the LGBTQ community is truly humbling. I am so honored, privileged and proud to be a part of such a tremendously prestigious and legendary venue with a  reputation that has housed celebrities such as Gianni Versace, Madonna, Princess Diana and more. As a gay man myself, it is a way for me to consecrate my lifestyle, as well as tie in my love and passion for the arts, theater, performance, food, and beverage while celebrating and sharing it with the entire community.  

RC: What are your plans to make Palace better than ever before? AL: My philosophy is very simple… If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Palace has already staked its claim as an iconic staple and landmark destination here on Miami Beach’s famous Ocean Drive.  My plan is to continue to celebrate all that we are, yet take us to the next level via implementation of new food, beverage, New York City style service and world-class entertainment in our drag performances. I want us to be recognized across the globe for our uniqueness, talent and world-renowned, innovative food and beverage on an epic scale. RC: Give us a sneak peek at some of the things you are working on to enhance what customers experience at the Palace. AL: Oh, I’ll give you a “sneak peek,” haha. On a less “perverted” note, or actually on a perverted note… perversion, which by definition expresses “a type of human behavior that deviates from that which is understood to be orthodox or normal.” In a culinary, beverage related and a more appropriate context, the newly “perverted” Palace will dare to take the simple, ordinary act of eating and drinking and transcend and elevate it to a decadent sexy artform and gastronomical indulgence. The relaunch of Palace’s food and beverage program will exude the ultimate in sexy, and display "perversion" through a moderately priced, authentic gastropub inspired menu, paired with unrivaled music, ambiance, service, and world-class entertainment. It will become an operation for all to enjoy and afford the quality of products and services offered. Top quality, luxury, gourmet and imported selections will serve to tempt, tantalize and titillate the senses of the engaging diner as their body, mind, soul, and palates are invited to surrender to our playground. Palace will use "perversion” to provide a sophisticated, unique and provocative experience that will take guests on a sinful journey through ultimate decadence, desire, drag, and drama.

RC: What improvements have you already made to the Palace brunch?  AL: I have always been a stickler for quality, presentation and the use of top quality ingredients in my menus. Here at Palace, this declaration will continue to resonate. I have an honest approach to business where I believe in giving my guests the best quality and value for the best price. I have been working closely with my chef, Denis Ampie, in order to roll out new menus for all dining periods. I chose to start with brunch, as this seemed to be where I could achieve the quickest, yet most powerful impact on my guests. Bringing in some of my own recipes, and collaborating with my chef, we conceptualized, executed and launched our first new brunch menu together almost six weeks ago. Some of our new and my favorite dishes include: Lemon Ricotta Pancakes with wild blueberry compote, maple brown butter reduction, candied lemon zest and house-made chantilly creme; Avocado Toast with toasted Campagnolo bread, sunny side up eggs, avocado-jalapeño tapenade, heirloom cherry tomatoes, micro cilantro and black lava salt; and one of my personal favorites from my arsenal, Tegamino Al Salmone Affumicato with free-range fried eggs, Norwegian smoked salmon, goat cheese mousse, micro cress and black caviar. My style has always been a little more of an Italian approach, as it is in my blood, as well as my training. Most of my mentors were of Italian descent, and have instilled their love and passion for food and people into me. Whilst I am aware that Palace is not an Italian concept, I will ensure that the same passionate, personal, warm and engaging style of guest service and quality is presented at all times, paralleled with unrivaled food and beverage.

RC: Tell us about the new bar Palace is opening upstairs. AL: Tom – Palace’s owner – and I are working very diligently in order to finalize all logistics in order to pull off a tight and flawless execution of the launch of our Rooftop Pool Bar, located directly above Palace on the sixth floor of the Strand on Ocean hotel. I want to ensure that we launch it in style and with great pride, honoring every single detail from setup, glassware, to lighting, music, sound, and ambiance. We still have yet to announce our official opening date, however, it shouldn’t be too long until you are sipping on a frozen margarita on the roof, bathing in the pool, overlooking one of the most gorgeous and breathtaking rooftop ocean views of South Beach. A multitude of luxuriating things are all in motion, all to materialize in due time.

RC: What experiences from working in hospitality and food & beverage do you bring to your new role as the general manager at Palace?  AL: Food has always been a passion for me, whether I was watching cooking shows as a child or learning about fine dining from my father who worked at the famous Russian Tea Room in New York City. Growing up in an Italian and Egyptian family, I absorbed all the influences available to me and learned how to create food inspired by other cultures with my own unique twist. I began my restaurant career working at Jonathan’s Ristorante in Huntington, Long Island’s culinary capital. Jonathan’s northern Italian food presented another new influence for me and I quickly learned another layer of a cuisine I had grown up around initially. For me, food is always evolving in ways that surprise me so I can, in turn, surprise the people I feed. Operating as general manager at Jonathan’s, I worked alongside James Beard award-winning Chef Tito Onofre and ran this high-end establishment with dedication, passion, and attention to detail that upheld Jonathan’s multi-award-winning reputation. When the opportunity arose to open my own establishment in Howard Beach, I bowed gracefully out of Jonathan’s and moved on to owning and operating a gourmet deli and catering company. After operating multi-million dollar venues in Manhattan predominantly my entire career, I caught the attention of investors in Beijing, China who were looking for someone creative, trustworthy, and committed to open a venue in the heart of their city. I relocated to China and opened The Woods with two partners at Central Park in Beijing in May of 2013, functioning as general manager, executive chef, and operating partner. Since then, The Woods has opened eight other locations, six of which have been under my orchestration, supervision, and direction. My last opening endeavor in China was probably the most memorable and most humbling and proud milestone of my career. I was selected to function as the pre-opening consultant/general manager and executive chef for Harrods Tea Room at The British House in Beijing. The British House is a 1,000 square meter and two-floor mecca, which showcased the finest in luxury retail brands endorsed by Royal Warrants, proudly featuring Highgrove products owned by Prince Charles, The Prince of Wales. I flew to London and trained in Harrods’ prestigious pastry kitchen and returned back to Beijing to open Harrods Tea Room at The British House. This marked Harrods first entrance into the China market. 

RC: What is Palace planning to do for its New Year's celebration? AL: What aren’t we planning should be the question, haha. This year, at Palace, we will be ringing in the new year with a Masquerade Ball themed New Year’s extravaganza. We will be featuring a 3-course prix fixe menu starting at $95 per person, with a special discounted rate of $100 bottles of Veuve Clicquot and Möet & Chandon. Chef Denis Ampie, the team and I are truly excited to take you and your palates on this culinary journey with us. Seating starts for dinner at 8 p.m., and we’ll all ring in the new year together with jaw-dropping drag performances on a stage built into the street, DJ Cesar Hernandez will be spinning his sick beats, concluding with stunning fireworks on the beach at midnight.   

RC: Is there anything else you'd like to share with Wire Magazine readers about yourself and Palace?   AL: I would just like to express from the bottom of my heart how truly honored, blessed and proud I am to be a part of such an iconic place with an incredible team and staff behind me.  There is no “I” in team, and there is no “I” in Palace. So, I would like to personally recognize the efforts of my amazing management team: Carlos Rojas, Branden Vidal, Skyler Styles, Godric Miguel Blanco, Denis Ampie and, of course, the owner, Thomas Donall. I wouldn’t be able to do this without all of their prodigious support, talent, and encouragement. I get chills and goosebumps when I talk about the future of Palace because I know in my heart that with my amazing management, my wonderful staff, mind-blowingly talented performers and ultimately, the family we have become. There is no stopping us from reaching monumental heights together. Here's to the next 30 years. Cheers!

This was originally published in Wire Magazine Issue 51.2018

[martadwatson]

Real Housewives Of Atlanta Season 11 Premiere Recap

Last night’s season premiere of Real Housewives of Atlanta was all about Porsha Williams turning right instead of left and finding Prince Charming – aka The Hot Dog King Of Atlanta, and hopefully getting a big ol diamond ring out of it. HINT, MEGA-HINT, HINT.

As we alll know Porsha is dating Dennis, who owns several clubs in addition to The Original Hotdog Factory. “Everybody loves hot dogs!” Porsha cheers, “Especially me!” And Dennis’s wienie in particular. Porsha met Dennis at one of his clubs, then went home with him. Porsha and Dennis’s one-night stand has now turned into ring shopping. He apparently told her he loved her the first night they met. “It just feels natural and we just went with it,” she gushes.

Porsha drags Dennis to her jeweler – the same one who provided her rings to Kordell, because, “Different man, different right, right?!” And bigger girl, bigger diamonds too! She’s a grown up now, no more playing housewives with a man who acts like her father. Also, it’s not like the jeweler cursed their marriage – RHOA did.

After diamond browsing, Porsha swings by Swagg Boutique to check in on NeNe Leakes. And NeNe is not doing well. Gregg has been diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer – which I didn’t know his cancer was so advanced! – and most of his colon was removed. NeNe is taking care of him, and trying to be strong, but in her car and at night she cries. Gregg is determined to fight – if only to have more time with his wife – so they host a revitalizing prayer circle of family and friends to boost his spirit and keep him strong.  NeNe gets Porsha for her spirit boosting! Gregg looks so ill and depleted, I am heartbroken for this family. And alas I just cannot make fun of NeNe’s confessional hat at a time like this. So she gets a pass, because of Gregg.

Porsha came to Swagg because she just had to see NeNe’s face to truly understand where she is. They speak on the phone regularly, but Porsha knows NeNe is hiding her true feelings and has decided to make it her sole mission (other than getting a ring) to make NeNe laugh to cheer her up. And Porsha, bless her heart, she is ride or die about shaking her booty for a friend in need.

Dennis is taking Porsha to Miami to celebrate her birthday and guess what – NeNe is also headed there for a comedy gig. NeNe somehow talks Porsha into trying on this tie-dyed two-piece number which looked like a Crayola box exploded on Porsha’s ass, or maybe like one of those Jackson Pollak paintings that sell for millions.

NeNe wants to see what’s cooking with Porsha and her Swagg outfit. The answer is stir-fried crazy. Crazier than a tye-dyed spandex outfit.

What’s also cooking is that Porsha has a brilliant idea. Well, at least for her it’s brilliant. She – ahem, the producers – decide this is the perfect opportunity for Porsha to plan a girl’s trip to surprise NeNe in Miami to cheer her up. Yes, I’m so sure Porsha came up with this all on her own. Just like I’m so sure Porsha and NeNe just so happened to be traveling to Miami at the exact same time…

Next, let’s check in on Cynthia Bailey. Fifty Cynt turned out to be a bad year, but Fifty Cynt & Change is doing OK. Cynthia is now dating – and quite serious with – Mike Hill, a sportscaster who lives in LA, but visits Lake Bailey regularly to dive into its cool, swampy waters. Mike calls for some Skype-Sex and Cynthia is all prepared with a glass of wine swimming with frozen green grapes so it looks like she’s drinking a witch’s brew filled with eyeballs. Then in the middle of Mike telling her how he likes to be in control, Noelle walks in unannounced. Noelle and Mike have met, and like each other – so much so that Mike and Cynthia almost continue their raunchy talk while she’s sitting on the sofa taking a selfie. Classy!

For Kandi Burrrus her personal life is problematic while her professional one is hitting the highest notes ever. Starting with Xscape being honored with an aascap Golden Note Award. The award is all fine and good, but the really important matter for these Ol Girls of the 90’s music scene is what craft services will be serving backstage. Um, aascap isn’t using OLG as their caterers? Aunt Bertha won’t be personally presiding over the koolaid kocktails while terrorizing the other esteemed attendees? Apparently not because it doesn’t even appear that Mama Joyce attended.

Instead, Kandi brought her toddler and Riley, neither of whom want to be there. Kandi is shocked that Ace is cranky and crying – she doesn’t even seem to realize what time he goes to bed. Probably because, as Riley points out, Kandi is constantly working and never home. Todd is essentially running “Daddy Daycare,” but while he’s at the bar getting a much needed drink after finally escaping the kids, Don Jaun Daycare had to take over while Kandi grimaced from the red carpet. Girl time to hire a NANNY.

We also need to take a moment to truly honor the star of that show: Kandi’s weave. It must have been supplied by Porsha’s Go Naked Hair!

Of course, while Kandi is missing school meetings she forgot were even scheduled (OK I’ve done that too) and being publicly called out by her teenager for ignoring home responsibilities, she’s contemplating another baby because duh – she has two frozen embryos left which she’s not sure what to do with. Yes – another stupid embryo storyline! Really Bravo… you have got to cook up some new recipes. Let Porsha get into that kitchen and open the oven and stuff a hotdog bun in there or something.

Eva Marcille had Michael Jr, and is now engaged to regular-old Michael. Basically, everything is great except that her wedding is in about 6 minutes but she has no wedding planner or anything else done. However, she does have professional family photographs with everyone wearing denim-on-denim like this is 1992. So priorities. After taking a couple photos with the kids, Eva quickly shoos them away, kicks off her Louboutins and turns this into The Eva Show to relaunch her modeling career. Does ANTM do a senior series? Wasn’t LeeAnne Locken on something like that way back when?

Porsha comes home carrying a Chick-Fil-A cup the size of her head and announces that she’s going to call all the girls to invite them to Miami on a mission trip to recharge NeNe’s batteries. She’s scared though because she’s well aware that none of her s0-called friends even like her! She starts with Cynthia, who is too busy sucking on frozen grapes to be mean and having nothing to do, is an easy yes. Next Porsha downs a shot of Hennessy to give Kandi a call. Kandi was just telling us how much she loves to work, so she had no problem jetting off to Miami at a moment’s notice and ditching her kids (again) to fulfill her Bravo contractual obligations. Everyone else, obviously, can go because these trips are sooo authentic!

Porsha pats herself on the back for being brave enough to work the telephone and surprisingly everyone was nice. Even Kandi. Good things happen when you project your happiness to the world in the form of constant hair flips and high pitched shrieking giggles. Porsha in love is worse than five 8th grader girls.

Porsha prepared for Miami by packing all white, because she’s having a very bridal moment – hopefully – and then adding a bring red wig to signify love. Also red is the color of ketchup – which pairs perfectly with hot dogs! I assume Porsha is no longer vegan? If Dennis doesn’t propose in the next 5 minutes she’s gonna explode like a hotdog cooked too long in the microwave! When he arrives to pick her up and fly her in a private plane, Porsha is literally bursting with glee and practically levitating at the thought of being proposed to during the trip. Did I mention that they’ve only been together five months?

Meanwhile, NeNe is calling Cynthia hourly to beg her to come to Miami where she’ll be doing her first comedy show since Gregg’s diagnosis. Cynthia is the worst liar ever and stumbles over pretending she has to get off the phone for conference calls and phone sex and any other reason, oh my! Then she’s so flustered she packs the wardrobe equivalent of Porsha’s personality.

Driving to their hotel, Porsha prattles on about how she has so much to do in Miami like wear WHITE. A LOT. And make NeNe feel better by showing off her GIANT ENGAGEMENT RING, but there are no plans to introduce Dennis to the girls. Porsha wants to protect him from them eating him alive. Dennis actually already knows Kandi… from around. No details given. Also, he used to frequent OLG Restaurant on the regular, being that he lives right across the street, but since meeting Porsha he hasn’t partaken in their fried chicken. Hmmm… so do we think Dennis is a famewhore? Or something else? Porsha is choosing to remain unbothered by this revelation because she is much more focused on the fact that Dennis could be proposing this weekend. HINT HINT.

Dennis has the room all prepared with a private chef to make gourmet food, and WHITE (hint hint!) rose petals on the bed and we all know what white rose petals mean… THERE IS A RING HIDING IN PORSHA’S SALMON STEAK. Like a bad sitcom, Porsha runs into the bathroom to frantically call her sister, whispering about how she knows this is the night. She’s in there so long Dennis finally asks if everything is OK. Cause nothing says sexy like your man thinking you have explosive diarrhea!

Finally, Porsha sits down on the bed and Dennis whips out a giant jewelry box and … TO BE CONTINUED.

Also, of course, Dennis knows Kandi. And of course, Kandi will know something nasty about him.

TELL US – DO YOU THINK DENNIS WILL PROPOSE? WHAT DO YOU THINK OF CYNTHIA’S MAN? ARE YOU EXCITED EVA HAS JOINED THE CAST FULL-TIME?

[Photo Credits: Bravo]

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For those who know their skin care products, Sunday Riley is a beloved brand. Good Genes face acid is a best-seller at Sephora and frequently hailed as a holy grail product. But the company got some unwelcome scrutiny this week after a former employee shared an email directing employees to open fake accounts and leave glowing Sephora reviews of new Sunday Riley products, on the subreddit r/skincareaddiction. The post shocked customers and served to highlight the questionable trustworthiness of online product reviews at retailers like Sephora.

Online reviews are really important to brands. Studies have shown that customers trust products that have a lot of reviews, and it’s human nature to look to peers and “real people” for their opinions. It’s why, especially for makeup and other beauty products, so many people follow bloggers, YouTubers, and Instagrammers. They’re perceived to be authentic (though recent drama in that world has revealed that their reviews can sometimes be purchased for a lot of money).

This is not the first time the authenticity of online reviews has been called into question. Amazon has been singled out frequently in stories alleging that brands pay people to write reviews. It happens enough that there are now even plenty of tips for recognizing when a review might not be what it seems.

In 2017, I reported on this phenomenon in the beauty industry for Racked. There are a variety of companies that offer free products in exchange for “honest” reviews, and small brands admitted feeling pressure to solicit fans to leave positive reviews. But this is the first time a major brand has been called out on the practice, with receipts. It provides insight into the way the beauty industry sells products, and how cutthroat and dishonest it can be.

A user and supposed former Sunday Riley employee calling themselves “throwawayacctSRiley” posted on Reddit and shared a copy of an email that clearly shows that employees had been asked by the company to register as fake Sephora users in order to leave glowing reviews for new acne products that the company was launching. The email lays out in great detail how employees should register as reviewers to avoid having their IP address traced back to the company, and to leave reviews on other brands as well to avoid drawing suspicion to themselves. It was recommended that employees set up several different profiles and “mix and match your identities.”

The most eye-opening section of the email reads:

It helps to make yourself seem relatable — like you know how hard acne is and you’ve tried everything, and this one actually works or mention things like, yes it’s a little more expensive but works incredible [sic] well compared to the cheaper masks out there. If you need any help with things to come up with to say, feel [sic] to ask myself, Sunday, or Addison. As reviews come in, read them too. If you notice someone saying things like I didn’t like “x” about it, write a review that says the opposite. The power of reviews is mighty, people look to what others are saying to persuade them and answer potential questions they may have.

It caused a huge commotion in the beauty world, racking up over 500 comments on r/skincareaddiction. And the news only got bigger when Sunday Riley confirmed that it was true. A brand representative wrote in the comment section of the anonymous beauty industry watchdog/gossip Instagram account Estee Laundry:

As many of you may know, we are making an effort to bring more transparency to our clients. The simple and official answer to this Reddit post is that yes, this email was sent by a former employee to several members of our company. At one point, we did encourage people to post positive reviews at the launch of this product, consistent with their experiences. There are a lot of reasons for doing that, including the fact that competitors will often post negative reviews of products to swing opinion. It doesn’t really matter what the reasoning was. We have hundreds of thousands of reviews across platforms around the globe and it would be physically impossible for us to have posted even a fraction of these reviews. Client word-of-mouth, sharing how our products have changed their skin, has been the cornerstone of our success. In the end, our products and their results stand for themselves.

(Sunday Riley did not return Vox’s request for comment by publication time.)

Responses were swift and decisive. Fans of the brand on Reddit commented things like, “Joke’s on Sunday Riley, even if they actually have good products now I’ll never believe it because of their manipulation” and “As someone who suffers with acne, I find this extremely upsetting. Advising your staff to write a review saying a product cleared your acne is preying on the vulnerable.”

People have strong attachments to brands, especially when it comes to skin care. This was largely seen as a breach of trust.

Sunday Riley is likely not alone here. “This happens a lot. Sephora puts the pressure on brands — they really ‘encourage’ reviews,” says a beauty industry source who wished to remain anonymous so as not to jeopardize their relationship with Sephora and beauty brands. “When you have a new launch, the sales will increase with a ton of good reviews. I do want to reiterate how common this practice for brands is. Sunday Riley just got caught. I’m not defending it, but it’s a vicious cycle.”

Caroline Hirons is a popular and well-respected UK-based skin care blogger and beauty brand consultant. She posted a sponsored video with Sunday Riley a few days prior to this controversy and worked as a consultant to the brand five years ago. She says she was never asked by the brand to post any sort of fake review, and wouldn’t ever agree to do so. But she concurs that it’s a common practice in the industry.

“It’s not the brands. The direction comes from the retailers,” Hirons, who has called out the practice in the past on her blog, says. She notes that she’s never had a request quite as detailed as the Sunday Riley email, though. “I’ve never come across anything that organized. I’ve just had verbal requests in retailer meetings.” (She also clarifies that she’s never heard those requests from UK-based retailers like Space NK, Cult Beauty, or department stores like Selfridges.)

In Hirons’s skin care fan group on Facebook, which has almost 10,000 fans, a user shared a screenshot of communication she had supposedly had with Sephora’s customer service department after she’d asked about the Sunday Riley issue. The email read: “Thank you for taking the time out of your day to reach out to us about this matter. We have recently found out about it and we are looking into it. We do not condone this type of activity. Rest assured we are working diligently on this.” It was signed “Jazlyn, Sephora Client Services.”

A screenshot of the Sephora email, with the customer’s name erased for privacy. Facebook

Sephora declined to comment for this story, but a representative offered the following comment in the 2017 Racked story about its reviews policy: “The goal of Sephora Ratings and Reviews is authentic client experiences that can inform fellow beauty fans on the product solutions and benefits based on their concerns. Reviews are monitored and if needed, removed if they are truly not centered around the product experience, therefore not a benefit to the larger community.”

The shelves of Sephora are crowded, and competition in the beauty industry is fierce. Brands, especially small ones, are under a lot of pressure to sell and to conform to the whims of retailers. Retailers often hold a lot of the cards. Read this cautionary tale about Sephora and the now-defunct makeup brand OCC for an example of how this can sometimes play out.

A small brand owner who wished to remain anonymous wrote in an email to Vox, “We are under a lot of pressure to drive reviews for our products on Sephora.com, but Sephora’s site is also really good about weeding out reviews that aren’t legitimate, so it’s very hard to build up a product page by leaving a large number of ‘fake’ reviews.”

Sunday Riley has struggled in the past few years, facing a lawsuit about false advertising, which was eventually tossed out. It also launched a foundation called The Influencer earlier this year, which no longer appears to be available. But it’s also been actively trying to build its business in the UK, launched a wellness-focused beauty box, and relaunched its website. This will likely be a setback, at least temporarily, but it’s a case that shines a brighter light on how retailers can manipulate customers.

It’s all just a modern-day example of the old adage, “Buyer beware.” As one redditor suggested, perhaps be wary of any review that’s too glowy, and head for mediocre territory: “This is why I tend to trust only the reviews that are 3 stars. That’s where the honesty is.”

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Original Source -> A leaked email reveals why you can’t always trust Sephora product reviews

via The Conservative Brief