#and when i edit the theme it says it's supposed to affect both the web and the tumblr app

[destiel-wings]

so last night I did a little remodeling and I've been trying to use a google font for the name of my blog, messing around with the html of my page but the fancy font won't show up in the app 😕 does anyone know why and how i can fix that?

[lemmetellastory]

Okay but, i want Loki to look at Tony’s outfits and he sees that Snow White one,  Loki is active in social media, and half of the ideas comes there, so he got the idea that he is gonna make Tony a real Snow White and magic him.

It started out as animals coming to Tony, birds tweeting around his head, squirrels around doing things and when he was in Compound, a DEER came, and all other animals too.  No one knew what to do. They didn’t want to hurt animals, animals didn’t hurt Tony or anyone else, there was like a lot of flowers and nuts and rocks and other things they bring, but they didn’t cause trouble, well, trouble for other than Tony because they were following him, everywhere, even in the labs.

Meanwhile, Loki was in his cat form and came with animals and watched Tony while he suffered from animals affection. No one detected him yet and he can easily come on go out of compound that way so he used it to spy on Avengers.

But Tony also fed this animals and sometimes pet them and Loki was a little bit put out the first time Tony petting him caused purrs. But he went back and got more pets.

Everyone was okay with it at that point and they even called the Strange to come look at what is going on but Sanctum was busy and a few animal following Tony had to wait while they dealt with more serious threats. But they were all keeping an eye on Tony.

It just got to the point where it was a new normal when Tony never showed up to an Avengers meeting. They thought he forgot or something but Friday told them she couldn’t wake him since yesterday afternoon and he was still in lab, sleeping.

They got Tony out of lab and tried to understand whatever was going on. Animals were still coming with seeds, nuts, flowers and etc and they were trying to build a shrine around Tony. That finally got everyone freaked out and they called in Strange again.

Strange came and tried to understand what was going on, the magic wasn’t malicious in the roots but there was a spell and it was trying to complete it is task. Real problem was, he didn’t know what completed task would have cost the Stark. For all he knows, to complete it, the man might have to die.

That made everyone more nervous and it was Peter who found out what was going on because he and Friday was looking everything Tony did since the animals started to show. And that was he who realised Tony went to sleep after eating an Apple Pie.

Others tried to look into the pie for possible drugs and other things but Peter got a chart that he went into a Tony’s Snow White colors outfit and social media, and he kinda had to explain everyone that he was following Loki’s social media and he was fun, okay, and Loki tweeting about it, while Loki was watching them in his cat form.

Rhodey was the one who asked if they need to be a prince charming and kiss Tony awake. Peter was pretty sure it was gonna work while Strange was saying they need to bring Loki and ask, what end purpose he cast this spell. Peter’s cries of he is a mischief god, what purpose he would do this otherwise was never heard.

While they all go for the look for Loki, Loki was just sitting next to the Peter and they were both watching Tony sleep. Peter was absentmindedly petting him when Loki decided to talk.

After a nearly heart attack, and Peter was adamant that just because he was young or a superhero, it didn’t mean he couldn’t have a heart attack if a cat started to talk, Loki was offering him a little bit water to calm him down. Peter asked if he came to finally end the curse.

Peter while he had the theme of Snow White on his own, completely forgot that the ending needed a kiss and when Loki went for one, he didn’t know what was going on was shouting and trying to hide his face because Loki was kissing his father figure there but at least it was a peck and he wanted to ask if he couldn’t just lift the curse without the kiss but Tony slowly waking up distracted him.

On the other hand, Tony found the Loki on his face and his brain was telling him to be alert but he was still sleepy and after a second he found Peter hugging him that he woke up finally, how much stressed he was and all that while Loki just smirked an vanished from the room.

After others were alerted to Tony waking up and Peter explaining that he asked Loki to lift the curse and Loki lifting the curse and Peter needing a brain bleach for it and Strange finally declaring Tony didn’t have any more magic on him, everything a little bit settled on.

Tony was… well, uh, he was well rested. He didn’t get a sleep like that for a long time and his body was telling him that was appreciated very much. And even if he did sleep for a while, he was… able to sleep more normally, well, for Tony normal. And he might have thanked Loki, but the god did kiss him, so he was not gonna thank him for it.

And okay, waking up to Loki’s face and his searching gaze and fingers on his chin might be engraved on his mind. Or apparently Peter and Loki had some kind of friendship going on social media and Peter might have sweared that Loki did help him one time or two, but he helped with daggers so he was not going asking his help anyway. He went for Doctor Strange for help, not Loki, and Peter going Doctor Strange for magical help was another thing he didn’t know, and he have to have talks with them because his teenager was apparently needed more help. 

Even if Peter argued he was the one who found out what was going on, nothing would have stopped Tony to have the talks. And Peter was telling Loki did Prince Charming kiss to wake him and he had to deal with that before Peter got more ideas to do secretly.

And animals still didn’t left completely. Birds had settled down. Mouses were no where to find, most of the wild forest folk left. There is still a few bunnies or squirrels or cats, but that was normal amount and unless you hand fees them, they are not following anyone around.

Well, there is a black cat that still went into Tony’s lab or settled down next to Peter for pets. Peter named him Kitty but people might have heard him say Lokitty a few times. And that cat was also never around when Strange or any other magic user comes into the compound.

Tony did have a talk with Loki. And they might have had a kiss, or more. And maybe, just maybe, he was sleeping better. Tony didn’t know if it was Loki’s magic or not.

It took a nearly year for him to find out the “Kitty” was Loki himself and yes, he did slept in his room, on his bed when he was a cat too. And listened Tony rambling and yes, Loki was cheating with when to appear or needed and might have cause mischief just for the giggles. And he might have helped sometimes.

It took 5 years, 5 whole years to learn that Loki never had to kiss Tony to wake him up. Loki could have let the magic go any moment. Thats what Strange told them. Peter might have accidentally webbed Loki’s mouth shut because he caused so much need for brain bleach, really. And Lokitty didn’t get pets for a week.

Edit: Instead of an Apple Pie, it could have been an Apple tech, mainly it might be the iPod SHIELD took from Darcy and somehow it ended in Tony`s hands and he was looking what it was and after he took it, he got sleepy. But it felt like more Sleeping Beauty, i don`t know, why Tony eat Apple Pie in his lab also a mystery to me but whichever works i suppose.

Edit2: Darcy finds out where her iPod is and then it is now a magical artifact that causes the sleeping beauty sleep. Made by Loki. She goes for a punch while Peter the real reason why Darcy learned where it is in the first place watches. 

[cryptnus-blog]

How IBM will use blockchain as its commerce backbone

New Post has been published on https://cryptnus.com/2018/09/how-ibm-will-use-blockchain-as-its-commerce-backbone/

How IBM will use blockchain as its commerce backbone

About four years ago, Jerry Cuomo and other technologists at IBM started to study blockchain, thanks to the phenomenal rise of Bitcoin and later Ethereum as cryptocurrencies based on the decentralized ledger that was both secure and transparent.

Now Cuomo is vice president of IBM Blockchain, and he interacts with more than 1,500 blockchain experts at Big Blue. Working with the Linux Foundation, IBM created its own fast and secure Hyperledger Fabric, to create a more robust version of blockchain that can scale up to the demands of modern commerce and its millions of transactions per second. Hyperledger Fabric is gaining momentum as the infrastructure for created trusted networks in a wide variety of industries. Earlier this week, IBM said it is providing the IBM Blockchain Platform for Hu-manity.co to use blockchain to enable consumers to exercise control over the use of their personal data.

And Cuomo is spreading the word about blockchain’s benefits to all sorts of industries. Recently, IBM cut a deal with shipping giant Maersk to create a blockchain-based supply chain where you could instantaneously track shipped goods back to the original source in a couple of seconds. 94 companies have joined the effort.

IBM is working with Walmart and others to pinpoint sources of contaminated food to the original source in an effort to reduce hundreds of thousands of deaths per year. Big Blue is working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to explore how blockchain can ensure patient consent for the transfer of health data.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

VentureBeat: Do you do blockchain, or cryptocurrency, or both?

Jerry Cuomo: I’m blockchain. I’m an equal opportunity employer of whatever sort of application you want to write on top of blockchain.

VentureBeat: How long have you been focused on that?

Cuomo: Since 2014. That was the big wake-up for everybody. I was a CTO for IBM’s middleware business. A big part of that was products that deal with transaction processing. While we were doing many things — cloud and AI and mobile — the transaction processing side of the business had flattened a bit. Not many big new things happening. But I always had my eye on things that were new evolutions in transaction processing.

When I really got to see what was happening under Bitcoin, I got excited, as excited as anyone on the crypto side. But I was really excited about applying this to other uses. IBM certainly caters to business and enterprise. I became very curious about how we can apply this technology to allow businesses to collaborate. It’s not a complete secret, or hard to imagine. Typically, in the world, a group of institutions or people can achieve more than any individual member of that group. One plus one equals three, or whatever you want to call the adage about the power of the group. It seemed like this could be a unique way to transform a supply chain, on one side of the fence, or how trade financing works, on the other side of the fence.

We got the spark of what could be. Once we started practicing this with some of the conventional technology of 2014–in blockchain years that was a long time ago. Ethereum was the gold standard, and it’s still very popular today. It’s great at what it does. But it’s what it didn’t do that started striking our fears. We’re trying to set up a decentralized network between institutions, but this institution needs to be accountable. The EU, pre-GDPR data privacy, or I have a HIPAA requirement–many of those networks require the members to be known and have some level of accountability. I need to be able to prove to an auditor that these events took place and I behaved this way. That’s what started making us scratch our heads. How do we do this with the conventional blockchain?

We came up with a set of ideas and we tried to apply them to Ethereum. We ran into a couple of roadblocks, one being the lack of modularity in the early code base of Ethereum. The other is the licensing model. It was an LGPL license. In IBM, or in any institution that wants to commercialize something, it would be very hard to commercialize something with an LGPL license. Last but not least, there was really no unified governing board for Ethereum.

Long story short, we decided we needed to take another path. The path we took was to start building a blockchain for business from the ground up. We didn’t try to do that by ourselves. We went to the Linux Foundation and they introduced us to several like-minded companies. Together we formed the Hyperledger Project. Within that project there’s a number of open-source projects, one of them being Hyperledger Fabric. IBM has been contributing quite a bit to that project, as well as State Street and Fujitsu and Hitachi and several other companies. We’re very invested in that.

Above: IBM and Maersk are teaming up.

Image Credit: IBM/Maersk

That forms the foundation of IBM Blockchain, which is a platform as a service offering. It forms the foundation of several solution ventures we’ve built with the likes of Wal-Mart and Nestle and Unilever. TradeLens, which is a trade finance network with the likes of Maersk. That’s our strategy. As I said, blockchain for business isn’t just a slogan. There’s some real hard engineering things that we had to do to provide the enterprise qualities needed.

I typically distill it down to four. There’s probably a few more, but four real succinct attributes. One is accountability. We get that through permissioning. You may have heard of permission blockchain. Simply put, members apply for a membership card, a public and private key issued through a decentralized certificate authority. Now you’re accountable. You’re known to the network. While you’re known to the network, the second one is privacy. While you’re known, you should be able to interact privately. In finance, there’s a lot of bilateral contracts and things like that. You don’t need everyone in the network to see your business. You just need the folks who are involved, who have a need to know.

The other is around performance and scalability. It’s known that Ethereum and Bitcoin purposefully don’t perform at high transaction rates. They’re designed not to because of how mining works and how they want to ensure–in a very clever way, blockchain networks are all about building trust. Those blockchains build trust while maintaining anonymity. It works for that use case, for currency, something trying to emulate cash, which is a bearer instrument. But they had to work in safety nets, like the group with the biggest computer couldn’t overrun the network. They put throttles in which hinder performance. But an enterprise blockchain has to support an immense volume of transactions, thousands per second potentially. That was the third.

The fourth is security. A blockchain network has to just keep running. It has to tolerate fault. In other words, it needs to keep running if there are bad actors in the network, and still roughly come up with the right answer. Or even sloppy actors, which in a permission blockchain are probably more the case. You have someone running on less reliable hardware that fails from time to time. The network can’t stop because one member is disappearing every so often.

Those are the four qualities we’ve built into Hyperledger Fabric. We started that with the Linux Foundation and the Hyperledger Project–it was announced in 2015. Three years into it, we’re really starting to see the first live networks happening, which is exciting. There are all sorts: big enterprises, small startups. There are hundreds of networks out there that are using Hyperledger Fabric. We have 70 of them on our radar right now that we consider live, meaning they consider that system the system of record. They have multiple institutions transacting on a daily basis on that network.

Some of them are small scale. Some of them are big scale. Some of them are small scale with big dreams. [laughs] Some are big scale with humongous dreams. We see everything in between. One of the things I’ve been talking about is–the exciting part about working on blockchain is working on middleware and helping usher in the transactive web. In the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, that was very interesting. I became a huge fan of some of the users of Java-based middleware. Many websites that we use daily still use that technology. But I couldn’t say necessarily that that technology was for good.

What I see happening with blockchain–while there’s all kinds of uses of it, I do see a theme in blockchain for good. It’s being used to protect people’s personal identity, or ensure that the information being fed into a clinical trial is correct. A drug that you’re taking hasn’t been counterfeited, or the food that has salmonella in it can be recalled quickly without affecting more people and without shutting down the whole U.S. production of spinach. These are all things that are good for you and I, not just for the industry.

VentureBeat: I’ve wound up in an interesting spot on blockchain. Most of what I do is supposed to be games, and then about 20 percent is tech, everything else. I cover a lot of big companies like IBM. That 20 percent has now been filled up. It’s a few blockchain stories a week now. It’s given me some knowledge, but it’s also confused me a bit as well.

Cuomo: What’s confusing, would you say?

Above: IBM is working with Hu-manity.co to secure your right to control your personal data.

Image Credit: IBM

VentureBeat: I see the basic tradeoff of security and transaction speed. The original Bitcoin was not built for transaction speed, as you said. There’s different parties saying they have the next-generation answer to that. But they all seem very fragmented. I wrote quite a bit about Hedera Hashgraph, which is fascinating, but it’s just one of many. How many different slices of this do we really need? Do the banks need to do their own blockchain systems? Do the shipping lines need their own? Everybody’s taking a different whack at similar problems, depending on how much they care about security and transaction speed.

Cuomo: There’s a balance. What excites me, because I’ve seen trends evolve over time–I know a few things for sure, or at least my history suggests these things very strongly. One is, what we know today is going to be very different. For companies like IBM, I believe we’re doing very well in the blockchain space. In order for us to continue leading, we’re going to have to change. It’s evolving.

The material thing to measure–usage and community. Let me explain. The most lasting blockchain technologies are going to be the ones that are built in the open and that provide a fair platform for innovators, for people who have an idea. I’m not going to be locked out if there’s a small group that’s running the board on this. That’s why we like working with the Linux Foundation. They can be really tough sometimes on the way they govern, but it’s good for the technology. It usually breeds winners. Again, they’re blind faith over there. They don’t care if you’re |BM or a small startup. The rules are the rules. There’s a church and state separation between the governing board and the technical board.

What’s measured on the technical side are contributions: not dollar contributions, but code contributions. You can contribute financially, you can contribute via code, or some combination of the two. That fosters a lasting environment. Again, it may not be what’s here today, but those things–I believe, for example, that the Hyperledger project will evolve to be amongst the winners. It’s Darwinian, the way they do it.

[victoriagloverstuff]

Edmund White: Reading is a Passport to the World

When I was a little child, my sister, who was nearly four years older, was astonished that I couldn’t read. We were in my mother’s old Ford, driving around the main square of Hyde Park, and my sister pointed to a sign and said, “You honestly can’t read that?”

“No,” I said sullenly. “What does it say?”

“Graeter’s,” she announced triumphantly, the name of Cincinnati’s premier ice cream maker. “Can’t you see that? What does it say to you?” She wasn’t being mean; she was genuinely puzzled. Reading was a magical portal—once you passed through it, you couldn’t even imagine going back.

I must have been four. Two years later I could read, or at least “sound out” syllables (that was the method then). When I realized that I could interpret these hieroglyphics, I felt so free, as if a whole new world had been opened to me. Now I could herar a chorus of voices, even those coming from other centuries and cultures. I was no longer bound to the squalid here and now, to my mother’s web-spinning of agreeable fantasies or my father’s sudden eruptions of rage, to the sweating summers of that age before air conditioning.

I remember toddling into my mother’s room, where she was taking a perfumed bubble bath in the late afternoon. I announced (or maybe thought), “I’m free. I can read.”

Could I really have had such an improbable thought at age six? Or have I just told myself that that thought occurred to me then? And yet I remember my mother’s sweetness, the good smell, the afternoon sunlight, and my very real feeling of joyful liberation. And, quite concretely, reading has always struck me as a passport to the world, one in which characters are more real than actual people, where values are more intense than in the dim light of reality, where characters fly up into destinies rather than paddle around in ambiguity.

I felt like a blind person who’d just regained his sight. I was no longer a Cincinnatian but rather an earthling. If things were clearly written in English, there was no text that was off-limits. I never read the standard children’s classics. No Wind in the Willows. Only recently did I get around to Treasure Island.

In my twenties and thirties no book was too ambitious for me; I worked my way through Theodor Adorno and Heinrich von Kleist, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, though I was drunk most of the time and often had to hold one eye shut. I suppose I was hanging out with a pretty brainy crowd back then, and I felt I had to keep up. I doubt I retained much, though in my thirties and forties I reviewed several books by Barthes and Foucault.

I was so driven back then, it never would have occurred to me to reread a book! My goal was to have read everything, or at least the major works that appealed to me, that seemed essential. Perhaps because I’d never done any graduate work, I felt inferior. I’d never read The Faerie Queene. Worse, I’d been a writer for eight years for Time-Life Books, the ultimate home of the middle-brow. Although I invariably said defensively, “I’m not an intellectual,” I wanted to be one—or at least to be able to refuse demurely that title. Sometimes I took comfort in the idea I was an artist, not an intellectual. I even resorted to the ridiculously snobbish notion I was a “gentleman amateur” and not an intellectual. But I’ve always wanted to have the choice to join any club, especially one that might reject me. For instance, I made a major effort to join the Century Club, for which one had to be sponsored by 11 or 12 current members. Two years after I was accepted, I resigned. Too many lawyers.

Now I do reread at least two books every year—Anna Karenina and Henry Green’s Nothing. Although these two novels are so different one from the other, they both reward closer scrutiny, so much so they scarcely resemble the same book one remembers having read the year before. People complain about the Kitty and Lvov parts of Anna Karenina, but that’s a frivolous charge. Their love stands in dramatic contrast to Anna’s and Vronsky’s passion and is the necessary counterweight to that tragic tale. In the same way, some readers treat Nothing the way they regard all comedy—as lightweight. Actually it is a profound study of the generations and social classes—and unexpectedly it sides with the older, richer people.

“Perhaps some prose is enough like a taut play script that it profits from being read aloud, but almost always a live reading of prose is an exercise in vanity.”

The other book I’ve reread five times in my life is Proust’s. When I was a teenager I read it as the bible of snobbism; it gave me a whole vocabulary to describe this vice that Proust calls “narrow but deep.” Now I read it as the definitive condemnation of snobbism.

For my memoir, I’ve reread a few favorites by Colette, Nabokov, and Tolstoy and read for the first time novels by Guyotat, Giono, and Malaparte. Do we prefer to revisit books we love or to explore the unknown? Are we happier to find new things in the old or to detect familiar themes and strategies in the utterly new and startling? The brilliant novelist of modern manners Alison Lurie once explained to me why she was more popular in England than in America. “For the English I’m writing about an unfamiliar subject [American academic and artistic life] in a familiar style of social satire, whereas for Americans I’m writing in an unusual style about familiar subjects.” Has she touched on an explanation of why we like certain books and not others?

*

Joe Brainard reportedly said on his deathbed, “The best thing about dying is that you never have to go to another poetry reading.” How many times I’ve had to sit through poetry readings in a stuffy room with subaqueous light at the end of a long day and fight against falling asleep! The mind loves a narrative, and in my half sleep my poor brain has spun cartoons made up of chance words, my embarrassment, trace memories (what Freudians call dismissively “the daily residue”), and my shipwrecked will to wake up, or at least not snore.

Everyone says poetry is an oral art, and perhaps some of it is meant to be read out loud. Good actors can make us understand passages in Shakespeare that use obsolete language, though I hate it when pedants hope to indicate the line break or the caesura. I could never make sense of The Tempest until I saw it onstage. On the page I could never keep track of all the characters. Charles Lamb argued in an essay that reading Shakespeare is preferable to seeing him produced, and maybe hammy acting and garish sets and thundering exits and entrances do topple certain of Shakespeare’s cloud castles, but great performances can dial into sharp focus even the vaguest verse.

But does modern poetry gain from being recited out loud? James Merrill was a smooth, trained reader and the smile in his voice could give the reader permission to laugh at his improbable mixture of metaphysics and gossip. His light social tone so often gives way to the sublime that a reader less civilized than he scarcely knows what is funny and what is serious (sometimes both at once, since he thought wisdom was expressed in puns and that the language itself is the collective unconscious).

Percussive poetry like Pound’s translation of the Anglo-Saxon The Seafarer as read by the author himself to the beat of drums can be riveting; a casual scanning of the page would never render the granitic, prehistoric force of this masterpiece. In his recitation (now on YouTube) Pound rolls his r’s, thuds the final d’s, and maintains a shaman’s monotone. Maybe Paul Verlaine’s musical verse (or John Keats’s) is improved by being read out loud, but most 20th- or 21st-century verse is too abstract or too dense to be understood on a single hearing. The mise-en-page, the line breaks, the Latinate or Anglo-Saxon origins of the words, as in tomb and grave (“The tomb in Palestine / Is not the porch of spirits lingering. / It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay”)—these are all elements that surrender themselves only to close reading.

With prose the problem is the speed. Everyone reads at a different pace, and some texts are not interesting or intricate enough to be dosed out at conversational speed. We get it; we want to scan it. Perhaps some prose is enough like a taut play script that it profits from being read aloud, but almost always a live reading of prose is an exercise in vanity. It may be valuable for the fiction writer to gauge the response of his audience, to listen for contradictions or unintended echoes, to detect where people’s attention wanders. But do these practical benefits for the writer outweigh the torture undergone by the public?

Silent, solitary reading (if the book is good) is the best conversation, with all the uhs and ahs edited out, the dead metaphors buried, the dialogue sharpened, the descriptions vivid, the suspense rising, the characters hovering between the unique and the representative. In the great Italian and French guides to good conversation during the Renaissance and 17th century, conversation must avoid pedantry and cruelty and seek above all to please and to entertain. Finally it must be natural; affectation is the worst sin, far worse than flattery, which may even be desirable. In her definitive study The Age of Conversation, Benedetta Craveri (granddaughter to the philosopher Benedetto Croce) argues that good conversation should not make anyone feel inferior or ill at ease but rather the object of a total consideration. And Simone Weil, the French religious philosopher, thought paying attention was a form of prayer.

The novelist or essayist should never mystify for no good reason. We should know why the marquise goes out at five o’clock (if it’s relevant). In an essay we should not be thrown off by academese. An idea may be difficult, but not its expression, as I learned from my beloved Marilyn; the words should be as lucid as possible. The assumption should be that the reader is intelligent but not necessarily informed.

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Good read found on the Lithub