#because it got boring and I realized I was only playing to get more jpgs I could look at on the internet

[boneless-mika]

Oooh no I’m being so bad and immoral, perhaps even irredeemable, because I occasionally enjoy gambling

[fullmoonfireball]

alright! I foresee this getting long, so I’m gonna slap a readmore on this.

let’s go from the mission after the first one I focused on (is that wording confusing? it feels confusing. whatever, this is from mission 7 onward.)

so this one isn’t all that eventful, but Herbert’s broken the clock tower! which is bad, since all other clocks are directly linked to it and they’re now going haywire. 

(fun fact! Gary built the Clock Tower because he was bored)

more specifically, Herbert’s stolen the prime gear, the removal of which sent one of the springs flying, and Klutzy decided to make off with its snowball target. most of the mission is just retrieving the missing parts... except the prime gear. you have to make a replacement for that one. but hey, at least it’s fixed and things are back to normal!

uuuntil tremors start happening around the island. turns out Herbert took that gear for a reason, and that reason was making the Earthquake Driller! he drilled around a bunch, making a maze for the player, and drilling through the Gift Shop’s foundation enough to make it fall underground, just to block your way. gotta love that villainous need to just,, inconvenience people. so once you (presumably) get back his map (I think you can do it without actually doing that? but don’t quote me there, I’ve never tried it) and find a way to lift the gift shop and keep it there, you can actually get to the polar bear meat of this mission! Herbert’s trying to steal from the boiler from well,, the boiler room. walking in on him distracts and upsets him, though, and he hits his wrench on one of the pipes... causing the boiler to shake violently. violence isn’t the answer, Herbert. apparently it’s overheating and gonna blow up! so, of course, Herbert hightails it out of there and you’re left to fix his mess.

mission 9 is just trying to track down Herbert, so he’s not really.. in? most of it? the parts he is in though... honestly, I’d just recommend watching it yourself. Herbert dancing is much better with visuals.

(fun fact!

this makes absolutely no sense out of context and doesn’t really make much more sense in context!)

mission 10! I really love this one bc it’s a fun story. we open with mission briefing from Gary (we’re supposed to keep a golden puffle statue safe at the Night Club), but then Herbert hacks into the PSA’s computers! pretty much just to gloat about how he used the camera from the last mission to hack in and that he’s also got a plan! but uh...

.... yeah, i think this speaks for itself.

THANKFULLY, though, this was all planned! Gary (and The Director) wanted this kind of slip-up, because this is all one big plot to capture Herbert! after you help JPG and Rookie with their preparations (and then get distracted by Klutzy), Herbert shows up at the Club to steal the Golden Puffle. dropping the cage on him seems to work until he just.. lifts it off. despite everything, he is a polar bear, and thus, is pretty strong. but joke’s on Herbert, because we have backup! and you can rely on either of your teammates to trap him again, either by shining the spotlights on the Electromagnet 3000′s solar panel to strengthen it, or by taking JPG’s jet pack and strapping it to the cage. either way, the cage gets slammed back onto Herbert. Gary comes in and goes through some options as to what to do with Herbert (ban him from the island, detain him in a holding cell, make him do community service, let him go because they’re nice (that one was a joke)), and the mission is over...

(fun? fact! the “first” time I played this mission I just kinda.. stole Guy’s jet pack and did Rookie’s solution anyways bc I 1: just meant to talk to him and 2: I didn’t realize that was a solution! sorry Guy, but you’re not getting it back.)

except it’s not over! Herbert demands one phone call and... well... Rookie gives him his Spy Phone. and he teleports out of there. cue mission 11! though since we’ve already gone through that, I’m not gonna re-explain The Veggie Villain. that’d just be redundant.

what we will get into real quick is the Battle of Doom! after a Medieval Party where Gary built a mechanical hydra to fight, Herbert took that robot for his own purposes and tried to attack the Everyday Phoning Facility with it. some damage was done to the exterior, but the robot was still pretty easy (and fun! I can attest!) to beat, and no damage was done to the EPF HQ. 

(fun fact! the music for this fight slaps.)

next comes Operation: Hibernation! the name is,, pretty self-explanatory, I’d say? gotta make the bear go to sleep. despite the fact that polar bears... uhhhhh... only do that sort of thing when pregnant? but that’s a can of worms I am going to throw RIGHT out the window. 

the writers later lampshaded that fact anyways. whatever. just add it to Herbert’s Un-Polar Bear-iness List. don’t look too far into this- it doesn’t make any sense either way. also I’ve spent way more time on this than it deserves.

and now let’s get into the final part here! which is going to be Very Fun to talk about! Operation: Blackout!

a while before the event, a certain “Hubert P. Enguin” (no relation, I’m sure) wrote in to Ask Gary, asking how to build a “high frequency infrared reversion laser”. after that, Gary went missing, with evidence to suggest a kidnapping. Field-Ops went offline. the EPF went on Red Alert.

exactly one week after that, the Blackout started. the laser was built and used. not only did it block out the sky over the island, but it was also used to blast the Everyday Phoning Facility, successfully destroying it this time. Herbert’s in control of the island now, babey! he’s revealing agents’ identities while hogging the sun’s warmth! well... the two that already had their real names in their most-known names, at least. (Dot and Guy) but I think that was just coincidence.

so slowly and surely, as the island grows colder and more EPF agents go missing, the player has to make their way into Herbert’s base. first, Herbert captured Dot. then Rookie. JPG was ambushed by crabs, and met the same fate as the others. and finally, The Director was captured while giving the player instructions...

and it was strongly implied you were next.

Operation: Blackout was,, really dark. ba-dum-tsh! and I’m kind of upset at myself for having fallen off of Club Penguin too early to experience it, but at the same time... I’m not entirely sure 11-year-old me would’ve taken it so well. 

but yeah, you self destruct the solar laser and get to see this video! I really like this one, so I’m just poppin’ it in here.

and yeah! that’s about where my knowledge ends vis a vis Herbert! thanks for like,, actually reading this if you did, bc this post is a mile long

[kkachis]

galra keith biology + behaviour headcanons

this is a really old post from like last year while galra keith theory was still a theory and i was way too invested in it

teeth:

his teeth have always been kinda fucked up

you know that thing where you get canines above your canines? that happened to him like all the time

keith's mouth was kinda fucked up because he had two of those extra teeth for each canine on both jaws, like his mouth wanted him to have a mouthful of fangs but decided "lol fuck it" halfway through

he’s got also got some canines that replace the molars right next to his canines, plus his canine teeth are kinda long anyway

(continuing on the vein of feline galra/bat galra instead of too much lizard-based galra because lizard teeth are Tiny and Boring)

eyes:

if you took a photo of him at night with the flash on his eyes would do the cat thingy like this:

http://www.pickaxemania.com/attachments/cat_flash_eyes_by_luluxoria-d3kxxv7-jpg.666/

i wonder if keith's eyes can go slit-pupiled?

that would scare the shit out of anyone on earth

imagine you're some asshole bullykid trying to harass the weirdo newbie

he tenses up and tells you to leave and you take this as a challenge and then he looks at you and he's baring his fucked-up canines and you could swear his eyes have slit pupils

you would piss your pants and run away

nails:

his nails were always extra tough to cut

when he was a kid he used the big adult clippers because they were the only ones that worked

when he got older he used his knife like the desert gremlin he is

galra crests:

there's a very slight, basically unnoticeable bony crest bisecting his head; most of the galra have something like that

his mullet always covered it tho lol

but if you like stick your hand in his hair and run your finger across the midline you can kinda feel it

he also has ridges on his back from the lizard descent

it's slight but more prominent than his head crest

like if you touch it you might just think his spine is bony

behaviour:

he probably got into lots of fights when he was a little kid because his approach was play-fighting and stuff but to everyone else he looked angry and temperamental

he can do some wild shit with his voice because his vocal chords are different

Top Tier Bullshit: (credit to @that-kid-named-ricc​)

shiro has a picture of him from when he was like twelve

somehow managing to balance, squatting on the fence (hint: cat genes)

laser cat eyes, paired with a hideous mullet/bowlcut fusion topping his head

keith, the True Cryptid

“cryptid squatted”

keith probably has a couple extra bones somewhere too

diet:

he’s always preferred his steak rare and his fish as sushi/sashimi rather than cooked

he’s probably eaten some meat that he shouldn’t have bare raw and come out of it fine but still got a scolding tho lol

“keith how are you still alive” – shiro, probably

when he was a kid he ate raw eggs from the fridge as a snack

he didn’t realize you weren’t supposed to do that

when he was older he still did it sometimes as a midnight snack

imagine this: on the castle hunk goes into the kitchen because he can’t sleep and he wants to make tea, but then he finds keith like fucking wholesale taking alien eggs from the fridge cracking open these cold boys into a mug and then going sluuuuuuuuuuuuuuurp

hunk: “keith. buddy. what the fresh hell are you doing”

nasty weird alien desert boy. I love him

he was probably absolutely terrible at eating his greens

*note: he does need to eat some vegetables, but he could subsist on an all-meat diet. humans have done so in the arctic, anyway, and it goes double if they’ve got part of their diet hailing from what looks like a species descended from predators

[because-its-important]

transitions & transformations

i. the rest of my batch at RC

I spent the first six weeks of my batch at Recurse Center in an out-and-out sprint. I learned Python, built and released projects, and wrote blog posts every week. I wasn’t sure where my limits were, but I was determined to find out - preferably by overshooting them, then adjusting after the fact.

A curious thing happened. I kept finding that I was more than capable of starting and finishing projects, especially when I had a firm mental image of the end goal. There were at least as many unexpected good-turns as there were setbacks, and I certainly didn’t come up against any inscrutable barriers. Mostly the challenge was in overcoming the distance between a thing that doesn’t exist and a thing that does, which I was able to sort out pretty handily through a consistent application of effort across time.

Who’d have thought?

A selfie taken on my birthday, which also happened in the last few months and was really great!

The second half of my batch was not so visibly productive - with the exception of The Question Game. The Question Game is a simple game designed to help groups of people get to know each other better IRL. I designed it with my friend Brittany a few years ago as an icebreaker when we found ourselves in a group of folks who knew us but didn’t really know each other. The game only really needs a method of generating random numbers for a small but arbitrary group size, but building it out as a toy webapp was a good excuse to get practice working with a JS-only stack. I learned React, got a lil more familiar with node, and even went as far as to attach an otherwise completely unnecessary PG database and Sequelize ORM. You can see the code for it here. Outside of this project, however, I didn’t publish any code. I didn’t publish any writing, either.

So I’d like to take a moment and shine a bit of light on the work that I did during the rest of my batch.

🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘

First, I made the decision to leave community.lawyer, the social impact startup I co-founded in 2016 following the Blue Ridge Labs Fellowship.

I’m happy to report that I left on the come up, which seems a rare and privileged thing for a founder to be able to say. Gaining traction in a hyper-specialized industry like legal tech takes a gargantuan amount of sustained forward momentum, and I departed just as we began to reap the fruits of our labor. In the last few months community.lawyer has reached final approval on partnerships a year in the making, won federal grants we’d submitted to in 2016, and every day our software is being used to help connect people who have legal needs with credible lawyers. Our first two partners were exactly the types of legal organizations at the heart of our mission: the Justice Entrepreneurs Project and the DC Reduced Fee Lawyer & Mediator Referral Service.1 Based in Chicago and Washington DC respectively, these orgs are specifically chartered to deliver quality services at rates that more Americans can afford. I am so proud. ⚖️

Second, I started my first ever job hunt as a software engineer. Wowee, this was scary! I knew that I had to prepare for interviewing, which meant a) getting my career change narrative straight, b) studying Data Structures & Algorithms 101, and c) learning how to perform my handle on both of these in a live, semi-adversarial environment.

At one point during my batch my laptop broke. I read through this wonderful illustrated book during the two days it was being fixed.

In order to direct my search I also had to craft a set of selection criteria of my own. Foremost: “What good will my work do for the world?”2 Additionally, “What degree of access will I have to supportive mentors?”

Getting started with interview prep was a challenge, at least partly because I had so many options for where to start. But I did get started! I read Cracking the Coding Interview, I did the free trial and weekly free problems on Interview Cake. I attended a few group mock interviews at Recurse Center and signed up for a 1-1 mock interview with an RC alum. Her name is Leah, and she’s amazing - the superbly friendly and encouraging Comp Sci TA I wish I’d had years ago. 💚Brittany also set up mock technical screens for me with her pals, Leaf and Ian. They were the vanguard against my outsized anxiety about programming for an audience and they each took the time to give me solid feedback.

Third, I extended my batch at Recurse Center by another 6 weeks. I had decided early on I wouldn’t extend (for no real reason) and stuck with this decision up until two days before my batch ending. A small group of folks - Lily, Connor, Alicja and I - went to NYX in Union Square to try out lipsticks. We played with different colors and finishes (satin! matte! shimmer!) for half an hour or so. There came a point when I looked up, glanced across the narrow makeup store at my beautiful friends’ beautiful faces and thought, “You know, you don’t have to leave yet, right? What’s the rush?” I’d already accomplished my primary goal, to forcibly rework my identity as an engineer, but it sure seemed that I could stand to reach for a second one. That night I decided to extend my batch, with the intention of sampling a more open method of self-directed learning, i.e. with a little more chill and a lot less panic. Specifically, I wanted to practice connecting meaningfully with my limited supply of social energy.

In my bonus six weeks, I: gave three talks (2 planned, 1 impromptu) under encouragement from Ayla and Lily, learned to juggle thanks to instruction from a fellow RCer, Edward, who also loaned me a book about learning, made it into weekly Feelings Check-in (read as: opt-in support group) fairly regularly, picked my first ever lock, saw a live-coding show and then later attended two live-coding workshops (one on TidalCycles, another on Super Collider), sat in a dark room and played howling wolf clips while Microsoft Sam read grimoires aloud, got my hair braided for the first time in a decade, made dumplings and DJ’d for a dinner party, connected with folks about queer-poly relationships, gave fiery advice, and received compliments so earnest and rational and persistent that it was difficult to refute them.

Zine fair plus Lightning Bolt concert inside a movie theater in Times Square??

I also put my interview prep to use and interviewed with a handful of Recurse Center partner companies. Job searching meant squaring off against impostor syndrome and a ton of related anxieties in rapid succession. I successfully choked most of that down when it mattered, though, and it was only a couple short weeks before I received my first offer.

To that end, I’m super happy to say that I’ll be joining Blink Health as a Fullstack Product Engineer! Blink Health is a healthcare startup in SoHo. They make it easier for people to afford prescription drugs, especially for those with limited insurance plans or none at all. These savings aren’t trivial either: an extra $50 can spare someone from choosing between groceries or medicine that week, and for some folks Blink saves many times that. I’ll be starting at the end of this month. ✌️🤓

The last two years have been a wild ride: participating in a social impact fellowship and accelerator, busting my product chops and learning web dev to get a public benefit company off the ground, then diving into four months of self-directed learning at Recurse Center. I’m really looking forward to having some externally imposed structure again. Real health insurance, too.

ii. some hard truths

I made a few radical life changes in 2016, like getting involved in activist spaces, dating more, biking everywhere, building strong friendships, going capital-B Boogying, programming full-time. As I carried those changes forward through 2017, I began to notice a lot of mental and emotional reconfiguration happening to me.

Did you know that along its way to becoming a butterfly, a caterpillar nearly completely liquifies inside its cocoon?

Psychological growth is confusing, full of false starts, and generally painful. You’ve got the static pain of stretching beyond your limits, the pleasure-pain of feeling an old knot finally release, the frustrating pain of stubbing your toe because some helpful asshole has been rearranging your psychic furniture when you weren’t looking. There’s the more dramatic knife-in-the-gut pain of realizing that just because you’re growing doesn’t mean the people closest to you are, and that now in certain cases what you previoulsy regarded as friendship actually looks a whole lot like run-of-the-mill exploitation or even emotional abuse, if you're being honest, and it's a realization that only hurts more because it’s so irredeemably cliche and boring. And despite all that pain you gotta go ahead and grow anyway, claw your way out of the relative comfort of ignorance. Transcendence may not be the only show in town but afaik it’s the one most worth watching.

Prior to attending Recurse Center I’d spent lots of time exploring my surroundings and cataloguing people and places worth coming back to. My view of myself did change (and positively!) as a consequence. But sooner or later, ya get tired of the taste of low-hanging fruit.

So, armed with the bookshelf of a philosophy grad and a burgeoning psychoanalytic vocabulary begging to be let off leash, I decided to use my time at RC to try confronting a few of my Hard To See truths in addition to becoming a better programmer.

Here’s what I’ve found so far.

Truth #1: People like me a lot. This causes me problems.

I’ve been metabolizing this one for some time. I remember having a conversation with Brittany in January of 2016. I don’t remember what social anxiety I’d been vocalizing, but I must have been worrying that someone “hated me.” Brittany cut me off, exasperated in the way that only a friend can be in the face of utter delusion: “No one hates you Nicole! You’re always worried that people don’t like you and it’s never true!”

I carried that admonishment with me through two years of voracious friendship-building. On the whole, seeing that people do in fact enjoy and seek out my company has curbed the most egregious overreaches of my social anxiety. But reckoning with my anxiety honestly has also meant acknowledging that my compulsive instinct to withdraw from social situations is also a protective (if suboptimal) response to a few very real dangers.

Most acutely: being friendly, generous, and intensely empathetic makes me a ready target for users. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt for as long as I can, which makes me proportionally susceptible to being taken advantage of and then gaslighted about it. A lifetime of socialization as a petite woman don’t help, neither. This leads to a pattern where, semi-regularly, I look up and take stock of how someone has been treating me and realize that the answer is Very Badly, For Quite A While. This in turn leads to rough periods of cutting ties and moving on. Ideally I’d like to be be able to filter bad actors out sooner, but I also want to stay open, giving, and hopeful beyond reason. Those desires are fundamentally at odds with each other - raising vs. lowering one’s defenses - but it’s clear that I need to come up with a strategy that balances both.

More broadly, though, I operate under an ever-present dread of inevitably disappointing everyone who knows me. Whether people project onto me because they already like me or like me more because they project positively onto me, I am extremely sensitive to the fact that when people meet me the conception they form has waaay more to do with what they want to find than what’s actually there. My body is a surface readily projected upon: young, female-shaped, ethnically ambiguous, small, smiling. These well-intended projections cause me the most trouble when people see me interacting socially; they’ll witness fifteen minutes of seemingly effortless extroversion on my part and extrapolate out massively. As far as they’re concerned I’ve got plenty of social energy to spare, and if I don’t spend it hanging out with them, it must be because either my friendliness is fake or I don’t like them.

Pretty much none of this is conducted consciously, of course, but it still creates a lot of unnecessary pressure that I can’t pretend not to feel and resent. I know there are people who dream about attaining this kind of “popularity” - to be assumed Cooler than one truly is - but getting buffeted around by folks’ totally unexamined, unarticulated psychological desires mostly sucks.

Truth #2: I’m non-binary.

I’ve also spent a very long time resisting this one. Two decades on the rack, easy. As such, the story of getting here is long. Perhaps one day I’ll tell it. 😛

The short of it, though, is this: I’m probably at least as much of a boy3 as I am a girl. Outside of where my life has been mutated by the chronic background radiation of sexism, “benevolent” and otherwise, I don’t strongly identify as a woman. Furthermore, I find the two-gender system to be infinitely more alienating than comforting. Gender is a social construction designed to impose order on the natural messiness of sexual experience, and as far as I’m cool with that, I am decidedly Not Cool with the “normal” state of affairs, i.e. aggressively shoving whole human beings into an absurdly reductive false dichotomy.

Between its either-or-ism and its forced assignment, the traditional approach to gender reveals itself to be obviously bullshit to anyone who spends more than a few minutes thinking about it. Its boundaries are arbitrary, inconsistent, and generally ill-fitting at the level of individual experience, which why they require such an outrageous amount of coercion and bodily violence to enforce. As much as other folks want to participate in a system of ritualized violence I guess they are free to? Personally, I’d prefer to see it actively dismantled.

If gender is to be saved it’ll be by subverting it, taking it apart, remaking it into something life-affirming. Not the dehumanizing garbage we’ve got now.

As of yet I don’t have any plans to change my presentation because I don’t fuckin’ gotta!

I do have a preference towards They / Them pronouns, but She / Her is still fine. For most of my friends this isn’t going to be at all surprising nor will it in any way negatively impact our relationship. Anyone who needs me to just-be-a-girl, however, can expect turbulence.

Truth #3: My righteous anger is justified and I am good at using it to help others.

I have felt conflicted about my anger for a long time. Since a very vocal childhood I have been regularly frustrated by prejudices and injustices, and I was frequently the first voice of dissent against them, whether that meant challenging adults or my peers. Unsurprisingly, I became well acquainted with the standard strokes of the backlash.

When you are confronting bigotry in a mixed environment, the voice of the status quo will generally manifest in one of two ways:

Gaslighting, e.g. “you are wrong to have said this at all, obviously I am a Good Person, you are just imagining that what I said sounded like XYZ, honestly how could you even think this, as a matter of fact it is I who is offended!”

Tone policing, e.g. “you’re too upset about this! after all, I, the person who did Fucked Up Thing, am perfectly calm about Fucked Up Thing, so any amount of anger makes you irrational by contrast, and I get a raincheck on whatever this is about!”

I know these responses are repulsive. I know they are merely the signs of a weak and imperiled ego acting out of fear. And yet I still spend an inordinate amount of time second-guessing my own anger. Gaslighting and tone policing are a favored weapon of the status quo because they work, and they work in direct proportion to how agreeable their target wants to be.

content warning: the following segment talks about sexual harassment and assault

About couple weeks ago I had the misfortune of being sexually harassed at a club in Bushwick. After numerous rejections and explicitly telling a creep bothering me, my friends, and other women in the club to get lost, I finally went to get a bouncer to eject him. The bouncer got the creep to leave. When I went to thank him, the bouncer told me a whole story about how the creep was “a harmless guy.” Then he reached down and grabbed my ass. Presumably he felt entitled to do this after helping me get rid of a person I asked him to remove... for unwanted touching.

It Really Sucked.

At every turn during the whole ordeal (and its aftermath) I had to hold onto my anger, convince myself that I wasn’t overreacting, remind myself that anyone who thought this was acceptable to do to me is almost certainly doing worse to more vulnerable people. I kept picturing myself the way this guy, this man in a position of power, must have seen me in order to feel okay doing what he did. That I was young, small, female, too friendly to say No, already indebted anyway; that he was one of the Good Guys, that his behavior was also “harmless” because he had decided it was. I conjured up as much anger as I could, pushed down the nausea of envisioning my own degradation from an attacker’s POV, and got to work. I reached out to the club and was quickly put in contact with the owner. The venue now has a publicly posted zero tolerance sexual harassment policy. The entire staff is going through training with a local org dedicated to creating safer nightlife spaces. And that motherfucker has been fired.

I demonstrably made the world better. I wasn’t alone, but all that happened because of my actions. Me and my anger, we did that.

I wish more people were this fucking angry. 💢

~ end of content warning ~

iii. an opinion

My Saturn return is upon me, y’all. As Frank Ocean serenades, we’ll never be those kids again. I have lived a few of these here nine lives and it seems only prudent to be moving forward with some sort of opinion on the matter.

My opinion is this: us folks with financial and physical security should be spending more time fixing shit around here. Figuring out what needs fixing and how you might help are the first steps.

If you’re operating on a similar scale of privilege as I am, maybe that means changing jobs to do more mission-oriented work. If you can’t swing a change of that magnitude, maybe it means showing up to community events and engaging with, caring for, supporting people you otherwise wouldn’t talk to. Churches, libraries, volunteering, supporting local artists, participating in local politics - this all counts. If you’re already doing this sorta thing, that is awesome! Maybe you also have a friend worth inviting who you sense is just itching for a chance to exercise compassion?

I’m using “fixing” pretty loosely here, too. Fixing, to my mind, means making the world brighter, safer, and sweeter for your fellows, human and otherwise. We’ve all got different ideas about what that looks like, and there are definitely folks - myopic or malevolent or both - who will swear up and down that their fear- and hate-driven behaviors will bring about better world. Ultimately, though, I believe that many hands reaching towards their personal vision of Better will in fact make things Better, especially when that vision is informed by meaningful interaction with the real world and its real sorrows and its real triumphs.

But ya gotta reach. Ya gotta try.

I am so tired of hearing my well-fed, well-homed friends piss and moan about late capitalism4 without lifting a damn finger in service of the communities bearing the brunt of material hardship. Unfettered capitalism sure does have a marked tendency to wreak havoc on organic life! But capitalism is not a monolith, and lamenting the abuses perpetuated by its principle benefactors as unchanging or inevitable only normalizes them. Any investigation into the history of capitalism (or the broader phenomena of how a Few come to subjugate the Many) will very quickly disabuse you of the notion that this shit is going to stop without a great deal of active resistance.5

So unless you are personally doing work to put our current strand of democracy-withering corporatism six-feet-under, seriously, just STFU instead. Your nihilism is boring! You don’t sound woke! Save it for your local DSA working group!

Which isn’t to say that I’m not convinced of the wickedness6 of the problems we’re facing: skyrocketing wealth disparity with no relief in sight; the destruction of most of Earth’s biodiversity via mass extinction; a pernicious climate of racism and xenophobia that scapegoats black and brown folks and then visits misery upon them; the weight of an aging population bearing down on the shittiest healthcare system of any nation in its class; a widely disenfranchised electorate further fragmented and fatigued by hyper-polarization; the gendered terrorism that is inflicted daily on women, trans and non-binary folks, and queer people at large; a rising wave of depressive anxiety as people become more aware of these problems and how thoroughly they’ve been disempowered from changing things for the better.

So yeah, I get it. These are hard problems. I just don’t see any better option than trying anyway. I want to spend my time fixing things around here and encouraging others to try their hand too. You already know the bad news: real change is hard and it can take a very long time. You might work your whole life sowing seeds whose fruit you never get to taste.

The good news, however, is that you can get started whenever and wherever you are. The good news is that a sense of purpose is its own reward.

iv. how to get started

When you’ve got hard work ahead of you, your best bet is to use your beautiful human brain and create some leverage. Ask Archimedes about it.7

Lever systems got two parts:

The lever, which is the tool you use to amplify your effort. The longer your lever is, the easier your job will be.

The fulcrum, which is the wedge the lever rests on. The nearer your fulcrum is to the thing you want to move, the easier your job will be.

If you’re starting from zero - “I want to do more for the world but I don’t know how!” - my advice is to forget about the lever arm for now. A lever ain’t shit without a fulcrum, anyway. Your time is better spent exploring the world, keeping an eye out for problems you’d like to solve, and identifying nearby points of leverage. If you want to get into activism, a fulcrum might be volunteering to fold pamphlets for an organization with a mission you believe in. If want to see more self-expression in the world, it might be might be inviting your friends to a zine-making class or hosting your own arts and craft night.

The best fulcrum is one that makes you Feel Good when you apply any amount of effort against it. Too many people get caught up in a self-defeating belief that if they can’t give 110% of their creative energy to something they might as well not try. I can confidently say that trying is itself a virtue. Every time you try even a little bit you make it easier for yourself to try again later, and more importantly, you make trying easier for others. A bunch of people altering their behavior a smidge in the same direction doesn’t add up to nothing; on the contrary, it’s a sea change.

If you’ve got a decent idea of the types of problems you want to solve, though, and you’ve tested your fulcrums, and you are thinking, “Okay, but is this all I’m capable of giving?” then it’s probably time to work on your lever. Given your own interests and inclinations, what skills can you develop that will increase the good you’re doing 10x, 100x over? This is the long game, but it scales a whole lot better than “keep doing what I’m already doing, but more.”

For me right now this means deepening my technical knowledge, building a resilient support network, and sharing what I’m learning. Helping others has been a powerful motivator for self-improvement, not the least of which because it’s a convenient shortcut through the snarl of self-confidence issues.

I am so grateful that Recurse Center was a stop on lengthening my lever! What a concentrated cluster of helpful, considerate beings.

I’ve spent the last two years wandering around New York City in wide-eyed wonder, asking myself the most ambitious question I could think of: how do you save the world?

Getting older comes with a lot of downsides, but asking yourself big questions and living your life as the answer is the primary pleasure of adulthood. It took a ton of courage to get started and I am still frequently awed to find myself moving in the right direction. I’m humbled by the grace and fortitude of the folks who’ve been at this for way longer.

I’m also a hell of a lot happier. This summer’s gonna be rad. ☀️

There are lots of extraordinarily sexy company names like this in the legal world. ↩︎

Having the choice to direct my energies in this way is a privilege. Working in tech gives me this freedom of motion and I have been drawn to software engineering in part because it is the freest of the free (if you still gotta labor for your living). ↩︎

😱😫😖😬😬😬... 😏 ↩︎

Substitute with whatever modifier is en vogue. As a point of fact, “late capitalism” is a term that’s been floating around for literally over a hundred years. ↩︎

Thankfully, history also clearly demonstrates that the tide can be turned. ↩︎

“The use of the term ‘wicked’ here has come to denote resistance to resolution.” Wikipedia page. ↩︎

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” etc etc. ↩︎

[maxsmusicmacrology]

Cliffhangers and Coffin Dances: Laughing in the Face of Death

Roundabout is a progressive rock track by the English rock band Yes. Released in 1971 for their album “Fragile”, and has since become one of their most popular and most recognized songs. It’s a lengthy track featuring poetic lyrics and long solo sections, but it’s most distinct feature may be it’s intro. Roundabout starts with an extended acoustic guitar riff consisting of incredibly sparse notes, before reaching a drop that completely switches the mood of a song. Give it a listen:

Hirohiko Araki, creator of the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure series, cited Roundabout as one of his inspirations for the series, and when the manga finally received an anime adaptation in 2012 they used Roundabout as the ending theme for the first season. As episodes of the manga and the anime were serialized weekly, they relied fairly often on cliffhangers to keep the audience engaged, often ending at a tension point to keep people coming back for next week. At the end of most episodes, the anime would play a few seconds of the song before the drop, then it would freeze-frame on a “to be continued” screen before segueing into the end credits.

(Roundabout was no longer playing at this point in the anime, but you get the idea)

It took a few years, but soon enough the internet realized “hey, this is a joke we can drive into the ground!” A new video meme known as “the Roundabout meme” or “the to be continued meme” began circulating in 2016, finding especially strong success on vine. The guidelines for the meme are simple: the video opens with a few seconds of what appear to be ordinary video, with the acoustic opening playing over it. There’s no rule as to how long this section has to be, but it generally wasn’t longer than a few seconds to stop the viewer from getting bored, and due to length restrictions on Vine it tended to only be 3-4 seconds. Then, something terrible has to happen right as the drop hits. It can be anything from something falling over to footage of an international catastrophe, but we never actually see it happen- the video freeze-frames and we hang on a “to be continued” screen as the drop starts to play. Below is a brief compilation to illustrate the meme.

CONTENT WARNING: the video contains footage of people (and 1 animal) that may have preceded serious injury. While no actual harm is shown, the video may be stressful or distressing to watch.

So, why Roundabout? Part of it is because of the popularity of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and how meme-able everything in the franchise is, but the Roundabout meme was enjoyed and eventually created by people who had never even heard of the series. Besides, plenty of other shows have “to be continued” moments and theme songs that could be incorporated into a similar meme. I believe it’s the structure of Roundabout that lead to its memetic evolution.

The opening to Roundabout is, for lack of a better term, boring. I don’t mean that in the “ugh, I’m going to skip this part” sense, because it’s boring-ness is an important contrast to the rest of the song (and the riff’s incorporation later on is wonderful), but it’s an acoustic guitar not doing anything special accompanied by a few trippy noises. It’s perfectly unassuming and a perfect match for the first half of the meme, which is a scene of ordinary life where nothing special happens.

And then the drop comes. Roundabout doesn’t ease you into it, one moment you’re listening to a slow guitar and the next you hear actual chords and a bangin bassline. It’s the perfect accompaniment to a meme about sudden catastrophe. Everything’s fine, and then suddenly it’s high-octane chaos.

What, then, could replace Roundabout? Meme formats get tired, but the ideas they wish to express are always there. People eventually got tired of using Roundabout for their memes, but no one wanted to stop making light of sudden injury or catastrophe. So Roundabout went the same way as any tired old meme: it picked up a new skin.

In Ghana, there’s a tradition where after someone’s passing, their family can hire pallbearers to dance while carrying the departed’s coffin. While this may seem macabre to those of us raised in the west, in Ghana it’s viewed as a way to celebrate the person’s life. As you can see in the video linked below, the dances are quite impressive and fun to watch. 

The song playing over the video is Astronomia by Tony Igy and Vicetone, and this is Roundabout’s spiritual successor. This new format, known as “the coffin dance meme”, ominously rose to popularity in March of this year. While Roundabout, in my opinion, is a more fun format, the coffin dance is easier to make and much funnier on first viewing. The rules are simple: include a clip of something dangerous about to happen to someone, then before we see any consequence, cut away to the dancing pallbearers carrying a coffin while Astronomia plays. The implication being, of course, that the person featured in the meme is in the coffin.

Roundabout and the coffin dance do vary in one significant way, though. Roundabout is at least tangentially empathetic- even if the meme is made to make light of a potential tragedy, the song matches the mood of the scene, recognizes the chaos that may be unfolding behind the “to be continued” filter. Astronomia, meanwhile, sees the tragedy and laughs at it. The dancing pallbearers may be there to celebrate life in Ghana, but this is a distinctly western meme. We live in the culture that gave us Fortnite, where players dance over their enemies’ corpses, and our preconceptions tell us that people dancing with a coffin are making fun of whoever’s inside.

(for those of you who were worried, apparently he had a parachute)

So why Astronomia? At first glance, it seems like the answer might just be “because that’s the song the first guy put in the video”. The rhythm is just right, and it looks like the dancers are in time with the song when synced up properly. But just like with Roundabout, there’s plenty of other songs that would’ve fit just as well. Astronomia has a unique sound profile, making a very clear electronic feel without that sound being overbearing. That leads to dissonance that fits the meme really well- in the western world, EDM is just as out of place at a funeral as dancing pallbearers.

More importantly, though, I think it’s the mood of Astronomia that really cemented it as the successor to Roundabout. It’s an upbeat song, but there’s a faint hint of sadness clinging to it, like water clings to leaves after a storm. Both memes are products of their respective times- in 2016, change was sudden and unexpected. Out of nowhere, the entire world was in upheaval and no one knew what to do about it. Four years later, we’re all jaded and over it. Tragedy and misfortune are expected at this point, the only thing we can do now is make a mockery out of it and find our happiness where we can.

Links used:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuGAWR2eRyQ - Roundabout by Yes

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/977/284/b6e.jpg - Angry Jotaro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsiNzg6-_MY - Roundabout meme compilation

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/363/817/9e7.jpg - scooby doo meme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9V78UbdzWI - “official” dancing pallbearers + Astronomia video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0QeptEf49k - Coffin dance skiing meme (debated to be origin of coffin dance)

[torentialtribute]

The inside story of England’s World Cup of woe in 1999

The last World Cup hero in England 20 years ago was a massive opportunity for cricket to put on a true carnival.

It turned into one of the worst of many England cricketing disasters that plagued the 1980s and 90s.

Sportsmail looks back at that doomed tournament through the eyes of the England coach at the time, David Lloyd, one of their players, Nasser Hussain, and our then cricket correspondent, Mike Dickson.

The coach

David Lloyd

TV personality Anneka Rice was hired by a domestic World Cup sponsor as an ambassador

That World Cup was the end of an era of under-achie cement by England. It was a watershed moment. It was the time English cricket realized we couldn't go the way we were.

Central contracts, which many of us wanted, were soon to come in and they were paid for by the first of the massive broadcasting deals with Sky that, whether people like it or not, have the biggest single reason for the huge improvement of our game.

We went into the 1999 World Cup playing catch-up with the rest of the world because of the system. To us at the time, it didn't seem like a major event from the moment the fireworks didn't really go off at the opening ceremony!

Contracts hadn't been issued to the players and we were stuck down in Kent for our training base when I wanted to be in Leicester because they had the best facilities. It would have been a convenient, centrally located, base.

It was while we were at Canterbury that Graham Thorpe decided he wasn't going to come to a dinner we were obliged to attend, and I'm reliably informed I was not very pleased at the time. Now I can laugh about it because Thorpey was always his own man!

People keep telling me about this World Cup song we had but I honestly had no idea we just had one, let alone that it only came out day after we were knocked out! I had other things to think about.

It was David Lloyd's fate as coach before he joined Sky, where he has remained for 20 years

But we should remember that after four matches we were sitting pretty having won three and it took a freak series of events to eliminate us at the first

One of the main reasons turned out to be our run-rate in victory against Kenya was not good enough. At the time we just thought about winning. Then our last match against India was rain affected and we got two shocking decisions against us.

Before we knew it, it was all over – the hosts were knocked out of their own tournament at the earliest possible opportunity.

At the end of it people simply packed their bags and went off to play for their counties. The players belong to them, not England.

It was a real low but it was then cricket got real and we sorted the game out. David Graveney, our chairman of selectors, had been caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

He was trying to work hard for the team while appeasing the counties too. He was piggy in the middle. It was a no-win situation but he did a valiant job.

That was the lot for me as a coach. I had a meeting with the then chairman of the board, Ian MacLaurin, and told him I was happy to continue.

But he said they couldn't make a decision at that time. I'd had overtures from Sky and because I couldn't get any assurances from the board I thought the writing was on the wall.

So I plumped for Sky and 20 years on I couldn't be happier with the choice. But that doesn't stop me feeling sad when I think back to that summer of 1999.

The player

Nasser Hussain

I'd been outside the squad leading up to that tournament after my horror shot against Shane Warne in Sydney earlier that year – I came down the wicket and was stumped when well set – and I think Bumble and Graham Gooch, a selector at the time, had seen enough of me.

When I got a late call-up after Mike Atherton's back went I felt a bit on the periphery.

It was clear there were issues about player contracts, people weren't happy with the amount they were being paid for the World Cup and there was an air of chaos around the camp that Alec Stewart, as our captain, was getting dragged into.

Not least that night in Canterbury when my room-mate Graham Thorpe told me he wasn't going to an official dinner because he was fed up with it all.

Nasser Hussain got a late call-up to the squad after Mike Atherton suffered a back injury

"I got paid to play cricket, not go to dinners," he said.

I had to tell Bumble as we boarded the team bus and I tried to cover for Thorpey but the coach had a face like thunder and stormed back into the hotel and dragged him out of bed!

Then the day before the tournament, Stewie knocked on my door at the hotel about the road from lord's and told me they were leaving Nick Knight out and would like me to open.

I never opened for anyone, not even Ilford Cricket Club, and there I was opening in the first game of our home World Cup at Lord's!

I thought Alec was joking at first but I was quite happy to do it – it was a World Cup! If I was going to bat anywhere in white-ball cricket I was better off at the top because I didn't have the firepower to smash sixes later in the innings.

I did feel sorry for Nick because he was a friend and he'd opened for England for about three years.

I didn't even notice the vapor squib or a fireworks display before the first match because I was so consumed by the prospect of opening the batting, but that summed up the utter shambles the tournament was becoming.

Hussain had never opened before but was forced into the role for a home World Cup

We did OK in the first few matches and I scored a few runs until the wheels came off. Yes, perhaps we should have tried to beat Kenya quicker to get our run rate up but we just concentrated on getting over the line. In the end it was one of the things that cost us.

It was a shame because we had a pretty good side, but even then being pretty good wasn't enough. It was nothing like it is now. I was basically picked for the ODI side because I was a decent Test player.

Both Stewie and Bumble were unlucky to lose their jobs. Yes, Bumble had his moments but he was a fantastic coach to play for. He backed us to the hilt.

He loved us and we loved him. He was so loyal to his team and the way he was around the dressing room was magnificent.

Stewie had been in charge of a good series win over South Africa the year before and we'd not been far away from at least drawing the Ashes the previous winter but maybe the whole business with contracts did for him. It was harsh.

I was made captain but Alec had done nothing wrong. Lord MacLaurin made sure things improved for the players, central contracts came in and, in Test cricket at least, things started to slowly improve.

But it was all too late to make any difference to our World Cup.

The cricket correspondent

Mike Dickson

As now, there was a real hope that a World Cup in England could re-invigorate the sport.

The feeling among the media was that while England were not the strongest team, the absurdly early start date of May 14 would work in our favor with those conditions. It was not long before that optimism was petering out.

Strange to say, but the first herald of what was to come was TV personality Anneka Rice. She was hired by a domestic World Cup sponsor as an ambassador, with the aim of adding glamor and creating interest among women.

But in the February she gave a car-crash promotional interview at Lord's, describing cricket as' more boring than fishing.

She did, though, see the virtue of one-day cricket because, in her view, it is at least ensured to finish in time for an evening gin and tonic and the chance to watch Blind Date.

The main" spectacular "of the opening ceremony at Lord's was a limp fireworks display

Sponsors were already proving a problem. The ECB had set out to get eight major corporate backers but only managed to find four.

The pay dispute was rumbling away for some time. The team went to Sharjah in April to play a triangular tournament and a few journos were on the same plane to Dubai.

Alec Stewart pulled a couple of us aside to gauge what media sentiment was towards the players asking for more money.

I had the sense Alec felt he was already a marked man among the authorities, adding to the pressure he would have felt anyway as a captain for a home World Cup.

In the lead-up to the tournament there was a launch at the Lord's indoor school, which involved gathering together some B and C-List celebrities to talk about their love of cricket.

I recall a PR person walking around shouting excitedly that John Kettley (the weatherman) was in the building, along with some bloke from Neighbors I had not heard of.

This was where we were introduced to Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics.

Dave Stewart wrote the World Cup anthem that came out after England were knocked out

One of his songs, All Over The World had been ordered as the World Cup anthem, although he cheerfully admitted he had not written it with cricket in mind and was not a fan.

The curious video featured some patients at a psychiatric institution breaking out and invading a cricket ground. The underlying message seemed to be: If you like cricket, you might be mad.

Famously, it was released the day after England were knocked out, and was not exactly a chart smash.

Nasser's late call-up suggested the selectors had bottled it, and were over-cautious amid worries about Nick Knight's form.

Any controversy about this was compounded by the comically bad opening ceremony before England's match against Sri Lanka. Its start coincided with a cloud burst about Lord's, with the main 'spectacular' being a limp fireworks display and the dropping in or a couple of skydivers.

As the display was reaching its climax, the smoke from the fireworks blanked the huge windows of the media center and none of us could see a thing. To this day I have never heard such a roar or laughter in a press box.

England's early exit was hugely deflating after two wins from first two group games

The opening match was considered a 'must-win' so there was huge relief when England cantered to victory. Alan Mullally, who I had got to know quite well, was the star bowler and I bumped into him afterwards.

I made some comment that I expected there would be a bit of a team celebration that night, but he replied that everyone was going home for the weekend and had disappeared.

He ended up tagging along with me to the King's Road, where I was meeting my wife and some friends for a pizza.

England's early exit, on run-rate, was hugely deflating, the more so because after the first two group matches it looked almost impossible for them not to progress.

The dread only set in when Zimbabwe upset South Africa at Chelmsford.

I felt sorry for Bumble and Alec. Only a few months previously they were unlucky not to come away from the Ashes with a 2-2 draw against a strong Australian side.

The rest of the tournament was like watching the second week of Wimbledon in a year without any British left, except for much longer.

The semi-final at Edgbaston between Australia and South Africa was an all-time classic

While there were few great matches, it was lifted by the two between the Aussies and South Africa, at the group stage and in the semi-final.

That semi at Edgbaston was an all-time classic, going down to the last ball and the run-out mix-up between Allan Donald and Lance Klusener when one was needed for victory.

The final, though, was a total bust, about teatime as the Australians capped a remarkable comeback by crushing Pakistan.

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[clusterassets]

New world news from Time: ‘To Be Number One Is the Target.’ China’s Ding Junhui Is Taking on the World Snooker Championship

Ding Junhui isn’t wearing the requisite waistcoat and bowtie of the professional snooker circuit, but even dressed in a baggy jogging suit, he isn’t difficult to pick out of the crowd. Ball after ball vanishes as Ding glides around the green baize, wielding his cue with metronomic ease. “I’m trying to make my rhythm more relaxed so games are like practice routines,” he tells TIME between training sessions at his snooker club in northwest Beijing. “How to take off the pressure and just play is the hardest part.”

All top sportsmen must deal with the weight of expectation, though it’s hard to imagine a burden comparable to Ding’s. China’s most successful player has been hailed by World Snooker chairman Barry Hearn as “the true superstar of the sport” in China, and more than a quarter of his homeland’s television viewing public — some 210 million people — tuned in to see his World Championship final defeat in 2016. (That’s double the viewers of last year’s Super Bowl.) The World Championship begins again on April 21 and Ding is determined to realize his potential by finally seizing the game’s top prize. (Eventual champion Mark Selby knocked him out at the semifinal stage last year.)

“To win the World Championship and to be world number one is the target for the next few years,” says Ding, his cherubic face and softly spoken demeanor masking inner steel that has seen him claim 13 ranking titles. “This is very hard, I know, because [snooker] careers are quite short. I’m now just over 30. There is just only one thing, to keep going and find more chances to win.”

Snooker is an unfamiliar sport for many Americans — a cousin of cue games like pocket billiards, though played on a surface about four times the size of your average pub pool table. Snooker has grown wildly popular in Asia following the success of Ding and Hong Kong’s Marco Fu. The winner of the World Championship takes home a cool $600,000 in prize money, which is many times the purse for the pool equivalent. About 70 million people are estimated to play cue sports in China each week, with thousands of snooker and pool clubs strewn across both big cities and donkey-cart towns.

Read more: How Snooker Swept China’s Sporting World

As a result, Hearn’s bold prediction that half of snooker’s top 16 will soon hail from China doesn’t look farfetched. “The future’s so bright, I should be wearing sunglasses,” five-time snooker World Champion Ronnie O’Sullivan said of upcoming Chinese talent at last year’s Evergrande China Championship. A raft of top young Chinese players have joined the professional tour, many inspired by Ding’s achievements. Although Ding was briefly world number one, he currently ranks third. There will be four other Chinese players — Li Hang, Cao Yupeng, Xiao Gudong and Yan Bingtao — chalking up at the legendary Crucible Theatre this month. “I picked up the cue all because of watching him,” Yan, 18, has said of Ding. “He is like an elder brother to all of us. We worship him.”

There is a superhuman quality to mastering snooker; rounded pockets and a lightening-quick surface render the sport less forgiving than pool, with titanic concentration required to build large scores. It’s also a rare sport where true perfection is possible. Team games like soccer or basketball contend with myriad external factors, whereas even tennis and golf matches may turn on a gust of wind or peculiar divot. The snooker table, by contrast, is like a vacuum; every facet is controllable, every shot theoretically possible. Top players only ever really play against themselves, meaning defeat always entails an avoidable blunder. This adds a significant psychological burden. “With football, sometimes you don’t play well but your team mates are playing great, so you still can win,” says Ding. “With snooker you have to win everything yourself. It’s a more of a mental game.”

It’s one that Ding has been honing since he was just eight years old, when his father spotted his son’s potential on the communal pool table below the family’s apartment in China’s eastern province of Jiangsu. Before long his parents sold their home and grocery business and moved the family 1,000 miles south to Guangdong province — considered China’s snooker Mecca — so Ding could work with the nation’s best professional coaches. He was pulled out of school to concentrate solely on snooker at just 12 years old, winning the Amateur Championships at 14 and turning pro at just 16.

As a teenager, Ding was sent to the British steel-smelting city of Sheffield, where the World Championship takes place each year. Stepping off the plane alone without speaking any English was a jolting experience. “It was scary at first,” he says. “I was always very shy. Every day I just wished to see another snooker player to play with.” But Ding is sanguine about missing out on simple childhood pleasures, insisting that the only pressure he ever felt was from himself. “Everyone of the age 10 or 11 likes to have some childlike time, to play some games,” says Ding. “This is what I lost… now I am getting something back.”

Dan Mullan—Getty Images Ding Junhui of China looks on during his first round match against Kyren Wilson of England at the Dafabet Masters in London on Jan. 15, 2017.

Still, from diving and gymnastics to table tennis, China has a reputation for putting inordinate pressure on young athletes that can verge on abuse. Parents are lured to surrender talented children to state sporting academies on promises of national glory and future commercial spoils. There, kids train until tendons snap and retinas detach, while neglecting regular studies. Some 45% of former athletes in China fail to find work after retirement, according to a 2010 report by the state-run Nanjing Daily newspaper. The nation’s best snooker players are recruited by the CBSA World Snooker Academy in Beijing, where 30 pupils from six to 22 years old play from 9am to 5pm, Monday to Saturday, according to the BBC.

For Ding, spending endless days alone with a snooker table is ultimately counterproductive. He says Chinese players often lack tactical and defensive instincts because they are used to clearing up every ball in just one visit. “But if you lose your concentration, lose your plotting, you’ve got nothing left,” he says. But even more damaging can be the psychological toll of isolation on youngsters. After eight to ten hours a day with just a snooker table for company, “I would get outside and forget how to speak to people, because you spend all day alone in a room,” he says. “It’s too much.” Ding says the game quickly went from being an all-engrossing passion to feeling “more like a day job.” Today, though, “I try to enjoy it more,” he says.

Ding hopes rekindling his love for the game can help spur him to the world title. Today, practice sessions last just three hours a day, and he books regular free time traveling the world and not thinking about snooker. More importantly, he isn’t lonely on or off the green baize. His wife is expecting their first child — “I don’t know what to do, so I have to learn quick!” Ding says — though he balks at the thought of raising another snooker superstar in the family. “Snooker is so boring,” Ding laughs, “my first choice [for my child] would not be this, something else.” Ding says his father didn’t push him to excel at the sport, but rather supported his decision. “I chose this for myself,” he says of his freedom as a child. As for raising his own, “I think I will let mine do the same.”

— With video by Zhang Chi / Beijing

April 19, 2018 at 03:01PM ClusterAssets Inc., https://ClusterAssets.wordpress.com

[torentialtribute]

Riveting interview with James Milner… a player who never stops surprising 

In the garden of the hotel on the Costa del Sol where Liverpool are preparing for Saturday's Champions League final against Spurs, James Milner sits in the shade of a tall tree. The prefers it to bright sunlight just as he prefers providing assists to scoring goals, just as he prefers small print to headlines and just as he prefers team to self.

It is part of the reason why he has aged well in the public mind. In this football era or Instagram and ego and rootlessness and young men who have more fashion ranges than England caps, Milner is the antidote to all that. People admire his down-to-earth doggedness. They see that his success is hard-earned. He is all about what he does on the pitch. For him, image is nothing.

He tells a story about that. When he was transferred to Newcastle as a teenager, he moved into a sparsely furnished flat on Tyneside. There were no mirrors in the apartment and it was a year before he got around to buying one. That Christmas his wife-to-be's mother bought him a present. It was a pair of cufflinks with a tiny mirror on each one and an inscription. "You're so vain," it said.

James Milner is not vain and it has been established by now that he is not boring, either

So Milner is not vain and it has been established by now that he is not boring, either. The older he has got, the more respected he has become. What defines him is his determination. If somebody doubts him, he burns with the desire to prove them wrong, even if the doubter is Lionel Messi.

Half-time or first leg of Liverpool's Champions League semi-final against Barcelona at the Nou Camp , the man Milner considers the world's greatest player called him a donkey. Milner respects Messi too much to have got angry about it. He found it funny. But it stuck with him. And in the second leg at Anfield, he did something about it.

When he is in, he is all in, however improbable the goal. Never give up. Work and work and work. That applies equally to overcoming a three-goal deficit to Barcelona and to his determination to learn Spanish. That does not stop at becoming fluent himself. It extends to his family. Milner, 33, and his wife, Amy, are parents to a four-year-old daughter and a three-year-old son and, when they are at home, the midfielder insists on speaking to them in Spanish.

He mentioned it for the first time a year ago and some may have thought it was a fad but Milner does not do fads. When they were babies, he spoke to them in Spanish while he was changing their nappies. The experiment in educational engineering is in its third year now. He smiles when he talks about it. He knows it is eccentric. Or maybe just Yorkshire stubborn. He likes to bend events to his will, events that may seem beyond the control of others.

If somebody doubts the Liverpool midfielder, he burns with the desire to prove them wrong

When his children get out of bed in the morning, they are greeted with: "Buenos dias". When they come into the kitchen looking for food, it is: "Que quieres para desayunar?" (What do you want for breakfast?) Or 'Elige un cereal'. He knew it was working when he got out of the shower one day and told his daughter, who was 13 months old: "Traeme una toalla." She went off and came back with his towel.

'I've been doing it that long if someone else's kids come round, my natural instinct is to speak to them in Spanish because I'm used to speaking to children in Spanish, "says Milner. 'I always wanted to speak another language. It seemed impressive when I heard people speaking different languages ​​and flitting between conversations. "

His iron will has worn down critics, too. They now recognize his quality as well as his industry. "People talk about how much he runs and grafts," says former Newcastle team mate Kieron Dyer. "But you don't get to play for this Liverpool team just because you work hard."

Now Milner is aiming all his focus on Saturday's game against Tottenham in Madrid. Some fear that Liverpool's energy will have been sapped by their titanic losing battle with Manchester City for the Premier League title but Milner says that and the memory of last year's Champions League final defeat by Real Madrid are driving Jurgen Klopp's team forward.

When Milner's children were babies, he spoke to them in Spanish while he was changing them

"Losing the title can work for us," says Milner. 'If we'd won the title, then the Champions League final might have felt like a bonus. The danger was that we ended up with nothing – and we still might – but the memory of losing out to City drives us on.

'Since I've been at the club, I've been desperate to win something for Liverpool. That's what the club demands and expects. You walk into the training ground every day and you see the numbers under each trophy. I've been desperate to get someone in to change those. "

Milner's commitment to the cause resonates. After the last Liverpool home game of the season, the Kop sang his name as loudly as anyones. For many, he has become the symbol of this side and its willingness to subjugate the egos or the individual to the good or the collective. It is part of the competitive urge that is never stilled. His dad recognized it in him when he was devoting his time to driving his son back and forth across the Pennines, watching him playing for the Leeds United youth teams at Blackpool, Manchester United, Everton and Liverpool.

'He knew how to get into my head and push me, "says Milner. "He used to say:" There's no chance of you making it as a player – you don't work hard enough ". He knew I'd want to show him he was wrong. He wouldn't do it in a nasty way but he knew it would drive me. It's still big when he says I had a good game. "

Now Milner is aiming all his focus on Saturday's game against Tottenham in Madrid

There is no reason why Messi or any of his Barcelona team mates should have been acquainted with any of this before their semi-final, or course. The mild eccentricities and primal competitiveness of the Liverpool midfielder may not have registered quite as prominently with them as the time Messi sat Milner down with a nutmeg at the Nou Camp in 2015 when Milner was playing for City.

The moment , inevitably, became a YouTube sensation, played and replayed as an example or what Messi can do to an opponent. It was not quite as spectacular as his bamboozling or Jerome Boateng a month later but it was not bad. High in the stands, Pep Guardiola, then the Bayern Munich manager, covered his face with his hands in happy disbelief.

Milner took it all on the chin. But when he went back to Catalonia with Liverpool at the start of this month, he was determined that it would not be in homage. "He's an incredible player," he says of Messi, but he's refused to stand back in awe. His studied iconoclasm set Liverpool's tone.

It was towards the end of the first half when Messi set off on a run down the Liverpool left and was tackled near the half-way line by Andy Robertson. A split second later, with Messi slightly off balance, Milner shoulder-barged him in touch and sent him tumbling to the peat. Messi was furious. He waved an imaginary yellow card at the referee.

"He wasn't happy," says Milner. 'He was giving me plenty in Spanish going down the tunnel at half-time as well. He was calling me 'burro'. It translates as donkey but I think it's also used in Spanish football as a general term for someone who goes around kicking people.

'I asked him if he was all right, but he wasn't having it. I don't think he realized I understood his Spanish. He said: "That you did, that's because I nutmegged you". I left him at that point and went into the changing room. Look, I've only got admiration for him. He has earned the right to say what he wants.

'The stuff he did in that game, stuff he has done his whole career, it makes him tough to play against. If you try and stop him, you can't be scared or being made to look foolish. I've done it. I've been nutmegged by him and it has been viewed a million times. I wasn't the first and I wouldn't be the last. He's an incredible player.

'But with players like that, you have to let them know you are there and not let them have everything their own way. You just need to try to disrupt their rhythm. You don't want to hurt him, but it's a physical game and, if he's running the game, you try and knock him out of his stride. It's part of the game, the mental side. ”

Messi scored twice in the second half and left Liverpool with a seemingly insurmountable task at Anfield but Milner and his team refused to accept their fate. Early in the second leg, Robertson ruffled Messi's hair as he sat on the peat. It was another gesture of defense, a signal that, while Liverpool's players might admire Messi, they would not be awed by him.

A couple of times, what Messi had said in Barcelona flickered across Milner's mind during the second explain. "Burro." It stirred up some old memories of past criticisms, those times when he felt he had to prove himself, times when he felt surrounded by doubters and beset by criticism. "I don't see myself being here for a long time buying team or James Milners," Graeme Souness said when he took over at Newcastle. Milner used it as a rich source of motivation.

It is not that he felt bitter about the 'burro' jibe. Or angry. He has too much respect for Messi for that. But he likes proving people wrong. Like the rest of his Liverpool teammates, he played like a superhuman in that 4-0 win.

"I want to be the best at everything I do," says Milner. 'I hate losing. It drives you on to prove people wrong. There's always that in football. You are always going to have critics, whether it is media, managers, players, someone who's kicking you.

'People have opinions and not everyone's going to like you and there are a few times in my career when I have not been appreciated, let's say. That's sometimes what sparks that drive to prove your worth and prove people wrong. ”

When the final whistle went on at Anfield, it was fitting that it was Milner who was on the ball, shielding it as if his life depended on it by the corner flag. In the mayhem or the aftermath, hey broke down. For those who have become accustomed to his stoicism, it was almost as big as a shock.

"It was a lot of fatigue," he says. 'There was a six-day period where we had lost 3-0 in Barcelona, ​​had a tough game in Newcastle and then realized there was a chance that, after everything we had done in the season, we were going to end up with nothing . That was driving us on. Then there is my age and the question of, "how many more nights do you have like that"?

This is the moment that enraged Lionel Messi and led to him calling Milner a donkey

Milner shoulder-barged Barca star and Messi ignored his hand during the Champions League tie

Messi squared up to him during the first leg of the semi-final tie at the Nou Camp

'There are a few games in your career you talk about and the hairs go up on the back of your neck. When we won the title against QPR with City was another. They don't come around very often those nights. We need to make sure we finish the job this time.

'And there was also the fact that it would have been so easy for something to go wrong. We had given everything and it meant we still had a chance to win something. It was being part of the occasion and part of that team performance. We did it without Mo [Salah] and Bobby [Firmino].

'Messi's an amazing player and the special thing about the night was to turn it round against a team like that with the best player in the world in there and Luis Suarez and Gerard Pique, too. There are not many teams in the world that could turn around a deficit like that with two or your star players gone. It was such a team effort. "

Milner has a reputation in the Liverpool side as the team's enforcer. He takes down the opposition's tallest poppy. He did it with a crunching tackle on Neymar when PSG visited Anfield this season. So have any of his team mates teased him about his tears?

"No one's said, to be honest," he says deadpan. "Because if they did, they would probably get a right hook."

Like the rest of his Liverpool teammates, Milner played like a superhuman in that 4-0 win

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