#economic indicators have not in fact suddenly stopped being useful in the last few years

[tanadrin]

I think this is pretty spot on; whenever I see discussion of the economy and economic perceptions, there's always people in the replies going "yeah, but eggs are $8 a dozen" or "why is every middle class family I know foodbanking." And then OP, or someone else, will post data showing egg prices are stable, or that wages have actually been rising faster than inflation, and the person who posted that may even admit that, ok, things are fine for them personally, but not for other people.

And it's always been true that politics is more about attitudes and aesthetics than it is about policy or facts on the ground; but it's rare that attitudes are so divorced from people's actual material circumstances. And while I think there are lots of things contributing to this disconnect, as matter of campaigning, I don't really know how you overcome it.

[sillyrabbit81]

Her Heavy Cross

Summary: Three years after tragedy hits, Lana she decides to start dating again. She meets Will through a dating app and they begin an online romance. After months of constant requests, Lana relents and agrees to meet and go on an irl date with Will. But is Will who he says he is? Lana is quickly pulled into an intense relationship forcing her to confront her tragic past. Will Lana face it or will she close her heart forever?

Pairing: OMC x OFC

Word Count: approx 2.7k

Warnings: swearing, angst, drunk, motion of death

Authors Note: The story started as a Henry Cavill fanfiction but I changed it to be an original character, but shades of Henry are still there. Hope you enjoy the story and thanks for reading.

Part 2 Part 4

Part 3

In less than ten minutes, we had pulled up to Liam's house. Liam paid for the taxi too. I kind of argued this time, but he pointed out he asked me to his house. I didn't get too stubborn about it.

Liam was living in a four-story terrace house, recently renovated by the looks of it. It was painted white with black wrought iron lacework, and it was beautiful. The front door and windows were painted black. It appeared to be the twin of the house that shared its wall.

We entered through the dining room, and I realised it was actually the two houses renovated together. The inside was modern with original heritage touches. The floors were light timber, and the walls were white. The ceilings had plaster and cornice so beautifully ornate that restoration must have taken ages. The room had an imposing black marble fireplace and a deep brown, almost black wooden dining table set on a grey shag rug in the room's centre. A huge abstract painting of bright pinks, greens and grey hung on the wall.

"Wow, this must have cost a mint!" I quickly covered my mouth. "I'm sorry, that was rude of me."

"It's ok. I was pleasantly surprised by the house too. The studio got the house for me I...." Liam was interrupted by a massive dog bounding into the room.

Liam got down and roughhoused with the dog for a bit. Wow, he was a monster! I'd seen a picture of Cole before that "Will" had sent me, but I wasn't quite prepared for how big he was. He was almost completely black with some brown above his eyes and ears. His paws were brown too, and his belly was grey. He wasn't any particular breed, apparently a rescue dog. I thought of my bull terrier cross cattle dog at home. This dog would eat him for breakfast, and Perrin wasn't small.

Cole's pink tongue lolled, and he panted as Liam moved from side to side. Cole imitated Liam's actions jumping about. He barked a couple of times as he got excited by the play. The noise reverberated through the quiet house.

"Shhh, Cole, people are sleeping." Liam softly admonished. Then his voice became stern. "Sit," he ordered before patting him. Liam looked at me and said, "Lana, this is Cole. Cole, Lana."

"Hi, Cole. You're much bigger in person." I could hear the slight tremor in my voice. Liam must have sensed I was nervous and came over to stand near me. Cole padded over and sniffed at me. Gingerly, I put my hand by my side and let him approach me. Cole nuzzled my hand, and I gave him a pat on the side of his neck. I let out a sigh of relief.

"I was worried he wouldn't like me. I love dogs but always get nervous around new ones." Liam put his head to the side, asking a silent question. "I had a dingo go me one time, and I've never really gotten over it." I squatted down and gave Cole more pats. "I think this guy is ok, though."

"Yeah, he's a good boy. How is Perrin, by the way?"

"He's ok." I sighed, "he's just old. The poor little guy can't get onto my bed anymore and sleeps in my lounge room now. I kinda miss it, but I have slept a bit better."

Liam gave Cole some more pats and told him to go sit. "Come on. I'll make you a tea or coffee if you'd like." I agreed a coffee would be perfect right now. I needed something to sober me up.

I sat at the kitchen bench while Liam made coffees. Cole sat by my stool, and I patted his head while watching Liam. Liam had kicked off his shoes and was walking around in his bare feet. It was amazing to see him so much more relaxed here than while we were out. He really did appear to enjoy being at home.

As Liam made our coffee, he moved with a grace that surprised me. His movements seemed economical and rigid but hinted at the power beneath them. He seemed coiled and ready to explode at any moment. It was like he was dancing the pasodoble, his body moving to an invisible beat. Images of Strictly Ballroom came into my mind, and I found myself humming Love is in the Air. I was drunker than I thought.

When Liam was done, he led me over to his large L shaped lounge, and I sat. Liam flopped down next to me, casually laying back and popped his feet up on the coffee table. Cole sat on a mat that was clearly his.

I sipped my coffee, not knowing what else to do. Suddenly the quiet between Liam and I felt awkward.

Liam and I spoke at the same time, "What.." "So..."

We both laughed. Liam indicated I should proceed. "Well, I was going to ask what brought you out to Sydney, for real, not the Will answer."

"A new project. I'm going to be filming a television show." Liam proceeded to tell me about his project, working with some people from Netflix on a fantasy/sci-fi series adaptation. He was so animated when telling me that it was obvious that he loved his job.

It would be his first television series and was to be more romance heavy than anything he had done in years. Liam explained that he is filming here because the story was written and developed in Australia. "If it works out, I'll probably be based out of Australia for the next few years. I'll go home to England for a few months during breaks, maybe do some small film roles. It's hard with Cole, though, because every trip into Australia means 10 days quarantine for him."

"Oh yeah, and you don't want a Pistol and Boo situation." Liam looked confused, and I explained about Amber Heard and Johnny Depp smuggling their dogs into Australia.

"I thought you said you don't follow celebrity gossip."

"I don't, but that was big news, hilarious really. It was on every bit of media in Australia, and then they had to make this cringe video apology. I almost felt bad for them." Then I yawned, suddenly all the alcohol had lost its buzz, and I was just tired. "The coffee doesn't seem to be doing its job. What time is it?"

Liam looked at his watch, "11.30."

"Yeah, it's late. I should get home. I don't want to turn into a pumpkin." I cringed. Fuck.

"You don't have to go. You could stay here." I raised my eyebrows. "I do have more than one bed if that's what you want." Liam leaned over to me and placed a hand on my cheek, rubbing his thumb against my skin.

I looked at my nearly empty coffee mug. I swirled the dregs around the bottom as if it were tea leaves, and they would tell me what to do. "I don't want to go home yet, but I don't want to go too fast, either."

"That's ok."

I didn't move. I wanted to stay. Ten years ago, I would have stayed, but Andy's face flashed into my thoughts. I knew it was ridiculous. Andy had been gone for over three years now. But every time I even contemplated being with someone, I couldn't stop thinking about him.

Liam was waiting for an answer, but I didn't know what to tell him. 'It's not you, it's me' is such a tired cliche, but sometimes it's true.

"Lana, it's ok. If you want to go home, that's absolutely fine. I'll even call you an Uber."

I felt my eyes sting, and I looked away from Liam. My bloody traitorous tear ducts giving me away. I shouldn't have drunk so much. Alcohol always makes me emotional.

"Fuck." I swore under my breath. I angrily wiped at my eyes, thankful I had used waterproof mascara. My eyeliner was a different story, though, and black streaked my fingers. I asked Liam where his bathroom was, and I got up, only half listening to his directions. I found it quickly. It was only through the doorway into a little enclave with a powder room, stairs and a lift. What kind of bloody house has a lift?

I closed the door and sat on the toilet seat. I knew enough not to try to stop the tears, so I just let them go. Bloody hell, Andy. Why did he fucking have to leave me? Why the fuck did you have to fucking die. Goddammit. Why do I do this to myself? Why do I do this to Andy? I wanted to scream, to punch something, to throw something. I needed another cigarette. Fuck you, Andy. Fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck Liam.

As I always did when I thought of Andy, I remembered the last time I saw him. His sweet face looked down at me as he kissed me goodbye. His deep brown hair fell like a curtain around us, hiding our kiss from the world. Cheekily I had slipped my tongue into his mouth, and he had groaned as he pulled away. He told me to save it for when he got back and would be as quick as he could be. I had thanked him for filling in for me. He winked and said to thank him later. Then he left.

When I was able to, I started to take deep breaths. In through my nose, out through my mouth. I could feel the tightness in my chest slowly ease. Breathing became more comfortable, and the tears stopped. I looked at my hands, and I was able to release the fists I was making. My nails hadn't broken the skin this time, but small red crescents remained etched into my palms.

I waited a few minutes longer to make sure the moment had passed. It wasn't Andy's fault he died, and I knew that. It's also not my fault that I wanted someone to love again. Sleeping with someone other than Andy felt like crossing the Rubicon, no going back.

The fact was there is no going back, no Andy to go back to, even if I wanted. In my head, it still felt like a betrayal. But it wasn't. And Liam wasn't just anybody. He was a guy I had spent weeks talking to, getting to know, and although he looks different, he is still acting as I had expected. I saw a potential future here. Did I really want to let my past ruin it?

I cleared my throat and stood up, preparing myself to see the horror that looked back at me. Ugh, it wasn't great. My eyeliner had given me panda eyes, and the tears had created streaks down my cheeks.

Getting a tissue and blew my nose, and decided there was nothing else for it, I washed my makeup off my face. I avoided washing my eye makeup off though, that was a mess I just didn't have the products for, so I just wiped under my eyes and cleaned it up. I binned my tissues, washed my hands, took a few more deep breaths and prepared myself to face Liam.

I opened the door and walked straight into something solid that made me bounce back into the bathroom like a tennis ball. Hands caught me before I hit the floor, and I found myself in Liam's arms.

"I'm sorry, did I hurt you?" He asked.

"No," I was flustered again. I spent all that time calming down to just be in a state two seconds later. "I just didn't expect you to be outside the door. Jesus, you're like a brick shit house."

Liam didn't laugh. "I was worried about you."

"I'm fine," I lied.

Liam didn't look convinced. He let me go and ran a hand through his hair. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"Not right now."

Liam nodded. "I'll get you that Uber." He pulled his phone out.

That's it then. All in all, it wasn't the worst date I'd been on since Andy died. Actually, it was probably the best. Liam, at least, was a guy I was attracted to and didn't appear to be a man child. He seemed to like me, even when I cried over another man. Although I doubt Liam knew that's why I was crying. I had told him I was married before and he had died, but that was only once and a long time ago, and we hadn't discussed it again.

The tears had done their job, and a calmness came over me now. I had said goodbye to Andy, and I was ready to take that last step to move on. That was why I started to date again; to open my heart, I was ready.

I put my hand on Liam's wrist, "if you still want me to, I'd like to stay."

"Are you sure? I probably shouldn't have asked in the first place. I let my other head think for me." Though I laughed at his candid admission, Liam's face was serious. "I'm not joking. I want you, and I didn't think about how you must be feeling. The whole fake profile thing must still be weighing on your mind. And all of the other problems that go along with being with me. You should have more time to think about it."

And my dead husband, let's not forget that. I didn't say that out loud, thank God. "I will have time to think about it. But right now, I want..." Shit. I've gone shy again. Just fucking tell him you want him too! "I mean, can't we just have a bit of a cuddle and a snog?"

Liam's lips twitched as he tried to suppress a smile, "a cuddle and a snog?"

I nodded.

Smiling, Liam put his phone back in his pocket. "I think I can arrange that."

Without further warning, Liam grabbed my wrists in one hand and pinned them to the wall above my head. His other hand snaked around my waist, holding me to him, his hips rolling into mine. His eyes were fierce and focused on mine. I  closed my eyes, the sensations too much, and my breath quickened.

I heard Liam say through gritted teeth, "It's taken everything I had not to do this to you since I saw you at the bar. I wanted to take you then and there." His voice seemed to ease, the words coming easier for him. "You don't know how much I've wanted to touch you. To know you are real." Then he whispered, "and you are. Real. You're as beautiful tonight as you were in your pictures."

I opened my eyes and found Liam staring at me, and his intensity was nearly frightening. He pulled me tighter against himself, his fingertips digging into me while he crushed me against his body. I felt his hardness against my hip, and I couldn't stop myself from rubbing against it. This time Liam closed his eyes, and I felt the rush of blood to my centre.

Liam opened his eyes, desire naked on his face, "Kiss me," he said.

I met his soft and warm lips. I felt Liam's groan rumble in his vast chest, and kissing him again, my lips scraped against his whiskers. Liam kissed me back now. His tongue pushed past my lips, and found mine. His tongue playfully danced in my mouth. Liam's hand left my arse and started to feel my hips, my waist and then my breasts. He cupped them and gently squeezed. My breath caught as his hand skimmed past my nipple. His palm created friction against the lace of my bra, and tingles radiated through my body.

His lips left mine and went to my neck. He kissed and sucked at me, moving down to the top of my breasts. I heard him take a deep breath into my chest as his cheeks rubbed against my skin. His kisses became harder against my chest and moved back up to my neck, his teeth nipping at me as he went. Even though he had me captured, I wriggled against him, my hips moved uncontrollably, my breath uneven and weak.

Liam pulled away, still firmly gripping one of my hands. "Come with me." Liam led me to the lift.

"Where are we going?"

"To my bedroom." I pulled against him, forcing him to stop. "Sweetheart, I promise I won't fuck you until you ask."

My legs turned to jelly. I wanted to fall to my knees and beg despite my reservations. I nodded and followed Liam into the lift.

Part 4

[lia-jones]

Growing Together - Chapter Ten - How Far We've Come

Victor watched her from afar as she fumbled with the zipper of her dress. He found her adorable, lightly scoffing at herself, her small hands trying to position to a good angle to get the job done, while she carefully watched herself in the mirror.

He mischievously stood in the distance, concealing himself from her, letting her fend for herself a little longer while he observed. This was his guilty pleasure, a small moment that was only his, when she was alone, oblivious to his presence, lost in a secret dialogue with herself. He drank every one of her expressions, how she silently scolded herself when she failed to do what she intended, how she would secretly pat herself in the back when she finally achieved it.

Eventually, feeling he had had his daily fix, he walked up to her and placed his hands on top of hers, still trying to pull the zipper.

“Need help?” He couldn’t help the slight amusement in his voice.

“Ugh. Yes.” She scoffed, turning her back to him so he could help her. “These dresses are so needlessly complicated. I’m always afraid I’ll pull too hard and rip the fabric.”

“That’s why husbands were invented.” He joked. “To help their clumsy wives zip their dresses.”

“Is that so?” She played along. “I thought it was to change tires.”

“No, that’s why road assistance was invented.” He quipped.

“Right, I’ve never seen you change a tire ever.” She turned and placed her hands on his chest, looking pensive. “Hm. I got myself a faulty husband.” She teased.

“And I got myself a wife that can’t reach the top shelf without help.” He smirked. “Life isn’t perfect.”

“How dare you?” She smacked his chest, making him chuckle. “That’s it, you’re sleeping on the couch tonight.” She went to look for her purse, pretending to be offended.

“Tonight is a big night.” He changed the subject. “Feeling nervous?”

“I think, at this point, feeling nervous is pretty much my normal state.” She laughed at her own exaggeration. “Ok, honestly, how do I look?”

The deep green satin dress looked stunning on her. The lace on the corset hugged her breasts in a perfect and elegant way, and the backless design showed her soft skin, the one he loved to kiss in their most intimate moments. He softly ran his fingers on her back, anticipating the events that would follow the gala.

“Honestly?” He pulled her closer, whispering wet in her ear. “Breathtaking.”

Inside the limousine, on their way to the ceremony, he heard her laugh, looking at her phone.

“Just look at this.” Andrea showed him the screen. He immediately identified Guy, Xavier and Mr. Mills in Guy’s restaurant, toasting with red wine, a caption below the picture that said: Á belle Andrea! Felicitations!

“That was heartwarming.” He quipped. “Remind me to send them something to thank them for the support.”

The beautifully decorated ballroom was brimming with warmth and life, and Victor could hear in every corner people engage in interesting conversations about religion, economy or politics. The greatest minds of Loveland were gathered into that very same place, and anyone that was remotely interested in drinking a little bit of knowledge was bound to have a very bountiful night.

Victor and Andrea were received with honor and enthusiasm by the GESA president and his assistant, Andrea being treated almost like royalty. True to herself, his wife was impervious to all the flattery, as she still couldn’t place herself among the great. Victor knew that was her greatest weapon: because she never felt like she was finally arriving, she would never stop walking. And because of that, no one knew how far she would walk.

As they sat at their table and Andrea, the eternal social butterfly, chatted idly with some guests, Victor let his mind wander to years before. Two years before, to be exact, when he didn’t know she would be his, and she didn’t know she would be brilliant. But on that specific day, he saw something on her that told him she would go far. And how.

It was a Saturday morning, and he was visiting Loveland’s Public Library. The Mayor had invited him under the pretense of showing his last monetary donation had been used, but Victor was no fool. He was perfectly aware that the politician was after another donation. Still, he let himself be led by the man through the many floors of the building, pretending to be unaware of his true intentions. It wasn’t like he had better plans anyway, and he knew how important his donations were, especially to students that couldn’t afford the books that their classes demanded.

“This should interest you since it’s your field.” The Mayor announced as they arrived at the Economic Sciences floor. “We are proud to say that, thanks to your generosity, we have an extensive collection of books and manuals. As you can see by how busy this place is, many students come here to study and research during the weekends.”

Victor took a look around at the place, and just like the Mayor said, all the tables were occupied with laptops and books, the people sitting at them engaged in stimulating conversations. Most of these people weren’t born with a silver spoon on their mouths like he had, and thanks to something that required little effort from him, they could study and work for a better life. Victor couldn’t think of a better use for his money. Enjoying a sudden feeling of accomplishment, Victor was about to leave to visit the next floor, when something caught his eye. At the end of the room, by the corner, was that Portuguese girl that worked for him, the one he had hired just a couple of months ago, Andrea.

His heart gave the alarm, pounding heavily, giving the rest of his body all sorts of instructions. He could feel something inside him flutter, his breath becoming faster, his palms starting to sweat. He had no idea why that woman caused such a reaction in him, the only time he spoke to her was during her interview, and he sure wasn’t going to let himself get all flustered for someone he barely knew. So he took a discreet deep breath, trying to regain control, telling his own body to quit the nonsense.

Despite it all, there was no harm in staying for a little longer and observing her. He was naturally interested in studying people’s behavior, especially the people that worked for him. It was not like he was staying behind to look at her, per se, he just wanted to know what she really was like. He could even say it was a precautionary measure, no more than that. With that thought firmly in mind, because there was obviously no other reason to do what he was about to do, he turned to the Mayor.

“If you don’t mind, I would like to take the time to explore this place a little bit further. Alone. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

Before the Mayor could retort, Victor turned his back on him. Taking a random book from one of the shelves, he sat on a corner where he could see her but was sure she couldn’t see him. It would be enjoyable to just sit and read for a while, enjoy the ambiance, he told himself. No, this had nothing to do with her at all.

However, Victor realized that he had no idea if the book he was holding was actually interesting. He was yet to read a word of it. Instead, his eyes kept stubbornly drifting back to her, curious to see what she was doing.

Her table was full of books, her open laptop, and a notebook ridiculously filled with colorful sticky notes. She looked different than usual, wearing casual jeans and a navy blue sweater, her curly hair in a messy bun that a pencil kept in place. She was laser-focused on her work, apparently taking quotes from one of the books and typing them on her laptop, making the occasional annotation on her notebook. The several empty cups of coffee at her table indicated she had been working since quite early, probably the whole morning.

Victor realized that, much to his surprise, a feeling of pride was growing inside him, and he simply put it aside, like he did with most of his feelings. He had nothing to be proud about, she was merely an employee, no one of relevance in his life. Besides, for all he knew, she was working hard but failing miserably, making all sorts of unforgivable mistakes.

Still, he had to admit, her effort was remarkable. Most people slept in on Saturday mornings or spent their weekend resting or entertaining themselves with ludic activities, and yet she was there, buried in books for who knew how long. Furthermore, Victor knew the previous day had been hard for her, as Ted had told him that they left the company close to midnight, due to a problem one of his clients had. Regardless, she was there. It was ridiculous for Victor to feel proud of her, but completely understandable if he experienced at least a shred of surprise.

She stopped her work, reading the covers of the books she had on her table, and frowning. She suddenly got up from her table and walked to the librarian’s desk. Without a second thought, Victor followed her.

“Excuse me.” He heard her call the librarian. “Do you by any chance have “The Theory of Development”, by Aidan Thorpe?”

Victor knew that book. It was a study published in the ’90s that had caused immense controversy, so further editions had been canceled, remaining only the first printed copies. Victor had purchased it for his personal collection and found it brilliant. It was interesting that Andrea was also using it.

The librarian struck a few keys on her computer and shook her head, Andrea’s face falling, disheartened. Thanking the woman, she turned to leave, absorbed in her thoughts. In fact, so absorbed that she wasn’t minding where she was going and bumping-

On him.

“Oh God, it’s you!” She jumped back, looking slightly frightened. “I mean, good morning, Sir. And I’m sorry.”

It was obvious to Victor that she became deeply uncomfortable with the sight of him. That quickly put him in a bad mood.

“Watch where you’re going.” Victor scolded her, although he didn’t mean to. “Looking for Thorpe’s work? It’s incredibly hard to find.”

“I know.” She sighed. “There was a copy at Calouste Gulbenkian, back at home, I’ll try to see if I can get any copies of it.” She tucked a curl behind her ear, not looking him in the eye.

“Interesting fashion choice.” He mocked, pointing to the pencil in her hair. “Is that how young people use stationery these days?”

“I forgot my hair tie.” She seemed unamused. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to work. Enjoy your weekend.”

Victor had no choice but to watch her and she hurriedly walked to her table, gathering all her things and leaving in a rush. She obviously couldn’t stand him. But then again, he knew he wasn’t all that loveable, being a business mogul comes with a price, and for the most part, he was willing to pay it. Yet, he couldn’t shake the sadness to see her leave like that.

Back at his apartment, Victor found himself staring at his bookshelf. Something was brewing inside him, he could feel it, but he was too much of a coward to look at it. He had been hurt before. He needed to tread lightly.

But she needed this. And it was so easy to give it to her. Was he really the kind of person that would disregard someone’s need for the sake of self-preservation? With a decided scoff, he took the book off his shelf and placed it on his coffee table. On the inside of the cover, he wrote a few words, closing it immediately.

He took his phone and dialed the number. She could never know.

“I will give you the donation you need.” He spoke, eyes focused on the book. “However, I have a special request.”

“Is everything ok?” He heard her ask. “You’re awfully quiet.”

“What? Are you done listening to Frank’s dissertations about his trips to Namibia?”

“I find them interesting actually.” She came close to him, whispering in his ear. “But the man does talk a lot .”

They both chuckled privately, as they watched from the corner of their eyes the said guest go on another tirade, gesticulating furiously. He lovingly took his wife’s wrist, the one where she wore her charm bracelet.

“You’re wearing it today.” He twirled the V charm between his fingers, proud to have her show that part of him.

“I wear it every day.” She gave him a confused frown.

“I assumed you wouldn’t today, fearing it wouldn’t go with the dress.”

“It’s part of me.” She touched the bracelet on her wrist like it was her favorite thing in the world. “I could never take it.”

He took his wife’s hand again, kissing the back, the softness of her skin and her scent making his heart swell. He loved how she proudly wore his gift, the testimony of their life together like it was her lucky charm, her source of strength.

She was very fond of symbols and superstitions, and although Victor was more of a logical man, even he had to admit the power objects seemed to have in summoning the best in someone, or their worst.

He could still remember that Sunday afternoon, after taking her out to lunch. He was at her place, baking cookies, while she worked on her study.

“It smells delicious.” She commented from the table, as he took the cookies from the tray to cool.

“It will only take another ten minutes. Are you ready for a break? I’ll boil some water for tea.”

“Yes, please.” She stretched her body, stiff from sitting so long. “I’ll clear the table.”

As the water boiled and the cookies cooled, he helped her clear the table of all books and sticky notes she had laying around, spotting the book he had donated to the library. He held it in his hand with a smile.

“That one belongs to the library.” She explained. “I should return it soon, but the librarian says I can keep it as long as I want, and to be honest, it’s breaking my heart to have to return it. I may buy it from them.”

“Why is it so special?” Victor smiled, hoping his expression wouldn’t give away his secret.

“The previous owner wrote this on the cover, see?” She opened the book, showing him the inside of the cover. “Probably for motivation. And you know what? Every time I feel overwhelmed, I look at that inscription, and I feel stronger. It does work.”

Victor couldn’t have guessed the impact his words on a cover of an old book could have on her life, but he was glad to be a positive influence in her work, even if disguised. The following week, while on a business trip, he texted her.

You no longer need to return the book. It’s yours.

“Why do I feel so nervous? I already know I won.” Andrea commented as they started announcing the awards.

“Is it because of the speech?” He held her hand. “If you forget it, just speak from the heart.”

“And now, ladies and gentleman,” a voice announced, “to present the award for Most Promising Mind in Economics… Professor Chauncey Williamson.”

Andrea froze on her seat. It was the teacher that gave her an incredibly hard time when she was defending her doctorate thesis. The professor climbed the stairs to the stage, taking the microphone.

“Ladies and gentleman, good evening.” He started. “Most of you don’t know this, but Mrs. Lee and I share a piece of history together, when she was still Miss Jones. In fact, I was one of the teachers invited to evaluate her thesis. I must admit that, while back in the day I considered Miss Jones too good to be true , Mrs. Lee has not failed to disappoint. Her ongoing study shows a lot of promise and raises many important questions, which is why it is my greatest honor to give the winner for Most Promising Mind in Economics, Dr. Andrea Lee!”

Andrea turned to her husband, pecking him on the lips, before getting up to deliver her speech.

“Go get them.” Victor whispered, before he saw his wife walk towards the stage.

“I have to admit, Dr. Williamson, I wasn’t such a fan of you back then, but I kind of like you now.” She joked, and everyone in the audience laughed. “First of all, I would like to thank GESA for this honor and its juri, and all of the present here for sharing this moment with me. I am deeply honored. There is a saying, no man is an island. And this is particularly true for this award, because, as you may imagine, I didn’t win it on my own. I’d like to thank my husband, who has been with me since day one, who believed in me even when I didn’t believe in myself, and made sure I was supported in every step of the way. I love you handsome, and I’m so grateful for having you in my life.”

Victor found himself close to tears, the pride and emotion being too much to bear with a straight face. He mouthed I love you too to his wife, although he knew words wouldn’t be able to convey the warmth he felt in his heart.

“I’d also like to thank my family and friends, for putting up with my absence and moods when I was too busy, you guys are the best, and I wouldn’t trade you for the world. I also want to thank my team, who worked relentlessly and believed in my project, taking hours and hours of their personal time so we could make the deadline we had defined. And lastly, I want to thank who I like to call my silent supporter.” Andrea’s voice faltered slightly with the emotion. “You see, when I was just starting to write my thesis for my doctorate, and I couldn’t afford expensive books for reference, I had to use the Loveland’s Public Library. There was a book that I needed, The Theory of Development, by Aidan Thorpe, and that the library was kind enough to let me take home temporarily for consultation. Inside the cover of that book, there was a quote that said The best view comes after the hardest climb. I have to say, that quote changed my life. Every time I felt disheartened, or tired, or felt like giving it up completely, I would go to that book and read that quote, and I found myself strong again. I don’t know who you are, and maybe you won’t listen to my speech, but I want to say to the world that your words gave me strength, and you are also a reason why I’m here. Thank you.”

Victor smiled as he applauded her speech, his heart feeling so big that it could barely fit in his chest. He would never tell her that the book was actually from him, and he was the one who wrote those words, although she could easily figure it out by his handwriting. He would keep it secret like his own personal treasure, the knowledge that he had been her supporter since even before she knew, that he loved her even before she loved him. This was for him and him alone. His guilty pleasure.

That day was a memorable day in their lives, and Victor couldn’t help to trace back all the events that led to it. How she started as a not so shy intern at Loveland, but so unaware of her potential. How even when faced with major difficulties, her past being all over the media, her career being on the line, she never gave up. How she bravely stood up to her abuser, and his father, and anyone who was unjust or had hurt someone significant in her life. If he had to describe his wife with a handful of adjectives, two of them would certainly be brave and relentless.

Later that night, he sat in his living room, nursing a glass of brandy and watching the city skyline, like he did many times when he was too overwhelmed by his own thoughts. Feelings like pride and love filled his heart, but there was one he could not shake off: sorrow. He had never seen his wife give up on anything, except for the thing she wanted the most. She had come so far, improved her life in so many ways, healed from the past, but there was one thing that still stung her heart: the fact that she would never become a biological mother.

As his loving husband, Victor decided that it was his duty not to let her give up on her dream, or better, their dream. He had seen her barely recover from their last try, and his heart feared that mentioning the subject again would reopen old wounds, but he couldn’t let her fold like that. There were still options. They still stood a chance.

“The bed is cold without you.” He heard her complain from the door.

“Come here.” He extended his arms to her. “I’ll warm you up.”

She sat on his lap, running her fingers through his hair.

“You’re drinking alone in the dark.” She looked at him with worried eyes. “Is something upsetting you?”

“Just lost in thought, that’s all.” He leaned his head against her chest.

“Anything in particular?” She kept combing his hair with her fingers. Victor closed his eyes, enjoying her care.

“How far we have come. How we were before, how we are now.” He mumbled.

“We did come a long way, didn’t we?” She was reminiscing. “I remember my trip to Loveland. It felt like navigating uncharted waters. I have changed so much since then.”

“Why did we give up? We never give up.” He looked up to her, knowing he didn’t need to specify. The look in her eyes told him she understood.

“I can’t give you a child, Victor.” She answered weakly.

“But we can have one. We can adopt. She may not be our blood or share physical characteristics, but we will love her. She will be ours, be a Lee, all the same.”

Andrea watched him lovingly as he spoke, tears brimming her eyes.

“I don’t want to give up just yet.” This time, it was his turn to ask. “Will you do this with me?”

“Yes.” She smiled as she let a tear fall. “I will.”

[v-hope]

Sue Me

Pairing: Min Yoongi x Fangirl!Reader

Genre: Fluff

Word Count: 1.4k

Request: "Hi! Do you remember that I will sue you min Yoongi girl? I have always kind of shipped her with Yoongi, so maybe a fluffy piece in that scenario? P.S. I really love your fluff and angst. Normally I don't go for angst but yours are so good?? Ily 💕💕💕"

A/N: I shipped them too, fam. I shipped them too 😔✊

Gif taken from Mojan Felfeli (Pinterest).

The first time you had shouted at Min Yoongi that you were going to sue him had been at one of BTS’ firsts fansigns. You were just another fangirl in line, waiting for your turn to meet your precious idols, when you felt overwhelmed just by the sight of them – most precisely, the sight of him. Yoongi was just interacting with their fans like he was supposed to, but the second he smiled as he waited for the next girl to stop talking to Jimin and go to him, you found yourself not being able to stop the words already coming out of your mouth.

He had gotten shy, obviously, not really replying to you but gazing down as he fidgeted with his hands – a shy yet cocky gummy smile forming on his lips. And when your turn came to be finally in front of him, you didn't really talk much about your previous words, instead having a nice chat about you, for he seemed interested in getting to know a little bit of your life in those short seconds.

The second time you did, it was at a concert – they were not that well known yet, so you managed to get pretty good tickets. You saw your chance once they finished one of their songs and everyone fell silent. As soon as you repeated the words ‘I'm suing you, Min Yoongi’, this time adding your ground was the reason of him having made your heart explode, he snapped his head towards where the sound of your voice had came from – trying to seem annoyed but failing miserably, for the corners of his lips betrayed him by curving up at the sight of you. And this time he actually replied to your complainings, telling you to 'square up' and sue him for real if he was hurting you so much.

By the third time, Yoongi was living for it. You were once again at a fansign, this time telling him you were suing him because he couldn't do his hair like that and not expect you to feel so strongly about him, and he had owned it. Yeah, he had argued with you, of course, but he owned it nevertheless.

Although you did not attend every single concert or fansign of theirs, for obvious economical reasons, Yoongi knew you were coming back at some point, which is why in the span of two years, it had became your guys’ thing; you would show up every once in a while, and he'd bicker with you about your intentions of taking him to court.

But that was it. Nothing but a fan to idol relationship. You went to their events, had your little interactions with Yoongi, and then the two of you returned to your lives.

The thing is, Yoongi had kind of grown not only fond of you, but also used to seeing you at some point. The downside of it all was that, just as that happened, you suddenly stopped showing up.

But it was no big deal, right? You were just another fan. If anyone would've told you that the Min Yoongi, the guy your heart beated so desperately for, missed your presence, you would've laughed right on their faces. But he did miss you, even if he didn't notice it, because, even though you didn't really know each other, you had formed a huge part during his initial idol journey. Because, you see, when you have just debuted with your group and are not very confident about neither your music nor your looks, having someone to literally scream to your face that they're going to sue you because of how you make them feel… yeah, talk about confidence boost.

It was only over a year and a half later, when you made your much awaited, by him, comeback.

This time, though, you hadn't yelled at him from the line, which is why he was so surprised when you out of nowhere were in front of him – his eyes lighting up and lips parting in a smile at both your presence and how beautiful he thought you looked.

His heart pounded loudly against his chest, having to clear his throat as he was almost afraid of you hearing his heartbeats.

“Well, if it isn't the threatener who never acted on her words” he greeted casually, starting to sign your album.

“Don't sing victory yet, you dangerous delinquent” you raised one of your eyebrows, mirroring the smile that had just formed on his lips. “You will be held accountable for your actions, I just had to get a job and start saving up for it because, I don't know if you've heard, but suing is not quite cheap”.

“Is that why you stopped coming for over a year?” he gazed up to lock his eyes with yours.

You felt a shiver run down your spine not only because of the way his eyes stared into yours, but also because he remembered.

“I mean, I guess it was part of it, but I also got into this relationship–”

“Ah, so you replaced me” he shook his head, resting his back on his chair as he clenched his fist to his chest in feigned hurt. “I thought you were my ride or die, you know?”

You couldn't help but laugh lightly at that, feeling kind of flustered. “I didn't replace you, I swear!” you tried to defend yourself. “It was just very… exhausting?” your uncertain words earned a frown from him. “Nevermind, I'm just glad it's over” you sighed in relief.

Yoongi raised one of his eyebrows in clear worry. “Should I go and punch this person?” he wondered, this time making you giggle.

“It's okay, thanks for the offer” you smiled brightly. “He was not a bad person, we were just… not compatible, I guess, and I ended up being so mentally drained that I didn't really feel like doing anything else and why am I telling you this?” you tilted your head at the sudden realisation, stopping yourself from rambling any further, “we should be talking about me suing you!”

“Just for the record” he leaned forward so he could be closer to you and speak lower, “you deserve someone who makes you want to go out and enjoy life, screw whoever does the opposite” his determined words made goosebumps appear on your skin.

Suddenly you remembered why he had been your bias all along.

“And about the whole suing thing” he instantly changed the topic, leaning back on his chair, “I'm afraid to inform you I am the one suing you this time” his statement took you by surprise, staring at him with furrowed eyebrows so that he would go on. “You can't just disappear on me for more than a year and not expect me to make you pay for it” your heart skipped a beat. “No way, we're going to court for this”.

“On what grounds, if you don't mind me asking?” you played along.

“On withdrawal?!” his intonation made it seem like it was the most obvious thing in the world. You rolled your eyes, your chest moving up and down as a little laugh escaped your throat. “Honestly, you just took my constant praise away from me out of the blue, I can't let it pass”.

That and the fact that he had missed seeing you, but there was no way he would say that out loud.

“Well, then I guess we will be suing each other, because I have like over ten sues against you I never took to a judge”.

“Maybe we could reach a settlement?” he proposed. “You know, so we don't actually have to go through the endless nuisance that is a trial”.

As you were about to answer, one person from the staff asked you to move forward in line, for your time had apparently been up for a while now; taking both of you by surprise.

“I guess we will have to continue this very serious business talk on your next fansign” you said, moving slightly to the side.

“Or we could…”

He shut his mouth before he could finish his sentence, looking around to the eyes and cameras on not only him but his members as well, and realising he couldn't just say anything he wanted since anyone could read his lips. So, instead, he rushed to write something down in your album, later closing it and handing it back to you.

“Third page” he pointed at it, “I trust you with this, don't give it to anyone” his pleading eyes left you dumbfounded. Not minding that, he added: “I'm glad you're back, suing girl. Don't disappear on me again”.

Trying to recover from the bright gummy smile he had just flashed your way and being still too taken aback by what had happened during those last few seconds, you opened the album in the page he had indicated, as you made your way out of the fansign – your body immediately freezing in its place after getting a glimpse of what looked like a phone number.

‘We should meet up… you know, for business reasons – Yoongi’.

Biting down on your lip, you turned around, realising the very man who had been messing with your heart for years was already looking your way – his shoulders moving up and down as he laughed quietly after you had glared at him, threateningly mouthing “I will sue you, Min Yoongi”.

So much for having wanted a settlement.

[redslilstories]

Little Pieces of You

Author: lilyme (aka. redslilstories aka. me ;)) Summary: Set in New York. Was it wise to be clinging to the past, to memories of an old them? Or should it all have been abandoned long ago? Pairing: Callie/Arizona Rating: PG Disclaimer: I do not own the characters in this story, nor do I own any rights to the television show "Grey's Anatomy". They were created by Shonda Rhimes and belong to her and the ABC network. No copyright infringement intended!All mistakes are mine.

A/N: Happy Valentine’s Day to all Calzona shippers!

There were things that she wasn't very good at.

And didn't like doing very much.

Organizing her closets and dressers was surprisingly such a thing.

She found that she sucked at keeping everything in its intended place, with shirts and pants roaming out to find themselves new spots to live in.

This happened whenever she had too much space to go around. Not because her closets were so huge they could fit an entire apartment block. But because she was using the room that was meant for two with the clothes of only one person.

Too much empty space that made clothes wander in desperate need for companionship, trying to compensate a loss.

But her clothes didn't have to suffer much longer. And today Callie had some much loathed reorganizing to do. For a very good reason.

"Sorry it's such a mess in here," she said to the approaching footsteps behind her, as she stood on the tips of her toes, rearranging her sweaters on the topmost shelf of her closet. "I didn't find the time to get everything ready".

"Come on, it's okay," the other woman said with an audible chuckle in her voice, as she carried a box into the bedroom. She found it endearing how anxious Callie could become over something like this. On any given day, the brunette's home probably looked way tidier than your average person's.

And even though she currently spent way more time than usual in her research lab at Heartmond Hospital in New York to get the finishing touches on her exoskeleton project, which was bound to revolutionize the world of medicine, her home in no way resembled a place of angst-inducing disorder and chaos.

And that could also be said about her wardrobe.

"So, um, I've got socks and underwear in this one. At least the box says so," the woman laughed as she placed said item on the ground. She was not always a hundred per cent certain which items had made their way into which box in the last steps of packing.

After Callie had asked her after four months of dating if she wanted to move in with her, she had not hesitated for one second.

There were so many advantages. Callie's apartment had more space than the one she herself had been able to find upon moving to New York a year ago. It was much closer to both their work places. And moving in together meant saving a lot of money.

But these were only the cold, economic facts.

What was even better was the prospect of them living together.

Again.

After all these years.

There certainly were jitters to be had about this step, considering their past.

But this was a new them. And this new them definitely deserved a new start into a home life together.

"Mm, sounds enticing," Callie laughed in return, referring to parts of the presumed content of the box.

She was so excited to be sharing her home with Arizona again. As was Sofia, who had been very open their rekindling relationship from the start and couldn't wait for them all to be living together again.

For now this apartment was perfect for the three of them. Barring the fact that they could hardly fit any of Arizona's furniture, so several things had to go into storage for the time being.

At some point they would probably start looking for a bigger place to accommodate them all, but that was not a priority right now.

"So, you said second drawer from top, right?" the blonde tried to recall as to where Callie had told her to stow her undergarments and went ahead to open said drawer.

Callie, temporarily distracted by her own task, only noticed with delay that Arizona did not remember all that correctly. And was about to open...

"Oh, no, wait, not that one," Callie hurried over with a movement of her hand that was to say Arizona should stop what she was doing.

But it was already too late.

And Arizona came face to face with... nothing much suspicious, really.

It was Callie's sock drawer.

"Hmm, nothing I haven't seen before," the blonde smirked, confused by the adorably abashed redness suddenly grazing Callie's features.

She turned her attention back the drawer, and on second glance noticed a black velvety box, about eight by ten inches sitting next to the assortment of socks on the right side of the drawer.

"It is about this?" she questioned. "If it's toys, you really don't have to worry," she shrugged seductively at her lover. "We're all humans. And it's not like we didn't use some before. Don't see why we shouldn't again sometime."

Callie was temporarily baffled by Arizona's alluring suggestion, and guffawed in amusement. "No, that... they're actually over there," she roughly pointed towards the nightstand, which was also equipped with several drawers.

"Valuable information," Arizona nodded in delight, while her hand subconsciously traced the smooth the surface of the mysterious box.

She had to admit... she was pretty curious to get to know more about the content. Solely due to Callie's peculiar reaction. But she wasn't going to push it. They each deserved their secrets – even living together, of course.

She was about to shut the drawer when Callie suddenly spoke. "Okay, you know what? Go ahead. Open it," she smiled cautiously, not having missed the woman's interest in this.

It was not something she was ashamed of or tried to hide. It just was something... she wasn't sure how Arizona would react to.

Chances were she would eventually see it anyway, and it was something... really, really not bad.

So why not do it now? Couldn't be weirder now than it would be at a later point, right?

"You sure?" Arizona wondered, wanting to reinforce Callie's permission.

"Yeah!" Callie nodded and sat on the bed to wait.

Arizona lifted the box from its hiding spot with tender hands, her curiosity piqued as she sat next to the brunette.

After a few moments of deliberation she removed the lid... and found herself perplex.

Because she caught sight of memorabilia of a time long years ago. And personal items she had almost forgotten even existed.

She found concert tickets from a Taylor Swift concert in 2010. The first concert she and Callie had went to together. It was their guilty pleasure. One they would certainly not admit to everyone.

She found one of the several scrap books she had made when she was a teen. This one being from the period she referred to as her punk rock era. It had little drawings, magazine clippings from singers and other celebrities she had fancied back then and even some poems the blonde had written. But most important of all it held pictures of her with unusually heavy eyeliner, dark t-shirts and ripped jeans. Once Callie had found this book, she had been unable to put it down. Mesmerized by Arizona's cuteness seeping through despite the appearance. And beyond fascinated by this unique insight into the mind of young Arizona. So fascinated that the blonde had not thought long about giving this book to Callie.

She found this really thick pair of knitted socks, which sported the most hideous green, gray, blue and red striped pattern ever. She had given it to Callie a few months into their relationship as a well-meant joke. Callie was the one with the ice cold feet in their relationship, and Arizona had often found herself fighting the urge to complain about icy toes against her calves whenever her lover held her as they slept. A part of her had feared that Callie would be insulted by this, but quite the contrary. She had worn them with joy, and even after the fabric had been ragged out from being worn God knows how many times, still had most obviously kept them.

She found a little jewelry box, which she didn't need to open to know that among other things it probably contained a heart necklace. A lot of people had laughed at them for wearing this matching items, but for them it had been their mutual show of love, belonging and care, and everyone laughing about it was just a fool who had never experienced this feeling.

And she found – to her utmost astonishment – tucked away at the bottom of the box – one of her old scrub caps. One in pastel tones that actually had butterflies on it. She had stopped wearing it shortly after coming to Seattle Grace, switching to a light pink one with little flowers instead. She thought she had thrown this old cap out. Actually remembered having put it on a pile Callie had prepared for the charity bin. But as it seemed now, the brunette had deemed it too valuable to be thrown out.

She sat with this box of 'her' in her lap. Of items that were not really the core of her being. Far from. But of pieces of her that apparently once had meant the world to someone. To Callie.

And maybe they still did.

"You kept all this," she stated as her fingers followed the patterns of her scrub cap.

And Callie sat beside her, worrying. Arizona didn't show any emotions that indicated how she thought about this... this... nostalgia? This desperate living in the past?

"I... I know... most of this didn't mean anything to you. The cap certainly didn't. Not like other surgeons who have their lucky caps. But I wanted to keep it. Because I saw you in it the day after the bathroom kiss. You were coming out of surgery. And you looked so proud and happy. I'll never forget that day. I think I fell in love with you right then."

This had actually been the first day she had seen her around the hospital at all. And while the cap itself was plain and unspectacular, it would forever remind her of the days she had met and gotten to know the blonde. Especially of the fact that she was not just an extraordinary human being, who went out of her way to dispel a total stranger's sorrow with a kiss – but also one of the most amazing doctors she had ever met.

Over the years items had been added, and they all meant no less to Callie.

But maybe more than they should have. Especially after they had broken up – for seemingly the final time.

And they probably meant more to her than Arizona was comfortable with.

"It's pathetic, I know," she cringed, and almost wished she had let Arizona assume the box contained adult toys for the time being.

"What? No!" Arizona was brought out of her own musings by Callie's evaluation and immediately calmed her with a vehement shake of her head. "No," she turned her body towards Callie, "it's really not. I find it sweet that you still have this. After all this time".

"So, you're not freaking out?" Callie questioned, somewhat relieved. She knew that to other people it probably seemed strange. And looked like a sign of being unable to let go.

Penny had certainly thought so when she had stumbled across the box while putting their clean underwear away.

Callie had to admit that it was a stupid place to stow something you didn't want your lover to find.

But maybe her subconsciousness didn't plan on it not being found by Penny. And maybe her reasoning about keeping it so that Sofia could have all this later – just like a pair of Arizona's wheely sneaks that sat in the back of her shoe drawer, somehow having made its way into her possession after the divorce – was really little more than easy to see through fib.

It had made Penny realize that Arizona still was much more to Callie than just the mother of her child.

It certainly had been a factor in their mutual decision to split up. And gave Callie the opportunity to try a new start with the woman still holding her heart.

The woman in question looked at her with a smirk that was tucked halfway between her teeth. Just like Callie remembered it when the blonde had something on her mind she wanted to share but also knew could mean trouble.

"What...?" Callie lured in amusement and tickled her fingers along the side of Arizona's thigh.

"I... uh, I might have kept a thing or two as well," she blushed.

"You did?" Callie queried surprised. Surprised that Arizona was just as much a nostalgic fool as she was.

"I still have the necklace too... And," the blonde began, her eyes coyly looking at the ceiling, "a couple of CDs we once made back then when people still had CD players," she laughed. They contained songs they had loved dancing to throughout the early years of their relationship. A wild mix of oldies and songs that had been brand new back then. They had used to dance for hours, only to end up in a heap of exhaustion and happiness.

"I think I still have a player somewhere," Callie wiggled her eyebrows, certainly not unhappy about the prospect of a little dance party. "What else?"

"Your kiddie Spanish book," she smiled lovingly. It was a book Callie – growing up bilingual – had learned to read with when she was little. At one point Callie had started teaching Arizona some Spanish, using this book among other things. And while it probably wasn't the best material to teach a foreign language to an adult, Arizona loved this book. It reminded her of lots of cozy hours snuggled together on the couch and studying. And it contained some doodles young Callie had made here and there of animals, flowers, people and whatever came to mind. "And, um, I have something else, and I hope you won't hate me for it," said the blonde and got up to leave the room, presumably to fetch the item.

Callie waited, wondering what it could possibly be.

She could hear rumbling... followed after a while by a bit of grumbling as apparently Arizona had trouble finding what she was looking for.

Then she heard a box or two crashing to the floor and became worried. "You okay?"

"Yup," Arizona announced and a few moments later emerged with a box that read...

"'Towels'?" Callie wondered.

"Hm? Uh, no," Arizona negated. "This is just the last box I packed, and it has some stuff in it I used till the last day like...," she opened the box and soon brought forth...

"Is that my sweater?!" The brunette exclaimed incredulously.

It was a garment so plain and simple. A normal woolen gray sweater. But it held so many memories for Arizona. She had loved cuddling with Callie wearing it and had during their time together sometimes worn it herself. And even during the difficult time of their divorce, Arizona's heart had wanted it. So she had snuck it out. And had frequently worn it herself since then. The sweater now being even more withered and having lost some amount of its original color. It was strange and nonsensical, but even after years of Callie wearing it last, Arizona found it still somehow smelled of her. And it always comforted her when she was having a bad day.

Arizona bit her lip, almost feeling she had to apologize. For taking this from Callie without asking.

At least the brunette didn't seem happy.

Long Moments later Callie's face twitched. "I knew I had seen it on you during that one video chat."

"Sorry?" Arizona said, hoping she could make amends somehow.

"Don't be," Callie returned and pulled Arizona into her lap. "It looks good on you".

"I know," the blonde returned cheekily as she put her arms around Callie. "So, um," she giggled as her lover used the opportune opportunity to kiss a long her neck. "Does it go on my pile or yours?"

"Sooner or later, it'll end up where it wants to anyway."

"True".

END

[asongstress1422]

A Lady's Warning

Zutara Fanfic – Part 5 of Bride from the Water Tribe

Summary: Katara was taken to the Northern Water Tribe by her grandmother; she was to be protected at all cost, for she was the last of the Southern Water. Once they got there, the North refused to teach her trying to strip her of her worth and turn her into what they wanted, a calm biddable healer to birth the next generation. They failed. And so as punishment they sent her to be a political bride to the Fire Nation.   Part 1  Part 2  Part 3  Part 4 AO3

As the dinner wore on, Arnook and the other Tribesmen kept their tablemates entertained,  interlaying talks of economic growth and trade with grander stories of past Hunts. That is, they kept the men entertained, the wives and daughters were too well bred not to be disgusted, or too entranced, to put a stop to the story of a man getting his stomach ripped out by a polar bear dog.  

“And you, Lady Katara,” one of the younger sons of the Kazen House seated next to her asked, amber eyes heated with an emotion that made Katara’s skin crawl, “have you ever been on  hunt?”

A memory floated up, like memories were want to do when triggered; mostly forgotten til suddenly clear. Katara was five, or there about, and father was taking her brother Sokka out for his first hunt and she had refused to be left behind.

It is still early in the season, Hakoda, she remembered her mother's voice laughingly taking her side, one failed hunt will not cause issue. She still remembered the shock on everyone’s faces when her father had thrown the spear in the pristine blanket of snow Katara had indicated and dug out a skewered white rabbit-fox. She remembered being so proud of those mitten’s her father had made for her.

Arnook’s seething voice interrupted her thoughts. “We do not allow our women to go out on hunts,” he told the boy in controlled derision. “Their presence disrupts the prey and makes it harder on the men. Their place is in the home.”

Katara fought a sneer. Her tongue clenched between her teeth as several of the earth nobility nod in agreement to the Water Chief's words. It was something she never understood, this faulty reasoning that denied half a people based on perceived inability. In the South every person had a duty to provide for the tribe in whatever capacity they could. Katara’s own mother’s aim with a spear second to none and before the snows closed in she would go on the last few hunts. Yes it was dangerous but it was no more dangerous then when her father went out. It was how the tribe survived.

The Kazen boy’s eyes rolled over her wishfully once more before he turned back to the other’s conversation, leaving Katara ignored in the room full of people.

After dinner the guests once more mingled with one another.

There was no hiding the main point of all the pomp and circumstance was to see that the Heir to the Fire Nation got a wife. Noble families from all over the world had gathered with the goal of marrying their eligible daughters into the best position imaginable. And while every girl and her family wanted a crown, anyone who had clung to power through the century long war would not let themselves be blinded to the fact that there were twenty other families vying for it as well. So while all the candidates simpered and flirted with the Crown Prince, their parents were cultivating second or even third avenues into high enough noble houses to cut the sting of not nabbing the golden goose.

Chief Arnook was playing the game one step further. Actively seeking a Fire Noble to give Katara too but, as it was not for something as noble as marriage, he did not have to cast his net on only eligible sons.

“She is rather eztotic.” The eyes that raked over Katara were predatory.

The current head of the Kaminari House  was here with his wife and four children. Katara had seen them in passing on several occasions as the they had arrived even earlier then she and her people had. The eldest daughter Lady Sai, who was maybe a year older than Katara, was the clan’s candidate. A quiet, reserved beauty that sadly trailed Lady Choe’s and her entourage. He had also brought two other daughters, the youngest being fifteen, both a bit more outgoing then Sai, in hopes of tempting the prince.

The man’s son and heir had also joined the family in the capital. He had the same look in his eye as his father as he and several other young lords prowled the palace.

“She,” Katara growled cooly, feeling her blood boil, “has a name.”

Arnook grabbed her arm, bearing down with considerable pressure. A warning. “My apologies for her behavior,” he smiled conspiratorially with the other man. “She is spirited.”

“Spirited can be fun,” the man raised his cup to his lips, “if it is controlled correctly.”

Fear burned through Katara’s righteous anger. She could feel the liquor in his cup, feel as he swallowed and it rushed down into his stomach. Asking her, begging her, to shape it to her will. To use it in anyway she saw fit.

Nauseous, she tore herself from Arnook’s hold. Uncaring of the eyes that were on her or the people she ran into, she shoved her way though the crowd. Her breath clawing its way out of her throat in ragged pants, vision cutting in and out. Once second all she saw was the the bright, elegant, fire nation party where people looked at her and thought ‘barbarian’. The next was the cold, dark stretch of ice where she proved she was one.

She had no idea were she was going knowing only that she need to put as much distance between herself and the insidious temptation that rolled through her body.

Outside, the little voice inside her head urged on a calming whisper . The rightness of the idea had her stumbling through an exit.

The soft wind brought with it the tang of salt that centered her firmly in the present. The moon hung big and ripe against the black velvet sky and she was thankful she did not have to spend another one of Tui’s nights on the ocean. Katara could still hear the party going on inside but it was so much easier to ignore, the noise further tempered as she stepped off the wooden porch into the tranquility of the flower garden. Closing her eyes Katara tilted her face up relishing in the stillness after so much sensory input.

The blending of past and present sensations, the coolness of the air and the smell of sea in the dark, helped Katara get the best of her anxiety. Allowed her grab hold of the memories and push them down where they were back out of sight. Where she did not have to remember the monster she had let herself become. Was still tempted to become.

“I thought it was only water-benders that felt the moon’s call,” Katara looked up to see Lady Chou sashaying down the stairs into her sanctuary, “but it seems all you people have ties to it. How primitive.”

She was in an elegant amber dress embroidered with hundreds of blood-red roses that accented the curve of her body and matched the color of the tint on her lips. It was a more modern dress, sleeveless with a delicate scooped neckline that showed her arms and collar bone to advantage. Katara had overheard more than one woman growl over its beauty.

“I’m here to offer you some friendly advice.” Her smile was fake, the fury in her eyes was not, as she came to a stop infront of Katara. “You will never marry Prince Zuko. He will marry a Fire Nation woman. You, and all the other women, are here only as a show of good faith. So do not press your luck.”

Katara was rather surprised that the Hotaru candidate was insecure enough to be issuing threats so early in the game.

The Hotarus were a powerful family well known for their firebending. Lady Chou was not recorded as having the power of her ancestors but she was comfortably in the seventh percentile of bending ranks; strong enough to produce small controlled bursts of flames but tired too easily to put forth the energy required for stronger forms. Not that it detracted from her overall score in the marriage mart. With the ties to her house and potential power pass on to future  conquerors she was still a decent enough choice for the Crown Prince.

Katara frowned. Why would this woman risk showing her weakness when-- then it hit her, “you do not believe the prince will choose you either, do you?”

It was hard to tell if the lady paled in the faint light but she did lose some of her loveliness as her face contorted in a sneer. “How dare you speak to me like that, you dirty little water peasant.”

Katara sighed. She hoped for his own sake that the Fire Prince chose a mate with more control. Shaking her head she turned away. “Go away, little firefly, I do not have the stomach to be the balm for your ego.”

“You dare to turn your back to me!” There was a hiss and the orange glow of fire cast the the bushes of periwinkle flowers in sharp relief.

Katara spun, sinking into a defensive crouch keeping her eyes on her opponent. Reflexively her hands went to her waist but the waterskin she carried for half her life was gone. That brief fumble kept her from destroying all the Water Tribe’s carefully laid plans as a figure stepped out of the shadows.

“Lady Chou!”

“Prince Zuko,” she gasped, quickly dropping her fist and extinguishing the flames as she slapped her gilded mask back into place.  

The prince stepped between the two women, his back mostly to Katara as he glared at his countrywoman. “You know bending is not to be use as a weapon on palace grounds unless you are in an Agni Kai. You also know, as Lady Katara is not a bender, she can not be challenged. What do you have to say for yourself for threatening one of my guests?”

The woman’s mouth gaped like a fish, eyes flickering between Katara and the prince. Any thing she could have said would have only landed her in even hotter waters and she new it.

Katara only wanted this over and done with. Stepping from around his back, she bowed her head to the prince, bringing up her clasped hands inside her trailing silk sleeves. “It was my fault, Fire Prince, I spoke out of turn. Lady Chou was merely defending her honor.”

She turn to the Fire Lily and bowed again. “Lady Chou, I meant no offence with my careless words. I humbly beg your forgiveness.” Katara straightened, a thread of iron lining her voice in a way only another woman would hear. “However if you find the slight too great for forgiveness I would accept your challenge of an Agni Kai. Though I am not a firebender I am skilled in combat. I would bring no shame to either of our names in such a fight.”

As a threat it was well done. Katara was not backing down but giving her opponent the chance to look merciful, while also threatening her with a loss of victory if it came down to it. It could only benefit the both of them if Lady Chou chose to take the white flag and she knew it too.

“No, Lady Katara, the fault is mine.” Though she did not like it, the fire lady accepted the peace flag, her words and smile sickly sweet. “You are ignorant of our culture and I was too quick to anger over an unknown slight. An aspect not fitting to my position as Daughter to the Horatu to a foreign dignitary. Please forgive me.” The fire nation girl bowed, keeping her head a half inch higher than Katara’s, granting herself a higher social rank.

“Without hesitation, Lady Chou.” With a biting smile Katara bowed the exact same height she had done before, showing the girl she saw the shallow bow as the slight it was ment and simply did not care.

“Lady Chou, I’m sure your father is looking for you.” The prince’s voice was coldly proper as he issued the thinly veiled dismissal.

Fire flared in Lady Chou’s eyes. This little bout showed that she was quick to anger and retaliate, a facet not good in a post-war Fire Lady, and her look said she blamed Katara for bring it out in her. She would need to do a lot of back pedaling to recover the ground she had lost this night with the prince. With a properly executed curtsy the Horatu’s bridal candidate left without another word.

Once the other woman had disappeared back into the palace the Fire Prince turned to Katara and bowed, head lower than even her’s had been to Lady Chou.

“I am sorry one of mine thought to bring you harm.” Katara looked over him with cool eyes, hoping to hid her discomfort at having anyone bow to her like that. She watched him swallow and realised he was nervous though his voice did not betray him. “If your people would give me the chance to see that this will not happen again, I would consider it a great honor.”

Oh. He was not bowing as a show of respect, he worried about a retaliation from her people. For some reason it was easier to accept that he was trying to placate her, made the guilty feeling in her chest fade.

“Do as you will, the others will hear nothing from me.” She turned her from him facing once more the ethereally painted gardens. “I am sure your guests are missing you.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw him stiffen.

“I am sure you are right.” There was a bite in his voice when he bowed to her again, shallower this time; a prince to a commoner. “I bid you good evening, Lady Kaszka, I mean, Lady Katara .”

She listened to his heavy tread up the wooden steps as he marched his way back to the party. Yes, he was well and truly riled. A joyless smile curled her lips with only the moon there to witness it.

The next day signified the start of the pattern that would become the bridal candidate’s lives.  

Morning and evening meals were to be given over to the Crown Prince, a way to get to know the women on an individual basis. Dinners were the more coveted option as they were the longer, typically more formal, meal. The line up was almost solidly saved for the Fire Lilies a few well connected Earth Kingdom women thrown in for appearances sake. Breakfasts were relegated to everyone else, including Katara who was schedule for two and a half weeks away. The morning meal had the tendencies of being rushed as the bridal candidates were set to meet for as a group activity at nine the morning.

Katara was not keen on it, seeing it nothing more than a waste of everyone’s time, though it would keep Arnook’s showings of her relegated to the not already scheduled times. Either the mid-afternoons, the hottest part of the day when few people wanted to be out, or to the early evenings, when everybody who was anyone already had other engagements. She was hopeful the new time constraints would keep that ship in the bay for a while longer. Though she knew that sooner rather then later it would put into dock and she would need to deal with it.

The Candidates first activity as a group had been a walk through the gardens, for which the palace had a plethora. As the walked through the flowers, the women played one upman games between themselves to keep the prince’s attention, flirting shamelessly when they had it.

Katara had distanced herself from that, more fascinated by the plants. There was a forest deep in the High North but, just like the spirit oasis, it was a sacred place not meant for humans. Here the sheer variety of flowers and of food producing plants was mind boggling.

Nivedita, the serving woman that had first made Katara feel welcome in the palace, was one of the dozen attendants there to fetch drinks and hold umbrellas for the nobility. She was kind enough to trail after answering all of the questions the young water tribe girl had that she could. When one of the other Ladys called her off to run an errand she left her in the capable hands of her cousin, Shanna, who was far more knowledgeable on the carefully tended plots of kitchen vegetables and rows of fruit trees.

The next day was a quick guided tour through the palace led by the the prince himself. And by quick, Katara was sure there were some points where his rapid pace had forced a few of the Lilies into a jog to keep up. He pointed out the sights, spewing historically significant trivia as fast as he could mouth the words. Not that he gave the other candidates time to actually look at the pieces with the pace he set. The few questions some of the more courageous women ventured to ask were curtly answered as he marched them past.

The pieces he brought to notice were all ones Katara had seen before. Tapestries, vases, and few ornate ceremonial pieces of armor and weaponry that were in the main clutch of the very public Entrance Hall. She knew there were more interesting items deeper in the palace, protected more by their obscure locations then any security measure. Like the Dragon Fang blade that held a place of honor in the library. The tapestry that hung above the War Room, hundreds of years old but still so vibrant in color, that told the story of a fallen star that created the Fire Islands and the First People. (The Water Tribe had a similar story passed down in the oral tradition. Though in theirs it was a piece of the moon that fell and gave the great orca’s, animals touched by Tui and La, the ability to transform themselves to live on shore.) Or the jade teapot that was painstakingly carved with the visage of a coiling dragon, the marker claiming it predated the first Fire Lord, that sat in a sheltered alcove in the west wing.

Instead of even hinting at any of these, the prince made a tight circle going only a hallway deeper than the foyer before depositing them in the same place. The women were shocked when after the fifteen minute sprint he bowed himself out claiming urgent business.

Katara was happy with the extra few hours this early breakup gave her before Arnook began to wonder where she was.

Breakfast on the third day came with a note.

[patriotsnet]

How Many Democrats And Republicans In House

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How Many Democrats And Republicans In House

Republicans Suddenly Sweating Falling Deep Into House Minority

Democrats win House, Republicans keep Senate in US

GOP leaders tout their chances to win back the majority, but falling poll numbers for Trump have some worried they could lose seats in November.

07/29/2020 04:30 AM EDT

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A slew of dismal summer polls and a persistent fundraising gap have left some Republicans fretting about a nightmare scenarioin November: Thatthey will fall further into the House minority.

Publicly, House GOP leaders are declaring they can still net the 17 seats needed to flip the chamber. But privately, some party strategists concede its a much grimmer picture, with as many as 20 Republican seats at risk of falling into Democratic hands.

Far from going on offense, the GOP could be forced to retrench in order to limit its losses.Theres a growing fear that President Donald Trumps plummeting popularity in the suburbs could threaten GOP candidates in traditionally favorable districts, and that their partys eagerness to go on offense might leave some underfunded incumbents and open GOP-held seats unprotected.

Internal Democratic surveys in recent weeks have shown tight races in once-solid GOPseats in Indiana, Texas, Michigan, Ohio and Montana that Trump carried handily 2016 data that suggest the battleground is veering in a dangerous direction for the GOP.

And should the environment worsen, other seats in North Carolina, Minnesota, Missouri, Washington state, central Virginia and Michigan could be at risk.

Rising Violent Crime Is Likely To Present A Political Challenge For Democrats In 2022

But there are roadblocks to fully enacting Democrats agenda. Their thin majorities in both chambers of Congress mean nearly all Democrats have to get on board with every agenda item in order to push through major legislative priorities. And without adjusting or eliminating the legislative filibuster in the Senate, Democrats need 10 Republicans to join them for various legislation a near-impossible task.

Theres Never Been A Better Time For Civic Engagement

Youve cast your vote. Now what? Join 10 million other Americans using GovTrack to learn about and contact your representative and senators and track what Congress is doing each day.

And starting in 2019 well be tracking Congresss oversight investigations of the executive branch.

Youre more than a vote, so support GovTrack today with a tip of any amount:

Or keep using GovTrack for free! Our public interest mission means we will never put our service behind a paywall.

Recommended Reading: How Many Congressmen Are Republican

Map: Republicans To Have Full Control Of 23 States Democrats 15

In 2021, Republicans will have full control of the legislative and executive branch in 23 states.;Democrats will have full control of the legislative and executive branch in 15 states.

Population of the 24 fully R-controlled states:;134,035,267Population of the 15 fully D-controlled states: 120,326,393

Republicans have full control of the legislative branch in 30 states. Democrats have full control of the legislative branch in 18;states.

Population of the 30 fully R-controlled legislature states: 185,164,412Population of the 18 fully D-controlled legislature states: 133,888,565

This week, Andrew Cuomos star went down in flames. While the smoke clears, lets take a moment to sit back and reminisce about the governors long history with ethical and legal violations.

Cuomos controversies regarding sexual harassment and nursing homes deaths were far from his first abuses of power. In fact, his administration has a long history of it, ranging from interfering with ethics commissions, to financial corruption.

In July 2013, Cuomo formed the Moreland Commission to investigate corruption in New Yorks government. At first it was a success, giving Cuomo good PR. Yet as it went on there were rumors that, contrary to his claim that Anything they want to look at they can look at, Cuomo was interfering with the Commissions investigations. There was friction within the Commission, itself with two factions forming: Team Independence and Team We-Have-a-Boss.

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Eric Holder: There Is Still A Fight For Democrats Against Gop Gerrymandering

In McConnells Kentucky, for instance, Republicans are divided over how far to go during the upcoming redistricting process, which they control in the deep-red state. The more extreme wing wants to crack the Democratic stronghold of Louisville, currently represented by Rep. John Yarmuth. More cautious Republicans like McConnell are willing to settle for smaller changes that reduce Democratic margins while stuffing more Republican voters into hotly contested swing districts.

Make no mistake: McConnells caution isnt rooted in any newfound respect for the integrity of our electoral process. Instead, Republicans are mainly worried about avoiding the costly and embarrassing court decisions that invalidated their most extreme overreaches and potentially turn the line-drawing over to the courts. So McConnells approach doesnt reject partisan gerrymandering it just avoids the type of high-profile city-cracking that could land the Kentucky GOP in federal court.

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Are Canadian Senators Appointed For Life

Unlike the Members of Parliament in the House of Commons, the 105 senators are appointed by the Governor General on the advice of the prime minister. Senators originally held their seats for life; however, under the British North America Act, 1965, members may not sit in the Senate after reaching the age of 75.

Important Dates And Deadlines

The table below lists filing deadlines and primary dates in each state for Democratic Party and Republican Party candidates for congressional and state-level office.

Primary dates and filing deadlines, 2020 State Filing deadline for primary candidates Primary date 04/21/2020 & 05/08/2020 08/04/2020 04/24/2020 & 6/12/2020 05/05/2020 & 06/02/2020 09/01/2020 06/24/2020 07/10/2020

The embedded spreadsheet below details filing requirements for major-party and unaffiliated congressional candidates in 2020.

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A Candid Conversation With Eight Women Of Color Running For Congress This Year

Gore is running against Democratic incumbent Rep. Marcia Fudge, who has represented Ohios solidly blue 11th Congressional District since 2008 a majority Black urban area.

Maybe the candidacies arent taken seriously because typically we dont get the Black vote. And sometimes we dont get the white vote, you know? So were kind of in a bit of a quagmire, Gore said, reflecting on her challenges to fundraise.

Klacik, a former Democrat who voted for Barack Obama, faces an incredibly steep climb in a reliably blue urban district, which includes parts of Baltimore. She is running against incumbent Democratic Rep. Kweisi Mfume, who was sworn in earlier this year after the death of Rep. Elijah Cummings in October 2019. Cummings held that seat since 1996.

I get called names all the time for being a Black Republican. Meanwhile, my whole push is to make it better in the Black community, Klacik said, criticizing Democratic politicians for a lack of investment in the inner cities.

Asked what advice she has for other Republicans of color who face similar backlash, Klacik urged them not to be discouraged.

People are always gonna either love you or hate you, she said. Youve got to fight for whats right.

The primary is our biggest place of hurt

Compared to an expansive network of Democratic organizations built over the last few decades to support female candidates, there are only a few Republican groups working specifically to boost the campaigns of Republican women.

Why The Number Of House Members Hasnt Changed Since 1913

US Midterms 2018: Democrats take the House and Republicans keep the Senate | #GME

There are still 435 members of the House of Representatives a century later because of the;Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, which set that number in stone.

The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 was the result of a battle between rural and urban areas of the United States following the 1920 Census. The formula for distributing seats in the House based on population favored urbanized states and penalized smaller rural states at the time, and Congress could not agree on a reapportionment plan.

After the 1910 census, when the House grew from 391 members to 433 , the growth stopped. Thats because the 1920 census indicated that the majority of Americans were concentrating in cities, and nativists, worried about of the power of foreigners, blocked efforts to give them more representatives, wrote Dalton Conley, a professor of sociology, medicine and public policy at New York University, and Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of political science at Northwestern University.

So, instead, Congress passed the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 and sealed the number of House members at the level established after the 1910 census, 435.

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Era Of Good Feelings 18171825

Monroe believed that the existence of political parties was harmful to the United States, and he sought to usher in the end of the Federalist Party by avoiding divisive policies and welcoming ex-Federalists into the fold. Monroe favored infrastructure projects to promote economic development and, despite some constitutional concerns, signed bills providing federal funding for the National Road and other projects. Partly due to the mismanagement of national bank president William Jones, the country experienced a prolonged economic recession known as the Panic of 1819. The panic engendered a widespread resentment of the national bank and a distrust of paper money that would influence national politics long after the recession ended. Despite the ongoing economic troubles, the Federalists failed to field a serious challenger to Monroe in the 1820 presidential election, and Monroe won re-election essentially unopposed.

Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal Gives Biden Biggest Crisis Of His Presidency

David Smith

Joe Biden was facing the biggest crisis of his presidency on Monday after the stunning fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban caught his administration flat-footed and raised fears of a humanitarian catastrophe.

Recriminations were under way in Washington over the chaotic retreat from Kabul, which one Biden opponent described as the embarrassment of a superpower laid low.

Bowing to pressure, officials said the president would leave his country retreat, Camp David, to address the nation from the White House on Monday afternoon.

The Taliban swept into Kabul on Sunday after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, ending two decades of a failed experiment to import western-style liberal democracy. Diplomatic staff were flown to safety but thousands of Afghans who worked with US forces were stranded and at risk of deadly reprisals.

As harrowing scenes played out on television including desperate Afghans clinging to a US transport plane before takeoff the White House scrambled to explain how the government collapsed so quickly.

Last month Biden, pointing to the Afghan militarys superior numbers and technology, predicted: The likelihood theres going to be the Taliban overrunning everything and owning the whole country is highly unlikely.

Unrepentant, the president issued a statement on Saturday, insisting the sudden withdrawal had been the only possible choice.

Read more:

Also Check: How Many Republicans Are Now In The House Of Representatives

Gop Women Made Big Gains

While the majority of the Republican caucus will still be men come 2021, there will be far more Republican women in Congress than there were this year. So far, it looks like at least 26 GOP women will be in the House next year, surpassing the record of 25 from the 109th Congress. Thats thanks in part to the record number of non-incumbent Republican women 15 whove won House contests. And its also because of how well Republican women did in tight races. The table below shows the Republican women who ran in Democratic-held House districts that were at least potentially competitive,1 according to FiveThirtyEights forecast. As of this writing, seven of them have won.

GOP women have flipped several Democratic seats

Republican women running for potentially competitive Democratic-held House seats and the status of their race as of 4:30 p.m Eastern on Nov. 11

District D+22.1

Results are unofficial. Races are counted as projected only if the projection comes from ABC News. Excludes races in which the Republican candidate has either a less than 1 in 100 chance or greater than 99 in 100 chance of winning.

Possible 2010 Or 2014 Midterm Repeat

Big bets on policy also don’t necessarily pay off at the ballot box, a lesson Democrats learned a decade ago when they passed the Affordable Care Act. President Barack Obama’s domestic policy achievement also helped decimate congressional Democratic majorities in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections.

It’s just one reason why Republicans feel good about their chances in 2022, along with structural advantages like the redistricting process, where House districts are redrawn every decade to reflect population changes. Republicans control the process in more states and are better positioned to gain seats.

“This deck is already stacked, because they’ve been gerrymandering these districts,” Maloney says. “And now they’re trying to do even more of it and add to that with these Jim Crow-style voter suppression laws throughout the country.”

He maintains that efforts among Republican-led state legislatures to enact more voting restrictions show the party has a losing policy hand for the midterm elections.

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United States House Of Representatives Elections 2020

U.S. House Republican Party primaries, 2020

Democrats maintained a majority in the U.S. House as a result of the 2020 elections, winning 222 seats to Republicans 213. Democrats flipped three seats and Republicans flipped 15, including one held by a Libertarian in 2020.

Heading into the November 3, 2020, election, Democrats held a 232-197 advantage in the U.S. House. Libertarians held one seat, and five seats were vacant. All 435 seats were up for election, with Republicans needing to gain a net 21 seats to win a majority in the chamber.

In 2018, Democrats gained a net 40 seats to win a majority. Republicans had held a majority in the chamber since 2010.

Ballotpedia tracked 41 districts as battleground races: 20 held by Democrats heading into the election, 20 held by Republicans, and one held by a Libertarian. Democrats defended 30 seats that President Trump carried in 2016, while Republicans defended five seats that Hillary Clinton carried that year.

In 2020, 49 U.S. House seats were open, meaning the incumbent was not running for re-election. Thirty-six of those seats were open because the incumbent did not run for re-election, eight were open because the incumbent was defeated in a primary or party convention, and five were open due to a vacancy.

On this page, you will find:

The number of filed candidates by political party

A list of districts that changed party hands in 2018

The Houses Balance Of Power Is Tipped Toward Democrats

The Democrats;have a narrow six-member margin in the current House of Representatives, meaning if just a handful of seats flip, Republicans can regain control of the House.

Democrats;advantage;will grow to seven when Troy Carter is sworn in;to fill a seat in Louisianas delegation left vacant;by Cedric Richmond, who left the House to join the Biden administration as the director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.;

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Opinion: House Republicans Have Two Critical Advantages In 2022

Democrats hold the balance of power in Washington, D.C., but their margin is wafer-thin: Joe Biden is president, and the party controls both houses of Congress only very narrowly. Theyve already enacted $1.9 trillion of economic stimulus. Theyre haggling with Republicans over the size of a bipartisan infrastructure bill. And theyre keen to pass a new voting rights law, although moderate Sen. Joe Manchin III might scuttle the effort.

Still, their time in the majority might be limited. We live in an era of bitter, closely divided elections. And in 2022, Republicans have two advantages that might soon give them the edge in the House.

The Republicans first advantage: The other party holds the White House. If Biden follows the path of other recent presidents, hell spend political capital, navigate crises and lose supporters in the process.

Barack Obama summarized this dynamic two years into his presidency: In the rush of activity, sometimes we lose track of the ways that we connected with folks that got us here in the first place. This is true of nearly every recent president. Ronald Reagan lost supporters as the 1981-82 recession tore through the economy. Obama alienated swing voters and energized tea party activists as he tried to advance the Affordable Care Act in Congress. And Bill Clinton lost voters when he attempted to pass a health-care reform bill of his own.

The GOPs second advantage: It draws the lines.

Read more:

Comparison To The Senate

Democrats take House, Republicans keep Senate in historic midterms

As a check on the regional, popular, and rapidly changing politics of the House, the Senate has several distinct powers. For example, the “advice and consent” powers are a sole Senate privilege. The House, however, has the exclusive power to initiate bills for raising revenue, to impeach officials, and to choose the president if a presidential candidate fails to get a majority of the Electoral College votes. The Senate and House are further differentiated by term lengths and the number of districts represented: the Senate has longer terms of six years, fewer members , and larger constituencies per member. The Senate is referred to as the “upper” house, and the House of Representatives as the “lower” house.

Recommended Reading: Who Raises More Money Democrats Or Republicans

Republicans Win Fewer Votes But More Seats Than Democrats

Republicans controlled the post2010 redistricting process in the four states, and drew new lines that helped the GOP win the bulk of the House delegation in each. Republicans captured 13 of 18 seats in Pennsylvania, 12 of 16 in Ohio, nine of 14 in Michigan, and five of eight in Wisconsin. Added together, that was 39 seats for the Republicans and 17 seats for the Democrats in the four proObama states.

The key to GOP congressional success was to cluster the Democratic vote into a handful of districts, while spreading out the Republican vote elsewhere. In Pennsylvania, for example, Republicans won nine of their 13 House seats with less than 60% of the vote, while Democrats carried three of their five with more than 75%.

One of the latter was the Philadelphiabased 2nd District, where 356,386 votes for Congress were tallied. Not only was it the highest number of ballots cast in any district in the state, but Democratic Rep. Chaka Fattah won 318,176 of the votes. It was the largest number received by any House candidate in the country in 2012, Democrat or Republican. If some of these Democratic votes had been unclustered and distributed to other districts nearby, the party might have won a couple more seats in the Philadelphia area alone.

The Closest House Races of 2012

NARROW DEMOCRATIC WINNERS

[anotheruserwithnoname]

New thoughts on The Orville and Star Trek Discovery

This post contains spoilers on both series up to “Cupid’s Dagger” for The Orville and “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum” for Discovery. As I’ll probably get wordy, I’ll throw in a page break.

Before the break, though, the tl;dr is The Orville continues to be great (though this week’s episode is a bit controversial to some); meanwhile, approximately three episodes ago, Discovery finally became, for me anyway, proper Star Trek. And the renewal of both series is a cause for celebration.

I’ll start with Star Trek Discovery. Up to and including “Choose Your Pain”, the episode that reintroduced Harry Mudd, I was starting to lose hope in Discovery. It was too dark, too unlikeable, the characters were not gelling either as a team or as TV heroes, the Klingon subplot was - save for some unexpected in-show shipping of two Klingons - dull as an economics textbook. It was fading. And I speak as someone who gave both Voyager and Enterprise more than a year each to find their voice. The “icing on the cake” was having two characters unnecessarily utter the F-word for no other apparent reason than to justify the episode TV-MA rating. I was already saying to people that I gave it two more weeks and then I was probably done.

And then came “Lethe” and something great happened. It felt almost like having Stamets and Tilly drop F-bombs caused the show and its writers to snap to attention and snap out of whatever TV-MA/streaming cliches rut they’d fallen into. Maybe hearing two people in Starfleet uniforms make like Malcolm Tucker made them realize they’d taken things too far. Because all of a sudden we began a run of episodes that truly felt like Star Trek, the characters snapped into place as a team and as TV heroes, the plots were interesting, Michael dropped the woe is me routine (for the most part) and even the Klingon stuff became less boring. OK, the tech is still too advanced, the Klingons look awful, and there are a few other problems, some of which (like the fact it’s a prequel) cannot be fixed ... but the show felt like Trek, finally.

“Lethe” gave us some valuable insight into Sarek and Michael’s backstory. And while I still wonder how they’ll reconcile not having any past reference to Spock having an adopted sister (maybe Sybok will show up and whisk her away somewhere), and the new abilities related to the mind meld are coming close to deus ex machina territory, it still seemed to work. Having Canadian actress Mia Kirschner as Amanda - who resembles both a young Jane Wyatt as well as Abramsverse Amanda Winona Ryder - was a bonus and I hope we see her again.

Then came my favourite episode so far, “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad”. Hopefully this episode will silence those Discovery fans who keep harping about The Orville borrowing/stealing/revisiting storylines and concepts from Trek considering this episode was basically a remake of the classic TNG tale “Cause and Effect” with a touch of Battlestar Galactica 2004′s “33″ tossed in for good measure - and even hints of Doctor Who’s “Heaven Sent”. And it works. Stamets finally became a character I enjoyed watching, and Tyler also became more interesting. Some are complaining about him and Michael becoming an item but, again, this is Star Trek and while TOS never went there, all the other shows had on-board romances. The time loop was intelligently played and out and Rainn Wilson was terrific as Mudd though I hope his cold-blooded killings early in the episode were done with his assumption that time would reset and everyone would be fine - I’m OK with Wilson playing Mudd as a darker character (so far he’s been the best part about Discovery), but making Mudd a cold-blooded murderer crosses the line. It’s also a shame they couldn’t put Mudd in the title of this or the Choose Your Pain episode, as that’s always been a bit of a tradition in the franchise, but they obviously didn’t want to give the surprise of his appearance away.

“Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum” was not as much fun as the last two, but it gave us some valuable character development for Saru, making him less of an Odo clone. And the subplot where the female Klingon operative teams up with and then appears to betray Admiral Cornwell was interesting. I think there’s more there than we think. By the way, I’ve been a fan of Jayne Brook since she was in WIOU back in 1990 so I’m glad to see her on this show. I hope they don’t kill her character off.

So, yeah, Discovery suddenly got good three weeks ago (and to be fair, “Choose Your Pain” was a good episode too; they just didn’t need to have the juvenile swearing; I was reminded how in one of Torchwood’s first episodes they had Jack announce he was taking a pee mainly because that was something they couldn’t do in Doctor Who. It just served to cement some folk’s negative first impressions). If it keeps on going this way, it’s going to become appointment viewing for me.

The Orville, meanwhile, continues to go from strength to strength. After the surprisingly grim “Krill”, we had “Majority Rule”, which tweaked today’s knee-jerk “like-dislike” culture. (Don’t let that stop you from clicking that little heart at the bottom of this article, though! 😂) I’ve heard people compare it to Black Mirror. Having never seen Black Mirror, my comparison is actually more towards The Outer Limits. It raised some interesting questions and right after watching the episode a friend sent me a video of Katy Perry doing an “apology tour” type TV appearance for some indiscretion of hers, much like LaMarr has to do in the episode. I enjoyed seeing the crew in (sort of) modern day outfits, too.

Then we had “Into the Fold”, a great spotlight episode for Penny Johnson Jerald (formerly Kassidy Yates on DS9) with the surprising reveal that she’s a single mom raising her two boys on board the Orville. The fact we’ve already been introduced to the concept of families on board a starship both with Bortus and his husband - and in TNG before that - makes it less of an ass-pull than such a sudden introduction might usually appear. And it works really well as a character builder for Isaac as he becomes the boys’ surrogate father when Dr. Finn goes missing. I have some issues with Dr. Finn’s rather violent escape (I don’t think shooting the guy was justified) but the episode holds together well otherwise.

Last night’s episode, “Cupid’s Dagger,” was the first overtly comic episode of the series, and it rubbed a few people the wrong way. The same way comedic episodes of TNG and DS9 often did. (Two decades of brain bleach have yet to wipe away the memory of Quark’s head superimposed atop a woman’s lingerie-clad body. 😱) There are also those who questioned the wisdom of an episode about a Deltan-like race that causes anyone who comes in contact with them to become sexually infatuated airing during a time when so many people are accusing or being accused of sexual misconduct and assault. I won’t go into those arguments. I’ll just say the episode was a very strong character building episode once again which gave some closure to the scene in the pilot where Kelly cheats on Ed, while raising more questions. We also saw some resolution to the Finn and Yaphit relationship (uh ... yeah ... I’ll just leave that with a “no comment”), some great Alara moments, and an interesting resolution to the episode’s B-plot involving preventing a war. We also get to enjoy the first appearance by one of Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy co-stars, as Mike Henry appears in a very funny running gag about an alien who wants to start piping elevator muzak into the Orville’s turbolifts.

Next week’s Orville is looking to be another dramatic one, and if the promo images that have been released are anything to go by, it might be an Alara-centric story, and more Halston Sage is never a bad thing.

---

So basically where I sit now is that The Orville is still amazing, a lot of fun, and still gives off classic Trek vibes with a little modern edginess, though “Cupid’s Dagger” probably pushes the show as far as I’d like it to go in terms of the comedy. Discovery, meanwhile, appears to have undergone some sort of slight internal reboot/reset after its initial set of episodes. Which is good because I want to be able to enjoy both shows, both for the remainder of their first seasons, and into next fall, too.

As a side note, it’s been announced that a book on the making of The Orville is going to be published in January 2018: The World of the Orville by Jeff Bond.

A North American DVD release for Season 1 of The Orville has also been indicated on Amazon, though no date has been announced yet. I’m assuming sometime early 2018, though with Season 1 ending in early December there’s always a chance they might try to sneak in a release for Christmas.

As for Discovery, a novel based on the show is already out in Canada and the US and IDW is gearing up to start publishing a spin-off comic or two. No word on a DVD/Blu-ray release. Being a streaming series doesn’t disqualify it from physical release (Netflix issues most of its shows on DVD eventually, with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black usually coming out within months of their release - though I wouldn’t be marking any calendar dates re: House of Cards at the moment) but I wouldn’t expect to see anything until at least fall 2018 assuming they release the complete Season 1 at once.

[sciencespies]

Aging US dams pose risk to thousands

https://sciencespies.com/environment/aging-us-dams-pose-risk-to-thousands/

Aging US dams pose risk to thousands

by David A. Lieb, Michael Casey and Michelle Minkoff

Reservoir No. 1, a 180 million-gallon water supply that has been out of service much of the past few decades, sits against the backdrop of the city skyline, Oct. 15, 2019, in Atlanta. The city made repairs and brought it back online in 2017, only to shut it down again after water leaks were noticed near businesses located beneath the dam. Were the dam to catastrophically fail, the water could inundate more than 1,000 single-family homes, dozens of businesses, a railroad and a portion of Interstate 75, according to an emergency action plan. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

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On a cold morning last March, Kenny Angel got a frantic knock on his door. Two workers from a utility company in northern Nebraska had come with a stark warning: Get out of your house.

Just a little over a quarter-mile upstream, the 92-year-old Spencer Dam was straining to contain the swollen, ice-covered Niobrara River after an unusually intense snow and rainstorm. The workers had tried but failed to force open the dam’s frozen wooden spillway gates. So, fearing the worst, they fled in their truck, stopping to warn Angel before driving away without him.

Minutes later, the dam came crashing down, unleashing a wave of water carrying ice chunks the size of cars. Angel’s home was wiped away; his body was never found.

“He had about a 5-minute notice, with no prior warning the day before,” Scott Angel, one of Kenny’s brothers, said.

State inspectors had given the dam a “fair” rating less than a year earlier. Until it failed, it looked little different from thousands of others across the U.S.—and that could portend a problem.

A more than two-year investigation by The Associated Press has found scores of dams nationwide in even worse condition, and in equally dangerous locations. They loom over homes, businesses, highways or entire communities that could face life-threatening floods if the dams don’t hold.

This combination of photos provided by the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources, shows the Spencer Dam near Spencer, Neb., in November 2013, top, when it was holding back water on the Niobrara River and again in March 2019, after the dam failed during a flood. State inspectors had given the dam a “fair” rating less than a year earlier. Until it failed, it looked little different from thousands of others across the U.S., and that could portend a problem. (Nebraska Department of Natural Resources via AP)

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A review of federal data and reports obtained under state open records laws identified 1,688 high-hazard dams rated in poor or unsatisfactory condition as of last year in 44 states and Puerto Rico. The actual number is almost certainly higher: Some states declined to provide condition ratings for their dams, claiming exemptions to public record requests. Others simply haven’t rated all their dams due to lack of funding, staffing or authority to do so.

Deaths from dam failures have declined since a series of catastrophic collapses in the 1970s prompted the federal and state governments to step up their safety efforts. Yet about 1,000 dams have failed over the past four decades, killing 34 people, according to Stanford University’s National Performance of Dams Program.

Built for flood control, irrigation, water supply, hydropower, recreation or industrial waste storage, the nation’s dams are over a half-century old on average. Some are no longer adequate to handle the intense rainfall and floods of a changing climate. Yet they are being relied upon to protect more and more people as housing developments spring up nearby.

“There are thousands of people in this country that are living downstream from dams that are probably considered deficient given current safety standards,” said Mark Ogden, a former Ohio dam safety official who is now a technical specialist with the Association of State Dam Safety Officials.

The association estimates it would take more than $70 billion to repair and modernize the nation’s more than 90,000 dams. But unlike much other infrastructure, most U.S. dams are privately owned. That makes it difficult for regulators to require improvements from operators who are unable or unwilling to pay the steep costs.

“Most people have no clue about the vulnerabilities when they live downstream from these private dams,” said Craig Fugate, a former administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “When they fail, they don’t fail with warning. They just fail, and suddenly you can find yourself in a situation where you have a wall of water and debris racing toward your house with very little time, if any, to get out.”

Joel Iverson, chief operating officer of Monday Night Brewing, is photographed in the brewery that sits beside Reservoir No. 1, a 180 million-gallon water supply that has been out of service much of the past few decades, Oct. 15, 2019, in Atlanta. Iverson has previously noticed water trickling out of the hillside of the dam near the brewery he co-founded. “If that one goes, it’s going to wash away us and a lot of beer,” said Iverson. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

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It’s unclear whether Angel, a 71-year-old Vietnam War veteran, declined to flee or simply ran out of time after workers with the Nebraska Public Power District warned him that water was overtopping the dam near Spencer, a town of fewer than 500 residents.

An attorney for Angel’s wife, who wasn’t home when the dam broke, has filed a $5 million lawsuit alleging negligence. It claims the power utility failed to properly maintain the dam, train its employees or inform the Angels of dangerous conditions.

Even though the Angels’ home was squarely in its path, the dam was rated as a “significant” rather than “high” hazard, meaning it wasn’t required under Nebraska law to have a formal emergency action plan. About 20% of state-regulated high-hazard dams nationwide still lack emergency plans, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains the national dam inventory.

When last inspected in April 2018 , Spencer Dam’s “fair” rating was accompanied by an ominous notation: “Deficiencies exist which could lead to dam failure during rare, extreme storm events.”

Tim Gokie, chief engineer of Nebraska’s dam safety program, said the warning was due to past water seepage the power utility addressed by installing a drain system. Ultimately, Gokie said, the rising Niobrara River simply overwhelmed the concrete and earthen dam, which was built in 1927 to generate hydroelectricity, not for flood control.

In this Dec. 27, 2018, photo, Murray Beach, an investment banker who lives on the shore of Willett Pond, points out the spillway of the lake, which is located on the border of Norwood and Walpole, Mass. The spillway at the 107-year-old Willett Pond Dam is capable of handling just 13% of the water flow from a serious flood before the dam is overtopped, according to a recent state inspection report. “We are not talking of just flooding someone’s house. We are talking about covering their house,” said Beach, who belongs to a citizens group that has lobbied for years for the spillway to be repaired. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

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“The fact was that it was just an unprecedented situation,” Nebraska Public Power District spokesman Mark Becker said. “It was beyond what everybody anticipated.”

Nebraska was among the states hardest hit by storms and floods this year that have caused an estimated $1.5 billion in damage to roads, dams, utilities and other infrastructure in 28 states, according to an AP analysis.

A National Climate Assessment released by the White House last year noted growing frequency and intensity of storms as the climate changes. That can push some dams beyond what they were designed to handle.

Even if kept in good condition, thousands of dams could be at risk because of extreme rainstorms, said Fugate, the former FEMA official.

“These are like ticking bombs just sitting there, waiting for the wrong conditions to occur to cause catastrophic failure,” he said.

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A vehicle passes over the spillway at Willett Pond on the border of Norwood and Walpole, Mass., Dec. 27, 2018. If the dam were to give way, it could send hundreds of millions of gallons of water into the heart of the Norwood, a Boston suburb of nearly 30,000 people. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

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The nation’s dams are categorized as high, significant or low hazard in the National Inventory of Dams database. High hazard means loss of human life is likely if a dam were to fail. A significant rating means no deaths are likely, although economic and environmental damage are possible.

There is no national standard for inspecting dams, leading to a patchwork of state regulations. Some states inspect high-hazard dams every year while others wait up to five years. Some states never inspect low-hazard dams—though even farm ponds can eventually pose a high hazard as housing developments encroach.

Dam conditions are supposed to be rated as unsatisfactory, poor, fair or satisfactory. But the ratings are subjective—varying by state and the interpretations of individual inspectors—and are not always publicly disclosed.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the U.S. government has cited national security grounds in refusing to include dams’ conditions in its inventory, which was updated most recently in 2018. But the AP was able to determine both condition and hazard ratings for more than 25,000 dams across the country through public records requests.

The tally includes some of the nation’s most well-known dams, such as Hoover Dam along the Colorado River, but mostly involves privately owned dams. Many are used for recreation.

The AP then examined inspection reports for hundreds of high-hazard dams in poor or unsatisfactory condition. Those reports cited a variety of problems: leaks that can indicate a dam is failing internally; unrepaired erosion from past instances of overtopping; holes from burrowing animals; tree growth that can destabilize earthen dams; and spillways too small to handle a large flood. Some dams were so overgrown with vegetation that they couldn’t be fully inspected.

A surveyor walks the banks of the Mill River, at the site of the former Whittenton Pond Dam, just upstream from downtown Taunton, Mass., July 25, 2018. The dam was removed following concerns that the 170-year-old plus structure could fail, after it buckled and nearly failed in 2005. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

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Georgia led the nation with nearly 200 high-hazard dams in unsatisfactory or poor condition, according to the AP’s analysis.

Among them is Reservoir No. 1 in Atlanta, a 180 million-gallon water supply dating to the late 1800s that has been out of service much of the past few decades. The city made repairs and brought it back online in 2017, only to shut it down again after leaks were noticed.

If the dam were to catastrophically fail, the water could inundate more than 1,000 homes, dozens of businesses, a railroad and a portion of Interstate 75, according to an emergency action plan .

Joel Iverson has previously noticed water trickling out of the dam near the brewery he co-founded, Monday Night Brewing.

“If that one goes, it’s going to wash away us and a lot of beer,” Iverson said.

The Atlanta Watershed Management Department declined the AP’s request for an interview about the reservoir and instead asked for questions in writing. When those were submitted, it declined to answer them.

In this April 2, 2019, file photo, water flows down the Oroville Dam spillway in Oroville, Calif. The state spent $1.1 billion repairing the Lake Oroville spillway, enacted new emergency plan requirements and launched a review of 93 other dams with similar spillways. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)

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One of the most common problems for aging dams are spillways incapable of handling an extreme rainfall event.

If water can’t escape quickly enough through spillways, it could flow over the top of a dam, which increases the probability of rapid erosion that can cause it to collapse.

The spillway at the 107-year-old Willett Pond Dam near the Boston suburb of Norwood is capable of handling just 13% of the water flow from a serious flood before the dam is overtopped, according to a recent state inspection report. If the dam were to give way, it could send hundreds of millions of gallons of water into the heart of the city of nearly 30,000 people.

“We are not talking of just flooding someone’s house. We are talking about covering their house,” said Murray Beach, who lives on the shore of the 220-acre privately owned lake and belongs to a citizens group that has lobbied for years for the spillway to be repaired.

A 2017 inspection report said improvements to the spillway could cost between $1 million and $5 million. A nonprofit that owns the lake received a $215,000 state grant last year to design spillway improvements. But there is no timeline to fix it.

In this Nov. 30, 2017, file photo, work continues on the Oroville Dam spillway in Oroville, Calif. The scare at Oroville, the nation’s tallest dam, led to evacuation orders for nearly 200,000 people, although no one was injured and the dam ultimately held. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)

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More than 1,300 properties lie within the dam’s inundation zone, including several shopping centers and at least two elementary schools, as well as more than 70 roads and two railroads.

Tamiko Porter, who operates a Montessori school serving some 75 students, said she was surprised to learn there was a dam upstream that could flood her school if it failed.

“Oh God, please let it happen when my kids aren’t here,” Porter said.

Norwood emergency management director Bernard Cooper said there is no imminent risk of dam failure.

“Yes, it needs work. The spillway should be rebuilt. Absolutely, no question,” Cooper acknowledged. But “there is no money in the system for that.”

Concerns about inadequate dam spillways date back decades to when the Corps of Engineers undertook its first nationwide assessment of dams posing a high risk to life and property. From 1978 to 1981, the Corps inspected 8,818 dams. About one-third were deemed unsafe due to deficiencies, and about 80% of those cited inadequate spillway capacities.

Hunter Croan walks along a dried-up section of Lake Dunlap, Sept. 30, 2019, in Lake Dunlap, Texas. Croan is one of many homeowners who were left high and dry, their lakeside docks now dry as the Guadalupe River retreated to its natural bed after the the center spill gate of the lake’s 91-year-old dam failed. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

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One of the dams cited for a “seriously inadequate” spillway in 1978 was Lake Sebago, located in a New York state park near the village of Sloatsburg. Forty years later, nothing has changed.

A 2018 state inspection letter warned of “inadequate spillway capacity and dam stability” and asked for an improvement plan within 30 days. None was provided.

The state dam safety office has no authority to force the state parks department to make repairs.

To modify the Lake Sebago spillway, workers would have to rebuild a road and bridge that pass over the dam. The project could cost over $15 million, said Jim Hall, the recently retired executive director of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, which manages multiple dams.

“That structure has been in place with the same spillway capacity for over probably 60 to 70 years and it hasn’t been overtopped,” Hall said. “Should it be improved to meet all codes? Yeah, that would be nice. Does it make it the highest priority for us to do in relation to other dam structures we have? Probably not.”

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Water flows over a spill gate on Lake McQueeney, Oct. 2, 2019, Lake McQueeney, Texas. A judge has issued a 12-month temporary injunction preventing the draining of McQueeney and five other lakes along the Guadalupe River after property owners sued. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

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In a 1982 report summarizing its nationwide dam assessment, the Corps of Engineers said most dam owners were unwilling to modify, repair or maintain the structures, and most states were unwilling to spend enough money for an effective dam safety program.

Since then, every state but Alabama has created a dam safety program.

But the Great Recession a decade ago forced many states to make widespread budget and personnel cuts. Since a low point in 2011, states’ total spending on dam safety has grown by about one-third to nearly $59 million in the 2019 fiscal year while staffing levels have risen by about one-fifth, according to data collected by the Corps of Engineers.

California, which runs the nation’s largest dam safety program, accounts for much of that gain. It boosted its budget from $13 million to $20 million and the number of full-time staff from 63 to 77 following the failure of the Oroville dam spillway in 2017.

The scare at Oroville, the nation’s tallest dam, led to evacuation orders for nearly 200,000 people, although no one was injured and the dam ultimately held. An independent investigation cited “a long-term systemic failure ” by regulators and the dam industry to recognize and address warning signs.

California spent $1.1 billion repairing the Lake Oroville spillway, enacted new emergency plan requirements and launched a review of 93 other dams with similar spillways.

Water spurts through a wood section of a spill gate on Lake McQueeney, Oct. 2, 2019, Lake McQueeney, Texas. A judge has issued a temporary injunction preventing the draining of the lakes along the Guadalupe River as a result of an agreement between suing property owners and the Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

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In South Carolina, after more than 70 dams failed following heavy rains in 2015 and 2016, the state tripled the personnel in its dam safety program and ratcheted up spending from about $260,000 annually to more than $1 million.

But some states have continued to pare back their dam safety programs. Thirteen states and Puerto Rico were spending less in 2019 than they did in 2011, and 11 states had fewer full-time positions in their programs.

The Association of State Dam Safety Officials says almost every state faces a serious need to pump additional money and manpower into dam safety programs.

“If you don’t have the staff to inspect a dam, or don’t have the authority to do that, you don’t know what the problems are,” said the association’s Ogden.

“If you are able to do the inspection but you can’t follow up, and you have dam owners who don’t have the resources to fix their dam, then ultimately you know what the problem is but you can’t get it addressed,” he added.

Many states face a quandary when it comes to problematic private dams when they can’t identify the owners. Rhode Island’s two-person dam safety office last year listed 32 high- or significant-hazard dams with safety concerns whose owners were unknown.

Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority’s John Moryl walks through the hydroelectric plant at the spill gates on Lake McQueeney, Oct. 2, 2019, in Lake McQueeney, Texas. The Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority announced plans to drain a chain of six lakes, including Lake McQueeney. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

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“If we don’t know the owner, then we can’t take any action to order anybody to fix it,” said David Chopy, chief of compliance and inspection for the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management.

In some states, dams go uninspected because of exemptions in state law.

A 2013 Texas law exempts all dams on private property with a capacity of less than 163 million gallons that are rated significant or low hazard and are located outside of city limits in any county with fewer than 350,000 people. As a result, about 45% of its roughly 7,200 dams are exempt from regulation.

Missouri performs safety inspections on only about 650 of its more than 5,000 dams. That’s because state law exempts all dams that are under 35 feet, used for agricultural purposes or subject to federal regulation.

Former Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt attempted to significantly expand the number of dams under state supervision after the mountaintop Taum Sauk Reservoir collapsed in December 2005, injuring a state park superintendent’s family. But the legislation failed after some rural landowners expressed concerns. Then the proposal quietly faded away as new officials took over.

“Maybe it’s time to take a look at that again and make sure that our dams are safe,” said Missouri state Rep. Tim Remole, who now leads the House committee overseeing dam safety.

This March 14, 2006, file photo, shows damage after a dam burst near Kilauea, on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. An earthen wall of the Kaloko Reservoir collapsed during heavy rains and sent a wave of water and mud rushing down a hillside. Seven people were killed on Bruce Fehring’s property, including his daughter, son-in-law and grandson. (AP Photo/Casey Riemer, File)

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Until Angel’s death in Nebraska this year, the last fatal dam failure in the U.S. occurred on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 2006.

An earthen wall of the Kaloko Reservoir collapsed during heavy rains and sent a wave of water rushing down a hillside. Seven people—including a pregnant woman—were killed on Bruce Fehring’s property, including his daughter, son-in-law and grandson.

Fehring, who wasn’t there at the time, got a phone call from a neighbor saying something terrible had happened. He was shocked by the scene.

“It took a while to register, and I went, ‘Oh my God, everything’s been washed away,'” Fehring recalled. “I mean, you have no idea the power of water (until) you see what it can do in a very short amount of time.”

Dam owner James Pflueger pleaded no contest to felony reckless endangerment and was sentenced to seven months of confinement and five years of probation. His property company pleaded no contest to seven counts of manslaughter. Prosecutors said Pflueger had filled in the dam’s spillway while attempting to make space for a waterfront development.

In this May 21, 2006, file photo, Bruce Fehring and his wife Cyndee, center, lead a procession toward Kahili Quarry Beach during a memorial service to honor those killed when the Kaloko Dam failed in Kilauea, on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. An earthen wall of the Kaloko Reservoir collapsed during heavy rains and sent a wave of water and mud rushing down a hillside. Seven people were killed on Fehring’s property, including his daughter, son-in-law and grandson. (Jamm Aquino/Honolulu Star-Bulletin via AP, File)

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Tess Coody-Anders, a university executive and homeowner near Lake McQueeney, one of the dams slated to be drained, stands near a sign showing the lake is closed, Sept. 30, 2019, in Lake McQueeney, Texas. “This is something that communities and states all across the country are grappling with as we are reckoning with our aging infrastructure,” said Coody-Anders. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

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The victims’ families and those whose property was damaged, including actress Bette Midler, agreed to a $25 million civil settlement. Though categorized by the state as low hazard at the time it failed, Kaloko Reservoir is now listed as a high-hazard facility in poor condition . It remains largely unrepaired.

That’s also the case with Lake Dunlap Dam, northeast of San Antonio. On a sunny morning in May, one of the 91-year-old dam’s corroded spillway gates suddenly gave way. No one was hurt in the rush of water, but scores of homeowners’ lakeside docks were left high and dry, facing barren swaths of dried lakebed after the river retreated, leaving boats stranded.

The dam was the second hydroelectric facility along the river to fail within the past three years. The Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority responded with plans to drain a chain of four lakes because of concerns their similarly designed spillway gates also could fail.

But after property owners sued, the river authority agreed in September to a temporary injunction delaying the plan for a year. That could allow time to find funding for the estimated $90 million to $210 million to repair the dams.

Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority’s John Moryl looks over the spill gates at Lake Dunlap, Oct. 2, 2019, in Lake Dunlap, Texas. One of the spill gates at the dam failed in May and the lake drained down to the original channel of the Guadalupe River. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)

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“This is something that communities and states all across the country are grappling with as we are reckoning with our aging infrastructure,” said Tess Coody-Anders, a homeowner near Lake McQueeney, one of the dams slated to be drained.

“I hope that everyone will recognize that, like in our community, entire economies and ways of life have developed around what started out as a civil engineering project,” she added. “And you can’t take that away.”

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Report: Most dams in Hawaii have ‘high hazard potential’

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Citation: Aging US dams pose risk to thousands (2019, November 10) retrieved 10 November 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-11-aging-pose-thousands.html

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#Environment

[upshotre]

Of Drones, The Governor And Saudi Prayer Warriors

By Azu Ishiekwene A few weeks after the New York Times published a report that Boko Haram may be using drones in fresh attacks in the North East, something unusual happened. Governor Babagana Zulum of Borno State entered a contract with Saudi-based clerics to offer prayers 24/7 for peace to return to the state. The full details of the contract signed with 30 clerics in Makkah are not available yet. But the governor’s spokesperson, Isa Gusau, who described the contract as “a critical move,” explained why the government took the unusual step. “The aim,” he said, “is to combine different approaches that include sustained support for the Nigerian Armed forces, aggressive mass recruitment and equipping of more counter-insurgency volunteers into the civilian JTF, hunters, and vigilantes as well as socio-economic approach in enhancing access to education, job opportunities and providing other means of livelihood through social protection initiatives (sic).” No need to split hairs over what the last paragraph means. If you look beyond the grammatical jiggery-pokery to the intent, you might agree that not since the Battle of Austerlitz, when Napoleon defeated the combined armies of three emperors, has the world known or seen such a grand and comprehensive war plan. Nothing has been left to chance. There was even a report on Cable this week that the government may have, in fact, recruited hundreds of hunters, not your run-of-the-mill type, but those who can disappear, walk through a wall, or leap over Sambisa forest, to protect the governor and citizens, when push comes to shove. The financial package, to be fully funded from state resources, is still a secret. Who can blame the governor? He was barely 100 days in office when Boko Haram attacked his convoy, letting him off by the skin of his teeth. Attacks have increased in the last few weeks, with reports last week indicating that at least 30 persons including soldiers and civilians may have been killed in different attacks in the North East, with Borno being the worst affected. Desperate situations sometimes require desperate remedies. But the thing with all desperation is that reason is the first casualty. At a time when Boko Haram and other forms of violence and criminality appear to be gaining ground and when the perpetrators of these crimes are becoming more brazen and sophisticated, we’re recruiting and paying hunters, vigilantes and clerics for help? At a time when our brave soldiers are depending on us for the best strategic and tactical support they can get to win the war, we’re using money that ought to have been channeled to the war to buy ecclesiastical support? Whether it is despair, demagoguery or desperation driving it, this joke is taking hold and it won’t be long before it becomes yet another acceptable absurdity in the Nigerian way of doing things. Before Governor Zulum contracted the 30 clerics, the Chief of Army Staff, General Tukur Buratai, was the special guest at a programme organised by the military in Abuja on the efficacy of spiritual warfare in the war on Boko Haram and its cousin, the Islamic State. Although we have not been told yet if the Army signed any prayer contracts with Christian and Muslim leaders at the Abuja event, I’m sure the Ooni of Ife, the Oba of Benin and custodians of other traditional religions would be watching keenly to see under what auspices they may also be co-opted in the army’s ingenuous contribution to modern combat. It’s not funny. It was for precisely this kind of absurdity that we severely criticised President Goodluck Jonathan’s conduct of the war on Boko Haram. Troops deployed in the frontlines fought bravely with bare hands, bought their own medicines, slept in open spaces and improvised to survive, while commanders up the ladder diverted funds meant to prosecute the war. Instead of rooting out the corrupt commanders and accepting foreign offer of help, Jonathan’s government waited until it was too late, and only then did it begin to ferry millions of cash to South Africa in special flights provided by one of the former president’s favorite clerics, to either buys arms in “black market” or hire mercenaries. Jonathan had apparently been misled or had misled himself into believing that the Boko Haram insurgency was a ruse - a political and spiritual warfare by his enemies, mostly Northern political interests, to bring him down and seize power from him. In hindsight, however, it is strange that he should believe this nonsense and watch while billions of Naira set aside for the war was diverted in long-winding trails of cronyism, which sometimes ended up in ecclesiastical pockets. Part of the charges against the former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, by the government of President Muhammadu Buhari, was that monies meant for the prosecution of the war on Boko Haram were shared among clerics to do exactly what Governor Zulum paid clerics in Saudi Arabia to do last week. And the governor, a professor of engineering, expects applause, sympathy or both? If five years of warring against Boko Haram and ISWAP have brought Buhari’s commanders and the political elite to the point where they have suddenly realised that entering prayer contracts using public funds is no longer an absurdity, much less an offence, the clerics excoriated in the prayer-for-cash era deserve a public apology. Dasuki’s charge sheet may also need to be reviewed while all business-minded persons of faith should be eligible to bid for spiritual warfare contracts in the next round. In this business of spiritual warfare, we can’t pick and choose our outrage. We cannot, for example, be outraged that the sales clerk at JAMB, Philomina Chiese, claimed that it was a “spiritual attack” by her house help through a snake that caused the disappearance of N36m in her care, and yet not be outraged by leaving our soldiers at the mercy of prayer contractors and juju-mongering hunters. Why is Philomina facing trial? We cannot be outraged that Jonathan turned a blind eye while his commanders shared security funds amongst clerics and not be outraged that a similar thing is happening under Buhari. The DG SSS, Yusuf Bichi, first shared it as a joke. In April, during a retreat by the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) for incoming governors, Bichi said he observed that Nigerian politicians appear to trust marabouts and “babalawos” more than they trust the security agencies. He is right. But he must have seen lately, too, that faith in the efficacy of spiritual warfare is not solely a politician’s thing. The military is also purchasing it at a premium. It’s not about the name the service providers are called: it’s the absurdity of using or misusing state funds so casually. What will troops in dire need of essential supplies think of this conduct? The Times report I cited at the beginning quoted the new commander of Operation Lafia Dole as publicly reminding his field officers in August, to “give food and water to the troops.” Yet, these same troops and commanders will hear that clerics have been contracted - at God knows how much - to pray for them while they wait earnestly for the performance of a spiritual contract to save them from clear and present danger. I have my reservations about the Times report - it’s understatement of the war effort so far and reference to the drones in the headline hardly supported by the story. But the tragic events that followed that report including the killing of a dozen soldiers and even greater number of civilian casualties, suggest that the war is not over yet. To win the war, especially the war of hearts and minds, we need to get everyone on board, including the Saudi prayer warriors and their non-Saudi cousins wherever they may be. But we must draw a clear line between clerical booty and the public war chest. There’s a long, shameless history of mixing religion and state in Nigeria that predates Zulum or any of the current political subscribers. But if it was wrong under Jonathan, it surely can’t be right under Buhari. It has to stop, now. Ishiekwene is the Managing Director/Editor-In-Chief of The Interview and member of the board of the Global Editors Network Read the full article

[miss-noo-na]

The Boy King ( Chapter 1)

Prologue / 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 10

Title: The Boy King

Genre: Royal AU

Rating: PG (for now)

He had little regard for your presence, a brief glance at best, and you hadn’t even the time to bow. He crossed the room to a writing desk and sat down.

“Is there anything you need, your Highness?” You asked as you stood, facing his back. He shook his head and you excused yourself from the room.

This became typical, you working around him and he only in your midst occasionally. You began to wonder what your real purpose here was, and why you had been uprooted from your place in the castle when it didn’t seem to make much of a difference. He had hardly spoken a word to you, and the “confidant” part of the Gentleman’s description of your duty drifted further and further from your mind. Though the Court’s intentions were pure, it seemed that the boy King did not want to be bothered.

As always, talk began to spread amongst the Court about the decisions he was to make, that he would be tightening the security of the kingdom, stationing soldiers at every entryway and port that led there. It had always been an open place, where travelers and newcomers were welcome, but this friendly neighbor approach had no place in the new King’s plan. You’d overheard as much as you swept the hall outside of one of the rooms.

“My father was too lenient with foreigners,” He explained, to mumbled agreements.

“We have always been an important part of the trade routes, your Highness.” One older statesman offered, though he treaded lightly.

“And our own supplies has been depleting a little more every year as a result. We have to protect our resources.”

You may not have known much about economics, but he made a fair point. Still, closing the borders? That sounded extreme.

A man left the room and you quickly resumed your sweeping, bowing your head and looking busy. You moved on, as the rest of the conversation disinterested you.

Over the next few days, the rumors turned into reality, with foot soldiers on patrol of the borders and the south port closing temporarily. Commoners came in droves when he held Court, often to complain about a lack of supplies. Every time, the King encouraged them to refocus their work on what could be created, grown, and maintained within the kingdom. Not many agreed with him, but it was unlikely that he cared. His face was always the same, a pressed mouth and hard eyes, voice firm.

You had come to fully agree with the others, as the border closings came to affect even your work. The thread you used for mending was no longer in supply, and instead you used the brittle pieces produced nearby, that made your work take twice as long since the fibers kept snapping. Your fingers were becoming raw from the constant re-threadings.

“My coat.” His voice carried through the room and sent a hard spike through your stomach.

You glanced up to find him standing over you as if he expected something.

“I’m working on it.” You almost snapped, then added a “your Highness” on the end.

“You’ve been working on it for two days.” He said, annoyed, and he sounded his age. It didn’t come out booming or angry, it was almost a whine.

“Forgive me,” You started, opening the coat to show the unsteady needle-work. “But this thread makes it difficult.”

“Then use a different thread.”

He was starting to sound more and more like a petulant child, and it only served to anger you.

“I had a good thread, before you stopped letting it come into the kingdom.”

You looked up into his face and narrowed your brow, as if for a moment you forgot, or ignored, that he was in fact the King.

Irritation flashed through his dark eyes, but to your surprise he didn’t say anything. He huffed, turning on his heel and left the room. Adrenaline from the interaction rushed through you and your hands began to shake, wondering what had gotten into you. You were lucky this time.

You stayed up late to finish the coat, feeling guilty for treating him so poorly. It couldn’t have been easy to become a King over night like he had, and those around him forgot that he was still very much dealing with the death of his beloved father.

This was apparent to you when you came into the room with the coat, expecting him not to be there since he tended to stay up late. He was staring out the window, and the side view of his face indicated a feeling of loneliness that seemed to emit off of him. He turned quickly away as he heard you enter.

You bowed; face down as you went to lay the coat over a chest.

“Did you just finish?” He asked, and you thought maybe he was angry that you’d taken so long.

“Yes, your Highness. I’ve been working on it since you left. I tried to get it done sooner but-“

He silenced you with a raised hand, picking up the coat and admiring the work. Not your best, but he knew why now.

“It’s fine, go get some rest.”

He turned away again and you blinked at him before bowing once more and backing out of the door.

You were probably just thinking too much of it, but there may have been some tenderness in his voice when he said that. Or maybe you just hoped that’s what it was.

Despite this, he continued making questionable decisions about the kingdom, ones that did not put him in many people’s favor. There was an air of suspicion, paranoia even, in so many things he did, and it baffled you for the most part. It had always been a peaceful place, devoid of major conflict, so why was he so worried about potential hostility?

These are the things that kept you up at night, and distracted you from your work. On occasion, as he sat at his writing desk, you wanted to ask him, but you knew that would be out of line, even if you had been placed here partially to be an outlet for him. It wasn’t unusual for kings to take on confidants, especially women, although usually they became much more than that. When the queen was busy bearing children, or prematurely deceased as in the case of the new King’s mother, these confidants would satisfy other urges, things you had only vague knowledge of. You’d never known another’s flesh intimately, but you were….aware…in some form of what that may entail. You’d talked to other handmaidens, ones more brazen than you who had taken courtly lovers. You had even seen things when you slept in the open barracks with other servants.

The sudden thought of becoming a companion to the king in this way didn’t immediately repulse you. Instead, it titillated your mind in a most unusual way, one that made you feel shameful yet excited.

Still, there were things about his personality you didn’t like. Such a handsome face was often marred by a constant scowl, and you don’t think you’d seen him smile even once. Not that a King should be too soft, but maybe some indication of a beating heart underneath all of that would get him much further with others, including you.

He’d had the chance to prove he wasn’t as cruel as he seemed, when a man had been caught slipping through the ports and into the village. He was brought before the King and you lingered in the back shadows to listen, because it sounded vital.

“Were you not aware of my new policies?” The King asked, even-toned. The man before him was in shambles, tattered and dirtied as if he’d come a long way. He hung his head in shame.

“I was aware, but I presumed-“

“I don’t care what you presumed, you had prior knowledge and you broke the law.”

His voice grew louder and it echoed through the hall deeply, hitting your core.

“Your Highness,” the man’s voice grew more faint.  “I have traveled to this kingdom for work every spring since my 13th year. This village knows me, and the previous king knew-“

“The previous king is dead, and I am in charge now. I’m not interested in what was the law in his time, only what it is now. You won’t be punished, but you will be escorted back to where you came from.”

The man seemed to crumble, his face quivering as he wrung his hand through the barley cap he’d taken off his head.  It seemed he depended on the work so much that he’d risked breaking the law to get here, and now he was being sent back. Your heart ached for him.

“If I find you here again, my punishment will be swift.”

With those last searing words, the King retired from the room and the man was guided outside by two guards.

That night in the King’s room, he sat at his desk. You mended his pillow case, but you kept snapping threads. This time, it wasn’t the weak material, but the way your blood boiled every time you thought about what he’d done earlier that day.

“Are you upset?” the King asked suddenly, not turning his head or looking your way at all. It startled you.

“Pardon?”

“The way you keep snapping threads and huffing, it seems like something is wrong.”

He said this in a flat, unemotional way.

“Why did you send that man away?” You asked, it tumbled from your lips before you had time to think better of it. You sank your teeth into your tongue once your mouth closed, almost drawing blood.

This propelled him to turn his head, slowly, in your direction.

“You were listening?” He asked, and you could only nod.

“Then you would have heard that he broke the law.” He said as he turned back to his work, thinking the conversation was done. You couldn’t let it go that easily.

“How can you shut out a man who has depended on our village for most of his life? And surely his work has benefited the kingdom at large. Is there no loyalty?”

When he turned back again, his eyes had narrowed into dark creases, visibly heated.

“Loyalty?”  He sneered, and when he stood up, causing the wood chair to screech across the stone floor, you jumped a little, swallowing hard.

“Where was the loyalty when they poisoned my father?” He nearly yelled as he took a step forward, which would have scared you further had you not been distracted by the confession. Poisoned? The cause of death given at the time was sickness, natural causes.

“He was poisoned?” You asked in a frail tone, and his face immediately softened into something like sadness.

“I’ve said too much.” He mumbled as he retreated to his desk, but he simply stared down at the parchment and made no move to write anything down. The silence was deafening as you stared at the side of his face, watching him clench and unclench his jaw.

“You can tell me.” You offered weakly. “That’s….that’s what I’m here for, isn’t it?” You asked, not even sure what exactly your role was anymore.

“I never wanted a confidant.” He spat viciously. “I don’t need a woman’s touch to do my job.”

Any sympathy you felt for him in that moment evaporated, and you weren’t sure if you were mad or hurt. Maybe a little bit of both, with embarrassment mixed in.

You stood and excused yourself, laying the pillow down on the bed before retreating to your private quarters. At first, having your own room was a delight. You didn’t have to share a room with countless other bodies, tossing on scratchy hay beds, snoring, staying up late to talk too loud. Here, you had a real bed on a wood frame with your own window, which you’d spent far too much time looking out of.

Tonight, however, it felt lonely. You missed the other maidens, and knew you would have confided in them if you could have. Would they even have anything to say? None of them had angered a King before.One whom, despite proving himself to be a cruel, uncaring soul, you found yourself wanting desperately to get close to.

[oncethrown]

So... at some point between The Mortal Instruments and the Dark Artifices, homophobia dissapeared from Shadowhunter Culture.

Even though homophobia in Shadowhunter society was an important part of the Mortal Instruments series, there is no reason it had to continue in the Dark Artifices. That’s not what I’m saying. However, making that change to the world without actually writing anything to create that change, brings out some really wierd mindsets and predjudices in Cassandra Clare’s writing.

Let’s start at the beginning- Shadowhunter Society in the Mortal Instruments was explicitly homophobic

-Izzy tells Clary that there are no gay Shadowhunters when Clary asks if Alec is gay -Alec suffers a lot of shame and fear and self-loating and self-harm over being gay -People seeing Alec and Magnus kiss in the Accords Hall express disgust -Alec has to explain to Jace that, yeah, he’s heartbroken that Magnus gets kidnapped -Alec and Jace have an extended conversation about how homophobic Robert is, and how hurt Alec is that Robert can’t accept him. - The ‘million little paper cuts speech -Aline realizes she’s gay because Alec- the only gay shadowhunter- exists -Aline and Helen’s marriage has to take place after the Clave decides that it can be legal and allowable, which means it was illegal before. 

And it’s explicitly homophobic for kind of no reason that is logical within the text

-Shadowhunters have no official religion according to the text, so there’s no doctrine or god forbidding homosexuality, as is typical in the real world

-Shadowhunter society is ancient and worldwide while also being super insular. It’s growing seperate from the mundane culture entirely, and encompasses a ton of regional cultures and time periods that wouldn’t have had the same concept of “gay” that Alec is experiencing in the Mortal Instruments. 

-Men and women are equal as warriors, so there shouldn’t be the same type of misogyny in Shadowhunter culture that fuels homophobia in mundane culture

-The parabatai bond- A bond that is between marriage and brotherhood, and often experienced between members of the same sex is paramount in the culture. (Caveat- the fact that parabatais are often members of the same sex and that there is a curse on parabatais who fall in love could have been written as a reason that Shadowhunters society is homophobic... except for the fact that this parabatai love curse thing only crops up in the Dark Artifices, and Alec is in love with Jace for a couple books)

But in the Dark Artifices:

(For the record I’m like 2/3rds of the way through Lord of Shadows)

There is no homophobia amongst any of the Shadowhunters at all, but also no indication that there ever used to be.

-Having an adopted warlock grandchild cured Robert and Maryse of homophobia (and racism maybe?)

-Alec is suddenly a goldenboy of the Clave. They are begging him to take over and Institute, and they *give* him the London Institute after he spends a day there. He’s also an important part of a political apparatus that works with downworlders and the Clave.

-Jia Penhallow becomes Consul, and her daughter being the second official gay Shadowhunter ever does not matter. Robert Lightwood becomes Inquisitor without Alec’s sexuality being an issue either.

-Mark Blackthorn, who was taken by the Wild Hunt when he was like fifteen, comes back and is caught a couple times by his family and several goody-two shoe, non-family member Shadowhunters with his male Seelie lover, Kieran, and no one ever reacts to the fact that this lover is male, even though when Mark was taken during the Dark War, his having a boyfriend would have been An Issue (like it was for Alec, Aline and Helen)

Even when all of the Blackthorns and Kieran (and Alec and Magnus) wind up as the guests of an old woman who is described as so old fashioned that she still wears Edwardian clothes, that old woman hates having a Seelie in her house, but never reacts to how many of the people suddenly in her Institute are not heterosexual.

-Even the villains, who are literal nazis who want to register, intern, and mass murder downworlders, are not homophobic.

Isn’t that good? What is the problem?

The Mortal Instruments series ended with the conclusion of the Dark War, where Sebastian Morgenstern turned a bunch of Shadowhunters into evil monsters with the help of the Seelie Queen. It was basically a Shadowhunter genocide, and the Shadowhunters blame the Seelies for it. Thus, they’ve imposed something called “The Cold Peace” on the Seelies, which is an obvious analogue to the Treaty of Versaille at the end of World War I, which punished Germany so harshly that it made World War II more or less inevitable. The terms of the treaty deny the Seelies council representation, and strip Seelies of all the civil rights downworlders have gained over the last few centuries.

The villains of Lord of Shadows are a group of Shadowhunters who are consistently, loudly, anti-downworlder. They want all downworlders to submit to a registry, and the leader of this villain group- Zara Dearborn- explicitly wants this registry to lead to the interment and genocide of downworlders. This is another obvious real world analogue.

And only like 5 years have passed between the end of the Mortal Instruments and the beginning of the Dark Artifices.

It would have been really easy to explain this sudden social turn-around in way that made the ongoing story more cohesive, said something about our world, or at least reinforced that the core issue of all of these books should be “Even with Friends and Relatives there, You Still Can’t Trust the Clave”

-The positive option- A lot of Shadowhunters died in the Dark War. They need to rebuild their ranks (and are doing it by using the mortal cup on mundanes) and there are orphans everywhere. Homophobia disappearing from society could really easily have been a result of the Clave changing the official policy to “Marry who ever you want, but please pick up your three orphans and two surly-formerly-mundane-teenagers on your way back to your brand new Institute”

-The deeply cynical option- In the new culture of enhanced blatant racism, agressive oppression, and actual existential threats to being a Shadowunter, being a Shadowhunter became more important than anything else. As long as you are *NOT A DOWNWORLDER* you fit into the approved Clave profile and gain benefits from it. Like how neo-nazi groups in the US are recruiting white gay men now, because whiteness and maleness are more important than sexuality as they seek to oppress non-whites and non-men. Or how people in Germany did nothing to help jewish neighbors because they stood to gain socially and economically from the government’s anti-jewish policies.

It also would have been easy and logical and potentially worthwhile story-wise to keep homophobia as a problem, and use is as a way to explore other issues within the culture of hatred that the Dark Artifices explores

- So many Shadowhunters died in the Dark War that the Shadowhunters are desperate to swell their ranks. Everyone needs to have as many babies as possible. The Clave declares their couple years of leniency on non-straight sexualities a lull in judgement, dissolves marriages, criminalizes the Birth Control Rune, and starts veering toward a forced reproduction type of society, Handmaid’s Tale Style.

-Homophobia becomes part of the anti-downworld campaigns. In the books it’s said somewhere that all Seelies are bisexual, and all the downworlder cultures are pretty open about sexuality. It would have been really easy for the books to show the Clave making non-heterosexuality analogous with being a non-shadowhunter, because it made you too much like a Seelie, and for Shadowhunters who had come out during the last five years punished, exiled, or encouraged to “come to their senses”. This also would have cast homophobia as a political tool rather than a “moral position” like we usually see, which I think would have been illuminating for the target audience of these books. 

But Even If You Can’t Write Good and Don’t Want to Deal With That it’s Worth Noting-

Homophobia being a major, systemic issue that simply evaporates from life and culture in less than five years, makes several of the things going on in the series seem weird under a little more scrutiny.

1. Why bother with the homophobia in the Mortal Instruments at all?

If it’s going to disappear without explanation or real consequences… why bother? Alec’s storyline in the Mortal Instruments could have been dramatic enough if he just had a crush on Jace, and it was never clear if Jace reciprocated, and then ouch,  Jace asks Alec to be his parabatai, so Alec knows it’s hopeless, since parabatai can never be lovers. Then this Clary girl comes in and screws everything up! Then there’s this warlock that Alec can’t stop thinking about! But! Good Shadowhunter Boys DO NOT DATE DOWNWORLDERS!

The books always come back to this race dynamic, so why not start there and stay there? Plus then you are exploring the main theme of the series, and wrapping all the plot points around it, instead of spending so many scenes listening to Alec’s slut-shaming and biphobia.

2. Kit and Livvy and Ty

So… again, I’m only 2/3 through Lord of Shadows, maybe this question gets answered before the end, but Lord of Shadows is a book about pining. And all of the language Kit uses to describe Ty sounds like the same language all the other pining characters use about the focuses of their affection. And it’s very similar to the language Kit uses to describe looking at Livvy, who he is eager to kiss early on in the book.

And Kit is 15. He’s got the puberty going on.

If there is no homophobia in the world anymore, and Kit has plenty of examples of gay and bisexual men in relationships around him, it doesn’t make a lot of sense that internalized homophobia would still be a thing either. They all look up to Mark Blackthorn and everyone is in awe of Alec and Magnus. 

So… that means that Kit can look at Livvy and feel attraction to her and know he feels attraction to her,  but doesn’t seem to think of his attraction to Ty in the same terms at all, even though they seem to be closer than Kit and Livvy are… which makes it seem like the resistance to be attracted to Ty is about Ty having autism.

3. Alec Vs. Aline and Helen

Alec becomes the golden boy, but Aline and Helen become banished women. They are shipped out to,  essentially, Siberia. They are not allowed to come back, even to visit. Helen, who is in a stable marriage and is old enough to run an Institute, and who is married to the daughter of the Consul, is forbidden from raising her six younger siblings, leaving the job to 12 year old Julian Blackthorn (even though Helen thinks that a much older, but just as male relative is rising the children).

In the text, the reason for Helen’s unfair treatment is, explicitly, because she is half Seelie… but Mark gets to live at the LA Institute. He is caught with his boyfriend a couple of times. When they run off to the London Institute Mark and Kieran are there together, without the excuse of being sort of protected by being in the LA Institute, and by the Blackthorn reputation for thwarting the Clave. There’s no reason in the text why the elderly woman who runs the Institute (until the second that Alec Lightwood shows up and the Clave gives it to him) would think the Clave would allow a full blooded Seelie and a half blooded Seelie to be housed in an Institute, but she lets it go. 

Also… Helen can’t raise her half siblings, but the Shadowhunter social climate in Lord of Shadows is also very anti-warlock, and Alec and Magnus are able to adopt two children, one of whom is a Shadowhunter. Not only that, but Alec and the Shadowhunter child have a language barrier, and Magnus and the Shadowhunter child do not.

So… it’s not really about the lack of homophobia in the work of the Dark Artifices, it seems to be Cassandra Clare wanting as few women as possible in her story, and especially getting away with saying she has lesbian characters, without having to give them any lines or screen time. There’s a scene in the London Institute about 2/3rds of the way through where there are five gay or bisexual men in a room together (6 if you count Ty, but at the point I’m at in the book it’s not entirely clear if he returns Kit’s affection)... but Aline who is a lesbian and Helen who, considering the Seelie thing, is probably bisexual, but the text never even bothers to tell us, have no line and have to live at the ends of the earth in a horrible ice hut full of pickled fish. 

[newsnigeria]

Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/putin-shreds-ukrainian-ultranationalists/

Putin Shreds Ukrainian Ultranationalists in a Powerful Press-Conference

During a recent press conference in China, president Vladimir Putin made a statement on the possible simplification of the issuance of Russian citizenship not only to residents of Donbass, but also to all Ukrainians. This news ripped Ukrainian ultranationalists to shreds.

Having received a sword as a gift from Kim Jong-un [on April 25th], the President of Russia left the sword at home and went to visit comrade Xi. After the head of our country talked to his Chinese counterpart, a press-conference took place during which Putin said lots of interesting things. Here’s some of it:

*Italicized text indicates portions of the press-conference not seen in Ostashko’s video*

Vladimir Putin: “China is a vast country. I have mentioned that according to open sources and IMF data, China is the world’s top economy as regards purchasing power parity. It is considerably lower per capita than, say, in the United States, but the volume is higher. Therefore, of course, China has plans for its development, and they are immense and ambitious; when China implements anything, it uses a highly pragmatic approach to achieve its tasks.

China is our strategic partner; this is obvious from all indicators and parameters. Our biggest trading partner is China. We placed an aim in 2018 to reach the volume of $100 billion, and we exceed that, at $108 billion. And we have good prospects for development.”

Let me remind you that at the beginning of April I was doing material about how quite casually Russia and China connected the pipelines built within the framework of the project “Power of Siberia.”

But, despite the oinking of neo-liberals and those on the Left who joined them, gas is not the only thing our country sells to the Chinese. For example, Russian food trade with China is growing. That is, Russia and China do not have such an imbalance of trade, as Beijing has, for example, with Washington.

In addition, Moscow receives considerable benefits from the transit of goods produced by the Chinese to the EU.

Putin: “When the country’s leadership and President Xi Jinping formulate these plans and set development tasks for themselves and for the country – this is a very pragmatic approach. Just like us or any other country, they are governed by their national interests. This is normal.

China implements this in a civilized and delicate way, making sure proposals for common development meet the interests of the vast majority of international participants, if not all. Generally speaking, China has offered nothing new; what it is doing is actually making attempts to reaffirm the principles set out by the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund, and many of our colleagues are mentioning this backstage like they did at the last meeting. What is China’s goal? Stability.

What is the reason for this? China’s economy is immense, and the domestic market is growing. But today, what China produces is basically oriented towards foreign markets.

Of course, domestic consumption will gradually increase with the overall growth of people’s incomes. Today China is interested in pushing its products to foreign markets, which is a natural aspiration for any country. For example, the Swedish economy is almost entirely focused on exports, and the same applies to the German economy. China simply has more products to offer. So how should China respond when it faces certain restrictions and attempts by some countries to stop its development? What should China do? It must strengthen the fundamental tenets of worldwide economic relations, and create conditions for promoting its products. How can this be done? By developing transport infrastructure, port facilities, air, rail and motor transport, and building roads. This is exactly what China is doing. This was how it all started, but later it became obvious both in terms of China’s growth and for us as well, that this would not be enough. We needed to strengthen the fundamental tenets of international economic relations.

Is Russia interested in this? Of course, it is. Considering the high volume of trade and the fact that it is growing, we are certainly interested in benefiting from the transit potential of the Trans-Siberian Railway and Baikal-Amur Mainline, and we intend to invest heavily in them, as well as in motor transport and roads. We have earmarked trillions of rubles for infrastructure development. Why are we doing this? In order to make effective use of our country’s transit potential and to be able to engage in mutual import and export operations.”

In his speech, Putin also kicked the US, pointing out that the participants of the Chinese initiative “One Belt, One Road” don’t actually need any trade wars.

Putin: “China acts in a highly civilized manner. For many years, we have been raising the issue of the need to increase the share of engineering goods in our trade. This is now beginning to materialize, which is attributable among other things to the position adopted by China’s leadership. I am very grateful to President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Li Keqiang for their consistent efforts to improve China’s trade patterns with Russia.

Does this meet our interests? Absolutely. I think that this initiative has a very bright future ahead of it, since almost all of us are interested in this, as I have already said. No one wants to face any restrictions, no one wants any trade wars, maybe with the exception of those who are behind these processes. In any case, an overwhelming majority, nearly 100 percent strongly believe that these restrictions and wars undermine the world’s economy and its development.”

At this point, Putin’s speech reaches the level of trolling. Liberal values are now protected not by those countries that promoted these values before, while it was profitable for them. Suddenly, the defenders of the free market were people who have Mao on Tiananmen Square, and the goal is “building socialism with Chinese specifics.” Isn’t that ridiculous?

Putin also stressed that Russia is not going to help the US strangle Tehran with new sanctions, that is, it does not intend to replace Iranian oil, which the Americans want to knock out of the market. The president reminded that Moscow has agreements with OPEC to limit the volume of oil production, and that our country will comply with them.

After that Putin was asked about simplification of issuing citizenship to residents of Donbass.

Question: Mr. President, your executive order on a simplified procedure for granting citizenship to residents of Lugansk and Donetsk regions has been the subject of extensive discussion among experts for a few days now. In particular, they are discussing whether this may require substantial expenses for the Russian budget, and even naming the figure of 100 billion rubles. Is the Russian budget ready for this? Will the government be able to meet its social obligations to Russia’s new citizens? Are there concerns that a situation may occur when these regions’ residents will receive two pensions – in Russia and in Ukraine? Thank you.

Putin: “As for discussions of this issue, I think that, regarding ‘scare stories��� about Russia’s budget, these stories are undoubtedly being spread by people or political forces that do not want Russia to support the people who reside in Donbass. This is the first thing.

The second is we are extending such a procedure of obtaining our citizenship not only to residents of the Lugansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic; we are thinking about simplifying the procedure of granting Russian citizenship to all Ukrainian citizens in general.

As for meeting or not meeting our social obligations to our citizens in Russia, there is no doubt that everything – social payments, pensions and pension hikes – will be fulfilled. We have no doubts regarding this. There will be no serious burden on the Russian budget related to possible setbacks in the work of Russia’s social system, this is absolutely out of the question. This is not a spontaneous decision; before signing the executive order, we considered everything: the number of those who would potentially seek out citizenship, including the number of pensioners (about one third of this number). There are mostly elderly people residing in these territories today.

Indeed, next year and in the following years this figure cost may reach some 100 billion rubles (not in one year but over the course of several years). This is not a critical figure for us, not something that can challenge the task of fulfilling our obligations to Russian pensioners. There is not even a slight chance of that happening.

Now, as for the possibility of people receiving both Russian and Ukrainian pensions. Well theoretically, this is possible. Do you know the average old age pension in Ukraine? It is almost three times lower than in Russia – or at least, this is what we can see from open sources. Which is why if someone receives a Ukrainian pension as well – let them, this will amount to some 6,000 Russian rubles. If we bear in mind that these people are living under fire from bullets, and artillery shells going off in their backyards – then I believe that our pensioners, many of whom went through and remember the Great Patriotic War, understand what conditions these people are living in today, will not think that we are dealing with some kind of social injustice. And we must support those people.”

At this point the entire Ukraine blew up. Both ordinary svidomiye (ultranationalists) and those anointed within the government screamed. Dumbest of them all sounded the newly elected comedian president Zelensky.

Volodymyr Zelensky: “I would not advise the Russian authorities to waste time trying to seduce Ukrainian citizens with Russian passports. Perhaps someone will do it for the sake of earnings or in an attempt to escape from criminal investigations.” (https://www.facebook.com/zelenskiy95/posts/2236347569948940)

He actually wrote many jokes. Here are his funniest passages.

Zelensky: “We, Ukrainians, have freedom of speech in our country, and free media, and the Internet. Therefore, we know very well what the Russian passport actually provides. This is the right to be arrested for peaceful protest. It is the right not to have free and competitive elections. This is the right to forget about the existence of natural human rights and freedoms. Therefore, we should not expect that many Ukrainians will want to become the ‘new oil’, in which the Russian authorities are trying to turn their own people.

Ukrainians are free people in a free country. Independent, sovereign and indivisible. Ukrainian citizenship is freedom, dignity and honor. This is what we have protected, and we will protect. Ukraine will not give up its mission to serve as an example of democracy for post-Soviet countries. And part of this mission will be to provide protection, asylum and Ukrainian citizenship to all who are willing to fight for freedom. We will provide shelter and assistance to all – all who are willing to fight side by side with us for our and your freedom.”

I wonder who wrote this text for the newly elected clown in the country that increases utility fees every six months to meet the IMF requirements? Being constantly pressured by the price of gas and water, Ukrainians – this is the “new oil”.

What’s funny, by the way, is to read statements that Russian passports will be firstly given to those who protected the Donbass republics from Ukrainian [international] death squads.

Here’s how this statement is explained by my colleague, Vladimir Kornilov:

“Ukraine declares that Russian passports in Donbass will first be given to the ‘militants of LDNR’. Wait, aren’t those ‘militants’ supposed to be the ‘Russian Army,’ ‘combat Buryats’, etc.? Then why do they need passports, if they are, according to official propaganda, are citizens of the Russian Federation???”

“Or does it mean that Kiev admits that this entire time it was at war with it’s own citizens, with Donetsk miners and tractor drivers?” If Putin really considers the possibility of simplified adoption of all Ukrainian trident passport holders who aren’t sick with the Bandera ideology, then those who “fight for your and our freedom” ultranationalist clowns will soon have major problems with human resources.

The main thing is that the one who will be the last to leave [from Ukraine] should not forget to turn off the lights.

[judithnegrin]

Being Successful in Free to Play Games: Atelier 801 Interview

We got in touch Melanie Christin, the co-founder of Atelier 801, an independent game studio that produced the massively multiplayer Free to Play title Transformice. Its community has been extremely active since 2011, the year of its initial release. We asked her for tips and feedback on the company’s experience.

Melanie, can you tell me who you are and what you do at Atelier 801?

Hi, I am Melanie Christin, the cofounder of Atelier 801. We built this game company with my partner, Jean-Baptiste Le Marchand, thanks to the success of our first game, a multiplayer title called Transformice. And we created the game one year before the studio.

Your flagship game is Transformice. How does it play?

Transformice is a massively online multiplayer browser-based game. The player is a small mouse that jumps from platform to platform to catch a piece of cheese. But he’s competing with other mice to be the first to bring the cheese back to the hole. One of the players is the shaman. He has the power to create crates and planks to help all the others in their mission.

This is our main product today. It represents 99% of our revenue.

Playing Transformice is a cheerful and funny experience

The game is made in Flash. Why did you go with that technology?

First of all, Transformice was released back in 2010. Then, both Jean-Baptiste and I were working at Ankama on the MMORPG Dofus. He was a developer there and I worked as an artist. We both had a lot of experience with Flash. Especially Jean-Baptiste, who had already created many games with that technology: he was one of the few persons back then still specialized in this language. Thanks to his experience, we could reuse a lot of code to make Transformice. It took us less than 3 weeks.

Flash has other advantages. As we use vector graphics, the game was and still is lightweight today, after 7 years. It’s but a 1 MB download.

Only 3 weeks? Did you plan to do Free to Play from the very beginning?

No, not at all. We made the game in 3 weeks. It was just a basic version, a test project for us. We released it on a forum, for free. We had no intention to monetize it. But suddenly, we had 10,000 players and an overloaded server. People had to queue up to play. We needed to pay for dedicated servers, which are very expensive. That’s when we decided to put an Adsense banner below the game, on the webpage. It generated enough revenue for us to keep the game running.

One year later, we left Ankama and created our own game studio: Atelier 801. Back then, will still relied on ads exclusively. However, it was enough for the both of us to make a living. it is only 2 years after we released the game, in 2012, that we decided to transition towards Free to Play.

How did it happen?

Well, that wasn’t planned either. At the end of 2011, we were really happy: we had a fresh company, our first employee… We had huge activity spikes, millions of players, all was good. But one day, we got banned from Google AdSense. And as you can imagine, we didn’t know why and had no way to get in touch with Google. To salvage the situation, we had to ask a friend who had been going to the same college as one of Google’s employees. He sent a few key emails on our behalf. Thankfully, within minutes, our ban was lifted. That’s only then that we learned why that happened. The Google bot had decided that the ad banner was too close to the game area.

The thing is, the ban lasted for 6 months. In that time, we didn’t pay ourselves just so we had enough money for our employee. That’s why we moved to Free to Play: to avoid another bad situation like that. That was in June 2012.

Here’s how we implemented it at first. In Transformice, you do not only collect cheese for the sake of it: you use it to buy hats for your mouse. We just gave the players the option to buy them with real money instead. And it’s been a huge success. On the first month only, we made €250,000.

Transformice relies on its massive multiplayer nature. We couldn’t add a barrier for people to get into the game. Because new players can get started within seconds, and for free, the community is really lively. Adding a subscription fee or making the game premium would have been a terrible idea. Transformice had been free for 2 years anyway. Changing that would have killed it. As hats and clothing is 100% optional, we were okay to let people pay for that.

  How did you change the way you monetize over time?

The business model didn’t evolve for a long time. However, we just added watch to play: video ads on demand. We slowly adjusted things over time. For example, in 2014, we stopped giving away hats for free during events. As this was our main source of income, by giving them away, we hurt our sales. As a player, you only need so many hats for your mouse, and we gave a lot of them. This is one of the main changes we made, but aside from that, the business model didn’t change all that much.

The new video that reward the player with in-game currency only arrived in April, 2017.

Then, in a more general way, what are the biggest challenges you faced getting into Free to Play, and how did you overcome them?

I’m a bit ashamed to answer, because we didn’t really do our homework. To us, there were 2 ways to do Free to Play:

The bad way, like some of the big studios, with energy-based systems that prevent you from playing if you don’t pay

And the right way, focused on cosmetics, as in League of Legends, with ethical prices

That was about all there was to know, for us, back at the time. We didn’t know what all these Key Performance Indicators were: ARPU, MAU, and all those barbaric acronyms. When we started doing Free to Play, we set our prices very low. Even today, our prices are much lower than other games on the market. The thing is, although you can lower your prices, you can’t increase them once they’re public. Players would not understand that.

It is hard to anticipate all those economic pitfalls, to understand all those metrics. They are not that accessible, not easy to grasp when you get started. We learned everything on the job, unfortunately. We should have learned all that in advance instead.

The in-game hat and skins shop

Over time, we added new paid options to cover different price points. Like, the ability to change the shaman’s crate, to buy complete outfits, or to rename your avatar. We started selling jewels that you can put on the tip of your mouse’s tail. They are shiny and they look unique, which justified a higher price than for hats and scarves.

The community accepts the fact that some services are more expensive than others. The idea that you will pay a higher fee to change your character’s name for example. We set this one around €10, which is standard in online games. It turns out it’s not a problem for people. We felt that was expensive, but it actually works.

I guess the community does that to support you at the same time?

Yes. At least when we first introduced Free to Play, our community wanted to support us financially. People were happy they could finally change their character’s fur color. They also sent us support messages, said they wanted to help after playing for 2 years for free. And we had donations before, but these didn’t work at all. It’s only when people could pay in exchange for something that they supported us massively. As I said before, in our first month, we made roughly €250,000.

Do use analytics for the game?

Yes, but not a lot. Laughs. Not as much as I would like to.

As we have a multiplayer game, we always track the servers’ status. If we have issues, like many players dropping, or a long queue waiting to get into the server, we can act in response. Our metrics are technical, for the most part: we monitor the servers’ response time, or for example if we have too many payments that arrive at once. That’s one way to spot credit card fraud.

We use few metrics to improve our monetization. We look at the sales for the latest added products, to see if the players like them or not. But aside from that, it’s mainly global sales and the average basket. We didn’t design the system from the very start to track all the common KPIs. Now it’d be hard to do today. We would have to refactor the system heavily. We have 2 separate databases for payments and for the players, which are hard to link with one another. I do track retention however: how many accounts are created, and for how much time people stay around in the game. The percentage of players that stay for more than one hour, one day, one week… also what I call the “deserters”: players who come back after months of inactivity on the game.

Share this interview on Twitter…

Being Successful in Free to Play Games: An Interview with @Atelier801 #gamedev Click To Tweet

Any advice for people looking to get into Free to Play games?

Do you homework! Laughs.

There are plenty of resources on the topic, and you want to read up so you don’t do the same mistakes others made before you. For example, for the KPIs, you don’t have to take everything. But you want to know what these are beforehand. You need to know how to use them, so you can pick the ones you need. You don’t want to use tons of metrics and never look at them. That’s worse than not having any at all. Whenever you add a metric to your analytics board, think about what you’re going to do with it. Will it help you to take actions? You should think carefully, always have a plan before you start to track analytics.

How do you see Free to Play evolve in the coming years?

Free to Play already dominates over premium, if you look at it at a global scale. Be it in terms of revenue or the number of players, Free to Play is really big. So I don’t see it getting that much bigger. There will always be both premium and Free to Play games, as Free to Play is more adapted to certain genres. Especially multiplayer titles, when there’s a lot of interaction between the users.

How did creating your own company and Free to Play change your vision of game creation?

Back when I worked at Ankama, I had a narrow vision: I thought that everything would be better if I did it all myself and was in charge. Then I made my company and discovered it’s a lot more complicated than that. In particular, human resources. Clearly, the hardest part of game development is to manage people, to lead the entire team towards a common goal and not hurt anyone along the way. Keeping a great relationship with all our employees was the hardest thing I’ve had to learn to do.

That’s the real challenge. At least if you want to get it right. We’ve had clashes, and they were quite painful. If I could start again from the beginning, I would take management classes, and make sure to work on my leadership. Because at first, we didn’t have a common vision. We just let people do their work. But it takes many persons to ship a game. A lot of discussion, collaboration, and it is harder than you might think at first.

Dead Maze, Atelier 801’s next title, looks gorgeous

Atelier 801 is now working on their biggest project so far: Dead Maze, a post-apocalyptic, isometric MMO where players cooperate to survive to a zombie outbreak. You’ll get to collect resources, fight, craft to progress through its deadly, yet beautiful world. The first images from the game look gorgeous, and Melanie told us they’re looking to release it in open beta next summer. You can follow Dead Maze on Twitter.

The post Being Successful in Free to Play Games: Atelier 801 Interview appeared first on GameAnalytics.

[michalewillard]

Being Successful in Free to Play Games: Atelier 801 Interview

We got in touch Melanie Christin, the co-founder of Atelier 801, an independent game studio that produced the massively multiplayer Free to Play title Transformice. Its community has been extremely active since 2011, the year of its initial release. We asked her for tips and feedback on the company’s experience.

Melanie, can you tell me who you are and what you do at Atelier 801?

Hi, I am Melanie Christin, the cofounder of Atelier 801. We built this game company with my partner, Jean-Baptiste Le Marchand, thanks to the success of our first game, a multiplayer title called Transformice. And we created the game one year before the studio.

Your flagship game is Transformice. How does it play?

Transformice is a massively online multiplayer browser-based game. The player is a small mouse that jumps from platform to platform to catch a piece of cheese. But he’s competing with other mice to be the first to bring the cheese back to the hole. One of the players is the shaman. He has the power to create crates and planks to help all the others in their mission.

This is our main product today. It represents 99% of our revenue.

Playing Transformice is a cheerful and funny experience

The game is made in Flash. Why did you go with that technology?

First of all, Transformice was released back in 2010. Then, both Jean-Baptiste and I were working at Ankama on the MMORPG Dofus. He was a developer there and I worked as an artist. We both had a lot of experience with Flash. Especially Jean-Baptiste, who had already created many games with that technology: he was one of the few persons back then still specialized in this language. Thanks to his experience, we could reuse a lot of code to make Transformice. It took us less than 3 weeks.

Flash has other advantages. As we use vector graphics, the game was and still is lightweight today, after 7 years. It’s but a 1 MB download.

Only 3 weeks? Did you plan to do Free to Play from the very beginning?

No, not at all. We made the game in 3 weeks. It was just a basic version, a test project for us. We released it on a forum, for free. We had no intention to monetize it. But suddenly, we had 10,000 players and an overloaded server. People had to queue up to play. We needed to pay for dedicated servers, which are very expensive. That’s when we decided to put an Adsense banner below the game, on the webpage. It generated enough revenue for us to keep the game running.

One year later, we left Ankama and created our own game studio: Atelier 801. Back then, will still relied on ads exclusively. However, it was enough for the both of us to make a living. it is only 2 years after we released the game, in 2012, that we decided to transition towards Free to Play.

How did it happen?

Well, that wasn’t planned either. At the end of 2011, we were really happy: we had a fresh company, our first employee… We had huge activity spikes, millions of players, all was good. But one day, we got banned from Google AdSense. And as you can imagine, we didn’t know why and had no way to get in touch with Google. To salvage the situation, we had to ask a friend who had been going to the same college as one of Google’s employees. He sent a few key emails on our behalf. Thankfully, within minutes, our ban was lifted. That’s only then that we learned why that happened. The Google bot had decided that the ad banner was too close to the game area.

The thing is, the ban lasted for 6 months. In that time, we didn’t pay ourselves just so we had enough money for our employee. That’s why we moved to Free to Play: to avoid another bad situation like that. That was in June 2012.

Here’s how we implemented it at first. In Transformice, you do not only collect cheese for the sake of it: you use it to buy hats for your mouse. We just gave the players the option to buy them with real money instead. And it’s been a huge success. On the first month only, we made €250,000.

Transformice relies on its massive multiplayer nature. We couldn’t add a barrier for people to get into the game. Because new players can get started within seconds, and for free, the community is really lively. Adding a subscription fee or making the game premium would have been a terrible idea. Transformice had been free for 2 years anyway. Changing that would have killed it. As hats and clothing is 100% optional, we were okay to let people pay for that.

  How did you change the way you monetize over time?

The business model didn’t evolve for a long time. However, we just added watch to play: video ads on demand. We slowly adjusted things over time. For example, in 2014, we stopped giving away hats for free during events. As this was our main source of income, by giving them away, we hurt our sales. As a player, you only need so many hats for your mouse, and we gave a lot of them. This is one of the main changes we made, but aside from that, the business model didn’t change all that much.

The new video that reward the player with in-game currency only arrived in April, 2017.

Then, in a more general way, what are the biggest challenges you faced getting into Free to Play, and how did you overcome them?

I’m a bit ashamed to answer, because we didn’t really do our homework. To us, there were 2 ways to do Free to Play:

The bad way, like some of the big studios, with energy-based systems that prevent you from playing if you don’t pay

And the right way, focused on cosmetics, as in League of Legends, with ethical prices

That was about all there was to know, for us, back at the time. We didn’t know what all these Key Performance Indicators were: ARPU, MAU, and all those barbaric acronyms. When we started doing Free to Play, we set our prices very low. Even today, our prices are much lower than other games on the market. The thing is, although you can lower your prices, you can’t increase them once they’re public. Players would not understand that.

It is hard to anticipate all those economic pitfalls, to understand all those metrics. They are not that accessible, not easy to grasp when you get started. We learned everything on the job, unfortunately. We should have learned all that in advance instead.

The in-game hat and skins shop

Over time, we added new paid options to cover different price points. Like, the ability to change the shaman’s crate, to buy complete outfits, or to rename your avatar. We started selling jewels that you can put on the tip of your mouse’s tail. They are shiny and they look unique, which justified a higher price than for hats and scarves.

The community accepts the fact that some services are more expensive than others. The idea that you will pay a higher fee to change your character’s name for example. We set this one around €10, which is standard in online games. It turns out it’s not a problem for people. We felt that was expensive, but it actually works.

I guess the community does that to support you at the same time?

Yes. At least when we first introduced Free to Play, our community wanted to support us financially. People were happy they could finally change their character’s fur color. They also sent us support messages, said they wanted to help after playing for 2 years for free. And we had donations before, but these didn’t work at all. It’s only when people could pay in exchange for something that they supported us massively. As I said before, in our first month, we made roughly €250,000.

Do use analytics for the game?

Yes, but not a lot. Laughs. Not as much as I would like to.

As we have a multiplayer game, we always track the servers’ status. If we have issues, like many players dropping, or a long queue waiting to get into the server, we can act in response. Our metrics are technical, for the most part: we monitor the servers’ response time, or for example if we have too many payments that arrive at once. That’s one way to spot credit card fraud.

We use few metrics to improve our monetization. We look at the sales for the latest added products, to see if the players like them or not. But aside from that, it’s mainly global sales and the average basket. We didn’t design the system from the very start to track all the common KPIs. Now it’d be hard to do today. We would have to refactor the system heavily. We have 2 separate databases for payments and for the players, which are hard to link with one another. I do track retention however: how many accounts are created, and for how much time people stay around in the game. The percentage of players that stay for more than one hour, one day, one week… also what I call the “deserters”: players who come back after months of inactivity on the game.

Share this interview on Twitter…

Being Successful in Free to Play Games: An Interview with @Atelier801 #gamedev Click To Tweet

Any advice for people looking to get into Free to Play games?

Do you homework! Laughs.

There are plenty of resources on the topic, and you want to read up so you don’t do the same mistakes others made before you. For example, for the KPIs, you don’t have to take everything. But you want to know what these are beforehand. You need to know how to use them, so you can pick the ones you need. You don’t want to use tons of metrics and never look at them. That’s worse than not having any at all. Whenever you add a metric to your analytics board, think about what you’re going to do with it. Will it help you to take actions? You should think carefully, always have a plan before you start to track analytics.

How do you see Free to Play evolve in the coming years?

Free to Play already dominates over premium, if you look at it at a global scale. Be it in terms of revenue or the number of players, Free to Play is really big. So I don’t see it getting that much bigger. There will always be both premium and Free to Play games, as Free to Play is more adapted to certain genres. Especially multiplayer titles, when there’s a lot of interaction between the users.

How did creating your own company and Free to Play change your vision of game creation?

Back when I worked at Ankama, I had a narrow vision: I thought that everything would be better if I did it all myself and was in charge. Then I made my company and discovered it’s a lot more complicated than that. In particular, human resources. Clearly, the hardest part of game development is to manage people, to lead the entire team towards a common goal and not hurt anyone along the way. Keeping a great relationship with all our employees was the hardest thing I’ve had to learn to do.

That’s the real challenge. At least if you want to get it right. We’ve had clashes, and they were quite painful. If I could start again from the beginning, I would take management classes, and make sure to work on my leadership. Because at first, we didn’t have a common vision. We just let people do their work. But it takes many persons to ship a game. A lot of discussion, collaboration, and it is harder than you might think at first.

Dead Maze, Atelier 801’s next title, looks gorgeous

Atelier 801 is now working on their biggest project so far: Dead Maze, a post-apocalyptic, isometric MMO where players cooperate to survive to a zombie outbreak. You’ll get to collect resources, fight, craft to progress through its deadly, yet beautiful world. The first images from the game look gorgeous, and Melanie told us they’re looking to release it in open beta next summer. You can follow Dead Maze on Twitter.

The post Being Successful in Free to Play Games: Atelier 801 Interview appeared first on GameAnalytics.

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Who's Teaching Black Women About Financial Literacy

It’s 2017, and yet girls are nonetheless combating for equality. Information indicates it’ll take till 2152 to shut the gender wage hole, but it shouldn’t take a century to get what we need. We need greater, and Refinery29 is right here to assist — due to the fact one hundred thirty-five years is just too long to wait what we deserve nowadays.

Growing up, I had no hassle discovering my ardor for writing and literature, or losing myself in my creativeness. but when it came to finances, I used to be suddenly alone. Forget now not knowing in which to start — I didn’t even know what I needed to research.

As a teen,

I had a part-time task at the mall, and that I used that paycheck to shop for clothes or visit the films. however outside of some hundred bucks in financial savings, I didn’t have a clue a way to make myself financially comfy, or how crucial it became. while I used to be applying for university, my mom sat me down and defined that I used to be now financially responsible for myself. She is a very smart and ingenious lady, but she didn’t go to college — and in an age, while you need an undergraduate degree to get most access-degree jobs, my mother wasn’t able to offer me with lots assist as I took that next step in my existence.

My story isn’t particular

It’s the norm among my Black friends to warfare to talk about money. Systematically and traditionally, the Black network has been left disenfranchised and disempowered. Even with the upward push of focus surrounding the gender pay hole, there’s still overwhelming silence surrounding the significance of such as race and other intersectional identities into the verbal exchange approximately cash. The median internet well worth for unmarried Black women is simply $five. If we want to exchange that, it’s essential that we have monetary planners who apprehend how vital intersectionality and race are for their clients.

Methods of Teaching In Schools Adopted By Teachers

Teaching methods are various ways of providing understanding to students or pupils in schools. Teaching is one of the fine careers inside the global because the majority of professions and careers derived their beginning from Education. Consequently, we need to undertake in lots of approaches to Teaching in order that the students can without difficulty assimilate the subjects as soon as viable. The most problems encountered through instructors nowadays that affect college students negatively is techniques of Teaching followed by using teachers.teaching strategies gold.definition teaching strategies

The lecturers realize the problem and topics very well but discover it hard to teach and transmit this understanding and ideas to college students which make it hard for the students to understand commonly technology orientated subjects and mathematical topics.

Horrific methods of Teaching discourage college students from understanding the subject as well cause their disasters in the examinations.teaching strategies my account

Now let us study the diverse techniques of Coaching

1 DESCRIPTIVE strategies-The lecturers begin by using describing the topics and challenge to the scholars. E. G the desk has four legs and flat tops. It’s far used for writing, studying and eating and for serving dinners. The teacher describes in info all he knows approximately desk, house, or any subject topics.

2 EXPLANATORY strategies-In this technique the teacher begin Teaching with the aid of explaining the subjects to students in sorts of definition. Examples are money-She or he defines money as anything this is commonly suitable as means of payment and agreement of money owed. It’s far a legal gentle.

The teacher provides an explanation for into info all he is aware of approximate cash for college students to apprehend.

3 QUESTIONS AND Solution methods-The academics start Coaching through asking the students questions regarding the topics and based on the subjects and subjects at fingers whilst the scholar’s replies by finding solutions to the questions asked. E. G What is Biology?while the students give back Answer by using defining biology as the subjects that study s dwelling things which include flowers and animals.

The instructor then went further to deliver his Teaching via explaining in info the meaning of biology and requested them greater questions referring to the issue matters at the stop of the Teaching or lecture.

4  EXPERIMENTAL techniques-

The teacher makes use of the test to train and impart understanding to the students. it is usually accomplished in the laboratory or study room with lots of experimental gear and equipment. It creates lasting reminiscence when you consider that students are uncovered to practicals that more desirable they’re getting to know a price. They even exercise it themselves to examine stages of know-how whilst The lecturers correct where there are mistakes.

five PLAYAWAY strategies-That is a technique whereby using the instructor plays with students in form of making a song and rhymes recitation whilst the scholars or pupils sing along and dance with the instructor.

Advantages of Non-Financial Performance Measurement Over Financial Performance Measurement

Monetary Performance Dimension

The motive of every business is to reap the lowest line of most Monetary advantages. On the way to comply with the equal, agencies have come up with Financial Overall performance Size techniques. The very concept is to make sure that regardless of what the assets do and the way they feature, they could have to expose profits within the income and loss statements. It is accomplished usually in three one-of-a-kind steps. They had been noted as follows: Capital one financial

First of all, it encompasses choosing the dreams of the agency.

Secondly, and also as an essential component, It’s far to consolidate the Measurement of data with admire to the Performance.

Sooner or later, the desired changes made by way of the managers so as to function a treatment over the susceptible hyperlinks within the Economic charts of the agency. So, you could say that the Economic elements of Overall performance Dimension are basically income driven. There are certain milestones that businesses set for employees. A deficiency in being able to fulfill even a positive procedure may be dangerous for the location. So, this approach of Overall performance Dimension is likewise recognized to show certain insecurity for the employees. As a result, it might not deliver the most authenticated results. commercial enterprise Performance Management is by means of and massive measured through the Economic components of Performance Dimension. The particular strategies for the identical had been stated as follows:

Processes to Monetary Overall performance Dimension

Financial Values Brought.financial planning

This approach deals immediately with the Economic earnings of the corporation that goes immediately into the stability sheets. This approach, in other words, may be used to measure the Net Running income after Taxes. There also are certain changes that are made in the calculation of Financial cost Introduced so that the corporations could make it greater synchronized with the profit entry within the profit and loss statements. This method is normally used by decrease stature organizations these days. The reason for the same is that for the time being, the corporations can have enough money to look at the enterprise functioning handiest from the Economic perspective. There’s a whole lot extra to obtain.

  Health Literacy: A Strategic Marketing Asset And Corporate Social Responsibility

Fitness literacy may be described as humans’ abilities to get entry to, recognize, appraise and practice records to make Health choices in ordinary existence. It allows people make healthy choices in instances where the bounds among paintings and lifestyles aren’t so clean anymore.

When human beings fall sick, they seek the nice remedies viable. However, how ought to they realize about those treatments if they are not provided with smooth-to-apprehend statistics in the first vicinity? Pharmaceutical companies develop limitless drugs and devices to help human beings in coping with their circumstance, But handiest on a few occasions are advertisements provided in a manner that educates the patient. By spending more time in making sure that everyone their communications are clear to people of any training degree, pharmaceutical companies can improve Health literacy.

Challenges Confronted With Health Literacy

Consistent with the Office of Disorder Prevention and Health Merchandising (Fitness Communication Sports), over 3rd folks adults-77 million human beings might have problem with commonplace Fitness obligations, together with following directions on a prescription drug label or adhering to an early life immunization agenda the usage of a well-known chart.1

A report supplied Via the Institute of medicine suggests that ninety million humans, almost half of the grown up US population, lacks Fitness literacy competencies needed to recognize and act on Fitness data and Health gadget needs.2 Healthcare advertising has a protracted manner to move before patients can discover it easier to relate and apprehend the data they are receiving from those organizations.

The present day strategies getting used to the marketplace to people with Health conditions is making patient schooling fall Via the wayside. humans find actors and models less relatable While as compared with real patients. If patients lack the Health literacy that is had to apprehend the ads, the statistics provided could mislead them or be misunderstood.

Only 12 % of Adults have talented Fitness literacy”

America Branch of Fitness and Human Services pronounced that most effective 12 percentage of adults have proficient Fitness literacy.3 Terrible patient schooling may want to result in Terrible control of continual ailments and even purpose setbacks. humans may additionally pass their lots-required appointments or exams, lack the capacity to manage situations, get hospitalized often and face accelerated Healthcare costs. If sufferers aren’t aware of the questions they need to ask approximately their drugs, in essence of ways the medicine could act or react, they could experience negative outcomes.