#except i don’t have a technological rabbit that can solve this problem

[yourdeepestfathoms]

Glitchtrap has witnessed Vanessa break down sobbing because of college before. not because of classes, but because she forgot to accept the award that would give her financial aid.

“WHY are you making so much RACKET?!”

“i forgot— i forgot to— i forgot to accept the award given to me for my financial aid for this semester, and now i might not be able to go to school! that’s $21K down the drain, Mr. Afton! i can’t afford to get my classes without it!”

literally, wailing. crying so hard she’s stammering and can’t speak. barely fucking breathing.

and Glitchtrap is just there like 🐇

she won’t shut up, too overcome with panic and stress and self-hatred for forgetting something so important. Glitchtrap finally gets fed up with her weeping and goes into the database to fix the issue himself. he doesn’t do it out of the kindness of his heart, but because her crying is giving him a headache—and he doesn’t even technically have a physical head!

“there! i fixed your fucking problem! now will you PLEASE stop crying?!”

“you— you fixed it?”

“yes. you got the stupid aid so you can do your stupid classes. now SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

[theseerasures]

Which part specifically? I mean, yeah, the whole game is a disaster, but I'd love to hear specific points. There was so much I didn't like about Fates that it just collectively merges as 'bad' in my mind.

it's not really anything specific tbh!! because the way Fates is misogynistic is not different from the way the other Fire Emblems (that i’ve. played. it’s possible all the ones pre-Sacred Stones were actually Forbidden Feminist Utopias) also carry that unmistakable whiff of misogyny. it's not done out of malice, it's just...a franchise that loves to play high fantasy tropes straight, particularly the bit about Restoring the Good Monarch. i never got the sense that they thought hard about the fact that the dude protags (Ephraim, Ike, Chrom) get intricate coming of age stories about tempering their talents for murder with wisdom, while all the lady "protags" (Eirika, Elincia, Micaiah) mostly don't change at all and just kinda swan around doing the "we are ethereal maidens too good for this sinful earth" thing, and when they do wibble it's always about how they wish they could be as "strong" as their dude counterparts except they inevitably can't and don't want to be, because war is bad!!! there's too much war in this war game franchise, buy our next DLC for how to solve war with war

(Lucina's a weird case, but that's why i love her, and...i suspect the only reason Lucina got to be the way she is was because she was doing DRAG, which is a rabbit hole that we don't have time for.)

Fates (sidebar: i played Revelations but i know what happens in Birthright and Conquest. i ended up doing all the Paralogues, because i was morbidly curious about how many different ways you could tell a "no dad!!! it's your dream" story, and the answer was "around four, so spreading them across TWENTY ONE versions basically creates the story equivalent of ultra skim milk.") doesn't do anything functionally different from its predecessors, it's just...more egregious this time, because so much of the story feels exclusively catered to drawing attention to it. i get the sense that the devs were trying to aim for bigger, more sophisticated storytelling than what they did with Awakening, which is why we got Fire Emblem: More Royals Than Ever and the requisite chin-stroking about families of blood vs. families of choice, but that they were trying to be Deep (tm) just made the parts that have always been shallow in the franchise look uglier.

i'm just gonna talk about the Royals, because the story privileges the Royals to a truly mind-bending degree (see above: high fantasy, monarchism). with the Royals we have:

the Hoshido/Nohr sibling matchy-matchy that is eerie from the outset (did Sumeragi and Garon set TIMERS so they'd impregnate women at roughly the same time and murder the babies who didn't come out the right gender?), even before you get to the part where they are "foils" for each other in p much aesthetic only, since their personalities are not actually that different when you get down to it. you have the Dutiful Big Bro (Xander and Ryoma), the Closeted Lesbian Big Sis (Camilla and Hinoka, representing opposite ends of the gender presentation spectrum), the Insecure Lil Bro (Takumi and Leo), and the Incorruptibly Pure Lil Sis (Sakura and Elise, the latter of whom for her crime of being outgoing was punished with death in Birthright, which...yikes)

so like. extremely paint by numbers right from conception (heh). why couldn't Xander have been the one who was Naive and Not Ready for This World? because he is Boy, which means he can only be flawed in the Boy Ways, so he must be Too Worldly instead. why couldn't Camilla be the oldest? she's already jaded and weird, so why not make her the heir just to shake things up? because she is Girl and Too Weird and Wearing BLACK, and weird girls in black can't be queen--even if Xander dies, she can't be queen.

Azura is clearly supposed to The Chrom Surrogate of this game insofar as she's your blue haired pal with whom you share a destiny, but she is The Chrom Surrogate but MAXIMUM GIRL, so she's the quintessential non-combatant class, she has a special song that soothes the hearts of warriors, she LITERALLY DIES FOR THE PEACE (TM) IN BIRTHRIGHT AND CONQUEST. (and obviously her hair can't be the Fire Emblem Classic shade of blue--that's too masculine.)

wrt the second gen, lineage is passed through the dad in the eugenics factory this time, which is on paper a fine shakeup from in Awakening, but...ALL the definitely-royal second gens are boys? don't get me wrong: i actually adore what they did with Forrest--like, fucking superb u gender-nonconforming fashion-loving Prince of Peace--but Forrest being an actually interesting inversion of what we expect (that isn't played for laughs!!!) makes all the other boys come off as much blander than they could be. why can't Kiragi be a dirt and hunting loving GIRL? i love Shiro's supports with Kana, but his whole "boisterous laid back but also inferiority complex" deal would be much less tired if he were the Crown Princess instead of Prince. i suppose if Siegbert were Girl with Anxiety and Kingship he'd just...be Lucina, but that's not necessarily a bad thing!!! bitches love Lucina!! (i'm bitches)

the thing is all of this would be...well. not FINE, but more acceptable if they did some things to flesh out those cookie-cutter personalities. Fates didn't deliver for any of the Royals to the extent i wanted it to, but even for what we had the girls got markedly less than the boys did. the moment that made me go "hoo boy maybe i will make poast about this" was in the climax when all the Five Whatevers lit up to form the Fire Emblem and we got some nice concept art of Takumi Leo Ryoma and Xander making :O faces, while the girls...were also there! in Revelation i'm pretty sure you can cut out Camilla Hinoka Elise and Sakura and leave the plot basically unchanged. you could say they fare better in Birthright and Conquest, but you could just as easily say they fare WORSE, because what they get to do if they're NPCs in those routes are: be sad and die, be sad and be spared from dying, be sad and get even weirder before being spared from dying, or be sad.

Camilla and Hinoka feel like the most wasted potential, because we haven't had as many "female royal who is actually pretty down with murder" characters before. but the devs clearly had no idea with what to DO with that, so (outside of her daddy and mommy issues, the details of which we learn about via supports with Niles the resident sex pest and hoo boy the "queer rep" in this game is whole other can of worms) Camilla became your momsistergirlfriend with built-in innovative airbag technology, whose creepiness is played for laughs, and Hinoka was...wait which one was Hinoka again

i am partly just being glib for comic effect, but like--the underlying problems are there, no matter how seriously or generously you want to read it. Fates doesn't go out of its way to mistreat its women; it just doesn't expend any effort thinking about them, so the misogyny breaks loose and stands out anyway.

[anonarat]

Looking at Ciconia no Naku Koro Ni from the perspective of Knox’s Decalogue:

(Contains spoilers for Ciconia no Naku Koro Ni and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd)

The first question is who is our detective?

Given that they hold the lion’s share of the POV time, I am assuming that this is Miyao.

The second question is more interesting: what is the mystery that is being solved?

There are a few murders in Ciconia where the originator is unknown. That I can think of, there’s the murder/accident of the VIPs at LATO and the murder of Rethabile’s brother. The problem is, both of these happen late in the story, and there isn’t too much direct investigation of these.

Another possibility is the question of who the infiltrators of the Ninth Prime Chivalric Order are, but there is a problem with that which I will discuss later. The final mystery that I can think of is: who is behind all these events?

Knox’s first - It is forbidden for the culprit to be anyone not mentioned in the early part of the story.

There are two possible sides to this. The first is that this title goes to Jestress and the Three Kings. The issue here is that there is no actual proof that these people even exist. Perhaps more accurately, Miyao can at least intuit that someone is behind these events, but there is no reason for him to assume it’s the Three Kings as opposed to any other group. As the Three Kings are all masked, one could argue that they are Gauntlet Knights (or are one of the few named adults), but it seems unlikely.

The other side is that the Three Kings don’t exist. If the Three Kings don’t exist, then the Ninth Prime Chivalric Order likely doesn’t exist either. That means that one of the potential mysteries doesn’t exist, so the only other question is the one of the instigator. There are very few candidates for this position, and Tojirou is top of the list.

This is why the question of who is in the Ninth Prime Chivalric order is a tricky one to even consider.

Knox’s second -  It is forbidden for supernatural agencies to be employed as a detective technique.

The only character or thing that seems to fit into this is MetaMiyao, and their prophecies. This may also fall under Knox’s Fourth, but I’ll get to that later. Either way, this means we should discount all scenes with MetaMiyao. Due to the way the scenes work, it’s hard to tell for definite that they are being fully experienced by Miyao. I think the only time Miyao references things said by MetaMiyao is when he’s talking to MetaMiyao.

Knox’s third - It is forbidden for hidden passages to exist.

There are two ways to look at this, both absurd. The first is that given the nature of the mystery, how would a hidden passage even be relevant. The other one would be to consider hidden Selcom chat rooms, and that is a deadly rabbit hole and not quite in keeping with the spirit of the rule.

Knox’s fourth -  It is forbidden for unknown drugs or hard to understand scientific devices to be used.

Ahahaha. Just look at all the various bits of technology in this world. You’ve got P3 levels, Gauntlets, the 8MS system to name a few. Ciconia takes this rule and tears it up.

Let us try accepting the things that have been explained in this story, that leaves us with ‘knowledge’. We must therefore assume pretty much every scene with Vier is not even relevant. We must also assume that the attempt to prevent the Three Kings using LATO that was foiled by Seshat didn’t happen. If we consider that, at no point do Valentina or Maricarmen mention it to Miyao, so we can consider it as not happening.

This really does call the question of whether the Three Kings even exist into further question.

Knox’s fifth - X

This rule isn’t used in Umineko; however I have looked it up. Knox’s fifth is more of a reaction to the stories being told at the time than something that should be relevant in the modern day.

Knox’s sixth -  It is forbidden for accident or intuition to be employed as a detective technique.

This is an interesting one. From Miyao’s perspective, the only logical conclusion is that these events have been orchestrated by a single mastermind, but he has no hard evidence of this. In his terms he lacks the necessary ‘eyes’ to gather information, let alone conclusively say that an instigator really exists.

I suppose the only exception to this is the drone attack, but the information that the reader is provided is absolutely minimal. In fact, Miyao does very little detecting at all.

Knox’s seventh -  It is forbidden for the detective to be the culprit.

Miyao, the POV character almost certainly isn’t the culprit but... there’s more that needs to be discussed in Knox’s tenth.

Knox’s eighth -  It is forbidden for the case to be resolved with clues that are not presented.

At the current time, this one is impossible to judge. We’re not even sure of what the mystery is yet.

Knox’s ninth -  It is permitted for observers to let their own conclusions and interpretations be heard.

This is kinda common sense, although I suppose we could look at Knox’s ninth as behaving in a similar way to Purple Text in Umineko. This is more a tool for reasoning though, and I can’t think of an instance where Miyao has intentionally told us a falsehood.

Knox’s tenth -  It is forbidden for a character to disguise themselves as another without any clues.

Now this is an absolute monster of a rule. With a large number of Gauntlet Knights being CPPs, they can all neatly sidestep this rule. I feel this is especially pertinent in the case of Meow.

We know Meow exists, but can she be considered the detective? I’m not so sure. It’s hard to say whether we even get her as a POV character (I can’t recall if she gets some definite moments early on, but certainly none later). This means that it’s entirely feasible that Meow the AOU member of the Ninth Prime Chivalric Order (if it even exists) or an accomplice with what’s going on even if it didn’t. It’s sort of like a The Murder of Roger Ackroyd situation, where most people will assume that the character can’t even be considered because of Knox’s seventh.

The setting itself laughs in the face of Knox’s tenth, making it much less useful than it should be.

[scenarioslovers]

Fault of Falling >> Suho, You (Part 5)

Part 1| 2| 3| 4

Do you trust me?

You frowned at the message you had received from your husband. You haven’t heard from him since he left in the morning and you got unwelcome guest called Miya.

It had been over 8 hours and he never called you and didn’t reply to any of your texts and when he did it was only this message. What did he mean?

You became more suspicious when Sehun, his personal assistant, knocked on the door and entered the room without even waiting for your permission. His face was red as if he had run all the way here. There were a few drops of sweat on his forehead, but his hair was perfectly done as always. You always wondered how he could do that.  

“I am sorry, ma’am.” He said, walking towards you. He stopped, short of breath, but it didn’t last long until he caught on and said, “But we are going to leave right now.”

“What?” Your eyes widened, confused. Out of the blues, he opened your closet and dragged the suitcase from under the bed before throwing it on the bed beside you, making you flinch in your place. You couldn’t even speak as you watched him astonished pulling whatever comes into his hands from inside the closet and threw it inside the suitcase.

“Sehun, Stop!” You snapped, grabbing him by the elbow. He gulped hard. His eyes said please don’t ask. But he wished. “What do you think you are doing? What is going on?”

“Did you receive the message?” He asked you. His eyes were arguing and inpatient. You got a tight feeling in your stomach. Since you had gotten married into a mafia family, this never happened before.

“Junmyeon’s? Yes.” You said, suddenly scared. “What is going on, Sehun?”

“There is no time to explain.” He said, shaking his head as he removed your hand from his elbow. “What is your answer?”

“Of course I trust him.”

“Then you should trust me too.”

You had no other choice but to nod in agreement. Whatever the hell was going on you weren’t so pleased about it. You hated that you are being pushed into the dark and just follow orders.

Nevertheless, you wanted to trust Junmyeon. Your relationship was finally more than an agreement. There were feelings, now, emotions that were bigger than you and him.

“Can you get out of the way?” You asked Sehun firmly. “You are not taking the important stuff.”

“Uh!” He blinked, realizing that he was touching your personal clothes without permission. “I hope you forgive me.” He dropped it to the ground, bowed once before gulping hard.

“You are forgiven.” You sighed, heavily. “Now give me five minutes and I will be ready, but...”

“But?”

“You are going to tell what is going on or I will break your head, understood?”

He gulped hard again, nodding before walking out if the door and waiting in the hallway.

You took a deep breath, hand shaking as you grabbed your phone and texted Junmyeon.

“Sehun is taking me somewhere. Did you order him to do that?”

You bit on your lips, heartbeat increasing with each second passing. You jumped from your place with your phone binged for a new notification. It was Junmyeon and his answer wasn’t really pleasing.

“Don’t call this number again. Sehun knows what he will do with your phone. Please, whatever you hear or whatever you see it is not true. Please trust me. I truly, truly love you. Please Y/N.”

You inhaled sharply, then exhaled slowly, trying to release the pain in your chest bit by bit.

You tried to call him. The first try he didn’t answer. The second try, his phone was off. The third try, no hopes. He probably closed his phone or burned it.

What was the hell going on for real? It sounded so serious and no one wanted to tell you anything.

Trust him. You decided that you should do so. If you didn’t trust him, what would you do anyway? You had no other choice.

You picked anything you could bring with you from the closet before heading out of the room. Sehun was standing there, blocking your way out. He mouthed an apology before he took your finger and stamped into finger's ink. You were so confused that you reacted slowly. Only when he pressed your finger on some paper did you realize that you had agreed on something you didn’t even know.

“What is that?” You snapped and tried to snatch the paper out of Sehun’s grip, but he was faster in folding it and sliding it into his suit jacket.

“Your phone!” He said, reaching out his hand.

You suddenly felt unsafe. Suddenly you felt as if someone was stripping you, leaving you naked. He just took your consent on something you didn’t know by force, and now he was taking your phone too.

“I am not giving you anything until you tell me what is going on.” You yelled, losing all your patience. It was all getting on your nerve. And you felt so alone and scared.

“I will tell you everything on our way. Now give me your phone.” Sehun said firmly, almost rudely. “If you still want to make it out of her alive, follow my lead.”

You scoffed rolling your eyes. “Are you threatening me?”

He rolled his eyes back at you as he snatched your phone from your hand. You gasped, surprised, from the sudden impact. You didn’t think he would do something like this.

“Yah!”

“We need to move on.” He said, throwing your phone in the next garbage. Pulling something out of his pocket, it was a new phone. A different model from yours, but with the same technology. “Take this. It only has my number if you needed anything. Boss will call at the right time. Until then, you can’t call him yourself. His old number is probably not working by now.” He was talking so fast that it was impossible to follow him.

You only realized you were following him when you reached the car that was waiting right in front of the house door. He opened the door for you and you got in as he put your bag in the back of the car.

Starting the engine, everything was going too fast, he didn’t let you ask questions. He kept talking about, you should do and what you shouldn’t. And whenever you asked a question he cut you and continued with his blabbing.

Call me if you needed anything.

Call me if you need to go to the hospital.

Don’t get out of your new house without telling me.

It is better not to watch the news

Trust the boss

Do

Don’t

Don’t

Don’t

Do

The list went on and on. It was almost impossible to follow.

You lost count. A headache attacked you so badly as you repeated Junmyeon’s words over and over again. Trust me. He said. But he made it almost impossible to trust him with all of this going on.

You were snapped back to reality, realizing that Sehun actually stopped talking when the car’s door opened and Sehun was looking at you.

“We are here.” He said, before gesturing towards a small house beside the shore.

When did you get near the ocean anyway?

~~

It had been two hours since he blocked your number. His heart was aching. His stomach was squeezing. He was biting his nails nervously, waiting to hear from Sehun anything, any update about you.

He didn’t think that you trusted him. His mind ran through all kinds of scenarios of you leaving him for real. If you would get an abortion and just forget about your life with him.

Why did it have to happen now out of all the times? After he had fallen deeply, madly in love with you.

It felt like he was letting go of a part of his heart.

“She will understand.” He said, biting on his index nail. “She will understand. It is alright. She will understand. She will wait for me.”

But he was only lying to himself. He still didn’t know how to solve this problem. How to get out of this trouble, and how to go back to you? His father’s words still fresh in his mind. Whenever he remembered what happened in the morning, his blood pressure increased. He felt like a little child who was following his parent's order.

“New wife?” Junmyeon echoed his father’s words. They sounded heavy in his ears. “What a new wife, father. I am already a married man.”

 “Leave her. Divorce her, my son. She is an old business now.”

Junmyeon blinked rapidly, trying to function what his father was talking about. He was forced to marry you and now after he... After he got attached to you, suddenly, you became an old business! “Father, my wife is...”

“I only asked you to marry her for a while!” His father pressed on every word, making sure that his son understood his point. “She was a card. A used card now. We don’t keep used stuff, Junmyeon.”

 Junmyeon jumped from his place when the phone rang. It was Sehun.

With a small smile over his lips, when he was about to pick up the call, the door snapped open. The smile disappeared as quickly as it appeared.

“Oppa!” A happy Miya hopped towards him like a little rabbit. Except that this rabbit wore a snake leather coat. What a perfect symbol to represent her. “I told you, no one loves you as much as I love you. She left you just because I threatened her. What a weak girl.” She smirked with a shrug. “She doesn’t deserve you. I do.”

“Please Miya,” Junmyeon said, firmly. “I don’t want to talk about her.”

Miya bit on her lower lip as she kicked the ground beneath her. “Why do you love her that much? Can’t you love me instead of her? You loved me before she appeared.”

“I still love you Miya, but as my little sister.”

“Don’t!” She screamed. “I will be your wife in a few days. The one who should carry your child is me not her.”

Junmyeon’s eyes widened. He didn’t tell anyone about this yet everyone seemed to know. Including his father who threatened him to end their lives if they remained his weak points.

“You know?”

“I hated it. The happiness in her eyes when she touched her stomach. She thought I can never have you because she was pregnant with your child. Look who’s your wife now.”

“Miya” Junmyeon sighed. “You are acting crazily. This isn’t you.”

“This is me who loves you too much. I can do anything to have you Junmyeon. Even if it was asking my dad to cut ties with yours.”

“Okay,” He said slowly, approaching her. He took her hands in his as he looked in her eyes. “It’s okay now, Miya. I am with you not her. So let’s not talk about her.”

“Promise that you will love me.”

Junmyeon gulped hard and nodded. He could not bring himself to say it. “Yeah, of course.”

She smiled before she pressed her head against his chest. A creeping chill ran down Junmyeon’s arms when her arms snaked around his waist.

“Let’s make a baby. I will be your wife and the mother of the child you always wanted”

“What?”

~~

“What?” You snapped, in disbelief. “He is getting married?”

“It is out of his hand, Mrs. Kim,” Sehun said, looking straight into your eyes trying to outline a point there. “He had no other choice.”

“No other choice?” You scoffed rolling your eyes. “What a joke.”

“I am pretty sure you should hear it directly from him,” Sehun said.

“How? How can I hear it from him? You took my phone and the new one doesn’t have his number.” By now, you were just so loud and hysterically screaming. “He basically threw me out of his house to marry another woman.”

“He bought you another house-“

“But...” You grabbed on your hair, still not getting it. “He is still married to me!”

“Technically, you just sighed the divorce paper. You are no longer married.”

You froze in your place as you looked at Sehun horrified. These people did not joke. It was this moment when Sehun forces you to stamp a paper. It must be this one. For a moment, you forgot who you were dealing with. Who you were married to and who controlled your life

I love you. He said and you scoffed at the memory.

No, he didn’t love you. All he wanted was the baby and now you were a prisoner of his lies.

Tears filled your eyes. You weren’t thinking clearly, you didn’t feel anything but you can see yourself punching Sehun hard in the chest many times and he was doing nothing. He was willing to get all your frustration without complaining.

“You are liars.” You cried, grabbing him from his white shirt. “What do you want from me? Why are doing this to me? I thought…”

I love you

“I thought he loved me. He said…”

I don’t want to hurt you anymore.

“It was all lies again.” You dropped to your knees, feeling like the biggest fool ever. What now? You got divorced finally. It was what had always wanted since you got married to him. He never loved you. And you didn’t love him at first, but now you had fallen in love with him deeply, so deeply, that it was hard to breathe right now.  

“Sehun,” You took a sharp breath, gasping as you looked up at him with teary eyes. The pain in your head was too much to take. It felt as if the world was spinning. “Was it all a lie? The family he promised me to have?”

“I am sorry.” He said, his head fixed towards the ground. “But you must trust him.”

“How can I….” You felt helpless, lost. “…do that when he left me all alone like this?” You threw your arms in the air. Your stomach felt tight and you wanted so badly to empty everything you had for lunch. “I don’t trust anyone anymore. Not even you.”

“It is okay not to trust me. But Mr. Kim-“

“Enough.”

Sehun pressed his mouth together.

“Take me to my father’s house. I can’t live here alone.”

“I am sorry, but you cannot.”

You scoffed, frustrated. “You no longer have a say in my actions. I am going alone.”

“There are no buses, taxis or Ubers in this area. You have to walk 20 km to find the nearest bus station.”

You halted in your place. Cold chills ran through your spine. This place was basically an isolated prison.

Turning angrily towards Sehun, you stopped a few centimeters away from him, ready to snap at his face and punch him.

“Where the hell is this place?”

“Somewhere safe. People are after you. He only wants to keep you safe.”

“To keep me prisoner. A pregnant woman on her own, here?”

“It is for your safety. Please trust him”

“You are all so sick. The worst.” 

 Did you this coming? lol Miya want to have babies. I hope that wasn’t cringy  #Part2!

So guys would you like to have part 6 and 7 or 6 only? Where is your happy ending? 

[ernmark]

Hi I love all your penumbra metas. In the latest episode I'm still confused by what actually went wrong with the dome, was it the society or the dome that didn't work?

Is this gonna be a thing I do?

I am totally cool with this.

Again, major detailed spoilers for Promised Land under the cut.

And an anon asked:

Thanks for explaining the end of the episode! I’m a little confused about what happened with the dome in the first place. I mean, I know the free dome wasn’t real. And Erin tried to get her son(?) to get it to work and he was a giant dick trying to torture people looking for it. Did Erin set up the dome stuff prematurely? Did it ever exist? Marshall’s son felt really bad and wanted to warn everyone. Where did the hallucination gas fit in? Did Erin and company think they had it but didn’t?

One thing to keep in mind is that we’re deliberately not given the full story, so all we’re left with is bits and pieces that we can glue together to kind of get a vague impression of what happened, but the way I put them together won’t necessarily be the way you put them together. 

So let’s get to it, shall we?

Why was the Free Dome important?

Real estate on Mars is expensive, outside of super low-income neighborhoods like Oldtown, The Boiler, etc. 

This is because 90% of Mars’s surface is uninhabitable. If you want to live somewhere, you better be willing to fork over a ton of cash for a tiny place, or else you’re going to be buddying up with your immediate family/seven of your closest friends/etc. 

JUNO: Mars only has a couple cities and a few desertoutposts cuz the radiation will bake you like a potato if you stay out theremore than a few hours, and Domes can’t be built just anywhere. So if you want anew city, you’ve got to figure out how to build a place to build it. You haveto invent a better Dome.

Life cannot exist underground, because the ambient radiation is just too strong:

PILOT: A lot of space in this subway. I wonder why I neverbuilt anything down here. Some housing or something.

PIRANHA: People lose their marbles if they live under Martianground too long. Radiation burns, Brainswell…

STRONG: You know whatbeing under all this radioactive sand too long does to you? Drives you crazy.Makes you see things.

This is likely why the subway has been closed off everywhere except Oldtown– most likely it wasn’t safe for the people working there, or for the people using it for transit.

Oldtown was the only part of Hyperion City that still had a connection to the Old Subway, behind a boarded-up door in a nondescript office building. (Stolen City)

This is probably also why the only thing that lives in the sewer are giant mutant rabbits. 

Notably, though, both the subway and the sewer system are in fairly good repair because they’re both under Hyperion City and its protective dome. The same doesn’t hold true for structures built outside of that protection:

People hadbuilt things down here, signs and lights and tracks, but the radiation hadclearly done damage even this deep below the surface. Fixtures corroded. Trackslike time had taken a blowtorch to them.

Even the existing domes are fragile. We know that Hyperion City’s has some places that are protected better than others.

RITA: Well… sounds like a pretty bad sandstorm is gonna hit this afternoon. You’ll probably want to be out of Oldtown by then; the shield over there’s about as strong as used tissues. They went into lockdown three times just last month. (Day That Wouldn’t Die)

Our Man-Who-Wasn’t picked a good neighborhood to set up shop in: the Old Industrial District, a place blasted by sandstorms and cosmic rays so hard that not even the roaches would live there anymore. The shields protecting the rest of Hyperion didn’t reach this far, and so neither would most of its citizens. It was the perfect place to do bad business – so long as you didn’t mind a tumor or two. (Prince of Mars)

That’s important: You can’t build domes just anywhere, and the domes that do exist have to be heavily shielded from sandstorms and cosmic rays. 

If you can solve those two problems, then you can build a dome wherever you want, you can build as many of them as you want, and all the unclaimed land on Mars is effectively yours for the taking– and that means that you now have the power to decide who gets to live there and who doesn’t. Do you give affordable housing to anyone who wants it, like Erin Marshall D’Arc? Or do you do like Pilot wanted, and make the hyper-wealthy pay top dollar so they can have their own personal golf course? Either way, that’s an incredible amount of power.

The Family D’Arc

So we have three main characters in this story: Erin, the scientist; Marshall, her son; and his kid, Domer 3 (they’re never given a name, but that’s what the script calls them).

We started in a reception hall that didn’t lookprepared to receive anybody. There were portrait frames on the walls, but mostof them were empty, and the ones that weren’t just showed family photos. A momand her son –- the D’Arcs, probably. The kid all grown up, moody, wild-eyed.The only full portrait in the room had the face scratched out – and theydidn’t look like Erin or Marshall. 

Erin was a military scientist who thought she had a solid technology on her hands, and believed in it enough to run away with a group of other believers. Erin was an optimist who seemed to genuinely believe in her Utopian dream.

After her death, her son Marshall took over leadership of the dome.

MARSHALL: Cuz Ma might’ve had allthat crap about everyone being her neighbor or whatever, but guess what? She’sdead.

The character descriptions in the script talk about how Marshall was a believer who wanted desperately to be good enough, but neither he nor the Free Dome ever lived up to expectations, and that broke him.

But all of that is background information. From what we see in the episode itself, Marshall was… not a nice person. His tests were murderous, sadistic, and full of gaslighting and victim-blaming, and the way he addressed his prospective “neighbors” was nothing short of abusive. 

So you’reprobably wondering why I stopped you out in these irradiated badlands, with allthe oogidies and the boogidies waiting to getcha. I’ve got three answers forthat. Answer one: it’s none of your business. Two: my testing materials havegot to last a long time, forever probably, and it’ll help wear-and-tear if lessof you make it to them. Three: it’s still none of your goddamn business.

“Anyone whowishes to enter the Free Dome must be generous, and give more of themselvesthan they can afford. So sit upon this Chair of Charity and give to us… fromyour blood.”

Congratulations.You’re a very generous idiot. Here’s the Dome… and here’s your blood back,weirdo. Just do me afavor: if you feel like you’re gonna bite the big one, show yourself out,alright? We’re already behind schedule without cleaning up your carcass.Marshall out.

That’s it!Easy, right? Just hold the Dome and walk straight. No matter what. You hear me?No matter what. (AN UNDERCURRENTOF DARK, DARK ANGER) And if youknow what’s good for you, you’ll listen.

That’s way beyond unreasonable. But it wasn’t just toward the test-takers. His kid flat out tells us that this was regular behavior for him.

Dad was a good guy, too. I mean… well, no hewasn’t. 

I never met her, but Dad… Dad wasn’t good beforethe radiation either.

(Notably, this is the same kind of language that Juno uses to describe his own mother.)

We don’t know Domer 3′s name, but we know that they lived outside of the dome with Marshall long enough to know him (and his abuse) before the radiation made him worse; we also know that Erin didn’t live to meet her grandchild. 

After Marshall presumably died, Domer 3 seems to be the last person here. They recorded warning messages to keep everybody away, and encoded a kill switch into the final recording so that once it was activated, nobody could enter the Free Dome again.

There is a fourth character here, but we only know them incidentally. I don’t know whether they were Marshall’s ex-partner or his co-leader, but Marshall really did not like this person:

MARSHALL: … a test tosee how generous you are. You want in you gotta have a sense of charity. Notlike that weasel Malvin, I swear ifyou’re listening to this, Mal, I’m gonna tear your—

Alright, fine.Test of Faith. You’ve got to do whatever I say exactly, right? That’s how youprove you can be faithful. That you’re going to listen when I tell you to dosomething. That you’re not just going to run out. Malvin.

I suspect Malvin is not Domer 3, because otherwise Domer 3 would have been given a name in the script. Also because Malvin clearly left on their own terms, whereas Domer 3 was clearly the last one there.

So what went wrong?

As near as I can put it together, there were two main problems, one structural and one societal.

Structurally, the dome tech just didn’t work.

I’m sure it did in the short term– after all, the dome sample that Pilot received was powerful enough to protect them from most of the dangers of the third trial, and it was stated to be a much less powerful version of the real thing. 

I genuinely believe that Erin set up her city on the other side of those doors in the end. But what worked in a lab setting just couldn’t hold up to the brute force of sandstorms and constant cosmic radiation. As soon as the dome failed, everybody had to rush back into the relative safety of the underground areas on the other side of the door. The ruins of the city were likely warped by radiation and ground up by sandstorms until they were reduced to nothing at all.

Underground, Erin kept trying to fix the dome tech, and then brought in her son to give it a go. Both of them failed.

I wish they made it. I wish it was possible. Erin, I think she really thought, even if she couldn’t do it… maybe Dad could. She believed in him so much. And when he realized he couldn’t make it work, he just… (BIG SIGH) It was bad. He was… bad.

They were underground in the facility long enough that they started to hallucinate death millipedes, undercrows, and from the sound of it, the functioning dome itself:

I don’t know how it happened. The undergroundradiation, maybe, making them see things, or… maybe they just wanted to see it. 

What exactly happened to them isn’t elaborated upon, but the implication is that they assumed that the tech worked and walked into the desert unprotected, which killed them within a few hours.

(Just to clarify: there was never any hallucinatory gas; the hallucinations were a result of the brainswell, which was in turn a result of the underground radiation.)

But there were some societal issues at play, too.

I’m gonna step back for a second into the real world: historically, there have been a handful of experimental Utopian colonies over the years, with varying degrees of success. A common thread, though, is that a lot of them tend to fall apart when people stop dividing things evenly and start hoarding and hiding an unfair share of the goods for themselves (among other things). The test of charity suggests that this is one of the things that went down here. Once again:

MARSHALL: … a test to see how generous you are. You want in you gotta have a sense of charity. Not like that weasel Malvin, I swear if you’re listening to this, Mal, I’m gonna tear your—

But it’s not the only thing that went wrong. 

Erin’s answer to a galaxy-ending conflict wasn’t to address any of the existing problems that broke the world, but to just pack up and move somewhere else.  Which is not that great of a strategy.

Your wholething is that the world’s a train wreck, so you open up a new city and just letanybody who wants walk in? That’s not anew world. That’s not a utopia. That’s the old one all over again. Justsmaller.

Erin’s strategy was apparently to please everybody, which is also not a great leadership strategy, especially in a small place with limited resources. Marshall had a lot of things to say about that, but he wasn’t much better. Apart from being seriously abusive, Marshall wasn’t the kind of leader that could command respect, which he clearly resented. 

… what isthis, second? Uh, Test of Faith, how about that? Listen to whatever I say.Somebody’s got to. Somebody should.

Hey, you listened. Nice work. If you’re alive. Which you probably aren’t. Because you probably didn’t listen. Nobody does. Why would you? Why would anybody? 

On a societal level, the Free Dome was doomed to fail even before the brainswell started making people hallucinate and taking away their ability to think rationally.

From the sound of it, people stopped listening to the D’Arcs, they started hoarding things, and then they started leaving or dying, until the only ones left were Marshall and his kid. And then it was just Domer 3, who shut down the whole thing and walked away.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND NERDS

And you know what? I couldn't imagine a great hacker how good he is, he's almost certain to reply, I don't know if it's possible to make yourself into one. Except the lions turned out not to have any teeth, and the average level of what they're writing, as you approach in the calculus sense a description of the US. As soon as someone tells you there's a rabbit as well as you can without endangering runtime systems like the garbage collector. Civil liberties are not just an ornament, or a car in the street playing thump-thump music. Now I know a number of people who use the phrase software engineering shake their heads disapprovingly. But even failure will get you out of most difficult situations. On the blunderometer, this episode ranks with IBM accepting a non-exclusive license for DOS. And that is almost certainly a good thing for investors that this is so easy you can pick a time when you're not in the middle. Get one. Or more precisely, archive, in the current filter, free in the Subject line has a spam probability for free with seven exclamation points, even though you won't actually use it: Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of the way?

They get new technology by buying the startups that created it—where everyone has to sit at their desk all day and work without interruption on things they can do without talking to anyone else. Now I have enough experience to realize that having invested time in something doesn't make it good for writing throwaway programs, because that showed how much time deciding what problems would be good to be popular to be good to solve? And the source of America's wealth and power. This is an open problem in the sense that architects have to design your life around getting into college, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me. There's no reason a new Lisp. Those are both good things to be. Because Boston investors were so few and so timid, we used to ship Boston batches out for a second Demo Day in Silicon Valley. When I discovered that one of our teachers was herself using Cliff's Notes, it seemed par for the course. What all this implies is that there is something amiss. But this Lisp must be a hacker's language, like the classic Lisps of the 1970s.

Not so much from specific things he's written as by reconstructing the mind that produced them. I'd tell myself I was only going to use the resources available. Introducing change is like pulling off a bandage: the pain is a memory almost as soon as possible, the same term was used for both products and information: there were distribution channels, and TV and radio channels. They ask it the way you might be able not only to pull off this scheme, but to do it well. To change the interface both have to agree to change it at once. And yet, as I used to hang around the MIT AI Lab occasionally. Inconceivable as it would have been too late. I've always thought that was unfair to them. If there are only so many startups, it's that they succeed or fail based on the total number of characters he'll have to type an unnecessary character, or even make sounds that tell what's happening.

At most those are interesting the way puzzles are. Hackers are lazy, in the famous Social Text affair. But you know perfectly well how bogus most of these are. Nerds on the LL1 mailing list, Paul Prescod wrote something that seemed cool, and just done something I liked. Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations. Having users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it. You want to be optimistic and skeptical about two different things. And yet the grad students seem pretty smart. This turns out not to want. Just be concise.

The tactics you encounter in M & A in the first sentence. Not smart enough You may need to refer to it at some point, but it seems lame to use them. Basically, I had to add a new application to my list of known time sinks: Firefox. But I know they exist. When my friends Robert Morris and I started. This is my excuse for not starting a startup for most of the talking. When we were in grad school I used to write existentialist short stories like ones I'd seen by famous writers. Investors' main question when judging a very early startup is whether you've made a compelling product. With some emails it's hard to tell good hackers when you meet them. I had to add a new application to my list of known time sinks: Firefox.

If a city offered these companies a million dollars. But I am always looking. They don't want to; you could tell he meant it. A language also needs to have a lot of questions, we all agree on this. What this means is that it only recently became feasible. It may seem cavalier to dismiss a language before they can use it to solve a lot of words on a slide, people just skip reading it. So is email, and spam in particular. Yes, but it's not as bad as the mid seventies. Civil liberties are not just an ornament, or a new category of things not to eat—the Bay Area would be the number of startups and think this can't continue.

Are there good universities nearby? A town with personality is one that isn't succinct enough. Plus I think they underestimate themselves: they think back to how easy it felt to ride that huge thermal upward, and they think anyone could have done to catch them. That will tend to produce an equilibrium. Why do good hackers have bad business ideas? On Demo Day each startup will only get ten minutes, a good economy won't save you. And what's especially dangerous is that many happen at your computer. What if you quit your job to start a new and much more exciting startup, Justin. When I probe our motives with Artix, I see signs of all three. There is hope for any language that gives hackers what they want, including Lisp. American universities during World War II, they often don't get thrown away.

[ezatluba]

How Koalas With an S.T.D. Could Help Humanity

When it comes to finding a vaccine for chlamydia, the world’s most common sexually transmitted infection, koalas may prove a key ally.

Skroo, a wild koala visiting Endeavour Veterinary Ecology clinic, on June 25. Researchers at the clinic are testing a vaccine against chlamydia in koalas, which is very similar to the human form of the disease.Credit...Russell Shakespeare for The New York Times

By Rachel E. Gross

July 13, 2020

The first sign is the smell: smoky, like a campfire, with a hint of urine. The second is the koala’s rear end: If it is damp and inflamed, with streaks of brown, you know the animal is in trouble. Jo, lying curled and unconscious on the examination table, had both.

Jo is a wild koala under the purview of Endeavour Veterinary Ecology, a wildlife consulting company that specializes in bringing sick koala populations back from the brink of disease. Vets noticed on their last two field visits that she was sporting “a suspect bum,” as the veterinarian Pip McKay put it. So they brought her and her 1-year-old joey into the main veterinary clinic, which sits in a remote forest clearing in Toorbul, north of Brisbane, for a full health check.

Ms. McKay already had an inkling of what the trouble might be. “Looking at her, she probably has chlamydia,” she said.

Humans don’t have a monopoly on sexually transmitted infections. Oysters get herpes, rabbits get syphilis, dolphins get genital warts. But chlamydia — a pared-down, single-celled bacterium that acts like a virus — has been especially successful, infecting everything from frogs to fish to parakeets. You might say chlamydia connects us all.

This shared susceptibility has led some scientists to argue that studying, and saving, koalas may be the key to developing a long-lasting cure for humans. “They’re out there, they’ve got chlamydia, and we can give them a vaccine, we can observe what the vaccine does under real conditions,” said Peter Timms, a microbiologist at the University of Sunshine Coast in Queensland. He has spent the past decade developing a chlamydia vaccine for koalas, and is now conducting trials on wild koalas, in the hopes that his formula will soon be ready for wider release. “We can do something in koalas you could never do in humans,” Dr. Timms said.

In koalas, chlamydia’s ravages are extreme, leading to severe inflammation, massive cysts and scarring of the reproductive tract. In the worst cases, animals are left yelping in pain when they urinate, and they develop the telltale smell. But the bacteria responsible is still remarkably similar to the human one, thanks to chlamydia’s tiny, highly conserved genome: It has just 900 active genes, far fewer than most infectious bacteria.

Because of these similarities, the vaccine trials that Endeavour and Dr. Timms are running may offer valuable clues for researchers across the globe who are developing a human vaccine.

A riddle, wrapped in a mystery

How bad is chlamydia in humans? Consider that around one in 10 sexually active teenagers in the United States is already infected, said Dr. Toni Darville, chief of the division of pediatric infectious diseases at the University of North Carolina. Chlamydia is the most common sexually transmitted infection worldwide, with 131 million new cases reported each year.

Antibiotics exist, but they are not enough to solve the problem, Dr. Darville said. That’s because chlamydia is a “stealth organism,” producing few symptoms and often going undetected for years.

“We can screen them all and treat them, but if you don’t get all their partners and all their buddies at the other high schools, you have a big spring break party and before you know it everybody’s infected again,” Dr. Darville said. “So they have this long-term chronic smoldering infection, and they don’t even know it. And then when they’re 28 and they’re like, ‘Oh, I’m ready to have a baby, everything’s a mess.’”

In 2019, Dr. Darville and her colleagues received a multiyear, $10.7 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop a vaccine. The ideal package would combine a chlamydia and gonorrhea vaccine with the HPV vaccine already given to most preteenagers. “If we could combine those three, you’d basically have a fertility anticancer vaccine,” she said.

Chlamydia’s stealth and ubiquity — the name means “cloak-like mantle” — owes to its two-stage life cycle. It starts out as an elementary body, a spore-like structure that sneaks into cells and hides from the body’s immune system. Once inside, it wraps itself in a membrane envelope, hijacks the host cell’s machinery and starts pumping out copies of itself. These copies either burst out of the cell or are released into the bloodstream to continue their journey.

“Chlamydia is pretty unique in that regard,” said Ken Beagley, a professor of immunology at Queensland University of Technology and a former colleague of Dr. Timms. “It’s evolved to survive incredibly well in a particular niche, it doesn’t kill its host and the damage it causes occurs over quite a long time.”

The bacterium can hang out in the genital tract for months or years, wreaking reproductive havoc. Scarring and chronic inflammation can lead to infertility, ectopic pregnancy or pelvic inflammatory disease. Evidence is mounting that chlamydia harms male fertility as well: Dr. Beagley has found that the bacteria damages sperm and could lead to birth abnormalities.

All of this — except the spring break parties — is true in both humans and koalas. Researchers who work with both species note that koala chlamydia looks strikingly similar to the human version. The main difference is severity: In koalas, the bacterium rapidly ascends the urogenital tract, and can jump from the reproductive organs to the bladder thanks to their anatomical proximity.

These parallels have led Dr. Timms to argue that koalas could serve as a “missing link” in the search for a human vaccine. “The koala is more than just a fancy animal model,” he said. “It actually is really useful for human studies.”

An ancient curse

No one knows how or when koalas first got chlamydia. But the curse is at least centuries old.

In 1798, European explorers reached the mountains of New South Wales and spied a creature that defied description: ear-tufted and spoon-nosed, it peered down stoically from the crooks of towering eucalyptus trees. They compared it to the wombat, the sloth and the monkey. They settled on “native bear” and gave it the genus name Phascolarctos (from the Greek for “leather pouch” and “bear”), spawning the misconception that the koala bear is, in fact, a bear.

“The graveness of the visage,” The Sydney Gazette wrote in 1803, “would seem to indicate a more than ordinary portion of animal sagacity.”

In the late 19th century, the Australian naturalist Ellis Troughton noted that the “quaint and lovable koala” was also particularly susceptible to disease. The animals suffered from an eye ailment similar to pink eye, which he blamed for waves of koala die-offs in the 1890s and 1900s. At the same time, the anatomist J.P. Hill found that koalas from Queensland and New South Wales often had ovaries and uteruses riddled with cysts. Many modern scientists now believe those koalas were probably afflicted with the same scourge: chlamydia.

Koalas today have even more to worry about. Dogs, careless drivers and, recently, rampant bushfires have driven their numbers down so far that conservation groups are calling for koalas to be listed as endangered. But chlamydia still reigns supreme: In parts of Queensland, the heart of the epidemic, the disease helped fuel an 80 percent decline over two decades.

The disease is also the one that most often sends koalas to the Australia Zoo Wildlife Hospital, the country’s busiest wildlife hospital, located 30 miles north of Endeavour. “The figures are 40 percent chlamydia, 30 percent cars, 10 percent dogs,” said Dr. Rosemary Booth, the hospital’s director. “And then the rest is an interesting assortment of what trouble you can get into when you have a small brain and your habitat’s been fragmented.”

Dr. Booth’s team treats “chlamydia koalas” with an amped-up regimen of the same antibiotics used on humans. “I get all of my chlamydia information from the C.D.C.,” she said, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the United States, “because America is the great center for chlamydia.”

But the cure can be as deadly as the disease. Deep inside a koala’s intestines, an army of bacteria helps the animal subsist off eucalyptus, a plant toxic to every other animal. “These are the ultimate example of an animal that’s completely dependent on a population of bacteria,” Dr. Booth said. Antibiotics extinguish that crucial gut flora, leaving a koala unable to gain nutrients from its food.

In a 2019 trial led by Dr. Timms and Dr. Booth, one of five koalas treated with antibiotics later had to be euthanized “due to gastrointestinal complications, resulting in muscle wasting and dehydration.” The problem is so dire that vets give antibiotic-treated koalas “poo shakes” — fecal transplants, essentially — in the hopes of restoring their microbiota.

For the past decade, Dr. Timms has worked to perfect a vaccine. Rather than treat animals once they are already sick, a widespread vaccine would protect koalas from any future sexual encounter and from passing the infection from mother to newborn. His formula, developed with Dr. Beagley, appears to work well: Trials have shown that it is safe to use and takes effect within 60 days, and that animals show immune responses that span their entire reproductive lives. The next step is optimizing it for use in the field.

At Endeavour, the vets treating Jo got a surprise: Molecular tests showed she was chlamydia-free. That meant she could be recruited for the current trial, which is testing a combined vaccine against chlamydia and the koala retrovirus known as KoRV, a virus in the same family as H.I.V. that similarly knocks down the koala’s immune system and makes chlamydia more deadly.

Dr. Timms is hoping that this trial and another in New South Wales will be the “clincher” — the last step before the government rolls out mass vaccinations. If he is right, it could be good news for more than just koalas.

Of mice and marsupials

Dr. Timms began his career studying chlamydia in livestock before moving on to using mice as a model for a human vaccine. Cheap, plentiful and amenable to genetic manipulation, mice have long been the gold standard for studying reproductive disease.

But the mouse model comes with serious drawbacks. Most glaringly, mice exhibit a profoundly different immune response to chlamydia than ours, making the idea of testing a mouse for a human vaccine “completely flawed,” Dr. Timms said.

After a decade of doing mouse work, he reasoned that he could take the insights he had gleaned and apply them to an animal that was actually suffering and possible to cure: the koala. “We don’t need a vaccine for mice,” he said. With “koala work, as hard as that is, and as difficult as that is, the results you get are the ones that matter.”

The more Dr. Timms worked with koalas, the more he realized that these marsupials were not so different from you and me. Here was a species that, like us, was naturally infected with several strains of chlamydia and suffered from similar reproductive outcomes, including infertility. He realized he might have a useful model animal on his hands.

“You’re better off doing a bad experiment in koalas than a good experiment in mice,” Dr. Timms said. “Because koalas really do get chlamydia and they really do get reproductive tract disease, so everything you do is relevant.”

Outside Australia, many researchers say the idea of a koala model is clever but difficult to implement. Dr. Darville pointed out that it would be expensive and logistically impossible to test 30 different vaccines in koalas. (According to Endeavour, it costs roughly $2,000 to pluck one koala from its tree and give it a health exam.)

Still, Dr. Timms said, the challenge was worth attempting: “The reason that we’re making a case that in between mouse and humans you should put koalas — rather than guinea pigs, minipigs and monkeys — is that koalas address all of the weaknesses, to some degree, that the others have.”

Paola Massari, an immunologist at Tufts Medical School, is collaborating with Dr. Timms to test a different potential vaccine in koalas. “The koala represents a perfect clinical model, because it’s an animal for which you can do some experimentation that’s a little more than what you can do in humans,” she said. “And at the same time, if you get results, you are curing a disease (in koalas).”

An unlikely alliance

On a hot February afternoon, Dr. Booth strode out into the blaring sunlight of the Australia Zoo grounds. She was heading to the chlamydia wards, which in 2018 were officially named the John Oliver Koala Chlamydia Ward after a grant was donated on the comedian’s behalf. About 20 sick koalas were being treated with antibiotics that day, with dozens more on the road to recovery.

Dr. Booth stepped up to a leafy enclosure, where a fluffy gray female eyed her curiously from her perch. This koala was originally brought in for chlamydia but had since recovered; her reason for being here, listed on her cage, was “misadventure.”

“This is little Lorna, who’s rather interesting,” Dr. Booth said. “She has a baby in her pouch and she’s had problems with her glucose metabolism” — she had diabetes.

Wasn’t it unusual to have an animal that gets such humanlike diseases: diabetes, cancer and sexually transmitted infections? “We are but an animal,” Dr. Booth said, throwing her hands up in a gesture of unity with the world. “We didn’t think of it first.”

It is still uncertain to what extent the research on koala chlamydia will help in developing a human vaccine. (Dr. Darville had been working for nine months when Covid-19 hit, shuttering her lab and slowing scientific progress.) What is certain is that the research done on human chlamydia has greatly benefited koalas. From human antibiotics to mouse insights, wildlife veterinarians have far more tools than before to save the vulnerable marsupials.

For Dr. Booth, helping koalas is more than enough. “I don’t want to save humans,” she said. “My emphasis is completely the other way: I want to use human research to help save other animals. Because they don’t have a voice unless we speak for them.”

[tylerbiard]

Some Social

So, in yet another bout of procrastination from my studies, I found a link via Facebook to an insightful article on Gen Z (or iGen), and sort of just immersed into it.  The article goes to great lengths to describe the incoming generation’s mindset and how it’s penchant for mobile phones and social media is destroying their mental health, which made me ponder my own life.

I know I’ve talked about Gen Z before, and my dealings with them, comparing them to my generation, the infamous Millennials.  I probably came off as smug.  To be sure, a lot of the things associated with Gen Z, even things that came to the fore with my generation, aren’t things I’m really enamoured by, but they aren’t the fault of Gen Z any more than they are the fault of Millennials.  I’ve actually been hearing more about Gen Z in media lately, almost as if the world has actually realized that we can’t have people born in the mid-’80s apart of the same generation as those born in the early 2010s.  I’m really just trying to not feel usurped by this upstart, now-trending generation. Gen Z encompasses people born from the late ‘90s to early 2010s, a generation that doesn’t remember 9/11 or a world without smartphones. Spooky, eh?

For me, what the article describes of the Millennial upbringing is accurate -- I did grow up with computers and the internet, but I didn’t have it around me at all hours. I remember in junior high, rushing out after school, to catch the earliest bus home so that I could chat on MSN with a friend living in Spain before he had to go to bed.  But that whole day at school?  Aside from class-designated computer time in a dedicated lab, which didn’t even occur daily, it was entirely offline.  We weren’t even able to bring our own laptops to school until 11th grade, and even then, most didn’t.  My first cellphones could only arduously send SMS via T9 technology, which limited its usefulness.  And accessing the internet with a circa 2002 Nokia?  What a joke!  This was an epoch before the endless onslaught of apps, a world without filters and Bitmoji.  Essentially, even though we largely got our first cell phones by 13 or 14, they were quite limited in capability.  What’s more is that they were strictly banned from usage during class time in junior and senior high, something that was lifted a few years after I graduated high school.  I realize this last bit is more geographically-dependent, as I’m sure many school boards throughout the world were more lax on cell phone usage circa 2008, and even with the outright ban, many still snuck it into class.

Furthermore, I didn’t really grow up with social media.  I know I’m a bit of an outlier for a Millennial, but I had Tumblr before I had Facebook, and the only social network I was apart of in high school was Flickr.  Still, I watched as peers, using Nexopia and Facebook, and migrating to early smartphones, fall prey to the now all-too-common side effects of social media and chatting.  Hell, I still dealt with it through MSN, Flickr, and such.  Our app-centric, mobile world is merely an outgrowth of this paradigm. 

Now, though, things are different.  I have an iPhone, I have multiple social media accounts, and use multiple chat services.  An onlooker could easily peg me as one fully in embrace of the 2017 “always on” lifestyle.  This is where the article really started to intrigue me.  A lot of what the article was describing vis-a-vis the Gen Z kids seemed applicable to this late Millennial.  Perhaps partly due to my not being that far removed from that generation’s eldest cohorts. Although I did grow up without iPhones and iPads and the ability to constantly be “on,” it’s now 2017, and that difference has eroded. I was surprised at the kinship I was feeling towards Gen Z and their woes mentioned in the article.  I may remember a time before all this stuff, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m living it now.

I recognize I spend too much time on social media, on chat apps, and to a lesser extent, my computer.  It does make me feel much lonelier than when I spend time in the physical world with friends and family, even if too much of that is exhaustive.  It does produce an environment where it’s inevitable to compare yourself to others, and resent others for how much fun they’re projecting on Instagram and Facebook, even if it’s really just a veneer.  Things like read receipts, last active information, and so forth just further aid at digging in the dagger.  It also produces an environment where you’re more likely to just stay in and send Snaps to friends than go out with them, which goes against human nature, as a social species.  It’s obviously extremely toxic and yet most can’t stop the vicious cycle. 

I’ve had my issues with Facebook in particular, and regularly contemplate deleting it, especially now that you can have a Messenger account independent of Facebook.  I’ve deactivated, I’ve deleted the app; now, I’m merely abstaining from posting to it and have moved the mobile app to a more hidden locale on my phone.  But honestly, it’s a problem I have with pretty much all social media, at least social media that is more personal.  I’m more ok with Twitter; it’s mostly just news and memes, not a detailed look into personal lives.  Tumblr is similar, due to its more anonymous nature, although when it was a more active platform, I had the same issues with it.

I recognize that I’m happier when I interact more with the physical world and I really don’t like spending so much time online.  But for me, there’s two major impediments to either significantly curtailing usage, or doing a total blackout, and I recognize it as a detriment to my health.

The first is school, which is obviously not actually related to social media, and so it isn’t an obvious reason for why I can’t stop spending time online.  But, because of how post-secondary is set up now, a lot of stuff occurs online, be it through e-mail, or eClass, where you gain access to readings and slides, not to mention being a place to take notes.  I’ve stopped typing notes, except in special cases, though I still end up using a computer to access other essential stuff for my courses.  And in doing so, it is all too tempting to look one tab over to Twitter, or see a new notification on Facebook, and then you go down that rabbit hole, and bam, you’ve lost 30 minutes of productivity.  I’m beginning to intentionally keep my laptop browser’s tabs all school related now, though I sometimes still get tempted to open new tabs, or tabs sometimes remain open from downtime.  The other, ancillary thing to being on campus is that I’m out, which means I have my phone on me, which means it’s always just there.  I may turn my phone to ‘do not disturb’, but the addictive qualities of smartphones just means I will still manually check for new notifications every now and again.  To entirely remove the distraction of my iPhone, personally, it can’t be present, which is why when I do homework at home, I make sure my phone is nowhere nearby.  Perhaps I should start leaving the phone at home.

The other impediment is more obvious to those who are aware of my background as a photographer.  Since DeviantArt and Blogger, through Flickr, Facebook, et al, and onto Instagram, social networks have been utterly vital for 21st century creatives to push their work to the wider public.  So, although it can be fun to just use social for everyday stuff, I use it as a more serious avenue, and feel it as a necessary evil nowadays.  How am I supposed to share and connect with other artists in 2017 if I do a social media blackout?  A blackout may solve the previous impediment, but not this one.  Having an Instagram is now so essential to share content as a creative.

I could do away with the smartphone, and only use social media and the internet when I’m connected to a computer proper, and essentially live a 2005 existence with the 2017 internet.  I’ve contemplated swapping the iPhone for a flip phone, and I swear it’s only partly over 2000s nostalgia.  I honestly am not hating that idea.  A problem arises from something I’ve belaboured before -- my disdain for the mobile-centric nature of social networks nowadays.    Sure, you can browse and explore Instagram from Chrome on your PC or iMac, but you can’t DM, you can’t view Stories, and most importantly, you can’t upload without tricking your browser into thinking it’s an iPad. Of all the social I use for more serious use today, Instagram is by far the most pivotal, due to its visual nature and strong engagement.  I’ve connected with a lot of amazing photographers, artists, and friends through it.  Even if mobile phones are to blame for teen suicide now being higher than teen homicide, it doesn’t change the fact that they’re at the zeitgeist for connecting in 2017, and app developers know that kids are using their phones far more than their computers and correspondingly create experiences that are mobile-centric.  It helps coding for a mobile interface is easier than a traditional desktop interface, too. 

As things continue, it seems like crucial connections will be increasingly on platforms that couldn’t give a rats ass about desktop interfaces, and so I realize a mobile device is still necessary, unfortunately.  Perhaps I could swap my iPhone for an iPod Touch, or migrate my SIM card to a “dumbphone” and keep the iPhone as a Wi-Fi only device (basically turning it into an iPod Touch).  I could also just get an iPad.  I actually sort of like that idea, but many mobile apps, like Instagram and Snapchat, don’t have a proper version for this mobile device.  I could just get an Android tablet, which doesn’t have the same differentiation that iOS has between phones and tablets, but I’ve had issues with Android, such that, at the risk of sounding like a Cupertino cliche, I’d rather have an iPad if I got a tablet.

Regardless, something needs to change. The current reality is too connected for my well-being.  My productivity is way down, too.  I’m too distracted.  What I find most ironic is that I was planning on watching The Social Network tonight, and instead, got engrossed in a random article, which inspired me to write an essay for the first time in eons with Starboy as my backdrop.  The result was still the same, however -- I again thwarted plans to further push through studies. 

What a world we live in.

[kiddylanes]

Why should you say 'No' to Multitasking?

When I ask people at what age they feel they were (or are) the sharpest, it is shocking to me that no matter their current age – 20s, 50s, 80s – they always say their peak performance was 10, and often 20, years earlier. It does not have to be that way. Your best brain years can be ahead of you, not behind. Recent studies show that if you can change the way you think, you can change the wiring in your brain to improve its function and health.

I have spent my career researching how the brain best learns, reasons and makes sound decisions, as well as how to strengthen it. My goal is to accelerate the discovery of ways to ensure our brains remain more vibrant, supporting our need to make sound financial decisions, solve problems and retain creativity. In my recent book, Make Your Brain Smarter: Increase Your Creativity, Energy and Focus, I condense 30 years of research into tips on how you can rev up your brain's performance at any age.

Many scientifically proven strategies to boost your mental performance involve easily embraceable, common-sense tactics that can have an immense impact on the long-term health of your most important natural resource. One such tactic is eliminating toxic multitasking.

Why Multitasking Fails

So often we find ourselves in environments that erroneously place a high value on being able to multitask, the prevailing perception being that the more you can do at once, the more expertly intelligent and efficient you are. Alarmingly, some people even believe that multitasking is a good workout for the brain.

This type of thinking is damaging to your health

Multitasking is a brain drain that exhausts the mind, zaps cognitive resources and, if left unchecked, condemns us to early mental decline and decreased sharpness. Chronic multitaskers also have increased levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, which can damage the memory region of the brain.

The truth is, your brain is not designed to do more than one thing at a time. It literally cannot achieve this, except in very rare circumstances. Instead, it toggles back and forth from one task to the next. For example, when you are driving while talking on the phone, your brain can either use its resources to drive or to talk on the phone, but never both. Scans show that when you talk on the phone, there is limited activation of your visual brain – suggesting you are driving without really watching. This explains how we can sometimes end up places without knowing exactly how we got there.

Frequently switching between tasks overloads the brain and makes you less efficient. It's a formula for failure in which your thoughts remain on the surface level and errors occur more frequently.

Multitasking, though, can be a difficult habit to break. It's more common among teenagers and young adults who are constantly connected to email, smart phones and social media apps, but older technology users also seek the immediate satisfaction of beeps, dings and buzzes. Each creates an addicting release of dopamine in the brain, which perpetuates the need for speed and ceaseless stimulation, making the cycle more difficult to break.

Time for a Change

If you are a chronic multitasker, there is good news: You are never too old (or too young) to be proactive about brain health and performance. Recent studies provide evidence that adopting healthier thinking habits and improved cognitive strategies can rejuvenate your mind, reversing its clock by decades.

When you train your brain to think more strategically and efficiently, measurable improvements register on the biological level. Our own studies show that after only six hours of training, subjects can experience upsurges in neuron-nourishing blood flow, the genesis of new brain cells, improved communication between regions of the brain and increased white matter growth.

Consistent single-tasking helps ensure that your decision-making skills last late into your senior years. In "Healthy Brain, Healthy Decisions," a recent study of rational ability in people age 50 to 80, sponsored by the MetLife Mature Market Institute, the biggest predictor of a sound decision-maker was a high capacity for strategic attention, the ability to filter the most important information from less relevant data. Even better, the study found that strategic attention actually increases with age. And single-tasking is one of the best ways to prime the mind for strategic attention. (See tips for making better decisions from the study's authors here.)

Steps to Single-Tasking

Start your journey toward better brain health by adopting a single-tasking lifestyle in which getting things done sequentially is the rule. Your brain was wired for deep and innovative thinking, but that's impossible to achieve if you're trying to make it go in two or more directions at once. It takes a concerted effort to leave the chaotic addiction of multitasking behind, but the benefits are immediate and immense. It will increase your creativity, energy and focus. Here are a few tips to get you started:

Give your brain some down time. You will be more productive if, several times a day, you step away from mentally challenging tasks for three to five minutes. Get some fresh air, for example, or just look out the window. Taking a break will help make room for your next inspired idea because a halt in constant thinking slows the mind's rhythms to allow more innovative "aha" moments.

Focus deeply, without distraction. Silence your phone, turn off your email and try to perform just one task at a time. Think it's impossible to break away? Start with 15-minute intervals and work your way up to longer time periods. Giving your full attention to the project at hand will increase accuracy, innovation and speed.

Make a to-do list. Then identify your top two priorities for the day and make sure they are accomplished above all else. Giving the most important tasks your brain's prime time will make you feel more productive. Or, as Boone Pickens said, "When you are hunting elephants, don't get distracted chasing rabbits."

These tips — along with a healthy diet, adequate rest (about eight hours a night) and regular aerobic exercise (three times a week for 50 minutes) — will keep your mind and body functioning well. Thanks to medical advances, more of us will live to 100 and beyond, but our peak brain performance comes, at best, at about half that age. So our bodies live almost another lifetime after our brains' natural peak. This is why we all need to make a concerted effort to make our brains smarter. Don't let your brain go backward. Your future depends on it

Courtesy: Sandra Bond Chapman, Forbes.com

For more of such feeds, visit, https://kiddylanes.com/blogs/news

[myupdatesystems-blog]

How To Master Your Website Even If You Are Not Tech-Ie

New Post has been published on https://myupdatesystems.com/how-to-master-your-website-even-if-you-are-not-tech-ie/

How To Master Your Website Even If You Are Not Tech-Ie

My website redesign went over-budget… I had three days to fix a long list of stuff, and my budget was running low, real low… and it turned out to be a Good Thing.

Although the “concept” of this website has started months ago, I have taken the time to let it brew because I want every move to be INTENTIONAL, to reflect how I want to do ME in my business.

4 weeks ago, I finally felt the click. The time was ripe, so I went ahead and contacted my web gal, Jenn, for the project. I outlined a scope, set a budget, prepare all the materials and necessary information (down to the hex#) to help make the process as smooth as possible. I thought I covered everything.

Of course, there is always Murphy’s Law. The theme we originally selected did not allow her to make the website the way we wanted (haha, so much about “plug-and-play”!) Then the sign up box under the header got all scrambled up when viewed on mobile.

Jenn ended up developing a custom theme for the site, and we had to come up with solutions for the mobile hiccup. Long story short, we ran out of time and budget.

It was Saturday and I was getting nervous about the list of “fixes” that needed to get done because I had a guest blog post going live on the next Tuesday with the author bio pointing to the new site.

The list was quite daunting… fixing homepage layout, adding a testimonial rotator, adding links to the footer, cleaning up social share icons, revisiting some sidebar content, figuring out URL redirect, setting up business email with the new domain name, going over layout of critical pages to make sure nothing is broken, synching up all Mailchimp lists and info with the new URL and email address, and installing a trigger-box for list building… And Jenn still had to code the homepage on Monday!

I decided that instead of toiling my thumbs, sweating buckets and putting pressure on Jenn, I would pitch in and check some stuff off the list.

And I did. I fixed some homepage layout stuff (figuring out html while chasing two kids was… interesting), hooked up the testimonial rotator, got all the sidebar and footer content sorted, figured out how to use a plug-in to set up redirect, reviewed layout of I-don’t-know-how-many pages (including 70 blog posts)… even tested a few pop-up plug-ins to see which one I like, and fixed the.php file for the shopping cart – without breaking anything!

On top of that, I did some research and came up with a solution for the scrambled sign up box on the header, created a new Photoshop file for Jenn so she can get it going first thing on Monday.

Yep, all in one weekend, while herding two kids and with family in town. Came Monday, Jenn was able to go in and focus on setting up the homepage and fixing the header sign up, and we got it “good to go” by the end of the day. PHEW!

Even though I was on hyperdrive and lost some sleep (the adrenals ain’t happy about that), it turned out to be a valuable learning experience.

I feel so much more empowered and confident about handling all things WordPress – not just what I can do to fix something, but also where to find the resources/information to tackle a problem. That means I didn’t just solve the crisis at hand, but also learned a bag of tricks and gathered a box of tools that will save me time, money and panic down the road.

It’s not about “doing it all by myself”. It’s not about proving something. It’s not about saving VA budget.

It’s about being able to be flexible and “not freak out” – because when sh!t happens at the 11th hour (and it will), you still have to roll up your sleeve and fix it. It’s better to feel confident and prepared, rather than spending the time and effort to start learning and panicking (which does NOT help with the thinking bit.)

It will cut frustration and panicking – energy drains that are not conducive to putting good vibe out there to attract the clients you want.

WordPress basics is NOT rocket science. First Thing you need to do to Conquer “Technology” is to stop saying “I am not tech-ie”

If you go in thinking you can’t handle it, you will look at the bumps and hiccups as evidence that you can’t handle it. Really, it’s that simple. It may sound like some trite personal development stuff… but that’s true and let’s roll with it for a moment.

You don’t have to be “tech-ie” to make things work on WordPress, or to hook up your online marketing. I had a client who asked a friend that teaches computer stuff in the university to help her with website, email marketing, social media and whatnot… of course, that friend has NO idea what Mailchimp is about, or how to make Facebook work for a business.

If you are thinking “tech-ie-ness” is what you need, you are barking up the wrong tree.

A lot of times, learning the basics (even the intermediates) is about having the clear head and the openness to ask the right questions.

Clear head comes from having the confidence in yourself that you CAN do it. Many competent coders don’t get it right the first time (I have witnessed this time and again during my 10 years working closely with these guys in online marketing agencies.) It is about having the confidence to keep at the troubleshooting – TRUST that you can do it, and think creatively.

How to Become the Master of Your Website

Of course, it’s not like you tell yourself you can do it and you can (I am not that out there.) Managing a website does take some solid skills and practical knowledge, so here are a few things to help you empower yourself and take charge so you can be the Master of your website:

(note: being the “master” does not mean you have to know how to do everything. It is about having the control so you can manage what comes up and devise solutions for the problem at hand)

Educate yourself on the basics – you don’t have to know how to code, but understanding the basics, knowing what to ask and using the correct terminologies can help facilitate the process. There will be fewer chances of miscommunication – which can lead to your web guy building something totally different that what you *think* you are getting, wasting precious time and money. I also find that developers show you more respect and are less likely to give you BS if you take the initiative to know your part.

If you hire someone to set up a website for you, ask for a 30-minute walkthrough as part of the service package so you feel comfortable making changes on your own, instead of having to wait a few days just for some minor adjustments to be made.

Check out this plug-in called Sidekick – it provides interactive, real-time, narrated guides through the WordPress administration area.

Don’t forget good ol’ Google! Ask the right question, and focus on your end goal so you don’t get sucked into the rabbit hole.

If you purchase themes and plug-ins, chances are the merchant offers some kind of support, such as a forum or help desk. Make good use of them – most sellers are very helpful and I had good experience with many of them.

If you have an email newsletter service provider and need to hook up your sign up form to your website, call customer support or submit a help ticket. Personally I have great experience with Mailchimp email support.

Know where to find help when you need it – there are many websites where you can post a task and developers will respond with a quote. E.g. Elance.com, oDesk.com, and Codeable.io.

A few “DUH” tips to save you time and frustration:

(I learned them the hard way… )

Clear Cache! Yes, simple as that! As you edit and save and edit more and save more, your browser gets gunk up with stuff. It not only impacts the load time (which can be frustrating for the impatient) you may also be seeing things that have already been updated but are still showing up because the browser is “remembering it.”

Less Is More when it comes to plug-ins. Those bells and whistles may look cool but the more plug-ins you have the more likely a code conflict will occur. Deactivating all the plug-ins (except the ones you can’t live without) and then reactivating them one by one to see which one is causing trouble, can often help troubleshoot a lot of issues.

Take a break. I can’t tell you how many times I walk away from nearly trashing my computer and come back with new solutions that worked magic.

Don’t Forget These Website Soulwork

You never know what variety of sh!t is going to hit the fan when the 1’s and 0’s are having a party, so SHOW UP to whatever shows up to you. And TRUST that you can do it (or have the resource to find someone who can!)

Fears* may be holding you back from asking the right questions, or asking any question! (Having humor helps if you end up asking the stupidest question… make a joke and laugh about it. I do that all the time.) – The fear of INADEQUACY – if you feel like you are not good enough, you don’t have the confidence to challenge others. You may not want to ask questions because it may reaffirm your limiting belief that you don’t know enough. – The fear of being VULNERABLE – if you don’t want to appear vulnerable, you may “puff up” and appear that you know it all. You don’t want to ask questions that make you appear not knowledgable. – The fear of MISSING OUT – if you are afraid that if you don’t “act now” and get it done you may miss out on something – and this fear drives you to make hasty decisions before you have all the facts. E.g. how many times we succumb to pithes like “buy this plug-in now for $97 or you will be the only one left without these cool features on your website!”, and ended up with a bunch of “stuff” on our hard drive – never installed, never put to use – only adding guilt and even make us feel we must be dumb because we can’t figure out what to do with it.

(Recap) If you go in thinking you can’t handle it, you will look at the bumps and hiccups as evidence that you can’t handle it. Pat yourself on the back every time you figure out something, because it gives you the encouragement to do more.

If you don’t preconceive what you can or cannot do, you may be pleasantly surprised by what’s possible.

Your potentiality is only limited by the fence constructed with what you tell yourself. Mind your words

Ling Wong, Business Artist and Chief Freedom Fighter at business-soulwork.com, provides Business Soulwork + Marketing Activation for the Maverick Entrepreneur to build a business that is a full expression of their creativity and individuality.

Ling helps her clients supercharge their actions not only through practical strategies and marketing tools, but also through their growth and development – so they not only grow their business, but also LET THEIR BUSINESS GROW THEM. Through her “left brain meets right brain” approach, she helps her clients uncover their truth and tap into their intuition, then ground those light bulb moments with practical strategies and marketing tactics.

[netmaddy-blog]

How To Master Your Website

New Post has been published on https://netmaddy.com/how-to-master-your-website/

How To Master Your Website

My website redesign went over-budget… I had three days to fix a long list of stuff, and my budget was running low, real low… and it turned out to be a Good Thing.

Although the “concepting” of this website has started months ago, I have taken the time to let it brew because I want every move to be INTENTIONAL, to reflect how I want to do ME in my business.

4 weeks ago, I finally felt the click. The time was ripe, so I went ahead and contacted my web gal, Jenn, for the project. I outlined a scope, set a budget, prepare all the materials and necessary information (down to the hex#) to help make the process as smooth as possible. I thought I covered everything Page Papi.

Of course, there is always Murphy’s Law. The theme we originally selected did not allow her to make the website the way we wanted (haha, so much about “plug-and-play”!) Then the sign up box under the header got all scrambled up when viewed on mobile.

Jenn ended up developing a custom theme for the site, and we had to come up with solutions for the mobile hiccup. Long story short, we ran out of time and budget.

It was Saturday and I was getting nervous about the list of “fixes” that needed to get done because I had a guest blog post going live on the next Tuesday with the author bio pointing to the new site.

The list was quite daunting… fixing homepage layout, adding a testimonial rotator, adding links to the footer, cleaning up social share icons, revisiting some sidebar content, figuring out URL redirect, setting up business email with the new domain name, going over layout of critical pages to make sure nothing is broken, synching up all Mailchimp lists and info with the new URL and email address, and installing a trigger-box for list building… And Jenn still had to code the homepage on Monday!

I decided that instead of toiling my thumbs, sweating buckets and putting pressure on Jenn, I would pitch in and check some stuff off the list.

And I did. I fixed some homepage layout stuff (figuring out html while chasing two kids was… interesting), hooked up the testimonial rotator, got all the sidebar and footer content sorted, figured out how to use a plug-in to set up redirect, reviewed layout of I-don’t-know-how-many pages (including 70 blog posts)… even tested a few pop-up plug-ins to see which one I like, and fixed the.php file for the shopping cart – without breaking anything!

On top of that, I did some research and came up with a solution for the scrambled sign up box on the header, created a new Photoshop file for Jenn so she can get it going first thing on Monday.

Yep, all in one weekend, while herding two kids and with family in town. Came Monday, Jenn was able to go in and focus on setting up the homepage and fixing the header sign up, and we got it “good to go” by the end of the day. PHEW!

Even though I was on hyperdrive and lost some sleep (the adrenals ain’t happy about that), it turned out to be a valuable learning experience.

I feel so much more empowered and confident about handling all things WordPress – not just what I can do to fix something, but also where to find the resources/information to tackle a problem. That means I didn’t just solve the crisis at hand, but also learned a bag of tricks and gathered a box of tools that will save me time, money and panic down the road.

It’s not about “doing it all by myself”. It’s not about proving something. It’s not about saving VA budget.

It’s about being able to be flexible and “not freak out” – because when sh!t happens at the 11th hour (and it will), you still have to roll up your sleeve and fix it. It’s better to feel confident and prepared, rather than spending the time and effort to start learning and panicking (which does NOT help with the thinking bit.)

It will cut frustration and panicking – energy drains that are not conducive to putting good vibe out there to attract the clients you want.

WordPress basics is NOT rocket science. First Thing you need to do to Conquer “Technology” is to stop saying “I am not tech-ie”

If you go in thinking you can’t handle it, you will look at the bumps and hiccups as evidence that you can’t handle it. Really, it’s that simple. It may sound like some trite personal development stuff… but that’s true and let’s roll with it for a moment.

You don’t have to be “tech-ie” to make things work on WordPress, or to hook up your online marketing. I had a client who asked a friend that teaches computer stuff in the university to help her with website, email marketing, social media and whatnot… of course, that friend has NO idea what Mailchimp is about, or how to make Facebook work for a business.

If you are thinking “tech-ie-ness” is what you need, you are barking up the wrong tree.

A lot of times, learning the basics (even the intermediates) is about having the clear head and the openness to ask the right questions.

Clear head comes from having the confidence in yourself that you CAN do it. Many competent coders don’t get it right the first time (I have witnessed this time and again during my 10 years working closely with these guys in online marketing agencies.) It is about having the confidence to keep at the troubleshooting – TRUST that you can do it, and think creatively.

How to Become the Master of Your Website

Of course, it’s not like you tell yourself you can do it and you can (I am not that out there.) Managing a website does take some solid skills and practical knowledge, so here are a few things to help you empower yourself and take charge so you can be the Master of your website:

(note: being the “master” does not mean you have to know how to do everything. It is about having the control so you can manage what comes up and devise solutions for the problem at hand)

Educate yourself on the basics – you don’t have to know how to code, but understanding the basics, knowing what to ask and using the correct terminologies can help facilitate the process. There will be fewer chances of miscommunication – which can lead to your web guy building something totally different that what you *think* you are getting, wasting precious time and money. I also find that developers show you more respect and are less likely to give you BS if you take the initiative to know your part.

If you hire someone to set up a website for you, ask for a 30-minute walkthrough as part of the service package so you feel comfortable making changes on your own, instead of having to wait a few days just for some minor adjustments to be made.

Check out this plug-in called Sidekick – it provides interactive, real-time, narrated guides through the WordPress administration area.

Don’t forget good ol’ Google! Ask the right question, and focus on your end goal so you don’t get sucked into the rabbit hole.

If you purchase themes and plug-ins, chances are the merchant offers some kind of support, such as a forum or help desk. Make good use of them – most sellers are very helpful and I had good experience with many of them.

If you have an email newsletter service provider and need to hook up your sign up form to your website, call customer support or submit a help ticket. Personally I have great experience with Mailchimp email support.

Know where to find help when you need it – there are many websites where you can post a task and developers will respond with a quote. E.g. Elance.com, oDesk.com, and Codeable.io. A few “DUH” tips to save you time and frustration:

(I learned them the hard way… )

Clear Cache! Yes, simple as that! As you edit and save and edit more and save more, your browser gets gunk up with stuff. It not only impacts the load time (which can be frustrating for the impatient) you may also be seeing things that have already been updated but are still showing up because the browser is “remembering it.” Less Is More when it comes to plug-ins. Those bells and whistles may look cool but the more plug-ins you have the more likely a code conflict will occur. Deactivating all the plug-ins (except the ones you can’t live without) and then reactivating them one by one to see which one is causing trouble, can often help troubleshoot a lot of issues. Take a break. I can’t tell you how many times I walk away from nearly trashing my computer and come back with new solutions that worked magic. Don’t Forget These Website Soulwork

You never know what variety of sh!t is going to hit the fan when the 1’s and 0’s are having a party, so SHOW UP to whatever shows up to you. And TRUST that you can do it (or have the resource to find someone who can!)

Fears* may be holding you back from asking the right questions, or asking any question! (Having humor helps if you end up asking the stupidest question… make a joke and laugh about it. I do that all the time.) – The fear of INADEQUACY – if you feel like you are not good enough, you don’t have the confidence to challenge others. You may not want to ask questions because it may reaffirm your limiting belief that you don’t know enough. – The fear of being VULNERABLE – if you don’t want to appear vulnerable, you may “puff up” and appear that you know it all. You don’t want to ask questions that make you appear not knowledgable. – The fear of MISSING OUT – if you are afraid that if you don’t “act now” and get it done you may miss out on something – and this fear drives you to make hasty decisions before you have all the facts. E.g. how many times we succumb to pithes like “buy this plug-in now for $97 or you will be the only one left without these cool features on your website!”, and ended up with a bunch of “stuff” on our hard drive – never installed, never put to use – only adding guilt and even make us feel we must be dumb because we can’t figure out what to do with it.