#except the website still has no explanation on whats covered yet because i only just got approved

[kiliinstinct]

Guess whose got a pair of broken glasses, a pink eye and just got approved for Medical Benefits the day after both these things happened?

[sortavibing]

what the karasuno team smells like but ✨realistic✨

daichi: like old spice cologne. this is so obvious, lets be honest here. his dad wore the same thing, so it’s just like a tradition for him, and he never thought about changing it, and since it isn’t bad, no one cares enough to tell him that maybe he should try and switch it up.

sugawara: he smells like oranges and cedarwood. suga knows how important it is to smell good, and he knows how to match scents well because he is a bad bitch. he isn’t afraid to call people out for smelling bad, so he has verbally attacked kageyama, hinata, tanaka, and noya many times, but they still refuse to change their ways.

asahi: he smells like vanilla, since he uses vanilla scented lotion and shampoo, and he really likes the smell of it, but he wants to seem tough, so he also bought a “tough guy” cologne, which smells like leather. those 2 smells actually smell pretty good together, and neither overpowers the other, so asahi likes it a lot.

nishinoya: you cannot convince me that he knows what a shower is, like he just hoses himself down every week and he calls himself clean. he didn’t use deodorant or cologne up until his 2nd year, when suga couldn’t handle the smell anymore and told him to wear something to cover the smell, so he asked tanaka for advice (bad idea), and he recommended him to use axe, so that’s what he does, but he doesn’t put enough, so he still smells like b.o. (i’m sorry noya simps but this is true)

tanaka: this man reeks of axe body spray, because he thinks it smells “manly” so he puts a shit ton of it on him because according to him, the more you put on the more manly and intimidating you are. the whole team (except noya, who agrees with him), has tried to convince him that the smell is suffocating, but he refuses to listen to them.

ennoshita: he smells like book pages. he uses a lightly scented deodorant, that smells like “fresh air”, but most of his scent is natural, and he doesn’t really notice that he naturally smells nice. suga told him once, and he became so much more confident in himself, and he silently gloats about it to the other 2nd years.

kinoshita: he smells like cinnamon, but like the smallest amount of cinnamon ever. you can’t really the smell it at first, but the longer you are around him, the more obvious it becomes. he doesn’t really know why he smells like cinnamon, because he uses unscented deodorant, but he doesn’t care because he thinks it smells good.

narita: like fresh cut grass and b.o. there is no explanation for this, he just looks like he smells like this and i take no arguments on this topic.

kageyama: he doesn’t realize that there is anti-perspirant deodorant, so he just uses normal stick deodorant that smells like “clean comfort” idk i found it on the dove website and it seemed right, but since he is playing volleyball literally all the time, he also smells like sweat, but he doesn’t notice until someone comments on it, and even if someone does, he won’t do anything about it.

hinata: he couldn’t care less about how he smelled, so he just smells sweaty 100% of the time, but it isn’t as bad as noya, so no one has decided to call him out on it yet. suga tried to introduce him to cologne once, but hinata accidentally sprayed it too close to his face and got it in his eyes and mouth, which made him hate it more, so he just doesn’t wear anything that would cover or stop his sweat.

tsukishima: like fresh linen. he doesn’t use really strong colonges, because he thinks it’s obnoxious and gross (another reason why he hates most of the guys on the team), so he uses stick deodorant, and you can only smell it if you are really close to him that's never going to happen

yamaguchi: he smells so nice. like- he uses dove body wash, and strawberry scented lotion, so he always has a slight strawberry smell. he also doesn’t like super strong smells, so he uses stick deodorant like tsukishima, but his smells like lavender. he also uses shampoo with lavender undertones, so he literally smells perfect. we stan this man so much holy shit.

kiyoko: like roses and jasmine. she once was out shopping, and she found this perfume and it smelled perfect. so now she religiously uses it. she really hates the smell of axe body spray, so whenever she’s around tanaka and noya, she carries a small container of a cologne that smells like sea salt and sandalwood, and she sprays them with it whenever they come close. the third years are very grateful

yaichi: she smells like the sugar cookie scent from bath and body works. there’s not really a reason for this, but she just gives off those vibes. it smells really good, so no one is complaining about it.

ukai: he smells like cigarette smoke with a hint of aftershave. he tries to use the aftershave to cover up the smell of smoke on him, but it doesn’t work that well, and it just makes the cigarette odor smell worse. his whole convenience store smells like this, and he doesn’t notice it, since he’s been in the store for so long, but it’s super strong.

takeda: he doesn’t use any strong smelling scents, because they hurt his nose and give him headaches, so he just uses dove charcoal scented deodorant, so he barely smells like anything. he is very aware that some of the volleyball boys smell bad, but he won’t say anything, he’ll just silently judge.

i hope you enjoyed!

[captain-of-the-historicfuture]

~hello~ !! For the meta asks!: 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, and 25 :))

Hello!! Thank you for sending these; I was really excited to see that ask game and I was hoping somebody would send some in. It still took me a while to actually answer them though, and for that I apologise. But without further ado! Some meta answers (under the cut because they ended up being fairly long, whoops):

3. What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (Consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway.)

I thought of a few examples, but they could basically be grouped together under a common theme: whumpy/angsty scenes that were self-indulgent as all heck. The whole self-indulgent aspect often required the characters to be just the teeniest, tiniest bit OOC and/or necessitated rather unrealistic plot circumstances. So it was simply easier to keep such scenes as maladaptive daydreams, rather than trying to think of explanations for the character/plot issues…or exposing myself to judgement for them LOL.

Receiving permission to write/share one such scene anyway is an opportunity I can’t let slip by though. It might be because I’m writing this while running on zero (0) hours of sleep—let’s hear it for insomnia, y’all!—but I suddenly couldn’t remember any of my newer ideas under this category. However, I did recall a one-shot I had started writing a couple of months ago that sort of counts? “Sort of” because I could actually be arsed to write it since I was, ya know, writing it. Only got about six hundred words down though.

…should I share those six hundred words…?

………nahhh. I don’t think I’m quite ready for that yet.

But here’s the gist of it: Coulson and May (because of course it’s Philinda) were married for quite some time before the Attack on New York. But then Coulson DiedTM and then got ResurrectedTM. But gasp of horror, he had to lose his memories of his romantic relationship with May because reasons. (I actually did have some ideas for those reasons but sshhhh this is about me yeeting context and setup.)

The first half of S1 still happens as normal (except MayWard doesn’t happen because??? Vows) and it’s now post-E20 “Nothing Personal”. The morning after (or a morning soon after, whatever) the T.A.H.I.T.I. reveal! May’s mom—who doesn’t know about GH.325 and whom May fed a cover story about Coulson divorcing her or something equally as oof, IDK—shows up at the hotel and starts ripping into Coulson for breaking her daughter’s heart, then dragging her back into the field with her ex-husband (him), then accusing her of terrible things and forcing her away again.

Poor guy’s confused as heck, and so is the team, and soon enough so is Lian. The only one who understands what’s going on is May, and she’s freaking dying off to the side like why is this happening to me and eventually everybody’s like! Explain??? (Was thinking about including something from Coulson like, “Are you still keeping things from me?” Just for that extra smidge of angst, yay!)

So yeah then May gives a, like, two-sentence debriefing that elicits more questions than answers. Coulson decides to take May aside and they have a heart-to-heart. Lots of feelings and angst and hurt/comfort and at some point plenty of kissing too. Just! May hiding her feelings for Coulson’s sake but really magnified, plus some actual apologies and consideration of the grief May’s been through on Coulson’s part.

And uhh yeah that’s basically it I dunno hdsjncjshd. I warned y’all it’s OOC, plot-bendy, and very self-indulgent!

6. What character do you have the most fun writing?

I don’t think I could name a single character for this. I get different things out of taking on different voices, you know? I guess recently I’ve found myself gravitating towards more taciturn and introspective points of view, like JQ from my original novel Rosewood or M. Yisbon from my…other original novel Temple.

Generally, however, I like tackling stories from an outsider’s perspective. That’s why I so rarely write my more “substantial” (serious? demanding? for lack of better words?) projects from the PoV of my “preferred” character. This usually means writing from their love interest’s perspective, but not always. With shorter fanfic, using a more removed/unconventional/niche PoV can be really fun. Like, I once wrote a canon compliant ficlet purely(-ish) about Philinda from Tony Stark’s perspective. That isn’t always sustainable with stories that demand more character development or closer character studies, however, which is why it’s a good thing I like writing drabbles!

9. Are you more of a drabble or a longfic kind of writer? Pantser or plotter? Do you wish you were the other?

My word counts tend to run long, but I usually only write one-shots for fanfic. If I’m even inspired with a novella- or novel-length story idea for a fandom, you already know I’m in deep with them. And if I actually find the motivation to plan and execute that idea? Dangg. That’s only ever happened…twice, maybe thrice, and I’m in a lot of fandoms.

At times, I wish I could go for more of a middle ground ’cause, like, you know what I love to see? An AO3 dashboard with several completed novellas for my ship/character of choice. I mean yes, I hecking love >90k fics, but sometimes I’m in the mood for quick reads…and what am I supposed to do when I burn through all the drabbles and 2k one-shots? (Besides despair and/or reread my faves desperately.) Novellas are basically always safe for me LOL, and I’d hope to be able to give as much as I take.

Ultimately though, I think I’m okay with where I am with regards to that. I wish I could write more in general, but I’d be okay with “writing more” just meaning “writing more one-shots”, ya know? More than okay, really. I have mad respect for fic writers who have, like, a hundred or more one-shots under their belt for this one ship. The fandom ecosystem would be incomplete without them (as well as every other type of writer, but sshhh that’s the type of writer I’m closest to being right now).

I’m definitely a plotter, and I definitely prefer it that way. It’s cool having such a detailed record of my process. I like feeling like a frazzled genius on the brink of a major discovery with all of my different outlines and colour coding and many drafts and various websites.

12. Do you want your writing to be famous?

Not exactly. It might be cool if my original works were recognisable in the world, but I don’t think I’d want to be recognisable. As for fanfic, I’d low-key enjoy gaining a place in that fandom’s community as a fic writer. Like someone who gave and got fic gifts from fic writer friends, who participated in challenges and GCs, who received writing prompts on Tumblr, whose name was known for doing a certain trope/genre a bunch of times… Ya know what I mean?

Unlikely to happen when I’m so hecking hesitant to publicly (i.e., outside of AO3) claim credit for my writing, but fjnskfsjhfjs. A writer can dream, right?

15. Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)?

Of those three, tags are the easiest for me, for I have a reliable system for figuring out those.

Next easiest would probably be titles. For fanfiction, I like to use titles that are a quote from the source material. You should have seen all of my old Hamilton fanfic… I was really proud of some of those titles. And I don’t mean, like, whole lines—usually only two to five words. It’s a unique type of wordplay that I just love dabbling in.

And lastly, summaries. Sometimes inspiration strikes me and a snappy and intriguing synopsis just jumps out—one that I’m quietly pleased with—but most of the time I’ll spend way too long trying to think of such a synopsis and eventually just go with whatever I’d come up with so far. And live with my quiet dissatisfaction for the rest of time.

18. Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (Plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations...?) Tell us about them!

Typically, no. If I have deleted scenes, I save and publish them separately, but that’s about it. I sometimes think of AUs for my own work and might talk about them in my author’s notes—might even talk about writing them—but I never really do anything with them.

Although…

It’s not uncommon for me to decide a plotline isn’t working for a certain story or to think of an interesting but undoable arc for a certain character, but what I’ll do is make a whole new story for those ideas. Once I’m done developing the original idea and the branched-off one, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell they grew from the same roots. Does that count?

21. What other medium do you think your story would work well as (film, webcomic, animated series, etc.)?

That depends on the story. I’ve actually written stories in other mediums—movie screenplay, musical stageplay, poetry, TV show scripts, play scripts, roleplay—but the novel does tend to be my comfort zone. Sometimes, if I have an idea that I think could work, or would even work better, as another medium, I’ll label it as such in my folder of ideas and decide not to write it as a novel.

Most of the time, my non-book projects are collaborations. I’m working with five different people on six different story ideas: two webcomics, one stage musical, one anime, and two animated TV shows. Little concrete progress has been made in any of those, mind you, but they’re still fun to discuss!

24. Would you say your writing has changed over time?

Absolutely. But I’ve been writing stories since I was five years old, so we would hope so, huh?

I wouldn’t say my writing’s changed completely, though maybe that’s just my insider’s perspective.

25. What part of writing is the most fun?

Oh gosh, I can’t believe you’d make me choose. Writing is just such a wonderful experience for me; I love just about everything to do with it. Admittedly, not all the time, but. Since that barely qualifies as an answer, however, I’ll give you this—

The endings. Not only that intense feeling of rightness when you wrap up that last sentence, but also the moments before. The adrenaline of knowing you’re almost there but you gotta push just a bit more to actually get there. And also the part right after—the real wrap-up, honestly: the revision and the editing. Heavens, I love revising and editing my work.

Which is not to say I don’t like writing it out for the first time, too—there’s nothing quite like seeing your cursor scroll to the next page, like going from a blank expanse to a Oh man, how many more lines are even going to fit on this page?, like watching that page counter tick up another number. However, there’s something cathartic about finally ironing out those problems I had to force myself to stop worrying about earlier because “just finish the first draft dangit”.

I guess that’s not really the end of the writing process, but whatever. Close enough (as fic writers are wont to say).

Another thank-you for these asks, and feel free to come back with more at any time! ;P

Send in fun meta asks for your friendly neighbourhood writer!

[helgaw321]

Takeru’s way of saying thank you

“Please be careful on your way home.“

This message, handwritten by him, was shown at the end of his 30th birthday event last year. What a lovely way to end the event, right?

I sometimes think why he’s doing this far for his fans, even after he’s getting more and more famous like now. He can just doing his work as usual, doing movies, dramas, without any interactions with fans, and I’m sure there are lots of people still will watch it. But he chooses to do something extra, through events, LINE, and Sugar, to provide fans some way to connect with him. He always said during the fan meetings, that he won’t be able to reach this far without his fans. So, maybe it’s just his ways of saying thank you to us. What a man.

I think because he understands that not all of us can just go to attend his events, he provides another way to convey his gratitude, and what’s even better, he chooses to convey it through one of his favorite things, riddle :))

(P.S: it will be a quite long post below, you have been warned :3)

First of all, just to avoid any misinterpretations, this is the 30th birthday anniversary book:

This book, or I should say dictionary, consists of every single piece of his work from his debut, be it, movie, drama, photobook, calendar, Taketere, you name it. After you’ve read all of it (it will take around 2 weeks according to Takeru XD), at the very last page, you will find a mysterious content:

You must be wondering what the heck is this, right? Don’t worry, I also felt the same at the first time seeing this XDD

The Japanese words loosely reads as: “My feelings is written at the tip of ......”

Now we have to find a way on how to fill those six words, so we can get the answer based on the highlighted boxes.

If you read the book close enough, you will find out that there are more riddles hidden throughout the pages, and you have to solve each of that, so we will need 6 riddles to fill all the blanks.

(Ah yes, so Takeru has provided the explanations for this riddle in Taketere 64, so you can watch that too~ )

For the first one, letter A, we need to turn the page to p.39:

See something different? As a warning, all of the riddles will be that small XD

Lemme make it bigger, riddle A is: “ ひandまandめ ”.

For this, you’ll need a bit of Japanese knowledge. “and” is “to (と)” in Japanese, so we just need to read that as is, and we’ll get “ひとまとめ (hitomatome)” as the answer~

Move on to the next one, let’s open p.157:

We need to zoom this one in, so here it is:

Recognize something? Yup, so those 4 icons at the corner represent the suits of a card, thus the next step will be easy:

1 = ace = えーす  11 = jack = じゃっく  12 = queen = くいーん  13 = king = きんぐ 

Then we just need to put these in the blanks, read the letters based on the numbers, and we’ll get “jinx (じんくす)” as the answer~

Move on to the next one, p.179:

“What is the animal name in ???“

This one will be a bit tricky. Notice that the letter C is kinda out of place compared to the previous riddle. Actually, it serves as a hint, saying that we have to add some letters around it to make this one more readable. The other hint is lots of “か (ka)”. There is a set of Japanese words that ends with “ka”, and that is the first ten days of Japanese dates (tsuitachi, futsuKA, mikKA, yokKA, etc). Because the last 2 letters are already present, so we just need to add the first letter, becoming like this (tsuitachi - ついたち - 1st is an exception because we need to add 2 letters):

From this illustration, we can see that the answer is “itachi - いたち - weasel”.

And we’re half way already! Let’s take a break~

Okay, so let’s continue with letter D, let’s open p.221:

I really couldn’t solve this one at that time lol. Annoying things about fill the blanks, when you don’t get the theme, you won’t be able to solve it. And for this one, the hint is only those letters....

Thanks for Takeru’s explanation, we now know that these letters represent Japanese era name, and by looking at the letters, the eras we need are (left > right): Meiji > Taishou > Shouwa > Heisei. Put them all into the boxes:

Read it with the given order, and we’ll get: “たんじょう - tanjou - birth” as the answer~

Let’s move to letter E in p.267:

For this one, you actually don’t need any Japanese knowledge, you just need to look at the shapes of the question, and compare with the big picture, so the answer will be taken from 2nd, 9th, and 7th letter, and we’ll get: “じ��う - freedom” as the answer~

Last one! Turn to p.371:

“Name a person who always eats udon as the final dish after eating nabe“

This is another tricky question, and we need to read the book again thoroughly to be able to understand it. Specifically, the hint is written in Takeru’s answer to Suzuki Ryohei’s birthday message:

“saigoudooon“ ---> “saigo (end)” + “udooon“

Got it? “always eats udon as the final dish”

He purposely gives us a word pun LOL.

So the person is Suzuki Ryohei, or rather, his role as Saigou Takamori, which is also called Saigou-don (Mr. Saigou in Kagoshima dialect), so the answer is “さいごうたかもり - saigou takamori”.

So! We’ve got all 6 answers. All we need is go back to the last page, and put all of those letters in the boxes like this:

“My feelings is written at the tip of a tranquilizer gun (the highlighted word is masuijuu - tranquilizer gun)“

That’s it???

Well actually, this message is the final riddle from him. As he said in Taketere, if we really read this book thoroughly and been following his career for years, this sentence must mean something.

Does “tranquilizer gun” ring a bell?

Not yet? Then how about this:

If this doesn’t help either, then you still have homework to do :>

So, yes, because we need to look for this gun picture in the book, the fastest way is to go through AJIN section, and look for any gun picture.

But there’s nothing about the gun in AJIN section...

There is this cute “frozen” Takeru and Ayano Go tho XDD

Let’s open the book again from the beginning.. So before the start of the whole list of his project, there’s this page called PLAYBACK, which contains the photo summary of all of his projects. If we look at this page thoroughly... FINALLY we’ll find a gun picture, and this is the proof:

“written at the tip of a tranquilizer gun”

So we need to look around this picture to find out, if we zoom it in:

“大好き。“ - “DAISUKI.“ handwritten by himself.

😭😭😭

Still not enough? Actually he still has more to give us. Go to this website, input the answer (ますいじゅう), and hit submit (送信).

Then, when the next page appears, enter the page of the message, because it’s on p.16, so input “016”, and hit submit again.

You will get a zoom-able Playback cover picture. Find out the message in that picture, and click it. If you are lost, just find that Nagai picture or look at this guide (circled red):

Has the picture loaded? 

Yup, we will get ANOTHER thank you message 😭

"Thank you for reading '13years～TAKERU SATOH ANNIVERSARY BOOK 2006→2019～' until the end. Please look forward to the 30-year-old-Satou Takeru!"

Isn’t he just too sweet? 😭😭😭

[popculturebuffet]

Animation Reviews: OK KO: Red Action 3: Grudgement Day

Whelp I said i’d do all three in one day and I MEANT IT. And I may do it again just to stay on schedule in the future, but for now i’m just proud and exausted to have gotten this done. And after a rather “eh it has some things but it’s mostly just there” episode” we’ve come to our last episode and my personal faviorite, Red Action 3: Grudgment day. Also as a quick note I forgot red was actually a major part of “I hope this thing flies” back in my first review, but I probably would’ve left it out as while the plot is her racing with Rad, it’s entirely a rad episode, and like plaza prom which I had to realize wasn’t important, isn’t really necessary.  One last where we are in the series thing. We’re in season 3 and as I mentioned last time, RIGHT before the final episodes and one episode before the three part final arc and unrelated but beautiful epilogue that closes out the series. I didn’t go into my throughts on season 2 but it was good, the ending was just a  really sloppy end to an otherwise good arc that i’ll get to. Season 3 is somehow even better, using it’s shorter run time to tie up loose ends and character arcs left and right and , after trying all series to do it, crossing over with Sonic the hedgehog, another thing for another time, and the final episodes, both the wrap up to the story arc “Let’s fight ot the end” and the wonderful where are they now epilouge “Thank you for watching the show”, are absolutley amazing and how you end a show.. and thankfully endings of this calibur became the trend this year given that same year star vs ended terribly and the bad taste is still in my mouth over that one but that’s a story for another bunch of reviews. The point is as I said the crew used the time wisely and wrapped up most ongoing character and story arcs that needed resolution. And given they spent two episodes on it the team decided to pull the pin on red and enid getting together, and solve one dangling issue the fans likely had all in one go. IT’s grudgment day under the cut. 

We open with Rad and Red arguging and KO looking at them in a way that just screams:”Third mom, Rad, please stop fighting”  Enid comes in and wonders why one of her two best friends and her girlfriend are fighting. She dosen’t use the term but given the kiss at the end of the episode, more on that when we get to it, the general way Enid acts about this and the way Red acts around her this ep.. their a couple at this point.  I do wish they had an episode of them becoming offical, adressing Enid and Elodie.. bucnhes of other things but I concede that the crew was blindsighted by having a smaller season and had they you know NOT BEEN CANCELED FOR NO GOOD GOODAMN RESAON, we might have gotten more renid and more stories and a full on steven universe crossover with both sides. But I digress.. CN’s managment is terrible right now... but that’s not the reason for this article so we’re moving on.  Anyways Enid wants to know why their so pissy when she arrives, and Red .. is in the right this time. Showing her growth while she still got heated with rad.

Rad did at least start it, as she simply came in to take enid jelly surfing and was kind enough to ask him to come along.. and KO implictly given he’s there and their buds now and all that. But when rad insults her again she quits the explaning and goes right back to arguing with him while Enid and KO look on awkwardly. Then Red decides to go into a mocking impression of rad, which is not NEARLY as mean as it could’ve been given the guy has canocially, had a super virus get worse because he refused to get rest something the villian that gave it to him was COUNTING on as part of his evil scheme, was left on the floor in pain over his cocoa being too hot, and once confused his 6-11 year old friend for a doppleganger despite having GIVEN said friend his nametag, though to be fair red’s own best friend also thought he was rad and gave him her number, so everyone was kind of dumb that day but still, the point is she has a LOT of ammo. In contrast Rad STARTS light saying she says words like Cowabunga (she only does once at the end of this ep and has not at any time).. before saying Enid deserves someone better and flinging her surfboard... which Crinkly Wrinkly jumps on and crashes into a wall because of course he does.  Anyways Enid is offended at this and reveals rad’s been acting like a raving dickhead to Red anytime she shows up, which were this season 1 would be on brand but after 3 seasons of becoming a better person and an episode earlier this season where he rejected his dudebro friends once and for all, who by the way: Beefer and Mega Football Baby are the worst and I hate them and i’m greatful that their final apperance is rad realizing what a bad influence they’ve been and telling their asses off for their toxic masculinity. But I will however give OK KO credit as their SUPPOSED to be obnoxious, and the crew still dialed back hteir apperances to almost nothing when they realized it went horribly right, versus Rusty whose still mildly to massively annoying, but has yet to be fixed or removed from LIncoln’s crew, despite the show having a good track record for taking problematic characters and fixing them. And i’ve gotten entirely offf topic because all three of them piss me off so much, so let’s move on.  Where were we.. ah yes, since Rad being a dickhead this consisently is now an exception not the rule, Enid rightfully demands to know why and Rad.. makes up two very petty, weak and obviously pulled out of his butt to try and cover the real reason up reasons for his actions: Red didn’t follow him back on Social Media, which is both a website and what the website is in this universe apparently which Is brilliant, and that she took the last bit of cake at prom... you know after he realized he was screwing it up and fixed it all with a homoerotic dance fight. Plaza Prom is amazing. When pressed because Rad fired his stupid friends, Rad hastily challenges red to a power battle, which I haven’t had to cover yet: Basically a hero can challenge another hero to a fight, usually for respect, to settle a grudge or who took the last bagle, and it’s a socially accepted thing called a power batttle. Really given it seems like KO’s world has not had a hero civil war, and the one time we’ve seen heroes on heroes outside of these things has been when POINT was acting shady as fuck and thus needed to be stopped, it seems like a resonable mesure, especially since most heroes just.. shrug off damage from battles and stuff after a bit.  Unable to convince her girlfriend not to punch her best friend in the face, however much he deserves it, Red gives enid her belt with her time capusles inside, so they don’t go off mid fight and gives her an air kiss. Awww. Enid bemoans the fact this is happening for such dumb reasons when KO relaizes they can just use the belt to fix what once went wrong and end this petty fight before rad dies.  First stop, the Bodega a few months ago, which KO proves both by the fact they have mean beans, which theys topped selling months ago and is one of the single best refrences this show did and it’s done a LOT, and the social media feed being from months and months ago, with Beefer bragging elodie beat him up. Ewwwwww.... I don’t wnat to kjnow what he’s into. Gah gotta scrub my brain. ONe brain scrub later Rad needs only one more follower to 100. I hear when you get 100 this happens. 

Rad asks for a follow for follow from Red, who says she dosen’t have her phone. Enid is sure she’s lying, which she is, and follows Rad for her. Also I love rad’s file photo

Seriously they use this any time they need a picture of him. It’s one of the series best runners and is only topped by homer simpsons various terrible ones and this gravity falls masterpiece as being the best stock photo used for a character.

I will use this any time I have an excuse to and I have no shame about that. Anyways they go back but

As things have only gotten more heated at the power battle, so they try the prom to see if that’ll help.  Cue PROM. Seriously why they never did a second Plaza Prom episode is really beyond me. Lot of potetinal with that concept.. plus I like episodes that put tons of cast, main and supporting, in one event together, ever since venture bros. It’s always a fun time. Anyways, Enid wants to stop a paradox but KO has already interacted with his past self.. which is the KO enid’s talking to and a great gag.  So the two seeing Rad and Red both about to go for the cake decide to pull a destraction: Enid goes over and talks to Red to hold her off and get the cake to rad, while KO does what any sane person would do: Jumps onto Rad’s face while yelling rad I love you, and Rad is clearly more annoyed he’s on his face and this has very obviously happened before. .... I miss this show.  Anyway after giving the explination that she’s a shadow clone to explain why her past self is still up there DJing, she offers to dance and the two have a good cute time until enid gets the cake into rad’s mouth and bolts.. and now we get the thing I hinted at earlier. Red talks to the other Alley Teens about it, and notes that while she dosen’t know Enid she kinda likes her.. then backpedals as the teens make faces but are clearly not fooled by they all look really creepy especially Gregg. 

WHelp I have ny nightamres for tonight. But yeah this is implied to be what got Red to ask her out in the first place. Time travel is weird and inconsietent. This does give me a chance to adress the fact that the alley teens.. sorta stopped beiing a thing eventually. I mean their stillf riends as of the season 2 openoer but red and drupe show up for their own eps or supportingroles while Gregg just kinda vanishes, poor person. That being said given this interaction and how close they were I DO think their still friends; I mean gregg and drupe was confirmed by the flash forward as they visit rad’s cafe, but Red would still be their friend, they just all likely have more stuff to do as they grow older: by the end of season 2 Drupe has a buisness and gregg is probably in college. But I expect Drupe would be Red’s best woman at her wedding. I mean gregg would probably be her best person but still. Anyways they return to the present again and.

Yeah that. Their now battling in cars and Enid decides to cut the bullshit and just ask Rad why he’s pissed at Red, asking Red to pause the fight, which she agrees to.  KO and Enid throw rad int he back of his van tied up and ask him to be honest about why he’s so pissed off. After some dithering he says he lo.. lo.. and instead of saying he loves enid, thank god i’m so sick of love triangles, may they die in a fire, like the episode hinted at it’s a swerve. and unlike a vince russo swerve which ends in A “Buff Bagwell’s mother on a forklift match”.. no really

This is actually a great one: Rad’s fully moved on and I like that, evne if the finale does leave it vauge if those bodegamen at the end are theirs or not, given Rad’s her best friend by the end and she and red would need a surrogate, it’s not a huge stretch to say Rad sperm donored for them and is still a beloved uncle and figure in their lives. Anyways the point is Rad’s real beef is.. suprisingly sweet. Turns out Rad’s still pissed at the whole “Teens humilating, burning and spanking” ko thing and Red posting it online. Which is likely to adress the fact they.. never adressed that and was a good call and a good way to show rad’s growth: he’s not jealous , he’s not mad she’s taking up enid’s time, he’s mad that his best friend is dating someone who beat up his other best friend for just trying to help them then put it online for a cruel laugh. Granted Drupe did the same thing and he not only danced with her but is on good terms with her to this day, but odds are given they see her more and she’s in fact the designer for their mission outfits in season 3, she probably apologized off screen while Red figured KO forgiving her was good enough and just wanted to forget it, running away from things as usual. IT speaks to the diffrence in their personality: Red runs hot is stubborn and takes time to admit she’s wrong, Drupe is very chill and as the series goes on very nice, and probably wanted to get it out of the way asap given she frequents the bodega more often, either in the background or foreground.  Anyways after KO reveals he actually enjoys the video as a treasured memory of when he first met the alley teens, disturbing his friends, seriously this kid needed to remerge with his edgelord side yikes, Enid gives rad a headpat and kudos for being normal and Enid decides to take all of them to go fix this.  Back in the past we’re back at the bullying and before past red can post, present red explains she should stop and after clarfying this isn’t an end of the world situation, not an unfair assumption given you know time traveler, she reveals it’s for someone unimportant.. but whose important to someone they care about, and that what they were doing was a terrible thing they’ll be ashamed of anyway. It’s a good scene that shows how far red’s come: from pushing everyone but two people awaya nd treating most like garbage in a vain attempt to avoid being who she used to be, to accepting it, finding love, and becoming friends with someone she hurt and accepting she hurt him. Rad is also clearly moved seeing that Enid did indeed choose wisely. Back in the present. 

... NO not this time. No instead red and rad are pals, talking about how shredded they are and what not, and while Enid finds it annoying, understandably, she’s glad their not trying to kill each other and dosen’t have to buy Rad’s gravestone or visit her girlfriend in prison. In the alterted timeline, which their also aware of by rad’s comment, time travel just go with it, they were already planning on going jelly surfing and invite enid, and implictly ko along. 

So we end on our main trio and Red jelly surfing, Enid and Red sharing a board before wiping out, laughing about it and then, as if you hadn’t already seen the header but fuck it. 

Yup. The subtext just became.. text. Awww. In case you were wondering, I do like them as a couple, especially after this quintology, as it’s made me realize just hwo much they click and how much chemistry they have, and by this point their just adorable, their drama gone and they can just be happy and gay together. And that’s something cartoons are doing more of and tha’ts wonderful and it’s wonderful that, with all else he had to wrap up, Ian felt confirming the gay couples lasted was extremley important, as two others are shown married in the finale. And we’ll get to the finale more in a bit, but first Rad floats by with an “I support this”, to approving smiles, and enid thinking he’s a weirdo. Also I love the meta text of having a character voiced by the shows creator say that.  KO however is sad that the video is gone but ENid says the memories will last. Rad is understandably not sad about it suggests they make new ones and we end on our quintent taking a selfie together. THE END. Before final thoughts, this wouldn’t however be the last we saw of them. The finale has a bit more as it flashes forwards a bit: the relevant part is one shows Enid take over KO’s mom Carol’s dojo. with red, the two kissing again and alllooking over some supsciously familiar kids who look supsciously like the hue troop, but are probably there great grandparents. While Red dosent’ show up again after that, and could’ve gone back to the future eventuallyf or all we know, I like to think she stayed, and that as noted above, she and enid had kids together with Rad’s help given the similar looking kids we see running the bodega... which admitely was kept vauge by Ian on purpose so fans could draw their own inclusion so that’s the one i’m drawing; rad is still there for them aand still family to them, but isn’t with Enid in a romantic sense, if you think diffrently that’s fine. But My ending is these two crazy kids worked it out and are now happy ever after. and that ain’t bad.  Final Thoughts: A fantastic episode with TONS of great jokes, call backs and a great resolution , showing off Rad and Red’s character development greatly,f ixing a possible plot hole and giving fans the kiss that many of them had wanted for some time. ONe of the series best I can’t gush enough about it but I shall stop for your benifit. If you liked this review, subscribe for more, check out the backlog via the convient pages on my blog, and shoot me an ask, wether it’s to suggst an episode or just to ask me about my opinons or yell about them or ask what I think about certain shows or what i’ll cover. And until next time, later days. 

[fulgensun]

[ When I discovered the FFX Ultimania Omega book had not only a long novelization of the whole story and trivia lists, but also snippets of the original plot and even parts of that original script and scenes (together with authors’ interviews and explanations) I knew I had to look more into it !  Points finger at it -- I want it haha. Admittedly, it was one of the first things I did concentrate on the moment my copy arrived, months ago by now !  Because so little of it is contained on the eng side of the fandom, it seems, that even the wiki had incomplete versions of these original parts of the script...

Honestly, I was surprised and baffled at the described snippets -- the ones similar to Tidus the plumber HH I guess that’s one known fact, but so much more was contained there... and all was deleted for a total change of the story--  but looking back at it now, I can’t help but wonder just how different the whole atmosphere and story would have been !  It’s something widely described and explained in the Ultimania... I have not seen anything like that ever posted anywhere, nor here or on other websites or wikis. While this won’t be a word-by-word translation of the script in the book, I feel - having a FFX centric blog like this, posting these little gems here, so that people can read them too, could be an amazing thing to do !  If these snippets can make people dream (ah...) or imagine how things could have gone, but don’t have the resources to know it since it’s all kept in an old book in Japanese, then that’d be awesome !  

To make things look better, I guess I’ll keep part of the post under a read more -- !  

REGISTAN

Before the book arrived, all I could find in the web, translated here and there, was the description of Tidus (the plumber yeah HHH) in Registan (the old name for Zanarkand) swimming around, meeting his group of friends at the Dome/Shrine of Registan and even fighting monsters underwater, where he’d also see a calm Sin passing by. The Dome was both a gathering place for citizens and a holy place -- with an altar and pictures of Yevon around, people would pray him for good health but it’s not considered a true religion as Yevon doesn’t seem to ask for anything in return. The Hymn (of the Fayth) would resound inside it.

In the end, they discarded the name Registan because a true city has that name - even though Zanarkand is based on the real city of Samarqand. Tidus was also described not as easy-going as we know him now. The script continues. Tidus, trying to hurry towards the Dome to meet his friends, would have met a group of soldiers fighting monsters in the street. They were supposed to be elite, chosen fighters, whose commander would shout orders at them. The commander being Auron !  The soldiers’ performance did attract a crowd; among them, Auron notices a man covered in a black cloak staring back at him and starts chasing him. The script reveals the cloaked man is, in fact, a Guado !  Tidus doesn’t notice this last part, and keeps rushing to the Dome... but he’s late, his friends have left already.

I have discussed in a HC post before how Tidus is able to cook. Well, that is something the original script had planned to show the player (so that we could feel nostalgia and closeness too, of Registan/Zanarkand) and something I inspired myself to, for said headcanon: there would have been a scene of him, cooking abundant meals at home (still a boat).

SIN ATTACKS

The next snippet tells of Tidus, some other day, entering the Dome. As he does, he notices a group of men in black cloaks exiting the Dome. A second later, panic settles. Announcements broadcast the same news and people start running and screaming: Sin is landing on Registan. As alarms invite people to evacuate the area, Tidus notices Auron outside the Dome helping people flee; Sin is indeed approaching the Dome area -- its body is scarred, pyreflies seeping out of it as many arrows and spear pierce its body. Sin opens its many eyes and stares at Tidus, before blinking, closing all its eyes except for two, brown-coloured pupils and keep staring at the boy, calmly.

Soldiers, in the meantime, keep attacking the still beast. Hurt, Sin tries to retreat back in the sea, destroying many buildings in the process and whatnot... but the men in a black cloak from before (the Guado), who have witnessed the whole scene, suddenly start following the monster. The script informs the reader the tallest cloaked figure is, indeed, the leader of these Guado, Seymour. Auron and Tidus follow the totally-not-suspicious bunch.

A very interesting thing I noticed... the script also has the dialogue of Auron and Tidus chasing Seymour and the Guado, who seem to want to do something to Sin. Auron DOES have his ‘This is your story’ moment !  And all is still supposed to be Tidus’ tale and flashbacks. The fact it all carried over to the game we know was nice to notice.

THE GUADO

Instead of Baaj as we know it, Tidus would have later arrived in a small lone island, most likely after having touched Sin. Exploring it, he would have found a video-sphere -- a scene of a mother and child would have played: the two would be conversing, but the language they spoke would be incomprehensible to Tidus. He would have also found human remains, buried in said island, of - he thinks, the same mother depicted in the brief video. The script reveals the language would have been the Guado’s native one. Tidus would have accepted the creepiness of it (’This place gives me the creeps’), grilled some fish and waited for someone to rescue him HAHA (it is also revealed he’d spend days alone, stranded in there...)

Here too, I kinda had some very familiar vibes of the whole situation. If I think of a hypothetical Guado language, a mother and child, desert abandoned island and all, the story of Anima and Seymour in Baaj comes to mind. Not to mention the script reveals the dialogue of mother and child would have become understandable once Seymour’s intentions etc were to be discovered by Tidus -- confirming the child in the video is most likely a younger Seymour (and probably that we would have learned the language of Guado as we do now with Al Bhed’s ! )  

MACALANIA’S MUSICAL

This is my favorite. Do you remember those animal-like forest creatures you see in FFX, playing instruments around Spira, greeting even Mika and Seymour in Luca and encouraging you to catch butterflies ?  Those are what nowadays remains of this original snippet of script, according to Kitase himself. The idea was to give Yuna an idol-like appeal (I guess they still had no idea what X2 would have done ahah) and this scene was a good example of it, together with the wedding ceremony, Toriyama confirms. 

The pilgrimage party would have passed by Macalania during a peculiar festival: people of all races would gather in the woods to commemorate and celebrate the figure of Yunalesca, all sponsored by the Temple of course. Seems like a traditional festival, if you think about it, full of lights, magic, happiness, etc. There would have been a stage built in the forest, depicting a corner of old Registan and people would sit there, waiting for the programmed musical number to start (the musical band would be composed of the beings I described earlier !) Yuna would have been chosen to play as Yunalesca -- the script describes her as breathtakingly beautiful, dressed as Yunalesca (I supposed the bikini was not planned to be Yunalesca’s official attire... I hope so). The Guado would have built, with magic, a ‘fake-Sin’ prop to be used during the recital... but as the scene of the Final Summoning did approach, the Sin-prop would have started causing panic by growing bigger and bigger (turns out it was all Guado’s plan) so manacing and real-looking people would freak out and its giant size would destroy the stage and the lights. In complete darkness, a weird light would appear on stage. This light would shape itself into a precise figure: High Summoner Baska (YES, his original name was supposed to be Baska, later changed in Braska), Yuna’s father. 

The audience would start yelling his name with joy, calming down, before a man yelled: “Do not fear Sin, for Baska has returned!". A violent wind would arise and the figure of Baska would disappear. Tidus’d then turn around and find out that man who just talked was Seymour. Angered, he’d yell: “That’s a fake! It’s a Guado illusion!” The script goes: people turn around to glare at Tidus, since Baska is a very loved figure among Spira’s people. Yuna remains still on the stage: “True, my father died ten years ago!”. People would turn their anger at the girl, asking if Baska had been Sent after his death. Yuna cannot lie and confirms his father could not be Sent to the Farplane, and that he may be a monster. The crowds protest: “So, are you going to kill your own father?! We don’t need you as a Summoner!”. Yuna would fall on the stage, probably overwhelmed by those hateful comments.

What does this make me understand ?  Guado are seen as magic experts, they help with the festival but yet find a way to add their own, weird personal touch to the musical. Also Yuna probably does not know what truly becomes of a High Summoner after their death, and probably thinks that, by dying and not being Sent, her father became a rancorous monster (by now, we know that Summoner performing the Final Summoning probably do not need to be sent: Braska didn’t receive one and is still present in the Farplane in X and X2).

Also, it’s worth mentioning the holy spring scene would have had Yuna screaming (much like Tidus does in Kilika) all her frustration and helplessness at her destiny, crying against Tidus’ chest. There is no mention of the kiss, but I cannot be sure about it as an idea: the script for the holy spring scene stops as she buries her face in his chest and weeps. Being there an affection system, if you hadn’t bonded enough with Yuna, Kimahri would have consoled... and that, kids, is why Kimahri still is present in the holy spring / kiss scene in FFX !  It’s a nice reference.

The last snipper in the Ultimania is the party facing Yunalesca. I find the scene really similar to the original -- she calls them fools, asks who will take Jecht’s place. She calls human beings weak creatures who find new ways to substitute the dead ones and reject peace. She does try to attack Auron too, but he dodges her attack and the battle begins. Outside the Dome, much like in the game we know, Sin is watching them. But in the original script, he did carry people of Registan on his back. Why? Kitase and Nojima explain Registan was supposed to float above Gagazet (Fayth Scar weird column of water, anyone?). Before the final battle, the player would have had the chance to do a sidequest, in which Sin would have helped you carrying your Registan friends in Spira... yea, crazy. Tidus would have been briefly taken home again and helped his old friends, all carried on Sin’s back to Spira. But once they did decide on Registan/Zanarkand being a dream, the sidequest disappeared. ]

[hopefulfestivaltastemaker]

September 13, 2020

My weekly roundup of things I am working on. Topics include wildfires, exotic energy sources, speculative energy sources, the Biden housing plan, and creative outlets.

Wildfires in Oregon

Oregon, along with the rest of the West Coast, has been in the news for devastating wildfires that are still ongoing. This is certainly the worst I have experienced, much worse that the 2017 fires in California. Both Oregon and California are having their worst seasons on record.

In Oregon, it started last Monday, when a strong (and unseasonably early) east wind came over an already dry state, drying the air further and spreading fires rapidly. The Portland metro area experienced sporadic bad air quality on Monday and Tuesday, and it has been consistently bad since Wednesday. Today is no noticeable improvement. The weather forecast is for clouds on Monday and some rain on Tuesday, which should finally bring about some improvement.

So far there have been dozens of deaths in the West and several dozen more people unaccounted for and significant property damage. My guess is that most of the damage will be harder to see: the impact of the poor air quality on people who are already vulnerable. These events bring about yet more disruption in a region that has already been reeling from the pandemic, economic hardship, and civil unrest.

I made a facetious remark on Twitter about solar radiation management, but I really have been struck at how much the weather has cooled down. The temperature is at least 20 degrees (F) cooler than it should have been, due to soot particles reflecting sunlight. In my neighborhood, the light-sensitive streetlights are on during the day. I can look directly at the Sun without hurting my eyes. Needless to say, I will need to be convinced that any solar radiation management scheme will not significantly harm air quality before I will believe it’s a good idea.

If anyone is actually reading this, I would implore you not to use the fires merely as a talking point for your pet climate policy. This is something that irritates me greatly. In the immediate term, we need relief and a stronger firefighting force. In the medium term, we need better forest management practices. Greenhouse gas mitigation helps only marginally in the long term. Don’t try to tell me that building a bike lane in New York City is the solution we in the West are looking for. Once the fires are extinguished, most climate activists will lose interest in our land use needs and move on to the next disaster.

Exotic Energy Sources

This week I added an Exotic Energy section to Urban Cruise Ship. I had been considering this for a long time, and I went ahead and did it mainly because I have been stuck on some harder projects and wanted to do something relatively easy. There are no graphics planned, as I don’t see the topic as important enough to justify assigning more work to our graphics guy, but there are a few interesting things.

One recurring scheme is various ways to capture piezoelectricity, which is generated through pressure on a surface, such as when people walk over a plate or cars drive over it. One study in Australia found that with more advanced generators, an educational building at Macquarie University might recover 0.5% of its electricity usage by installing generators at high traffic points. With technology that was current at the time of the study, it’s probably more like 0.06%.

As for roadways, I cited several studies that report levelized costs of electricity in the range of multiple dollars per kilowatt-hour (wholesale prices tend to be in the range of 3-6 cents/kWh and retail on the order of 10 cents). The exception was a California study that reported 8-20 cents/kWh, which as far as I can tell is just an uncritical repetition of claims from the vendor. Also not discussed is the fact the source of energy is kinetic energy from cars, so unless the car is braking, the generators are stealing energy from motorists. We might as well be using diesel generators then.

If I were to make a guess, the pilot project is little more than California burning several million dollars on a patently unworkable scheme because of some marketing by a shady vendor. I’m all for trying bold ideas that are not guaranteed to succeed, but one must draw the line at ideas that clearly won’t succeed or where basic feasibility questions haven’t even been asked.

Biomechanical energy harvesting is an idea that got a bit of hype a few years ago, but now few people seem to still be interested. Making some extremely generous assumptions, I estimated that it would have a theoretical of about 1 exajoule per year, or about 0.2% of primary energy supply. More medium-case assumptions would cut that by at least a factor of five. Plus that doesn’t account for extra exertion required by the person or embodied energy in the devices.

There are probably some niche use cases for piezoelectric generators and biomechanical systems, such as low power distributed sensors and personal electronics respectively.

I even commented on the power from rainfall paper earlier in the year, an idea too silly to take seriously.

Speculative Energy Sources

But even with the above we’re not done. I decided to venture into the realm of speculative physics.

In quantum physics, even a system with zero temperature must have some latent energy due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. This has been termed the zero point. So naturally that leads people to speculate that zero point energy could be harvested for useful purposes. The near-consensus seems to be that this is impossible, that it must violate thermodynamics somehow, though I found it surprisingly difficult to find a rigorous explanation of why this is the case. This paper from 2019 is all I found, and even then, it only rules out two of three proposed ZPE extraction methods based on thermodynamic principles. Incidentally, the authors hold a patent on the third method and claim there is inconclusive evidence that it works.

Additionally, there is the NASA Eagleworks project to use the quantum vacuum to develop a spacecraft that can operate without onboard propellant.

There is a lot of interesting physics here that I don’t understand. I was expecting to write a short, dismissive comment for the website, but it would seem that ZPE is a legitimate area of scientific research. Maybe this will actually work for energy production someday. But there is no solid evidence yet, and any claims of a currently working ZPE device can be safely rejected.

Some other ideas that pop up, based in speculative physics, including hydrinos, neutrinos, quark fusion, and the ever popular perpetual motion machine. At least neutrinos and quark fusion are legitimate physics, but as far as useful energy production goes, these are all pathological ideas. I’ll add more as I see them. I briefly covered cold fusion a while ago on the Fusion page.

I expect that when the site is finally done, of the many things people could fairly accuse me of, not being comprehensive will not be one of them.

The Biden Housing Plan

Evidently I am a few weeks late, but the Biden-Harris campaign has a housing plan. The tl;dr is that there might be a few good things here, but I’m not too impressed.

When it comes to housing affordability, the principle I’ve tried to reiterate over and over again is that it comes down to supply. If there are 1,000,000 people who want to live in a city with a zoned capacity for 800,000, then 200,000 people will not be able to live there. It doesn’t matter if you impose rent control, eviction moratoria, inclusionary zoning rules, offer Section 8 or other subsidies, or whatever. As long as the supply is fixed, all these do is change the rationing mechanism from price to something else. Which, it must be acknowledged, is often the intent.

Traditionally, the federal government has a limited role in zoning. That could change of course; the federal government today has major roles in many areas where it previously had a limited or no role. As it is now, I see two plausible hooks for federal involvement in the near term. The first is the Fair Housing Act, where it can be argued fairly convincingly that zoning rules have disparate impact on protected groups, and in some cases intentional impact; and the second is to tie zoning reform to federal Community Development Block Grants or transportation funding, where reform is a matter of insuring that federal spending is actually used effectively.

The Biden plan calls for reinstatement of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which while imperfect, I think is better than what the Trump Administration decided to go with, which is nothing. As for the second, I momentarily got my hopes up when I saw that they were promoting legislation to do just that. But upon reading the details of the HOME Act (which was introduced last year but I was unfamiliar with until now), I see that the list of measures the bill calls for to promote “inclusive land use” are wide-ranging, and only some of them can reasonably be expected to increase the housing supply. It could be a good piece of legislation, but much rides on the implementation. Zoning reform advocates at the state level routinely underestimate the creativity that municipalities will show in evading the intent of their laws.

Anyway, there is a lot of other stuff here on racial discrimination, energy efficiency, and the Davis-Bacon Act (which probably makes housing less affordable by running up construction costs), but I won’t belabor the issues. All in all, it’s a plan that reflects the set Democratic interests pretty well, has a lot of stuff in it, and would do little to achieve broad-based housing affordability.

Creative Outlets

Like many people, I have been continuing to struggle with a variety of stressful circumstances. I took more time than usual this week on some creative projects, which has helped.

The newest one I am calling Project Epsilon, which for now is a maze generator. I’ve long had a fascination with generative content, and I would like to see how far the concept can be taken, but for now it is really just for fun. It is not deployed, but someone knowledgeable with Python and Flask in particular can download and run it fairly easily. Not that there is much to see yet. All it does it let the user input a few parameters and make a maze.

The other is Repair the Cosmos, which is deployed but hasn’t been updated publicly in a long time, despite considerable local activity. This is an incremental game that is meant to tell the story of humanity from the Paleolithic to the far future. I started it in January and have been working very intermittently since then, but I finally have a burst of creativity going for the first time in months. I still expect at least a few weeks before the next update, and I can only go for so long before I start feeling guilty about not doing real work.

[the-light-followed]

THE LIGHT FANTASTIC (1986) [DISC. #2; RINCEWIND #2]

“What shall we do?’ said Twoflower. ‘Panic?’ said Rincewind hopefully. He always held that panic was the best means of survival; back in the olden days, his theory went, people faced with hungry sabre-toothed tigers could be divided very simply into those who panicked and those who stood there saying ‘What a magnificent brute!’ and ‘Here, pussy.”

Rating: 5/10

Standalone Okay: No

Read First: ABSOLUTELY NO.

Discworld Books Masterpost: [x]

* * * * * * * * * *

If The Colour of Magic is a bad place to start reading Discworld, The Light Fantastic is 100% worse.  Not because it’s bad, because it’s absolutely an improvement on its predecessor.  It’s just that The Colour of Magic ends on a cliffhanger (only in the metaphorical sense; in the literal sense, Rincewind has just fallen off the cliff).  The Light Fantastic picks up exactly where it left off, with only a little exposition or explanation to soften the shift from one to the next.  I tend to think of The Light Fantastic as more like The Colour of Magic: Part 2, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, because, well, now we’re getting somewhere.

Folks, we finally have a cohesive, over-arching plot! We have stakes greater than “let’s not get killed by this latest thing that wants us dead!”  We have purpose, and drive, and successful barbarian heroes so old they lack teeth and have to make dentures out of diamond, and I love absolutely every bit of it!

In what will quickly become obvious is the norm for him, Rincewind’s life continues to be a series of upsetting things happening one after the other.  Some highlights from The Light Fantastic include:

Being forcibly teleported (back) onto the Disc by the parasitically-attached Great Spell living in his brain, after falling over the Rimfall.  Reality is completely rewritten to do this, but everything remains exactly the same except Rincewind’s new position clinging to the top of a pine tree.  (Twoflower gets dropped back onto the Disc as well, but that seems mostly incidental.)

Going to the land of Death while still alive, picking up his mostly-dead friend, and running right back out to the land of the living.

Camping in the mouth of a giant troll the size of a mountain, while being held captive by mercenaries.  Somehow only the mercenaries end up dead.

Being attacked by wizards and Things from the Dungeon Dimensions, and fighting said wizards and Things in life-or-death battles.

Using the most powerful magical book on the Disc, possibly the most magical item full-stop, and then afterwards, allowing said item to be eaten by the carnivorous sentient Luggage for safekeeping.  Rincewind ends up owning the Luggage before the end of the story—so technically, he still has this wildly dangerous book.

Oh, and saving the world, of course.  He also does that.

I love, love, love the way Pratchett writes ‘heroes’ vs. how he writes his protagonists.  Absolutely none of his protagonists are the stereotypical hero, and his stories are better for it.

Quick sidetrack to define terms: when I say ‘stereotypical hero,’ I’m talking about the kind of lawful good protagonists you see in most high fantasy adventure stories or superhero comics, the stuff with worldwide or even cosmic stakes.  They’re typically well-trained or have some kind of special skills, or they acquire special training/skills along the way.  They almost always set out specifically to save the world, and typically do not have any ulterior motives beyond it being ‘the right thing to do.’  Usually, they’re strong and rugged manly men with impressive jawlines.  I’m talking Aragorn from Lord of the Rings.  I’m talking Captain America and Superman.  I’m talking the real Boy Scout types.

Truth, justice, and apple pie—or whatever the regional-specific pastry of choice might be!

Pratchett’s heroes are not that.  They’re cowards.  They’re scared or confused or unprepared, or making the whole thing up as they go along.  They’re fools, alcoholics, con men.  They’re salty old ladies and know-it-all young girls.  If there is a stereotypical hero-type character, they’re going to be a foil for the actual main character, and they won’t stay perfectly pure and uncomplicated for long—I’m thinking specifically Carrot, though we’ll talk about him later when we get to the City Watch books.  

Here, what we get is Rincewind.  And he is as far from a stereotypical hero as it is possible to be, probably because he would have started sprinting full-speed away from the thought before anyone finished saying it out loud.  Rincewind doesn’t save the world because he suddenly found his courage, or developed bonus superpowers, or found some kind of magical sword to do the fighting for him.  (He actually found the sword back in The Colour of Magic, hated every second of it, and got rid of it as soon as possible.  Goodbye and good riddance to Kring the magic sword.)  He hasn’t secretly had the courage inside of himself all along.

Rincewind saves the world because he’s got nowhere left to run, and that’s excellent.

I’m going to save a lot of my rambling about Pratchett’s deconstruction of the concept of ‘heroes’ for when I get to Guards! Guards! and later City Watch books, since Carrot is, like I said, both the main example and the central thesis.  But it is very important for everyone to understand: for me, nothing is more satisfying from a literary perspective than knowing that, at the end of the Discworld series, coward and hero-only-by-accident-or-mistake Rincewind is one of the two people in contention for the spot as ‘ultimate savior of the world, the universe, and all of existence.’  The other is a teenage girl.

Honestly, the only reason I think Rincewind might edge her out for the title is because he technically saved a slightly larger slice of reality with this whole escapade.  In Tiffany’s defense, I’m 98% sure she hadn’t been born yet when this whole thing went down, so we really can’t blame her for not solving it first.  If she were there, she’d have it handled, and that’s just objective truth.

But Rincewind.  Rincewind.  At the end of The Light Fantastic, the dude’s spent two whole books screaming and running whenever something tries to kill/maim/eat/threaten him.  The audience has absolutely figured out by this point that while he’s smart and sarcastic and surprisingly speedy, he’s totally useless in a conflict.  His priority is saving his own skin, not dashing feats of derring-do or whatever it is heroes are supposed to do.

And yet with the end of the world looming, his back against the wall, and no real place left to run, when the Big Baddie demands that he give up the last Great Spell, the one last thing preventing the immediate destruction of everything and everyone, we get this from Rincewind:

“If it stops anywhere, it stops here, thought Rincewind. ‘You’ll have to take it,’ he said. ‘I won’t give it to you.’”

And that’s it.  That’s what saves the world.  Not a stereotypical hero, not a hero of legend, not a mythic champion showing up for a final glorious battle—it’s a Pratchett hero.  It’s an everyday guy, a coward and a failure, dragged in by accident and against his will.  It’s an average person, nothing really special, who looks at something that he knows is wrong and that he’s sure will hurt him for disobeying.  And yet he still says no.  It stops here.

Even rats fight back, as Rincewind himself says.

This is the moment that really sells me on Rincewind’s character, every time.  Even before Pratchett was really taking Rincewind or the Discworld seriously, even while the whole thing is still one massive joke more often than not, he���s still given the readers a POV character who feels believably real.  He’s scared shitless, he’s tired, he’s sarcastic, and he doesn’t want to be there.  But that’s too damn bad, because he’s the one there, and if he doesn’t do this, no one else will.

And maybe Rincewind’s not Superman, but he still does it. He succeeds, he saves the day, and—despite everything—he’s somehow the hero of this story.  Screaming all the way, maybe, but he still gets it done.

[Paul Kidby does incredible Discworld art, including some of the amazing cover art for the books.  You can find a lot of it on his website— www.paulkidby.com.  This one,The Colour of Magic, stars Rincewind, Twoflower, and their dramatic escape from the Wyrmberg.]

While we’re on the subject of heroes, we can’t skip over Cohen the Barbarian, who makes his debut here in The Light Fantastic. Now, Cohen is technically a hero, but this is still not in the ‘stereotypical hero’ sense—it’s literally his job.  It’s the thing he writes in the little box marked ‘Occupation’ on his tax forms, or at least it would be if he actually paid any taxes.  Or if he actually wrote things down.  

For Cohen, being a hero is how he makes a profit and pays the bills, and he is very, very good at it.  That’s 100% objective truth, and I know that for sure, because the man is old as the hills and still gets into life-or-death fights about twice a day, and that’s the sort of thing that gets you dead very quickly if you aren’t very good at what you do.

But Cohen still isn’t a stereotypical hero.  He does a lot of looting and pillaging, and his body count over the Rincewind books is—wow, it’s up there.  It’s a real doozy.  It’s hard to call his work heroism when it’s hardly a smidge to the left of repeated, outright murder.  I’ll probably circle back around to this in Interesting Times and The Last Hero, because there are some really interesting points made there about the ways that Cohen and his contemporaries play at heroes and villains like they’re a sort of performance they’re putting on rather than a moral act or a choice made out of necessity. But I will say now that putting Cohen in the same storylines as Rincewind really does put both characters into a more complex and interesting light.  Rincewind, the coward-not-hero, and Cohen, the fearless warrior, can kind of play off of each other.

It just goes to show Pratchett’s grasp of people as people, and not unidimensional cardboard cutouts.  Nobody’s always right.  Nobody is always wrong.  And real people don’t always stand up to perfect, pure concepts of what we think they should be.

Also, since Cohen is about a billion years old, we get little gems like his toothless lisp before he picks up some dentures, a concept that Twoflower brings with him from the Counterweight Continent.  (Or, as Cohen calls them, dine chewers.  That, friends, is a pune, or a play on words.)  Also, because he’s Cohen and therefore a dramatic bastard, the dentures are solid diamond.  It’s not as if the man can’t afford it, I guess?

I do want to take a little side trip into some other new details that pop up in The Light Fantastic, specifically the more in-depth stuff about Unseen University and the wizards.  The wizards are a lot of fun in the early Discworld books, specifically if you’re really bloodthirsty, because up until Ridcully arrives in Moving Pictures there’s quite a lot of turnover in Unseen University staff. The wizards are backstabbing bastards early on, and it’s almost jarring to compare the shifty, power-hungry jerks in The Light Fantastic and Sourcery to the fat, lazy hedonists they’ll become. We do get an impression of them as a collective that will stay pretty consistent as we move forward: their values, their skills, the way they do magic.

This is important not only because it establishes a lot of lasting detail for stories involving Rincewind, the University, and the city of Ankh-Morpork, but also because we’re about to get our first glimpse of the witches.  (Hey-o, here comes Equal Rites!)  With a lot of this stuff mapped out in advance, it makes it easier to run a compare-and-contrast of what’s going on with the two main schools of magic users on the Disc, what’s different between them, what’s the same—and the positives and negatives in them both.  (Again, hey-o, Equal Rites!  That all is about to be the whole damn point.)

I think it’s also fun to note that The Light Fantastic features the brief run of Galder Weatherwax as Archchancellor of the Unseen University, A.K.A. He Who Dies So Granny Weatherwax Can Have His Frankly Excellent Name.  Granny Weatherwax is the steel-souled spine of the witches, and the driving force of their run of books, and it’s kind of hilarious to think that Terry Pratchett did the writer’s equivalent of digging through a graveyard to give her a name.  This theft is later lampshaded and then ignored; Granny says something briefly about Galder Weatherwax being a distant cousin she barely knew, and the whole thing is never mentioned again from then on out. I can’t exactly remember where, and it might even have been in a short story or one of the side books Pratchett eventually put together, not in a novel.  Honestly, who cares—Granny Weatherwax is such a force of nature that it only takes a few minutes to forget that her name ever could have belonged to anyone but herself.

But Granny Weatherwax is not a discussion for The Light Fantastic.  It’s time to move on to Equal Rites!

* * * * * * * * * *

Side Notes:

This is the book where the Unseen University Librarian is changed into an orangutan.  It happens early on in a magical accident, as the grimoire containing the Eight Great Spells attempts to save Rincewind and the spell trapped in his mind, and he is never reverted to human form.  

He is referenced but does not appear in The Colour of Magic.  

At no point anywhere in the Discworld does he appear in human form.  At no point does he have lines in human language.  He is never named.  At no point is he described as he was prior to this change, except that the orangutan he becomes is initially said to look “like the head librarian,” so presumably he was already a bit orangutan-ish. 

For something as weird as this is, and for something with such long-lasting repercussions, it is treated in the moment as a thing of very little importance—except, of course, that now he has to be paid in bananas.  I find this absolutely delightful.

Tim Curry plays the wizard Trymon in the BBC miniseries The Colour of Magic, which combines The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic.  Trymon only appears in The Light Fantastic in the books, and I can’t read it anymore without picturing Tim Curry in his ridiculous robes and shoes, with his ridiculous overdramatic murder plots, working his way up to the top just to die a ridiculous death.

No, really. Look at this hat.  Look at this goatee.  Only Tim Curry has the acting chops to pull this off.

Death once again appears, and this time we also get to see his house and his daughter, Ysabell!  I can see why it didn’t take long to go from here to Mort: the concept is way too good to leave to little snatches and side appearances.

Krysoprase the troll shows up for the first time in this book.  Later, he’ll be known as Chrysoprase, and will make appearances in several other Discworld novels: Feet of Clay, Wyrd Sisters, and, notably, Thud.  There’s also a troll named Breccia in The Light Fantastic; Breccia will become the name of Chrysoprase’s gang in Ankh-Morpork.

While going through my copy of The Light Fantastic to work on this post, I glanced at the cover and briefly thought I was losing my mind.  At the bottom, there’s a blurb talking about beloved Discworld character “Conan the Barbarian”—but up until that moment I was 100% certain the beloved barbarian on the Disc was named “Cohen.”  Turns out I’m not crazy, it’s just that the literal cover of the book decides to make a reference to the character that Cohen is parodying rather than to Cohen himself.  And this is the 2008 print edition, not an early run or a badly-assembled e-reader edition, which means it’s being released by a professional publishing company a full 22 years after the original novel came out.  It’s not like nobody’s had time to look over the material and do some copy-editing.

* * * * * * * * * *

Favorite Quotes:

“The important thing about having lots of things to remember is that you’ve got to go somewhere afterwards where you can remember them, you see? You’ve got to stop. You haven’t really been anywhere until you’ve got back home.”

“Do you think there’s anything to eat in this forest?” “Yes,” said the wizard bitterly, “us.”

“Not for the first time she reflected that there were many drawbacks to being a swordswoman, not least of which was that men didn't take you seriously until you'd actually killed them, by which time it didn't really matter anyway.”

“Are you a hero, actually?” “Um, no. Not as such. Not at all, really. Even less than that, in fact.”

“What shall we do?’ said Twoflower. ‘Panic?’ said Rincewind hopefully. He always held that panic was the best means of survival; back in the olden days, his theory went, people faced with hungry sabre-toothed tigers could be divided very simply into those who panicked and those who stood there saying ‘What a magnificent brute!’ and ‘Here, pussy.”

[cindylouwho-2]

RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, September 2019

Welcome to my latest summary of recent news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & ecommerce! This covers articles I came across in the past 5 weeks, although some may be older than that.

I am still working on scheduling enough time to post these every 10 days or so, but lately luck is just not on my side. Writing this elsewhere then cutting & pasting it here is creating some significant formatting issues, so if you find any errors or broken links, please let me know. 

Are there types of news you would like to see here?  Leave a comment below, email me through my website, or send me a message on Twitter.

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES 

Etsy introduced Etsy Ads at the end of August; I covered it on my blog. Some people are seeing decent returns, but many are not. I started a forum thread here for continuing discussion. 

A day later, Amazon announced it has waived their $40 a month shop fee for Handmade by Amazon shops. See the pinned post on their Facebook page. 

A large study of click-through-rates (CTR) on Google reveals that the top link gets over 30% of the clicks, titles with questions get 14% more clicks than those without, and moving up one slot in the results leads to more clicks, unless you move from 10th to 9th. They cite Etsy’s study of titles & CTR (which showed that shorter titles get more clicks, something that this study also found).

Trend watch: a suggestion that Americans can avoid most of the tariff pain in the pocketbook by buying used clothing & other items. “Secondhand and vintage is no longer synonymous with a dusty pile of outdated sweaters in the corner of a church basement, or a yearly rummage sale. Online resale, including high-end designer items, is booming, thanks to start-ups like The RealReal, Depop, Poshmark, eBay, and Etsy. It’s possible to fill your entire closet this way”. Pre-owned & rented clothing also makes fans of sustainability happy. 

Also, “grandmillennials” are a thing. 

ETSY NEWS 

Etsy US searches often now have a full first page of items that ship free or have the $35 free shipping guarantee, as of September 6 (although they were testing it earlier than that.) I was seeing the rare exception, beyond searches that have fewer than 48 items shipping free, but it wasn’t clear if these are tests or personalization. Then on September 21, we started seeing many items with shipping charges on the first page of even very large results, & most smaller results didn’t give much if any priority to free shipping at all. There has been no statement from Etsy, so your guess is as good as mine ...

In the meantime, they’ve begun promoting free shipping to buyers, which has led to some media coverage. Some note that the timing is good, since most US holiday purchases online in the past several years have included free shipping. 

There is a new chapter in the Ultimate Guide To Etsy Search, involving attributes. The accompanying podcast with Etsy’s head taxonomist [transcript with links to the podcast] is quite interesting. She says that one of the reasons that some attributes haven’t shown up yet as search filters is that not enough sellers have applied them to listings. “If we have 100,000 items in the search results and a buyer uses a filter, and that filter causes the results to return just 20 items, that makes it seem broken. The buyer no longer trusts the results. If only 20% of sellers fill out an attribute, showing a filter based on that attribute to buyers isn’t going to be helpful because such a drastic reduction in results makes them lose confidence in those search results. We have to wait until a large number of sellers fill out that data to show it to buyers as a filter. When we do, sellers who have filled out that attribute show in those filtered search results. Sellers who haven’t, don’t.” Also, “[w]e know that shoppers who interact with these filters tend to buy more expensive items.” And, there aren’t separate jewellery attributes for “gold”, “gold-filled” & “gold-plated” because “[m]any jewelry buyers don’t have your experience and don’t know the huge difference between these things.”

The new commercials were launched earlier this month; you can check them all out here, and here is some media coverage. Some analysts think this is a good thing for the stock. 

Vox published  a review of Etsy’s latest free shipping push, in contrast with its history. [I am sure most of you have seen that, but if not, it is a good read!] “Silverman doesn’t like the words “handmade” or “craft” because they “don’t communicate anything to buyers about when to think of Etsy.” he says now. Nobody wakes up thinking, “Gosh, I need to buy something handmade today,” he tells me, which may be true but I rarely wake up thinking I need to buy anything at all, and more commonly wake up in horror because I’ve already bought way too much. “You need to furnish your apartment. You need to prepare for a party. You need to find a gift for a friend. You need a dress. Handmade is not the value proposition — unique, personalized, expresses your sense of identity, those are things that speak to buyers.” [emphasis added]  Also, apparently Etsy founder Rob Kalin “didn’t know what seed funding was when he took it”  😮

The new tool for creating country-specific sales is finally out. You still can’t create the equivalent of the $35 free shipping guarantee for countries other than the US, however, which makes this pretty useless for people wanting to offer free shipping in the US and to their own country. The only way to come close is to set a 30 day free shipping sale to your own country, but it won’t show up in search (unless people filter for free shipping) or get the Canadian search boost for items that ship free, and you still need to renew it every 30 days. In short, Etsy is telling us to overcharge our customers in other countries with no way to offer them the same deals Americans are getting.

Sellers can now use Etsy Labels for USPS First Class letters & flats. 

Holiday tips continue to roll out: here are some ideas for running holiday sales and promotions on Etsy.

Advanced content on machine learning: Etsy is employing its data on styles to serve up personalized recommendations, including the “Our Picks for You” section on the home page. The purchase and favouriting rates are part of what gets shown. They’ve discovered that some styles are more popular are different times of the year. 

For those of you who think Etsy doesn’t spend enough on advertising, they are actually buying spots on tv shows now, including this Las Vegas morning show. [video]

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES 

Sad to report that Keywords Everywhere is becoming a paid tool starting October 1st (although it may take longer to roll out to your account). https://keywordseverywhere.com/news.html  They need to do this because they were being scraped by bots, which was affecting user experience & costing them a lot of time and money.  Fortunately, it is still going to be very cheap - 10,000 keywords for $1 USD, purchased ahead of time as credits. They say that the average user will spend less than $2 a month, & I suspect that the average Etsy user will spend less. Once your account moves to a paid one, you will no longer see the search volume, cost per click & competition numbers under search terms until you buy credits, although the "related keywords" & "people also search" sections will still show up on the right side of Google search.  I usually do not recommend any paid tools, but I do think this will still be worth every penny, especially if you remember to turn it off when shopping instead of researching! Every comparable paid tool costs way more than this. And despite the rush of attention since their announcement, I still received a personal reply to my email within 24 hours. 

You know how I always talk about nofollow links? They still exist, but Google has expanded their link attribution codes to include “sponsored” &  "ugc" (user generated content), and all might be crawled at any point after March 1, 2020. Moz did a top level explanation, and here is Google’s (shorter) summary. But it may not really matter much to the average site. 

Want to rank well on Google and other search engines? Create “complete content.”  

A followup on last edition’s discussion of canonical URLs - Google gets the final say. [video]

Google is now releasing monthly videos of their search news; first one is here. 

Some of you will remember Moz’s Whiteboard Friday series on learning SEO in one hour. They’ve now compiled all 6 videos in one place. 

And if you want to learn the basics of link building quickly, Moz has a short version of that chapter from their Beginner’s Guide to SEO. 

If you are afraid you are missing some SEO rules on your top pages, check out this complete checklist for on-page SEO. 

There are tons of SEO tools for Wordpress; here are 15 of the best. 

Many people will find your blog through search engines, so make sure you use keywords in your blog posts. 

If you have a website, check out 16 things that can harm your search engine rankings [semi-advanced in part, some points are discussing coding]

Success on YouTube involves SEO, something I find many users forget.

Mostly advanced: reminder that as of September 1, you can’t use robots.txt to tell Google not to index pages or sites. 

Advanced content for website developers: you need to make sure the site is ready for SEO work. 

There are always more Google updates; this one is still rolling out, and was confirmed by Google, but very few details were given. Sistrix did the first comprehensive analysis, although it is still early, and health and media sites seem to be the most dramatically affected. 

CONTENT MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails) 

Marketing emails need to be carefully designed for success. Everything from the layout to the “preheader” matters. 

If you have content on one medium that is doing well for you, it’s time to “repurpose” it for different platforms. 

Infographics are very popular in content marketing; here’s how to make one, with 15 free templates.

Some Instagram posts do better than others; here’s why. Among other study findings, “smaller profiles which use more hashtags actually do see better engagement rates per post.”

If you aren’t getting much interaction on Instagram, you could be “shadowbanned.” There are ways to avoid that happening, and ways to fix it when it does. 

“Content factories” are a big part of Instagram traffic. Maybe Facebook should crack down on this? 

Pinterest is combining image recognition visual search with Shoppable Pins. 

Facebook is considering hiding the like counts on News Feed posts, as Instagram is testing in 7 countries right now. “The idea is to prevent users from destructively comparing themselves to others and possibly feeling inadequate if their posts don’t get as many Likes. It could also stop users from deleting posts they think aren’t getting enough Likes or not sharing in the first place.”

Video app TikTok can be confusing, so here is a step-by-step guide for beginners. And here’s a podcast [with text] on the basics. 

Twitter chats are a great way to attract interest in your business.

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS) 

Facebook is testing new shopping ads, but they are only available to small groups at the moment: checkout from the Facebook app, and turning Instagram shopping posts into ads. Here’s more on the latter. 

Snapchat now has longer ads and different formats. 

I see a lot of questions on what you can advertise on various platforms; here’s a good summary of items/topics prohibited on major sites. 

Since so many sellers are interested in other types of advertising right now, here are a few primers, most of which I have posted here before: Setting up Google Shopping for your website Instagram Sponsored Posts How to beat Facebook’s ad algorithm Setting up Pinterest ads

STATS, DATA, OTHER TRACKING 

Have Google Analytics set up on your website but don’t know how to use it? Here are some common features [text and video] you may want to take advantage of. Note that the part about setting it up doesn’t apply to most marketplaces and many website builders, which have a more simplified set up, as Etsy does. 

The old Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is now almost entirely converted to the new version. Expect all of the old reports to be moved to the new version soon. 

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS 

There’s new evidence that Amazon has skewed its search algorithm to favour its own products & third-party products that make Amazon the most money. ”Executives from Amazon’s retail divisions have frequently pressured the engineers at A9 to surface their products higher in search results, people familiar with the discussions said.” In case that WSJ article goes back behind a paywall, here is some news coverage of it. “Instead of adding profitability into the algorithm itself, Amazon changed the algorithm to prioritize factors that correlate with profitability, the article said.” Amazon denies this, of course. 

Despite the legal agreement in Germany, Amazon is still suspending accounts without 30 days notice. 

Want to use cash to pay for online purchases? Amazon is now offering that option in the US. 

eBay listings now default to 1-day handling; if you ship slower than that, make sure to remember to change the default on each new listing you make. 

eBay managed payments (the equivalent of Etsy Payments) are now available in Germany. 

A review of major shipping trends in ecommerce notes that “[t]he accelerated supply chain is putting small sellers at a crossroads regarding if they can afford to take a hit on margins” when discussing Etsy’s free shipping push. 

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE 

Over ⅓ of US adults have bought something on social media, over 50% of 18-34 year olds are in that group. Far fewer had used visual search or virtual reality. 

More people are shopping online late at night; women are more likely to do it, but men spend more when they do. [I’ve noticed this trend on my site and Etsy shop for a few years now,compared to when I first started selling in 2008.]

The majority of shoppers worldwide who are online use videos to make some purchase decisions, as shopping lists, how-to research, and to check reviews. 

Gen Z (the generation after millennials) is more concerned about their health than the the previous 2 generations, and sometimes avoid the stresses of social media by shopping in brick & mortar stores. “About two-thirds (67%) of Gen Z prefer products made with ingredients they can understand, and tend to buy products in health and wellness categories more frequently than other generations. On environmental issues, 65% said they prefer simple packaging and 58% said they want eco-friendly packaging. Half of the group seeks products that are locally sourced or made, and 57% are seeking products that are environmentally sustainable, but fewer are willing to pay a premium price for them.”

For the 2019 holiday season, “65% of holiday shoppers will use a mobile device to shop, and 65% will make an online purchase via mobile.”

How do different industries get their online traffic? Google sends sites 8 times more traffic than all social media sites combined, and Facebook drives nearly ⅔ of all visits from social media. Instagram is responsible for less than 1%, while Twitter tops 10%. The author notes that “faster-growing social networks like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok are designed from the ground up in a way that makes it difficult to drive traffic to external sites.”

MISCELLANEOUS (including humour) 

Google is working on letting you search your Google Photos for text; it seems to be using AI to identify & store the text in your screenshots and other images. It’s interesting technology that will likely be used in many ways, including search engines, if it works well. 

If you like convo snippets on Etsy, here’s a tool that will make them possible in many more places. 

Need a photo editor that works on mobile? Here’s a list of 12, most of which are free or cost only $1 USD. 

This one simple trick makes everything faster and easier. 

Stuff that probably shouldn’t taste like pumpkin spice. [humour]

[harrisongreeves-blog]

Laravel 6.0: What You Should Know

Since the inception of Laravel 5.0 around 4.5 years ago, the Laravel ecosystem has blossomed into something that leaves users nothing to complain about, to say the least. Laravel Nova, Laravel Horizon, Laravel Echo, Laravel Scout, and Laravel Passport are just some of the tools that have been introduced since then. At the time of this writing, we’re on Laravel 5.8 and Taylor Otwell has decided to skip past 5.9 on to 6.0 on the 3rd of September. Previously, Taylor has stressed that this won’t be a major paradigm shift for Laravel and the most significant change will be the transition to semantic versioning. However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of new features worth talking about.

Let’s dive into some of the smaller changes first.

The Smaller Things

Authorization

Authorization messages can now be made easier for users to understand. Before Laravel 6.0, the infrastructure wasn’t in place to easily give a specific response to a user when they were given an authorization-related error. The status code could be given fairly easily, but giving a custom error message was more complicated back then. Giving a custom messaged required the developer to create a new file and write their own exceptions.

Now, to get a customizable authorization response, you can simply use the Gate::inspect method when linking to the function that enables you to receive the response. Delivery of the message to the front-end is also easy to organize. Simply add $this->authorize or Gate::authorize to a suitable route or controller.

No More Default Front-End

The typical front-end setup you are given when you first start a Laravel project is now gone. This means the Vue and Bootstrap code you would usually see, would have now been removed. What it’s been replaced with is unknown. Perhaps, it hasn’t been replaced. Strangely, the make:auth command, used to provide the login system scaffolding is now not a part of the original Laravel install either. To be honest, the rationale behind this change is unclear to me. However, given Laravel’s versioning adjustment, it makes sense that third-party technologies like Vue and Bootstrap that haven’t recently undergone the same changes could cause conflict. Though, this is merely speculation.

If you want access to the old UI, you can extract a composer package that contains it with the CLI: composer require laravel/ui and php artisan ui vue --auth.

Lazy Collections

This is one of the more interesting additions. If you’re new to Laravel, Collections are tools that make it easier for you to manipulate arrays. Eloquent, one of the two main tools in Laravel used to communicate with databases, returns its queries as Collection instances. Check out the docs for Collections if you think you’re gonna lack context in a moment. https://laravel.com/docs/5.8/collections

So, what are Lazy Collections? Traditional Collections are often used for working with large amounts of data. When they run into data-heavy files, they’ll try and store all of that data at once. This may sound quick and convenient but the downside is that this is very memory-taxing. Lazy Collections solve this problem by only storing the part of the file they need, and thus, save memory usage and boost performance.

If you understand how lazy loading works then you’ll be familiar with my previous explanation. Lazy loading works the same way. When you make a request to the server with lazy loading implemented, the browser will only return the part of the web page it knows you’re going to use immediately. Then, when the user scrolls down the page or clicks on an internal link, the server will provide you the necessary content it knows you need. This way, only memory that is needed at that particular moment is being used. This method increases speed. Lazy Collections is kind of like lazy loading but with arrays from a database and not content on a webpage.

The Bigger Things

Laravel Ignition

So yeah, the new error page for Laravel is called Ignition and it looks awesome. It’ll be the default error page for Laravel when 6.0 releases. However, if you don’t feel like making the switch to 6.0 just yet, that’s fine, you can still install Ignition on previous versions. Let’s talk about what Ignition brings to the table.

With Whoops (the current default Laravel error page), stack traces and relevant code snippets are shown in an error page, but this doesn’t always lead the developer to the solution. Worse, sometimes the stack traces just reference compiled paths. This can it make it difficult to find the necessary non-compiled files to fix because they aren’t listed anywhere on the error page. Thankfully, this isn’t a problem with Ignition, it can display to you the non-compiled file where the problem actually exists. By clicking on a pencil icon, you can go directly to the file in your chosen editor.

The second coolest feature of Ignition is that it can display potential solutions when displaying an error message. Most error pages just leave you with the error. For example, if the error is that you misspelled a property name, Ignition will tell you that the property has been misspelled and offer you the correct spelling. Solution suggestions can be way more sophisticated than this, I’ll link you to the source down below. Your suggestions are even customizable!

You wanna know the coolest feature? These solution suggestions are actually runnable!

Yes, really. Take a look at this short demo by one of the creators, Freek Van der Herten.

https://youtu.be/EZu0-CwTU9Q

Also, you can add your own runnable solutions too! This is great as Ignition is open source so people in the Laravel community will undoubtedly contribute their own solutions for everyone to use.

There’s a bunch of other cool features too such as creating your own tabs (yes Ignition has tabs) and sharing your error messages with other people. This is done using Flare, a tool that comes with Ignition.

For everything about Laravel Ignition and Flare, visit https://freek.dev/1441-ignition-a-new-error-page-for-laravel.

Laravel Vapor

Another big one. Laravel Vapor is a serverless deployment platform for Laravel. But wait, why do we need a deployment platform? We already have Laravel Forge, right? As beloved as Forge is amongst the Laravel community, it does have its limitations. It doesn’t have autoscaling to deal with large sudden increases in traffic that prevent your site from crashing. Also, configuration is required when OS or PHP updates occur. Vapor has autoscaling, so, you don’t have to worry about sudden spikes in your traffic causing website downtime. In addition, because of the serverless structure of Vapor, it also handles all the updates you may stress about when using Forge.

Vapor’s website is very clean looking and everything seems easy to find. When you deploy a project, you can see the different stages of the deployment process loading on the UI. I find this to be very reassuring and comforting. You can also rollback your application with a click of a button. Just click on “rollback” and it’ll do just that. Pretty neat. Same deal if you want your app to undergo maintenance. Just click on the “maintenance mode” button.

Another cool feature of Laravel Vapor is that you’re able to set alarms. What do I mean by that? For example, to know when your website traffic suddenly blows up, you can set a certain amount of HTTP requests per minute, and if your website hits that limit, the alarm will go off, informing you of the surge in traffic. Taylor Otwell showcases this and other conditionals in his Laravel Vapor demo which I’ll link to below.

There’s so much to cover with Laravel Vapor and the Laravel update itself. Because of this, I didn’t really want to dive into the complexities too much in this post. To learn more about the technical aspects of Laravel 6.0, you can take a look at the release notes here https://laravel.com/docs/6.0/releases. For more info on Laravel Vapor, visit this video by Taylor Otwell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsPeWjKAUt0&t=362s.

[xoidua]

FIFTY SHADES OF A COLOR*

*I have just noticed maybe Margaret Mitchell used homophony and meronymy to name the two characters with clear purpose: Scarlett and Rhett (Red) are two shades of the same color.

Since I was still a secondary school girl, I have heard a lot about “Gone with the wind” in many ways. The first adjectives appearing in my mind whenever I think about this novel are “Classic” and “Romantic”, based on the praise and description about it. I have always been curious about the film, especially when I saw the beauty of the actress playing Scarlett O’Hara.

“Gone with the wind” - an epic candidate to embodish both  American Literature and Filmology, whose plot was created by Margaret Mitchell in 1936, has the setting in the American South around the time of the Civil War. Refering to its phenomenal success, it would be a mistake if we complement its plot only and skip the characters. There have been numerous critics for the two protagonists of the story, however, it does not prevent me from expressing my own thoughts on Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler due to their strong impression.

Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara

When the story opens, Scarlett O’Hara was a pretty sixteen-year-old girl with dark hair, green eyes and slim figure, one evidence was her 47-cm waist. Unlike the other girls, her choice of outfits challenged the traditional unwriten rules for ladies. For example, she insisted on wearing a rather skin-revealing dress before 3:00 p.m to attend a party at The Twelve Oaks. Normally, she had special care to her appearance and outfits, however, during the difficult time of Tara, she told her sister that having pretty hands – symbols  of a lady – was no longer a concern in that situation. At the beginning of the story, she used to quarrel with her sister for a dress, but when Tara suffered from the war, she did not care about appearance anymore until she thought of enducing Rhett Butler for money and accepted wearing a dress made from window curtain.These details prove that on the outside, Scarlett can be a charming, dreamy, feminine and somehow spoiled lady, however, she was truly fiery and practical at core.

Having parents as different as chalk and cheese, Scarlett inheritted their both significant featues. While Ellen O’Hara was a refined French aristocrat, Genald O’Hara was a fun and free-spirited father, who stemmed from a humble background but thanks to hard-headedness and a bit of luck, he could enjoy a better life. Scarlett resembled Ellen in the way she appeared to the outsiders but on the inside, she was more like her father, especially the determination. This characteristic is the driving force for her actions during the story, from her first attempt in expressing her love with Ashley Wikes, best manifested in the War time and highly probable to continue even after the story ended on the pages.

The most exciting thing about Scarlett O’Hara is her personality. Although her aforementioned appearance and background have partially revealed who she is, it is her actions and words throughout the story that define Scarlett O’Hara. Notably, we can see the development of this character along with the chronological events. In the first part of the film, I can easily name three values that Scarlett appreciated: herself, herself and herself. She was as pretty as narcissus but she was also a narcissist, illustrated by her attitudes and actions towards other characters. Around her were often many men and boys, she flirted with them to feed her pride and make other jealous of her.  Despite knowing Melanie and Ashley were going to get married, Scarlett still expressed her love for Ashley regardless of his fiance’s feelings, and even after they were husband and wife, she still pursued her desperate love and hurt others. Scarlett got married with the first two husbands without love just to revenge Ashley and got money. Even after the unfortunate husbands died, she never shed a tear for them but for her own sake and shallow guilt. When Scarlett was a nurse in Atlanta, she could not bear it because she only thought about how disgusted and terrified she was. In these details, Melanie’s kind heart and selflessness highlighted the sharp contrast between the two sisters-in-law. Scarlett’s care for herself represents to some extent American values: self-reliance and individualism. It may be terrible for people around Scarlett but definitely benefit herself and helped her achieve ambitious goals.

Melanie Hamilton 

Ashley Wilkes

Another striking feature of Scarlett is her intelligence. The way she talked with boys, the way she managed through difficulties, saved Tara, run successfully a sawmill in Atlanta, etc proved her outstanding talent compared with other typical ladies at that time.

It is hard to say Scarlett is a loyal woman or not without any explanation. She was definitely faithful to her love for Ashley since teenagehood till having 3 husbands. The wrong thing here is they were not single; they all had their partners, yet still had improper behavior. Her infidelity resulted in tragedy for all four people: Ashley and Melanie, Rhett and herself.

The thing I admire Scarlett O’Hara the most is her strong determination. Once she wanted to achieve something, she would take any measures necessary and forget concepts like honor and kindness. Even at the darkest moment of war, this woman still did not give up on hope and a better future. She overcame social prejudices to enjoy life, to run a carriage, to manage a sawmill. I support her as a strong-minded woman, yet do not agree totally with her heartless methods from time to time.

On a whole, Scarlett may be a bad girl who only thought for herself but sometimes she was quite adorable and childlike, especially when she was near Rhett. For example, when they ran away from Atlanta, she told him: “I forgot to lock the door”, and afterward she cried like a baby missing home and insisting on seeing mother. She also resembled a child’s excitement when she was cared by Rhett in New Orleans.

Unlike Scarlett O’Hara, we hardly know anything about Rhett Butler based on his background and appearance. This man’s personality can only be revealed through his sayings, actions and interactions with others. Under the cover of a gentleman with signature smirk is a cunny, wise, quick-witted, decisive and brave man. Sometimes we can feel that Rhett is like a male version of Scarlett.Thanks to his wit, he could quickly took advantage of the war and became rich. Once he wanted to achieve something, he would also take any measures necessary. He was the only man that can understand her best, even better than Scarlett herself. Although he may have any woman he wanted, he still loved Scarlett years after years. Between these two is a special chemistry: they may be bad in other people’s eyes but strangely compatible with each other despite Scarlett could not realize it sometimes. However, on the whole, I think Rhett seemed to be less selfish than Scarlett. He risked his life to save Scarlett, joined the army because of honor, he cared about others’ feelings, no matter what class they came from, no matter that person is Melanie or Mammy. He also behaved more rationally, could keep calm and conscious in almost every situation, except for when it related to the two people he loved the most: his wife and daughter. That was also his weakness, we can see how heartbreaking he was when he knew Scarlett, despite his unconditional love for her, still loved Ashley, and when his beloved daughter died, he was literally insane until Melanie came. Overall, I do not think we can classify Rhett Butler as a completely good guy, but this man has some admirable characteristics which definitely deserved widespread recognition.

Mammy (on the right, in case you are confused)

All in all, the two classic characters had made a strong impression on me as well as many other audiences. Black or white, we can not classify them in one word, and that is why I love the complexity and development of these characters. A strange love story between two extraordinary people will have a happy ending or not, based on their personality, I can not give a certain anticipation, nevertheless, even without knowing the ending, we can still admire them for themselves only.

------------------------- Cảm ơn các bạn đã quan tâm. Youtube: https://youtube.com/c/beeline92 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/xoiduamedia/ Website: http://xoidua.com

[welllpthisishappening]

The Baby Was Fussy

I have no excuse for this. I have no idea what this even is. But I had so many questions. And so I wrote the answers myself. Canon is not my usual jam, but...nope, still no excuse. I’ll retreat back to hockey as soon as possible. 

Killian thinks it’s colic.

Well, no, that’s a lie. Killian is positive it’s colic, because Killian has read every book about babies and then a few more about only-recently born babies and...the word for that is infant.

God, Emma is so tired.

It’s definitely colic.

There’s been more crying in their house in the last forty-eight hours than should ever exist in one space ever, and Emma swears she can feel the bags growing underneath her eyes, but it’s not the bone-deep exhaustion she’s used to from saving Storybrooke or fighting monsters or even realm hopping.

They don’t have to do that anymore, after all.

It’s the kind of exhaustion that just kind of wraps around her and feels a bit like a blanket and a little warm, like she’s been covered in feelings and emotions and she’s clearly become a giant sap at some point, but Emma has, somehow, smiled more in the last forty-eight hours than she ever once thought possible.

So...by comparison.

It’s definitely colic and it’s not really that bad and they’re absolutely going to be late.

“Swan,” Killian calls from the other end of the hall and she can hear Hope fussing because, at some point, that’s become their theme song.

The website claims colic doesn’t last forever.

Emma is not convinced.

There are footsteps moving towards her, but Emma keeps her eyes trained on the mirror in front of her, trying to convince herself that curling her hair is a good idea. And won’t end with a tiny fist gripping the strands.

“Swan,” Killian repeats like she didn’t hear him, and the floor creaks when he moves into the room. The whole house seems to creak, constantly, no matter where they step or what they touch, and that’s kind of nice too because it feels lived in and theirs and they’ve mapped out every single inch of it, padding out tiny semi-circles in attempts to get Hope to sleep.

That’s worked about as well as this curling iron.

She nearly burns her right ear when she does, finally, glance up.

Emma knows her mouth drops open slightly, breath rushing out of her in a quick huff, and maybe her eyes widen too – just to complete the perfect look of surprise and several other words that are hardly appropriate in front of their infant daughter.

She remembered the word that time.

“Everything alright, love?” Killian asks, but it’s clear he’s not expecting an answer and she briefly considers if she can arrest her co-law enforcement for whatever the hell he’s doing with his eyebrows.

“Aye,” she mutters in a pale imitation of his voice and it gets the laugh out of him she was hoping for.

Emma presses her lips together, careful not to burn her ear – because, honestly, if they go see Doctor Whale again or set foot in one more doctor’s office she may actually scream. And they’re going to be so late.

Killian hums, stepping into her space and Emma doesn’t even try to stop herself from leaning against his chest. It takes some finangling and shifting and she’s not sure what noise she lets out when she notices that pink, plastic monstrosity Ruby bought them as a gift at the end of his hook, but she’s smiling again and Hope is actually not crying.

Emma is not going to question whatever miracle it is.

“You’re not dressed yet,” Killian points out, and Emma’s laugh turns into a sigh. She wriinkles her nose, glancing at their reflection in the mirror, and, she swears, her mouth goes dry.

There was never really a discussion about keeping it. It just kind of...hung in the back corner of the closet and, maybe, did something ridiculous to her pulse every time she saw it hanging in between button-up shirts with slightly absurd floral patterns and leather jackets and the few actual gowns in their combined space because that’s the kind of life Emma lives now.

But there was also no actual, specific discussion about Killian wearing full scale pirate regalia to a royal coronation in a different realm that they can drive to now.

Her life is very weird.

Her life is fantastic.

“And you’re incredibly dressed,” Emma counters, smile tugging at the corners of her mouth and she laughs again when she notices the tips of Killian’s ears go red.

He narrows his eyes, pressing his tongue to the corner of his lips, and Emma has to dig her heels into the floor to stop herself from turning around. The collar of his jacket is popped slightly, which Emma has a fairly strong suspicion is also to avoid it being tugged on by tiny, little hands, and Hope is already clearly fascinated with the charms around his neck.

“Ah, yes,” he mutters. “There was an...incident. While you were in the shower.” “An incident?” “A crying jag that turned into a rather loud ordeal and a forgotten towel for my shoulder and unfortunately that new jacket took the brunt of the damage.” Emma nods in understanding, ignoring the pang of disappointment in her gut because she liked that jacket a lot and that woman Ashley just knew from the Enchanted Forest worked incredibly hard on it. Or Emma assumes she did.

She still can’t quite wrap her mind around fairy godmothers and magic outfits for royal coronations.

Maybe she’ll get there eventually.

Maybe after this coronation.

Maybe after she stops staring at her husband in full scale pirate regalia.

“I can…” Killian starts, taking another step back and Emma finally spins around, the note of concern in his voice doing something even more potent to her pulse than anything to do with the actually impressive amount of black leather he’s wearing.

His tongue keeps darting out between his lips, eyes glancing around the room and anywhere except Emma and she really needs to get dressed.

A fairy godmother made her dress.

“No, no,” Emma says, only slightly embarrassed when she practically shouts the words in his face. Killian’s eyes widen slightly, but they’re also looking at her, which works pretty well and they haven’t been out of the house in the last two days.

They both fell asleep propped up on the wall in the corner of Hope’s room the night before.

“No,” she repeats. “It’s...you look…” Emma is going to arrest her own husband for the look on his face. “Aye,” he says. “Feels almost appropriate doesn’t it?” “Does it?” “Swan.” “I know, I know,” she grumbles, rolling her eyes when his smile, somehow, gets wider. “If I answered a question with a question I’d argue too. Whatever. But, yeah, I guess you’re right. Full circle or something. I’m sorry about your coat, though.” “It’s alright, love. I think we’ve exhausted ourselves completely now, haven’t we?” It takes less than half a second to realize he’s not actually talking to Emma, which is far more endearing than she would have expected. She may sprain several different muscles in her face by the time this is all over.

“Maybe we won’t cause a scene upon arrival then,” Emma says, reaching out to brush her fingers over Hope’s stomach. That earns her a quiet noise too – one that’s inching closer to a giggle every day.

“I think we do need to actually arrive in order to do that.” “How much time are we talking?”

“To travel there or for you to put your gown on?” Emma arches an eyebrow, but she’s only met with a smirk and that goddamn tongue and maybe she’s missed full scale pirate regalia more than she realized. “I don’t know you to be one to complain about my clothing choices choices, Captain.” She will absolutely, positively never admit to doing it solely for the reaction, but that may be exactly why she did it and Killian’s eyes practically flash when he meets her gaze.

Emma isn’t sure flirting is a good excuse for being late to a royal event.

“Never, Swan,” he says, ducking his head and brushing his lips over hers. It’s over before she’s entirely ready for it, and if she chases after him slightly it might not be a lie. She blames the coat. And the cut of his shirt. “Although,” Killian adds. “I’d rather we didn’t begin this new royal reign with wanted posters because our tardiness.”

“Pirate,” she accuses.

“With a fantastic sense of timing.” Emma rolls her eyes, but their daughter is squirming in his arms and neither her hair nor Killian’s charms are safe. “Fine, fine,” she says. “Give me five minutes.”

It takes her four.

And even that feels too long, the quiet creak of the living room floor proof positive of the path Killian’s been tracing for those two-hundred and forty seconds.

He smiles when he sees her anyway.

“Everything alright?” she asks, and it’s kind of a copout and a little cheesy, but they haven’t been outside in two days and her dress is pink.

And so, maybe, Emma awkwardly asked her mom if she still had those polaroids from her first date with Killian. And so, maybe, she brought the dress when the fairy godmother asked for a more detailed look. And so, maybe, this one wasn’t exactly the same, but it was also pink and soft and there was a pattern on it that was so intricate the only explanation was magic.

Killian nods slowly, eyes tracing over her and back up to her face and, possibly, down to her lips and Emma doesn’t bite them, which seems like some kind of victory. She might exhale softly though, like everything is settling or starting and it’s a weird balance, but that’s kind of their lives and she absolutely refused to wear poofy, bell sleeves.

There had to be a line somewhere.

“Stunning, Swan,” he says, voice low and intent when he takes a step back towards her. There’s a baby bag at her feet. It’s nautical theme. Elsa bought it. “You look stunning, love.” Emma grins – possibly so she doesn’t cry, which she may do later anyway because this is supposed to be some kind of event and she’s already seen designs for her mom’s dress too.

“You think I need a coat?” she asks.

It’s clearly not what Killian expects, which almost makes it better but he laughs softly and kisses her again. That doesn’t leave her much room to argue.

“I have no idea,” he answers. “We haven’t been outside in eons.” “That’s only slightly dramatic, don’t you think?” “That’s a pirate trait too, love. I’m afraid, you’ll have to get used to it.” “I think I’m good with that,” Emma says, but it sounds as important as stunning and maybe they can hang her dress next to his jacket when they get home later. “C’mon, it takes real, literal eons to get Hope in the car seat.”

Killian nods and neither one of them moves before they both lean forward slightly and the kiss is quick and normal and it threatens to make Emma’s heart burst, but she ducks down to grab the bag they’ve got filled at all times now.

That’s definitely a Navy thing, but Emma never mentions that.

And she briefly considers how ridiculous it will look, but she doesn’t have anything else and they’re late enough already and Killian’s smile threatens to rival the sun when Emma closes the door behind her – her red, leather jacket on over her gown.

“All good?” she asks.

“Aye, love. Let’s go.”

[autobodyrepaircalifornia]

With the growing popularity of electric cars, it was only a matter of time before someone introduced an electric truck. Tesla’s new Cybertruck is not available just yet, but the company is taking preorders. For those of you who may be thinking about getting one of these cutting-edge vehicles, let’s take a look at everything we know about the Cybertruck so far.

Will The New Tesla Pickup Truck Have A 500-Mile Range?

Well, that depends on which one you buy. The Cybertruck will be available with three different motor configurations, and each one will have a different range. You can get a single-motor version, a dual-motor version, or a three-motor version. The single-motor version will have a range of 250 miles on a full charge, while the dual-motor version will have a range of 300 miles. If you go with the tri-motor version, you will indeed get a range of 500 miles, and maybe even a little more.

Why Is The New Tesla Pickup Truck So Cheap?

Overall, the Cybertruck is not that expensive. Electric vehicles are usually much more expensive than gas-powered vehicles, but this one comes in at about $39,000. Thus, it’s only a little more expensive than a comparable gas-powered truck of similar size. Of course, the double-motor and tri-motor versions cost a little bit more.

The company went to great lengths to hold down the costs on this vehicle, and the unique shape of this vehicle is part of that effort. Since the exoskeleton is made from flat pieces of steel, it does not require the kind of expensive stamping and shaping that other auto bodies require. They also saved money by cutting out the paint job entirely. The whole exterior of the vehicle is made of stainless steel, which is difficult to paint anyway.

The simple interior of the vehicle also contributes to its lower cost. The dash is quite plain except for a single screen. This one screen allows you to control everything that you might need to control. The dash has a front-piece that is made to look like marble, but which is actually a paper composite. As such, it is also quite cheap.

What Are The Pros and Cons Of A Tesla Pickup Truck?

It is very hard to evaluate the pros and cons of the Cybertruck at this time, mostly because it has not yet been released. However, we can see a few pros and cons right off the bat.

It is obvious that Tesla has attempted to make a vehicle that is much more practical than its other offerings. The idea is to make a vehicle that has all the utility of a pickup truck with the performance of a sports car. If they can actually deliver on those claims, it will be a serious feather in their caps.

The bed of the Cybertruck will have a steel tonneau cover, making it much more secure than a normal truck bed. Instead of a tailgate, this truck has a collapsible ramp. This is a really cool idea that someone should have done a long time ago.

If it lives up to the hype, the Cybertruck will also have a very long driving range, as we discussed earlier. It will thus be a lot more suited for hard use than the average electric vehicle. We can also expect that this vehicle will have a very high durability factor. With a body made entirely of hardened stainless steel, it will surely be much more difficult to dent than most others. The windows are also much more durable than standard auto glass.

When it comes to cons, we can only think of one major problem: The risk of buying something that might not live up to the hype. So many claims have been made about this particular vehicle, and it’s hard to believe that all of them will turn out to be true. We should probably look at the recent unveiling demonstration as an example of this risk.

During this demo, the Cybertruck was subjected to several kinds of abuse, and it held up very well for the most part. However, the windows did break when a steel ball was tossed at them. Is this a tough vehicle? Absolutely. Being made mostly of stainless steel will do that. However, there are already some indications that it may not be quite as tough as advertised.

It should be noted that the vehicle in that demonstration was a prototype, but we couldn’t help but notice that it lacked something very important: Rear-view mirrors! The law requires that all vehicles be equipped with these things, so Tesla will almost certainly have to add them at some point. Still, the lack of such a basic safety measure makes us wonder what else may have been forgotten. There was a recent incident in which Tesla CEO Elon Musk hit a traffic pylon with his rear wheel while driving the Cybertruck prototype. The lack of rearview mirrors on this vehicle is the most likely explanation for this mistake.

When Can We Expect The New Tesla Pickup?

At present, there is no way to know exactly when the Cybertruck will be available to the public. The company has said that the vehicle is slated to be released in late 2021, but that schedule is subject to change. Thus, you might as well try to remain patient if you have chosen to preorder one of these.

Conclusion

On the one hand, the Cybertruck represents an exciting new frontier in vehicle design. It might very well revolutionize the auto industry, but only if it can live up to all the hype. On the other hand, the Cybertruck might not live up to the hype, and might not even be available for several more years. Only time will tell if this vehicle will become the next new thing or another flashy disappointment. If you have found this article to be helpful and interesting, please feel free to fill out the contact form below.

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By Julio Fernandez

January 17, 2020

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[keepingupwithfundies]

On blanket training and the Duggars...

Trigger warning: The following topic covers issues related to corporal punishment and abuse at certain points. Consider carefully, if you want to read into the practices of the Pearls. For my uneducated eye it is clearly child abuse.

Here we go, I have spent a few hours researching, I have dug through countless FreeJinger threads and read many newspaper articles and watched a handful of videos.

What is “blanket training”?

From my research, blanket training is a form of training, to get you child to stay on a blanket for a longer period of time, without getting off the blanket or disturbing you. Methods used to ensure that behaviour is kept up are widely different. 

Who are the Pearls and what is the book “To train up a child” about?

The Pearls (Mike and Debbie and I think 6 kids) are a fundamentalist family who wrote and published the book “To train up a child”, that is supposed to “help” your kid, to become a happy and obedient child. How is that achieved? Via spanking/switching aka training the child.

Here is the full copy to read. Please be aware, that many real cases are described in the book, they are very disturbing: http://web.archive.org/web/20070206184100/http://www.achristianhome.org:80/to_train_up_a_child.htm

Later-on a few cases of children dying of horrible abuse were linked to this book, since the parents of the dead children owned and used that book.  Graphic violence is described, please watch with caution!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5vGHOOzokI

Here is also a very long “webinar” of the Pearl family defending their methods and denying their connection to these murders:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RAEa2ORFbg

Here are also a few chapters from the book, that I think are particularly disturbing!!

“OBEDIENCE TRAINING--BITING BABIES One particularly painful experience of nursing mothers is the biting baby. My wife did not waste time finding a cure. When the baby bit, she pulled hair (an alternative has to be sought for baldheaded babies). Understand, the baby is not being punished, just conditioned. A baby learns not to stick his finger in his eyes or bite his tongue through the negative associations accompanying it. It requires no understanding or reasoning. Somewhere in the brain that information is unconsciously stored. After two or three times of biting, with the accompanying head hurting, the child programs that information away for his own comfort. The biting habit is cured before it starts. This is not discipline. It is obedience training.”

“NEVER TOO YOUNG TO TRAIN The parents who put off training until the child is old enough to discuss issues or receive explanations find their child a terror long before he understands the meaning of the word. A newborn soon needs training. The child needs holding, loving and lots of attention, but the mother often has other duties. As the mother, holding her child, leans over the crib and begins the swing downward, the infant stiffens, takes a deep breath and bellows. The battle for control has begun in earnest. Someone is going to be conditioned. Either the tender-hearted mother will cave in to this self-centered demand (thus training the child to get his way by crying) or the infant is allowed to cry (learning that crying is counterproductive). Crying because of genuine physical need is simply the infant's only voice to the outside world; but crying in order to manipulate the adults into constant servitude should never be rewarded. Otherwise, you will reinforce the child's growing self-centeredness, which will eventually become socially intolerable.

“Just last night while sitting in a meeting, I looked over to see a young mother struggling with her small child. He seemed determined to make her life as miserable as possible--and destroy her reputation in the process. She had the "Why me?" look on her tired face. He kept defiantly throwing his bottle on the floor (assisted by her picking it up and handing it back to him) and making angry noises that forced the preacher to scream louder and louder. With threats of increasingly embarrassing displays, he forced her to put him down on the floor where he proceeded to audition for circus clown while insisting on procuring a neighbor's property. When she tried to prevent his thievery and rescue the stolen goods, he kicked his feet like an eggbeater and screamed his protest. It was enough to make you believe the Devil started out as an infant. I am just thankful that one-year-olds don't weigh two-hundred pounds, or a lot more mothers would be victims of homicide. It causes one to understand where the concept of a "sinful nature" originated.”

“SINKING FEELING When our children were coming along, we lived in a house with a pond in the immediate yard. As they grew to be toddlers wandering around outside, we always watched them closely. Yet, knowing the possibility of one getting out of sight, we cranked up the training. On a warm spring day I followed the first set of wobbly legs to the inviting water. She played around the edge until she found a way to get down the bank to the water. I stood close by as she bent over reaching into the mirror of shining color. Splash! In she went. Girl, it was cold. I restrained my anxiety long enough for her to right herself in the water and show some recognition of her inability to breathe. When panic set in (mine as well as hers--not to mention her mother's), I pulled her out and scolded her for getting close to the pond. She didn't swallow any water, and there was no need for resuscitation--except on my wife who took several hours to begin breathing normally. We repeated the same process with all the children. It took only one time for each of them to learn respect for the water. And it got easier on us. We did have trouble with one of them. She is the one who became mobile early, crawling at four months and walking at seven. She always had marvelous coordination. She just wouldn't fall in. I got weary taking walks to the pond. So, to bring the class to graduation, I pushed. Oh, she didn't know it. As she was balanced over the water, I just nudged her with my foot. To this day, I still believe that if I had left her alone she would have swum out. But, it distressed her enough to make her not want to play around the pond. No, they didn't stay distressed of the water. My children were all swimming by the time they were four. We still closely watched them, and we never had a close call. The training worked. Do not try this unless you are sure that you can maintain full control of all the circumstances.”

How are the Duggars and Pearls connected?

The Duggars not only use the same terminology and apparently the same methods (see further below) as the Pearls, they even actively promoted their teachings on their own website:

Duggars on corporal punishment:

We already knew before, that the Duggar(senior aka JB and Michelle) were spanking their kids with a rod:

http://keepingupwithfundies.tumblr.com/post/161236886344/do-the-duggars-believe-in-corporal-punishment 

The girls, questioned by the police for the molestation by Josh, stated they were in fact hit with a rod. 

Blanked training described by Michelle:

I found very old posts about someone who was on the same Christian mother forum as Michelle, who shared what Michelle apparently posted:

She also described the practise in her book “20 and counting” (if anyone were to look into the chapter about child training and give us a review, I’d be incredibly thankful, but I understand, if nobody is interested in reading about abuse):

Later on she gave an interview, to well known owners of the duggarfamilyblog, Lily and Ellie, where she calls it “Quiet and still”, maybe because by then, the words “blanket training” had a negative connotation due to a few deaths of children linked to the Pearl’s book. Here is the audio to it.

Also from an old version of the Duggar website:

The Bible on spanking:

The bible actually seems to encourage spanking of you child and even the use of a rod. Check out this website:  https://www.openbible.info/topics/spanking_children

Knowing that the Duggars take the bible seem to adapt the bible as literally as possible to their lives, this shows us, why they spank their children.

I think it is pretty safe to say the the Duggars (senior) not only spanked their kids with a rod (proven fact) but it also seems very likely, that they did use tools such as a ruler for blanket training (still no proof to that though, just a statement by a person claiming to have been there. Seems likely though with the connections between Duggars and Pearls) .

How is Jill connected to all of this?

The discussion heated up again, when Derick stated in this video that 2yo Israel was manipulating him:

Jill grew up with blanket training. Michelle said, she started, when the twins (Jed and Jer) were 17 months old, so Jill was only 9 years old (and already had Joy as a buddy). There is no evidence, but always the possibility of her being taught by her mother how to train Joy and now using this practice on Israel.

We have seen a few pictures of Israel in distress:

But how I see it, pic 1 and 2 is not blanket training but swaddling (another controversial method, but this would need another post) and I would have been rather upset, if she let Izzy play on a stone-cold tile floor instead of the nice blanket (pic 3).

Here are also 2 threads on FJ discussing exactly this subject:

http://www.freejinger.org/topic/21012-do-you-think-jill-derick-will-do-blanket-training/

http://www.freejinger.org/topic/22770-will-jill-blanket-train/

So my conclusion?

I think imo the Duggars did use blanket training before the TV show started (4 years after she started with the method). I am unsure, if Jill is doing/did blanket training with Izzy the way the Pearls teach it in their book, or the way her mother played it down later-on. I will not go into much more detail, there is a lot of information gathered now, form your own opinion on it! Stay critical guys and believe in facts! (Annie) OMG what a monster post.... TLDR: Read it, don’t be lazy, inform yourself  💗

[bakagamieru]

Merger =/= Bail Out

Yesterday I saw a post about how Irving Azoff had to bail out Jeff and how Jeff isn’t good for Harry because he’s not promoting solo Harry and Harry is still linked to Kendall.

I can’t seem to find the post anymore, but I didn’t agree, so I wanted to offer my alternative view.

Fake Team vs. New Team with Hands Tied

The Azoffs’ hands are still tied.  If Zayn isn’t able to choose representation that supports his best career interests, if Louis isn’t able to, if Niall arguably isn’t because of his continuing connection with Modest, and if Liam can’t seem to release music since it keeps getting pushed back with no explanation, then why should the Azoffs be able to manage Harry normally at this point in time? All of them have their hands tied, so I think it makes perfect sense that the Azoffs are still biding their time as well.

I think in some cases like Zayn and Louis and maybe Niall (mgmt), they’re being represented by teams they didn’t choose.  I don’t think these will be long term arrangements and I think they’ll change when they can.  I think either they’re being loaned out under the original contract or they were forced to sign short term contracts under some sort of manipulation.  In some cases like Harry and maybe Liam and maybe Niall (label), it might be that they have legit new teams that can’t fully function until 1DHQ ends whatever stalling tactic they’ve used.

The reason some of the teams are real and some aren’t would be that 1DHQ still has control over the representation of the boys.  If they allow a new team to announce itself, it can happen, but they don’t have to allow it and the new teams can’t do anything under that situation.  1DHQ would have allowed the announcements as a way to control the spacing of them and not make 1DHQ look as bad.  They would have mandated the fake teams in order to cover their tracks with forcing Zayn to leave, to pretend that one person stayed with Modest, and to pretend that one person stayed with Syco.

The fake new teams would allow their name to be used because it’s promo for them and their actual artists.  The real new teams wouldn’t have a choice because my theory is that they’re still waiting in the wings, primed to go but without official power yet.

1DHQ Is Still Lingering

All of this boils down to the idea that 1DHQ is still in power.  I don’t think it’s absurd to think that since:

We’ve had a lot of starts, regressions, and restarts with the band-Zayn reconciliation narrative.

Babygate is STILL ongoing and has seen the same start-stop-start pattern as the reconciliation has.

The bearding that is heavily weighted in favor of promoing the beards is still ongoing for Zayn and Liam in particular and for Louis as well.  They even brought back Eleanor which I can’t see anyone but 1DHQ doing.

There’s still a more positive spin on news in the US, but nowhere near what you’d expect if any of the boys’ new teams had power and were actually going to bat for them.

It’s likely 1DHQ don’t have control over the boys’ solo releases and the majority* of the solo music keeps getting pushed back further and further without much explanation. 

*The exceptions are singles from Louis and Niall that may well have been to add to the perception that 1DHQ didn’t get totally ditched. Zayn’s new single is so recent it’s hard to judge.

We’re still getting massive coordination among solo efforts and stunt news which shouldn’t be happening if everyone is really conducting separate solo careers under separate teams.

It also relies on the idea that 1DHQ doesn’t have control over the upcoming solo material.  Mainly I think this because of the delayed releases mentioned above and because based on their original contract, there’s no reason 1DHQ should have control.

It’s possible none of the current teams are the new teams as well.  Liam’s management and Louis’ management were both considered odd choices when they were announced.  Louis’ is definitely tied to 1DHQ and Liam’s has no other music clients.  We know Louis staying with Syco is BS and Niall being with Modest is likely more of the same.  

Full Stop

For Harry, I would say that he probably never intended to be managed by Jeff under a new company.  I don’t think the “merger” was because Jeff failed.  I don’t think they ever intended Jeff’s company to do anything real.

At the time it was announced it was set up oddly with the business name not being registered ahead of the announcement.  The corporation was set up a year in advance, but the fact that the fandom knew the name of the company before it was even registered properly still holds true and is still very odd. 

Then there’s the fact that the corporation for Full Stop also seems to be connected to Irving Azoff’s other companies.  O’Hana was created the same day it was announced Harry was leaving Modest for Jeff.  Also... this retweet on Jeff’s Twitter from April 2015, 3 months after the first corporation was registered and about 9 months before O’Hana was filed.  It may be coincidence, but it’s a rather interesting thing to keep in mind that out of 36 total tweets, one just happens to reference the same word.  The song is by Leon Bridges who Jeff is connected to, but still.

They also never got a website up which even the most incompetent people can do. You buy a domain name from Godaddy and use a website builder site like WIX or Squarespace.  Voila.  You can hire a college kid to do it for $50 probably.  It makes no sense not to set up a site if you intend to have a viable artist agency.  The name for the site was even bought. It was done before the announcement, so you would assume the name was purchased by Jeff et al., yet it was never set up.

They don’t seem to have an active Twitter either.  The only two results that pop up have 3 tweets between them.  I found what I assume is Jeff’s actual Twitter since Gemma and Ben Winston follow it, but that only has 36 tweets that most related to his father’s clients or the people he’s been an agent for.  His business partner, Tommy Bruce, has a private Twitter.  There’s no promotion for this company or its artists anywhere except a couple news articles.

The other thing is that Harry was the main and nearly only client that Full Stop claimed.  Meghan Trainor has also been said to be under Full Stop, but it’s impossible to tell since there’s no real social media coverage, the Full Stop website isn’t up, and there’s no official list anywhere of their clients.  Meghan doesn’t list her management on Twitter or on her website.  Just like Harry, Meghan was originally a client of Jeff when he was an agent at CAA.

Full Stop has 2 public clients max and for a management company who should be advertising their clients, there shouldn’t be any private clients.  Out of those 2 clients, 1 of them hasn’t released anything since joining the management company and there’s little evidence that he ever intended to release something any sooner than is now planned.  It’s not like Jeff took on clients and failed.  He never started at all before merging.

Kendall Jenner

The other claim made was that Jeff was screwing Harry over by connecting him to the Kardashian family.

But how connected is Harry really?  The last time he was truly seen with her was quite a while ago.  The last big hurrah was the yacht at the end of 2015 really.  Ever since then some articles pop up occasionally when Kendall and Harry are in the same building, but there haven’t been any pap walks or social media pictures or anything.

Harry’s bearding is super low key at this point by anyone’s standards. In fact, he hasn’t really been involved in any big stunts personally for quite some time. The Sun has tried to create scandals, but they didn’t exactly have Harry’s cooperation with those.  They just pulled them out of thin air.

I would say it’s obvious that Harry is somewhat immune to the BS going on with Louis, Zayn, and Liam especially.  Niall is somewhere in the middle considering his ongoing connection to Modest.  There’s some reason that Harry is immune whether it be a negotiation or something else, but it doesn’t really matter why when we can see the difference clearly.

I can’t see how Jeff can be blamed for connecting Harry to the Kardashians when Harry’s been entirely under the radar for the last year.  He had one magazine cover, showed up in fan pics a handful of times, was papped out a handful of times, and that’s pretty much it.  Kendal Jenner is not at all comparable to the other beards we’ve had over the last year.  She’s more like when Niall and Demi Lovato used to be connected in the press constantly, except Hendall isn’t brought up nearly as frequently.

Good Relationship

There’s been no particular indication of a bad relationship between Jeff and Harry.  Pictures aren’t everything, but Harry seems genuinely comfortable with Jeff’s presence and to actually like spending time with him.  I don’t think I’ve seen any pictures where Harry looks like he’s looked while bearding or like the other boys look when they’re clearly doing something they don’t like.  None of the boys play along particularly consistently with forced relationships.

I don’t think Harry would be friendly with a guy he thought was screwing him over.  All the boys have been around long enough and have experienced the crappy side of the entertainment industry enough at this point that I don’t think they’d get themselves into that again.  If they made deals, it was with the best advice possible.  If they chose actual new teams, those new teams will serve them well and they’ll have contracts that give them the control they want.

Irving Azoff

The theory was always that Irving Azoff was behind the new team for 1D as a group.  I see Jeff merging his company back into his father’s as a sign of forward movement in the 1D connection to Irving Azoff.  If Full Stop being a separate company was mostly for Harry’s benefit as it seems, then Harry becoming a client of the bigger combined company is a good thing.  Eventually, after all the delays are done, after all this stupid BS stops lingering, I’m still betting 1D will be with Azoff.

[ellefsonbeblandadr70insuran-blog]

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