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mean-scarlet-deceiver · 3 years ago

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Rusty Saves the Day (aka: continuity? what continuity?)

Right, so, from what I can tell this is an #UnpopularOpinion, but... this one is actually the best of the Season 6 narrow-gauge episodes?

Admittedly, that is a LOW-ass bar to clear. For those who don't work their way through the classic series once every three weeks or so... here's a refresher on how Season 6 (a season that FOR SOME REASON I so often feel the need to start hyping as "it's actually pretty decent you guys!!!!") actually ends:

Yeah, thanks, S6. What a kick in the teeth to all your fans and defenders. Ending on a real high note, here.

But "Rusty Saves the Day" stands out to me as by far the most watchable and (from a creative viewpoint) useful of this little hall of shame.

The flaws are obvious and I am far from denying them:

Skarloey and Rheneas continue to be reduced to semi-indistinguishable blobs with all the charisma, backbone, and wisdom of lukewarm tapioca.

"Rheneas and Skarloey's line" is lightyears away from their line as it was introduced in Season 4. Not even bringing up RWS here. It's not consistent within the show. It's like they rebooted this whole railway—ill-advisedly, and clumsily. Their line in Season 4 was beautiful and lit, intriguing even the casuals with all its hints of lore and history and complexity. By Season 6 this setting is way uglier, absurdly simplified, and heart-stoppingly boring.

The pacing. The pacing is so bad. The problem here is similar to my complaint about Henry's forest: You can't establish a new setting (which this "line" may as well be), destroy it, and restore it all in one episode and expect anyone to care. That's not drama. That's just a busybody narrative that means nothing to anyone.

What the hell is with STH's characterization????

I can defend STH's portrayal in "Middle Engine"—I maintain that his self-declared temporary punishment of Percy while he "got to the bottom of this" might be flawed but that it is well within STH parameters (and that I'm sure he did eventually sort it out). I don't think it's out of line with the kindly-but-firm thing he does in S6. Throughout the season, he lacks the omniscience of RWS Hatt, but that's fine, TVS Hatt is kind of his own character and I feel like it's working well. Until we get to this disgraceful story, I thought STH's worst moment was actually his ill-advised fog warning machine—but the replacement of Cyril was a reasonable place to mark down STH's boundary of "most hardass moment."

Then, in the two episodes before this, we get STH being more hands-on parenting than ever before. Notably he makes engines apologize to each other at the end. Geez. Up until this point STH cared about confusion and delay, y'know? And that was it. Now all the sudden he's gunning for Moralizing Dad of the Year. It's weird.

THEN we get to this episode, and he goes full-tilt down the opposite end of the nice/mean spectrum, swinging out the notorious "Sorry we're late, we were helping Skarloey and Rheneas." "Again? Y'know what, I am going to reduce your workload by... 😈closing their line down😈." "But—" "🔥🔥NO BUTS🔥🔥!!! mwahahaha"

Oof! The whiplash!!

So, acknowledging all this—why do I kind of have a soft spot for this dumpster fire of an episode?

1) The Rusty characterisation is on-point. The rest of Season 4 might have been torched, but Rusty-the-plucky-problem-solver is BACK, baby!

This is, like, the first time in ages that a character got a good episode, an episode where they actively showed agency in a way that showcased their personality! Love how Rusty not only proposes to STH that they take the two-week quarry break to restore the line, but how they also realize the job will require a lorry to finish on their ridiculous deadline, and how they also recruit the prickly Elizabeth with some reverse psychology. It's all very Little Diesel (Classic)™!

2) Also, Elizabeth's presence here doesn't hurt. Just sayin'.

Am I biased for thinking that Elizabeth always manages to rescue every half-baked story they throw her in, just by being her delightfully ornery self? Or am I right?

the second one. the answer is that second one.

3) I hate the abruptness of STH closing the line, but... the plot point itself? Uhh, don't kill me, but—it's not bad? Not in TVS world. I feel like the logical conclusion of TVS's "hard-nosed, expansion-minded, and sometimes-oblivious-and-inept businessman Fat Controller who in this universe also manages the Skarloey Railway" is, in fact... that he took over the small railway as a later acquisition, and that perhaps it's not at first, so dear to his heart. He makes those changes between S4 and S5. It's not at all like the Tallylyn history but I actually prefer the Skarloey to be as distinct from the Tallylyn as possible. Like in RWS this development makes no sense but in TVS I actually feel it kind of does. If it had been handled correctly.

4) Ah, the siren song of if only it had been handled correctly... that's probably why I have a soft spot for this story. The other dregs of S6 as listed above, pah. I don't want to play with them. "Faulty Whistles" just... exists, and they already made the idea of "give this Mike story to Duncan" better than I could have by their delightful stop-animated organ-playing headmaster. "Dunkin' Duncan," well, salvage the Actually Pretty Funny montage of Duncan's many stupid-ass accidents, but scrap the rest; it sucks. "Edward the Really Useful Engine"... scrapping's not even enough to contain the fallout. Just punt the entire shebang directly into the heart of the sun, it's the only way to be sure.

But "Rusty Saves the Day"... I feel like a good writer could make some magic with this general idea. Like, STH closing the line Just Like That makes no sense, but hell, for the 15 seconds we were allowed to feel Skarloey and Rheneas's pain, it was compelling! I did feel stuff! It was blatant emotional manipulation, but even in this rushed half-assed state, it kind of worked!

As usual, if they had spread this over the course of an arc or two, I feel you'd really have something. Frame a bunch of lower-stakes narrow-gauge stories under the shadow of some financial problems. Give Skarloey and Rheneas a bit more of a role, make it their "fault" (fault in quotation marks for a reason) that STH decides to just close up shop. Then keep them in exile for a while. Have a story or two take place when they are working the quarry with Rusty. Develop this as Blue Mountain Quarry lore, idk? Let us spend some time with the pain.

Then, at the end of the arc, hit me with the plot in the second half of this episode. Let Rusty see an opening and grab it with both buffers, let them recruit Elizabeth, etc.

This episode mentions Skarloey and Rheneas missing their passengers most of all *sob*—use that at the end! Let the whole region served by the line absolutely flip out and have the party of the decade when the line re-opens and they get their trains back!

Also, instead of STH having his pat, aggravating, passive-aggressive "and now, Rusty, maybe you'll have time to work at the quarry hahahahaha" shtick at the end... show us his less jackass-y side at the end, let us see him have a moment of regret or at least realization that he decided too hastily.

tl;dr: They actually had some interesting (kinda batty... but interesting) ideas here, the problem is that they needed to take their time and lean. the fuck. in.

See also: Bertram the Old Warrior, Stepney's line on Sodor, 'Arry and Bert ready to scrap engines at the drop of a hatt, Thomas as storytelling moralizing mentor figure, Tiger Moth, and any new character from seasons 7-16 that wasn't female (and some who were!)

#chatter #ttte episode talk #rusty saves the day #ttte #thomas the tank engine #ttte rusty #ttte elizabeth #the fat controller #ttte season 6 #edward the really useful engine #dunkin' duncan #faulty whistles (tvs)

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ssixa · 4 years ago

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Feel Special //Narachan x OC (BW)

Description: Nala realizes that nice guys can make more than just great friends.

Genre: fluff, SMUT!!!

Pairing: Narachan (from M.O.N.T) x OC (BW)

Word count: 5.4k

Content warning: switch, mommy kink, daddy kink, profanity, language

A/N: shit I wish I did this art, but I found this black girl pic on the internet and I just had to use it! it’s absolutely beautiful. So full on S/O to the Pinterest profile Jess Create. Idk this person, but the artwork is just absolutely too beautiful not to share<3. This was technically my first time writing smut and I suck at it, so...sorry.

*All pic collages are made by me unless I state otherwise. Individual pictures in the collage are not mine and I give credit to where credit is due.

Nala found herself in one of those unique circumstances where she ended up living with 2 other men. The only difference was that she knew one of them by the name of Bitsaeon since childhood. While growing up she made another friend by the name of Roda and it didn’t take long for all of them to get close and be each others closest friend. At some time during high school, Roda ended up moving away and it wasn’t until later in their 20s that Roda decided to move back, but instead it would be better and financially easier if all three of them lived together. That’s how Nala came to live with these two men who conveniently were her already good friends.

Nothing honestly became awkward between them. They survived each others hook up moments they had in the apartment (both the warned and not warned moments). Others around them knew that they were close and wondered if Nala ever had any feelings for either at any point in time and her answer was always no. She knew majority of the females, whereever they were, always tried flirting with the boys, but she always helped them out when they had no interest in doing anything with those girls by pretending to be in a relationship with them. That’s how close she was to these boys.

A new friend by the name of Narachan popped up around the time they all moved in together. He knew Roda and Bit from their work at the record label where the staff at the company gathered them to work on a project for the debut group under the company. During the project, they became close so when it eventually came to an end they kept in contact with each other. Eventually, Roda and Bit invited Narachan over to the apartment to be able to finally meet Nala in person and to hangout altogether. Nala was only ever acquainted with him through pictures and few brief exchanges over the phone. She was curious as to what kind of person he was.

The day Narachan finally came over, the two hit it off instantly. He was honestly just like Bit and Roda so it wasn’t hard trying to figure him out. They spent a whole evening together playing games, drinking, and just vibing. Nara spent the night on the couch since he had a little too much to drink and wouldn’t be able to drive back to his place. She gathered blankets and a pillow for him and wished him a goodnight. The next morning she woke up early (since for some reason she wakes up earlier after a night of drinking) and decided to grab hangover food for everyone. The smell of food eventually woke everyone up and they all enjoyed a nice breakfast. Nara evetually left after she convinced him to not worry about paying her back for the food.

“So~” Bit speaks up while they (they as in Roda, Bit, and Nala) were having a lazy Saturday evening.

“So what?” Nala replied as she was taking down her hair that was long overdue. She always had a love hate relationship with her hair since it tended to be the 4c type. Her hair looked beautifully filled out when the cornrows are taken out, but once water touched it the shrinkage is real.

“Narachan, y’all seem to have hit it off a lot better than Roda and I predicted” he replied.

“Honestly he’s adorable. He seriously reminds me of you two idiots so it’s probably why we got along so well” She answers focused a section of a row that refused to come out.

“oooohhhh does our Nala have a crush on our new friend?” Roda speaks up mockingly

“Oh shut up and no, he’s just chill and there for the vibe so I appreciate it” She replies smacking him on the shoulder. The room filled with laughter and the evening continued on as everyone did absolutely nothing worthwhile.

Months passed by and eveyone were just as close as ever. One particular day, Nala had a date with a guy she had been talking to online and was beyond excited. Roda and Bit knew about her date and in order for them not to die of boredom without her, they planned a boys night out with Narachan. While getting ready in her room, she could hear Narachan walk in the front door, he really just wasn’t a very quiet human being. She felt proud of her outfit for the night. It was a cute, body shaping, off the shoulder black dress and black heels with a little silver jewelry to match. Her makeup was simple as well since she wasn’t one to wear a lot in the first place. Her date and her were going to an art gallery event since they both shared a love for those types of artistic events.

After giving herself a look over, Nala grabs her purse and leaves her room. She walks into the kitchen to grab a glass of water before heading out.

“WOOOWWWW” Nala hears Roda exclaim followed by a whistle

“Oh shut up” she rolls her eyes in response

“But honestly, does it look like too much? I mean we are going to an art show at a gallery” she start giving herself a once over having second thoughts.

“You look amazing” she hears Nara speak up. She looks up and sees him quickly avoid eye contact with her. Odd.

“Thanks boo” she replies back like she always does. Nala was one of those nickname girls who calls everyone boo, dude, or bruh so this didn’t phase anyone...well that’s what she assumed at least. She gave herself a once over when she gets a message from her date saying that he was outside. She tells the boys to have a fun night and not be too reckless without her around. They wished her a good night and she left the house ready for an amazing night.

That date was absolutely terrible. The whole night was a mess and it was because of him messing up left to right. They got to the event and turns out he bought faulty tickets for the event on some sketchy website so he pretty much got scammed. Nala let that pass since the night was still young so she decided they should go in anyways. She ended up paying for her own ticket which she found quite irritating because she really was only planning to spend very little if nothing at all tonight. They get into the event which was absolutely amazing. The ambiance of the whole place was set nicely and matched very well with the different art pieces posted around the small building. They had little snacks and drinks to offer guests since they came with the ticket purchase so she ate only a little expecting them to go to dinner like he had planned.

During the whole event though, he drank and ate to his hearts content and when she reminded me him about dinner after he said this was it. That had her fuming because the last thing he can do to piss her off is mess with the relationship between food and her. He walked around flirting with other women at the event and fully neglected the art that they came here for. Even when they walked around, he stayed on his phone and only looked up to say “that’s cool” or “I don’t get it”. At least she could understand now that he lied about being an arts lover. They left the event and at that point she was ready to go home. He tried making a move on her which is what she realized was his whole motive for the night. He wasn’t too pleased at her rejecting him and called her a bitch and a dumb slut. So she called herself an uber and blocked his number.

Honestly, they had talked for a few weeks so Nala thought it would work out, but she guessed it wasn’t in the stars. This always happened though. She could never find herself a decent guy because they either become a friend or end up being an asshole. You may ask “why not date the friend that’s decent then?” well it’s because once they hit it off, she finds it hard to see them any other way. Nala can acknowledge that they’re attractive, but that’s it. Another failed date for the books, hopefully the boys bought some alcohol so she could drown her sorrows.

Nala unlocks the front door to the apartment and kicks off her shoes once inside. She throws her stuff on the kitchen table and heads for the fridge. She opens it grateful there’s a new case of ales stocked and ready to be consumed. She cracks open the bottle and chugs half of it down.

“Um, Nala, you good?” She heard Narachan speak up from the darkness of the living room. This nearly causes her to choke not having realized he was there. She spends a few minutes coughing her lungs out before trying to say anything.

“Oh my god I’m sorry, did I scare you?!” he exclaims standing up from the sofa

“I’m fine, and yes you literally just scared the shit out of me” she laughs after finally coming down.

“Oh sorry” he says scratching the back of his neck

“You’re fine and to answer the first question before I just almost died, no I’m not good. Tonight was terrible” she sighs grabbing herself another drink from the fridge and heading to the sofa.

“You wanna talk about it” he asks sitting down beside her. She agreed and began telling him all that happened. Thoughtlessly laying her head on his shoulder and linking her arms around his. This tended to be her comfort mechanism whenever she vented her feelings. Bit and Roda were used to it by now, but very comforting to her as she poured out her feelings to them. So it didn’t seem weird to her to do it with Nara since she now considered him one of her good friends. They sat there in the darkness staring at the blank tv at the front of the room.

“I swear is it that guys think I’m ugly or take me as a joke? I seriously don’t know what’s wrong with me”

“Nala you’re an absolutely amazing person. I do admit that your taste in men is pretty bad though” he replies with a laugh.

“Yeah I guess it is” she replies back with a sad laugh.

“If you don’t mind me asking, but Roda and Bit are actually amazing guys. Why is it you’ve never thought of a relationship with one of them” he comments

“Lol you wouldn’t be the first to ask that. I do admit that they’re amazing and not actually ugly. It just happens that guys that are amazing I end up becoming friends with them. There ends up being no feelings to them and I don’t know why that is, but it is” she states with an acknowledging sigh.

“So you can’t date decent guys because you end up becoming good friends with them?” he repeats back

“Pretty much” she sighs for the nth time tonight.

“So I guess there’s no hope for me huh?” he adds with a slight laugh. It took a moment for his words to register in her brain.

“Wait...Nara, what d-did you just say” she stutters out

“Honestly, I’ve liked you ever since I first came to your place” he replies

“Nara that was months ago. Why didn’t you tell me?” she replies back still in shock

“I know and it would’ve been weird since we had just met. You are an absolutely amazing person and I didn’t want to ruin our friendship that had barely just started”

“I- Nara”

“It’s ok that you don’t feel the same way, I just thought you should know. I hope this doesn’t affect our friendship” he says finally looking down at her. She finally turns her head to look up from his shoulder. He just has a soft smile on his face. Nala doesn’t know what came over her, but she leaned in and kissed him. She could feel him freeze for a second, but finally lean into it. It was a soft and innocent kiss. They separated after what felt like forever.

“Nala, y-you don’t have to force yourself to like me back I promise I’ll be fine” he says still in shock

“You idiot, I’ve liked you for a little while now” she comments back laughing

“W-what did you...”

“I haven’t like you as long as you’ve liked me, but I think I realized my feelings not that long ago. I think you have been one of my first friends I’ve actually fell for” she replies back shyly looking away. They sat in silence over the confessions that have just been admitted. Next thing she realizes is a hand grabbing her chin up and lips back on hers. The kiss was intense and saw no end. Nara slowly laid her down on the sofa without the kiss having any sort of break. She wrapped her arms around his neck trying to bring him closer to her. The kiss, which really turned out to be a make out session finally reached it’s breaking point and they both needed to catch their breaths.

They starred into each others eyes catching their breath,

“Nala, please let me show you how amazing and worth it you really are” he says with almost pleading eyes

“O-okay” she reply back. He leaned back down connecting their lips once again in another heated kiss. Shs could feel his hands roaming her frame which only sent shivers down her spine and having her get butterflies in her stomach. His lips made his way to her chin then down to her neck and shoulder. The feeling of his lips were light and yet deadly like an addictive poison. Sbs felt him nip at her shoulder which caused slight pain to turn into immense pleasure.

Nala felt his hands that were still left roaming go towards the back of her thighs. Before she knew it, he had picked her up to straddle him. He proceeded to stand up and she instinctively wrapped her legs around him. She paid no mind to what was happening because she could tell they were walking towards her room. He opened the door and once inside kicked it closed with his foot. He carried her to her bed where he laid her down and hovered not ceasing to leave leave alone for even a second. After what felt like another eternity, she felt him fully disappear. She let out a moan from the sudden lack of him and opened her eyes to see what was happening.

“Now sweetheart, can you take off that pretty little black dress for me” he said with a dark lusd filled voice. She starred at him completely amazed by the man who looks like Nara, but doesn’t sound like the one she know.

“Don’t make me ask you twice” he said slightly threateningly. She pulled her dress off over her head as fast as she could. She realized that apart from her lace underwear the only other thing she had on was the pasties covering her nipples so they wouldn’t poke out through the dress. At this realization, she covered herself up, but also realized that his dark gaze added an extra shiver up her spine.

“Nala, you’re beautiful. Don’t hide yourself from me” he says as he reaches out to put her arms by her side.

“C-can you at least take your shirt off...” she asks softly.

“Not yet. First I’m going to make you feel good” Nara utters with a smirk. He kneels and centers himself between her legs making himself at eye level to her. He goes in for another intense kiss to her lips. He pushes her down slowly onto the bed while he leads the trail of kisses down her neck then to the center of her chest. He reaches up and carefully removes the pasties from her right nipple. He then reaches towards her left nipple and removes the other pasty from there.

He start rolling the right nipple with his fingers and attacks the left one with his mouth. The sucking, tugging, and small licks he delivered out her in a state of near ecstasy. She felt the heat between her legs growing the more it was left neglected. She wanted him, needed him.

“P-please Nara, I need you” she begged. He released his right hand and glided it down her stomach to her inner thigh. She was going crazy, she craved the touch that was so close yet time made it seem so far away. Nara, slowly glided his fingers up to her heat and on to her sensitive nub. He didn’t do anything, but place his finger on her nub but that little gesture had her floating.

“F-fuck please, do something Nara” she begged

“Baby you’re so needy. Trust me this will all be worth it” he says softly. As she was about to respond he shoved one finger into her heat with no chance of warning

“F-FUCK FUCK OH MY G—OHHHH” she blurted out. He started moving his fingers in and out as he continued sucking on her now very sensitive nipple.

“A-another p-please” she begged. The one wasn’t giving her the feeling she wanted only the bare build up. He adds in a second finger and pumps faster. He curves his fingers which ended up hitting the spot that would send sparks flying.

“Found it” he whispers seducingly when he heard her let out a big moan. His pumps were constant, but fast and he could tell she was close to her release with her heat being like a vacuum to his fingers and removing them became increasingly difficult. To really push her over the edge, he placed his thumb on her clit and started circling motions causing more arousal than she even knew she could get.

“F-fuck N-Nara I’m so fucking close fuck” she squeaks out. He went faster and faster and her climax hit,

“F-FUCK DADDY” she exclaims as she pushes her orgasm with the help of his fingers. She started seeing sparks and felt like this could have only been a dream.

“So...daddy. I love the sound of that coming from your lips” he leans down to whisper in her ear once he finishes her

“I-I...” she had no words to say. She always knew this was one of her kinks, but never had she imagined calling this sweet “innocent” man daddy.

“So what do you want daddy to do for you princess?” He says in a deeper tone

“I need you Nara” she says softly with eyes looking in all directions but his

“That isn’t my name now is it” he glares

“Please d-daddy, I need you” she begged once again

“Now that’s my good girl” he replies. He stands up ripping off his shirt in a way that was a lot more sexy than needed. She never realized how fit Nara actually was and she could’ve honestly never guessed either. He continues on removing his pants leg by leg as their eye contact never broke from his. He tossed his pants to the side and grabbed the rim to his maroon boxer-briefs. All she could do was swallow at what would be occurring in just a few moments.

Nara agonizingly slow removed the clothing finally letting his hard member spring free. He wasn’t big, but he definitely wasn’t small either; he was just right. She could feel drool pool up and risk escaping her mouth. She just wanted to wrap her mouth around his member and suck him dry, but as soon as she sat up making her way towards himl, he stops her.

“Baby girl, what do you think you’re doing” he asks with a smirk and a raised eyebrow.

“I-I just want to make daddy feel good” she replied without breaking eye contact with his hard member.

“As much as I appreciate the thought, I already told you I would make you realize how amazing you are” he says softly pushing her back on the bed.

“B-but I-”

“No. Now answer me. Are you on birth control?” he asks in a demanding tone

“Y-yes” she replies softly. She still wasn’t used to this side of Narachan.

“Good” is all he replies. He bends and spreads her legs and then pulls her bent legs forward to shift her whole body to the edge of the bed.

“You ready?” He asks almost as to make sure this is what she actually wants.

“Na- daddy, please” she looks at him with pleading eyes. At the very end of her statement he leans forward slowing filling up her hungry and deprived core. He pauses for a minute giving her time to adjust and once she said she was fine and he could move, he pulled out part way and pushed back in slowly.

His few slow strokes had her feeling like you were on cloud nine, but after a little while she hated to say it but she needed more.

“D-daddy please faster” she pleaded. On command, he started moving faster snapping his hips like he had been waiting for those words his whole life. He just as quickly got over this one position. He pulled out and she let out a sigh at the sudden emptiness.

“Hands and knees, now” he commands. Nala flips quick needing to be filled once more. She was expecting him to be gentle in the beginning until she told him it was ok to go faster, but she was wrong. Nara thrusted his hard member without warning cause her to let out a moan that she knew her poor neighbors would be able to hear. He was in pulling and pushing in and out at a constant yet fast speed.

Nala could feel her stomach tension build up and she knew she wouldn’t be able to last very much longer.

“I’m so close” she whaled out not caring who could hear her. Her moans became increasingly louder which encouraged Nara to go faster and deeper and one particular thrust hit her spot at just the right angle. She let out the biggest moan she had ever heard herself let out. He knew what he had done and made it a point to hit the exact spot back to back. He added the circling of her clit giving her an extra push to her splendid end.

She never realized sex could feel this amazing. Her past hookups were good for the moment but easily forgettable. With Nara, she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to forget this. She always said that “having a big dick doesn’t always mean men always know how to use it” (a/n: I’ve heard this so many times so I can’t really give credit to a specific person...so credit to social media lol). As her moans persisted, he never let up until the very end. The tension finally peaked and she was hit with her climax.

Nara kept thrusting and circling her clit helping her ride out her high for a little while longer. Nala’s limbs gave out and she couldn’t bare her own weight anymore. She fell on her side trying to catch her breath and stopping the convulsions running through her body almost like they were trying to milk out as much of her climax as possible. Nara makes his way to the side of the bed, picking her up and moving her up the the head of the bed and covering her with the bed sheets.

“W-wait Nara...you didn’t cum did you?” She asks as she sits up slowly.

“It’s ok, this was for you...all for you” he finishes with a soft shy voice. He for the nth time threw her off tonight. Maybe this guy is bipolar because this wasn’t the same boy that was just ramming his cock into her only a moment ago.

“No. It’s not ok.” Nala deadpans

“Sit.” She commands. Out of nowhere, Nara found himself obeying and sitting on the bed. She climbs out of the bed with whatever new found strength she got out of nowhere and made her way between his legs. Her lips became at level with his still painfully erected member that was slightly oozing with precum.

“So you’re saying that you were going to deal with this yourself? Nara, you made me feel special, more than a lot of people who have been in my life so let me do the same for you” she says without hesitation, but a lot of confidence.

“But, Nala” he tried to interject

“That wasn’t a statement open for an opinion” she cuts him off before he could finish his statement.

“Now, tell me what I can do for you baby” she cooed lightly kissing his tip. He let out a small moan to only try and repress the others that would follow. She slapped her hands on his thighs using them as a way to propel herself towards him. Her lips slightly grazing his ear,

“No holding back. I want to hear you” she says with an evil whisper while placing her hand on his member and stroking it dreadfully slow. She pulls back to make eye contact with the now frazzled man who tries his best to keep as much composure as possible. That failed. He let out a small string of grunts and moans that he gave up trying to suppress. So with a smile, Nala commands,

“So tell me what you want mommy to do”

“P-please suck me off...m-mommy” he says with a breathless tone.

“Anything for my baby” she replies with a smirk. She gets back on her knees and licks a strip from base to tip. She then wraps her lips around his member and begins to bob her head, hallowing her cheeks out. Nara continues on with his moans and grunts.

“Mommy please faster...deeper” he says barely able to get his words out. Nala did as requested making him moan out “yeses” and “fucks”. Just like Nala, Nara felt the tension of his climax building up.

“Fuck I’m so close...mommy....please...inside you” was all he was able to muster out. She releases his member with a pop that echoed through the room. She stands a little ways in front of him,

“So what position baby do you want me” she says with a lustful gaze. His boldness takes over as he grabs her arm and bends her over the edge of the bed. He pushes his member in and starts thrusting a a decently quick pace. The room is filled with slaps of skin to skin and strings of moans and profanity.

Nara brought Nala’s body up to a standing position with his member still deep in her, but the skin on her back molding with his chest. He continued with his last few thrusts before meeting his ultimate bliss. He thrusted a few more times to let out whatever seed he felt like he left in him. He pulled out causing Nala to feel emptiness once again while she laid back in the bed and he goes to the bathroom to grab a towel.

He comes back and cleans both of them up and tosses the used towel into the laundry basket. He gets back into bed and pulls her in so they’re chest to chest.

“Hey Nala” he speaks up

“Mhmm” was all she was able to get out.

“You know I like you right?” He asks

“Dumbass...I really like you too” she replies back with a light hit to his chest. He laughs as he pulls her in for a closer hug. Not too long later, they both were fast asleep in each other’s arms.

The next morning, the sun beamed through the window of Nala’s bedroom. Nara was the first to open his eyes and he couldn’t be more at peace looking at Nala’s sleeping form. He couldn’t believe that the girl he’s pretty much been in love with for the past months is finally in his arms. He must’ve not realized he zoned out because when he finally snapped back to reality, Nala was staring back at him with her beautiful brown eyes.

“G-good morning” he stutters out

“Good morning” Nala replies in a sleepy voice

“So...breakfast?” He quirks up

“Pancakes sound amazing right now ” Nala laughs

“Definitely, let me go make some” Nara snaps up as he begins to get out of bed. Nala suddenly reaches out for his arm,

“What’s wrong?” Nara looks back kind of concerned

“Nara, let’s make them together...for a commemoration...” she shyly speaks up.

“Commemoration for what?” He laughs

“Our first day” she says with a warm smile. This reply startles Nara because he realized that he never actually asked Nala out.

“I’m a dumbass, I don’t normally hook up with someone I like before hooking up with them” he hangs his head in embarrassment.

“It’s ok, honestly. Last night was really great” Nala replies lovingly

“It was, wasn’t it” Nara smiles to himself

“But you know what’s even better?”

“What?” Nara questions with a laugh of confusion

“PANCAKES!” Nala replies as she jumps out of the bed and runs to the door. Nara catches her as soon as they reach the kitchen and holds her in his embrace. Nala turns around and reaches up on her tippy toes to give him a quick peck.

“EEEHHHEEEMMMM” a voice comes out of nowhere. Nara and Nala both snap their heads to the mysterious voice and grow a look of embarrassment when they see Bit and Roda sitting in the living room watching tv

“How are you guys like this this early in the morning?” Roda speaks up with a grossed out face

“Ummmm” Nala speaks up

“Ah nevermind, I don’t wanna know. I’m just glad y’all are finally together, Roda you owe me 20 bucks” Bit laughs sticking out his hand. Roda reaches for his wallet and retrieves the 20 to give to Bit.

“What the hell kind of bet did you guys even place?” Nala aks getting increasingly angry.

“Oh just that lover boy over there would confess to you before the end of the month. I was getting nervous that I would lose, but thanks Nara” Bit laughs waving the 20 in the air. Nara’s face got red not realizing that his feelings for you were that obvious to eveyone but you.

“Y’all are assholes” Nala tried to rush them, but stops herself to turn around.

“Wait...Nara...were you in on this?!” She says looking a little heart broken. Nara starts to realize what she means,

“Nala I promise I knew nothing about this. If I did...that wouldn’t make much sense now would it” he replied hastily with his hands up and back.

“Don’t worry Nala, Nara knows nothing of this” Roda replies back with a nonchalant smile.

“Fine, I would’ve ended all of you if it was true” she say with clenched teeth. Nara comes behind her giving her another back hug and she visibly melts into his touch.

“Wait...where were y’all last night. I got home from the freak show of a date and Nara was chilling on the couch by himself”

“Oh we had a last minute edit to make for one of the album tracks we’re making for that new debut group. We were trying to finish up quickly, but when we did...let’s just say we heard and saw more than we wanted to” Roda replies with a shiver.

“Oh my g- wait, don’t tell me y’all stayed in the house the whole night” Nala says in a panic.

“Why the fuck would we want to stay and listen to all of that. As soon as y’all went to the bedroom we dipped and went to the bar with Beomhan” Roda spoke up.

“Wait isn’t he the kid in the debut group you’re working with? Isn’t it risky for him to be out like that?” Nala speaks up and Nara nods in agreement behind her,

“He was bored so what the company doesn’t know won’t kill them” Bit laughs.

“Oh whatever, y’alls career funerals” Nara speaks up laughingly.

“Oh shut up lover boy. On a different note I hear we’re having pancakes” Roda smiles.

#kpop smut #kpop fluff #underrated kpop #m.o.n.t #narachan #roda #bitsaeon #m.o.n.t arena #beomhan #non idol au

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losingmymindtonight · 5 years ago

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WARNINGS: Peter jokes about dying a lot in this. It’s just Gen Z humor, but if that’s likely to trigger you, please be careful!

On days like this, the cabin was a haven, a lighthouse, a McDonald’s sign shining through midnight darkness.

(Okay, maybe his last metaphor wasn’t as romantic as the others, but it was still true. Midnight hash browns were the best hash browns. Fight him.)

Peter thought he was a pretty chill person. Hell, he was known for a being a chill person. Go to Peter, people said. He’s just so chill, people said. You could punch him in the face and he’ll apologize, people said.

(Okay, maybe nobody actually said that about him, because nobody besides, like, a handful of people actually cared about his existence, but if they did, that’s probably be what they’d say.)

But, sometimes, he just got frustrated. Like, kinda-wanted-to-find-some-abandoned-hunting-lodge-in-the-middle-of-a-forest-somewhere-and-tear-it-to-pieces-with-his-bare-hands frustrated.

(Okay, maybe not a whole hunting lodge. Maybe, like, a cabin. Or a half-molded shed. The point was: he wanted to annihilate something. The more satisfying the thing was to destroy, the better.)

He’d admitted it rather shamefully to Tony in the lab, once, and the man had laughed so hard that Peter had genuinely thought he was going to hyperventilate.

“Jesus, Pete, you are not actually feeling bad for occasionally, just occasionally, being frustrated, are you? Because if you are, I’m selling you for a less faulty kid.”

As it turned out, Tony was probably gonna have to sell him, because the guilt never, ever abated. See, Peter wasn’t supposed to get frustrated. That wasn’t his purpose. He was a fixer. Fixers were patient, wise, and they certainly didn’t get frustrated. They didn’t get angry. Those emotions were not things that fixers felt.

Maybe he was faulty. Maybe Tony should sell him.

He was always a mess when he was pissed, and he always blamed it on inexperience with functioning when he was focusing so much energy on not punching the nearest object. He tripped getting out of his car, locked his backpack inside and ended up fumbling angrily with the trunk before finally, finally getting it open. When he got to the door, he missed the lock the first time and then it took him four tries to get the damn thing open.

(He nearly cried at that point. Which, was, you know, not his proudest moment.)

Tony was reading on the couch when he came stomping in, although the book was quickly discarded. Peter just threw himself face-first onto the unoccupied loveseat, groaning for a solid fifteen seconds before Tony’s amused voice interrupted him.

“You alright there, kiddo?”

“I’m gonna kill someone,” he said, monotone despite the lava in him, “and then I’m gonna kill myself, and then I’m gonna... well, I don’t actually know who’s gonna die after that bit, but the killing’s not ending there, I can tell you that.”

Tony whistled. “Wow, Pete. Resorting to a murder-suicide before dinner? That’s drastic, even for me. Must’ve been one hell of a day.”

He couldn’t stop the snort that jumped up his throat. God, he hated being so cynical. It really didn’t come all that naturally to him. It felt like wearing a suit that didn’t quite fit.

“You have literally no idea.”

“Wanna tell me about it?”

Poor Tony. He was the one who always had to listen to him complain. He barely did it with his friends, certainly never did it with May. Like he’d said before, that wasn’t his purpose, wasn’t his role in those dynamics.

But here? In the cabin, carefully cocooned in the safe-space of Tony’s world? Yeah, he could be a little whiny.

Still, though: poor Tony.

“I hate people,” he rambled. “I hate the world. I hate myself. I even hate the sky. Can I hate the sky? Is that, like, a thing I can do? You know what, don’t answer that, cause I do, so it’s a thing I’ve done either way.”

“Mm,” Tony replied, and Peter could hear the leather on the couch creak as he shifted his weight. “I have a proposition.”

“Does the proposition include me dying?”

“Uh, absolutely not. Haven’t we been over this? No dying, not allowed. You dying is off limits.”

“Tragic.”

“Shut up. Besides, my proposition is much better than dying.”

Peter turned his head, and used the one eye not smothered by the loveseat’s cushion to squint over at Tony. “What’s your proposition?”

“Scream.”

“Uh, excuse me?”

“Just scream. Loud as you can. We’re the only ones in the house, by the way, so you won’t worry anyone. Pep’s with Morgan at her dance class.”

“You want me to scream?”

“It’s therapeutic.”

“It’s weird.”

“No, it’s therapeutic,” Tony shot back, rolling his eyes. “C’mon, kid. I dare you.”

“No, no, don’t make this a dare-”

Tony was grinning, obviously beyond proud of himself. “I bet you won’t do it.”

“Mister Stark-”

“Who knew that Spider-Man was scared of a little screaming, huh?”

“I’m not scared-”

“You seem a little scared.”

“I’m not-”

“You sure? Cause I’m starting to wonder if I need to-”

Peter buried his face into the cushion, and screamed.

He paused. Gasped in a breath that smelled like hot sweat and damp leather. Screamed again.

There were a few seconds of silence after he’d finished. Then,

“You done?”

He rolled onto his back, giving Tony his full attention. The man had his legs propped up on the coffee table, arms folded behind his head: the picture of relaxation. Definitely not how you’d expect someone to look if they’d just had a sixteen-year-old kid screaming their head off in their living room.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m done.”

“Feel better?”

“A little,” he admitted, and it was true. The frustration was still there, lingering like a pit in his chest, but he knew it’d probably stick around until the next day, anyway, so any relief was, well, a relief.

Mostly, he was just feeling guilty for feeling those things in the first place.

“You’re allowed to be pissed off sometimes, y’know,” Tony said, studying his face. One day, Peter was determined to uncover how it was that his mentor always seemed to know exactly what he was thinking before he’d even finished thinking it. “It’s called being human. Even freakishly precious kids like yourself aren’t immune to that particular tragedy.”

“I don’t like it, though.”

Tony laughed. “I know. Seriously though, Pete, you’re a good kid. Give yourself some leeway. Not everyone can be cheerful all the time.”

Peter sighed, shoving a cushion off the loveseat just because he could. “But if I’m not cheerful, who’s gonna be?”

“Uh, I don’t know, maybe jolly old Saint Nicholas?” Tony rolled his eyes. “Anyway, who gives a shit? Everybody’s supposed to get their day in the sun, but that means that you’re allowed a day in the darkness, too.” He shuddered. “God, look what you’ve done to me. I just got poetic.”

Despite the resentment still brewing him his gut, he couldn’t resist Tony’s prodding. “It was good, Mister Stark. Like, really good. Like, Shakespeare who? Sorry, I don’t know him.”

“You’re obnoxious.”

“Hey, I’ve had a bad day.”

“Are you gonna sing a sad song just to turn it around?”

“Daniel Powter.”

Tony stared at him like he’d just spoken a foreign language. “Excuse you?”

“Daniel Powter,” Peter repeated. “He’s the guy who did that song, Bad Day.”

“Well, thank god I know that now,” Tony said, reaching out for the remote and turning on the TV. “Now, I say we drown our sorrows in awful television and pizza for dinner. Thoughts? Comments? Objections?”

The cabin: haven, lighthouse, midnight McDonald’s. All things that called out to people in the dark. “Sounds good to me.”

It looked like they were going to move on, that the previous moment had passed, but then Tony stalled, face growing serious again. “Actually, one last thing before I let you change the subject for good.” Tony pointed at him with the remote. “Remember this: you’re allowed to clean up your own messes before you clean up everybody else’s, and you’re not responsible for other people.”

“I feel responsible for other people,” Peter muttered.

“Yeah, well, you’re delusional.” Tony turned back to the screen. “Now: Family Feud or Kitchen Nightmares?”

“Star Wars!” Peter exclaimed, just to lighten the mood, and to see Tony’s face.

Sure enough, the fond-annoyance blossomed within a second.

“No-”

#the author is projecting #me? using Peter to self soothe? it's more likely than you may think #i don't even know what this is i wrote it in like #half an hour #if you wanna send someone to kill and/or give me therapy #i'm totally cool with that #anyway #tony stark #peter parker #tony & peter #irondad #losingmymindtonight writes

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girl4music · 4 years ago

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My review of the XBOX Series X

So I’ve had nearly a full week with the XBOX Series X and here is my honest opinion on my experience with it and this is my initial review of it. I’m not gonna talk about the technology or go into anything about the console’s hardware too deeply. I will talk about the features and benefits it offers. Going into some things that work and don’t work as well as promised by Microsoft and XBOX. Finally, I will talk about all the bugs and issues that I experienced and found most annoying. Most of which have already been identified and reported.

First up, be aware that I am coming from an XBOX 360 as my last XBOX console experience so I may say stuff that applies to the XBOX One as well.

1. BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY AND AUTO HDR: Microsoft promised that the XBOX Series X and S would work right out of the box with 1000’s of gaming titles across 4 generations. This promise holds up… However, they do not run anywhere half as well as they also promised they would. They do run better than their native platform, that is true. But it’s not a groundbreaking difference. And AUTO HDR doesn’t really work with most games that never had it to begin with. It makes the colours and textures look really odd and you don’t get that nostalgic feeling of playing an old legacy title because of the “updates”. Which is something I was very much looking forward to. It’s pick your poison I guess. You can either have a legacy game running better and looking greater on a platform that can take the graphical fidelity and framerate boosts, or have a full reunion with your beloved legacy games from your childhood. You can turn AUTO HDR off via the main console settings, but this still doesn’t really give you the latter. Not in my personal opinion anyway. It’s not disappointing as it’s not something I really expected. I just would have liked to have it. Nostalgia >>> Shiny any day.

2. QUICK RESUME AND LOADING TIMES: The XBOX Series X (can’t speak for the S) has significantly improved on speed thanks to the custom lightning fast and functional SSD. So much so that you can now travel between multiple games fully loaded up on the SSD within the time of a few seconds. However, quick resume is not only useful to be able to play between 3 or 4 games (more according to YouTube influencers who have tried and tested this out far more than me) in one sitting. You can also effectively use it to save your game. Or rather… Replace save states IN a game. What quick resume allows you to do is keep your game saved at ANY point, and completely SHUT the console down and UNPLUG it for several days (or longer, again, never tested it that far) and then PLUG it in and switch it ON again, and come back to exactly where you left off in the game. And I do mean EXACTLY WHERE YOU LEFT OFF!

For example; you could be in an all-important boss fight in ‘Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla’ and be so frustrated with not being able to beat this boss after trying many times. You could indeed just pause the game, come out to the dashboard, turn the console off and walk away from it all…. And when you came back to have another go at it, you would not have to restart the boss fight and just carry on with where you left off in chopping down their health. I did this several times because I suck at boss fights… And every time, this worked and it was the strategy that got me through them all. So a little cool off time is more than affordable with the XBOX Series X. And if you hate boss fights, suddenly you won’t hate boss fights as much anymore if you do the same. It makes a world of a difference to your experience. Believe me, quick resume is a literal life-saver.

To add to that, you also benefit from much quicker load times both with booting up the games and in-game fast-travelling or level-entering. Instead of 5 minutes waiting for a game to boot up into the main campaign or wherever,… It will take at most up to 50 seconds for the most power-taxing of games. 'Grand Theft Auto 5' for instance, known for it’s notoriously long boot into story or online mode… Now only takes 10 seconds from the company title advertisements to get into the area of the game you want to play. It is so fast that you do not have the time to read the tips and tricks dialogue that takes up the screen during the initial loading. It’s honestly a quality of life you never even knew you needed or was missing until you had it.

3. BUGS AND ISSUES: Being that I bought the XBOX Series X at Launch (November 10th), I very much expected it to come with a plethora of bugs and issues to discover and be witness to as a consumer and user of newly developed and released hardware and software. And these bugs and issues have already been identified and reported to Microsoft and the respective console and game developers. Bugs where you cannot play games that offer 4K at 120 hertz (4K/120fps) without visual and audial distortions or even without turning the game off altogether. I particularly had trouble with this in trying to play ‘Rise Of The Tomb Raider' 20 Year Celebration edition. Once I downloaded it from the XBOX Store fully, (which took a LONG FUCKING TIME, we’ll get on to that in a bit), I immediately tried to play it and because my display settings were set at 4K/120 because I have a TV that supports that setting, it was having all sorts of problems in booting up. There was all this distortion happening on screen both visually and audially that I thought my ultra high speed HDMI cable that came with the console was broken or faulty. I also remember specifically that it kept turning my Game Mode on and off rapidly and I didn’t know how to stop it avoiding a full reset of the console. This game was the worst for it but it also happened in other games I tried to play too. Including those I had as physical disks.

Speaking of… I did not encounter the “black/blank screen of death” issue other next-gen XBOX consumers and users did where you would enter a game disk and be met with a black or blank screen. BUT I did have trouble with downloading the “updates” for the games I had bought physically. I expected the games I downloaded digitally to take a long time to download fully, but I figured that it would be much quicker for the “updates” for physical games. This was not the case, and for some games, it actually took LONGER. I don’t know why this happens or if it can even be fixed in a firmware update, but it has put me off buying games physically for it, which is certainly not a good thing for store game retailers. And I’m someone who actually cares about that and would want to help them out as much as possible since they are a dying breed. But if it takes longer to download physical games than to download digital games, I’m not sure I can hold up that promise. The time it takes to download is a major frustration for me. I’ll be leaving my console on for long periods of time doing nothing but downloading that I otherwise wouldn’t. And I’ve got to say right now that I am glad I do not have an OLED TV where this would be much more of a problem due to burn-in risks. I would highly suggest anyone who is buying a new TV for their XBOX Series X or S with all the bells and whistles to not buy an OLED for this reason. Leaving an OLED TV on with a display picture that never moves for hours at a time would severely decrease it’s life and usage capacity. I recommend a Samsung QLED TV instead. That’s what I’ve got. I bought their Q95T 55inch 4K TV for gaming alone and it has not disappointed in the slightest. But I won’t go into why it’s the better TV to buy for next-gen gaming since this is not a TV review. You can look that up for yourselves at your leisure.

Another issue the XBOX Series X has is with its sharing image snapshots and video clips feature. The new controller for the console has a dedicated share button and that works really well. I’ve had no problems with it capturing the content that I want to share. But sharing to social media and to XBOX Live itself is the issue. And this happens with video clips more so than image snapshots. For some reason, when I go to share a video clip to Twitter, the load bar moves forward partly but then it immediately stops and gives me a black/blank screen. And sure enough, when I go to check my Twitter on my phone, it has not posted the video clip. And trying to share it to XBOX Live first and then share it to Twitter from my phone via the XBOX app doesn’t work either. The same issue applies here too. Black/blank screen when trying to share it to XBOX Live. Snapshot images also has this issue but every once in awhile it will allow you to share to both XBOX Live and social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch ect…) whereas it will not allow you to share video clips at all. This is an issue Microsoft are aware of and are apparently fixing in a November firmware update at the end of the month. To what degree they fix it though is the real question because this feature is buggy as hell. So much for promoting and hyping up that dedicated share button on the controller, eh Phil Spencer and Co?

Well, that’s it. That’s been my experience with the XBOX Series X so far. Of course the pros of quick resume and loading times cut in half far outweigh the cons of faulty 4K resolution at 120 hertz gameplay and buggy sharing content features. I say do not let that put you off buying this fantastic piece of hardware because those bugs and issues can be fixed easily. The extremely long downloading for digital and physical games might not though and you might want to reconsider buying a next-gen XBOX console if you have an OLED TV. Or if you have the console already but not the TV to get the most advantages out of the console, consider buying a Samsung QLED instead. Thank you.

#xbox series x #microsoft #next-gen gaming #phil spencer #review #backwards compatibility #auto hdr #quick resume #loading times #bugs and issues #downloading #digital #physical #games

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newsfluxe-blog · 5 years ago

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Missouri Sues China Over Coronavirus Pandemic to Distract From Trumps Failures

Protesters hold signs encouraging people to demand that businesses be allowed to open up, and people be allowed to work at the Country Club Plaza on April 20, 2020 in Kansas City, Missouri.Photo: Getty ImagesThe state of Missouri filed a lawsuit against China in U.S. federal court on Tuesday, claiming the Chinese government caused the global coronavirus pandemic. The lawsuit is unlikely to succeed and is most likely a political stunt by Missouri’s Republican Attorney General to distract from the U.S. federal government’s abysmal response to the global health crisis. The new lawsuit, which was posted online by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, alleges the Chinese government is, “responsible for the enormous death, suffering, and economic losses they inflicted on the world, including Missourians, and they should be held accountable.” The lawsuit claims the Chinese Communist Party is not protected by sovereign immunity, a legal concept that largely shields foreign governments from being sued in U.S. courts. Without sovereign immunity, foreign governments would be forced to defend against any number of silly lawsuits brought by average U.S. citizens anytime Americans were unhappy with another country’s products, politics, or policies.“Months were lost—most of December, all of January, where they were aware of the human-to-human transmission,” Schmitt told local TV station KSDK on Tuesday, adding that China was, “destroying the evidence, silencing critics, silencing whistleblowers.”

Burrow's Modular Index Wall Shelves Can Be Assembled 'In Just 15...

Schmitt alleges that China was also “hoarding PPE,” the personal protective equipment for health care workers that’s been in short supply around the world. Schmitt appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show last night and neither the Attorney General nor Carlson mentioned President Donald Trump even once.At least 6,142 cases of covid-19 have been identified in Missouri, with 229 deaths. The U.S. has identified 825,306 cases and 45,075 deaths, the most in the world by far, as of early Wednesday morning.While it’s true that China was silencing whistleblowers, most notably doctor Li Wenliang who tried to warn fellow doctors before dying of the illness in early February, it was clear to world by the end of January that this disease was a big deal and that it could spread globally very soon. Any reader of Gizmodo could have told you that, in fact. But allies of President Trump prefer to blame China rather than the Trump regime’s own incompetence.U.S. intelligence agencies, which regularly brief the president, had information about the virus in December and were reportedly giving Trump classified briefings on the threat in January and February, according to the Washington Post.“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were—they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” one unnamed government official told the Post. “The system was blinking red.”There were also at least a dozen Americans working at the World Health Organization’s Geneva headquarters in January, many of whom were staff members with the CDC, providing realtime updates to the Trump regime about the coronavirus spread. But Trump denied that the virus was a problem and wasted the months of February and March, which could have been used to prepare, as many other countries did. Faulty tests, distributed by the CDC in early February, also put the U.S. at a disadvantage in identifying the scale of the problem and being able to contain it, most health experts agree.The virus originated in Wuhan, China in late 2019 and the city was placed on lockdown early on January 23. Two other nearby cities were placed on lockdown that same day, effectively stopping 20 million people from traveling, the largest lockdown in history to that point. The virus was identified in Thailand on January 13 and in Japan on January 16, as Gizmodo wrote about at the time.Disney theme parks in Shanghai and Hong Kong were also closed the last week of January, which should have made it abundantly clear to anyone who was paying attention that this was serious. When Disneyland closes, you know it’s a big deal.On January 16, the World Health Organization said that it didn’t yet see evidence of human-to-human transmission of the disease but it was still warning on Twitter about the “possibility of limited human-to-human transmission.” And by January 21, we here at Gizmodo wrote a story titled, “New Virus Kills Sixth Person After Human-to-Human Transmission Confirmed.”In January, doctors in Asia were already talking about the importance of wearing a mask when out in public, something that U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams was saying as late as February 29 did nothing to prevent the spread of the disease.“Please take care if you are ill,” Dr. Gabriel Leung, Founding Director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Control, said on January 21 in a video press conference that Gizmodo reported on. “If you are going to a crowded place, put on a mask even if you are not ill because others may be, even if they have cough etiquette or sneeze etiquette, they may still get in touch with you.”It’s certainly true that the Chinese government engaged in a coverup during the earliest stages of the crisis, as any authoritarian government would be expected to do. But the U.S. has also engaged in activities that would be viewed by Americans as a “coverup” if they were happening in any other part of the world.For instance, the world was shocked when it saw drone footage of the mass burials that have taken place at Hart Island in New York. But police in New York have actively sought to stop journalists from being able to photograph the activity there, ever since the footage went viral.From a report in the Gothamist:A few minutes after he launched a small drone to survey what was happening on Hart Island, Steinmetz said that a group of plainclothes NYPD officers emerged from an unmarked van, and asked him to bring the drone back. He said they initially tried to confiscate the few photos he took, along with his phone, which acts as the drone’s remote control. Instead, they confiscated his $1,500 drone and issued him a misdemeanor summons for “avigation,” a law that dates back to 1948 that prohibits aircraft—including drones—from taking off or landing anywhere in New York City that isn’t an airport.Mickey Osterreicher, the general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, said Steinmetz is the second journalist whose drone was seized trying to photograph Hart Island since the pandemic began. (AP photographer John Minchillo was apparently able to take a few drone pictures of mass burials on Hart Island last week without getting caught.)Doctors and nurses in the U.S. have also been fired for trying to secure PPE and warning about unsafe practices in American hospitals. Health care workers in Seattle, Oklahoma, Detroit, Chicago, New Jersey, Oakland, and Muskegon, Michigan all claim they’ve been fired for raising alarms and speaking to the media. Plenty of others have been threatened by hospital management if they blow the whistle on their unsafe working conditions. If this was happening in any other country in the world it would rightly be called a conspiracy to obscure the real scale of the problem. Health care professionals simply don’t have the tools to do their job safely, and much of that responsibility rests at the feet of President Trump.Trump’s handling of the crisis has been so bad that some states have formed alliances to coordinate their responses to the pandemic, something that would typically be done by the federal government. But Trump has shown no real interest in sending a consistent message about how states should be handling the public health problem. Instead, he uses his coronavirus press briefings each day to pick fights with members of the media and deny personal responsibility.“I don’t take responsibility at all,” Trump famously said on March 13 in the Rose Garden of the White House when asked about the federal government’s mishandling of the crisis. The U.S. government was still way behind on getting states the tests that they needed, a problem that persists to this day.When another reporter followed up on March 13, Trump doubled down on the idea that he wasn’t to blame for things like a lack of coronavirus tests and a failure to secure PPE and other vital medical supplies, opting to make it sound like the media was the real problem in all of this.“Well, I just think it’s a nasty question because what we’ve done is—and Tony has said numerous times that we’ve saved thousands of lives because of the quick closing,” Trump said. “And when you say me, I didn’t do it. We have a group of people.” Read the full article

#Missouri Sues China Over Coronavirus Pandemic to Distract From Trumps Failures | NewsFluxe

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appliancesreviews · 5 years ago

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Coffee machine problems

As a rule, the apartment of a modern person is filled with various household appliances, including TVs, PCs, a washing machine, an air conditioner, a vacuum cleaner, more than a dozen kitchen appliances, etc. Of course, the coffee machine occupies one of the first positions in this list. Today, this popular device is present in almost any kitchen. Its history goes back over 200 years and begins in 1800, when Jean-Baptiste de Belloy, Archbishop of Paris, invented the Le Dubelloire device, which became the prototype of the geyser coffee maker.

Of course, modern, for example, capsule coffee machines have little in common with their prototype.

But many companies continue to produce very popular models in retro style. Viennese royal coffee makers perfectly illustrate this trend.

Its design can reasonably claim the artwork status and will decorate the interior of any apartment. Unfortunately, the equipment even from well-known manufacturers periodically breaks down. Of course, the warranty greatly simplifies the repair. But even it does not free from the hassle, and sometimes - from the costs. Therefore, the reliability and reputation of the company remains one of the main criteria for choosing a coffee machine or any other device. As a rule, a complex equipment contains many individual nodes, the failure of any of which limits or completely blocks its functionality. Of course, they all require periodic care. Therefore, device damage is often caused by improper use, inadequate care or other fairly simple reasons. Many users can easily eliminate some failures without the help of qualified professionals.

The reasons

As known, the success of any repair directly depends on the correct diagnosis. Of course, displaying some faults as an error code or a symbol on the device screen partially solves this problem. Unfortunately, not all models support this feature. In addition, the error code often contains ambiguous information that allows for some interpretations. Therefore, even a simplified classification of failures can help in many cases. 1. Water quality significantly affects the service life of many components. For example, the intensity of the scale formation directly depends on the water hardness and various chemical impurities. However, today the market offers in abundance various filters and descaling agents.

Of course, any user can successfully solve this problem. In addition, many models provide automatic descaling, which requires the owner to only activate this mode. 2. Most innovative SMART coffee mashines use complex electronic control modules that require stable power supply. Power outages and voltage drops adversely affect the service life of any complex electronics. Of course, such faults require the intervention of specialists. 3. Of course, the wear of parts due to long-term operation requires their periodic replacement. In some simple cases, many people can solve this problem on their own. 4. Of course, insufficient care significantly reduces the service life of the coffee machine. Unfortunately, many modules and systems, such as the dairy tract, require cleaning after almost every cycle. But many models from well-known companies often support the automatic cleaning mode. 5. Clogged filters, fat deposits on seals, scale and even foreign objects inside the device top the list of reasons in many cases. Of course, their elimination does not require a specialist.

Some failures

Water leakage from under the horn Many horn-type coffee machines have this problem. Usually, water seeps near the attachment point of horn to the housing. But many owners of coffee machines will be able to eliminate this damage on their own. Most often, this problem arises due to wear or clogging the sealing ring between the horn and the housing.

Accordingly, this repair requires its cleaning or purchase and replacement. Of course, a new sealing ring must fit the model. Clogging the horn filter also provokes water leakage because it collects cake of coffee beans. Extraneous noise As a rule, an increased noise level, including crackling, hissing, whistling, etc, also appears due to clogging the horn strainer, which requires cleaning. Many models have special accessories for this purpose.

But a toothpick or an old toothbrush often also perfectly solves the problem. Of course, cleaning the strainer requires caution, because excessive force can damage the filter surface. Regular use of coarse grinding also increases the noise level due to the mechanical effects of large coffee particles that pass through the filter cells under water pressure. As a rule, reducing the grinding value reduces noise and filter wear. Natural wear of the built-in pump also provokes an increase in the noise level. But this reason requires replacing the pump. Fault of controls Modern models often use different protection algorithms that block the activation of certain options. Possible reasons: - no coffee beans or water. The locking protects the device from overload. Many models indicate this reason on the screen. - dirt, grease or bloom may block the operation of buttons, which, of course, require periodic cleaning.

Other

The coffee machine does not activate the coffee making mode. Of course, the normal device operation requires the serviceability of all its components, including the control module, the motor and the brewing unit. Fault any of them blocks the coffee making. In the absence of a warranty, a visual inspection after disassembly can help establish the cause. Often, simple cleaning the internal knots solves a problem. Sometimes, components have obvious damage. Otherwise, fault diagnosis requires qualification. Lack of coffee supply from dispenser Clogging the brewing unit or supply system may block the beverage dispensing. Addressing this cause usually requires thorough cleaning. No water heating Failure of the electric heater or temperature sensor blocks water heating. You can check both items with a multimeter. Too slow heating may indicate excessive water hardness. But special filter cartridges reliably protect the device from scale, softening the water.

Unfortunately, their cost reaches several hundred dollars. Cappuccinator failure Today, most espresso models use an automatic cappuccinator.

A faulty cappuccinator does not foam milk, depriving the owner of their favorite drinks. Typically, it occurs due to clogged air ducts of the dairy tract, which requires cleaning after each cycle. Accordingly, a thorough cleaning can solve this problem. Some expensive models provide it automatically. As a rule, companies recommend using pasteurized milk with a fat content of 2.5%. Screen does not display water level or pressure Contaminated float or clogging the inlet tube can block these functions. Cleaning float or purging the tube will solve this problem. This video demonstrates the cleaning brewing unit in the Miele coffee machine. Read the full article

#cappuccinatorfailure #Coffeemachineproblems #descalingagents #descalingthecoffeemachine #SMARTcoffeemashines #Vienneseroyalcoffeemakers

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hearteyeslikeafooligan · 7 years ago

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I rotated and adjusted the lighting on that quote from the bottom left, to find what article it was referring to, since it’s the cover page of a newspaper section.

It reads:

Ta-Nehisi Coates: “It was as if I’d spent all my years jiggling the key in the wrong lock.”

The editor who put that quote on the cover page seems to have misquoted the article though, because the actual quote from the article is, “It was as if I had spent my years jiggling a key into the wrong lock.”

Married with a young child, he possessed intellectual curiosity and the gift of a wordsmith. He produced an essay about Bill Cosby that caught attention and led to a relationship with the Atlantic magazine, where he is now a national correspondent. His ascent coincided with Obama’s and a new world of possibilities. “It was as if I had spent my years jiggling a key into the wrong lock. The lock was changed. The doors swung open, and we did not know how to act.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/08/ta-nehisi-coates-our-story-is-a-tragedy-but-doesnt-depress-me-we-were-eight-years-in-power-interview

Below is a cut and paste of the article in case you can’t access that link.

Ta-Nehisi Coates The Observer

Ta-Nehisi Coates: the laureate of black lives Coates’s eloquent polemics on the black experience in America brought him fame and the admiration of Barack Obama. Here he talks about the rise of white supremacy – and why Trump was a logical conclusion

Ta-Nehisi Coates is short on sleep. He did five interviews yesterday to promote his new book, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy. Today there was another at 7am, then surgery “to get a little thing removed” from his neck. As his tall frame appears in the doorway of an office at his New York publisher, a bandage is visible above the collar of his blue suit jacket.

Coates is friendly but fatigued and yawns several times during the course of our conversation. Some questions animate him and he digs deep with evident passion; others elicit a brief “I don’t know”. The interview doesn’t always flow. But even on an off-day, Coates, 42, is more compelling than almost any other public voice about the state we’re in. The New York Times described him as “the pre-eminent black public intellectual of his generation”. The novelist Toni Morrison compared him to James Baldwin. He emerged as the equivalent of poet laureate during Barack Obama’s presidency, chronicling the spirit of the age. If anything, the advent of Trump has pushed his stock higher. Coates admits it is “tremendously irritating” to be in constant demand by the media, as if he is sole spokesman for African American affairs.

But he does have much to say about Trump and the divided states of America. His book is a collection of eight essays he published during Obama’s eight years in office plus new material, including an epilogue entitled “The First White President”, in which he contends that Trump’s ability to tap the ancient well of racism was not incidental but fundamental to his election win. Many people have called Trump a racist or white supremacist, but Coates has the rare ability to express it in clear prose that combines historical scholarship with personal experience of being black in today’s America.

Halifu Osumare, director of African American and African Studies at the University of California, says: “Ta-Nehisi Coates has done his homework, including much self-reflection. He clearly knows his literary forerunners – [Richard] Wright, Baldwin and Morrison, yet he speaks as a 21st-century writer. He eloquently conflates the personal, political and the existential, while telling it like it is.”

Certainly, in contrast with other commentators, Coates has no qualms about stating that the White House is occupied by a white supremacist (a term he does not apply to other Republicans, such as George HW Bush or George W Bush). He lays out evidence that Trump, despite his upbringing in liberal New York, has a long history of racial discrimination. There was the 1973 federal lawsuit against him and his father for alleged bias against black people seeking to rent at Trump housing developments in New York. Trump took out ads in four daily newspapers calling for the reintroduction of the death penalty in 1989 after five African American and Latino teenagers were accused of assaulting and raping a white woman in Central Park. Even after the five were cleared by DNA evidence, he continued to insist: “They admitted they were guilty.”

He was once quoted as saying: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” More recently, Trump was a leading proponent of the “birther” movement, pushing the conspiracy theory that Obama was not born in the US and therefore an illegitimate president. While running for president, he said that a judge of Mexican heritage would be unfair to him in a court case because he was a “hater” and a “Mexican”. In one interview, Trump refused to condemn the Ku Klux Klan (he subsequently blamed a faulty earpiece).

In his epilogue, Coates writes: “To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic, but the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.”

Since then, there has been a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a civil rights protester was killed, prompting Trump’s comment that there were “very fine people on both sides”. Today, Coates adds the president’s visit to hurricane-hit Puerto Rico to Trump’s charge sheet: “Just yesterday, he goes to a part of the United States that’s been devastated by a natural disaster and throws toilet paper out to the crowd like they’re peasants or something. There are people in this country who will not be happy until Donald Trump is literally executing a lynching before they’ll use that term [white supremacist]. I’m not going to play around; let’s call things what they are.”

Last month Trump was at it again, condemning American football players who “take the knee” during the national anthem to make a statement against racial injustice. Throwing red meat to his base at a rally in Alabama, he called on team owners to fire them and to say: “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now.” The protest was started last year by Colin Kaepernick of San Francisco 49ers. Coates reflects: “Kaepernick’s protest has been very successful. I really appreciate the fact that he’s been giving away money to organisations; he pledged to give away a million dollars and he’s been doing it.”

But Trump used his familiar tactics to divert and distract, kicking up bitter divisions around the anthem, the military, how much sportsmen earn, the meaning of patriotism and, of course, himself. Amid the media storm, it was easy to forget what the original protest was about. “The police brutality element has been lost, but I think that is a danger that all protests face,” Coates says. “At some point, you’re always co-opted, successful protests especially. It happened in the civil rights movement. People forget that the 1963 march [on Washington] was for jobs: that somehow got lost, and it became this warm, fuzzy thing [now best known for Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech].”

The notion that all these issues would be resolved by Obama was always fanciful. Even so, Coates was swept up in the euphoria with millions of others in 2008 when the US elected its first black president. Had the nation – whose founding fathers were slave owners, and where today African Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites – truly changed? Coates admits he took his eye off the ball. The racial backlash was coming.

“The symbolic power of Barack Obama’s presidency – that whiteness was no longer strong enough to prevent peons taking up residence in the castle – assaulted the most deeply rooted notions of white supremacy and instilled fear in its adherents and beneficiaries,” he writes. “And it was that fear that gave the symbols Donald Trump deployed – the symbols of racism – enough potency to make him president, and thus put him in position to injure the world.”

Trump did not come out of nowhere; he was the logical conclusion of years of racial dog whistles from the Republican party, which has sought to suppress the black vote through spurious claims of cracking down on fraud. Coates recounts: “Throughout his eight years in office, Barack Obama endured a campaign of illegitimacy waged either by pluralities or majorities of the Republican party. Donald Trump rooted his candidacy in that campaign. It’s fairly obvious.

“His first real foray out again as a political candidate was into birthism [Trump began questioning Obama’s birthplace in TV interviews in 2011], and a lot of people dismissed birthism as just something cranks do and we don’t have to deal with. That was a huge mistake: it underrated the long tradition of denying black people their citizenship and basic rights. That was what this was piggybacking off of, so it’s not a mistake that he started there and then became president at all.”

Coates does not make the claim that all 63 million people who voted for Trump are white supremacists; but they were, he points out, willing to hand the government over to one. It was an astonishingly reckless act. Coates’s book is a wake-up call to white America, a holding to account. “So this question, is everyone who voted for Trump a racist? This misses the point. Did everyone in Nazi Germany believe all the stereotypes about Jews? Of course not. It’s beside the point.

“When France deported its Jews, did everyone in France believe all this stuff? No, but that’s beside the point. Looking the other way has consequences and you might not be a racist or a white supremacist or a bigot, but if you voted for Trump, you looked the other way, you said it’s fine to have that in the White House, and a substantial number of Americans felt that way. That’s a statement.”

Coates also takes issue with the media’s obsession with the white working class as a bloc that turned its back on Democrats and defected to Trump. His book challenges politicians and journalists who make earnest defences of Trump-voting communities as “good people” not motivated by bigotry. Countless articles and books such as Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance, a memoir about growing up in the white underclass, have been studied as key to understanding the despair of small towns left behind by globalisation. Are they missing the point? Is class secondary to race?

“It’s not like most working-class people voted for Donald Trump; they did not,” Coates says. “Most white working-class people voted for Donald Trump and the through line that you find is whiteness, not class and not gender. It’s not like he only got men; he got a majority of white women too. So if you look at categories of white people you find Trump being dominant among them, in part because of the appeal he made, but also in part because the Republican party has effectively become in this country the party of white people.

“What’s happening is the white working class is being used as a kind of signpost tool… There is some effort not just to absolve white working people, but to absolve whiteness because here’s the deal: ‘Oh, it’s fine that white working-class people and white poor people voted for Donald Trump because over the past 30 years they’ve had unmet expectations. And it’s also fine that rich white people voted for Donald Trump because of tax cuts.’ Come on: everybody gets off the hook.”

And yet many senators, including Bernie Sanders, whom Coates supported in the Democratic primary, Al Franken and Elizabeth Warren have argued that a generation of economic stagnation is real, fuelling anger that led some voters to throw a grenade at the Washington establishment. Middle- and working-class parents are frustrated that their children will not have the same opportunities they did. Trump’s defeated opponent Hillary Clinton writes in her new memoir: “After studying the French Revolution, De Tocqueville wrote that revolts tend to start not in places where conditions are worst, but in places where expectations are most unmet.”

To that, Coates responds: “Those expectations are built on being white. People say that as though it’s indivisible from the idea of race. You want to talk about unmet expectations? Black folks have been dealing with that since we got here, so the notion that, ‘My child isn’t going to have it as good as me, so that therefore gives me the right to vote for someone who conducts diplomacy with a rogue nuclear state via Twitter’ – that don’t work. Bottom line is, a significant number of people in this country have tolerance for bigotry. No one, I don’t think, can act like they didn’t know. You know I think [Trump’s racist] comments were well reported and America just decided it was OK.”

When white voters make bad decisions, Coates argues, excuses are made; when black voters do it, they get the blame. Coates recalls how the election of Marion Barry as mayor of the District of Columbia [later to be caught on camera smoking crack cocaine] prompted articles suggesting people in the district should lose the right to vote. “So there’s all this kind of rope that’s given, all these excuses allowed when you’re white in this country. But if black people acted that civically irresponsibly, that rope would not be awarded.

“Like you take the opioid crisis and all of the compassion that’s doled out in the rhetoric? Where was that during the crack epidemic in the 1980s? I remember it well. I was in a city where that was going on. Where was all that compassion? Black people aren’t worthy of that. That’s a story that can be created for white people because they’re white, but we don’t get that sort of compassion.”

Democrats are said to be torn between an emphasis on economic justice that aims to win back Trump voters and an emphasis on racial justice that will energise its liberal base. Asked about the future direction of the party, Coates is hesitant: “I don’t know. I shouldn’t answer that.” But after a pause, he weighs in: “Here’s one thing. I don’t think they can get away from talking about race because of the way things are aligned. You’ve got to get to a state like South Carolina or Georgia: these states have large numbers of black and brown voters.”

Coates grew up in Baltimore, where Francis Scott Key wrote The Star Spangled Banner and the first residential racial segregation law in any US city was enacted. More recently, it was famous for David Simon’s crime drama The Wire. “I had very little interaction with white people as a kid,” Coates recalls. “I think about what my world looked like as a child, a place that felt fearful, violent, then I’d put on the TV and I’d see that that was not the country at least as it advertised itself. That struck me and I always wanted to know why, what was the difference, why was my house not like Family Ties? That motivated a great deal of my work from the time I was young.”

His father, Paul Coates, was a Vietnam war veteran, Black Panther and voracious collector of books about the history of black struggle. Paul Coates had seven children by four women and was an intellectually inspiring father who also administered beatings. Coates has described him with affection as “a practising fascist, mandating books and banning religion”. The religion ban worked – Coates is an atheist – and so did the books, eventually. In February 2007, Coates, then 31, had just lost his third job in seven years and was trying to stay off welfare. He writes: “I’d felt like a failure all my life – stumbling out of middle school, kicked out of high school, dropping out of college... ‘College dropout’ means something different when you’re black. College is often thought of as the line between the power to secure yourself and your family, and the power of someone else securing you in a prison or grave.”

Coates made a splash with a 2014 article for the Atlantic arguing that the US should pay African Americans reparations for slavery. Then, a year later, came Between the World and Me, a rumination on black life and white supremacy, addressed to his teenage son in a letter form that evoked Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. It argued that the “destruction of black bodies” is not simply a recurring theme of American history but its central premise. It won the National Book Award in nonfiction, sold 1.5m copies around the world and has been translated into 19 languages.

As his star rose, Coates was invited to the White House. He got to spend time with Obama, whose fundamental optimism in America had convinced him that Trump could not win. He says: “He was tremendously intelligent, one of the smartest people I’d ever talked to, and he was smart in many ways. I met him a few times: one was with a bunch of journalists and he had the ability to address each journalist in their specific area in a very learned way. I thought he was brilliant.”

He reckons “in the main” Obama lived up to the impossibly high expectations of his presidency. “He had an incredible tightrope to walk and it’s difficult, man. You’re the first black president and you’ve got to represent a community, then speak to a larger country at the same time. If he was more radical he wouldn’t have been president. That’s what I’ve come around to: who he was was what the country wanted at that time. He can’t be me; not that he should want to be. But it’s a very different calling.”

Indeed, Coates sees himself as a writer – including of a comic-book series starring superhero the Black Panther – rather than an activist or potential politician. “That’s what I’m supposed to be doing because it’s what calls to me and it’s what I’m good at, what I excel at. I don’t really excel at this other stuff. I’m not a person who’s going to say whatever I have to say to get a coalition together, which is what you have to do in politics. I’m a writer.”

Towards the end of the interview, the questions become longer and Coates’s answers become shorter. He is probably relieved when it’s over, though he is too polite to say so.

Later he is busy tweeting links to articles about gun violence, nuclear war and earthquakes, jokingly chiding their authors for offering no hope. It is a charge with which he is all too familiar. “Our story is a tragedy,” he writes in We Were Eight Years in Power. “I know it sounds odd, but that belief does not depress me. It focuses me. After all, I am an atheist and thus do not believe anything, even a strongly held belief, is destiny... The worst really is possible. My aim is never to be caught, as the rappers say, acting like it can’t happen. And my ambition is to write both in defiance of tragedy and in blindness of its possibility, to keep screaming into the waves – just as my ancestors did.”

• We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates is published by Hamish Hamilton (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

#Just Like You #lyric video #Louis Tomlinson

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thefoxholecourtrp · 7 years ago

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THIS IS YOUR GAME

Name: Jacob Feldman Age: Twenty Two Class Year: Senior Position: Backliner, #29 Hometown: Banks, Idaho

THIS IS YOUR MOMENT

TW: death

Muddy boots and windswept hair were a staple look for Jake’s childhood. The Feldman farm had been in his family for generations, to the point where nobody could really remember when they had first settled in Idaho, but all he needed to know was that it was home. Growing up, Jake spent many a spring on the farm helping with the sheep and watching as his father worked tirelessly for weeks on end during the lambing season, knowing that, as the oldest of the three Feldman children, the farm would eventually fall into his hands. And for the longest time he had been perfectly okay with his destiny. He loved the farm, and he loved his family, and though the chores were hard and the fields were cold, he knew it was where he belonged��until he saw Exy.

Living on a farm over an hour’s drive away from the nearest town meant being disconnected when it came to a few things. They never had time to sit down and watch sports during the week, there were always chores to do and sheep to feed, so for the longest time Exy had been completely foreign to Jake. Maybe he’d occasionally heard some kids in his school mention the sport or seen an advert or two on TV, but it wasn’t anything that had ever managed to catch his interest, always preoccupied with so many other things. However, on a field trip to the nearest city, his middle school class had been invited to see an Exy game between two teams. They were minor league, with barely a thousand fans to their names, but the moment the whistle blew and the players sprinted towards center court to grab the ball for themselves Jake was obsessed.

Soon the fields where he’d played with his younger siblings became training grounds for his own private Exy sessions. His muddy boots turned into muddy trainers and basketball shorts as he continued to train by himself at every free moment he had. What guilt may have come from his lack of attention to chores was eased by the knowledge that his younger brothers were growing older and starting to do their part now as well, and the smile on his mother’s face when he caught her watching him practice. He was only fourteen, and had never played a single game or even just a small skirmish with friends, but Jacob knew that he wanted to play Exy for the rest of his life.

High school presented him with new challenges. For the first time ever he had the chance of trying out for an actual team and playing with others, but the hours he would dedicate to the sport meant less time he could spend on helping out his parents on the farm. The night he expressed his concerns had been an emotional one: He’d spent an entire week building up to it, imagining every scenario over and over in his head, convincing himself that it would go horribly and his parents would never let him play the sport that he loved, but when he finally admitted that that was what he wanted he was only met with smiles. Michael, Jacob’s father, had pulled him into a hug and told him they’d known for years that he would never end up inheriting the farm. His talent for the sport he’d practiced alone for years was so great that they’d spent night after night talking about one day seeing their eldest son on television playing in the big leagues. The sense of relief that had washed over him that night had been so severe that he’d started crying out of pure joy, and soon after his mother had joined in, laughing at how silly they all were.

With the support of his parents his love for Exy no longer knew any bounds. His family, still barely scraping by, bought tickets and jerseys for his favourite teams as presents on his birthday and during Christmas, and slowly he began to become the player he had always wanted to be. Tryouts had him biting at his nails in nervousness, but when he saw his name on the roster sheet the following week he spent the rest of the day grinning from ear to ear.

The rest of high school was a rush: Early morning practices, followed by lessons, followed by gym time, followed by lessons followed by even more practices, and on top of that he still had chores to do when he got home. He was running himself ragged, and his parents were worried he was going to burn out in less than a month but through everything it was his passion for the sport that allowed him to keep going. His coach was impressed from the start, his stamina was good from the hours spent running through fields alone, and his balance even more so from the years he’d spent on the farm learning not to slide in the mud. Really, the only thing that wasn’t amazing for his age was his knowledge and experience of the game, but his willingness to learn and enthusiasm to play quickly erased that. Soon enough, his name was being murmured among the parents and coaches, and just after that the talent scouts.

Entering his final year of high school, Jacob Feldman was a name linked to a new generation of Exy, a name and a player that was worth remembering, that was going somewhere. He had never lost his passion for the sport, and was one of the strongest backliners among his peers on the high school circuit. His team had gone from second to last to second place in the state in the three years he had played with them, and if the rumours were true, all of the Big Three teams would be fighting to sign him. Jake spent many a night during his first term of senior year dreaming about signing with some of the biggest names in Exy—and then, after that, first round in the profession draft and, finally, Court. It hadn’t seemed impossible then: he had become a miracle story almost, the perfect small town boy that went from rags to riches, and the media ate it up. Everything was going perfect for him, his grades were still going strong and his games were only getting better, he should have had everything he wanted right in front of him—but nobody expected the fire.

An away game in early December left Jake’s father and two younger brothers alone on the farm as his mother, Lucy, was one of the parents who volunteered to chaperone on the two day trip. The investigation into the incident never reached any definite cause, but wild speculation in the small village of Banks all came to the same conclusion: A faulty generator that hadn’t been turned off properly. The call had woken Lucy up at 4:02 am, and the pounding on the motel room door at 4:04 shook Jake’s world. Nobody was left to be saved by the time the fire brigade even got to the farm through the early snowfall and muddy tracks, the old house had been burnt to a crisp, and there was very little—if anything at all—that could be salvaged from the wreckage. Suddenly, the three points he’d scored in the game earlier that night meant nothing.

The following day his coach would announce to disappointed journalists that Jacob Feldman would be absent from games until further notice as he dealt with family issues, but the fire on the farm wasn’t exactly a secret. Everyone knew why Jacob Feldman suddenly dropped from the face of the earth.

SEIZE IT WITH EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT

Jacob Feldman was a name that nobody in the Exy world had thought about in years, all of the excitement surrounding his senior year of high school washed away as other players grew into the space he once took up. The final articles with his name in the title had all depicted the gruesome tale of the deaths of his father and two younger brothers, and how the young prospect hadn’t played a single game ever since. It wasn’t until three years later that he popped up in Palmetto, North Carolina, wearing a plain white t-shirt with the bright orange paw print of the Palmetto State Foxes emblazoned on the back.

“Today we are proud to announce that Jacob Feldman, former backliner for the Boise Braves, will be joining the Foxes as a transfer from Treasure Valley Community College.”

Jake had barely picked up a stick for an entire year after the death of half his family, too ridden with sorrow and guilt over not having been on the farm with them to help. It had taken him a long time to creep out of his depression, to accept that even if he hadn’t spent so much time on Exy he wouldn’t have been able to stop the fire, but he managed it. He knew he’d ruined his chances of making it big in college, hell, he still needed to actually finish high school as well, but when he’d joined a small community college team in Idaho he was surprised when Coach Wymack reached out. Raring to get back into the sport, he graciously accepted, though he begged for the transfer to not take effect until the start of the following school year. He didn’t want to leave his mother alone in Idaho after everything that had happened, and she’d need to find a place to live and a new job in North Carolina as well—all he needed was a bit of time, and thankfully, Wymack had granted it.

JACOB FELDMAN is portrayed by JOSH O’CONNOR and is TAKEN

#rp #rpg #roleplay #death tw #jacob feldman #jacobbio #a #f #t #tf

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myrjdecker121 · 7 years ago

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Do we live inside a dream?

Are you a fan of Twin Peaks? If not you should be. Twin Peaks was a TV show which first ran in the early 90’s. It was a groundbreaking and influential show. Its latest and perhaps best incarnation was on Showtime for eighteen episodes this past summer. One question the show implicitly asks is, what is reality and can we change our reality?

Do we live in A Matrix?

There are science-based theories, which assert that we live in a type of simulated reality. Or, we are living in a matrix. That can be difficult to accept. So many unanswered questions. A central question would be who is the dreamer and who is creating the dream? Who created the simulation?

I’m not so sure about these theories. Although it would validate every science fiction fantasy I had as a kid, it doesn't seem likely. I once heard a Buddhist monk give a response to someone who asked him if we live in a dream state world. He said, “if you think you live in a dream walk in front of a moving bus, you will figure out rather quickly what reality is.” That may sound harsh, but he makes a valid point.

Now we do live in a dream of our creation. How is this dream world created? It springs from a misinterpretation of where things arise from and the difficulty in experiencing reality directly.

From where do phenomena arise?

We get confused most of the time and think that the things, people, and events that exist around us are independent of each other. The exact opposite of this is the the truth. In other words, nothing exists completely on it own. The Buddhists refer to this as Dependent Origination. Things and phenomena only exist because other things and phenomena are existing, rising and falling, becoming and ceasing. It is logical and easy to explain. Think about yourself and how you came to be. You didn’t just arise from nothing. You had to have two people a male and a female meet and create you. You had to spend nine months in the womb, and then you came out into the world, and for several years you had to be taken care of. You would not be reading this is if that did not occur. To think you are on your own and independent is an illusion. A powerful illusion, but an illusion none the less.

Quantum physics confirms dependent Origination. All things down to the smallest particles and waves exist only in relation to other particles and waves. Nothing exists completely on its own. Even you. Your continued existence is dependent on so many factors that it would take a year to list them all. This is why the Buddhist would say that there is no self.

Do you experience reality directly and correctly?

The answer to this question is no. Our perceptions of reality are clouded by the instruments which we have to experience it. The five sense as amazing as they are can often be faulty measuring instruments. Do I see the same color of red as you do? Most likely not. Can you hear a dog whistle or see an x-ray? No, but we know that they exist because my dog hears the whistle, and I can look at the pictures of my bones by using x-rays. Once there was a wise man who said to me when I was quite young to “believe nothing that you hear and only half of what you see.” That has always stayed with me. I would be lying though if I said that I always followed this rule. I tend to agree with situations and information that conforms to my current set of beliefs. I now see that as I have gotten older much of what I believed in the past was false. I see the world as I am not as the world is. Do you ever completely see the world as it is? Most likely not.

Do we live inside a dream?

My answer to this is I don’t know. That is my go-to answer these days. If we gain any wisdom as the year's pass, we see that what we know for certain is almost nothing. It is all a mystery. The best course of action is to gain control of the mind and to continue to peel the onion of reality. Although there is no end to the peeling and mystery, the other course of action would be to become complacent and stop growing. How boring is that?

Until Next Week,

Rich Decker – Mindful Accord

#reality #the matrix #twin peaks #illusion #perception #mindful #buddhism

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mean-scarlet-deceiver · 3 years ago

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Duncan's Whistle?

Man, I have so many thoughts about the other two Season 6 Duncan episodes. But, to me, this one just kind of... exists? It's not too bad, but it also doesn't really have anything speci

⭐⭐ the headmaster just blissing himself out with the organ while riding a train all day living his best life, omg the serotoninnn ⭐⭐

I would die for this dear man. fantastic Sudrian, 10/10

#not to be That Binch #but yeah... the original RWS story is better #*ducks*#i'm sorry! just!#cooking an egg over duck's whistle?#rex 'pausing impressively' and cheeking off mike?#that's two excellent bits to the TV adaptation's one #also then i don't have to look at the stupid large-scale narrow-gauge models #so that's THREE plusses in the RWS column here...#ttte #thomas the tank engine #chatter #ttte episode talk #ttte season 6 #faulty whistles #duncan's whistle

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artificialgrievand · 4 years ago

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equiuszahhak:

Hm is right! Loom gives a whistle while heading into the room. Fingers ghosting along the dusty surfaces, eyes finding purchase on the clearly missing TV. Surely this place was vandalized at some point, perhaps squatters? Ducking into the fridge, they inspect the plastic container - their seems to be nothing of interest, so they set it back and close the door. Scrape some grime from the stove with their long nail. That would need to soak…

They feel pretty good after making the rounds of this room, though don’t hold hope that the rest are in this good of condition. Fists planted on their hips, the troll gives a nod to the cute robot. “I’ll be back in a few moments. Unless you already have, could you see if there is a janitorial closet? We could use the mops.” A chuckle. About to teleport out, but they pause - right. Transportilizor!

– About ten minutes pass, and the void god is back in some proper cleaning clothes! Easier to move in, easier to get dirty in. And in their backpack, some very strong supplies. Wings splay, before they hover up to 101, landing gracefully before heading into the room. “Any luck Serket?” They set the bag down on the barren coffee table, setting everything out. They take a spray bottle and scraper! The first thing they want to tackle is that stove.

The container did in fact have something within it, the item clattering a bit as the container was inspected. It was hard to identify with such a quick glance, but it seemed to be metal. Surely not a key? Or some sort of signet? It almost just looked like a metal globe. So tiny.

Serket went to the coffee table in the middle of the room, before looking off through the open doorway. If it didn’t have a door, was it just a... way? Serket smiled and shook her head, then looked up in alert as Loom addressed her.

“Ah, janitorial? Yes I... think I checked for that loc8ion earlier. Perhaps...” She seemed uncertain however, tapping her chin before giving a quick salute. “I should 8e a8le to find it. I 8elieve it was through the kitchen towards the 8ack!” She grinned, heading out the door at the same time Loom did, swerving off into a different direction as they reached back towards the first floor. Her memories were a bit faulty but she was nearly certain she had inspected the janitorial area at least once, perhaps while looking for maintenance? Or, were they one in the same? Probably not, but certain supplies might overlap.

In eight minutes time Serket was able to locate the correct closet, fish out a mop and some cleaning sprays, a bucket, and with all of that was able to make her way back up to room 101. Once there, she produced a bubble of light before quickly popping it, summoning a rag, with which she could dust some surfaces with. She would quickly wipe down the coffee table, just in time for Loom to arrive.

“Hello, and yes!” She said, gesturing to the supplies that she had left out in the kitchen. “Nothing too exciting 8ut the variety in sprays seemed like a potential set of winners. I have no idea what any of them do! I think I’ve used one of those for food in the past, though.”

Indeed, one of the four sprays was marked with Vinegar. The other was marked Degreaser, another marked Bleach, and the last one Alcohol. All fairly simplistic and basic, but they could get various jobs done if need be. At least, that was the hope Serket had when she grabbed for all of them. The mop and bucket were propped nearby, awaiting use if they were called for.

“I think whoever was here 8efore liked to read,” Serket noted, heading into the adjacent room through the open doorway. It seemed to house a study of sorts, with a large mahogany desk and bookshelves made of a much darker wood. Most of the shelves were in fact empty, but just a few were left. Three, to be precise, though Serket didn’t pay them any mind.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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I’m not sure how many times I’ve personally heard the words “J.D. Power and Associates,” but it’s definitely often enough that I’ve accepted it as a part of my reality that needs no further explanation. The phrase is a permanent fixture of late-night TV, when car commercials boom through your speakers at inexplicably loud volumes. You’ve heard it in ads for Chevys, Lexuses, and Fords.

And because of its consistent place in advertisements, I’ve always believed two things: one, that J.D. Power is a very important institution, and, two, some people must know what it is. Why else would it be worth mentioning in a 30-second car ad?

J.D. Power is a marketing firm best known for its automotive research; it collects consumer responses for a variety of surveys (asking drivers about the reliability of their car’s transmission or the comfort of the passenger seat or performance of the navigation system) and then awards car models rankings based on those surveys. But how helpful those surveys are to car designers and car consumers is up for debate. And the reason car companies choose to so frequently include J.D Power rankings in their commercials has less to do with the surveys’ legitimacy than with how recognizable the firm has become to consumers.

James David Power III and his wife, Julie, started J.D. Power and Associates in 1968. According to Jalopnik, the “associates” were Power’s wife and children. By the time he started this venture, his résumé was a mix of auto and advertising, first auditing dealers in the tractor department at Ford and then moving on to the research division at the advertising agency McCann (formerly McCann-Erikson), and then to market research for a chainsaw manufacturer. Power’s experiences taught him not only how to conduct detailed market research but also that detailed market research wasn’t something car manufacturers had access to.

So J.D. Power and Associates began with Power and his wife mailing out surveys and tabulating the results at their kitchen table. It wasn’t until 1973 that they gained national attention for their work. When looking at the surveys, Julie found that one-fifth of the rotary engines on a Mazda R100 were failing somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 miles. The survey concluded that the engine’s failure was due to bad O-ring gaskets. Even if you’re not sure what all of this means, it’s easy to see how this information — sputtering engines, faulty parts — was sensational enough to make the Wall Street Journal front page, which it did.

Soon, every automaker was buying J.D. Power’s research. Today, its roster of current and past buyers includes BMW, GM, Hyundai, and Volvo. J.D. Power’s corporate communication director Geno Effler tells me, “You can go ahead and include every car manufacturer that operates in the United States on that list.”

Over the next decade, J.D. Power became an industry name, but a mention during a well-timed 1984 ad made the market research firm a household name. During Super Bowl 18, Subaru aired the first commercial to boast its J.D. Power rankings. Since then, J.D. Power has been mentioned in more than 350,000 television ads and 2 billion print ads, according to its website.

The cost of a 30-second commercial at Super Bowl 18 was $368,200. The beauty of J.D. Power’s Super Bowl debut is that the firm likely didn’t pay directly for a cent of the ad — if anything, it probably got paid. At the time, J.D. Power charged companies like Subaru $350 to mention its study for 10 months. Power saw the bigger benefit as publicity, rather than money, but soon the firm upped that number. (Today J.D. Power does not disclose how much an automaker pays to include the company’s findings.)

Power sold the company to McGraw Hill Financial (now S&P Global) in 2005 for $400 million, after which it dropped “Associates” from its title, and in 2016 it was acquired by XIO Group for $1.1 billion. “But there are still lots of people at J.D. Power who were here when Dave was here,” Effler says.

Three years after that Subaru commercial, J.D. Power debuted its Initial Quality Study, one of the firm’s more frequently consulted offerings. The survey asks car buyers to divulge any “problem” with a car they’ve had in the first 90 days after purchasing, and quantifies these problems into a ranking. The survey contains more than 200 questions in eight categories (exterior, interior, features/controls/displays, audio/entertainment/navigation systems, seats, climate controls, powertrain, and driving experience), and answers are supposed to reflect the “voice of the customer,” according to Car and Driver. But the problem with reflecting the voice of the customer is that customers voice not just concrete issues but also their opinions.

Effler says that when the study was first conducted more than 30 years ago, cars had fewer bells and whistles, so the survey did usually just evaluate the mechanics. But today, he says, cars are like “computers on wheels,” which is why consumers can flag things that are difficult to use, even if they aren’t malfunctioning. “It is a measure of vehicle quality as perceived by the consumer,” he says.

In recent years, J.D. Power’s IQS has come under a lot of scrutiny from publications like Car and Driver and Extreme Tech for what it classifies as a problem and how it uses consumer surveys to rank vehicles. The survey records “problems,” but this could mean an actual problem with the function of the car, or a problem a driver has personally with a feature in the car. For example, a faulty door lock and a frustration with voice command would be equally weighted as “problems,” even if the voice command is working exactly as it’s supposed to. In this sense, J.D. Power’s IQS is not reflective of quality, like the name implies, as much as consumer satisfaction.

Still, this can be helpful in its own way. Ezra Dyer of Popular Mechanics says that when he was at the Kia factory in Georgia a few years ago, Kia employees told him that when they first released the Sorrento, J.D. Power’s IQS report informed them that customers didn’t think the back windshield wiper should be a button on the dashboard but a rotary switch on the steering wheel. The next year, Kia changed this design and customers no longer had a problem with it. In this instance, the fact that the survey collected what people didn’t like — not only what didn’t work — was helpful to Kia.

“That’s a big part of that survey,” Dyer says. “It’s not just, ‘Did your car break?’ but, ‘How is your car annoying you?’ So when a car company rolls out some new feature that nobody likes or is hugely confusing or both, the manufacturer can hear about it from real customers and hopefully change course.”

After acting on feedback from the IQS, Kia moved to No. 1 in the rankings, but it still doesn’t mention J.D. Power in many advertisements. Dyer suspects it’s because the company doesn’t want to draw attention to its prior negative ranking (no one wants the Most Improved trophy). Porsche is another car manufacturer that doesn’t mention J.D. Power in its commercial, despite its high rankings. “J.D. Power is kind of a weird beast where it’s both overblown by some marketers and, behind the scenes, actually useful to manufacturers in making cars more reliable and easier to use,” Dyer says.

Knowing how J.D. Power conducts its research, it’s easier to see why car companies mention it so frequently; it’s a survey theoretically filled out by customers just like you and me, with rankings that would be relevant to customers just like you and me. Even if it isn’t indicative of anything concrete but rather customer satisfaction, car companies find some value in that.

But why do we find such value in it? Our acceptance of J.D. Power as an authority on something, even if we don’t know what, may well have to do with the name itself. It feels specifically manufactured by someone inventing a car ranking company, not the real initials of a real person.

It’s hard to say how many people know what J.D. Power and Associates is. Just last year, Chevy debuted a commercial where “real people” discovered that Chevy received more J.D. Power Initial Quality Awards than any other car company. The commercial shows consumers responding with low-energy exclamatives like “wow,” “I’m speechless,” and the somehow even more robotic, “That really makes me a lot more confident in Chevy as a brand.”

Later, the A.V. Club interviewed one of the real people (who was in fact a random person with no ties to the company) from the commercial, and found that none of the participants actually knew what J.D. Power was prior to filming. The participant told the A.V. Club, “[The spokesperson] was asking us all these buzzword questions, and then after a while he was like, ‘Do you know what a J.D. Power And Associates Award is?’ And we all go, ‘No.’ Because we all know they don’t really matter because nobody really knows what they are.” Even if you’ve heard of it, its function is still a mystery.

Jeff Galak, an associate professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, says it’s this exact lack of knowledge that makes the award such a trustworthy prize. “People have no idea what it is,” he says. “If you say to somebody, ‘I have an award for the best cow,’ they don’t know how to evaluate a cow. But this award is ostensibly official-sounding.”

Effler agrees that some people may not know what exactly J.D. Power does, but because they are familiar with it, he believes they have a neutral to positive response to it, something also referred to as the “mere exposure effect.” The phenomenon states that the more you see or hear something, the more you like it. So those car commercials that you’ve seen a million times have in fact done something for J.D. Power — made you familiar with the name. “If anyone … made the term ‘customer satisfaction’ a part of the vernacular of America, it was J.D. Power,” Effler says.

Hearing “Winner of 3 J.D. Power Initial Quality Test Awards” means something because you have been told it means something, every time you sit in front of the TV.

Want more stories from The Goods by Vox? Sign up for our newsletter here.

Original Source -> Why every car commercial mentions J.D. Power and Associates

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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suyashsaysitsapenalty · 7 years ago

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That night in Cardiff…

It's 3 in the morning. The referee blows the whistle. Thrice; and as soon as the third ‘Phurrrrr’ ends, I see all the substitutes and the assistant managers start running towards the middle of the pitch. Even I’m not in my chair. I’m just standing there right in front of the TV. I see people in the purple jerseys dancing, celebrating, running towards each other with joy. I see some tears too. I’m still standing there like a crazy person, just a feet away from the TV. Still can’t figure out how I am supposed to feel. I’m just watching all these wonderful things happening in Cardiff. I see an old guy bringing that beautiful platinum-plated thing onto the podium. People who were wearing those purple jerseys put on the white ones now. They all are gathered up on the podium.

“We are the champions!”

“No time for losers,”

“'Cause we are the champions… Of the world!”

I hear the famous song of Queen. I’ve to keep the volume of the TV to the lowest as my dad is sleeping in the next room. I see a warrior-looking guy receives that platinum-ware from the old guy. People in white jerseys are too eager to touch that platinum-ware. The guy looks as calm as anyone ever would be. He asks them to stay calm for a while as he is about to walk towards them. They all are jumping, dancing. Pure joy. Nada mas. He comes, stands in the middle of the group and at the count of three, the UEFA Champions League trophy goes up! For third time in four years by the same team! The same team that have lifted this trophy more than any other team on this planet, 12 mammoth times! The team - the club - which is awarded as the club of the 21st century, the Real Madrid C.F.!

What a night that was! Even though winning UCLs is more than a habit for Real Madrid C.F., we all fans were still eagerly waiting for the final; and boy, the way this team delivered?! Simply majestic! I remember the match-day. The whole world was against Real Madrid C.F. for winning this prestigious competition in back to back years. All the social media platforms were flooded with the support towards the opponents. Everyone, except Real Madrid C.F. fans, has already declared the opponent team as the winner of 2016-17 UCL; But beating all these odds, the great Real Madrid C.F. lifted the trophy without any extra workload, beating Juventus, the Serie A champions, by 4 big goals to 1.

The Real Madrid C.F. went through some hard moments over the past a couple of years. They had their manager sacked in last season due to bad quality of outputs, they had to release some important players two seasons back, they had to find and sign some new players, Especially the CDM position when Alonso left, they went trophy-less a couple of seasons back, they had to see their rivals clinching a treble. The team was going through the transition phase, but still they never gave up. There is a reason they are the club of the 21st century; and they proved it after clinching the league and the European title this year.

This achievement isn’t the result of individual efforts, but the whole teamwork over the past year. The team, which is made not only of big players, but also of the manager and their support staff. Since the French magician Zinedine Zidane took the charge of managing this giant club, every self-claimed football pundit was saying that he is good enough as a player, but it takes a lot more than being just a great football player to handle such a big club - the club that always have extra-humongous expectations from the players and the managers as well; but see how funny the things turned out, as those same football pundits now call him as one of the greatest managers. The manager who was once mocked as the ‘lucky one’, is now holding two gold medals of UCL and a La Liga title, over the span of merely 18 months.

Even though the manager comes up with hundreds of tactics, plans, formations, it's still players’ job to execute those plans over the field; and that's why all these players who are in the squad, even though they aren’t the part of the match-day squad, are the most important ones. Real Madrid C.F. never had any problems with their attackers as they were fortunate to sign some of the best in that department. Zidane, Di Maria, Ronaldo, Benzema (?) are some of the bests Real Madrid C.F. signed over the years. The signing of Cristiano Ronaldo was the much-needed boost for Real Madrid C.F. He impressed us time to time whenever the team needed him the most. We can take this season as an example. Cristiano was there whenever the team was winning, but the most important part is, he was there whenever the team was in the losing position. He is the one who scored most of his UCL goals in the knockout stages, the time when the team needed him to score. Also it is impossible to forget the contribution of rest of the players such as Benzema (His solo goal against Atletico Madrid), Modric, Kroos, Isco (Invaluable contributions such as the control over the game, crucial passes, creating chances for attackers), Kovacic, Casemiro (CDMs which were always needed to regain possessions, to support the defenders), Ramos, Varane, Pepe, Nacho (Well, these are defenders, don’t need to say more about them), Navas (Can't thank him enough and the faulty 'fax-machine'! Obviously! (If you know what I mean!)) and the most important players like Carvajal and Marcelo (The defensive wingers that are needed to provide those crosses for the attackers).

So all I can say after witnessing every match and analysing this whole season that, the both titles are the product of the hard-work of the players and the supporting staff, hence they all deserve it to hold on to them; and so do the fans all over the world for the constant support towards their beloved club, through thick and thin. We all love this club, these great players and all the other things that belong to this beautiful club.

¡Hala Madrid Y Nada Mas!

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ntrending · 6 years ago

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Stop putting off your device updates—here's why

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/stop-putting-off-your-device-updates-heres-why/

Stop putting off your device updates—here's why

As your shiny new gadget ages, so does its software. To keep devices running smoothly, manufacturers issue regular updates. But those patches can’t do anything if you refuse to install them.

Gadget updates take care of a lot of problems, but their most important application might be security. When disasters strike, they usually hit hardware that’s running outdated software. To prevent this, manufacturers will regularly roll out crucial patches that protect your laptop, phone, and other gadgets from the latest threats.

Updates also tackle a host of bugs and performance issues. If your gadget suffers from poor battery life, can’t connect to Wi-Fi properly, keeps displaying strange characters on screen, a software patch might sort out the issue.

Occasionally, updates will also bring new features to your devices. In addition to giving your gadget all the latest bells and whistles, this type of major upgrade can also improve its compatibility with new gear and programs.

Luckily, developers know the importance of installing updates, so they make the process pretty straightforward. It may be annoying to interrupt your work, but it’s worth taking the time to check for and download the latest software. Here’s how to update everything from your phone and computer to your network router and security camera.

If you own a smartphone, you’ve probably seen plenty of prompts asking you to install updates. Apple releases a new version of iOS annually, granting cool new abilities to iPhones, and Google also updates Android regularly—however, unless you have a Pixel phone, the latest version might take a while to reach your device.

Many of us delay installing these updates, which require that we give our phone time to reboot. Then we forget about them altogether. If you have a tendency to ignore update requests, you can check whether you missed a valuable patch.

On Android, go to Settings > System > Advanced > System update. You should see a message telling you your system is up to date. If you want to double-check, then hit the Check for update button.

Over in the land of iPhones and iPads, check for new updates in Settings > General > Software Update. If a new version of iOS is available, you can tap Download and Install; otherwise, you’ll see a message saying everything is up to date.

In the latest iOS 12 update, Apple provided a new Automatic Updates option on the Software Update screen. If you enable it, the phone will automatically apply patches overnight, waiting until the device is idle, plugged into a power charger, and connected to a Wi-Fi network.

Updates for Windows, macOS, and Chrome OS can provide your computer with a lot of new abilities. For example, this year’s macOS Mojave download added the handy desktop-cleaning Stacks feature. However, for that same reason, these updates can be pretty hefty—which means they take longer to install. Even if the process should happen automatically, many of us ignore download prompts. So run a quick check now to make sure you’re up to date.

On Windows, launch Settings (open the Start menu and then click the cog icon) and go to Update & Security > Windows Update. While you’re in this menu, you can set specific times when Windows is allowed to install patches automatically: Just click Change active hours. This prevents a download from kicking in while you need to use the computer.

For an Apple computer, the aforementioned arrival of macOS Mojave has changed the location of the tool used for updates. You now find it by looking at the menu bar on top of the screen and clicking Apple > About This Mac > Software Update. On this screen, we recommend that you tick the box marked Automatically keep my Mac up to date. That lets your computer install updates automatically whenever it falls idle. To further manage how this works, click Advanced and tweak the settings.

If you own a Chromebook, then your operating system should already be installing updates automatically, whenever you shut down or restart your computer. To check which version of Chrome OS you’re currently running, open a browser tab, click the menu button (three dots) in the top-right corner, and go to Help > About Chrome OS.

Even your smart devices have to get software updates. Luckily, a modern-day smart home setup should largely take care of itself. Most smart home devices, such as Nest security cameras, will update themselves automatically over the internet. However, they do rely on their accompanying apps to ping you if a problem arises—say the update experiences an error, or a faulty internet connection prevents it from downloading.

So, generally speaking, all you need to do is install the companion apps for all your smart home devices and then keep them up to date. We recommend that you set your smart-home apps to update automatically. On an Android device, open the Google Play Store app, tap the menu button (three lines) on the top left, and then select Settings > Auto-update apps. On iOS, go to Settings > iTunes & App Store and set Apps to automatically download. Here’s what you need to know.

Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo and Google Home make things even easier for their human owners. These devices gain new features through the cloud, so they really don’t need you to provide any input.

Other gadgets, such as Philips Hue smart lights, do require that you manage their updates through the associated app. When a patch is ready, the app will send an alert to your phone. Because your lights (or other devices) will be unavailable while their on-board software refreshes, the app lets you choose the best time to install this update.

Like smart home devices, most wearables rely on their apps for updates. So follow the aforementioned guidelines to keeping those apps up to date. When new software becomes available for your gadgets, the app will send you an alert.

Take the Apple Watch. You should see an iOS alert whenever a new update is ready to download, but you can also check for yourself: Open the app and tap My Watch > General > Software Update. If you see a new patch, then go ahead and install it.

Fitbit devices undergo a very similar process. Launch the Fitbit app on your phone, tap the account card button on the top right, select the name of your device, and then look for the Update button. If it doesn’t appear, then your wearable software is already up to date; if it does, then hit it to install the new patch.

For Wear OS smartwatches, updates appear in the app, but you can also access them from the wearables themselves. Head to Settings by swiping down on the watch face and then tapping the cog icon. Then choose System > About > System updates to look for new software.

Across the board, manufacturers are getting better at building automatic downloads into their gadgets’ software.

For example, updating the on-board software for a wireless router used to be a tricky task. However, just about every modern router will update itself automatically in the background—and you won’t even know it’s happening. If you do want to check your router’s status, head to the manufacturer’s website to look for new updates.

Likewise, you once had to undergo the confusing and complicated task of manually updating drivers for computer peripherals like the mouse and monitor. These days, Windows and macOS handle everything automatically: Patches for the computer-support hardware will appear as part of the general operating-system updates we discussed previously.

Devices that stream television might just be the exception. Although most smaller streaming devices, including Roku sticks and Chromecasts, will upgrade themselves automatically in the background, some larger TV boxes require a little extra work.

For an Apple TV, go to the front screen and choose Settings > System > Software Updates. On this screen, turn the Automatically Update switch to On. Now the television will install new software automatically, working in the background so you don’t need to put in any more effort. If you prefer more control, you can turn off this switch and instead download updates manually, which you do from that same Software Updates screen.

On Android TV devices, a notification should pop up on screen when a new update is ready. You can also check manually: From the main interface, head to Setting > About > System upgrade.

Written By David Nield

#DIY

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silviajburke · 7 years ago

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Fire And Fury Time

This post Fire And Fury Time appeared first on Daily Reckoning.

One of Bloomberg’s Wall Street cheerleaders let loose of a deep secret yesterday. When the S&P 500 reversed sharply from its intraday all-time high in response to the Donald’s “fire and fury” demarche, Mark Cudmore explained why the index has probably topped out for the summer:

Not to overplay the value of seasonal patterns, but there’s an intuitive reason why August is by far the worst month for the S&P 500 over the last 20 years — people don’t like fighting the market from the Hamptons.

Say it isn’t so!

The titans of Wall Street are supposed to be doing god’s work pushing the stock averages ever higher, not sipping on a “Hot Skinny Wench” of silver tequila, agave, jalapeno and citrus at their favorite Hamptons watering hole.

Then again, Mr. Cudmore may have been on to something. The casino has become so addicted to central bank liquidity and buying the dip that the only thing which can interrupt the relentless climb of stock prices, apparently, is beach time in the second half of August.

To be clear, we aren’t arguing for a Korea Panic. We just don’t buy CNN’s breathless alarmism about the Donald’s statement or think that nuclear armageddon on the Korean peninsula is about to break-out any time soon. In fact, we are downright suspicious about the “leak” which apparently triggered yesterday’s contretemps.

It seems that just in the nick of time to keep the North Korean nuke “threat” at full boil, the intelligence community (IC) favored the CIA’s house organ, the Washington Post, with a strategically leaked answer to the obvious point. Kim Jong-un’s recent ICBM test doesn’t put Los Angeles in imminent danger. That’s because North Korea hasn’t yet miniaturized its clunky 1950’s vintage A-bombs so that they fit in the cone of a missile.

Well, contrary to common knowledge among experts, suddenly it has.

North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, crossing a key threshold on the path to becoming a full-fledged nuclear power. The IC [intelligence community] assesses North Korea has produced nuclear weapons for ballistic missile delivery, to include delivery by ICBM-class missiles,” the assessment states, in an excerpt read to The Washington Post. Two U.S. officials familiar with the assessment verified its broad conclusions.

Forgive the cynicism and history reference, but we are tempted to ask: Does Colin Powell concur with the “assessment” of these two anonymous officials?

Are those cited even real spooks, or just some fat guys in the basement of a house in Langley, VA?

When the former national security advisor went off half-cocked based on faulty “intelligence” about Saddam’s WMDs, of course, he did it at the UN in full dress diplomatic language.

By contrast, the Donald was alone with his Twitter account at his Bedminster golf club, where he channeled Mr. Kim’s very own vernacular:

“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with the fire and the fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state, and as I said they will be met with the fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before. Thank you.”

The point is not merely that the Donald’s bluster was inopportune, unscripted, exceedingly dangerous and shockingly blunt. That part of it was made completely “inoperative” within hours by his Secretary of State, who took the Trumpian kettle off the stove and doused it in an ice tub:

Separately, in an attempt at de-escalation, Sec. State Rex Tillerson also stepped in to calm the mood, when speaking to reporters this morning, he says he doesn’t believe there is “any imminent threat” from North Korea, and says that they should “have no concerns about this particular rhetoric of the last few days.” As the AP adds, he downplayed speculation that the US was moving closer to a military option.

In an amusing twist, Tillerson tried to justify Trump’s bombastic threats, saying that “Trump is sending a message to North Korea in language Kim Jong Un would understand.”

What the markets are ignoring is not that Trump’s impulsive tweets might start a catastrophic war, but that the reality is he has already been sunk by the Deep State and its allies.

There is no way that a Secretary of State would gut the words of a President in the manner of Tillerson’s repost from Guam if the President were speaking for the machinery of state.

Wall Street is not remotely prepared for the upcoming breakdown of fiscal governance and the Washington kabuki dance which will lead up to the Donald’s last ride on the White House helicopter. The straws are already in the wind and by next Groundhog Day the broken furniture will be piled high in front of the Oval Office door.

It can be taken as virtually a given that there will be no FY 2018 budget resolution and that after repeated showdowns and shutdowns during October-November. There will be nothing more than short-term patches on the debt ceiling and continuing resolutions for next year’s $1.2 trillion worth of appropriations bills.

That means legislative food fights over these short-term patches and expedients will become the permanent business of Washington, not the rebirth of pro-growth policies fantasized by Wall Street.

The myth that the so-called GOP majority is capable of passing a sweeping tax cut stimulus, or even any tax bill at all, will be dead by February. As a procedural matter, there is no possibility of a tax bill from the US Senate.

If a GOP consensus on a 10-year budget plan – including the cuts that would be needed to pay for making America’s war machine “great again” along with border construction, veterans and even a modest tax cut – actually existed, an FY 2018 budget resolution would have passed weeks ago.

The talking heads on TV have suggested that there is no reason to sweat a delay on the tax bill. The general sentiment amongst pundits is that the market is a discounting mechanism and that an eventual cut in the corporate tax rate will permanently raise cash flows and stock prices. Yes, and if dogs could whistle, the world would be a chorus!

At the end of the day, all roads lead back to the Gipper and the giant one-of-a-kind tax cut accident of July 1981. When fully effective in the late 1980s, the Reagan tax cut knocked down Federal revenues by a staggering $1.1 trillion per year in today’s sized economy. But it was all paid for by massive increases in the public debt. That increase was made possible because of a clean national balance sheet in 1980, and by subsequent “tax grabs” in which upwards of 40% of the revenue loss from the tax bidding war of 1981 was recouped.

Those recoupment bills of 1982-1984 and the subsequent bipartisan revenue neutral tax reform of 1986 hang heavily, if unnoticed, over the present tax bill debate. Namely, they removed most of the politically achievable loopholes from the tax code. What is left is a hardcore of “incentives” and “fairness” measures that have weathered 30 years of political challenge.

In short, there are no “payfors” that amount to a hill of beans on the revenue neutral tax bill front. There is no conceivable increase in the national debt ceiling that could enable a Reagan-style deficit-financed tax cut. That fact is that even the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that the built-in “current policy” deficit over the next decade will total upwards of $12 trillion before a single dime of new tax cut is added on top.

The chart below, in fact, explains where Trump is starting relative to the Gipper, and why he will end there, as well.

The only thing that can save Trump’s presidency is a successful GOP tax bill. But the clock is running out and the legislative and policy barriers are nearly insurmountable.

The Donald’s single greatest applause line during the campaign, outside of denouncing bad trade deals, was his full throated attack on ObamaCare. But when faced with an emergency continuing resolution (CR) containing an ObamaCare bailout, Trump will be in no position to challenge the Congress.

He will be forced to sign, amid swirling intra-GOP recriminations, a bill that will mark the end of his improbable sojourn in the Oval Office.

With no tax bill and a humiliating defeat on ObamaCare, the GOP will face the prospect of harsh elections in November 2018. That will be especially true because by then Robert Mueller’s squad of legal assassins will have made mincemeat of the Trump family and anyone who supported him in the early days (such as Paul Manafort, General Flynn and Jeff Sessions).

At that point, the GOP’s only hope will be to offer up a scapegoat. As with Nixon, it will do so once the polls show that removal of the Donald has become a condition of survival.

Then the Fire and Fury will really begin.

Regards, David Stockman for The Daily Reckoning

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