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olliepig · 4 years ago

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Waiting in the Wings chapter 5

Thanks as always to the wonderful (and ever patient) @willow-salix for all her help in getting this beast out.

As always, the whole thing is available on AO3 here

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The cheers of the crowd bathing her in a glow of satisfaction that she’d never managed to find elsewhere, Cat stood on the stage of the Opera House after her performance of Swan Lake, savouring the moment. It was a marathon of a ballet that took every ounce of energy she had, and the appreciation shown by the audience at the end made the hard work and downright pain of her chosen career totally worth it.

She knew as well as everyone else on the stage that the post performance glow could be short lived and, with her long day nearly over, she was relieved that all she had left to do was receive her flowers, get changed and head home. Sensing a shift in focus from those around her, she looked over to the wings in time to see one of the Opera House staff staggering onto the stage with quite possibly the largest bouquet she had ever seen and heading straight for her.

Since her first performance of Giselle, larger and larger arrangements of flowers had started arriving at the Opera House to be presented onstage at the end of each show. There was never a name or message on the card hidden inside, just the initial S and two kisses. It was a fact that didn’t go unnoticed and became a source of debate and amusement within the company whenever she performed to see how many flowers she would receive and whether the mysterious sender would make themselves known.

Outwardly, Cat pretended to be exasperated by the constant influx of flowers but secretly she loved it and always thanked Scott profusely for his thoughtfulness. She had never expressly told him what her performance schedule was, so she supposed that he had looked it up and made arrangements accordingly. It had never been discussed aside from her giving her thanks but it was something that made her heart flutter dangerously every time and she cherished it.

With the curtain calls over, and with everyone having somehow managed to avoid tripping over the flowers as they laid on the stage, Cat headed back to her dressing room, barely able to see over the top of them. It wasn’t the only bouquet she had received that night and as she walked she thought that it was lucky that it was a route she had followed so often as she was relying almost entirely on memory to find her way.

As soon as she was safely in the dressing room, she carefully placed her flowers in the sink and pulled out her phone.

How the hell am I supposed to get these home on the tube?! They barely fit in the bloody dressing room! (Thank you very much for them btw. They’re beautiful!)

Smiling, she put her phone down and started to get on with the business of getting her costume undone when, almost instantly, her phone buzzed with a reply.

Good job I'm here tonight then, isn’t it? I’ll have the car at the front when you’re ready.

Cat smiled as her heart lurched with the unexpected excitement of seeing Scott again. It wasn’t the first time they had met up since their night at Penny’s and their friendship felt like it was blossoming. Multiple messages were exchanged daily and the more they learned about the others lives, the more comfortable they became.

What?! Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? Why don’t you come round to stage door and I’ll come down to meet you there? I need to grab a shower before I leave and I’ll be a while so you can wait in my dressing room.

Text sent, Cat raced through getting her tutu off and threw a tracksuit on. Checking her phone, she smiled again as she saw the reply,

I wanted to surprise you and yeah, that sounds much better than sitting out here by myself. See you soon!

Keen not to keep Scott waiting, she flew down the stairs, shoving down the nagging thought that she shouldn’t be this excited to see someone who was supposed to be just a friend. It was a decision that they had made together and she was determined to stick to it, regardless of the little voice in her head that kept pointing out that it had been her idea and that he had merely agreed to it.

Scott was already waiting for her when she arrived and her breath caught slightly as she took him in before he spotted her. He really was almost impossibly beautiful, she thought; the very epitome of tall, dark and handsome. His impeccably cut suit looked to be the same colour as his dress blues from his airforce days, a memory that stirred another flutter in her stomach.

“C’mon then you,” she greeted him fondly, enjoying the look of surprise on his face when he registered her next to him as she grabbed his hand and led him into the maze of corridors backstage.

“Well hello to you too,” he smiled, following behind and enjoying the touch of her hand much more than he thought he should.

Having never discussed the identity of her flower sender with anyone but her closest friends, bumping into two members of the corps de ballet on the stairs while escorting Scott Tracy back up to her dressing room was definitely not part of Cat’s plan to keep it a secret, especially as, she realised with a start, she was still holding his hand.

A hot flash of something akin to jealousy flared through her as she saw the appreciative glances they threw his way as they passed by and she mentally kicked herself for it as she hurried an oblivious Scott up to the relative privacy of her room. It wasn’t that she was trying to keep their friendship a secret; she just really didn’t want to be pressured into publicly defining something that was so far totally undefinable to her.

“You did great tonight,” Scott started with a smile that made Cat’s heart rate increase as the door closed behind them.

“Thank you very much,” she grinned, turning away quickly so he couldn’t see the effect he’d had on her. She watched in the mirror as he headed over and made himself comfortable on her window seat before starting the job of unpinning her headdress and letting her hair out of its tight bun. “When you said you were here I wondered if you’d seen it.”

“Wouldn’t have missed it, even if it did mean a ridiculously early start this morning. Sorry about the flowers by the way,” he added as he caught sight of them, the small sink making the arrangement look even bigger than it was. “I didn’t realise you’d have other bouquets as well and I genuinely didn’t expect mine to be quite that big.”

“That’s OK,” laughed Cat, moving on to removing the worst of her makeup. “It was hilarious watching them try to get them all onstage. I’m just glad you’re here to help me get them all home.”

“So, um, what would you like to do once you’re ready? I’d be very happy to take you for dinner if you'd like?” Scott knew full well that she wouldn’t have eaten since late afternoon and would likely be hungry after all the energy she had used in her performance. He had many happy memories of late meals after her shows and was keen to recapture those moments, even if they didn’t lead to the same end to the night as they used to.

“Not sure I really fancy dinner,” came the reply, throwing a bucket of ice water over the daydream he had somehow slipped into. “It’s been a long day and my feet really hurt. I was just planning on making some pasta and chilling out tonight if you’d like to join me?”

“That sounds wonderful,” smiled Scott, his initial disappointment at her rebuttal turning to enthusiasm for her counter offer, visions of cosying up on the sofa appearing in his head.

“Right, I’m going to jump in the shower, keep making yourself at home and I’ll be as quick as I can,” she finished, grabbing her clothes and disappearing without a backward glance, leaving Scott to his thoughts.

Scott looked around and wondered what to do. He'd been in the dressing room once before after Giselle but with Penny and Gordon there too he hadn’t paid much attention to it at the time. He was acutely aware that this was her private space in the theatre and he didn’t want to pry. Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. He found her fascinating and wanted to find out everything he could about her life but he wasn’t prepared to violate her privacy, so he contented himself with settling down on the chair at her dressing table and looking at the pictures that she had stuck around her mirror.

He’d looked at nearly all of them when, to his surprise, he spotted a picture he had taken of Cat and some friends of hers whose names he had once known. Seeing it again transported him back to that day: waking up with her beside him before going for a lazy brunch, then heading out on a trail walk along the James River where they bumped into a group of her friends, joining them for a while on their walk and laughing with them as they took the pictures.

He wondered, with a pang of regret, if she still had the picture of the two of them that had been taken moments later, cuddled up to each other and smiling, cheeks rosy from the slight chill in the air. He’d not thought of that picture since the day it had been taken. At the time it hadn’t seemed like it was of any real importance, just a snapshot of another day together with the promise of countless more like it in their future, but now… Well, now it mattered somehow.

His musing was interrupted by Cat breezing out of the showerroom, now dressed and ready to go. As they chatted amicably while she gathered her belongings, to his delight he noticed with a start that she was wearing the same outfit that she had at Pennys, sending his thoughts spiralling back to the events of that night and making him wonder if there was a significance there that he was not yet aware of. He was very relieved when she thrust a couple of her bouquets into his arms and led him out of the room, unwittingly breaking that particular train of thought before it could affect him too much.

Down at the stage door, Scott found himself hanging back while Cat signed autographs for the second time in as many months. Unlike the last time, however, he was now playing the role of a glorified vase and within the first 10 minutes he started to quite seriously regret his choice of bouquet as the foliage tickled his nose for what felt like the 100th time.

The number of people who turned out, and were prepared to wait in the unseasonably cool London night to speak to their favourite dancers, amazed him. When he thought about it properly, he wasn’t sure why; they were stars in their own right and their fans wanting to meet them made perfect sense. It was a world away from his experiences of waiting alone for Cat after her early performances in Richmond and his heart swelled with pride at her accomplishments since then as he watched her work her way through the crowd.

As he waited, he became uncomfortably aware of people watching him too and once he had realised that, he became sure he could hear his name being whispered in conversation, making him quickly duck behind the flowers, using them as a shield. He was well aware of the attention his presence could attract and also very keen not to let the focus be taken away from those who deserved it so he started to maneuver himself away from the crowd.

On their way down from the dressing room, Scott had promised Cat that he would have the car waiting for her once she was finished and when he became certain that he had been spotted, he gratefully snuck away to fetch it, rifling through his pocket for the keys and trying not to drop the damn flowers that were quickly becoming the bane of his life.

Safely settled in the driver's seat, Scott allowed himself to slump for a moment and prepare for the evening ahead of him. He cherished his friendship with Cat but there was no doubt of how he still felt about her. As soon as they’d started talking again it was clear to him that they still had a connection and the night they’d spent at Penny’s had cemented that. Or at least he’d thought it had.

He understood why she had made the decision to be friends and nothing more, but that didn’t mean it hurt him any less. He had pushed that hurt down in order to keep her in his life and he’d been pleasantly surprised at how natural it had felt when they had met up a few weeks later. Where he’d expected awkwardness and long silences, he’d found laughter and flowing conversation which encouraged him to persevere further, truly hoping that one day his feelings would fade and he could be the friend she desired.

When they were apart, he almost managed to convince himself that friendship between them would be entirely possible, but as soon as they were together, he longed to reach out and bridge the gap between them. Being so close to her but unable to act on his feelings was like some kind of delicious torture that he hated and loved in equal measure. He was hopelessly addicted to her, and he had no idea what to do about it.

*****

Feeling unnaturally clumsy under Scott’s gaze, Cat muddled around her flat, finding light switches and vases while simultaneously urging him to make himself at home and apologising for the non existent mess. She hadn’t been expecting a visitor when she had left that morning and she reddened as she spotted the underwear that she’d left over a radiator to dry, grabbing and stuffing them down the side of a cupboard, most likely never to be seen again.

If Scott saw her, he didn’t mention it and for that she thought she would be forever grateful. He followed her around, helping as much as he could as he looked around in interest at the place she called home.

“Hey,” she commented with a smile, finally coming to rest and surveying the veritable florists that had appeared in her kitchen, “remember when you used to just get me a single rose after a show?”

“What, like this one?” Scott grinned, holding out a blood red flower that he had produced from lord knows where.

Cat smiled slowly as she met his eyes, making his heart race. He kissed the flower and presented it to her with a deep bow, as he had seen her doing to her partner on stage earlier that night and was delighted when she received it with a curtsey.

“I…. Thank you,” Cat smiled, genuinely pleased with what she hoped would be her final floral gift for the night. The rose brought back so many memories of their time together and for that alone it meant more than all the other flowers combined.

“Right, shall we get dinner on, then? We're still making pasta?” Scott broke the moment and took charge. Seeing a kettle, he filled it and set it to boil before looking around the kitchen for any hints of where utensils and food might be kept.

“Bottom drawer, next to the fridge,” Cat instructed, following his line of thinking and directing him towards the saucepans. The pair of them bumped companionably around the kitchen as they made the simple meal for themselves, falling easily back into old habits and divisions of labour.

“Ooh, wine,” Scott exclaimed, emerging from the fridge and holding a bottle triumphantly above his head. “Would you like a glass?”

“Yes, I think I would,” came the reply from somewhere deep within a cupboard as Cat rummaged through for the sauce she was looking for. “It always takes me ages to unwind properly after a show and I do like a nice glass or two now and again.”

“I remember,” Scott replied softly as he put the bottle down. Something in his tone caused Cat to stop what she was doing and turn to look at him, finding his eyes mesmerising as they caught hers.

Cat was pinned by them, her breath quickened as she drowned in their depths and she fought the sudden urge to take the few steps needed to close the gap between them. His lips looked so soft and inviting and she found herself wondering if they tasted the same as when she had last kissed them.

“Shit!” Cat’s attention was distracted by the unmistakable sound of a pan boiling over. She rushed to mop up the worst of the water, the moment lost.

By the time she looked back up, Scott had moved too and had busied himself by pouring two glasses of wine and getting the plates ready for when it was time to dish up their dinner.

It was probably for the best, she told herself. They were just friends. They’d both agreed. And friends didn’t look at each other like that, right?

Settling down after dinner, they flopped into well practised positions on the sofa, facing each other with their legs comfortably tangled together in the middle and her feet in his lap.

As he listened to Cat talking about her plans for her summer break and the ballets she had coming up in the new season, Scott had found his mind drifting back to the moment that they had shared in the kitchen, feeling once again the way his breath had seemed to catch every time her eyes met his.

Lost in her, he absentmindedly rubbed her feet, feeling the tense muscles slowly loosen under pressure from his thumbs, the action soothing him and allowing him time to let his racing thoughts settle.

Ultimately, he had no idea what was going on. If they were to be friends, he’d make his peace with that and would continue to hide his true feelings for her until they faded, but they continued to have moments that were charged with such intensity that they were impossible to ignore or write off as something else.

He realised that she had stopped talking and was watching him with an almost unreadable expression but for the little smile creeping onto the corners of her mouth.

“Sorry,’ he apologised, feeling the heat creeping up his cheeks and snatched his hands away as if her feet were on fire.

“No, it’s OK. It felt good,” she reassured him. “You were always really good at that. It just brought back a lot of memories, that's all.”

Scott smiled gratefully and went back to working on getting the knots out of her feet, a comfortable silence coming over them. Listening to her talking had planted the seed of an idea, one which he was unaccountably nervous about broaching lest she think he was overstepping any boundaries. As he worked, the idea grew and coalesced into something more tangible, something that he thought might actually help cement their friendship.

“I’ve got something to ask you…” he started hesitantly, “You can absolutely say no but I wanted to ask anyway.”

“OK, fire away.” Cat fixed him with a look that excited and scared him in equal measure as she fiddled with her wine glass.

“I know you were saying you have some plans for your summer break, but if you have a bit of time would you like to come out to the island for a visit? Spend a bit of time in the sun?”

“Wow! That’s quite the suggestion,” she paused, taking a moment to consider the offer and nearly causing Scott’s heart to stop. “Yeah, that sounds lovely,” she decided, giving him a small nod and a beaming smile that lit up her face.

Scott let out the breath he realised he’d been holding since he’d let the question into the open and his smile matched hers, relief washing over him. “Really? You don’t have to agree to it if you’re not completely sure.”

“No, I really want to, it was just a surprise that’s all.” As the idea took hold, Cat could feel herself getting more excited. She’d not had a proper chance to relax since the previous summer, and even that had been marred by the tail end of her previous relationship, so the thought of a week on a tropical island with Scott was definitely something she could get on board with.

“Amazing! You’re going to love it,” Scott smiled, beyond delighted at the thought of being able to show her his home and introduce her to everyone who was important to him. “We can sort out the details another time though. You look exhausted and don’t think I’ve not seen you stifling yawns for the last 10 minutes.”

Cat couldn’t do anything but laugh. “Yeah, you got me, I think it might be my bedtime. It’s awkward question time now, though. Where were you planning on staying tonight?”

“Selene said I could use her place so I was just going to go there,” Scott responded at once, his answer taking her by surprise. “Um, who’s Selene?” Cat tried very hard to maintain an even tone and a neutral expression despite the flash of jealousy that surged through her for the second time that night, somehow catching her by surprise again.

“John’s fiancee and my best friend. Remember, I did tell you about her?” replied Scott, trying very hard not to grin at her obvious discomfort.

“Ah yeah, I just, um... forgot her name, that’s all…” Cat tried to explain, fooling nobody, least of all herself.

“You weren’t jealous there were you, Miss George?” Scott pressed, a glint appearing in his eyes and a wicked grin on his lips.

“Not at all,” Cat insisted, suddenly becoming very interested in her wine glass and trying to ignore the flush that had appeared on her cheeks. “Well, it’s very late, we've had a drink and I have a spare room so you’re welcome to stay here if that would be easier?”

“That does sound tempting. I’ll not be sleeping much though,” he couldn’t help but pause for effect and was gratified with the response when Cat’s eyes shot back up to meet his as she cocked an eyebrow at him. “It’s 2 in the afternoon my time so I’m pretty wide awake I’m afraid. If you don’t mind me watching TV and having a quick nap so I’m good to fly back tomorrow, then I’d love to stay.”

“You’re a terrible tease, Mr Tracy,” Cat shook her head but her smile betrayed her true feelings. “Of course that’s OK.”

Having set Scott up with everything he could ever possibly need for the coming hours, Cat finally retired to bed but despite her exhaustion, sleep didn’t come easily for her. No matter how hard she tried, her thoughts kept returning to the man in her living room and how torn she felt about him. From the moment they had met again, something had been constantly there, telling her that she couldn’t let him go but to her it wasn’t as simple as that.

At an early age she had learned the pain of rejection by those who should have loved her and it had scarred her deeply. In Scott, she had found someone to whom she had given both her trust and her heart, and his sudden departure from her life had hurt her tremendously.

Once broken, trust wasn’t something she gave out again that easily and she had thought very carefully before letting him back into her life. Yet, despite everything, she wanted to give him her trust. She wasn’t prepared to risk loving him for a second time but friendship seemed to be a good compromise to make in order to be in his life but not stray too close.

When they were apart it seemed perfectly easy. The messages and calls flowed constantly and there was no end to the things they could talk about. The problem arose when they were together. He seemed to have a magnetic pull on her that was getting increasingly difficult to deny. She had slipped up once and even though her body might be crying out for a repeat performance, her mind was made up.

Groaning quietly, she rolled over and buried her head in the pillow. It was going to be a long night.

*****

Whatever Scott had planned for their Sunday morning together, it was not the little cafe that he found himself sitting in a few blocks away from Cat’s flat. At the very least, he had imagined going someplace where there were proper tablecloths covering tables that didn’t wobble when you leaned on them, risking spilling drinks with every move. However, the food was excellent, the coffee plentiful and the company the best he could imagine so, all things considered, he was very happy with his situation.

Full of food and starting to feel tired from a day that had started almost 19 hours earlier on Tracy Island, he stretched back in his chair, inadvertently catching the attention of the waitress and flashing her a smile in response to her enquiring look.

Across from him, Cat felt a rush of annoyance fire through her as she sipped her coffee and tried to maintain a neutral expression. She’d been feeling on edge all morning, the fight between what she was prepared to give and what she really wanted, wearing her down and making her feel vulnerable and irritable.

An idea sparked at that moment though, one that would both prove to herself that she was fine with their friendship being nothing more than that and take away any temptation to push things further.

“You should get her number,” she suggested, instantly surprised by how much that simple little sentence hurt.

“What? Why?” Scott stuttered, completely blindsided. He couldn’t think of anything in his behaviour that had suggested that he might have wanted a date and had no idea where this suggestion could possibly have come from.

“You were flirting with her. All those jokes and looks while we were ordering, and that smile right there? Don’t say you weren’t,” she continued, hating herself for every word but doubling down and pushing ahead anyway. The thought of Scott dating anyone hurt her more than she was willing to admit, but she had started down this path and she was committed now.

Scott sat back, running his hands through his perfectly styled hair, not quite believing what was happening. “I wasn’t flirting, I was being polite and friendly. There is a difference, you know.” He knew he was being defensive, but at that moment he just didn't care.

“You’ve got to admit it though, you are a flirt. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you not hit on someone, given half a chance.” Cat felt like she was watching herself from afar, not quite believing what she was saying. As soon as the words were out of her mouth she felt the cold rush of dread spread over her and picked up her coffee cup again in a bid to disguise her shaking hands.

“Listen, this conversation is starting to make me really uncomfortable. I don’t want to date the waitress and I’m not really sure where all of this has come from. Can we just drop it now please?”

“Sorry,” Cat looked down at the empty cup in her hands, desperately wishing that she could go back in time to before she’d ever thought of her wonderful ‘idea’. In retrospect, she wasn’t sure what she had expected to happen, but it certainly wasn’t the reaction that she had gotten. She couldn’t remember a time that he’d ever spoken to her as sharply as that before and it had shaken her.

Scott nodded curtly and went back to his coffee, looking outwardly calm but his mind was whirling. He always flirted. It was part of who he was and he’d always thought she liked that, or at the very least accepted it about him. It had never been an issue when they had dated before so he couldn’t understand why him behaving totally normally to a waitress was now cause for comment.

Fine, he thought petulantly, if flirting means that I want to sleep with someone and we’re just going to be friends then I’d better stop flirting with her too. Don’t want her getting the wrong idea now, do we?

A pang of loss hit him as soon as he made the decision; he had come to crave the excitement that her looks and touches gave him and it would be hard to give that up. Not that he’d been the only one doing the flirting, he thought in annoyance. Not responding was going to be a tough but perhaps necessary evil given the circumstances.

“Wanna get out of here?” he asked with the barest hint of a smile.

Cat nodded miserably. She knew he was angry, she could see it in the set of his jaw. The sparkle had gone from his eyes and he was avoiding looking at her but really she couldn’t blame him. She’d messed up and called him out on something that came to him as naturally as breathing, so he was perfectly entitled to be annoyed and she hated herself for being the cause of it.

Walking around the local park afterward, Cat did her best to act as if nothing had happened but she wasn’t getting anywhere. She knew from experience that Scott needed a bit of time to cool down when he was angry, but they had limited time together and she didn't want to waste it, even if he was clearly in a bad mood with her.

Slowly, the frosty atmosphere between them thawed slightly but there were still long, awkward silences that had never been there before and Cat had to work hard to initiate any conversation. The animosity that had radiated from Scott since they left the cafe abated but Cat found she still couldn’t relax as she started to notice a marked change in Scott’s behaviour towards her.

Since their argument, he hadn’t been cold exactly, but there was a reservation in his actions that hadn’t been there before. Where he had been open and playful, often touching her hand or holding a smile for fractionally longer than necessary, now he was barely making any contact at all and she felt the loss keenly.

Despite trying to act relaxed, Scott was trying desperately to squash down his natural urge to fix everything. He knew that a quick smile and a cheeky comment would make everything OKagain but he hadn't liked being called out for flirting so he was damned if he was going to use it to get back into her good books.

Her comment about asking out the waitress had confused him and nothing more but, when she started challenging him about flirting constantly, that had angered him. The more he thought about it the more angry he had become and the more he doubled down on his resolution not to flirt with her again.

Deep down, he knew he was being petty and probably overreacting but he’d gone to a lot of effort to pull together his trip to London He’d been so excited to see Cat and spend some quality time with her and it felt like her actions at brunch had thrown all his efforts back in his face and ruined it. He stewed silently as they walked, his growing anger mixing with regret, knowing that he would need to apologise at some point but not willing to back down and fix everything quite yet.

The longer it went on, the more her attempts to apologise and lighten the mood were rebuffed, the angrier Cat became. She knew she’d messed up but his treatment towards her was completely disproportionate. She’d apologised and in her experience of adult relationships that was the point at which people would talk about it and move on. Scott treating her like she was barely even an acquaintance when she was giving him a chance to regain her trust was going too far and she wasn’t going to stand for it.

She’d had enough and took them on a shortcut back to her flat, keen to get the walk over so she could talk to him more privately. Her anger at his childish behavior was growing by the minute and by the time they reached her flat she was seriously considering whether it was worth even continuing their friendship at all.

Closing the door behind her, Cat was surprised to find that Scott had already grabbed his bag and was standing ready to go.

“I need to get back...” he tailed off, glancing down at his bag as he shifted uncomfortably.

Cat had always known he was going to need to leave after brunch. She would much rather have had a chance to sit down and talk properly but time was against them and she wasn’t going to let him run away on her when the going got tough again. “OK, but I’m going to ask you something before you go.”

“Of course,” Scott replied warily, not expecting the sharp tone of her voice or the way she straightened as if preparing herself for battle.

“Is everything OK with you today? You’ve seemed pretty distant since we went for brunch,” she challenged with a lot more confidence than she felt. It was not a question that she wanted the answer to, but she couldn’t let him go without asking him, she had to know.

“Yeah, I’ve told you I’m fine,” he answered shortly, keen not to get drawn into a discussion right now when emotions were clearly still running high for both of them.

“I just… I wasn’t sure if you still wanted to be friends or not?” she met his eyes, finding her strength and challenging him to be honest with her now that the question, and her deepest fear, was in the open.

“Of course I do. What gave you that impression?” Scott was growing frustrated by her questions, baffled as to how they could possibly even be having this discussion.

“Yesterday you surprised me for the night, bought me the biggest bunch of flowers I’ve ever seen and invited me to spend a week with you on your family's island, and this afternoon you’ve hardly even looked at me,” she argued, feeling more confident about making her point but not wholly convinced by his answer given his actions that day. “I get it, I messed up earlier and I’m sorry, but I feel like I have whiplash from how fast everything has changed. So I’ll ask you again, and I want you to be honest with me - do you want to be friends or not?”

“No, I don’t,” Scott snapped, as anger surged through him, shocking her with his ferocity.

Everything he’d been doing to ensure he didn’t cross the line from friends to something more had been taking its toll on him, and that, combined with whatever the hell it was that had happened at brunch, had finally pushed him to his limit.

“I flew 13,000 miles to see you. I rearranged my time off so it fitted in with your performance and your schedule. And today you tell me I should be dating some waitress I’ve never spoken to before? You want to know what I want? You”

Cat was speechless. All she could do was stare at him, her mouth slightly agape, as he bared his soul.

“I want to date you, Cat, no one else. I was to kiss you and take care of you and love you like I used to.”

Suddenly realising what he’d said, Scott pushed past her without waiting for a reply and walked through the door, slamming it on his way out and leaving a bewildered Cat to wonder how on earth she was going to salvage this one.

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds #thunderbirds fanfiction #Scott Tracy

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alternativeartifactspodcast-blog · 5 years ago

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1 - Ruby Slippers

This week’s episode explores the unique story behind one of America’s most iconic and beloved objects: Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers.

LISTEN NOW

Resources Used (in order of reference)

Smithsonian History

“The Slippers” Documentary

Smithsonian Magazine

Henry Littlefield’s Piece on Allegory

American History Blog on Recovered Slippers

American History Blog on Conservation

Kickstarter Campaign

Learn More about the Ruby Slippers

Antique Roadshow Podcast

The Populist Movement in America

The Ruby Slippers of Oz

To access the transcript, click read more.

Greetings and welcome to Alternative Artifacts, a museum in your ear, the podcast that explores the strange stories behind the most unique objects in museum’s collections. Ever wonder how a gigantic Naked George Washington ended up in the National Museum of American History? Or why there is an entire museum dedicated to art made from human hair? Now you can listen to the stories of America’s most iconic objects from your favorite exhibit or from the comfort of your own home. My name is Lexi and I will be your tour guide.

[Transition Music]

Our first season will focus on objects in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. Founded in 1846 with funds donated by British citizen James Smithson, the Smithsonian Institution is the largest museum complex and research centers in the world, and serves as an umbrella organization managing 19 museums and a zoo. Access to all Smithsonian Institution museums is completely free to the public. Beyond these publicly accessible venues, the Smithsonian also manages dozens of research centers throughout the United States and internationally, leading scientific research and disseminating knowledge. Some of the object’s stories we explore will expose the complicated, colonial history of the Institution, some will reveal how museum methods effect objects, and others will provide a glimpse into the lives of objects beyond the confines of the museum. Today’s object falls in the last category.

Picture this. You enter the American History museum from the bustling DC street Constitution Avenue, you will need to head upstairs to see our first artifact. This object is so famous it has its own special gift shop, instigated an investigation led by the FBI, and inspired a documentary. It is regarded as an object of cultural significance, despite being linked to no significant religious or political event. In the newest renovation of its exhibit, this object now sits on a pedestal in its own room, surrounded by walls decorated with murals that harken to the object’s origin. Poppy flowers, emerald green, a sweet little dog, a girl in a blue dress…I am talking about the Ruby Slippers. An American icon visited as often as the Star Spangled Banner and regarded by generations of movie lovers as a symbol of the American film industry. But how did these slippers become icons of American history? How did they end up property of the federal government? Why is the FBI involved in the science of their preservation? And what is the weird history behind them so few of their visitors actually know about? Today on Alternative Artifacts we investigate the Ruby Slippers.

[Transition Music]

In L. Frank Baum’s original book “The Wizard of Oz” the slippers that took Dorothy home were silver. Spoiler alert, if you can even spoil something that’s 119 years old. Some historical scholars argue the fact that the slippers were made of silver was meant to serve as a symbol from American politics. In the 1960s a scholar named Henry Littlefield claimed that Baum’s fairytale of a magical land called Oz was actually a satire. Littlefield argues that Baum’s experience on the prairie, which overlapped with the establishment of the Populist movement, or people’s party, in the region, was fodder for the allegory present in The Wizard of Oz. But this detailing this allegory could make an episode all its own, so for today’s episode we will only be focusing on the ruby colored slippers from the MGM film and how they came to be.

So how did the slippers we know and love today end up ruby instead of silver? During the early stages of production for the film “The Wizard of Oz,” MGM studios had a script that mentioned the shoes being silver. However, they decided to change the color to red during a round of script edits. There were several reasons for this change, but the most significant was actually quite simple and direct. If you recall the film, the scenes in Kansas are depicted in dull, black & white. The scenes in Oz are bright and colorful. Think of the yellow brick road and the emerald city. This was a very deliberate choice made by the film studio. While the Wizard of Oz, released on August 25, 1939, was not the first major motion picture to use Technicolor technology, the use of this tech was still very new and many audiences had little exposure to color footage. Making the slippers a vibrant color made them “pop” on screen, drawing viewers attention.

During the production of the film several pairs of the slippers were created, using commercially produced high heels which prop designers dyed red and added sequins to. There are four known surviving pairs of these original prop shoes. Today we will focus on two. First, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History is home to one pair, donated in 1979.

Another museum which possessed a pair of the shoes was the Judy Garland Museum. In 2005, their pair of Ruby Slippers went missing. They disappeared almost without a trace, with the thief leaving behind only a single red sequin. More on this later.

In 2016, the Smithsonian launched a kickstarter campaign to preserve their pair of the Ruby Slippers. Prior to this conservation, the slippers could only remain on display for short periods of time yet remained an iconic object, one visitors inquired about daily. This most recent conservation effort addressed many issues facing the aging footwear. It also included in-depth research into the properties of the materials the shoes were constructed from to better conserve them and similar objects in the future. Then, the team working to restore the slippers received an odd call from an unexpected party inquiring about their research.

[Transition Music - Suspenseful]

In a plot twist straight out of Hollywood, the Ruby Slipper conservators were about to become forensic scientists. The call was from the Federal Bureau of investigation, who had in their possession a pair of Ruby Slippers recovered in a sting operation. Suddenly, the conservation had become an investigation. The FBI asked the conservators to take a look at the slippers they had confiscated and compare them to the pair from the Smithsonian’s collection. The FBI wanted to know if it was possible for their pair of shoes to be an authentic pair of Ruby Slippers, and perhaps the ones stolen 11 years prior from the Judy Garland Museum. Dawn Wallace, the conservator leading the project, compared the moment she learned that she may be helping identify the pair of stolen slippers to the Indiana Jones films. After all, it is not often a museum professional gets the chance to fight crime.

Upon examining the FBI’s pair of slippers, Wallace knew that they were in fact an authentic pair of Dorothy’s iconic shoes. This pair of shoes was in fact so similar to the Smithsonian’s pair, it lead to another question. Why were they so similar? What Wallace noticed while trying to answer this question an even more astonishing discovery. When comparing the slippers side by side, it became clear that they were in fact mismatched pairs. The next question the team wanted to address was obvious: did the swap occur before or after filming? The evidence suggests the pairs were in fact swapped when they were made, and filmed as mismatched pairs, just as they are presented and preserved today. This conclusion is drawn from the fact that the construction patterns are similar between the matching shoes, but the wear patterns are similar between the mismatched shoes, suggesting Judy Garland wore and used them mismatched. In other words, the prop team working on the Wizard of Oz made the two pairs of shoes separately, but at some point swapped one shoe of each pair, leading to mismatched pairs being used on the set of the film.

The Ruby Slippers have developed a life beyond MGM’s production of “The Wizard of Oz” and outlived many other homages to the iconic film, including its depiction in Disney’s Great Movie Ride. They serve not only as an attraction for tourists, but as a monument to two major moments in American History: the introduction of technicolor technology to the American people and the immortalization of a wholly American fairytale. Today the Smithsonian’s pair of Ruby Slippers keep the magic alive. They can be viewed daily in their humidity and temperature controlled display case at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History at 1300 Constitution Ave NW, Washingtion DC.

[Transition Music]

Now here’s the museum tip of the week. Did you know the Smithsonian fossil hall recently reopened after being closed for 5 years? The newly renovated exhibit features 700 fossils and tells the story of 3.7 billion years of earth’s history. The only downside is that the Natural History Museum which houses the collection is also one of the most trafficked museums on the mall. The best time to go to avoid crowds according to a local? Wait until the weather cools down. By the end of October most of the Smithsonians will clear up, but the best time to go for an almost empty museum experience is always the month of January. Happy museum travels.

Want to learn more? Show notes including sources, further reading, links to cool stuff and podcast transcripts for each episode are available through our tumblr, alternativeartifactspodcast.tumblr.com. Alternative Artifacts is hosted through Anchor.fm, a free hosting service for podcasts of all kinds. You can subscribe to us on Anchor.fm directly or through Spotify Podcasts. Interested in sponsoring an episode? Have an awesome idea for an episode? Want to be a guest star? Email us at [email protected]. Theme music was created by NordGroove and downloaded via Fugue. The sound effects were provided by zapsplat.com. Remember, there is no place like home and never stop exploring.

[Outro Music]

#museum #museumlover #podcast #american history #wizard of oz #ruby slippers

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happylittlemarmite · 4 years ago

Text

Creative Journal

26/10/20- Week 5

Session Themes: We began this weeks session recapping Edward De Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats idea from last week and there were some important points i thought i should note down as a reminder for myself:

“Thinking as a skill”

A “tools approach”

“Software for thinking”

Parallel thinking- Everyone thinking the same thing at the same time

we covered whether originality is important in terms of creativity. Looking back at our discussion in previous lessons regarding the definition of creativity, we saw how overall originality is a key aspect of a lot of peoples interpretation of creativity. We looked at Disney’s Steamboat Willie as a case study. The iconic 1928 short film known by many as the opening animation for numerous Disney films, is actually an idea taken from Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr., a silent picture from the same year. Using characters like Mickey mouse, changing the story and the addition of music makes Disney’s take entirely different from the “original”. It’s not that the idea was stolen and copied, but instead used as a point of influence for the animation. Many people today know the name “Steamboat Willie” but would not recognise “Steamboat Bill Jr.”.

We also learned about “Permission Culture” or “Read-Only Culture”, “ a culture in a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past. ” (Lessig, Free Culture, 2004). I found this idea super interesting as someone that utilises “outsourced” mixed media in my own graphics work, the idea that so many people can produce things with the intent of it being theirs only, so that nobody else can work on it, add to it, or use it in their work. This has lead to the rise in popularity of concepts such as “Creative Commons”, a creative copywrite license that allows free public distribution and usage of materials that may have otherwise been copywrited in the past. Concepts such as these are so important to the industry especially in times like these when going out and capturing images for yourself is less feasible.

We discussed whether utilising somebody else’s work was necessarily considered “stealing”; the difference between outright theft and copying. The examples we looked at were parody and pastiche.

Pastiche

Imitative work with the purpose of replicating artistic methods/stylisation

To celebrate/admire

To pay homage (publicly displayed special honour or respect)

Parody

Imitative work with satiric/ironic intent

To mock

Parody and Pastiche link to the ideas we’ve been learning about in terms of “reverse brainstorming”. In order to replicate something for pastiche/parody you need to truly understand your source materials and similarly “reverse engineer” it.

DSD Activity: This week I’ve started trying to listen to “sleep meditation” podcasts. I’m on sleep medication but still struggle to fall asleep before 3am on a regular evening, usually i listen to fan noises or rain noises but haven’t been able to recently since i broke my phone. So far I’ve been struggling to get into it, it’s a pretty foreign feeling to me trying to tune out of a conversation in order to sleep. They keep talking about how “some people find it difficult to tune out but keep at it” but I’m too interested in whatever they’re speaking about. Sometimes they tell stories, other times they’re more of a guided meditation to help you become more relaxed and think about physical sensations and distractions that may be preventing you from getting to sleep. I find the latter much better for sleeping, but i do enjoy listening to the stories although they keep me awake.

Inspiration: Some interesting media I’ve been looking into this week are old “big tobacco” advertisements. A friend and I were discussing the depopularisation of smoking in recent years, how we always thought it looked “cool” when we were younger but now my 13 year old sister pretends to gag when i come in from a cigarette at my mums place. We were talking about how old “big tobacco propaganda” has been replaced by vape/ecigarette/shisa advertisements. It’s not quite the same in terms of product, obviously cigarettes are much worse than their substitutes, however in terms of corporate propaganda its exactly the same. In years time when we have more research into the long term effects that come with these substitutes we may even laugh in disbelief that these were once being marketed as a safer and healthier alternative. Looking at some of these advertisements, i also really enjoyed the retro art style and shocking nature of some of the messaging, so i’ve also held onto this as inspiration for my own graphics work.

“Make Something Rubbish” Project: For this mini-project, I decided to pitch a film about paint drying. I thought about doing grass/plant growth but in order to actually see any growth on film i think I’d need to do some kind of time lapse which may end up being actually interesting, the only interesting thing that occurs as paint dry's is perhaps a slight change in depth of colour, which is MUCH LESS interesting than plant growth. I started by thinking about traditionally enjoyed aspects of film and how i could counter-cater to the masses. Popular film usually has a range of exciting characteristics whilst this does not. No exciting cast, no music, no interesting camerawork or lighting. This film couldn’t even be enjoyed by people that are into “interpretive art“.

I really thought i had done something clever with this idea, until i did more research and found out that such a film already exists! However, i think my idea is unique to this in terms of intent. Charlie Lyne’s Paint Drying was made with the purpose of making a statement against the BBFC for making film production in this country less accessible to aspiring creators. He made it with the intent of making the BBFC sit and watch an entire 10 hour film of only paint drying, which, whilst making a statement on censorship and economic privilege, was a conversation heavily publicised due to it’s message and comedic nature. This research inspired me in some ways, instead of making a time-lapse, I too had decided to pitch a 10 hour paint drying film. However, the key difference as I’ve stated is intent. Whilst the exact same concept, my film is not trying to make any kind of statement, cause any kind of conversation. It’s simply a film about paint drying. It doesn’t mean anything, doesn’t have any kind of purpose. Just boring paint drying. I can’t find the full film anywhere online but judging from the video on the kickstarter page and the trailer made available on youtube, i believe the actual piece may even contain some music and/or somebody painting the actual wall initially. This would be much too exciting in my film.

youtube

#Journal

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after-skies-ananthology · 5 years ago

Photo

I'm an undercover journalist investigating the President’s space force

BLACK SKY WARS

the third part

approx. 5 yrs ASE

It can be pretty difficult to decide on the kind of story you want to do sometimes. I hadn’t expected the popularity of Slice to grow the way it did. But, well, it did. I was just doing what I had always done since I was a little girl. Getting myself into trouble, getting myself out of it, and in the process acquiring that which I desired. Information. Ever since I could speak, people have been wanting to keep things hidden from me. I suppose it means I’m still childish if I admit that I can’t handle being told no, but it’s true. Dangle something in front of me so tantalizingly mysterious like that, and you’ll soon find me obsessed with it. That’s why I started Slice, it was originally just a little blog I wrote on using my old see-through Mac as a teen. I used it as part diary, part National Enquirer for my neighborhood. Basically, a lot of people in my home town who were aware of it became addicted to it. Others, well... they fucking hated it. Understandably I guess. But, I mean, it’s their fault for making themselves so... interesting for lack of a better word? I guess I’ll leave it at that. I’ll spare you the boring details of how it led me to the kind of life I wallow in now. One of a contradictory ‘shut-in by day, extrovert Renaissance woman by night’. Does that sound pretentious? It should, because it is. Those aren’t my words, but that of my co-editor and business partner, Philip. Publicly, I have him run the company side of things. Legally, he’s both the chief editor and founder, in order to conceal my preference for anonymity. I have two things that make me a better journalist than what you see out there in the pool of filth they call media these days. 1) My legs (and a good set of heels I suppose), and 2) the fact that those I deceive into narcing on themselves have never seen my face before.

Last week, Philip had texted me out of no where in the middle of the night. He wasn’t interrupting my sleep or anything. I had been up since four in the afternoon and still had that exhausted disheveled look on my face, staring at my computer screen meticulously researching random unimportant shit and generally wasting my own time. Me and him had been debating back and forth for a while now on what angle we should approach the upcoming IACS seminar from. You know, the same one where Monterrey decided to turn the whole thing into “Let’s See If I Can Start WW3: The Movie”? I opened my phone, and read his message as the light from the array of screens assaulted my retinas and danced over my face in the depths of darkness that was my apartment bedroom.

“So, try not to react badly to this but...” His text message warned. “Maybe we should explore something tangentially related to the seminar, rather than the seminar itself?”

I let out a small cackle and shook my head in disbelief. I had been trying for a month, to no avail, to get a job as a hostess where the seminar was being held. Under a pseudonym of course. For the last few weeks I’ve been consistently told by the employer that all positions are currently filled. This flies in the face of what numerous former employees of the hotel told me when I contacted them. They informed me that about two thirds of the wait staff were abruptly let go without warning a day after it was announced to them that the seminar would be held at their establishment. That’s why I even tried applying in the first place. Hearing this lie told to me, I decided to check in at that very hotel for a night to see if it were true. And to my disbelief, it was. The hotel was being run smoothly, almost, surgically. The new staff seemed nice. In a dystopian kind of way. It kind of felt like they were smiling at me only when I was actually looking at them. I had this strange sense they were scowling at me when my eyes were averted.

Let me help you understand why this doesn’t make sense to me. They fired all the waiters except those with the most time with the business. They fired all the cooks. They fired all the valets except for two. They fired the general manager of the hotel itself. I was told about the mass layoff the day it happened by a source. I applied a day after that. Within a day, they had already filled all of those positions to their satisfaction. No wanted ads, seemingly no interviews, no listings on job search sites, etc. Nothing. It was as if these new employees just showed up to work out of nowhere and started waiting tables or cooking steak. I had spent the last few nights putting together a new fake identity so I could try getting another room on the last night of the seminar next week. I had paid a lot of money to people on the dark web for this fake driver’s license and Canadian passport. And now, Philip was asking me to give up and write about a ‘safe’, ‘tangential’ topic vaguely related to space militarization.

I texted him back, “Sometimes I can’t fucking believe you.“

He did that thing when you’re texting someone and they’re typing this big ass message but you don’t realize it and as soon as you’ve hit send they hit send and... God it’s really annoying. Philip’s still a Boomer you have to realize. He doesn’t “get” technology yet. Or maybe he willfully refuses to understand it like most old people. Hmm. Either way, his giant wall of text he sent me tried assuaging my anger.

“I’m not trying to stop you from pursuing the story you want. I would never do that Clem. I mean, not anymore. Look, trust me I learned my lesson with that whole fight we had over you narrating the weekly recaps. BUT, I think I have something better than the seminar itself. I might just have the reason behind that whole hotel staff business. Will you hear me out?“

I texted him back as I let out a long, frustrated sigh. “Fine. What?” And then I sent him one more. “And it seriously better be good or I’m blocking your number for a week again.”

His reply read, “I have this guy in Needles, California. Ever heard of it?”

I told him, “No but it sounds like one of those crappy little towns between Barstow and Vegas that no one ever visits.”

Philip confirmed in response, “Well, it is one of those crappy little outskirt towns. But that’s not the point! There was this whole supposed UFO crash and some sort of military helicopters came and took it away and blah blah blah.”

“Philip I AM NOT doing a UFO story.” I told him.

“I know I know“ his message read. “That’s not the point! There’s this conspiracy theorist guy from Nevada, you know one of those Coast To Coast types? Anyways, he’s been telling me that he has some sort of bombshell information that connects the Needles crash with your seminar shadiness.”

I groaned, resigning myself to at least let him tell me. “I’m listening. What is it?” I asked.

A picture appeared on my phone. It was an airliner sitting on a tarmac at dawn painted lily white with a single red stripe along the fuselage, with no company branding or logos. “What’s with this airliner?” I asked him in my text.

“Did you know that a Janet Airlines flight arrived at a private airport near Santa Rosa the night before everyone was fired, and offloaded the exact number of people needed to replace everyone?” Philip informed me.

I was silent for a small moment. I looked at the posters on my wall drenched in neon-purple light, taking inventory of what was just said to me. I texted him back one more time, “Philip, you know I love you right?”

Flash forward to the next day, I had tried sleeping off some of my insomnia from 6 to 10 AM. I tried getting up at 10:15. Not having it. Then I tried 10:45. Again, absolutely not. So I did what I always do when I’m in a bind to meet with a source and my Circadian rhythm isn’t cooperating with me. Don’t judge. I mean, please don’t judge. I mean... Hmm, well. I did a line. I’m not proud of... well, no. Fuck you, I am proud of it. I mean I’m not, I mean... not, fuck you? Look, either way when a story like this is in front of me and my insomnia is in the way, I...

I don’t have to justify this with you. And I’m not going to.

After the white lady had gotten me out of my funk I finally took a shower, got dressed, and hopped in my car and headed down the road to the Silver State. Philip gave me the guy’s address and phone number as I left the Southland. “Frank Monterrey?“ I said to myself out loud as I read the text. I pulled over and texted Philip back, “Is that... really his name?“

“I guess so. No relation obviously. Just one of those things in life.“ He said in reply.

I continued on my journey northeast along the I-15, passing highway patrolmen, smart cars, and meth-lab RVs along the way. Noticing the run down watering holes filled with cheap signage set in contrast to flashy over priced watering holes with pretentious signage, all posed against the backdrop of the California desert and its Joshua trees. Every now and then, I would take a peak at the day time moon piercing through the blue firmament gazing back at me. I wonder, how hard would it be to get approved for a visit to Armstrong? I doubt I have the money though. I kept glancing at it, wondering to myself, are you looking at it too Will?

The coke’s getting to me at this point I think. I focus my attention to other things, turning the radio up. Let’s see. Talk radio? “You simply don’t know what you’re fucking talking about! Explain to me exactly how it ain’t socialism you dick! If it’s government, it’s socialist! That’s why the founding fathers gave us social security, to teach us responsibility.”

No.

Umm, pop? I pressed down on the seek button. The tired “Millennial whoop” burst through the speakers of my car. People who are 35 pretending to be 15, dressed in neon clothes reciting their modern chant to their contemporary God. Nothing. Safe, marketable, unoffensive, nothing.

Where is this guy’s house? I double checked my GPS. It wasn’t working suddenly. I hadn’t paid attention to it for a bit. It was flickering back and forth between my car’s position and where my destination was. Doesn’t make any difference, I’m near the exit anyway. The satellite radio I was listening to began screwing up as well. I couldn’t understand what the lyrics of the song were trying to say anymore. They were verbalizing something, but it was all mushy. I turned it off, as it strangely made me feel drowsy. Don’t want to fall asleep at the wheel. I glanced back at the daytime moon again.

What is that? I thought to myself. There was this black speck gliding along the rim of Luna’s spherical shape. It’s not a bug. It... can’t be an airplane. This is Nevada I suppose, I’m liable to see a UFO at some point. I returned the view of my eyes back to the road, and finally took my exit. His “house” was a beat up RV, not unlike the meth labs on wheels I mentioned earlier. He had encamped himself on a slice of desert in an undeveloped part of North Las Vegas, not far from the gate to Nellis Air Force Base. I parked behind it and began texting Philip to let him know I was here, just in case this guy decides to chop my head off. If that happens, at least Philip will know where to find the skin suit he’s going to make out of me. As I hit send, I heard a bang on my wind shield. And then a dozen more in quick succession. There he was, fat, receding hairline, broken sunglasses, dirty polo shirt, and openly carrying a 9mm. “Hey! Hey! Hey! You’re here! You’re the girl? You’re the girl! From the news people thing? Come on, hurry up we got to go! Come on! Come on! Come on!” He screamed at the top of his lungs. I slowly got out, somewhat regretting not bringing my own sidearm with me. I guess that’s why you shouldn’t take a hit of cocaine to wake you up in the morning. I felt a sharp edge slightly press into my chest as I stood up out of my car seat. Good. I thought, at least I have my knife with me. Hidden in the one place he (hopefully) won’t try to grope. I stuck my hand out to shake his as the car door shut. “Nice to-”

He man handled it like a maniac before I could finish. “Yep! Great great great! We really gotta go doll face! They’re gonna be there any minute!” He spouted off.

“Who?” I asked.

“Air Force Special Activities Center! Illuminati enforcement bureau. Really high level dinosauroids. Far higher level lizard people than even the Governor.” He shouted as he got into his RV’s driver seat and started the engine. Or attempted to. Several times.

I was silent. Dumb struck. “You’re Frank Monterrey, right?” I asked him.

“Shhhhhhh! Don’t say it out fucking loud! Have you even run an evasion and recovery op like this before? Quite clearly not!” He shouted. The engine finally turned over and breathed life into the vehicle.

“I have... no idea what you’re talking about.” I said as I reluctantly climbed into the passenger side. I texted Philip real quick to tell him that I hated him now. As the man shifted into drive, I looked behind me into the interior of the RV. You know that meme from Always Sunny with Charlie explaining all the crazy shit on his wall and how its all connected? Yeah, I should convince this guy to let me take a picture of him doing the exact same thing in front of all that stuff back there because it would be a one for one. As implied, the RV’s walls and windows were littered with a collage containing pictures of some spade-shaped aircraft, portraits of some women in Space Corps and Navy uniforms, a group photo of a few astronauts in their space suits in front of an American flag, grainy photos of a bizarrely shaped... satellite? Hmm. Finally there was an old Polaroid of a woman with an 80s-style hairdo in a wedding dress holding hands with someone in a gorilla costume. The entire quote unquote ‘modern-art masterpiece’ was interspersed with the occasional classified military document and incoherently linked together with red string and thumbtacks.

“We’re coming, we’re coming, we’re coming now you pricks.” He said as the RV turned onto the road heading north. He continued to say something under his breath, “Bitch, Su, you bitch, hag, you hag you’ll finally see what choosing Squatch over me really means.“

My jaw hung out for a few seconds as I just took stock of what I drove over four hours to get out here for.

I just met a mentally-ill stranger who uses the President’s name as a pseudonym, stepped into his run down RV willingly so that he can take me God knows where so that we can recover something from the government in order to steal his crush back from the Sasquatch...

I checked my phone again to see if Philip had replied yet. I was going to tell him when I see him again I’ll be giving him a castration. But he hadn’t responded to my last text, or to the one before that for that matter. I turned to ‘Frank’ and asked, “Listen, does this have anything to do with that airliner you told my business partner about?”

He cut me off before I could finish. “Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah.” He motored off. “We’re gonna get it, yes yes. We’re gonna get IT. Oh man, haha! You won’t believe how we’re gonna get it.“

“Uhhh, ok. How are we going to get ‘it’?” I asked politely.

He then proceeded to pull his pistol out of its holster and wave it around in my face with the safety off. “Good old American freedom! Hail Odin for the Third Amendment.”

I corrected him, “Second.“

He began to talk over me. “Tenth. Anyways, you women never know when you’re wrong especially when it’s that time of the month so to speak. Just like Su. Ahhh, yes. My lovely old Su.“ He looked over at me in that creepy old man I’m about to sexually harass you kinda way. My hand drew closer to where my knife was hidden. “You remind me of her. Oh yes. Oh yes.“ I now regretted the choice of clothing I made for that summer day. My legs pulled away and slammed into the door as he tried to place a hand on my thigh. I reached under my shirt and pulled the knife out reflexively. Before he could bring his hand back to where his holster sat on his hip, I instantly lunged over and pressed the blade just above it directly into where his kidney would be without breaking the skin.

“Keep your hands on the fucking wheel bitch!” I screamed at him, my eyes tearing up in rage, my head and chest pounding from the adrenaline. The RV slowed down on the empty road we had traversed to.

It was quiet. The RV stopped. He began to laugh. “Ahhh Su. Our famous lover’s quarrels. We’re not officially married until we have a few of those I suppose.”

I looked at him in confusion and disgust. “What is your problem old man? I’m not your wife, or who ever you’re talking about. I’m from the news group? Remember?”

A tear ran down his cheek. He suddenly lunged towards me and started to shout at the top of his lungs, “Su, please God just love me and not that ape!” He tried kissing me as his free hand pulled my torso into him. I stabbed into his side with the knife. And then again, and again. And then one more time until he stopped moving. He was lifeless on top of me now. I pushed him off, some of his blood gushing onto my shirt and shorts. It was so thick that when I stood up out of the RV, it escaped the fabric of my clothes and ran down my leg. Not a good look. I collected myself, thinking about where I was. On a back road in Nevada, a few miles away from my car. I could walk back to it, I thought to myself. I folded my arms as I leaned onto the door jam, staring at his body, trying to get myself to stop shaking. I didn’t cry. But I should have.

“How did you even come across that airliner?” I said out loud, and lingered on the thought. I recalled the collage of conspiracist fuel he called wallpaper inside. “Yeah. How did you come across it?” I said again, out loud. I pulled my phone out and texted Philip before I climbed in the back of the vehicle, “I need help. Now. Philip I really need your help now, please. Call me.” The message said. I started rummaging around all his stuff inside. There was a strange version of the American flag draped on a small plastic table. It was white with blue stars and vertical stripes. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t place my finger on it at the time. I looked underneath, finding a print out of a map. It showed a route from North LV to Needles to Santa Rosa, California and back. Did he actually go there? Did he take the picture himself? How did he know it would be there? I put it down and turned my attention to all the stuff on his wall. Who were these military women? Who were these astronauts? I unpinned the photo of the spade-shaped airplane from the wall and studied it, after a while glancing up to the grainy picture of the strange object and letting it catch my attention. I pulled it down next. It was shaped like... how can I describe this? It’s like I’m looking at a 3D image without 3D glasses. I pulled down some of the documents, beginning to think that this may have actually been worth it - kind of. If the red string was anything to go by, the document I was looking over right now had something to do with the uniformed young woman with glasses.

It was a transfer order of some sort from a few years ago. I’m not sure what the military would call it. It basically said this woman was to be released from the Air Force so that she may become a member of Monterrey’s new Space Corps. It said that she was to be promoted from 1st Lieutenant to Captain in doing so. It said her parent organization at the time was an intelligence squadron. Next to that it listed her weight and height. Next to that, her social security number. Next to that her last then first name.

Hayek, Poinsettia.

As I pondered over her significance, I heard the fake Frank’s phone go off. I walked over to the driver’s seat from behind his slumped over corpse, and struggled it out of his pocket. It was a text from someone named Will, which forced the image of the Will I know to the front of my mind, making me zone out. Another notification sound snapped me out of it. “Where are you? They’re almost here! This is the last chance for the We The People revolution if we miss this window! I State This Emphatically As Will Williamson, Individual, Sovereign, Citizen Of The Republic of Nevada, Independent AND Sovereign. Electronically NOTARIZED (Documented Permanently) In The Year Of Our Lord In Accordance With Common Law AND NOT ADMIRALITY LAW.”

After reading that bit of nonsense I went and scrolled up into the conversation they had over messaging and found the map coordinates of the destination fake Frank was supposed to meet him at before I stabbed him... to death. I decided that, well, since I killed him it might as well be worth it to at least see what he was taking me to. I collected everything off the wall and the table save for the flag and piled it together. I laid them on the passenger seat, got out and went around to the driver’s side. I pulled his fat, smelly, stiff body out of its place with all my strength, nearly pulling my back out in the process. After he fell onto the asphalt of the road, I leaned over and removed his pistol from his holster. I checked the magazine. It was full. Placed it back in, putting the safety on. I got into the driver’s seat he once occupied, and sped off to the location provided by his fellow freak.

It took me another thirty minutes to get there. Civilization was far from here now. I was almost certain this had to border some sort of military range or government land of some type. As I arrived I noticed a beat-up sedan with a faded paint job to the side of the road behind one of the safety barricades. I pulled up behind it and put it into park. I stared at it for a minute, seeing if anyone was there. After a while of inactivity, I got out to take a closer look. There was no one inside. There were more documents and folders in the back seat however. Then I heard a voice call out to me.

“Hey! Hey!” He shouted. He was dressed like a hobo, standing by himself far away from the road in the middle of the desert facing away from me. I squinted my eyes and realized he was urinating. He finished, turned around and began walking towards me, neglecting to put his... thing away.

“Umm, hello?” I replied.

He shouted back. “Who is you?” I could make out his crusty, sun burnt face now.

“I’m a friend of Frank. I think.” I said back.

“Who’s Frank?” He asked.

“You don’t know who-“ I looked down and realized it was still hanging out. “Oh my God. Hey look, your... member is still out.”

He looked down and made an embarrassed face. “Ooopsies. I’m sorry.” He said in a strangely childish way as he fixed himself. I got the feeling he was a bit slow or low-functioning. As he finally made his way over to me and came around the front of the car, he saw that I had a gun in my hands and began to panic. “What!? Who is you! Why you have that!” Then he saw the dried blood on my leg and stains on my clothes. He began to scream. “Oh my Jesus! You... you killeds Will! That’s why he ain’t been back! Get aways!”

I put the gun down on the roof of the car and tried calming him. “Listen! Shh! Shhh! It’s okay, listen. I didn’t kill Will okay? Someone tried to hurt me, and I... stopped them from doing that, alright? But it wasn’t Will. Okay?”

He relaxed slightly, trying not to look at me, keeping his eyes on the gun as he muttered “Okay...”

“Listen, can you tell me who Will is or what you’re doing out here all alone?” I asked him in a concerned tone.

He kicked some rocks at his feet and put his hands in his pockets. “Well... Will said we was going to stops the dinosaur guys, take the rocket ship back and start the We People rebelution.”

I put my arm on his shoulder and questioned, “Okay, and where did Will go?”

“He says he was gonna get the other American heroes and that he’d be back.” The poor man informed me.

“How long ago was that?” I asked him.

“Since the... um, the sun come up before the the last time it was down and up. I think.“ He said, possibly alluding to yesterday morning.

“You’ve been out here for two days?” I said, shocked.

He shrugged his shoulders, and said “I guess” as though he were a confused child separated from his mother.

Before I could ask him what his name was, the sound of thundering engines broke through from over the horizon. Down the road we could see a convoy. Three black SUVs. A white pickup. And a semi-truck bearing an oversized load sign on it. On its trailer sat a large object, which I first thought was saucer-like in shape. However the closer it got to us I realized that was only from the front, as it was much more spade-like from the side. “Wait, is that the thing he was talking about?” I said out loud.

The poor confused man in front of me got jumpy again all of the sudden. He pulled out a torn piece of line paper and read from it. “This is, this is what Will says would be happen! I got to do the revolt thing, for Will!” Before I could say anything, he grabbed the gun from off the roof of the car and ran out into the road, almost tripping over the barricade and falling on his face. He stopped on top of the median, and raised the pistol to the sky and tried firing off a few rounds before he realized the safety was still on. As he tried to figure out how the thing works, the semi-truck pulled up in front of him and stopped. Two of the black SUVs flanked around the truck aggressively and stopped in front of it. Suddenly, hatches opened on each of their roofs, both revealing a Gatling gun turret manned by what I assumed to be soldiers in black masks and tan helmets. A man got out of the passenger side of the SUV in front of me. He didn’t have a mask on, but he was equipped with the heavy-duty version of the military’s new powered exoskeleton. I knew this, because some more mainstream journalists I’m acquainted with had been invited to a closed door demonstration of it last year. It looked just like the one in the few photos they were allowed to take. If my memory serves me right, the program that developed it was known as “INVICTUS” which stood for something though I can’t exactly remember what.

He stepped forward in his suit towards the confused man. The torso of the suit resembled something an EOD might wear (in fact I think those bomb disposal suits were the inspiration for it originally). A plate of Kevlar jutted out from the chest area, protecting the man’s neck and covering up his lower jaw. This plate of Kevlar had a black and white American flag sticker placed upon it, with some words etched into it that read “NOYFB”. Around his stomach area sat a small hollowed out compartment built into his armor that provided a place where things like extra magazines and smoke grenades could be easily accessed by the wearer. From the right side of his body there was a black tactically dressed up 12-gauge hanging in the air via parachute cord. The weapon dangled carelessly near the grip of his palm with each step he took. From the pictures I saw, I recalled that the wearer is usually supposed to be sporting a helmet of some kind possessing all the night-vision accessories you’d expect to see on a commando like this. However, this man did not have his with him. I could see his face from the mouth up. Head shaved. Either Black or mixed-race. Hazel eyes. It sounds cliche, but he had a prominent scar running down from his temple to the corner of his mouth. He stopped about 6 or so feet in front of him. His right hand became itchy, the servos in the exoskeleton girding his arm quietly revving up and down as if they were imps begging their master to let them slaughter something.

One of the men on the turrets called out to my confused acquaintance. “Move or be moved!”

I could tell the poor guy had a lump in his throat at this point. He tried reading from the piece of paper he had, gun still in hand. “We the pe... We... People. Demands, uhhh.“ He said through the nervousness consuming his face muscles.

As he fumbled with his words I could see the man on the turret was now becoming agitated. He shook his head, and exclaimed to the man in the INVICTUS armor - “Well then I guess you gotta move him!”

Suddenly he gripped the trigger group of his shotgun, pulling down on it and breaking the parachute cord that held it. And then he did something I hadn’t expected to see that day. Remember how in certain Westerns or movies like RoboCop, when the hero un-holsters his weapon he spins it around in the air as he brings his arm parallel with the ground? Yeah, he did that. One handed. With a shotgun. The 12-gauge did one full rotation until it returned to its original position, the soldier quickly steadied it and fired a slug off into the poor confused man’s face killing him instantly. The recoil barely forced his arm up. The confused man’s body hit the ground with a loud thud, relinquishing the pistol and his torn piece of paper from his grip. I watched as the breeze carried it away into the wasteland of southern Nevada. That’s when the soldier, or commando, or security guard or whatever he was turned his attention to me.

He calmly walked towards where I was, stepping on top of the safety barricade that previously separated us. He pumped his weapon with the assistance of his other hand and proceeded to point it at me now. I stood there, frozen. He asked in a cold tone, “Who the fuck are you?”

The man in the turret spoke, “We don’t care! We’re on a schedule, pump one into her and let’s go!”

I tried bargaining with them for my life. “Hey... hey... Listen.” I said in a soothing, somewhat sexual tone in an attempt to put their guard down. I then fucked it up with “Please” as my voice cracked out of fear. I tried seeming cute and aroused to them. I forced a flirtatious smile out through my terror, bent my unbloodied leg at the knee towards him, and pulling my shirt down by the collar revealing a portion of my bra. “Tha-that’d be such a waste, Sir.” I said that bit with as much suggestive energy as I could muster considering the circumstances.

He didn’t buy it.

He smirked, chuckling a bit. “Hahaha... wooow. Really?”

I nodded as my breath became shorter. “U-uh huh.” I said nervously, still smiling like an idiot.

“Well... nah.” He replied, a nasty smile covering his face. His index finger gripped the trigger. I turned pale, collapsing into a ball, covering my head with my arms in terror.

I shouted, “No please!”

Then, I heard a click. And nothing happened. I looked up from where I had been cowering. He was still pointing that thing at me. He spoke. “Well, would you look at that? All out of rounds.” He laughed at me.

The man in the turret threw his arms into the air in frustration. “Are you fucking kidding me?” He screamed at his compatriot. He turned the barrels of his weapon towards me. “Move, I’ll do it.” He commanded the soldier in front of me. My eyes widened, how the hell do I get out of this?

As he stepped down off of the barricade, he looked into the sky behind me as if something suddenly set his internal radar off. He squinted his eyes, looking past me, and pointed once he finally found it. I turned to see what it was. A small, faint gray dot off in the distance flying in front of some clouds. I heard the man in the INVICTUS armor say - “Shit, they’ve been following us.” He yelled at the man in the turret. “I told you not to stop!”

Suddenly they were all in a panic. They retracted their turrets back into their SUVs, the soldier running back over to the one he got out of and slamming the door as he got back in. The semi-truck started its engine back up, and the convoy sped off leaving me to be showered by the dust they kicked up. The semi flattened the dead man still laying their like roadkill as it escaped. I stared as they disappeared down the road. I pinched myself just to make sure I didn’t dream that part.

“What the fuck is going on here?“ I said out loud to myself, and to my dead friend over on the road. I turned around to see what could of scared them off. The gray dot was bigger now, a lot bigger, actually it wasn’t a dot at all. More like a boomerang or something. Was it... a drone? Maybe, I know they fly them out of the middle of Nevada somewhere. It must be a drone, because I can hear its jet engine now. The drone was directly over head of me now, banking left to make a turn. Just then, I noticed something gigantic appear in my periphery vision. It was a large... blimp I guess? I’m not sure, but I couldn’t hear anything coming from it so it had to be a blimp I assumed. It was painted all black but wasn’t shaped like a traditional blimp however, more triangular than oval. It emerged from inside a massive nimbus cloud, where I assumed it must have been hiding all this time. Was this what they were running from? Soon it completely escaped the ivory clutches of the cloud and I could discern a series of turbofans mounted on the end of it.

And that was the last thing I can remember before I woke up here.

That’s right. I blacked out. I don’t remember what happened after that. I have a splitting headache now though. Probably from all the adrenaline and fear that day, but also probably from whatever drug was used to knock me out. If I was really knocked out that is. Whoever it was that drugged me left me here in the terminal at McCarran Airport south of Vegas. I was cleaned up. My blood stained clothes were replaced with some jeans and a button up blouse I had packed in my car for the trip. I shuddered at the thought of anyone undressing me while I was incapacitated. I looked around me. My computer bag I had left in my car was there next to me. My purse was no where to be found however. I had a Combined Airways ticket in my hand. My phone began to vibrate in my pocket. I pulled it out. It was Philip’s intern.

“Hello?” I answered it.

“Hey boss, did you get through security yet?“ He said over the phone.

“Umm... I don’t, yeah. Wait, what’s going on?“ I asked him, still groggy.

“What are you talking about?“ He sounded concerned for me.

“Listen, I’m sorry about how weird this must sound but can you just tell me what’s going on?“ I demanded.

“Uhh, sure. I guess. You’re about to take a flight home to SoCal because your car was stolen.“ He explained.

“And what else? You may not believe me, but I really have no idea what’s going on.” I sounded desperate.

He reassured me. “Ok ok. Calm down. You called me yesterday night and said the conspiracy theorist guy never showed up and that Philip wasn’t answering his phone. Remember?”

“I remember Philip not answering my texts...” I ran my finger through my pastel hair, losing my mind.

He continued. “Well I tried calling him but he wouldn’t pick up for me either. And he wasn’t at the office or his house today. On top of that, his girlfriend said she hadn’t seen him since he left for work yesterday. I’m kinda concerned actually. Anyways, after I got done talking to her, you called me and said you were mugged after getting some Burger Paladin last night. You said the muggers stole your car and your purse.“

I was floored. “Burger Paladin? I never eat at Burger Paladin. I hate that place.”

“Well, I mean I thought it was a little weird. I don’t know many people who go there myself.” He reasoned. He went on. “Anyways, after that you had me go buy you a ticket so you could come home. Man, I hope Philip’s not missing.”

“Me too...” I said nervously. “Look, I need to do something normal to clear my head. Can you send me the script for the recap? I have some time before my flight starts boarding.”

“Sure, I’ll email it to you now.” He affirmed.

I thanked him and hung up. My heart was beating so fast I thought I was going to pass out again. I needed something to eat. The food court was right in front of me. As I stood up from the bench I realized I had been sitting on a folder the entire time. I picked it up and opened it. My happiness returned for a fleeting moment. It was the stuff I had taken out of fake Frank’s RV, and if I’m not mistaken the stuff that was in that confused individual’s car as well. Why would they leave this with me?

I ordered a few tacos from Hornet’s, and a slice of pepperoni to boot. I sat down at a table and collected myself, opening my laptop as I crunched into the shell. I felt like crying. I started recording the weekly recap, beginning it with my signature line. “This is Slice. This is your week. This, is the world’s week.” It didn’t take me that long to finish it, they’re not that extensive usually. Never lasting more than five minutes. Things weren’t looking too good in the world. A bunch of people were taken hostage in the Indian Ocean. The government was fighting itself instead of solving it. The IACS seminar had ended earlier than expected because of Monterrey’s announcement. The Chinese were telling the world they’re prepared to wallop the U.S. in space if they tried anything. I suppose the Space Corps, if it works as advertised, will solve the problem it created.

I lingered on that thought. Space Corps. Who was it that I know in the Space Corps? That’s right... that Captain Hayek woman. I reopened the documents I had with me. I went over her transfer papers again. I found another document detailing her reassignment to the “Air Force Special Activities Center” after she joined the Space Corps. Now didn’t fake Frank mention something about that? I studied the files of these other two women. Both enlisted. One who was transferred from the Air Force into the Corps. The other from the Navy. Horace, Jessica. Gregory, Amanda. Miss Horace was promoted from a Technical Sergeant in the Air Force to Space Systems Sergeant when she switched. Miss Gregory’s transfer hasn’t happened yet but is scheduled for this upcoming week. What do these people do? What’s their job? I searched for their unit’s name on the internet. Interestingly enough, I came by a thread on a dormant BBS forum from the early 2000s. The author of the thread claimed that the AFSAC were the originators of the “Men In Black” urban legend going all the way back to the 50s. I almost screamed in fright in the middle of the food court as I read the poster’s username. Frank_Monterrey.

“It can’t be.” I quickly dove back into the documents splayed out in front of me. All of it was crazy. After action reports of AFSAC monitoring the daily routines of NASA astronauts. Commander’s authorizations for invasions of privacy, including the taping of the astronauts’ phone calls, breaking into their homes and installing spyware onto their electronics. A request asking for enough AFSAC agents to replace the wait staff at the hotel I tried getting at job at. Details of the government’s dissatisfaction with this “Blackstar” program - the aircraft I had seen all those pictures of, one document calling it the ‘XOV’. And then this thing... this ‘object’. What the hell is it? It creeps me out to look at it too long. There were additional photos of a damaged Chinese spacecraft. These labeled “inadvertent shoot down“. Wait a minute, shoot down? I double checked to make sure where exactly this spaceplane was when it was shot at. I recognized the unfinished habitats behind it. Everyone in the United States had seen these paraded around by Hood Fisher in a bunch of different soft drink and fast food commercials throughout the year. It was New America. The future space colony. But that doesn’t make any sense. I checked and re-checked the script I had been sent for the weekly recap. Last paragraph - “PLA officials also announced this week that an accident of some type has taken place at the site of the future State of New America near Lagrange point 5 that required the emergency reentry of a small group of space vehicles. No further elaboration on the details of this event has been given at this time.“

I sat back in my chair and took stock of what the evidence was telling me. We shot at the Chinese in space, just after the President announced to the world that we would no longer accept the presence of anyone else’s military in said space. And now the Chinese are covering it up? After threatening the President right back?

I looked down and let my hair drape over my face as I rubbed my forehead trying to mull this over. The headache was still getting to me. I resolved to get something more than just what I had in front of me. I sent Philip’s intern my finished recording of the recap and asked him to file a FOIA request about this shoot down near New America. As I sent the email I heard an airplane taxiing outside the window in front of me at the food court. A Janet flight. That’s not funny. That’s really not funny. Fuck you, you’re what started all this. I watched as it approached the runway and began to take off. All I could think about was how much I hated this airliner, how much I hated not knowing why the Chinese were covering up the shoot down, how much I hated that man I killed and how much I hated myself for killing him. And I thought about how much Will would hate me.

I picked up the picture of the damaged spaceplane once more. “It can’t be.” I said under my breath.

“Oh, but it can be.” I head a voice say. I looked up as a balding old white guy in a dress shirt and sunglasses sat down in front of me, closing my laptop as he did so.

“Umm, excuse me asshole.” I said indignantly. “Who the hell are you?”

“Well my dear Clementine. Ah, Clementine Forrester that is. I’m... a snake person or a lizard I guess.“ He revealed my own name to me as he laughed in my face. I watched two cops in plain clothes sit down on the table behind him, seemingly not paying any attention to us.

My heart began to pound again. I was silent for a few seconds. “How do you know that? How do you know my name?“ I asked.

He expounded. “Well, I mean, how couldn’t I know? I am the one who sold that passport to you after all. In fact, I’m the one that set you up with ‘Frank Monterrey’. And I’m the one that gave him all that shit you’ve been blowing your mind with for the past few minutes. And to top it all off, I’m the one who’s gonna get you on board one of those Janet flights so you can do some ‘personal’ journalism for me.“

I narrowed my eyes and steeled my resolve. “And tell me exactly why I would do a fucking thing for your ass?”

He cackled as he stole my slice of pizza, taking a bite of it. He swallowed and threw it back down onto my plate, leaning in as he rubbed his hands together and explained. “Well my dear, because I’m the only one who can get your business partner out of the proverbial and literal hole he’s in.”

A shiver ran down my back.

“You didn’t think he could just aide and abet a known national security threat like yourself and get away with it, did you?“ He asked me.

Well, at least I have my story now. I thought to myself.

I'm an undercover journalist investigating the President’s space force

#after skies #black sky wars

0 notes

alanafsmith · 6 years ago

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Mark Zuckerberg is rumored to have a secret escape passageway beneath his conference room for emergencies (FB)

Facebook budgets $10 million a year to protect CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

When Zuckerberg first got executive protection, he had a habit of wandering off without telling them where he was going.

Business Insider has published an in-depth investigation into Facebook's corporate security practices.

There are rumors internally that Zuckerberg has a hidden escape passageway beneath an office conference room for emergencies — but it's not clear what the truth is.

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg first got 24/7 executive protection, there was a problem: He kept wandering off.

Sources said that in the early 2010s, the world-famous tech cofounder didn't always keep his security team — initially just one person — in the loop on his plans. He might decide on a whim to leave the office, or go for a jog, or to a bar, leaving his staff scrambling to keep up.

"He [was] in his mid-twenties ... he was developing a platform he truly believed was good ... at the time he didn't grasp the concept that there were haters out there," one source said.

Since then, however, the billionaire exec has grown more accepting of executive protection's constant presence, according to insiders. His closely monitored patterns of life now far more closely resemble a head of state than a typical 34-year-old engineer, with the stricter security practices mirroring the increase in Facebook's own fortifications over the years.

Business Insider has spoken to current and former workers at Facebook's Global Security organisation and others familiar with the matter, obtained internal company documents, reviewed court documents, and surveyed publicly available information in a 5,000-word investigation into how Facebook handles its corporate security, which you can read in full here.

These sources described sophisticated logistical challenges in protecting tens of thousands of employees and contract workers every day, and an underlying struggle between the techie ideals of openness and engineer freedom and the realities of protecting a high-profile and increasingly controversial multinational firm — as well as the challenges that come with protecting one of the world's richest men.

Armed executive protection officers stand on constant guard outside Zuckerberg's gated homes in the Bay Area, at least one of which also features a panic room. If he goes to a bar, his team will sweep through ahead of time to make sure it's safe. They will vet new any new doctors, or trainers if he wants to take up a new hobby. He is driven everywhere, with the security team monitoring traffic and adjusting his route accordingly. (Back when he still drove, Zuckerberg was, in the words of one source, a "shitty driver.")

During company all-hands meetings, members of Zuckerberg's Praetorian Guard sit at the front of the room and are dotted throughout the crowd, just in case an employee tries to rush him. They wear civilian clothes to blend in with non-security employees.

Zuckerberg doesn't typically work in a cordoned-off office like a traditional corporate executive. Instead, his regular desk is on the floor of Facebook's open-plan office, just like everyone one — but executive protection officers sit near his desk while he works, in case of security threats. Facebook's offices are built above an employee parking lot, but it's impossible to park directly beneath Zuckerberg's desk, because of concerns about the risk of car bombs.

He also has access to a large glass-walled conference room in the middle of the space near his desk, which features bullet-resistant windows and a panic button. There's also a persistent rumor among Facebook employees that he has a secret "panic chute" his team can evacuate him down to get him out of the office in a hurry. The truth of this matter remains murky: One source said they had been briefed about the existence of a top-secret exit route through the floor of the conference room into the parking garage, but others said they had no knowledge of it. Facebook declined to comment on this.

A $10 million security plan

All told, there are now more than 70 people on the executive protection team at Facebook, led by former US Secret Service special agent Jill Leavens Jones. In July 2018, Facebook's board approved a $10 million security allowance for Zuckerberg and his family for the year.

And with good reason: The billionaire chief exec lives an extraordinarily public life, with 118 million followers on Facebook alone (making him both an icon of Facebook's ideals and, increasingly, a magnet for public ire following his company's recent scandals), and the threats he faces are severe.

He receives numerous of death threats a week, and the security team actively monitors social media for mentions of him and COO Sheryl Sandberg to detect them. The pair also have stalkers, who alternately declare their undying love for the execs or harbor worrying vendettas against them.

Zuckerberg and Sandberg are the only two Facebook execs with 24/7 executive protection, though others may get it for specific occasions like traveling. The pair also have amusing security codenames, which Business Insider is not publishing for safety reasons.

Such stalkers are classified as "BOLOs," short for Be On the Look Out, a category of person banned from all Facebook property. If BOLOs use Facebook or the other apps the company owns, the security team may quietly use data drawn from these apps to monitor their location without telling them, as CNBC previously reported.

In one surreal episode, someone turned up outside Zuckerberg's house with a love letter scrawled across the side of their truck, a source recalled. Security officers initially assumed it was directed at the CEO — but it was actually for the benefit of one of the housekeeping staff.

Pranks and political stunts are another concern: High-profile execs make prime targets, as Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates infamously discovered when he had a pie thrown in his face in Brussels in 1998. Any time Zuckerberg goes out in public, there are concerns he could be mobbed, and his appearances at events are carefully planned and mapped out in advance.

People will also send unsolicited presents to his home — everything from cookies to a gift from a rabbi after the birth of one of his children. (These get sent to the security team for inspection; Zuckerberg doesn't open them himself.)

In Facebook's offices, things are less intense, but employees will still rush to get the seats at meetings closest to Zuckerberg. Executive protection officers are instructed to be alert for employees and guests at the offices trying to take unauthorized photos of Zuckerberg, which is against the rules. Some employees, too, will try and give him gifts.

"If you’ve ever been close to his office, you’ll see there are big burly people sitting there staring at screens. They pretend to be software engineers, but everyone knows that they are security guards," one Facebook employee wrote in a Quora post. "Once I was there at 7am, and tried to take a picture of his office (he was not inside) to send to my family, but immediately, 3 of the men came seemingly out of nowhere and asked me to delete the picture."

You can read Business Insider's full investigation into Facebook's corporate security here »

Do you work at Facebook? Contact this reporter via Signal or WhatsApp at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at [email protected], Telegram or WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.) You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 6 reasons Snapchat is losing its popularity

from All About Law https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-global-security-mark-zuckerberg-executive-protection-2019-3

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that-public-diary-blog · 7 years ago

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This morning I had a doctor’s appointment. I was able to clear my day, because I’ve had issues in the past when having blood drawn.

I’m now sitting here with a feeling I usually get at 6-7 pm. I’ve got free time, but instead of relaxing I feel like I must go and do something constructive that can make money.

For some reason, this got me thinking about video games. That reason might be because making video games is my preferred method of making money.

I’ve been trying to compile lists of games based on how much money they’ve made and how quickly they’ve done it, which is difficult. There’s no obvious metric that the video game industry uses as a standard, unlike the film industry where box office sales are always compiled, an agreed upon standard, and very publicly available.

The closest I’ve come to for video games is three different metrics that all have downsides to them:

The first metric is “copies shipped to retailers.” It’s great for old games and I have the feeling this was a good standard that the industry used 20+ years ago. Many older games published these numbers. It’s a good metric in theory. Publishers and retailers had to put their heads together to guess at the demand for the game and adjust as time went on. The number of copies sold to retailers would often be updated after 24 hours, after a week or two, and after a year. The major downside is the reliance on brick and mortar stores and it’s not a perfect metric of how much money a game makes or exactly how many people are playing it. With the rise of Steam and digital distribution, these numbers become less useful and show less of the full picture. Not everyone goes to the store to get a game. Some very recent games (2015 and later) don’t publish these numbers anymore.

The second metric is “copies sold.” In theory, this number is better. It has to account for the total amount of games in people’s hands and paid for. However, this number is not as widely published as the previous metric, if ever compiled or even known by publishers and game makers. With recent games, it’s difficult to account for every source. Some services try to scrape data from where they can and compile what they can. But I don’t even know if refunds are counted against these numbers and it’s weird to have to rely on a hacky method of number crunching. Also: Steam isn’t the end-all for video games.

The last metric is “revenue generated.” This one’s easy to get, especially with publicly traded companies, and it’s probably the closest I can come to answering the question: “How much money did this game make.” The problem arises from sussing out how much of the revenue generated for a company is based on a single game. This is especially hard for those large publicly traded companies that are probably large publishers pushing out a variety of games. Occasionally publishers and game makers will say X game produced Y revenue for the company, but this isn’t consistent.

So, it’s very hard to find the answer to “how much money did X game make?” Copies sold, metric #2, is a good method of comparison between two video games, though it doesn’t really answer the money question. In a vacuum, if game A sells 1 million more copies than game B, then game A is doing better. This is assuming you can find the numbers in the first place and this is completely avoiding the elephant in the room: free to play games, microtransactions, re-releases, and many other methods of monetization in the game.

I’ve been looking for these numbers to see if headlines like “a video game crash is coming and needs to happen” and “microtransactions are killing the games industry” hold any water (Okay, maybe not headlines, maybe just negative comment sections). The short answer is no.

Fallout 3 sold more copies than Fallout: New Vegas despite the latter being critically named the best Fallout game. Fallout 4 shipped more copies to retailers in its first 24 hours than either of the previous two games ever shipped in their lifetime.

Grand Theft Auto IV, after 5 years, sold around 25 million copies. Grand Theft Auto V is 4 years old and has shipped 80 million copies.

Video Games, at least in the small AAA subsection I’ve looked at, are doing really well for themselves.

#video games

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magzoso-tech · 5 years ago

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The Org nabs $8.5M led by Founders Fund to build a global database of company org charts

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The Org nabs $8.5M led by Founders Fund to build a global database of company org charts

LinkedIn has cornered the market when it comes to putting your own professional profile online and using it to network for jobs, industry connections and professional development. But when it comes to looking at a chart of the people, and specifically the leadership teams, who make up organizations more holistically, the Microsoft-owned network comes up a little short: you can search by company names, but chances are that you get a list of people based on their connectivity to you, and otherwise in no particular order (including people who may no longer even be at the company). And pointedly, there is little in the way of verification to prove that someone who claims to be working for a company really is.

Now, a startup called The Org is hoping to take on LinkedIn and address that gap with an ambitious idea: to build a database (currently free to use) of organizational charts for every leading company, and potentially any company in the world, and then add on features after that, such as job advertising, for example organizations looking to hire people where there are obvious gaps in their org charts.

With 16,000 companies profiled so far on its platform, a total of 50,000 companies in its database and around 100,000 visitors per month, The Org is announcing $11 million in funding: a Series A of $8.5 million, and a previously unannounced seed round of $2.5 million.

Led by Founders Fund, the Series A also includes participation from Sequoia and Balderton, along with a number of angels. Sequoia is actually a repeat investor: it also led The Org’s $2.5 million seed round, which also had Founders Fund, Kevin Hartz, Elad Gil, Ryan Petersen, and SV Angel in it. Keith Rabois, who is now a partner at Founders Fund but once held the role of VP of business and corporate development at LinkedIn, is also joining the startup’s board of directors.

Co-headquartered in New York and Copenhagen, Denmark, The Org was co-founded by Christian Wylonis (CEO) and Andreas Jarbøl, partly inspired by a piece in online tech publication The Information, which provided an org chart for the top people at Airbnb (currently numbering 90 entries).

“This article went crazy viral,” Wylonis said in an interview. “I would understand why someone would be interested in this outside of Airbnb, but it turned out that people inside the company were fascinated by it, too. I started to think, when you take something like an org chart and made it publicly facing, I think it just becomes interesting.”

So The Org set out to build a bigger business based on the concept.

For now, The Org is aimed at two distinct markets: those outside the company who might most typically be interested in who is working where and doing what — for example, recruiters, those in human resources departments who are using the data to model their own organizational charts, or salespeople; and those inside the company (or again, outside) who are simply interested in seeing who does what.

The Org is aiming to have 100,000 org charts on its platform by the end of the year, with the longer-term goal being to cover 1 million. For now, the focus is on adding companies in the US before expanding to other markets.

But while the idea of building org charts for many companies sounds easy enough, there is also a reason why it hasn’t been done yet: it’s not nearly as simple as it looks. That is one reason why even trying to surmount this issue is of interest to top VCs — particularly those who have worked in startups and fast-growing tech companies themselves.

“Today, information about teams is unstructured, scattered, and unverified, making it hard for employees and recruiters to understand organizational structures,” said Roelof Botha, partner at Sequoia Capital, in a statement.

“Organizational charts were the secret weapon to forging partnerships during my 20 years as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and Europe. Yet, they are a carefully guarded secret, which have to be painstakingly put together by hand,” said Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, general partner at Balderton Capital, in a statement. “The Org is surfacing this critical information, improving efficiency from the sales floor to the boardroom.”

“Up-to-date org charts can be useful for everything from recruiting to sales, but they are difficult and time consuming to piece together,” added Rabois in a statement. “The Org is making this valuable information easily accessible in a way we were never able to do at LinkedIn.”

The approach that The Org is taking to building these profiles so far has been a collaborative one. While The Org itself might establish some company names and seed and update them with information from publicly available sources, that approach leaves a lot of gaps.

This is where a crowdsourced, wiki-style approach comes in. As with other company-based networking services such as Slack, users from a particular company can use their work email addresses to sign into that organization’s profile, and from there they can add or modify entries as you might enter data in a wiki — the idea being that multiple people getting involved in the edits helps keep the company’s org chart more accurate.

While The Org’s idea holds a lot of promise and seems to fill a hole that other companies like LinkedIn — or, from another direction, Glassdoor — do not address in their own profiling of companies, I can see some challenges, too, that it might encounter as it grows.

Platforms that provide insights into a company landscape, such as LinkedIn or Glassdoor, are ultimately banked more around individuals and their own representations. That means that by their nature these platforms may not ever provide complete pictures of businesses themselves, just slices of it. The Org, on the other hand, starts from the point of view of presenting the company itself, which means that the resulting gaps that arise might be more apparent if they never get filled in, making The Org potentially less useful as a tool.

Similarly, if these charts are truly often closely guarded by companies (something I don’t doubt is true, since they could pose poaching risks, or copycats in the form of companies attempting to build org structures based on what their more successful competitors are doing), I could see how some companies might start to approach The Org with requests to remove their profiles and corresponding charts.

Wylonis said that “99%” of companies so far have been okay with what The Org is building. “The way that we see it is that transparency is of interest to the people who work there,” he said. “I think that everyone should strive for that. Why block it? The world is changing and if the only way to keep your talent is by hiding your org chart you have other problems at your company.”

He added that so far The Org has not had any official requests, “but we have had informal enquiries about how we get our information. And some companies email us about changes. And when an individual person gets in touch and says, ‘I don’t want to be here,’ we delete that. But it’s only happened a handful of times.” It’s not clear whether that proportion stays the same, or goes up or down, as The Org grows.

In the meantime, the other big question that The Org will grapple with is just how granular should it go?

“I hope that one day we can have an updated and complete org chart for every business, but that might prove difficult,” Wylonis said. Indeed, that could mean mapping out 1 million people at Walmart, for example. “For the biggest companies, it may be that it works to map out the top 500, with the top 30-40 for smaller companies. And people can always go in and make corrections to expand those if they want.”

#Miscellaneous

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funface2 · 5 years ago

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Yu-Gi-Oh!: 10 Hilarious Exodia Memes That Will Make You Cry | CBR – CBR – Comic Book Resources

Yu-Gi-Oh! is everyone’s favorite card game and anime series from their childhood. Unlike the Pokemon card game, many people actually knew how to play Yu-Gi-Oh! and didn’t just collect the cards. While the card game was fun, the anime was iconic and very entertaining for its time. Who can forget our spiky-haired protagonist trusting in the heart of the cards and dramatically pulling out the winning card at the last moment? Or even the unforgettable characters of Maximilian Pegasus, Seto Kaiba, and Yugi himself.

RELATED: Yu-Gi-Oh! Most Powerful Cards Ranked

Originally armed with the ancient Exodia, Yugi takes on many challenges throughout the series. Yu-Gi-Oh!‘s legendary cast and plot inspired a myriad of memes throughout the years. Thankfully, Yu-Gi-Oh! memes are making a comeback, so here are 10 hilarious Exodia memes that will make you cry!

Continue scrolling to keep reading

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10 Exodia Defends Area 51

With September 20th’s legendary Area 51 raid closely approaching, the raiders are in for a surprise. While the military was a bit scared about Naruto runners in attack mode swiftly dodging their bullets, they shouldn’t have any fear when they release their first line of defense at the front of the raid, a swarm spiky-haired kids with duel disks and Egyptian jewelry.

If these kids are lucky enough to draw all 5 pieces of Exodia, the raiders’ life points will go down faster than Seto Kaiba can yell “impossible!”

9 Exodia’s Military Weapons

Speaking of the military, there is a lot of talk these days about citizens being able to purchase military-grade weapons. In this meme, this person was able to purchase these high-grade assault weapons without even having an ID! This is absolutely unacceptable in today’s political environment.

We can’t have kids getting sent to the shadow realm during their lunch breaks anymore! Enough is enough, protect your children and make sure to phone your local senators to tell them how outraged you are that these dangerous weapons are publicly available!

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8 That Is Some Strong Coffee

Latte art is the cornerstone of small coffee shops everywhere. Usually, customers receive their coffee’s with a nice flower or other cute imagery such as cats in their coffee. Most people get the energy to get through the day through their coffees, but what if you need the strength the propel yourself into attack mode for the rest of the day?

Look no further, for drinking this Exodia latte will give you the strength of one of the most powerful monsters in the game to send any issues you have during the day straight to the shadow realm!

7 Salt Bae Steals Exodia

If you had the most powerful card in the game what would you do with it? Most people would probably carefully protect it from harm, out of fear that some jealous opponent would try to steal it. But not the beloved protagonist Yugi. This genius thought it would be a great idea to lend his only copy of the most powerful cards in the game to some stranger on a boat who looks and talks like a bug. Who could forget the look of horror on Yugi’s face when the insect known as Weevil threw his most precious possession off the boat? Here we have Weevil (Salt Bae) sprinkling Yugi’s precious Exodia cards into the sea.

RELATED: 10 Coolest Yu-Gi-Oh! Monsters

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6 When Your Whole Outfit Is On Point

A lot of people tend to feel bad about their self-image, but sometimes you just have those days when you feel fresh. You perfectly matched your shoes, pants, and shirt together, you just got a new haircut, and you feel good. Every part of your outfit comes together well and nothing can stop you today.

That is probably how Exodia feels when you finally draw the 5th part of him and summon him. Before he obliterates your opponent, he takes one look at the mirror and smiles, because he knows his outfit is perfection.

5 Shaggy The God’s Heart Of The Cards

The overpowered Shaggy memes ran the internet for a few months about a year ago. They were fresh tales of Shaggy’s godlike status and his ability to instill fear and anxiety into any entity he chooses. These stories were frequently told by his coworkers during interviews who had to spend a terrifying amount of time with him. These legends combined with his regular and harmless appearance made for a hilarious meme that lasted many months.

In addition to his supernatural powers, he also is a first-rate duelist who truly understands the heart of the cards. Here a coworker explains that you can’t beat Shaggy in a duel, his inhuman powers allow him to always draw Exodia, even without the pieces in his deck!

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4 No Limitations

Have you ever played poker and felt like your opponent was cheating? You started out with more money and now you are down to your last few chips. Even though you are just playing Texas Hold’em with your usual group of friends, one of them keeps pulling out different cards and screaming “obliterate!” at the top of their lungs.

They keep insisting they won, even though you have a royal flush. To make matters worse, whenever you tell them “you can’t use Yu-Gi-Oh! cards in poker, your friend throws down some cards with pictures of limbs and just keeps screaming “the forbidden one has no limitations!”

RELATED: Yu-Gi-Oh!: 5 Greatest Duels In The Series (& The 5 Worst)

3 Shy Exodia

Apparently even the mighty forbidden one can get shy on a date. Often, when people go on their first dates things can get a bit awkward. Sometimes you and your date don’t get along and things just feel weird, but other times things could go really well and even lead into the bedroom.

But this presents its own problems as well. Your date might be into you but you are a bit shy about what she might find down there. Well, you are not alone in this endeavor, Exodia himself has some small problems of his own.

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2 Speaking To The Manager

Anyone who works in retail or the food industry knows that no matter if you are a sales associate, cook, or manager, some customers can always be a pain. This meme shows that beautiful moment of triumph when a particularly angry customer is giving you problems and asks to speak to the manager.

You slowly turn around and pretend to walk into the back and find someone higher up the chain than you, but then you turn around, unleash your inner Atem and calmly say with a smirk of satisfaction on your face “I AM the manager.” There are very few sensations one can experience at work that can amount to this one.

1 Rick The Forbidden Pickle

Ah, Pickle Rick, the internet sensation that flooded websites and meme groups alike. After Rick initially turned himself into a pickle in season 3 of the cult classic show Rick and Morty, fans everywhere repeated the phrase frantically and put it on T-shirts, hats, poster, and honestly EVERYTHING.

While Rick was trapped in his pickle form, he had to get limbs to help him move around, luckily Rick was able to trust in the heart of the cards and draw the limbs of the forbidden one before it was too late.

NEXT: Yu-Gi-Oh!: 10 Best Duelists In The Series

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iyarpage · 7 years ago

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How (and Why) to Get Everyone Sketching

If experience has taught me anything it’s that pictures are better than words, nothing aligns everyone’s understanding of a web design problem like a quick scribble with a sharpie (other writing instruments are available). It’s the quickest, easiest and cheapest way of making others understand your design thinking… so why don’t we do it more often?… in fact why doesn’t everybody do it?

Why?!

Maybe we scare people off? one thing we often fall foul of as UX designers is making our sketches impressively artistic (which is great – it lends them an air of creativity and makes them easier to progress “look at these beautiful sketches” etc etc) but we need to realise that this really isn’t the point of sketching. We sketch to quickly and simply convey information.

Often our ‘artistic’ sketches can make others feel like sketching is an activity reserved for creatives – more like a piece of art than a simple piece of information.

This creates a fear in everyone else that their quick scribble on a post-it note or napkin isn’t good enough, that the snooty designers might point and laugh and at it (sadly not always an unreasonable fear).

But it’s one we need to dissuade as much as possible—there’s huge value in getting all the people involved in any web design project comfortable with sharing their thoughts and their feedback visually.

If you still need convincing, imagine this scenario – a classic email ping pong conversation that we’ve all experienced before:

Client: Hey, Can you move the block to the centre. Thanks You: Hi, Yeah sure which block? Regards Client: Hello, Just the one at the top please. You: Hi, Ermm do you mean in the header? Client: Not sure, is the header the top bit? You: Yes the element at the top of the page with the hero banner and primary CTA Client: Sorry you’ve lost me, it’s the button you click that I want moving You: Ah right…which button? [crying noises]

Instead of 18 wasted emails of 2 difficult phone conversations and a nervous breakdown, imagine this being the conversation

Client: Hey, Can you move the block to the centre – like this. Thanks

So how do we do this? how do you convince ‘Brian from Accounts’ that he can, and should, sketch out his ideas for the new finance software?

How

So if the main blocker for most people is a perceived lack of artistic skills “I couldn’t possibly draw something I’m not a designer” right off the bat you need to make sure everyone knows that the neatness or attractiveness of a sketch is irrelevant. People need to see a sketch as just a quick and easy way to communicate certain things, with the emphasis on quick. One of my favourite ways to frame it with people is to politely ask “would you be able to do me a real quick rough sketch of that? Nothing detailed, just scribble it out and send me a pic of it?”

Usually this is enough for good old Brian from accounts to pick up a pen and give it a try but there can be others issues.

Logistics

With the remote nature of some teams and clients it’s rarely as easy as walking round to someone’s desk with the actual paper a sketch is on. Faxing it is a little retro and mailing it might take a while! But thankfully technology easily comes to the rescue, just encourage people to scan their sketch or even take a picture on their phone if needs be.

Easy to use software that allows digital sketching such as inVision also exists. These tools allow amazing ways to collaboratively sketch, but while they are indispensable to many UX Designers it’s always worth considering how daunting this might feel to the audience we’re talking about before suggesting it.

Not My Job

As we’ve discussed the biggest barrier to getting everybody on board with sketching is usually a fear of being laughed at—‘how stupid and quaint it is that Brian from accounts thinks he can design now.’

This is even more true of your senior clients or stakeholders—this stems from the fact that there’s something quite vulnerable about presenting things that you’ve drawn yourself. A CEO of a massive mega global organisation may be very comfortable firing off written directions in email form but sketching some feedback to go along with it won’t come naturally to them at all; it’s not their job.

To get round this one it’s a case of setting expectations and positioning a sketch as nothing more than a scribble, something that won’t be viewed based on its artistic merits or shared unnecessarily. What I’ve found works well in the past is to demonstrate this. By this I mean actually creating a super rough and ugly sketch yourself early on in the project to prove a point. Show everyone that it’s ok to share that ‘napkin sketch’ without fear of it being publicly mocked.

When

So now you’ve (hopefully) got everyone onboard with sketching is there a right and a wrong time to entourage it?

In truth whenever you’re involving others in your project you should be pushing people to express themselves through a quick scribble—communicating ideas visually just works better nine times out of ten. There are however points in a project where you’ll find you can get the best out of sketching as a methodology, in my experience there are 2 key areas that benefit most.

Ideas Time

Early idea generation is a fantastic time to be encouraging the quick iteration of ideas that sketching allows – ideally with everyone in the same room clutching a sharpie. You’ll find that by getting everyone actively contributing to the creative process, regardless of their role, will remove a number of project hurdles very quickly – it also has the unexpected benefit of helping you get buy-in from everybody if they feel like they had an active hand in defining your design solution. If they drew a little bit of it themselves – they’re invested!

A nice simple way to get people sketching in this kind of situation is to lay the room out so that everybody has a pad and pens sat in front of them begging to be picked up and used.

Feedback Loops

Any point at which feedback is being gathered is the other time where I’ve found you can get the most benefit from encouraging everybody to sketch. The biggest benefit you’ll likely see here is the wonderful time saving you can get from removing misunderstandings (and the inevitable frustration that comes with them).

Obviously receiving a tiny sketch of every single feedback point from every single stakeholder would quickly drive even the most seasoned UX Designers round the twist (basic feedback like “Change LTD to Plc in footer please” would rarely benefit from an accompanying sketch). Instead just try and make sure your stakeholders know that if they think that any of their feedback might be tricky to follow you’d love them forever if they attach a quick sketch or even print out the design/page/wireframe in question and scribble on top of it.

So next project, break out the felt tip pens and hand them around.

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mwriters4 · 7 years ago

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5 Secrets About Builders That Nobody Will Tell You.

Why You Shouldn\'t Venture Into The Builders Industry Now.

The leads are better and the fact that you’re coming by way of a reference goes a long way to securing the client. We looked at 4 ways to earn referrals so that you can feel more comfortable when approaching existing contacts for referrals. Offline Marketing is Still Essential A lot of what we focus on at eVision Media is specific to online efforts. That is essentially because we specialize in professional website development, social media marketing, and search engine optimization. Your business success can rely on not only online marketing strategies and tactics, but also offline efforts. So remember to keep up some hard and true staples to keep the leads coming in. Newspaper Mentions These are great for getting eyes on your business. It’s even better if the newspaper has an online equivalent that publishes the article.

Weightlifting is something that will require the beginner to remember quite a few concepts.

There is simply something about a newly painted house. It looks much better than one that has been battered by the weather, with all the rain, wind, and sand that is part and parcel of the environment. Your house here is a stunning expression of the care you provide it. That is why, when it does get to look bad, you try to find one of the paint contractor Houston has for you for this cosmetic work. When looking, in the Greater Houston city TX location for a crew of professional painters, you can analyze the newspapers or phone-book. Weightlifting is something that will require the beginner to remember quite a few concepts. To prevent any frustration from appearing, or at least some, do things proper and good at all times. If you want to have great results, and proper form must always be used. But if you start getting lazy with form, then you will actually slow down the process. When done the right way, you will notice how much patience you will need to have.

1.5 - 8t combos

Don't let a gift or a good price disrupt the project overall

Ability to handle changes in design or scope[12]

Install bathroom fixtures

Was everything done properly

What are good sizes and proportions for rooms? What style do I want

What would this manager like you to have achieved at end of thirty days? Sixty days? Ninety days

How to Find a #Good Builder for Your House http://goo.gl/2dxeiu

— Vanizza (@Blogtechweeks) February 5, 2014

Stay in Build Mode until you’re satisfied with your creation. Use the Undo and Redo buttons at the top of the screen liberally. You now have a bare-bones structure within which your sims may dwell. London builders That’s all well and good, but your sims need more than empty rooms. They need… stuff. Lots of stuff. Check out the Styled Rooms section of the menu. These prebuilt rooms contain a variety of items that are important to the survival and prosperity of your sims. Click on any of these items and you can place them in your house. Check the Objects by Rooms button, located in the bottom-left corner of the screen, just below the Build button (a picture of a house).

Beneath are some issues to don't forget when you are deciding on a creating contractor.

You can avoid costly mistakes if you take the time to learn as much as you can about the company. If you're looking for a landscape designer, you can also check out our Certified Landscape Designers. CONSUMER ALERT: Please check our membership listings on our website to verify a company is a member of our association. Unfortunately, contrary to representations that have been made by some companies, they are not members of our association. This is of great concern to our association and its upstanding membership, so please verify their membership status. The majority of those ambitions are actually achievable should you appear for constructing contractors inside the correct way. Usually the very best method to locate building contractors is to go by recommendation but there are other strategies to ensure that you don't wind up hiring a cowboy builder. Beneath are some issues to don't forget when you are deciding on a creating contractor. A trustworthy builder will probably be greater than pleased to provide you references from perform he has carried out previously. Once you get references it truly is an excellent concept to try and view the developing function they've completed so it is possible to speak to their earlier clients and take an excellent appear in the work they have completed.

Materials readily available in the area generally dictate the construction materials used (e.g.

Commercial building construction is procured privately or publicly utilizing various delivery methodologies, including cost estimating, hard bid, negotiated price, traditional, management contracting, construction management-at-risk, design & build and design-build bridging. Residential construction practices, technologies, and resources must conform to local building authority regulations and codes of practice. Materials readily available in the area generally dictate the construction materials used (e.g. According to McKinsey research, productivity growth per worker in construction has lagged behind many other industries across different countries including in the United States and in European countries. You can create illumination by adding windows or electric lights. Each contained room should have at least one source of light. More on adding lights in a bit. Windows may change form depending on which way they’re facing, and you can swap them around by right clicking once you’ve selected a window. The same goes for the facing of any other item with different sides. Rooms. A room is more-or-less defined as an area contained within a minimum of three walls. Your sims will want a variety of different rooms, typically with each room dedicated to a different task or activity. The more sims you have in one household, the more rooms you should build.

Working directly with a builder is not easy.

I appreciated his sincerity, but I understood the quality of my content would determine whether I build an audience. John Clover then came to speak with me, as I understood him, he played a role in ensuring that the content people published on Quora did not violate the rights of others. Like Kat and Marc, John expressed a real passion for making Quora a great community for all those who wanted to be a part of it. Working directly with a builder is not easy. As the client you are taking on a role that is normally the domain of an architect - a person with many years training and experience in construction methods, scheduling and council requirements. What starts out as a lovely, mutually beneficial relationship can end up in litigation if the ground rules aren’t established from the very beginning. Once you or your architect have accepted a tender you are locked into that builder for better or worse - and you will need to go with the flow of the builder’s work and life commitments.

You can find the best job opportunities on the construction job websites. You will find a list of jobs on these websites. It is also very important to choose the best website so that you can check out the jobs offered by the best construction companies of the world. Sometimes you might find the construction jobs help wanted by lots of people who are interested in these jobs. There are certain things that you need to consider while looking for the construction jobs. First of all if construction jobs wanted is the case then always try to get proper training in construction. You got to have a sense of proportion and know how to blend different shades as well to highlight and play down tones to match with the interiors. Publisher: James Anderson There are virtually thousands of construction positions for which a foreign worker can apply. Here are just a few of them: Carpenters, Bricklayers, Ceiling fixers, Joiners, Welders, Concrete form work specialists, Plasterers, Project foremen, Steel fixers, Materials managers. Best Resume Writing Services: What Is Most Ideal for You?

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symbianosgames · 7 years ago

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

This post is co-authored by Pietro Polsinelli and Daniele Giardini.

In this post we discuss two themes: How to facilitate writing for games? Given that writing say partially generative in-game dialogue is a specific process, how can one minimize the impact on writing of values from state and output variations technicalities? and How to design an in-game dialogue user interface? Designing in-game dialogues doesn’t seem to generally get much attention with respect to other kinds of game assets. We look at existing usages and we point out features to be considered when designing dialogues’ user interface.

A note on the use of the author’s point-of-view. We sometime write as “we”, in the outlining sections, and sometime use “I” as a part may be one of the authors writing his direct experience, be it Daniele or Pietro. Bare with us - him - me :-)

Stories are remarkably useful tools for creating good games, Bogost aside. But writing for games is hard for several different reasons. In The future of dialogue in games Adam Hines is quoted:

Writing for games and writing for anything else is a totally different job. It’s more like trying to solve a very complex mathematical problem than it is a pure writing exercise.

Most media have a predetermined, linear, progress. Even when the writer tries to hide this under a complex narrative, there's only one way to go from beginning to end. Under this aspect, games are a completely different medium: writing a game means dealing with mutations, branching narratives, and is a sort of chaos theory applied to storytelling. Hence the writing style for games needs to be quite specific - this is from Writing for Animation, Comics, and Games:

Animation, comics, and games fall into the category I think of as “shorthand” writing. This is in contrast to prose writing, where a writer can write plot, description, and dialogue to any length, and can cover all of the senses—sight, sound, touch, taste, smell—using both external storytelling (description, dialogue) and internal storytelling (thought processes, emotional description). This specialized form of “shorthand” writing requires the discipline to write within a structured format; to pare description down to an absolute minimum; to boil dialogue down to a pithy essence; and to tell concise, tightly plotted stories.

In the following we consider how shorthand writing merged with state and variations handling can be smoothened for writers using specific tools. Methodological advances in how writing can be prototyped and tested can make a crucial difference in the quality of results (see How We Design Games Now and Why for an historical perspective) and so adding practical writing applications to your toolset can be useful. Another feature of writing for games is that it has specific properties in the testing process: when you write say a short novel, you can do testing by printing drafts on paper, or reading it out loud, but in all cases you are working on a unique draft. In the case of in game state you need a way to do quick testing and changes while testing multiple possible results. For example this allows testing of the logic of what your characters end up saying in different situations. Narrative in games can solve problems - but it must be capable to relate and change in connection with dynamic state. Here is a problem described by Daniele that having a dynamic flow tool that supports interactive writing and testing can probably help to solve:

As a short out-of-theme anecdote, Pietro wanted me to write about one thing I mentioned in our talks, a thing that always kinda annoys me, and which represents a good example of bad flow. It's what I call the "wall of NPCs" effect, which is typical of RPGs but also of some adventure games.

It's when, for a few hours, you went around exploring and met no more than a couple people to talk to, then suddenly you reach a city. And kaboom, tons of people appear and, if you're a completionist / narrative - explorer like me, you HAVE to talk to each and every one of them. If the group of people was small, let's say four people, it would be a welcome change in pace. When the group is city-sized though, the flow completely breaks and you simply enter the "wall of NPCs" section of the game, which I find to be both interesting and stressful, mostly because all these people are not introduced gradually, but as a sudden presence, a feat, you have to overcome.

One solution to this problem is already used by less dialogue-centric games, where most NPCs are idiots with nothing to say. This removes depth from the characters, but keeps the flow, uh, flowing, since the player doesn't see them as a weight anymore. Still, I'm sure there's better solutions for more dialogue-centric games. Just something to ponder about.

So let’s have a look at the existing writing tools for games.

Inkle’s Ink

A remarkable tool that allows all above is Inkle’s Ink, presented generally by Jon Ingold here and in more technical detail in this GDC’s talk by Joseph Humfrey.

Ink is free and open source, just download it, install and there you go. Writing is linear (top down), the syntax is a markup language of sorts, and you control everything directly from text. This is how Ink’s author sums it up:

Possible problems with this (wonderful) tool is that it seems really hard for anyone to get what is happening in anybody else’ writing, and possibly the writer herself could get lost when the text gets longer.

Dialogue as flow graph

A different approach is to write by creating nodes of a connected graph on a plane, as in the pictures below.

Night School Studio’s Oxenfree dialogue editor - image from The future of dialogue in games.

Daniele’s Outspoken (see below). In a recent podcast by Keith Burgun interviewing Raph Koster, the latter made a wonderful casual observation about IDEs (Interactive Development Environment, Unity's in particular) embodying in their evolution some principles of game design. In the case of Unity, some of this learning by the IDE structure is built-in, and sometimes it is provided by third-party extensions. For the case of writing tools for games, let’s see an example from one of the author’s: Daniele Unity’s plugin Outspoken.

Outspoken

A while ago I (Daniele) found myself in need of a dialogue editor to use in Unity. I'm sure there's some marvellous in-house editors out there, but for what concerns publicly available stuff, I couldn't find anything that suited my tastes, most of all because all editors were pretty writer-unfriendly (except Ink, which is great but is missing a quick visual/organizational side which for me is—totally subjectively—fundamental). So I started the taxing feat of making my own internal dialogue editor, Outspoken. Please note that this is not advertising for Outspoken, especially because it is internal/for-friends-only. It's just a good example of the philosophy behind an in-house dialogue editor which I obviously know extremely well. So. The philosophy I decided to follow for the editor:

1. It must be, first and foremost, writer-centric. As a writer, I will write directly inside it, so I want its flow to be fast, easy to read/use, and pleasant. If my focus is lost and I'm distracted by the usage/complexity of the editor, the coherence and verve of my writing will resent it.

2. It must be fun to use, almost giving the writer the feeling of a comic. Because this editor is very personal to me and I'm a comic writer too, so that mindset works perfectly for me.

3. Nice to the eye, no cluttering UI. A dialogue node shouldn't be cluttered with encumbering UI, and should be as small as possible. In the end, I decided to hide all UI that is not always necessary (which means a lot of it) unless ALT is pressed.

4. Keyboard shortcuts for the win. They allow to write without moving your hands back and forth between mouse and keyboard, which is a focus-breaker.

5. It must obviously have all necessary features, and be expandable. "Necessary" as in "what I personally deem necessary" :P Which means actors, audio clip references, a custom in-dialogue scripting language, in-dialogue text blocks either randomized or chosen from variables/gender/etc, localization, global and local variables, etc.

It was a lot of work, but I used it for a few games and I can say I'm pretty happy with it (and the few friends that used it, Pietro first among them, seem happy too). Clearly, I'm also constantly evolving it.

How to design beautiful dialogues in games? Here we begin by presenting some example of existing in-game dialogues and then describing what we learned from developing several projects with such dialogues.

Learn from comics

I (Daniele) come from a strong comic culture. I loved, studied, cherished, all forms of comics — and also made tons of them. Thus when I made my first mini-adventure, Faith No More, it felt natural to me to look in that direction and start experimenting.

There's one thing comics understand very well, out of necessity. Lettering/written-dialogues are, or should be, an art. They can be used to convey emotions, mystery, fascination, as much — sometimes even more — as the text they display. Videogames instead, either consider text as mere subtitles, even when there's no audio, or as a beautifully printed paragraph from a book, sometimes surrounded by a multitude of decorations (there's just few recent exceptions I can think of, like Night in the Woods and Oxenfree, both inspired from comics). In short, every dialogue is, if not a wall, a brick of text. And that's bad: lettering can be so infinitely better. Both in how it displays text and in how it composes its elements, pulling them apart, shrinking and distorting them, giving a director's touch to their flow. Just look at these wonderful works — please enlarge those images to watch them in full glory.

Cerebus: Dave Sim and Gerhard Snapchat: Chris Ware Arkham Asylum: Grant Morrison, Dave McKean, lettering by Gaspar Saladino Giallo Scolastico: Andrea Pazienza Elektra Assassin: Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz, lettering by Jim Novak Obviously, comics have it easy. Everything is—kind of—created altogether in there, with perfect knowledge of each, utterly static, element. Videogames instead live in a dynamic state, with lots of variables messing things up. They're much more complicated. So I'm not saying, "Look at them comics! Let's just make dialogues like they do!" I'm just saying it's a pretty cool visual culture to start from, in order to find one's own way.

Learn from games

Let’s start with a negative example, or “how not to do it” / the standard way / the obvious way: I (Pietro) chose The Banner Saga, because it’s a wonderful game and also its narrative flow is a marvel but its dialogue user interface may be its less curated feature, as you can see from the screenshots:

The great quality of the graphic design of the game is a bit in contrast with the dialogue and ensuing choices UI. It looks like the designers have a cinematographic sensitivity, that does not consider “user interface” as deserving design attention beyond the basics. A (very) positive example of user interface for in game dialogue is Night In The Woods (best comic-based example in our opinion - it's just beautiful):

As Night in the Woods dialogues are explored best when seen in animation (and that already tells something), check out this: 24 Minutes of Gorgeous Night in the Woods Gameplay. For each of the examples we’ll list a recap of the design choices is expresses. Choices for the user interface: text all caps, fixed font size, animated background, left aligned. In 80 Days, there are two kinds of dialogues. The most used is a flow of pure text in a graphic context:

And a second less used style is with characters on the side:

Choices for the user interface: sentence case, no balloon, left aligned on left and right aligned on right. Now let’s see three examples of user interface for in game dialogue we (the authors) developed.

Faith No More + Nothing Can Stop Us - link

Notes on the user interface: (Daniele) apart from the comic-based approach, the interesting thing here is the choice of leaving previous balloons present in the background. In my opinion, this helps readability, since the player can see a partial history of the dialogue (still, in a new game I'm working on, I'm scrapping this "history" concept to have single animated balloons, so it all depends on the context—see work-in-progress example of a "thought balloon" below).

In hindsight, I have to say I find the dialogue user interface of the two pictures above as nothing more than interesting experiments, still lacking a lot of the depth and charm they should strive to achieve. The one on the bottom is already going in a better direction. Whew, did I write too much here? Pietro never scolds me and then this is what happens!

Football Voodoom - link

Choices: centered balloon text, fixed font size, standard “sharp” pointer, slight bounce of talking character.

The above dialogue design examples draw ideas and techniques from comics and game feel (see An Incomplete Game Feel Reader to learn about the latter). What is the conclusion? The conclusion is that there is no conclusion. What are you, crazy, in thinking the creative work of crafting a dialogue user interface can be concluded anyhow? It's a constant never ending work in progress, and being inspired from comics is just a suggestion, mostly to point out a different creative direction than the "widely accepted and standardized" one :-) But games are games, not comics nor books nor movies, so it's an open ground for experimentation and for bringing your own personality in play. Cheers! You can follow Daniele and Pietro on Twitter.

#IFTTT #Blogger

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viralhottopics · 8 years ago

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Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web

Chrome development team from left, Mark Larson, Brian Rakowski, Darin Fisher, and Ben Goodger Photo:Joe Pugliese

Brian Rakowski walks to the whiteboard in a small conference room in Building 41 on Google’s Mountain View campus. A lanky, gregarious man in his twenties, Rakowski is the product manager of a top-secret project that’s been under way for more than two years. The weekly Monday meeting of managers or “leads,” as Google puts it in its nonhierarchical way will be one of the last before the upcoming launch. Rakowski writes 12 items on the board with a black dry-erase marker. The first is “State of the Release.” It’s late August, and the release in question is called Chrome, Google’s first Web browser. Since a browser is the linchpin of Web activity the framework for our searching, reading, buying, banking, Facebooking, chatting, video watching, music appreciation, and porn consumption this is huge for Google, a step that needed to wait until the company had, essentially, come of age. It is an explicit attempt to accelerate the movement of computing off the desktop and into the cloud where Google holds advantage. And it’s an aggressive move destined to put the company even more squarely in the crosshairs of its rival Microsoft, which long ago crushed the most fabled browser of all, Netscape Navigator. A Google browser has been rumored for so long that most people have stopped talking about it. But the folks in this room know that the talking will soon begin again. Chrome is due to rock the Web just 16 days from this meeting. It turns out the state of the release is … not so bad. At Release Build Minus One ideally, the last version before the public beta hits the streets there are only five “blocking” bugs, all of which Rakowski and team deem fixable. “Things are looking good,” says Mark Larson, one of the tech leads. “What are we missing?” asks Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management. “What’s keeping you up at night?” “It’s not Chrome,” says Darin Fisher, an engineer who coauthored the first prototype. That gets a laugh because everyone knows he’s got a 10-week-old at home. Rakowski takes a red marker and puts an X next to the State of the Release item. The Google browser is one step closer to reality. Why is Google building a browser? A better question is, why did it take so long for Google to build a browser? After all, as Pichai says, “our entire business is people using a browser to access us and the Web.” “The browser matters,” CEO Eric Schmidt says. He should know, because he was CTO of Sun Microsystems during the great browser wars of the 1990s. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know it, too. “When I joined Google in 2001, Larry and Sergey immediately said, ‘We should build our own browser,’” Schmidt says. “And I said no.” It wasn’t the right time, Schmidt told them. “I did not believe that the company was strong enough to withstand a browser war,” he says. “It was important that our strategic aspirations be relatively under the radar.” Nonetheless, the idea persisted and rumors percolated. After a 2004 New York Times article quoted “a person who has detailed knowledge of the company’s business” saying a browser was in the works, Schmidt had to publicly deny it. But behind the scenes, the subject remained a running argument between Schmidt and the founders. As a kind of compromise, Google assembled a team to work on improvements for the open source browser Firefox, spearheaded by browser wizards Ben Goodger and Fisher. (Both had worked with Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind Firefox.) Another hiring coup came when Linus Upson, a 37-year-old engineer whose pedigree includes a stint at NeXT, signed up as a director of engineering. “This was very clever on Larry and Sergey’s part,” Schmidt says, “because, of course, these people doing Firefox extensions are perfectly capable of doing a great browser.” Sure enough, in the spring of 2006, the Firefox group began talking among themselves about designing a new app. They loved Firefox but they recognized a flaw in all current browsers. When Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and the codebase at the heart of Firefox were originally conceived, browsing was less complex. Now, however, functions that previously could be performed only on the desktop email, spreadsheets, database management are increasingly handled online. In the coming era of cloud computing, the Web will be much more than just a means of delivering content it will be a platform in its own right. The problem with revamping existing browsers to accommodate this concept is that they have developed an ecology of add-on extensions (toolbars, RSS readers, etc.) that would be hopelessly disrupted by a radical upgrade. “As a Firefox developer, you love to innovate, but you’re always worried that it means in the next version all the extensions will be broken,” Fisher says. “And indeed, that’s what happens.” The conclusion was obvious: Only by building its own software could Google bring the browser into the cloud age and potentially trigger a spiral of innovation not seen since Microsoft and Netscape one-upped each other almost monthly.

Chrome: Here’s What Shines

Google wanted a browser optimized for cloud computing, with a design emphasis on simplicity and speed. Key features:

Speed Blazing fast JavaScript engine opens the door to more advanced Web applications.

Navigation The “omnibox” combines the search and address boxes, and pop-up thumbnails show your most-visited destinations.

Availability The open source software was launched in over 40 languages, but Windows only; Mac and Linux versions are in the works.

Reliability Tabs run in isolation, so if one crashes, no others are affected. Also, you can drag tabs to create new windows.

Privacy Browsing history is now searchable and editable; incognito mode offers private surfing.

One key change they had in mind was something called a multiprocess architecture, the system that helps the computer keep going when an application crashes or freezes. Why not extend that idea to browsers, so if something crashes in a tab, the other tabs are unperturbed? Also, for that matter, why not set things up so that you can drag an existing tab to create a new window? Starting from scratch had other advantages. You could design it to look cleaner and run faster, the twin dogmas of the Google corporate religion. Around June 2006, Goodger, Fisher, and another former Mozillan named Brian Ryner cooked up a small prototype. Their first big decision involved the choice of a rendering engine, the software that processes the HTML code of a Web page into the stuff that appears on your screen. The two major open source options were Gecko, used by Firefox, and WebKit, which powers Apple’s Safari browser. The word was that WebKit (which had already been adopted by the group developing Google’s Android mobile operating system) could be nasty fast three times as fast as Gecko, in one example. In a few weeks, they had a simple application running WebKit on Windows that kept going even when a Web page crashed a tab. Early on, Goodger recalls, “our prototypes had a picture of a little tab that was unhappy, and if a tab died you’d see that. It was the first piece of personality in the product.” Not long after that, Brin and Page came by to check in on the furtive beginnings of their browser. “I remember sitting at my desk, which at the time had a stuffed snake running along the back of it,” says Pam Greene, an engineer on the team. “Sergey was bouncing on one of those exercise balls, watching Darin give a demo, and petting the snake.” No one will say exactly when the browser project got the official green light. Pichai recalls an executive meeting when Schmidt no longer seemed as opposed as he had been. If Google did go for it, the CEO said, the team had to produce something very different from Explorer and Firefox. In addition, a Google browser would have to be fast, and it would have to be open source. Which, of course, was exactly what the team already had in mind. In any case, by the autumn of 2006 the line between unofficial concept and formal project had been crossed. “One Friday, there was a meeting called with like an hour’s notice,” engineer Brett Wilson says. “We were told, ‘The management is thinking about doing our own browser what do you think about that?’ Everybody was a combination of excited and freaked out.” Part of the freak-out was they knew full well that building a competitive browser was a massive undertaking. There were also mixed feelings because of the group’s attachment to Firefox, an icon of open source development and a hedge against Microsoft’s dominance. “The fear was that people were going to read this as sabotaging Firefox,” says Erik Kay, an engineer who joined the team in October 2006. The Googlers were mollified by the fact that their browser would be 100 percent open source: Google’s innovations could potentially find their way into the Mozilla codebase. “We really want to make Firefox successful, as well as other open source browsers,” Upson says. As part of Google’s Firefox effort, Pichai had been meeting with Mozilla head Mitchell Baker, and at some point he told her about Google’s project. Baker now says a Google browser is a mixed bag for Mozilla and Firefox. She sees the effort as a vindication of Mozilla’s belief that browser choice is essential. “If Google comes up with some good new ideas, that’s really great for users,” she says. “Competition spurs the best in us.” But she also understands that many of her users will download Google’s app. “We expect people will try it and come back,” she says. “Mozilla exists because independence is important.”

The Illustrated History: To introduce Chrome and its development team, Google asked noted artist Scott McCloud to create a 32-page comic (available online) that depicts the browser’s two-year gestation and special features.

A less weighty issue was what to dub the product. After considering some ridiculous codenames (Upson says they were so awful that he took the un-Googly step of a top-down veto), the project borrowed its moniker from the term used to describe the frame, toolbars, and menus bordering a browser window: chrome. One more hire was key. Because Chrome was supposed to be optimized to run Web applications, a crucial element would be the JavaScript engine, a “virtual machine” that runs Web application code. The ideal person to construct this was a Danish computer scientist named Lars Bak. In September 2006, after more than 20 years of nonstop labor designing virtual machines, Bak had been planning to take some time off to work on his farm outside rhus. Then Google called. Bak set up a small team that originally worked from the farm, then moved to some offices at the local university. He understood that his mission was to provide a faster engine than in any previous browser. He called his team’s part of the project “V8.” “We decided we wanted to speed up JavaScript by a factor of 10, and we gave ourselves four months to do it,” he says. A typical day for the Denmark team began between 7 and 8 am; they programmed constantly until 6 or 7 at night. The only break was for lunch, when they would wolf down food in five minutes and spend 20 minutes at the game console. “We are pretty damn good at Wii Tennis,” Bak says. They were also pretty good at writing a JavaScript engine. “We just did some benchmark runs today,” Bak says a couple of weeks before the launch. Indeed, V8 processes JavaScript 10 times faster than Firefox or Safari. And how does it compare in those same benchmarks to the market-share leader, Microsoft’s IE 7? Fifty-six times faster. “We sort of underestimated what we could do,” Bak says. Speed may be Chrome’s most significant advance. When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven’t made something better you’ve made something new. “As soon as developers get the taste for this kind of speed, they’ll start doing more amazing new Web applications and be more creative in doing them,” Bak says. Google hopes to kick-start a new generation of Web-based applications that will truly make Microsoft’s worst nightmare a reality: The browser will become the equivalent of an operating system. Google also brought in reinforcements to implement the multiprocess architecture that allowed each open tab to run like a separate, self-contained program. In May 2007, it acquired GreenBorder Technologies, a software security firm whose technology was designed to isolate IE and Firefox activities into virtual sessions, or “sandboxes,” where malware intrusions couldn’t mess with other activities or data on your computer. When the deal was announced publicly, tech pundits wondered whether it meant that Google was going into the antivirus business. Only after the acquisition did GreenBorder’s engineers learn that their job was to construct sandboxes for the tabs of a new browser. “It was confusing,” says Carlos Pizano, one of the GreenBorder hires. “They would not say what they wanted to sandbox.” The team was growing, but the process never got bogged down in bureaucracy. In the project’s early stages, Chromers would all have lunch together at a table in one of the Google cafs. Soon even the largest table couldn’t accommodate them all. Working in an open source spirit, every engineer was free to check out any piece of code and tweak or improve it. Rakowski always tried to keep things light, one day awarding tins of chrome polish to the best bug catchers. As the plumbing aspects of the product fell into place, activity focused on user interface. From the beginning, the Chrome team hoped that its visual presentation would be so understated that people wouldn’t even think they were using a browser. The mantra became “Content, not chrome,” which is sort of weird given the name of the browser. (“We’ve learned to live with the irony,” Mark Larson says.) The clearest expression of this comes when you drag a tab containing a Web application like Gmail to its own separate window and specify that you want an “app shortcut.” At that point, the tabs, buttons, and address bars fall away and the Web app looks pretty much like a desktop app. Welcome to the cloud era.

Any tab in Chrome can be dragged out to start a new window.

When deciding what buttons and features to include, the team began with the mental exercise of eliminating everything, then figuring out what to restore. The back button? No-brainer. The forward button? Less essential, but it survived. But if you’re a big fan of the browser status bar that meter that tells you what percent of a page has loaded you’re out of luck with Chrome. And then there was the bookmarks bar. At first, engineers thought they could kill it. Chrome introduces several new navigation methods, including one where the browser figures out where you want to go next with no typing required. And when you do type something in, you use the “omnibox,” a combination of address bar and search box: Just tell it what you’re thinking and it delivers a Web address, search results, or popular destinations that fit your query, all in non-intrusive text underneath the box. It’s a bulked-up version of “I’m Feeling Lucky.” Still, user tests showed that some people just love to navigate by clicking on the bookmark bar. The compromise: If the user has previously configured the bar in IE or Firefox, Chrome will import the setup. Otherwise, users won’t have a bookmark bar unless they choose to. It’s incredible that something as potentially game-changing as a Google browser has stayed under wraps for two years. It wasn’t until mid-2007, about a year into the project, that the team let employees outside the group even see what they were doing. At the first of a series of Tech Talks featuring the current prototype (events designed, in part, as a way of recruiting internally for the ever-growing team) the reaction was volcanic. Googlers broke into spontaneous applause when various features, like dragging a tab into a new window, were demo’d. As the number of people who knew about Chrome increased, the inevitable occurred word did leak out to a blog or two, yet nothing came of those stray items. No reporter put it all together. “I think it was because rumors about Google browsers have been around so long it’s like sightings of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster,” Upson says. On the eve of the launch, Pichai shares some of his ambitions for Chrome. How many people will use it? “Many millions,” he says. “I want my mom to use it. I want my dad to use it.” The Google imprimatur doesn’t assure success, but Pichai believes that even if Chrome doesn’t snare huge market share, its innovations will improve the landscape. “We benefit directly if the Web gets better,” he says. As launch approaches, the team has just moved into new space in a freshly renovated building on the Google campus, and there’s another all-hands gathering in the biggest conference room available. It’s standing room only. Milk and cookies are provided. After some initial business, Rakowski hands the floor over to Goodger. The rumpled engineer talks about the benefits of making Chrome an open source product the code will be publicly released and a community will emerge to determine the browser’s evolution. “We’ll be able to scale our testing efforts,” he says. “It’ll enable people to do things we haven’t thought of. And it’ll generate trust that we’re not doing something evil.” As the meeting breaks up, the energy level is over the top, and not just because of the sugar rush. The Chrome team is close to unleashing the product that Google was destined to create. First, though, there are five bugs to swat. Senior writer Steven Levy ([email protected]) also writes about Jay Walker’s in the October issue of Wired.

Infographic: Chrome Enters the Battleground of Browser Development

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